Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Rabbit at Rest


John Updike died today.
I love the novels of his that I've read (all the "Rabbit" books, "Witches of Eastwick," "Couples," "S.") and plan to read the others. Sorry never to have met him or heard him speak, despite the fact that he is native to Shillington, about 30 minutes from here.
What an imagination!
(I blogged about and posted an article about his most recent book, The Widows of Eastwick, in November 2008. You can check that out by clicking here.)


Date: 1/27/2009 2:36 PM
John Updike, prize-winning writer, dead at age 76

By HILLEL ITALIE

AP National Writer
NEW YORK — John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, best known for his four "Rabbit" novels, died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass., according to his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.
He released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.
Although himself deprived of a Nobel, he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.
His settings ranged from the court of "Hamlet" to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb, the great new territory of mid-century fiction.
Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by "penny-pinching parents," united by "the patriotic cohesion of World War II" and blessed by a "disproportionate share of the world's resources," the postwar, suburban boom of "idealistic careers and early marriages."
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing. Last year, judges of Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize voted Updike lifetime achievement honors.
But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached."
Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's "chuckling whir" or look to the stars and observe that "the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass."
In the richest detail, his books recorded the extremes of earthly desire and spiritual zealotry, whether the comic philandering of the preacher in "A Month of Sundays" or the steady rage of the young Muslim in "Terrorist." Raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa., where the Lord's Prayer was recited daily at school, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.
"I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe," Updike told The Associated Press during a 2006 interview.
"I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, 'This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'"
He received his greatest acclaim for the "Rabbit" series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.
The series "to me is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation," Updike would later write. "He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important."
Other notable books included "Couples," a sexually explicit tale of suburban mating that sold millions of copies; "In the Beauty of the Lilies," an epic of American faith and fantasy; and "Too Far to Go," which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban couple with parallels to Updike's own first marriage.
Updike's "The Witches of Eastwick," released in 1984, was later made into a film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon.
Plagued from an early age by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, he found creative outlets in drawing and writing. Updike was born in Reading, Pa., his mother a department store worker who longed to write, his father a high school teacher remembered with sadness and affection in "The Centaur," a novel published in 1964. The author brooded over his father's low pay and mocking students, but also wrote of a childhood of "warm and action-packed houses that accommodated the presence of a stranger, my strange ambition to be glamorous."
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the "chastely severe, time-honored classics" he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his "wooden Harvard chair," cigarette in hand.
While studying on full scholarship at Harvard, he headed the staff of the Harvard Lampoon and met the woman who became his first wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington, whom he married in June 1953, a year before he earned his A.B. degree summa cum laude. (Updike divorced Pennington in 1975 and was remarried two years later, to Martha Bernhard).
After graduating, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University. During his stay in England, a literary idol, E.B. White, offered him a position at The New Yorker, where he served briefly as foreign books reviewer. Many of Updike's reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White's stepson, Roger Angell.
By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, "The Poorhouse Fair," soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, "Rabbit, Run." Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike's "natural talent" was exposing him "from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise."
Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its "cultural hassle" and melting pot of "agents and wisenheimers," and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a "rather out-of-the-way town" about 30 miles north of Boston.
"The real America seemed to me 'out there,' too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape," Updike later wrote.
"There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange."
In recent years, his books included "The Widows of Eastwick," a sequel to "The Witches of Eastwick"; and two essay collections, "Still Looking" and "Due Considerations." A book of short fiction, "My Father's Tears and Other Stories," is scheduled to come out later this year.
Updike is survived by his second wife, Marsha, and by four children.

Monday, January 26, 2009

That kind of aunt


My four nieces (ages 3 to 9) and 1 nephew (age 1) are likely to receive from me, Auntie Shell, a book for Christmas and college money (about 5-minutes-worth a pop) on their birthdays.


Yes, I'm that kind of aunt.


I loved it last month, while visiting my sister's three girls in the Rocky Mountain State, we went to the bookstore and they were soooo excited about reading. Even 3-year-old Sarah, not yet a reader, could point out the books in the children's section that were read in her daycare "class." She could quote them word for word and name every character in every picture. Amazing.


The two older girls twisted my arm to buy them the latest, neon-green covered "Guinness Book of World Records" during our store visit (I practically gave them my credit card). They loved all the bizarre stuff in there. Just as I did when I was in elementary school.


Below is a children's book that was recently announced at the winner of the prestigious Newbery. Perhaps 9-year-old Caroline would like it (she got "Inkheart" for Christmas). It might be too spooky for 7-year-old Olivia, but then she asked for Shel Silverstein's "Light in the Attic" for Christmas.
I love that they love to read.


Date: 1/26/2009 1:03 PM
The horror! Neil Gaiman's spooky book wins Newbery
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
NEW YORK — Oh, the horror: Neil Gaiman has received the top prize for children's literature: The John Newbery Medal.
"I am so wonderfully befuddled," the best-selling author said Monday after winning the 88th annual Newbery for "The Graveyard Book," a spooky, but (he says) family friendly story about a boy raised by a vampire, a werewolf and a witch.
"I never really thought of myself as a Newbery winner. It's such a very establishment kind of award, in the right kind of way, with the world of librarians pointing at the book saying, 'This is worthy of the ages.' And I'm so very used to working in, and enjoying working in, essentially the gutter."
Also Monday, the Randolph Caldecott Medal, given to the illustrator of the best picture book, went to Beth Krommes for "The House in the Night," written by Susan Marie Swanson. The Coretta Scott King Award for best author was given to Kadir Nelson, for "We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball." The illustrator award went to Floyd Cooper for "The Blacker the Berry." The King prizes were founded 40 years ago to honor the works of black Americans.
The Newbery and other awards were announced by the American Library Association, currently meeting in Denver.
Other winners included Melina Marchetta's "Jellicoe Road," given the Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature, and two Pura Belpre awards for Latino writing — best author to Margarita Engle's "The Surrender Tree" and best illustrator to Yuyi Morales for "Just in Case."
Gaiman, known for his "Sandman" comic-book series, had worked on the "Graveyard Book" off and on for more than 20 years, an understandable delay for the author of more than 20 books and the winner of prizes for science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Newbery winners have included such favorites as Louis Sachar's "Holes" and Kate DiCamillo's "The Tale of Despereaux." But medal judges have also been criticized for picking books either too difficult (last year's "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village," by Laura Amy Schlitz) or too disturbing (Susan Patron's "The Higher Power of Lucky").
"School librarians say they simply don't have enough money to spend on books that kids won't find interesting — and in their opinion, that category includes most of this century's Newbery winners," the School Library Journal reported last fall. "Book aficionados frequently used the words 'odd,' 'unusual' or 'unconventional' to describe the latest Newbery winners."
Gaiman is a beloved writer for adults and children, but "The Graveyard Book" isn't the coziest read, at least at the beginning, with its image of a knife so sharp that "if it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately."
He says "The Graveyard Book" was inspired in part by "The Jungle Book," Rudyard Kipling's classic about a boy raised by animals. Gaiman's book opens with a baby boy escaping an assassin who is massacred by his parents and older sister. The boy totters to a decrepit cemetery, where he's adopted by ghosts, christened Nobody Owens (Bod for short) and given the Freedom of the Graveyard.
On Gaiman's blog, he writes that "The Graveyard Book" is not a children's book. It's "a book for pretty much for all ages, although I'm not sure how far down that actually starts. I think I would have loved it when I was eight, but I don't think that all eight-year olds were like me."
On Monday, Gaiman said he has been following the debate about the Newbery, never imagining he would become part of it. Beloved by readers and book-sellers, he is certainly far more popular than the past few Newbery winners, and he doesn't think his novel, beyond a little death and darkness, is upsetting.
"Apart from the first few pages, it doesn't exist to frighten people or trouble people," he said. "I've written my share of disturbing stuff, but this book is really a way of trying to think about the process of growing up, and, of course, the fundamentally joyous tragedy of being a parent, that if you do your job properly, your kids will grow up and leave you."
Gaiman, 48, has three children. Two have grown and moved away.

Monday, January 19, 2009

An intimate portrait of Michelle Obama



Washington Post reporter Liz Mundy talks about her biography of Michelle Obama.

Change has come



Artist Kadir Nelson's images are accompanied by words from Barack Obama in this moving book. Click on the play button above to listen.

Monday, January 5, 2009

When life gives you lemons, call it like you see it


Let me start off by saying: I don’t like to give negative book reviews, but sometimes there’s no way around it.

I will preface my review of Nancy Stampahar’s book "Peace, Love and Lemonade: A Recipe to Make Your Life Sweeter" by saying I acquired my review copy from the author under the assumption that I could treat what appears to be a self-help book as a business book, or at least apply it to business.

This book, however, is more like a pep talk for life, which comes as little surprise when we learn that Stampahar is a Pittsburgh-based motivational speaker.

The premise for "Peace, Love and Lemonade" (Silver Lining Solutions, 2008, $14.95, 175 pp.) is cute: A recipe for making your life sweeter. You start by choosing to "make lemonade" in your life. You take your "lemons" — aka the tough experiences in your life — remove the seeds (emotions of anger, fear, guilt and shame), harvest the "lighthearted zest" and sweeten with courage, assertiveness and passion. Blend with 1/3 cup each accountability, attitude and action.

Stampahar uses examples from her own life challenges and how she overcame them. A drug user and one-time high-school dropout, she had an epiphany after finally achieving her goal of earning her high school diploma: "I realized that if I make myself happy first, I can make others happy too."

Throughout, Stampahar informs the reader of other life lessons, incluing "You are the one person who is responsible for your life," and "No matter how tough our lives have been, we can reach ‘our greatness potential’," and "It’s never too late to get happy."

I’m afraid this short drink of "lemonade" is too sweet and Pollyannaish for me. It reminds me of an "inspirational" column that runs in The Mercury on Sundays that contains declaration after declaration of basically the same advice: "You can do it!" It’s tough to read because the paragraphs never go anywhere. It’s all, "You can do it!" and "Like I said before, you can do it!"

Likewise, Stampahar’s advice seems to be well-meaning, but is hard to swallow and, at times, a little scattered. Consider the following sentence from the chapter entitled "The Lighthearted Zest": "This would not be a true peace, love and lemonade book if I did not briefly share my live music experiences." Wait. What? She goes on to describe her love of collecting ticket stubs from concerts.

It seems Stampahar had a sound premise, but her execution suffers from saccacharinity. Such as the page on which Stampahar quotes the entire lyrics from the song Whitney Houston made popular in 1986, "The Greatest Love of All."
That’s where she lost me entirely.
Ugh.