Dear Great Book Guru,  My friends and I  have enjoyed many of your mystery and  novel  recommendations but we were wondering if you have some nonfiction we might enjoy.  We want our book club to try a new genre.   In Need of Nonfiction

Dear In Need of Nonfiction, I recently read a very interesting, albeit disturbing book your friends might enjoy: DISILLUSIONED by Benjamin Herold. Herold focuses on five different suburban communities outside of major cities: Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angles, and Dallas.  In each case, he traces a family who moves to one of these communities and shows how their needs and expectations are addressed.  Almost universally, the desire for a good school system is what leads them to their new homes. Soon they realize that high taxes, a crumbling infrastructure, and poor transportation make for a nightmarish situation and the schools are not so great either.  Each family has a unique set of problems with racial discrimination impacting many of them. Younger families seeking to improve their schools quickly find themselves at odds with an aging population who no longer has a need or interest in maintaining stellar educational systems. Mired by cracked roadways and overcrowded classrooms, the new families soon find the promise of the good life that the suburbs had offered to the previous generation is a cruel joke for them. The author offers examples of communities trying to upend these problems, but he was not optimistic that the future would brighten for upcoming generations. A harrowing tale of dreams derailed but also highly recommended as a cautionary tale for community planners and citizens alike! 

 

 Dear Great Book Guru, We are interested in starting a small book club reading only small but extraordinary books - filled with thought provoking ideas.  Any suggestions? Thinking Small

Dear Thinking Small, I just finished in about three hours, the perfect book for you and your friends: THE VULNERABLES by Sigrid Nunez.  In 249 pages Nunez covers aging, friendship, literature, grief, memory,  and -yes- zoology in a beautifully meditative style.  Set in the first months of the pandemic, the novel tells the story of three “vulnerables” who find themselves in  lockdown in  a luxurious New York City apartment.  The trio includes our narrator - a woman in her seventies, a young college student with a history of psychiatric breakdowns, and a spirited parrot - all vulnerable in different ways.  When her friend finds herself  on the West Coast unable to return, she asks the narrator to care for her parrot who is alone as everyone in the building has fled the city for second homes upstate. The narrator spends much of her days and nights thinking about her past and present with many references to her favorite authors, especially Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens. As a writer herself she questions the value of literature in difficult situations.  Through a series of miscommunications, Vetch - a young, troubled college student - arrives to share the apartment, and the two form a mutually beneficial alliance. Eureka the parrot serves as an ever-present source of muted comic relief.  Throughout this novel, we see evidence that even the smallest acts of kindness and generosity can make a huge difference in people’s lives. Highly recommended!  

 Dear Great Book Guru,  We were at an amazing event last week - Dinner and The Dead - Dinner at Foster Restaurant here in Sea Cliff and The Dead - a dramatization of James Joyce’s most famous short story from the DUBLINERS.  Many of the guests were talking about the latest Man Booker Prize winner that was set in Dublin.  I am intrigued - thoughts?   Booker Prize Reader

Dear Booker Prize Reader, Yes, I always try to review the prestigious Booker Prize winner and this latest is a fascinating and disturbing read: PROPHET SONG  by Paul Lynch.  Set in Dublin a few years in the future, the novel describes a country cast into chaos by unnamed forces.  Eillish Stack, a scientist and mother of four children, is living a comfortable middle-class existence when her husband Larry, a union official, is arrested after participating in a peaceful demonstration with fellow teachers.  Eillish’s nightmare has begun as she tries valiantly to find him, keep her teenage children safe from conscription, her elderly father and infant fed, and her home intact.  The challenges of dealing with monolithic bureaucracy mount as she sees her chances of escaping over the border slip away.  Written with long painful sentences and no paragraph breaks, the novel moves with a feverish pace. Eillish is consumed with the mundane aspects of her life - cleaning her bomb-struck home, keeping milk in the fridge, choosing hair ribbons for her young daughter while the world around her is collapsing. Her sister in Canada offers her a way out but the moral cost is too great. Finally, we are left with the terrifying question - what would any of us do?