Beth's June Pick -- Old Filth

Jane Gardam’s Old Filth

From Book Group Buzz on Google
Jane Gardam is an author who is still very much under the radar in the United States, even though a 2006 review in The New York Times mused that Old Filth might just garner Gardam the attention she deserves. The same review praised Old Filth for its “typical excellence and compulsive readability,” called it “pitch-perfect” and hailed Gardam’s talent at creating a hero that “eludes sociological or psychological pigeonholing.” With such words of praise, why do I feel as though I am the only person talking about this book and this author?
First off, there’s the title—you’re probably wondering what it means. Well, Old Filth is merely an acronym for a phrase that the main character coined as a young, struggling lawyer that later become his moniker. It stands for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.” Sir Edward Feathers was a renowned lawyer and judge in Hong Kong before he and his wife, Betty, returned to Dorset, England to retire. Edward Feathers is a proper, faithful, emotionally distant man whose life in upended when Betty suddenly dies. Edward’s past starts looming up within him in interesting ways, and the way that Gardam writes this character and draws us in to his interior world is fascinating and unforgettable.
Edward and his wife Betty were both what’s called “Empire Orphans.” Their parents were colonials who sent their children back to England to be educated, in many cases never setting eyes on them again. Edward’s mother died after he was born, and his father scarcely acknowledged him his entire life, but he was sent from his home with the servants in Malay to a foster home with his cousins. We learn that Edward’s childhood was a difficult one, marked by one abandonment after another and a dark secret that Gardam reveals only towards the end.
What I love about Jane Gardam is that she reminds me of Iris Murdoch. Gardam is funny, cutting, a keen observer, and so well-attuned to her characters. Another novelist, Maggie Gee, said it better than I can: “The writing crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness. It is the writing of a 25-year-old with the wisdom and subtlety of a razor-sharp 100-year-old.”

I don’t mean to beg or anything, but I guess when I see the numbers for the readership of this blog, I harbor idealistic visions of book groups across the country tipping the scales for authors like Gardam. Can you trust me, and schedule this book for your book group at some point in the future? You may not love it as I do, but I guarantee a great discussion out of it. And if you like Old Filth, you might also find that Flight of the Maidens and Faith Fox are also wonderful for discussion.

About Jane Gardham:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth40
More reviews on the book:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/old_filth/

Beth’s comment:
I loved the wry humor and writing style. It is a bit British and some people may be a bit put off by that, but it is worth the effort!

Best in Books June 2010

Digging to America by Anne Tyler was on both the Booklist Editor's Choice list for 2006 Best Fiction and the New York Times 2006 Notable Books.

School Library Journal Review
–Two families arrive at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport in August 1997 to claim the Korean infants they have adopted. Strangers until that evening, they are destined to begin a friendship that will span their adoptive daughters’ childhoods. Bitsy and Brad Donaldson are the quintessential middle-class, white American couple. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian Americans. From the beginning, the differences in the ways they will raise their daughters are obvious: Bitsy’s well-meaning but overzealous efforts to retain her child’s Korean heritage are evident in the chosen name–Jin-Ho–and in the Korean costumes that she dresses the girl in every year as they mark the anniversary of the adoption date. The Yazdans are comfortable with their daughter Susan’s assimilation into their own Iranian-American culture. When Bitsy’s widowed father begins to show romantic interest in Susan’s grandmother, cultural differences are brought to a head. Tyler weaves a story that speaks to how we come to terms with our identity in multicultural America, and how we form friendships that move beyond the unease of differences. She does not dwell on the September 11 attacks, but subtly portrays the distrust that the Yazdans have to endure in the following months. Tyler’s gift, as in her other novels, is her ability to infuse the commonplace with meaning and grace, and teens will appreciate her perceptiveness in exploring relationships within and between families across the cultural spectrum.–Kim Dare, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA --Kim Dare (Reviewed July 1, 2006) (School Library Journal, vol 52, issue 7, p133)

Book Discussion Questions

BETH'S MAY PICK

The Lady and the Panda

By Vickyi Constantine Croke

AUTHOR’S HOMEPAGE:

http://vickicroke.com/theladyandthepanda.aspx

BOOK REVIEWS:

Booklist

*Starred Review* It was once a story that every school kid knew. Ruth Harkness, a dress-designing socialite, following a trip laid out by her dead husband, captured the first giant panda to ever be seen in the West. Little Su-Lin, as the infant panda was named, made the front page of the Chicago Tribune for nine days straight after he was placed on display at Brookfield Zoo. Croke discovered the story while researching zoos and became fascinated by the adventure. Harkness' husband, Bill, died in China while on an expedition to capture the first live panda. The grieving Ruth, in a spirit of kinship with her husband, decided that the best homage to his memory was to finish what he had started. The moment when the expedition discovered the infant Su-Lin, bolstered by the fact that they kept him alive, made history. Croke has created an exciting tale, full of the color and spectacle of a lost, exotic era and place. She was given access to Harkness' letters to her closest friend, and the detail she gleaned from this correspondence gives such intimacy to the text that it simply pulls the reader in. Harkness was a mass of contrasts: sophisticated city dweller and earthy lover of remote places, hard-drinking libertine, and devoted nurturer of infant pandas (yes, she went back and got more), and Croke evokes her character in an evenhanded style that makes her three-dimensional. Complete with period photographs.

Publisher’s Weekly

Starred Review. During the Great Depression, inexpensive entertainment could be had at any city zoo. The exploits of the utterly macho men who bagged the beasts also made good adventure-film fodder. Yet one of the most famous animals ever brought to America—the giant panda—was captured by a woman, Ruth Harkness. Vicki Constantine Croke, the "Animal Beat" columnist for the Boston Globe, became fascinated by bohemian socialite Harkness, who was left alone and in difficult financial straits in 1936 after her husband died trying to bring a giant panda back from China. Instead of mourning, Harkness took on the mission. Arriving in Hong Kong with "a whiskey soda in one hand and a Chesterfield in the other," she soon found herself up against ruthless competitors, bandits, foul weather and warfare. Luckily, she was accompanied by the handsome and capable Quentin Young, her Chinese guide and eventual lover. This gripping book retraces their steps through the isolated and rugged wilderness where pandas hide, and then back to America, where the strange bears took the West by storm. Despite her remarkable journey, Harkness was derided and ignored by male adventurers. In dusting off this exciting tale, Constantine Croke (The Modern Ark: Zoos Past, Present and Future) returns Harkness to her rightful place in the top rank of zoological explorers.

Bookmarks Magazine

Following the publication of her article on Harkness in The Washington Post, Croke discovered hundreds of letters from Harkness’s trip to China. Armed with this correspondence, as well as hours of new interviews conducted for the project, Croke, the "Animal Beat" writer for the Boston Globe and author of The Modern Ark (1997), has produced this well-researched, well-written tale. The Lady and the Panda succeeds as a grand adventure and celebration of an overlooked independent woman whom Croke describes as "part Myrna Loy, part Jane Goodall." Critics tease out themes of early 20th-century gender and culture issues as well as a cautionary tale about the hazards of exploration for endangered species. Only some complaints of overly purple prose mar the generally positive embrace of Croke’s exotic story.

BETH’S COMMENTS:

This continues an Asian theme of books I have been reading; often facts on different time periods are filled in with the various books I have read. I did not realize I had recently concentrated on one area of the world, but after Nepal, perhaps it is to be expected. My Asian journey is a fascinating one; I hope you enjoy it too.

This book covered zoo behavior, adventuring spirits, and the main cities of the Orient. I followed the birth of recent pandas in Washington, DC, and San Diego. That is why I first read the book. I am so glad to fill in my knowledge of early twentieth century Asia. Happy reading!

Best in Books May 2010

This month’s Best in Books pick is the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. March by Geraldine Brooks is a historical fictionalized account of the Civil War through the eyes of Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March enlists as a chaplain in the Union Army to help support the cause while his family is left to make do in Concord. Detailed letters home are the March family’s only connection to this absent man whose faith in himself and the Union are tested as he witnesses the cruelty of war by both sides. Brooks has done extensive research to create a tone and setting that draws the reader into the time period and the lives of the March family.

Publishers Weekly Review

Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering. Agent, Kris Dahl. 10-city author tour. (Mar. 7) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Discussion questions for March

Classic Suggestion May 2010

The Stranger by Albert Camus
Book Review
The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.


The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.
Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson, Amazon.com

Beth's April 2010 choice: Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer

Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer

Summary:

Some people have dreams that are so magnificent that if they were to achieve them, their place in history would be guaranteed. Francis Drake, Robert Scott, Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, Edmund Hilary, Neil Armstrong, and Lewis and Clark are among such individuals. But what if one man had such a dream, and once he had fulfilled it, there was no proof that he had achieved his ambition? Jeffrey Archer’s latest book, Paths of Glory , is the story of such a man-George Mallory. Mallory once told an American reporter that he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, "because it was there." On his third attempt in 1924, at age thirty-seven, he was last seen six hundred feet from the top. His body was found in 1999, and it still remains a mystery whether he ever reached the summit. But only after you have turned the last page of this extraordinary novel, inspired by a true story, will you be able to decide if George Mallory’s name should be added to the list of legends, in which case another name would have to be removed. Paths of Glory is truly a triumph.

Reviews:

Library Journal:

A real-life mountaineering mystery serves as the springboard for bestseller Archer's abysmal latest. The plot begins promisingly with the body of mountaineer George Mallory discovered on the slopes of Mt. Everest in 1999, possibly having been the first man to have reached the summit. But hopes of an adventurous yarn are soon dashed as the novel becomes a long flashback, offering stock vignettes of Mallory's childhood, Cambridge days and mountaineering adventures. These passages are hampered by phoned-in writing, clumsy attempts at verisimilitude and a notable lack of psychological depth. Along the way, Mallory marries, becomes a father, serves in WWI and finds himself pitted against Australian mountaineer George Finch as a potential leader of Britain's push to conquer Everest. Archer does eventually offer his opinion as to whether Mallory summited Everest, but by that point all but his most devoted fans will have fled the icy crags of this lifeless novel.

Booklist:

This historical-adventure novel is a bit of a change of pace for the author of such best-selling contemporary thrillers as Kane & Abel (1979) and The Fourth Estate (1996). Its subject is George Mallory, the famed mountaineer who disappeared while attempting to climb Mount Everest in 1924. (Mallory is the source of the famous line because it is there his answer to the inevitable question asking why one would climb a mountain.) Archer portrays Mallory as an adventurer at heart, a charming, impulsive young man who matures into a dedicated and careful climber. The book shows evidence of exhaustive research. Archer could easily have written a traditional biography, but that wouldn't have permitted him to take the literary license necessary to turn Mallory from a historical figure into a living, breathing human being. This is one of Archer's best efforts, and it's highly recommended to fans of classic adventure fiction.--Pitt, David


From The Times: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article5859048.ece

Author’s home page:

http://www.jeffreyarcher.co.uk/

Author notes:

Jeffrey Archer was born on April 15, 1940, in Somerset, England, and has survived a roller coaster life of fame, financial ruin, political prominence, and scandal. After graduating from Oxford, Archer founded his own company named Arrow Enterprises and promptly amassed a fortune. In 1969, he was elected to the House of Commons. A conservative Member of Parliament, Archer was, at the age of 29, the youngest member at that time. While in Parliament, Archer invested in a corporation and lost his fortune because of embezzlement. Devastated and facing financial ruin, Archer recounted his experiences in his book, "Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less." The success of this book launched Archer's writing career.

"Kane & Abel" and "Honor Among Thieves" are some of Archer's other well-known titles. "Shall We Tell the President?", a work of fiction about an assassination plot on "President Edward Kennedy," created much controversy, and was considered to exhibit poor taste toward the Kennedy family. Archer himself encountered controversy when, while he was serving as the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party in 1987, a prostitute claimed to have had sex with him and to have accepted money to leave the country. Archer won a case against the tabloids that printed the story and once again survived an unpleasant situation.

In 1992, Archer was created a Life Peer. In addition to his controversial writings, Archer also writes plays and children's books.

Beth’s Comment:

Once they were planning the expedition, I could not put the book down. You felt like you
were a fly on the tent wall! There has been some criticism on yahoo about the facts in this novel. BUT IT IS A NOVEL, not non-fiction.

April Non-Fiction Book Selection

The Man Who Owns The News by Michael Wolff.

If Rupert Murdoch isn’t making headlines, he’s busy buying the media outlets that generate the headlines. His News Corp. holdings--from the New York Post, Fox News, and most recently The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few--are vast, and his power is unrivaled. So what makes a man like this tick? Michael Wolff gives us the definitive answer in The Man Who Owns the News.

The intro and the beginning of the first chapter inidicate to me this may be a pretty good book!