BETH'S JULY PICK

LOVING FRANK

By Nancy Horan



REVIEWS

From The New Yorker
In 1904, Frank Lloyd Wright started work on a house for an Oak Park couple, Edwin and Mamah Cheney, and, before long, he and Mamah had begun a scandalous affair. In her first novel, Horan, viewing the relationship from Mamah’s perspective, does well to avoid serving up a bodice-ripper for the smart set. If anything, she cleaves too faithfully to the sources, occasionally giving her story the feel of a dissertation masquerading as a novel. But she succeeds in conveying the emotional center of her protagonist, whom she paints as a proto-feminist, an educated woman fettered by the role of bourgeois matriarch. Horan best evokes Mamah’s troubled personality by means of delicately rendered reflections on the power of the natural world, from which her lover drew inspiration: watching her children rapturously observe a squirrel as it pulls apart wheat buds or taking pride in the way the house that Wright built for them in Wisconsin frames the landscape.

From Publisher’s Weekly
Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion. Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist.

From Amazon.com Review
It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch.

AUTHOR HOME PAGE
http://www.nancyhoran.com/


INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=1480

LIVE CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR
http://books.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977077718

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
http://www.litlovers.com/guide_lovgfrank.html

BETH’S COMMENTS:
I really liked reading a fictional account of a real person versus their biography or autobiography. The mixture of fiction and real life made you think even more. The ending of the story will blow your mind!

Popular Fiction and Bestsellers Suggestion June 2010

Life Sentences by Laura Lippman
Starred Review. This stunning stand-alone from bestseller Lippman (Baltimore Blues) examines the extraordinary power and fragility of memories. Writer Cassandra Fallows achieved critical and commercial success with an account of her Baltimore childhood growing up in the 1960s and a follow-up dealing with her adult marriages and affairs. The merely modest success of her debut novel leads her back to nonfiction and the possibility of a book about grade school classmate Calliope Jenkins. Accused of murdering her infant son, Jenkins spent seven years in prison steadfastly declining to answer any questions about the disappearance and presumed death of her son. Fallows (white) tries to reconnect with three former classmate friends (black) to compare memories of Jenkins and research her story. In the process, she discovers the gulf (partially racial) that separates her memories of events from theirs. Fallows's pursuit of Jenkins's story becomes a rich, complex journey from self-deception to self-discovery. - Publisher's Weekly

Book Discussion Questions
Laura Lippman's Website

Classic Suggestion June 2010

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
Summary from Amazon.com
After the young Prince Edward VI of England and a peasant boy switch places, the "little king" tries to escape from a world in which he must beg for food, sleep with rodents, face ridicule, and avoid assassination. Meanwhile, the peasant, who is now the prince, dreads exposure and possible execution; members of the Court believe he has gone mad. As a result of the swap, both boys learn that social class, like so much of life, is determined by chance and random circumstance. Originally published in 1881, The Prince and the Pauper is one of Mark Twain's earliest social satires. With his caustic wit and biting irony, Twain satirizes the power of the monarchy, unjust laws and barbaric punishments, superstitions, and religious intolerance. Although usually viewed as a child's story, The Prince and the Pauper offers adults critical insight into a people and time period not really all that different from our own.
Mark Twain Biography
Full Text Online

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