The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Until I sat down to write these reviews (so I can pass these along to friends in Kuwait who I know will read and discuss them 🙂 ) I didn’t realize that the books had so much in common. They both take place in the WWII time frame, and both are told from the point of view of children coming of age in this time. Both are love stories, romantic, parental, community – they have many of the same elements. They both have bullies, and children who steal. They both have wise adult conspirators, mentors and guides.
In The Book Thief, right off you get a chill. One of the main characters in a personification of Death, a tired, weary, cynical Death, but a Death who is fascinated by his humans. When the opening pages are written by Death, you get a feeling that this can’t be good.
And, in the beginning, it is not good. Liesel is on her way . . . somewhere, we don’t know where, on a long train ride, during which her brother dies. They are forced off the train, and her brother is buried in some small village where they are unknown; the grave will probably never be visited. Shortly after, they re-board another train, and when they arrive, Liesel is turned over to a government foster family agency, and she is placed with a rough, uneducated couple in a small village on the outskirts of Germany.
Not far from Dachau.
So many similar elements . . . people at the mercy of their government, and the madness of the politicians and mass hysteria. Bullies, but not just in the schoolyards, here there is also a nationally encouraged group of bullies, the Nazis, and people in every village are encouraged to join the party. The kids join Hitler Youth and practice to become good Nazis.
Except inside each one of us resides a spirit of humanity, and if you let that spirit dominate, you can come into conflict with the party, even if you appear to comply most of the time. Liesel’s foster parents turn out to be a very humane sort. They feel compassion for the Jews marched through their village on the way to the camps, and attempt to give them a little bread, for although they have little to share, they can see that these Jews are starving.
And then, a stranger arrives on the doorstep, the son of a man who saved Liesel’s Papa’s life in the first world war. He is Jewish. He needs a place to be hidden. Liesel’s foster parents take him in and hide him in the basement.
Only after I read the book and read the afterword did I discover this is a book written for young adults, and that makes me laugh, because I am not a young adult, and I enjoyed the book so much. I love books about the triumph of the human spirit, the triumph of good over evil, and the triumph of hope and life over hopelessness. Even Death has a heart, in this book.
I know that there will be one copy of this book in Kuwait; I am leaving it with a friend I know will read it, and I know she will pass it along, because this is a book worth discussing. I hope you are friends with my friend, and that you will get a chance to read it, too!
Another Gorgeous Day in Kuwait
Oh my friends, I am having such a good time. I have been getting together with my friends, one on one, and we have talked so much – or maybe it is the particulate content of the Kuwait air – that I have lost my voice, LOL.
Last night, I slept the entire night. I was able to get up early and have breakfast with my poor hard-working AdventureMan before he rushed off to another day of high level decision-making and problem solving. Me? Another play day in the great land of Kuwait. 🙂
Here is what life looks like at seven in the morning:
It is another great day in Kuwait.
When I checked Weather Underground for the Kuwait weather forecast, I found an ad for Wataniya’s Give Kuwait.com where people are submitting their own videos to celebrate Kuwait’s upcoming celebration, a four day holiday, February 24 – 28, celebrating 50 years of Independence, 20 years since liberation and 5 years under the rule of the current Amir. There are some really fun videos, some with old photos (you know how I love the historical photos!)
Dinner at Kuwait Magic
Kuwait is changing almost by the minute. I am awed by some of the new buildings downtown, apparantly finished, with huge, gravity defying sweeping curves that mirror the Gulf waters. For dinner, we decided to go somewhere that stays pretty much the same – Kuwait Magic.
Even many expats who live here have never been to Kuwait Magic; we rarely see other westerners there. I also think maybe there is a ban on bachelors; it is a very very traditional family mall, not at all fancy, but with a really fun children’s play area, and a restaurant that has Adventureman’s favorite stuffed vegetables.
AdventureMan thinks that is stuffed zucchini. It doesn’t look like zucchini to me, although it may be a variety of zucchini. I think it might be an Indian squash called something like snake squash. Anyone out there can tell me for sure?
In the US, you can find mechanical rocket ships, mechanical cars, mechanical horses that you can ride. In Kuwait Magic, there is a camel! It is a very high camel; if I were a child, I would be terrified to be up so high.
Flu Spreads Through Social Network
This is fresh off the press at The New York Times
Close Look at a Flu Outbreak Upends Some Common Wisdom
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: February 3, 2011
If you or your child came down with influenza during the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak in 2009, it may not have happened the way you thought it did.
A new study of a 2009 epidemic at a school in Pennsylvania has found that children most likely did not catch it by sitting near an infected classmate, and that adults who got sick were probably not infected by their own children.
Closing the school after the epidemic was under way did little to slow the rate of transmission, the study found, and the most common way the disease spread was a through child’s network of friends.
Researchers learned all this when they studied an outbreak of H1N1 at an elementary school in a semirural community in spring 2009. They collected data in real time, while the epidemic was going on.
With this information on exactly who got sick and when, plus data on seating charts, activities and social networks, they were able to use statistical techniques to trace the spread of the disease from one victim to the next. Their report appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists collected data on 370 students from 295 households. Almost 35 percent of the students and more than 15 percent of their household contacts came down with flu. The most detailed information was gathered from fourth-graders, the group most affected by the outbreak.
The class and grade structure had a significant effect on transmission rates. Transmission was 25 times as intensive among classmates as between children in different grades. And yet sitting next to a student who was infected did not increase the chances of catching flu.
Social networks were apparently a more significant means of transmission than seating arrangements. Students were four times as likely to play with children of the same sex as with those of the opposite sex, and following this pattern, boys were more likely to catch the flu from other boys, and girls from other girls.
The progress of the disease from day to day followed these social interactions: from May 7 to 9, the illness spread mostly among boys; from May 10 to 13 mostly among girls.
“Our social networks shape disease spread,” said Simon Cauchemez, the lead author. “And we can quantify the role of social networks.”
Thirty-eight percent of children 6 to 12 were infected, compared with 23 percent of 11- to 18-year-olds and 13 percent of those older than 18. Adults were only about half as susceptible as children, but when they got sick they were just as likely to transmit the virus to others.
The school closed from May 14 to 18, but there was no indication that this slowed transmission. It may already have been too late — May 14 was the 18th day of the outbreak, and 27 percent of the students already had symptoms.
The scientists found no difference in transmission rates during the closure and during the rest of the outbreak. This, they write, confirms earlier studies showing that a school has to be closed quite early in an epidemic to have any effect on disease transmission.
Only 1 in 5 adults caught the illness from their own children, and this goes against one of the most common arguments for closing schools: that it will prevent the disease from moving from the school to households.
“Here we find that most of the infected adults were not infected by one of the children in their household,” said Dr. Cauchemez, a research fellow at Imperial College London. “This information could be used to understand whether it might be better to close a school, or to close individual classes or grades.”
Other experts were impressed with the work. “I think it’s a nice step,” said Ira M. Longini Jr., a professor of biostatistics at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “It’s a beautiful analysis of an important dataset. This virus spreads very fast among school-age children, so the topic is important.”
Al Jazeera (English) Covers Egypt
If you are in the USA, the best coverage I have been able to find has been on Al Jazeera live. They have English language coverage. Unlike Egypt, which has closed down all access to the internet, you can stream Al Jazeera live by clicking on the blue type below.
Their coverage is – from what I can tell – fair and balanced.
It’s in the mid 70’s Fahrenheit, in Cairo in the daytime, getting down to the 50’s – 60’s at night – perfect weather for a protest. Looks like Paris in the late 60’s.
The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke
“Here’s the book,” Sparkle said, sliding into the restaurant seat as we all poured over the menu, wafts of garlic, white wine and butter drifting our way. “I’m getting kind of tired of Dave and Clete.”
“What, you mean not just bending the envelope but tearing right through it?” I asked “Or all the gratuitous violence?”
“Mostly the scorn for official procedures,” she started, two little lines between her eyes as she took in all the delicious possibilities, “How about some of that Montepulciano?”
She passed the book along to me. I was in the middle of another book, but oh, the temptation to drop it and get on with a new James Lee Burke.
The book opens with Dave Robicheaux, our recovering alcoholic detective, meeting up with a convict on a work crew whose sister has disappeared and who was found murdered. Bernadette Latiolais’s remains are thought to be the work of a serial killer working the area who targets prostitutes, but Bernadette was an honor student, graduating with a full scholarship promised to a Louisiana university. She was also an heiress, in a small way, to some property at the edge of a swamp. She doesn’t fit the profile, and her brother wants justice – not for himself, he’s doing his time, but for his sister, who never did anything to anyone, and who wanted to create a conservation area to preserve bears.
Right off the top, Robicheaux is outside of his parish, investigating a case nobody cares about in an area out of his jurisdiction.
OK, OK, my sister is right, this is pretty much another formulaic James Lee Burke. There are the corrupt rich families, the amoral women, the voiceless victims. Instead of the old Italian organized crime families, this time there are hired mercenaries, equally creative in killing, but way more efficient in cleaning up afterwards.
I’m just a sucker for James Lee Burke’s writing. Here’s one sample, from his interview with a very rich old man who goes a long way back with Robicheaux’s family:
“Don’t get old, Mr. Robicheaux. Age is an insatiable thief. It steals the pleasures of your youth, then locks you inside your own body with your desires still glowing. Worse, it makes you dependent upon people who are half a century younger than you. Dont’ let anyone tell you that it brings you peace, either, because that’s the biggest lie of all.”
Burke’s Dave Robicheaux and his private-investigator friend Clete are flawed men, prone to violence, but I cut them a lot of slack because in each novel they are bright shining avengers of all the wrongs done to the weak and helpless. They are Quixotic. They fight the rich and powerful for the rights of the common man. They know the risks they take, and they are too old to think they are going to survive every bad guy they go after. It’s a good thing the law of averages doesn’t hold true in novels; they should have been dead a long time ago.
What keeps me coming back are the lyrical descriptions of life along the Atchafalaya Bayou, community life in New Iberia, Louisiana, and Robicheaux’s family life, wife Molly, daughter Alifair (now grown to young womanhood) and Snuggs their cat and Tripod their raccoon, as well as the knowledge that at the end of the book, in spite of every evidence to the contrary, Dave and Clete will emerge alive, if damaged, and their indirect and violent path will have achieved some semblance of justice.
(I ordered the spaghetti with a white-wine mussel sauce, and Sparkle ordered the chicken marsala. Mom had seafood diablo.)
House Rules by Jodi Picoult
I got it all done – two days before Christmas. Wooo HOOOO, I get the reward, a new book! One I had been eager to read, House Rules by Jodi Picoult. (You can read reviews of other Picoult books by doing a blog search, enter Jodi Picoult in my blog’s search window.)
What I really like about Jodi Picoult is that she writes about really tough situations and exposes our ignorance and ambivalence to us. In this book, she writes about a single mother who is raising two sons, one of whom has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is extremely bright, but lives in a world where he is bombarded by too much sensation. He cannot block out sensory input that we learn to ignore, and some of it – noise, colors – in his case, the color orange – or any change in routine can cause him to spin out of control. Imagine a two year old having a tantrum in a grocery store . . . now imagine an eighteen year old young man having the same tantrum. It helps you see what the Mom is dealing with.
Dad left when the second son was born. “It’s too hard,” he said, and left her to cope with all of it.
She gets child support, while her husband is raising his new family a continent away. She free lances as an advice columnist, and edits from her home to supplement the bare bones family existence. She learns to cope with Jacob’s needs, and she advocates for him fiercely, to be mainstreamed in the school system AND to have some special supports to soothe him when he becomes over-stimulated.
Jacob isn’t a burden, although his need for routine – certain colors for different days of the week, including meals – can be burdensome. Jacob is also very very bright, and obsessed with crime scene forensics. He loves setting up “crime scenes” for his mom to solve and the one bright spot in his daily life is the Crime Busters show which comes on every day at 4:30.
And then, suddenly, a life which is already wobbling turns upside down. Jacob is implicated in the murder of his tutor, a young woman Jacob loved working with, who helped him develop an understanding of how people interact and behave. Those who know Jacob understand his quirks and eccentricities are due to his wiring, but Jacob looks very odd, very threatening and even violent to the outside observer – a nightmare client as a defendant.
It is a GREAT read. Picoult keeps her secrets up to the very end; the book is tightly wired and we are given clues all along the way. The edition I read had both a reader’s guide and an interview with the author at the end. It is NOT cheating to read those first! It gives you good guidance on what the author is trying to say, and what may be significant, while not appearing particularly so.
It gave me a great appreciation for parent’s of children outside the realm of ‘normal.’ It gave me an appreciation for the work and persistence and dedication it takes to try to get a more level playing field for their children.
It the book Jacob has some self-awareness, and compares Asperger’s Syndrome to seasonings, and he believes we all have a dose of Asperger’s Syndrome in our wiring, but that some children get a little extra.
‘Lost Boy’ Casts Vote for Independence
I found this today on NPR News and it delights me for a number of reasons. For one thing, I didn’t know David Eggars (you remember him from Zeitoun) had helped with the writing of ‘What Is The What?’. Second, who knew that any of these kids would survive? Survive, write a book, thrive, go back to the Sudan, give to the country – and vote. Every now and then in this sad world you hear a good story. This is one.
January 10, 2011
During Sudan’s civil war, in which some 2 million people died, Valentino Achak Deng fled to Ethiopia on foot. Separated from his family for 17 years, Deng is one of Sudan’s so-called Lost Boys, children who were orphaned or separated from their families during the brutal war.
Now, voting is under way in Southern Sudan in a referendum that is expected to split Africa’s largest country. Among those voting this week are the Lost Boys, including Deng, whose life became a best-selling novel in America and who has returned to his homeland to build a school.
After a peace agreement between north and south, Deng returned to Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, in 2006. He says when he got there, the place was still a wreck.
“On some of these roads, you could see old war tanks. On some of these roads, in some neighborhoods you could see the bones and skulls of dead people,” he recalls now, driving around Juba.
Now, as Southern Sudan appears headed for independence, Deng is optimistic — and Juba looks a lot better. Paved roads, now lined with hotels and restaurants, arrived for the first time in 2007.
Juba is a booming city, one of incredible contrast: Barefoot women selling piles of gravel by the side of the road sit next to a Toyota dealership.
Peace is spurring investment and consumer demand. Juba’s growth is driven by Southern Sudan’s oil revenue as well aid from foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations.
Deng grew up in a tiny village called Marial Bai. In the 1980s, northern bombers and Arab militias came.
“They bombed Marial Bai, destroyed it, killed everything, burned crops and livestock,” he says.
Deng was there when the fighting came. He says he “ran away with the rest.” He was 9 years old.
Deng joined thousands of Lost Boys, who spent months trekking across Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia. His experience is captured in What Is the What, a novel by Dave Eggers, which reads like a modern-day story of Job.
The boys, some naked, march across an unforgiving landscape, facing Arab horsemen, bombing raids, lions and crocodiles.
Deng eventually resettled in the U.S., where he attended college and was mentored and sponsored by ordinary Americans.
In 2007, he returned to start a high school in Marial Bai, where there was none.
“We have 250 students. Our annual budget now stands at about $200,000 because the school is free,” he says.
The school is funded by Deng’s private foundation. He says most donations come from Americans touched by his story and the plight of Southern Sudan.
Deng, now 32, has just cast his vote for independence. He says that for a Sudanese child of war, his life’s journey is almost inconceivable.
“I never imagined I would be the person I am right now,” he says.
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
You know how wonderful it is when you start a book, and immediately you are hooked? This is not that kind of book. This is a book you start reading and you think “Why am I reading this? I don’t like ANY of the characters!”
And yet, somehow, I kept reading. And slowly, slowly, the hook was set, I could not stop reading.
Actually, I read the book several months ago, and I am still thinking about it. That’s a good book. 🙂
We meet one of the main characters as he stands waiting for a train to arrive, carrying his bride-to-be. As we stand waiting with the man, we discover that he is not very likable. We also learn that winters in his part of the country are long and hard, and very strange things happen to people cooped up together during these long, hard winters. It is a very bleak beginnning.
Then we are riding in the train with a woman who is answering an ad placed by the first man who was advertising for a wife. We get a few clues that she is misrepresenting herself, but . . . isn’t a little misrepresentation part of the mating process? Do we really show all our less attractive features to the person to whom we want to be married? And does she know what she is getting in for with this rather cold and distant man?
Do you really want to read this book?
It gets better. So much better. People are complicated, and they lead complicated lives. Sometimes evil leads only downward, and to more evil, and from time to time, there is a gleam of hope and the slim promise of redemption. It gives a clear slice of time from the early 1900’s, and a much earlier time in America. For anyone with the illusions that life in that turn-of-the-century America was a better, simpler, more moral time, this book is a reality check.
Nothing in the beginning of this book is quite what it seems, and yet every word is finely crafted to give a clue as to where the book is going. Will you be able to figure it out before you get there?
(I did not.)
There are so many good books out there. This one is slow to start, but builds steadily to an unforgettable ending. It is worth a read.
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