Books Reviews:Insightful memoirs
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-15 08:07
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Books
Insightful memoirs
Joe Eszterhas' 16 movies have grossed something like $1 billion. Anne Rice's novels have sold something like 75 million copies. So when writers with this economic mojo write memoirs about their return to the Roman Catholic faith of their childhood, attention must, and perhaps should, be paid.
They could not be more different: Eszterhas writes with his fists. You practically duck as you turn the page of his Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith (St. Martin's Press). Rice is a voice whispering at you from behind a beaded curtain: You have to lean into the binding with her Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Alfred A. Knopf). Neither is exactly pleasurable.
What these two very different writers have in common, apart from Hall of Fame-bad movies, are: Catholic upbringing; the death of their mothers under wretched circumstances; alcoholism; terrible encounters with death and disease. So the stages here are set for many - many - deployments of the word "miracle".
One of the more challenging or, if you will, trying aspects of accounts by people who have been "saved" is that everything is viewed as a personal intervention by Jesus himself.
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause
By Tom Gjelten (Viking)
For anyone who has logged much time on a bar stool staring at the elegantly lighted bottles across the way, the latest title in pre-Castro reminiscence - Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause, by Tom Gjelten, a veteran NPR correspondent - might be a little confusing at first.
For years the labels of many versions of Bacardi's rum have announced, beneath their familiar bat logo, that they are the products of Puerto Rico, where the company has operated a distillery since 1937. But Bacardi was founded 75 years earlier in a tiny dirt-floored distillery in Santiago de Cuba by Facundo Bacardi Mass, the Spanish-born son of an illiterate bricklayer.
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
By Alison Light (Bloomsbury Press)
Virginia Woolf's relationship with her cook, Nellie Boxall, may have been more fraught than those with her other servants, but the doings of the help loomed large throughout her adult life. In Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light informs us that it wasn't until 1929, when Nellie was working, for a time, elsewhere, and the Woolfs hired instead a daily housekeeper, that they first found themselves home alone: "By 3 o'clock the Woolfs were alone - a complete and utter novelty. ... Thus the life of the British modern couple was inaugurated."
Virginia Woolf was 47 years old. Light, a British academic and journalist, has illuminated Woolf's upstairs-downstairs life in a manner intended to exemplify the broader socio-economic shifts of the first third of the 20th century, deftly spanning the intimate, the socio-historical and the literary.
The New York Times Syndicate
(China Daily 10/15/2008 page20)
