notanotherbookreview

I just finished Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy, which I may have read in my dim high school past. I had little recall except a vague idea of liking it, when my book group brought it up. Our group is small and impatient with trendiness. We want a quality read and this time, not overly long. At 85 pages we are reading a book that's fairly forgotten. O Pioneer probably makes it to college reading lists. But My Mortal Enemy asks that eternal question, what happens when you have the joy of getting the lover you want? And at a huge cost? Lizzie, age 15, meets Myra Henshawe, who's visiting her aunt in their small town in Illinois. From New York, she's a breath of glamour and elegance. Myra at age 45 is short round with the beginning of a double chin, but she dazzles with her style and her contagious laugh. Her voice is "bright and gay and carelessly kind" (except when it's withering and cold and her lip curls but that's later) Lizzie is attracted, as well...

I am reading classics for free on my KOBO and buying hardcovers of new fiction. I am liking the classics better. In terms of slightly guilty pleasure, I'm reading classics I've seen on PBC or BBC. NY in 2012 is sending me back to more genteel times? I feel a little like Clooney in The Descendants, who's shocked when his kids open their mouths and vile street invective comes out. Made me laugh but not sure I like living here. So, when Margaret Hale is partying with her cousin on Harley Street, I may know the dances and dinners and the made to perfection clothes--fab fabrics--and the admiration of handsome men is superficial hooey. She certainly has an inkling of this, and, though a great beauty, is skeptical of her lovely cousin's superficiality, but heck--it's so much fun to be a girl with money and prospects! Then her cuz marries an aristo with a military career and leaves for Corfu. Margaret returns home to the genteel poverty of her father's parsonage in th...

EMERGENCY PUBLIC RELATIONS: Crisis Management in a 3.0 world by Alan Bernstein and Cindy Rakowitz is not just nonfiction, but fantastic nonfiction, it teaches you about handelling the impossible; the improbably feared event, a crisis. As Cindy says in the book, most publicists would rather be shot than deal with a pr crisis. As a pr professional, I have been like the "Little Dutchman," foolishly using my thumb to plug a hole in a bursting dam. Wish I had had this book to school myself in the crisis mind-set and have some base-line plans for when the unexpected inevitably occured. The problem is there are very few mentors qualified to write such a book. Most PR people wing it with some perspective from the last crises, though they know that every one is different with it's own momentum and challenges. But experience in this book means more than "war stories." Between the two of them, Alan and Cindy have over 50 years of crisis management, from law enforcement to...

The Orphanmaster's Son by Adam Johnson is a book I wanted to like, lots of people I respect do, and I am always willing to champion a book that's against totalitarian repression and meglomaniacal dictators. So what's the problem? It's unrelenting in its narrative of atrocities so viscerally frightening in this "no exit" world that they would have been the envy of Kafka's Castle or Dostoyevsky's The Lower Depths or Solzenetsyn's Gulag or any concentration camp history....and that's my problem. I don't know if Mr.Johnson's N.Korea is meant to be mythic or real or a combination of both. Why does this matter? If it's historical truth or fiction based on it, then I accept the necessity to shock so we can be outraged and perhaps contribute to some change or resolve it won't happen again. If he's created this world in order to indict N.Korea, that would be an endeavor made more believable by a novel with more than one note--des...