Tag Archives: books

Mar6

Book Review: Honeymoon in Purdah

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[amazon template=image&asin=0312263449]Last month when I was putting together the post about books and articles by and about traveling women, I came across the review I’d written for Honeymoon in Purdah: an Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing. The review was a bit long to go into an already long post, so I decided to save it for another day. That day has come!

Honeymoon in Purdah is the true story of a young Canadian woman traveling in Iran in the 1990’s. (I don’t believe the exact year of her travels is mentioned, but I vaguely remember a reference to Clinton as the US President, and the book’s copyright is 2000.)

The back of my copy of the book includes the huge spoiler of how this woman is able to travel extensively in Iran. (I HATE it when the back of a book tells me something I would rather not know before I start reading.)

I appreciate how Wearing manages to be funny without making fun of the folks she encounters. I was able to smile along with her because her writing shows a great love for most of the people she met. The majority of Iranians (and expats who stayed after the country’s Islamic Revolution) are portrayed as warm, affectionate, generous, caring, curious, concerned human beings. Wearing shows Iranians as a people who will go above and beyond, who will inconvenience themselves and their families, to make Canadian tourists comfortable .

I also appreciate that Wearing lets the Iranian people speak for themselves. Some folks she meets think life was better before the Islamic Revolution, when the Shah was in power. Others (of course) think life is better since the Shah was overthrown. Wearing allows both sides to have their say in her book.

However, I wish the author had woven historical facts in with her travel stories and character sketches. More facts about both the Shah’s reign and the Islamic Revolution would have put the people she met and the adventures she had in a historical context. Of course, maybe she expects me to do my own research. In that case, a bibliography would be nice, as I’m assuming she had some ideas about helpful references when she started writing.

Very interesting to me was Wearing’s experience of proper dress for traveling in Iran. Even as a Western tourist, she was expected to dress modestly, which really meant staying covered up, even in the desert heat. In many situations, she was dressed appropriately when wearing long pants; a long coat that came nearly to her ankles; and a scarf covering every bit of her hair, but in some situations (such as visiting Islamic holy sites), she was expected to further cover up by wearing a chaador on top of the whole outfit. While she writes extensively about feeling hot and confined by all of the black polyester fabric, about the sweat constantly rolling over her skin during the day and having to wash the salt deposits from the fabric at night, after months of dressing this way, she is uncomfortable in Iran when any stray bit of hair or skin shows.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will probably never travel in Iran, so I was glad to live vicariously through Wearing. This is a book that I want to loan to friends, then read again when it finally makes its way back to me.

Nov1

Here’s a Book Review: The Biggest Bear

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[amazon template=image&asin=0395150248]Today’s review is of The Biggest Bear by Lynd Ward. I wrote this review in August 2015. The Lady of the House saw it in a thrift store and picked it up for me. She picked it up at first because she thought a book about a bear would be cool. After looking at the last page, she read the whole thing, and sent it to me, even though the story is all kinds of fucked up.

This has got to be the saddest children’s book I’ve ever encountered.

Little Johnny Orchard carries a big gun. He is “humiliated” because while other barns nearby have bear skins nailed to them to dry, his family’s barn has never had a bear skin hanging on it. One day Johnny goes into the woods to shoot a bear and comes out with a (live) bear cub.

Where is the cub’s mother? That issues is never addressed in the book, but I suspect she’s nailed up to somebody’s barn. If mamma bear had been there, I bet she’d have fucked up that little shit Johnny.

Of course, the bear eats everything it can get its paws on. (And you thought giving a mouse a cookie or a pig a pancake caused trouble.) The bear wreaks havoc and grows huge.

After leading the bear far away on three occasions, only to have it return within days each time, Johnny and his father decide the boy will shoot the bear. (Ok, this impending shooting is not spelled out, but anybody over the age of six is probably going to look at the illustrations of a sad boy with a gun and figure it out.)

What passes for a happy ending still seems pretty sad to me, but I guess it’s better than having your best friend shoot you because the neighbors think you’re a nuisance.

I guess this book is what passed for children’s entertainment in the early 1950s. No wonder my parents’ generation is so messed up.

Unless you are from a bear hunting family, don’t read this to your kid unless you want to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions.

May15

BookMooch

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BookMooch is a gift economy website that helps people give and receive books. I’ve been a member since 2007.

Here’s how BookMooch works:

I set up an inventory of books I want to give away. Most books are already in the BookMooch database and are easy to add to the inventory. I earn 1/10 of a point for each book I add. I can take a book out of my inventory at any time, for any reason, but when I do, 1/10 of a point is deducted from my point total.

BookMooch members can see my inventory. If any member wants a book in my inventory, s/he can mooch it from me. I’m sent an email notice that someone wants one of my books. I respond to that notice by accepting or rejecting the request. It’s in my best interest to accept the request because I get a point each time I accept a request. (I only send books within the United States, so I get one point per book. Books sent internationally earn 3 points.) I then send the book to the person who asked for it. I pay postage for books I send.

Once I acquire points, I can choose books that I want to mooch from the inventories of other members. When I ask for a book, BookMooch sends a message to the book owner asking if s/he is willing to send it. The sender pays the postage on books sent to me. I use one point for each book I mooch within the United States. I never mooch books from folks in other countries, but I could if I wanted to. Books mooched internationally cost 3 points.

Folks have to send out one book for every two received. If a member doesn’t keep up the 2:1 ration of received to sent, s/he is not allowed to mooch any more books (even if s/he still has points) until s/he improves that ratio.

In seven years, I’ve given away 282 books and received 192 books.

The condition of listed books varies widely. Members can add condition notes when they list their books. I try to describe my books accurately, although a couple of times I’ve been in a hurry and left out information and the receiver of the book has complained. Some people are looking for a specific edition of a book or specifically want hardcover. Also, people with allergies might not want books that have been in the same room as cigarette smoke or pet fur. I just want to read whatever book I am mooching, so I’m not usually picky about the condition of the books I receive.

Some books listed are old and seemingly unpopular, but I have found many relevant books to read on BookMooch. This is not a website where people are just trying to get rid of their junk.

Go here: http://bookmooch.com/ to learn more about and/or sign up for BookMooch.

May4

Interested in Shanghai? (A Book Review)

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[amazon template=image&asin=1481931512]Today I’m sharing a book review. I won the book, Cutted Chicken in Shanghai, through a First Reads drawing on GoodReads. The author is Sharon Winters, and I wrote the review in January of 2014.

 

I enjoy travel memoirs, especially when the travel happens in countries I will probably never visit, like China, so I was very excited to win Cutted Chicken in Shanghai  from a First Reads drawing. I was a little disappointed when I started reading and found the author is nothing like me. Well, ok, we are both “white” American women, both educated, both writers. Unlike me, Sharon Winters is married to a man whose job took them both to China in the mid-90s. Also, it quickly becomes apparent that Winters and her husband have a lot more money than I’ve ever had. I don’t know if Winters would call herself rich, but she sure seems rich to me. (Some examples: Winters loves to shop and most of her adventures recounted in this book center around shopping. She buys over 150 paintings during her two years living in Shanghai. She also buys countless pearls; at one shop in Beijing, she buys 15 pounds of pearls in one day! Most telling is where she and her husband live. The two of them inhabit a four bedroom, four bath apartment for which the rent is $6300 per month! [Winters is quick to point out that “this price does include the furniture rental.”])

At the beginning of the book, I thought I was getting the “adventures” of a rich, pampered lady, and I didn’t think I was going to enjoy that very much. I kept reading, though, and by the middle of the book, I was charmed.

The aspect of Winters I most admire is her desire to communicate in Mandarin, a notoriously difficult language to learn. She starts studying the language before she leaves the US, and continues her studies as a student at Fudan University in Shanghai. Most importantly, she speaks Mandarin every chance she gets. She speaks to her driver in Mandarin and gets him to correct her homework before class every day. (She also helps him with his English, including teaching him the term “SOL” without telling him what it means). Chinese people are constantly surprised (and usually charmed) when Winters speaks to them in their own language. Sure, she makes mistakes. (Once she addressed her language teacher as “rat” instead of “professor,” then humorously writes, “[f]ortunately, I also know how to say [in Mandarin], “Oh, I’m sorry.”) But she doesn’t let her mistakes stop her from trying again (and again and again), and I highly respect her determination and perseverance.

Yet, some of Winters’ experiences in China perplex me. She is terrified to cross streets because of the thick traffic and lack of crosswalks, so she always gets someone (friend or stranger) to walk her across while she keeps her eyes closed. After two years she still has no idea how to cross a city street, and I want to shout at her to grow the fuck up!

She has a driver, provided by her husband’s company, and she seems to go nowhere without him. She explains, “Because a car accident in Shanghai could cost a company millions of dollars, the company [her husband] worked for assigned drivers to all US employees and their spouses.” It is unclear if Winters is even allowed to go anywhere without her driver. The first of only two times she leaves her apartment alone (yes, at two o’clock in the morning, but only to walk one block to buy an ice cream bar at a kiosk), the night guard at her apartment building narcs her out to her driver, who is very mad at her and tells her she should never go out alone at night. She chalks this up to “the protective instinct men have where women are concerned,” but I wonder if the driver was worried about losing his job or having to answer to some governmental force if Winters had been harmed in some way.

Winters does seem to genuinely like her driver; she calls him her friend and writes that they kept in touch after her return to the U.S., but I can’t help but think that if I were living in Shanghai, I would have wanted to ditch my driver at least some of the time in order to have adventures on my own. If Westerners were simply not allowed to wander off alone during that time period, I wish Winters would have just come out and said that. Otherwise, she looks to me like a bit of a ninny too scared to even take a walk alone.

As I said, Winters shops a lot, and she’s not afraid to negotiate with merchants to get what she considers a good price. I’m always skeptical of Westerners who want to haggle to get even lower prices on what seem like bargains to me. Yet Winters shows herself to be a really sweet person and not a cheap American by her interactions with a “nearly blind old woman” who sells string at a flea market. On several occasions, Winters addresses her with the respectful form of hello, then proceeds to buy all her string at ten times the asking price with no bargaining at all! Winters writes, “Do I feel sorry for her? No. I admire her greatly, and when I hold her string in my hand, I see her face and whisper to myself—a great woman held this string before me.”

Some parts of this book seem to be filler. Winters tells stories about her children, her childhood, and her family history. None of these stories have a lot to do with Winters’ life in Shanghai. Many passages read like a holiday newsletter sent out to family and friends to show them how cheerful and chipper Winters is in the face of this whole new world that is China. I’d rather hear more about the gritty side of China (such as the memorial dedicated to the massacre of over three hundred thousand Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese Imperialist Army in 1937 and having to meet the seafood before eating it at many restaurants.)

All in all, I did enjoy reading this book and learning about one woman and her time in China. I guess I can learn some things from a rich lady too scared to cross the street.