Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of My Life in France, by Julia Child

This book was a delight! Although it is less than a comprehensive autobiography, it does encompass Child’s life in beyond her time in France, extending to the success of her TV show here in the United States. And Julia Child is so … endearing, without pretense except in those instances where she is trying to give the benefit of the doubt to someone with whom she has been at odds.

Child and her husband, Paul, went to France as newlyweds in 1948. She had never been there before, while he had lived there in his 20s and was returning to work for the U.S. Information Service. At that point, she was an amateur in the kitchen and seemed rather adrift in her life, other than having found a partner in Paul and playing hostess to their many visiting friends and family members. As she explored Paris, she fell into cooking, taking classes at Cordon Bleu, talking to local chefs, and allying herself with two Frenchwomen with whom she taught French cooking to English-speaking ex-pats. She and Simone Beck went on to write the innovative cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, taking wildly different approaches to recipes, getting dumped by their first would-be publisher, and maintaining a strong friendship despite the tension these situations created. All along, Child took time to smell the sea air of the Meditteranean, follow Paul to postings in Germany and Norway, and become America’s first celebrity chef.

She was also a cat lover, and among Paul’s many photographs illustrating the book is a photo of their first cat, Minette. There is also a memorable French quote that translates to: “A house without a cat is like life without sunshine.” I could not agree more! As far as animal incidents, there are a couple of negative images, but nothing that keeps this book from being SAFE for animal lovers. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Four Queens, by Nancy Goldstone

Imagine if, say, Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, and Michelle Obama  were all … sisters. Four women, each married to powerful men, one a powerful politician in her own right (Clinton), one an outspoken activist (Roosevelt), another remembered mostly for her fashion and style (Kennedy), and the fourth a supportive and intelligent partner (Obama, in all likelihood). That is essentially what occurred in the 13th century with four sisters from Provence. Nancy Goldstone’s chronicle of the Four Queens tells their story in an engaging manner, as they became the queens of France, England, what we know as Germany, and Sicily.

It’s an intriguing tale, especially regarding the two older sisters, Marguerite and Eleanor, who were active in empire-building, civil wars, the crusades, and more. Goldstone writes well and makes the lives of her subjects seem vivid. For example, I could just see Marguerite wanting to ditch her obsessed husband, King Louis IX of France, as he single-mindedly pursued one futile crusade after another. Instead, she remained steadfast and tried to steer him back toward governing, which she sometimes did in his place. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read history from something other than the usual war-and-politics angle.

As far as animals, the point of this blog, there are a couple of brief references to horses that did not survive certain situations, but nothing vivid or off-putting. So I will declare this book SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Don’t Go There, by Peter Greenberg

Why am I reviewing a book on travel tips? Because there are places where you don’t want take your dog, that’s why.

People travel with their dogs. Noah’s Wish, the animal rescue group I trained with, joined with the Humane Society at the Inauguration this week to care for any dogs that people might have brought along. And a few did show up, even though people were discouraged from bringing them. I have cats, but I know people who take their dogs everywhere.

Anyway, the title of Greenberg’s book is self-explanatory: he discusses places that you might want to avoid in your travels, and explains how he came to his conclusions. The book — which is well-written and informative, though not something you’d pick up like a novel — is divided into chapters addressing specific hazards. In the chapter on water pollution, Greenberg notes that a couple of dogs died drinking the waters of Lake Champlain in Vermont. Another 14 dogs died after they drank from Mississippi’s Lake Washington. Sick fish are mentioned in another section, and tainted dog meat has been linked to cholera in Vietnam. There is even a text box entitled “Don’t Let Fido Go There,” about transporting pets on airlines.

So I recommend this book for people who travel with their pets, even though some sad incidents are recounted. That means it is SAFE for animal lovers. Happy trails!

The Inauguration, Random Thoughts Part Two

The inauguration of Barack Obama humbled me almost to the point of having nothing to say. Almost.

I loved that he emphasized responsibility and mindfulness. I loved that he rephrased traditional arguments: we should not argue big government vs small government, but rather seek effective government, etc. I loved the crowds, I loved the peaceful transfer of power. I loved Aretha Franklin’s big hat, I loved Rev. Lowry’s sermon. I loved that when the Obamas passed the Canadian embassy, uniformed Mounties saluted him:

In front of the Canadian embassy

I do not do immense crowds, stand for hours, or subject myself to cold temperatures for prolonged periods of time. So Dave and I stayed home and watched on TV. On a mid-afternoon walk, we ventured into a middle school parking lot near the closest Metro station and found many cars with out-of-state license plates: Georgia, Michigan, Alabama, New York, Connecticut. Someone had to have directed them there, since the entrance isn’t obvious.

One of my online groups asked what two pieces of advice we’d give President Obama. I said:
1. Keep some parts of your pre-Presidential routine, like the 90 minutes of daily exercise, the weekly date nights with Michelle, and the time with your daughters. You’re a human being first, president second.
2. Your nominees for cabinet and your other advisors are mostly stellar, so please listen to their wise advice and delegate to them as much as you can, because you’ll have plenty to do regardless.

I think he’ll do fine without my advice, though. I think he is an extraordinary man who came along just when this country needed him most. If he does half of what he wants and a quarter of what we want him to, he’ll go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.

The Inauguration, Random Thoughts Part One

Quick note: the concert at the Lincoln Memorial is awesome. HBO will be unblocked tonight, so if you’re not catching it live, be sure and watch!

As happy as I am about Barack Obama’s inauguration, I don’t do crowds. So Dave and I made plans to “pretend a hurricane is coming,” as Arlington County so wisely advised its citizens in a recent alert. He was going to bring over his laptop, a bottle of champagne, reading material, and several changes of clothes. I planned menus and stocked up on food. He was going to drive back and forth until Monday, at which point he’d stay here for the duration. And I wasn’t going to move my car from Friday onward. Then life interfered: his car died, as it does periodically. Dave has a great little sports car that spends way too much time in the shop. Which meant I ended up driving a bit, the last trip being around 1 today.

Driving back from his place, I made several observations. First, I thought it might be fun to get out of my car and say to the guy in front of me: “Welcome to Virginia! I hope you have a great time at the Inauguration and have many pleasant stories to take home to your family and friends. And please tell me, because I’m curious, just what does a green arrow on a traffic light mean in your home state?” I don’t really need to say much more about that, do I? Because we’ve all been there.

The other observation was that a lot of people hung the American flag from their houses. Nice touch, that.

When I got back, there was only one parking space left on my block, so I took it. My house is close to a Metro stop, and people do park here and walk over, especially on weekends and holidays when the residential parking restrictions don’t apply. The Sunday concert today’s crowd Metro’d in for started a couple of minutes ago, but I’ll watch it on HBO tonight.

Here’s a cool Joe Biden story. One of Dave’s law school buddies, Jim, is married to Jane, who was the best friend of Biden’s first wife and her maid of honor. In 1972, Biden’s first wife and children were in a terrible car accident that injured their two sons. Biden’s wife and daughter died. So that was over 36 years ago. But Biden has always honored that friendship, and so he invited Jim and Jane to be among his guests at the Inauguration on Tuesday. They will also be at a special reception he’ll have on Wednesday at the Naval Observatory, the traditional residence of the Vice President. I think that says a lot about the man.

I’ll post again Wednesday, after the main event. I can’t wait!

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Sleeping Where I Fall, by Peter Coyote

Only so many people can survive on making earrings from feathers and playing the guitar. Someone has to pick up the garbage, fill the potholes, and manufacture lightbulbs — none of which sounds fun. But a division of labor that includes discrete jobs where people do things they probably wouldn’t want to do on their own is just part of living in a large, post-agrarian society. However, back in the 1960s and 1970s, quite a few people tried going off the grid, spurred by everything from the Vietnam War to the Beatles. Coyote’s account of his years in the counter-culture provides wonderful detail of that experience from an insider’s perspective.

You probably know who Coyote is, because he’s been in a lot of films and has done numerous voiceovers. This memoir covers none of that, instead focusing entirely on the time he spent in various communal living situations, while getting high, acting in the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe, sleeping around, rebuilding damaged trucks, and searching for a way of life that matched his soul. In the end, he managed to stick with acting but integrated his life back into the mainstream.

I don’t know how this book would come across to someone who wasn’t born before 1970. I found it fascinating, but I was in high school and college during the time Coyote chronicles, and I lived in San Francisco for part of the time Coyote was there. But by time I arrived, Haight-Ashbury had been mostly gentrified for the rush of careerist Boomers, the Hell’s Angels reputation as dangerous and completely untrustworthy was well-established, and millions of young feminists (such as myself) had declared counter-culture men to be useless at best. I read Coyote’s book as a chronicle of how all those things came to be. I will recommend this book for those who have any memories of that time, but I’d be curious to know what younger people might think. Coyote writes well and presents vivid stories, so it might be that anyone would appreciate this book.

I set up this blog in order to tell animal lovers whether certain books might disturb them. And there was something in this book that disturbed me, though it wasn’t a scene as such. But when the Hell’s Angels visited a commune where Coyote was living, they not only trashed the place, they also hurt several of the communards’ dogs. This isn’t shown, but it saddened me when I read it, and it has stuck with me. Coyote himself was a devoted dog owner, and he confronted the Hell’s Angels about what they did. There was also an incident in which an owl was killed. Again, this wasn’t shown, but it was sad. With these and similar anecdotes scattered throughout, there are no actual scenes of animal abuse. Still, I’m declaring this book BARELY SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Halide’s Gift, by Frances Kazan

As a history major at the University of Illinois, I took a senior seminar for which I had to write what turned out to be a short thesis. The topic of my seminar was Women in Islam, and my paper discussed a legendary Turkish feminist, Halide Edib Adivar. Edib Adivar was a prolific writer, a revolutionary, and a politician, as well as an amazing person by any standards. So when I saw that Frances Hazan had novelized Edib Adivar’s early years, I purchased the book.

This is not, as I’d hoped, the book that introduces Halide Edib Adivar to this country’s reading public. The writing style is a bit too … young adult-ish? It lacked something, and I can’t put my finger on what that might be. It’s also largely the story of a child, and I found Edib Adivar’s later years to be much more interesting. On the other hand, there is truth to the cliche that “the child is father to the man,” and it works for women, too. So I appreciate what Hazan tried to do. And it was a good book. I was just looking for something more. Perhaps Hazan intended this to be the first of a series, in which case the best is yet to come.

This blog is meant to tell readers who care about animals whether animals come to harm in a book. Here, they do not, making the book SAFE for animal lovers. There are a few animals mentioned, but no real animal characters; there is a tired horse, nothing more. I recommend this book despite the quibbles I noted above.

Friday Fun

I will admit, I’m slightly blue today. The economy, the cold weather, etc., etc. So I’m going to skip the book review I’d planned for today and go for the kind of post that should cheer me up. Maybe something here will brighten your day as well.

Let’s start with something funny from YouTube. It makes me appreciate my cat, Eddie, that much more.

Next, I recently shared the URL for this blog with some writers on LinkedIn. This is for you, fellow writers, or for anyone who has to write for work or school. Because we all know, accurate citations are important.

And in case you, too, are bummed out by the economy and other things, here is an Armageddon Flow Chart .

Special pre-Inauguration bonus: Arlington County, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington DC, sent out an e-mail alert to residents yesterday. An excerpt:

To prepare for this event, pretend a hurricane is coming during that weekend and expect large crowds, congestion, traffic and many delays. 

I thought the part I bolded was pretty funny. But maybe that’s just me

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov – and a Rant about Translations

Maybe some books should be left in their original languages and not translated. I reach this conclusion reluctantly after having read most of The Master and Margarita. I just couldn’t finish it, it was that bad.

 

And yet … I have read quite a bit of Russian literature, including many translations. So I’ve been wondering if the translation might be the problem. Up front, the translators explain that they tried to use exact words instead of synonyms, adhering to Bulgakov’s phrasing to the extent possible. And I think that was a poor choice. Take, for example, these two sentences, chosen from a random paragraph:

        “The stranger beckoned with his finger for Timofei Kondratyevich to come out of the kitchen and into the hall. He said something to him, and then they both vanished.”

 

Imagine reading 335 pages of that kind of thing! Had someone handed that to me with a request for editing, I would have sliced and diced and rearranged, because it’s poor, awkward, clumsy English. As a reader, I get nothing from a translation like that. Absolutely nothing. Fidelity to the original work is not as important as readability in the translated version. If nothing else, this travesty will make me appreciate good translations that much more.

 

On top of the bad English, there was a huge section at the end of the book explaining the many cultural references that are likely to go over the heads of those of us who are not scholars of Russian literature.

 

This is all very frustrating, because parts of the book were thought-provoking, humorous, or poetic. But for the most part, reading this book felt like having a Russian hockey player recite the Yellow Pages to me.

 

I have all these tape flags stuck where I would normally take a second look to see how animal lovers might react to the book, but I’m not even going to go there. If you read this book, you’re on your own. Sorry. I wish it were different.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

This book was fun to read! And yet I’d resisted it for several years, in part because I didn’t really care for a more recent book by Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Me Talk Pretty One Day was much better, and I wish I’d picked it up sooner. Oh, well. Better to read it late than not at all.

“Me Talk” is a series of humorous essays, some of which first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, and other magazines, as well as on National Public Radio. Part One of the book is about Sedaris’s family and his adult life B.H. — Before Hugh, the partner who literally led Sedaris to France. And France is the setting for Part Deux, where Sedaris struggles with the French language, discovers the best way to watch American movies, and visits a local fair where hostile cattle are unleashed during a soccer game.

Generally, humor makes me smirk. It’s quite hard to get me beyond the smirk to the laugh-out-loud state, but Sedaris succeeded several times. His droll wit, his stranger-in-a-strange-land outlook (even while living in the U.S.), and his refusal to pretend to be anyone other than himself — fantasy life aside — add up to endearing comedy. For a sample of something from the book, go to this NPR site and click on The Sex of French Nouns. It’s 7 minutes long and hilarious.

From an animal lover’s perspective, this book is Mostly Safe. In an episode from Hugh’s childhood, a piglet is killed. On the other hand, when they lived in Africa, Hugh’s family had a pet monkey who went on vacations with them. Sedaris also recounts the lives and deaths of his family’s many pets in the sweet but sad essay entitled “Youth in Asia,” which you may want to skip if you still get weepy about having had to put down a pet.

One of the best chapters, both in general and from an animal lover’s perspective, is “I Almost Saw This Girl Get Killed.” First of all, no one dies, and second, that’s the chapter about the cantankerous cattle and the soccer game. The cattle, from a breed called “vachette,” were taken to various small-town fairs in Spain and France, where they were displayed in what was essentially a reverse bull-fight. Volunteers did a variety of strange activities — the aforementioned soccer game, stacking inner tubes, etc. — and the vachette attacked these defenseless individuals, sending a few off in an ambulance. Whether they were attempting to avenge their bull-fighting brethren or just attacking for the fun of it, the vachette were certainly diligent in their efforts, and the whole scene perplexed Sedaris to no end. In and of itself, this chapter is worth the price of the book. Enjoy!