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This Week's Featured Simmons Library Diversions Books

Posted September 27, 2005

This week’s featured Diversions Collection books include A Good Yarn, Me & Emma, Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon’s First Year, Lighthousekeeping, and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.

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A Good Yarn by Debbie Macomber

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Macomber revisits the cozy Seattle yarn store of 2004’s The Shop on Blossom Street in another heartfelt tale of crafts and camaraderie. After a slow beginning, this sequel clips along satisfyingly, as shop owner Lydia, a cancer survivor, and her no-nonsense sister, Margaret, meet three new and conveniently quite different friends and bond over the complications of life. Overweight, depressed teenager Courtney Pulanski has found herself plopped into a new town for her senior year, living with her grandma while her dad works in Brazil. Bethanne Hamlin, a recent divorcee, and Elise Beaumont, who’s been single for years, are both still suffering from their broken marriages. Serving as sounding boards and sources of endless support for each other, the women find friendship and, of course, resolution for their problems (the latter a little too easily). Readers will miss The Shop on Blossom Street’s spirited Jacqueline, who plays a minor role here, and a few things-like the character of Elise’s ex-husband, Maverick-strain credibility. But the author’s trademark warm treatment of the lives of women will satisfy her readers. Despite occasional draughts of treacle and a too-easy denouement, this should be another Macomber bestseller.

Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock

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BOOKLIST: Carrie, an eight-year-old narrator wise beyond her years, lives with her six-year-old sister, Emma, her mother, and her stepfather, Richard, in a small North Carolina town. Carrie fondly remembers her Daddy, a carpet salesman who was killed in a robbery. Richard is his opposite: an often-unemployed alcoholic who abuses Carrie and Emma as well as their momma. But they are dependent on him as he moves them across the state when he finds a sawmill job. With a seemingly indomitable spirit, Carrie perseveres, making friends at her new school, avoiding blows from both parents whenever possible, and seeking solace with an elderly neighbor who senses her isolation and introduces her to guitar picking and target shooting. Various other adults see the signs of abuse but never take the steps necessary to stop it, leading to a violent denouement that seems preordained. Deftly capturing the hidden thoughts of an emotionally bereft child, Flock’s haunting second novel, reminiscent of Kaye Gibbons’ Ellen Foster, is not soon forgotten.

Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon’s First Years by Michael J. Collins

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Collins begins this personal chronicle with an account of a choice he had to make between amputating a 14-year-old boy’s leg and saving the limb at a greater risk to the boy’s life. (He amputated the leg.) This dilemma came at the conclusion of Collins’s grueling four years of residency at the Mayo Clinic, culminating in his appointment as chief resident in orthopedic surgery. Now in practice in Illinois, he details, with admirable humor and insight, the early, virtually sleepless years when he learned not only to perfect his craft but to come to terms with the emotional impact of causing pain and losing patients. Collins brings to life the dramatic moments when he made his first, terrifying incision and hand-drilled a traction pin into a weeping six-year-old’s leg. Collins and his wife, Patti, wanted a large family, but the economic strain of having three children in three years (they eventually had 12) forced him to moonlight every other weekend at rural hospitals. There are moving passages about his love for Patti and the bonds he developed with other residents, and empathetic evocations of those he treats. Collins describes powerfully how he came to understand that his calling was not just to develop as a skilled surgical technician, but to treat his patients humanely as individuals.

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

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BOOKLIST: Known for her slyly metaphysical tinkering with narrative conventions, time, space, and gender, British writer Winterson took a new tack in her whimsical children’s book, King of Capri (2003), which seems to have engendered a new simplicity of style. Not that this enchanting, funny, history-raiding, and literature-borrowing tale of an orphan seeking her fortune on Scotland’s rugged coast lacks dimension. Quite the contrary. Young Silver (so much is in a name) is taken in by Pew, the old, blind lighthouse keeper, who teaches her that to “tend the light” is to learn and tell stories. Stories do save lives, but they also destroy them. Take the stories Minister Babel Dark, who sometimes goes by the name Lux, tells to conceal his double life. His lies make him suicidal yet provide Robert Louis Stevenson with a terrific plot. Then there’s the tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde and the story of natural selection, which even Darwin admits makes for a “less comfortable” world. Add to that Silver’s own misadventures, and Winterson’s fables-within-a-fable turn into a bewitching demonstration of the power of storytelling, the force that defines the self and links us to the past and each other.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: As the New York Times’s restaurant critic for most of the 1990s, Reichl had what some might consider the best job in town; among her missions were evaluating New York City’s steakhouses, deciding whether Le Cirque deserved four stars and tracking down the best place for authentic Chinese cuisine in Queens. Thankfully, the rest of us can live that life vicariously through this vivacious, fascinating memoir. The book-Reichl’s third-lifts the lid on the city’s storied restaurant culture from the democratic perspective of the everyday diner. Reichl creates wildly innovative getups, becoming Brenda, a red-haired aging hippie, to test the food at Daniel; Chloe, a blonde divorcee, to evaluate Lespinasse; and even her deceased mother, Miriam, to dine at 21. Such elaborate disguises-which include wigs, makeup, thrift store finds and even credit cards in other names-help Reichl maintain anonymity in her work, but they also do more than that. “Every restaurant is a theater,” she explains. Each one “offer[s] the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while. Restaurants free us from mundane reality.” Reichl’s ability to experience meals in such a dramatic way brings an infectious passion to her memoir. Reading this work-which also includes the finished reviews that appeared in the newspaper, as well as a few recipes-ensures that the next time readers sit down in a restaurant, they’ll notice things they’ve never noticed before.

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  • These recently published works, selected for your reading pleasure, may be borrowed for 14 days.

  • The Diversions Collection is located on the first floor of the Simmons Library, near the Circulation Desk.

  • To request a book that is currently checked-out, find it in the on-line catalog, then click the “REQUEST” button.

 

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