In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran

Christopher de Bellaigue is a British journalist who lives in Tehran (or did at the time he wrote In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, in the early 2000s) with his Iranian wife and son. He is then, well-positioned to think and write about Iranian culture and society for a western audience, but with an insider's nuance.

What de Bellaigue does best is modern Iran: the traffic; the nuances of buying a car, and why new rarely trumps used; the contradictions. If he had written an entire book on the Iran of today (or 2002, say), the entire work would have been a joy. He writes, as one would expect of an author whose byline has appeared in such stalwarts of the Western press as The Economist and the New Yorker, beautifully, using short, snappy prose to bring emphasis, irony, or humor as needed. That said, a reader can only remember/differentiate so many mullahs, so many generals, so many wounded veterans of the Iran-Iraq war. To say I was bogged down in the politics is an understatement, and quickly I learned to skim passages on the competing ideologies that led to or stemmed from the Revolution.

While Iran's relationship with the world today is largely defined by its standoff with the U.S. (and on which side of that standoff others nations choose to align themselves), de Bellaigue deftly raises the issue of the collective West's long history of meddling in the Middle East (see: Hero), writing, "Two centuries of semi-colonization sometimes seem worse than unambiguous colonization; at least the unambiguously colonized got railways and sewers and unambiguous independence."

The Iran-Iraq war looming as it does over so much and so many in Iran and the larger Middle East, de Bellaigue also plucks at the threads of U.S. involvement, not least the Iran-Contra affair. That U.S. arms - to both sides - increased the firepower and made the bloodletting that much greater is clear, only reinforcing one of the central tenet's from Notes on a Foreign Country: U.S. decisions directly impact the lives of those in other countries on a regular basis, in a way that is difficult for Americans to appreciate. (Although the global experienced with Covid-19 may offer a taste.)

The most telling exchange occurred toward the end of the book, as de Bellaigue is discussing the present and future of Iran with one of the few Iranians he considers a friend, Mr. Zarif. In thinking about the state of the country, Zarif draws a corollary with the state of the Iranian-made Paykan, the butt of more than one joke throughout the book (and country, it seems). Zarif says, "When I get into my Paykan and it lurches and coughs, I think to myself that the men who made it aren't well enough trained or paid, and that they have bad equipment and are badly managed and didn't sleep well last night. ... On the few occasions that I've been in a Mercedes and been astonished by its mechanical perfection, don't you think I've asked myself if the men who built this car are better off?"

Food for thought.

Four stars. 

Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries

Tim Anderson is a gay southerner who finds himself drifting after college and decides the cure for his ennui is a stint in Japan. A former English major, Tune-In Tokyo is the resulting memoir documenting his time teaching English in and around Tokyo.

This is not the finest book about Japan I’ve ever read, but it provides a unique perspective on life there, and particularly on the business of the ubiquitous English schools. (I know of ex-pats who’ve made a veritable fortune teaching English, so the demand is certainly there!) Anderson has no desire to go full-native, a la Jake Adelston and Tokyo Vice, but anyone who is familiar with the in, outs, and many quirks of Tokyo will find much to relate to in Anderson's work. 

3.5 stars

Summer at Tiffany

Summer at Tiffany is Marjorie Hart's delightful, fast, fun, nostalgic memoir of the summer of 1945, when she and her best friend, Marty Garrett, traveled to New York City for the summer and became the first women to ever work at Tiffany's. (Yes, as in, little blue box baubles.) Not only did she and Marty make history becoming the first women ever hired at the iconic flagship, but they also had a front row seat the V-E Day and V-J Day celebrations that punctuated the beginning and end of the summer. In between, they flirted with sailors, rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, worried over news from the Pacific, and experienced the joys and perils of life in the big city, a day at the ocean, and so much more.

The idea to spend the summer in New York came from some of Marjorie and Marty's Kappa sisters at the University of Iowa. Convinced it would be easy to find jobs as shop girls in the best department stores, Marjorie and Marty take the train east, only to be turned away from a succession of top stores. Through a combination of grit, pluck, luck, and a fortuitous reference through a previously-unknown family connection, they land jobs as pages where everyone from Judy Garland to the Windsors to the top mafiosos shop.

Remarkable as the stories about Tiffany are, it's the overriding sense of an era, the zeitgesit, that sets this memoir apart. The little details - about fashion, news reports, food, curfews, college songs, and attending church - are in many ways the heart of the book. I tore through this in a couple of nights, and it left me wanting more. It also left me a bit awed by Hart herself, who the internet tells me is 95 and still going strong. She's even on Twitter, which is more than I can say.

Five stars, for the book, and the author.

The Water is Wide

The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy's memoir of a year teaching in a sea islands school off the coast of South Carolina circa 1969, is a fascinating glimpse into the lives and conditions of the people on little Yamacraw Island (the fictional name of Daufuskie Island).

Conroy is young and more than a little idealistic when he arrives on Yamacraw/Daufuskie to teach the island's children, virtually all of whom are black, poor, descended directly from the slaves who worked the island's plantations, and have never journeyed farther than Savannah, some 13 miles away. Though Conroy is teaching the upper grades (5-8), he discovers within the first week that a plurality of his students can neither read nor write, and some are unable to recite the alphabet or add 1+1.

Conroy quickly adapts his teaching methods, working to gain the trust of the children and their families, while incurring the ire of the other teacher, Mrs. Brown, who is most distressed at his refusal to employ corporal punishment. Throughout the year Conroy butts head repeatedly with both Brown and the district heads on mainland South Carolina; this combined with his total racial tolerance and outright support of school integration, ultimately dooms his cause and the district fires him after the first year.

The Water is Wide is inspiring and depressing in equal measures, and makes Tony Danza's year in Philadelphia look like a walk in the park. Conroy brings to life not only his students but the ways of the Gullah people and a tiny forgotten corner of the country. In that way, I was regularly reminded of Chesapeake Requiem, another island whose way of life is quickly being upended.

Five stars. 

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is a balm for the reading soul. After spending the last few weeks slogging through a couple of books that I still have decided whether to finish (no titles yet, in case I do!), Alexandra Fuller's Cocktail Hour felt like coming home.

Part memoir, part biography, this book is a clear-eyed look at the lives and choices of Fuller's parents, Tim and Nicola Fuller, whose African lives began in the era of British colonialism - the Happy Valley set comes in for more than an occasional mention - span the final, bloody years of Rhodesia, and continue into the sub-Saharan Africa of the twenty-first century. It is a fascinating account of British colonialism and the choices, which Fuller seems to both understand and be unable fathom, of those like her parents who fought so desperately to hold onto their piece of Africa.

It is also a daughter's ode to her mother, all the more poignant for the tragedies and madness that have dotted the landscape of Nicola Fuller's life. Few lines have struck me with more power than Alexandra Fuller's observation that "the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy."

Initially, I was expecting Cocktail Hour to unfold along the lines of The Last Resort, probably, foolishly, because both are set in Zimbabwe, which is not exactly a hotbed of travel writing or memoirs or literature these days. The books are quite different - Fuller's Cocktail Hour is much heavier than the often-laugh-out-loud The Last Resort - but it is a satisfying read in every respect.

Four stars.

All You Can Ever Know

Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know is the memoir of growing up Korean in a white family in small town Oregon circa 1985. I was interested in it as an adoption memoir, and Chung certainly touches on her emotions regarding feelings of abandonment and not fitting in. Much of the latter owes, it seems from the book, to the fact that Chung was raised in a town so small and so white that the only other people of color she ever saw were a handful of Asians in stereotypical roles (aka, dry cleaning and Chinese takeout). Chung's experience was also colored by the fact that she knew much of her early history (born prematurely, immigrant parents unable to cope with the expected special needs, etc.) and as she describes, her birth mother went as far as to attempt to make contact with her when she was still quite young.

Ultimately All You Can Ever Know vacillates between Chung's memoir of a mostly unhappy childhood and then her adult quest to locate her birth family. This she does successfully and, owing to the relationship she forges with a sister, she is also able to tell the family's story, frequently woven through chapters of Chung's own experiences.

Final verdict: I liked it, but I didn't love it. There are a lot of memoirs out there, and a lot of adoption-related books, memoirs, advice, and so on as well. Certainly there's an audience for this work, but on the whole it's a pretty niche read.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality

Jacob Tomsky's Heads in Beds purports to be a tell-all on the hotel industry. Instead I found it mostly recounted Tomsky's personal exploits, frequently involving alcohol, often a hustle, and almost always some choice expletives, most commonly beginning with the letter F. So, no, it didn't really appeal...which is unfortunate, because it had potential, especially in the early chapters.

Tomsky more or less lost me when he got tired of his job and packed off to the Europe to live a backpacker's lifestyle until the money ran out. Returning to the States, he settled on New York and, out of options, returned to the hotel industry where he learned the real tricks of the hustle (aka scam). He did confirm for me others bits of hotel lore I've heard over the years, such as never, ever, ever drink from a glass in a guest room and the do not disturb sign is a very good friend. Also, valet parking: not a good idea.

As rapidly as the travel industry is changing, I'm curious how much some of the "advice" in Heads in Beds holds true a decade on. Certainly, I would expect that as the industry consolidates (think Marriott-Starwood merger), front desk staff have less autonomy than they did in the early 2000s, particularly at the mid-tier properties. (I also assume that hotels track individual guests more closely than in the past. Try Tomsky's mini-bar hustle on multiple properties in the same chain and I bet they catch on pretty quickly.)

Two-and-a-half stars.

Nurse, Come You Here! More True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle

Nurse, Come You Here! is the sequel to Mary J. MacLeod's delightful memoir, Call the Nurse. The sequel picks up right where Call the Nurse leaves off, and many of the characters will be familiar, at least to the reader who hasn't allowed too much time to pass between reading them.

One of the primary differences is that, while the first book truly centered around MacLeod's work as a district nurse, Nurse, Come Your Here! takes a broader perspective, with many of the chapters describing island life and happenings that don't have a direct connection to nursing. (Of these, the story of Louis the Sheep was probably my favorite.) While the language is unchanged, the sequel also doesn't quite capture the essence of the islands in the way MacLeod's first memoir does, perhaps because that book is so focused on the ways and events that make the Hebrides the Hebrides.

I was admittedly surprised when, with a few chapters to go, the MacLeods packed up and moved to California. In the U.S., the nurse did not nurse, and so these chapters are devoted to her musings on life in the U.S., particularly on the West Coast, as well as similarities and differences between the Americans and the Brits. It was a startling transition for this reader and would have made for a better epilogue, I felt.

Although I preferred Call the Nurse, this second memoir is also highly readable.

Hammerhead: The Making of a Carpenter

Nina MacLaughlin has a stable job at a Boston newspaper when she decides to hang it up and do something, possibly anything, else with her life. Not having so much as wielded a hammer before, she accepts a job as a carpenter's assistant and embarks on the life of a journeyman carpenter, learning to tile bathrooms, build decks, and renovate entire rooms. In describing and understanding the metamorphosis, MacLaughlin relies on the words of those as varied as Greek mythology, Studs Terkel, Virginia Woolf, and Pliny the Elder.

Although it sounds like the plot of a promising novel, Hammerhead is actually MacLaughlin's memoir. Beautifully written, and wise beyond its years, Hammerhead has the goods to make any reader question the decisions they've made thus far, and whether they're the right ones. In the opening chapter, MacLaughlin writes, "Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date..." and I was hooked. How better to describe the reasons that keep many of us where we are.

This sentiment is book-ended by what can by a question that many of us, I'm sure, have asked ourselves on occasion: "How do we decide what's right for our own lives? The question never gets easier to answer. If we're luck and we pay attention, pieces here and there will start to fit together." Her words put me in mind of Abraham Verghese's beautifully blunt prose in Cutting for Stone where he writes, "We come unbidden into this life and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot."

Both authors, certainly, make the reader question choices, priorities, and the related decisions. I don't plan to leave my job and become a carpenter anytime soon, but I admire MacLaughlin's ability to create a new life while also - as evidence by both the writing of her memoirs, as well as the authors she chose to include within its covers - creating space for the old one. Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Call the Nurse: True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle

Call the Nurse is Mary J. MacLeod's delightful memoir of working as a district nurse on one of the Inner Hebrides islands in the 1970s. That latter part is actually shocking, as many of the homes have only just gotten electricity, and some are still without indoor plumbing. Although she is practicing decades later than James Herriot, the conditions she encounters are so similar that I had to actively and repeatedly remind myself that they were not, in fact, contemporaries.

Part of what makes Call the Nurse so delightful is the style in which it's written. I often felt as though MacLeod were next to me, reminiscing for my benefit alone. Her folksy, yet unmistakably British, language and approach is also very much in keeping with Herriot's style - as well as that of Jenny Lee, whose memoirs were adapted for the excellent Call the Midwife television series.

As with both Lee and Herriot, MacLeod's caseload offers a mixture of grace, humor, and tragedy, with a good measure of resilience and hope. The people of the Inner Hebrides are unquestionably self-sufficient, used to doing for themselves. In bad weather, the only off the island is by helicopter; in terrible weather, one must manage on one's own. Her work as a nurse offers MacLeod a glimpse into her patients' inner lives, as well as myriad social issues from the land clearances (still only one or two generations removed for the very oldest residents) to lingering wartime trauma, incest, alcoholism, and murder. All of these MacLeod treats beautifully.

Since finishing Call the Nurse, I've learned of a sequel, Nurse, Come You Here, which I am now patiently waiting to read as soon as my turn is "up" at the local library.

I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High

As a child of the '80s, I well remember Tony Danza of Who's the Boss? fame, and can even cop to watching more than a few episodes when they were on the first time. I'm not exactly up on my pop culture, though, and couldn't have told you that a few years ago he spent a year teaching in a Philadelphia high school had my life depended on it. His memoir, I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had, is an ode to teaching as much as the re-telling of his single year in the classroom.

If Danza's teaching career can't entirely be categorized as a lark, it is the case that he undertook it as part of a reality show, though he eloquently expresses his misgivings about this aspect of the work early in the book. (I also learned that his college degree is in education, and he did intend to become a teacher before boxing and later acting derailed his plans.) In any case, it's clear that Danza's heart is in the right place, and I came away impressed not only by how hard he worked and how creative his assignments often were, but inspired by his portrayal of teaching in the very hardest circumstances. In that sense, it's clear that this gig was anything but a lark.

Years ago, back when I was myself a fresh-eyed college grad, I read Wendy Kopp's One Day, All Children about the Teach for America movement. I wasn't sold, perhaps because I even had a couple of friends who did the TFA thing. Neither the efforts nor the results were anywhere near what Danza appears to have achieved in 2009-10.

At a time when education, and too often teachers, is so regularly under attack, the profession can use whatever support it can get, whether from an actor whose heyday was three decades ago or otherwise. I'd Like to Apologize... is also a good gut check for anyone who has ever wondered if they're in the right profession, if their work is meaningful, or if it's too late to switch careers.

Four stars.

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 ¼ Years Old

Is it fiction? A memoir? A combination? The only people who might now (the publisher?) aren't telling. in any case, it's great. Hendrik Groen is - duh - 83 years old. He lives in an assisted living facility that, despite being in the heart of Amsterdam, embodies every complaint I ever heard either In my great-grandfather or my husband's grandparents make about their facilities, long-time denizens all. First, the old people. It does not matter that my grandfather was perhaps the oldest resident in his final years - the litany of complaints about "all these old people" was never ending. And truly, the petty behavior of other residents ("the pineapple pickers," so named for their selective raids on the fruit salad were my grand-father-in-law's most frequent target) and disputes with management over a twenty cent raise in a cup of coffee are also a regular feature of assisted living life, both on paper and IRL. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

First, Hendrik Groen. It's a pseudonym, and of the book, released as fiction, he says only that "there's not one sentence that's a lie, but not every word is true." So, in other words, believe what you want. As the title says, the book is his secret diary, in which he records the minutiae of a year, but from the perspective - real or not - of an octogenarian. As such, it's a fairly unique perspective: the value of friendship is central to the book, but the nature, naturally, is a bit different between the very elderly. Death, too, is a constant presence here, and Hendrik and his friends are regularly coming to terms with its approach, as well as with the ailments that so often precede it.

Although the humor is far less pronounced, I was regularly reminded of A Man Called Ove, although I think Hendrik is much more optimistic and much less crotchety than Ove. (His friend, Evert, could give Ove a run for his money, though.)

Five stars.

Dimestore: A Writer's Life

I encountered Lee Smith's Dimestore on Bookbub and from the description understood it was a memoir of growing up in the hills of Appalachia. As such, I was expecting something of a cross between The Truth According to Us (fiction set in Appalachia) and A Girl Named Zippy (memoir of growing up in small town America mid-twentieth century). Initially, my expectations seemed in line with what I was reading: the early chapters of Dimestore are, in fact, devoted to Smith's formative years in Grundy, Virginia.

By degrees, though, Smith turns away from these early years - perhaps she felt she had already mined them extensively for her other works, primarily fiction - and the chapters become essays and the story becomes disparate episodes in Smith's adult life. I was far less drawn to these later essays, particularly the ones dealing with Smith's divorce, her subsequent remarriage, and the mental health battles of her grown son, than I was the chapters devoted to her girlhood.

I use the words "chapters" and "essays" purposefully here, for the first half of Dimestore reads like a story, and a very good one, while the latter half is disjointed and less engaging. For that reason, I came away with only a lukewarm liking of the book. I wasn't familiar with Smith's work prior to reading Dimestore, and having finished it, I'm not likely to seek out her other works intentionally, though I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd avoid her, either.

Devotees of Americana and Appalachian would likely delight in the early chapters in which the reader meets the spirited Lee with her "kindly nervous" parents and unique perspective on life in the mountains. The images of small town gossip, the general store, and the mountain stream running black with coal are acutely done, and early on wrote a check that the rest of the book just couldn't cash.

Two stars.

Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother's Boarders

Chicken Every Sunday is a marvelous little book. I first heard of it in the pages of When Books Went to War; it was described as being one of the absolute favorite Armed Services Editions, one that simply could not be published fast enough to meet the demand of the troops wanting to read Rosemary Taylor's memoir. As Books author Molly Guptill Manning explained, the troops craved not only Taylor's descriptions of the home front, but also and especially her descriptions of mealtimes. And no wonder.

Taylor's family, the Drachmans, were a family unlike most others. Her mother was a Claiborne from Virginia (an FFV, or First Family of Virginia, as Taylor explains) who had been weaned on a former plantation in the immediate post-Civil War South. Taylor's father grew up in one of Arizona's original pioneer families. The pair of them, and their three children - of whom Rosemary is the oldest - are wonderfully entertaining. More than the Drachman's though, are the boarders: since before Rosemary's birth, Mr. and Mrs. Drachman had boarders, both as a service, if you will to early visitors to the territory (for there were no good hotels in those early days before statehood), as well as to earn additional income (primarily on the part of Mrs. Drachman, who saw her husband's get-rich-quick-schemes for what they were).

Yes, the boarders. As Taylor wrote, "One of the boarders who ate Mother's chicken every Sunday summed it up when he said, "I was told that in your house I'd have good food and some fun." They all had fun, and they all became part of the family -- Jeffrey, who lost his front teeth and won his independence, Rita Vlasak, who loved anything in pants, including Father, Miss Sally, who loved Miss Sally and cold cream, the Lathams, who bought a mine, and even the hell-bent-for-heaven Woolleys, who were sure God had sent the skunk to hide under the house because the family didn't go to church on Sunday." Taylor's gift is for bringing them all to life, making the reader today as much a part of the family as the boarder's were 100 years ago.

All of which is to say, they don't make books like this anymore. Cheaper By the Dozen, The Situation in Flushing, All Creatures Great and Small, they are memoirs in the same vein as this one. If you read and loved any of them, Chicken Every Sunday will be soup for your soul; if you read this one and want more of the same, any of the others will provide the same sustenance.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is, in its simplest description, a memoir of author William Kamkwamba's early life as a poor (poor!) boy in rural Malawi, his hunger for knowledge, and his experiments to build an entire windmill for his home. This is all the more impressive as he faces famine, scavenges for the parts, and is forced to leave school because his family can no longer pay the fees. This book could just as easily have been titled, Improvisation 101.

Beyond the memoir aspects, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a fascinating look at life in Africa, written by an African (and in that sense is a wonderful contrast with Dark Star Safari). Kamkwamba succinctly relates the realities of life in Africa to his (presumably mostly Western readers) with candid and clear language, such as his passage describing a life without light. "Once the sun goes down, and if there's no moon, everyone stops what they're doing, brushes their teeth, and goes to sleep. ... Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa."

Beyond the voyeuristic pleasure of peering deeper into another culture, Kamkwamba's story is also incredibly inspirational. He built a windmill. Using a relatively ancient, English-language text designed for individuals with both fluency in English and advanced education, neither of which he possessed. And he did this because he hoped to expand upon his invention in order that his family could have water on their farm (rather than a two-hour walk from it), not so that he might become rich or famous, or make his life vastly different, but so that they would not starve in the next famine.  As in literally perish of hunger, something he knows too much about.

Kamkwamba also minces no words in describing the situation in his country, and to a certain extent, in Africa more broadly. He understands the scope and scale of the corruption, he knows how this directly impacts him, and he is determined to simply do what he can to bring positive change to his very small piece of his country. In this sense, he reminded me of Abdel Kader Haidara, whose story is recounted in The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu).

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind ends on a hopeful note, with Kamkwamba in South Africa at an academy with other equally gifted and visionary young Africans. One can but hope that together they will achieve Kamkwamba's goals of bringing Africa out of the darkness.

The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West

Dayton O. Hyde was a Yooper who set off on a freight train west to avoid his mother's wrath (yes, you read that correctly), and never looked back. The Pastures of Beyond is his memoir of an adolescence and young adulthood spent on a sprawling Oregon cattle ranch.

Initially out of his element, but with an unquenchable desire to become a real cowboy, Hyde learned to break colts, rope steer, and even to fight bull. His life on the ranch spanned the years immediately before and after World War II, with the requisite service in Europe, where Hyde landed on Norman beaches just after D-Day. Hyde writes of knowing many of the last true cowboys and Indians, and the first of the true rodeo stars. There can be no question that his life has been a colorful one, or that the West he knew exists no more.

The Pastures of Beyond is an excellent corollary to books about an earlier West, most notably To Hell on a Fast Horse and The Colonel and Little Missie. It's also a fun memoir that has many of the qualities the best memoir writes, James Herriot, Edmund Love, and the Gilbreth siblings among them.

Four stars.

West With the Night

Born in 1902, Beryl Markham was a woman ahead of her time. A champion racehorse trainer, author, and bush pilot, Markham was the first female pilot in Kenya and flew solo across the Atlantic during the early years of the aviation age. She is also a fine author, as evidenced by this memoir, in which she writes what must be one of my all-time favorite lines. Writing of an encounter with low-level Italian bureaucrats in the years immediately preceding World War II, Markham writes that there is "no hell like uncertainty, and no greater menace to society than an Italian with three liras worth of authority." I'll have to remember that the next time I'm bemoaning a peon on a power trip.

West with the Night offers not only a glimpse into Markham's own remarkable life (if Gertrude Bell was the Desert Queen, perhaps Markham is the queen of the savanna), but also into British colonialism. Unlike White Mischief, which focuses almost entirely on the British experience in Kenya, West with the Night includes extensive memories of Markham living the "authentic" Kenyan experience, including being "moderately eaten by [a] large lion." Although I was most interested in Beryl the bush pilot, Beryl the bush hunter is also a fascinating study, particularly as this phase of life preceded the former by many years - making Markham but a girl when she would join native tribesman on boar hunts!

Markham may have been ahead of her time in some respects, but in her regard for native populations, she was very much a woman of her time and place. The early pages, in particular, reek of colonialism; Markham's description of the various Kenyan people are jarring, and the depth of British imperialism is something to behold. To say it is a long way from West with the Night to The Last Resort is to rather understate things.

Cider with Rosie

As regular followers of this blog may already know, I often read memoirs, not a few of which have been British (see all of James Herriot or Goodbye to All That). Laurie Lee was born in middle of the Great War, deep in green England, and begins his memoirs by warning readers that some of what he recalls may have been obscured by the fog of young memories. Quickly I understood his meaning, as I often felt I was reading a lot of pretty words, as opposed to a lucid story.

As I was reading, felt more like a collection of anecdotes centered around the dotty and colorful characters who peopled Lee's childhood than a work that captured the zeitgeist of rural, post-war England. Only after reflecting that this was the same time period captured by Edmund Love did I realize that in describing these individuals, Lee was reproducing the time and place - and how very, very different they are from Love's midwestern memories. Lee was not kidding when he wrote that his generation saw, "the end of a thousand years' life."Coincidentally, where Lee ends is nearly where Herriot begins. Between them, a reader is privy to some half-century of life in rural England.

Cider with Rosie ends rather abruptly, with Lee an adolescent on the cusp of leaving home, an adventures he remembers in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a continuation of Cider with Rosie, which, at this time, I do not anticipate reading.

Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France

Several years ago I read Julia Child's memoir of her time in France in the immediate post-war years, My Life in France, which is one of the finest memoirs I've read to date. Naturally, then, Finding Fontainebleau, jumped out at me from the pages of a recent Publisher's Weekly. So first:

Thad Carhart was four-years-old when his father was stationed in France as part of the NATO command. The entire family lived in Fontainebleau for three years, during which Thad started school (becoming "Ted" in the process, as Thad proved impossible to render, as he explains in a humorous anecdote), a good, but naughty, student. In Finding Fontainebleau, Carhart looks back on those three years - a giant Chevy station wagon, a brood of five rambunctious children, and a France still awakening from the nightmare that was World War II - while also weaving in the history of Fontainebleau, and by extension the kings and emperors of France. (Side note: it is to my great regret that I have not yet visited Fontainebleau. If this book convinced me of anything, it is that I really must do so at the next opportunity.)

I enjoyed Carhart's style very much, although I found the steady stream of inserted French to be distracting. For me, it was distracting because I could read it, and so the translations served only to repeat what had read in the previous line. I'm not sure if it would be more or less distracting to a non-French speaker. And, while I enjoyed both the memoir aspect as well as the French history lessons, I felt these were often each so short as to be quite choppy. Carhart's interjections about his life in France since returning to live with his own in the late 1980s further served to heighten this sense for me. And, unfairly, I couldn't help but compare it to the incomparable My Life in France. This is entirely unreasonable, as one memoir is told from the perspective of an adult, while the other is a child's memories, but given the time and place, I couldn't help myself.

Francophiles will still, no doubt, enjoy this book. Carhart provides a particularly interesting look at the work of renovation in France and the work that goes into maintaining the country's patrimoine - the churches, chateaux, palaces, and even parks that make France, well, France. He does a great job distilling the cultural quirks of the French and capturing the old Paris of berets, pissotières, and baguettes.

The Boys of Summer

As the cover states, The Boys of Summer is "the classical narrative of growing up within shouting distance of Ebbets Field, covering the Dodgers in the Jackie Robinson years...and what's happened to everyone since." While not false, I would say that the emphasis is strongly on the "covering the Dodgers" and "what's happened," with less focus on the growing up in Brooklyn bit. In other words, this is more Mike Royko meets The Summer of Beer and Whiskey than it is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Roger Kahn grew up in Brooklyn, in the shadow of Ebbets Field, the son of a man who loved the Dodgers almost more than he loved his family. Roger never had a chance of being anything other than a Dodgers fan. Through luck, happenstance, and hard work, he became the Dodgers beat reporter at the tender age of 24, at which point he hopscotched the country with the likes of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in 1952 and 1953. Traveling with an integrated ball club through the Jim Crow South, he learned more than he expected before leaving the assignment after two seasons. These experience comprise the first half of the book.

The second half is the "what's happened" bit, where Kahn criss-crosses the country again, this time by himself, as he visits the former players who have scattered from Connecticut to LA to Middle America. Their stories are fascinating for what they show us about how former athletes used to retire versus how they retire today. Carl Furillo has a job installing elevators in the World Trade Center. Billy Cox is tending bar at an American Legion. A few have gone into business, but none seems to have achieved over-the-top success. Only Gil Hodges is still in baseball. The modesty with which they are living out their lives - and for the most part these are still relatively young men - speaks volumes about how the country and professional sports have changed.

I liked this book. At times Kahn was a little too technical (or, honestly long-winded) in describing specific plays or games, but on the whole this is a book that a layman can read without getting bogged down. I especially enjoyed the passages that focused on journalism in the 1950s - the nuts and bolts of the newsroom and the culture, in particular.

In 1997, Kahn added an afterward where he writes about how the book was originally received in 1972. "Yardley complained, not entirely pleasantly, that I had written two books, not one." When I read that, I thought, "bingo!" The two haves are well-written, certainly, and each is interesting in its own way, but they really do feel like two different books. Unlike Yardley, I'm not convinced this is a complaint, but it was unexpected.

Final verdict: Baseball fans will undoubtedly relish Kahn's work. Non-fans may want to consider what other titles comprise their current reading list and prioritize accordingly.