When Breath Becomes Air

Author: Paul Kalanithi

Genre: Memoir

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group

Pages: 5 CDs (256 pages)

Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

Review: I don't know how one rates a book such as this. It's absolutely worth reading though, so do it.

Delicious!

Author: Ruth Reichl
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2014
Pages: 400
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: Ruth Reichl is a born storyteller. Through her restaurant reviews, where she celebrated the pleasures of a well-made meal, and her bestselling memoirs that address our universal feelings of love and loss, Reichl has achieved a special place in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, with this magical debut novel, she has created a sumptuous, wholly realized world that will enchant you.

Billie Breslin has traveled far from her home in California to take a job at Delicious!, New York’s most iconic food magazine. Away from her family, particularly her older sister, Genie, Billie feels like a fish out of water—until she is welcomed by the magazine’s colorful staff. She is also seduced by the vibrant downtown food scene, especially by Fontanari’s, the famous Italian food shop where she works on weekends. Then Delicious! is abruptly shut down, but Billie agrees to stay on in the empty office, maintaining the hotline for reader complaints in order to pay her bills.

To Billie’s surprise, the lonely job becomes the portal to a miraculous discovery. In a hidden room in the magazine’s library, Billie finds a cache of letters written during World War II by Lulu Swan, a plucky twelve-year-old, to the legendary chef James Beard. Lulu’s letters provide Billie with a richer understanding of history, and a feeling of deep connection to the young writer whose courage in the face of hardship inspires Billie to comes to terms with her fears, her big sister and her ability to open her heart to love.

Review: This was barely Delicious with a period, let alone an exclamation point. It wasn't a terrible read, but the book never really drew me in. It was "fine."

Kitchen Privileges

Author: Mary Higgins Clark

Genre: Memoir

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Pages: 224

Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: Angela's Ashes comes home to the Bronx in a brilliant, touching, charming, and bittersweet account of a childhood during the Depression from America’s Queen of Suspense.

Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir begins with the death of her father in 1939. With no money in the house—the Higgins Bar and Grill in the Bronx is failing and in debt, and worry about it is one of the things that has killed her father—Mary’s indomitable Irish mother (she devotes a chapter to her “Wild Irish Mother”) puts a classified ad in the Bronx Home News: “Furnished rooms! Kitchen Privileges!” Very shortly there arrives the first in a succession of tenants who will change the lives of the Higgins family and set the young Mary on her start as a writer, while bringing to them all a dose of the Christmas spirit that seemed to have vanished with Mr. Higgins’s death.

Full of hope, faith, memorable characters, and warmth, Kitchen Privileges, brings back into sharp, nostalgic focus the feeling of growing up poor, but determined to survive, in a vanished Bronx that was one of white lace curtains instead of a slum, and at a time when everybody was poor and either needed or offered a helping hand.

Review: Let me start by saying that I have never read a Mary Higgins Clark novel so this might seem an odd choice. Kitchen Privileges was on display at my library and the cover caught my attention, the photograph, the title, the memoir designation, everything about it seemed right up my alley. And, it totally was. I loved everything about it. 

This is what it is when an author, someone naturally gifted with writing talent, pens a memoir. I'm a writer, but I certainly don't write fiction or creatively, and it was obvious to me that the type of writer who can has a different perspective on the world. They way they view situations and people is just different from the rest of us. 

It's been awhile since I sat down and read a book in one sitting. This was a treat.

The Mapmaker's Children

Author: Sarah McCoy
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Crown/Archetype, 2016
Pages: 336
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in the root cellar—the remains of an Underground Railroad doll with an extraordinary past of secret messages, danger and deliverance. 

Ingeniously plotted to a riveting end, Sarah and Eden’s woven lives connect the past to the present, forcing each of them to define courage, family, love, and legacy in a new way.

Review: I really struggled with a rating for this book. It's not terrible and a total waste of time, I just think it misses the mark in several ways.

• This toyed with my heart strings, and not always in a good way.
• At times the transition from past to present, or vice versa, was abrupt and emotionally jarring.
• Eden was unlikeable for 3/4 of the book and then, inexplicably, underwent a major transformation unexplained by the author. Eden 2.0 was a product of convenience and felt "false."

Overall, I just felt let down by the whole experience.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

Author: Susan Jane Gilman

Genre: Memoir

Publisher: Hachette Audio, 2009

CDs: 7

Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: They were young, brilliant, and bold. They set out to conquer the world. But the world had other plans for them.

Bestselling author Susan Jane Gilman's new memoir is a hilarious and harrowing journey, a modern heart of darkness filled with Communist operatives, backpackers, and pancakes.

In 1986, fresh out of college, Gilman and her friend Claire yearned to do something daring and original that did not involve getting a job. Inspired by a place mat at the International House of Pancakes, they decided to embark on an ambitious trip around the globe, starting in the People's Republic of China. At that point, China had been open to independent travelers for roughly ten minutes.

Armed only with the collected works of Nietzsche, an astrological love guide, and an arsenal of bravado, the two friends plunged into the dusty streets of Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, they quickly found themselves in over their heads. As they ventured off the map deep into Chinese territory, they were stripped of everything familiar and forced to confront their limitations amid culture shock and government surveillance. What began as a journey full of humor, eroticism, and enlightenment grew increasingly sinister-becoming a real-life international thriller that transformed them forever.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is a flat-out page-turner, an astonishing true story of hubris and redemption told with Gilman's trademark compassion, lyricism, and wit.

Review: This memoir was surprisingly good, but I'm glad this was Gilman's adventure and not mine. Asia isn't anywhere I've ever wanted to visit, and I'm even more certain of that now. That said, I do know that China today is not the China it was in 1980s.

The title doesn't do this book justice. I expected it to be light, chick lit, fluffy even, but there's depth and a darkness to Susan's memories. I love her naive, freshly graduated from college perspective, and way she has to roll with the punches and be at the mercy of so many strangers, both Chinese and foreign. An older traveler would have had a very different experience, to the reader's detriment.

After traipsing through China with Gilman, I enjoyed her "afterwards" immensely, and loved that she left no strings undone for the reader so invested in her crazy experiences and travels.

I was curious about the author so I did a little bit of research. I didn't realize Gilman also wrote The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, which I also enjoyed.