Marianne Peters

NonfictionMemoir

Finding a life’s work

Review by Marianne Peters

In his bestseller The Other Wes Moore, Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran and White House fellow Wes Moore pondered how his youth propelled him to the pinnacle of success while another Baltimore man with the same name sank into poverty and crime. Moore’s inspiring new book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, could be considered a sequel, as Moore describes what happened when he became an adult. More than a travelogue of adventures, however, this memoir shares his quest to understand how people find their true calling.

Moore’s career has not had a straight trajectory, and readers puzzled about their own direction might find his indirect path encouraging. In choosing employment, he found more motivation in compassion and a hunger to serve than in personal gain or status. Moore’s course has intertwined with larger events such as the war in Afghanistan, where he served as a paratrooper, and the recession, which found him working in New York’s financial district at the time of Wall Street’s collapse. His inside accounts of these events strongly evoke the concerns of those times.

Between each chapter, Moore tells stories of other people who bring their unique talents to lives of service. These stories underscore Moore’s point that the meaning of life is clearer when we are willing to serve others, whether as an inner-city principal or a social entrepreneur. The Work will resonate with people seeking their own purpose in life.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his bestseller The Other Wes Moore, Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran and White House fellow Wes Moore pondered how his youth propelled him to the pinnacle of success while another Baltimore man with the same name sank into poverty and crime. Moore’s inspiring new book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, could be considered a sequel, as Moore describes what happened when he became an adult. More than a travelogue of adventures, however, this memoir shares his quest to understand how people find their true calling.
FictionDebut Fiction

A summer on the homestead

Review by Marianne Peters

Kevin Gillooly, the teenage protagonist of Christopher Scotton’s debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, returns with his mother to her Eastern Kentucky hometown of Medgar after the horrific accidental death of his 3-year-old brother. Kevin’s father hopes a summer under the care of Pops, the family’s cantankerous patriarch and the town veterinarian, will restore the devastated Anne. For Kevin, his time in Medgar is not a retreat, but an introduction to the thorny issues of adulthood, as well as the healing power of nature, thanks to his friendship with Buzzy Fink, a local boy who instructs Kevin in the ways of wilderness.

The town knew better days when the nearby coal mines were productive. Now people are selling off their ancestral lands for the latest in coal extraction: mountaintop removal, which destroys the landscape. In a place with more poverty than opportunity, the choice to sell is a tempting one. A small group of townspeople oppose the powerful mining interests, including Pops. As Kevin accompanies Pops on his veterinary rounds into the hills and hollows, he begins to see what happens when a community loses its connection to its history—a connection Kevin has just discovered for himself, thanks to his time on the family homestead.

Among the novel’s many joys are its characters, which add humor, drama and heartbreak to this layered story. Though a few are just this side of stereotypical (the gay hairdresser, the sassy housekeeper, the repugnant mine company boss), they illustrate the way years of common experience and friendship can be tested by change and hardship. This affecting coming-of-age story faithfully portrays environmental concerns alongside rich family histories.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kevin Gillooly, the teenage protagonist of Christopher Scotton’s debut novel, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, returns with his mother to her Eastern Kentucky hometown of Medgar after the horrific accidental death of his 3-year-old brother. Kevin’s father hopes a summer under the care of Pops, the family’s cantankerous patriarch and the town veterinarian, will restore the devastated Anne. For Kevin, his time in Medgar is not a retreat, but an introduction to the thorny issues of adulthood, as well as the healing power of nature, thanks to his friendship with Buzzy Fink, a local boy who instructs Kevin in the ways of wilderness.
Memoir

Finding a grandfather’s forgotten love

Review by Marianne Peters

Sarah Wildman knew her grandfather, Karl, escaped from Vienna on the eve of the Nazi occupation. One day after his death, however, she discovered a box of letters and photographs hinting that there might be another, truer version of his story, one that included a girl nicknamed "Valy."

Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind is a Holocaust memoir, a survivor's tale and a detective story all at once. After reading the letters and seeing Valy's smiling face in the photos, Wildman is determined to find out the fate of this mysterious Jewish woman her grandmother referred to bitterly as her husband's "first love." Her search takes her from Czechoslovakia to Berlin and deep into the maze of bureaucracy that traces those scattered by war. In an increasingly digital age, I was staggered by Wildman's description of the paper records that still exist, accounting for thousands of people both lost and found.

The author includes selections from Valy's letters, which glow with love for Wildman's grandfather. It's impossible not to root for her, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when, as the months pass after his departure, Valy's letters turn into desperate pleas requesting money and passage to America, even as she attempts to put a cheerful face on the increasing humiliations of life in WWII Berlin.

Paper Love is an intimate portrait of a woman caught in the Nazi net—a woman who might have been forgotten without Wildman's efforts. In telling Valy's story, Wildman reflects on the stories we tell about our own pasts, what we include and what—and who—we leave out.

Sarah Wildman knew her grandfather, Karl, escaped from Vienna on the eve of the Nazi occupation. One day after his death, however, she discovered a box of letters and photographs hinting that there might be another, truer version of his story, one that included a girl nicknamed "Valy."

NonfictionHistory

Miracle in a Chilean mine

Review by Marianne Peters

In 2010, the world watched the dramatic rescue of 33 Chilean miners who had endured 69 days buried a half-mile underground. The men, who agreed in advance that they would only tell their story collectively, talked to Héctor Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had exclusive access to the miners. They were generous and unsparing as they shared their experiences with him, resulting in a narrative that’s both harrowing and deeply moving.

Tobar makes it clear that each man's experience is unique. Even from the beginning, as he traces their journeys that fateful morning from their scattered homes to the San José mine in the Atacama desert region of Chile, we encounter the men as individuals. How they manage to work together to endure—even before they are found—is fascinating and inspiring.

Deep Down Dark describes the cave-in, the day-to-day struggle to survive below, the search above and the triumphant discovery that the men had lived, as well as the complicated and risky rescue operation. I know I'm in the hands of a skillful writer when I know the end of the story, but I still cannot stop reading because I'm riveted by the suspenseful account. Because the miners were willing to reveal their personal, emotional and spiritual struggles, as well as family issues, Tobar is able to illuminate how their experiences made leaders and spokesmen of some, followers and rebels of others, and left a permanent impression on their lives.

In 2010, the world watched the dramatic rescue of 33 Chilean miners who had endured 69 days buried a half-mile underground. The men, who agreed in advance that they would only tell their story collectively, talked to Héctor Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had exclusive access to the miners. They were generous and unsparing as they shared their experiences with him, resulting in a narrative that’s both harrowing and deeply moving.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Where dark history and fairy tales collide

Review by Marianne Peters

Eliza Granville’s suspenseful novel hearkens back to the fairy tales we remember from childhood—but not the sanitized Disney versions. These are the darker tales about witches, ovens and children lost in the deep woods, fleeing for their lives.

Gretel and the Dark tells two stories that eventually connect, revealing the mystery at the heart of the novel. The first concerns Krysta, a young girl in Nazi-controlled Germany whose widowed father works at an infirmary with an ominous mission. Granville reveals this world through the eyes of Krysta, a spirited and stubborn girl who seems to delight in confounding her adult caretakers. Krysta uses elements of fairy stories to explain her father’s increasingly tortured mental state and the bizarre world in which she finds herself. As Granville gradually unveils the chilling details—which her innocent narrator does not fully understand—we readers recognize the true terror of her situation.

The second story, told in alternate chapters, takes place in the late 19th century. Josef Breuer, a psychoanalyst of some renown, becomes fascinated by a nameless, beautiful woman claiming to be a machine. She’s in search of a monster, she tells him, who must be destroyed before he spawns more monsters just like himself. Breuer is determined to discover who she is and why she bears a smudged tattoo of numbers on her forearm.

This combination of history, mystery and fairy tale makes for engrossing and irresistible reading—right up to the ultimately redemptive final twist.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Eliza Granville’s suspenseful novel hearkens back to the fairy tales we remember from childhood—but not the sanitized Disney versions. These are the darker tales about witches, ovens and children lost in the deep woods, fleeing for their lives.
NonfictionTechnology

The downside of constant connection

Review by Marianne Peters

I read The End of Absence with interest, because I am a member of what author Michael Harris calls the “Straddle Generation,” the generation born before 1985, the last one to remember adult life before the Internet. Harris compares this moment in history to the advent of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, when the written word became universally available. “Young and old,” he writes, “we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life. We forget the myriad accommodations we made along the way.” Through constant connectivity, he argues, we have lost our “daydreaming silences,” giving up times of solitude and wonder.

Harris’ book is a sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing look at the relationships we have with the technology in our lives, as well as the human beings we know and love and increasingly view through the lens of our various technologies. As he points out, “When we don’t want to be alone and yet don’t want the hassle that fellow humans represent either, the digital filter is an ideal compromise.”

What’s more disturbing, Harris argues, is that we are allowing ourselves to be reshaped unconsciously, even biologically, sacrificing the ability to be completely absorbed by a story, keenly aware of life’s smallest details or attuned to silence.

On a hopeful note, Harris offers his own attempts to regain the gift of absence as a roadmap for those of us who want it back.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

I read The End of Absence with interest, because I am a member of what author Michael Harris calls the “Straddle Generation,” the generation born before 1985, the last one to remember adult life before the Internet. Harris compares this moment in history to the advent of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century, when the written word became universally available. “Young and old,” he writes, “we’re all straddling two realities to a certain degree. In our rush toward the promise of Google and Facebook—toward the promise of reduced ignorance and reduced loneliness—we feel certain we are rushing toward a better life.
NonfictionBiography

The three sides of William Tecumseh Sherman

Review by Marianne Peters

Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman includes a photograph of the celebrated Civil War general with his staff. While the other men strike classic poses and gaze into the middle distance, Sherman sits slightly slumped, legs crossed, jacket unbuttoned, glittering eyes focused directly on the camera. It fits with the popular notion of Sherman, the man who invented “modern war” and whose soldiers burned a path of destruction through the American South.

O’Connell’s biography envisions Sherman not as one man, but three, shaped by his own personality and his circumstances: “the strategic man, the general, the human being.” He tackles each persona sequentially, emerging at the end with a fully realized portrait of a complicated individual.

O’Connell displays warmth and occasional humor as he considers Sherman’s more memorable traits. An acclaimed talker, Sherman was “a veritable volcano of verbiage,” he writes. O’Connell doesn’t overlook Sherman’s darker characteristics, especially his treatment of Indians and his overwhelming belief in Manifest Destiny, no matter who or what was in the way. Sherman was not cruel, the author argues, but a man committed to duty and accomplishing his goals.

O’Connell devotes a final section to Sherman’s relationship with his family, particularly his tempestuous marriage to his foster sister, Ellen. Despite his adultery and her manipulations, they were each other’s best friends and allies—a remarkable relationship in a truly remarkable life.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman includes a photograph of the celebrated Civil War general with his staff. While the other men strike classic poses and gaze into the middle distance, Sherman sits slightly slumped, legs crossed, jacket unbuttoned, glittering eyes focused directly on the camera. It fits with the popular notion of Sherman, the man who invented “modern war” and whose soldiers burned a path of destruction through the American South.
FictionPopular Fiction

Unlikely romance on the road

Review by Marianne Peters

In One Plus One, British novelist Jojo Moyes (Me Before You) once again introduces her readers to two mismatched lovers who have troubles of their own but find a safe haven in each other.

Jess is always just one missed paycheck away from disaster. A single mother with two jobs, a disappeared husband, a bullied stepson and a brilliant daughter, she is also desperate to deliver her daughter Tanzie to Scotland to take a math exam that will win her a scholarship to a good school.

In steps Ed Nicholls, one of Jess’ housecleaning clients—and a millionaire. Recently accused of insider trading, he’s lost his company and his best friend. Through chivalry or simply a desire to redeem himself, Ed decides to drive Jess and her family (and their gigantic dog) up to Scotland, a trip of several days. Jess accepts, but she has a secret: In an act of desperation, she registered her daughter for that school using money she stole from Ed’s wallet. The road trip that follows is part comedy, part tragedy.

One Plus One is full of quirky characters and absurd situations, but it is written with authenticity, humanity and warmth. It is impossible not to root for Jess, a compassionate woman who knows she hasn’t always chosen wisely, but who is determined to make life bearable for her kids. With her characteristic blend of heart and humor, Moyes takes her characters on a journey, and despite the roadblocks, they find their way home.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In One Plus One, British novelist Jojo Moyes (Me Before You) once again introduces her readers to two mismatched lovers who have troubles of their own but find a safe haven in each other.

NonfictionBiography

The unknown life and lasting effect of a CIA officer

Review by Marianne Peters

On September 13, 1993, the day Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, several dozen CIA officers quietly gathered at the grave of Robert Ames in Arlington National Cemetery. While most of the world focused on the hope of Middle East peace, those at Ames’ grave paid tribute to an operative who may have made that peace possible, even though few knew what he had accomplished—not the presidents he served, not members of Congress, not even his own family.

The Good Spy is Kai Bird’s engrossing biography of Ames, who served his country for decades in the Middle East. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (American Prometheus), received no official help from the CIA, but found that dozens of retired operatives, Ames’ wife Yvonne and his children, and Ames’ longtime contact Mustafa Zein were more than willing to tell his story. A devoted family man, Ames was also gifted with sharp intelligence, a love of Arabic language and culture, and the requisite patience and sensitivity that made him a very effective clandestine officer.

This book is not only a fascinating character study of the man himself, but also a window into the skills Ames used to recruit agents and cultivate relationships with key political and military players. It describes in detail the CIA’s relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, including the lengths the agency went to in an effort to protect key leaders of the organization and the ties Ames maintained with PLO security chief Ali Hassan Salameh, a crucial back-channel to Arafat, the PLO’s “chairman.”

Bird also details Ames’ death in the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, an attack that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. The Good Spy demonstrates anew all that was lost on that tragic day, and the consequences for those seeking peace in a war-torn region.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On September 13, 1993, the day Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, several dozen CIA officers quietly gathered at the grave of Robert Ames in Arlington National Cemetery. While most of the world focused on the hope of Middle East peace, those at Ames’ grave paid tribute to an operative who may have made that peace possible, even though few knew what he had accomplished—not the presidents he served, not members of Congress, not even his own family.

NonfictionMemoir

Downsizing to what really matters

Review by Marianne Peters

Dee Williams was living the dream—the American Dream. She had a three-bedroom house with a driveway and a mortgage. She had stopped spending weekends in the mountains with her friends, trading that carefree existence for more adult matters such as rewiring the bathroom. She worked full-time and traveled too much. Then one day, she woke up in the emergency room, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. Life was never going to be the same, but not in the usual way these stories go.

Williams’ memoir The Big Tiny tells the story of her ambitious idea to chuck the big house and build her own home—all 84 square feet of it. Like other memoirs about a transformation, Williams describes her moment of inspiration, followed by the hurdles she faces along the way: self-doubt, design questions, letting go of material possessions, hiccups in the building process, physical injury, not to mention where to park the tiny house once it’s finished. The tiny house itself—part of a movement of small dwellings that has been catching on across the country—has a design that is appealingly practical and simple, cleverly arranged and subversive, almost like a child’s playhouse for adults.

What makes this memoir unique is Williams’ voice, with its quirky, self-deprecating humor and emotional transparency. While she constantly pokes fun at her own foibles, she also allows us into her fears as she starts over after a health scare. She also reveals how her tiny home brings her into close community with friends and family, which helps her rediscover a meaningful existence through relationships with others.

The Big Tiny is not a construction manual, but don’t be surprised if it leads you to wonder how you could build a tiny house of your own.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dee Williams was living the dream—the American Dream. She had a three-bedroom house with a driveway and a mortgage. She had stopped spending weekends in the mountains with her friends, trading that carefree existence for more adult matters such as rewiring the bathroom. She worked full-time and traveled too much. Then one day, she woke up in the emergency room, diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition. Life was never going to be the same, but not in the usual way these stories go.

NonfictionMemoir

Love story of the Great Plains

Review by Marianne Peters

In her memoir, The Ogallala Road, Julene Bair chronicles the last days of her family’s Kansas farm, as well as the bittersweet love affair that feeds her hope of saving the place her folks called home. She makes the case that modern farming practices are inexorably eroding the vast resources her ancestors took for granted, and she mourns the unraveling of the tapestry that once bound together her family, their history and the land they shared.

Twice divorced and worried about her teenage son, Jake, Bair returns to her family’s farm for a visit and meets Ward, a rancher from nearby Smoky Valley. Lonely in middle age, she is thrilled to have a man in her life again, as well as a role model for Jake. Together she and Ward dream about building a life together and working the land Bair has inherited from her parents. From the beginning, however, Bair knows that Ward does not share her passion for land preservation. She begins to wrestle with her family’s part in draining the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides the only source of water for the Western Plains. Eventually, she supports more sustainable use of this precious water source—even as she realizes that her actions will drive a wedge between her and Ward.

Bair’s memoir is a moving and honest account of a woman trying to reconcile parts of herself that seem irreconcilable—daughter, mother, lover, landowner, environmental advocate. In searching for unity within herself, she discovers what she truly values.

In her memoir, The Ogallala Road, Julene Bair chronicles the last days of her family’s Kansas farm, as well as the bittersweet love affair that feeds her hope of saving the place her folks called home. She makes the case that modern farming practices are inexorably eroding the vast resources her ancestors took for granted, and she mourns the unraveling of the tapestry that once bound together her family, their history and the land they shared.

NonfictionMemoir

A novelist traces her pioneering ancestors

Review by Marianne Peters

Diane Johnson’s wry new memoir, Flyover Lives, is an absorbing exploration of the people and places that have shaped her. The book begins and ends in France, where the acclaimed novelist (Le Divorce) lives with her husband John half the year. In between, her stories take us to Illinois, California, New York and London, and also back in time, when the footsteps of her ancestors led them to the Midwest.

“No one writes much about the center part of our country, sometimes called the Flyover, or about the modest pioneers who cleared and peopled this region. Yet their Midwestern stories tell us a lot about American history,” Johnson writes in the foreword. “Migration patterns, wars, the larger movements, are after all made up of individual human beings experiencing and sometimes recording their lives.”

In this memoir, Johnson records her own growing up in Moline, Illinois, part of a close family. Her childhood was one that some might call idyllic; she describes it as “lacking in drama.”

Her story becomes more dramatic as she gets older and moves away from Moline—marrying and divorcing young, moving to London under false pretenses, writing for Stanley Kubrick. However, her recent past is just part of the book.

Johnson’s curiosity about her forebears led her to research and discover some of the traces they left behind—letters, journals and photographs, tales handed down over the years. Telling their stories of life in the Midwest makes up a good chunk of this memoir. Johnson relates her family history honestly and compassionately. Some of the stories are funny, others heartbreaking. She dwells mainly on her grandmothers’ experience: getting married, moving to the center of a young country, setting up house, having children and sometimes, as in the case of her grandmother Catharine, burying their children. Catharine buried her three daughters in the space of one week after they died of scarlet fever.

By investigating the lives of her ancestors, Johnson finds that there are no “flyover” lives, and that every person has a story worth telling.

Diane Johnson’s wry new memoir, Flyover Lives, is an absorbing exploration of the people and places that have shaped her. The book begins and ends in France, where the acclaimed novelist (Le Divorce) lives with her husband John half the year. In between, her stories…

Social Science

Following the trail of trash

Review by Marianne Peters

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, and reveals who is making a living harvesting the materials we pay to part with. He follows the trail all the way to the end, describing the people who pay a high price to pick apart and process (usually with bare hands) the valuable resources locked up in our waste. The book also includes color photographs of working conditions few Americans would tolerate.

Minter is uniquely qualified to write about this industry. He grew up in the family scrap business and now lives in China, where he serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. The book is part family history and part travelogue, as he accompanies Chinese scrap dealers crisscrossing the U.S., snapping up shipping containers’ worth of materials, including electronics that are tossed out by the tons every year. He also travels to Asia, where entire regions have dedicated themselves to recycling our scrap. Recycling brings much-needed employment to these often-impoverished areas and demonstrates the resourcefulness of the developing world, whose citizens repurpose, reuse and resell the stuff we consider “trash.” Minter describes these places, transformed from fertile rural backwaters to bustling, polluted urban centers where the labor is unregulated and the materials are toxic.

Adam Minter does not claim to be an environmentalist, and readers of that bent might be offended at his disdain of recycling, especially as practiced by well-to-do and well-meaning suburbanites. He does point out, however, that despite the toxic effects of some overseas materials processing, the developing world is doing what people in America used to do before things got so disposable: They are using brains and initiative to reuse perfectly good stuff. For all our talk about sustainable lifestyles and “going green,” Minter says, the people who buy our leftovers might be teaching us a lesson or two.

Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use)…

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