book review Archives - Page 3 of 9

Author du Jour: Pauline Lévêque and Florence Mars

07/17/201707/05/2017 by Frederic Colier

“Say Bonjour to The Lady: Parenting From Paris to New York,” by Florence Mars and Pauline Lévêque

(Clarkson Potter, pp 250, $19.99)

If you lived abroad for an extended period, even simply during a semester off while in college, you know that cultures are nothing alike. There is as much in common between Russian and Portuguese bread than between a whale and a tiger. That is what give the world its colors and texture. There has been a bevy of books about raising children in foreign countries of late. France and Paris seem to be the target to this topic. A mother forced to live abroad because her husband’s multi-national has relocated the family to a distant land or simply a single mom in search of new adventures learn quickly that, in France, things are not quite the same as in the States. They readjust with more and less success to the new local flavors.

There’s always an element of silliness and caricature while observing another’s culture. Italians speak with their hands; French shakes their head to show easy irritation, and so on . . . But beyond surface observations, social frameworks speak louder than words. They are harder to pinpoint. The French knock on your door uninvited for dinner. The Spanish don’t start dinner before 11 pm, and the Dutch bring their own food along in case you have not inferred the hint. Yes, they are camping in your place, for a few days.

In their charming illustrated book, “Say Bonjour to the Lady,” Florence Mars and Pauline Lévêque achieve that sweet delicate balance by drawing funny everyday situations between the art of raising children in Paris versus New York, from first-hand experience, without falling into obvious cultural yawns. What becomes apparent with the Lévêque‘s clean-lined illustrations and Mars‘s micro texts is the swinging pendulum between the two cultures applying different approaches to reach nonetheless the same goal. On one hand, French parents seems far less concerned or involved in monitoring their children around the clock, which could be interpreted as a sign of trust. They preferring instead to allow their children’s own self-development to flourish or let them deal with themselves to the point of coming across as not caring. Whereas in New York, parents seems at the service of their children around the clock, to the point of appearing to reveal an underlying anxiety or fear of missing out or stunting or damaging them if they fail to validate any one of their initiatives. Which would be a mistake to believe as well. New York parents simply love to include their children in their lives. Raising them is a hands-on family affair. The book’s strength stems from the playful comparisons Lévêque and Mars draw. Both sides have wonderful and sad pros and cons. If you can accept that, in France, children play in a separate room located as far as possible from the adults’ center of gravity, the living room, and that, in New York, parents live in their children’s living room, another word for playroom, you are in for a few complicit merry giggles.

Author du Jour: Beatriz Williams

06/12/201706/09/2017 by Frederic Colier

“The Wicked City,” by Beatriz Williams

(William Morrow, pp 368, $26.99)

In “The Wicked City,” one can smell the whiffs of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway as he journeys back and forth between New York and East Egg. You can touch Princeton, the Prohibition, the allure of speakeasies with Fitzgerald pouring himself a scotch, and nudging the fabulously wealthy yawning at thought of attending the next party. From where we stand, the era feels like a distant shore, a fata morgana only made possible by the booming business and new wealth created overnight, the windfall of WWI. In typical Hollywood stories, with the new breed of winners come the losers, and not necessarily those who never had, but rather those who tried hard, got there, and walked away on a whim, which, for many of us, reveals a certain disposition towards foolishness. This is where Williams starts her two-time-framed narrative. The story moved from present to past and back and forth. “The Wicked City” is a Nick Carraway journey in reverse.

Ella Gilbert starts at the top of society and decides to leave it all behind upon learning that her banker husband cheats on her. She trades her life of luxury and high-comfort in Soho for a small pad of Greenwich Village. That’s for the near present. But Williams’s story also is situated in 1924, where the Village was not the ultra-expensive resort for the startup moguls of today. Back then there were forbidden places, where more prosaic people went in search of excitement. The place in question is a speakeasy, the Christopher Club. The club introduces the second protagonist, Geneva Keely, a flapper, who gets caught in a raid and is forced to help the police track down her father, an important bootlegger . . . The story takes its own flight as we ponder how the two narratives are interrelated, making the twists and turns highly entertaining and surprising.

Author du Jour: Elizabeth Blackburn & Elissa Epel

05/18/201705/17/2017 by Frederic Colier

The-Telomere-Effectfinalcover-small “The Telomere Effect: a Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer,” by Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD and Elissa Epel, PhD

(Grand Central Publishing, pp 399, $28.00)

Whoever came up with the subtitle for this fascinating book did an excellent job creating a strong hook. Who indeed would not want to live longer? Contrary to what you may consider, that life is just a game of roulette, with molecules moving one way and DNA reacting in another, the authors claim that you can certainly influence your longevity. To entice you into their secret, they ask: why some people at 40 look like 60, while others at 60 look like 40? The story narrated here deals with telomerase and, more precisely telomeres, which are the capstones at the end of the DNA, whose states mirror the way we treat ourselves. Good telomeres will keep you disease free longer. Translation: your lifespan will be elongated.

Here, as in diet books, we find that the main culprits for premature aging: quality of sleep, frequency of exercise, types of diet, and chronic stress, all of which deeply impact our telomeres. Over the book, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn (Nobel Prize winner) and Dr. Elissa Epel clearly demonstrate the mind-body connection. Having recurring negative thoughts for example will affect also your telomeres, and your appearance. Telomeres shorten in repeated adverse conditions. People looking healthy have long telomeres. So the main question you should ask yourself, and it should make you want to pick up this book at once, is whether a body who has been exposed to all types of unhealthy habits and physical and self-inflicted mental abuses can reverse damages done to the capstones of its DNA? In other words, are frayed telomeres irreversible? The book goes at great length to provide answers. Particularly fascinating are the chapters discussing the impact of early trauma during pregnancy and income inequalities to show the relations between depression and schizophrenia . . . which logically would mean that we may pay the price for circumstances that we do not control and that, in turn, impact our appearance. But nothing is set in black and white, and life choices still play their part. One thing is certain, reading this book will not age you.

Author du Jour: Suzanne O’Sullivan

05/11/201705/10/2017 by Frederic Colier

“Is It all in Your Head? Trues Stories of imaginary Illness,” by Suzanne O’Sullivan, MD

(Other Press, pp 296, $26.95)

Psychosomatic illness is problematic. Disregarded as not real, it is often not considered seriously and is relegated to footnotes in medical books. And yet, it is all around us, often having debilitating effects on the sufferer, which can last for years in some cases. According to Dr. O’Sullivan, it costs the health system twice as much to treat as diabetes. Expensive for imaginary treatment. Who has not heard of someone suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or sudden memory loss? In this important book, O’Sullivan lays out her case for a new approach and treatment methods for psychosomatic illness. Her argument is convincing. Taken from real life experiences, through her work as a neurologist and neurophysiologist, she shares the cases of some of her patients and ponders how come so many of them complain about symptoms without any physical manifestation? Is it really all in their head?

At first brush the book can appear predictable, since each chapter is matched with a specific patient. There’s Pauline, Camilla, and Rachel among others. But each has been carefully selected to illustrate precisely O’Sullivan’s claims. The plurality of psychosomatic manifestations run far and wide and would appear to stem from hidden stress and major traumas. O’Sullivan points out surviving rape or exposure to chronic mental abuses as being frequent culprits. We’ve known for century that the mind can affect our physical health. But clearly, here O’Sullivan seeks to establish a connection between mind and body that goes beyond simple mood disorder treatment. She advocates for new ways to look, understand and treat unexplainable symptoms, paving the way for bringing relief to her patients. Some of the cases will break your heart. Matthew did it for me.

Author du Jour: Lawrence Weschler

05/15/201704/10/2017 by Frederic Colier

“Waves Passing in the Night,” by Lawrence Weschler

(Bloomsbury, pp 176, $25.00)

If you wonder what “Apocalypse now, “The Godfather,” and “The English Patient,” have in common, you may scratch your head for a while. Or maybe not. Yes they are all films. Congratulations. But think harder? The first two films would have been an easy guess, but when introducing the third title, the Kubrick-Coppola connection falls apart. The connection is what this engaging little book, half memoir half critical conversation, that Lawrence Weschler wrote with bravado, is about. Its subject? The celebration of the great Walter Murch, the nine-time nominee for the Academy Awards and three-time its winner. Murch was much more than a sound and film editor. Listen careful Lucas’s very first film “THX 1138,” (his most futuristic and thought-provoking by far) and you will understand that at the time of its release, the soundtrack was destined to contribute to its cult masterpiece status. In case you care to know, he also co-wrote the script with Lucas.

Still, the sophistication of sound editing hides Murch’s other passion. He was for much of his life a devout amateur astrophysicist, chronicling long forgotten connection between the Titius-Bode theory and musical harmony in the universe. For a long time, it was believed that each planet of our solar system emitted its own frequencies . . . I would spare you the details, but in this case the law was supposed to have a progression ordered very much like the Fibonacci numbers, and based on planets’ positions and rotations, one could deduce whether cosmic organization was subject to universal mathematical rules. As you can imagine a sound editor advancing long discredited physics theory did not go down too well. But at the heart of this quixotic quest, Murch questions the nature of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And who is to decide what we should know? The questions may seem a bit of a stretch. Not everyone agrees that we should accept universal order in specific examples. But if these sorts of questions are something you are not used to face, you are in for a seductive compelling read.

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