Dinners with Ruth

By Nina Totenberg

Simon & Schuster     2022

304 pages     Memoir

Every American woman knows who Ruth Bader Ginsburg was. Her legacy continues to evolve as a beacon of light for women’s rights in this confused country. And if you listen to National Public Radio, you know who Nina Totenberg is. She has been NPR’s legal affairs correspondent for many years, and she covered the Supreme Court during the years that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a justice and only the second female justice on the Court.

In this memoir, Totenberg tells her own life story interspersed with stories of her friendship with Ginsburg. It becomes an ode to the power of women and of the hard-fought battle to overcome the stigma of women’s second-class status in society. Her friendship with Ginsburg began when she interviewed her in 1971 and continued through interviews, dinner parties, phone calls, and medical emergencies.

More importantly, it is the story of friendship and of women helping women succeed. Not only Totenberg’s friendship with Ginsburg, but also her friendship/working relationship with Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts at NPR. Through story after story, we learn of these women’s growth as well as the progress of women in the media and in the public arena.

We all wondered why Ginsburg, who knew she was suffering from fatal cancer, did not retire from the Supreme Court. Totenberg offers her own justification. She says, “It was a gamble and she lost.” Ginsburg had wanted the first woman President  to choose her successor. Of course, this didn’t happen, and then Ginsburg wanted to survive through the Trump administration. And on a political note, it has been all downhill since then.

One story I found particularly fascinating is extraneous to the story of Ginsburg. Totenberg tells of her father, Roman Totenberg, who was a world-famous violinist. His Stradivarius violin had been stolen by a former student in 1980. In 2015, the FBI informed the Totenberg family that the violin had been discovered in a closet when the man died. It is a remarkable story and should, of course, be present in Totenberg’s memoir, even though it has little to do with Ginsburg.

Many of my major opinions regarding Dinners with Ruth has to do with the power of friendship. I very much connected with that particular story line because of how deeply my friends have rallied to help me following the death of my husband. My book club is discussing Dinners with Ruth tonight and I will want them to know how dear they all are to me. Reading the book has also caused me to do a lot of thinking about my role in sustaining friendships.

Some reviewers complained that the memoir leans too much on Totenberg’s rather than Ginsburg’s life story. But I don’t think that was Totenberg’s purpose. I found the book to be an intimate look at how friendships grow from work relationships, and that with some effort on the part of all parties involved, friendships can survive and thrive.

Here is the story of Nina Totenberg’s father’s Stradivarius. 

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret

 By Judy Blume

Atheneum  1970

171 pages     YA

When I saw that the brilliant 1970s YA novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was being made into a movie, it brought back my first year as a librarian when the book was published. I absolutely loved the book but worried about putting it in the Middle School library because of some of the topics Blume covers in the book: “menstruation, burgeoning sexuality and fraught gender dynamics, religion, the barefoot-in-the-sprinkler joys and gossip-twisted tribulations of girlhood.” The New York Times article describing the movie suggests the book has “been both banned and beloved for it.” Indeed, I put the book in the library and never had a problem with people concerned about it. That was 1970—way before book banning because a “thing.”

But now I have two 12-year-old granddaughters and my love for the book caused me to re-read it and buy copies for my granddaughters. It was absolutely as good as I remembered it to be. What I had not remembered was the focus on religion. Margaret’s father is raised Jewish and her mother was raised Catholic. Margaret is interested in religion and trying to figure out the differences between the faiths her parents were raised with. After praying “Are you there, God?” many times, she decides she won’t have a religion, like her parents. I guess you could call her “spiritual but not religious.” This concept, too, has caused the book to be banned as well.

I am so looking forward to the movie when it is released on April 28. You can find the trailer here. There is also a just-released documentary about Judy Blume on Amazon Prime. It’s gonna be a Judy Blume week.

P.S. I just read a really good review of the movie on the LitHub website. Here it is. 

A Lesson in Woo-Woo and Murder

 By David Unger, PHD

KDP     2023

232 pages     Mystery/Humor

A Lesson in Woo-Woo and Murder is the ninth “lesson” book by psychologist, David Unger. Surprisingly, the main protagonist of the book is a psychologist named David Unger. I had read several pages before I said to myself, “Wait, Who is telling this woo-woo story?” I had to start the book all over again. Apparently the main protagonist in all of David Unger’s books is aah…David Unger.

Because this is a tricky book to review, I will refer to the publisher’s synopsis to get started on this review:

“David’s chakras are stimulated and he takes a skeptical step into the unknown when he’s asked for support at the Santa Monica Whole Life Expo – bad juju is coming, and positive therapeutic auras are required. Murder soon spoils the cosmic karma, and with the posse on hand to spice up the mystic mix, David’s sleuthing leads him to places he’s never been before, and most likely won’t return to.
But David is distracted – Nova, the Love Doctor, puts the “oo” in his personal woo-woo, and when a psychic foretells of romance in his future, he all but enters a different dimension. David’s special brand of voodoo-therapy-magic has never been more at home, but can he overcome his super Nova distraction for long enough to unmask the killer before anyone else gets hurt?”

Not having read any of the ‘Lesson’ books by David Unger, I had no idea what I was getting into. First, the book takes place in 1985 when a “Whole Life Expo” was a “New Age, spiritual, natural health, conscious living, metaphysical, extraterrestrial, enlightening hodgepodge of vendors, speakers, and snake-oil purveyors.” David, the hero of the story, has never been to a Whole Life Expo, nor have I. After reading the book, I’m not sure I would have gone, because there is a lot of woo-woo going on at the Expo and a lot of very weird characters. Very shortly, three of the vendors are killed, and David’s curiosity gets the best of him.

David has already solved at least eight murders in previous books  with a certain amount of his karma, and the karma is very evident in the woo-woo murders as he stumbles along, trying to solve these new murders that he has indeed stumbled into. He can’t help himself, as he pursues Nova, the love doctor, at the same time he is trying to solve the mystery.

The chapters are really short and contain a lot of cringe-worthy humor. Frankly, it was the short chapters and the humor that kept me reading. The plot, in itself, is not really enough. Several times I caught myself reading and thought, “Why am I doing this?” Although not very enlightening, A Lesson in Woo-Woo and Murder is a lot of fun. It would be a perfect airplane read or a good audio book for a long ride. Fun without taking up too much intellect or concentration other than remembering the names of a lot of strange characters.

As I read, I kept thinking that David Unger must be having a really good time writing these novels, solving these crazy crimes, all the while thinking up silly jokes to include in the chapters. He has another book coming out soon, A Lesson in Dogs and Murder.

A Lesson in Woo-Woo and Murder is coming out in two weeks. Look for it. You will have a lot of fun.

David Unger PHD’s website.  On his website is an audio recording recalling how he got into the humor/mystery writing business in the first place.

Leaving: How I Set Myself Free from an Abusive Marriage

 By Kanchan Bhaskar

She Writes Press    2023

249 pages     Memoir

Kanchan Bhaskar was born and raised in New Delhi, but she has lived in the United States since the early 2000s, currently in Chicago. Encouraged by a therapist to write down her inspiring journey, Kanchan Bhaskar has written a memoir of life in an arranged marriage and how she escaped to live a productive life in the United States.

Kanchan was raised in an Indian family, where her parents cared for each other and spread that love to their children. Her mother was an educated, career-minded woman, and her father loved her and their children deeply. Kanchan, then, had very little understanding about how badly a wife and mother could be treated in the more patriarchal Indian society into which she married—in an arranged marriage, of course.

 The new husband, Vijay, was attractive and charming, but narcissistic and an alcoholic. Very early in the marriage he began hitting and abusing her, begging her forgiveness each time he sobered up. It was absolutely more than she could bear, and she plotted how she could escape this abuse with her three children. She knew that this could not happen in India, so her freedom from Vijay would not be possible until she arrived in the United States.

 Kanchan says at one point that she would not become the “frog trapped inside the well.” Several times she escaped to her parents’ home, always encouraged by Vijay to return—that next time it would be different. Of course, as we read her story, we know that next time will not be different.  When she exerts her freedom ultimately, we cheer that she has developed a clear sense of her self and her soul. She has developed an incredible power to achieve her freedom and tell her story.

Leaving  is difficult to read while at the same time restorative. Kanchan suggests that a woman must gather her innate strength and her inner spirituality in order to become the woman she was meant to be. I can see why her therapist suggested that she tell her story so that other women stuck in abusive relationships can learn to grow and thrive. I was so impressed how she learned to get in touch with her soul and pass on her strength to her children. One of the most touching aspects of this memoir is the dedication written by her daughter. The daughter suggests that she and her brothers were not important enough to their father for him to make any effort to change. She concludes, “Thankfully, we were—and are—important enough to our mother, who left him for the sanity of us all.”

Here is an outstanding You Tube video of an interview with Kanchan Bhaskar. I received the memoir from the author’s publicist. I believe that Leaving will be valuable for therapists to use with women suffering through abusive relationships, as well as for women wanting to read stories of feminist empowerment. The memoir is published this week.

The School for Good Mothers

 By Jessamine Chan

Simon and Schuster     2022

336 pages     Literary

Dystopia! Thank goodness! The School for Good Mothers is Jessamine Chan’s first novel, and it is every mother’s nightmare.  

Frida Liu is divorced from Gust and shares custody of their toddler daughter, Harriet, with him and his partner, Susannah. Frida is overtaken by stress and anxiety one day and leaves Harriet alone for two hours while she goes to her office to pick up some paperwork. Neighbors hear Harriet crying and report Frida to Child Protective Services. And her nightmare begins!

As mothers, we have all done things that we might be ashamed of—spanking, ordering kids to go play outside, denying them treats when they misbehave, and on and on.  In Philadelphia in an unknown dystopian future, punishment for reported mothers is far worse than a slap on the wrist. Harriet’s custody is given completely over to Gust, Harriet’s father, and Frida is sent to a “school for good mothers” where she must undergo one year of re-education in parenting and only have a once-a-month phone conversation with her daughter. If Frida disobeys the rules of the school or fails to grow in her mothering skills, the phone conversation is denied. Her ability to ever get custody of her daughter depends completely on her ability to learn new skills as a mother.

Mothers at the school are there for a variety of reasons, but all have been brought to the attention of Child Protective Services at some point in their parenting. At the school, each mother is given an AI doll that closely resembles their own child, and the doll records every moment he or she is with their mother. One of the key components of the novel is the invasive nature of facial recognition software—something that we are just beginning to understand.

The story is told through Frida’s eyes, but it is told in the third person. We are able to have a somewhat detached, although horrified, view of the school and the mothers and the potential power of artificial intelligence.

The School for Good Mothers took me quite a while to read, and every reading session was haunting. I found myself questioning what makes a good mother nearly every day as I watched families while I was on vacation. I told the basic plot to several people as I was reading it, and everyone had examples of “bad” parenting from within their own lives. For example in the novel, one young mother was at the school because she had her 12-year-old niece take care of her baby when she was called into work. As a 12-year-old, I was babysitting all over the neighborhood. No one reported those mothers!  The other day, I watched a mother trying to cope with a screaming toddler in the checkout line at the grocery store. I remembered hauling a screaming child out of the grocery store, leaving a cart full of groceries behind!

No matter how hard Frida tries, she cannot succeed in becoming a good mother. The NY Times reviewer says, “Chan poses a grim question: What happens to a person when she has no way to beat an intolerable system and no way to escape it?”

The reviewer concludes: “Chan’s ideas are livid, but her prose is cool in temperature, and the effect is of an extended-release drug that doesn’t peak until long after you’ve swallowed it. One test of speculative fiction is whether or not it gives you nightmares, and when mine came — I knew they would — it was a full week after I’d finished this time bomb of a book. ‘This is a safe space, ladies,’ a faceless captor was telling me in my sleep. Terrifying.”

 I have not had any nightmares yet, but I am constantly aware of the parents around me, and for the most part, their awesome skill in parenting. The School for Good Mothers was very disturbing and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

The School for Good Mothers has been optioned to be a movie or a tv series. I will be looking forward to it.

Jessamine Chan’s website.

Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux     2023

432 pages     Literary

Where to start on the best book I have read this year? The setting? The South Island of New Zealand. The time frame? 2017. The cast? A group of environmental idealists called Birnam Wood and their primary members, Shelley and Mira. A would-be journalist named Tony. An American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, and a newly knighted businessman and his wife, Sir Owen and Lady Jill Darvish. The plot? OMG, the plot! The plot would be nothing without this cast of amazingly-written characters, each so important to the plot that it would be nothing if the reader hadn’t come to know the characters so intimately.

Mira and Shelley are the organizers and leaders of a gardening collective named Birnam Wood. The group’s purpose is to plant trees, plants and vegetables on unused or abandoned land on the South Island of New Zealand. Mira has heard about a huge farm close to a national park that has been abandoned because of a gigantic landslide and decides that this might be the next big project for Birnam Wood. Early in the plan, she comes in contact with the American techno billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who also has his eyes on the farmland, but for far different reasons. He realizes that Birnam Wood might be the perfect coverup for his nefarious plans, and he convinces Mira that he has just bought the farm from Sir Owen Darvish. He offers Mira considerable money to come and use the land for their environmental purposes. Mira and Shelley bring the group to the farm, and they settle in, ready to farm the land. A former member of the group, Tony, has a lot of questions about a collective taking so much money from an American billionaire, and he sees the potential for a major exposé that will guarantee him a journalism career. Sir Owen Darvish only has understood little bits and pieces about Lemoine’s plans for his family farm, and his wife, Jill, knows nothing. The set-up is complete, and the plot begins.

The story line would go nowhere without 21^st century technology, and the vast amount of knowledge that Lemoine uses to manipulate the scene with technology of all sorts. His money has come from his drone company, and he uses those drones to monitor everything that happens on the farm. He also is able to drop in on the group and manipulate their cell phones and laptops and on and on. In this way, he controls all the situations and people like puppets. One reviewer compared Lemoine to Elon Musk, and I had Musk’s image in my mind throughout the book. I was quite impressed that Catton understood the technology so well that she was able to use it so successfully in her plot.

This is an incredible book, extremely clever and innovative. The set-up is amazing, and when the plot really began to take off, I almost had to hold my breath, because I had become so entrenched with the characters that I knew that nothing good was going to happen to any of them. And I will say no more about plot.

I can’t say enough about Catton as an author. One reviewer said, “Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice for most of us, is an act of self-definition.” For instance, Shelley worries about why she has a constant sense of dread. “She was trying to escape it now, but she would never escape it, because she could not feel the difference, could not understand the difference, between running toward something, and running away.” All the characters are very clearly defined and identifiable without being caricatures. I can’t say that I identified with any of them, but I sure knew who they were.

I have been to the South Island of New Zealand, and I hoped that I might have been to the national park described in the book, but Catton mentioned in the afterword that all the locations were made up.  I became intrigued with the book when I read a terrific review in The New Yorker, and then remembered that I had been given access to a copy of the book from the publisher. I highly recommend Birnam Wood.

The New Yorker review.

The Brave

By James Bird

Feiwel & Friends     2020

311 pages     Middle Grade

The Brave is a brave, sober, loving book that was introduced to me by my sixth grade granddaughter, Adela. I bought the book at her request, and we will have a book discussion after she finishes. While it is realistic fiction, it has some aspects of magical realism.

Collin is a 12-year-old with an OCD problem that makes it difficult for him at school. He counts all the letters in the words that people say to him. When he responds, he begins with the number of letters. So if his teacher says, “Good morning, Collin.” He would respond : “17. Good morning,” No matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop counting, and the school kids can’t stop harassing him. When things become unbearable, his alcoholic father sends him across the country with his dog, Seven, to live with his mother, whom he has never met.

Cecilia, his mother, is Ojibwe and lives on the Fond du Lac reservation outside of Duluth MN. Wait! Duluth! My home town! I called Adela and said, “You didn’t tell me it takes place in Duluth.” Oh yeah” she responded, “I forgot.” Actually, the reservation is about 15 miles from town.  Of course, to me, that made the book all the more important.  As a kid growing up in Duluth, there were kids from the reservation in our school, but native culture was pretty much a given in the culture of Duluth.

The native culture takes a secondary role in the story line, except, perhaps, for the magic that seems to surround a new acquaintance, Orenda. Orenda lives mostly in a tree house next door to Collin’s mother and grandmother. She believes that she is turning into a butterfly as her body deteriorates from ALS. Her mother, who died of ALS, is a butterfly that visits her frequently. Orenda is an incredible character in the book, and the fact that her father built her a treehouse makes her all the more magical.

As Collin becomes her friend, she teaches him about strength and bravery, and the stronger he becomes, the easier it is for him to manage at school and control his counting obsession. His mother teaches him about the purity of love, and he finds himself growing into the person that he wants to become. He gains enough mastery over his life that when Orenda is dying. he is able to manage the pain and grief. Collin muses at one point: “I wish I could take her pain away. I’d happily feel it if it meant she would feel better, but I also know she would never let me. It’s hers. It’s part of her story.”

I tried to read the book through the eyes of my 11-year-old granddaughter. She definitely will have seen the depth of the crisis at hand, and is responding to the challenges of bullying and the joys of beautiful relationships. One reviewer complained that some of the natives were stereotypes. “Still we should be past stereotypes of stoic, wise Indians who speak little and are abnormally attached to the great outdoors.” These details were things I was looking for as I read, but I became so involved in the beauty of the story line and the relationships that I didn’t pay attention to potential stereotypes.

Before I began The Brave, I read that it was on several lists of best books of 2020, including School Library Journal, and the New York Public Library, so I was surprised when I read negative reviews in The New York Times, The Circle Newspaper, among others. They felt that the Native American experience wasn’t accurate enough. But, that’s wasn’t what I was reading the book for. I saw a young boy and a teenage girl struggling, finding, and becoming the butterflies that they were destined to become. In my opinion, The Brave was just that, brave and beautiful.

Just two small caveats: Orenda is constantly followed by butterflies, and the woods around their homes are filled with butterflies. Ah, butterflies have a very short season in northeastern Minnesota. Likely they aren’t there in the autumn and winter. Also, she feeds peaches to  the butterflies. Peaches don’t grow in Minnesota—too cold. Oh well, but it’s a beautiful illustration.

James Bird, the author of The Brave, is a filmmaker and author. He is of Ojibwe descent and went to school in Minnesota. He has a new book, No Place Like Home, coming out in August.