Mini Book Reviews

Some mothers have told me, "I don't read anymore." I don't understand that. Not anything? Doesn't that make you want to shoot yourself? I've been a voracious reader since childhood. Reading has now become more difficult--and I'm sure it will become more difficult still if we have another baby--but I still manage to slip it in: the newspaper during Elmo's World, magazines during naptime, novels in the evenings. (Could this be why my house isn't tidy?) When Ben's at day care, I read the young adult novels I write book discussion guides for. I go to two book clubs regularly, and a third when I have time. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading at a breakneck pace... but it's part of what makes me feel human.

Today, I give you four brief reviews of books I've read in the past month:

Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity, by Harry Bruinius. I gather from some of the amazon.com reviews that this book does not present much new research, but rather provides a readable overview of the topic. I was fascinated to read about the eugenics movement in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century; looming over the narrative, of course, are the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany. As someone who places great faith in science and studies, I found this book a welcome reminder of how intellectualism and elitism can lead people astray. It was interesting to me how in some ways the founders of the eugenics movement were committed to scientific principles, but in other ways they used their research to reinforce their existing prejudices.

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The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory. This trashy but fun story is told from the point of view of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's sister. Although there were times the first-person narration didn't strike me as authentic (Was "sexy" really a word people used in Tudor times?), I thought Mary made an interesting narrator--as described in the story, she was familiar with the court, but longed for the comfort of love and family. Reading this book inspired me to brush up on my Tudor history, and I discovered that while Gregory invented many of the details, the broad outlines of the story are taken from the history books. She provides fascinating insight into life in the royal court, and the instability caused when the need for a male heir caused a king to take more and more power into his own hands.

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Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner. I reread this for a different book club; it made me feel almost nostalgic for the days of early motherhood, when even intellectual women desperately buy any book that promises to get their babies to cry less and sleep better. This is an easy read about four women and their experiences with motherhood. Reading it made me nostalgic for Philadelphia.... Although the ending ties everything together a little too neatly, I didn't mind because I was cheering for the characters.

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Heaven Lake, by John Dalton. I chose this novel for my book club because I heard Dalton, a St. Louis writer, give a reading a few months ago and he seemed like a nice guy. In his debut novel (which took him 8 years to write), he tells the story of Vincent, a Christian missionary to Taiwan in the early 1990s. When Vincent's affair with a high school student gets him into trouble, he embarks on a quest through mainland China. I enjoyed the detailed descriptions of Taiwanese and Chinese life, which give a strong sense of the otherness people feel while traveling in a foreign country. This book was more dense and difficult than I had anticipated, but by the end I felt a sense of accomplishment. At the reading, Dalton read a chapter from his next book, set at a Missouri summer camp, and I look forward to reading that one too.