Celbrity Detox by Rosie O'Donnell

Celebrity Detox by Rosie O'Donnell - I don't watch daytime TV. I don't watch nighttime TV, come to think of it. So it was really something of a remarkable coincidence that the one time I happened to have the television on during The View was the day Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had such a vitriolic argument that I stopped what I was doing and sat, dumbstruck, at this train wreck of a broadcast.

I'd heard about the feud with Donald Trump. Who could miss it? It was everywhere. In both instances I could see both sides. It seemed like Rosie lashed out unnecessarily at The Donald, but his overreaction was stunning and unkind. And I could see how Rosie's remarks about our soldiers and the terrorists could be misconstrued, so I felt like Rosie was being a bit bullheaded in her insistence on being right, even though I do think Elisabeth is naive in her support of the war in Iraq.

After the Big Bad Broadcast and Rosie's premature departure from the show, I clicked onto her blog to see what she had to say. A person needs thicker skin than I have to be able to withstand the hatred being spewed at this saucy Irish woman. But there's a lot of love being tossed around as well. Rosie seems to bring out the best and the worst in people. On her blog, she bares it all -- her home life, her anger, her joy, her art, her family and friends. She invites people into her life through this new medium in a naked, honest fashion that few celebrities would dare to do.

So when her book was announced, I ordered a copy. True to form, Rosie bares everything -- warts and all -- in an effort to make sense out of the madness that is the world -- hers and ours -- against the backdrop of her childhood, which was marred by the untimely death of her mother. She showed us, unflinchingly, what loneliness and isolation she felt as a child, and despite my early insistence that I wouldn't get sucked in, I found myself shedding tears for this little damaged girl, who in so many ways remains damaged to this day, but is also strong and brave and solid.

She readily admits to flaws that many of us would not -- selfishness, narcissism, self-loathing. She talks about her weight problem with a candor to which I could relate, having suffered the barbs of my own toddler's honest assessment of my more-than-ample derrière. Even though she laughs about it, I could feel the pain beneath that laughter.

I was surprised that so much of the book focused not on her feud with Elisabeth, but on the fray with Donald Trump and her feelings about Barbara Walters, whom she felt did not come through for her when the going got tough, and found myself wanting to explain to Rosie what terror some people feel when faced with confrontation. I know, I know. Walters is a journalist and should be unafraid of unpleasantness, but it seemed to me that she was simply being human. I've heard Walters is upset about the book, but really I felt like Rosie went out of her way to show how much she loves and respects her.

There's a large portion of it devoted to her admiration for Barbra Streisand, an affection that was nurtured by Rosie's mother before she died.

I think what struck me most about this book is Rosie's intensity. She seems to feel things more intensely than others, and in ways that would make me take to my bed for days. It's probably what makes her an artist, but what also gives her pain. In the end, I was left a little sad by this woman whose life is so open for people to see and pick apart, and I wish her all the best.



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Just Finished - Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes by the World's Greatest Chefs edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman - Haven't you always wanted to start your own catering business? Open your own quaint little restaurant? I know, I know. You have visions of sitting around at the bar, sipping tea and creating delicacies that everyone will oooh and ahhh over. Everyone will love you. You will become beautiful and life will be perfect. Not! Trust me. I know this from experience. I had a restaurant once. It was nothing but a nonstop nightmare.

So when I ran across "Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs," I thought maybe it would help me lick the wounds I'm still licking 25 years after I lost my little fantasy. And it did! This is the stuff of nightmares that everyone -- even those who don't cook for a living -- can enjoy. Grab a cup of tea with a nice side order of schadenfreude, and eat your heart out.

Chefs aren't always brilliant. Now, don't you feel better just knowing that? The book opens with a truly horrific tale of a chef who let the lobster spoil the night before catering a lobster dinner for 3,000 people. I almost had a panic attack, myself, just reading about how he had to scramble to try to salvage that disaster.

A story by Anthony Bourdain about a New Year's Eve dinner that flopped spectacularly had nearly the same effect on me. Then there was the one by former Good Morning America food correspondent Sara Moulton about cooking and flubbing her first Thanksgiving dinner after attending culinary school that was downright heartwarming. And the one by Gabrielle Hamilton, who, worried about being politically incorrect, hired a blind line cook...with disastrous results.

There are plenty more tales of woe, tender and tough, and I recommend this highly to anyone who's ever had to pass off store-bought pecan pie as homemade to a busload of tourists who just have to have real Southern cooking because someone forgot to write it down. Who me? Never.

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Just Finished - Possible Side Effects

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs - It takes a certain kind of person to find the humor in tragedy. I’m one of those people. My husband simply cannot understand it when he finds me giggling maniacally as I watch a southern-Gothic Betty Butterfield tell the emergency-room doctor that the pills he’s prescribed for her Fox News-induced panic attack are not what she had in mind. “I want somethin’ with a “X” in it,” she wails.

http://www.bohnsplace.com/betty_butterfield/ and http://www.mmmhellooo.com/.

If you don’t think Betty Butterfield or Augusten Burroughs are funny, then you either led a boringly normal childhood or you’re completely psychotic.

When my mother saw that I was reading Possible Side Effects, she remarked, “I don’t think that man is funny at all.” In case you’re wondering, she didn’t live a boringly normal childhood. I doubt Augusten’s mother would’ve seen the humor either.

See, me and Augusten? We’re so much alike it’s kinda scary. And it’s not just because we both have southern backgrounds rife with mental illness of the Auntie Mame variety. Or because we’re insecure, hypochondriacal slobs with a tendency to write down our lives. It’s because I get it. Oh, I sooo get it. Burroughs has this kind of Seinfeld-episode quality to his stories it that I can relate to.

When he writes a chapter about buying up as many first-edition John Updike novels as possible because the guy’s old and could die any minute, and just THINK how the value on those books will skyrocket when he does, finally, bite the dust… Well, let’s just say I understood, and brushed the dust off my two Easton Press signed Kurt Vonneguts.

And when Burroughs recounts the story about taking a weekend getaway with his partner at a private B&B only to get completely creeped out by the owner’s doll collection, I knew just how he felt.

“Standing there on the foyer, on the inch-thick maroon carpeting, I stared directly at a human baby girl doll, seated in a high chair. Behind her on a bookcase, a row of little girls, all in Victorian dressing gowns and black flats… ….All around the room, dolls. Little dolls in a display case between the windows. A doll on the sofa right next to us. Two dolls sharing a seat behind the innkeeper’s chair.” Geeze! Who could sleep with all those dolls leering at you?

Later, behind the closed door of their room, they fantasize about sneaking through the house at night, removing all the dolls’ heads, or writing things in the guestbook for the next guests to find. “She watched us,” or “There’s something about one of the dolls.” Har!

But Burroughs has something Seinfeld doesn’t have. There are stories here that break your heart. These are stories about damaged people, some who bloom in the face of tragedy and some who succumb to it, and what is to be learned there.

While Burroughs has a knack for skewering people in his life, he also shines the spotlight on himself, revealing his less-than-pretty habits and his less-than-noble intentions. It’s this unpitying self-revelation that makes me like him because I recognize so much of myself in his essays.

He’s damaged goods, that’s certain. But it’s the kind of damage that reveals the strength beneath it, even in humor, the wisdom gained through pain – his own and others’. And it makes me think that maybe I’ve got some of that strength, too. It makes me want to have him over for tea and compare mental illnesses. I’ve got some funny stories in my family, too, that I just know he’d like.

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On the Bedside Table

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The National Enquirer (yeah, yeah. I know.)
Bookmarks Magazine
Discover Magazine

Just Finished - It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News

It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News by Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com - Every time I see Nancy Grace on television, I have an urge to destroy the television. Come to think of it, I feel the same way every time I see Bill O'Really [sic.], Larry King, Stone Phillips, Geraldo Rivera... Heck, I've even started hating Katie Couric, and nobody hates Katie, do they? I feel like the guy in that movie who went around saying, "I've had it up to here and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" We don't get news anymore. What we get is pure, unadulterated crap. And I'm sick of it. So when I came across this book at Barnes & Noble the other day, I figured I'd found a book that'd make me feel like I was beating up on all of 'em. And I was right! A satisfying read it was! And funny, too.

Drew Curtis, the author of the book is a news hound who used to email news stories to all his friends until one day he decided to quit sending them out and told his friends if they wanted to read interesting news stories, he'd post them on a website and they could come take a look, themselves. Before he knew it, people were sending HIM stories and now Fark.com is the busiest news-aggregate website on the net. Curtis's pet peeve is also mine -- the absolute crap that the news media pass off as news that's not really news, what he's termed Fark.

According to Curtis, news had degenerated into about four or five categories:

Fearmongering -- this includes terrorists, natural disasters, global warming, pandemic illnesses, meteors hurtling through space toward earth, etc. that are all supposed to make us panic.

Missing White Chicks -- It's true. Have you noticed how much news time missing white chicks and missing white kids get on national news? Since when was this a global or even national concern? It's local news masquerading as Big News.

Unpaid Advertising Placement Masquerading as Actual News -- Top-ten lists, movie stars' opinions on antidepressants, Banned TV commercials that the advertisers intentionally made so they'd be banned. All of these are designed to bring attention to the star's latest movie, the magazine's latest issue, the store's latest clothing line. And it works. Sales go up in direct inverse proportion to the buying public's instinct for bait-and-switch.

Seasonal Articles - These include how bad the traffic is going to be this Christmas, how hot it's going to be this July 4, how busy the stores will be the day after Thanksgiving. It's the same thing, year after year. It never changes, and they still roll it out and make us listen to it all over again.

Bellybutton Contemplation - Okay. That's sort of my moniker for it. It's the media talking about whether the media has gone too far in covering certain stories, or about how someone got in trouble for plagiarizing the news. The media love to talk about themselves as if they're as important as the news they're not reporting.

So that's basically the meat of the book. But the best part about the whole thing is Curtis's well-honed sense of humor. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to finally slink into the other bedroom so my husband could get some sleep. Some of my favorite passages from the book:

"Equal Time for Nutjobs"

Journalists are taught to give equal time to both sides of a story.... But in some cases, there flat-out isn't another side. Take moon landings, for example. Any time moon landings are mentioned in the media they always have to go get a paragraph of comment from the nutjobs who think the moon landing was faked.

"Media Fatigue"

Having no new information [on a developing story] is the bane of Mass Media. ....so if you want to continue to report on something, you've got to start exploring Other Angles. Right after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a Fox News reporter on a live feed interviewed the first person he saw: a man walking a dog.

REPORTER: You're live on Fox News Channel. What are you doing?

MAN (INCREDULOUS): Walking a dog.

REPORTER: Wh-why are you still here? I'm-I'm just curious.

MAN (SLIGHT STUNNED PAUSE): None of your [***ing] business!

REPORTER: Oh, that was a good answer, wasn't it? That was live on air on national television; thanks so much for that.

MAN: Well, you know...(continuous yelling at the reporter)
[National desk cuts live audio feed]


HAR! I've seen this sort of thing myself. I remember a few years ago during the big Malibu conflagration, seeing a news reporter come up to a harried-looking firefighter who was shoveling dirt over dry brush:

"Sir, can you please tell us what you're doing?" to which he responded (paraphrasing), "Can you please get the hell out of the way? We're trying to fight a fire here."


Curtis tells a hilarious story about news coverage on a terrorism drill at a Kentucky goat show.

"Homeland Security's explanation for the staged attack: 'Kentucky is one of the nation's top five goat-producing states...'"

Curtis then points out that if they say top five, then it's number five. "Because if Kentucky were the number one goat-producing state, they would say that instead. I've lived in Kentucky most of my life and have never seen a goat farm. They're probably around somewhere, but my point is, it likely doesn't take a lot of goats to be the number five goat-producing state."

He outlines other hilarities with headlines like, "Oh, my God! There's bacteria on everything!"

The only drawback to the book is that if you're not internet savvy, a lot of what he's talking about won't make much sense to you. I'd really like to give this book to my father, but he'd be completely baffled by the reader's comments from the website at the end of each section. He'd just never figure out that "MyNameisMofuga" is someone's internet alterego.

But for those of you who've joined the 21st Century and actually go onto the internet as well as read the news, this is a book that will have you laughing uproarously, satisfied in the knowledge that it's not just you -- the news really is crap.

www.bambooks.biz

Just Finished -- The Darling

The Darling by Russell Banks -- My first introduction to Russell Banks was an afternoon in the car, driving toward New Orleans and listening to This American Life on National Public Radio. I'd chanced upon it while changing stations between towns and happened to catch it at the very beginning of Banks's reading of Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story about a narcissistic man's affair with a homely woman. It was good-- the kind of story where you hear lines and think, "Wow. I wish I'd written that." It stayed with me for a long time. But there was something "off" about it. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Until I read The Darling.
The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a 59-year-old woman who owns a farm in the Adirondacks and whose life remains a mystery to everyone around her. Through her narrative, Hannah tells us about how she had been a priviledged child of the '60's and a member of the violent radical Weather Underground, who fled the United States and began life anew as the wife of a mid-level bureaucrat in the African country of Liberia.
It is the story of her life as a wife to her African husband, a mother to her three African children and caretaker of a number of chimpanzees in an American pharmaceutical research facility in Liberia, and her betrayal of virtually everyone who loved her -- her parents, her friends, her children, her husband, her chimpanzees -- against the backdrop of the turbulent '60s and the political upheaval surrounding Liberia's civil war.
I had a difficult time reading this book, mainly because the main character was so unsympathetic. Frankly, if I hadn't been stuck at my daughter's school for three hours, I might've put it down and not finished it.
Oddly enough, I got the impression that Banks wanted us to feel sympathy for Hannah. Banks did a wonderful job in his portrayal of Hannah's mother, whose clueless narcissism helped explain Hannah's own self-centered nature. But it failed to excuse it, and I got the feeling after finishing the novel that he hadn't quite fleshed Hannah out completely, even though she seemed aware that she was selfish and was not able to feel the proper emotions a wife; friend; daughter; and, particularly, mother; should feel.
He never quite completely developed the character, and it occurs to me that this is what bothered me about Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. Perhaps it's intentional. Narcissists aren't fully developed characters. They are, instead, two-dimensional creatures incapable of the full range of real human emotions and empathy. If that's the case, he succeeded brilliantly.
The only real emotional attachment Hannah makes throughout the story is for the chimpanzees in her care, and I never could quite figure out why. The background story of Liberia's history is fascinating, and there is real tension in the plot.
I have read stories by Banks, however, that are simply wonderful. Rule of the Bone was brilliant, and I recommend it to all. I also recommend Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. It's a fine piece of writing that left me mulling over it for weeks after I heard it. To hear it read by Banks, himself, on This American Life, go to: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1059

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On the Bedside Table

The Darling by Russell Banks
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Collected Poems by Philip Larkin
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Just Finished - The Judas Field

The Judas Field by Howard Bahr -- The story of Cass Wakefield, a confederate soldier during the Civil War, his friend and compatriot, Roger; and the young orphan boy, Lucifer; who stumbled into their lives and onto the battlefied during this country's most horrific war. Twenty years after the war, the scars that linger, both literal and psychical on the landscape of the South, her defenders and her citizenry culminate in a shocking but inevitable climax.
This book left me weeping openly and dumbstruck at the talent that Howard Bahr has for some of the most beautiful, poetic prose I have ever encountered, even while describing the ugliest moments of our country's history. The characters in this book grappled not only with an enemy of their own house, but the ghosts of the dead and dying whose presence was ever constant, a God whose seeming indifference challenged their faith, and -- most of all -- with themselves, whose demons followed them from the battlefield to haunt their dreams and waking moments forevermore.
With dialogue typical of the quaint Southern patois 150 years ago, Bahr's characters are sympathetic, even while committing atrocities that would shock today's calloused reader:

Well," said Lucian, "there's no sense in praying a-tall, if you ask me."
Roger laughed again and slapped the boy's leg. "There you have it," he said. "No sense in it a-tall. To ask for protection is pure lunacy, lad, especially when the other side is doing the same, and to the same address. That's exactly why everybody prays, you see; it's all we have to offer commensurate with the madness."
"But if God -- "

"Hush," said Roger. "Be still and listen. You must have your faith, and it will be sore tested when you see what's left after a fight, what's hanging in the trees and spread over the ground -- that place you saw back at Muscle Shoals was a garden by comparison. You look around, and you might be tempted to ask where God was when all this happened."
"Well, where was He?" asked Lucian.
"He was there," said Roger. "He was there all along, watching and grieving...." "...We have lost pretty much everything, but faith we must not lose. That is why we pray, and fervently -- but not for preservation, mind. That article is left to you and your pards, not to God. To ask Him for it, and be spared when so many are not, will only doom your faith."
"What do you ask for, then?" said the boy.
Roger pulled the quilt around his shoulders. "To be forgiven," he said.
They were quiet then. The snow swirled around them, borne on a cutting wind, and through it ghostly shapes began to pass, bending, searching, speaking softly. Little stars of candlelight pricked out in the whiteness as men gathered their belongings. A murmur rose from the camps; the army was stirring, its vast and myriad soul already in motion toward the mystery that waited beyond the river.

This is not a book for the lazy reader. It's a book to be savored, to marvel at, to grieve over. A beautiful, beautiful book.

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Just Finished - Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - This is the story of Jacob Jankowski, a 90-year-old nursing-home resident coming to terms with age and disability as seen through the lens of his past as a lonely young man during the Depression whose leap onto a night train landed him in the middle of a three-ring circus -- literally.
This was a quick, easy read that couldn't help but be fun. What's not to love about the down-and-dirty story of Carnival workers on a traveling circus, replete with a menagerie of big cats, camels, chimps and one big, tragic, lovable elephant named Rosie?
It's a simple story where the villians are villians and the heros are...well, human. Doesn't require too much thinking on the part of the reader -- just the kind of book to take to the beach or absorb after a long day at the office.

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