Rushdie to write book about decade in hiding
By DORIE TURNER, Associated Press Writer Dorie Turner, Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA – Novelist Salman Rushdie plans to write a book about his decade in hiding under a death threat from the Iranian government using a digital archive of his personal papers housed at Emory University, he said Tuesday.
Rushdie, who is in the middle of a five-year stint as a distinguished lecturer at the Atlanta university, has donated his literary archive to Emory’s special collections library. The university created an exhibit from the manuscripts, letters and photographs that opens Friday and runs through September.
“It’s my story, and at some point, it needs to be told,” he said during a news conference before touring the exhibit with reporters. “That point is getting closer, I think. When it was in cardboard boxes and dead computers, it would have been very, very difficult, but now it’s all organized.”
Read the rest of the news article here: Yahoo News
New Releases
House Rules by Jodi Picoult
Intelligent, obsessive: ‘House Rules’ is one of Picoult’s best
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
Everyone, it seems, has an opinion on autism: celebs, politicians — not to mention the medical community.
But to grasp on a gut level the emotional texture of what it’s like to live with Asperger’s syndrome (the highest-functioning form of autism) or to love a family member who has it, you need to read Jodi Picoult’s powerful new House Rules.
House Rules has a serviceable plot involving a murder trial. Set in Vermont, the novel centers on Emma Hunt and her two teen sons. Older son Jacob, 18, is a high school senior with Asperger’s; the younger son is the unimpaired Theo, 15. (People with Asperger’s are often highly intelligent and very verbal but have difficulty navigating the world because they cannot interpret social cues correctly.)
Where’s Dad? Although he sends his monthly child support, he fled to Silicon Valley when Theo was 6 months old, overwhelmed by the chaos created by a special-needs child.
Everything revolves around Jacob. Picoult brings alive how “Aspies” crave order and fall apart when confronted with change. Jacob’s rigid schedule, his clothes, his food become minefields if threatened.
Emma has devoted herself to helping Jacob through endless therapies, supplements, special diets, doctors. She also ceaselessly advocates for accommodations in school for Jacob. He’s doing better, but he’ll never be self-sufficient. Hers is a heroic but exhausting and isolated life filled with fear about Jacob once she’s gone — as well as guilt over Theo. With good reason, he resents how his whole life is dominated by his older brother’s disability.
Emma’s deepest grief is Jacob’s loneliness. To help him, she hires a lovely grad student named Jess to tutor Jacob in how to read social cues. And to learn why he shouldn’t drone on about his favorite topic, a CSI-like TV show. Jacob has a Talmudic knowledge of blood splatters, forensics, crime scenes and decomposing bodies.
This fixation makes the police suspicious when Jess turns up dead. Jacob’s Asperger behaviors — twitching, little eye contact — only deepen their suspicions. The plot trots along with cops, lawyers, a trial and various twists.
The most impressive and moving chapters are the ones narrated by Jacob. Picoult captures his intelligence and his obsessiveness but also his emotional flatness and self-absorption.
Picoult doesn’t whitewash the fact that Jacob experiences the world differently. Not an easy task — and one of the reasons House Rules ranks among her best.
Philip Hoare: The Whale - review by Gregory McNamee
The Washington Post
Call him Ishmael, this Mr. Hoare, who would not, at first glance, seem a likely candidate for the job. He is famed on the other side of whaleroad, as the Anglo-Saxon kennings called the ocean, for books of a more indoors nature, among them studies of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward. But inside this literary scholar’s heart, it turns out, has long lurked the strenuous desire to head to the sea--"cities and civilizations rise and fall, but the sea is always the sea,” he writes—and find Leviathan for himself.
And so he does. Where there is a place on the planet likely to harbor whales of just about any description, Hoare is likely to have visited it, to have read about it, to have studied its every contour. “The Whale” results from years of devoted researching, talking, kayaking, diving and swimming; it is equal parts almanac, literary study, celebration, elegy, eulogy and literary travel essay.
Read the rest of the review here: ‘The Whale’ by Philip Hoare
Book of the Month
March 2010 BOTM: Water For Elephants
by Sara Gruen
As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie.
It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.
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