Customer Comments

SandyPP has commented on (16) products.

Absolution by Patrick Flanery

SandyPP, June 12, 2013

Is there a way to navigate South Africa's apartheid years without guilt? Or maybe Clare Wald has more guilt than others? As the aging famous writer is interviewed by her biographer in present day, very dangerous South Africa, she mourns and imagines what happened to her disappeared activist daughter and obsesses over her betrayal of her right-wing sister. The reader has to work a bit; Clare and her biographer have different stories to tell, or is the reality of history impossible to know? In any case, it's work worth doing.

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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

SandyPP, January 1, 2013

What do we really know about North Korea? Next to nothing. I was so grateful to finally learn something that feels accurate.

Journalist Demick was stationed in Seoul and managed to get a visa to go to the north but found it wasn't possible to be allowed to actually talk honestly with anyone. So she came back to the south and interviewed people who had escaped. It feels balanced because among her subjects is a woman who belonged to the Communist Party and believed in the government, who hadn't even wanted to leave but was tricked by one of her children.

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As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis Devoto by Joan Reardon

SandyPP, August 31, 2012

I never read letters but a friend raved about this book and I love Julia Child so I gave it a try and was immediately hooked! Julia was trying to write a cookbook for use in America from France. Avis was testing recipes, sending her ingredients, telling her what was available in the U.S. (e.g. shallots, hearing the process of this influential cookbook was fabulous. But the book is about all sorts of other things too: strangers becoming bosom buddies; liberal intellectuals being affected by the McCarthy witch hunts; differences between French and American culture; the hunt for a publisher...

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Stitches: A Memoir by David Small

SandyPP, August 30, 2012

what's that growing on David? Will anyone pay attention? One of your heavier graphic novels, this memoir is both moving and astonishing. If you thought you had the most dysfunctional family around, move over.

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A House in Bali by Colin Mcphee

SandyPP, August 27, 2012

A musicologist goes to Indonesia because he fell in love with gamelon music the first time he heard a recording of it. I'm not a musician and not even very knowledgeable about music, but I found this one of the best books I read as I prepared for a trip to Bali.

While there is quite a bit about gamelon music and the people who play it, ((I think I enjoyed the gamelon performances I attended there more because of reading this book) it was so much more, providing a wonderful picture of Balinese culture, especially before it was so impacted by tourism.

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