Book Reviews and a Little More…
Title: Cruising Attitude Author: Heather Poole Format: Kindle Pages: 272 (2012 total – 1,856) Approx. Word Count: 68,000 (2012 total – 542,004) Release Date: March 06, 2012 Publisher: Avon Categories: memoir Source: ARC from Publisher Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Back of the book: Flying the not-so-friendly skies… In her more than fifteen years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all.
Read moreI’ve been meaning to read this for a long time, and finally got around to it a few weeks ago. We were traveling, and it was a good book to read start-to-finish in the car — only took me about an hour. David Small’s story is rather sad. The second child of a pair of emotionally and physically distant parents, he spent much of his childhood entertaining himself and learning how to best maneuver with the least upset to anyone. When he develops a tumor on his neck, it becomes just one more thing to deal with silently. His parents seem barely concerned, leaving it for several years before finally having it removed when David is 14. Even then they don’t tell him what is going on, just that he’s having surgery. He wakes up with a giant scar and no voice with absolutely no preparation. It’s hard to tell which is worse, the physical scar or the mental one.
Read moreSeveral days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve – the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.â€
Read moreNew York Newsday called this memoir of a warhood childhood in Japan “one of the saddest and yet most uplifting books about childhood you will ever encounter.”
Separated from her family in the confusion and horror of World War II, seven-year-old Tomiko Higa struggles to survive on the battlefield of Okinawa, Japan. There, as some of the fiercest fighting of the war rages around her, she must live alone, with nothing to fall back on but her own wits and daring. Fleeing from encroaching enemy forces, searching desperately for her lost sisters, taking scraps of food from the knapsacks of dead soldiers, risking death at every turn, Tomiko somehow finds the strength and courage to survive.
Many years later she decided to tell this story. Originally intended for juvenile readers, it is sure to move adults as well, because it is such a vivid portrait of the unintended civilian casualties of any war.
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