Great flick

Last night, Garrett & I watched an amazing movie, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. Everything about this movie is terrific - it tells a compelling (but sad) story about a remarkable man, the filmmaking is beautiful, the score is lovely, the acting is great. Director Julian Schnabel is a genius.

The story is about Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a brain-stem stroke and was paralyzed from head to toe. Locked into his body (as if in a diving bell), he kept his mind active through his imagination and memory. Schnabel's portrayal of this and of how Jean-Do wrote a book about it is simply extraordinary. Jean-Do's only means of communication was by blinking his left eye. To write the book, a transcriptionist recited a series of letters and Jean-Do would blink when she got to the letter he wanted. I'll write more about the book when I've finished it. In the meantime, rent the movie and watch it. And then watch it again.

UPDATE: The book is also an amazing testament to Jean-Do's resiliency in the face of an unimaginable tragedy. It increased my admiration for Julian Schnabel in his ability to translate the book into such an amazing movie.

Girls Like Us

Having grown up listening to Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and to a lesser extent, Carly Simon, I was thoroughly captivated by this triple biography by Sheila Weller. The title tells it all: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- And the Journey of a Generation, although I was born a little too late (and with no musical talent) to experience life in the '60s as they did. The book provides back stories for many of my favorite songs. Like, did you know that when Joni Mitchell wrote "Carey" and "California", she was fleeing from what she had come to see as a smothering love affair with Graham Nash (who wrote "Our House" about their relationship)? Or that she wrote "Circle Game" in response to Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain"?

This book is full of titillating stories about not only the three women, but many other musicians who filled the airways with the music I still love - James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Crosby Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne -- the list goes on and on. I was reminded of the time (it must have been in the early '70s) when I went to see James Taylor. Carole King, whom I had never heard of, opened for him and and blew everyone away.

The book isn't all gossip - Weller also provides some insight into the music industry, the process of songwriting, and how our society and culture changed over the last four decades of the 20th century. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am still humming tunes from these three great women in music.

Not a Fan

I know a lot of people love Anne Tyler, but I am not one of them. Her latest book, Digging to America, did not change my opinion. The premise of the story holds a lot of promise: two very different families are brought together when they each adopt baby girls from Korea. One of the couples is Iranian-American, the other middle-class white Americans. The cultural differences between the families and the way they adjust to their Korean daughters is interesting, although not at all surprising. The problem, from my point of view, in addition to the fact that nothing much happens, is that the characters are poorly developed and not very likable. At the end of the book, we know practically nothing about the two fathers, and the main thing we know about one of the mothers, Bitsy, is that she’s really judgmental and annoying. The most well developed character is one of the grandmothers, long-time widowed Maryam, who gets involved with the other grandfather, who has been recently widowed. But it felt like Tyler was holding back on revealing too much even about these characters

Mary Doria Russell delivers again

When I bought my Kindle, I chose a new book by one of my favorite authors as the first read. Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell did not disappoint, although I did not love it nearly as much as I loved The Sparrow, on of my all-time favorite books. Dreamers, like her previous book A Thread of Grace, falls into the genre of historical fiction (a favorite of mine), and Russell delivers with a compelling story set in an exotic setting (Cairo), during a historically important time (the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference), and full of wonderfully complex fictional and non-fictional (e.g., Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia) characters. The plot is somewhat far-fetched, but the story and Russell’s beautiful writing make up for this weakness.

Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortensen deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, or maybe sainthood. The work he has done and continues to do in Pakistan and Afghanistan is truly inspirational, and this book does a fantastic job of telling his story. I had a little trouble at first getting used to the book being written in the third person (by co-author David Oliver Relin) although it was clear that Relin was not there for most of these events. But over time, I got used to it and it didn’t bother me. Moreover, I can’t think of a better way of telling the story. And what a story it is, starting with his near death experience attempting to climb K2, developing a deep bond with the villagers who nursed him back to health, living in and out of his car in Berkeley while trying to raise money to open a school in Pakistan, and other brushes with death such as when he was kidnapped in Waziristan. Oh, and in the meantime, he falls in love, marries, and has two children.

Mortensen and the Central Asia Institute, which he founded, have now built 61 schools, mostly for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and the links he has forged with the people there offer some hope against Muslim extremists who breed terrorism. That he has done this all at such great personal cost, both to himself and his family, only makes his accomplishments more extraordinary.