Two of Fall's Best Books

Reprinted from the Citizen:

Fall is a big season for publishers, one in which books with high hopes for success hit the shelves. Two books that fit that category are by a well-respected author of fiction, essays and nonfiction, and a debut author whose name is well-known to anyone who has followed television and movies for the last 40 years.

The debut author is actress Sally Field, who took seven years to write her memoir In Pieces. 

Field grew up in a decidedly female household with her mother, grandmother and great-aunts, all strong women. She tells some of their fascinating stories, explaining how they got to be where they were. It will inspire the reader to talk to their own mothers and grandmothers about their life experiences.

The biggest influence on Field’s life was her beautiful mother, an actress who had a modest film career. Field had a complicated relationship with her mother growing up, made more so when her mother married an actor/stuntman, Jock Mahoney. Mahoney sexually abused Sally at a young age, and that relationship resonated with her for the rest of her life.

As Mahoney’s Hollywood fortunes waned, Sally’s interest in acting earned her a starring role in the 1960s sitcom “Gidget.” It was a good first experience, but her second television show, “The Flying Nun,” was a deeply unhappy one.

She didn’t want to do it, but Jock convinced her that she may never work again and she needed to take the job. After a few desperately unfulfilling years there, she was introduced to the Actors Studio, where she came alive. She studied and worked hard to become a serious actress.

Field details the highs and lows in her personal and professional life, from her marriage at a young age and subsequent divorce to raising her three sons and working to get the kind of serious roles she wanted.

From her breakout role as a severely mentally ill woman in “Sybil” to her Academy Award-winning performance in “Norma Rae” to her very complicated relationship with actor Burt Reynolds, Field lays it all on the line in an honest portrait of her life.

Although her mother had a drinking problem as Sally grew up, it was her mother she turned to when she needed someone to care for her sons when she worked. And her mother was there for her and her sons at every turn.

She ends the book trying to understand her mother, what drove her and why they had such a complicated relationship. In Pieces is an indelible portrait of a woman we all thought we knew.

Barbara Kingsolver has written some of the best books of the past 30 years, most notably The Poisonwood Bible. She writes about big issues as illuminated by her brilliantly conceived characters. 

Her latest, Unsheltered, tells a story that many people can relate to today. Willa Knox is a middle-aged mother of two grown children, happily married to Iano, a college professor she has loved forever.

When Iano’s college closes, they are forced to move to New Jersey, where Iano found a one-year teaching position at a small college. His very ill father, Nick, lives with them, a man who loves cable news and talk radio and loudly, and profanely blames anyone different from himself for the woes of the country.

Soon their son Zeke arrives with a new baby in tow, progressive daughter Tig comes home after two years incommunicado, and life becomes more difficult, made even more so by the fact that the home left to Willa by her aunt is literally falling down around them.

Willa lost her job when the magazine she wrote for folded, and money is tight. She discovers that their home may have historical classification, and she begins to research the previous owners in hopes of saving it, and them.

Thatcher Greenwood was a science professor who lived in the home after the Civil War. He believed in the work of Charles Darwin, which caused him trouble with his own family and the townspeople of Vineland. People believed Darwin's science was sacrilegious, and it frightened them.

Kingsolver writes brilliantly and beautifully in a novel that touches the reader emotionally and rationally. Her characters feel like real people (and some of the historic ones are), and the relationships between them (especially Iano and Willa) are moving. She really nails the family dynamic, especially in times like these when it can be problematic.

If you read

BOOK: In Pieces by Sally Field

GRADE: A

PUBLISHER: Grand Central Publishing

COST: Hardcover, $29

LENGTH: 417 pages

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BOOK: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

GRADE: A+

PUBLISHER: Harper

COST: Hardcover, $29.99

LENGTH: 480 pages

You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein
Published by Grand Central ISBN 9781478936619
Hardcover, $26, 287 pages

Jessi Klein is the head writer and executive producer of the very funny Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer. For that reason alone I wanted to read her book, You'll Grow Out Of It.

The book is a series of essays about how Jessi got to be where and who she is. The first essay, The Tom Man, recounts what happens when a  tomboy grows up. People like tomboys, tom men not so much.

She didn't care much what she looked like, wearing "her dad's old button-down cowboy shirts with enormous shapeless jeans and combat boots" in high school. When she got a real office job, she still dresses " a smidge like a rodeo clown" and thought that Hanes Her Way bikini underwear was the height of sexiness.

Finally, when she met a girlfriend at a bar, and her friend told her that she loved her, but her maroon backpack overflowing with papers and books hurt her feelings, she got the message. Jessi decided that if she wanted to date a Grown Man then she'd have to make an attempt to look like a Grown Woman.

"But when I looked at what it would mean to become a woman- one of those standard grown-up ladies, like the ones from commercials for gum or soda or shampoo- it all seemed to involve shrinking rather than growing."

Klein's observations are thoughtful, like in her essay The Bath, about how women loves baths because for women, the bath is "where you go when you run out of options", when you don't have a room of your own to go to.

"This is why Virginia Woolf stressed the importance of having a room of one's own. If you don't fight for it, don't insist on it, don't sacrifice for it, you might end in that increasingly tepid water, pruning and sweating while you dream of other things."

Klein is a comedy writer, so there are many funny lines in here, like describing a woman who was "just rounding third from medium drunk to very drunk." (I'm a sucker for a baseball metaphor.)

In talking about attending a Bar Method exercise class, she observes that "women have problem areas in a way that men don't. We have big hips and muffin tops. Men just have the thing where they create wars and wreak havoc all over the globe."

In The Cad, she advises that "when you encounter a man wearing loafers with no socks, run. I once heard that the late Tim Russert also believed that a sockless man is not to be trusted, which means that it is definitively true."

One of her funniest essays is Types, where she describes the different types of men she likes and their celebrity inspiration. I don't normally read anything about the TV show The Bachelor, but her take on it made me think, as did her essay on porn.

The one essay that spoke to me the most was Ma'am, abut that time in all our lives when we move from being called miss to being called ma'am by department store clerks, waiters, bank tellers, etc. I just kept saying "amen" throughout this essay, like Klein was a preacher in church and I was agreeing wholeheartedly with her sermon.

The book ends with Klein preparing to attend the Emmy Awards, just a few weeks after giving birth to her son. She was panicked about choosing a dress, and when her friend told her that the one Jessi liked best made her look like Mrs. Roper, she nearly gave up hope.  Anyone who likes the backstory on Hollywood will love that essay.

You'll Grow Out Of It made me laugh and made me think, just like when I watch Amy Schumer's show. It's a little Tina Fey mixed with Amy Poehler mixed with Nora Ephron, and it's a great gift to give to a young woman just starting out in life. I recommend it.

A Great Book For Father's Day- Good Talk Dad by Bill and Willie Geist

Good Talk Dad by Bill and Willie Geist

Published by Grand Central ISBN 978145554727

Hardcover, $27, 272 pages

Bill Geist has been doing pieces for CBS Sunday Morning for years. He usually profiles interesting (quirky) people and places, and his sense of humor makes me smile. His son Willie Geist is currently one of the co-hosts on the third hour of the Today Show, and is featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe. He clearly inherited his father's sense of humor.

Just in time for Father's Day, they have written a book that I dare say most of us can relate to: Good Talk Dad: The Birds and The Bees...And Other Conversations We Forgot To Have, which pokes fun at the fact that Bill never gave Willie 'the sex talk'. Come to think of it, they never had deep conversations about other important things either. Sound familiar?

Early on, Willie describes embarrassingly being baptized as a 19 year-old in a church service, along with several babies sleeping peacefully in their mother's arms. He asks: 

"Couldn't they have done this in a private ceremony before the service, as they do with the technical awards at the Oscars? In a ceremony earlier today, nineteen-year-old Willie Geist was given the sacrament of baptism."

If that made you giggle, you'll love this book as much as I did. Bill and Willie alternate telling stories from their lives, some of which differed depending on whom was telling it.

Bill and his wife Jody decided to send Willie to summer camp. But not to the camp that all Willie's friends were going to; Willie went to Camp Carson, "where convicted nonviolent offenders were sent to serve out their sentences", unbeknownst to Bill and Jody. That wasn't in the brochure. The campers had to decide whether they were safer backing the Latin Kings or the Spanish Gangster Disciples, who, at night, slashed each other car tires as a "prank".

When Bill received a $10,000 check to write a book, he bought a brand new red Jeep to celebrate. Willie loved his dad's "instinct to take that ten-thousand-dollar book check and spend every nickel of it as fast as you could, like a rapper who just got his first record deal".

Some of the funniest stories involve that Jeep. Jody taught Willie to drive on that Jeep, and then when it was all beat up and on its last legs, Jody drove down to Nashville to accompany Willie to college, but they had to make many stops along the way, coaxing that Jeep and stopping to repair it and feed it antifreeze several times before making it to Vanderbilt.

Bill and Willie shared a love of the New York Yankees and inappropriate humor. When Willie's basketball team held a year end banquet and discovered that the special guest was not a famous New Jersey Nets player but the team mascot, the boys pounded the poor mascot with rolls from the table. Some dads disciplined their sons, yanking them out of there. Bill laughed hysterically, thinking it was pretty darn funny.

There are serious moments in here, such as when Bill finally tells his children (after ten years) that he has Parkinson's disease. They found out when they received emails from people after reading about it on Bill's Facebook page. They suspected something was wrong, but never realized the truth.

I met Willie at Big Fish on Broadway- nice guy!

I loved the stories about aunts and uncles and grandparents; it reminded me of my own family. And when Willie becomes a dad, his stories about his children, Lucie and George, are utterly charming.

This is a perfect book to read this Father's Day, or to give as a gift. It is funny, heartwarming (but mostly funny) and Bill and Willie are terrific writers; their voices come shining through as if they sitting next to you on the couch, recounting their stories aloud. It's like S@$t My Dad Says, but without all the cursing.

rating 5 of 5

Dan Rather- Rather Outspoken

Rather Outspoken- My Life in News by Dan Rather with Digby Diehl
Published by Grand Central Publishing ISBN 978-1-4555-0241-7
Hardcover $27.99
Source: book provided by the publisher for review

Dan Rather has been a news reporter for over 50 years and in all those years he has made a few enemies, from the KKK during the civil rights movement to President Nixon to members of George W. Bush's administration. He covers the reasons why in Rather Outspoken- My Life in the News, co-written with Digby Diehl.

There are several events in Rather's life that had a lasting impact on him, beginning with a bad case of rheumatic fever when he was a child that left him trapped in his home, unable to play with his friends or even attend school. The radio became his best friend and he grew up listening to reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood in the run-up to WWII.

When he was a child, a few teachers took an interest in Rather, encouraging him in his love of writing. Although Rather acknowledges that he is not the best writer (and in fact a bad speller), or the smartest man in the room, he credits his dogged determination for much of his success.

One of his biggest strengths is his ability to ad-lib, which he learned working at a Houston radio station.  He had a lot of air-time to fill, and he also covered play-by-play in high school sports, which gave him a leg up when it came time to move into television.

He got his dream job of working for CBS News, one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world. On his first day, one of his idols, Charles Collingwood offered to show him around and invited him for a drink.

The book gives a terrific overview of Rather's career, and he covered many of the most important stories of the last fifty years. He spent a lot of time covering the civil right movement, and that section of the book is fascinating, especially for those who were too young to remember that period.

He covered Vietnam, and I liked his analysis of the difference between reporters working in Vietnam, where they could just tag along and grab a ride with a helicopter pilot to cover whatever story they wanted, to today's embedded reporters, who can only go where the US military allows them.

His chapter on Afghanistan, which Rather covered back in the 1980s by sneaking into the country then at war with Russia, is very interesting. I can remember watching Rather on CBS at this time, never imagining how important that country would become to our nation twenty years later.

The best chapters in the book cover the end of Rather's career with CBS News. He and his news team did a story on President George W. Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War. They found evidence that Bush went AWOL from his unit for more than a year, and when they tried to run the story, they were stymied at every point by corporate executives at CBS.

Rather's most important point in the book, and one that I think he makes very well, is how the corporatization of the news has changed what news the American people get. The big three networks are now owned by huge corporations- ABC by Disney, NBC by Comcast/Universal and General Electric and CBS by Viacom.

All of these corporations have vast holdings, and as such, they are constantly lobbying government for legislation favorable to their companies. Because of that, the news divisions are pressured to not report on anything that may hurt their lobbying efforts. The days of the news divisions having the freedom to cover the stories they think are important to the American people sadly seem to be over.

Rather ends the book describing his new job at HDNet, owned by billionaire Mark Cuban. Rather and his news team create 42 hours of investigative reports per year (unheard of!), and he lists some of their most honored reports, including a story on a British bank that launders money for Iran, the horror of underage sex trafficking in Portland, Oregon, and a problem with Boeing's new Dreamliner plane that endangered lives. I definitely will be checking out HDNet and Rather Reports, they are doing the reporting I want to watch.

Rather Outspoken is a fascinating look not only at an interesting man, but also at the most important news stories of the last fifty years. The book is really written in Rather's distinctive voice, with many of his Texas-isms, like his description of the very small office for Dan Rather Reports, running it as a "Hong King hot-pillow joint."

He is a somewhat polarizing person with a big ego, and those who do not like Rather will probably not have their minds changed by this book, but for those looking for one man's story of his place covering the history of the past fifty years, this is an enlightening book.

I had the pleasure of hearing Rather interviewed at this year's Book Expo America, where he talked about his childhood, gave a quick overview of the presidents he has covered, and the most moving was when he cried describing the women and children being fire-hosed and set upon by dogs during the civil rights demonstrations.  He left the audience speechless with that emotional recollection. While walking back to his publisher's booth, he was inundated by people and he graciously signed autographs and posed for pictures.

Dan Rather being interviewed at BEA

rating 4 of 5