On The Road

This week's e-mail book club book, is Queen of the Road by Doreen Orion.

From the book jacket:

A pampered Long Island princess hits the road in a converted bus with her wilderness-loving husband, travels the country for one year, and brings it all hilariously to life in this offbeat and romantic memoir.

Doreen and Tim are married psychiatrists with a twist: She's a self-proclaimed Long Island princess, grouchy couch potato, and shoe addict. He's an affable, though driven, outdoorsman. When Tim suggests "chucking it all" to travel cross-country in a converted bus, Doreen asks, "Why can't you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?" But she soon shocks them both, agreeing to set forth with their sixty-pound dog, two querulous cats--and no agenda--in a 340-square-foot bus.

"Queen of the Road" is Doreen's offbeat and romantic tale about refusing to settle; about choosing the unconventional road with all the misadventures it brings(fire, flood, armed robbery, and finding themselves in a nudist RV park, to name just a few). The marvelous places they visit and delightful people they encounter have a life-changing effect on all the travelers, as Doreen grows to appreciate the simple life, Tim mellows, and even the pets pull together. Best of all, readers get to go along for the ride through forty-seven states in this often hilarious and always entertaining memoir, in which a boisterous marriage of polar opposites becomes stronger than ever.

So far, I'm enjoying this one quite a bit and think its pretty funny. It is also, I fear, a look into my future. Here's a little story about my in-laws (who I love):

Many years ago, my father-in-law bought a Unimog that had been converted into a camper. [FYI, a Unimog is a Mercedes-Benz truck originally built as a German missile carrier (or something).] Since then, he has tricked it out with everything you could imagine (including a wind turbine for off-the-grid electricity) and it is one serious RV on steroids. I wish I had a photo of the finished product. Here's a photo of a virgin Unimog:



Even though they are retired, my m-i-l and f-i-l both volunteer and keep busy, so going off for a year isn't in the cards for them. But still, the in-laws, God love 'em, have taken this thing all over, including to Alaska. I don't imagine that this was my m-i-l's first choice for summer vacation, but she's a great sport and this was a dream of my f-i-l's.

And, like father, like son. Though my husband's dream isn't to spend extended periods of time crammed into a truck, cruising the roads of America. No, no. His goal is to some day spend an extended period of time crammed into a boat, sailing the Pacific. We occasionally sail and pretty much every time we do, my husband suggests that we throw it all in for life living aboard a sailboat. In my more delusional moments, I agree, but then I get home, and look at my closet and our bookshelves and I think, I could never live on a boat.

So, if author Doreen Orion and my mother-in-law are any indication, I'll be packing up my belongings and moving to a boat in about twenty years. Yay!


Buy Queen of the Road on Amazon.

Review: My Stroke of Insight

I was very excited to read this month’s selection for my local Book Club, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. The author, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, had a stroke when a blood vessel in the left side of her brain exploded. My Stroke of Insight is Taylor’s story of what happened the day of her stroke, her subsequent recovery and the lessons about herself learned from this experience.

In the end, though, I was really disappointed by the book. This was a very quick read for me (the hardcover clocks in at 184 pages including the appendices) and it shows. Taylor, I felt, only lightly skimmed over most topics. For example, while Taylor has two brief chapters describing the science of the brain, it is done in the simplest way possible, perhaps even to the point of having dumbed the science down. Once the scientific explanation was out of the way, I felt like Taylor ignored further opportunities in the course of telling her story to return to the science and explain how the anatomy covered earlier tied into the events happening. I am all for making the science understandable to the lay-person but not at the expense, I thought, of fuller explanations.

As a point of full disclosure, and because I understand that I may be somewhat unusual in wanting more science, I should say that my husband is a professor of anatomy and frequently lectures on neuroanatomy. I, however, am most definitely not a scientist and not an anatomy expert myself.

The latter portion of the book is devoted to the insights Taylor had about herself and her brain from having a stroke. In a nutshell, the big insight is this: inner peace is available to anyone because it’s already in your brain and if you would just get out of your own way by meditating, you would be happier. While this is a lovely insight, I was really annoyed by the amount of time Taylor spent on this topic, considering the libraries devoted this subject, when in the end, I don’t really think she added anything new to the discussion. Once again, I feel like she just glossed over how to, as she calls it, step to the right of our left brains. The pages devoted to how to meditate are, in my opinion, perfunctory and yet also a waste of space when there are so many other resources out there about meditation (including other books; an Amazon search for "how to meditate" pops up 4,356 books).

I think that as a scientist, Taylor had an opportunity to create something really special. I had eagerly hoped for something along the lines of A Leg to Stand On by the great Oliver Sacks and in the chapters about the day of her stroke, Taylor comes close. Otherwise, I think there was too much focus on new age glossiness and not enough on substance.

Disappointment aside, I do think there is one group of people for whom this book will be very helpful: family and friends of stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak for themselves. While Taylor makes it clear that every stroke is different, I think this book could be very helpful for anyone who is at loss of how to interact with a person in recovery from a stroke.

Review: Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose

Richard Bangs’ Adventures with Purpose by Richard Bangs

The concept for this book is great and most of the adventures are amazing. The book is full of good stories and compelling personal journeys. Many of the places and stories in this book are fascinating. There were many highlights in this book for me –like the trip down the Neretva River in Bosnia or visiting an isolated village in Papua New Guinea. I found the last chapter of the book—a quick sketch of an African safari—to be touching.

At issue for me, unfortunately, is the writing. It took me over a month to read Adventures with Purpose and I struggled to finish it. Bangs is clearly a storyteller at heart and I imagine his wit comes across better in person than it does on the page. Bangs is a very casual writer and his writing doesn’t hang together very well. I think if the editing had been better it would have vaulted this book to the next level, because the bones of a great book are here.

After struggling to stay involved with the book, I asked my husband (who is also a voracious reader and is unlike me an outdoorsman) to read Adventures. He, too, found it difficult to get through and gave up about a quarter of the way through.

The first several chapters highlighted the plight of places/people in need of help. In the first chapter, for example, takes Bangs to the Nile, where he explores work to bring the crocodile back from the brink (see photo at top, from a NY Times article). In another, very interesting chapter, he visits the Moken people of Thailand’s Andaman Islands, who are struggling to recover from the devastating 2004 tsunami. There was a good mix in these chapters of both environmental/ecological and humanitarian concerns to which Bangs brings attention.

I was really disappointed, then, when the book lost this focus on helping. Richard Bangs’ definition of purpose is broader than I expected, but I thought that once the scope expanded to include stories of personal purpose, the book bogged down. The chapters on mountain climbing, in particular, were indulgent and out of place in this book—especially when there so much other material Bangs could have explored in more depth in some of the other chapters. Bangs, in my opinion, should have cut the number of chapters in half and put more energy and information into the remaining chapters.

In the end, I am torn about whether to recommend this book or not. There are so many good things to say about Adventures but the overall product is spotty. Adventures with Purpose is also a syndicated public television show; I would be interested in checking it out. Find out more about it and Richard Bangs at his website here.

Currently Reading

I have two books I'm reading right now to review. One is Adventures with Purpose by Richard Bangs -- its an adventure travel book in which the author visits places in order to bring attention to either an ecological or humanitarian crisis there.

The other book I'm reading is Last Days of Krypton by Kevin Anderson. Its not something I would normally pick up (I actually got it for my husband to read, but he is too busy with school starting) but I'll see how it goes!

Guest Book Reviews

My sister has posted  on her blog quick reviews of several nonfiction books she has recently read. They are The Wrecking Crew by Tom Frank (here), Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, and Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John (both here). In a nutshell, she liked all of them. From her descriptions, Rammer seemed like the book I'd be most interested in reading.

Email Book Club

In addition to my actual book club, I belong to the Dear Reader email non-fiction book club (sign up here). Every weekday I get a 5-minute portion of a book. By the end of the week, I've usually read the first chapter of the book and have a really good idea of whether or not I'm interested in reading more. This week, I am reading Out of Poverty by Paul Polak. Its about poverty and why traditional approaches to poverty eradication haven't worked. So far, its interesting.

Other books I have read from Dear Reader that I have been really intrigued by include The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward,  The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, that is the number 8, its not a typo), The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman (one of my favorite authors already) and Too Far From Home by Chris Jones.