One of the joys of the summer reading clubs is seeing what other folks enjoy reading and finding new, interesting books. Customers from Miller Branch contributed these reviews, and there’s a little something for everyone.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Willa Cather captures the feel of New Mexico and the southwest with vivid description. The lovely missions and landscapes of sand and mountains remain today, just as the author pictured in her writings. The dear archbishop really is buried in his Santa Fe church, an architectural prize.  – Janet P.

Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado

This is the interesting story of Sandra Bullock’s sister, who left a high-powered Hollywood career to open a small bakery in Vermont. It includes recipes, although not for her specialty Almond Macaroons. I enjoyed reading this book – except for the place where she calls Jane Austen "Victorian." – Ana K.

Playing for Pizza by John Grisham

This upbeat novel is about a third string NFL quarterback who in the last minutes of a championship game blew a 17-point lead and gave the single worst performance in NFL history. Not willing to give up football since that was all he knew, his agent secured him a position of starting quarterback in Italy. Being the only professional (and paid) player on the team, he soon learned how seriously these Italians took their game. What followed every game (win or lose) was beer and pizza paid for by the team’s owner – hence "Playing for Pizza."  – Karen D.

Slightly Shady by Amanda Quick

Full of suspense with a surprise ending, this book is about two people who come together to solve crimes through private inquiries. One does it for a living and one, due to circumstances, is now forced to also do it for a living. Together they solve the crimes of who has been murdering women, and the mystery of the Blue Chamber group. In the end, it was a person no one would or could think of. Also, the two people who started out as adversaries became lovers. – Amy T.

Every entry for Water Your Mind — summer reading for adults — is a chance to win a monthly prize at each branch and a grand prize at the end of summer. Send in your reviews!

"I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have." During a 60 Minutes interview with Andre Agassi about Open, his new memoir, Katie Couric asked whether tennis has always been a love/ hate relationship. Agassi responded by saying it has always been a hate/love relationship. 

Born with spondylolisthesis, Agassi lives with pain. "I’m a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning."

Open starts with the 2006 US Open (Andre’s last tournament) and works back to his childhood, when at age seven he is forced into "tennis servitude." Andre begins hitting balls from a dragon named Prince, "a ball machine modified by my fire-belching father" while being commanded to hit the ball harder, harder. No wonder he hated the sport and always thought of tennis as a lonely game.

Andre Agassi played tennis professionally from 1986 to 2006. Often ranked number one, he captured eight Grand Slam singles championships. Founder of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, he raised more than $85 million for the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy for underprivileged children in Las Vegas, where he lives with his wife, Stefanie Graf, and their two children.

This memoir was written with J. R. Moehringer, who wrote The Tender Bar. With Andre’s narrative style and Moehringer’s gift of gab, this is one of the best memoirs I have read. Welcome to Agassi’s world. It is tennis and then some — tennis celebrities and the misery of tennis. Agassi was not well-educated, so there really isn’t much else in his life to talk about other than tennis; nonetheless he is a complicated man. His strength was gathering a team of the very best people around him, people who knew what they were doing and who cared for him more than they did their own families. Loyalty like that is earned.

Eve Olsen – Central Library

There’s nothing better than a well-written memoir. They’re evocative, provocative, and powerful. They provide a glimpse into someone else’s life, and insights into how the author sees himself or herself. The best memoirs also tap into something universal as they’re exploring something very specific, and move the reader to reflect on their own life from a new perspective or a different direction. Mary Karr’s memoirs do all this and more.

The Liar’s Club is a memoir of Karr’s childhood in Texas and Colorado in the early 1960s. The club of the title is the informal social group that includes Karr’s father, and is named for the tall tales spun by members as they spend their time together one-upping one another, reminiscing and embellishing their stories. The club serves as an entry point to the complex and challenging story of Karr herself. Karr presents the unpredictable adults in her world to the reader the way that she saw them, with her domineering grandmother, alcoholic mother and intermittently-present father looming large. The book pivots around a traumatic event that is at first hinted at and later fully addressed. This event casts a long shadow that falls across much of the rest of the book.

Cherry, Karr’s follow-up to The Liar’s Club, is altogether different in tone. Here Karr taps fully into the universality of her experience, documenting her passage to adulthood with a vibrance and power that will surely appeal to anyone who has ever been a teenager. This is the story of Karr forcefully asserting her independence, and breaking away from the world of her childhood as an independent person.

Karr’s latest, Lit, is the story of her adulthood, her battles with alcoholism, and her religious conversion. Start at the beginning of Karr’s story, though, with The Liar’s Club and Cherry.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a captivating and challenging combination of science textbook, social history, and biography. The book explores the extraordinary events surrounding the life and death of Henrietta Lacks, and the subsequent repercussions of those events. Rebecca Skloot discusses her book at Howard County Library’s East Columbia Branch on Saturday, February 20 at 1:00 pm. Register to attend the event.

In 1951 Henrietta Lacks was treated for an aggressive form of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD. Before she passed away, samples of her tissues were harvested for research purposes, and cells from one of her cancerous tumors were sustained artificially in a laboratory. This line of cells (called HeLa from the first two letters of her first and last name) grew and divided, becoming the first self-sustaining line of cells grown in a laboratory. They were shared by the lab’s director, George Gey, with his colleagues throughout the U.S. and around the world. HeLa cells subsequently played a role in the development of the Polio vaccine, were sent into space, and were subjected to nuclear radiation in the name of science. That, however, is only half of the story, since the cells were harvested from Henrietta Lacks without her consent, and without her family’s knowledge.

What is celebrated by scientists as a remarkable new frontier is something else for the family of Henrietta Lacks. Lacks’ experience in hospital and the harvesting of her tissues were part of the social fabric of a segregated Maryland in the 1950s, where the public wards of Johns Hopkins hospital were one of the limited treatment options available to African American patients. Lacks’ descendants understandably have different opinions about their mother’s immortality than the scientists who celebrate her cells. 

Explaining her efforts to access the family’s opinions, author Rebecca Skloot includes herself in the narrative, first as a college student encountering Henrietta Lacks in a footnote, and later as a researcher, author, and supporter of the family. Skloot ably discusses both the personal impact of these events on the Lacks family, and the global significance of the HeLa cell line, telling equally revelatory scientific and family stories.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

An American sex symbol is found floating in the Hudson River and the newspapers are reporting that it’s a murder. A famous author known for his detective series claims he will get to the bottom of the mystery. Is this another episode of Castle? No, it’s the true story of the murder of Mary Rogers, and Edgar Allan Poe’s attempt to solve the crime.

In The Beautiful Cigar Girl, Daniel Stashower captures New York’s political climate of 1841. "The beautiful cigar girl" is Mary Rogers, a sales clerk and local celebrity — many of New York’s famous men frequent the cigar store for a glimpse of her. Mary’s behavior made her a darling of the media and her death precipitated a call for reform. Also present is Edgar Allan Poe, a once famous writer for the literary magazines, now looking for his next story. Although considered brilliant, his brutally honest book reviews and erratic behavior have alienated him from society. 

I enjoyed The Beautiful Cigar Girl because of the mystery. Who did kill Mary Rogers? And why? In The Mystery of Marie Roget, Poe attempts to answer these questions through deductive reasoning. I equally enjoyed the story’s history, as well as the author’s inclusion of Poe’s biography. Stashower tells Poe’s story, from his turbulent childhood though his untimely death in Baltimore. The telling of Poe’s life is critical to both the mystery and the reason why he would care so much about writing Mary Roger’s story.  In some way, they are kindred spirits, each bent on the same destination.

Robert Bates – Glenwood Branch

Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy is a uniquely engaging biography. As the author tells her tales of "growing up small in Mooreland, Indiana,” we’re transported 30 years back in time and encouraged to remember what is important in life. Zippy’s world is, at first, a small one, but her concerns and cares are large and important. Kimmel does an incredible job of recalling her childhood experiences with the eyes of an adult, but communicating them to us from the perspective of her younger self. We hear about Zippy’s friends Julie, Rose, and the exotic out-of-town transplant Dana from Los Angeles. We focus on Edith, the less than kind but elderly neighbor, and on Petey Scroggs, the boy next door who is cruel to animals. Through Zippy’s eyes we share her childhood fascination with the mysteries of adulthood. Most of all, though, we imagine Zippy flying down Broad Street on her bicycle, heading to the drugstore for a Lemon Phosphate. This exceptional nonfiction is an experience all its own.

Kimmel’s sequel to Zippy, She Got Up Off the Couch, is equally engaging and remarkable. This second visit to Mooreland reunites us with the Jarvis family and provides a second chance to savor Kimmel’s signature style of narrative nonfiction. Zip is growing up now, and from her more mature perspective she sees some of the contradictions and complications in her life that she previously assumed to be “normal.” As her point of view changes, we learn more about Zippy’s friends and siblings. Most significantly, though, we get to know her father Bob, and follow her mother Delonda out of the Jarvis household and into the wider world.

Both A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch are available as audiobooks read by the author — Kimmel’s stories are even more stirring and emotionally involving when she’s the narrator. Whether in print or audio, these two autobiographical stories are can’t miss nonfiction. I’m mad with myself for waiting this long to read them, and I can pretty much guarantee that once you read A Girl Named Zippy, you’ll wonder what took you so long, too!

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Author Helene Cooper is the White House correspondent for the New York Times. Prior to her current assignment, she was a diplomatic reporter and assistant editorial page editor for the same paper. The House at Sugar Beach chronicles her youth and coming-of-age.

Helene’s paternal and maternal ancestors were among the free blacks who emigrated from the U.S. to Liberia during the early 1800s. Helene was born and spent her first 14 years there. She and her siblings lived a relatively well-to-do life. Both of her parents were educated abroad, and her family owned homes in Monrovia and Spain. She attended private school and enjoyed regular family trips to the U.S. and other countries. Her story seems to be one of privilege as a member of the "Congo" tribe that was in power in democratic Liberia. Her family even took in Eunice, a "poor" girl from the Bassa tribe. Eunice, a few years older, became an "adopted" sister and confidant to Helene and her younger sister Marlene.

Excerpt:
Our house at Sugar Beach was a source of pride and of pain. It was a testament to the stature of my family in a country where stature mattered, sometimes above all else. Liberian society rivaled Victorian England when it came to matters of social correctness. In Liberia, we cared far more about how we looked outside than about who we were inside. It was crucial to be an Honorable. Being an "Honorable" – mostly Congo People, though a smattering of Country People were sometimes pronounced educated enough to get the title – meant you were deemed eligible to hold important government posts. You could have a Ph.D. from Harvard but if you were a Country man with a tribal affiliation you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee. Daddy was an Honorable with a proper college bachelor of science, but being Hon. John L. Cooper Jr. was a hell of a lot more important than whatever degree he got in America.

However, a coup in 1980 shattered the somewhat serene life of the Cooper family. Soldiers enter their home, and the unthinkable happens to Helena’s mother. War is hell. Once you start reading about this remarkable journey, you will continue until it is complete. Ms. Cooper’s memoir has rekindled my interest in learning more about the history of Liberia.

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

In so many ways Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury reminds me of the feelings and events of my childhood. Set in 1928 Illinois, it is an admittedly semi-autobiographical novel. Composed of a series of stories, Dandelion Wine centers around 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding, and the friends, families, and folk tales in which they all seem to play, at least, peripheral roles. Every facet of a childhood summer is touched upon…the joys, ponderings, mysteries, tragedies, questions, fears, anticipations, sights, smells, and of course, the taste of dandelion wine.

Each story (some of which weave throughout the book, while others stand alone and have a singular moment of glory) serves as a visceral snapshot of some sort of universal human experience. I found myself sympathizing with different characters at different times: Leo, the creator (and eventual destroyer) of the Happiness Machine; Grandpa, aghast at the idea of a self-cutting lawn; Colonel Freeleigh, the human Time Machine; and of course, The Lonely One, who may or may not be right behind you waiting for his moment to strike.

There is not one particular emotion that monopolizes this book. It quite often takes you into deep sadness and fear, only to bring you to the top of a mountain laughing hysterically, as in the tellings of the Green Machine (owned and “operated” by Miss Fern and Miss Roberts), and my personal favorite, the banishment of Aunt Rose.

Better yet was reading the book aloud to a loved one, just as the summer warmth was beginning to take hold. And like the final days of summer, inaugurated by the display of school supplies in the shop windows, I mourned the passing of the last page.

Dan Curry – Savage Branch

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to grow up in a family with a multitude of siblings, 12 to be exact? The constant chaotic vying for attention competes with the everpresent clutter of clothing, mismatched socks, and mounds of school books – not to mention the unending hum of major/minor squabbles. James McBride’s poignant memoir The Color of Water offers a panoramic view – from the Depression through the turbulent 60s and beyond — inside the life of one such remarkable family.

In writing The Color of Water, the author attempts to explore his Jewish mother’s hidden past. As a result of his persistence, McBride’s mother Rachel tells her story, simultaneously allowing McBride to gain a greater understanding of himself. Rachel was the daughter of a strict, distant Orthodox Jewish rabbi and a loving, meek mother. Years of childhood sexual abuse led Rachel to run away and literally reinvent herself. How she raised her brood with a surprising blend of "chutzpah" and grace was truly amazing to me.

After reading McBride’s latest book Song Yet Sung, I decided to purchase The Color of Water on audiobook. Told from alternating points of view by McBride and his mother (Momee), actors Andre Braugher and Lainie Kazan create an unforgettable audio production.

This memoir had me quietly crying one minute and laughing the next. Pick up a copy of the book or the playaway – I guarantee you will be moved.

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

Ta-Nehisi Coates

In his powerful childhood memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates skillfully details life in a very unconventional household on Baltimore City’s turbulent west side during the 1980s. His father Paul Coates fathered seven children by four different women – two of whom he married. Coates, a Vietnam veteran and former Black Panther leader, was an indomitable, larger-than-life icon, especially in the eyes of his sixth child.

Reading and research played a pivotal role in young Ta-Nehisi’s life as he watched his father finish college, complete graduate studies in library science, and build Black Classic Press, a successful publishing company — while raising seven children with their respective mothers. The reader also "travels" with Ta-Nehisi as he navigates the often brutal, misguided world of middle school boys from rough-and-tumble neighborhoods. At the beginning of the book, there is a handy family tree and picturesque map of west Baltimore.

The author effortlessly captures the essence of his father, including his attributes and character flaws. His prose is so lyrical that the words quite literally dance off the pages of this book. This is a gem of a memoir that delivers a walloping psychological punch.

Click here to learn what the author has to say about his life and his book.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates and publisher Paul Coates will discuss The Beautiful Struggle. Join us as we welcome this gifted young writer and his father. Books are available for purchase and signing. Register online for this event.

Father and Son:  Publisher and Author
Wednesday, February 11; 7:00 pm
Howard County Central Library
10375 Little Patuxent Parkway
Columbia, MD 21044

Elaine Johnson – Central Library