Lemuria Bookstore Blog

I heard The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reviewed on public radio; the review whetted my appetite. This novel is not for the faint of heart, but for those who read it, a powerful experience emerges.  The author, Heidi W. Durrow, a graduate of Stanford, Columbia School of Journalism, and Yale Law School, received  a Bellwether Prize of Fiction for this her debut novel.

As the novel opens, the reader meets Rachael,  a bi-racial young girl, whose mother is Danish and father is African American. Because of a horrific accident, which left her as the only survivor,Rachael has recently  gone to live with her very strict African American grandmother. Having been reared as a “white girl” in Europe where her father was a serviceman, she is now thrust into an American black community and quickly learns that her very blue eyes will constantly be an attention getter, for good and for bad. Set in the early 1990s in Oregon, the novel flashes back and forth in time, and the reader slowly learns about Rachael’s past while cringing with her about the  unfamiliar social norms and customs which she encounters in the black community. She knows there is a mystery behind her mother, s0 Rachael tries to fit pieces of a missing puzzle together.

Friendships with positive and negative people, both old and young, develop for the adolescent girl as she grows from year to year. Unbelievably a childhood friend who met her father and witnessed first hand the horrific accident, appears in Rachael’s neighborhood and a renewed friendship develops. Filled with sadness, pangs of adolescent development and experience, heartbreaks of love lost, and limited hopefulness, this provocative novel will make its mark on readers as they decipher their own views of our newly changing American culture.

See Heidi W. Durrow’s website.

……….Nan

Last Saturday, Sarah Campbell was here at Storytime (10:00) to read and sign her new book, Growing Patterns! On her blog she has some great pictures of the event. Check it out!
Sarah Campbell’s Blog

Our next kids event is this coming Saturday at 12:00 with The Weeb by local art teacher Robert Maxwell.

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When To Quit (And When to Stick)

by Seth Godin

Portfolio (2007)

Yesterday, I was asked, “Are you going to close Lemuria?” I smiled back and simply said, “No.”

Of course, no one knows the future, but as I reflect on Godin’s The Dip, I’m reinforced by his concepts of using a big picture view of building small business. Using a big picture view, small businesses must have resources laid up ahead of time in order to deal with unsuspecting problems. This recession has produced many problems for small businesses, forcing us to question our focus and judgments.

Godin emphasizes that difficult times create difficult work. However, opportunity for more profit exists as we give our best effort to oppose a severe dip. Ask yourself, “Is this dip my greatest ally?” Remember shortcuts are not the answer. Investing time and money into something that can get better is adding value. Don’t play the game if you can’t give it your best effort. Keep in mind who decides what’s best. You do!

Now is a great time to start a new business or refortify or renew an old one. On an individual level, it is also an advantageous time to contribute one’s labor to a place with a quality vision.

Lemuria = A good bookstore? We are being tested. We hope to be authenticated by this process. As we confront this “dip” we want more of the better books in our inventory, and we are striving to be better booksellers. We want to practice good customer service (which is easier with fewer customers). Our readers are our judge and jury. You decide the success of our book-selling. Compare us to our competition as they work through their “dip,” too. Furthermore, book-selling as an industry is changing. Lemuria wants to change in light of all this and become something better in the process.

Seth’s Dip questions sticking with or moving on, striving for excellence whichever the decision.

Click here to read other blogs on Seth Godin’s books.

Berlin, 1932: In many ways Gabriella Schramm lives a charmed, carefree life. She loves her sister, Ulla. She loves her new literature teacher. She loves her family’s summer lake house, next door to Albert Einstein’s. And most of all Gaby loves books.
But soon she begins losing all these things, one by one, as Hitler climbs to power. People Gaby thought she could trust turn out to be Nazis. Many of her friends are fleeing or, worse, being taken away. And there’s something troubling about Ulla’s boyfriend that Gaby can’t quite figure out. As always, she turns to her books for comfort—but now even those are in jeopardy of disappearing. How can Gaby say good-bye to the way of life that she loves?
Newbery Honor winner and master of historical fiction Kathryn Lasky once again brings the past to life with this searing portrait of a nation on the brink of war, seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl. (Ages 12 and up)

Read about other books by Kathryn Lasky on our blog.

Have you ever witnessed actions of random people in your life, and wondered, “What planet are they from?” Have you seriously considered someone’s actions so bizarre and alien to you that they might indeed be an alien? 

I just finished reading Brad Watson’s new collection of short stories entitled Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. I had never read Brad Watson but knew that he was from Meridian, Mississippi, and that his only novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Fortunate for those in the First Edition Club, Mercury was the selection for August of 2002, and from what I hear, the  novel was a wonderful read.

With all of this information logged away in my brain, I was not disappointed with the short stories in Aliens.

Most of the stories are set in contemporary times with families dealing with problems we are all too familiar with–a couple who cannot seem to quit arguing; a divorced and distanced father who must spend his visitation time with his son in a hotel instead of a home; in an effort to escape the memories of his ex-wife, a newly divorced man leaves their home to find an apartment of his own.

I must warn you that the first story is different from the rest. In my opinion, this story was disturbing, a little shocking even. It is, however, a story that I want to talk about with someone else who has read it. It raises many issues, but the most interesting to me is the character development of children.

While these stories are dark, I did not find them depressing. Brad Watson’s talent lies in his ability to portray a humanity that might seem alien to us with astonishing sensitivity.

Brad will be at Lemuria Friday, April 2nd at 5:00 p.m.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande will finish off my trio of must-read medical books. A hospital, as the saying goes, is no place for sick people. It’s filled with potential disasters to your health, infections, missed diagnoses, dosage mistakes (think Dennis Quaid and the Heparin debacle with his newborn twins) and other complications that pop up from human error and in a hospital, human error seems a pretty sure bet.

But Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at the Johns Hopkins medical center in Baltimore, thought he knew how to minimize human error. The plan he put into effect was, as Dr. Atul Gawande describes in this book:

” . . . an idea so simple that it seemed downright loopy. In 2001 Dr. Pronovost borrowed a concept from the aviation industry: a checklist, the kind that pilots use to clear their planes for takeoff. In an experiment Dr. Pronovost used the checklist strategy to attack just one common problem in the I.C.U., infections in patients with central intravenous lines. Central lines can be breeding grounds for pathogens; in the Hopkins I.C.U. at the time, about one line in nine became infected, increasing the likelihood of prolonged illness, further surgery or death. He wrote down the five things that doctors needed to do when inserting central lines to avoid subsequent infection. Washing hands, wearing hospital gowns etc. but knew that about one-third of the time doctors were skipping at least one of these critical steps. What would happen if they never skipped any? He gave the five-point checklist to the nurses in the I.C.U. and, with the encouragement of hospital administrators, told them to check off each item when a doctor inserted a central line — and to call out any doctor who was cutting corners. The nurses were strict, the doctors toed the line, and within one year the central line infection rate in the Hopkins I.C.U. had dropped from 11 percent to zero.”

Dr. Atul Gawande, who in addition to practicing medicine, is also a popular writer for “The New Times,” heard about this study and wrote a series of articles on it and then decided to turn those into a book. As he states so elegantly,

“If something as simple as a list that reminds medical personnel to wash their hands and introduce themselves by name and job to everyone in the operating room can improve care, that’s reason enough to take the checklist concept seriously. What a powerful insight this is: In an age of unremitting technological complexity, where the most basic steps are too easy to overlook and where overlooking even one step can have irremediable consequences, something as primitive as writing down a to-do list to “get the stupid stuff right” can make a profound difference.”

I have written about Alice Walker before. In case you don’t know, Alice is Rebecca Walker’s mother. As I read more and more by and of Alice Walker, I became more interested in her daughter, Rebecca. I then found that she is a published and well-respected author and activist in her own right. I have had her memoir, Black, White and Jewish, on my bedside table for some time but was afraid  I would not have the time to finish. So I when I realized that she had edited collection of short essays from different authors writing about their own family life, I thought I could at least read one. Well, I am almost finished with One Big Happy Family. It has been a thought-provoking read. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about the great variance of family structures.

While I knew that a new collection of essays, The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker, was coming out in April, I learned this weekend that Alice has a book of poetry coming out in September 2010: Hard Times Require Furious Dancing.

Alice also has quite an informative website these days. Rebecca has one as well. Sadly–and while both are inspiring women–Rebecca and Alice have not had very good relations. If you have read both of their works, you would understand why I add this comment. When I read Alice and Rebecca, I do not admire them so much because I relate or agree with everything they say, what keeps me reading is the privilege of witnessing a woman’s development. Both of them are very adept at showing show how they work through life’s intricacies. And I think that this is what keeps me reading One Big Happy Family–I can witness and learn from so many different types of families dealing with life.

There are lots of great reasons why independent bookstores should be supported, and the other day I read an article that reminded me of what is perhaps MY favorite part of exploring independent bookstores (and also it’s one of my favorite parts of working at one): our displays!   Believe it or not, the piles of books you trip over when you walk in are actually lovingly, carefully crafted selections of what we think you should read.  There’s such a great chance of stumbling upon something lovely that you never figured you’d read just by walking around and looking.

Since March is National Women’s History Month, we’ve put together an appropriate display that ranges from Grace Kelly to Joan of Arc, and which also happens to include a recently released book I’ve just begun: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  It’s one of the most bizarre stories I’ve ever heard and since I’ve not read the entire book yet, I’ll just try to condense the premise here.  The story itself is enough to spark anyone’s interest.

Henrietta Lacks was born in Virginia in 1920, the daughter of a tobacco farmer.  She went on to marry her first cousin and move up to Maryland, where she gave birth to five children.  She and her family were poor, and when Henrietta died at age 31 due to complications brought on by cervical cancer, she was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery back in Virginia.  To this day nobody knows exactly where her body is buried.

What most people – her family included – didn’t know about Henrietta when she died was that when she was being treated at Johns Hopkins for her cervical cancer, her cells were taken without her permission.  In fact, she didn’t even know they were taken.  Researchers took a look at them and found out they could be kept alive and grown – something scientists had been desperate to succeed in doing.  The cells of this African-American woman who died poor and young and in pain were named ‘HeLa’, and it’s thanks to HeLa that a polio vaccine was developed.

HeLa has since been mass produced and used to help doctors research AIDS and cancer, study gene mapping, and realize the effects of the atom bomb, among other things.  They’ve been mailed to curious scientists all over the world and here’s a neat fact: 50 million metric tons of her cells have now been grown.

Another kicker is that Henrietta’s family only found out about her still-living cells about 20 years after her death.  They didn’t get any profits from her ‘immortality’, and in what feels like an unbelievably cruel twist, they couldn’t afford health insurance.

It’s an alarming story that raises confounding questions about race, class, science, and bioethics.  Author Rebecca Skloot writes with authority and sensitivity, and so far I can’t put the book down.  As I said, it’s on our women’s history month display, but it also goes beyond that – it’s a science book, a history book, and a civil rights book too.  I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so fascinating.

The Night Fairy is the newest book from Newbery Award Winner Laura Amy Schlitz is all about Flory the night fairy. She loves her wings–until a horrid bat mistakes her for an insect and her wings are ruined. She lands in a giant’s garden and makes a home in a birdhouse. Angry at the bats, angry at the night, and angry at herself, Flory decides she won’t be a night fairy anymore–she’ll be a day fairy. She slowly learns that some things are more important than vanity. This book has beautiful illustrations and is perfect for anywhere from a first grader to third grader.

Wondrous Strange  and Darklight by Lesley Livingston are the first two books in a fairies series centering around plays of Shakespeare, and personally, I thought they were so much fun. I actually I spent my whole day yesterday reading the second book, Darklight. Lesley has definitely hit her stride with this book and I am hoping I can get the review copy for the final book in the trilogy ASAP!!! There’s not much I can give away about plot, but what I can say is that I love that main character Kelley Winslow is empowered and rash. I mean, she’s a teenager, that’s how she’s supposed to be. Yet, she doesn’t cower just because she is a girl or because she is young. I love that! Definitely a good continuation to the story and I think it makes me love this trilogy even more. Age: 12+

The Cure by Geeta Anand is one such story. It is SUCH a powerful and emotional story that it has been made into the movie, Extraordinary Measures, with Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford.

“At 15-months-old, Megan Crowley was diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare genetic disorder that was likely to reduce her life span to five years at most. Her five-month-old brother, Patrick, shared the same disease and its crippling progression. Their father, John Crowley, a brand new Harvard MBA graduate, was determined to use his brains and connections to find a cure. He started a family foundation to fund research on Pompe disease and eventually headed a biomedical start-up company with a promising approach. Ironically, the more involved he got in efforts to find a cure, the slimmer the prospects were for his own children as hard business decisions and conflict-of-interest questions thwarted his efforts. Blocked from getting his children into clinical trials that could prolong their lives, and watching them grow weaker and weaker, Crowley concedes that he was occasionally tempted to simply steal the precious drugs. But he pressed ahead.”

Geeta Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with the Wall Street Journal, delivers a detailed and emotional rendering of a father’s exhausting efforts to save his children and find a cure for a dreadful disease. By the end, we all feel like a part of this family and their struggle.