Author: authoress

An Unquiet Mind

The Book of the Week is “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison, published in 1995.  This autobiography tells the story of someone with bipolar disorder (also called manic-depressive illness) who had gone undiagnosed until, ironically, she started working on her PhD in psychology.

Jamison was showing symptoms in high school– hearing music in her head, clear as a bell, and staying up all night, sometimes more than one night, energetically completing schoolwork. Sometimes she spoke too fast for people to understand her. A little later, she went on credit-card spending sprees and could not remember them afterwards. She also fell into periods of extreme depression. Each continual up-and-down cycle lasted about three days. She theorized that she had inherited the disorder from her father.

When Jamison got to graduate school, she was given a questionnaire on symptoms of her condition. That was the first time she got an inkling that she was mentally unbalanced.  Read the book to learn how she dealt with this revelation.

Our Little Secret

The Book of the Week is “Our Little Secret” by Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie, published in 2010.  This is a true murder story that took a long time to unfold, and the secret was not very little. The crime was committed in November 1985 in Hooksett, New Hampshire by a high schooler, Eric Windhurst, acting on behalf of another, Melanie Paquette.

Many friends and family members of both the victim, Danny Paquette, and the shooter had reasons for not telling law enforcement all they knew about the incident.  Some would argue there were many victims in the case, just a few of whom included Danny’s brother, Victor, Danny’s ex-wife, Denise, his stepdaughter– the aforementioned Melanie, and Eric’s half-sister, Lisa Brown.  If the reader skips the back-cover blurb, the very first page, prologue and the pages of photos of this book, he or she ought to enjoy a well-researched, suspenseful saga of abuse, anger, fear, regret and finally, resolution.

Ogilvy on Advertising

The Book of the Week is “Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy published in 1985.  The author was the co-founder of what has become a world-famous, worldwide advertising agency– a major feat, as he started his advertising career at 38(!) years old.  Perhaps his business has endured because he had the right idea.  He wrote that he did not care whether the viewer of an ad said “What a great ad!”  Ogilvy’s major goal was to get the viewer to say, “I must go out and buy this product!”  This way, he would make money for the client.  This book recounts his experiences in the field and provides tips on how to advertise.

Kitchen Confidential

The Book of the Week is “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain, published in 2000.  This is the eloquent account of the author’s personal experiences as a worker in the restaurant business.  He provides anecdotes on the people, their personalities, problems and the kinds of behind-the-scenes activities and events that restaurant patrons do not see.

Bourdain describes one of his first kitchen jobs he held when he was a brash youth, and how his older coworkers put him in his place.  Other forms of entertainment that culinary workers enjoy include the initiation rite of sending the new kitchen help on a fool’s errand, and playing practical jokes on the restaurant manager.  Bourdain tells of his employment woes and others’.   He also reveals culinary dangers (dirty little secrets) about which diners may not want to know.  This book is educational for anyone wishing to enter the restaurant business as well.

Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s

The Book of the Week is “Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s” edited by Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee, published in 1960.  This compilation of Vanity Fair magazine articles showcases two decades of literary luminaries; some of whom were discovered by Frank Crowninshield, the magazine’s editor.  Currently, those names, such as P.G. Wodehouse, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Amy Lowell, Robert C. Benchley and many others, are fading in the public’s memory.  However, they were witty, humorous and entertaining for their era.  A perusal of this book today indicates that certain aspects of American life never change.  Wodehouse wrote of monies going to the government in an article on family involvement in completing tax returns (which during WWI, were due in March), “…I can only hope that they will not spend it on foolishness and nut sundaes and the movies– but apparently, they needed a few billion dollars, and you and I had to pay for it.”

The Jack Bank

The Book of the Week is “The Jack Bank, A Memoir of A South African Childhood” by Glen Retief, published in 2011.  This autobiography focuses on the author’s realizing his gay identity in a specific generation– as a white South African male in the last years of apartheid.  While coming of age, he struggled with not only apartheid, but with “authoritarianism, patriarchy and cycles of violence.”

The author explains that his family was English, rather than Afrikaner.  The latter people were militant in nature.  He illustrates this point by recounting his experiences at nine and ten years old, of playing war games with his Afrikaner friend, and looking up to his friend’s father, a police officer, as a role model.

At twelve, he was sent to boarding school.  As a freshman, he was subjected to extremely brutal bullying.  Later, as an upperclassman, he himself did the bullying. He would have undergone this pattern again– in “military basic training, and then the whites-only conscript force… to control forty million black South Africans;” however, Nelson Mandela’s political activities finally succeeded at the tail end of the 1980’s.  Prior to that, Retief witnessed examples of the pattern again and again, at university and later in his black boyfriend’s violent, rundown neighborhood.

Read the book to learn more details of what growing up was like under South African apartheid, and what the author did to find his place in the world.

Irrepressible

The Book of the Week is “Irrepressible, the Life and Times of Jessica Mitford” by Leslie Brody, published in 2010.  This biography recounts the life of the chain-smoking, hard-drinking, charismatic rebel.  Her motley English family included duke and duchess parents, two Nazi-sympathizing sisters, three other sisters, a brother, and she, who, born during WWI, was a Communist.

Jessica, nicknamed “Decca,” led an eventful life. In her late teens, she ran away with her lover to the United States. Later, she underwent an abortion, committed thievery from the wealthy social set with whom she rubbed shoulders, pleaded the Fifth Amendment on the stand at a McCarthy hearing, eventually gave birth to four children, raised money with her second husband for the Civil Rights movement, wrote several books including a very successful one on the American death industry, and grieved over deaths of various of her family members.  She enjoyed herself to the fullest, regardless of what others thought of her actions, falling in and out of relationships with her family members through the years.

In a letter to her unconventional daughter, nicknamed “Dinky,” Decca provided her take on life:

“One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one’s life has assumed some sort of shape… which would include goals set by onseself and a circle of life-time type friends… Even after one has, all may be knocked out of shape, so one has to start over again…”