The Oregon Book Report - Book News from Oregon

Rethinking how we see ourselves aging

By Michal Ann McArthur, Bend
Author of Choking on a Camel
Her blog

Book Review: “The Gift of Years” by Joan Chittister
Genre: Self-Help/Spirituality

For an attitude adjustment on aging, read Joan Chittister’s “The Gift of Years.” Before I read this book, aging was something I dreaded. I worried about all the negatives—failing health, not feeling useful, being boxed in by growing limitations and narrowing opportunities, wrinkling and fading away. Bah, humbug! says Chittister. Her book focuses on the positives of aging and outlines how to grow old gracefully. As soon as I started reading, I was hooked.

The book is a series of 40 short chapters on various topics related to aging. The chapters are meant to be read and considered thoughtfully one at a time, much the way a daily devotional book should be read. Chittister considers such topics as regret, fear, ageism, joy, fulfillment, forgiveness, and letting go.

Invisible girls novel based in Portland

By Michelle Barnhart

Reviewing the book, “Invisible Girls”, by Sarah Thebarge.

The Invisible Girls is a double helix of a memoir, two stories spiraling around each other. One strand relates her struggle with breast cancer which she contracted in her 20’s, and the other narrates her relationship with a Somali immigrant family.

Although raised in a strict Christian home, when cancer struck, Thebarge struggled to find answers to the questions “Why?” and “Where is God in all of this?” These chapters were raw and honest to the point of making me uncomfortable, but no one had any answers.

Needing a fresh start, she moved to Portland and one day met a mother from Somalia with five young daughters but no money and limited English. These chapters detailed how utterly unequipped the family was for life in the US (for instance, they didn’t know to close the refrigerator door after they put food in), how quickly she fell in love with the girls, and how she worked to help them acclimate to a new culture. This family was “invisible;” living in plain sight, nobody noticed their situation or offered help.

Oregon: Then & Now—A Review

Audrey Sauble
Lake Oswego
check her blog

Review of book “Oregon: Then & Now”

Even the permanent changes sometimes—trees grow up, roads change, old buildings disappear and new ones take their places.

Often, after the landscape changes, the old view vanishes completely. “Oregon: Then & Now” restores some of that lost past from Oregon’s history.

I happened to stumble across “Oregon: Then & Now” while browsing the history section at my library. The book is a history of sorts, and a coffee-table album, but s a photo album only, “Oregon: Then & Now” might be a trifle dull—Gifford’s photos are black-and-white, without the stark contrasts that make Ansel Adams’ images so famous, while Terrill imitates the originals closely, though in color.

So, why spend time on yet another photo book? I picked it up out of curiosity, but decided to look deeper when I realized its unique claim. This book is a collection of images taken by two Oregon photographers in two different centuries.

This curmudgeon will steal your heart

By Michal Ann McArthur, Bend
Author of Choking on a Camel
Her blog

Book Review: “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge is an unsentimental curmudgeon (think of the cartoon character “Maxine”) who will steal your heart. For all her glaring faults, her deep compassion and humanity forced me to fall in love with her. Like the rest of us, she’s a bundle of contradictory impulses. She can be heroic and self-sacrificing, childish and selfish. This prickly, brutally honest woman is simply unforgettable.

As is the case with most literary fiction, “Olive Kitteridge” is more about people than plot. The novel is actually a collection of 13 short stories in which Olive is sometimes the main character and sometimes in the background as the reader gets to know the other residents of Olive’s small coastal hometown of Crosby, Maine. You will meet Olive’s former student on the verge of suicide, a piano player whose lover has dumped her, an anorexic teenager, an elderly mother whose son has been imprisoned for a shocking crime. Throughout the book, Strout creates cameos of ordinary people living ordinary lives, at least on the surface, but as she shines her light on these faces, we see how extraordinary they really are.

Marital woes gone awry in new thriller

By Chrstina Rainey,
Portland writer
Reviewing “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn gone

It is the morning of Amy and Nick Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary and Amy abruptly goes missing.  “Gone Girl”, written by Gillian Flynn, creates a story of a missing woman with delightful and tangible detail that draws you into their seemingly common marital woes: money, family, parenthood and turns them into an irresistible thriller.

The story of Gone Girl, a thriller like none other, takes those marital woes a step too far and turns them in sort of psychological warfare between Nick and Amy.  Nick and Amy Dunne appear to be a normal couple on the outside, though as the book develops, it reveals a relationship that is anything but ordinary.  And when her disappearance continues for days and weeks, Nick becomes the prime suspect and their relationship crumbles to the brink.  Nick, who has odd behavior and hasn’t been honest with the police, becomes the prime suspect. He maintains his innocence even while more evidence appears against him.  Where is Amy?  Is Nick the killer?

A window into Portland’s wild past

Christine Webb
Beaverton,

Choosing a favorite historical novel written by an Oregon based author was not a difficult  task at all.   Hands down, my favorite novel in this category is “Land Sharks,” written by S.L. Stoner.  With a writing style that keeps the story and action moving very quickly, Ms. Stoner has crafted a historical mystery that explores the difficulties and dangers faced by the very first union supporters in Portland, Oregon, during early 1900′s.  While telling the story of these workers who risked their lives to ensure safer working conditions for everyone during this initial introduction of unions, another story evolves, one equally, if not even more devastating–the story of those involved in the business of shanghaiing.

Right downtown, at 3rd and Couch there was actually a wharf where row boats filled with drugged, beaten or tortured, unconscious men very often left to meet outgoing ships, more than likely bound for China.  Many of these men were never seen again. This novel brought to life, for me, this unsavory aspect of Portland’s history.  Many Portland citizens were involved in the trafficking of men and boys–some actively, others simply turned an uncaring eye in the opposite direction. Gratefully, there were a handful of people who risked their lives, as well, to do whatever they could to stop this abhorrent activity. 

A student’s crisis of faith

Jan Sheerin,
Bend, Oregon

Review of “Choking on a Camel” by Oregon author Ann McArthur

Rarely do I read a book twice, but this time I did, carried along by reminders of my freshman year at a similar place and time, the turbulent 60’s. Michal Ann McArthur’s “Choking on a Camel” reminds me that I, like Alex, have moved on while the memories of those formative years remain.

Alex Ferguson, in her senior year at Providence Christian University, a conservative Southern institution, faces tragedy, guilt and rebellion amid several well-characterized groups: roommates, church, campus and family. As she faces her brother Jack’s fatal accident, her parents’ divorce, campus hypocrisy and school stress, she feels “homesick for God.” Alex, a good student, is also a “self-denying little mouse,” a perfectionist pressurized by life. In the days surrounding Easter, she eventually rises to new beginnings as she finds faith in the poor and meek. For her it’s not in the talkers, the “examples” or the institutions.

Autobiography at 33 becomes classic

Kirsten S. Badger
Baker City Author
Excerpt here From Science to Selling Moose Nuggets; No Career, No Regret

Review of the book “Good-bye to All That” by author Robert Graves

Recognizing the title, but without knowing anything about it other than that is was a classic, I picked up a used copy of the revised second edition from 1957 of Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That, first published in 1929.

A quote from the prologue looked promising, I wonder how my publisher escaped a libel action.

It turned out to be his autobiography, written at the age of 33, just before he left his native England for good to live in Spain. He was by then already well known as a poet and writer.

The first 20% of the book is devoted to his childhood that mainly consisted of the trials for a non-conformist of a middle-class English boyhood at various unpleasant boarding schools. A quote, I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

A memoir of hurt

Book Review By Laura Dennis

Review of “Reaching” by author Grace Peterson

Reaching shows how a legacy of abuse, neglect and maliciousness can damage a child. Author Grace Peterson had always felt a strong allegiance to her family, a closeness to her siblings, a willingness to stay in bad situations just to be loyal, good and decent. But neither of her parents saw the goodness in her, and instead belittled, abused and allowed others to abuse her–sexually, psychologically, emotionally, you name it.

The trauma of Grace’s childhood and teenage years affected her in deep and troubling ways. It’s only by what some would say “the grace of God,” or by luck, or by the fact that she is a beautiful, loving person, that she married a good man and started a strong and loving family.

But that didn’t mean that her abuse was over.