Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo

Hardcover, Hardcover, 400 pages Published February 1st 2011 by Free Press (first published 2011), ISBN13: 9781416583936, Lit Awards: American Book Award (2012), James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee for Writing and Literature (2012), Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee for Nonfiction (2012), Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Non-fiction (2011), Books for a Better Life Award for First Book (2011)

This extraordinary debut by Annia Ciezadlo is memoir of her time covering wars, loving Mohamed (her husband), and trying to make a home in the Middle East since 2001. Reading this memoir is like being with a friend on a crowded New York City subway: she tells the story loudly over the clatter of wheels and we (and everyone else) are riveted to her startlingly vivid tale of love, war, revenge, and mothers-in-law. And Food—it’s as though she “has prepared a feast for us with her own hands.”

Ciezadlo makes no bones about it: she is obsessed with food. Food spells happiness, love, and generosity of spirit. Food matters. She has a distinctive voice: “dark purple figs, wrinkled and soft as a baby’s balls”; “eggplants like giant obsidian teardrops”; “tomatoes puckered into little baboon butts”; “bananas hanging like spider-bait.” Her exuberance in finding the real heart of Middle East in the kitchens there is infectious and joyous. We long for the sun, the taste of olive oil, the smell of bharaat, the clamorous markets, and the riot of colors. We wish we knew her and hope she will tell us more.

A description of her attempts to recreate recipes from basic home cooking is one I will never forget because it happened to me as well. The “simplest” dish of onion, potato and egg can be an utter mystery if one has the proportion, the heat, or the order slightly awry. Ciezadlo’s search for an apartment with a kitchen in Beirut is epic and filled with irony, pathos, and humor. I now have an infinitely better idea of what it means to live in the Middle East. A memoir like this, filled with insight (and recipes!), is a loving and important introduction to the Middle East. Buy a copy for yourselves and buy one to give one away.


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Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido

This gorgeous, sumptuous collection of graphic episodes in the life of John Blacksad, Cat Cop, is involving and adult. This is graphic art at a pinnacle of sorts, where the characters are speaking animals who demonstrate both their animal and human natures. The text and the art is loaded with references to familiar cultural touchstones so the meanings are many-layered, often amusing, always fascinating.

I am curious that the authors were both born and living in Europe, and yet the stories are American-based. Perhaps the medium, born (?) and developed in the United States, carries so many references in its form that the authors wanted to keep that authentic feel. This is noir, and Canales and Guarnido excel in depicting the gritty streets.

The stories are good—always some difficult resolution to a thorny ethical issue--but the drawings are spectacular. I particularly remember a depiction of a street in the shadow of leafy trees, the clear or reflective glass of eyeglasses or skyscrapers, and two people talking in an aquarium--the angle being from inside the tank. But every pane is a miracle of sophisticated artistry that one can marvel over again and again. This is not child’s fare, but for a discriminating adult.


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The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

When I first picked up The Dog Stars , I didn’t know anything more than the cover copy gave me: “savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.” Just my cup of tea. A woman at checkout said, “This is considered one of the best books of the year.” I waited for her to say more, to personalize her review, but she didn’t, so I thought I’d be able to tell for myself shortly.

Actually, it was definitely one of the best books of my year but it wasn’t because I learned “what it means to be human,” but because Heller told an old-fashioned story in a new way. I could have read on, far past the last pages. The writing was stellar. Tension and restraint braid the narrative and propel the story. Heller took us on a flight in a plane packed with only essentials: he jettisoned anything that didn’t add to the narrative…pronouns, prepositions, even nouns and verbs were flung aside. If less is more, we get just enough to set our imaginations free. I loved it.

The setting is post-apocalyptic times. Let me state that this is not my favorite venue. But readers who find might someone else’s vision less than fully imagined, put your reservations aside in this case. This vision is fascinating, but it is the writing that makes the experience. There is a clipped, muscular quality to this narrative that kept me rapt. Heller managed to make even his hard-bitten characters completely absorbing, flawed but generous in unexpected ways. These are characters we care about. And I suppose it is about what humans want and need to thrive. While it’s frightening at times, it is not dreary, not really. It’s a love story.


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Rosemary Verey: The Life and Lessons of a Legendary Gardener by Barbara Paul Robinson

Rosemary Verey was a British garden designer with a distinct style based on historic gardens of old. Her inventiveness was allowed full rein within the constraints of geometric patterns: the outline of the gardens was defined somewhat strictly and marked with box balls and clipped hedges, but within these boundaries a brilliant collection of perennials, shrubs, bulbs and herbs complemented one another and competed for space and gave the impression of an orderly chaos.

There was a moment in our [American] recent history when new homeowners and gardeners yearned for just such a profusion of structure, color, and character, and lionized anyone who could help them achieve it. Rosemary Verey was just such a one: a woman of strong opinions, she could teach those interested how to create memorable plant pictures suitable to specific conditions. But we learned as all artists soon do that success is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. The labor-intensiveness of her most successful schemes makes one reassess the time commitment after enjoying the fruits of one’s labors for a few years.

Fortunately most of Verey’s books were available to me when I began my flirtation with gardening. She enriched my imagination and most of all encouraged boldness and a degree of daring (but no orange). Barbara Paul Robinson, the author of this Verey biography, reminds us of Verey’s oft-repeated remonstrance: “It is a sin to be dull.” Dull Verey was not, and she could evoke strong feelings in most people who touched her life or her work.

Verey’s gardens remind me a little of jazz musicians. A great and successful jazz musician (Branford Marsalis?) once said that great art is not completely improvised: it is creating something new within the constraints of an accepted form. I like the idea of constraints, because we all have them, and some do better than others when operating inside of them. And this is so for Verey. The gardens she created will always be lovely, but they won’t have her individual spark of genius without her.

Born in 1918, she lived a traditional middle class life until her children left home, and was in her forties when she began creating gardens around the house at Barnsley in the Cotswolds that her husband had inherited as the only son of a long line of clergymen. She began with garden designs unearthed in her historical researches, and began to riff on that, adding a profusion of sometimes new and complementary plants within the formal outline.

Verey had an outspoken and outgoing personality that was much prized and admired in America, though perhaps less so in Britain. She had opinions on everything, but her real focus was gardening in a particular style. And that is perhaps why her star has waned. What she brought to us was an obsession and said “you can do it, too.” We liked to think so, but alas, we could not. We hadn’t the time, the army of gardeners, the wealth, the vision, the dogged pertinacity.

Robinson the author shows us Verey the woman: whatever her flaws, they are presented within the context of very basic human needs for companionship, closeness, intimacy. This is a fascinating portrait of a woman working within the constraints of her own nature, excelling in some things while doing less well on others. The trajectory of her life gives us material for meditation in our own gardens.


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Rosemary Verey: The Life and Lessons of a Legendary Gardener by Barbara Paul Robinson

Rosemary Verey was a British garden designer with a distinct style based on historic gardens of old. Her inventiveness was allowed full rein within the constraints of geometric patterns: the outline of the gardens was defined somewhat strictly and marked with box balls and clipped hedges, but within these boundaries a brilliant collection of perennials, shrubs, bulbs and herbs complemented one another and competed for space and gave the impression of an orderly chaos.

There was a moment in our [American] recent history when new homeowners and gardeners yearned for just such a profusion of structure, color, and character, and lionized anyone who could help them achieve it. Rosemary Verey was just such a one: a woman of strong opinions, she could teach those interested how to create memorable plant pictures suitable to specific conditions. But we learned as all artists soon do that success is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. The labor-intensiveness of her most successful schemes makes one reassess the time commitment after enjoying the fruits of one’s labors for a few years.

Fortunately most of Verey’s books were available to me when I began my flirtation with gardening. She enriched my imagination and most of all encouraged boldness and a degree of daring (but no orange). Barbara Paul Robinson, the author of this Verey biography, reminds us of Verey’s oft-repeated remonstrance: “It is a sin to be dull.” Dull Verey was not, and she could evoke strong feelings in most people who touched her life or her work.

Verey’s gardens remind me a little of jazz musicians. A great and successful jazz musician (Branford Marsalis?) once said that great art is not completely improvised: it is creating something new within the constraints of an accepted form. I like the idea of constraints, because we all have them, and some do better than others when operating inside of them. And this is so for Verey. The gardens she created will always be lovely, but they won’t have her individual spark of genius without her.

Born in 1918, she lived a traditional middle class life until her children left home, and was in her forties when she began creating gardens around the house at Barnsley in the Cotswolds that her husband had inherited as the only son of a long line of clergymen. She began with garden designs unearthed in her historical researches, and began to riff on that, adding a profusion of sometimes new and complementary plants within the formal outline.

Verey had an outspoken and outgoing personality that was much prized and admired in America, though perhaps less so in Britain. She had opinions on everything, but her real focus was gardening in a particular style. And that is perhaps why her star has waned. What she brought to us was an obsession and said “you can do it, too.” We liked to think so, but alas, we could not. We hadn’t the time, the army of gardeners, the wealth, the vision, the dogged pertinacity.

Robinson the author shows us Verey the woman: whatever her flaws, they are presented within the context of very basic human needs for companionship, closeness, intimacy. This is a fascinating portrait of a woman working within the constraints of her own nature, excelling in some things while doing less well on others. The trajectory of her life gives us material for meditation in our own gardens.


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Just Kids by Patti Smith

This spare, elegiac memoir about Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith has something of the Christian iconography about it: if words were installations, one can imagine an altarpiece with the Virgin Mary and perhaps a crucifix surrounded by velvet, feathers, bits of lace, and little skull beads…not kitschy, but strong, puzzling, edgy. Patti Smith is a force, though perhaps one might say she is the negative to Mapplethorpe's positive in the first part of the book: the black negative to Mapplethorpe’s clear clean photograph. In the last half of the book, Smith herself is the positive and lighter image, and entirely clear. And what an unforgettable picture it is.

Smith and Mapplethorpe were soulmates, and she accepted him unconditionally. That closeness and lack of criticism gave them both room to develop in a environment of mutual trust. Even if Smith didn’t agree with, nor completely understand, the impulses that ruled Mapplethorpe she was his first proponent. She grew into her own art even as it grew in her. She was often unsure of the work, but not of the path. By now she might be considered a swami for the equilibrium she exhibits in writing this book. Amerigo is the first song on her new album, Banga, out in 2012, and in it she says “they called us Caribe, which means men of great wisdom…” Perhaps only now can she say that, but she has earned it.

I loved reading of those moments when one change (in appearance, friends, or piece of art) made an enormous difference in how Smith or Mapplethorpe were perceived. She makes it sounds like a chemical reaction–that moment a salt solution becomes crystal.

Her sound is even better for my knowing her history. A life in the pursuit of art is something extraordinary, and this telling of it is breathtakingly lovely and clear and spare. Not the life, especially, but the telling of it. Perhaps Mapplethorpe and Smith were destined to meet, but imagine for a moment they did not. Smith was perhaps the less fragile. We can’t help but wonder at the path they took and how, necessarily influenced by externals as we all are, things would have been for them in a different constellation. Great read.


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March by Geraldine Brooks

It feels like a long time since I’ve read such an accomplished novel. Geraldine Brooks manages to catch the horror of war in a phrase: “…[men] were clinging [to the rocky bluff over the river] as a cluster of bees dangling from a hive, and slipping off in clumps, four or five together.” Her characters are so richly drawn and steeped in a historically accurate language that we feel transported, and are eager to delve into our own researches.

In this novel she recreates the environment of one of our most beloved and earliest American writers, Louisa May Alcott. But instead of walking on furrowed soil, she moves back to imagine Alcott’s father, using his own journals and those of his friends, as well as the journals of Civil War chaplains, soldiers, medics, and slaves. She chose an unusual man, but she made him gracious, sympathetic, fallible, generous, and loving. This is essential to carry us through those bitter days of the Civil War, for we need a man willing to mull over events of that time but also to guide us.

He was sincere, but must have also been painfully strict with his family:

…I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man’s duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming…None in our household ate meat but now we learned to do without milk and cheese also, for why should the calf be deprived of its mother’s milk? Further, we found that by limiting our own consumption to two meals a day, we were able to set aside a basket of provisions from which the girls were able to exact a pleasure far greater than sating an animal appetite. Once a week they carried the fruits of their sacrifice as a gift to a destitute brood of German immigrants.

I laughed to read this, for the sincerity of the father must be the disappointment of the daughters.

Part I is written in the voice of Captain March, chaplain of the Union Army. Though we learn the deepest secrets buried in his heart, we never learn his first name. Part II is written in the voice of his wife, Marmee March née Day of Concord, Massachusetts. The juxtaposition of the two voices shows us once again, should we need reminding, that gestures alone between husband and wife are often miscontrued and that we should try to give careful voice to our meaning and intentions if we wish the union to succeed.

“Ragged scallop of cypress woods”, Jo's “lawless strands” [of hair], “a cold drizzle [falling] from heavily swagged clouds”: such phrases spike the book with rich flavor and bursts of color, and these are all Brooks. It is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction, but what I reveled in most was her smooth and seamless telling of the tale in backward glances and nineteenth century cadence and language, her use of metaphor, her rich imaginings, and its grounding in historical record. We can thank her for reminding us of our history and for remembering those men and women who left records of their lives and of our most uncivil war.

For those contemplating the audio version, the narration by Richard Easton is magnificent. His reading's fluency of expression and elegance of tone mirrors the beauty of the text.

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