My youngest son, Nicholas, loves "All About That Bass,' that contagiously catchy, retro-inspired pop song.
"All About That Bass" has been accused of "skinny shaming"
("I'm bringing booty back; go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that...")
and encouraging women to feel validated by what a man thinks
("Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase and all the right junk in all the right places...my mama she told me don't worry about your size... she says boys like a little more booty to hold at night").
I'm not too concerned about the "skinny shaming," because there's just no comparison to the fat shaming that overweight people experience. But I don't like the word "bitches." I've clearly explained to my kids that they are never to use that word...I don't like the way it's become so commonly accepted in popular culture (thanks, Breaking Bad).
I'm glad to report that I've found a better alternative to the original song, and it's "All About Those Books," by Mary Ellen and the Readers! It's produced by Mount Desert Island High School in Maine. Enjoy!
I'm glad to report that I've found a better alternative to the original song, and it's "All About Those Books," by Mary Ellen and the Readers! It's produced by Mount Desert Island High School in Maine. Enjoy!
Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, by Cyndi Lauper with Jancee Dunn
My first memory of Cyndi Lauper was when I was a junior in college, and "Money Changes Everything" was a big hit. In the video, Cyndi Lauper kicks a garbage can...and my roommate and I would blast the music and pretend to kick things. You know...the silly things one does in college!
Then when I was in Japan in the late 1980s, both Cyndi Lauper and Madonna were all the rage. I bought her "True Colors" cassette tape (yes, that's right--that's how old I am) and I loved her unique sense of style, which was appealing to this woman whose mom once told her, "Marie--you have a style all your own!" In that era I had short, spiky hair with a tail (wish I had a photo) and I've always been drawn to colorful clothing. Lauper was a true pioneer in the 1980s, inspiring many of today's edgy artists such as Lady Gaga, Nikki Minaj, and Pink.
Then a few summers ago we went to see Cyndi Lauper perform at the Oregon Zoo after she'd made her blues album, "Memphis Blues." She was a dynamic, compelling, and talented performer, who had essentially reinvented herself as a blues singer. She even had blues legend Charlie Musselwhite on tour with her. When she sang "True Colors," I cried along with most of the audience.
Cyndi Lauper's memoir is very much like her personality--all over the place. Writer Jancee Dunn manages to capture Lauper's voice and style in her writing. The narrative jumps around a bit, and she digresses, just as Lauper does...you can practically hear her distinctive voice jumping off the page.
She seemed to have a reasonably happy childhood and she was loved by her mom and siblings, but she never really fit in. She ran away when she was in high school because of a lecherous stepfather. What I admire the most about her is her crazy sense of self-confidence and self-assurance, even at a young age. She took herself off camping in Canada completely alone as a young woman--the only companion she had was her dog Sparkles. She has always been passionately committed to her ideals of justice, and she's also been committed to making great art--both musically and visually.
When she started to get successful and make records (after some awful experiences with some of her initial bands, including once when she was raped by her former bandmates), she was screwed over by record company executives, who wanted to make her into someone else--more marketable and less assertive.
At times, the book digressed into the details of each record production, and I began scanning...but I enjoyed reading about how she met her husband David and had her son, Declyn, after struggling with bad endiometriosis.
Somehow, I'm not sure why, I was late to the Bruce Springsteen train. I knew his more popular songs and liked them, but it wasn't until I went to my first Springsteen concert with my teenage son last November that I became a convert.
Peter Ames Carlin, a writer for the Oregonian and author of several musician bios, interviewed Bruce and his colleagues and pored over the albums, articles, and interviews to create this exhaustive (and some say, exhausting) biography. At times Carlin uses sentence fragments, which I'm not crazy about, and he does tend to go on at times...perhaps a more diehard Springsteen fan would have gotten more out of the long stories about various concert tours and people who helped him along the way. It was interesting to read about how Bruce made it big, gradually and with a lot of hard work and a loyal fan base in New Jersey.
Younger Bruce
One reviewer (and local New Jerseyite) wrote about how this book was book-ended by death...starting out with the childhood death of Bruce's aunt, which affected his whole family forevermore, and ending with the death of his beloved friends and bandmates Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons. Reading about Clarence's death (and Bruce bringing his guitar into the hospital room to sing Clarence out during the last 3 hours of his life) brought me to tears, as did the poignant description of how Bruce's dad asked him to sit on his lap one night (as an adult) after a lifetime of conflict and tense silence between the two of them.
With Clarence
I'm still amazed that I'm a Springsteen newbie. He stands for so much of what I believe in. From representing the common American working person to singing a song for the movie "Philadelphia," before most of Hollywood became gay friendly, from engaging with and advocating for Vietnam vets and Amnesty International, to continuing to sing about the underprivileged even after he hit it big, and for showcasing a local charity at each of his concerts...he is a strong voice of social justice.
Carlin's book does not paint him as a perfect man...he can be narcissistic, demanding and selfish. He hurt the members of his band when he cut them off for several years to pursue his solo work. He has exacting standards for everyone who works with him.
With Steve Van Zandt
But he is clearly a musical genius, prolific in his song writing and creative in his musical arrangements, and a true poet of the people.
The one thing the book was lacking was more about his family. Carlin writes about the birth of Bruce and Patti's first son, but doesn't go beyond that. I'm guessing that Bruce asked Carlin to keep his family out of the book...but it would have made this bio much more comprehensive. We hear about his initial relationship with Patti, but in later years not much.
With his family at the Kennedy Center Honors
Now I'm going to go listen to the albums painstakingly described in the book, and they will mean much more to me.
I am a polar opposite of Storm Large. I had a happy childhood with two stable, loving parents who were always there for me. I am happily married with three children and have never been promiscous or used drugs. Yet I love Storm Large, as you can see by the multiple posts about her on my main blog.
After seeing Storm's show, "Crazy Enough," twice at Portland Center Stage and purchasing the show CD, as soon as I read she was writing a book I put it on hold at the library. I've been waiting for several months to get my hands on it.
As I expected, the book delivered. Storm was able to go into deeper detail about her crazy childhood and young adulthood. Raw, honest, and full of profanity and crazy-making shit, she lays it all bare for her readers. Sex addict, drug addict, and now a performing addict, she knows all too well how larger than life and wild she is. It's part of her act. The world is a better place because she can use her wildness as art and be addicted to music and performing instead of the unhealthier habits. Much of the content was covered in her one-woman show, but she's able to go into more detail here.
If you have a strong stomach and are not easily offended, read this book.
Plain Truth was the first one, and My Sister's Keeper and Keeping Faith have also been some of my favorites. But Sing You Home is definitely in my top three, and perhaps #1 now.
It's about a music therapist, Zoe, who is struggling with major infertility issues. She has multiple miscarriages and finally a pregnancy "takes," only to end at 28 weeks with a stillborn. (I think these types of books should have warning labels on them for anyone who has experienced infant loss!!!) That's why my reviews of them often have spoilers. No one who has experienced the loss of a child should have to read something like this unless they are prepared to. As someone who experienced infertility and miscarriages, I could understand Zoe's feelings of helplessness...and the way the medical staff referred to her lost babies as "tissue." I could also understand her love for music, along with its healing power.
After their baby dies, Zoe's husband Max decides he can't take any more and announces that he wants a divorce. Zoe tries to pick up the pieces of her life, and she finds love again, and has some hope that she might be able to be a mom after all.
As do most Picoult novels, there's a court case involved, and a lot of hateful intolerance (this time in the name of Evangelical Christianity). If you don't mind knowing some of the plot details, I encourage you to visit Picoult's wonderful web site and watch the videos she made about how this book personally affected her and her family. She also shares her personal commitment to justice and equality for all. Although some might say that some of the characters were one dimensional, I disagree. Picoult writes on her web site in great detail about her research with fundamentalist Christians, and although she disagrees with their intolerance, she paints her characters with depth.
My only criticism of the book was one time when I felt that one of the characters acted in an uncharacteristic way (by getting angry when Zoe was at one of her lowest moments), but beyond that, it was a highly satisfying read...and it made me cry at the end! I heartily recommend it.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
I first heard about this book back in January when it lit up the blogosphere after an excerpt in the Washington Post titled "Why Chinese mothers are superior." As you can imagine, mothers came out of the woodwork, fiercely attacking her and defending their own parenting approaches. As much as I can understand their perspective, I also find it amusing when people attack each other's parenting styles. What they didn't quite understand about the book was that Chua meant it to be a parody of this parenting style. The front of the book says: "This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old."
Chua, who arrived in the U.S. as a very young child, was raised here by her immigrant parents, and she was convinced that her daughters would be far more successful (and happy) if she made all the choices for them. For example, they were never allowed to do the following things:
Attend a sleepover
Have a playdate
Be in a school play
Complain about not being in a school play
Watch TV or play computer games
Choose their own extracurricular activities
Get any grade less than an A
Not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
Play any instrument other tan the piano or violin
Not play the piano or violin
Chua, a Yale law professor and writer married to a Jewish law professor, makes a bargain with her husband. They would raise the kids in the Jewish faith if she could apply Chinese parenting principles. Honestly, the man must be a saint. I don't know how he put up with it. She is far stricter, demanding, and (in my opinion) cruel than her parents were with her.
Her two long-suffering daughters could not have gotten much enjoyment out of their childhoods. They were too busy studying, learning Chinese, and practicing violin or piano. She hires a Chinese tutor for them (even though Chua herself does not speak Chinese). She comes across as a complete snob, telling her kids that other children (who are able to go to slumber parties or do not have to practice 4 to 5 hours a day) come from bad families. Anything less than the top performance is not acceptable. She rejects birthday cards her daughters make for her and tells them to do them over again.
A friend who lives in Maryland tells me that half of the kids in her children's school live like this. Their parents constantly pressure the schools to accelerate the curriculum well beyond the usual grade levels.
It's hard to tell, at times, whether Chua is making fun of herself or if she really believes what she did is right. For example, she calls her daughter "garbage" when Sophia acts disrespectfully toward her. When she mentions this conversation later at a dinner party, the other adults ostracize her. One guest breaks down in tears and has to leave early. So she must have known, on some level, the kind of reaction this book would get. Chua says that this approach worked "great" with her daughter. She speaks with admiration of the Chinese (or other) cultural more of insulting their children--for example, saying to an overweight child, "Hey fatty--lose some weight." In contrast, "Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of 'health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image."
She goes on to recount ONE anecdote of hearing a "western" father toasting his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent," and the daughter later telling Chua that it made her "feel like garbage." I do not know anyone who would feel like garbage upon being told they were beautiful and incredibly competent. Chua likes to spout one-off anecdotes to defend her actions. Another one is the fact that her husband had been asked if he wanted to play the violin as a child, and he said no...and now he always regrets it. Hence, it's okay to FORCE your child to play the violin.
Each time Chua forces her daughters (often the younger, more defiant one, Lulu) to do something unreasonable, and hours of angry fights ensue, the daughters eventually cave in to Chua's ridiculous demands. She considers these triumphs as her rightful due as a mother, and feels justified in her methods.
Chua perhaps unintentionally pits Asian parenting styles against "western" parenting styles. She consistently puts down the latter. She writes "There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests." I find this comment pretty hilarious, because this is the best-known book about Asian mothers, and it does just that!
She truly believes that only she knows what would make her children happy--in the case of Lulu, "I wanted her to be the best violinist in the state--and that was for starters. I knew that was the only way Lulu could be happy."
I think Chua is a little bit crazy, actually. In the midst of her incredibly high-stress life (teaching law, writing books, going on lecture tours, on top of screaming and shouting at her daughters to practice all hours of the day), she decides to get a puppy. She chooses a Samoyed, and then begins to focus her competitive energy on her dog! As if one unruly puppy wasn't enough (she ended up doing all the dog walking and care on top of her other responsibilities), later she decides to get a second one.
During the course of the book's time period, she loses her mother-in-law, a vibrant, independent woman, and comes close to losing her beloved younger sister, Katrin, to leukemia. You would think that these experiences might prompt her to think more about her family's quality of life and her daughters' happiness. It can't have been fun or relaxing to live in a household constantly fraught by fights (usually about practicing the violin, and sometimes the piano). Why doesn't she realize how short her time with her daughters would be (while they were young) and make the most of it? Well, she says it herself: "The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life. It's not one of my strengths...I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence (her mother-in-law) always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl--she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments." So Florence died without getting to spend a full day with her granddaughters. How sad is that??? Especially because Chua doesn't realize that it is sad.
When their beloved grandmother dies, Chua forces her grief-stricken adolescent daughters to give eulogies. When they protest, Chua demands it and pours on the guilt. She then rejects Sophia's first draft as totally unacceptable and calls her selfish. Both girls come through in the end, but it shocks me to think of how callous and unfeeling she was to demand that they speak at the funeral.
Chua writes about some of the arguments she had with her long-suffering husband, Jed, but for the most part he lingers in the background. In one argument, he accuses her of making crazy overgeneralizations about "westerners" and "Chinese people" and asks her to stop insulting people all the time. "I know you think you do people a huge favor by criticizing them, so that they can improve themselves, but have you ever considered that you just make people feel bad?" When he points out how wrong it is to praise Sophia in front of Lulu, she completely refuses to see his point, claiming that Lulu doesn't "need affirmative action."
The fights continue when she hosts a 50th birthday party for Jed. She demands, again, that Sophia and Lulu give speeches, and Lulu refuses. It is the first of many battles Chua loses, and she accuses Lulu of dishonoring the family. After Lulu hacks off all her hair after Chua tells her they don't have time for her to get a haircut, you'd think she might consider backing off...but no.
The simmering hostility begins bubbling and finally explodes when the family travels to Russia. Chua tries to force Lulu to sample caviar and calls her a juvenile delinquent and a barbarian when she refuses. Lulu throws a temper tantrum in the middle of the restaurant and tells her mother she hates her, her life, and her family. Chua tells her she's a terrible daughter. Finally, Chua realizes she must change.
She allows Lulu to give up the violin and take up tennis. But it's clear at the end of the book that she doesn't have any regrets and feels good about the way she has raised her daughters. That's why I'm not sure it's a parody. Everyone around her--her husband, daughters, parents-in-law, and even her own strict Chinese parents--tell her to chill out and back off, that she's going too far, but she refuses until Lulu ultimately explodes. She's extremely lucky that she didn't alienate her children forever.
Even though Chua and her husband are law professors, I wondered how they could afford their extravagant lifestyle. Full-time Chinese tutors (at least in early childhood), expensive piano and violin lessons, trips all around the world, constant dining out, and when Sophia performs at Carnegie Hall, a truly extravagant reception to which Sophia's entire class is bussed into the City?
In summary, this book was compulsively readable and a welcome break after The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which took me weeks to finish. I admire Chua's honesty--she does expose herself to heaps of criticism. But I truly feel sorry for Chua's daughters and husband. She admits that her family is not the type who has intimate conversations about their feelings. She believes that her daughters are happy and well adjusted, but how would she know what they really feel about her? (After I wrote this review, a Facebook friend sent me this link to a letter written by Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, which defends her mother and says how much she loves her. Chua apparently has received death threats, so I understand why she wanted to defend her mom.)
Yes, she realizes she couldn't win, continuing the way she was going, but her closing pages smack of the kind of person who realizes, deep down, that she was right all along.
Author Jo Brand is a former psychiatric nurse-turned comedian-turned writer. Her first novel is about Alice, whose mum Gina suffers from schizophrenia. She's in and out of the mental hospital, and when she's heavily medicated, she's a shadow of her former self.
Alice and her dad Keith do their best to care for her and love her--but she's not terribly unlovable. Finally, Alice conspires to give Gina a break from her medication, and all hell breaks loose. Gina's form of mental illness is to fixate and obsess on a particular man, convinced that they are meant for each other. This time, Gina's target of affection is Alice's own obsession, Morrissey from the rock band, The Smiths.
In the Herefordshire countryside, Alice and her family are surrounded by Alice's school mates, a horrible bully, Gina's crazy family (aptly named the Wildgooses), Keith's social-climbing parents, and the family doctor (named Marie!), who is in love with Alice's dad.
The book veers into slapstick and tries to accomplish way too much at times (with bunches of side storylines), but Brand handles the subject matter sensitively and wisely. She gives insight into what it would be like to live with a mentally ill mother (or wife), and she manages to make Gina into a sympathetic figure, even as she is difficult and unlikable. View all my reviews
Blah. So glad to be done with this one. I only finished it because I wanted to see what would happen. It was by an Irish writer...about a woman who disappears and various people who are trying to find her...
I didn't particularly like the characters--most of them didn't seem to have any morals--and in fact I didn't feel as if I really got to understand them at any rate. The writing was just not very strong.
This novel is a classic example of telling rather than showing. And even though I love music, the Jack Lukeman theme felt completely forced and hollow.
I've always been a Julie Andrews fan, so it was interesting to read about her early years--she had quite a difficult childhood. Her stepfather was an alcoholic and bordered on abusive, and her mother was absent and disengaged at times. This memoir goes up to the point where Andrews has her first daughter, Emma, and is still in the midst of her first (presumably happy) marriage. When she writes the second half, I'll be sure to read it!
I think I might not have been in the right frame of mind when I picked up this book. Perhaps because I had just finished the very dark The Road; who knows? I found myself scanning through some of these pieces...and I'm not much of a scanner.
The book was beautifully assembled, with black-and-white photos and essays by several women singer-songwriters such as Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow, Sarah Maclachlan, Jewel, Lucy Kaplansky, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Roseanne Cash, Suzanne Vega, etc.
The most valuable part of the book for me was to learn about some new singer-songwriters to discover. It was interesting to learn more about their background and how music has touched their lives. But I'm glad I got it out of the library.
This was a great introduction the Beatles for my six-year-old son. We both cried, though, when I read the part about John Lennon dying to him. Now that the Beatles are making a big comeback (and we enjoy playing Beatles Rockband on the Wii), it was a great way to teach him all about the band...and I learned quite a few things too.
