Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia

#755
Title: Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia
Author: Rebecca G. Haile
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
Year: 2007
200 pages

A better book than it's getting credit for being. Part history, part family history, part travelogue, this is an elegant piece of work that speaks not only to what might cause a family to need to flee their homeland, but what it's like to come back. Haile balances the legacy of her family with the strange experience of being an expatriate tourist in her own land.

It was also fun to see Amharic words that are from the same Semitic roots as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

My Life in France

#754
Title: My Life in France
Author: Julia Child & Alex Prud'Homme
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2006
336 pages
Audiobook.

A lovely autobiography (mediated by Alex Prud'homme). The narrative is a mix of written and oral styles, with a tone distinctly Julia's that makes me miss watching Julia on PBS, a staple of my younger life. At the time, I just thought she was fascinating, funny, and frank. She wasn't afraid to say she'd made an error, which wasn't true of many authorities at that time. I had no perspective on how revolutionary Mastering the Art of French Cooking was; I just knew that the recipes made sense, even if I had no plans to prepare sweetbreads, say, or bread. Her cookbooks are still among the clearest and most explanatory I use.

The audiobook reader does a good enough job, with occasional mispronunciations, but she has a good reading voice. However, there is no PDF of the photos, so I'll still need to look at the book.

Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son's Story

#753
Title: Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son's Story
Authors: Patrick Cockburn & Henry Cockburn
Publisher: Scribner
Year: 2011
255 pages

A reasonable example of its genre, and with the added interest of Henry's and (uncredited in the authorship) his mother's writing in addition to father Patrick's. A useful addition to family memoirs about schizophrenia because of the minor but repeated emphasis on the deleterious effects of marijuana on people vulnerable to psychosis.

In its best moments, it's absorbing and sad; at worst it's sometimes confused about where to direct its anger. I certainly empathize with the author's frustration about the insecurity of secure facilities, though for one I think his vision of the security of pre-community mental health facilities is a romantic one (his son might well have spent his days tied to a bed prior to the advent of medication). Having worked on a unit where a patient kicked his way out through a barred metal door and absconded over a tall fence, I also know that someone bent on escaping will manage to do so unless their right to any freedom is abrogated. In terms of rights, it interests me that Henry seems not to have been tried on older medications (they have higher side effect profiles, but work well for some people), nor, until they began powdering his cozapine, did he appear to really have a successful trial (and given the frequency with which he smokes marijuana, I'm not convinced he's had a totally clean trial yet). I also wonder, given the sometimes manic flavor of his episodes, if he was ever tried on lithium or Depakote, but hey, I'm not a medical doctor and this is idle speculation on my part.

Read with The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness for another perspective on British mental health care, and with Hunt's Mental Hospital and Rosalynn Carter's Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis for an early perspective on the miracle of antipsychotic medication, and a contemporary perspective on the failure of adequate community-based mental health care. 

Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish

#752
Title: Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish
Author: James Prosek
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 2010
303 pages

An enjoyable, easy to read book about eels. While there is enough scientific and technical information to be engaging, the heart of the story is cultural, with an emphasis on New Zealand, Pohnpei, and Japan. I would think of this genre as "personal nature writing," with Prosek as a character as well as narrator of the story, woven together by both the focus on eels and Prosek's shift of focus from the objective to the spiritual. I found it engrossing as well as sometimes gross. I admire Prosek's ability to subtlely shift between genres as he reports on his learning and experiences. I'll never eat unagi again without thinking about this book. 

Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts

#751
Title: Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts
Author: Amílcar Cabral
Translator/editor: Richard Handyside
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Year: 1969
Country: Guinea-Bissau
174 pages

Guinea-Bissau. A selection of political essays and related materials by Amílcar Cabral, architect of the revolution in former Portuguese Guinea. Though dense and somewhat repetitious, it underscores Cabral's contentions about colonialism, neocolonialism, the role of the petty bourgeoisie, the role of the peasantry/working class, and the question of whether a people exists in history if they do not meet Marxist criteria. His arguments are easy to follow, he is a smooth operator, and he manages to get his digs in at Portuguese colonialism as he makes other points to the UN and Tricontinental Conference.

This volume was published in 1969, before the establishment of Guinea-Bissau and four years before Cabral was assassinated. Given the year, he has much to say about colonial conflicts in Vietnam and Cuba as well.

I most appreciated Cabral's emphasis on the importance of understanding the characteristics and history of the culture seeking to liberate itself; he asserts frequently that one size of revolution will not fit all, so different strategies will be needed. Unusually for a set of political essays, there is more than one in which he describes the social and political structure of the local indigenous peoples, using these descriptions as the basis for revolutionary strategies that differ from those of straightforward Marxism.

Not an easy read, but a useful one, providing an intelligent insider perspective that also illuminates struggles in Mozambique, Cape Verde, Angola, and Vietnam. Worth the effort.

Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man

#750

Title: Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man
Authors: Chaz Bono with Billie Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Dutton
Year: 2011
255 pages

Chaz Bono reitterates his life and coming out process, here from an acknowledged transgender perspective. The writing is often repetitive, but read simply as a memoir it's a useful addition to the literature. It's also an interesting illustration of how we interpret ourselves and our stories post hoc; Bono and I share a number of characteristics and experiences, but understand them differently in relation to our identities. What matters, of course, is not that one of us must be wrong, but that we are both right about ourselves, and at peace.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace

#749
Title: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace
Author: Dang Thuy Tram
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2007/2008
227 pages
Audiobook.

The diary of a young North Vietnamese woman, working as a doctor for the Viet Cong. By turns poignant and polemical, it manages to be more engaging than not, and to provide a different perspective than we usually get. The introduction by Frances Fitzgerald (and read by her in the audiobook) summarizes the action, as well as the path by which the book came to be published and its reception in Vietnam. The reader pronounces the tones in Vietnamese words, which is welcome.