My Sister’s Keeper

by Jodi Picoult (Washington Square Press, 2004)

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been slowly slogging through Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Other Invisible Illnesses: The Comprehensive Guide. But I took time out to read My Sister’s Keeper, which I has been on my to-read list for a while (possibly not on this blog, but in my head). It took hold of me like some kind of flesh-eating bacteria. I could hardly put it down; I read the 423 pages in just a few days.

The book is the story of the Fitzgerald family–Brian and Sara and their children, Jesse, Kate, and Anna–and the lawsuit that Anna brings against her parents to prevent them from forcing her to donate a kidney to Kate, who suffers from a usually fatal form of leukemia. The story is seen from the perspectives of all of these characters, and also those of the lawyer and the guardian ad litem, a person appointed by the court to get to know the plaintiff, her family, and the situation in order that she might make an informed but objective recommendation to the judge. Each chapter is written in the first person from the point of view of one of these characters, at a certain point in time (or in the week or so between Anna’s hiring the lawyer and the verdict of the court), and each character has his or her distinct font. The reader is drawn into the stories of each character and comes to care about all of them.

The book raises a number of serious ethical questions (example: Is it right to conceive a child for the purpose of saving the life of another child?), and there may be no good answers. But Picoult gets you to ponder them.

If there was anything I didn’t like, it is perhaps that the (surprise) ending is a little too pat. (No spoiler here; you will have to read it yourself.)

Advanced non-native readers will not find particularly difficult language, and the chapters are mostly short, but it’s a really long book for a slow reader. On the other hand, if it grabs your interest the way it grabbed mine, you may find yourself reading faster than you usually do because you want to know what will happen next!

My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman’s Story

by Latifa (Hyperion 2001)

“Latifa” (not her real name) was sixteen years old when the Taliban took over Kabul, where she lived with her parents, her sister and brother (another sister and brother having already left home), their dog, Bingo, and their canary.  Her mother was a doctor; her sister worked as a flight attendant for the national airline. Both women were forced to give up their careers, although her mother continued to treat patients secretly until she ran out of medical supplies. Latifa had just begun her entrance exams for university, hoping to follow a career in journalism. Her dreams of furthering her education were crushed as the Taliban systematically imprisoned women in their homes and chadris, making it too dangerous for them to venture out for any reason. Those women who had no male family members to run errands for them or escort them either starved in their homes or risked savage beatings and rape if they went out. (An infraction of any of the many decrees governing their behavior gave men an excuse to punish them any way they wanted.) Sick or injured women had no access to medical care, because male doctors were not permitted to treat female patients, and female doctors (the majority, before the Taliban) were not permitted to practice medicine at all. It’s difficult to imagine how any person (let alone a whole group of people) could so oppress half of the population of a country.

The book is written like a journal, mostly in the present tense; if it were not for the fact that I think it unlikely that the author could have left Afghanistan with a diary in her luggage, I would assume that that it is her actual journal, kept over a span of years between the Taliban takeover and her leaving Afghanistan for Paris, along with her parents, in 2001, to publicize the situation of Afghan women in France. While they were in Paris, the Afghan authorities apparently discovered her identity and ransacked the family apartment, making the their return impossible.

The genius of the book is its ability to make the reader feel that such a thing could actually happen to any of us. Latifa does not come across as “foreign”. Although a devout Muslim, she enjoyed all the same things that American teens enjoy; she was a good student, with hopes of a bright future. Suddenly, all that was lost. She battled boredom and then depression, until she courageously began to teach some of the children in her building in one of what must have been many clandestine “schools” set up under the noses of the Taliban. This was why she was invited to go to Paris to speak on behalf of Afghan women. At the end of the book, she is pessimistic about the response: “…I don’t think anything will change. My father, ever the optimist, keeps telling me that … a word is never lost in the desert. One day it will burst into bloom…. Women listen to other women, and what you’ve told them will make people here understand what the Taliban are doing to you. A woman is not nothing. If a talib tells a woman she is nothing and he is everything, he is ignorant. Man is born of woman, the saint has a mother, the whole world was born in the body of a woman….” (pp. 196-197) But after the news that a fatwa has been issued against them and their apartment gutted, even her father is demoralized.

The book ends in 2001, after Al Qaeda’s attack on America but before the escalation of the American war in Afghanistan. A quick Google search does not bring up updated information on whether Latifa and her parents were ever able to return to their country or whether they were ever reunited with her brothers and sisters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States. In any case, as I write, the Taliban are still in control of parts of Afghanistan and are still presumably waging war on the women and girls of Afghanistan.

The book is simply written and would be accessible to upper-intermediate and advanced English language learners.

Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning

by Sugata Mitra (TED Books 2012)

This is my first TED Book. TED launched TEDBooks recently: “an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run fewer than 20,000 words each — long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.”  Each book (there are currently just 13, but presumably more will be added) costs just $2.99 and can downloaded for the Nook, the Kindle, or the iPad/iPhone (I think; available from the ITunes store, anyway). I envision the day (pretty soon) when I can have my students purchase a few TED books to read on their iPads, iPhones, Kindles, or Nooks. The fact that the books are so short and so inexpensive, that they are nonfiction and that students can be turned on to their subjects by watching the related talks, is bound to make them popular. I just have to wait until everyone has the capacity to download the book somewhere. (I suspect that it may already be the case, as I think they all already have iPhones, and there are apps for eBooks available for those.)

Sugata Mitra was an invited speaker at the last WiAOC  (Click on “Keynotes for 2009″ at the top); this may have been where I first learned about the “Hole in the Wall” project, or I may have listened to his 2007 talk, “Sugata Mitra Shows Kids How to Teach Themselves,” or perhaps “The Child Driven Education” in 2010. Mitra is described as “an education  scientist.” His big idea was to make a computer with internet access available to poor children in the streets of New Delhi and to watch what happened. What happened was that the children rapidly taught themselves/each other how to use the computer and how to get online. From this starting point, Mitra tried out his experiment in different places and in different ways, always finding that children are seemingly hard-wired to learn from each other. They naturally organize themselves into learning communities and need very little (if any) adult supervision or actual instruction to do so. Mitra praises MIE, or “minimally invasive education,” as a way to ask groups of kids a “big question” (e.g., Who was Archimedes and what is he known for?” or even better, a question to which even the teacher does not know the answer) and then stand back and let them use the computer to find the answer.

I found Mitra’s descriptions of what he has observed to be very interesting, his predictions about how things will work 50 years in the future, using a fictional child named Rita, much less so. We really have no idea what technologies will be invented between now and 2062 nor how they will affect our lives. MIE and SOLE (self-organized learning environment) are interesting enough!

The book is only 56 pages; I finished it during part of a bus ride from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. I am looking forward to reading more TED books! See here for more information about TEDBooks and a list of books that are currently available.

Purple Hibiscus

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003)

I first heard of Chimamanda Adichie when I listened to her 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” In that presentation, she talked about how she grew up reading the literature of other cultures, e.g., British, but that she came to realize that the stories she needed to write should be about her own experiences as a Nigerian. That is what she does in this story of 15-year-old Kambili and her family: her father, Eugene, a fanatical Catholic and owner of a daily newspaper, who abuses his wife and children in the name of saving them from sin; her mother, Beatrice, who enables the abuse until she can put up with it no longer; her brother Jaja, who rebels openly against their father’s intolerant brand of Catholicism; her Aunty Ifeoma, Eugene’s sister, also Catholic but loving, liberal, and tolerant of diversity; Ifeoma’s three children, Kambili and Jaja’s cousins; and Papa-Nnukwu, Ifeoma and Eugene’s “traditionalist” (for Eugene, “heathen”) father. Kambili adores her father and does her utmost to please him, but he is not easily pleased; instead, he is enraged by the slightest infraction of the impossible rules he sets for his household. His children and his wife are required to be perfect at all times. He schedules Kambili’s and Jaja’s every waking moment, and a tiny slip brings a beating or worse. He is responsible for his wife’s miscarrying at least two babies. Still, Kambili makes excuses for him–even when he nearly kills her. Like so many abused women before her, she believes that she deserves the abuse.

Kambili and Jaja are given permission to visit Aunty Ifeoma and her children in a nearby university town–their first experience sleeping away from home. They experience life in a relaxed and loving home and slowly come to enjoy the freedoms they find there. Kambili even falls in love–with a young Nigerian priest, Father Amadi. Their priest at home in Enugu is almost as punitive as their father. A whole world begins to open up for her.

The story is told against the backdrop of a coup d’état which puts a brutal dictatorship in charge of the country, causing economic chaos. As much as we hate Eugene, we cannot help but admire his courage in speaking out against the dictatorship.

The book catches and holds the reader’s interest–I read it in about 3 days. An advanced English language learner could probably understand it well (especially one from an African country). The language is not difficult, but I frequently wished for a glossary of Igbo words (especially words for food), which would not have been difficult to provide and would have increased my appreciation of the book.

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage Books, 2006, originally published by Knopf, 2006)

This was a thoroughly depressing book. A father and son trudge through a destroyed America. It is not clear what has burned the country, killed all the plant life and wildlife and most of the humans, yet left a few humans alive; but they must keep going if they are to survive the winter and avoid the marauding gangs who will kill and consume them if they catch them. It’s a kind of survival story (like Hatchet or My Side of the Mountain), but much grimmer. There is no clean place to return to; everything that was before, is gone now. Corpses litter the landscape and they find little to eat, wear, or use because everything has been ransacked before by others. Apparently the destruction, whatever it was, happened years ago.

The redeeming part of the story is the love and trust between the father and son. They are everything to one another. I guessed the boy to be between seven and ten, but he has been aged by the horrors he has seen and experienced on the road. He remembers nothing else. I kept hoping for something good to come out of it, although I couldn’t see how that would be possible.

The grammar is very simple, and most of the sentences are short. Most of the vocabulary is common as well, but then there will be a sentence like “He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings” (p 15).  There are a lot of sentence fragments, and for some reason contractions are written without apostrophes (e.g., didnt) and dialogue without quotation marks (that’s common these days). An English language learner who could ignore these things would understand the story at least as well as I did, but why you would want to read it is another question. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie, and I kept reading until the end, but I guess I prefer my fiction to more more uplifting than this was.

Shanghai Girls

by Lisa See (Random House 2009, 2010)

Narrated by Pearl, Shanghai Girls tells the story of Pearl and her younger sister May, born to wealth and privilege in pre-war Shanghai. At 21 and 18, Pearl and May earn their own money by modeling for “Beautiful Girl calendars”, wearing mostly western clothes and showing rather more skin than is proper for young Chinese women. They speak fluent English and Pearl has just graduated from college. She is in love with the artist who frequently paints them. Pearl and May do not respect their parents as good Chinese daughters should, but life is good and full of promise. At the beginning of the book, I rather dislike the two sisters. They are empty-headed and spoiled.

Abruptly, their world collapses. Their father has gambled away the family’s wealth and has promised Pearl and May as brides for the sons of “Old Man Louie” in Los Angeles, as a repayment for his debts. Pearl and May are forced to go through with the weddings, and Pearl even sleeps with her husband, Sam, but neither girl intends to show up to take the boat for California. However, the “Green Gang” comes after them on behalf of Old Man Louie as the Japanese are attacking Shanghai.  They barely escape with their mother and then undergo horrors as they try to distance themselves from the besieged city. In the end, after many troubles, they do end up in Los Angeles, but the promised wealth and beautiful houses turn out to be a pack of lies. Old Man Louie is relatively poorer than their family was. But there is no going back, as the Communists follow the Japanese in Shanghai. Pearl and May must make their lives in Los Angeles as best they can.

This is a great story, well written and with a lot of historical detail. I learned a lot and enjoyed it.  Advanced English language learners, especially Chinese students, will probably find it enjoyable as well.

The Laramie Project

by Moisés Kaufman

I don’t usually read plays; I prefer to see them performed on stage or even on TV. Maybe that is why I never read this when it was the University of Maryland First Year Book back in 2002-2003, and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since. I took it down after the public library snatched the book I was reading off my Nook when I couldn’t finish it in 14 days (Excuse me? The book had over 400 pages! I have a job! How could I possibly have finished it?).

The tragic story of the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shephard is the centerpiece of this Teutonic Theater Project play, so I assumed I would be reading about the callousness and prejudice of the people of Laramie, whose interviews make up the play. I’ve been through Laramie, driving west to California on Route 80.  It is so alien for me–like a different country, maybe a different planet. But I was wrong. Most of the people who “speak” in the play were as appalled by the crime as I was. Several of them are also gay. Who thought there were so many gay students, professors, and citizens in Laramie WY? (I guess it’s like Jews: we are everywhere.) So I ended up feeling somewhat comforted by the idea that the two young men who beat Matt Shephard to the point of death and then left him to die, and who are paying for their crime in prison, were as much of an aberration in Laramie as they would be in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

I recommend it to English learners because it is quite short and the language is quite accessible.

Room

by Emma Donoghue (Back Bay Books, 2010)

Five-year-old Jack has never been outside of the small room where his mother has been held captive for seven years, and he has never spoken to another human being other than Ma, who makes sure he is hidden in the wardrobe during the nightly visits of her captor to her bed. Although they have a television, Jack believes that the people and things he sees on TV aren’t real like him and Ma. Even the person he calls Old Nick does not seem quite real to him, and he cannot imagine Outside at all. The individual things in his world (Room, Wall, Ceiling, Bed, Table, Spider, Toilet, Eggsnake, etc.) are the only things that matter. Jack’s Ma has somehow managed to structure their lives to include reading, cooking, cleaning, exercising, playing, and talking.  It is as if Jack spent his formative years in complete isolation, like Genie or the Wild Boy of Aveyron; but unlike them, Jack had his mother to talk to him, read to him, tell him stories, and teach him, with the result that not only does Jack have language–his language is very sophisticated for his age.

Jack and Ma do almost everything together, with what little they are allowed. It is enough for Jack, but not for his mother, who, of course, must still submit to the sexual predator who keeps them locked up in this soundproofed shed in his back yard. After Old Nick cuts the power to the shed for three long, freezing days, she decides she cannot wait any longer to act, and she plans a daring escape, using Jack as her tool. (That particular chapter made me so anxious I raced through it to find out what happened and then had to go back and reread it for the details!)

The last part of the book describes Jack’s gradual adjustment to life Outside. This part is very compelling. Never having known the wider world outside Room, Jack longs to return to the one place he really felt safe. When he finally does go back, he finds it different from how he remembered it, but he also finds closure.

Written in the language of a very precocious child, Room is accessible to high intermediate and advanced English language learners.

Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok (Riverhead/Penguin 2010)

Kimberly Chang, the narrator of this short coming-of-age novel, has much in common with author Jean Kwok. Both immigrated to the United States  from Hong Kong; both lived in Brooklyn; both worked in a sweatshop; both graduated from top schools, making successes of themselves through sheer grit and brains.  So it is tempting to wonder how much of the novel is autobiographical: the freezing apartment in a condemned building? the roaches and mice? the full scholarship to a fancy prep school? Kimberly and her mother’s mistreatment by an unfeeling, jealous relative and their perseverance under seemingly impossible conditions make the book hard to put down (I read it in two days).  It’s impossible not to like this plucky young girl (when the book opens, she is eleven; it ends when she is eighteen and there is an epilogue that takes place twelve years later) as she resolutely develops her American self, smart and successful in school, and her Chinese self, rather more outspoken than is proper, but ready to do whatever it takes to survive and help her mother.

I enjoyed the way Kwok portrays Kimberly’s limited English by substituting what she thinks she hears people say for what they actually say, for example: the prep school headmistress tells Kimberly that although she is applying after the normal deadline, they can “make an excession for you”–possibly “up to fifty percent of the twosheen costs.” It’s a good reminder that language learners do not always hear what we think they hear!  I also loved the way Chinese idioms are translated word for word in the dialogue between people speaking Chinese, and then interpreted, for example: “Hey, someone has to find the rice, right?” To earn the money. And “he has the white disease.” She was calling Park retarded. Additionally, colorful Chinese insults are translated word for word, like “You have the nose of a pig and slits for eyes too!” These add an authentic flavor to the text.

There are several wonderful characters besides Kimberly, including her true love Matt and her best friend Annette, a Caucasian girl she has the good fortune to meet when she enrolls in public school. Annette has a pure soul and offers Kimberly true friendship, even though Kimberly finds it necessary to lie in order to hide the extent of her poverty from Annette. Annette goes on to the same prep school as Kimberly, and it is a pleasure to watch her grow from a rather naive child who cannot imagine a life so different from her own wealthy existence into an independent thinker, a political activist, a feminist, but always a true friend to Kimberly. I wonder if Kimberly would have had the strength to persevere through the years of abject poverty, bullying, and accusations of dishonesty on her road to immigrant success, had she not had the love, support, and trust of this one friend. By offering friendship to someone like Kimberly, the Annettes of this world can make a huge difference in their lives.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama (copyright 2006; Vintage Books 2008)

Barack Obama wrote this book when he was serving in the United States Senate; I read it in his fourth year as President, just after the devastating battle over the debt ceiling (July-August 2011), when the so-called “Tea Party” Republicans brought the country to the brink of ruin trying to ensure his defeat at the polls in November 2012.

Like Dreams from My Father, this book is notable for its honesty. Obama writes of his relationship with his wife and children and his first election loss very directly and forthrightly.  He also writes clearly and simply of politics, history, religion, race, and international relations.  ”Opportunity”, perhaps my favorite chapter, deals with how our capitalist system developed its unique relationship between government and industry. Obama writes, “Our free-market system…emerged through a painful process of trial and error, a series of difficult choices between efficiency and fairness, stability and change.” Beginning with Alexander Hamilton’s ideas about a national economy, Jefferson’s fear that this would “undermine his vision of an egalitarian democracy tied to the land”, Lincoln’s “groundwork for a fully integrated national economy” (the transcontinental railroad, research funded by the National Academy of Sciences, the Homestead Act, the land grant colleges…), Wilson’s Federal Reserve Bank and Roosevelt’s New Deal, Obama clarifies the path that Americans have taken to arrive at the impasse at which we now find ourselves, split down the middle and paralyzed, unable to act on the simplest legislation (although at the time he wrote it, Obama could hardly have predicted the absurdity of the impasse Congress created during this summer of 2011).

Reading his words, I felt a renewal of faith in Obama’s priorities, even as I feel disappointed by his apparent inability to make the Republicans toe the line (in the battle over the debt ceiling, it was he who blinked: and the bill that finally passed contained no closing of tax loopholes, new taxes, or tax reform).  It does take a certain amount of audacity “to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict.”  I continue to hope, but without much conviction.

For English learners, this book provides a clear picture of American history, values, culture and politics. It is written in clear language and organized neatly into its various chapters: an excellent example of good, clear writing.