Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, by Portia de Rossi. Atria, 2010. Print length: 272 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...at once shocking and instructional, especially for younger women who may be secretly suffering on their own." Kindle edition $12.99 (Hardcover: $15.59). Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work—first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying. In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to a life of health and honesty, falling in love with and eventually marrying Ellen DeGeneres, and emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues. In this remarkable and beautifully written work, Portia shines a bright light on a dark subject." - Amazon.
Compass Rose, by John Casey. Knopf, 2010. Print length: 384 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...the characters shine so brightly that it's easy to forgive a little narrative excess." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (7 reviews). Kindle edition $15.37 (Hardcover: $20.12). Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"In this sequel to the author’s National Book Award–winning Spartina (1989), Natural Resources warden Elsie Buttrick is forced to grapple with the fallout from her affair with Rhode Island fisherman Dick Pierce. As the novel opens, Elsie has just given birth to their daughter, Rose. Over the next 16 years, Elsie reins in her fierce love for the taciturn Dick, is grateful for his wife’s love and acceptance of Rose, must deal with the insular nature of a community well aware of her daughter’s illegitimate birth, and, finally, must convince her daughter that she is her biggest fan... With its emotionally intricate interior monologues and many complicated relationships among multiple characters, this is a novel best suited to those who have read Spartina... - Joanne Wilkinson for Booklist.
Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print length: 544 p. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...the humor and genuine awe Frazier injects into his depictions are the stuff of a great vicarious vacation". Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (5 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99 (Hardcover: $17.55). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind - from Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the czarina for copying her dresses; to the noble Decembrist revolutionaries of the 1820s; to the young men and women of the People’s Will movement whose fondest hope was to blow up the czar; to those who met still-ungraspable suffering and death in the Siberian camps during Soviet times. More than just a historical travelogue, Travels in Siberia is also an account of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union and a personal reflection on the all-around amazingness of Russia, a country that still somehow manages to be funny..." - Amazon.
Why Not Say What Happened?: A Memoir, by Ivana Lowell. Knopf, 2010. Print length: 304 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...Lowell's writing remains conversational and refreshingly free of self-pity." Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $15.37 (Hardcover: $18.45). Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Named after a line from a poem by Robert Lowell, her mother's third husband and an important stabilizing presence in her early life, this self-searching, poor-little-rich-girl story is, in ways, a search for a father. Alcoholism ran through Ivana Lowell's family, the descendants of the Guinness beer fortune; her fabulous grandmother, Maureen, married royalty, and cultivated 'talented snobs,' while her mother, novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, who had grown up in northern Ireland, crossed into bohemia by first marrying Lucian Freud, then composer Israel Citkowitz. Moving between New York's Greenwich Village and London, her mother also had affairs with English screenwriter Ivan Moffat and New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, so it was never clear who was the author's father. After her mother's marriage to Robert Lowell, the family lived in a rustic house in Kent; there, the author was sexually molested by a caretaker. Lowell embarked on her own destructive drinking while at various boarding schools, attended drama school, and ended up in New York... In alternate chapters she chronicles her extensive rehab over the years, her voice stripped of all vanity and self-pity, revealing a near palpable relief in baring the unlovely details." - Publishers Weekly.
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