Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A Vegetarian's Tale: Tolstoy's Family Vegetarian Recipes Adapted for the Modern Kitchen

This is a fun light book to read.  Good for an afternoon on the couch during a snowstorm.  You are reading about recipes and looking at wonderful pictures of the different foods mentioned in Leo Tolstoy's novels.  Now those recipes are created to be cooked and tasted by the average reader.

Once again there is so much butter added to these recipes, that I cannot in good conscience eat them,  But all of the original recipes in the book have been updated and tweaked a little to make them taste good and easy to prepare for the modern audience.  I do think I would prefer to see how to really make them the original way with a little more guidance.  Some of the new revisions seem to change the recipe completely for the modern reader.

So pulling recipes from the writings of Tolstoy is a creative idea.  There are so many other authors where you could create a cookbook based on their novels.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

The Prodigal Son

Written by Sulari Gentill, this short novella is the the back story for her mystery series about gentleman painter, Rowland Sinclair.  This book is written in that old world style of the upper crust, gentile society.  I must say I think it is extremely well done because for quite awhile I kept checking to see if it was a reprint from the 1930s or currently written.  Gentill does a fabulous job of writing about a time in history and a lifestyle that she makes seem very realistic.

This is a fun story about a young man who comes home to his family estate somewhere in Australia when he inherits the house.  Reluctant to be back he is excited to meet up with an old school chum who convinces him to take painting classes for the fun of it.  Rowland meets some interesting new friends and even falls in love.  But when relationships seem suspicious and his friend starts acting strangely, Rowland tries to solve the mystery.

This is a short story but the characters are intriguing so I will be looking for the actual series of Rowland Sinclair mysteries and start with number one of the seven novels Sulari Gentill has already published.

Faithful

Faithful by Alice Hoffman is again another wonderful story.  Hoffman has once again been able to weave a plot that touches so many and is so real.

 Exploring the world through the eyes of a teenager who has experienced tragedy the reader is taken to the depths of despair and brought back from the edge.  Following through the eyes of Shelby we are taken for a joyride that turns tragic.  Shelby and her best friend, Helene, are at the pinnacle of their high school experience.  They are popular and get good grades.  They have been accepted to the same college.  But a mistake changes their lives in a minute and there is no going back.

Shelby people would say was the lucky one, she walks away able to continue on with her life.  But, as sometimes people don't see from the outside, Shelby does not feel lucky.  She does not feel like she can move forward or go on with the life she had planned.  Though her parents try to help, they also are working through challenges in their marriage.  Shelby must find her own way, the answers that will resonate for her and bring her back from the edge.  She meets Ben, a boy she did not like in high school, who now is trying to help rescue her.

Shelby is not sure she is worth rescuing or that it is even possible.  Shelby learns with time that, "Every story had the same message; what was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken."

Shelby feels that she is broken and is not sure she can be fixed.  This is a story that every parent understands as the reason we set rules for our children.  This is exactly the kind of heartbreak we are trying to save our children from.

Mischling

Written by Affinity Konar, Mischling is a beautiful descriptive story about a subject that is extremely difficult to accept.  Though some of these subjects are difficult digest and believe they could even could have happened, Konar does an incredible job of showing us it was real and how it affected the people it touched.

The word mischling means hybrid or half breed.  This word was used during the Holocaust by the Third Reich to describe a person of mixed blood.  In this novel Konar focuses on the area later referred to by the survivors as the Zoo.  This is the part of the Auschwitz concentration camp where Josef Mengele houses the children, especially twins, who he uses for scientific experimentation.   The children are given more food and allowed to wear regular clothes, instead of the striped uniforms that adults wear.  He has teachers and classrooms for the children and he wants the children to call him Uncle.  When he studies the children, he offers them candy.  But he was also known as the 'Angel of Death' because the experiments that he performed on these children were horrific.  He would inject them with a variety experimental fluids and operate on them changing their bodies all so he could study the results.

In this novel, Konar takes the reader into the camp through the eyes of Pearl and Stasha Zamorski, twelve year old twins, who in the fall of 1944 are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather.  As identical twins who share a secret language and can almost read each other's minds and feel each other's pain, they catch Mengele's eye coming out of the cattle car.  The outgoing personalities of  Pearl and Stasha draw attention to themselves by not only the other children in the camp, but also they are focused on by Mengele.  The plot explores the way that twins are connected, that if one twin feels pain the other also can feel a complimentary pain.  When one twin is gone it as if the remaining twin is incomplete.  The prose used in this novel makes the subject matter palatable.

As Pearl and Stasha are introduced to the bunker they will be staying in and the nurses who are assisting Mengele in taking care of the children the reader learns about who the two nurses are, "There in the laboratory, I knew only that we were flanked by two women who seemed to fall into interesting positions in the order of living things.  They looked to entirely without feeling, their soft forms walled with protective layers.  In Nurse Elma, this seemed a natural state; she was an exoskeletal creature, all her bones and thorns mounted on the outside - a perfect, glossy specimen of a crab.  ... Dr. Miri was differently armored - though she was gilded with hard plates, it was poor protection, one that hadn't warded off all the wounds, and like the starfish, she was gifted at regeneration.  When a piece of her met with tragedy, it grew back threefold, and the tissues multiplied themselves into an advanced sort of flesh with its own genius for survival."

So beautifully written that such a harsh subject become palatable and the reader does not want to put it down, hoping that for these twins, Pearl and Stasha, the Holocaust would not have devastating affects.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Among The Living

Jonathan Rabb has brought to the forefront an interesting comparison between the survivors of the Holocaust who immigrate to the United States after the war and the African Americans who have just recently be awarded freedom in the Jim Crow South.  This is a story of understanding identity and belonging.  It looks at the relationships of blacks and whites and what happens when someone who doesn't follow those established rules responds differently.  It also looks at the idea that the Holocaust survivor was also in a different position than the American born Jew.

In Among The Living, Yitzhak Goldah has come to America to live with distant relative in Georgia. This last remaining relative, Abe Jesler, owns a shoe store and employs members of a black family both in the store and as domestic help in his home where he lives with his wife, Pearl.  They are members of the shul, which is where the conservative Jewish members of the town observe the holidays.  As Goldah learns his way around the town and his newfound freedom, he also learns the distinction between the shul and the temple where the reform Jews attend services.  For Goldah having survived the concentration camps, these differences and disagreements seem trivial.  He also finds love for the first time, with a member of the reform community, to the Jeslers dismay.  This novel presents the story of life in America during that time period and the uncomfortable feelings of American Jews as they confront the Jewish immigrants coming to join their communities.  There are uncomfortable discussions as they ask questions and make insensitive comments.

To add suspense to the plot, Jesler is involved with some black market business dealings and a woman from Goldah's past comes to town creating conflict in Goldah's new relationships.  Goldah has to choose between living in the past or moving into the future.