Sunday, September 02, 2007
The Glass Castle
For those that love memoirs, Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle is an amazing read. She has been a gossip columnist on !E and a contributor to MSNBC, just recently resigned to continue with her writing. The book is an account of her childhood (she is one of four) with brilliant but troubled parents-her mother an artist and her dad, a genius at math and engineering, but a drunk. Neither can hold down a job. They live in the dessert, in Vegas, Phoenix, and Virginia in shacks, shantytowns-in some places with no plumbing. They give their children so much yet so little at the same time. One Christmas when they were little, they didn't have any money, so their dad gave them each a star; Jeannette chose a planet, Venus. Years later, their dad steals money three of the kids had been saving to move to New York, to go out and get drunk. I strongly recommend reading this book. Walls' pluckiness will make you laugh your ass off and her candor will make you cry at the same time.
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That sounds like a great read. You should check out Welfare Brat by Mary Childers. She grows up poor and white in the Bronx as one of seven kids with a mother who's unbelievable. It's a great read.
Just finished yet another "how we can defeat the war on terrorism" book for one of the book clubs, and now I'm reading a pretty hilarious one called "Farewell My Subaru" about an NPR journalist who decides to go completely green. It's not preachy, it's basically reading like if one of us attempted this. Good stuff.
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