The Help by Kathryn Stockett (fiction)
Outside Martin Luther King has begun his March, but inside the homes in Jackson, Mississippi, black maids have ample reason to be wary. Generations of white children have grown up in the care of these women, but unfortunately, they grow up to be just like their parents. The lines that separate the two communities are far from flexible and anyone who puts a toe across the line faces violence and certain social ostracism.
The women though are about to find an unexpected champion in Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter. Unlike her friends, Skeeter is curious about what is like for Jackson’s maids. When she decides to chronicle the stories of the black maids who work for her friends, Skeeter doesn’t really understand what she’s getting into, and what it’s going to cost her.
Aibileen and Minny do know and they decide to help Skeeter anyway. In the two women, the book finds real heart. Abby is raising Mae Mobley, the seventeenth white child to grow up under her care. Then there’s Minny, short, fat and sassy, she has her own hands full with a new boss who is considerably more grown up than Mae, but just as unprepared for the real world. In their own ways, the three women are tired of being suffocated by the rules that circumscribe them.
When they decide to write a book that tells the whole truth, it becomes their most liberating, most terrifying adventure yet. Author Kathryn Stockett gives each a pitch perfect voice, and a story worth telling.
First lines: Mae Mobley was born on an early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby, we like to call it.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (non-fiction)
How does Ben Pridmore, the current world memory champion, memorise the exact order of 1,528 digits in an hour? Foer wanted to find out. He first found himself dazzled by the feats of memory exhibited at the US Memory Championship which he was covering as a science journalist.
(The book’s title and first lines refer to a memory device that Foer used in the US Memory Championship to help him memorize a deck of playing cards.) With his interest kindled, Foer went looking for people with unique memories -from one man whose memory only extends back to his most recent thought, to another who can memorize complex mathematical formulas without knowing any math.
With the help of experts, Foer began to duplicate some of these seemingly impossible feats. His story and the techniques he shares offers readers to do the same.
First lines: Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has bocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the ground of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds).
Michael Jackson (king of hearts) has engaged in bizarre behavior even for him. He has defecated (two of clubs) on a salmon burger (king of clubs) and captured his flatulence (queen of clubs) in a balloon (six of spades).
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (fiction)
The story is a riveting saga of twin brothers, Marion and Shiva Stone, born of a tragic union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa.
Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
But it’s love, not politics -- their passion for the same woman - that will tear them apart and force Marion to flee his homeland and make his way to America, finding refuge in his work at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital.
When the past catches up to him, wreaking havoc and destruction, Marion has to entrust his life to the two men he has trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
First lines: Sister Mary Joseph Praise had come to Missing Hospital from India, seven years before our birth. She and Sister Anjali were the first novitiates of the Carmelite Order of Madras to also go through the arduous nursing diploma course at the Government General Hospital, Madras. |
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