Jamaica Kincaid, Isabelle Allende, William Styron, and 19 other scribes spin dross into gold, pain into love. Stephanie Golden tracks the beast of self-sacrifice to its lair in "Slaying the Mermaid." "Angela the Upside Down Girl" explains the importance of being limber. And more...

"Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis"
edited by Kathryn Rhett
Order Kathryn Rhett's Survival Stories Today!

Memoirs constructed around crises can easily spin out of control, free falling to the level of tearjerking melodrama. Fortunately, most of the 22 pieces in "Survival Stories," including contributions from such noted authors as Jamaica Kincaid and Isabelle Allende, bypass that sticky trap and carve crystalline beauty from raw anger, sorrow, and dread. Christopher Davis, whose work revisits the steps leading up to and away from the murder of his younger brother, finds crisis memoir a "way to transform pain back into love." Surely this is true for other contributors, too. Natalie Kusz retraces months spent in a children's hospital reconstructing her face after being mauled by a dog in Alaska. Her story and her mother's perspective emerge almost lazily in disarming counterpoint to their intensity. Christina Middlebrook tells of the effort she made to slip back into her soul after a bone marrow transplant, burning everything she had in the hospital except the inevitable memories. In an excerpt from "Darkness Visible," William Styron conjures a wraithlike "second self" who watches dispassionately as he carefully wraps and discards his treasured writing notebook, a bow to the numbing depression pushing him toward suicide. Not every tale is dire, but each draws on different losses or hurts that befall us in life and may be of comfort to others walking these roads.

"Angela the Upside-Down Girl and Other Domestic Travels"
by Emily Hiestand
Order Emily Hiestand's Angela the Upside-Down Girl and Other Domestic Travels Today!

The loose-linked remembrances Emily Hiestand packs into "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" reveal a tongue tucked firmly in cheek, an eye for social travesty, and a flair for wry, evocative description. Fresh from the American South with a carload of art-school friends, Hiestand alights in a down- at-the-heels seaside town near Boston, where the houses boast fake rock siding that resembles "giant mixed nuts inexplicably plastered to the wall." The eponymous Angela is a stripper who peels off clothes whilst standing on her head and earnestly lectures others on the importance of being limber. Shuttling across time and latitude lines, Hiestand recalls growing up in Tennessee's "Atom City," where Manhattan Project physicists developed the bomb that razed Hiroshima and where geek chic ruled. She writes ruefully and wonderfully about trying to document the lives led by her grandmother's clan in the deeper South. Along with some memorable stories are hours of tape recording full of "hisses, things being bumped, sudden cries" and surprising turns of thought as Aunt Mary declares while "talking about a Kodak camera, 'We wore brassieres. Yes, we did.'" Although uneven, Hiestand's tales are often very engaging.

"Leaving Deep Water: The Lives of Asian American Women at the Crossroads of Two Cultures"
by Claire S. Chow
Order Claire S. Chow's Leaving Deep Water Today!

Navigating the oceans dividing cultures is a formidable task that can easily consume a lifetime. In "Leaving Deep Water," Asian American women talk of assuming one identity with family and another in the outside world. A few cross these boundary lines easily, but most of the women interviewed in Claire S. Chow's thoughtful book feel the strain of frequent clashes between Asian cultures that vigorously enforce parental authority and encourage family fealty, and a brash new world that saves its applause for independence. As just one example of the difference, says Chow, traditional Asian families are nonplussed by the praise Americans shower on children, believing it best not to provoke the ire of the gods or slack off on expectations. "The problem comes when you are a child of America, not China, and your next-door neighbor gets a buck for a good math test while you get berated for a score of 97 percent," she notes. Chow concentrates mainly on middle-class women with roots in such Asian countries as China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The abundance of personal narratives gives welcome weight and authenticity to her commentary on themes such as marrying within or outside a culture, parental expectations, aging, and raising children.

"Slaying the Mermaid"
by Stephanie Golden
Order Stephanie Golden's Slaying the Mermaid Today!

Ah, the nobility--or is it futility?--of sacrifice. Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid willingly traded her voice and sensual, seagoing tail for feet that bled pitifully as she trailed her oblivious, beloved Prince. French philosopher Simone Weil was literally consumed by her fervid wish to be one with all suffering souls. And ordinary women sacrifice piece after piece of their bodies, dreams, and lives every day in search of acceptance or in service of others.

The fluid, engaging prose and high-mindedness of "Slaying the Mermaid" is a welcome approach to subject matter that could have been the centerpiece of a talk-show trauma fest ("Women Who Give Too Much and Keep Too Little for Themselves"). Stephanie Golden sheds light on the roots of sacrifice and the pleasures reaped from denial while shuttling between myths and religious mysticism, popular culture, and psychology. The women she interviews speak more often of selfless, often depressingly pointless, sacrificial acts than of feminist--or, rather, human--desires for self- realization. The ideal, Golden suggests, is to live mindfully, as in the teachings of Buddhism, walking away from sacrifices that leave one utterly empty and choosing those that connect us to a larger world through a replenishing cycle of nurturance.

"Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century"
by Susan Ware
Order Susan Ware's Letter to the World Today!

Anyone awake during the most rudimentary U.S. history lesson has at least a foggy notion about most of the seven American women biographer Susan Ware selected for "Letter to the World." Social activist and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is included along with globetrotting journalist Dorothy Thompson, who sent hundreds of dispatches from foreign war zones, and anthropologist Margaret Mead, most famed for the sexual Eden she painted in "Coming of Age in Samoa." Rounding out the field are the pithy androgynous actress Katharine Hepburn, outrageously gifted athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, volatile modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham, and opera star Marian Anderson. Ware debunks certain widely touted conceits about her subjects: Dorothy Thompson, for example, never ran off to cover a war dressed in a shimmering evening gown; she stopped off at home to change and pack first. Ware has a zest for these women and has culled many choice quotes by and about them. When asked by reporters if there was anything she didn't play, Didrikson answers succinctly: "Yeah, dolls." Readers who find these thumbnail biographies tantalizing, but too brief to be deeply satisfying, would do well to pick up books such as "No Ordinary Time," "Blackberry Winter," and "My Lord, What a Morning."

--Francesca Coltrera writes frequently on women's health issues and has been a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, the Boston Herald, and the Boston Phoenix.

******

We want to be sure that our Amazon.com Delivers message delivers the type and quality of information you want to receive. To reach us just send us your comments in an E-Mail.

******

Copyright 1998 Amazon.com, Inc. All rights reserved.