Book Review: Eat Pray Love

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved Eat Pray Love and I decided to read it first before seeing the movie, which I have not seen yet. It's a great read that could be a life changing experience if I wanted it to be. She starts off in Italy to enjoy a carefree time and food. It was helping me to slowly but surely relearn to appreciate food again. She experiences different people in Italy and decides not to get involved with men while there. She describes it as being a diverse penninsula with every city with different characteristics. Then she goes to India for another 4 months at a meditation place where you have to be qualified to come to for intense and devotional meditation. Then to Indonesia for balance and she meet and falls in love with a Brazilian there. While she's in Indonesia she practices meditation with an old medicine man.



The writing and the descriptions of the scenery is just spectacular. It was perfect timing for me to read this going through a divorce myself and trying to find myself again. Even on her travels Liz goes through the emotions and growing pains of her spiritual growth as she naturally brings herself on her travels around the world. I wish I could afford to get away for a year for soul searching but many of us like me can do a lot of this at home too. I recommend it to anyone who would like to learn to live in the moment and quiet the mind which can be a challenge. It's an entertaining read with some humor and the human condition interwoven. Great stuff to think about although not a bible to refer back to by doing what she does since we're all different, but an inspiration.



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Book Review: The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse

Happy weekend everyone and I'm finally done with this book! This book was givin to me about 8 years ago and I finally had the chance to read it all the way through, determined to finish it. It's written by Louise Erdrich and I was very unfamiliar with her work. It was so well written that I had to actually think through the book being a genuine literary piece.

It takes place on a fictional Ojibwe Indian reservation called Little No Horse. It's about a woman who lives as a priest Father Damian posted at the reservation. At the end of her life after serving there for over half a century (as the priest imposter), she is interviewed by a younger priest in regards to a nun who is being considered for sainthood. She's in a dilema of either revealing her identity and confessing or keeping it a secret.

The book has many twists and turns going back and forth from the past to the present. It's an interesting read although very slow. Some parts were hard to follow and I always had to return to the front of the book to the family tree in order to follow the characters and their relations to whom. It explores the conflicts between Catholicism and the Indian religion. The differences between good and evil. The nun who was being investigated was the polar opposite of the Father Damien character. She was more abusive to people and her actions could not qualify her for sainthood. After being a nun she then becomes a woman called Agnes who lives with a companion, then taken hostage in a bank robbery and shortly thereafter is transformed into Father Damien after a great flood. When she's both nun and Agnes she's passionate about the piano and Chopin. That's where my previous post comes in. There were some humorous parts too with Agnes giving the town children chicken eggs in the nude, the Indian couple Mary and Nanapush having the Moose pull their boat in order to kill him. It was a good read although I recommend taking your time to read it due to lots of background and description of the lead and the people on the reservation. I can't say I loved the book but the story was interesting with all the different stories and characters woven together.

Book Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (May contain spoilers!)

I had to refresh my memory on this one yet I finished this book last spring. It was a book written about the maids in the south in the early 1960's. It takes place in Jackson, Mississippi and the three main characters are; Aibileen Clark an older maid who's been raising white children, her friend Minny Jackson who has such a bad reputation and money problems gets hired by an eccentric women outcast of the town, and the other is Eugenie "Skeeter" Phelan a college graduate who moves back to town. Their stories are told individually then weaved together throughout the book.

Skeeter could possibly stir things up in Jackson by interviewing the maids in order to publish an article about their treatment to land a job in New York. She had to do it secret to avoid being seen with the African-American maids in the still segregated South. Despite the maids working with the families for many years the relationships between the maids and their families were impersonal. It was a different world and stereotypical for the Southern White Women, playing afternoon bridge, and Junior League membership. They would have typically one maid in the household doing everything around their houses including looking after their children. The children grew fond of the maids, especially Skeeter who wandered why her maid disappeared.

It's a great read and page turner exploring all the characters that I sympathized with except for the head of the Junior League who was still set in the old ways and resistant for change. In the point of view of the African American maids, spoken in their dialect throughout the book, the reader can see the lifestyle they lead and how they live. They were religious and involved in their church which kept their spirits up. The relationship between Minny and her employer symbolized 2 outsiders coming together. Her employer was somewhat reclusive, and was never accepted into the white women's clubs, and Minny could not get employment in most households, so they had eachother. Skeeter was a woman coming of age at the time right before the ever changing '60's by being friendly with the Help which was controversial at the time. She risked her friends and social club involvement to talk to those women.  This was a well crafted book for someone like me who never knew what went on in the Southern households or about the servants and their lives. I recommend that book to anyone who's into Southern history. All three of the main characters are good people working hard to make a difference in the human condition and treatment.

Book Review: Jackie Ethel Joan The Women of Camelot

I just finished this book and it was an appropriate time to read this during the anniversary of the death of Ted Kennedy. I was in Miami at the time of his funeral getting ready for a happier occasion by boarding a cruise ship. I got to watch clips of it via You Tube recently.

It's a fast and enjoyable read for an over 400 page book. A complex and strongly political East Coast family, the family has always fascinated me. The fascination started when I did a report on JFK in High School over 20 years ago. At the same time was my fascination with Jackie when she was on the covers of magazines celebrating her 60th birthday, when she did not look a day over 40. Prior to that reading articles about "Ted and Joan's divorce" in a magazine at my grandmother's house in my tweens. I did not know about Ted Kennedy at the time, or about his other brother Bobby.

I read the Kennedy Women years ago when I was in Greece ironically on the kind of boat Jackie would have enjoyed. This is the only book written about the Kennedy's that explores the relationships between the wives. They had 3 very different personalities thrown together with the same family. It made me have some mixed feelings about Ethel(Bobby's wife), she was lovable or hateful at times. She was always blunt and said it as it was and very ambitious. She seemed like a very hard person to be around, yet she was devoted to the whole family and their political ambitions. He described her home Hickory Hill as being a chaotic place and I could believe it. It seemed like Lord of the Flies there with her out of control kids who she left to the servants to watch. Some of them turned out okay though getting into public service work. As far as being lovable Ethel graciously opened her home to both Jackie and Joan when they were going through hard times. Jackie however did not want her kids to be around Ethel's kids too much.

Jackie was a strong one, and I was always a Jackie admirer for years. She had a life for herself despite Jack's behavior. Like me, both her and Joan were not too much into politics. I think Jackie was a stronger political wife than Joan. Her and Joan were close since they would take strolls on the beach while the other Kennedy's played touch football which didn't interest them at all. Although she was stoic during the assassination she cried a lot in private and went through a major depression. She never really got over it. Jackie and Joan head eachother to lean on based on a series of miscarriages, husband's infidelities, and love for art and music. Both Jackie and Ethel tried hard to get Joan to feel included in the clan. Jackie had her tour Europe with JFK's belongings to raise money for the JFK library and Ethel included her in campaigns. They remained friends for years although it was pretty complex. I really felt for Joan, she seemed too sweet and innocent for that family. Although they say the Chappaquiddick episode drove her to drink she may have been an alcoholic all along, since both her parents were. From the book they endured a lot being a Kennedy wife with tragedies and husbands not emotionally and physically available. They had the financial security but not the emotional security that was needed so much. If I can relate to any of the wives it would probably be Joan, since I'm not into politics and that I tend to be sensitive and vulnerable. I think being in her shoes would have been hard for me since I'm not a competitive person in life and that's what the Kennedy's were.