World of Confusion – Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I really wanted to like this book, and it started off appealingly, but as I read on it became more and more disjointed. I suspect that was the author's intention, with the book partially set amidst a geological and political disaster, but I eventually just lost interest. I skipped through to the end, and I was never really clear on where it was all going. The end didn't clarify or wrap up anything for me. It was disappointing. I was hoping to discover a new Latina voice I could embrace.

This is a family story of three generations of women of Guatemalan heritage living in Boston: elderly grandmother Candelaria, her daughter Lucia, and granddaughters Paola, who disappeared and is now back and calling herself Zoe, while living as part of a bizarre women-only brainwashed cult; the second daughter is Bianca, who became an archeologist but was pushed out of her Ph.D. program after an affair with her program advisor; and the youngest, Candy (short for Candelaria) a recovering heroin addict and film buff, who works in an art house cinema. The granddaughters' lives become intermeshed through their attachments to men and others. There's a kind of magic realism quality to the book, but it's more nightmarish than mystical. 

This was a novel I chose as one of my Mark Twain American Voice in Literature candidates to read and rate in the initial round of that selection. Unfortunately I cannot recommend that it goes forward in the competition.

Trapped in Their Own Web – Hope by Andrew Ridker

This novel by Andrew Ridker was one of my choices to read and rate for this year's Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. Our group of readers was presented with a lengthy list of nominations. Each person must choose several books to read and rate (rather than review). Once this reading period is over, the selections that garnered positive ratings will go on to the next round. 

This book captures a unique cultural segment of American society – the contemporary secular Jewish family...not about the Orthodox or the various groups of Hasidim in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, or Borough Park, not about the Holocaust, not about mid-twentieth century Brooklyn or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or about the immigration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century, which are subjects that have been endlessly covered by many authors over the years, and are usually what we find in books about Jewish people.

While the milieu of upper middle class Brookline, a close-in suburb of Boston, will not be familiar to many, Ridker gets inside it so thoroughly that we feel we know these people, nearly all of whom are Jewish. The author very skillfully takes the characters from what first appeared to be clichés to something much deeper and more profound. The writing is exemplary. It addresses the moral ambiguity of modern American life without preaching. 

In brief, the book covers one year in the life of the Greenspan family. Husband and father Scott is a respected cardiologist, wife and mother Deb is a former dancer who is devoted to liberal causes, daughter Maya works in publishing in New York, and son Gideon is a pre-med student at Columbia. Each of them is faced with a personal crisis that threatens the entire family's status quo and shakes their stability, but the chain of events is set off by financial problems that Scott tries to solve by falsifying the information he provides for clinical trials, which he thinks will pay him the money he needs to extricate himself and his mother, Marjorie, from poor financial choices...until he gets caught.

Greek Triumph: Ask Me Again Tomorrow, a Life in Progress by Olympia Dukakis

Olympia Dukakis, the well-loved and Oscar-winning actress who passed away earlier this year at the age of 89, is vibrantly and fully alive on the pages of this fast-paced and fascinating memoir. Her strong personality comes through on every page, first as she describes her childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, her teen years and first career steps in and around Boston, and her young adulthood and continued career development in New York. 

Her Greek-American identity and fraught family relationships shaped her character. She was rebellious and unconventional from the start, not the "good Greek girl" she so often referred to. She had a tense relationship with her critical mother and eventually uncovered disappointing behavior on the part of her father, a philanderer who badly hurt her mother and the family.

Despite many challenges and setbacks, she was determined and ultimately succeeded in becoming a serious and successful actress, had a loving relationship and marriage that spanned 40 years, started and for years ran a theater company with her husband in their adopted home base of Montclair, New Jersey, and was the mother of two children.

Her memoir, written with Emily Heckman, recounts the many details of her struggles and travails to achieve career goals, to find acceptance as an ethnic "outsider" in many circles, her struggles with depression and health issues, and celebrates her many successes as well. While she also describes relationships with others in the acting field, she avoids imparting celebrity gossip – there is not a word, for example, about Cher, her co-star in "Moonstruck", for which they both won Oscars, though she is listed in the many acknowledgements at the close of the book.

While reading the memoir, it was hard to grasp that she was no longer with us, it is that vivid and intimate. It is almost like receiving the confidences of a friend who trusts you to listen, but knows you won't judge her. She is so real, so down-to-earth, that you feel you know her, and only wish she could live forever.

I was fortunate to have a fleeting moment in which I shared a space with her (from afar). A friend and I attended an Off-Broadway play shortly after "Moonstruck". We had balcony seats in the smallish Lambs' Theater (now demolished, sadly), and looked down into the orchestra section, where we spotted Olympia (in mink) and Cher (in a white fur) arriving and taking seats in the front row. We were amused to see them sharing an aluminum foil-wrapped snack during the intermission – maybe Olympia brought it from her kitchen in Montclair – who knows? So normal and so just like the rest of us!

I highly recommend her memoir, not only if you are a fan, but also if you have an interest in theater, and the lives of unconventional feminist mid-century women. There's a lot to chew and digest here.

Obituary for Olympia Dukakis from the Boston Globe

Sobering Lessons: The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America were a time of great immigration, with many hundreds of thousands coming from eastern and southern Europe. They were not welcomed by all, including many at the very uppermost echelons of society in Boston and New York. Some turned to the pseudoscience of eugenics to support their prejudices. These proponents of eugenics and the bigotry it typified were generally influential men of great means, some of whom were "scientists" – in fact, many of them had advanced degrees and wrote scholarly books which were later debunked. The author, an acclaimed historian, explores them and their "work" in great detail, and with extensive documentation. 

Highly restrictive laws were passed in the House and Senate in the early 1920s to stop the flood of newcomers. Outrageous quota systems cut the former number of immigrants from Italy, the former Russian Empire, Poland, Greece and many other countries to a tiny fraction of what it once was, while favoring large numbers to immigrate from the British Isles, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and other northern European countries with so-called "Nordic" peoples. 

The lessons of that period, roughly one hundred years ago, are extremely relevant right now, in a time in which we are fighting pervasive racial inequity and other inequalities, brought to a head by the presidency of Donald Trump, which is thankfully nearing its end. America, as we all know, has a great deal of work to do to correct its path.

As the saying goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I might add that those who not read or study continue to encourage ignorance. That might sound obvious, but it is all too true.