In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men — college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps — to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers... Views: 5
When Ann Leary and her husband, then unknown actor-comedian Denis Leary, flew to London in the early nineties for a brief getaway during Ann's second trimester of pregnancy, neither anticipated the adventure that was in store for them. The morning after their arrival, Ann's water broke as they strolled through London's streets. A week later their son, Jack, was born weighing only two pounds, six ounces, and it would be five long months before mother and son could return to the States.In the meantime, Ann became an unwitting yet grateful hostage to Britain's National Health Service -- a stranger in a strange land plunged abruptly into a world of breast pumps and midwives, blood oxygen levels, mad cow disease, and poll tax riots. Desperately worried about the health of her baby, Ann struggled to adapt to motherhood and make sense of a very different culture. At once an intimate family memoir, a lively travelogue, and a touching love story, An Innocent, a Broad is utterly engaging and unforgettable.Amazon.com ReviewJust 26 weeks into her first pregnancy, Ann Leary's water broke--an event she sardonically refers to as "the PROM" (doctor-speak for "premature rupture of membranes). Unfortunately for her, the "PROM" took place while she was strolling along Oxford Street during a weekend trip to London, where her (then-unknown) husband Denis Leary was booked to perform a BBC comedy show. Forbidden to return home and placed on total bed rest, Ann gets "knackered" from the medications pumped into her body to prevent premature labor. In some of the book's funniest passages, she makes great efforts to prevent her many hospital roommates from discovering she's American, lest they suspect she's freeloading off the National Health Service. (Don't let the bad pun of the book's title put you off; Ann's sense of humor is often as biting and gritty as her husband's).Despite the doctors' best efforts, baby Jack is born two weeks later, while Denis is back in the U.S. working at comedy clubs (and trying to keep the couple from being evicted from their apartment). Jack is in relatively good shape, but Ann's mental state is at risk, as sleep deprivation, anxiety, and loneliness get the best of her. Among her postpartum goofs is befriending another woman whose baby is also in intensive care; she mistakes her for a slim, serene Earth Mother instead of the heroin-addict she really is. So, An Innocent, A Broad is not so much a drama of Jack's survival as much as it is a chuckle-fest at the expense of both Ann's predicament and of the Brits in general, whose overwrought sense of propriety is mocked non-stop. Beware if you think this might seem a perfect gift for a pregnant woman; the belly laughs are constant and likely to cause any expectant woman's water to break. --Erica JorgensenFrom Publishers WeeklyWhile pregnant, Leary, a television and film writer, fantasized about the birth of her son: it would include a home birth ("I would realize that there was no time to make it to the hospital"), an easy delivery (an "evening on our bed, laboring and breathing"), and, of course, a healthy child ("a beautiful, plump baby that my husband would triumphantly slide onto my bare belly"). This fantasy, Leary admits, occasionally included "a handsome fireman who was called upon in a moment of panic." Needless to say, it didn't happen that way. On a weekend trip with her husband, comedian Denis Leary (who was still relatively unknown at the time), to London in 1990 during her second trimester, Leary's water broke. No home birth, no healthy baby, no fireman. With a light touch and comic flair, Leary recounts the five months in London surrounding her son Jack's birth (they had to wait until Jack was more developed to travel back to the U.S.). Forgoing the gory medical details, Leary focuses on her life in and around the hospital and her naïveté about childbirth and parenting. Her cultural observations are especially droll, as Leary sorts out that "tea" is actually a meal and tries to prove that Americans aren't stupid: "I tried to look intelligent, but... I had nothing to read or even to look at, so I narrowed my eyes and stared at my fingernails, in what I hoped was a thoughtful way." Oddly, the one thing missing from the narrative is her husband, who plays a surprisingly small role. Still, this memoir is an easy read that finds the humor in this trying time in Leary's life. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 5
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that "there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones." Amis's scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics, with each of whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy. More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy post-war manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through... Views: 5
