Medusa by Michael Dibdin

Despite the fact that I am supposed to be reading (and finishing) two or three other things, I read Medusa this weekend, a later entry in the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin (published in 2004).

10 Amazon readers gave this book an average of four and a half stars, and I'd say they're well deserved. I really enjoyed reading it because I didn't really notice myself making an effort to read it; the prose pulled me along and when I lost my place it didn't bother me too much to reread a chapter. I think his prose is very handsome.

The book opens when a retired army officer, reading his paper on the tram in Milan, discovers that the corpse of a man he thought everyone has forgotten has been discovered in the Alto Adige, a part of Italy that abuts Austria. He knew this man and he knows that he's in danger. Gabriele's fear, and his cross country flight, inspire some similar road warrior behavior in Zen, who visits Alto Adige, Bolzano, Verona, Cremona, and Milan before getting to return to Lucca. As Dibdin says, Zen feels at home in police archives, and has visited most of them at one time or another.

In this novel, Dibdin satirizes the sloganeering of modern Italy, what he calls "Italia lite": enthusiastic assertions of the need for teamwork while serving the public while the same old internecine agency rivalries between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior rage on, as healthy as ever.

He also talks about the "Mysteri d'Italia," how matters are settled quietly, behind the scenes, by powerful members of the oligarchy who never step forward out of the shadows.

In this story, Zen has aged quite a bit since Ratking; he's living in Lucca now, with a woman named Gemma. Their conversations are priceless.

Just Married & Cooking by Brooke Parkhurst & James Briscione

I guess today is lifestyle day at my blog. I was interested in this book because its title suggested to me simple recipes and instructions for a newer cook .. someone newly married, perhaps, who would be cooking much more than before.

I was a little bit disappointed to find that while the authors state that the purpose of the book is make interesting everyday eating, I found the recipes overly elaborate for my taste. Perhaps I need the "Short Attention Span Cookbook: Recipes in 6 Minutes or Less."

The authors, a journalist and a Food Network chef, acknowledge that they are unabashed foodies and that food preparation, eating and just thinking about food are a major part of their every day.

I guess I feel that while there are many obviously tasty recipes and some good advice - even some answers to questions that you've had -- what's a quick bread? what's a grit? what's pancetta? how do I cook asparagus? (Does everyone not know how to cook asparagus? Even I know how to cook asparagus), that this is really a lifestyle book in which they exhibit their excellent taste and suggest you use good French butter in your baking (gosh, they don't have Celles sur Belle or Isigny Ste. Mere at the Jewel) buy elegant skewers for your S'mores, drink your coffee like you're on Boulevard St. Germain, use White Lily flour ("Brooke's mother wouldn't consider baking with anything else").

That said, some of these recipes seem very appealing: Simple Breakfast Focaccia with Spinach, Butternut Squash and Fontina, Rigatoni with Escarole, Pine Nuts and Goat Cheese (Dinner in a Hurry).

Parkhurst and Briscione teach a couples' cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

101 Things I Hate About Your House by James Swan

Perhaps you imagine that I became interested in this book because of its title. If so, you are correct.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I have not read this book in its entirety but I believe that I have read enough to make a judgment. Alas, there just isn't time enough to read everything.

Mr. Shaw is a professional designer accustomed to working with clients for whom money is not an issue and to working with budgets most of us could not afford. The book is illustrated with color drawings that are funny and which, frankly, I didn't like at all. There are a few photographs of some interior rooms that Mr. Shaw has designed, including a Moorish-inspired grand staircase for a California client and an over-the-top powder room in which a beautiful set of drawers has been refitted with a stone top and repurposed as a bathroom vanity.

While this wouldn't be the right approach for most of us, I was delighted to find a bathroom in which the vanity had been banished and replaced with something truly beautiful. Mr. Shaw is no Sarah Susanka, but I suspect that they have more in common that might at first appear. In his introduction Mr. Shaw writes: "A gracious and beautiful home effortlessly considers the needs of its occupants and consistently rises to the occasion. We understand style and taste as being subjective, but principles for gracious living are not. While the former denotes mastery of historical nuance and devotion to a fickle public's fleeting fixations, the latter -- and the object or our attention -- is rooted in common sense piled high with practical experience.

Mr. Shaw's tone is witty, directive, arch, and somewhat abusive. Yes, he is a better decorator than you are and now he expects you to take his advice. I was somewhat alarmed at being called "Kitten" (didn't Dame Edna copyright that expression?) but admire his courage. Was adopting this tone a conscious choice? I imagine so. Indeed, Mr. Shaw was assisted by Carol Beggy in the production of this little tome and I imagine Carol is the real architect here.

Having said all this, you might imagine that I might be a little put off by Mr. Shaw's bossy commands and feel that his experiences working with the rich and famous make him out of touch with the needs and aspirations of us mere mortals. On the contrary, although much of what Mr. Shaw has to say may be viewed as common sense I've come to realize that sense is not all that common. In fact, much of Mr. Shaw's advice is especially helpful to beginning designers and also useful to those with more experience.

For example, his advice to pull furniture away from the walls, use it to create intimate seating spaces, provide ample tabletops and coasters for drinks may seem obvious but I expect it isn't for everyone. I applaud his insistence that walls, whether in dining rooms, living rooms or even family rooms be adorned with art. I was surprised that he insisted that all adults - even teenagers - needed to have their own double bed.

His rants against inadequate toy storage, excessively cute or expensive kids' room furnishings, failure to action-proof a family room, or control excessive remote control growth are not surprising. I was chagrined by his rant against overgrown, straggly, ill-cared for house plants (Officer I'm guilty! Take me away!), and surprised to learn that I failed to appreciate the need for correct scale when incorporating live plants into a decorating scheme.

His insistence that "we are our stuff" and need not only well-designed creature comforts but mementos, souvenirs, family photographs, collections and books and art to distinguish our living spaces from those of others and to express ourselves surprised me a little. His insistence on the importance of books was manna to my book lovin' heart and I was delighted by his suggested that in the absence of a library or the room to create one that bookcases lining the dining room were a pleasant and effective substitute.

One tip I really appreciated was that all lampshades should be lined with pink silk. I can't quite believe that all lampshades should be lined with pink silk, but I actually think that that is a tip that could transform faux pas to fabulous. I'm sure that the pink reflection from the silk is flattering to everyone and does help to create a more comfortable envrironment for everyday life.

I also appreciated his conviction that small spaces are no excuse for giving up on decorating, more essentially, a well-appointed space that use the tools of design to create space that is both comfortable and efficient. As Mr. Shaw tells us:

Never write off a small kitchen as being incapable of producing dazzling feats of entertainment. Big things come in small packages, and at the end of the day it's not size that matters but what you do with what you've got!

You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning by Celia Rivenbark

I fell in love with this title, as I often do when I'm inspired to read a new author. Celia Rivenbark is a humorist; she lives in North Carolina and her weekly column is syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune Media Services.

She's a "kinder and gentler" Chelsea Handler, with a calmer but equally irreverent view of the world. She has feel for the absurd, and she's not afraid to be a little bit vulgar if it'll make us laugh. She certainly knows a lot more about celebrities than I do. (I like to think that she keeps up with celebrities so that, after all, I don't have to.)

She's funny and she has a feeling and fondness for the Southern eccentric.

Some of the titles of the book's chapters might give you a feel for Celia's work:

"Poseable Jesus Meets Poser Ken"

"Gwyneth Paltrow wants to Improve Your Pathetic Life"

"Clay Aiken Ain't Marrying Your Glandular Daughter"

"Sex Every Night For a Year? How Do You Wrap That?" (One woman's optimistic gift to her husband.)

The book includes recipes: the last chapter's recipe is "Better-than-Sex-365-Nights Cake" which certainly sounds impressive (it involves pineapple, pecans, bananas, vanilla, flour and cinnamon).

Humor is important and I think I don't pay enough attention to it, so I'm glad that this book is here! 

Onward by Howard Schultz

I've just finished Howard Schutz's Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, and it's very hard for me to resolve my mixed feelings about it.

I went into a Starbuck's last weekend for a cup of coffee and was surprised when the barista asked me what I thought of the book .. I'd forgotten that I was carrying it with me. I hesitated. Finally, I said that I thought Howard Schultz was silly. I was having trouble taking him seriously at 100 pages into the book; he seemed to be saying that he had fired Jim Donald, the previous CEO, because he would not remove breakfast sandwiches from the store -- because Schultz didn't like the way they smelled. And, some of the other things he said in the beginning of the book just seemed silly to me.

He characterized Jim Donald by saying you couldn't find a kinder guy. That strategy, they taught us in high school English, is "damning with faint praise." I found myself wondering: did Schultz, or the board, ever articulate any goals for CEO besides growth? Did they ever identify new product innovation, preserving and enhancing the store experience, or solving supply chain logistics issues as goals?

I was immensely uncomfortable with the idea that, breakfast sandwiches notwithstanding, what was killing the company was overexpansion and Schultz was both the main architect and the main implementer of that overexpansion. How, then, did he earn the privilege of attempting to turn the company around?

Of course, you can't argue with success and Starbucks has been hugely successful and so has Howard Schultz. The overexpansion that Schultz helped to foster is a common result of the successful entrepreneur's hubris, and it's killed many other retailers, as has the recession. Schultz led Starbucks through an organizational crisis caused by overexpansion, neglect of employee training, runaway costs and operational inefficiencies, the effect of which was exacerbated by the recession. By 2010, his leadership staff had closed hundreds of stores and in the process, raised net revenue by billions of dollars. Just saving his company was a huge achievement; greatly increasing operating revenue was spectacular.

Further, I would argue that Starbucks is a lifestyle company, that is, that much of their appeal was the "lifestyle" element. For me, it was a chance to have coffee like that I had in Italy; for others, the chance to be among young people or get away from the office. But as a "lifestyle" store, especially one that did seem "hip" or "cool" to some and pretentious to others, there was a danger that once the "overexpansion" factor had been corrected, Starbucks would no longer be seen as of the moment and would continue to decline simply because of the impression that its moment had passed.

That that didn't happen to Starbucks is certainly part of Starbucks' and Schultz's achievements.

What fascinates me most about this book, however, is the question of how you manage a retail business. One of Schultz's answers is that you provide health benefits to your "partners" (i.e., employees). Another is that you call your employees something other than employees - in this case, partners. (Zappos does the same thing.) Another is that you shoulder enough corporate responsibility to help your employees feel good about the fact that they work for you.

I actually think that all three of these elements are important. Schultz talks at length about a partner conference in New Orleans and the "experiences" that were created for partners there, including volunteer work opportunities rebuilding New Orleans. I infer that Schultz also believes that creating marketing aimed at employees is important.

Not to confuse you, either, but Schultz believes in tradition -- he talks many times about maintaining the "core" of Starbucks business, its coffee authority -- as well as innovation.

He talks about his experience visiting Italy on business and seeing how integral a part of urban life the espresso bars on every corner are. He talks many times about Starbucks should and does function as a "third place," someplace other than home or work that adults can visit to get a sense of connection. I agree that this is important.

However, I am uncomfortable hearing a businessman talk about these things. Schultz talks at length about the "store experience" and the "theatre" and "connection" that baristas foster. Starbucks is a retail business but has qualities of the restaurant business. It surprises me, however, to hear a businessman talks at length about something that's so hard to quantify.

Schultz does talk a lot about things that can be quantified, like the year-to-year store profit comparisons called "comps". At one point, he stops reporting them on the grounds that the increasingly disappointing news is hard on morale.

Because morale is another of his abiding, although hard to quantify, concerns. And he's not afraid to spend money on it. He reports that his decision to hold the biennial conference of district, regional and store managers cost the company millions and would, he was sure when he made the decision to hold it New Orleans, be a lightning rod for criticism.

In fact, a large part of this story is his decision to grow the quality of the company's products and services at the same time that the company undertook dramatic steps to cut costs.

I cannot feel entirely comfortable with the contradiction between maximizing profit and talk about a third space, creating connection, and helping others. Toward the end of the book, Schultz reported that the company had lived up to its pledge to donate $5 million dollars to New Orleans over the course of five years. I was shocked by the smallness of that figure. It's nothing compared to Starbucks' overall profit in 2010 (Schultz writes here, on p. 315, that operating income rose to $1.4 billinoin in 2010 from $562 million in 2009).

Schultz's talk about connections between baristas and their customers seems to me an acknowledgment that this is the heart of the Starbucks' business, and is why it's essential to treat their employees well. This business is really all about service (like many others).

Something especially appealing about this book is that Schultz often does talk in great detail about how he turned the business around. It was a combination of many factors, among them: customer research, new products, closing underperforming stores and laying off staff; reducing staff hours in slow times; placing new people in leadership positions and going outside the company for operational expertise; fixing longstanding operational issues including chronic supply chain breakdowns (it's crippled armies and so it's no surprise that it was crippling Starbucks), implementing customer loyalty programs, turning to others for expert advice (including those on the Starbucks board), and one of my all-time favorites -- advocating for LEAN principles which allowed staff to organize their own procedures and work space.

In Chapter 30, "Balance," Schultz explains that he visited a store in Vancouver, Washington and talked to Amy Bernash, the store's manager. Amy had implemented Lean principles at her store. Lean originated in the manufacturing world, and is intended to reduce waste and inefficiency while making procedures easier for employees and improving quality for customers. It was introduced to Starbucks by Scott Heydon who was interested by Lean's emphasis on incorporating employee suggestions for streamlining work.

Amy explained that she began her implementation of Lean by watching her employees work; getting out from behind the counter allowed her to observe small mistakes of which she'd been unaware. At her store, employees rearranged the store room to make it easier to reach items that were frequently needed; they posted step-by-step beverage instructions at the "cold" station to help ensure accuracy and consistency; and they made the crucial decision to grind coffee as needed throughout the day instead of grinding as many beans as they thought they'd need first thing in the morning.

That ensured that the ground coffee would be very fresh and ensured that the aroma of ground coffee would frequently be present in the store.

Schultz found that delightful. The aroma of freshly ground coffee is a large part of the "store experience" he wants to offer customers. It was the smell of burnt cheese from the breakfast sandwiches that he had found so objectionable he had them pulled from all the Starbucks stores when he became CEO for the second time.

Earlier in the same chapter, he spoke at length about how much he admired an Italian shopkeeper in Milan, Aldo Lorenzi, the second generation proprietor of a knife store. Lorenzi wrote a book about his store and his philosophy of retailing called, That Shop in Via Montenapoleone. Schultz quotes at length from Lorenzi's book in this chapter and I was very impressed by these excerpts. My favorite is this:

I believe the shop can still justify its existence if the staff put their experience and [professionalism] at the disposal of the customer. That is not just a commonplace catchphrase. It is the communication of one's passion for one's work .. A presumptuous person lets slip every opportunity to pass on to his workmates the knowledge he derives from his sales activity and interrupts that precious exchange of information that always takes place through contact with the customer. Each one of us is necessary; isolating oneself in the shop is negative.

By the end of the book, my respect for Schultz had grown: he quoted many Starbucks employees talking about their passion for the company, and many customers talking about their passion for the "connection" that they find at Starbucks.

Schultz's reason for writing the book, I imagine, is that he's keenly aware of the value of good PR (he talks about the fact that Starbucks has traditionally avoided national advertising but has warmly embraced the world of social media and other publicity efforts) and a 300-page book allows him to tell the story the way he wants to tell it and to ensure that Starbucks gets the credit he believes it has not always received for its efforts to procure coffee in an ethical way, for its relationships with Conservation International, Heifer International, Bono's RED campaign, and adopting and meeting fair trade standards.

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Midnight in Paris

I saw Midnight in Paris on the 7th, enjoyed it, and having been very busy, didn't think much more about it -- I was astounded to see that it's been a big box-office success. Nostalgia for the past and trying to get a right sense of how and where we stand in relation to any of a number of golden ages doesn't strike me as "big box office" but I guess I'm wrong.

I suppose the difficulties of our present make nostalgia very psychologically powerful.

I was delighted when Owen Wilson said "the past isn't dead; it isn't even past - that's something that Faulkner said" as that's one of my favorite quotes. I think my favorite performance was actually Michael Sheen's, although I think Owen Wilson hit just the right note: oblivious, but not perfectly so.

This consideration for nostalgia made Sy Syfransky's Notebook entry from November, 2010 relevant:

"Frank Zappa: 'It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.'"

Reading now ..

I started Daniel Pink's Drive last month and while I haven't gotten very far, I certainly get the gist of one of his main arguments: many of our ideas about motivation and providing incentives for employee performance are not just outdated, they're plain wrong!

Considering this question is timely, as I'm still trying to digest Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness and I'm now reading Howard Schultz's Onward.

I'm only about on page 120 or so of Onward. In it, Schultz tells the story of how he returned as CEO of Starbuck's (after six or seven years as chairman) and began to try to right the company.

Many things about his story surprise me but one comes back to the subject of Daniel Pink's book - how do you motivate people?

One of the issues for both companies (Starbucks and Zappos), and many others, is that so much of the business is service. People in retail don't make much money. In a world in which there weren't so many other "clean" jobs retail jobs had some advantage and prestige, but that hasn't been true for decades. How do you get low-paid people to give spectacular service.

Hsieh's company was founded in San Francisco. But he moved his company to Las Vegas because he couldn't find folks who wanted to work as customer service representatives in San Francisco. He doesn't say so, but I find myself wondering if, in San Francisco, folks could live on what he could afford to pay. I guess Las Vegas was a better fit.

Interestingly, he located his warehouse in the middle of the country, which makes sense for logistical reasons, but didn't locate the rest of his company nearby. I still find that surprising -- if Las Vegas is a good location for hiring customer service representatives, why isn't Kentucky?

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

Lisa See is the author of 8 books, including the Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones, which together make up the Red Princess mystery series. Dreams of Joy, her latest book, is a sequel of sorts to Shanghai Girls, chronicling the visit to China of the daughter of one of the sisters from the first novel.

See is also the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which has been made into a movie and is currently in limited theatrical release.

Shanghai Girls is the story of two elegant but sheltered sisters from Shanghai who suffer a terrible reversal of fortune just before Shanghai falls to the Japanese in 1937.

The daughters of an owner of a successful rickshaw business, Pearl (21) and May (18) enjoy the best 1937 Shanghai has to offer: they love their beautiful dresses cut from Parisian fabrics, and enjoy going out with rich Chinese and Westerners living in Shanghai.

May, the younger sister, is so beautiful that she and Pearl get work as models for calendars and other advertising vehicles. Pearl and May feel independent and modern.

They're deeply shocked when they discover that their father has lost his business, their family home and all the girls' savings by gambling. To pay off his gambling debt, his father is forced to offer both his daughter in an arranged marriage to the sons of a Chinese-American merchant visiting the city.

The girls protest that they're modern women and that they'll do no such thing, but as Shanghai is attacked by the Japanese, the girls realize that accepting these arranged marriages is their last and only hope for escaping the city before the Japanese invade.

With only their mother and a rickshaw driver they escape into the countryside as they try to reach Hong Kong, a British protectorate where they can get a boat to the U.S. As they travel deeper into the countryside, they unwittingly pass into Japanese territory with disastrous consequences they haunt them for years to come.

It's a cliche, but this novel has something for everyone: a well-researched historical novel, it appeals to the travel and history buffs; spanning decades, it's a family saga; and it's also the story of mother and sister love. The relationship of these two sisters and their differing reactions to the changing events around them is the heart of this novel and its real subject. This story reveals the special hardships that Chinese immigrants to this country suffered as a result of severely discriminatory laws and practices, and also shows the painful impact of the Red Scare of the 1950's on Chinese immigrants.

Lisa See's own family were Chinese-American merchants working on Los Angeles, and she sets the American part of this novel in Los Angeles, reviewing the interesting connection between Chinatown and Hollywood history.

The "immigrant experience" is such a huge part of American history, and this story underscores the kinds of generational conflict that can rip families apart.

It's Lisa See's passion for telling the stories of Chinese-Americans that appeals to me most.

The "sequel" to this novel is "Dreams of Joy," the story of Pearl's daughter and her efforts to find herself in Mao's China.

Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy: A Memoir of Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana and She Got Up Off the Couch and Other Heroic Acts in Mooreland, Indiana

Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana and She Got Up Off the Couch and other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana are two wonderful memoirs. I’ve struggled to try to articulate why they’re so wonderful.

Both books are collections of brief essays. Zippy is a collection of accidents, other mishaps, and some wonderful stories. Of course, everything is interesting to Zippy. She Got Up Off the Couch has some wonderful things to say about friendship between girls.

Of course, they’re cute, funny and although I hate to use this word, nostalgic. Not in a syrupy corn-fed way. Kimmel’s achieved a delicate balancing act. Part of the charm of these books is the unaffected way in which Kimmel tells stories from her childhood: much is inferred and little is stated. The charm of children, their blithe willingness to say whatever pops into their heads, is a big feature of the first book and certainly part of the second book.

As a baby, Kimmel had been quite ill after her birth, and I think that that may have made her very special to her father. Her parents were not what I would call well-suited; they were quite the opposite and the story of how they got together would be quite interesting but not as funny as a story starting Zippy.. Her mother was in love with narrative, and a “good” girl who quietly accepted a lot that she found hard to accept. She read voraciously; her daughter reports that she’d check a bunch of books out of the library and when she got done reading them she’d start all over again.

I’d say that like her mother, her father was immensely creative but in a different way. He was a little wild. He loved her intensely and was a very attentive, if sometimes angry, parent. Zippy got her name because she recovered from her illness and became a very energetic toddler.

Here’s a story from the book that I love though I can’t tell it anything like as well as Haven Kimmel tells it. The family had two wonderful dogs, each blessed with a powerful set of lungs, and their nighttime barking was driving an elderly neighbor crazy.

The neighbor threatened to poison the dog.

The next evening, a bunch of trucks rolled up to the house. Zippy didn’t know any of the men who got out, carrying crates with coon dogs in them. High energy hunting dogs, loud barkers, who are incapable of being still unless they’re exhausted. Then another man Zippy didn’t know drove up. When he got out of the truck, Zippy saw that he was so tall and thin that she thought he must have had a tapeworm. He handed something to her father that she couldn’t make out – it just seemed to be a manic furball. When she saw that it was a raccoon, desperate to escape, and a clear and present temptation to the coon dogs present, one of whom got so excited he knocked his crate over, she got so scared she sat down on the sidewalk and put her down with her arms around her knees.

Well, you know the dogs barked all night.

The deputy was called; he came over in his pajamas and his official hat and had a few soft words with Zip’s Dad which reduced him to such an apoplectic state of laughter that he banged his head several times on the official car he drove there.

As time passed, more and more neighbors came over to visit – and why shouldn’t they, as there was no chance that anyone in their tiny town could get any sleep that night. Dad won that round.

A word about She Got Up Off the Couch’s title. Delonda, Zippy’s mother, had really given up and one symbol of her tired resignation was the Delonda-shaped indentation that could be seen in the couch when she wasn’t in it, a couch sometimes littered with tell-tale pork rind crumbs. In the course of She Got Up Delonda tests out of a full year of college classes by taking the CLEP test she sees advertised on TV, gets federal student aid, finds a very scary used car she can afford, just barely (only $200!) and then gets her master’s degree as well. And then she teaches. Delonda went on to become a writer, as did her daughter. And yes, her decision to get up off the couch was heroic.

Delonda’s independence was hard on her husband, who stoutly objected, and after Zippy got to be a certain age, her father withdrew from her. Her parents grew farther apart and they were already pretty far apart when things got going with Zippy’s arrival on the scene. Her dad’s departure is a common phenomenon, but its contrast with his fierce and devoted care of Zip makes this ordinary event more poignant.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

I’ve just finished Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man (2005). I’ve been reading it for a while; it’s part of the extensive collection of books I’ve picked up that it will take me a long time to get through. I picked up Teacher Man at the AAUW book sale. I love browsing; the thing about a used book sale like the AAUW book sale is that you will find multiple copies of books that are ten years old. I also picked up “’Tis” so I know I wasn’t just seeing an accumulation of 10-year old class gifts – although maybe I was seeing that, too.

McCourt is best known for his first memoir, Angela’s Ashes. Possibly, I am the only reader who’s not read it. (As an aside, several years ago, the Irish American Echo ran a contest for the best parody of Angela’s Ashes. The winning entry began, “We were so poor we had to borrow from the McCourts ..” which I wish I’d written.) He also wrote and performed in "A Couple of Blackguards" with his younger brother Malachy, whose outgoing personality he says, in this book, that he envied.

Over the years I’ve had the sense that McCourt wasn’t elegant enough for some. But I love this book, and greatly admire his skill as a storyteller.

McCourt taught for 30 years in the public school system of New York City. He writes about the different high schools where he taught in the course of his career: McKee Vocational High School, Fashion Industries High School, Seward Park and Stuyvesant High School, interrupted by stints teaching at a community college and pursuing a doctorate at Dublin’s Trinity College.

He has a lot to say about teaching. He points out that some classes have their own chemistry, a tacit commitment not to be engaged and to turn nothing but their sullen resistance to face their teacher. Other classes like him and allow him to like them.

What he’s best at, and he does this at his very first teaching demonstration, is to engage the students by translating the literature he’s teaching into something more immediate that the students can comment on. In his teaching demonstration, he’s asked to teach two poems, one by Siegfried Sassoon and the other by Wilfrid Owen, English soldiers in the First World War. He invites the students to talk about veterans of the Second World War and Korea. The class becomes quite animated talking about friends and family members.

Later, at Stuyvesant, he engages the students by getting them to read recipes they’ve brought from home. The students are so excited by this class project that they decide, on their own, to accompany each other on instruments. This leads to a picnic in Stuyvesant Park, which in turn attracts the bemused attention of some New York City beat cops. Concerned that he’s let his class get too far from literature, he assigns them Mimi Sheraton restaurant reviews.

I think the best part of this book is the stories McCourt tells about his students. He tells the stories of his students – the Korean student who hates his father for the pressure he puts him under, only to begin to forgive him at Stanford, where a professor shares his experience coping with his own hard, demanding, damaged immigrant father.

McCourt has another student with a problem with his father. Bob wants to be a farmer. Bob’s father is a rabbi, and the rabbi is embarrassed by his son’s career aspirations. It’s not just the pigs that Bob wants to raise. No one aspires to be a farmer in Bob’s world. Years later, McCourt runs into Bob on the street who confesses that although he has become a farmer, he couldn’t bring himself to raise pigs. He just couldn’t do that to his father. They embrace.

A theme is this book is McCourt’s insecurity, both as a teacher and as a writer. He talks about his failure to complete his doctoral dissertation, how his insecurity is perceived as lack of ambition and how this hurts both his career and his personal life. Even when his class is “turned on,” to an extent that would make some teachers green with envy, he fearfully imagines how his unorthodox teaching methods would be disapprovingly perceived in a report written by a schools inspector.

One of the things he does to entertain and perhaps placate his classes is to tell stories about his Irish childhood in Limerick. This is perhaps how he honed his talent as a storyteller in the very years when he felt that he was allowing his dream of becoming a writer to elude him.

What he does in this book is tell stories so vividly and candidly that I was drawn in, completely captivated, and cared about his feelings as a teacher – admitting that there are days when he wishes he could escape, physically, by just taking the ferry to Manhattan, and getting a beer – and days when the success of a class or a student’s compliment has him walking on air all the way home.

To me, this book is partly about teaching's challenges and delights, but it's also a little bit of a journey of personal growth as McCourt works his way through some powerful feelings that sometimes hold him back from claiming credit for the things he has achieved and being able to confidently undertake things that are important to him like writing. That's the story that's really most exciting to me and that holds out promise for us all.