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Weekly Words about BooksAUGUST 18, 2013
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Great New Memoirs in Paperback Land on Bestseller List
| Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman. You'll be hearing more about this book now that's been made into a Neflix original series. It's the incredible story of Kerman's 15-month stint in the  infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, after being convicted of a drug crime she had committed 10 years earlier. The well-heeled Smith College alumna becomes inmate #11187-424 - one of the millions of people who disappear "down the rabbit hole" of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison - why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they're there.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan. Another harrowing ordeal, this one quite possibly worse than a year in the slammer. When 24-year-old journalist Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory  of how she d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?
It turns out Cahalan had a rare autoimmune disorder that was causing her to literally lose her mind. In addition to violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia, and fierce paranoia. Cahalan spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family, before doctors diagnosed her. "Her brain is on fire," one doctor tells her family. "Her brain is under attack by her own body."
Cahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing about her month-long hospitalization. But ever the reporter, she reconstructs - through hospital security videotapes and interviews with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life - her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The result is a kind of anti-memoir, an out-of-body personal account of a young woman's fight to survive one of the cruelest diseases imaginable. And, as with Orange Is the New Black, this is a story that ultimately has a happy ending.
Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young. For a more relaxing, trip-down-memory-lane autobiography, you could do worse than mellow out in your old tie-dye  t-shirt with legendary singer and songwriter Neil Young. He ambles amiably through his life - from his Canadian childhood, to his part in the Sixties rock explosion with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, through his later career with Crazy Horse and numerous private challenges. His is not a titillating, let's-trash-others memoir; it's more like a stream-of-consciousness conversation and self-appraising journal. But for a generation rooted in the era of rock-and-roll, his memories are the stuff of legends and a gas to read.
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Cheesy Bestseller Also Indie Next Fave
| | The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese, by Michael Paterniti. Working in the famed Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the author discovered what he considered a fabulous Spanish sheep's milk cheese and became interested in its origins. Fresh out of college at the time, he didn't have means to pursue his quest, but he didn't forget the cheese. Years later, Paterniti set out on his journey, and he brings his accomplished magazine writing skills to this narrative of his 10-year odyssey. Here's one bookseller's review from the August Indie Next list:
"While working in a deli, a young Paterniti encountered what was then considered the finest cheese in the world - Páramo de Guzmán. Too poor at the time to buy a taste, Paterniti instead vowed to one day meet this fascinating, magical cheese again. Years later, with family in tow, he made good on his vow by traveling to the rustic Spanish village where the cheese is produced. Enter Ambrosio, the brilliant, salt-of-the-earth cheesemaker with an infectious zest for life and a love for creating something simply and beautifully. Paterniti spent the next decade embedded in the rural village, playing Sancho Panza to Ambrosio's Don Quixote, while piecing together a meandering mélange of stories about food, flavor, love, loss, betrayal, and revenge. What begins as an investigative journalist's foodie memoir becomes a culture study, a travelogue, a comedy, and an allegory. I got lost in this book!"
- Nick Berg, Boswell Book Co., Milwaukee, WI
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WHERE TO FIND A BOOKSTORE
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Many of you already have a favorite local bookstore, but for those of you without such a relationship, this link will take you to a list of Northern California indie bookstores by region.
If you live or work elsewhere, you can click here to find the nearest indie bookstore by simply entering your postal code.
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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
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My name is Hut Landon. I'm a former bookstore owner who now runs the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) in San Francisco.
My goal with this newsletter is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.
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