Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: Depression-Era

Everything about Andorra Kelsey is big, and her Depression-era story is no exception. At nearly eight feet tall, the woman known in Detroit as the Giant of Elsa Street, is looking for a way to escape when a Hollywood scout offers her a role in a picture. The movie is about Anna Swan, another giant from a generation earlier, whose stature gained her fame in P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York. As the two stories unfold, numerous similarities surface in this witty and earnest work of historical fiction. While Andorra is an invented character, Swan was very real, born to a farming family in Nova Scotia in the mid-nineteenth century. Fishbane deftly draws out the difficulty these women face in finding the right fit, whether it's with a suitable suitor or a piece of furniture. Although their personalities seem cut from the same cloth, they are differentiated enough by their adventures through wars, disaster, and redemption. As it turns out, the biggest thing about these amazing women is their hearts. (Booklist Reviews)

"A sweeping saga of unfathomable greed and revenge that grabs the reader's attention from the first page. The Depression-era tale is centered on newly married George and Serena Pemberton, owners of a logging company in the mountains of North Carolina. Their operation is aimed strictly at maximizing profits, with no regard for either the safety of their workers or the future of the land they're pillaging. The tragic result of environmental disregard looms large in all of Rash's fiction, and the Pembertons are his worst villains to date in that respect leaving behind a wasteland of stumps and slash and creeks awash with dead trout. Side plots involve the drastic means, including murder, the couple employs to avoid losing land to environmental groups and Serena's unflagging pursuit of the young girl who bore George's son shortly after he and Serena were married. With a setting fraught with danger, and a character maniacal in her march toward domination and riches, Serena is a novel not soon forgotten." ~ Booklist *Starred Review*

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

Thunder of Giants by Joel Fishbane

Book to Movie Alert: Serena by Ron Rash