“Half my life ago, I killed a girl”.

That opening line grabs the reader, immediately. What happened? How did it happen? Suddenly, all these questions popped into my head, and I had to know more about this story.

The book is a true story. It is a memoir that the author wrote about something that actually happened to him, and about how he managed to cope with it. When he was eighteen years old, he was driving his father’s car. A few of his friends were with him. They were heading out to have some fun, not unlike most people that age. It was supposed to be a normal, relaxing day.

That’s not how things went, though. What happened instead changed his life, forever. A girl from his high school was bicycling on the side of the road. In the book, he calls her “Celine”, but I am not sure that was her real name. All of a sudden, she swerved into the road, and Darin hit her with his car. She survived the initial accident, barely, but didn’t make it. At eighteen years old, he killed a girl with his car.

The book gives an unflinchingly, often painfully, honest examination of the events of that day. The author reveals his every thought, every emotion, every action, from that day, no matter how embarrassing or exposing those things may be. It is an incredibly compelling story.

Some eighteen years later, Darin Strauss wrote this book, about the event that happened “half a life” ago. The book includes his ability, or inability, to cope with what happened. How do you go back to school after killing a classmate, (even though it was an accident)? What is it like to deal with the girl’s parents? Should you attend her funeral? How do you cope with having to drive down that road, where it happened, ever again?

He did manage to go on with his life. He would have had to, of course. He grew up, got married, had children. All through his life, thoughts of “Celine” stayed with him. He thought of her when he got married, and when his wife told him she was pregnant. He worried that employers would find out what he’d done when he was eighteen, and fire him. Eventually, he decided to tell his wife about what happened, and experience her reaction to it. There was a court case that he was involved in.

There is more in this book than I can adequately describe here. It is an incredibly compelling read, that is achingly honest, about an incident that really did happen. If you have a severe driving phobia, then this book probably has a few “triggers” in it that you may want to avoid. For everyone else, I highly recommend this book.

This was a short 5 hour audiobook that my wife and I listened to on the way to and back from the Texas coast this past weekend. It is narrated by Tina Fey herself and the book was pretty funny. You could definitely tell that she is a comedy writer because she would offer several variations on a particular joke and there were jokes and humorous anecdotes throughout. The book also seems to be aimed more to women than men because at one point she says that if you are a man who bought this book, “Thank you”.

Tina Fey talks about everything from working at a theater company during the summer as a teenager, her first job at the YMCA, auditioning and then making it to the famous Second City Improv group in Chicago, her stint at Saturday Night Live, and writing for and acting in her series 30 Rock. Along the way she talks about her dad who was a wonderful father figure and role model for her as well as what it is like to be a mother herself. She does spend quite a bit of time talking about breast feeding and other aspects of parenthood.

Some of the highlights of the audiobook (as opposed to the print version) is that the Saturday Night Live sketch where she first played Sarah Palin is featured in its entirety. In fact that whole episode of her life where she became super famous playing Palin because of the similarity of their appearance was one of the more interesting parts of the book. I also thought some of the behind-the-scenes stories of getting 30 Rock off the ground was kind of interesting also.

Overall I thought it was an enjoyable book; I laughed quite a bit throughout. It was a good short road trip kind of audiobook to listen to. My biggest problem with the audiobook was some of Tina Fey’s narration. She would slip in some theatrical “asides” that came across as mumbles that I really couldn’t understand. However, that is my only complaint with the book.

I listened to this book in audio format from Audible.com and this is the kind of book that I could only read by listening to. It was a really interesting book, but there were enough dry patches that if I were reading this in print, I probably would have given up on it. Two things made this book great as an audiobook; first was the reader and his slight Southern drawl which really captured the Texan, Alan Lomax and the other thing that made this book great was that there were some of Alan Lomax’s original field recordings interspersed here and there within the book which was cool because you could hear some of the folk music that Alan Lomax is famous for recording.

Alan Lomax was a folk song collector, ethnomusicologist, radio and TV producer, a freelancer for the Library of Congress and researcher of American folklore particularly music and later dance. His father John Lomax Sr. was also a folk song collector and wowed academic audiences in the 1920′s with his lectures at Universities on the folk songs he collected in the fields. Alan Lomax joined his father on these early recording expeditions to East Texas plantations, prisons and prison farms, and juke joints. When Alan finished his schooling at the University of Texas, he set out on his own to make recordings. He started out in the Southern U.S and encountered racism and even arrest for being a white man hanging out in black neighborhoods and bars. He was with a prominent African American writer of that time Zora Neal Hurston who was able to bail him out of these predicaments. After touring the South, he went to Haiti and recorded sea chanteys including an early version of Sloop John B which was played in the book. He also recorded a lot on land in Haiti including children’s games and other folk music.

Lomax never made much money at what he did and was often broke and plagued with self-doubt as to whether he should really be travelling all over and recording folk music (in the 30s he recorded everything for the Folk Music Archives at the Library of Congress). Alan subsisted most of his life on grant money from foundations such as Carnegie or The National Endowment for the Humanities. In the late 30′s Lomax made one of his seminal recordings which was an extended interview session with one of the early jazz greats Jellyroll Morton. Morton claimed to have been an inventor of jazz which some critics dispute and labeled him a braggart, but there was no question he was an important figure in early jazz music. During World War II he began working for radio and came up with ideas to bring a kind of National unity through folk music bringing along his friends like folk singers Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. In fact his relationship with the Seegers and his political leanings on issues related to the average American people roused the interest of the FBI who suspected he may be a communist.

In the 50′s at the height of McCarthyism Alan was overseas recording the folk music of Spain, England, and Scotland. When he returned to America in the mid-1950′s Rock ‘n Roll was in full swing. Alan had a hand in helping to bring about the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and during the 60′s had an interest in using folk music to foster social justice during the Civil Rights era. During the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s Alan came up with several anthropological methods of coding folk music performers using several measuring systems. When he was in Europe in the 50′s, he figured out that people from different regions typically used different vowel placements in the mouth for singing. For example, people in the south of Italy placed the vowels in the front of their mouths and in northern Italy people placed the vowels in the backs of their mouths. In the 80′s he started analyzing dance patterns and movements and came out with a measuring system based on that as well.

Alan Lomax died in 2002, but one of the fascinating things about this book is how devoted he was to American culture and preserving it with recordings and later video. He was also ahead of his time on some things. In the 80′s he wanted to develop a global jukebox where people could hear whatever they wanted whenever they wanted using what we know now as metadata. With the advent of iTunes and now Spotify and similar services we basically have this global jukebox to hear whatever we want.

In Different Worlds is an autobiography by Dankwart Koekler. Koehler is a German man, born in the 1920′s. The book chronicles his experiences growing up in pre-war Germany, his time in the German army during the war, several years he spent as a prisoner of war, and then his post-war life. The book’s cover contains one subtitle, “From POW to PHD” and one tagline, “The story of a remarkable life.” These two things, combined with the contrasting images on the cover – one of Koehler dressed in his military uniform, above another image of Koehler in front of a large, equation-filled blackboard, are what the marketers of this book would like you to focus on when considering it for purchase. Sage wisdom advises us to never judge a book by the cover. So let’s examine this one a little further.
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The cover of this book is the now-familiar chalkboard writing from the opening credits of The Simpsons except this one says “I will not write an uncensored, unauthorized history of The Simpsons” over and over again. Ortved set out to write what he calls in the introduction to this book, “an oral history” of his favorite TV show. The book primarily consists of anecdotes from various people involved in the production of The Simpsons including writers Conan O’Brien and Brad Bird, Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, Matt Groening’s ex-wife, and many others.  Quotes from Matt Groening himself come from interviews or DVD commentary.

Ortved chronicles the history of The Simpsons from Matt Groening’s alternative weekly comic strip Life in Hell to getting the Simpsons on The Tracy Ullman Show all the way through the mid-2000s.  The book was published in 2009 so it was mentioned that O’Brien would be taking over Leno’s Tonight Show, but the ensuing fracas happened after the book was published.  Some of the more interesting tidbits I learned from this book included the in-fighting and jealousy that went on between Sam Simon and Matt Groening at the beginning of the show’s run.  Matt Groening was the face of the Simpsons since he created the main characters and he got all of the credit in the press for writing, producing and the directing where in reality he did none of those things.  Sam Simon was one of the head writers and was upset that Groening was getting all of the credit for work that he and the other writers were creating.  Also interesting is that Groening was more than willing to sell out and spearheaded a lot of the merchandising boom of Simpsons T-Shirts, dolls, etc in the early 90′s.  He even reportedly bought a second house to store Simpsons memorabilia.

Other big names discussed in the book include James L Brooks, the executive producer as well as director or producer of many big comedy movies of the 80′s.  The Simpsons made Fox, a fledgling network then, what it is today and the book talks about what free reign the show was given on the network.  A lot of the book is about the writers on the show and the eras of the different show runners from Al Jean and Mike Reiss to Mike Scully to Al Jean again in the 2000s.  Ortved talks to owners of two of the biggest Simpsons fan sites on the Internet The Simpsons Archive and NoHomers.net.  The latter half of the book is interesting in that it tries to pinpoint why the show didn’t stop when it was ahead and how mediocre the shows have gotten under Al Jean’s leadership in the 2000′s.  It also touches on its successors South Park and Family Guy and where they are taking the medium of prime time animated comedy.

If you are a fan of The Simpsons and are interested in this type of anecdotal history of a TV show then you will probably find this book to your liking.  There was a lot I didn’t know about the behind-the-scenes workings of the show and so on that level I enjoyed the book. I listened to it on Audible and didn’t know if I liked the narrator at first, but it grew on me.

In 1910 a massive forest fire spread through two million acres of Idaho and Montana just at the infancy of US Forestry Service.  This book documents this burn as well as the events preceding it and what its ultimate legacy was for America and its national forests.  The book can easily be broken into two parts.  The first half focuses on Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the Forestry Service during Roosevelt’s administration Gifford Pinchot.  Also mentioned is a background on the settlement of the area where the burn occurred.  The second half can be characterized by descriptions of the burn itself, its toll on human life and the land that was burned as well as its legacy in helping build the Forestry Service into what it is today.

Gifford Pinchot was an interesting character.  He started the Forestry Service and educated what would be his park rangers at Yale.  These rangers would be known at their outposts in the West as “Little GPs” and were not well respected by the settlers but more on that later.  He was a Progressive and good friends with Teddy Roosevelt even to the point that they would wrestle together at Roosevelt’s home. Roosevelt made him the first head of the newly formed Forestry Service.  What really made Pinchot and interesting character though is that he believed in the supernatural.  He lost his wife Laura at a young age, yet he believed Laura was with him at every moment of his life and he talked to her.  In his diary if he spoke to Laura he called it a “good day” but as time went on the spirits faded and  whenever she didn’t appear to him he said it wasn’t a good day.  Pinchot toured the West many times and loved to hike the forests.  He became friends with the great naturalist John Muir while at Yosemite and the Sierras in California.  Muir would become like a mentor to him, but would also lobby for more environmental rights since Pinchot was a government leader.

Another part of the book was about the affected area itself in Wallace, Idaho and surrounding areas.  The book opens with a train coming to evacuate the women and children from Wallace and the mayor saying that men need to stay behind to help fight the fire.  However, there were some men who defied the mayor’s order and cowardly pushed women out of the way to get on that train. This brings us to some of the settlements out here like Taft, Idaho that made Deadwood seem tame by comparison.  They were founded as gambling, liquor,  and prostitution dens.  William Howard Taft, who became president after Roosevelt, was seen as fat, weak-willed and not a respectable leader.  The town of Taft was named after him as a joke.  Amongst and surrounding these towns were the newly formed National Forests which were also seen as a joke.  The rangers or Little GPs were not respected and were constantly battling the politicians and lumber magnates who wanted to clear cut the entire forest.

So all of this sets the backdrop for the big burn of 1910.  A perfect storm of hot, dry August weather and the emergence of these strong, hurricane force winds in the Washington and Idaho area called Palousers (pronounced Palooser) caused one of the biggest forest fires in American history. There was also a complacency amongst the settlers in this area.  A newspaper a year before the burn declared that they would not be susceptible to forest fires.  Even Gifford Pinchot believed man could systematically defeat forest fires and they weren’t much of a threat.

Overall I thought this was a pretty interesting book.  I learned about the history of the forestry service, the debates over logging and clear cutting vs. conservation and keeping the forests public and most of all the effects and after effects of this giant forest fire I had never heard about that occurred 100 years ago which really helped in a large way to create the US Forestry Service as it is today.

Record collector and author Nick DiFonzo likes to gather what he calls “forgotten records.” He finds them mostly at swap meets and second-hand shops. These so-called forgotten records vary in description from the weird to the religious. One thing many of them have in common is that they have terrible album covers. DiFonzo catalogs some of his more outrageous finds in this small coffee table-style book. There’s the fingerless fiddler, the singing midget, Orleans and lots of innuendo-laden references to the organ (you know, the musical one). As a music fan and album collector myself, I enjoyed this book a lot. Still, anyone in need of a laugh should get something out of it.

Just 26 miles off the coast of San Francisco  are a set of islands very few people on the mainland know about.  These islands are more jutting teeth like rocks (which partly plays into the title)  than regular islands and are host to many different species of birds, sea lions and in the waters surrounding them great white sharks.  The islands are called the Farralon Islands and it is deemed a wildlife refuge by the California State Parks and Wildlife.  The public is not allowed on the Farralons without a permit and their only human residents are the scientists and biologists who study the birds and the sharks.

Susan Casey, a journalist who has written for Time and other publications, watches a BBC documentary about the great white sharks at the Farralon Islands and is immediately interested.  She gets in contact with the California Parks and Wildlife and is able to wrangle a guest permit to do a report on the islands.  When she arrives at the Farralons for the first time she meets Peter and Scott, two of the shark scientists stationed at the Farralons.  They were originally there to study birds but were able to talk the state into letting them study the great white sharks as well.  The Farralons are not easy to get on to.  You have to row up to the rocks in a small rowboat or whaler and get lifted on to the island using a crane and rubber raft-type harness.  Once on the island there is a house where the scientists stay and at the highest point a light house which is now automated.

Great white shark season in the Farralons is in the fall from September through November.  There are two types of great white sharks Casey describes in the book, the Sisters and the Rat Packers.  The Sisters are large females and can be the most aggressive in attacks.  The Rat Packers are the males.  In the several trips Casey went out to the Farralons she never did see a Sister, but she witnessed several attacks by Rat Packers.  Peter and Scott could put out a surfboard onto the water and see it immediately get attacked and bitten from below.  One would watch from the lighthouse and when a shark attack on a sea lion was discovered, he would radio to the other in the boat so he could observe and video tape.  The scientists kept a journal of all of the attacks in the house.  A shark attack could easily be spotted from on high because the sea gulls would flock together and the sea would turn red in the general area of the attack.

This was an utterly fascinating book.  Casey talks about the history of the Farralon Islands and the early settlers of San Francisco found out that eggs could be found on the Farralons. They would risk their lives scaling the rocks of the islands to steal eggs from the birds and then sell them in San Francisco since they didn’t bring chickens with them.  Casey also gives a brief history of the Monterey and San Diego aquariums trying to be the first to display a great white shark in their exhibits, but the sharks did not do well in confinement and ultimately had to be let go.  Having read other reviews of this book I did accidentally get a spoiler which I will not reveal here.  A lot of these reviews say that they liked the first part of the book and found it very interesting, but did not like Susan Casey as a person in the second half of the book. They believe she acted selfishly at the expense of others to get onto the islands.  I can see where they are coming from, but I found the whole book to be extremely interesting, well-written (and read as I listened to the audio book) and it made me do some Google image searches of the Farralons because I had never heard of these islands before.  I would highly recommend this book.

I don’t have much real world knowledge of people with schizophrenia except from what I see in such movies as A Beautiful Mind or Proof.  This book gives a good perspective on the condition and the challenges associated with it, not only for the person afflicted, but for those who care for them as well.   Social workers must be some of the most caring and patient people in the world.

Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who, while on his way to work, stumbles onto this homeless man in one of the tunnels in L.A.   He is playing an old, beat up violin with 2 strings, but Steve can see that the man has talent.  After talking with the man a little bit, Steve learns that the man, Nathaniel Ayers, went to Julliard.  Lopez can’t believe this and after doing some research and calling the school finds out that what Ayers was saying is the truth.  This starts one of many columns about Nathaniel Ayers and a long lasting friendship.

Nathaniel has a way of rambling when he talks, jumbling many different ideas from Beethoven to Steve Lopez to Cleveland, where he’s from originally, to New York and L.A.  He lives on the street in the Skid Row section of Los Angeles and has to tap a couple sticks on the ground at night to scare the rats away.  Steve Lopez takes it upon himself to try to get Nathaniel some help through LAMP, a non-profit organization in L.A. devoted to ending homelessness.  Through Steve’s columns, readers donate cellos and violins to Nathaniel and at one point he has 6 instruments.  He keeps the cello, violin, and his original 2 string violin in his shopping cart that he carries with him everywhere.  He is very paranoid, despises smokers and cigarettes with a passion, and can be horribly racist on his bad days.

The book is really interesting in that Steve talks to mental health workers to get their varying opinions on what to do with Nathaniel.  Opinions vary so widely because mental health is so varied from person to person.  It’s not easy and it takes more than a year, but Steve slowly starts to see Nathaniel start to move inside to an apartment which he resisted so vehemently at first.  He also starts to learn more about Nathaniel’s back story, his time at Julliard, and his family.  He also struggles with trying not to spend too much time with Nathaniel so he can have time with his own wife and his new daughter.

I enjoyed this book.  Nathaniel has such a passion for music and relishes it when Steve takes him out to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.  It was interesting learning about homelessness and schizophrenia in one of the worst cities for homelessness as well.  The movie version was very similar to the book and I couldn’t help picturing Robert Downy Jr as Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers while I was listening to the book. Of course the book had more information and more details.  If you enjoyed the movie or have an interest in the mental health profession you should check out this book.

Danielle Trussoni was definately “Daddy’s Little Girl”. She was named after him, physically resembled him, and adored him. Her parents split up when Danielle was young. While Danielle’s mother kept her other siblings, Danielle chose to live with her father.

The two were very close, and this allowed Danielle to notice that there were some very odd things about her father. Dan was haunted by his experiences in Vietnam. He would tell stories about his experiences over there, and end up lost in thought, oblivious to his surroundings. Danielle simply accepted her father as he was, and basically took care of him until he was “back”. In many ways, she had become the adult in their family.

When she grew up, she was able to sift through her memories from childhood and re-examine them with the eyes of an adult. She remembered pictures her father showed her from when he was in Vietnam. Some were brutal, and frightening. Was the skull she found in the basement real? Why did her father have it?

This memoir is an extremely personal look at how her family was affected by her father’s experiences in Vietnam. The book jumps in chronology, juxtaposing Trussoni’s childhood memories with her adult experiences as she searched for answers about what really happened.

She discovers that her father was once what was called a “Tunnel Rat” in Vietnam, one of the most dangerous and psychologically damaging jobs a soldier could have. After doing a lot of research on Vietnam, and what American soldiers went through in regards to it, Danielle embarks on a trip. She visits Vietnam herself, and takes a guided tour of the same tunnels that her father crawled through years before. Her experience going into one of these dark, small, dirty tunnels following a tour guide is terrifying and stressful. There is something about being in the dark, underground, in an enclosed space that is unnerving all on it’s own. She can only imagine what her father may have felt as a soldier, who knew that these tunnels held traps, and enemies, both of whom could kill him in an instant.

There are a lot of families who watched loved ones head off to war, and return home as a completely different, and damaged, person. This book focuses on a father who was in Vietnam, however, I am certain that soldiers who have been in other wars come back dramatically different too. I think a lot of people will read this book, and recognize some of the behaviors and patterns seen in Trussoni’s family in their own.

I chose to read this book for a few reasons. My father was in the military around the time of Vietnam. I haven’t any idea what he may, or may not have experienced, or where, exactly in the world he may have served. However, it is clear that my father is different from many other fathers, and I can see some similarities between how he behaves, and how Trussoni’s father behaved. This is a book that daughters of soldiers will understand.

I also wanted to read this book because I think it was part of a group that once was on MySpace called “The Memorist’s Collective”, or something close to that. Long ago, I entered a contest that they held, where the winner would get their memoir published by a major publishing house. I didn’t win the contest, but I did get the opportunity to read some excellent submissions and excerpts from other people’s memoirs. As a result, I now really enjoy reading memoirs, and finding out about other people’s lives from their unique and personal writings.

There were four authors organizing the group, and Trussoni was one of them (unless I am completely mistaken). I have reviewed the books of two of the other members so far: I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir by Josh Kilmer Purcell, and Queen of the Oddballs by Hillary Carlip. Each book is unique, touching, fabulous, and extremely personal. I intend to seek out the last book from this group sometime soon.