The Webber Family Bookshelf is the blog of the Strange-Webber family, descendants of Dorinda Rebecca Strange and Myron David Webber. Shake the family tree and you will discover diversity in education, ethnicity, viewpoint and reading habits. Whatever family members are reading may be reviewed: fiction, history, theology, cookbooks, poetry, children’s books, etc. At least two reviews will be published each month. Reviews represent the viewpoint of the writers, not the family.
Dr. Seuss, Scrambled Eggs Super (New York: Random House, 1953). Other editions also available.
Note: Dr. Seuss is the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.
Reviewed by Lucas Fernandez
My favorite Dr. Seuss book is Scrambled Eggs Super. Peter T. Hooper went out and got all the eggs to cook them, to make the best scrambled eggs. He got eggs from all the birds he observed or heard of. They were make-believe birds.
I liked the pictures and the rhymes and the names of the birds. I like it when Grandpa reads it to me.
(NOVEL) The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (Ballantine Books, 2011). Also available on Kindle.
Reviewed by Sally Dayton
The Paris Wife is a fictionalized version of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage. The story follows Hemingway and Hadley Richardson as they meet and fall in love in Chicago, eventually moving to Paris so Ernest can become part of the vibrant arts community there during the 1920’s. McLain details the pair’s separate family issues so that the reader has some insight into what might have drawn them together as lovers. The novel is written mostly from the perspective of Hadley.
Much of the story revolves around Ernest’s interest in bullfighting, the writing of The Sun Also Rises and the “characters” in their lives who end up coming alive in the story he is writing. This book is enjoyable not only for Hemingway enthusiasts but also for anyone interested in the literary history of the period. Many famous Modernists make appearances in the book, including Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.
The story covers five years, the length of Hadley and Ernest’s marriage. The last segment of the book is a summary of the rest of their lives until Ernest dies in 1961. I thought it seemed tacked on and unnecessary since most people are aware of how Hemingway's life ended. I don’t think that it really did anything to illuminate their marriage, which is the focus of the book.
I would definitely recommend this book. It is well written and engaging.
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage International, 2009, paperback $15.95).
Reviewed by Laird Addis, Jr.
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk is yet another great novel by the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. I have read all of his novels (at least all that have been translated into English) as well as his memoir of growing up in Istanbul, and may have enjoyed this one the most. It is a perhaps slightly improbable love story that takes place mostly in Istanbul over several years, in the 1970’s and 80’s, and involves at many levels the conflicts of the traditional Muslim culture of Turkey with the secular, European- oriented culture that the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk, established after the first world war. There is much description of Istanbul itself (the city I most want to visit of those I have not yet visited) and the surrounding area, especially where the wealthy went (and probably still go) to get out of the city in the summer. The history it tells during the years of the story includes the military coup of 1980, and its immediate consequences. Finally, the story includes a wonderful kind of self-reference insofar as the author is himself a minor character in the story but with a twist not to be revealed here. (Vintage International, 2009, paperback $15.95)
(Pamuk, incidentally, was a student in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in the 1980’s, which was then located in my own office building. So I must have seen him many times, before he was famous. The University hoped to give him an honorary doctorate a few years ago, but because of death threats against him by Islamic fanatics, the University decided it couldn’t give him adequate security.)
