Review and Release Tuesday: Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction by Erica Garza

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Standalone to date

Blurb:

"A fiercely courageous account of one woman's unflinching, raw, and ultimately hopeful journey through sex and porn addiction.

For almost two decades, Erica Garza was consumed by a singular, secret, shame-fueled pursuit that threw her life into chaos: orgasm. Back-braced, isolated, and teased in adolescence, and ambivalent about her Catholic upbringing, Garza found a secret solace in masturbation and porn--first by way of the limited softcore viewing offered by late-night cable, and, later, with the booming proliferation of online porn.

In this wrenching, vivid account, Garza explores her sexual fixations and relives the series of disastrous relationships and one-night stands that haunt her as she runs from one side of the world to the other in a futile attempt to break free of her habits―from East Los Angeles to Hawaii and Southeast Asia, through the brothels of Bangkok and the yoga studios of Bali to disappointing stabs at twelve-steps, therapy, and rehab back home.

Garza's terror at digging so deeply into her history to understand her anxieties is palpable, as is her exhilaration when she begins to believe she might just be free of them. And yet there is no false hope or prepackaged sense of redemption. Even her relationship to the man she will ultimately marry is credibly rocky as it finds its legs with several false starts, making her increasing sense of self-acceptance and peace by journey's end feel utterly earned.

In exploring the cultural taboos surrounding sex and porn from a female perspective, Garza offers a brave and necessary voice to our evolving conversations about addiction and the impact that Internet culture has had on young women."

ARC Review Thursday: Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor

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Stand alone to date

Goodreads Blurb:

"The drama that shaped today’s Iran, from the Revolution to the present day.

 
In 1979, seemingly overnight—moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world—Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East and have acted upon their beliefs with urgency and passion, frequently staking their lives for them. 
 
With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. Essential reading at this moment when the fates of our countries have never been more entwined, Children of Paradise will stand as a classic of political reporting; an indelible portrait of a nation and its people striving for change."

Mini Review Monday: I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

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Stand-alone to date

Goodreads Blurb:

"I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. 

Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world."

Review Sunday: Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops by Jen Campbell

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Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops #1

Goodreads Blurb:

"This Sunday Times Bestseller is a miscellany of hilarious and peculiar bookshop moments:

'Can books conduct electricity?'
'My children are just climbing your bookshelves: that's ok... isn't it?'

A John Cleese Twitter question ['What is your pet peeve?'], first sparked the 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller's collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor. 

From 'Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?' to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year's weather; and from 'I've forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter' to'Excuse me... is this book edible?'

This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top 'Weird Things' from bookshops around the world."

Review Sunday: Tell No One Who You Are: The Hidden Childhood of Regine Miller by Walter Buchignani and Regine Miller

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Goodreads Blurb:

"During the days of Nazi terror in Europe, many Jewish children were taken from their families and hidden. Régine Miller was one such child, who left her mother, father, and brother when she was 10 years old. Utterly alone as she is shunted from place to place, told to tell no one she is Jewish, she hears that her mother and brother have been taken by the SS, the German secret police. Only her desperate hope that her father will return sustains her. At war’s end she must learn to live with the terrible truth of “the final solution,” the Nazi’s extermination camps.

The people who sheltered Régine cover a wide spectrum of human types, ranging from callous to kind, fearful to defiant, exploitive to caring. This is a story of a brave girl and an equally brave woman to tell the story so many years later."

A Discussion: Heaven Is For Real by Todd Burpo, Sonja Burpo, and Colton Burpo

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Goodreads Blurb:

""A beautifully written glimpse into heaven that will encourage those who doubt and thrill those who believe."

--Ron Hall, coauthor of "Same Kind of Different as Me"

"Do you remember the hospital, Colton?" Sonja said. "Yes, mommy, I remember," he said. "That's where the angels sang to me."

When Colton Burpo made it through an emergency appendectomy, his family was overjoyed at his miraculous survival. What they weren't expecting, though, was the story that emerged in the months that followed--a story as beautiful as it was extraordinary, detailing their little boy's trip to heaven and back.

Colton, not yet four years old, told his parents he left his body during the surgery-and authenticated that claim by describing exactly what his parents were doing in another part of the hospital while he was being operated on. He talked of visiting heaven and relayed stories told to him by people he met there whom he had never met in life, sharing events that happened even before he was born. He also astonished his parents with descriptions and obscure details about heaven that matched the Bible exactly, though he had not yet learned to read.

With disarming innocence and the plainspoken boldness of a child, Colton tells of meeting long-departed family members. He describes Jesus, the angels, how "really, really big" God is, and how much God loves us. Retold by his father, but using Colton's uniquely simple words, "Heaven Is for Real" offers a glimpse of the world that awaits us, where as Colton says, "Nobody is old and nobody wears glasses."

"Heaven Is for Real" will forever change the way you think of eternity, offering the chance to see, and believe, like a child."

Book Review Tuesday: Clara's War by Clara Kramer

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Goodreads Blurb:

"On 21 July 1942 the Nazis invaded Poland. In the small town of Zolkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Clara Kramer was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug cellar. Living above and protecting them were the Becks.

Mr Beck was a womaniser, a drunkard and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life throughout the war to keep his charges safe. Nevertheless, life with Mr Beck was far from predictable. From the house catching fire, to Beck's affair with Clara's cousin, to the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room just above, Clara's War transports you into the dark, cramped bunker, and sits you next to the families as they hold their breath time and again.

Sixty years later, Clara Kramer has created a memoir that is lyrical, dramatic and heartbreakingly compelling. Despite the worst of circumstances, this is a story full of hope and survival, courage and love."

Book Review Sunday: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

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Goodreads Blurb:

"From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.

In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting“ in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter — Annawadi's "most-everything girl" — will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget."

Review:

Thank you to my aunt for recommending this to me!  It's been quite a while since my last non-fiction book so I thought I'd give it a shot!  She also recommended several other non-fiction books that I'll be trying out in the coming months.

Down to business.  As I said above, this is a non-fiction book.  Which made reading it especially heart-breaking.  It's in slums like the ones in India where the extremes of human nature come out to play.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  Neighbors turning on each other over simple misunderstandings.  Softhearted police officers among the one's whose hearts are made of a substance harder than stone.  Or maybe that's just because they have it as bad as everyone else.  Because no matter what the media and government officials tell you, everyone can lie.

It was appalling to read about these sorts of things still taking place in our 21st century world.  I don't think I'll forget this book anytime soon.  I did some research and (as well as reading all the acknowledgements and such) and learned that this is truly a non-fiction book.  Nothing was fabricated.  Everything that Ms. Boo wrote came from either first hand experience or interviews with these people.

I loved the way Ms. Boo approached this topic.  She did it with complete honesty and candor without laying blame on anyone and simply reporting what happened.

It was a bit unorganized and I was confused in several places.  It also dragged in the first 2 chapters which I had difficulty getting through.  I promise though, it's worth it!

The Final Verdict:

A well written non-fiction novel that was written with complete candor.  It was a bit unorganized and the first few chapters were difficult to get through but once I did, I loved it!

4.5 stars

Quotes:

“...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.” 

“What you don't want is always going to be with you
What you want is never going to be with you
Where you don't want to go, you have to go
And the moment you think you're going to live more, you're going to die” 

“It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.” 

“He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice...He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.” 

“Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead”

“I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.” 

Seriously, I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres

This may just be the funniest book I've ever read. It's all about how Ellen DeGeneres sees the world. If you haven't seen her show, GO NOW. If you like laughing I can almost guarantee that you'll love her. I don't have much to say about this other than I didn't give it 5 stars because well, it was sort of a biography... I don't know but it wasn't like Divergent where I fantasized about it day and night and found a book boyfriend and had book withdrawal when the series ended. It kept me reading though and made me laugh so that counts for something right?

"Accept who you are. Unless you're a serial killer.”

“My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The pina and the colada.” 

“What’s not so great is that all this technology is destroying our social skills. Not only have we given up on writing letters to each other, we barely even talk to each other. People have become so accustomed to texting that they’re actually startled when the phone rings. It’s like we suddenly all have Batphones. If it rings, there must be danger. 

Now we answer, “What happened? Is someone tied up in the old sawmill?”

“No, it’s Becky. I just called to say hi.”

“Well you scared me half to death. You can’t just pick up the phone and try to talk to me like that. Don’t the tips of your fingers work?” 

“Leaning forward in your chair when someone is trying to squeeze behind you isn't enough. You also have to move the chair.” 

“It must be around forty, when you're "over the hill." I don't even know what that means and why it's a bad thing. When I go hiking and I get over the hill, that means I'm past the hard part and there's a snack in my future. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.” 

Those are just a few of the quotes in this book that made me laugh hysterically.  I can't wait to read her other books!