Running For My Life: My Journey in the Game of Football and Beyond / by Warrick Dunn

Just after midnight on January 7, 1993, Cpl. Betty Smothers of the Baton Rouge Police Department was helping a local store clerk institute a night deposit at a nearby bank when both women were ambushed by two gunmen who shot and ultimately killed Smothers. The violent incident was notable not just because a loyal police officer was killed--only the fifth Louisiana policewoman ever--but because Smothers was the single mother of five children, the oldest being Catholic High Senior football standout Warrick Dunn. The previous fall Warrick, a quarterback, corner and kick returner, had guided Catholic to its first ever state championship game and later signed a letter of intent to play football at Florida State. With the death of his mother, he assumed his role as head of his family even as he would enroll at FSU later that same year. Dunn instantly became a key component of a backfield which included Heisman trophy winner (and Warrick's roommate) Charlie Ward, helping lead the Seminoles to their first ever National Championship almost a year to the day of his mother's death. The rest of the story is something of a legend, Dunn breaking all manner of school rushing records, winning awards and receiving accolades on his path to a standout pro career where he won a Super Bowl as part of the Tampa Bay Bucs and was a three time Pro Bowl selection.

But this story's not really about football. No book which opens with a man confronting his mother's murderer on death row can really be about a game. And even though Dunn's story, his athletic career included, is something of an improbable feel-good tale of overcoming obstacles, the book's not a publicity piece or an overdramatized memoir weighed down by sentiment. The narrative is a truly down-to-earth confessional from a humble, soft-spoken man who managed to parlay a horrendous tragedy into an opportunity for love, forgiveness and a chance to help those in need. Since 1997, the Warrick Dunn Family Foundation has helped thousands of underpriveleged single parent families find help with basic needs assistance and the "Homes For the Holidays" portion of the non-profit has given the gift of home ownership to thousands in the Greater Baton Rouge area, Tampa Bay, Tallahassee and Atlanta. Dunn is now a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons. (796.332092 DUNN)

A Prayer For Owen Meany / by John Irving

New England is one of those places where good writers seem to flourish. Not that there aren't other places in the country where literary prowess is concentrated, but the region's seemingly always had an endless supply of talented bards. John Irving is one of them. An Exeter, New Hampshire native where his stepfather and uncle were on the faculty of the local high-profile prep school, Irving grew up never knowing his biological father, an Army Air Corpsmen killed in WWII. After attending Exeter, he went on to the University of Pittsburgh with the hopes of continuing a successful amateur wrestling career but ultimately matriculated back home and the local state university. In the mid-sixties he attended several prestigious writers workshops including the noteworthy University of Iowa gig as well as one in Vienna, a location he would later tab for his first novel. By the 1970's he was writing moderately successful novels and teaching English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. In 1978, The World According to Garp became a bestseller and an international sensation, initiating a decade of success for the writer whose 1980's novels (and one short story) were all either bestsellers or award winners--1985's The Cider House Rules would later net Irving an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. A Prayer For Owen Meany is likely the author's most autobiographical work and though not as wildly popular as 'Garp'--its subject matter is much tamer and more solemn by comparison--is still one of the most widely read books around.

By any standard, Owen Meany is small. It's not just his diminutive stature which distinguishes him from all his peers, or even his fawn-like build and bone structure which projects a alarmingly vulnerable quality. It's his voice. Always a bit of a high pitched squeal several octaves above normal, it's never changed with age, a damaged larynx responsible for the son of a New Hampshire granite mason's conspicuously awkward speech. His size or lack thereof and his quirky, atonal articulations aren't really what sets Owen apart though. It's something else altogether, something especially remarkable. For John Wheelwright, it's not really something about his best friend as something which is him, a fated and fatalistic phenomenon which underlies a particularly critical truth in both their lives. Owen possesses a prescient, almost clairvoyant insight into the future. But it's not so much a psychic power or mystical foreknowledge of things to come as it is an unmistakeable ability to gauge the nature of reality, to foresee a culmination of events based off calculations and intuitions made from an especially brilliant mind. And yet Owen's neither a cold intellectual nor a cynical forecaster of doom. There's a spiritual side to the boy, a very serious spiritual side.

A particularly odd and tragic accident has inadvertently illuminated this fact: the death of John's cherished mother from a foul ball which Owen hit--the only connection the boy ever made with a baseball--during their last little league game. The death is very sad of course. But instead of driving the boys apart, the tragedy actually brings the 12-year-olds closer. After all, Owen loved John's mother as much as John did. The event marks an almost cathartic transformation in Owen who senses a hidden destiny behind the oddly peculiar incident. As the two transition from childhood to adulthood amid a world going from bad to worse in the 1960's, what's already becoming clear to Owen is slowly revealed in tragic and devastating fashion before John's eyes. Although by the time it manifests in full, it just may be too late for John to salvage the life and legacy of his best friend.

Not everyone likes John Irving. Need it be said that he doesn't care for a few of his peers either. His plots are rather atypical and complex, many of them more than a little 'all over the place' with characters demonstrating a propensity towards odd choices and peculiar behaviors. More than a few critics have called his novels Dickensian marking the author's twisting narrative style, quizzical personalities and multiple settings. He writes well though, with a style that's very engaging and accessible to readers. 'Owen Meany' isn't quite as outlandish a plot as 'Garp' or Hotel New Hampshire in which some truly oddball characters cross paths in small town America and Central Europe. John Wheelwright and Owen Meany are relative down to earth types, John a somewhat lazy New Englander descended from founding fathers and Owen an unusually intelligent, especially dynamic product of the working class. That the story is especially grounded in spiritual principles, fervent Protestantism at that, is rather uncharacteristic of Irving. This is after all the same guy who wrote the characters of 'Roberta' Muldoon, the transsexual ex-football star, and radical feminist Jenny Fields into the same story ('Garp'). 'Owen Meany' has nothing so eccentric which may be why it's one of the author's most universally accessible novels. At the same time it's hard to see the story working as well in another's hands. Written by someone else, Owen might come off as something of nerdy outcast or a fledgling sidekick. He's neither of these, really not anywhere close though to call him a hero in a realistic sense wouldn't be too far off. No, the character of Owen is likely one of Irving's greatest achievements, a "small wonder" who's very much the classic visionary as well as an imperturbable charismatic, a cherished friend and magnanimous martyr and, penultimately, every bit a human being. Because of him, the book is a truly captivating work. (FIC IRVING)

The Landed: A Novel / by Tim Pears

The most memorable moments of Owen Ithell's childhood were spent on his grandparents farm in the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Usually only there during holidays when he could accompany his grandfather, a hardscrabble farmer, on his chore rounds, Owen first cultivated his love of the soil. Most of his other memories of youth, of living at home with a cranky single mother and a disappointing academic record in school, aren't as nostalgic. Now an adult living in another, more urban part of England, he makes his living working as a gardener. He has a wife now, Mel, and three small children and believes he has found something resembling happiness.

When a fatal car accident takes the life of his young daughter and injures Owen, his hand  ultimately needing to be amputated, he falls into despair to the point of alienation from his family. Eventually Owen is legally separated from his wife estranged from his remaining children. Resolving to reconnect with a time and a place he once cherished, Owen makes a drastic decision, suddenly abducting his children and embarking on a walking journey to the Welsh farm of his childhood where he hopes to attain some kind of understanding and resolution. This is a rather riveting little novel. Pears has a somewhat unorthodox writing style. A bit of an abrupt, blunt method of storytelling akin to Don Delillo or Don Robertson, the author tells a story about the frequently hardluck circumstances encountered by those in England's west country. Thomas Hardy would be proud. (FIC PEARS)

Blame / by Michelle Huneven

In high school, Patsy MacLemoore was valedictorian. She was also "Party Hardiest", voted the person most likely to have a good time. Always someone who could burn at both ends, she hasn't let two DUI's, a suspended license and numerous broken relationships keep her from attaining a Ph.D. in history and a professorship at a mid-level college all by the age of 29. Patsy lives full-speed ahead, a drink never far from her hand, a party never far away, all the way up until the unspeakable happens. While pulling into her driveway one night, definitely not sober, she hits and kills a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter. In the following days and weeks, Patsy tries to piece together what happened and then, despite the best efforts of an experienced lawyer, finally accepts her fate--four years in prison.
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The county jail, of which Patsy's been in quite a few times previous, is nothing like being incarcerated in the state penitentiary where male guards openly monitor female inmates in the latrine, the food is never fully cooked and violent altercations are always only a side-step away. There's also mandatory sobriety and AA meetings which Patsy must attend and where, to her horror, she finds herself in the same boat with people who claim a few months or years without alcohol as their life's best achievement ("an amazingly pathetic perspective"). With time though, Patsy makes her peace with aspects of her past, reconciling with those she's hurt, even reconnecting with the father/husband of her victims and forging ahead full-fledged with AA until she's sober. By the time she's released after two years on good behavior, the once arrogant, boozy life of the party is a whole new person returning to a whole new life.

Huneven paints a good portrait of a life rehabilitated in this provocative tail of personal injury, guilt, redemption and mercy. The circumstances surrounding Patsy's fall from grace, her exile and suffering are refreshingly down to earth. Patsy is still the same person more or less after her release. She just makes better choices. Her new relationships are different; she's no longer as bossy. Her academic work of teaching, researching and writing is substantially better and her life is generally more productive. What sets this at a level above the rest of the swath of books on abuse, repercussions and rehab is the startling twist near the end which reconceives an entirely new perspective on crime and punishment. Definitely a must-read somewhere down the line. (FIC HUNEVEN)

The Island / by Elin Hildebrand

It's the event Birdie Cousins has been waiting for: her daughter Chess (Francesca) is finally getting married. Everything's been planned for the day of the wedding. All the elegant, lavish plans are set in motion for the refined ceremony and subsequent celebration to be held at the family's Nantucket island home with funds provided upfront by Chess's father/Birdie's ex-husband Grant. Then the bottom falls out. First Chess calls her mother to tell her she's broken off her engagement to heartthrob fiance Michael Morgan for no apparent reason other than prenuptual jitters. Next, Chess quits her prestigious editing job at a major lifestyle magazine, and then Michael himself dies tragically in a Rock climbing accident; the mini-vacation with his brother Nick was supposed to be a way of taking his mind off his recent heartbreak. Chess is now more than just a mess; she's become a wreck of emotional guilt and depression, pushed to drastic extremes like shaving her head and holing herself up in her apartment permanently.

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Birdie's unsure of what action should be taken--Chess has always been the responsible, got-it-together girl. Other than enlisting the aid of her second, younger daughter Tate, it's hard to think of the right thing to do. Finally Birdie decides a family retreat is what's needed. Mom and both daughters will spend a month long holiday on the same Tuckernuck Island beach house where the wedding ceremony was to take place. Birdie's sister India, an artist-socialite who's overcome the vast tragedy herself with the suicide of her celebrity sculptor husband, will complete the party.

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This is Hilderbrand's latest in a long line of successful "beach reads", all of which have been set in and around the same Cape Cod region where she and her family live year-round. The Island reads pretty much like the cover looks: everything's nice and non-threatening. Everyone is well-off and well-settled, if not downright rich and famous. Stuff happens for a reason with personal growth and lessons learned by all in the end. It's easy to get into the characters, all of whom are sympathetic in their own way, exuding warmth and positive qualities in nearly all situations. And Hilderbrand's language and prose moves things along at a pleasant pace. It's the kind of "never-never land portrait"* of life that can't help but find an audience. (FIC HILDERBRAND)

*Publisher's Weekly

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl / by Timothy Egan

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How could a natural disaster be man-made? Yet the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930's was just that. For many in the great plains states, most notably Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the Dust Bowl was not just a difficulty, like the financial woes others faced because of the country's economic depression. It was a catastrophe of epic scale, akin to some sort of biblical plague, begetting wide-scale damage, destruction and death in over 100 million acres, much of it centered in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Many of the mostly farmers and their families, lots of them recent immigrants, simply up and left in the wake of the "Black Blizzard" even with nowhere to go. More than a few, like the Joads of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, traveled west to California where life was little better (and in more than a few cases, worse), though at least the air was breathable.

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But for those who stayed behind, life was not unlike hell on earth. The 'earth' itself quite literally turned against the farmers who were more or less deceived into cultivating the less-accommodating soil of the region. Seduced originally into buying land not accustomed to growing greener, more arable crops, the settlers had to learn the truth the hard way. Following decades of errant farming, defective crop rotations and years of famine and drought, the ruined topsoil caught up in the wind until a mass of flurrying dust, like mountains, blurred everything in its wake, terminating all organic life and causing epic amounts of ecological and agricultural damage.

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Author Egan does a good job of illuminating this not necessarily neglected, but perhaps less-scrutinized niche of American history. When most people think of the Dust Bowl, they think of drought, of windstorms and of families traveling westward wearing worn, haggard clothes and looking downcast in despair. But few even consider the plight of those who stayed, a forgotten collection of doomed souls--entire families and communities--left without any protection, sustenance or adequate relief. Thrust into starvation or made deathly ill by the dust itself, through "dust pneumonia", the region and the people consumed by the disaster would never be the same. (978.032 EGAN)

The Infinities / by John Banville

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Once a renowned mathematician, Old Adam Godley now lies on his deathbed where family and friends have gathered round for his final days. In addition to his much-younger second wife Ursula, there's his desultory son Young Adam, who's never gotten out from beneath the shadow of his father, and his beautiful but flighty wife Helen, a once much sought after actress who's grown colder with age. Nineteen-year-old Petra, daughter to Old Adam, may or may not be insane (like her mother who killed herself) and Petra's wierd little boyfriend Roddy, an aspiring mathematician who seems more attached to dying Old Adam than Petra, are also present. This awkward combination of individuals in the house aren't quite alone though. Gods of the Greek myths, who've "always been here . . . ", mysteriously occupy the atmosphere and the consciousness of the scene around them. Pan (god of nature) wanders in on the crowd taking on the human form of Benny, a family acquaintance of bygone days, while Zeus, who's set his sights on the lovely Helen, maneuvers his way toward a series of "illicit amours". Meanwhile, monitoring the proceedings is Hermes, messenger god and son of Zeus, who's inhabited the body of a nearby farmer and fancifully interprets all that goes on.

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Banville, who won the Man Booker prize for his darker, more realist novel The Sea, displays just why he's called one of the greatest stylists of the English language alive today*. No one can quite mesh prose and poetry like he does. His story is more a forum for characterization than a plot with a beginning, middle and end. It's genius all the same. With lyrically adept personal emotions, thoughts and even subconscious ephemera all beautifully articulated, Banville is one of those authors who just seems more comfortable whispering thoughts than vocalizing dialogue (of which there is almost none here). So fluent is he at narrating the life of the mind, at evoking the substance of the soul that virtually no action is necessary. (FIC BANVILLE)

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*"Banville shines with profound rendering of a parallel universe" by Val Nolan". The Sunday Business Post. September 6, 2009.

Before I Die / by Jenny Downham

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. -Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
16 year-old Tessa lives waiting to die. Terminally ill from a young age, she and her parents have exhausted all the options. Now in her final months Tessa stares down fate alongside family and friends until, in an effort to 'feel' alive, she embarks on a 'list of things to do before dying'. Sex, drugs, crime, love, fame, reunite parents, etc., each item is heedlessly pursued even as the necessary treatments and transfusions sustain her steadily depleting health. Readers won't confuse Tessa's list with any media-friendly, 'Make-a-Wish' endearment. It's a resentful pastime despite any sentimentality; only reaffirming her impending exit from a world that will continue without her. But not all's bleakness. As days, then weeks and months pass away Tessa's made 'aware' of each conscious experience (good and bad) amidst her vanishing livelihood, recieving what's given even after all is lost.

Frankness more than sadness gives this story its distinction as Downham illuminates the eternal fate with a rarely-glimpsed authenticity. A first-person narrative, it's dying seen through someone. Tessa's situation is unique but her behavior won't deny any real reactions or consequences; her illness doesn't make her a saint or forgive abuse. Her family and friends--perhaps more emotionally wrought than herself--still maintain intimacy with her, not some fragile creature. It's this deeply intrapersonal tone that edges the drama toward its staggering climax, depicting life's final moments like nothing before it. (YP FIC DOWNHAM)