Mother Country : Memoir Of An Adopted Boy
by Jeremy Harding

Good thing this book was slim (189 pages) because it saved me from having to read it all. The reviewers are out of their minds. "Beautifully written, captivating, the most brilliant British memoir published in years." I guess if you're from England, then maybe it is.
Harding learned that he was adopted at the age of five. As an adult, he decides to investigate and try to find out who his natural mother was. It's easier to seek this information out in Britain as opposed to the United States. (Adoption records are sealed in America, but not so in England.)
I didn't get too far. The book plods along and is not very exciting. I was irritated at the tight binding of the paperback. You had to pull the page all the way back to read the text on the left-hand side. After a while, I could no longer stand doing that and closed up the book.

The Hare With Amber Eyes : A Family's Century Of Art And Loss
by Edmund de Waal

I waited months to receive this book so when it arrived, I hungrily jumped in. Alas, it was not to be. It all boiled down to the author's style of writing. He's described as a potter who "writes." That's laughable. I stopped reading the book after thirty pages. It felt stilted and lacked warmth. De Waal comes off as an insufferable elitist.
The subject is netsuke which are tiny Japanese carvings that can fit in the palm of your hand. Apparently he is the fifth generation of his family to inherit these exquisite figures so he endeavors to seek out how they came to be and who in the family first started collecting them.
I would have liked to have seen these carvings but the photographs are few and grainy.
What a disappointment!
Not recommended.

The Boy : A Holocaust Story
by Dan Porat

On the cover of the book is the most recognized photograph of the Holocaust. A child has his arms raised. His face portrays acute fear. A soldier is pointing a gun at him.
The author presents three Nazi men who may or may not have been associated with this particular pictured child and two Jewish people who encountered these Nazis in Warsaw.
The writing style is dry and pedantic. What's worse, though, are the imagined thoughts and conversations that Porat ascribed. For somebody that teaches courses on the Holocaust (in Israel), you wonder why he would have chosen to go this route.
His editors weren't too happy and many arguements ensued.
It's a shame because there's information about the Warsaw Ghetto and who was involved that I have never read about before.
Not recommended.

Learning To Die In Miami : Confessions Of A Refugee Boy
by Carlos Eire

Why did I bother to slog through 300 pages and skip the last four of a totally disappointing book? Perhaps I thought it would, marginally, get better? I should have stopped halfway through the mess.
A few years ago, Carlos Eire wrote Waiting for Snow in Havana which was so beautifully written and had such gorgeous imagery. In that book, he wrote about growing up in Cuba before Castro's revolution and then being airlifted out of the country.
Learning to Die in Miami is supposed to be a continuation of what happens to Carlos when he lands in America and learns to adjust.
The book certainly started out ok but then started to deteriorate. As soon as I saw his first metaphor (they're excessive), I should have stopped reading. He jumps around from past to future incessantly and after a while that becomes quite irritating.
Eire's style of writing changed from his first book and it's pretty dismal.
Not recommended.

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So : A Memoir
by Mark Vonnegut

Gee, why does the last name sound so familiar? Of course, Mark is the son of Kurt Vonnegut and we get snippets of what it was like growing up in a family with a famous author. (Before he became a celebrity, he was a car salesman.) We also mainly find out that schizophrenia ran rampant through scores of relatives.
Vonnegut is a pediatrician and in the Introduction, he writes about the fate of medicine and how it has become idiot-proof due to the checklists on templates that doctors fill in so that insurance companies can pay them correctly. That was the most interesting part of the book. Sixty-eight pages later, I stopped reading. He tends to ramble and nothing is cohesive. Each chapter is made up of small vignettes of things that have happened to him or what he is thinking of.
The book is not interesting and kind of ho-hum.
Not recommended.

Dreaming In Chinese : Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language
by Deborah Fallows

Being a language nut (I speak French, German, and Spanish and know a smattering of Chinese, Farsi, Hebrew, and Hindi), I thought this book was going to be a delight. It certainly started out that way. Each chapter has linguistic explanations of the Chinese language and at the same time the author interweaves her encounters with everyday life.
Mandarin is one of the most difficult languages to learn due to characters, tones (there are four and don't mix them up), no verbs and no tenses.
Deborah Fallows is a linguist yet in her three years of living in China, she doesn't really master the language and it's understandable. Even the Chinese get rusty about remembering some of the characters.
One of the things she writes about that is irritating is saying how rude and impolite the Chinese are. She generalizes from some of her encounters as if that's the norm. (Having worked with several Chinese, I have found the opposite to be true.)
This book will have limited appeal for most readers. Only students or tourists visiting the country would want to peruse this slim tome.
One more thing. The title isn't valid. Fallows never did say that she dreamt in Chinese. When that happens, you truly have arrived.

A Diamond In The Desert : Behind The Scenes In Abu Dhabi, The World's Richest City
by Jo Tatchell

It used to be an endless desert home to Bedouins. They lived in tents and rode camels.
Abu Dhabi means "Father of the Gazelle" for that is what brought the huntsmen to the area in the first place. Now, the only gazelles that can be found are on mugs and currency.
The author lived as a child in Abu Dhabi in the 1970s. She has wonderful memories of that time. In 2008 she returns and everything that she remembered from her childhood has been obliterated.
There are 420,000 citizens each with a net worth of 17 million dollars. Kind of leaves you gasping. Glitzy condos and skyscrapers abound with luxury hotels. Most of the wealth came from foreigners who were willing to invest. Nobody seems too happy in the world's richest city.
I got to page 153 and for me, the book came to a screeching halt. The particular chapter that ruined it is called The Next Generation and it's about the young people who party, shop, sleep around, etc. It's like reading a trashy gossip column. Ugh. Who cares?
The book was really interesting up until this part. I learned all about the history of the United Arab Emirates, oil, the different tribes, how the island came into existence.
There are no pictures except what is on the front cover (in the background you can see all these high-rises).
There's got to be somebody out there who can write a decent book on Abu Dhabi and just stick with the facts. So far, I haven't found one. (Months ago there was a previous attempt for a book on Abu Dhabi and that one was equally dismal. It's on this blog.)
Not recommended.