Julia Roberts and the “Eat, Pray, Love” movie is getting big play right now. Go see it if you want, but I’m not joining you. The book was annoying, chronicling the high-end life of a narcissistic, high-maintenance woman with bad judgment who solves her problems with—guess what? A man. (That cliché is especially unappealing at the 90th anniversary of women getting the right to vote.) I can’t see how the movie will do any better, although the scenery is probably pretty, and it may make the woman more appealing.
Instead, I’ve got some better recommendations for your end-of-the-summer entertainment. I’ll start with one of the best books I’ve ever read.
“Cutting for Stone” follows the life of a British-Indian doctor who grows up in Addis Ababa. The title is a play on words. The phrase in the Hippocratic Oath means that a doctor should not operate on a person for kidney stones since in ancient Greece, at least, the patient will surely die. In other words, operate only when it will do good.
But in this book the phrase also means assisting and being influenced by a surgeon named Stone. The narrative is fast-paced and exotic. The characters are unique. They behave badly out of malice, but also out of confusion, uncertainty and desperation. By the end, the reader feels uplifted because the author shows how some people can grapple with the world’s sorrows in graceful ways.
The author is a surgeon at Stanford, and the story is filled with medical phrases, sometimes in irony. This is a book to buy, since you’ll want to keep it. It is literature, not just a novel.
Less erudite, but nevertheless diverting is “Losing Mum and Pup,” Christopher Buckley’s account of his famous parents’ deaths. When they were in their prime, the Buckleys were interesting less for their political views, but more for their lifestyle. The parties, Pat Buckley’s clothes, William Buckley’s pronouncements, their houses and the general aura of privilege and wit were a lot better to follow than Lindsey Lohan’s troubles, although one wonders if William Buckley might have wished that people were paying attention to him for his political views rather than his living habits. Their only son turned out to be a good writer. He contributes to the New Yorker from time to time, and is a regular at the Daily Beast. This memoir is fast-paced and doesn’t require much attention—perfect for the beach.
Another non-fiction recommendation is “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. The book jacket gave a somewhat incomplete biography of Mr. Ridley, so I googled him. He’s a viscount in England, or he will be when his father dies. The family owns a large estate in Northumberland. His great-grandfather was the British architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. Ridley himself was the American editor of “The Economist” for a time. He emerged unscathed, even though he was one of the leaders at Northern Rock when that bank went bust. No wonder he’s an optimist.
Here’s what I like about the book: it makes you want to scribble in the margins. As in: “How do you know?” “But you didn’t consider this fact.” “That’s ridiculous.” I need a book every once in awhile that I can fill with marginalia, and I imagine you do too. (Did you know there is a whole literary scholarship devoted to marginalia, my favorite part of a used book?)
The theory he espouses is that by working together in a market economy and a world of ideas we humans and our collective brains have improved our lot, and we can do it over and over again. People who predict doom and gloom frustrate him. His economic point of view is pretty basic: specialized producers and diverse consumers make the world more prosperous. His recommendations that markets be unfettered may seem naïve to some readers. But the writing is lively and caused me to consider certain ideas in new ways.
This book suffers from a malady shared by almost all nonfiction books about ideas—it should have been an article. But if it were an article, Ridley would not have been paid enough to have afforded the time he needed for the research—his list of sources is exhaustive, and exhausting. To be paid for a book that should have been an article—again, another reason to be optimistic about life, and another quirky point about economics, which he doesn’t explore.
Finally, there’s “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.” This is not a book I would have bought or checked out of a library. But there it was, free on my Kindle. So I downloaded it, read it in a couple of hours, and wondered how I had missed until now such a jaunty read written by a remarkable man. Maybe it is free on other e-readers also.