Will another Chicago Catholic memoir really hold up?
Those who follow publishing all know the story of John Grisham, who as an unknown author started out self-publishing a little book called A Time to Kill , driving around selling it out of the trunk of his car.
While most self-published authors don't see Grisham's kind of success, with a little persistence it can happen. Former Chicagoan John Bernard Ruane is getting a shot with his memoir Parish the Thought: An Inspirational Memoir of Growing up Catholic in the 1960s (Roswell Press, $19.99), which found its way into the book room right about the time I took over the job of Books Editor last year.
Anyone who grew up Catholic wlll relate to Ruane's stories of growing up in a Chicago parish, where he served as an altar boy and was schooled under the influence of nuns and priests in the 1960s. (One can't help recall John R. Powers' fictionalized memoirs about growing up Catholic in the '50s — The Last Catholic in America, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?)
Ruane, who now makes his home in Roswell Georgia, printed only 5,000 copies last summer. Most of the hardcovers have sold out and now Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will publish the paperback edition this fall.
None other than our city's own archbishop, Francis Cardinal George blurbs the book on the back cover:
"John Bernard Ruane writes about a truly memorable parish, St. Bede's in the Archdiocese of Chicago. His witty but moving recall of his years growing up is a marvelous tribute to his mother and father and to the parish itself. Chicago priests and parishes have shaped literally millions of Catholics, and all of us now have reason to be grateful to John."
Round about the time America's love affair with Texas Hold 'Em took hold, writer Martha Frankel had already dived in, head-first, hit bottom and lived to tell the tale in Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair With Gambling (Penguin, 240 pages, $23.95).
"In the Church of 80% Sincerity, we understand that the basic motivating factor for all human beings is not self-preservation or sex or love. It is the desire to not be embarrassed."
I'm not sure I've ever read a more true statement. It comes around the middle of David Roche's The Church of 80% Sincerity (Perigree, 160 pages, $19.95).
Roche's "church" is a "church of choice for recovering perfectionists," he states in the introduction to the book. "We think 80 percent sincerity is as good as it gets. You can be 80 percent sincere 100 percent of the time or 100 percent sincere 80 percent of the time. It's in that 20 percent area where you get some slack and you can be yourself."
In Robert Leleux's author's note at the beginning of his debut, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy (St. Martin's, 272 pages, $23.95), he quotes, "A hat's not a hat till it's tilted," to inform readers to expect embellishments throughout:
Anyone who's ever dreamed of growing up in a castle will be happy to learn that it's all it's cracked up to be, and more. (The "more" would be the not-so-pleasant parts.)
Author Liza Campbell grew up in Scotland, more specifically, in Cawdor Castle. She is the second of five children born to the 25th Thane of Cawdor and the last child to actually be born in the famed castle.
Campbell's beautifully written memoir, A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle (St. Martin's, 323 pages, $24.95), details the ups and downs of such a legacy...
Anyone who's ever waited tables will love Phoebe Damrosch's memoir, Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Watier (William Morrow, 228 pages, $22.95). Anyone who dines out a lot will love it, too.
Damrosch set out to be a writer, but like a lot of struggling artists found herself working at a restaurant to pay the bills. Having never done any restaurant work before, she started as a busboy in a little place in Brooklyn that ran on a shoestring.
"I was the only busboy not named Mohammed," she writes. "Here, as in many restaurants around the city, any deviation from the distinct class/race hierarchy makes everyone uneasy. In most New York restaurants, the chef is Caucasian, the waiters are starving artists, the busboys are from Bangladesh, and the kitchen workers and dishwashers are from Latin America...
Just as the news of U.S. military personnel mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib filtered into the United States, Lt. Col. Deanna Germain, a 53-year-old grandmother and Army reservist from Minnesota, was sent to the prison when her yearlong tour of duty was extended.
Germain details her experience at Abu Ghraib, as well as her tour in Kuwait just prior, in Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib (Borealis Books, 211 pages, $24.95), written with Connie Lounsbury. It was the idea of a grandmother going to war that drew me to the book...
At 12 years old, I was a plaid skirt-wearing, flute-playing bookworm trying to maintain good grades while pining away for the same boy I'd had a crush on since the first grade. All in all, not a bad way to spend the tween years.
The author of today's book (a reprint from 2001), Disguised: A Wartime Memoir (Candlewick Press, 366 pages, $17.99), spent years 12, 13 and 14 living in a prisoner of war camp in Sumatra during World War II...
