Books

words by > Michael J. Bandler

About Alice
Calvin Trillin

Alice Trillin lived an additional quarter-century—until September 11, 2001—from the time cancer first struck in 1976 until her heart gave out. An “incorrigible and ridiculous optimist”—in the words of her author husband, a veteran New Yorker writer, essayist and novelist—she enjoyed a blessed life among family and friends, lucky until the end. Perhaps most precious commodity of fortune she enjoyed was her husband, who, throughout his writings, has mirrored the magic she brought to their marriage. He filled his essays and stories and genial asides with descriptions of Alice’s adventures, quirks, pragmatism and penchant for plain talk (including what her husband called “an instinctual attraction for avoided subjects”). As loving and admiring as he’s been in print over the years, his newest book, though slight in size, trumps what has gone before. In it (an expansion of a New Yorker article), the reader will sense Alice’s beauty, take stock of her courage, marvel at her selflessness—equally directed towards passing acquaintances and longtime friends—revel in her candor, and ultimately acknowledge the irreparable chasm that is present at the author’s core. (Random House, $14.95)

Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire! The Methods And Madness Inside Room 56 Rafe Esquith

Tech With Your Heart: Lessons I Learned From The Freedom Writers Erin Gruwell

For the past quarter-century, in a fifth-grade classroom in a Los Angeles elementary school that is one of America’s largest, Rafe Esquith has introduced his mostly immigrant kids to study strategies, writing techniques, economic responsibility, moral growth and the linkage between, say, Elton John and Hamlet. In doing so, he has taken the ordinary (the fifth-graders) and made them extraordinary, through their hard work and his imagination and inventiveness. Not far away, in a high school classroom in a rough, racially divided Long Beach neighborhood, Erin Gruwell (starting as a first-year student teacher) challenged those whose lives had been engulfed in bigotry, crime and death—urging them to exorcise the demons in their lives by expressing their feelings in words. The Freedom Writers, as that first group became known, have been role models for students who followed them into Gruwell’s classes. Esquith’s and Gruwell’s personal histories, personalities, methodologies and passions are sometimes parallel, sometimes complementary—but never anything less than inspiring. (Esquith: Viking, $24.95. Gruwell: Broadway Books, $22.95)

Traveler
Ron McLarty

Actor-turned-novelist McLarty’s luminous new memory novel is rooted equally in past and present. Something happened, back among first-generation immigrant families in Rhode Island, with reverberations across the decades. As compelling as is his actorhero’s quest for answers, the thrall lies in McLarty’s flashbacks of youthful escapades and traumas, and in his vivid depiction of the mean streets and old neighborhoods—and the scruffy working-class folks who dapp led them. Audiences can still find McLarty her e and there on prime-time network drama series, but this latest tale shines the light on a masterful contemporary novelist. (Viking, $24.95)