A Word About Awards

BEASTS OF NO NATION by Uzodinma Iweala   Award: LA Times Winner 2005   Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Longlist 2006, Dublin Longlist 2007, James Tait Black Finalist 2005   Date Read: September 17, 2023   How an American was able to capture the horror of a child soldier in Nigeria I will never know. Agu is a young child and after his father is killed and his mother and sister disappear, he joins a militant sect fighting in Nigeria. But all Agu has ever wanted to do is go to school. An adept reader, he spent the better part of his early years begging to be let into the school and he was admitted earlier than most.   With nowhere else to turn and the pictures in his young mind of the stateliness of soldiers, Agu becomes a soldier. He quickly learns the violence and disregard for human life that are required of him. Agu is also subjected to starvation, beatings, rapes and constant fear. For such a young life, the reader just knows his life will always have been ...

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann   Awards: Dublin Winner 2011, National Book Winner 2009 Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Longlist 2010   Date Read: May 12, 2011   From Kirkus Reviews: “The famous 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers is a central motif in this unwieldy paean to the adopted city of Dublin-born McCann (Zoli, 2007, etc.).   Told by a succession of narrators representing diverse social strata, the novel recalls Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), except that where Bonfire was deeply cynical about Reagan-era New York, McCann’s take on the grittier, 1970s city is deadly earnest. On the day that “the tightrope walker” (never named, but obviously modeled on Philippe Petit) strolls between the Twin Towers, other New Yorkers are performing quieter acts of courage. Ciaran has come from Dublin to the Bronx to rescue his brother Corrigan, a monk whose ministry involves providing shelter and respite to...

BLAME by Michelle Huneven   Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Longlist 2010, Dublin Longlist 2011, LA Times Finalist 2009, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2009   Date Read: September 12, 2020   Blame is an easy and entertaining read but to say that it stands out in any significant way would be an overstatement. Patsy is a professor with a blackout drinking problem. On one of these blackout sessions, she runs over two people – mother and daughter Jehovah’s Witnesses- while entering her driveway. She gets shipped off the prison for two years where she is forced to become sober.   I have to pause and say that her sentence is shocking. I can guarantee that if she were not a privileged white woman, she would have had a much longer sentence. Even still, she took two lives and gets paroled after two years. I just cannot let this sink in. Further, she is returning home after a night of drinking so why would Jehovah’s Witnesses be out that late pamphleting? I find it v...

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett   Nominations: Dayton Literary Peace Longlist 2010, Dublin Longlist 2011, Women's Prize Longlist 2009   Date Read: November 8, 2009   Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.   Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.   Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business,...