Passing the calm and elegant campus of the Broadmoor resort and climbing up Old Stage Road to this week’s featured home, a private wrought-iron gate opens to a circular drive and presents an estate straight out of the golden age of Hollywood.

This courtyard is where Sabrina might have attended her first garden party with the Larrabees. This sweeping marble stair could have been where Norma Desmond asked Mr. DeMille for her close up. This home is where even a 21st Century family could feel the luxury and glamour of living like movie stars, down to learning the pleasure of taking a dip in the indoor pool every morning after breakfast.

“It has tons of character,” says Terrie Elwood of The Clement Team and RE/MAX Properties, who list the four-bedroom, seven-bath, 11,509-square-foot home for $1.895 million. “You’re not going to find a house like this anywhere else. It’s one of a kind.”

The lower level of stacked stone, the upper tier of stucco and the roof tiled, exquisite garden beds and retaining walls lead to the double front door. Inside, custom tile spills down the aforementioned stairway into a truly grand great room with a peaked ceiling and a wall of windows. Yards and yards of windows, looking out at a postcard perfect view of the Broadmoor nestled below and the entire city.

CLICK HERE to read the full text of this article, which published in the June 13, 2009 Springs Houses.

Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own mental equilibrium, Norah boldly commits herself to three different facilities up and down the socioeconomic ladder, and brings to life an astonishing range of tragic and comic inhabitants of these wards. We are with her as she navigates the byzantine rituals of the urban hospital with its overburdened staff and underattended, near indigent patient population dazed on a buffet of powerful psychotropic drugs; a calm private clinic in the Midwest, populated largely by lonely middle-class substance abusers on court referrals; and, finally, an alternative-therapy private clinic, opposed to medication with a focus on human process.

Revealing as to the human psyche, the state of mental health care in our country, the prevalence of often dangerous pharmaceuticals as well as the author’s personal history and emotional struggles, life inside the loony bin is very well rendered in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-accident manner. Craziness fascinates us, craziness scares us, and in the end, craziness is something that we “other,” drawing a line between it and us that’s thinner than most people imagine.

But you, reader, are the sane person reading this now, and you are thinking that these people on this page are not you. By no means are they you. They are the other, put away, out of sight — and yes I, too, laugh at this expression newly now — out of mind.

It is a significant expression in this context — out of sight, out of mind. But out of whose mind? Who is out of whose mind? The lunatic is out of his mind and so we put him out of sight — not because being out of sight is necessarily good for someone who is out of his mind, but because when the lunatic is out of sight he is out of our minds. We can forget him, forget his resemblance to us, forget he is a member of the family. Thus he is made into not just “an,” but “the” other.

But as I mentioned, this, by the author’s admission, is not an objective account of anything, but becomes…

… the very persoanl account of a bona fida patient’s search for rescue and, if possible, a touch of lasting self-awareness along the way. The journalist and the patient are both me: one doing a job, or trying to; the other slouching, in her own time, toward bedlam; and each, by turns, pushing the other up and along or dragging her down.

This is non fiction that flies by, that you can’t put down, that you don’t want to be interupted from. It’s a book that anyone with experience personally or tangentially with mental issues or anyone with a healthy curiousity about mental health won’t regret picking up.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, like our current president, voted for him and eat arugula, so of course my enjoyment of this book stems partially from those preferences. But the other part of me that enjoyed this read comes from the way Obama describes himself intellectualizing as I do, dissecting himself and his place in the world in a way that both made sense and entertained me.

Half black and half white, growing up among the white part of his family, he has no one to teach him how to be black. No one can tell him how to exist in both worlds, or if that’s even possible. And so this book is the story of his journey to become comfortable in his skin and find his place — his unique, personal place — in society at large.

From his college days:

The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture has individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselvs in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us of the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every day of the lives — although that’s what we tell ourselves — but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Don’t you know who I am? I’m an individual!

No, he’s not a Pulitzer Prize-winning genius writer, but he does know how to tell a straight-forward, descriptive and interesting story. (As a writer, I know that’s quite a feat itself. I’ve met and helped many who couldn’t.) But I wasn’t really in this book for its literary value. I wanted to know Obama’s story in detail. I wanted to know how he came to be the man he is, if he’s for real. And because I admire him, I wanted to know how he came to be the person he is today. Without being dry or boring, this book certainly quenched my thirst.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Vacation book-club reading

Lilla was an identical twin, a girl who was born in China as the daughter of Brits engaged in trade in China. In those days, Westerners were allowed in the port towns and trade cities, basically left to their own Western ways of polo games, high tea, starched linen and Victorian morals, rolling in money with the bustling import/export business in the Orient. She’s a child of the empire, not quite belonging in China, but definitely not welcomed in London, where she was seen as a bit of a hick.

The great thing is that Lilla loves to cook. It’s her defining characteristic throughout her life. Therefore it’s no real surprise that when she was imprisoned by the Japanese for almost two years during WWII — all foreigners in Japanese-occupied China were so imprisoned — she keeps herself sane by writing out a cook book of her favorite recipes and household hints. No, I’m not going to go try any of her dishes, which are a little vague to this modern cook’s eyes and sometimes a little gross. (Ox tails, brains, etc.) But I’m not going to get over the image of her writing out a chapter of desserts during a time she was starved, forced to eat horse meat, rolled coal with mud to heat her hut and took turns cleaning out the latrines.

I really don’t understand why some people are unwilling to try reading biographies, especially when I stumble across little gems like this. Had I been born a century ago, on a different continent, with an identical twin, I think this woman could have been me and I learned a great deal from her true story of empire, food, family and belonging. (I don’t think I could take the twin part, though. I’m too opinionated sometimes to coexist with myself.)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

Not that it was bad by any means. It was amusing and witty, typical of Sedaris, but let’s just say that it was a little forced, as if a publisher with a  five-book deal wanted No. 5 already and was breathing down his neck. As if all the stories of his childhood and every interesting anecdote of his life had been thought, re-thought and mined for publication long ago. What we’re left with is the day-to-day journal of a very funny man, just not the same funny man as he’s been in the past.

Can’t blame him. After all, he’s had more than 40 years to gather those best-ever stories. Now he’s an adult, and he’s not about to take guitar lessons/become a performance artist/come out of the closet/stop smoking by taking a $20,000 dollar, three-month trip to Japan ever again, now is he?

If you’re a Sedaris fan, it’s still worth picking up, like checking in with an old and beloved friend. But if you’re not a Sedaris fan, start earlier with “Me Talk Pretty” or “Naked.” Then you’ll fall in love, breeze through his whole series and wind up back here, where you’ll be mildly disappointed without losing faith in the author all together.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

Fhew. Now that I got that uncomfortable subject out of way, let’s breeze right on to the sex, shall we? This book, which was amalgamated from a blog written in 2003 and 2004, is exactly as advertised: It’s the daily journal of a London-based, high-class “working girl,” a legal profession in the UK. And it’s sallatious and fun and silly and sad and witty, all of what you’d expect. And just as you’d expect, there’s a good dash of kinkiness thrown in just for kicks — HIGH kicks with those legs. Very “Sex in the City” in its tone, it never jumps over the line into downright crudeness, but remains a light and entertaining read.

Not much more than that, though. After all, it was a blog. There’s no character arc or plot development. There’s really no point. It simply ends, and that is that, which is rather disappointing. I’m told — by the boldface advertisement on the cover — that Showtime is making a series out of the concept, and I’m thinking that’s a much better venue for this material than literature.

Still, sometimes you need an easy, breezy and naughty story. At least I do now and then, so in that context it’s worth the 290 pages.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

This calm, measured and thoughtful book, however, is anything but incendiary in my opinion. Granted, my opinion is firmly in the pro-choice camp, so perhaps it’s easy for me to say that. But Susan Wickland’s story could make a more convincing case for safe, legal abortion than doubtful readers out there may expect. After suffering a horrific abortion as a young woman and then becoming a mother, Wickland became a doctor later in life, specializing in women’s health issues. She had to fight for the right to learn the abortion procedure, thinking that it was a necessary thing to know when you dealt with women who, you know, get pregnant and might want to, gee, have a perfectly legal procedure done to stop that pregnancy from progressing.

She had little idea what she was getting into. Because of the high personal risk of the job, very few doctors are willing to step into the shoes of “abortion provider.” They’re stalked, libeled, threatened — as are their families. From 1977 until 2005, these doctors have seen seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 52 bombings, 100 acid attacks, 3 kidnappings and 480 cases of stalking. Needless to say, few have the courage to provide the services anyway and more women than you would ever guess are thankful for them every year. And Wickland? Well, she even had the courage to provide services to the very women protesting outside her door, who would then use privacy protections to be out on the front lines the next day, harassing other women in the same situation.

“Smile: Your mom chose life!” read several billboards around my city, the very conservative town of Colorado Springs. These ads make me very angry, because they assume that every pregnancy is potentially unwanted, that women make arbitrary decisions about such important things. (Should I dye my hair red? Should I have this baby? How insulting to our intelligence. No wonder some think they have the right to make choices FOR us flippant women.) The experiences Wickland describe have nothing to do with women using the procedure as birth control or making offhand choices. These are real women making hard choices, women who would have no where else to turn except dangerous, back-alley, illegal providers. These are the victims of rape, abuse and incest. They are women who don’t want to bring their child into the wrong situation. They are women who know they aren’t ready. Women who don’t need to share their motivations with anyone, really, just as they need not make if or what form of birth control they use, what career choices they make, who they love public. It’s a hard choice no doubt, but one they have the right to make.
Wickland writes: “Abortion is about life: quality of life for infants, children, and adults. Everywhere and in every sense of the word. Life, not death.”

If you don’t believe this, or don’t believe that the above could be true for ANYone in ANY situation, read the book. Perhaps it will change your mind.

Chicago — the second largest American city at the turn of the 20^th century — full of marvels like horseless carriages, trolleys, skyscrapers and modern medicine. But also overflowing with immigrants, shysters, con men, crooked politicians, bribed policemen and, of course, prostitutes. By the tally of the 1911 Vice Commission, there were no less than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and 5,000 full-time prostitutes, and the Levee (the red-light district) raked in more than $16 million per year, which would amount to $328 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.

Enter Minna and Ada Everleigh and the Everleigh resort. (Yes, yes, the ever-lay club. The pun is intended.) These two madams set out to elevate the profession, which they see as a necessary service to male society, a sex that they not-so-secretly disdain. Their harlots are fed gourmet meals, dressed opulently, cared for by a respectable physician, taught to recite Balzac and made never to drug, rob or otherwise con their clients. The Prince of Prussia drank champagne out of the slipper of a Butterfly, as the Everleigh’s harlots were known, and any visitor to Chicago (who had the money, of course) wanted to see the inside of the sisters’ carpeted, gold-plated, perfumed bordello.

But this was 20^th century America and the moral reform movement was already at hand, the same movement that would pass the Mann Act to prevent white slavery and make alcohol illegal for more than a decade. And so the free spirits of the Levee district and their bacchanalian attitudes clash with the street preachers, the stern lady do-gooders and the fiery spirit of moral uplift. I think we all know who wins.

Even if the reader knows that the brothel doors will one day be closed, Abbott is a masterful story teller. Never dry or dusty, she brings the lives of these ladies off of the page with sensory details, real dialog pulled from first-hand accounts and a burlesque sense of humor that it’s difficult not to share.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell (a Chicago-based preacher and reformer) wrote, “In this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

Ah yes, just imagine. How sordidly and wretchedly fun to read and imagine.

In other words, portions of the book are pure fan-to-fan fiction. If you don’t share the same heartfelt passions for particular gods of indie rock, you won’t truly get what the man is laying down, dig? And given indie fans’ (all music fans?) tendency to bash the well-loved indie bands of others as “too trendy” or “knock-offs” to make their own favorites seem more cool, he alienates a few readers, too. (I mean what’s with the animosity, or perhaps just indifference towards Modest Mouse, Johnny boy? Huh?!)

But I’ll give the man props for this: He made me REALLY listen to the music of The Shins. Outside of the ubiquitous Garden State Soundtrack, that is. While Seller’s prose didn’t disappoint me (let’s get that straight), it didn’t wow me either, but lyrics like this from The Shins (Sleeping Lessons, Wincing the Night Away) do:

Eviscerate your fragile frame
And spill it out on the ragged floor
A thousand different versions of yourself

And if the old guard still offend
They got nothing left on which you depend
So enlist every ounce
Of your bright blood
And off with their heads
Jump from The hook

You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life

And they got no right
As sure as you have eyes
They got no right

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Vacation book club selection

Update: I can’t upload the song here, as per The Boyfriend’s little reminder of legality (party pooper!). Check out the link in the comment below for the YouTube video of Sleeping Lessons.

It’s a great biography that gave me a lot of insight about the country of Jordan and their unique role and perspective in the region, and it also fleshed out and humanized the role of women in politics in the Middle East. While I wouldn’t say Queen Noor (Noor meaning light in Arabic) is a hero of mine or any such thing, I would say her life story is a valuable addition to my view of the world and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and she’s really purdy, too, especially for a woman that’s my mother’s age.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

While she goes into detail about how to make bread for a hundred and her school schedule, even that her brothers hoard John Deere tractor catalogs like other boys do dirty magazines (my words, not hers), she doesn’t really go into the things I want to know. Such as do they talk about the birds and the bees? Is enjoying sex a crime because the act in purely for reproduction? Are there illegal drug rings skulking around the barns in the dead of night? You see, that’s why I couldn’t be a Hutterite, that dirty little mind of mine.

So while I enjoyed the book, I wanted more. I wanted the truth that didn’t have to be read by her mother before it went to press. Also, the narrative style was a bit choppy given that the book is simply a compendium of her previous columns, not a cohesive work. I guess all that bread baking keeps a girl too busy to re-write from scratch. Still, a really fun read. I think I finished the whole book over the course of an airplane trip with a layover.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

“What fresh hell is this?” Such was the typical, pessimistic attitude of Parker when the doorbell rang or something new happened to interrupt the old. She was known to like you to your face, and rip you to shreds when you back was turned. She had but a few friends, but those loyal, and an on-again-off-again success monetarily. As in the newspapers, gossip columns and magazines of the day — she was one of the first writers, and a continuing one, in The New Yorker magazine — she is still remembered for her biting one-liners. A sampling:

• When told that President Coolidge was dead, she asked, “Well, how can you tell?”
• A friend of Dorothy’s was described as never being able to hurt a fly. She replied, “Not if it was buttoned up.”
• At one of her first literary jobs at Vogue, Dorothy wrote captions for fashion pictures. One, which almost ran before it was caught, read, “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

But her personal life was turbulent, and included abortion, two divorces, buckets — if not barrels, if not ships — of alcohol, Communism and other then-disdained political choices, and chronic financial neediness thanks to a drive towards charity and the need to spend every penny in her hand, when she had it.

One of my favorite of her magazine poems, many of which she came to think of as vapid and silly in her later life, spoke of marital problems:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

It’s a long read (414 pages in my copy), but worth it if you have an urge to find out more about this “Wit.” (I’d like to know, how do you get the title of “Wit” anyway? Is it possible in the 21st century?) However, the story of her life is darker and deeper than her cutting words. The biographer did a great job, but her poetry and short fiction depict her personality, too, in a much more dynamic way… a more true way, from a certain point of view. Besides, it kind of depressing to know that her ashes are still lying unclaimed in some attorney’s office in New York.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

With brutal honesty, Plath speaks of how meaninglessness and powerlessness can sneak up on an otherwise successful girl like a thief in the night, stealing her ability to sleep, to read, to eat, to feel. Yet she manages this without resorting to self-pity or whining. She is more a journalist who returned from the brink, chronicling the dark side with a dispassionate and often humorous tone. It’s also a quick read – I finished it over a weekend – that nails the specifically female and specifically adolescent penchant for morbidity and doubt.

I liked the book. I don’t know how much of my feelings sprung for the fact that the novel is almost wholly truthful and that Plath descended once again beneath that bell jar, never to return: She killed herself one month after the book’s English publication and long before it came out in America. We are all interested in the dramatic misfortune of others, especially if we see roots of that person within ourselves. (No, I’m not suicidal, but I am an author, a woman and an emotional being.) We like to see the depths to which a person we can recognize can sink without having to take the plunge ourselves. And there’s always something so sad yet so poignant about a truly talented being drawn inevitably toward an untimely death like a moth to flame. (Elton John would say a candle in the wind, yes?)

(My favorite Plath poem? The very famous, but still excellent “Daddy.”)