Book Review
How to Win Friends From the playground to the workplace, we all know we’re not going to get by without a little help from our friends. But how do we go about forging those friendships in the first place? When Dale Carnegie wrote ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, he was instantly onto a winner. Surely everyone just wants to be liked? We’ve put together a collection of stories where a friendship is central. And it just goes to show, bonds can be formed in the most unlikely of places.
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
George Milton and Lennie Small are two migrant workers who dream of owning their own farm. George is intelligent but uneducated and Lennie is a great hulk of a man; physically strong but mentally weak. This unlikely pairing sees George acting as a calming influence and father-figure to Lennie. Set during the Great Depression, the pair is forced out of the aptly-named ‘Weed’, California after Lennie’s fondness for touching ‘soft things’ lands him in trouble. Chasing the elusive American Dream, George must decide what kind of a future their friendship can have.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas John Boyne
Bruno is the son of an SS officer and is also a natural-born explorer, so it’s no surprise that when his family moves to ‘Out With’, he has a lot of questions about the children who appear behind the barbed wire fence wearing blue striped pyjamas. Bruno meets Shmuel, who lives the other side, has a shaved head and is constantly hungry and the two form a friendship that will have devastating consequences. PAGE 30
Boyne’s children’s book about concentration camps is a must-read for all adults. It will stay with you for days, weeks and months afterwards, just as it should.
The Help Kathryn Stockett
This is the story of three women: Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, and their attempts to change the social structure and confines of a segregated Mississippi in the 1960s. Young Skeeter is a white woman with a degree, but no husband. She’s also lost her maid and confidante, ‘Constantine’ and nobody can tell her where she’s gone. Aibileen is a black maid who is essentially raising a white woman’s child for her, whilst grieving for her own dead son. Meanwhile Minny is a fantastic cook but an even greater gossip. Between them, the three plan to write and publish their own stories, revealing social scandals and ‘tellin’ it like it is’. It’s brilliant, and worth reading just to hear the revelation of the ‘terrible awful’. That’s a laugh-out-loud moment in itself.
The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan
Before Carrie Bradshaw et al, four Chinese women began meeting in San Francisco to compare notes as recent immigrants. It was 1949 and they called themselves ‘The Joy Luck Club’. The women were bound together by circumstance and history, vowing to make money and a new life for themselves. It’s a complex and delicately interwoven tale of Chinese mothers and daughters, revealing secrets and lies and all striving to find a place in the modern world whilst feeling the constant tug of their past. If you’ve never read Tan before then this is a brilliant place to start.
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