BlueMumble Reviews | Movies, Books, TV, and Music

90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life
Don Piper with Cecil Murphey
(8 out of 10)

Category: Memoir
Paperback: 208 pages
First Edition: September 2004

While going home from a Baptist Convention in 1989, Don Piper’s car collided with an eighteen-wheeler truck, the wheels crashing through the roof of his car at 110mph.  He was barely recognizable from his car seat, with legs and hands, bones and blood all over him.  The emergency team that came to the scene declared him dead on the spot.  No pulse.  Ninety-minutes later, a minister, one of those held up by the traffic jam caused by the accident prayed over him, singing praises to God.  Dead as Don Piper was, he sang.   This is his story.

Continue reading »

written by admin

Myself, Elsewhere
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil
(8 out of ten)

Category: Memoir
Paperback: 191 pages
First Edition: December 2006

Someday in the future, someone will write about Manila at the turn of the 21st century and I wonder what it’d be about - the high-rise condos?  EDSA II?  The almost-forgotten EDSA III?  Rockwell?  The Fort?  What traces of places and events would be remembered and how will they be remembered?

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil at 84 writes about pre-war Ermita, how it was nothing like the dark, downtrodden place it is now.  How “it was a charming colonial town built by Europeans and Americans for their delectation.”

At once a memoir and a personal account of Philippine History, Myself, Elsewhere, is an engaging, oftentimes self-deprecating, and ultimately bittersweet portrait of a Manila that we can only imagine.  San Juan is what Tagaytay is now for most of us.  Antipolo was a vacation and pilgrimage site.  Quiapo is not the dirty and dangerous place it is now.  And Ermita was never synonymous to Malate. 

She takes us through familiar names and places, lensed and voiced through a personal point of view, that we come out changed and different after the last word has been written.  She moves back and forth in history, from Philippines’ Declaration of Independence to the aftermath of World War II, with a cold insight that cuts swiftly without a trace of sentimentality.

She writes as her social status dictates, but without any pretension or prejudice.  And the last two chapters of the book relives what she calls her “self-inflicted amnesia” about the war.  Their house was shelled and destroyed, her husband and most of her relatives have died from the war; they were destitute and she had a 16-month old baby (Gemma Cruz Araneta) and another one in her belly.  And she was only 22. 

The words resonate so well today with wars going on in all corners of the world when she writes: “How it made me hate the Americans for their ruthlessness and callous disregard for human, civilian, non-combatant lives.”

And in this age when most Filipinos dream the American Dream, she reminds us of the greatness and valor of Filipinos past and the treachery and deception of the Americans.  She tells us that more than food, drink and a roof, we need our memories.  Memories not just of ourselves, but of our country as well.

written by admin

The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer
(9 out of ten)

Category: Memoir
Hardcover: 384 pages (also available in paperback)
First Edition: September 1, 2005

Few of us would call a bar a holy place.  But for J.R. Moehringer, the bar has been his refuge and sanctuary where “the heart is purer, the mind clearer.” 

The mostly male populace of the bar, in Manhasset, New York, has provided him the balance he sought growing up in a house populated by the female species.  The men from the bar makes up for the absence of his father, whom he calls “The Voice, a DJ who almost killed his mother when he was a baby.

He writes affectionately about the bar, the characters that inhabit it, and how it had served him and saved him from most of his life.  From his struggle to search for his own identity separate and distinct from his father, to his feeling of helplessness of being unable to provide for his mother; his acceptance at Yale and the difficulty of an underprivileged student studying at an Ivy League school; his first love and heartbreak; his dead-end copywriting job, the bar has always been the place he sought for solace and answers.  Drinking, drinking, and drinking.  Where it seems drunken wisdom rings truer than a sober one.

The writing flows seamlessly from page to page, from characters to characters, and anywhere in the book are nuggets of wisdom that run smoothly like a good ol’ drink.  When he was failing spectacularly at Yale, his mother told him: “Your best is what you can comfortably do without having a breakdown.”

And when he voiced out his concern about his first love, asking his mother what if it ends.  His mother replied, “You’ll find a way to live.”

Indeed, for all his search for a perfect male role model, JR realized that his mother, more than any other male character in his life, has always been the resilient one so much so that when he finally graduated from Yale, he gave his class ring to his mother.

He quotes Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, “They say, best men are moulded out of faults/And, for the most, become much more the better/For being a little bad.”  And his story shows us how.

written by admin