EVERYTHING I LEARNED, I LEARNED in a CHINESE RESTAURANT: A MEMOIR (audiobook) by Curtis Chin

Published in 2023 by Little, Brown, and Company.
Read by the author, Curtis Chin
Duration: 8 hours, 12 minutes.
Unabridged.

Curtis Chin grew up in the 1980s in and around Detroit, Michigan. His immediate family and his extended family shared ownership in a Chinese restaurant in Detroit's Chinatown. Chin spent a considerable chunk of his early life working, eating, and doing homework in the restaurant.

Chin tells about how his family ended up in Detroit, how his parents met and got married, the sometimes uncomfortable extended family dynamic, and the decline of Chung's Cantonese Cuisine's once vibrant neighborhood.

There is also plenty of discussion about school from kindergarten through a four year degree at the University of Michigan. These parts of the story often discussed the racial dynamics of going to school in Detroit's majority minority school system. Later, when the family joined the white flight to the suburbs, there was a new dynamic of going to a school where there were almost no minority students. On top of that, the family was clearly not welcome in the suburbs because they were not white.

As Chin grew older, he had another issue that had his attention more than the ins and outs of the shifting racial currents - his sexual orientation.

Chin starts this part with an amusing story of how he and a cousin snuck out of the restaurant to go into a store near the restaurant that sold porn magazines to take a look. It's an enlightening story for a couple of reasons. It shows how the neighborhood around the restaurant had declined. But, Chin knows something is different when he is more interested in the magazines featuring men than the ones featuring women.

The family restaurant in 1976
Photo from Detroit News archives.

From that point, the book focuses heavily on Chin's struggles with who he can safely come out to and how to meet a man while constantly being surrounded by a very traditional family. Chin often wonders how his family will react when he finally comes out to them.

I have two big criticisms of the book. The first is that we never find out how his family reacts when he comes out to them. He worries about that throughout the second half of the book and he almost tells them at one point at the very end. The second is that considering the title of the book, I found it disappointing that there is no summary at the end of the book that points out the life lessons he learned in a Chinese restaurant.

Not a bad book, but I was disappointed by the two omissions that I mentioned. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  EVERYTHING I LEARNED, I LEARNED in a CHINESE RESTAURANT: A MEMOIR (audiobook) by Curtis Chin.

Unthinkable (Jane Candiotti and Kenny Marks #4) by Clyde Phillips

Published in August 2013 by Thomas and Mercer

This is my 1,000th review on my blog. I have several good books that are already read and just waiting to be reviewed, but only one could be my 1,000th review. This is the best of that small bunch of books and it is really quite good.

This is the fourth book in a series of books about married San Francisco homicide detectives Jane Candiotti and Kenny Marks. I had not read any books in the series until this one and the reader does not have to read them in order to join in.

Candiotti and Marks are called in to a nasty murder scene in a fast food restaurant. Six strangers are massacred in the basement storage area right after the lunch rush. They have nothing in common except for the way they died. To make everything much, much worse, one of the victims is Marks' nephew.

The San Francisco Police Department starts to sort through the clues and work through the pasts of all of the victims looking for a motive and their search leads them to a former gang member who is conducting an investigation of his own and he promises to deal with the murderer in his own way...

Photo by Rich Niewiroski Jr.

This story grabs you from the first moment and pulls you right through. I flew through this book and I was genuinely surprised by who actually committed the murders and the ending is quite satisfying.

Disclosure: the publisher sent me an advance reader's copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program at no charge in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Unthinkable by Clyde Phillips.

Reviewed on June 30, 2013.

NPR Driveway Moments: Cat Tales (audiobook)

Published by HighBridge Audio
Duration: about 2 hours.

Every installment of HighBridge Audio's NPR Driveway Moments series is composed of collections of stories that aired on NPR. In this case, the common theme is cats.  The stories aired from 1984 to 2011 and cover everything from lions to mock youtube videos of a cat running for the Senate (Hank the Cat - see the video below) to the origins of the domestic house cat to cats being used in the fight against AIDS.




But, the heart of the collection are the stories about the connection between every day house cats and the people they live with. There are travelling cats, vacationing cats, a cat that lives in a hotel and several stories memorializing cats who have passed on.

All of the stories in the collection have first-rate production values but, as always happens in any collection, some stories are better than others. The cover of the audiobook promises "Radio stories that won't let you go" and some do that, but a couple of the stories were so maudlin (brooding over cats that had recently died) that it was a relief when they ended.

But, if you are a cat person, this is a great collection for you.

I rate this collection 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NPR Driveway Moments: Cat Tales.

Reviewed on October 17, 2012.

Guilt (Abe Glitsky #2) by John Lescroart

I hate to be the party pooper but...

Published in 1997.

Despite good experience with Lescroart in the past, despite the rave reviews on the back cover of Guilt and a dozen rave reviews inside the front cover, I found myself only caring about what happened to Abe Glitsky. The slow-moving, plodding plot line only reinforced the fact that I did not care what happened to the Mark Dooher. Did he kill his wife? I don't know - it's mentioned in the first sentence in the plot synopsis on the back cover and 200 pages into the book she's still alive and I'm getting irritated at reading about Dooher's connivings to sleep with one of his young employees.

So, anyway, I read exactly 200 pages of this book. It was not easy. I was forcing myself to continue on, much like I would do with a college textbook.

Then I came across the new Tony Hillerman book and I gladly dropped this one into the box of books that I'm dropping off at the Goodwill. Thank goodness I am now "Guilt" free!.

I rate this book 1 star out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Guilt by John Lescroart.

Reviewed on November 26, 2006.

Act of Deceit (Harlan Donnally #1) by Steven Gore

A very busy book that just didn't do it for me.

Published in 2011.

 I enjoyed meeting retired detective Harlan Donnally in Act of Deceit. Donnally was forced to retire due to an injury sustained during a shootout. He goes about his business with a battered body but a world class commitment to following the trail to wherever it leads.

But, the book has so many twists and turns that it felt like the author was whipsawing the story around just build an artificial sense of tension. We start out with an investigation that dates back to the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love movement in San Francisco but the investigation soon veers into other territory: Catholic priest sex abuse and international sex trafficking as well as the dynamics of the dysfunctional relationship between a father and son. The first part was interesting to me, the last part - old and tired territory.

Gore notes at the end of the book that his wife is involved in investigating Catholic priest sex abuse accusations in the San Francisco area, which is the inspiration for involving that angle in this story. However, I for one am tired of having that brought into so many stories. Was every priest a pedophile? Hardly, but you wouldn't know it from the bestseller list.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Act of Deceit by Steven Gore.

Reviewed on October 20, 2011.