Norma Kurap Herr was a talented musician when she started hearing voices at age 19. She struggled with schizophrenia for the rest of her life, and was in and out of psychiatric wards and often homeless before she died at age 80.

In this new memoir Mira Bartok, one of Herr’s two daughters, describes in heartbreaking detail her mother’s descent into chaos and its effect on the author and her sister.

Herr frequently threatened to kill herself and warned her daughters to be careful because someone, perhaps Nazis, might try to kidnap, kill or rape them. At night she would pound on her daughters’ bedroom door, screaming and frightening them. In one scary scene, Herr grabs a broken bottle, pins the author to the floor, slices into her neck and threatens to kill her.

Finally, as young adults, Bartok and her sister reluctantly decide to change their names and cut off all contact with their mother. They communicate with her through a post office box, but do not see her again for 17 years.

Bartok is an engaging writer who helps us see the devastation of schizophrenia and its cruel impact on a brilliant woman who loved music and art, but was captive to a malady that took control of her brain. Bartok quotes another schizophrenic as saying, “It’s like your head is plugged into every electric socket in every house on every street.”

The book excels in its exploration of the fragility of memory, which is particularly relevant here because Bartok was involved in a horrific traffic accident that severely damaged her brain in 1999. It appears that she still has difficulty performing simple everyday tasks.

Bartok describes the science of memory, the impact of brain damage on memory, and the difficulty of trying to write an accurate memoir when her memory is foggy and sometimes differs from what her sister recalls. The author admits her confusion and uncertainty about certain particulars and conversations.

Before the age of 10, she writes, children “have a kind of childlike amnesia.” As adults, they might learn about long-ago events from someone who cannot tell the difference between reality and a dream.

The author’s discussion of her leaky memory raises the obvious question of how she could recall numerous word-for-word conversations from decades ago.

The book’s title comes from a Jesuit priest who visited China to teach scholars how to create an imaginary palace to keep their memories safe.

Although the first half of this book captures the reader’s interest as it describes the chaos of living with a schizophrenic mother, much of the second half meanders as Bartok travels to Italy, Israel, and Norway for extended stays. She writes children’s books, marries and divorces a man who suffers from apparent bipolar illness, pursues her devotion to art and sets out to learn more about her dad, “an aspiring alcoholic writer” who left the family when the author was 4 years old.

But these chapters serve as a diversion that take us away from the central theme of Bartok’s complicated, strained relationship with her sick mother, who loves her daughters deeply even while she while she is gripped by a terrible illness.

When Bartok and her sister learn in 2006 that their mother is dying from cancer, they return to Cleveland to be with her. They find the key to a U-Haul storage locker where their mom has put family memorabilia, journals and letters that bring back memories and show how much she loved them.

In a poignant scene of mother-daughter love and renewed connection, the author helps her terminally ill mother to the bathroom, and then assists her as they move slowly back toward the mother’s bed.

“We stay in the middle of the room for a long time, holding on to each other” Bartok writes. “I wrap my arms around her tighter. My mother closes her eyes and relaxes into my embrace.”

The Memory Palace: A Memoir, by Mira Bartok. Free Press, 305 pp., $25

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

For weeks, Unbroken has been perched at or near the top of the nonfiction best-seller list, and for good reason.

The book tells the riveting story of a World War II airman who survived for 47 days in 1943 on a raft in the Pacific Ocean before Japanese soldiers captured him and held him in brutal conditions for the rest of the war.

The airman, Louis Zamperini, was a world-class runner who expected to compete in the 1940 Olympics when war sabotaged his athletic dreams. He joined the military and was assigned to a B-24 crew in the Pacific. During a search mission an engine failed, and his plane plunged into the ocean. Most crew members were killed, but Zamperini and two others survived.

Unbroken grabs readers from the first page because of Laura Hillenbrand’s obvious passion, compelling writing, and use of telling details to bring the story to life.

Hillenbrand puts us on the raft as the survivors struggle to stay alive. “The equatorial sun lay upon the men, scalding their skin,” she writes. “Their upper lips burned and cracked, ballooning so dramatically that they obstructed their nostrils, while their lower lips bulged against their chins.” Sharks circled and violent storms tossed the raft into the air. The starving men survived on birds, fish, small sharks and rainwater.

One of the three surviving airmen died on the raft, and Japanese soldiers captured the others after they had drifted 2,000 miles. Hillenbrand details the horrific treatment endured by prisoners of war in Japanese concentration camps. One particularly brutal soldier, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, would run among the POWs and club every man he saw, “fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man’s ear half off, leaving men unconscious.”

Watanabe took a special interest in Zamperini, springing on him “randomly, every day, pounding his face and head.” He ordered Zamperini to care for the camp’s pig by cleaning up its excrement with his bare hands. Zamperini ate the pig’s food to survive.

Hillenbrand expertly weaves into the story background on the war and Japan’s belief that it had a divine right to rule over all of Asia. Japanese soldiers and civilians saw their enemies as “brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome ‘Anglo-Saxon devils.’ ”

Treatment of prisoners of war was so harsh that tens of thousands died in captivity, Hillenbrand writes. Many who survived returned home with grievous injuries and illnesses. A huge percentage suffered from crippling post-traumatic stress disorder.

The book’s description of the devastating psychic aftermath of war is relevant today because thousands of men and women are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with staggering physical and mental ailments.

Back home in California, Zamperini suffered from extreme anxiety and random rage, and soon drifted into alcoholism. He married, but the couple fought over his wild behavior. In one scary nightmare Zamperini saw himself straddling Mutsuhiro Watanabe and strangling him, but in fact he was strangling his pregnant wife on their bedroom floor. She screamed in terror, and he woke up.

Zamperini fixated on returning to Japan so he could seek out and kill Watanabe, but in another remarkable story twist, Zamperini’s wife persuaded him to attend a Billy Graham crusade, where the suffering soldier experienced a conversion to Jesus. He gave up alcohol, founded a non-profit boys’ camp, became a Christian speaker, and forgave the man who had tortured him.

I have one quibble. Unbroken occasionally is repetitive as Hillenbrand catalogues Japan’s unconscionable treatment of POWs. The mind becomes numb, trying to absorb so much horror. But overall Unbroken is a masterful, well-told account of an important slice of World War II.

Hillenbrand previously wrote Seabiscuit, the best-selling story of a race horse that later became a successful movie. One can safely bet that Unbroken will appear on the big screen, too.

One of the most remarkable aspects of both Seabiscuit and Unbroken is that Hillenbrand was able to write a book at all. She has suffered for years from crippling chronic fatigue syndrome, and rarely leaves her Washington, D.C., home. She has never met Zamperini, who lives in California, although she interviewed him scores of times by phone.

Readers can hope that one day Hillenbrand will use her superb writing skills to pen a memoir about her own remarkable life.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House, 473 pp., $27

Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

As America’s only three-time poet laureate, Robert Pinsky would appear perfectly suited to deliver a “State of the Nation”-style disquisition.

Who better to survey the role of poetry in contemporary life -- the challenges (and opportunities) presented by the digital revolution, the rise of spoken-word and hip-hop, the advent of the amazing shrinking attention span?

Pinsky, however, declines the invitation:

“Unlike the Dow Jones or the Mets or video games, poetry is fundamental and central and enduring,” Pinsky says. “Poetry goes deeper than terms like ‘the state of’ and ‘2011.’ Nothing against 2011, but personally, I’m in many ways more interested in 1595 and 2164.”

Before branding Pinsky with a scarlet “E” (for “elitist,” or perhaps even “effete”), it’s important to note that his faith in high culture is matched by an equally firm confidence in the general reader.

Pinsky, special guest poet at this week’s 7^th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, created the Favorite Poem Project during his time as poet laureate (1997-2000). Not only is it an ingenious forum for the promotion of poetry, it also disproves a received truth about the American character that goes back to the nation’s beginnings.

That’s the idea that America hates poetry and neglects its greatest poets. Eighteen thousand people responded to Pinsky’s call for a favorite poem, with 50 of them filmed in mini-documentaries, reading and discussing their selection. [To see the videos, visit http://www.favoritepoem.org/.]

“No human culture I know of is without poetry,” Pinsky says. “Poetry is like dancing, or singing. There may be fads or exemplars, but the thing itself is large and permanent. I love the Favorite Poem Project because it doesn’t persuade you to love poetry, but asks what poetry you already love.”

As a poet, Pinsky is often praised for the musicality of his verse. He grew up hoping to become a jazz musician and at one time hoped to be a musician, but turned to poetry when his skill with the saxophone fell short. Since his first collection, Sadness and Happiness, came out in 1975, he’s published a total of 11 collections. He’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s also an important translator, critic and essayist.

“I write with my ear,” Pinsky says. “I’m trying to do with the sounds of vowels and consonants what I was not always doing with the horn.”

When he reads Wednesday night after the gala fundraising dinner, Pinsky will be accompanied by the Paul Tardiff Jazz Trio.

“Jazz was one of the pleasures of youth, but I drifted away from it in my 20s. I thought that pleasure was in the past, but now I’ve read with some tremendous musicians. It’s very different from songwriting, where the words fit the tune. It’s more like a conversation between words and instruments.” [To see samples of Pinsky reading with jazz accompaniment, visit http://vimeo.com/2772210/.]

Miles Coon, founder and director of the festival, calls Pinsky “a master of taking a symbol of America or some aspect of American life and expanding on it.”

“One of the things I love about poetry is the way it presents the vagaries of life and how to deal with them,” Coon says. “One of Pinsky’s poems I adore is ‘Samurai Song.’ It’s a persona poem, with a samurai talking about loss and how he copes with it. In reading it I feel like I’m a samurai and we are all warriors on the battlefield of life.”

In fact, adds Coon, the first time he saw Pinsky read the poem it was with a jazz trio. “Which seemed odd,” Coon recalls. “Jazz? Samurai? But it works, which proves a point. Even someone reading to the rhythms of jazz is a samurai. Pinsky epitomizes the strength of the personal lyric. He represents all of us, and what it means to be a body in time, alive.”

Coon is no less enthusiastic for the other poets on this year’s schedule: Heather McHugh, Thomas Lux, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Vijay Seshadri, C.D. Wright, Jane Hirschfield and the spoken-word poets D. Blair and Taylor Mali.

The poetry workshops are sold out, but plenty of room remains for the public readings and discussions by the featured poets that take place each afternoon at 2 p.m. and each evening at 8. You don’t even have to attend the gala dinner (at $250 each) to attend Pinsky’s performance.

Tickets for all the public events are $12 general admission, $10 for seniors and $8 for students. All events are at Old School Square in downtown Delray Beach. For schedules, directions and tickets (it’s wise to purchase ahead of time), see http://www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org/.

The festival begins Tuesday with a 2 p.m. craft talk by Jane Hirschfield and Vijay Seshadri. The kick-off reading, featuring Heather McHugh and Alan Shapiro, follows in the evening at 8. It wraps up Saturday night with a spoken word performance by Blair and Mali, both national slam poetry champions.

“This festival is going to be great,” Coon says. “We have 107 poets coming to take the workshops, including a woman from England here for the second time. We have a participant from British Columbia. It’s a testament to what we’ve accomplished here. And our line-up of featured poets is just terrific.”

Lux, for example, is the festival’s “old stand-by,” Coon says, having been here for every year to date: “People are blown away by his readings.” McHugh, he declares, “is a certified genius, one of the most intelligent, witty poets writing today.”

Pinsky, making his first appearance at the festival, also praises the line-up of poets. “Anyone who knows poetry will see how good it is,” he says. It’s also the kind of event that can prove his idea that Americans already love poetry and do not need to have it sold to them “like soap or toothpaste.”

A big part of the misconception that America doesn’t revere poetry comes from its characteristic entrepreneurial spirit, which has left poetry in particular and culture in general to the mercies of the marketplace. In many European and Asian cultures, Pinsky explains, “there is a social class that considers itself by heredity the curator of art.” In Eastern Europe, he says, two cab drivers in an argument may accuse each other of having no culture.

“It’s no better or worse, but for good or ill we don’t have that traditional snob value for certain kinds of art,” Pinsky says. As a result, it falls to two “industries” to preserve and foster culture: show business and academia.

“I have a lot of respect for shows and film, but the idea poetry is not loved by comparison is misguided,” Pinsky says. “You can’t compare an Elizabeth Bishop poem to a TV show, or even whether it’s on the curriculum. Entertainment and the academy are only part of the culture. They are not the culture.”

I doubt Laura Lippman would want me to say this out loud, but she’s not a mystery writer anymore.

Oh, sure, the talented Ms. Lippman, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, is a mystery writer when she’s producing the popular, award-winning series featuring private eye Tess Monahan. But her stand-alones – there are five of them now – are something else again.

Her latest, I’d Know You Anywhere, doesn’t even stand as a thriller, unless the mere presence of suspense qualifies. Nor is it conventional crime fiction, though crime does figure, and it is, of course, fiction. But if I’d Know You Anywhere isn’t a mystery or a crime novel, then what is it?

Using Holmesian logic (“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”) I conclude that any book so utterly lacking in genre convention as I’d Know You Anywhere is, by definition, literary fiction. It is certainly the kind of novel that merrily complicates the eternal debate over the genre divide.

Consider a recent essay in the London Guardian, wherein an acclaimed British novelist named Edward Docx sets out to clear up the genre vs. literary muddle for us once again. After pointing out how lousy Dan Brown or Stieg Larsson actually are, he proceeds to dismantle genre writing as a whole: “[E]ven good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works, and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this.”

This is all nicely elitist, as any argument in favor of the supremacy of literary fiction ought to be. Docx’s bracing corrective presents simple aesthetic truths that, somehow, need to be restated every few years (or perhaps weeks). In fact, I’ve written similar things in the past, and I find myself nodding in agreement – all the while something inside is furrowing its brow, stammering, “And yet, and yet…”

And yet no matter how persuasive Docx’s thesis might be, he necessarily carries his truth in a leaky wineskin. The scope of his argument allows no room for some of the distinct virtues of genre fiction – the lurid energy of pulp, for example, or the highly useful idea-mongering of science fiction, or for the places Jim Thompson, Eric Ambler, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford (to name but a very few) take us with ease, but which seem off limits to most literary writers, who have their own constraints, truth be told.

Take The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald’s depiction of Gatsby as a mobster is the least authentic (and also the least important) aspect of this otherwise sterling little classic. On the other hand, some few literary writers are quite at home with thrilleresque themes and characters. Hemingway, for example, virtually invented gangster-speak in his short story The Killers (read this story, then watch any noir film from the ’30s or ’40s), and the pulpiest parts of To Have and Have Not, featuring the smuggler Harry Morgan, are by far the most successful bits of this otherwise failed novel.

And what, Mr.Docx, are we to make of writers the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Price, Albert Camus, Barbara Vine, Dan Choan, Elmore Leonard, Denis Johnson, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Stephen King, Kate Atkinson, and innumerable others, some coming from the literary side, some from the genre side, and all meeting in that portion of the Venn diagram where fascination with crime and morbid psychology shade into writerly excellence?

In truth, much more intercourse takes place between literary and genre fiction than critics like Docx care to acknowledge. And Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere is a brilliant example of the kind of novel that snaps Docx’s rule in half. Focusing on Eliza Benedict, an affluent stay-at-home mom (with a secret!) in Bethesda, Md., the novel thwarts genre expectation at every turn.

Married to a former journalist who has gone over to corporate communications, Eliza and her family have returned from nearly two decades in England. She’s just settling in to her new surroundings when she gets an unwanted letter from an old acquaintance, Walter Bowman, who has seen her picture in a society magazine. “Of course you are an older woman now,” Bowman writes from Virginia’s death row. “Still, I’d know you anywhere.”

When Eliza was 15, it quickly transpires, Bowman, a serial rapist who murdered his victims, kidnapped her when she came upon him burying a body in the woods. He forced her to travel with him for six weeks, until he kidnapped and killed another girl, and was finally caught.

Against her better judgment, Eliza eventually decides to correspond with Walter, who claims to be a changed man in search of forgiveness. He also promises to reveal the location of more bodies for the benefit of families still grieving in uncertainty. But Eliza also has unresolved conflicts about why Walter did not kill her, and why she did not try to escape when he left her unwatched.

Every major character is fully drawn, and most minor ones (Eliza’s husband is the sole cipher, but he doesn’t matter much). These include not only Eliza and Walter – a wonderful creation, full of cunning and self-deceit – but also an unstable prisoner’s advocate, and the embittered mother of a victim who blames Eliza for her daughter’s murder.

Lippman toggles neatly between the present and 1985, when Eliza was a plain, Madonna-obsessed girl in the shadow of a more brilliant sister. She knows she wasn’t, as some critics claim, Walter’s girlfriend. But why, then, did he let her live? Why was she so passive? What hold does he still have over her? And ultimately, will she join the effort to get his death sentence commuted to life in prison?

The psychological and emotional richness of I’d Know You Anywhere is its secret narrative engine. Eliza is an imperfect heroine, yet she’s all the more believable for her weaknesses. And the resolution, as suppressed memories rise to the forefront of Eliza’s mind, is also more satisfying for being both hard-earned and exactly life-sized.

Chauncey Mabe is the former books editor of the Sun-Sentinel. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

I’d Know You Anywhere, by Laura Lippman; 384 pp., William Morrow, $25.99.

Reading Sara Gruen’s Ape House, I was reminded of one April Fool’s Day when my daughters were 6 and 4.

I got up in the morning and excitedly called them: “Come quick, our cat Mittens is talking!”

Their astonished but not disbelieving faces as they rushed into the living room, expecting to hear our housecat opine for tuna rather than Meow Mix delighted me, and we all ended up laughing wistfully at the very idea.

It’s that type of amazement and gratification regarding animals actually communicating with us in language that forms the premise of Ape House. Gruen’s first wildly popular best-seller, Water for Elephants, also centered on animals in captivity and their relationships with humans.

This time, she focuses on bonobos, small cousins to chimpanzees, and the theme is tantalizing to animal lovers everywhere: An animal that talks, and lets us in on the mystery of those simian, yet achingly human, eyes.

Gruen’s novel begins in the fictional Great Ape Learning Lab. Here, Dr. Isabel Duncan has been teaching bonobos American Sign Language. The six bonobos are immediately captivating, and individually rendered, from the matriarch Bonzi, to the adolescents, the alpha male and the baby Lola. Gruen says in her acknowledgements that she based much of the apes’ dialogue and actions on real events that happened when she visited and studied the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa.

Unfortunately, while Gruen spins us along on a fast-paced plot involving a journalist, the scientist who loves the bonobos like her own family, and a nefarious reality show showcasing the apes that captivates the nation, she leaves behind the best part of her novel: the relationships and characters of the apes themselves.

In addition to the quickly but sweetly rendered bonobos, Gruen’s characters are John Thigpen, a newspaper reporter who begins a feature on the apes and then, when the lab is mysteriously bombed setting the apes free, finds it becoming the biggest story of his career; Isabel Duncan, the scientist who has devoted her life to them; and an ever-expanding crew including the lab director (who is Duncan’s fiancé) , Thigpen’s Hollywood-bound and biological clock-ticking wife, a porn filmmaker intent on using the bonobos to establish ratings, and a roster of others that push this novel to the bursting point.

Unlike Water for Elephants, which shifted time periods and had a historical quality, Ape House is thoroughly modern. The real time references and themes are promising at times: the bonobos become stars of the world’s most popular reality show, Ape House, which has millions glued to their sets watching the apes order in cheeseburgers, candy and pizza, have sex constantly, and skim board on the wet floors with ripped off cabinet doors.

But Gruen’s characters lack depth. She explains Isabel’s closeness with the apes with a conveniently horrible childhood rife with abandonment. We never understand why a woman who is so in tune with primates would be captivated by the increasingly suspicious Dr. Peter Benton. The plot twists often are not explained. Why does Benton put his uncharacteristically drunken fiancée in a cab on New Year’s Eve and stay behind, only, we learn later, to have sex with a flirty intern?

I was tantalized by the possible plot turns afforded by the evil Cat, the journalist colleague who pushes John Thigpen out of his enterprise story on the apes and takes over. Why does John’s editor let this happen, and where is his internal angst or rightful anger over this turn of events? Why does he slouch back to work on the Urban Warrior column with no argument, enduring evermore humiliating assignments?

But Gruen abandons her character portrayal in favor of a plotline that becomes a predictable thriller. Where the reader should have been worrying about whether Bonzi and the other apes would ever get back home, it becomes assumed this will be the happy ending because the story has become so clichéd, down to the rescued but lovable giant of a pit bull dog. Why was that bombed-out meth lab in the book, anyway?

Ape House is an enjoyable novel, but I expected it to evoke more emotion. If Gruen had stuck to exploring the apes’ characters and their relationships to each other and the humans, while also looking at the underlying questions of keeping primates in captivity, it would have been much more satisfying.

If I cried when I read a short article about Koko the talking gorilla and her relationship with the cat she named All Ball, certainly a whole novel about apes who also talk, who love, and who form bonds with their humans, could have caused at least a little sniffling.

Terri L. Parker is the investigative reporter for WPBF-Channel 25 in West Palm Beach. She was an English major at the University of Virginia.

Ape House, by Sara Gruen; 320 pp., Spiegel & Grau; $26.