Three Weeks With My Brother

written by Nicholas Sparks

My friend Kellie loaned me this book and talked me into giving Nicholas Sparks a second try. This is his first nonfiction book, and I will admit, I did like it better than his smarmy novels. There's some candid, touching stuff here as he tells some stories about his childhood, set against the backdrop of a travelogue from a current-day trip that he embarks on with — you guessed it — his brother. His style still irritates me, though.

Of note:

• The byline includes Sparks' brother Micah, but the entire book is told only from Nicholas' perspective. I find that kind of weird. I kept expecting to hear from Micah, but that never happened.
  
• Sparks calls this "a memoir." I'm sorry, but the guy's only thirtysomething! Is he really entitled to use the word "memoir" when his life isn't even half over yet?
  
• It was fun to read about some of these brothers' childhood antics, especially because they grew up around the same time as I did. The parenting styles and cultural trends of the early and mid-seventies are certainly things that I identify with.
  
• Even in his nonfiction, Sparks is guilty of oversimplifying just about everything! Case in point: he tells of how his son seems to have some form of learning disability or autism or something, and scads of respected medical professionals couldn't agree on a diagnosis or effective treatment. So what does Sparks do? He basically just pulls the kid up by the bootstraps, spends hours on end "working with him" and by third grade the son ends up being pretty much normal. Huh? Anyone with a special-needs kid knows that life just isn't that simple! You don't solve a learning disability by just "working with" the kid more, or harder.
  
• Sparks seems to have a perpetual need to to puff himself up, sending the message that his biggest fault is that he just can't quit accomplishing so much. Check out this self-important statement about one of the more difficult periods in his life: "Somehow, despite all that, I squeezed in time to earn a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, lift weights, and jog daily. I continued to read a hundred books a year. I slept less that five hours a night..." (And he did this all while writing a sizeable collection of very simplistic but bestselling novels, each of which he carefully and clearly mentions by name, several times.) Looking past all the overachieving, I see a dysfunctional dad/husband/workaholic who just seems driven to write more books and make more money.
  
• There is some pretty enjoyable humor here, though if you're super-sensitive to cultural propriety, there might be some stuff that offends you. In some of their travels, the two brothers come off as dorky, juvenile, overgrown nine-year-olds swept up in a lot of buffoonery, with no appreciation for foreign cultures. (Micah, for example, gets busted for lying down on a sacred ritual stone at a Mayan ruin and asking to get his picture taken.)
  
• There were some kind of aimless ponderings about God and faith, but they didn't materialize into much. Sparks seems to have a vague sense of devotion but can't quite seem to close the loop on why God should matter - to his brother or to anyone else.
  
• The recounting of the loss and pain this family has experienced is memorable. I think any person will empathize with some of the difficulties Sparks experienced through the death of his parents and his sister.