Book Review: Something to Hold

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Something to Hold

Author: Sharon Stone

Date: 2005

Publisher: Assouline

ISBN: 2-84323-754-8

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: black-and-white or sepia-tone photographs by Mimi Craven

Quote: “[W]orking for and traveling with...(American Foundation for AIDS Research), I have met so mnay extraordinary people...traveling with my best friend of twenty-three years, Mimi Craven...We wanted to encourage people to reckon with their feelings; not to be engulfed by them...Mimi and I would like to transfer all of our royalties to AMFAR to help continue research in the ongoing crisis of AIDS.”

For those who don't remember, Sharon Stone was the beautiful blonde star in a batch of really lame movies. Men used to want to watch these movies. Women used to hate sitting through movies whose only redeeming feature was brief images of apparently naked blonde-flesh, hate the idea that men who usually picked decent movies to share with us were subjecting us to all this badness just because they were attracted to Sharon Stone. Therefore a lot of women our age dislike Sharon Stone. I didn't like her movies any more than anyone else did, but I never blamed her for doing what young actors do, either.

The actress's and her friend's gift to their favorite charity was a book of pretty pictures of angel sculptures in memorial gardens, with captions like “even angels need new friends” and “I see you around every corner.”

I'm tempted to say “Nufsed.” Our entire demographic generation know who Sharon Stone is. You want to read her book, or you don't. We also know how AIDS is transmitted, once but no longer by medical treatments, now by the voluntary behavior of adults who've had plenty of time to learn why their voluntary behavior was stupid. You want to support AIDS research, or you...well, put other charities ahead of it on your list. Either way, whether a book of photographs of stone angels helps you process grief, or not, is not something a book review can predict. What you won't love is that there's only one picture of Sharon Stone, on the little ribbon of paper the publisher unaccountably chose to substitute for a dust jacket, in the whole book.

But in fact I do find more to say about my copy of Something to Hold, because what I bought in aid of a local charity turned out not to be merely a famous actress's fundraiser, but a unique, hand-collaged creation by an anonymous local author. (I know what you're thinking; if that author has a screen name, it's not “Priscilla King.”) After the angel pictures, which are untouched in my copy, apparently Stone wrote down some thoughts about angels that the local author found doctrinally unsound, so the local author carefully hand-wrote a Bible study about angels on bits of paper s/he glued over the original text. The last eighteen pages of my copy are the work of an evangelical Bible student. Apparently Stone was content to address the topic of angels in a bland, general, New Agey way, but the person who collaged my copy added a final section redirecting the glory to Jesus.

Well... Stone wrote, “Angels are...Ongwheonwhe in the Amerindian language: the 'Birds People.'” Which “Amerindian” language? Analogue: “Information that's presented in a way that makes it too incomplete to verify is Merde in the European language”? I can see why the former owner lost patience and started collaging. It's not that there is or has ever been any shortage of books that contain vague, incomplete, or just plain wrong information about “Amerindians.” It's that the angels in the main section of the book are very real and concrete. The words that follow this collection of angels needed to be concrete and factual too, and by covering the vague New Age wordage with a Bible study, the anonymous evangelical writer has added an upbeat climax to the angels where I suspect a vague denouement used to be.

The unique hand-collaged book is available only in real life--readers have to see it for themselves. What I can offer online is Stone's original book. This is a book that seems to generate strange reactions. Apart from the hand-collaging, there's also the way Amazon tried to redirect me, when I set up the photo link, to two other books whose author and title are irrelevant to the search string I used...Some people really don't like Sharon Stone. Some people really don't like New Agey angel literature. Some people really don't like AIDS charities. If buying it as a gift, please make sure the recipient doesn't have any of those reactions. 

To buy it here, send $10 per book (it was designed as a collection piece) plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, and we'll send $1.50 to AMFAR. Four copies will fit into one package, and if you order four copies we'll send $6 to AMFAR.