A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.
Liz and her sister Lisa grew up with parents who were hard-core drug abusers. They lived in New York City. There is one B & W photo of her mother who looks a bit like Janis Joplin but with dark hair. Her parents used drugs intravenously every day.
"A man had beaten Daddy's head into the cement just down the block...and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, has addiction was so strong that he gambled his safety night after night....he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma's crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealer in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents' world."
Liz grew up somehow but almost never went to school. For years and years she ran the streets with her street family, a group of friends who cared for her and she for them. Many also had compromised lives but they struggled together, helped each other and were her salvation. She became adept at avoiding trunacy officials, at working off and on in marginal non-official capacities, at doing everything she could to help her mother. For a long, long time, their dirty disorganized apartment was a haven for her. Her parents would occasionally emerge from their drug hazes, and there would be a semblance of normalcy and love that sufficed for Liz. She became their protectors, especially looking out for her mother, watching from the window at night for her to stagger home from the bar.
But then her Ma gets sick with AIDS and also has periodic mental breakdowns requiring hospitalizations. She would return home and be clean and sober for short periods of time, but always quickly relapsed. Her mother sold herself for drugs and finally moved in with a brutish man named Brick, off IV drugs but not off alcohol.
Liz finally is forced to live on the streets, on park benches, sleeping in subway cars, on landings in friends' apartment buildings, or hidden in friends' rooms, arriving after a parent had gone to bed and leaving before they got up. She stole food to survive; she was dirty and tattered and cold and hungry much of the time. And then, at age 17 with ONE high-school credit to her name, she hears about Humanities Preparatory Academy and gets accepted, although this meant, among other hurdles, that her Dad needed to sign papers to register her. Her mother had died and her Dad was living in a shelter by this time, but he comes to the school and fills out the papers.
And as they leave the school:
"He didn't ask questions, and I hoped it would stay that way. What I was avoiding in every way possible, was for him to know what I was really going through. Because if he found out, I knew it would hurt him. Then he'd be living in a shelter and worrying about me too. Then I'd worry about him worrying about me, and what good would that do either of us?" An amazing and poignant reaction to a man who had done so little to nurture his daughter. That she had the wisdom at age 17 to accept and forgive and love her parents is also why Liz' story is remarkable. Seldom is this the case with such messed up parents.
Liz perseveres and does go to Harvard and eventually she has her Dad move in with her and some friends in Cambridge.
"Just a month before Daddy died, Ed and I took him a on long-awaited trip to San Farncisco...Ed and I just followed Daddy to his favorite spots: Haight-Ashbury, Alcatraz, and his beloved City Lights Bookstore..."
He died 3 weeks later; he too had AIDS, but had been 8 years sober by then.
One's heart aches for Liz and her sister and even for her pathetic addicted parents, but this is a compelling story of the human spirit, determination, discipline and love emerging from chaos.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
Book: A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer
This a little book of essays about viruses written "to help people understand more about viruses and virology research." There are 12 chapters and a lovely photo at the beginning of each chapter showing viral forms:
1. The Tobacco Mosaic Virus was discovered by Dutch scientists Mayer and Beierinck in the late 1900s by filtering diseased and ground-up tobacco plants through a fine filter that trapped plant cells and bacteria. The juice that got through the filter still infected plants. "Beijerinck could add alcohol to the filtered fluid and it would reman infective. Heating the fluid to near boiling did it no harm. Beijerinck soaked filter paper in the infectious sap and let it dry. Three months later, he could dip the paper in water and use the solution to sicken new plants." He first used the word virus "to describe the mysterious agent in his contagious living fluid."
2. The Uncommon Cold - Rhinovirus. A virus with only 10 genes and spread by contact. Wash YOUR hands and don't touch your face. Nothing much works to "cure" the common cold.....yet. Scientists are always working on vaccines.
3. Influenza virus. "In 1918, a particularly virulent outbreak of the flu killed an estimated 50,000,000 people. Nowadays, approximately 300,000 people die worldwide from the influenza virus. H1N1 is a flu virus that, fortunately, was not all that virulent. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. See Contagion (movie) if you want more information about how a flu pandemic could (and probaby will) eventually happen.
4. Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Can cause cervical cancer but there is a vaccine. "Of the 30,000,000 American women who carry HPV, only 13,000 a year develop cervical cancer."
5. Bacteriophages. A possible alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that attack bacteria, which is noteworthy as antibiotics continue to become resistant to the organisms they target.
6. Marine Phages. Interesting chapter about viruses living in the oceans. Among other facts is this one:"By one rough calculation, 10% of all the photosynthesis on Earth is carried out with virus genes" or "The genetic makeup of marine viruses...matches almost nothing...Only 10% showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism--even from any other known virus. The other 90% were entirely new to science." (This from seawater samples from Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and the northern Pacific.)
7. Endogenous Retroviruses. Things get more complicated. I think these are viruses that acquire and add DNA from a host. It's all about exchanging DNA and mutating. "Each of us carries amost 100,000 fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8% of our DNA."
8. HIV. Most likely spread from Kinshasha, and HIV probably came from chimpanzees. As our world becomes more a global community, viruses come along with us, moving more freely than ever, down rivers and roads and over the sea and land in airplanes, buses and trains. Do not have unprotected sex and wear gloves when encountering bodily fluids.
9. West Nile Virus. Spread by mosquitoes from infected birds to people. "Between 1999 and 2008, US doctors recorded nearly 30,000 cases of West NIle virus." One gets fevers, rashes and headaches but 85% infections do not even cause symptoms. Nevertheless, in those 10 years, 1131 people died, about 110 per year. There is no vaccine at this time. Warm, muggy, rainy weather are optimal conditions for mosquitoes and the time to be most cautious. Try not to get bit by mosquitoes.
10. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom (SARS) and Ebola or Predicting the Next Plague. SARS "started in Chinese bats....and began to spill over into a catlike mammal called a civet...and then evolved the ability to leap from human and human." The virus was discovered relatively quickly and measures were taken (quarantines, banning civets) and the virus "disappeared, but did cause 900 deaths.
Ebola virus, while horrific, "is just too good at making people sick and so it kills its victims faster than it can find new ones. Once an Ebola outbreak ends, the virus vanishes for years."
11. Smallpox. An interesting chapter on the history of a virus that "may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth." A vaccine was developed and smallpox was totally eradicated on Earth although there are small stocks here and there to be used by scientists (or bioterrorists). There is controversy about preserving this lethal virus of course.
12. Mimivirus, a gigantic virus with 1262 genes (usually viruses have about 10 genes) first found in a water cooling system. They are 100 times bigger than other viruses and are puzzling scientists once again on how and where to classify these organisms...where to place them on the life forms continuum.
So, very briefly, viruses are ubiquitous; minuscule (way smaller than bacteria) and are not killed by antibiotics. They have potential to kill us; they mutate; they move between humans and other fauna, changing as they go in order to stay alive.
Wash your hands; don't touch your face, and keep doing everything your can to promote your own personal healthy effective immune system.
1. The Tobacco Mosaic Virus was discovered by Dutch scientists Mayer and Beierinck in the late 1900s by filtering diseased and ground-up tobacco plants through a fine filter that trapped plant cells and bacteria. The juice that got through the filter still infected plants. "Beijerinck could add alcohol to the filtered fluid and it would reman infective. Heating the fluid to near boiling did it no harm. Beijerinck soaked filter paper in the infectious sap and let it dry. Three months later, he could dip the paper in water and use the solution to sicken new plants." He first used the word virus "to describe the mysterious agent in his contagious living fluid."
2. The Uncommon Cold - Rhinovirus. A virus with only 10 genes and spread by contact. Wash YOUR hands and don't touch your face. Nothing much works to "cure" the common cold.....yet. Scientists are always working on vaccines.
3. Influenza virus. "In 1918, a particularly virulent outbreak of the flu killed an estimated 50,000,000 people. Nowadays, approximately 300,000 people die worldwide from the influenza virus. H1N1 is a flu virus that, fortunately, was not all that virulent. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. See Contagion (movie) if you want more information about how a flu pandemic could (and probaby will) eventually happen.
4. Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Can cause cervical cancer but there is a vaccine. "Of the 30,000,000 American women who carry HPV, only 13,000 a year develop cervical cancer."
5. Bacteriophages. A possible alternative to antibiotics, bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that attack bacteria, which is noteworthy as antibiotics continue to become resistant to the organisms they target.
6. Marine Phages. Interesting chapter about viruses living in the oceans. Among other facts is this one:"By one rough calculation, 10% of all the photosynthesis on Earth is carried out with virus genes" or "The genetic makeup of marine viruses...matches almost nothing...Only 10% showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism--even from any other known virus. The other 90% were entirely new to science." (This from seawater samples from Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and the northern Pacific.)
7. Endogenous Retroviruses. Things get more complicated. I think these are viruses that acquire and add DNA from a host. It's all about exchanging DNA and mutating. "Each of us carries amost 100,000 fragments of endogenous retrovirus DNA in our genome, making up about 8% of our DNA."
8. HIV. Most likely spread from Kinshasha, and HIV probably came from chimpanzees. As our world becomes more a global community, viruses come along with us, moving more freely than ever, down rivers and roads and over the sea and land in airplanes, buses and trains. Do not have unprotected sex and wear gloves when encountering bodily fluids.
9. West Nile Virus. Spread by mosquitoes from infected birds to people. "Between 1999 and 2008, US doctors recorded nearly 30,000 cases of West NIle virus." One gets fevers, rashes and headaches but 85% infections do not even cause symptoms. Nevertheless, in those 10 years, 1131 people died, about 110 per year. There is no vaccine at this time. Warm, muggy, rainy weather are optimal conditions for mosquitoes and the time to be most cautious. Try not to get bit by mosquitoes.
10. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom (SARS) and Ebola or Predicting the Next Plague. SARS "started in Chinese bats....and began to spill over into a catlike mammal called a civet...and then evolved the ability to leap from human and human." The virus was discovered relatively quickly and measures were taken (quarantines, banning civets) and the virus "disappeared, but did cause 900 deaths.
Ebola virus, while horrific, "is just too good at making people sick and so it kills its victims faster than it can find new ones. Once an Ebola outbreak ends, the virus vanishes for years."
11. Smallpox. An interesting chapter on the history of a virus that "may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth." A vaccine was developed and smallpox was totally eradicated on Earth although there are small stocks here and there to be used by scientists (or bioterrorists). There is controversy about preserving this lethal virus of course.
12. Mimivirus, a gigantic virus with 1262 genes (usually viruses have about 10 genes) first found in a water cooling system. They are 100 times bigger than other viruses and are puzzling scientists once again on how and where to classify these organisms...where to place them on the life forms continuum.
So, very briefly, viruses are ubiquitous; minuscule (way smaller than bacteria) and are not killed by antibiotics. They have potential to kill us; they mutate; they move between humans and other fauna, changing as they go in order to stay alive.
Wash your hands; don't touch your face, and keep doing everything your can to promote your own personal healthy effective immune system.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Book: 2030 by Albert Brooks
The Real Story of What Happens to America
This is a funny provocative book. Funny because Albert Brooks is gifted at writing humor and provocative because 2030 is only 18 years from now. Technology has continued to define the lives of Americans, and as a result people are living much longer, are healthier, more energetic, more vital and are using too many resources...or so say a growing group of younger (20 to 40-year-olds) who fear nothing will be left for them. And, perhaps that is true. Groups like Youth for Equality begin protesting and acting against the "olds." A devastating earthquake pretty much levels Los Angeles, and the US is way too broke to fix LA. Ah....what to do about all this. The President turns to China and tries to borrow even more money but the Chinese say no. They, however, do offer something.
And then the President's mother (whom he never liked all that much) becomes one of the elderly who "live" several years in a coma. Facilities warehouse those kept alive on machines, but the rooms are tastefully decorated, the tubes and lines are mostly hidden, and the staff always tells visitors that the "patient" seemed to smile the other day.....anything to keep false hope alive in the families.
Random examples of Brooks' writing:
"Compassionate Care was a very successful business, housing thousands of older people who needed sophisticated machines to keep them in their comas. Hospitals certainly couldn't handle them, and nursing homes had no place for people living on machines only. "
"He believed that many of the pro-lifers never thought about life as an entire journey. Just get human beings here any way possible and the rest will be figured out. Who would do that? Who would figure it out?...The pro-life movement only cares about the human while it's still in the mother. As soon as it's born, the pro-choice people have to take care of it."
"A new infrastructure has been built up around the electric car. One of the things that really caught on was the modern-day drive-in, known as the Charge N' Eat. Gasoline could only be sold by the oil companies, but electricity could be sold by anyone, and it was...As their cars were charging, customers could order food and cute roller-skating girls delivered it...If people needed to get going in a hurry, they could charge their cars with the ultrafast electrical pumps, but that cost more, like premium gas. So most people opted for the cheap thirty-minute slow charge, and they had to have something to do while they waited. Why not munch burgers and fries?"
And on and on....
This is an entertaining, funny novel. I laughed a lot while also realizing Brooks is laying out issues our nation will surely face sooner than later.
This is a funny provocative book. Funny because Albert Brooks is gifted at writing humor and provocative because 2030 is only 18 years from now. Technology has continued to define the lives of Americans, and as a result people are living much longer, are healthier, more energetic, more vital and are using too many resources...or so say a growing group of younger (20 to 40-year-olds) who fear nothing will be left for them. And, perhaps that is true. Groups like Youth for Equality begin protesting and acting against the "olds." A devastating earthquake pretty much levels Los Angeles, and the US is way too broke to fix LA. Ah....what to do about all this. The President turns to China and tries to borrow even more money but the Chinese say no. They, however, do offer something.
And then the President's mother (whom he never liked all that much) becomes one of the elderly who "live" several years in a coma. Facilities warehouse those kept alive on machines, but the rooms are tastefully decorated, the tubes and lines are mostly hidden, and the staff always tells visitors that the "patient" seemed to smile the other day.....anything to keep false hope alive in the families.
Random examples of Brooks' writing:
"Compassionate Care was a very successful business, housing thousands of older people who needed sophisticated machines to keep them in their comas. Hospitals certainly couldn't handle them, and nursing homes had no place for people living on machines only. "
"He believed that many of the pro-lifers never thought about life as an entire journey. Just get human beings here any way possible and the rest will be figured out. Who would do that? Who would figure it out?...The pro-life movement only cares about the human while it's still in the mother. As soon as it's born, the pro-choice people have to take care of it."
"A new infrastructure has been built up around the electric car. One of the things that really caught on was the modern-day drive-in, known as the Charge N' Eat. Gasoline could only be sold by the oil companies, but electricity could be sold by anyone, and it was...As their cars were charging, customers could order food and cute roller-skating girls delivered it...If people needed to get going in a hurry, they could charge their cars with the ultrafast electrical pumps, but that cost more, like premium gas. So most people opted for the cheap thirty-minute slow charge, and they had to have something to do while they waited. Why not munch burgers and fries?"
And on and on....
This is an entertaining, funny novel. I laughed a lot while also realizing Brooks is laying out issues our nation will surely face sooner than later.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Book: Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Nightwoods is a wonderful novel by the man who wrote Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. It is set in the 1960s in the hills of North Carolina.
Luce is a young woman, living in an old lodge, generally satisfied with her life, although she is isolated, and has limited social contact. The lodge was once a successful vacation destination, situated across a mountain lake from the nearest town. It is now only a relic, empty except for Luce. The owner was an elderly gentleman who died and left his property to a wandering, footloose grandson named Stubblefield. When Luce's sister is murdered by her brutal low-minded husband, Luce becomes the caretaker of a young niece and nephew, nearly mute and feral children who love to start fires and who settle in with Luce, but reluctantly.
The book is beautifully written, evoking so clearly the seasons and landscape of North Carolina, the creeks and twisting mountain roads, the woods and trails, the weather and fauna. There are flashbacks to Luce's adolescence and Frazier has also drawn fine characters: the children, the murdering husband, the lawman with his addictions, the small town folk, along with Luce and Stubblefield and Maddie, an old woman of the hills, surviving on her own, who becomes part of the salvation. The story has a beginning, a middle and an ending, all satisfactory, and along the way, tells of a time and place in our country in vivid prose.
The book is rich in description and narrative--a love story that moves in several directions enveloping the memorable characters.
"She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again towards winter."
Luce is a young woman, living in an old lodge, generally satisfied with her life, although she is isolated, and has limited social contact. The lodge was once a successful vacation destination, situated across a mountain lake from the nearest town. It is now only a relic, empty except for Luce. The owner was an elderly gentleman who died and left his property to a wandering, footloose grandson named Stubblefield. When Luce's sister is murdered by her brutal low-minded husband, Luce becomes the caretaker of a young niece and nephew, nearly mute and feral children who love to start fires and who settle in with Luce, but reluctantly.
The book is beautifully written, evoking so clearly the seasons and landscape of North Carolina, the creeks and twisting mountain roads, the woods and trails, the weather and fauna. There are flashbacks to Luce's adolescence and Frazier has also drawn fine characters: the children, the murdering husband, the lawman with his addictions, the small town folk, along with Luce and Stubblefield and Maddie, an old woman of the hills, surviving on her own, who becomes part of the salvation. The story has a beginning, a middle and an ending, all satisfactory, and along the way, tells of a time and place in our country in vivid prose.
The book is rich in description and narrative--a love story that moves in several directions enveloping the memorable characters.
"She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again towards winter."
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Book: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
William E. Dodd was offered the position of ambassador to Germany by President Franklin Roosevelt (after several others declined as Dodd learned later, tempering his pride somewhat). In 1933, he travels by ship across the Atlantic to Berlin with his wife and two grown children, Bill and Martha. He becomes a disillusioned, sad and frustrated man as he witnesses the changes happening to a Germany he loved and remembered fondly from his student days in Leipzig years before.
Martha Dodd was a very modern woman, flirtatious, intelligent, not overly concerned with propriety, and Larsen had the benefit of her many written observations during their stay in Germany.
What fascinated me was how reluctant the United States was to believe and censor Germany as Hitler began his rise to power as chancellor and then became the supreme leader after the death of President Hindenburg. It is a strange and barely comprehensible story even to this day. Dodd was eventually forced to quit his post, a bit earlier than he would have left Germany anyway. His predictions of Hitler's evil intentions vindicated him later in life, but he was never accorded his due as ambassador since a few high-ranking officials in the US government just did not like this quiet, unassuming man, a man who wanted to live within his means and not fritter time and money, a man who kept trying to alert the US to the reality of what was happening in Germany. Dodd thought for awhile that the common sense of the German people would surely prevail and Hitler would be ousted but, when that did not happen, he felt powerless to effect change and was revolted by what was becoming more and more obvious to him.
Slowly and inexorably Hitler and his henchmen moved to the status of monsters, appealing to German pride and nationalism, but also exploiting the darker urges and unexpressed thoughts of the German people.
The Dodd family at first was inclined to not meddle in Germany's internal affairs. This was the prevailing reason (along with a pervasive anti-Semitism) that many in the US offered when they looked the other way. And times were different without today's instant communication from nearly any spot in the world, so events were likely diluted and diminished by the passage of time. What is immediate today would be month-old news 80 years ago.
The book is not a history of those times; it merely glances at them through one American family, albeit a high-profile family, whose members and acquaintances documented their experiences in the cafes, restaurants, salons and streets of Berlin in the mid 1930s.
Can most of us ever understand anything about the rise of Nazism and Hitler? Not if we don't make an attempt. Reading this book, I learned a a bit about the years leading up to WWII. I was wandering through the library stacks at Herrick the other morning and happened on a book titled My Wounded Heart or The Story of a Jewish Mother and Her Children in Hitler's Germany. There is black and white photo on the cover...of a family: a mother and father and four children. These specific memoirs often can make history more vivid, more real, more terrible or heroic or mundane, than any "history" book.
Larsen's book also has a subtitle: Love, Terror and and American Family in Hitler's Berlin.
Martha Dodd was a very modern woman, flirtatious, intelligent, not overly concerned with propriety, and Larsen had the benefit of her many written observations during their stay in Germany.
What fascinated me was how reluctant the United States was to believe and censor Germany as Hitler began his rise to power as chancellor and then became the supreme leader after the death of President Hindenburg. It is a strange and barely comprehensible story even to this day. Dodd was eventually forced to quit his post, a bit earlier than he would have left Germany anyway. His predictions of Hitler's evil intentions vindicated him later in life, but he was never accorded his due as ambassador since a few high-ranking officials in the US government just did not like this quiet, unassuming man, a man who wanted to live within his means and not fritter time and money, a man who kept trying to alert the US to the reality of what was happening in Germany. Dodd thought for awhile that the common sense of the German people would surely prevail and Hitler would be ousted but, when that did not happen, he felt powerless to effect change and was revolted by what was becoming more and more obvious to him.
Slowly and inexorably Hitler and his henchmen moved to the status of monsters, appealing to German pride and nationalism, but also exploiting the darker urges and unexpressed thoughts of the German people.
The Dodd family at first was inclined to not meddle in Germany's internal affairs. This was the prevailing reason (along with a pervasive anti-Semitism) that many in the US offered when they looked the other way. And times were different without today's instant communication from nearly any spot in the world, so events were likely diluted and diminished by the passage of time. What is immediate today would be month-old news 80 years ago.
The book is not a history of those times; it merely glances at them through one American family, albeit a high-profile family, whose members and acquaintances documented their experiences in the cafes, restaurants, salons and streets of Berlin in the mid 1930s.
Can most of us ever understand anything about the rise of Nazism and Hitler? Not if we don't make an attempt. Reading this book, I learned a a bit about the years leading up to WWII. I was wandering through the library stacks at Herrick the other morning and happened on a book titled My Wounded Heart or The Story of a Jewish Mother and Her Children in Hitler's Germany. There is black and white photo on the cover...of a family: a mother and father and four children. These specific memoirs often can make history more vivid, more real, more terrible or heroic or mundane, than any "history" book.
Larsen's book also has a subtitle: Love, Terror and and American Family in Hitler's Berlin.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Bird: Snowy Owl
Maria and I looked, albeit sporadically, all last winter for a snowy owl.
I had actually seen one years ago one winter afternoon on the road along the dunes to Ludington State Park. It was perched on a pole against a background of cold grey sky and Lake Michigan waves, and it was a perfect sighting, elemental, forever memorable.
We didn't see one last year so were excited when the bird blogs starting reporting snowy owls, first from a friend in Montana, and then several here in Michigan.
They were seen at the Muskegon Wastewater site during the week before Thanksgiving. Deborah, Maria and I almost "chased" them on Thanksgiving day, but decided to tend instead to delicious brined turkey (a la Richard), oyster and sausage dressing, perfect gravy, roasted root vegies, a sublime pumpkin pie and walnut pumpkin butter cheesecake.
So, on Friday, which was unexpectedly sunny, Maria and Richard headed home with a planned detour through the MWW. I decided to caravan with them in my car as far as the Wastewater site in hopes of seeing a snowy. And we did exactly that! The Wetzels were just in front of me as we crept along the north side of the east lagoon. We kept in touch via cell phones with Maria noting the several cars parked on the center dike and wondering what they were seeing. And then, a beautiful snowy owl burst from the weeds on the rocky lagoon edge right in front of their car and flew south, its long broad white wings flapping relatively slowly. Awesome!
I hung around another 30 minutes as it flew back and forth from the west side to the north side of the east lagoon. From a distance, it looked almost gull-like as it sat on the rocks, but when it flew, the huge wings were lovely and distinctive.
So this may be an irruptive year, occurring when lemmings get scarce farther north, and the owls venture more south than they usually do. Pete Dunne describes them as looking like "small, soot-flecked, partially melted snowmen with yellow eyes." We didn't get close enough to see the yellow eyes, but perhaps another time.
I had actually seen one years ago one winter afternoon on the road along the dunes to Ludington State Park. It was perched on a pole against a background of cold grey sky and Lake Michigan waves, and it was a perfect sighting, elemental, forever memorable.
We didn't see one last year so were excited when the bird blogs starting reporting snowy owls, first from a friend in Montana, and then several here in Michigan.
They were seen at the Muskegon Wastewater site during the week before Thanksgiving. Deborah, Maria and I almost "chased" them on Thanksgiving day, but decided to tend instead to delicious brined turkey (a la Richard), oyster and sausage dressing, perfect gravy, roasted root vegies, a sublime pumpkin pie and walnut pumpkin butter cheesecake.
So, on Friday, which was unexpectedly sunny, Maria and Richard headed home with a planned detour through the MWW. I decided to caravan with them in my car as far as the Wastewater site in hopes of seeing a snowy. And we did exactly that! The Wetzels were just in front of me as we crept along the north side of the east lagoon. We kept in touch via cell phones with Maria noting the several cars parked on the center dike and wondering what they were seeing. And then, a beautiful snowy owl burst from the weeds on the rocky lagoon edge right in front of their car and flew south, its long broad white wings flapping relatively slowly. Awesome!
I hung around another 30 minutes as it flew back and forth from the west side to the north side of the east lagoon. From a distance, it looked almost gull-like as it sat on the rocks, but when it flew, the huge wings were lovely and distinctive.
So this may be an irruptive year, occurring when lemmings get scarce farther north, and the owls venture more south than they usually do. Pete Dunne describes them as looking like "small, soot-flecked, partially melted snowmen with yellow eyes." We didn't get close enough to see the yellow eyes, but perhaps another time.
Book: Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst
Jeanne, her three sisters and her parents move from St.Louis to Amagansett in June of 1976, the beginning of this memoir. Jeanne's father is a writer who is always just ABOUT to be wildly successful and publish a best seller. Her Mother stays at home and cooks and drinks.
Jeanne grows up in this household with these parents and her sisters, becomes a writer and drinker herself and tells her story: witty, poignant, honest, profane.
About her Dad:
"I saw him as a tragic hero. Like all tragic characters, he was trying to do the impossible--write novels, sell novels, make money, keep the drinking under control, get the cracked wife some help, take care of four kids. Like all tragic heroes, he had a fundamental lack of self-awareness."
About her Mom"
"Like a professional chef, Mom was never hungry by the time dinner came around, never really ate a meal with us. She took one bite, lit a cigarette and began a sort of post-shift meltdown.....And she'd weave up the front staircase to her bedroom and shut the door. That was more or less how my mother now said good night..."
But there is a lot of love in this story. At the end, Jeanne writes:
"I have to let my father read this book and it is terrifying to think that I will hurt him with it...Am I saying he put writing before all of us? All my father has done has been to show me wild enthusiasm and encouragement as a writer. I would never want to hurt him. I admire his writing and know I am not half the thinker or writer he is. His support of my writing was never about the writing for me. It was the love from my dad."
From this underlying family history, she emerges with her own voice:
"Things were worse than before I quit drinking. I was now living in a couple rooms with wigs drying on a hanger outside my front door and a restless unpredictable teenage pot-head next door and no bathroom and no money, no job, no ascertainable work skills, all without alcohol."
The book is good because of the love in spite of dysfunction, or can be read just for the very funny scenes describing the ongoing "obsession" her father has with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald or Jeanne's various misadventures as she constantly moves about and changes jobs and lives the wild life in New York. And it is also a tale of someone who finds she has to write:
"My days so far as a small-time writer have been just that, essential to me as if they are a great masterpiece. Did I just quote Zelda Fitzgerald?"
Jeanne grows up in this household with these parents and her sisters, becomes a writer and drinker herself and tells her story: witty, poignant, honest, profane.
About her Dad:
"I saw him as a tragic hero. Like all tragic characters, he was trying to do the impossible--write novels, sell novels, make money, keep the drinking under control, get the cracked wife some help, take care of four kids. Like all tragic heroes, he had a fundamental lack of self-awareness."
About her Mom"
"Like a professional chef, Mom was never hungry by the time dinner came around, never really ate a meal with us. She took one bite, lit a cigarette and began a sort of post-shift meltdown.....And she'd weave up the front staircase to her bedroom and shut the door. That was more or less how my mother now said good night..."
But there is a lot of love in this story. At the end, Jeanne writes:
"I have to let my father read this book and it is terrifying to think that I will hurt him with it...Am I saying he put writing before all of us? All my father has done has been to show me wild enthusiasm and encouragement as a writer. I would never want to hurt him. I admire his writing and know I am not half the thinker or writer he is. His support of my writing was never about the writing for me. It was the love from my dad."
From this underlying family history, she emerges with her own voice:
"Things were worse than before I quit drinking. I was now living in a couple rooms with wigs drying on a hanger outside my front door and a restless unpredictable teenage pot-head next door and no bathroom and no money, no job, no ascertainable work skills, all without alcohol."
The book is good because of the love in spite of dysfunction, or can be read just for the very funny scenes describing the ongoing "obsession" her father has with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald or Jeanne's various misadventures as she constantly moves about and changes jobs and lives the wild life in New York. And it is also a tale of someone who finds she has to write:
"My days so far as a small-time writer have been just that, essential to me as if they are a great masterpiece. Did I just quote Zelda Fitzgerald?"
Book: Confessions of a Young Writer by Umberto Eco
By the end of this book I could only think that Eco has a "beautiful mind," and defines the adjective "erudite."
There are four chapters:
1. Writing from Left to Right (literally, he says with tongue in cheek). He also writes here of how he researches his books. For instance, he "went to the South Seas, to the precise geographic location where the book [The Island of the Day Before] is set, to see the colors of the water and sky at different hours of the day, and the tints of the fishes and corals....I also spent two to three years studying drawings and models of ships of the period, to find out how big a cabin or cubbyhole was, and how a person could move from one to the other." In other words, he does intensive thorough research before he writes a novel.
2. Author, Text, and Interpreters.
3. Some Remarks on Fictional Characters.
4. My Lists.
All are chapters in which Eco is revealed as a man who is thoughtful, inquisitive and forever learning. He explores the dimensions of fiction and characters, and it is obvious he loves writing about such. His knowledge is impressive. It is a small, rich book that allows a glimpse into the art of this brilliant man.
The chapter on Lists has passages like the following:
"Anaphora is the repetition of the same word at the beginning of every phrase or of every line of verse. This may not always constitute what we would call a list. There is a beautiful example of anaphora in the poem "Possibilities" by Wislawa Szymborska.
I prefer movies.
I refer cats.
I prefer the oaks along he Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyesky.
I prefer myself liking people to my myself loving mankind
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
And so on for another 26 lines. "
Eco draws from his extensive mental library in this book, and would delight those who liked The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum or any of his other books. He also has a personal physical library of 50,000 volumes according to Wikipedia, obviously a man in love with the written word.
He, BTW, has a new book, The Prague Cemetery.
There are four chapters:
1. Writing from Left to Right (literally, he says with tongue in cheek). He also writes here of how he researches his books. For instance, he "went to the South Seas, to the precise geographic location where the book [The Island of the Day Before] is set, to see the colors of the water and sky at different hours of the day, and the tints of the fishes and corals....I also spent two to three years studying drawings and models of ships of the period, to find out how big a cabin or cubbyhole was, and how a person could move from one to the other." In other words, he does intensive thorough research before he writes a novel.
2. Author, Text, and Interpreters.
3. Some Remarks on Fictional Characters.
4. My Lists.
All are chapters in which Eco is revealed as a man who is thoughtful, inquisitive and forever learning. He explores the dimensions of fiction and characters, and it is obvious he loves writing about such. His knowledge is impressive. It is a small, rich book that allows a glimpse into the art of this brilliant man.
The chapter on Lists has passages like the following:
"Anaphora is the repetition of the same word at the beginning of every phrase or of every line of verse. This may not always constitute what we would call a list. There is a beautiful example of anaphora in the poem "Possibilities" by Wislawa Szymborska.
I prefer movies.
I refer cats.
I prefer the oaks along he Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyesky.
I prefer myself liking people to my myself loving mankind
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
And so on for another 26 lines. "
Eco draws from his extensive mental library in this book, and would delight those who liked The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum or any of his other books. He also has a personal physical library of 50,000 volumes according to Wikipedia, obviously a man in love with the written word.
He, BTW, has a new book, The Prague Cemetery.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Book: Naked Cruelty by Colleen McCullough
Ms. McCullough is/was a neurophysiologist who worked in the Neurology department at Yale's School of Internal Medicine for 10 years. She was born in Australia and wrote, among many other books, The Thorn Birds, which I read years ago and remember only that Richard Chamberlain was in the movie. Ms. McCullough now lives on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific. Her biography intrigued me....
And that was about it. This book is not good. It's about a serial killer who calls himself The Dodo, but uses the old Latin term Didus ineptus as his name. The book opens with a horrific rape.
I gather there is a series of Carmine Delmonico novels (Delmonico is a Captain in the local police department in a Conneticut town.) There are several characters and a lot of plot but it seems that the author had trouble deciding what her storyline should be. Much happens and then is resolved in not credible ways, quickly and simplistically.
Along with the rapes, there is personnel turmoil in the police department; there is the postpartum depression of Carmine's wife, Desdemona; there are the very weird nephew twins of a woman who sells expensive glass and crystal in an exclusive shop in a mall.
My problem is that if I read at least half of a book, I feel compelled to finish it...most of the time. I then often feel I've wasted several hours as it usually even gets worse. This book seemed to wander more and more before the rather abrupt ending. All of the various plots could have been developed (and have been in various novels) into a good novel.
Oh well, such is life...
And that was about it. This book is not good. It's about a serial killer who calls himself The Dodo, but uses the old Latin term Didus ineptus as his name. The book opens with a horrific rape.
I gather there is a series of Carmine Delmonico novels (Delmonico is a Captain in the local police department in a Conneticut town.) There are several characters and a lot of plot but it seems that the author had trouble deciding what her storyline should be. Much happens and then is resolved in not credible ways, quickly and simplistically.
Along with the rapes, there is personnel turmoil in the police department; there is the postpartum depression of Carmine's wife, Desdemona; there are the very weird nephew twins of a woman who sells expensive glass and crystal in an exclusive shop in a mall.
My problem is that if I read at least half of a book, I feel compelled to finish it...most of the time. I then often feel I've wasted several hours as it usually even gets worse. This book seemed to wander more and more before the rather abrupt ending. All of the various plots could have been developed (and have been in various novels) into a good novel.
Oh well, such is life...
Book: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
The Ask was a New York Times Bestseller but only because the author writes well and is entertaining, not because the book is worthy. It is just one of those wickedly fun books to read..all that edgy, neurotic New York stuff, fast-paced, clever, witty. The main character Milo gets sort of fired from his job in which he has to get money from rich people for philanthropic reasons. They are the "Asks" and one Ask specifically wants to work only with Milo, except now he is fired.
Milo has a wife Maura, and small son, Bernie. He loves them both but his wife leaves him, sort of temporarily she implies, so he is cast adrift in New York, and if you want to laugh and follow Milo around for a few weeks, then read this book. It's about people utterly self-absorbed, generically like you and me, but specifically quite different by virtue of living where they do, when they do.
"Horace lived in a huge room filled with cages. Inside each cage was a young person, a futon or cot, a footlocker, a few milk crates. Bare bulbs on wires hung from fixtures in the high ceiling. I'd read about these places. Kids moved to the city, but there were no apartments left to rent to them, or none they could afford. But on a starting salary, or no salary, you could maybe manage a cage. Several dozen people resided here among the drum kits and guitar amps, the antique film editing deck, a few long tables and spindly chairs, a mini fridge. Power cables streaked the floor under mounds of black and silver tape. Laptops glowed from the cages. Voices rose and fell, rippled about the room, a dozen conversations going at once, or maybe one conversation replicated over and over by feral and beautiful children..."
Milo ends up here for a bit. He bounces around, getting close to his Ask when he is sort of hired back but also keeps wondering about this job or non-job. He schleps Bernie to daycare, has single-man adventures. It's like Seinfeld or Woody Allen with more profanity.
The writing reminds of Nick Hornby's novels but is less sweet and with nothing really to recommend it, except that the author is obviously smart and deft with words and social satire, even though the characters and story are not all that memorable. The Ask is just one more funny, easy-to-read, instant gratification kind of book....not that there is anything wrong with that.
Milo has a wife Maura, and small son, Bernie. He loves them both but his wife leaves him, sort of temporarily she implies, so he is cast adrift in New York, and if you want to laugh and follow Milo around for a few weeks, then read this book. It's about people utterly self-absorbed, generically like you and me, but specifically quite different by virtue of living where they do, when they do.
"Horace lived in a huge room filled with cages. Inside each cage was a young person, a futon or cot, a footlocker, a few milk crates. Bare bulbs on wires hung from fixtures in the high ceiling. I'd read about these places. Kids moved to the city, but there were no apartments left to rent to them, or none they could afford. But on a starting salary, or no salary, you could maybe manage a cage. Several dozen people resided here among the drum kits and guitar amps, the antique film editing deck, a few long tables and spindly chairs, a mini fridge. Power cables streaked the floor under mounds of black and silver tape. Laptops glowed from the cages. Voices rose and fell, rippled about the room, a dozen conversations going at once, or maybe one conversation replicated over and over by feral and beautiful children..."
Milo ends up here for a bit. He bounces around, getting close to his Ask when he is sort of hired back but also keeps wondering about this job or non-job. He schleps Bernie to daycare, has single-man adventures. It's like Seinfeld or Woody Allen with more profanity.
The writing reminds of Nick Hornby's novels but is less sweet and with nothing really to recommend it, except that the author is obviously smart and deft with words and social satire, even though the characters and story are not all that memorable. The Ask is just one more funny, easy-to-read, instant gratification kind of book....not that there is anything wrong with that.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Book: American Boy by Larry Watson
I like novels that are of a piece, with a beginning, a middle and an end. This is a fine novella in that regard.
It begins on Thanksgiving of 1962 in a small Minnesota town. Matt Garth and Johnny Dunbar are best friends. They are teenagers. Johnny's family is upper class; Matthew's father has died and his mother is a waitress. Matt spends most of his time with the Dunbars and then something happens. A young woman gets shot. Dr. Dunbar takes care of her and the story is set in motion. Along the way are vignettes of growing up in the 60s in a small midwestern town.
A few random examples (not especially germane to the story) of Mr. Watson's writing:
"Mr. Veal was a demanding, difficult teacher, and it was rumored that his high standards had put his job in jeopardy. The high school principal, Mr. Linton, had supposedly reprimanded Mr. Veal for the many low grades he dispensed...when a teacher failed...the daughter of the principal...or Bobby Karlstad, the son of the school board president, then that teacher had to be reined in."
"Eventually I settled in a parlor on the main floor, where earlier the entire family--the Dunbar family plus Matthew Garth, that is--had gathered before a small fireplace to take in the doctor's stories of how deep the snows of his childhood had drifted and how far into spring the lakes and rivers remained locked in ice. With the room to myself that night, I sat in the big overstuffed armchair that the doctor had occupied, and tried to situate myself in the chair such that my boy's body could feel and fill the indentations Dr. Dunbar's weight had made in the cushions."
Running like fine rich threads through the fabric of this story are these evocative little passages that make this novel worth reading.
It begins on Thanksgiving of 1962 in a small Minnesota town. Matt Garth and Johnny Dunbar are best friends. They are teenagers. Johnny's family is upper class; Matthew's father has died and his mother is a waitress. Matt spends most of his time with the Dunbars and then something happens. A young woman gets shot. Dr. Dunbar takes care of her and the story is set in motion. Along the way are vignettes of growing up in the 60s in a small midwestern town.
A few random examples (not especially germane to the story) of Mr. Watson's writing:
"Mr. Veal was a demanding, difficult teacher, and it was rumored that his high standards had put his job in jeopardy. The high school principal, Mr. Linton, had supposedly reprimanded Mr. Veal for the many low grades he dispensed...when a teacher failed...the daughter of the principal...or Bobby Karlstad, the son of the school board president, then that teacher had to be reined in."
"Eventually I settled in a parlor on the main floor, where earlier the entire family--the Dunbar family plus Matthew Garth, that is--had gathered before a small fireplace to take in the doctor's stories of how deep the snows of his childhood had drifted and how far into spring the lakes and rivers remained locked in ice. With the room to myself that night, I sat in the big overstuffed armchair that the doctor had occupied, and tried to situate myself in the chair such that my boy's body could feel and fill the indentations Dr. Dunbar's weight had made in the cushions."
Running like fine rich threads through the fabric of this story are these evocative little passages that make this novel worth reading.
Book: In the Sun's House by Kurt Caswell
Subtitled, My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation.
Kurt Caswell is a man with an unrequited wanderlust. This is his account of a year teaching at the Borrego Pass School in western New Mexico, near the Continental Divide and approximately 100 miles west of Albuquerque. He wrestles with his commitments to Borrego Pass, to the Navajo kids, to his Japanese girlfriend who comes to visit. Borrego Pass is an isolated community and his 6th, 7th and 8th graders know little of the world outside of occasional trips to Gallup or Crownpoint. Kurt comes with ideals as most of us would, arriving in what we would perceive as an impoverished neglected pocket of the American West. Those poor Native Americans, we would think....we romanticize our intentions, our good intentions.
He writes of hogans and potsherds, of hiking with his dog Kuma, of taking the kids to the Eastern Navajo Agency Spelling Bee in Chinle and of trip to Mission: Wolf (www.missionwolf.com) where he also arranges to meet a group of Navajo kids from another school in Ganado, New Mexico, hoping his students will connect with the Ganado kids, hoping to find ways to enrich their lives.
"Out at the edge of the mesa top, where I could see north into the wide word, I found tires stacked in some places and scattered in others, heavy spikes driven into trees on which things had once been hung, coils of brittle wire and rusted chain, and a red flannel shirt tangled in a juniper flying like a war-wounded flag in the breeze."
"In the quiet under the desert sky, I looked up into the countless stars that graced the inight. It was beautiful."
He becomes a student himself, learning from the land and from his students...humbled by his deficiencies, accepting that he makes only a tiny ripple (if any at all) in the ebb and flow of this remote Navajo community.
"I had accepted this job at Borrego only to continue exploring; I never meant to care. And now that some measure of caring about what happened to these kids and this community had penetrated my defenses, I didn't quite how what to do. Caring just caused trouble for me. I could no longer liver here without caring or leave here without regretting."
At the end of the school year, the class reads Romeo and Juliet and he asks them to write something about the play. "What had I been thinking? I am still failing as a teacher, I thought, at least failing to properly gauge my student's competency level and shoot for something just above it, rather than shooting for the moon." But one student does write what Kurt calls an "eighth-grade teacher's dream...[and] I had not expected to be so happy about Renee's good work. I carried those feelings around for days. That, I surmised was the heart of teaching. Perhaps I'd be a teacher after all."
What I liked was the honesty of this book as he writes of his responses to Navajo culture and his students and of his reluctance to stay in one place very long. I certainly can understand this. For some of us, there will always be a new road to travel, a different river to cross, the next experience. His restlessness bothers him though, especially in his relationship with Sakura. He quotes Bruce Chatwin as saying that we all need a "base" (with a nod also to Maria here...), a place to return TO even as we wander about.
Kurt didn't physically stay in Borrego Pass, but something of him remained and he took something with him. This book is about that exchange between him and a small group of Navajo kids...expressed memorably.
Kurt Caswell is a man with an unrequited wanderlust. This is his account of a year teaching at the Borrego Pass School in western New Mexico, near the Continental Divide and approximately 100 miles west of Albuquerque. He wrestles with his commitments to Borrego Pass, to the Navajo kids, to his Japanese girlfriend who comes to visit. Borrego Pass is an isolated community and his 6th, 7th and 8th graders know little of the world outside of occasional trips to Gallup or Crownpoint. Kurt comes with ideals as most of us would, arriving in what we would perceive as an impoverished neglected pocket of the American West. Those poor Native Americans, we would think....we romanticize our intentions, our good intentions.
He writes of hogans and potsherds, of hiking with his dog Kuma, of taking the kids to the Eastern Navajo Agency Spelling Bee in Chinle and of trip to Mission: Wolf (www.missionwolf.com) where he also arranges to meet a group of Navajo kids from another school in Ganado, New Mexico, hoping his students will connect with the Ganado kids, hoping to find ways to enrich their lives.
"Out at the edge of the mesa top, where I could see north into the wide word, I found tires stacked in some places and scattered in others, heavy spikes driven into trees on which things had once been hung, coils of brittle wire and rusted chain, and a red flannel shirt tangled in a juniper flying like a war-wounded flag in the breeze."
"In the quiet under the desert sky, I looked up into the countless stars that graced the inight. It was beautiful."
He becomes a student himself, learning from the land and from his students...humbled by his deficiencies, accepting that he makes only a tiny ripple (if any at all) in the ebb and flow of this remote Navajo community.
"I had accepted this job at Borrego only to continue exploring; I never meant to care. And now that some measure of caring about what happened to these kids and this community had penetrated my defenses, I didn't quite how what to do. Caring just caused trouble for me. I could no longer liver here without caring or leave here without regretting."
At the end of the school year, the class reads Romeo and Juliet and he asks them to write something about the play. "What had I been thinking? I am still failing as a teacher, I thought, at least failing to properly gauge my student's competency level and shoot for something just above it, rather than shooting for the moon." But one student does write what Kurt calls an "eighth-grade teacher's dream...[and] I had not expected to be so happy about Renee's good work. I carried those feelings around for days. That, I surmised was the heart of teaching. Perhaps I'd be a teacher after all."
What I liked was the honesty of this book as he writes of his responses to Navajo culture and his students and of his reluctance to stay in one place very long. I certainly can understand this. For some of us, there will always be a new road to travel, a different river to cross, the next experience. His restlessness bothers him though, especially in his relationship with Sakura. He quotes Bruce Chatwin as saying that we all need a "base" (with a nod also to Maria here...), a place to return TO even as we wander about.
Kurt didn't physically stay in Borrego Pass, but something of him remained and he took something with him. This book is about that exchange between him and a small group of Navajo kids...expressed memorably.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Book: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
There are three main characters: Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard who all graduate from Brown in 1982, and this novel is about their first year after graduation. Mitchell and Leonard are in love with Madeleine. Both are intelligent but with very different personalities. The author writes with that facile grace that seems effortless but probably isn't. The reader gets the nuances and allusions of the early 1980s in clever, often funny, paragraphs about the students with the carelessness and freedom and self absorption of that age. He writes of their respective childhoods, their parents and the immediate few weeks leading to graduation day. It is all easy to read, entertaining, fun....
But then the narrative matures as these kids leave the coziness of the campus for the larger world. Mitchell takes off for Europe and Asia, trying to forget Madeleine, but also seriously seeking a spiritual path. Madeleine goes with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has a biology fellowship, and they live there for several months.
Leonard, it turns out, is manic-depressive, and reading about his struggles is reason enough to read this book. I felt ashamed for the times I have been dismissive of mental illness...not totally, but often enough, thinking about mentally ill individuals in generic simplistic ways.
The book was also satisfying because it had a good ending in that it was time to stop this particular narrative even though life would continue for the characters. Often books seem to have a flat, uninspired ending as though the author doesn't understand denouement.
Few examples of Eugenides' writing:
"And then Phyllida [Madeleine's mother] was there, with a bellman in tow, her clothes neat and her hair in place. Everything Madeline hated about her mother--her imperturbable rectitude, her lack of visible emotion--was exactly what Madeline needed at the moment."
"They stood at the subway entrance, one of the hugging, crying couples in New York, ignored by everyone passing by, granted perfect privacy in the middle of a teeming city on a hot summer night."
Mitchell goes to Quaker Meetings: "As for Mitchell, he didn't say anything at the Meetings. The Spirit didn't move him to speak. He sat on the bench, enjoying the stillness of the morning and the musty scent of the Meeting House. But he didn't feel entitled to illumination."
So while Eugenides can write very well and tells a good story, he also gives us something to think about beyond the material world of his compelling characters.
But then the narrative matures as these kids leave the coziness of the campus for the larger world. Mitchell takes off for Europe and Asia, trying to forget Madeleine, but also seriously seeking a spiritual path. Madeleine goes with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has a biology fellowship, and they live there for several months.
Leonard, it turns out, is manic-depressive, and reading about his struggles is reason enough to read this book. I felt ashamed for the times I have been dismissive of mental illness...not totally, but often enough, thinking about mentally ill individuals in generic simplistic ways.
The book was also satisfying because it had a good ending in that it was time to stop this particular narrative even though life would continue for the characters. Often books seem to have a flat, uninspired ending as though the author doesn't understand denouement.
Few examples of Eugenides' writing:
"And then Phyllida [Madeleine's mother] was there, with a bellman in tow, her clothes neat and her hair in place. Everything Madeline hated about her mother--her imperturbable rectitude, her lack of visible emotion--was exactly what Madeline needed at the moment."
"They stood at the subway entrance, one of the hugging, crying couples in New York, ignored by everyone passing by, granted perfect privacy in the middle of a teeming city on a hot summer night."
Mitchell goes to Quaker Meetings: "As for Mitchell, he didn't say anything at the Meetings. The Spirit didn't move him to speak. He sat on the bench, enjoying the stillness of the morning and the musty scent of the Meeting House. But he didn't feel entitled to illumination."
So while Eugenides can write very well and tells a good story, he also gives us something to think about beyond the material world of his compelling characters.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Book: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The subtitle is A Biography of Cancer.
Elegantly written and fascinating, this book kept my interest through its several hundred pages. It is a detective story, a story of individuals (mostly scientists helped by lay people and politicians who supported and funded the science) along the historical byways of cancer who added pieces to the puzzle of what cancer is and what is isn't. This incredibly complex puzzle is certainly not complete but the researchers and scientists and physicians continually find and fit more pieces.
Ultimately, cancer is us; it is first a cell in our body that mutates in certain conditions, under certain influences (some known, others yet to be discovered), and the normal regulating rhythms and mechanisms of healthy cells no longer function. These mutated cells become super cells and some (but not all) outwit any attempt to eradicate them or disable them.
Because we all know someone with cancer or have cancer ourselves, this book has a compelling pertinence. Learning about this entity which threatens, terrifies and saddens us can help us understand what it is and perhaps even allow us to find solace and hope somehow.
Because this author writes so eloquently and lucidly about this subject, one can learn a lot about cancer from reading this book and can learn without losing one's way in pages of obscure science or boring disquisitions. I surely did.
He writes of his daughter's birth:
"Leela was born on a warm night at Massachusetts General Hospital, then swaddled in blankets and brought to the newborn unit on the fourteenth floor. The unit is directly across from the cancer ward. (The apposition of the two is hardly a coincidence. As a medical procedure, childbirth is least likely to involve infectious complications and is thus the safest neighbor to a chemotherapy ward, where any infection can turn into a lethal rampage...)
When I cut that cord, a part of me was the father, but the other part an oncologist. Umbilical blood contains one of these richest known sources of blood-forming stem cells--cells that can be stored away in cryobanks and used for a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia in the future, an intensely precious resource often flushed down a sink in the hospitals after childbirth. The midwives rolled their eyes; the obstetrician, an old friend, asked jokingly if I ever stopped thinking about work....Even in this most life-affirming of moments, the shadows of malignancy--and death--were forever lurking on my psyche."
The author is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. In writing this book, he combines the precision of the science and the humanity of the individuals involved in the telling of this story to make a wonderful book.
Elegantly written and fascinating, this book kept my interest through its several hundred pages. It is a detective story, a story of individuals (mostly scientists helped by lay people and politicians who supported and funded the science) along the historical byways of cancer who added pieces to the puzzle of what cancer is and what is isn't. This incredibly complex puzzle is certainly not complete but the researchers and scientists and physicians continually find and fit more pieces.
Ultimately, cancer is us; it is first a cell in our body that mutates in certain conditions, under certain influences (some known, others yet to be discovered), and the normal regulating rhythms and mechanisms of healthy cells no longer function. These mutated cells become super cells and some (but not all) outwit any attempt to eradicate them or disable them.
Because we all know someone with cancer or have cancer ourselves, this book has a compelling pertinence. Learning about this entity which threatens, terrifies and saddens us can help us understand what it is and perhaps even allow us to find solace and hope somehow.
Because this author writes so eloquently and lucidly about this subject, one can learn a lot about cancer from reading this book and can learn without losing one's way in pages of obscure science or boring disquisitions. I surely did.
He writes of his daughter's birth:
"Leela was born on a warm night at Massachusetts General Hospital, then swaddled in blankets and brought to the newborn unit on the fourteenth floor. The unit is directly across from the cancer ward. (The apposition of the two is hardly a coincidence. As a medical procedure, childbirth is least likely to involve infectious complications and is thus the safest neighbor to a chemotherapy ward, where any infection can turn into a lethal rampage...)
When I cut that cord, a part of me was the father, but the other part an oncologist. Umbilical blood contains one of these richest known sources of blood-forming stem cells--cells that can be stored away in cryobanks and used for a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia in the future, an intensely precious resource often flushed down a sink in the hospitals after childbirth. The midwives rolled their eyes; the obstetrician, an old friend, asked jokingly if I ever stopped thinking about work....Even in this most life-affirming of moments, the shadows of malignancy--and death--were forever lurking on my psyche."
The author is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. In writing this book, he combines the precision of the science and the humanity of the individuals involved in the telling of this story to make a wonderful book.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Birds: Western Grebes
Maria and I were on a road trip in mid September, driving from Montana to Michigan. We had intended to drive through Sand Lake NWR in northeastern South Dakota, but the auto route was closed, so we were driving in the general "neighborhood" and found ourselves driving east on a gravel road, just north of the refuge. Almost immediately, we realized we had hit the mother lode of Western grebe-dom.
The area was flooded and the road was actually closed to "tractors and trailers" but not to automobiles. We were surrounded by high water, and the marginal road was only a few inches higher than the surface. The sky was blue and the temperature was in the high 60s; there was no wind and very few insects. What there was were hundreds of birds, especially the Western grebes, all around us, vocalizing, swimming, diving, very close. It was magical! We could easily see the distinguishing black on the head covering the eye, which distinguishes the Western from the Clark's grebe. There were also hawks and herons and double-crested cormorants and yellow-headed blackbirds and a miscellany of shorebirds that day, including a Wilson's snipe with its improbably long bill at the edge of a pond early in the misty morning, a nice start to a memorable birding day.
There was a rookery with 100s of nests in the flooded trees to the south of the Western grebe area. A probable prairie falcon began feeding on a dead fish just up the road but a vehicle passed from the opposite direction and it flew off before we could positively identify it. We watched a pair of hawks (likely Swainson's) fly in nearly perfect symmetry for several minutes; we saw several rough-legged hawks with pale heads, perched on fence posts.
And we saw cattle egrets hanging around some cows, and great white egrets and snowy egrets in the reedy marshes, along with great-blue herons. Nice day.....
Bird: Black-capped Chickadee
This noon, on a quintessential Indian summer day, all warm sunshine and colorful falling leaves, I was sitting on Eunice's front porch. Suddenly a black-capped chickadee flew onto the porch, flailed about a bit, and awkwardly landed on her mailbox. I watched as this cute little black and white bird hung from the bottom of the mailbox by one foot for a few seconds before collecting its wits and flying off.
Book: When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle
The North Channel Islands lie off the coast of southern California. Feral pigs and rats are invasive species that are to be totally eradicated: rats from Anacapa, and pigs on Santa Cruz. Alma Boyd Takesue is a scientist working for the National Park Service, overseeing and coordinating the killing, and this is mostly her story. She has public battles with animal rights activists, especially Dave LaJoy, a nasty character who is determined to sabotage the killings. She is a also a daughter and granddaughter of extraordinary women and Alma has a private life involving choices and outcomes apart from her work on the islands.
The author makes a story of Alma and the contentious issues that arise as the planning and process of eradication evolves during this period in her life, with chapters exploring the history of the islands, tales of shipwrecks and of the sheep that once grazed on Santa Cruz; he describes the wild beauty of these islands and how an equilibrium of species is always tenuous.
While Boyle wonderfully invents and writes his characters, I did not find the evil Dave LaJoy all that credible. How such a self-indulgent, angry man could care so much about rats and pigs didn't seem reasonable to me. But the point was that this interspecies "meddling" does occur, is not universally embraced, and protestors are often impassioned folk, not above using violence or defying the laws. There are always arguments to be made in defense of or against such actions of rearranging the flora or fauna in a given environment.
While the annihilation of a specific population of fauna on these islands was the underpinning of this novel, there is so much more that makes it rich and colorful and a pleasure to read.
The author makes a story of Alma and the contentious issues that arise as the planning and process of eradication evolves during this period in her life, with chapters exploring the history of the islands, tales of shipwrecks and of the sheep that once grazed on Santa Cruz; he describes the wild beauty of these islands and how an equilibrium of species is always tenuous.
While Boyle wonderfully invents and writes his characters, I did not find the evil Dave LaJoy all that credible. How such a self-indulgent, angry man could care so much about rats and pigs didn't seem reasonable to me. But the point was that this interspecies "meddling" does occur, is not universally embraced, and protestors are often impassioned folk, not above using violence or defying the laws. There are always arguments to be made in defense of or against such actions of rearranging the flora or fauna in a given environment.
While the annihilation of a specific population of fauna on these islands was the underpinning of this novel, there is so much more that makes it rich and colorful and a pleasure to read.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Book: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
This is novel about the Vietnam War, specifically about Bravo Company and the soldiers who lived and died while fighting the North Vietnamese Army west of Cam Lo. While Matterhorn is a fictional hill rising from the jungle, much of this novel is based on the author's Vietnam experiences.
I found it compelling, informative, full of tragedy, some comedy, every page dense with the grittiness and reality of war in the jungle. But there are grace notes in unexpected places throughout the book that make it more than just a war story. The time is 1969; racial tensions are very much a part of the civilian and military psyches. The disconnect between the majors and colonels and the men they command, the men who do the actual fighting and killing, the men who live in terror and with the knowledge that they may very well not survive the next 24 hours...this disconnect is also a part of the story.
A paragraph chosen randomly:
"Mellas looked at the tableau of friends around him. Some of them would very likely be dead in an hour. Fracasso, who was barely old enough to drink, really showed his fear. He was writing everything he could in his notebook bouncing up and down in a crouch, his teeth bared in a tense grin. Goodwin, the hunter was nervous, like a runner before a race, possessing some primitive ability to lead men into situations where death was the understood payoff. Kendall, worried sick, his face pallid, his helmet already on his head, was leading a platoon that didn't trust him. Finch, at age twenty-three, had already worn responsibility that most men only debated about. He was now taking 190 kids into battle, and his decisions would determine how many came back. The kids, dreaming of R & R, remembering the R & R from which they'd just returned, some savoring a memory of smooth brown skin pressed against their own, a few remembering wives left behind at antiseptic airports. And Mellas: In less than an hour there could be no Mellas."
For those of us who support wars and for those of us who don't, this book tells us what exactly war is, who the servicemen are, and how and why as young men they find themselves in a jungle (or desert) fighting for our country.
I found it compelling, informative, full of tragedy, some comedy, every page dense with the grittiness and reality of war in the jungle. But there are grace notes in unexpected places throughout the book that make it more than just a war story. The time is 1969; racial tensions are very much a part of the civilian and military psyches. The disconnect between the majors and colonels and the men they command, the men who do the actual fighting and killing, the men who live in terror and with the knowledge that they may very well not survive the next 24 hours...this disconnect is also a part of the story.
A paragraph chosen randomly:
"Mellas looked at the tableau of friends around him. Some of them would very likely be dead in an hour. Fracasso, who was barely old enough to drink, really showed his fear. He was writing everything he could in his notebook bouncing up and down in a crouch, his teeth bared in a tense grin. Goodwin, the hunter was nervous, like a runner before a race, possessing some primitive ability to lead men into situations where death was the understood payoff. Kendall, worried sick, his face pallid, his helmet already on his head, was leading a platoon that didn't trust him. Finch, at age twenty-three, had already worn responsibility that most men only debated about. He was now taking 190 kids into battle, and his decisions would determine how many came back. The kids, dreaming of R & R, remembering the R & R from which they'd just returned, some savoring a memory of smooth brown skin pressed against their own, a few remembering wives left behind at antiseptic airports. And Mellas: In less than an hour there could be no Mellas."
For those of us who support wars and for those of us who don't, this book tells us what exactly war is, who the servicemen are, and how and why as young men they find themselves in a jungle (or desert) fighting for our country.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Book: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
A wonderful, fantastical novel. Like where would YOU rather live: deep in Amazon basin or in Minnesota? What a sophisticated imagination Ann Patchett must have. My sister, Faith, who lives in the Washington, DC, beltway heard Ann Patchett speak at Politics and Prose, a lively thriving bookstore near her home. She mentioned how she enjoyed listening to the author so I reserved her latest book at our local library here in Kalispell, Montana. It took several weeks to arrive but finally it was here. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Marina and Anders work for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota to be exact. They have worked together for seven years and are friends, nothing more, but Marina is very fond of Anders. As the book begins, word has been received from South America that Anders, who went to the Amazon to check on an eccentric scientist/researcher, Dr. Anna Swenson, and to try to figure out how her research on a fertility drug was progressing, is dead...that he died of a fever.
The company's CEO sends Marina to found out what happened and Marina agrees to go, in part because of Anders' grieving wife and his three small sons, all quintessential midwesterners, although Marina soon discovers how unfair and simplistic this assessment is. It was interesting to me how the author portrayed a prototypical Minnesotan family with finesse and without apology. Anders loved his wife and children fiercely, which Marina comes to realize, and she starts to understand the richness and complexity of their seemingly ordered lives, how blessed they are and how unfair it is that Anders has died. There are many questions and the need for some resolution to his abrupt death. The understandable coolness that had always existed between Anders' wife and Marina, the woman he has closely worked with for seven years, dissolves as their respect for each other deepens.
So Marina goes to the jungle. She finally connects with the reclusive scientist and is taken upriver to the village of the Lakashi where Dr. Swenson is doing her work, along with a handful of other researchers. This, being a good novel, offers surprises and adventure and understated larger questions of what happens at the crossroads of very different cultures and cutting edge science with huge implications for both cultures but in very different ways. There are parts that are almost science fiction; there is a fearsome anaconda, an endearing deaf child, native tribes with poisonous arrows, a million biting insects, incredible thunderstorms, the rivers, a possible malaria cure, hallucinogenic mushrooms, a species of trees and butterflies existing in symbiotic relationships with amazing pharmaceutical potentials, all part of the story about the quest for a fertility drug and the dedicated scientists working in this remote jungle.
I kept wondering how Ann Patchett conceived the plot. Did she go to the Amazon? Did she read something one day that was the seed for this story? Is she a scientist? or just gifted with an exquisite sense of curiosity?
WhateVer, this book is certain to entice and then captivate the reader.
Marina and Anders work for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota to be exact. They have worked together for seven years and are friends, nothing more, but Marina is very fond of Anders. As the book begins, word has been received from South America that Anders, who went to the Amazon to check on an eccentric scientist/researcher, Dr. Anna Swenson, and to try to figure out how her research on a fertility drug was progressing, is dead...that he died of a fever.
The company's CEO sends Marina to found out what happened and Marina agrees to go, in part because of Anders' grieving wife and his three small sons, all quintessential midwesterners, although Marina soon discovers how unfair and simplistic this assessment is. It was interesting to me how the author portrayed a prototypical Minnesotan family with finesse and without apology. Anders loved his wife and children fiercely, which Marina comes to realize, and she starts to understand the richness and complexity of their seemingly ordered lives, how blessed they are and how unfair it is that Anders has died. There are many questions and the need for some resolution to his abrupt death. The understandable coolness that had always existed between Anders' wife and Marina, the woman he has closely worked with for seven years, dissolves as their respect for each other deepens.
So Marina goes to the jungle. She finally connects with the reclusive scientist and is taken upriver to the village of the Lakashi where Dr. Swenson is doing her work, along with a handful of other researchers. This, being a good novel, offers surprises and adventure and understated larger questions of what happens at the crossroads of very different cultures and cutting edge science with huge implications for both cultures but in very different ways. There are parts that are almost science fiction; there is a fearsome anaconda, an endearing deaf child, native tribes with poisonous arrows, a million biting insects, incredible thunderstorms, the rivers, a possible malaria cure, hallucinogenic mushrooms, a species of trees and butterflies existing in symbiotic relationships with amazing pharmaceutical potentials, all part of the story about the quest for a fertility drug and the dedicated scientists working in this remote jungle.
I kept wondering how Ann Patchett conceived the plot. Did she go to the Amazon? Did she read something one day that was the seed for this story? Is she a scientist? or just gifted with an exquisite sense of curiosity?
WhateVer, this book is certain to entice and then captivate the reader.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Book: Long Way Home by Bill Barich
On the Trail of Steinbeck's America. The author spends six weeks driving across country from east to west always inspired by Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. He did not have a dog and he did not have a camper but he traveled nearly 6000 miles pretty much across the middle of the country...close to US 50, but veering southwest in Utah to southern California and then up to San Francisco. Of course, I LOVE travel tales and have done my share of cross-country driving, always having the sorts of encounters Mr. Barich had on HIS trip. He takes time to engage in conversations along the way. He detours whimsically and he refers to Steinbeck often.
"The next passage in my journey is a love affair," John Steinbeck swooned over Montana, but it was "Jefferson City, Missouri that stole my heart," says Bill Barich. The book moves right along, with anecdote following anecdote, historical perspectives, musings on how Americans live and what they find important in their lives.
He finds his route peopled mostly with conservatives. He is traveling just before Obama was elected so he asks folks about their politics and concludes that there was a "bizarre reality irrespective of the facts. On this particular subject [guns] as with abortion, the possibility of an intelligent discussion had gone by the boards."
After an overload of advertising aimed at attracting tourists with all possible inducements and hyperbole, in Ouray, Colorado, he finally "saw the best sign of the trip, a small brass plaque on a nondescript brick buidling: ON THIS SITE IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED."
If you like the open road, you will like this book with its observations on the America he experienced in 2008.
In Monterey, he "asked around Cannery Row to discover what, if anything, of John Steinbeck's the tourists had read. Of Mice and Men topped the list....The late novels, such as The Winter of Our Discontent and Sweet Thursday, drew a blank. Oddly, Travels with Charley earned just a single mention despite being a bestseller. Readers had forgotten about it, apparently, but they praised it when prompted." The author also notes that they "loved Charley and the idea of being on the road, but they were blind to the author's acid observations, barely concealed malaise, and outright expressions of disgust." And I admit, I too have only a romanticized remembrance of Travels with Charley.
He agrees with Steinbeck's pessimism and "the trashiness of the landscape, the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions, and the uniform blandness of our mass culture are here to stay barring a catacylsm." He decries our "gross obesity and polluted watersheds...our unsurpassed talent for living on credit cards.. and our indulgence of the divisive talk-show pundits or the way we've devalued--even become suspicious of--the pursuit of excellence."
But the author is also heartened by many of the individuals he meets, by the national protected lands, by our technology, and at the end of the book by the vote for change...the election of Obama. And he also notes that the "fifty states each with its own mores and set of priorities, don't cohere except on paper."
I find that individuals are always more complex, with richer lives, in real-time than they are when generalized or as statistics. This author, as all good travel writers, seemed honestly interested in those he met with their diverse lives and histories. This book is a very readable combination of specificities and the generalities of a trip across America.
"The next passage in my journey is a love affair," John Steinbeck swooned over Montana, but it was "Jefferson City, Missouri that stole my heart," says Bill Barich. The book moves right along, with anecdote following anecdote, historical perspectives, musings on how Americans live and what they find important in their lives.
He finds his route peopled mostly with conservatives. He is traveling just before Obama was elected so he asks folks about their politics and concludes that there was a "bizarre reality irrespective of the facts. On this particular subject [guns] as with abortion, the possibility of an intelligent discussion had gone by the boards."
After an overload of advertising aimed at attracting tourists with all possible inducements and hyperbole, in Ouray, Colorado, he finally "saw the best sign of the trip, a small brass plaque on a nondescript brick buidling: ON THIS SITE IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED."
If you like the open road, you will like this book with its observations on the America he experienced in 2008.
In Monterey, he "asked around Cannery Row to discover what, if anything, of John Steinbeck's the tourists had read. Of Mice and Men topped the list....The late novels, such as The Winter of Our Discontent and Sweet Thursday, drew a blank. Oddly, Travels with Charley earned just a single mention despite being a bestseller. Readers had forgotten about it, apparently, but they praised it when prompted." The author also notes that they "loved Charley and the idea of being on the road, but they were blind to the author's acid observations, barely concealed malaise, and outright expressions of disgust." And I admit, I too have only a romanticized remembrance of Travels with Charley.
He agrees with Steinbeck's pessimism and "the trashiness of the landscape, the pernicious malls and ugly subdivisions, and the uniform blandness of our mass culture are here to stay barring a catacylsm." He decries our "gross obesity and polluted watersheds...our unsurpassed talent for living on credit cards.. and our indulgence of the divisive talk-show pundits or the way we've devalued--even become suspicious of--the pursuit of excellence."
But the author is also heartened by many of the individuals he meets, by the national protected lands, by our technology, and at the end of the book by the vote for change...the election of Obama. And he also notes that the "fifty states each with its own mores and set of priorities, don't cohere except on paper."
I find that individuals are always more complex, with richer lives, in real-time than they are when generalized or as statistics. This author, as all good travel writers, seemed honestly interested in those he met with their diverse lives and histories. This book is a very readable combination of specificities and the generalities of a trip across America.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Book: Walking Isreal by Martin Fletcher
A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation, the nation being Israel. Martin Fletcher is a newsman currently living in New York and Israel and working for NBC news. He decides to walk the Mediterranean coast of Israel from north to south and this is the story.
I felt immersed in the "soul of [this] nation" and certainly learned about the Arabs and Jews and Israelis and Palestinians as Martin trudges through the beach sand and settlements and cities along the way, occasionally cooling off in the sea. He talks with people as he walks and eats in restaurants and visits friends and he asks hard questions at times. I learned that there are 7.4 million Israelis and 20% are Arab, that Israel's currency is the shekel (an old Biblical word from my youth), and that there is the concern that "reducing the Arab birthrate is essential to maintaining Israel's Jewish majority."
He visits kibbutzim and I learned how 2/3 of them are now privatized because the ideology of the kibbutz movement didn't translate into successful, economically independent communities. "Kibbutzniks always complained that there were two types of members--the suckers who did all the work and the parasites who did as little as possible."
I learned how the victims of the Holocaust were scorned and derided for years. Yegudit Winkler is a retired journalist who tells about coming to Israel , "I was one of four children from the Holocaust, out of 24 kids. They called us soap...Even in the summer my mother's friends wore long sleeves to hid their tattoos." That changed with the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 and the survivors "found their voice, and Israel listened in horror."
Fletcher talks about the compulsory military service. He describes how various nationalities came to Israel during different decades: Russians in the early 1900s, Poles in the 1920s, Germans in the 1930s, Europeans from many countries in the 1940s and 1950s, and Ethiopians and those from the former Soviet republics in the 1980s and 1990s. Over a million Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel in the 1990s.
I laughed occasionally as when Fletcher went into a restaurant: "The waiter, whose arm was in a sling, informed me that the cook was off, and that I should look only at items that could be cooked with one hand." Or, "She is an American Jew whose despairing parents sent her to Israel at age 16 to save her from the Roman Catholic she was dating. Unhappily for them she then ran off with an Arab poet. "
He is self-deprecating, aware of his age (especially as he briefly tries to relive his youth in the bawdy nightclubs of Tel Aviv), always seeking answers and trying to understand both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He notes that the press seldom covers the amicable relations between these two peoples, only the animosity and bombs and raids and terror, and that he also has been guilty of that type of reporting.
An Israeli Arab tells him, "I always thought Israli Arabs could serve as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians." Yet Martin says that "in all my research for this book, this has been the most common warning--Israeli Arabs have had it up to here. The new generation will instigate the next intifada, which will be inside Israel." There is some feeling that Israelis are becoming too materialistic and soft, and the Palestinians just have to "survive and avoid a peace agreement Israel collapses from within."
He does make it to Gaza and gets stopped from approaching too closely by two soldiers with M16s who insist he delete the photos he took. He explains that that the warning signs should be in English and Arabic, not just Hebrew, and the soldiers agree.
He muses, "Imagine being a refugee only a few miles from your stolen home, watching strangers tilling your fields and harvesting the fruit from the trees your father planted....If an Arab creeps up at night and picks fruit from his old trees, is that stealing? Who here is the thief?"
The book tells of daily life in Israel, and Fletcher finds Arabs and Jews often live comfortably as neighbors, co-workers and citizens of Israel. Still, sadly, it often seemed that Arabs living in Israel are second-class citizens, subtly so, but still "not our kind."
It is a land of sunshine and memories; it is modern and ancient, colorful, lively, a country that in "2008, had more companies listed on NASDAQ than companies from Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined."
At journey's end, he is body-surfing in the sea in a celebratory mood, and a wave crashes him into a small rock and he calls his Hagar his "long-suffering" wife to come pick him as he likely had a broken nose.
Hagar--another strong association with the Bible from my childhood.
I felt immersed in the "soul of [this] nation" and certainly learned about the Arabs and Jews and Israelis and Palestinians as Martin trudges through the beach sand and settlements and cities along the way, occasionally cooling off in the sea. He talks with people as he walks and eats in restaurants and visits friends and he asks hard questions at times. I learned that there are 7.4 million Israelis and 20% are Arab, that Israel's currency is the shekel (an old Biblical word from my youth), and that there is the concern that "reducing the Arab birthrate is essential to maintaining Israel's Jewish majority."
He visits kibbutzim and I learned how 2/3 of them are now privatized because the ideology of the kibbutz movement didn't translate into successful, economically independent communities. "Kibbutzniks always complained that there were two types of members--the suckers who did all the work and the parasites who did as little as possible."
I learned how the victims of the Holocaust were scorned and derided for years. Yegudit Winkler is a retired journalist who tells about coming to Israel , "I was one of four children from the Holocaust, out of 24 kids. They called us soap...Even in the summer my mother's friends wore long sleeves to hid their tattoos." That changed with the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961 and the survivors "found their voice, and Israel listened in horror."
Fletcher talks about the compulsory military service. He describes how various nationalities came to Israel during different decades: Russians in the early 1900s, Poles in the 1920s, Germans in the 1930s, Europeans from many countries in the 1940s and 1950s, and Ethiopians and those from the former Soviet republics in the 1980s and 1990s. Over a million Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel in the 1990s.
I laughed occasionally as when Fletcher went into a restaurant: "The waiter, whose arm was in a sling, informed me that the cook was off, and that I should look only at items that could be cooked with one hand." Or, "She is an American Jew whose despairing parents sent her to Israel at age 16 to save her from the Roman Catholic she was dating. Unhappily for them she then ran off with an Arab poet. "
He is self-deprecating, aware of his age (especially as he briefly tries to relive his youth in the bawdy nightclubs of Tel Aviv), always seeking answers and trying to understand both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He notes that the press seldom covers the amicable relations between these two peoples, only the animosity and bombs and raids and terror, and that he also has been guilty of that type of reporting.
An Israeli Arab tells him, "I always thought Israli Arabs could serve as a bridge between Jews and Palestinians." Yet Martin says that "in all my research for this book, this has been the most common warning--Israeli Arabs have had it up to here. The new generation will instigate the next intifada, which will be inside Israel." There is some feeling that Israelis are becoming too materialistic and soft, and the Palestinians just have to "survive and avoid a peace agreement Israel collapses from within."
He does make it to Gaza and gets stopped from approaching too closely by two soldiers with M16s who insist he delete the photos he took. He explains that that the warning signs should be in English and Arabic, not just Hebrew, and the soldiers agree.
He muses, "Imagine being a refugee only a few miles from your stolen home, watching strangers tilling your fields and harvesting the fruit from the trees your father planted....If an Arab creeps up at night and picks fruit from his old trees, is that stealing? Who here is the thief?"
The book tells of daily life in Israel, and Fletcher finds Arabs and Jews often live comfortably as neighbors, co-workers and citizens of Israel. Still, sadly, it often seemed that Arabs living in Israel are second-class citizens, subtly so, but still "not our kind."
It is a land of sunshine and memories; it is modern and ancient, colorful, lively, a country that in "2008, had more companies listed on NASDAQ than companies from Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined."
At journey's end, he is body-surfing in the sea in a celebratory mood, and a wave crashes him into a small rock and he calls his Hagar his "long-suffering" wife to come pick him as he likely had a broken nose.
Hagar--another strong association with the Bible from my childhood.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Bird: Clay-colored Sparrow
This July, I have been walking in fields near Glacier High School early in the morning before the sun gets too high. I park in the school parking lot and see and hear several killdeer, the young ones a bit clumsy as they scurry across the parking lots, the adults doing their noisy best to have me move on.
The adjacent fields are full of Salsify and Musk Thistle which is a tall and formidably prickly plant with a beautiful purple flower. This is open country with primarily weedy fields. The more I looked and listened, the more sparrows I saw and heard and soon kept hearing an insect-like buzz, repeated 2 to 3 times, in addition to the more melodious Savannahs and Vespers. With some bird guide research, I narrowed things down to a couple of possibilities and then listened to the CD. I am nearly clueless with bird calls, but several years ago Steve and Andree had given me this CD, which is always in the car, and I am beginning to refer to it more and more. The buzz was unmistakably the Clay-colored Sparrow. Now I just had to SEE it. I do not list birds I do not see. Nothing virtuous here; just my personal decision.
So the next day, I listened and soon heard the buzz, buzz, buzz. I got off the sidewalk and moved slowly through high weeds, which wasn't so bad except the ground underneath was uneven and I had to be careful not to fall. I did wonder about ticks, although I don't think this is the right habitat for them. I walked up a bank, over some minimal fencing wire and just stood still, repeating my mantra of "Let the birds come to you." After five minutes or so of standing quietly, I began hearing the buzzing again and soon spotted the bird. I knew the field marks and it WAS a Clay-colored, a life bird for me! There were a couple of them and they would dive under cover for a few minutes and then pop out and sing again. No one was near, even though I was out in the open and close to the whole northern strip mall / box store area. The sun was out, the sky was very blue and a whole world of sparrows was singing and nesting and fledging and surviving in this habitat which certainly will be expropriated within a decade for something we humans want. But for now, it is idyllic.
Since then I have heard and seen these rather unobtrusive sparrows a couple of times, in different spots in the fields. They don't show themselves like the Savannah or Vesper sparrows; however, and I needed to do a little work to find them. I think of this as another puzzle piece now in place in my perception of the natural world, the Clay-colored Sparrow piece.
What I have found much more challenging recently is the identification of grasses, with their ligules, lemmas, glumes, auricles, panicles, spikelets, bracts and awns. Still, I am now finally noticing and appreciating grasses and how graceful they are.
I need to remember to talk to Betony about botany as we gather for her wedding next month. A serious botanist needs a dissecting microscope I discovered, but I am hoping there is a simple way for at least figuring out the common grasses in my field.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Book: Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison
I just re-read this book. I have never done that intentionally before. I love how Jim Harrison writes. This is a beautiful novel, and while reading it, I wondered how others would react and if they would find it as compelling. To some, it might seem deceptively simple in a way. I think his writing is unique. His scenes and characters and dialogue make me peaceful.
The story takes place almost entirely in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While I only drive through this part of the state occasionally, all the place names are familiar, and I would guess that many of the vignettes are taken from Harrison's personal experiences when he lived in the UP. So for us who have lived or are living in Michigan, there is the sense of home ground, of a known geography.
Donald is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and the book is partly that story but also the stories of his wife, his daughter and son and his brother-in-law. The days go by, with lovely descriptions of the natural world, of Lake Superior, of life in the small towns and in Marquette, of the history of the UP, and of bears and cabins and rivers and of the Anishinabe. It all just flows in a way that delighted me, maybe even more through this second reading. While most of his characters are likable enough, familiar in their foibles, mentally and emotionally organized or not, they are mostly ordinary people, but also extraordinary as they become vivid and real in Harrison's words, if that makes any sense. It does for me. It is the gift a good author has passes on to readers, a universality quotient that draws us in as we recognize ourselves and feel somehow comforted.
I wanted the book to go on and on, not to find out what happens to the characters, but because the pages were full of weather, water, the woods, spoken insights by one or another of the characters, or their mental observations on the state of things general or specific and, of course, what happens to Donald.
Here are a few sentences, chosen at random. The first is when K unexpectedly meets Sandra and her 18-month-old baby in a grocery store. (K's friend had killed himself after his young girlfriend becomes pregnant and he is charged with statutory rape.)
"The baby reached for me and I held her between the grocery aisles. The baby had my friend's green eyes and I was falling apart inside. The girl said that her family had moved to Newberry after the funeral mass. She said her family didn't believe in abortion and they couldn't give up the baby for adoption because it might have gone to an unchristian family. She said she was sorry every single day...I looked at her and down at the baby in my arms, who was fondling my pretentious Tibetan prayer necklace. 'I knew you was so close as friends.' Her bad grammar made it all more unbearable. I impulsively said that if she ever wanted to get away from her family I'd support her and the baby. She never called."
"If you were making five bucks a day at an American-owned maquiladora plant in Sonoran Nogales and stood on a hill outside your cardboard hut you could see a PizzaHut in American Nogales where you could make more than five bucks an hour. It was a no-bainer why people crossed the border."
One more...again chosen at random. I didn't have to look to find sentences that I liked because I liked them all:
"Ravens don't stand on the ground unless they're sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven't figured out cars but ravens have....A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground...My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree."
The story takes place almost entirely in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While I only drive through this part of the state occasionally, all the place names are familiar, and I would guess that many of the vignettes are taken from Harrison's personal experiences when he lived in the UP. So for us who have lived or are living in Michigan, there is the sense of home ground, of a known geography.
Donald is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and the book is partly that story but also the stories of his wife, his daughter and son and his brother-in-law. The days go by, with lovely descriptions of the natural world, of Lake Superior, of life in the small towns and in Marquette, of the history of the UP, and of bears and cabins and rivers and of the Anishinabe. It all just flows in a way that delighted me, maybe even more through this second reading. While most of his characters are likable enough, familiar in their foibles, mentally and emotionally organized or not, they are mostly ordinary people, but also extraordinary as they become vivid and real in Harrison's words, if that makes any sense. It does for me. It is the gift a good author has passes on to readers, a universality quotient that draws us in as we recognize ourselves and feel somehow comforted.
I wanted the book to go on and on, not to find out what happens to the characters, but because the pages were full of weather, water, the woods, spoken insights by one or another of the characters, or their mental observations on the state of things general or specific and, of course, what happens to Donald.
Here are a few sentences, chosen at random. The first is when K unexpectedly meets Sandra and her 18-month-old baby in a grocery store. (K's friend had killed himself after his young girlfriend becomes pregnant and he is charged with statutory rape.)
"The baby reached for me and I held her between the grocery aisles. The baby had my friend's green eyes and I was falling apart inside. The girl said that her family had moved to Newberry after the funeral mass. She said her family didn't believe in abortion and they couldn't give up the baby for adoption because it might have gone to an unchristian family. She said she was sorry every single day...I looked at her and down at the baby in my arms, who was fondling my pretentious Tibetan prayer necklace. 'I knew you was so close as friends.' Her bad grammar made it all more unbearable. I impulsively said that if she ever wanted to get away from her family I'd support her and the baby. She never called."
"If you were making five bucks a day at an American-owned maquiladora plant in Sonoran Nogales and stood on a hill outside your cardboard hut you could see a PizzaHut in American Nogales where you could make more than five bucks an hour. It was a no-bainer why people crossed the border."
One more...again chosen at random. I didn't have to look to find sentences that I liked because I liked them all:
"Ravens don't stand on the ground unless they're sure of themselves. Only once have I seen one dead by the road and it was pretty young. Deer and many other animals haven't figured out cars but ravens have....A real old raven had fallen slowly down through the branches of a hemlock tree over a period of two hours, grabbing hold of a branch now and then with his or her last strength, while around the bird about three dozen of his family were whirling. I heard the soft sound when he finally hit the ground...My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree."
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Birds: Lostwood, Medicine Lake and Bowdoin (NWRs)
May 27, 2011 ~ North Dakota
I headed west to Stanley and then north to Lostwood NWR. This country is so beautiful, to me anyway. And it was especially so on this bright spring morning. Lostwood is out in the open on the high plains, away from everything; there is a modest visitor center with a bunch of brochures and a whiteboard where folks could list what birds they had seen. No one came out to greet me or the other guy who drove in just ahead of me. Around the office there were some trees, a few buildings and vehicles but mostly it was rolling prairie with no trees and many potholes and small lakes. The wind was blowing hard, it was a bit chilly, and I was still somewhat tentative what with the GI upset the night before and not sleeping much.
First I tried to see any warblers lurking in the brush near the office but only saw a beautiful Northern harrier flying about, so I decided to drive the auto tour. I wondered why the guy who drove in before me was walking down the road carrying his camera with a long lens, but soon realized the gate to the auto tour was closed. A young kid came by and apologetically said something about birds nesting and the rangers not wanting people to get stuck on the water-logged roads. Darn…I was not about to walk for miles in the wind.
So I left and headed vaguely north and west to the extreme NW corner of ND, kind of heading for Westby, Montana. I did eventually make it there but started going on gravel roads since so many fields were flooded and there were hundreds of birds taking advantage of this. I saw eared grebes (at one point there were three pair swimming just off the roadside!), willets, all kinds of other ducks and swallows, and I stalked (with the car) a Franklin’s gull, which was sitting in the muddy road. I crept closer and closer and got wonderful views. There were also marbled godwits which are magnificent large wading birds with long bicolored bills. I was on marginal country roads and came out north of the town of Bowbells, ND, and saw that the road I was on was blocked from that end. I made it around the barricade and got on a paved road.
Westby is JUST across the state line and is a Montana town…a small, old town, looking rather shabby and certainly without tourist amenities. While trying to find the City Park, I noticed a street named “State Line” so maybe half the town is really in ND. The park seems to belong to another era. There were tall trees, un-mown grasses, houses on the periphery here and there…a glade under the trees, some sports fields and picnic tables, but all seemed like they had been there for 100 years…to me, it was right out of a Willa Cather or Wallace Stegner novel. There were a lot of birds chirping and I saw a pair of thrushes, but birding here would require patience and time. Also, of course being me, I felt strange and out of place in this intimate little corner of the world, where undoubtedly everyone knows everyone else and who was this strange woman out there?
So I drove on to Plentywood, hoping there would be a motel there because it would have been a long drive to find one elsewhere. There was: The Sherwood Inn, where I stayed in a lower level dreary room. I ate an early supper at Cousin’s, a restaurant across the street and went to bed early, kicking myself for not asking for a second-floor room in the front which looked out into tall pine trees. At it was, my view was a street level parking lot. I read and went to sleep early.
May 28 ~ Montana
And got up early. I had a cup of motel coffee and there were at least nine guys hanging around in the small lobby. I think some were oil men, some fishermen and some ranchers. One had a shirt saying “Been there…Wrecked that.” It was dark and gloomy outside and raining.
Medicine Lake NWR is 20 miles south and I headed there. As I drove off the main road onto the refuge road, I started to see birds and immediately saw a life bird: a chestnut-collared longspur. YES! There were also many Western kingbirds. There is a large lake (Medicine Lake) to the south and a lot of protected prairie making up this refuge. I wondered how it would be to live here through the seasons.
I started on the auto route and watched a pair of harriers fly around and soon discovered that (guess what?) the auto route was closed. Jeez. I think it was because of flooding and horrid road conditions. So I took a dirt road north and a sign said I was leaving the refuge. At first I thought it was a field, but looked at the map and realized it was a county road. Eventually, I ended up at the other end of the refuge and drove around there for hours, since part of the auto route was open at that end. I did not see another soul in the refuge.
At one point there was water over the road, but I got out and saw that it was a short cement section over a low spot and only a couple inches deep so on I went. I had to pass cows that were unfenced and got onto a 2-track leading to the “Pelican Overlook.” I saw more willets and godwits; I watched an upland sandpiper for a long time; I saw the pelicans although it was too cold and windy to stand out for long; I kept hearing grass birds…probably the Sprague’s pipit and Baird’s sparrow I was hoping to see and didn’t. 
There were lots of yellow-headed blackbirds near the watery places and killdeer constantly doing their distress thing right in front of the car so as to lead me away from their nest and/or babies. And then all of a sudden my car wouldn’t start. I was slightly freaked as I really was MILES from a person or a building, it was cold and I was sure the cell phone (if it was even charged) would not work…Oh, f_____. Could I sleep out here? in my car with the cows around? Would they close the gates at dusk? Would I try to walk the 5 to 10 miles to get to a road through the cows?
Of course, the car started after a couple of minutes. I flooded it or something. I had been starting and stopping and not being very careful about putting the car in Park and constantly trying to start it in Drive, etc.
I finally left but thought I could go south and west on the country gravel roads instead of retracing my route, and I did, but a few places were iffy. Still, I was closer to farm houses and ranches, even if they were distant and on the horizons. At least I could SEE them.
I got to Hwy 2 and headed west, through Culbertson and the tiny town of Brockton and immediately got stopped by the Tribal Police for speeding through Brockton. I got a lecture about having to stop at ALL the small towns on the Hi Line (which is what Hwy 2 is called across northern Montana but which is called Grandma Bea Boulevard for the 1/4 or 1/8 mile that is Brockton. It says on my ticket “Grandma Bea Boulevard"). There are reservations all along here. I didn’t have cash, so the officer said to just make a U-turn on the road and go back to the Quick Stop in Brockton and he would meet me there and I could get cash with my debit card, BBB. Which I did and left the Quick Stop and a nice middle-aged Native woman asked if I “could spare 90 cents” which I could. We chatted a minute and I went on to Bowdoin NWF, another 100 miles or so down the road.
I got to Bowdoin well into the afternoon and took a couple of hours driving through this wonderful NWR. Again, being a Saturday, the visitor center was closed but the auto route was OPEN. It was perfect! I watched so many lovely birds like lots of Wilson’s phalaropes (one of the very few bird species where the female is more brightly colored than the male. I saw black-necked stilts on nests and calling and flying about and many American avocets, truly striking birds. I came upon a small group of white-faced ibises (remember Maria…they were in the pond close to the visitor center the time we went? This time, they were in a way different place.)
The weather was just stunning, with the immense Montana sky constantly changing with sun and occasional clouds. I saw only two other vehicles on the roughly circular 17-mile auto route.
The birds were not very skittish. There were more marbled godwits and lark buntings and bobolinks, along with many ducks. I saw a loggerhead shrike and magpies. I saw a flycatcher I couldn’t ID. This is, so far, my favorite NWR and it belongs to me (and to all of you!)
May 29 ~ Montana
A bright beautiful Sunday morning with even less traffic than during the week. I had about 5 hours before Kalispell and it was easy. At one point I pulled off on a road leading to some farms to photograph another old building. The road was muddy but I didn’t think anything of it until I was ready to get back in the car and realized my tennis shoes were loaded with gumbo mud…like a heavy paste about an inch thick. So, I tried to scrape some off on the edge of the door but finally just drove barefoot. On and on until I had one more birding thrill: I spotted a hawk on a road sign while flying by in my car. I turned around and got great looks at another life bird: a Swainson’s hawk.
The Rockies were visible for miles. I thought of adorable 4-year-old Ginny asking as she saw the Rockies for the first time from this approach: "Where's the door?" I went through the Blackfeet reservation town of Browning and then through Glacier NP and on to my house near Kalispell.
I know road trips help sustain me, both in the reality and the remembrance...Perfect spring weather and all the birds made this an especially grand traverse.
Book: City of Tranquil LIght by Bo Caldwell
This book "is based on the lives of my maternal grandparents, Peter and Anna Schmidt Kiehn, who were Mennonite and later Nazarene missionaries in China and Taiwan from 1906 to 1961." So notes the author at the end of this heartwarming story.
It is a wonderful tale, all the more so for being based on real people. Normally, I quickly decide I don't want to read novels based on "religion," but I didn't realize what the content was when I brought it home from the library. I scanned the back cover and found Gail Godwin saying that this narrative "is full of light, even at its darkest moments." Or Jay Parini who says, "Bo Caldwell has...conjured a miraculous story, one full of passion, historical interest, and spiritual questing."
The main characters are Will and Katherine Kiehn and they arrive in China in 1906. They are not married or even acquaintances but have traveled together with a group who are to become missionaries in China. But soon they fall in love and marry. The book alternates between their voices and is a compelling, warm memoir with details of what happens in China through their years in Kuang P'ing Ch'eng, the city of tranquil light. They endure many, many hardships but are totally committed to their mission. Bandits, drought, soldiers and wars, illness and death of loved ones...overwhelmed at times with all that needs attention, they persevere always with their faith ultimately intact, even if it wavers at times.
They grow to love China; it is their home and they are true servants. For the Chinese who watch these foreigners and who are initially reluctant and suspicious, the actions of Will and Katherine, as they unconditionally ease the miseries of body and spirit of those in need, working through the years selflessly and without flagging and always with the love of God in their hearts, break down cultural barriers, and they and their message are accepted. Yet, they are always also strangers, foreign-born, and when the Communists come to power, they know there may soon come a time when they must leave, to protect, not themselves, but their friends, parishioners and neighbors.
They do eventually return to the US, reluctantly, partly because of the political situation and partly because of Katherine's declining health. As they wait to board the ship in 1933 that will take them to Seattle, Will looks at Katherine:
"I looked at her. She was my own sweet wife....with Mo Yun's silver clasp holding her [bun] in place....In her hand she held our extravagant purchase for the journey: A Sunkist navel orange from California, which we planned to share when we boarded the ship. Then I took in the rest of her: the shapeless gray hat I did not recognize, the nondescript tweed coat I remembered buying on furlough twenty years ago, the flat black hand-me-down shoes I knew were too big. I looked down at myself: brown shoes with holes in the soles, patched woolen trousers sent from home a dozen years ago, a worn gray overcoat that had been given to by an American doctor who had been passing through years earlier. We had tried to dress up for our journey , butI saw how shabby we looked, and how bereft, and what a contrast our appearances were to the rich lives we had led in Kuang P'ing Ch'eng....People often spoke of the sacrifice Katherine and I had made in going to China. This had always sounded odd to me, for I had never thought of it a sacrifice...."
The idea of a missionary will now always be enriched in my mind, not glamorized or idealized, but better understood.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Book: Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass
Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie Brown were siblings who grew up in Arkansas in the mid 20th century. They became famous as country singers.
"The Browns' voices were shiny and elegant, and utterly controlled; the spirit of their voices had the Appalachian hillbilly music as its rootstock, but without the nasal whine and twang. People had never heard anything like it and could not get enough of it. Every song the Browns released in 1955 and 1956 hit the top ten. Never in the history of music has any group had as many Top Ten hits over a two-year period, nor as many number ones."
Rick Bass has written this novel about Browns and their family, their mother Birdie, their father Floyd. It is a fictionalized account of their lives, often returning to Maxine, now a lonely and elderly woman who remembers it all and who still hopes she will grace a stage again.
"That the fame has been gone fifty years now does not register in her. In her mind it has only been gone one day." Finally, she settles for putting up a notice at her local Piggly Wiggly asking if someone would like to make a movie of her life. And someone responds.
Elvis is a minor character and Chet Atkins becomes their manager. The Beatles become famous; musical tastes change and the Browns, for all their talent and success, are forgotten and dismissed. Jim Ed and Bonnie let it all go without much regret, but Maxine is tenacious in her hopes of a reprise of their fame. She has a hard life with an unhappy marriage and too much alcohol, and she never really lets go. Some can and some cannot.
Rick Bass almost always has written of the West or of the natural world, so this book was a surprise. He has lovely memorable scenes all through the story, as when Bonnie's husband-to-be, Brownie, comes to meet the family one snowy evening, or when Elvis and Bonnie take a canoe trip down the river, or when Maxine makes a carefully negotiated trip to the grocery store and it is almost more than she can manage in her frail state.
It is a also the story of a family struggling through adversity and celebrating when things ease in the small towns and hills and woods of Arkansas...the household tasks and homemade cooking, the hard and dangerous work of running a lumber mill, the bonds of family through the years, moonshine and Floyd's drinking, the long road trips when they are out performing and always the comfort of returning home.
So, for a glimpse into the country music scene just before the huge impact of rock-and-roll and technology, this is a sweet, often poignant remembrance.
www.themaxinebrown. com
Monday, June 27, 2011
Book: To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron
The mountain is Mt. Kailas. It is 22,000 feet high, and has never been climbed. It is in western Tibet just east of India and just north of Nepal. If one looks on a map, it is where the borders of these three countries converge. Mt. Kailas is "sacred to one-fifth of humankind...both Buddhists and Hindu." To not have known this amazing fact is humbling. Complicating his trek are concerns about whether the Chinese will allow them into Tibet. Mr. Thubron is a strong and sturdy traveler. While he does hire a couple of guides and carriers, he makes the journey on foot.
All through my reading of this book and increasingly so as both the book and the actual trek progressed, I was struck with how un-American it was, not in a bad way, but in a way that brought into focus another culture and people who live without technology, roads, electricity, medical care, comfort as we define comfort, ease of mobility.... Many books do this, but NOTHING seemed familiar to me, and the author seemed not bothered with the lack of modernity, which to my mind is the mark of a true wanderer. He accepted this world and was respectful of it. He struggles to understand and learn about the mystery of Mt. Kailas and why it has become symbolic and sacred.
He walks through a world of wild beauty, of dangerous beauty, often harsh, with raging rivers and precipitous trails on talus slopes, enduring cold, wind, snow and oxygen depletion, through a landscape of prayer flags and prayer wheels and other pilgrims. He is intrepid and continues with his goal of walking around Mt. Kailas; this circling journey is a kora. He seeks a connection with all that has happened before in this place and also with his personal familial history. His sister died on a mountain when she was young; his aged mother recently has died.
"...for long minutes I am slumped on rocks, gasping, my legs gone...Then my trekking pole snaps in the shale. I think: if things are like this at 11,000 feet, how will they be over 18,500, where I am going?...Suddenly...I feel the air too thin to sustain me. Nothing remains but this thread of oxygen It is not enough. Barely enough. Faint, I am lying on stones. The air is receding from me, everything depleted. My breath is rasping sobs."
He learns from those along the way, from the monks, the other pilgrims, from the villagers and from his sherpas. He recalls what he has read and recounts histories we are never taught, stories and myths of which we are not aware, and in this narrative I learned of a mountain whose name I never had heard before.
The book is part adventure, part history, part world religion, part anthropology and geography, part modern geopolitics....
"They are all Bhotias and local Tibetans now, swarthy, wild-faced men whose backs are sheathed in fleeces and yak pelts and foreheads rumpled by headbands to steady their toppling loads."
As I said, this book was filled with new images and stories, the physical adventure vicariously enjoyed, offering glimpses into other realities, never a bad thing for any of us.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Book: Prairie Spring by Pete Dunne
Or, since most books I read have subtitles, A Journey Into the Heart of a Season.
Pete Dunne, a premier birder, traveled with his photographer wife, Linda, to the western prairies for several weeks in the spring. This is a rather small book, with some photographs, but with enough to color in this somewhat forgotten part of our country. Pete writes about Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Montana...with observations on weather, history, botany, sociology, geography, the mammals of the prairies, large and small, and, of course, bird finding and watching. His commentary is not pedantic; he never takes himself too seriously and finds humor in most situations. It was a good book to read while crossing the prairies myself at the end of May, albeit further north. This land is defined by weather patterns, grasses, magnificent skies, water-filled potholes, rivers, creeks, sunshine, county roads, a few major highways, small towns, ranches and farms, aridity in the more western states and only occasional trees.
If the place name Pawnee National Grassland does not pique your interest at all, then you can probably skip reading this book, but if something trips in your heart and soul when reading those words, I think you'll like it.
I refer often to another book Pete Dunne wrote: Essential Field Guide Companion in which he describes most of the birds in the United States. His descriptions often make me smile, as when he describes the snowy owl as a looking like "a small, soot-flecked, partially melted snowman with bright yellow eyes." For me, I can usually confirm a tentative identification after reading his notes on a particular bird.
A couple of examples of how he writes:
"I thought I'd try to calculate how many primroses stood in front of me. Using an average of 350 blossoms per 100 square feet, figuring that to the far hilltop I was looking at an area about three quarters of a square mile, I came up with approximately 73,180,800 flowers."
"A buffalo (American for bison) is a front-heavy ungulate with a head too large and hips too small to win any ribbons at the local county fair stock show."
He is the Director of the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Book: Stones for Schools by Greg Mortenson
Given that Greg Mortenson has been prominent in the public discourse recently after a 60 Minute segment which challenged much of what he has written, I finally finished this book (I had read most of it off and on the during the previous six months) with a certain puzzlement about Greg and this whole mega-story.
This continues the previous Three Cups of Tea in which Greg stumbled into Korphe in Pakistan and "the subsequent chain of events through which a lost mountaineer eventually came to discover his life's calling by fostering education and literacy in the impoverished Muslim villages of the western Himalayas."
So what is reality in this story? It is an amazing tale and I am inclined to give Greg the benefit of the doubt and reserve judgment at this point as Nicholas Kristof wrote that he would do. I just cannot think the Greg Mortenson has messed up so badly as to be incredible.
In the northeast of Afghanistan, there is a long, narrow piece of land that extends eastward to China for about 150 miles. It is called the Wakhan Corridor. To the north is Tajikistan and the Pamir Range, to the east China, and to the south the Hindu Kush and Pakistan. Bozai Gumbaz is a very remote village in the eastern Wakhan, about 25 miles from China, and it is there that Greg wishes to build a school for "The People at the End of the Road." It is a formidable task but then the whole project is. The vision and determination of one man, the power of one (and then thousands of supporters) and how schools got built in this politically troubled, geographically rugged area fill the pages of both of Greg's books.
So we will see, perhaps, what was/is reality and what may have been something else entirely. Of course I hope that the bones of this hugely inspiring story are solid.
Book: A Supremely Bad Idea by Luke Dempsey
subtitled "Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All."
Luke is introduced to birds by two of his friends (a married couple). They are originally from England but now live in NYC. One day, they are all together at Luke's second home in Pennsylvania and his friends see a Common Yellowthroat. Luke is the novice and can't see through the binoculars at first, but then: "Oh my! Wow! Are you kidding me? Wow!"
And so they all begin birding together. They make periodic trips all over the US, and this is the wonderfully funny account of what they find, of their friendship, where they go, and the people they meet on their quests. Birding is a strange passion, I suppose. The author says that "I can't log how many times I've seen a blank stare, even a twitch of an eyeball, when I admit that, yes, I love to look at birds. With strangers, I can go from mildly interesting to completely written off in about a second and a half."
But for those of you who are seduced by birds, and even if you're not, this book will probably make you laugh out loud--more than once.
Esther was in Michigan last week and I took her on my favorite trail. Her cell phone kept ringing until she turned it off. It has a loud obnoxious ring. She was carrying a blue Crown Royal bag with batteries, phone, etc. The bag had a hole in the bottom and the batteries kept falling out on the trail. But, she settled in after a bit. We saw Common Yellowthroats, close enough to see even without binoculars and (I think) she may have progressed a bit along the spectrum of birding from a starting point of barely being able to distinguish a robin from a cardinal to the far end of being able to confidently ID Empids.
She actually started a list: the glorious male Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Goldfinches, the constantly singing House Wrens nesting in my yard, along with several other species. She will figure out the doves and parrots she sees all the time in Florida, and she bought a small feeder with seed cakes to take home with her. Should she accept this challenge, she will be the fourth (of six) sisters who carry around binoculars, buy bird books, take birding hikes, go to birding websites, visit sewage lagoons and beaches and marshes.
Book: Catching Heaven by Sands Hall
Catching Heaven in a novel set in the Southwest with three narrators: Lizzie and Maud (sisters) and Jake (a musician and friend of both Lizzie and Maud). There is a lot in this novel; it is worth reading. It could have been what I call a "zuzu" novel but it rises above cliches and facile characterization. It's a lovely piece of writing, evocative, with credible story lines and characters (for the most part).
In spite of the title, it is not saccharine. It is a wonderful melange of Shakespeare, country and western bars and music and cowboys, Native Americans, kids, the different ways of artistic expression not dependent on big cities, relationships (of course...what novel isn't?), families, friendships, living and dying.
Amy Tan says "Rich, warm and utterly satisfying...a wonderful debut from a first-rate storyteller." It is that....
Monday, May 16, 2011
Book: The Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler
It took me a long while to read this book as I read others in between and, as a result, I don't have the most coherent memory of much of it. Still, I finished it tonight. It is an account of the modern Arctic. Sara Wheeler begins most of her nine chapters with a pie-shaped wedge of map, the center of the "pie" always being the North Pole but with different geographic perimeters in each chapter: Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Greenland and Alaska.
"In Nuuk I saw a pair of nylon panties pegged on a washing line next to a row of curing seal ribs...There was the twenty-year-old Inupiat woman with two children; almost everyone in her family was drunk almost all the time; she had never been out hunting; she ate Western junk food and watched The Simpsons." This theme recurs, sadly, throughout the book in many places.
There are towns with names like Ittoqqortoormitt where "a girl in Wrangler jeans and Nike sneakers drinks Coca-Cola with her sealskin-clad grandmother."
Ms. Wheeler loves the Arctic. Along the way, she tells some history; she tells of the amazing explorations and men who ventured into and through and on the ice, many of whom perished. She says of the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen that he was "an intellectual giant as well as a natural poet" and the author considers him the "presiding spirit of my Arctic story." Of course, I now want to read more of Nansen.
There is a chapter on Greenland, and Wheeler rooms with US scientists working there. Tiny flowers bloom in the Arctic, and she speaks of reindeer, musk oxen, narwhals, mineral exploration, the Lapps, geoscience, pollution, global warming and the extremely brutal gulag on Solovki, an island in the White Sea; she travels the Dalton Highway in Alaska with Jeannie, a lady trucker, and tells of Bob Marshall and John Muir and their experiences in the north.
Each page is filled with a meandering rich narrative, most of it about the land and people (natives and others) who find themselves above the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north.
I feel I should have taken notes; there is so much of interest in this book in addition to what I have already mentioned. For instance, there is book An African in Greenland by a young self-educated man from Togo by the name of Kpomassie, who finds himself in Greenland after eight years of working his way north from Africa. He did not wish initiation into the cult of the python which was to be his destiny and which prospect was the impetus for his flight from Togo. He writes:
"In the eyes of an Eskimo hunter, the Arctic world with its vast, frozen expanses, its barren, snowy peaks and great, bare plateau--all that drab, white, lifeless immensity of little interest to an African like me--becomes a living world."
So a hundred or more vignettes of the Arctic fill the pages of this book; it is the "next best thing" to traveling there oneself writes Erica Wagner of The Times (London).
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