Book One of the Century Trilogy.
I took this along while on a train trip to Oregon and had long uninterrupted hours of reading the nearly 1000 pages. A perfect train book.
It's a historical panorama of Europe and Russia from 1911 to 1924, a novel of World War I, with engaging characters from Wales, England, Germany, Russia and the United States.
Along with the events leading up to war and battles in France and Germany, there are sociopolitical agendas of industrial safety, the vote for women and a burgeoning feminism; there is the inequality of class with wealth, opulence and entitlement versus lives spent in coal mines and factories; there is love and romance, stately manor houses, humble homes and grungy apartments.
The revolution in Russia: "The carnival atmosphere grew as they neared the center. Some people were already quite drunk, although it was only midday. Girls seems happy to kiss anyone with a red armband, and Grigori saw a soldier openly fondling the large breasts of a smiling middle-aged woman. Some girls had dressed in soldiers' uniforms, and swaggered along the streets in caps and oversize boots, evidently feeling liberated."
The battles: "Walter put on his gas mask, and gestured to his men to follow suit , so that they would not be afflicted by their own poison fumes when they reached the other side…There was an explosion to his right, and he heard a scream. A moment later, a gleam on the ground caught his eye, and he spotted a trip wire. He was in a previously undetected minefield. A wave of pure panic swept over him as he realized that he might blow himself up with the next step…."
After the war in Germany: "She left the club and went straight to the bakery. It was dangerous to hold on to money: by evening your wages might not buy a loaf. Several women were already waiting outside the shop in the cold. At half past five the baker opened the door and chalked up his prices on a board. Today a loaf of black bread was 127 billion marks."
"Over dinner everyone talked about what was happening in Bavaria. On Thursday an association of paramilitary groups called the Kampfbund had declared a national revolution in a beer hall in Munich….Everyone in Germany was angry about the Versailles Treaty, yet the Social Democratic government had accepted it in full…The Munich beer hall putsch had everyone worked up…." However, soon Walter tells Maud that "…the revolution in Munich is over…They've caught the leader. It's Adolf Hitler…He's been charged with high treason. He's in jail." His English wife Maud replies, "Good…Thank God that's over."
I learned and re-learned about this era in history which affected millions of people, and I am about to start Winter of the World, the second book in this trilogy.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Book: Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin
A beautifully crafted tale about a prep-school rowing team, as it happened in their senior year and in the events leading up to their 15-year reunion.
Rob is the protagonist and this is mostly his story. Because he came from working class parents, the only reason he ended up at Fenton was because he was an outstanding rower in high-school. He had learned and excelled in a single-man skull, but at Fenton, he to row with three others in a four-man crew known as the God Four. The team had lost to Warwick four years in a row. Connor Payne was another crew member, and the author creates an exquisite tension between Connor and Rob. Both are extraordinary athletes but worlds apart socially. Both are young men in their physical prime, on the brink of adulthood. This is a fifth year of high-school, a preparatory year for college. The Ivy Leagues are next for many of them.
Connor's parents drove to the Warwick-Fenton race the previous year in a limousine with tinted windows, parked near the end of the race and left without getting out of the car when Fenton lost. Such was his burden.
And there is Ruth, the coxswain for this crew, tough and smart, and the first female cox in Fenton's history.
Alternating with this year on the water is Rob's subsequent career as a documentary filmmaker for National Geographic. He lives with his girlfriend in New York City works out of the country much of the time and is in Cape Town, South Africa, when he receives a letter from John Perry, another of his former crew-mates. They have not been in contact but Perry is writing as a newly sober man, in rehab, wanting to connect, He says, "I battled to write this, wondered if I even have a right to say anything at all to you about that year, even if you are reading this letter in some rainforest or whatever. But for what it's worth, here it is: Make peace with the past. Figure it out.…Fifteen years, Rob. Sitting here in his room, it feels like two minutes ago we were gods."
Michael Koryta, a New York Times bestselling author says this novel "...is the best debut novel I've read this year…an original and powerful work. I'll read anything Irwin writes after this. "
Book: Casual Vacancy by J.K.Rowling
We all know who J.K.Rowling is. I kept seeing this book at the library but wasn't tempted to read it. I didn't read the Harry Potter books, heretical as that is, and only wondered very casually about her novel written for adults.
Then I heard part of an hour-long book review show that Diane Rehm does on NPR once a month where Casual Vacancy had been chosen, and my interest was piqued. So I got it at the library and read it.
And was impressed. It takes place in the small English town of Pagford. One of the members of the local governing body dies of a brain aneurysm, creating a "casual vacancy" for his spot. There are supporters of different political philosophies (sort of Republican vs. Democrat) vying for the seat on the parish council. This is the skeleton of the story. We see these folks mainly in their homes where they are not guarded and where they do not pretend to be better than they are. Sadly, they are a rather unattractive lot which was disconcerting to some of Diane Rehm's reviewers. But they are also recognizable as modern and universal characters. Many call-in listeners made the point that this was "real life," and that this is "how life is." I agree completely.
One of the issues is the Bellchapel addiction clinic used mostly by the poor. Rowling writes of the lives of an addicted woman and her teenage daughter and small son, lives with daily rhythms anathema and inexplicable to the more prosperous middle-class men and women in the town of Pagford: a social worker, businessmen and their wives, a lawyer, a school administrator. There are also the teenagers, children of these adults, who interact at school and on the streets, bullying, smoking, acting out sexually and keeping the secrets of their homes.
There is a Pakistani family with their three children who have settled in this smug little English town. Both parents are physicians and one is also on the parish council.
I liked that it was complete…a novel with a conflict and a resolution. It was of a whole.
"Gavin had drunk even more greedily than Kay throughout dinner, enjoying his own private celebration that he had not, after all, been offered up as a sacrifice to Samantha's gladiatorial bullying. He faced Kay squarely, full of a courage born not only of wine but because he had been treated for an hour as somebody important, knowledgeable and supportive, by Mary."
"None of them was Barry. He had been a living example of what they proposed in theory: the advancement, through education, from poverty to affluence, from powerlessness and dependency to valuable contributor to society. Did they not see what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?"
Any author who tackles and tried to explicate broad issues like addiction and poverty and lack of quality education does society a service.
Book: The Last Original Wife by Dorothea Benton Frank
Fun to read…what I call a zuzu book, written in the manner of other southern women writers like Cassandra King or Anne Rivers Siddons…romance, food, manners, gentility, class….more romance, and small dogs who have their own wardrobes.
Still, some points were made about how men treat women….how women allow themselves to be second class…and how change can happen.
Still, some points were made about how men treat women….how women allow themselves to be second class…and how change can happen.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Book: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink
Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
The hospital was Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, and this story begins on Saturday, August 27, 2005. We've all seen and read about the horror of Katrina and the aftermath. Here is an account of one hospital and its staff and how they struggled, and it is also about hard decisions they made while exhausted and under extreme stress.
In addition to the patients admitted to Memorial Medical, there were also "very sick, often elderly and debilitated patients" requiring long-term care on the 7th floor, which was leased by LifeCare, a separate entity. So the story of what happened involved two separate healthcare providers at the corporate level, which complicated the turn of events.
"Pou and her colleagues had little if any training in triage systems and were not guided by any particular protocol. Pou viewed the sorting systems they developed as heart-wrneching. To her, changing the evacuation order from sickest first to sickest last resulted from a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone."
"Pou found clean scrubs to change into each day, but she was drenched and dirty, and for the third night in a row, she worked on scarcely an hour's sleep. She had assumed an attitude of blindness, navigating dark corridors with the run of fingers along humid walls and ascending navigable staircases by kicking the steps ahead as she went and counting. With several doctors and crews of nurses, she changed patents' diapers and dipped rags into water to make cool compresses. She said prayers with anxious nurses whose faith in their skills was shaken. "
Many patients were evacuated and survived, but not all. Some died of natural causes; some died directly or indirectly due to the chaos and compromise of the physical facilities that the hurricane left after it passed (water, electricity, heat and sanitation) but others were euthanized.
The author was not in New Orleans during Katrina so everything she writes about is from sources other than a first-person experience. But it seems she researched thoroughly; she is also a Pulitzer Prize winner and has MD and PhD degrees from Stanford. Still, she was not there and so the story comes from others. As it turns out and as one would expect, there was outrage and empathy when the facts surrounding some of the deaths came to light in the months following. A grand jury was eventually convened to "decide whether the evidence they heard persuaded them that [Dr. Anna] Pou had a 'specific intent to kill' --part of Louisiana's' definition of second-degree murder."
"As the outlines of this medical tragedy sharpened, there was an urgent need to understand its causes before the next catastrophe occurred in New Orleans or elsewhere in the c country. Were deaths at hospitals and nursing homes regrettable results of an acute of nature, a chaotic government response, and poorly constructed flood protection overload on a degraded environment? Or had lax oversight allowed individual or corporate greed to play a role?"
Could this happen again? WIll this happen again? Can we be better prepared? Will we be better prepared? This is one set of questions; the other set is how we feel about euthanasia, hospice options, comfort care only, advanced directives, rationing of healthcare...
The New York Times' reviewer says, "This is not a morality tale for others, but for ourselves."
The hospital was Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, and this story begins on Saturday, August 27, 2005. We've all seen and read about the horror of Katrina and the aftermath. Here is an account of one hospital and its staff and how they struggled, and it is also about hard decisions they made while exhausted and under extreme stress.
In addition to the patients admitted to Memorial Medical, there were also "very sick, often elderly and debilitated patients" requiring long-term care on the 7th floor, which was leased by LifeCare, a separate entity. So the story of what happened involved two separate healthcare providers at the corporate level, which complicated the turn of events.
"Pou and her colleagues had little if any training in triage systems and were not guided by any particular protocol. Pou viewed the sorting systems they developed as heart-wrneching. To her, changing the evacuation order from sickest first to sickest last resulted from a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone."
"Pou found clean scrubs to change into each day, but she was drenched and dirty, and for the third night in a row, she worked on scarcely an hour's sleep. She had assumed an attitude of blindness, navigating dark corridors with the run of fingers along humid walls and ascending navigable staircases by kicking the steps ahead as she went and counting. With several doctors and crews of nurses, she changed patents' diapers and dipped rags into water to make cool compresses. She said prayers with anxious nurses whose faith in their skills was shaken. "
Many patients were evacuated and survived, but not all. Some died of natural causes; some died directly or indirectly due to the chaos and compromise of the physical facilities that the hurricane left after it passed (water, electricity, heat and sanitation) but others were euthanized.
The author was not in New Orleans during Katrina so everything she writes about is from sources other than a first-person experience. But it seems she researched thoroughly; she is also a Pulitzer Prize winner and has MD and PhD degrees from Stanford. Still, she was not there and so the story comes from others. As it turns out and as one would expect, there was outrage and empathy when the facts surrounding some of the deaths came to light in the months following. A grand jury was eventually convened to "decide whether the evidence they heard persuaded them that [Dr. Anna] Pou had a 'specific intent to kill' --part of Louisiana's' definition of second-degree murder."
"As the outlines of this medical tragedy sharpened, there was an urgent need to understand its causes before the next catastrophe occurred in New Orleans or elsewhere in the c country. Were deaths at hospitals and nursing homes regrettable results of an acute of nature, a chaotic government response, and poorly constructed flood protection overload on a degraded environment? Or had lax oversight allowed individual or corporate greed to play a role?"
Could this happen again? WIll this happen again? Can we be better prepared? Will we be better prepared? This is one set of questions; the other set is how we feel about euthanasia, hospice options, comfort care only, advanced directives, rationing of healthcare...
The New York Times' reviewer says, "This is not a morality tale for others, but for ourselves."
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Book: One Doctor by Brendan Reilly, MD
Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine
Informative and well-written.
Dr. Reilly writes of how medicine is practiced today in the United States. There is much wrong with our health care delivery and he explains the problems. One of the most important concerns for him is how nearly every patient now dow not have a "family doctor." So, as he or she progresses through the onset of symptoms, diagnostic testing, illnesses, hospitalizations, specialists, surgeries, aging, cancer treatments, medications, preventive medicine education, recoveries, recurrences and ultimately death, dozens of medical practitioners and service providers are involved but seldom do any of them have a unifying and cohesive knowledge of the individual they are treating each with his or her unique familial, emotional, psychosocial and physical components. Even with electronic medical records (which are not always available and do not always include all the pertinent information about a patient), a relative stranger, no matter how brilliant or dedicated, can miss important details about a patient.
Dr. Reilly illustrates all of this, drawing on his own experiences, and he does it well.
For anyone interested in the ramifications of the Affordable Care Act, or where our country falls on the healthcare spectrum, or what we can expect as patients, or why we should be informed, and what our moral obligations are to those without resources (although Dr. Reilly does not get into that arena as much), I recommend this book. There are over 50 pages of Notes supporting what he writes and which further explicate the terms and statistics he uses.
Just one example of his writing:
"Did Ms. Dubois's son who insisted that his mother receive CPR, understand these things? So much depends on whether doctors explicitly debunk CPR creep when they discuss resuscitation with patients or their surrogate decision-makers. One geriatrician, who cared for elderly patents in a long-term care facility like the one where Ms. Dubois lived, wrote that 36 of his 40 patients (whose average age was 87) told him that they wanted CPR. This confused him until he found that they did not understand the low likelihood of benefit and the potential downside of CPR. After he had discussed the realities with his patients, 39 of the 40 opposed resuscitation."
Informative and well-written.
Book: Headhunters on My Doorstep by J. Maarten Troost
A True Treasure Island Ghost Story
Sort of….this isn't really a ghost story but rather a story about footloose J. Maarten Troost as sails the South Pacific, sort of following Robert Louis Stevenson's island journeys. He is happy as he wanders about, writing of earlier famous visitors, most especially stories of Stevenson's life, observing tourists and the indigenous peoples, reveling in the hot sun and warm seas.
He had also stopped drinking a year previously and had substituted an addiction to running.
"If you can drink liter of vodka, you have what it takes to become an Ironman. It's true. It takes years of steadfast devotion, untold months of anguish, an unwavering commitment to solitude, a fondness for taking things to the edge, and a constitution that embraces pain for you to succeed at either endeavor. You never start out believing that you can down a bottle vodka but with enough practice and diligence, you find that it becomes second nature. The important thing is persistence. And so it is with running. A year earlier, if you had told me that one day I'd be running mile after mile up a steep-sided slope in withering heat on a faraway island--for the fun of it no less--I would have looked at my wobbling gut and snorted with laughter. Not bloody likely. Which goes to show you now unpredictable life can be."
Stevenson and his amazing wife, Fanny:
"It was an odd party that'd boarded the Casco: There was Stevenson of course; his wife, Fanny; his mother too; his stepson, Lloyd; and a maid,Valentine…The boat was captained by A. H. Otis, who'd read Treasure Island and thought little of Stevenson's knowledge of seafaring ways. He also didn't think it likely that the author, thin and emaciated as usual, would survive the voyage, and accordingly he'd stowed what he'd need to bury him at sea. And this business of bringing his elderly mother along? Pure madness…For more than month they sailed. Land was becoming but a distant memory, their only company the occasional seabird seeking a handout…And then, as the sun crested the horizon, there lay the Marquesas…And this, of course is why we always get on the boat."
Troost is funny in the edgy Rolling Stone way…
One evening, he leaves his fellow traveler, an Israeli who is traveling the islands with his girlfriend "trying to get the locals to depart with their gold. You can buy it here for about two or three hundred dollars an ounce. In Tel Aviv, you can sell it for twelve hundred or more an ounce…bade them goodnight and settled down with my Kindle, browsing through the Sober Lit I'd downloaded. Infinite Jest was my go-to book for when I was craving hard. I'd just need to read a few pages about Don Gately, during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergrment, as he attended to his commitments at Boston-area AA meetings. No one writes about the gawping maw, the horror, of addiction and the pain-in-the ass, life-or-death struggle of early sobriety like David Foster Wallace."
The theme of staying sober runs through this book as background, but compelling as a back story.
Maarten hires a local lady and goes horseback riding: "Isn't there a beginner's course around here? A pony park? Did I misrepresent myself? Sure, I'll wear a Stetson, I'll drive a pickup truck. But I'm an urban cowboy, lady. If you want to line dance I'm your guy. But barreling up muddy, rocky, slippery, steep slopes on massive horses, beasts that I senses are ready to topple at any moment, well, let's just say that it left me a trifle uncomfortable….We dismounted and took a gander at the view. Below us was a plummeting precipice, a couple of thousand feet at least, cascading down into a valley so serene and lovely and breathtaking that if God ever made a cathedral of His own it would be here, and this would be it."
He gets a tattoo. "They let nine-year-olds stab ink-stained needles into people around here?"
Snorkeling: "Have you ever shared a tight, confined space--say about six feet wide, a watery alleyway--with a half-dozen sharks? Exciting doesn't even begin to describe it. It's more like Holy F___ Holy F___ Holy F___…there were hundreds of sharks swarming below now…and a gazillion tropical fish, schools, no universities of them, hugging the cliff wall and all around were the sharks--blacktips, whitetips, vast amounts of greys and a few massive, beefy silver tips…It was shark nirvana…I've snorkeled all over the South Pacific, but nowhere have I seen a place more bewitching than the South Pass of Fakarava. We emerged, speaking a Babel of languages, all expressing our amazement, as Shark Boy, who had returned with his catch, stood cleaning fish while the blacktip reef sharks stirred themselves into a frenzy. He threw a rock from time to time to keep them at bay, but otherwise remained in the shallows, unconcerned. This guy, a kid really, needs his own TV show."
"I was captivated. I didn't know what was coming over me. Tattoos. Sharks. And I wanted more. Well, that part was familiar. I have a head for more, of course.." And he gets the bejesus scared out of him…
He goes to Tahiti, musing on Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh and Captain Cook. And stops in Fiji on the way to Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands. In Fiji he sees a newspaper with the headline "ENTIRE NATION OF KIRIBATI TO BE RELOCATED OVER RISING SEA LEVEL THREAT." Think about that…
On to Samoa where Stevenson is buried with his famous epitaph written 15 years before his death: "Under the wide and starry sky….."
Troost writes of Jacques Brel and of Paul Gauguin, a thoroughly dissolute man. The author tells a story of local boys harassing tourists by riding furiously down the beach "through clumps of visitors…then I noticed their big noses and figured that here were a bunch of little Gauguins. These apples, clearly, didn't fall far from the tree."
These same world travelers on the beach (the intrepid ones) continually got surprised by the waves and "no matter how often you yelled Attendez it would happen over and over again causing me to doubt in the healing power of neuroplasticity, because here, very clearly, was some novel stimuli that demanded a swift adaptation in behavior and yet it never came. Again and again it happened to the very same people. Just turn the f___ around, I felt like yelling, as I cringed every time they were smashed and held under and swept forth in the collapsing froth. Man, I though, how is it that some of you are still in the gene pool?"
I have quoted more than wrote anything new here, but I find this author absolutely so much fun to read (which I did on a recent never-ending Amtrak trip, wishing the book were 1000 pages instead of 250). And I like that he was born in the Netherlands.
Sort of….this isn't really a ghost story but rather a story about footloose J. Maarten Troost as sails the South Pacific, sort of following Robert Louis Stevenson's island journeys. He is happy as he wanders about, writing of earlier famous visitors, most especially stories of Stevenson's life, observing tourists and the indigenous peoples, reveling in the hot sun and warm seas.
He had also stopped drinking a year previously and had substituted an addiction to running.
"If you can drink liter of vodka, you have what it takes to become an Ironman. It's true. It takes years of steadfast devotion, untold months of anguish, an unwavering commitment to solitude, a fondness for taking things to the edge, and a constitution that embraces pain for you to succeed at either endeavor. You never start out believing that you can down a bottle vodka but with enough practice and diligence, you find that it becomes second nature. The important thing is persistence. And so it is with running. A year earlier, if you had told me that one day I'd be running mile after mile up a steep-sided slope in withering heat on a faraway island--for the fun of it no less--I would have looked at my wobbling gut and snorted with laughter. Not bloody likely. Which goes to show you now unpredictable life can be."
Stevenson and his amazing wife, Fanny:
"It was an odd party that'd boarded the Casco: There was Stevenson of course; his wife, Fanny; his mother too; his stepson, Lloyd; and a maid,Valentine…The boat was captained by A. H. Otis, who'd read Treasure Island and thought little of Stevenson's knowledge of seafaring ways. He also didn't think it likely that the author, thin and emaciated as usual, would survive the voyage, and accordingly he'd stowed what he'd need to bury him at sea. And this business of bringing his elderly mother along? Pure madness…For more than month they sailed. Land was becoming but a distant memory, their only company the occasional seabird seeking a handout…And then, as the sun crested the horizon, there lay the Marquesas…And this, of course is why we always get on the boat."
Troost is funny in the edgy Rolling Stone way…
One evening, he leaves his fellow traveler, an Israeli who is traveling the islands with his girlfriend "trying to get the locals to depart with their gold. You can buy it here for about two or three hundred dollars an ounce. In Tel Aviv, you can sell it for twelve hundred or more an ounce…bade them goodnight and settled down with my Kindle, browsing through the Sober Lit I'd downloaded. Infinite Jest was my go-to book for when I was craving hard. I'd just need to read a few pages about Don Gately, during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergrment, as he attended to his commitments at Boston-area AA meetings. No one writes about the gawping maw, the horror, of addiction and the pain-in-the ass, life-or-death struggle of early sobriety like David Foster Wallace."
The theme of staying sober runs through this book as background, but compelling as a back story.
Maarten hires a local lady and goes horseback riding: "Isn't there a beginner's course around here? A pony park? Did I misrepresent myself? Sure, I'll wear a Stetson, I'll drive a pickup truck. But I'm an urban cowboy, lady. If you want to line dance I'm your guy. But barreling up muddy, rocky, slippery, steep slopes on massive horses, beasts that I senses are ready to topple at any moment, well, let's just say that it left me a trifle uncomfortable….We dismounted and took a gander at the view. Below us was a plummeting precipice, a couple of thousand feet at least, cascading down into a valley so serene and lovely and breathtaking that if God ever made a cathedral of His own it would be here, and this would be it."
He gets a tattoo. "They let nine-year-olds stab ink-stained needles into people around here?"
Snorkeling: "Have you ever shared a tight, confined space--say about six feet wide, a watery alleyway--with a half-dozen sharks? Exciting doesn't even begin to describe it. It's more like Holy F___ Holy F___ Holy F___…there were hundreds of sharks swarming below now…and a gazillion tropical fish, schools, no universities of them, hugging the cliff wall and all around were the sharks--blacktips, whitetips, vast amounts of greys and a few massive, beefy silver tips…It was shark nirvana…I've snorkeled all over the South Pacific, but nowhere have I seen a place more bewitching than the South Pass of Fakarava. We emerged, speaking a Babel of languages, all expressing our amazement, as Shark Boy, who had returned with his catch, stood cleaning fish while the blacktip reef sharks stirred themselves into a frenzy. He threw a rock from time to time to keep them at bay, but otherwise remained in the shallows, unconcerned. This guy, a kid really, needs his own TV show."
"I was captivated. I didn't know what was coming over me. Tattoos. Sharks. And I wanted more. Well, that part was familiar. I have a head for more, of course.." And he gets the bejesus scared out of him…
He goes to Tahiti, musing on Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh and Captain Cook. And stops in Fiji on the way to Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands. In Fiji he sees a newspaper with the headline "ENTIRE NATION OF KIRIBATI TO BE RELOCATED OVER RISING SEA LEVEL THREAT." Think about that…
On to Samoa where Stevenson is buried with his famous epitaph written 15 years before his death: "Under the wide and starry sky….."
Troost writes of Jacques Brel and of Paul Gauguin, a thoroughly dissolute man. The author tells a story of local boys harassing tourists by riding furiously down the beach "through clumps of visitors…then I noticed their big noses and figured that here were a bunch of little Gauguins. These apples, clearly, didn't fall far from the tree."
These same world travelers on the beach (the intrepid ones) continually got surprised by the waves and "no matter how often you yelled Attendez it would happen over and over again causing me to doubt in the healing power of neuroplasticity, because here, very clearly, was some novel stimuli that demanded a swift adaptation in behavior and yet it never came. Again and again it happened to the very same people. Just turn the f___ around, I felt like yelling, as I cringed every time they were smashed and held under and swept forth in the collapsing froth. Man, I though, how is it that some of you are still in the gene pool?"
I have quoted more than wrote anything new here, but I find this author absolutely so much fun to read (which I did on a recent never-ending Amtrak trip, wishing the book were 1000 pages instead of 250). And I like that he was born in the Netherlands.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Book: North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson
A Daughter's Arctic Journey
In June of 2005, Shannon Huffman was in Portland, Oregon, visiting her brother when she got a call from the North Slope Borough in Alaska (Alaska does not have provinces or states; they have boroughs). The call was from a law enforcement officer telling her that "… a bear came into their campsite last night…."
"Their campsite" was that of her Dad and his wife Kathy who were kayaking the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, moving north and downriver to the Beaufort Sea. The bear killed both of them.
The book is Shannon's tribute to their lives, her journey to find peace and resolution and an adventure in its own right. She rafts the Hulahula the next summer with one of her brothers and a friend. She has to "finish their trip…I have to see the place Dad and Kathy loved so much."
It is a lyrical, moving, compelling tale.
Also in the first year following the tragedy, Shannon auditions for and is accepted into the chorale company of the Seattle Symphony for a special performance of Mozart's Requiem which will be performed with Itzhak Perlman. There are short chapters of the rehearsals and the final performance alternating with river stories.
"...the flyer I received and the audition that followed, lined up as though orchestrated from another place, by a bigger hand, in the careful way that even when you do not feel him, God moves gently in you life."
She writes in lovely prose about the barren beautiful topography of north Alaska…and the silvered, musical river with its sandbars and braided channels and cold rocks and rapids. They find the last campsite and Shannon fashions a small driftwood cross anchored in a cairn of river rocks.
So this is a story of love, of acceptance, of family, of remembrance and also a plea to protect the "wild coastal plain of the ANWR" as it continues to be threatened by the greed of an oil industry that is pushing to develop another 2000 acres of the coastal plain "requiring roads and helipads and other destructive infrastructure on tundra perfectly suited for the cruelty of an Arctic winter, and utterly unable to withstand human development."
Her web site is: www.aborderlife.com
In June of 2005, Shannon Huffman was in Portland, Oregon, visiting her brother when she got a call from the North Slope Borough in Alaska (Alaska does not have provinces or states; they have boroughs). The call was from a law enforcement officer telling her that "… a bear came into their campsite last night…."
"Their campsite" was that of her Dad and his wife Kathy who were kayaking the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, moving north and downriver to the Beaufort Sea. The bear killed both of them.
The book is Shannon's tribute to their lives, her journey to find peace and resolution and an adventure in its own right. She rafts the Hulahula the next summer with one of her brothers and a friend. She has to "finish their trip…I have to see the place Dad and Kathy loved so much."
It is a lyrical, moving, compelling tale.
Also in the first year following the tragedy, Shannon auditions for and is accepted into the chorale company of the Seattle Symphony for a special performance of Mozart's Requiem which will be performed with Itzhak Perlman. There are short chapters of the rehearsals and the final performance alternating with river stories.
"...the flyer I received and the audition that followed, lined up as though orchestrated from another place, by a bigger hand, in the careful way that even when you do not feel him, God moves gently in you life."
She writes in lovely prose about the barren beautiful topography of north Alaska…and the silvered, musical river with its sandbars and braided channels and cold rocks and rapids. They find the last campsite and Shannon fashions a small driftwood cross anchored in a cairn of river rocks.
So this is a story of love, of acceptance, of family, of remembrance and also a plea to protect the "wild coastal plain of the ANWR" as it continues to be threatened by the greed of an oil industry that is pushing to develop another 2000 acres of the coastal plain "requiring roads and helipads and other destructive infrastructure on tundra perfectly suited for the cruelty of an Arctic winter, and utterly unable to withstand human development."
Her web site is: www.aborderlife.com
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Book: The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester
America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
A readable interesting book. It has five parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal, all contributing to and intertwined with the discoveries, explorations and development of America.
Winchester retells the familiar grand stories of our nation but also writes of more obscure adventurers, and scientists, geologists and visionaries…men many of us have never heard of, and acknowledges their contributions also, like the story of Calbraith Perry Rodgers for instance, "a flamboyant pioneer of early aviation [who] made the first transcontinental airplane flight between New York and Pasadena in the fall of 1911. It took seven weeks, interrupted by dozens of mishaps and and crashes."
There are the early explorations of our country, especially the Corps of Discovery led by Lewis and Clark with the help of Sacagawea, and John Wesley Powell's journey through the Grand Canyon, but also stories of the telephone, computers, radio, canals, dams, television, electricity, the telegraph, the Interstate system…
In 1919, General Eisenhower traveled with the Army Transcontinental Convoy as an observer on a road trip across the country on what turned out to be "deplorable roads, averaging 5.6 miles per hour on roads that were not suitable anywhere in Nebraska or Wyoming and …worse than useless in Utah. Most of Nevada was a near trackless waste where the expedition got itself hopelessly lost...The roads were execrable…and the seed of the idea of the Interstate highway System had been planted." While it was eventually named after Eisenhower, "it was one Thomas MacDonald who…fashioned the billions of tons of concrete and steel in a such a manner as to make the notion whole..."
Thomas MacDonald is another of the men Winchester resurrects... "a half-forgotten man today but whose unforgettable legacy was to give Americans of all stations the ability to cross their country by road at speed and with ease…" And FDR was the man who argued for a four-lane divided highway.
The author tells a personal story of showing a 7-year-old in western Queensland in Australia what the Internet and World Wide Web could produce and how the boy was thrilled such that he "placed his hands gently across Gidgee's (his pet lamb) woolly face and pointed the creature's eyes directly at the screen. He lowered his head and, desperate to share the moment with his best friend, said solemnly to the little lamb, 'Look Gidgee! It's Mars!'"
This is a history book rich with detail but not boring, thanks to Winchester's gift of writing.
A readable interesting book. It has five parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal, all contributing to and intertwined with the discoveries, explorations and development of America.
Winchester retells the familiar grand stories of our nation but also writes of more obscure adventurers, and scientists, geologists and visionaries…men many of us have never heard of, and acknowledges their contributions also, like the story of Calbraith Perry Rodgers for instance, "a flamboyant pioneer of early aviation [who] made the first transcontinental airplane flight between New York and Pasadena in the fall of 1911. It took seven weeks, interrupted by dozens of mishaps and and crashes."
There are the early explorations of our country, especially the Corps of Discovery led by Lewis and Clark with the help of Sacagawea, and John Wesley Powell's journey through the Grand Canyon, but also stories of the telephone, computers, radio, canals, dams, television, electricity, the telegraph, the Interstate system…
In 1919, General Eisenhower traveled with the Army Transcontinental Convoy as an observer on a road trip across the country on what turned out to be "deplorable roads, averaging 5.6 miles per hour on roads that were not suitable anywhere in Nebraska or Wyoming and …worse than useless in Utah. Most of Nevada was a near trackless waste where the expedition got itself hopelessly lost...The roads were execrable…and the seed of the idea of the Interstate highway System had been planted." While it was eventually named after Eisenhower, "it was one Thomas MacDonald who…fashioned the billions of tons of concrete and steel in a such a manner as to make the notion whole..."
Thomas MacDonald is another of the men Winchester resurrects... "a half-forgotten man today but whose unforgettable legacy was to give Americans of all stations the ability to cross their country by road at speed and with ease…" And FDR was the man who argued for a four-lane divided highway.
The author tells a personal story of showing a 7-year-old in western Queensland in Australia what the Internet and World Wide Web could produce and how the boy was thrilled such that he "placed his hands gently across Gidgee's (his pet lamb) woolly face and pointed the creature's eyes directly at the screen. He lowered his head and, desperate to share the moment with his best friend, said solemnly to the little lamb, 'Look Gidgee! It's Mars!'"
This is a history book rich with detail but not boring, thanks to Winchester's gift of writing.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Book: The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy
The Story of a Father and His Son
An interesting book. I still don't quite know what to make of it.
Here we have a horribly abusive father according to Pat Conroy as detailed in The Great Santini. Then this book, which in the beginning reiterates some of his traumatic childhood: "My mother's physical beauty played counterpoint to my father's powerful fists….H knocked me with another backhand that sent me sliding across the living room floor…."
But, amazingly, his father spends the rest of his life being rather proud of his role. He goes to book-signings and never once acknowledges or apologizes. He insists Pat made up the stories, was weak and sniveling, was an opportunist, wrote "horseshit." In this book, Pat and his siblings deal with their father (and their mother who finally did divorce Donald and remarry) as they age and get ill and die.
This is also a story of siblings, often with fractious relationships, attempted suicides, a completed suicide, breakdowns and different memories.
The prose is gothic and florid some of the time but then so is Pat Conroy's life and his sister Carol Ann's life, and the lives of his mother's family. His father's family was Chicago Irish Catholic and they do not fare well in this book either.
Still, there is redemption…
Don gets colon cancer.
"When my father left the hospital, we took off on the first of many road trips we made during the last two years of his life." The book is also about Pat Conroy who also has not had the most tranquil life. He is volatile, quick-tempered, perhaps self-aggrandizing and loves those southern states in which he lived much of his life….He weeps a lot as his parents get old, infirm and die, and in his eulogy for his father says: "Don Conroy was the best uncle I ever saw, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend--and my God, what a father. After my mother divorced him and The Great Santini was published, Don Conroy had the best second act I ever saw. He never was simply a father. This was the Great Santini."
"In his last weeks, my father told me, 'I was always your best subject, son. Your career took a nosedive after The Great Santini came out.' He had become so media savvy that during his last illness he told me not to schedule his funeral on the same day as the Seinfeld farewell. The colonel thought it would hold down the crowd. The colonel's death was front-page news across the country. CNN announced his passing on the evening news all around the world."
An interesting book. I still don't quite know what to make of it.
Here we have a horribly abusive father according to Pat Conroy as detailed in The Great Santini. Then this book, which in the beginning reiterates some of his traumatic childhood: "My mother's physical beauty played counterpoint to my father's powerful fists….H knocked me with another backhand that sent me sliding across the living room floor…."
But, amazingly, his father spends the rest of his life being rather proud of his role. He goes to book-signings and never once acknowledges or apologizes. He insists Pat made up the stories, was weak and sniveling, was an opportunist, wrote "horseshit." In this book, Pat and his siblings deal with their father (and their mother who finally did divorce Donald and remarry) as they age and get ill and die.
This is also a story of siblings, often with fractious relationships, attempted suicides, a completed suicide, breakdowns and different memories.
The prose is gothic and florid some of the time but then so is Pat Conroy's life and his sister Carol Ann's life, and the lives of his mother's family. His father's family was Chicago Irish Catholic and they do not fare well in this book either.
Still, there is redemption…
Don gets colon cancer.
"When my father left the hospital, we took off on the first of many road trips we made during the last two years of his life." The book is also about Pat Conroy who also has not had the most tranquil life. He is volatile, quick-tempered, perhaps self-aggrandizing and loves those southern states in which he lived much of his life….He weeps a lot as his parents get old, infirm and die, and in his eulogy for his father says: "Don Conroy was the best uncle I ever saw, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend--and my God, what a father. After my mother divorced him and The Great Santini was published, Don Conroy had the best second act I ever saw. He never was simply a father. This was the Great Santini."
"In his last weeks, my father told me, 'I was always your best subject, son. Your career took a nosedive after The Great Santini came out.' He had become so media savvy that during his last illness he told me not to schedule his funeral on the same day as the Seinfeld farewell. The colonel thought it would hold down the crowd. The colonel's death was front-page news across the country. CNN announced his passing on the evening news all around the world."
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Book: Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia
A True Story of Faith and Madness in the Alaska Frontier
The tiny town of McCarthy, Alaska, is about 150 miles east of Anchorage and 50 miles west of the Yukon. It is in the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve which, at over 8 million acres, is our largest national park. In January of 2002, a man who called himself Papa Pilgrim (but who was born as Robert Hale) moved his family first to McCarthy and then a dozen or so miles north up the McCarthy Creek valley to an in-holding homestead in the Park away from the corruption of society as he knew it.
What a compelling and fascinating tale. Papa Pilgrim, his wife Country Rose and their 15 kids were a sight to behold as they invaded this sweet spot in the Alaskan wilderness. But sadly the story is fraught with darkness, evoking other tales of cults and misguided religiosity, megalomania and abuse, the psychology and sorrows of submission to a powerful visionary.
The author lives in Alaska. He and his wife had a cabin near McCarthy and he reported for the Anchorage Daily News. He tells of Robert Hale's earlier years including a teenage marriage to John Connally's daughter Kathleen. The couple ran away from home, got married in Oklahoma and settled in Florida…and 44 days later, Kathleen was dead of a gunshot wound. Bobby Hale testified that it was an accident and passed a lie-detector test. He was cleared. "Connally wrote that the death of his vivacious daughter left a burden or sorrow more profound than any tragedy in his life--his later bribery trial, his bankruptcy, even the assassination of a president."
Hale then spent several years as a hippie…Summer of Love in San Francisco, drugs, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Mediation, communes, South American, more LSD and finally, on a visit to Texas in his 30s, he goes to a Baptist church. He and Rose were legally named Sunlight and Firefly Sunstar by this time. The church members "told Bobby they'd been praying for him for twenty years...He tore free and strode to the front of the church to receive Jesus…He removed his bag of marijuana from the bus and sprinkled it over a field. He cut his hair and shaved his beard and renounced the name Sunstar and lit a bonfire to burn their eagle feathers and tarot cards."
So, he now had religion and a family and new babies arriving yearly. They settle in New Mexico for several years before heading to Alaska. Tensions build over the years that the Pilgrim family live in the Sangre de Cristos mountains. The oldest daughter, Elishaba later would write of that time:
"As we huddled in the lean-to, my father actually built our log cabin around us. I will never forget the picture of him driving long spikes into the logs as the snowstorm hurled huge snowflakes all around us. At the end of each day, we would crawl into a our little lean-to, lit with only a bare oil-burning lamp, where we snuggled up just to stay warm. I looked toward to cuddling with my daddy each night, as he felt so big, safe and secure."
Weirdly, this land belonged to Jack Nicholson, and Papa Pilgrim and his family were caretakers for a $10 a month lease. The only two books the family owned were the King James Bible and and Pilgrim's Progress. The kids did not go to school.
They move to Alaska both fleeing authorities and seeking a place where Hale would not have to answer to any human higher powers. While the town of McCarthy first accepted them, the family was soon embroiled in a long dispute with the National Park Service over various issues. Papa Pilgrim was not averse to handouts, to creative stealing, to manipulation, to using his charming kids as wandering minstrels, to ingratiating himself with susceptible folks in the guise of one more wanderer who finds refuge in the wilds of Alaska and only wants to be left alone.
"A state Fish and Wildlife protection officer on the Kenai Peninsula had ticketed Joshua (one of the kids) for illegally shooting two Dall sheep along the Resurrection Pass Trail. Eight children at the scene wept pitiably as Papa Pilgrim described their poverty and begged for mercy. When the trooper wouldn't relent, Pilgrim turned red and told him he was going to hell. The family was all sweetness again by the time they got to court, with the smallest children fetched charmingly on the courtroom railing, but Joshua was convicted anyway."
The author becomes interested in this story and asks if he could visit the Pilgrims in an effort to learn more about the "conflicts between the national park and the community. Many citizens in McCarthy staunchly defend Papa Pilgrim for years, seeing the issue as heavy-handed prerogatives of big government versus the rights of individuals, especially the charismatic (to some at least) clan of Papa and his large family. The author says that Papa "thought about it a minute. He decided I should see the historic road to Hillbilly Heaven for myself. 'Come on by, neighbor, ' he said. 'You'll see we're just modest simple folks, not some strange religion.'" Kizzia does visit and continues researching and writing.
Eventually, it all comes around in awful disturbing ways. The family became non grata; the children grew older; the dreams and plans and ideals of Papa Pilgrim mature into evil and disillusion.
It is an amazing story of the romance of Alaska and the way it seduces people, along with Robert Hale's journey there, and his subsequent violation of everyone who wanted so desperately to believe and trust him.
The tiny town of McCarthy, Alaska, is about 150 miles east of Anchorage and 50 miles west of the Yukon. It is in the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve which, at over 8 million acres, is our largest national park. In January of 2002, a man who called himself Papa Pilgrim (but who was born as Robert Hale) moved his family first to McCarthy and then a dozen or so miles north up the McCarthy Creek valley to an in-holding homestead in the Park away from the corruption of society as he knew it.
What a compelling and fascinating tale. Papa Pilgrim, his wife Country Rose and their 15 kids were a sight to behold as they invaded this sweet spot in the Alaskan wilderness. But sadly the story is fraught with darkness, evoking other tales of cults and misguided religiosity, megalomania and abuse, the psychology and sorrows of submission to a powerful visionary.
The author lives in Alaska. He and his wife had a cabin near McCarthy and he reported for the Anchorage Daily News. He tells of Robert Hale's earlier years including a teenage marriage to John Connally's daughter Kathleen. The couple ran away from home, got married in Oklahoma and settled in Florida…and 44 days later, Kathleen was dead of a gunshot wound. Bobby Hale testified that it was an accident and passed a lie-detector test. He was cleared. "Connally wrote that the death of his vivacious daughter left a burden or sorrow more profound than any tragedy in his life--his later bribery trial, his bankruptcy, even the assassination of a president."
Hale then spent several years as a hippie…Summer of Love in San Francisco, drugs, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Mediation, communes, South American, more LSD and finally, on a visit to Texas in his 30s, he goes to a Baptist church. He and Rose were legally named Sunlight and Firefly Sunstar by this time. The church members "told Bobby they'd been praying for him for twenty years...He tore free and strode to the front of the church to receive Jesus…He removed his bag of marijuana from the bus and sprinkled it over a field. He cut his hair and shaved his beard and renounced the name Sunstar and lit a bonfire to burn their eagle feathers and tarot cards."
So, he now had religion and a family and new babies arriving yearly. They settle in New Mexico for several years before heading to Alaska. Tensions build over the years that the Pilgrim family live in the Sangre de Cristos mountains. The oldest daughter, Elishaba later would write of that time:
"As we huddled in the lean-to, my father actually built our log cabin around us. I will never forget the picture of him driving long spikes into the logs as the snowstorm hurled huge snowflakes all around us. At the end of each day, we would crawl into a our little lean-to, lit with only a bare oil-burning lamp, where we snuggled up just to stay warm. I looked toward to cuddling with my daddy each night, as he felt so big, safe and secure."
Weirdly, this land belonged to Jack Nicholson, and Papa Pilgrim and his family were caretakers for a $10 a month lease. The only two books the family owned were the King James Bible and and Pilgrim's Progress. The kids did not go to school.
They move to Alaska both fleeing authorities and seeking a place where Hale would not have to answer to any human higher powers. While the town of McCarthy first accepted them, the family was soon embroiled in a long dispute with the National Park Service over various issues. Papa Pilgrim was not averse to handouts, to creative stealing, to manipulation, to using his charming kids as wandering minstrels, to ingratiating himself with susceptible folks in the guise of one more wanderer who finds refuge in the wilds of Alaska and only wants to be left alone.
"A state Fish and Wildlife protection officer on the Kenai Peninsula had ticketed Joshua (one of the kids) for illegally shooting two Dall sheep along the Resurrection Pass Trail. Eight children at the scene wept pitiably as Papa Pilgrim described their poverty and begged for mercy. When the trooper wouldn't relent, Pilgrim turned red and told him he was going to hell. The family was all sweetness again by the time they got to court, with the smallest children fetched charmingly on the courtroom railing, but Joshua was convicted anyway."
The author becomes interested in this story and asks if he could visit the Pilgrims in an effort to learn more about the "conflicts between the national park and the community. Many citizens in McCarthy staunchly defend Papa Pilgrim for years, seeing the issue as heavy-handed prerogatives of big government versus the rights of individuals, especially the charismatic (to some at least) clan of Papa and his large family. The author says that Papa "thought about it a minute. He decided I should see the historic road to Hillbilly Heaven for myself. 'Come on by, neighbor, ' he said. 'You'll see we're just modest simple folks, not some strange religion.'" Kizzia does visit and continues researching and writing.
Eventually, it all comes around in awful disturbing ways. The family became non grata; the children grew older; the dreams and plans and ideals of Papa Pilgrim mature into evil and disillusion.
It is an amazing story of the romance of Alaska and the way it seduces people, along with Robert Hale's journey there, and his subsequent violation of everyone who wanted so desperately to believe and trust him.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Book: The Son by Philipp Meyer
Read this book! It's wonderful, covering 6 generations of Texans and their interactions (almost all disgraceful) with the Mexicans and Native Americans, especially the Comanches.
It is told in the alternating voices of Eli, born in 1836 and captured by the Comanches when he was about 12 and with whom he lived for 3 years; Peter, his son, who was born in 1870; and Jeanne Anne, Peter's granddaughter born in 1926.
It is truly a saga, full of adventure and the history of Texas from the eras of cattle to oil.
The family is the McCullough family. They become very rich. Eli and Peter especially are compelling characters:
At random:
Peter: "Charlie and Glenn came to me [Peter's sons]. They have both decided to join the army. I told them it would be better to wait until the end of the year when it would be easier to find hands to replace them. They were unconvinced. 'We have plenty of money to hire people.' said Charlie…They could not have picked a worse war to join. Machine guns and half-ton shells. I had always thought the Europeans returned to the Stone Age when they landed in America, but apparently they never left it. Seven hundred thousand dead at Verdun alone. What we need is another great ice to come and sweep us all into the ocean. To give God a second chance."
Eli: "By the time I'd been with them a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche, though they kept a bright eye on me, like some derelict uncle who'd taken the pledge. Dame Nature had made my eyes and hair naturally dark and in winter I kept my skin brown by lying out in the sun on a robe. Most nights I slept as a gentle as a dead calf and had no thought of going off with the whites. There was nothing back there but shame and if my father had come looking for me, I hadn't heard about it."
Jeanne: "Her father had been out in the far pastures. He did not return for supper but a few hours later his horse showed up at the gate, alone and still saddled. It was even darker now; she could barely see her own feet. There was no chance of going after him, but it was not cold, and he was resourceful, and she expected he would show up sometime in the morning, soaked and footsore but otherwise, intact….Four days later, one of the Midkiff vaqueros found him at a water gap, the white sole of a foot showing under the brush and flotsam…Because of her father's condition, the funeral was planned for the next day, and as she lay in her bed that afternoon, exhausted but unable to fall asleep, it occurred to her that the ranch still needed to be run, that there was no one left but her."
The book is 550 pages and I loved every sentence. This is a fine story.
It ends with a young man named Ulises Garcia:
"He had shaved and his hair was wet and neatly combed. He was wearing a fresh shirt and pants. The shirt was brand-new, as were the trousers; his boots were polished. He brought his leather bag with all the birth certificates, and his great-grandfather's old Colt revolver, which no longer works but was clearly engraved ________. He walked around the porch, looking for her, and saw a pair of open glass doors….."
It is told in the alternating voices of Eli, born in 1836 and captured by the Comanches when he was about 12 and with whom he lived for 3 years; Peter, his son, who was born in 1870; and Jeanne Anne, Peter's granddaughter born in 1926.
It is truly a saga, full of adventure and the history of Texas from the eras of cattle to oil.
The family is the McCullough family. They become very rich. Eli and Peter especially are compelling characters:
At random:
Peter: "Charlie and Glenn came to me [Peter's sons]. They have both decided to join the army. I told them it would be better to wait until the end of the year when it would be easier to find hands to replace them. They were unconvinced. 'We have plenty of money to hire people.' said Charlie…They could not have picked a worse war to join. Machine guns and half-ton shells. I had always thought the Europeans returned to the Stone Age when they landed in America, but apparently they never left it. Seven hundred thousand dead at Verdun alone. What we need is another great ice to come and sweep us all into the ocean. To give God a second chance."
Eli: "By the time I'd been with them a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche, though they kept a bright eye on me, like some derelict uncle who'd taken the pledge. Dame Nature had made my eyes and hair naturally dark and in winter I kept my skin brown by lying out in the sun on a robe. Most nights I slept as a gentle as a dead calf and had no thought of going off with the whites. There was nothing back there but shame and if my father had come looking for me, I hadn't heard about it."
Jeanne: "Her father had been out in the far pastures. He did not return for supper but a few hours later his horse showed up at the gate, alone and still saddled. It was even darker now; she could barely see her own feet. There was no chance of going after him, but it was not cold, and he was resourceful, and she expected he would show up sometime in the morning, soaked and footsore but otherwise, intact….Four days later, one of the Midkiff vaqueros found him at a water gap, the white sole of a foot showing under the brush and flotsam…Because of her father's condition, the funeral was planned for the next day, and as she lay in her bed that afternoon, exhausted but unable to fall asleep, it occurred to her that the ranch still needed to be run, that there was no one left but her."
The book is 550 pages and I loved every sentence. This is a fine story.
It ends with a young man named Ulises Garcia:
"He had shaved and his hair was wet and neatly combed. He was wearing a fresh shirt and pants. The shirt was brand-new, as were the trousers; his boots were polished. He brought his leather bag with all the birth certificates, and his great-grandfather's old Colt revolver, which no longer works but was clearly engraved ________. He walked around the porch, looking for her, and saw a pair of open glass doors….."
Book: We Are Water by Wally Lamb
A novel about a family, especially about Annie, the mother. They are the Ohs, two daughters, a son, Annie and father / husband Orion. They live in Connecticut. It's a mostly a contemporary novel but also about some of Annie's and Orion's childhood and adolescence.
I like Wally Lamb's writing (The Hour I First Believed; She's Come Undone; I Know This Much Is True) and this latest novel didn't disappoint. So read it if you enjoy good writing, good stories, diverse and interesting characterization: for instance, the mind of a pedophile, or the love between women, or getting away with murder, or living with paraplegia...
Book: The Longest Road by Phillip Caputo
Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
The author, his wife and their two dogs take this long road trip in a 19 foot, refurbished, 1962 Globetrotter Airstream which they towed behind a Toyota Tundra. If you like travel tales, you will probably like this one. I definitely liked the following from near Columbia, Tennessee:
"Man, I tell you what, we were hot and sweaty and ready to go home…and there we were, setting' at that red light, and here they come, all in a line, seventy, eighty school buses all painted in funny colors, with stovepipes sticking' out the winders, and we wondered. What in the world? We didn't know what was going' on. We thought somebody was invadin' us."
It WAS an invasion. As the author recounts: "Bud was witnessing, that afternoon in 1971, the end of a cross-country odyssey of 320 hippies disillusioned with the self-indulgent scene in San Francisco. Led by Stephen Gaskin, a balding, bearded ex-marine who preached a fusion of Christianity and Eastern religions, the pilgrims had searched the nation for a place to establish a settlement based on the principle of nonviolence, respect for the earth, and communal living….They named their property "the Farm" and soon went to work turning it into one. "
My sister Eunice lived on the Farm for awhile and had a couple of babies, who were delivered by their competent midwives. I would follow her life from a distance, and one time visited the Farm. In some ways, this experiment in communal living was successful as there are now third generation families there.
The author asks Noah what he asks folks all along the trip: "What holds us together as a nation?" and Noah replies "I think it's greed and the quest for material possessions that holds the country together. What our leaders want is us to be good little consumers and keep buying, buying, buying." His friend Cedar gives his opinion, "One of the big things is complacency…We're used to it this way, the quote free market unquote. What people need to do is wake up and say, 'As a nation, we're not happy. We don't love each other.'"
So that was one story in this book. There are many such vignettes...bits of history, weather tales, dog adventures, small towns, campgrounds, cowboys and Indians, a visit with Jim and Linda Harrison in Montana….just about what one expects in a road-trip book. And they finally arrive in Deadhorse, Alaska on Prudhoe Bay where they were escorted around in a tourist bus. Branden, the driver told them, "Stay inside folks, I'm calling my dispatcher to find out where the bears are."
And then back again to Breckenridge, Texas, having driven 16,241 miles….
"In the end…the journey had been the destination. It had never been anything else."
The author, his wife and their two dogs take this long road trip in a 19 foot, refurbished, 1962 Globetrotter Airstream which they towed behind a Toyota Tundra. If you like travel tales, you will probably like this one. I definitely liked the following from near Columbia, Tennessee:
"Man, I tell you what, we were hot and sweaty and ready to go home…and there we were, setting' at that red light, and here they come, all in a line, seventy, eighty school buses all painted in funny colors, with stovepipes sticking' out the winders, and we wondered. What in the world? We didn't know what was going' on. We thought somebody was invadin' us."
It WAS an invasion. As the author recounts: "Bud was witnessing, that afternoon in 1971, the end of a cross-country odyssey of 320 hippies disillusioned with the self-indulgent scene in San Francisco. Led by Stephen Gaskin, a balding, bearded ex-marine who preached a fusion of Christianity and Eastern religions, the pilgrims had searched the nation for a place to establish a settlement based on the principle of nonviolence, respect for the earth, and communal living….They named their property "the Farm" and soon went to work turning it into one. "
My sister Eunice lived on the Farm for awhile and had a couple of babies, who were delivered by their competent midwives. I would follow her life from a distance, and one time visited the Farm. In some ways, this experiment in communal living was successful as there are now third generation families there.
The author asks Noah what he asks folks all along the trip: "What holds us together as a nation?" and Noah replies "I think it's greed and the quest for material possessions that holds the country together. What our leaders want is us to be good little consumers and keep buying, buying, buying." His friend Cedar gives his opinion, "One of the big things is complacency…We're used to it this way, the quote free market unquote. What people need to do is wake up and say, 'As a nation, we're not happy. We don't love each other.'"
So that was one story in this book. There are many such vignettes...bits of history, weather tales, dog adventures, small towns, campgrounds, cowboys and Indians, a visit with Jim and Linda Harrison in Montana….just about what one expects in a road-trip book. And they finally arrive in Deadhorse, Alaska on Prudhoe Bay where they were escorted around in a tourist bus. Branden, the driver told them, "Stay inside folks, I'm calling my dispatcher to find out where the bears are."
And then back again to Breckenridge, Texas, having driven 16,241 miles….
"In the end…the journey had been the destination. It had never been anything else."
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Book: Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, MD
A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife.
How provocative is that? Proof of Heaven??? This was an interesting book. Dr. Alexander inexplicably gets a bacterial meningitis, nearly dies, should have died, is in a coma for a week and then "wakes up." While in the coma, he experienced his proof of heaven and describes it vividly in this book or at least as much as he can, given words we all know and understand. He also knows unequivocally that what he experienced was God and heaven. He constantly does admit to a frustration in not being able to accurately portray a reality that did not abide by our known earthly rules of time, space and sensory input and acceptance.
So....
NDE or Near Death Experiences are not uncommon but Dr. Alexander may be the first highly educated and very knowledgeable scientist (whose specialty training was all about the brain and how it works, who practiced medicine as a neurosurgeon for years and who heard patients' talk about their NDEs), he may be the first of his ilk to write about it with such conviction and with so much certainly that what he experienced was, in fact, proof.
He was not a particularly religious man before his coma so was not predisposed to an easy acceptance of what he saw, heard, experienced. He offers as many possible explanations as he can to explain on a purely medical / physiological basis what had happened to him and refutes all possibilities. He knows there are skeptics, just as he was before, just as he never really fully believed what people said about near-death experiences and he accepts that.
Dr. Wade (Eben's doctor in the Lynchberg General Hospital) after several days of coma: "We've lightened Eben's sedation considerably, and by this point his neurologic examination should be showing more neurological activity that it is. His lower brain is partially functioning, but it's his higher-level functions that we need, and they're all still completely absent."
But then one day his eyes open and he begins the journey back. Months later he writes:
"Medically speaking, that I had recovered completely was a flat-out impossibility, a medical miracle. But the real story lay in where I had been, and I had a duty not just as a scientist and a profound respecter of the scientific method, but also as a healer to tell that story."
I have read no reviews of this book yet but will. I am deeply curious how others reacted to Dr. Eben's story...the believers and the skeptics.
It is easy to read, compelling, not too long....sometimes fascinating, but still.....proof? If you read it, you will decide for yourself.
"It wasn't any single, discrete butterfly that appeared, but all of them together, as if they were a river of life and color, moving through the air. We flew in lazy looped formations past blossoming flowers and buds on trees that opened as we flew near...She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for few moments, would make your whole life up to that point worth living...no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these..beyond all the different types of love we had down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them....Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real--was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial."
How provocative is that? Proof of Heaven??? This was an interesting book. Dr. Alexander inexplicably gets a bacterial meningitis, nearly dies, should have died, is in a coma for a week and then "wakes up." While in the coma, he experienced his proof of heaven and describes it vividly in this book or at least as much as he can, given words we all know and understand. He also knows unequivocally that what he experienced was God and heaven. He constantly does admit to a frustration in not being able to accurately portray a reality that did not abide by our known earthly rules of time, space and sensory input and acceptance.
So....
NDE or Near Death Experiences are not uncommon but Dr. Alexander may be the first highly educated and very knowledgeable scientist (whose specialty training was all about the brain and how it works, who practiced medicine as a neurosurgeon for years and who heard patients' talk about their NDEs), he may be the first of his ilk to write about it with such conviction and with so much certainly that what he experienced was, in fact, proof.
He was not a particularly religious man before his coma so was not predisposed to an easy acceptance of what he saw, heard, experienced. He offers as many possible explanations as he can to explain on a purely medical / physiological basis what had happened to him and refutes all possibilities. He knows there are skeptics, just as he was before, just as he never really fully believed what people said about near-death experiences and he accepts that.
Dr. Wade (Eben's doctor in the Lynchberg General Hospital) after several days of coma: "We've lightened Eben's sedation considerably, and by this point his neurologic examination should be showing more neurological activity that it is. His lower brain is partially functioning, but it's his higher-level functions that we need, and they're all still completely absent."
But then one day his eyes open and he begins the journey back. Months later he writes:
"Medically speaking, that I had recovered completely was a flat-out impossibility, a medical miracle. But the real story lay in where I had been, and I had a duty not just as a scientist and a profound respecter of the scientific method, but also as a healer to tell that story."
I have read no reviews of this book yet but will. I am deeply curious how others reacted to Dr. Eben's story...the believers and the skeptics.
It is easy to read, compelling, not too long....sometimes fascinating, but still.....proof? If you read it, you will decide for yourself.
"It wasn't any single, discrete butterfly that appeared, but all of them together, as if they were a river of life and color, moving through the air. We flew in lazy looped formations past blossoming flowers and buds on trees that opened as we flew near...She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for few moments, would make your whole life up to that point worth living...no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these..beyond all the different types of love we had down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them....Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real--was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial."
Book: The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
I loved this book about two Australian sisters who worked as nurses in WWI, mostly in the Mediterranean. It's what a novel should be. The characters become more and more vivid as I turned the pages. I absorbed some of the history of the war and was moved to read more. And, of course, there was much about nursing and war casualties...blunt force trauma, psychological distress, the phenomenon of gas as a weapon, horrific infections, amputations, respiratory illnesses and frostbite, but the delight and light of the book are the stories of Sally and Naomi, their friends, their family, their employers and the soldiers they, two of whom they eventually loved.
The book begins with the death of their mother from cancer: "For six month Mrs. Durance ate her fruit and sat in sumps of sunlight on the veranda. But the cancer owned her by night...Sally was to administer a sixth of a grain of morphine hypodermically when brave and reticent Mrs. Durance confessed, one way or another, to agony."
After she dies, the sisters then travel via ship from their home in the Macleay Valley (north of Sydney) around the south coast of Australia, through the Indian Ocean to Port Suez and Alexandria and then over the Mediterranean to Lemnos (near Gallipoli) and later to France. Keneally has written a wonderful story set in the troubled, unsettled, often nearly unbearable times for the men and women of WWI.
"As they went past they could be smelled--not just filthy flesh but fermentations of the skin and uniform. They still carried the trench-fever lice. For the louse it was always summer in the clefts and crevices of the body."
"Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours....There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery--where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained...plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen. She connected a healthy orderly's blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube."
They were young and stalwart and brave, doing their duty, falling in love while immersed in killing fields and mobile hospitals, with occasional breaks in the grand cities of Alexandria and Cairo, London and Paris....where they dined out in small cafes, eating and drinking, where they went to museums; they saw the pyramids and the Sphinx in the moonlight....they flirted and laughed and loved and restored themselves in all the time-honored ways.
It's a huge canvas, engaging, sweet and sorrowful. Bravo, Mr. Keneally....
The book begins with the death of their mother from cancer: "For six month Mrs. Durance ate her fruit and sat in sumps of sunlight on the veranda. But the cancer owned her by night...Sally was to administer a sixth of a grain of morphine hypodermically when brave and reticent Mrs. Durance confessed, one way or another, to agony."
After she dies, the sisters then travel via ship from their home in the Macleay Valley (north of Sydney) around the south coast of Australia, through the Indian Ocean to Port Suez and Alexandria and then over the Mediterranean to Lemnos (near Gallipoli) and later to France. Keneally has written a wonderful story set in the troubled, unsettled, often nearly unbearable times for the men and women of WWI.
"As they went past they could be smelled--not just filthy flesh but fermentations of the skin and uniform. They still carried the trench-fever lice. For the louse it was always summer in the clefts and crevices of the body."
"Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours....There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery--where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained...plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen. She connected a healthy orderly's blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube."
They were young and stalwart and brave, doing their duty, falling in love while immersed in killing fields and mobile hospitals, with occasional breaks in the grand cities of Alexandria and Cairo, London and Paris....where they dined out in small cafes, eating and drinking, where they went to museums; they saw the pyramids and the Sphinx in the moonlight....they flirted and laughed and loved and restored themselves in all the time-honored ways.
It's a huge canvas, engaging, sweet and sorrowful. Bravo, Mr. Keneally....
Monday, October 21, 2013
Book: Killing Kennedy by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
The End of Camelot....
I liked this book. The writing is fluid and smooth as the authors summarize the highlights of Jack Kennedy's life, beginning in 1943 when his PT-109 patrol torpedo boat gets rammed by a Japanese destroyer near the Solomon Islands. Jack was the skipper of the patrol boat and, after a faltering start, realizes he needs to take charge. He "tows a badly burned crew member by placing a strap from the man's life jacket between his own teeth and pulling him. During the five long hours it takes to reach the island, Kennedy swallows mouthful after mouthful of saltwater, yet his strength as a swimmer allows him to reach the beach....Days pass. Kennedy and his men survive by choking down live snails and licking moisture off leaves." After several days and nights during which Kennedy repeatedly swims out into the Pacific at night hoping to intercept another PT boat, he and his men are finally rescued by local islanders. It was a nightmarish odyssey from which Kennedy emerges a much stronger man than he had been.
The book also details highlights of Lee Harvey Oswald's rather pathetic life as a perpetually frustrated and unhappy man, a former Marine, who never achieves the recognition he craves. He defects to Russia, meets and marries Marina, but is still a person of little consequence in spite of his socialist beliefs and not accorded the stature he feels his due, so he decides to return to America. Because he had lived in Russia, he was on the radar of the FBI and was questioned but ultimately deemed not a threat. Was there a conspiracy? The authors only say that "The world will never know the answer." It seems to me that they think Oswald acted alone even though they don't state that explicitly.
Most of the information in this book is known but was presented anew for our review and pleasure. It is gossipy at times with tales of Marilyn Monroe, the Mafia, Frank Sinatra, the intense personal enmity between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jackie's frolic aboard Aristotle Onassis' yacht, but there are also chapters on the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, the death of Jack and Jackie's infant son, the days leading up to Dallas and the immediate aftermath.
"They load the body onto Air Force One through the same rear door John Kennedy stepped out of three hours earlier. That moment was ceremonial and presidential. This moment is morbid and ghastly."
Bill O'Reilly obviously is taken by the Kennedys and admires them and is fascinated by them as so many of us were.....and some still are.
"A generation after his assassination, more than four million people a year still arrive at Arlington to pay their respects to the fallen president. And also to the grand American Vision that he represented."
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Book: Facing the Wave ~ A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich
One of the best books I've read lately.
Gretel Ehrlich spent many weeks in Japan very soon after the tsunami that devastated so much of that country on March 11, 2011. She travels up and down the eastern coast bearing witness to the devastation. It is beautifully written:
"Upstairs I roll up my futon. The smell of green tea, coffee, rice and fried eggs wafts through the small house, mixing with the savage beauty of geological violence that continues to take place. There have been over 800 aftershocks greater than 4.5 since March and it's only June now....."
"On March 11, 2011, Japan's earth-altar broke. The descending oceanic plate--a slab of lithosphere--slid under the overlying plate that carried the island of Honshu. Pulling and grinding, the subduction zone was pulverized. Its topmost plate bulged and dropped and a rupture occurred: an undersea rip, 6 feet across, 310 miles along, and 120 miles wide."
She tells of the ongoing radiation, the rescue of animals, the woman who rents a bulldozer and spends her days looking for her lost child; she visits with an elderly geisha; she quotes from Hirayama's blog: "Urchins were cancelled this year. We thought abalone season might be stopped too, but it wasn't."
Radiation News (a continuing disaster and a theme that runs through this book):
"Five thousand, two hundred tons of stone from the town of Namie were quarried and used to build condominiums for refugees from the no/go zone. The stone is all radioactive and has to be removed."
"The Daiichi nuclear plant scraps plans to dump its contaminated water into the ocean. TEPCO's new insurance policy cost three hundred million yen a year."
The writing is sparse and powerful:
"Death leaves marks: a woman told Abyss-san that her 14-year-ld grandchild was practicing with the school's swim team when the tsunami occurred. The wave came over the pool. The granddaughter survived but she had scratch marks all down her legs made by the other girls as they tried to claw their way up to air. They drowned."
Some of the fisherman raced out of the harbors and "took their boats up the face of the wave. It was steep and they had to use all their power. The ones who went out too late died. One boat climbed the wave and ran out of gas. The fisherman just ahead threw him a line and the bigger boat pulled him that way. They both made it."
28,700 people perished and 4000 bodies have yet to be found.
"Yet I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades--one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; the the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all."
Reading this book is the least any of us can do for the victims and survivors.
Gretel Ehrlich spent many weeks in Japan very soon after the tsunami that devastated so much of that country on March 11, 2011. She travels up and down the eastern coast bearing witness to the devastation. It is beautifully written:
"Upstairs I roll up my futon. The smell of green tea, coffee, rice and fried eggs wafts through the small house, mixing with the savage beauty of geological violence that continues to take place. There have been over 800 aftershocks greater than 4.5 since March and it's only June now....."
"On March 11, 2011, Japan's earth-altar broke. The descending oceanic plate--a slab of lithosphere--slid under the overlying plate that carried the island of Honshu. Pulling and grinding, the subduction zone was pulverized. Its topmost plate bulged and dropped and a rupture occurred: an undersea rip, 6 feet across, 310 miles along, and 120 miles wide."
She tells of the ongoing radiation, the rescue of animals, the woman who rents a bulldozer and spends her days looking for her lost child; she visits with an elderly geisha; she quotes from Hirayama's blog: "Urchins were cancelled this year. We thought abalone season might be stopped too, but it wasn't."
Radiation News (a continuing disaster and a theme that runs through this book):
"Five thousand, two hundred tons of stone from the town of Namie were quarried and used to build condominiums for refugees from the no/go zone. The stone is all radioactive and has to be removed."
"The Daiichi nuclear plant scraps plans to dump its contaminated water into the ocean. TEPCO's new insurance policy cost three hundred million yen a year."
The writing is sparse and powerful:
"Death leaves marks: a woman told Abyss-san that her 14-year-ld grandchild was practicing with the school's swim team when the tsunami occurred. The wave came over the pool. The granddaughter survived but she had scratch marks all down her legs made by the other girls as they tried to claw their way up to air. They drowned."
Some of the fisherman raced out of the harbors and "took their boats up the face of the wave. It was steep and they had to use all their power. The ones who went out too late died. One boat climbed the wave and ran out of gas. The fisherman just ahead threw him a line and the bigger boat pulled him that way. They both made it."
28,700 people perished and 4000 bodies have yet to be found.
"Yet I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades--one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; the the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all."
Reading this book is the least any of us can do for the victims and survivors.
Book: Dinner with the Smileys by Sarah Smiley
One Military Family, One Year of Heroes, and Lessons for a Lifetime
When Sarah wrote this book, she and her husband Dustin and their three sons lived in Bangor, Maine. Dustin was stationed there as commander of Navy reservists. He was also a Navy pilot. When he is deployed for a year, Sarah decides to invite guests to share dinner with herself and her boys one day a week for the year Dustin will be gone, and this is the story of those guests and those dinners. It is also the story of her sons and how they mature through the year.
I am of two minds about this book. I got it from the library because a woman saw it in the new book section where I was browsing and recommended it. I probably wouldn't picked it up otherwise.
Of course, it is a "feel good" book. What's to not like about it?
Sarah writes of having to stretch some to do this thing..."I don't like to cook, and I hate small talk."
Her kids are not always thrilled and she is honest about the grumpiness, obstinate behavior and anger she sometimes has to deal with. They all survive though and are certainly better for the experiences. They meet and make new friends, and the boys (and Sarah) become the beneficiaries of many acts of generosity as they struggle with loneliness. Also, during this year, Sarah graduates with her Master's degree and teaches part-time. So, yes, she is a busy working mom.
The guests were teachers, coaches, political figures, friends, radio personalities, authors, a US Marshal, the governor. Sometimes the dinners were off-site, like at Fenway Park in Boston, or just a family picnic at her parents' summer place.
So, what didn't I like? It was undoubtedly hard for Sarah to be a single mom for a year, but thousands and thousands of women do this for much of their lives. I'm sure she is a good and well-intentioned lady but perhaps a bit self-absorbed. She got a lot of attention for what she did and tons of support and help. Several of the dinners were not at her home and she didn't have to prepare them. She became the beneficiary of the publicity. It was only in the Acknowledgments that Sarah reveals there was a photographer present "at almost every dinner..." Her name was Andrea Hand. For some reason, it seemed odd that all this time there was a person documenting these dinners without the reader realizing it until the end of the book. It made the whole concept not quite so spontaneous or simple. It made it more of a show.
But, enough already of the negative.....Good for Sarah...
When Sarah wrote this book, she and her husband Dustin and their three sons lived in Bangor, Maine. Dustin was stationed there as commander of Navy reservists. He was also a Navy pilot. When he is deployed for a year, Sarah decides to invite guests to share dinner with herself and her boys one day a week for the year Dustin will be gone, and this is the story of those guests and those dinners. It is also the story of her sons and how they mature through the year.
I am of two minds about this book. I got it from the library because a woman saw it in the new book section where I was browsing and recommended it. I probably wouldn't picked it up otherwise.
Of course, it is a "feel good" book. What's to not like about it?
Sarah writes of having to stretch some to do this thing..."I don't like to cook, and I hate small talk."
Her kids are not always thrilled and she is honest about the grumpiness, obstinate behavior and anger she sometimes has to deal with. They all survive though and are certainly better for the experiences. They meet and make new friends, and the boys (and Sarah) become the beneficiaries of many acts of generosity as they struggle with loneliness. Also, during this year, Sarah graduates with her Master's degree and teaches part-time. So, yes, she is a busy working mom.
The guests were teachers, coaches, political figures, friends, radio personalities, authors, a US Marshal, the governor. Sometimes the dinners were off-site, like at Fenway Park in Boston, or just a family picnic at her parents' summer place.
So, what didn't I like? It was undoubtedly hard for Sarah to be a single mom for a year, but thousands and thousands of women do this for much of their lives. I'm sure she is a good and well-intentioned lady but perhaps a bit self-absorbed. She got a lot of attention for what she did and tons of support and help. Several of the dinners were not at her home and she didn't have to prepare them. She became the beneficiary of the publicity. It was only in the Acknowledgments that Sarah reveals there was a photographer present "at almost every dinner..." Her name was Andrea Hand. For some reason, it seemed odd that all this time there was a person documenting these dinners without the reader realizing it until the end of the book. It made the whole concept not quite so spontaneous or simple. It made it more of a show.
But, enough already of the negative.....Good for Sarah...
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Book: Silken Prey by John Sandford
Sandford's lastest novel. I finally got it from the library after several weeks of waiting. He is still my favorite author for this genre. I now have read 20 to 25 of his books. What keeps me interested is the dialogue and characters and the small asides or little deviations which have little connection with the main plot but which are refreshing and make the characters more real. While the plots are good enough, they are the standard stories of mostly good guys, bad guys and really evil guys, along with slightly rogue cops and often an irregular but satisfying justice.
A woman wins the Democratic primary in the state of Minnesota. She is at her victory party:
"In what would have been an expansive family room, if Taryn had had a family, all the white folks and the necessary number of blacks and browns were cuttin' a rug, if a lot of really stiff heirs and fund managers and entrepreneurs and politicians could, in fact, cut a rug."
And later, at the end of the story, the denouement: "For a political gathering, there was a remarkable lack of even symbolic amity. The governor shook hands with everybody, but nobody shook hands with anybody else."
Irregular justice: "She relaxed her fingers, and the watch dropped like a golden steak through the grey light of winter, and quarter million dollars disappeared into the black water below the bridge."
Another thing I like about his writing is that he describes weather, seasons, the north woods and the Midwest and I know exactly what he is talking about...
Book: Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley and Debra McKinney
How I Learned to Live and Love Again After Being Blinded by a Bear
Mauled by a huge brown bear as he was returning from a day of fishing, Dan nearly died. This is his story, and it is hugely compelling, both for the adventure and drama but equally for Dan's courage, spirit and attitude.
Brian (Dan's brother) flies to Anchorage immediately on hearing the news and arrives at the hospital where a nurse tells him: "He's heavily sedated, so he won't be able to respond. You're going to see a lot of equipment and a lot of tubes. He's had a tracheotomy so he's on a ventilator. He has a feeding tube and a catheter. Here are puncture wounds on his back, shoulders, arms, wrists and left thigh. His eyes were severely damaged so his eyelids have been sewn shut."
Dan describes his mauling:
"Those eyes, I remember them as yellow and burning like comets. Those eyes would be the last thing I would ever see....Somewhere between the bashing of my head and regaining consciousness, the bear had managed to flip me over. It stood over me now, straddling my body, claws sunk deep into my shoulders, pinning me to the ground with bone-crushing weight. My arms useless, I could do nothing to stop it as it cocked its head sideways and clamped its jaws across the middle of my face. Crunch. Like a mouth full of eggshells."
And so the rest of his life begins. Dan is a remarkable person with a remarkable story. I could write a lot more of the details, but if you are interested at all, it will be so much better reading Dan's words.
Book: Gaining Daylight by Sara Loewen
Life on Two Islands
The two islands are Kodiak and Amook in Alaska. Amook is where Sara and her family spend their summers while her husband Pete works as a fisherman. They have two small sons. Liam and Luke. Amook is an island in Uyak, one of Kodiak's western bays. In the winter, they move to Kodiak. The book is a collection of wonderful essays about their life, weather, the sea, the Arctic seasons, local history, mothering and homemaking, writing, and Sara's resignation as seasonal affective disorder sneaks up every year:
"By February, I lose all perspective. I'm bewildered by the rage that wells up as I try to buckle stiff car seat straps over Luke's snowsuit while he cries about the cold and a passing truck coats my back with slush, or when I find myself cursing frozen door handles and the snowplow that knocked off the side view mirror, or crying at random magazine articles about warmer climates. And then I recognize the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder....."
Each chapter adds to a painting of their island lives, a canvas of place and history, with details of the grit and grace necessary for this chosen way of living.
"Last night I filled the old drum stove with wood and cardboard and lit the banya--a blending of Russian saunas with Alutiiq bathhouses: side huts carpeted in fresh grass where bathers poured water over heated rocks. A friend was visiting, and we washed the kids in the dark, hot room. Steam hissed off the cedar benches and round beach stones piled around the wood stove. Clean and content, we stepped out onto the banya porch into the cool autumn air. We are rich in driftwood. Rich in fish. Rich in wind and blue tides."
Cold and always the capricious wind and water and weather; whales and bears; eagles and otters....family, home.... this is their life, and as I would read her words, I was also there.
Her husband returns from Kodiak, across Uyak Bay with their young son:
"It was too rough to bring the skiff in so Pete tied off on the running line. He shouted to me, but I couldn't hear him over the storm. He held Liam and jumped toward the beach, landing in water up his waist. We struggled to pull the boat sway from the rocks. My hands were shaking. Liam's chubby ankles were pink with cold. 'I should have turned back,' Pete said."
The wild heart of Alaska is offered as a gift in this small book....with a deft blending of past and present.
I had dinner with Dave and Ellen last night as they returned from Alaska, and I told them about this author. They, in turn, gave me some recommendations and told wonderful stories of the land, the people they keep meeting, hunting, rivers and mountains, brown bear and moose and halibut fishing one day when Ellen caught the big ones!
The two islands are Kodiak and Amook in Alaska. Amook is where Sara and her family spend their summers while her husband Pete works as a fisherman. They have two small sons. Liam and Luke. Amook is an island in Uyak, one of Kodiak's western bays. In the winter, they move to Kodiak. The book is a collection of wonderful essays about their life, weather, the sea, the Arctic seasons, local history, mothering and homemaking, writing, and Sara's resignation as seasonal affective disorder sneaks up every year:
"By February, I lose all perspective. I'm bewildered by the rage that wells up as I try to buckle stiff car seat straps over Luke's snowsuit while he cries about the cold and a passing truck coats my back with slush, or when I find myself cursing frozen door handles and the snowplow that knocked off the side view mirror, or crying at random magazine articles about warmer climates. And then I recognize the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder....."
Each chapter adds to a painting of their island lives, a canvas of place and history, with details of the grit and grace necessary for this chosen way of living.
"Last night I filled the old drum stove with wood and cardboard and lit the banya--a blending of Russian saunas with Alutiiq bathhouses: side huts carpeted in fresh grass where bathers poured water over heated rocks. A friend was visiting, and we washed the kids in the dark, hot room. Steam hissed off the cedar benches and round beach stones piled around the wood stove. Clean and content, we stepped out onto the banya porch into the cool autumn air. We are rich in driftwood. Rich in fish. Rich in wind and blue tides."
Cold and always the capricious wind and water and weather; whales and bears; eagles and otters....family, home.... this is their life, and as I would read her words, I was also there.
Her husband returns from Kodiak, across Uyak Bay with their young son:
"It was too rough to bring the skiff in so Pete tied off on the running line. He shouted to me, but I couldn't hear him over the storm. He held Liam and jumped toward the beach, landing in water up his waist. We struggled to pull the boat sway from the rocks. My hands were shaking. Liam's chubby ankles were pink with cold. 'I should have turned back,' Pete said."
The wild heart of Alaska is offered as a gift in this small book....with a deft blending of past and present.
I had dinner with Dave and Ellen last night as they returned from Alaska, and I told them about this author. They, in turn, gave me some recommendations and told wonderful stories of the land, the people they keep meeting, hunting, rivers and mountains, brown bear and moose and halibut fishing one day when Ellen caught the big ones!
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Book: Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen
A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right and Solves Her Lady Problems
Rhoda Janzen is the author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, which was NYTimes best seller. She teaches Creative Writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
This is a good book with a not so good title. In fact, I think it's an awful title. But getting past that, Rhoda's life continues in this interesting and humorous account. I definitely recommend it. I was surprised by the content but don't want to say much for fear of taking away the pleasure of reading it.
She writes about some pretty important life events in spite of her jaunty prose. I'm still thinking on her religious choice, for instance. It just now struck me that there are similarities to Eat, Love and Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert, which book I didn't like as much as this one. She does meet a man and she does find a new church.
The other big thing is not eating and it's bigger than food, although there IS this scene:
"When Mitch and I first got together, we had dinner with a nice Christian couple who referenced the Jonah story in casual conversation. The husband and wife were citing the story as a metaphor, telling us of a time when they had been reluctant to answer God's call in a matter of service to their church. Something in their tone lay submerged under the current of general conversation. It pressed up from the deep and into my mouth, 'Hey,' I said brightly, 'do you guys believe in the literality of the Jonah story?' An uneasy silence descended--you'd have thought I had asked how much their new couch cost, or what they thought about Obama. I instantly realized the severity of my faux pas. Apparently, in Christian circles, unlike academic circles, one did not discuss where literality leaves off and metaphor begins. The wife set down her fork and looked at her husband, who nodded faintly. 'We do believe that big fish swallowed Jonah whole,' she said to me gently. She chose her words with clipped care, as if she had just discovered that she was dining with a heretic who deserved a good stoning. "
Just read the whole book; you won't be disappointed.
Book: The Highway by C. J.Box
I picked this book up because it takes place in Montana. It's a so-so zu-zu book about a serial killer truck driver who delivers his victims to an old ranch near Yellowstone.
I always compare this genre to John Sandford's writing and, so far, I haven't found another author who comes close to Sandford when writing about criminals and cops.
This book / author would be about a C on the Sandford Scale. Still, there were some good passages and dialogue, the characters were credible and the venues worth the story for me. I've driven all those highways in southern Montana and know those mountains and rivers and little towns.
I'd probably try this author again.
I always compare this genre to John Sandford's writing and, so far, I haven't found another author who comes close to Sandford when writing about criminals and cops.
This book / author would be about a C on the Sandford Scale. Still, there were some good passages and dialogue, the characters were credible and the venues worth the story for me. I've driven all those highways in southern Montana and know those mountains and rivers and little towns.
I'd probably try this author again.
Book: The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte
A book of short stories. I read all but one. (I did not read The Dungeon Master.) Wasted my precious time. Like who wants to read about creepy people who do lots of drugs and lie and have casual sex and are so clever and edgy and nuts and go nowhere and nothing real happens.
Not that the author can't write well. He can. I read The Ask which was a NYTimes Notable Book.
This seemed to me like words written under the influence of some speedy drug...by a pretty smart guy.
Book: Double Double by Martha Grimes and Ken Grimes
A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism
Martha Grimes is the well known writer of mysteries and Ken is her grown son. They write alternating chapters about their respective lives, pre and post alcohol. The book would be of interest to anyone who knows, who lives with, who is, or who is wondering if he is an alcoholic. Which would include 99% of Americans, I think.
Ken respects and endorses Alcoholics Anonymous while Martha went to a clinic. Both are now clean and sober and have been for years....or at least they were when this book was published. Alcohol always lurks and beckons, especially for Martha. Her honesty about her life with and after alcohol is refreshing. She misses drinking every single day. She writes as though she had a love affair with alcohol...a tender, sweet, comforting, almost passionate love affair, and on reflection, this might not be the best book to read if one is looking for a testimonial on the improved quality of life sans alcohol.
Martha: "I remember a movie in which the daughter of wealthy parents had come for dinner. There was no alcohol served because the father was a recovering alcoholic. Afterward, the girl and her mother were talking about the father, and the mother said ruefully that she had liked him better when he was drinking. That was a shocking admission, she knew, about herself. But he had lost a spark, something that made their lives more enjoyable. Since he'd stopped drinking, he was sad a lot of the time. In my clinic, I think they would come down hard on this woman; they'd call her an enabler. But she wasn't: She had never done anything to undermine her husband's earnest effort to stay sober. I thought she was being devastatingly honest."
For Martha, the enemy is not alcohol but the inability to regulate intake..."drinking uncontrollably every day..."
She says, "There's no recipe for ending an addiction. Unless you consider this one: Here is a glass. It has vodka in it. Do not pick it up."
"The blessed first drink that goes down like fire stolen from the gods...the deliverance, the relief from the sharp-edged day, from party anxiety, from boredom outside and in-, from the empty night."
Ken: "At the age of seventeen, all I wanted to do was drink pints and pints of Guinness...I loved Guinness more than anything....The dark, rich, bitter beer that slid down my throat like ice cream. Guinness was a spiritual experience."
"I graduated with the worst hangover I ever had in my life and was desperate for the ceremony to be over and for them [parents and relatives] to leave so I could start partying again."
The book will help the reader understand the problem.
Martha Grimes is the well known writer of mysteries and Ken is her grown son. They write alternating chapters about their respective lives, pre and post alcohol. The book would be of interest to anyone who knows, who lives with, who is, or who is wondering if he is an alcoholic. Which would include 99% of Americans, I think.
Ken respects and endorses Alcoholics Anonymous while Martha went to a clinic. Both are now clean and sober and have been for years....or at least they were when this book was published. Alcohol always lurks and beckons, especially for Martha. Her honesty about her life with and after alcohol is refreshing. She misses drinking every single day. She writes as though she had a love affair with alcohol...a tender, sweet, comforting, almost passionate love affair, and on reflection, this might not be the best book to read if one is looking for a testimonial on the improved quality of life sans alcohol.
Martha: "I remember a movie in which the daughter of wealthy parents had come for dinner. There was no alcohol served because the father was a recovering alcoholic. Afterward, the girl and her mother were talking about the father, and the mother said ruefully that she had liked him better when he was drinking. That was a shocking admission, she knew, about herself. But he had lost a spark, something that made their lives more enjoyable. Since he'd stopped drinking, he was sad a lot of the time. In my clinic, I think they would come down hard on this woman; they'd call her an enabler. But she wasn't: She had never done anything to undermine her husband's earnest effort to stay sober. I thought she was being devastatingly honest."
For Martha, the enemy is not alcohol but the inability to regulate intake..."drinking uncontrollably every day..."
She says, "There's no recipe for ending an addiction. Unless you consider this one: Here is a glass. It has vodka in it. Do not pick it up."
"The blessed first drink that goes down like fire stolen from the gods...the deliverance, the relief from the sharp-edged day, from party anxiety, from boredom outside and in-, from the empty night."
Ken: "At the age of seventeen, all I wanted to do was drink pints and pints of Guinness...I loved Guinness more than anything....The dark, rich, bitter beer that slid down my throat like ice cream. Guinness was a spiritual experience."
"I graduated with the worst hangover I ever had in my life and was desperate for the ceremony to be over and for them [parents and relatives] to leave so I could start partying again."
The book will help the reader understand the problem.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Book: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The boys are Bob and Jim. They both now live in New York City. They, however, grew up in Shirley Falls, Maine, where their sister, Susan, still lives with her son Zach.
One day Zach throws a pig's head into a Somali mosque. The novel begins with this incident. Susan, a worried, crabby, rather unlovely woman calls her brothers for help. Bob and Jim live very different lives. Jim is rich and successful with a devoted, confident wife and three grown children. Bob gets by but is content with far less. He has no children and is single again. Their differences in character are slowly revealed as the novel progresses. But they are also family and they do what they can, in their own ways, to help Susan and Zach. As the story progresses, we also learn more of the lives of Bob's ex-wife, Jim's wife, Susan's elderly renter, a Somali man named Abdikarim, a Unitarian minister. There are the big city chapters and the small town in Maine chapters with themes of what families do for each other, how they care (or don't care) for each other and how the past (though seldom talked about) is the elephant in their lives.
So a fine stew of families, prejudice, love, deceit, youth, middle-age and morality is served up by an author with a mastery of the ingredients that make a wonderful story.
Ms. Strout was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Olive Kitteridge. She lives in NYC and Maine.
One day Zach throws a pig's head into a Somali mosque. The novel begins with this incident. Susan, a worried, crabby, rather unlovely woman calls her brothers for help. Bob and Jim live very different lives. Jim is rich and successful with a devoted, confident wife and three grown children. Bob gets by but is content with far less. He has no children and is single again. Their differences in character are slowly revealed as the novel progresses. But they are also family and they do what they can, in their own ways, to help Susan and Zach. As the story progresses, we also learn more of the lives of Bob's ex-wife, Jim's wife, Susan's elderly renter, a Somali man named Abdikarim, a Unitarian minister. There are the big city chapters and the small town in Maine chapters with themes of what families do for each other, how they care (or don't care) for each other and how the past (though seldom talked about) is the elephant in their lives.
So a fine stew of families, prejudice, love, deceit, youth, middle-age and morality is served up by an author with a mastery of the ingredients that make a wonderful story.
Ms. Strout was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Olive Kitteridge. She lives in NYC and Maine.
Book: Benediction by Kent Haruf
Benediction is a lovely novel as were Mr. Haruf's previous books (Plainsong and Eventide). The place is the high plains east of Denver in the small town of Holt, Colorado. The characters are Dad Lewis, his wife and his daughter. Dad is dying of cancer. He is a good man who owned a hardware store and worked hard his whole life; he was solid, stable...a good man. But his life was not without heartbreak.
The end of his life is a tale of days passing as he sits by a window looking out over his yard. He receives visits from a pastor, a neighbor, a few good friends. The ways of living in a small town are written in beautiful prose but simply, effectively. The author also shows us glimpses of the lives of those who visit Dad, both their present and their past. So this is also a novel also of those on the periphery, making it rich and satisfying.
But it isn't cloying or simplistic...just a fine mix of sweetness and sadness in the manner of other authors who do this so well. Wendell Berry comes to mind. To read it is a respite from the larger world of information overload, TV commercials, our devices, our restlessness.
The end of his life is a tale of days passing as he sits by a window looking out over his yard. He receives visits from a pastor, a neighbor, a few good friends. The ways of living in a small town are written in beautiful prose but simply, effectively. The author also shows us glimpses of the lives of those who visit Dad, both their present and their past. So this is also a novel also of those on the periphery, making it rich and satisfying.
But it isn't cloying or simplistic...just a fine mix of sweetness and sadness in the manner of other authors who do this so well. Wendell Berry comes to mind. To read it is a respite from the larger world of information overload, TV commercials, our devices, our restlessness.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Book: Plutopia by Kate Brown
Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
An ambitious accounting (57 pages of footnotes) of the "atomic cities" of Richland, Washington, with its Hanford plant, and Ozersk, Russia, with its Maiak plant. Both cities were chosen as venues for production of plutonium (which, incidentally, has a half-life of 25,000 years). They were chosen because they were relatively remote. To date, the "only use of nuclear weapons in war" are the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima on August 6 and August 9 of 1945, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
The details of the involvement of big business (DuPont, GE, Rockwell, Westinghouse, Fluor, Batelle and Bechtel Jacobs in the US) and our government are sobering, shocking and mind-boggling. A parallel and very similar story happened concurrently in Russia, and both areas have ongoing sequelae. In the beginning, ignorance was a factor but at time went on, and knowledge of radioactivity and its effects on humans and the environment became better known by more and more people, there was outright dismissal of the facts, lies, cover-ups and intimidation of the "whistle blowers" in order to keep the projects going with not enough concessions to safety or monitoring, and very little official acknowledgement of consequences (even as evidence increased). There is no immunity from exposure to unprotected radioactivity.
The folks who lived in Richland and Ozersk became very used to their safe, lovely, relatively small towns, subsidized by the governments and businesses, and most chose not to question what was involved in the production of radioactive materials. These towns were assured amenities (good schools, parks, theaters, police protection, healthcare, cheap housing, jobs), and since the damage from radioactive isotopes is usually not evident for years and is invisible, the residents and workers chose not to believe the sporadic reporting that all was not as rosy as it seemed. Richland was homogenous, white and conservative, proud of their community and liked its exclusivity. The lesser skilled workers, those of color and those of dubious character, were housed in other communities.
Over the years, select citizens, workers, journalists and scientists tried to warn of the dangers inherent in plants where safety measures were often ignored, where construction was hurried along so that Americans would win the Cold War instead of the Russians, where known radioactive materials were consciously (or in error as happened often) flushed into the rivers, or stored in containers which were prone to cracks and leakage, or released into the air where capricious winds then carried the particles far from the plants, where people began getting sick and sicker and babies were born with defects and the local fauna also began showing signs of radioactive poisoning....all was too often ignored, and still is, to some degree.
I read Plutopia over several weeks and ultimately found it fascinating. It seemed to me that the effects of too much radioactivity are not yet clearly defined or even quantifiable. Some folks live long lives; some get sick and/or die. The death toll from Chernobyl varies between "37 and a quarter of a million." Successive generations of those who lived near the plants are sometimes affected. Genes mutate, but without precise predictability, and the bad stuff silently accumulates....in bones, in soft tissues, in thyroids, in reproductive organs.
Hanford is the largest Superfund site in the US, and in 1989, DOE (the oversight agency after the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded) "shuttered the plutonium plant admitting catastrophe in need of cleanup." Cost was estimated to be $100 billion and would take 50 years! with the imperative to "safely contain 1700 pounds of plutonium-239 scattered among 53 million gallons of other poisons and fission products."
And, just for the record, "1/4 of American communities are within four miles of a Superfund site" according to author, Sandra Steingraber.
I've driven US 14 along the north side of the Columbia River in SE Washington many times. It is a most gorgeous road, with far far fewer cars and trucks than the Interstate on the south side of the river. I will never drive that way again though without a slightly creepy feeling as I pass near Richland and Hanford.
An ambitious accounting (57 pages of footnotes) of the "atomic cities" of Richland, Washington, with its Hanford plant, and Ozersk, Russia, with its Maiak plant. Both cities were chosen as venues for production of plutonium (which, incidentally, has a half-life of 25,000 years). They were chosen because they were relatively remote. To date, the "only use of nuclear weapons in war" are the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima on August 6 and August 9 of 1945, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
The details of the involvement of big business (DuPont, GE, Rockwell, Westinghouse, Fluor, Batelle and Bechtel Jacobs in the US) and our government are sobering, shocking and mind-boggling. A parallel and very similar story happened concurrently in Russia, and both areas have ongoing sequelae. In the beginning, ignorance was a factor but at time went on, and knowledge of radioactivity and its effects on humans and the environment became better known by more and more people, there was outright dismissal of the facts, lies, cover-ups and intimidation of the "whistle blowers" in order to keep the projects going with not enough concessions to safety or monitoring, and very little official acknowledgement of consequences (even as evidence increased). There is no immunity from exposure to unprotected radioactivity.
The folks who lived in Richland and Ozersk became very used to their safe, lovely, relatively small towns, subsidized by the governments and businesses, and most chose not to question what was involved in the production of radioactive materials. These towns were assured amenities (good schools, parks, theaters, police protection, healthcare, cheap housing, jobs), and since the damage from radioactive isotopes is usually not evident for years and is invisible, the residents and workers chose not to believe the sporadic reporting that all was not as rosy as it seemed. Richland was homogenous, white and conservative, proud of their community and liked its exclusivity. The lesser skilled workers, those of color and those of dubious character, were housed in other communities.
Over the years, select citizens, workers, journalists and scientists tried to warn of the dangers inherent in plants where safety measures were often ignored, where construction was hurried along so that Americans would win the Cold War instead of the Russians, where known radioactive materials were consciously (or in error as happened often) flushed into the rivers, or stored in containers which were prone to cracks and leakage, or released into the air where capricious winds then carried the particles far from the plants, where people began getting sick and sicker and babies were born with defects and the local fauna also began showing signs of radioactive poisoning....all was too often ignored, and still is, to some degree.
I read Plutopia over several weeks and ultimately found it fascinating. It seemed to me that the effects of too much radioactivity are not yet clearly defined or even quantifiable. Some folks live long lives; some get sick and/or die. The death toll from Chernobyl varies between "37 and a quarter of a million." Successive generations of those who lived near the plants are sometimes affected. Genes mutate, but without precise predictability, and the bad stuff silently accumulates....in bones, in soft tissues, in thyroids, in reproductive organs.
Hanford is the largest Superfund site in the US, and in 1989, DOE (the oversight agency after the Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded) "shuttered the plutonium plant admitting catastrophe in need of cleanup." Cost was estimated to be $100 billion and would take 50 years! with the imperative to "safely contain 1700 pounds of plutonium-239 scattered among 53 million gallons of other poisons and fission products."
And, just for the record, "1/4 of American communities are within four miles of a Superfund site" according to author, Sandra Steingraber.
I've driven US 14 along the north side of the Columbia River in SE Washington many times. It is a most gorgeous road, with far far fewer cars and trucks than the Interstate on the south side of the river. I will never drive that way again though without a slightly creepy feeling as I pass near Richland and Hanford.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Book: Tenth of December by George Saunders
Hmmm.....this book reminded me of what a French professor told our class once while we were reading Moliere. He said that Moliere was most admired by the folks he most satirized.
I had never read anything by Saunders before, but it seems the literary world likes him. And I did too, sort of......
A family comes to look at a new puppy. But the situation shocks the mom:
"Well, wow, what a super field trip for the kids, Marie thought, ha ha (the filth, the mildew smell, the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy can inexplicably sticking out of it), and although some might have been disgusted by the spare tire on the dining-room table...Marie realized (resisting the urge to rush to the sink and wash her hands, in part because the sink had a basketball in it) that what this really was, was deeply sad."
And in the yard:
"When the boy ran, the chain spooled out. He was running now, looking back at her, showing off. When he reached the end of the chain, it jerked and he dropped as if shot. He rose to a sitting position, railed against the chain, whipped it back and forth, crawled to a bowl of of water, and lifted to his lips, took a drink: a drink from a dog's bowl."
The stories are told in fresh imaginative language. They are funny and not funny at the same time. Sometimes it takes a few pages to figure out what exactly is happening. There are stories set in the near future, not exactly sic-fi, definitely more bizarre than the world we know, yet not all that unbelievable....which is one reason to read this book.
Read how beautiful young girls from the third world make money after coming to the US; read how a debilitated cancer patient spends his last days; read of a very ordinary man who wants nothing so much as a happy daughter and what he does to see her smile; read of experiments with mind altering drugs; read of a young man with truly horrid parents who rises above their confining boundaries and does the right thing.
Here is a sad, overweight, middle-aged small business owner:
"He just really hated those beggars walking past his shop with their crude signs. Couldn't they at least spell right? Yesterday one had walked by with a sign that said, PLEASE HELP HOMLESS. He'd felt like shouting, Hey sorry you lost your hom! They spent enough time under that viaduct, couldn't they at least proofread each other's____"
Thanks, Faith, for the recommendation....
I had never read anything by Saunders before, but it seems the literary world likes him. And I did too, sort of......
A family comes to look at a new puppy. But the situation shocks the mom:
"Well, wow, what a super field trip for the kids, Marie thought, ha ha (the filth, the mildew smell, the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy can inexplicably sticking out of it), and although some might have been disgusted by the spare tire on the dining-room table...Marie realized (resisting the urge to rush to the sink and wash her hands, in part because the sink had a basketball in it) that what this really was, was deeply sad."
And in the yard:
"When the boy ran, the chain spooled out. He was running now, looking back at her, showing off. When he reached the end of the chain, it jerked and he dropped as if shot. He rose to a sitting position, railed against the chain, whipped it back and forth, crawled to a bowl of of water, and lifted to his lips, took a drink: a drink from a dog's bowl."
The stories are told in fresh imaginative language. They are funny and not funny at the same time. Sometimes it takes a few pages to figure out what exactly is happening. There are stories set in the near future, not exactly sic-fi, definitely more bizarre than the world we know, yet not all that unbelievable....which is one reason to read this book.
Read how beautiful young girls from the third world make money after coming to the US; read how a debilitated cancer patient spends his last days; read of a very ordinary man who wants nothing so much as a happy daughter and what he does to see her smile; read of experiments with mind altering drugs; read of a young man with truly horrid parents who rises above their confining boundaries and does the right thing.
Here is a sad, overweight, middle-aged small business owner:
"He just really hated those beggars walking past his shop with their crude signs. Couldn't they at least spell right? Yesterday one had walked by with a sign that said, PLEASE HELP HOMLESS. He'd felt like shouting, Hey sorry you lost your hom! They spent enough time under that viaduct, couldn't they at least proofread each other's____"
Thanks, Faith, for the recommendation....
Book: The Looking Glass Brother by Peter von Ziegesar
A Memoir....
Big Peter von Ziegesar grew up in an affluent family in the northeast. His parents divorced and remarried. His father's remarriage brought with it a couple of his new wife's children, including Little Peter. This non-fiction account of the two Peters and their families is original, sad, funny and (I think) as honest as the author could tell the story.
Little Peter was a physically lovely child and musically talented, but as he becomes a teenager, he also becomes mentally ill, or at least that was the perception of most of society. He enters and leaves multiple treatments, both residential and outpatient. He survives on the streets somehow but is an addict and often gets in trouble with various law enforcers. He travels here and there, usually on buses. He sleeps on sidewalks and in parks; he eats out of dumpsters. He occasionally is explosively violent, but much more often is a fairly gentle soul with some insight into his fractured life. He is not exactly abandoned by his mother and sister but they eventually become weary. There is almost nothing about his biologic father, and his stepfather is too self-absorbed to pay more than token attention now and then...to any of his children, step or otherwise.
So one day, after years of no contact, Little Peter telephones his step-brother, Big Peter. The book tells of the next few years with many reminisces of lazy summers on Long Island with wealthy, self-indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and various parental combinations, who vaguely and off-handedly raise this youngest generation, sometimes there, but more often not in any real way. They were not the most highly evolved people with regards to sanity and morality.
Big Peter is now an adult with wife and children of his own, living in Manhattan, successful enough, but not without his own jagged edges.
This book is about all of the above with the main theme Big Peter's presence in Little Peter's life, his compassion, his attempts to "help" his brother with the implications of how nature versus nurture affect us.
Big Peter von Ziegesar grew up in an affluent family in the northeast. His parents divorced and remarried. His father's remarriage brought with it a couple of his new wife's children, including Little Peter. This non-fiction account of the two Peters and their families is original, sad, funny and (I think) as honest as the author could tell the story.
Little Peter was a physically lovely child and musically talented, but as he becomes a teenager, he also becomes mentally ill, or at least that was the perception of most of society. He enters and leaves multiple treatments, both residential and outpatient. He survives on the streets somehow but is an addict and often gets in trouble with various law enforcers. He travels here and there, usually on buses. He sleeps on sidewalks and in parks; he eats out of dumpsters. He occasionally is explosively violent, but much more often is a fairly gentle soul with some insight into his fractured life. He is not exactly abandoned by his mother and sister but they eventually become weary. There is almost nothing about his biologic father, and his stepfather is too self-absorbed to pay more than token attention now and then...to any of his children, step or otherwise.
So one day, after years of no contact, Little Peter telephones his step-brother, Big Peter. The book tells of the next few years with many reminisces of lazy summers on Long Island with wealthy, self-indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and various parental combinations, who vaguely and off-handedly raise this youngest generation, sometimes there, but more often not in any real way. They were not the most highly evolved people with regards to sanity and morality.
Big Peter is now an adult with wife and children of his own, living in Manhattan, successful enough, but not without his own jagged edges.
This book is about all of the above with the main theme Big Peter's presence in Little Peter's life, his compassion, his attempts to "help" his brother with the implications of how nature versus nurture affect us.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Book: Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago
A historical novel about Portugal and events leading up to the Carnation Revolution in 1974
From Wikipedia, this is the bare bones background of Raised from the Ground:
From Wikipedia, this is the bare bones background of Raised from the Ground:
António de Oliveira Salazar
Opposed to communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism, Salazar's rule was corporatist, conservative, and nationalistic in nature.
At home, Salazar's government and its secret police PIDE repressed civil liberties and political freedoms in order to remain in control of Portugal, including the 1965 PIDE shooting of Humberto Delgado, declared winner by the opposition in the 1958 presidential election, while Delgado and his secretary tried to illegally enter Portuguese territory from Spain.
Control of the economy, of citizens and of colonial policy were only cosmetically relaxed until the left-wing Carnation Revolution in 1974. The latter led to attempts to introduce democratic socialism and eventually allowed for the restoration of a full parliamentary democracy.[5]
The men and women who live on and work the latifundio (large estates) are the characters in this novel. They are poor, mostly illiterate peasants who work for the prosperous owners. In this novel, we follow four generations of the Mau-Tempo family. Their priest, Father Agamedes, is of little comfort and gives no lasting solace for his people. They are always struggling and hungry.
"But Joao Mau-Tempo isn't so sure about having set a good example. He has spent his whole life simply earning his daily bread and some days he doesn't even manage that, and this thought immediately forms a kind of knot inside his head, that a man should be bom into a world he never asked to be born into, only to experience a greater than normal degree of cold and hunger as a child...and grow up to find that same hunger redoubled as a punishment for having a body capable of withstanding such hardship, to be mistreated by bosses and overseers..."
The men slowly begin small resistances with predictable results of brutality and incarceration and torture when discovered. Their stories are universal in the history of civilizations and are sobering. To write of the poverty and marginal existence of these men and women is to recognize, validate and honor them. Every country has their Mau-Tempos and we need to be reminded how everywhere and every place there are those with power and money and those without. How the fortunate think of and treat the less fortunate is surely a measure of morality which can be operative in each of our lives, everyday.
Book: Follow the Money by Steve Boggan
A Month in the Life of a Ten-Dollar Bill
The author is an Englishman and he does follow a $10 bill for a month, starting in Lebanon, Kansas, and ending in Detroit, Michigan.
The book is delightful and basically a travelogue through the upper Midwest. Steve meets and hangs out with all kinds of interesting, mostly kind and helpful folks and surely revised some of his notions about these states between the coasts.
He interjects bits of history about the places he visits, but mostly just tells the story of a $10 bill with the serial number IA74407937A. He starts in Lebanon because it is close to the geographical center of the contiguous United States. From there, he goes where the money goes.
One memorable encounter is with the band Crash Meadows and its singer Dean Agus:
"I couldn''t remember when I've seen such accomplished musicianship in a small town bar. Possibly never, and I had hung out in more bars than most....Dean was 36 and past his prime if he wanted to be in a boy band. Thankfully, he had no such ambition and so looked just about right for an earthy blues and rock singer who had lived a little....His mother, Jula, a Gypsy and his father, Javid, had married at at the age of 12, which was not unusual in that community (Macedonia) at that time, and they were struggling to make ends meet as their children arrived one by one. Then, as unlikely as winning the lottery, the family was identified as a worthy case by members of an American church working in the region. They were adopted by the church and brought to the US via France and Belgium and to opportunities beyond their wildest dreams."
These are the kinds of stories Steve tells.
And of gangsters and therapeutic baths at Hot Springs, of apple orchards and wheat farmers, of discovering Chicago, stories of St. Louis and days spent in deer camp near Morley, Michigan...
The title is a bit boring but the content isn't.
The author is an Englishman and he does follow a $10 bill for a month, starting in Lebanon, Kansas, and ending in Detroit, Michigan.
The book is delightful and basically a travelogue through the upper Midwest. Steve meets and hangs out with all kinds of interesting, mostly kind and helpful folks and surely revised some of his notions about these states between the coasts.
He interjects bits of history about the places he visits, but mostly just tells the story of a $10 bill with the serial number IA74407937A. He starts in Lebanon because it is close to the geographical center of the contiguous United States. From there, he goes where the money goes.
One memorable encounter is with the band Crash Meadows and its singer Dean Agus:
"I couldn''t remember when I've seen such accomplished musicianship in a small town bar. Possibly never, and I had hung out in more bars than most....Dean was 36 and past his prime if he wanted to be in a boy band. Thankfully, he had no such ambition and so looked just about right for an earthy blues and rock singer who had lived a little....His mother, Jula, a Gypsy and his father, Javid, had married at at the age of 12, which was not unusual in that community (Macedonia) at that time, and they were struggling to make ends meet as their children arrived one by one. Then, as unlikely as winning the lottery, the family was identified as a worthy case by members of an American church working in the region. They were adopted by the church and brought to the US via France and Belgium and to opportunities beyond their wildest dreams."
These are the kinds of stories Steve tells.
And of gangsters and therapeutic baths at Hot Springs, of apple orchards and wheat farmers, of discovering Chicago, stories of St. Louis and days spent in deer camp near Morley, Michigan...
The title is a bit boring but the content isn't.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Book: Wilderness by Lance Weller
This is a fine, fine novel, and will probably be my favorite fiction for 2013.
Abel Truman is now an old man, a recluse, living in a shack on the beach in Washington State. It is 1899. He fought in the Civil War and the chapters alternate between his present life and a few weeks in May of 1864 when Abel fought in the Wilderness campaign.
This book has everything a good novel should have, and Abel's story is told with tenderness and beauty, in lush and vivid descriptive prose.
1864
"See them on the road....What little dust their bare feet raises curls and licks the road-side grasses, then finally settles after they pass. Two of them, a man and woman, hopeful contraband, walking north along the road. The man's face creased with worry and with pain, hand furrowed with fieldwork, stiffened and rough, He emancipated himself a fortnight ago, and the root-sour stink of fear still rises from the sad folds of his thin shirt."
1899
"Abel had been watching them since dusk and it was getting on late now for an old man to be up and about in the woods in winter. He fisted his hand before his lips and blew warmth into his cold fingers. Every now and again a great nausea would surge through him, hot, salty waves breaking against the back of his throat, and he had to fight to keep from coughing. When he hung his pale hand in the dark before him, it trembled and he could not stop it. Abel sniffed softly and rubbed his prickly, hairless chin. Taking a breath,he softly blew and figured in was November. "
The author lives in Gig Harbor, Washington. This is his first novel.
Annie Dillard writes: "Here is a book in the great tradition of the novel: a vivid world that wraps and holds the reader who can well lose himself in its grandeur."
Book: Open House by Elizabeth Berg
This was an Oprah's Book Club book.
While predictable, it was fun to read, with good dialogue and credible characters.
Sam's husband leaves her and she is heartbroken. She has an adolescent son, a perky mother, a good friend....
"I sigh, lean back in my chair, close my eyes. How come Rita gets such a good life and I get such a crummy one? ....How come Rita's husband adores her, sits lazily in his char watching her, laughing at all her jokes?"
Sam takes in boarders to earn extra income. She thinks a lot and works through what her marriage was and what happened. She continues with all the daily stuff that needs doing...
If you like relationship books...need a good zuzu book that you can read in a night or weekend, this will probably suit.
While predictable, it was fun to read, with good dialogue and credible characters.
Sam's husband leaves her and she is heartbroken. She has an adolescent son, a perky mother, a good friend....
"I sigh, lean back in my chair, close my eyes. How come Rita gets such a good life and I get such a crummy one? ....How come Rita's husband adores her, sits lazily in his char watching her, laughing at all her jokes?"
Sam takes in boarders to earn extra income. She thinks a lot and works through what her marriage was and what happened. She continues with all the daily stuff that needs doing...
If you like relationship books...need a good zuzu book that you can read in a night or weekend, this will probably suit.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Traveling ~ Miles City, MT to Dickinson, ND
I woke to another lovely sunny and hot morning, and immediately got on a secondary road that ran parallel to the Interstate but closer to the Yellowstone River. There were large farms along here and, at one point, an eagle nest with three young visible through my scope. How cool would it be to live along this great river? I would see small groups of brown cattle standing in the shallows, cooling off. I dreamed of kayaking a long river and thought about the stories I have read of those who did that and of the guy who spoke last winter at the Herrick Public Library in Holland who told, in such an unassuming way, of his experiences on the Yellowstone in a kayak.
I crossed into South Dakota and the first town was Beach. The last town in Montana was Wibaux. Beach??? I soon got to the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and spent several hours driving the auto route, after first buying a few things at the gift shop and also talking to the rangers about the possibility of spotting a Peregrine. I got a great book on the prairies. The topography was amazing...
The LIttle Missouri River runs through the park and the riparian areas had camp grounds and were one of the few places while traveling that I saw way more tents than RVs. In this verdant riparian habitat I got the best view I will ever have of a red-eyed vireo. With time and patience, one could see lots of species in this place. I did not see raptors though at any time on the 35-mile route through the park. Fragrant sage, blue skies, no commerce, fascinating geology, sunshine.....
The commerce was in Medora, the town just east of the park entrance and where the tourists hang out, as Dave VH says, looking in shops, talking on cell phones, ambling along, eating ice cream and replenishing for the road. And buying shirts.
I drove a bit more and stayed in Dickinson, ND as the motels were filled in Jamestown.
I crossed into South Dakota and the first town was Beach. The last town in Montana was Wibaux. Beach??? I soon got to the South Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and spent several hours driving the auto route, after first buying a few things at the gift shop and also talking to the rangers about the possibility of spotting a Peregrine. I got a great book on the prairies. The topography was amazing...
The commerce was in Medora, the town just east of the park entrance and where the tourists hang out, as Dave VH says, looking in shops, talking on cell phones, ambling along, eating ice cream and replenishing for the road. And buying shirts.
I drove a bit more and stayed in Dickinson, ND as the motels were filled in Jamestown.
Book: An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
Yes, that Steve Martin
This is a novel about the art world and connivings and characters who work in museums, galleries and auction houses.
Lacey is beautiful, ambitious and not overly concerned bothered by scruples. She is also lucky, most of the time.
"On the way back to the Carlyle, his mental reenactment of their last kiss told him, yes, she loves me, and he once again saw Lacey as an illuminating white light, forgetting that white is composed of disparate streaks of color, each as powerful as the whole."
I liked the Manhattan buzz and insights into the world of art.
"The publicity that convinced broke home owners that they could make nice profits flipping their houses was the same as that which motivated moneyed art collections to go further into the market than was practical. The lure in art collection and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust if paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year. In the ebb and flow of artists' desirability, some collectors wondered how a beautiful painting, once it had fallen from favor, could turn ugly so quickly."
Entertaining....
This is a novel about the art world and connivings and characters who work in museums, galleries and auction houses.
Lacey is beautiful, ambitious and not overly concerned bothered by scruples. She is also lucky, most of the time.
"On the way back to the Carlyle, his mental reenactment of their last kiss told him, yes, she loves me, and he once again saw Lacey as an illuminating white light, forgetting that white is composed of disparate streaks of color, each as powerful as the whole."
I liked the Manhattan buzz and insights into the world of art.
"The publicity that convinced broke home owners that they could make nice profits flipping their houses was the same as that which motivated moneyed art collections to go further into the market than was practical. The lure in art collection and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural and intellectual rewards, is like the trust if paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn't take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year. In the ebb and flow of artists' desirability, some collectors wondered how a beautiful painting, once it had fallen from favor, could turn ugly so quickly."
Entertaining....
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