Book: We Shall Not Be Moved by Tom Wooten

Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina

Walter Isaacson (the author of the Steve Jobs biography) wrote in the foreword that this book is "Every bit as gripping and important as tales from the storm itself." 

Well, it is not all that "gripping"so I wonder if Mr. Isaacson actually read it.

Wooten tells of the aftermath of Katrina in five New Orleans' neighborhoods and how the people who lived in them took charge in determining their futures. These neighborhoods were Village de l'Est, Hollygrove, Lakeview, Broadmoor and The Lower Ninth Ward. 

I did have trouble keeping all the characters in their proper places, but this book tells of the many outstanding men and women who worked continuously for months and even years to rebuild their own neighborhoods. They often had to fight for the "right of self-determination" as various agencies and political entities worked to put different plans in place. 

These folks helped their neighbors, organized endlessly and formulated plans specific to their unique needs.

One of them, Pam Dashiell, said, "I believe that the people of Lower Nine, and the people of Lakeview, and the people of every other neighborhood need to be absolutely involved and made aware of what's going on in this process....It seems that some of the commissioners are the folks who were running things before--and who perhaps didn't run them as well as they could have."

I would have told the story of one neighborhood at a time. There was too much going back and forth and places, names and the progress made in different venues got confusing. But, perhaps, reading it sporadically for several weeks as I did accounted for some of that. And, I wish the author had included photographs and better and more detailed maps. 

Book: Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

The Art of Nonfiction ~ Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing.

Todd has been Kidder's editor for a long time and here they collaborate on the relationship between editor and writer, especially their own, and, yes, tell "stories" and give "advice" on how to write better. There are chapters, for instance, that discuss Narratives, Essays or The Problem of Style. The last chapter, Notes on Usage, includes one of my personal irritations: the ubiquitous use of "grow" as in the economy. The authors admit this a prejudice they share, so I'm in good company. 

Todd is the fatherly soothing guiding one; Kidder is the kid even though they are only five years apart in age. Or at least it began that way. They are mutually complimentary, and the respect and fondness they have for one another is refreshing. 

There are examples of good and bad writing, along with the processes Kidder and Todd use as they work together. It is often interesting enough...these glimpses into a writer's life and how a good editor is a skilled literary midwife. It is a book that is best read quickly, not at the pace of a few pages at a time. 

Of Katherine Boo's book The Beautiful Forevers, Kidder writes that "This is difficult material transformed by story, by Boo's skill in making those unfortunate people real--people with hopes and plans and flaws and virtues, all looking for ways to improve their lives, people at bottom not all that different from anyone else, people the reader roots for and occasionally against. One hardly notices while reading their stories that the author is also supplying some of the sociopolitical context in which the stories occur, not a sanitized but a distilled context, to slightly insinuated that we feel we understand the forces that afflict these people." 

Todd says that "Over the years people have sometimes asked me what it 'takes' to be a writer....[and] the answer is that is seems to take an inability to imagine yourself doing anything else, because anything else is so much easier. It would have been impossible to discourage Kidder, and heartless to try." 

If you like Tracy Kidder's books and are curious about the intersection of editor and author, you would probably like Good Prose. 

 

Book: Wild by Cheryl Strayed

From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I liked this book a lot. Cheryl didn't hike the whole trail and her hike happened several years ago, but she is a skillful writer and recounts a fine adventure.

She starts off "hunching in a remotely upright position" as she struggles with her pack, her too-heavy pack.

"Three hours in, I came to a rare level spot near a gathering of Joshua trees, yucca and junipers and stopped to rest. To my monumental relief, there was a large boulder upon which I could sit and remove my pack in the same fashion I had in the van in Mojave. Amazed to be free of its weight, I strolled around and accidentally brushed up against one of the Joshua trees and was bayoneted by its sharp spikes. Blood instantly spurted out of three stab wounds on my arm. The wind blew so fiercely that when I removed my first aid kit from my pack and opened it up, all the of Band-Aids blew away...I'd never been so exhausted in all of my life. Part of it was due to my body adjusting to the exertion and the elevation...but most of my exhaustion could be blamed on the outrageous weight of my pack. I looked at it hopelessly. It was my burden to bear, of my very own ludicrous making, and yet I had no idea how I was going to bear it."

But bear it she does of course, beginning in the heat in the Mojave Desert and ending at Bridge of the Gods in Oregon, near Mt. Hood, which was her finish line.

There is always the present but also much of her past in this book, especially the death of her mother and her own reckless way of life before she began hiking. But she keeps moving forward, physically and emotionally, and we are her vicarious companions.

Cheryl stops at her pre-determined re-supply stations, sometimes totally out of food and with less than a dollar in her pocket. She meets other hikers and animals and snow: "I walked all day, falling and skidding and trudging along, bracing so hard with my ski pole that my hand blistered...Around every bend and over every ridge and on the other side of every meadow I hoped there would be no more snow. But there was always more show amid the occasional patches where the ground was visible."

I could quote from any page chosen at random. The adventure never got boring or dull for me.

"Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I walked, scratchy plants I couldn't identify gazed my calves. Others I knew seemed to speak to me, saying their name to me in my mother's voice. Names I didn't realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne's lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine--those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white and orange and purple When we passed them as we drove my mother would sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch."

So I could go on quoting Cheryl, but if any of this piques your interest, just read the book.

Book: Blue Wolf in Green Fire by Joseph Heywood

A Woods Cop Mystery.

Grady Service is a Conservation Officer (CO) in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The story here reminded me of a John Sandford novel in that it takes place Up North and has a main character somewhat like Lucas Davenport, but the writing is less nuanced, not as elegant. It's like bar-room juke-box music while Sandford's is smooth bluesy jazz. And Sandford usually has odd little observations or curiosities that have nothing to do with the main story but which add depth to his writing. His characters are more finely drawn, more interesting, and his plots are only complicated enough for credibility.

I think Mr. Heywood is certainly capable of writing a compelling novel but he has way too much happening here: a mysterious wolf sanctuary with a rare blue wolf, Grady's very wealthy sexy girlfriend who also wants to be a CO, a state governor who does not like Grady, major accidents that happen when Grady is in the vicinity, like a bear ambling across the road in front of a car right after a drunken hunter falls from his deer blind onto his arrow, is mortally wounded and then also stumbles out onto the road, a moose/car wreck, an airplane crash as Grady just happens to be driving by, an Amish versus Mennonite confrontation in the woods; there is a far-fetched IRA connection who becomes an undercover US Fish and Wildlife operative, big-league poaching, a Native American thread, FBI, BATF, county and state police involvement, local bombings, ...all happening in the fall of 2001, during and right after the 911.

Also the attempt to render local dialogue is distracting and overdone. Yes, many Yoopers have a way of speaking as do the Irish and the backwoods folk, but it seemed patronizing to me and overdone.

She was "out in da truck. She come in tru da back door....No, dude. I went out and tolt her da room number and I go in first and open da door and den she slips in."

"Yah I been watchin' dis galoot coupla weeks, eh. Seen him a half dozen times."

I did finish the book although the ending made my eyes glaze over as the twists of the plots were untangled.

Still, the general sense of life in the UP comes through which was good enough for me, with roads I've travelled and towns I've passed through, along the shores of Lakes Michigan and Superior, through the woods and rolling hills, swamps and farm lands.

Book: Home by Toni Morrison

A beautiful short novel about siblings, a man named Frank who has just returned from the Korean War, and his sister Cee (Ycidra).

Frank is dealing with the horror of war and the deaths of his two homeboys. Cee marries and is abandoned in Atlanta. She finds a job with a white doctor whose interest, unfortunately, is eugenics. This is only briefly mentioned but Cee is hurt by his experiments, not sexually, but physically, although she is not aware of what is actually happening. 

Their home town is Lotus, Georgia, where Cee is nursed by the woman there. One of them tells her: "You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land. You young and a woman and there's serious limitation in both, but you a person too. Don't let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That's slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world."

Frank too needs healing and Morrison tells his story also. 

"In Lotus....there was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else's quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for. If not for my two friends I would have suffocated by the time I was twelve. They, along with my little sister, kept the indifference of parents and the hatefulness of grandparents an afterthought." 

Home is truly a gem of a book.

Book: Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

A sequel to the book Let's Not Go to the Dogs Tonight which was about the author's childhood in Africa. I read that quite awhile ago and only remember that I liked it (which is why I now blog about the books I read...on account of the lack of memory issue...).

Alexandra's parents are now older of course but still alive and well and living in Zambia, farming fish and bananas. There are great black and white photos in each chapter and an inspired title for the book.

It's a love story, a love story mainly about her remarkable mother, Nicola, who refers to Alexandra's previous book as "that Awful Book" and who is always chiding her daughter about what she will reveal in Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. 

I felt immersed in the most seductive of Africas while reading this book. Once they settle there, certain people just cannot live anywhere else (white folks of course).

(Another story like this is The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers, also a child with ex-pat parents who lived in Zimbabwe.)

Alexandra tells of her memories and of current encounters and brings them together in funny and sweet tales of her own childhood, but also of her mother's youth and their early years in Kenya and later in Malawi and Zambia. Some are horribly sad and heartbreaking as her parents worked so hard to make a life in Africa. They truly dreamed of a "farm in Africa..." They had the children; they partied; they survived political turmoil; they moved often. At times though, Nicola just checked out of reality, had breakdowns, drank too much, took too many pills. These times were her "wobblies." Alexandra's Dad, Tim, remained steady throughout, loving his wife, working, working, working...raising a family and is still working his banana farm to this day. So they persevered and the book is a loving testament to that endurance.

"In addition, leaving was treason talk, cowardly stuff. Mum makes a fist. 'The Fullers aren't wimps,' she says. 'No you don't walk away from a country you say you love without a fight just because things get rough.' So the war escalated and escalated until very few families--rural, urban, black or white--were untouched by it and still we held on."

"After our siesta and more tea, my parents are back out on the farm, Dad trailing a fragrant pulse of smoke from his pipe, Mum's walking stick thumping the ground with every stride. The soil under the bananas is being sampled for effective microorganisms; the fingerlings in several of the ponds are being counted; the shepherds are beginning to bring the sheep in for the night. Then the air takes on a heavy golden quality and we walk along the boundary with the dogs to Breezers, the pub at the bottom of the farm, in time to watch the egrets come in from the Zambezi to roost."

Book: San Miguel by T.C.Boyle

Now this TC Boyle novel is well worth reading.

San Miguel is one of the Channel Islands off the California coast, off Santa Barbara. This book is historical fiction and makes a wonderfully engaging tale of the two families who lived on San Miguel, mostly from the perspective of the women, the wives and mothers.

The first small family unit was the Waters. Marantha was consumptive and not well and hated the island. The second family was the Lesters, and Elise (wife of Herbie and eventually mother of two daughters) loved the island.

They came to San Miguel because the men had dreams. They came first as caretakers to raise the sheep but hoped to make enough money to eventually buy the ranch. With only very occasional contact with the mainland when a supply or fishing vessel arrived, most of the time they were self-sufficient, small worlds unto themselves. There are many, many beautiful and evocative passages in this book: of the weather and the sea, of time spent ashore, of the business of raising sheep and the daily rhythms of the seasons, of passions (love and hatred) between the couples and always of the sense of island living in an era with few of the material or physical comforts that ease work in our time. Their time was the late 1880s through the first half of the 1900s.

Marantha:
"I'll tell Will, she was thinking, frightened all over again, terrified. Tell him it's not going to work, tell him I need sun not gloom, comfort, pampering, civilization,, that this is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Tell him I can't be his wife, can't sleep in the same bed with him, can't do what expected of a wife because my bones won't stand it, my lungs, my breast, my heart, my heart....."

"What could she say? She tried to be accommodating, tried to soothe him, tried even to scrub the place into submission, but the idea was a living death to her--the world was in San Francisco, in Boston, in Santa Barbara, not here. Queen? Queen of what? the sheep?"

Elise:
"As they emerged from the canyon and started across the beach, the sled gliding over the sand with a soft continuous hiss and the mule going easier now, she saw that the sea was alive with birds, an enormous squalling convocation of them--gulls, shearwaters, pelicans, all of them bobbing and wheeling and plunging into the careening froth of the waves so that the boat, the schooner was almost lost in the storm of them"

"He put the mice in an old sock and left them beside the stove, for warmth, then ducked back out the door and into the fog that showed no sign of burning off. She went about her business, careful where she stepped as she moved around the kitchen, the cobbler taking shape and the soup she'd prepared for lunch boiling furiously on the stovetop. Three times that morning he came in to check on the mice, patiently holding the eyedropper to their snouts, though whether they took any of the milk or not she couldn't say."

This was Herbie, Elise's husband The Legenary King of San Miguel, a complicated gorgeous character. All of the novel is just such fine writing and a complete story with a beginning and end, which is always an important criterion for me.

"They walked the hills, hand in hand, picked mussels from the rocks at low tide, sat before the fire at night and warmed each other in bed. And she had Marianne, who toddled around the house all day, chattering to herself and taking naps whenever and wherever the mood struck her and each night climbing determinedly into her father's lap for her bedtime story when dinner was done, the dishes washed and the light failing out over the ocean."

I don't like every book Boyle writes. So pick The Tortilla Curtain or The Women or even Drop City if you haven't read him before. Don't choose Talk Talk or Budding Prospects. Even his zuzu books are well written though and entertaining, I guess. The man surely can write.