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.
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