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."

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.




 


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….."




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."

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."




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....