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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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....