Sailors Are Happy, Whales are Blue

Taken from Whalingmuseum.org

Leviathan is proving to be a very interesting book, full of all kinds of information about whaling and the times, especially in New England.

So far I've learned that the War of 1812 devastated the whaling industry for a number of years, due mostly to the attacks on shipping from the British, and blockades of harbors. Whalers couldn't fish or sell their fish with all the hostilities on the water. After the war, though, the whaling industry started up again full force, with Nantucket leading the way, followed by New Bedford, MA, the busiest and most commercially successful port for whaling for many years. Checking the 1850 census for New Bedford shows most of the jobs were related to whaling: sailors, captains, pilots, carpenters, riggers, boat makers, block makers, and especially coopers to make the many, many barrels they would need to store the whale oil.

I learned about how the whaling industry expanded to all possible waters, including the Arctic Circle. Whales were being taken with no restraint, to the point that some began to worry they would all soon be gone. There was a letter published in a newspaper of the time, quoted by the author, that was from "Polar Whales" to whalers asking them to please stop fishing for them as they feared they would soon disappear forever--early conservation appeals that went largely unheeded.

Interesting, too, were the reports at the time that whaling ships would sometimes fill their cargo holds with slaves, bought in Africa and sold in South America, since by the mid 1800s the slave trade had been outlawed. On the other hand, crews from Nantucket often included black sailors, as the whaling Quakers of Nantucket believed in equality of opportunity as well as pay for their crews. One noted captain was black, commanding a mostly black crew; they sailed one of the most commercially successful ships of their era.

It had never occurred to me that the Gold Rush of 1849 would disrupt whaling, but it did. Crews on whalers were so attracted by the dream of getting rich quick that they abandoned their jobs in great numbers, especially those whaling ship crewmen working off the coast of California.  The captains of those ships had no choice but to go into port and abandon the enterprise until gold fever was over.

By now, late 1850s, things are starting to wane.  Soon the use of gas to light houses will supplant the use of whale oil and I expect the Civil War will have an effect on fishing of all kinds. But that remains to be seen. I'll keep you posted!

World War to a Whale of a Tale

Eric Jay Dolin

Well, I finished the novel about the unfortunate football players who, except for the narrator, all lose their lives in WWII.  It turned out to be pretty good and got me interested in wartime propaganda and in-house reporting and the real people who inspired the novel. I'm not sure I will read anything else by the author, but I can recommend his books to anyone who likes that sort of stuff.

I've started on a new "D" book: Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, by Eric J. Dolin. As the title claims, it is a history of the whaling industry, from its earliest beginnings before the colonies were established, through its heyday in the 19th century, to its current diminished state. I've read about a third so far and it's pretty interesting, despite its rather detailed descriptions of whales, boats and whaling procedures. I'm learning a lot about the types of whales considered good to hunt (right, for one) and what sorts of commodities whalers would extract from the unfortunate giant beasts. I'm looking forward to learning more in the days ahead.

Football and War

Ivan Doig

Going down the list of books written by authors whose last names start with D, I'm in the middle of a book called The Eleventh Man, a novel set in WWII about members of a Montana college football team who volunteered for the service.  The eleventh man is the chronicler of their adventures, Ben Reinking, one of the team who happens to be a journalist.  The story was inspired by real events, a Montana State College team that suffered the loss of 14 football players during the war.  Here is a link to that story: Everybody's All-Americans.

So far I'm enjoying the book, although it is a little too detailed at some times and a little slow at others. The author seems to write in the "western romance" tradition--think Louis L'Amour. But the premise is interesting, and I'm eager to see what happens to the players.

The author, Ivan Doig, has written many books, but unfortunately, died April 9th of this year from multiple myeloma.

Spices and Suspense

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Mistress of Spices, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is a fabulous book! It was riveting from beginning to end. It's a story about a witch/healer from India who is learning to cope with modern life in San Francisco and with the restrictions that come with her powers. One of those is that she must not mingle with the mortals she is trying to help.  But mingle she does when she falls in love with a customer, with interesting consequences. It's very complex, but compelling. I recommend it highly. It's also a movie, apparently, that came out in 2006. I may have to check that out!

Mysteries Abound

The anthology of women mystery writers I've been reading is interesting. There is quite a variety of styles and approaches to the whodunit genre represented there.  One thing I like is that some of the writers are new to me, and of those, some are quite good. I'll be checking those women out in the future, I think.

One thing I've concluded from reading this anthology is that it isn't easy to write a mystery in the short form. Some of the stories seem to be wrapped up a bit too abruptly, featuring the Deus Ex Machina type ending, or so it seems to me.  The two who are already my favorites, Sara Paretsky and Nevada Barr, have done the best job of writing a good, short mystery, not surprisingly. Both are accomplished writers.

Matthew Pearl

I've already started another book in between stories, a novel by Matthew Pearl, The Last Dickens, also a mystery. It's very interesting, but then I like a book with a literary historical point of view!

Dark Tide of Greed

Stephen Puleo

Dark Tide, by Stephen Puleo, was a very good book, filled with interesting information about the era surrounding the beginning of World War I, 1915, when the molasses holding tank was built in the Boston wharf area. It was intended to hold molasses that would be trucked to a nearby plant where it would be made into industrial alcohol that would be used to make munitions.  The company was selling the alcohol to other countries involved in WWI, and then eventually, when we got into the war, to our manufacturers.

I didn't know that there were all these anarchists in our country then who were against the war and against government as well, I guess, exploding bombs that damaged property and sometimes killed people.

But the anarchists were not to blame for the disaster that killed 20 people and injured many more, some seriously, in January 1919--greed was.  But that's not surprising at this time (not surprising at any time, really), when there were not enough regulators to enforce laws that might have saved people if they had been paid attention to.  A hastily built tank that was shoddily made could not safely contain 2.3 million gallons of molasses, especially when it started to ferment and release gases. The miracle is that it stayed upright for three years, continuously leaking, before it ruptured and spilled its contents across a wide swath of Boston.  The spill was more like a tidal wave, really, like a tsunami of molasses; a 25-foot-high wave moving at 35 mph can do a lot of damage.  It sounds comical, but when you read about the suffering of the injured and dying, you know it must have been terrifying.

Reading this story can make you angry--be forewarned! But it's a worthwhile read just the same, because the story has been forgotten, at least by everyone except Bostonians. One person I know who grew up in the Boston area said he was told that parts of the city still smelled like molasses 40 years later.  Fortunately, the guilty were made to pay for their actions, but that didn't help all the people who were devastated by this avoidable accident.

Next I'm reading an anthology of mystery stories written by women, edited by Sarah Paretsky, Women on the Case.  So far, the stories are mostly well written, especially those by Ruth Rendell and Nevada Barr.

La Coja Triumphs

Ana Castillo

I finally finished a novel by Ana Castillo, Peel My Love Like An Onion. I had started it years ago but couldn't get into it then, but now I'm glad I went back to it. It was very good! Castillo is a wonderful writer! Her main character, a flamenco dancer suffering the effects of childhood polio, has a collection of adventures with dancers and lovers. What an interesting person Carmen is! It would be hard to give a synopsis of this story. Suffice it to say that Carmen is complex and sympathetic, and you come to care about her deeply by the end of the book. Brava!  Check out her website at http://www.anacastillo.com/content/.

My current book is non-fiction, the history of the horrific molasses flood that happened in Boston in 1919. It is called Dark Tide, by Stephen Puleo. So far it's proven to be fascinating!

From Burning Cities to Freezing Mountains

Is Paris Burning? is a wonderful book--informative, interesting and terrifying. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about the liberation of Paris during WWII. I recommend it to anyone, but especially those interested in WWII.

Jim Curran, taken from his website

I've returned to the book about the 1986 expeditions to K2 that resulted in a number of deaths, including two Americans who were lost in a landslide.  The book's name is K2: Triumph and Tragedy; the author, Jim Curran, is a photographer who was on the mountain during that summer to photograph the expeditions. He describes what happened in detail.

Actually, a bit too much detail for me, I think, although I must admit that his audience seems to be other mountaineers who will understand the jargon and the technical descriptions of equipment and mountaineering techniques.

It does have a degree of suspense, though, despite the reader's knowledge of the tragic outcome. If you don't want to skip to the end of the book to see who survived, you can just look at the many pictures whose captions spill the beans.

Notwithstanding my difficulty with its technical detail, I'm enjoying the book and will continue reading it to the doubtless bitter end.

They Didn't Start the Fire

I stopped reading the play writing book as it was starting to make me feel guilty that I wasn't trying to write a play. Since I'm still doing the "Cs" I thought I'd start instead on Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins. Published in 1965, it's a classic about WWII and Hitler's command that Paris be burned if it were going to fall into the hands of the enemy and how his orders were ignored.

So far it's very good and well written, suspenseful, in fact, though the outcome is known at the beginning.

Play Writing in Depth

Writing for the Stage, by Leroy Clark, is a how-to book, but it also gives readers the tools to more effectively analyze drama. I'm having fun thinking about how to write a play and also how to measure the success of plays I've read. It's a well written book and I'm learning quite a few things about play writing I didn't know before, as well as new ways to think about storytelling. More later.

Son of China

:Bridge Yong'an, Fujian, China
Taken from Wikimedia

I've finished Jimmy Carter's biography of his mother, which was quite good and easy to read, although I think he may have soft-pedaled a few of his mother's faults, as a good son would, I suppose.

Now I'm in the middle of another non-fiction book, a memoir by Da Chen, an American writer from China who has written two books about his life in China, the one I'm now reading, Sounds of the River, and an earlier book, Colors of the Mountain. The earlier book covers his early life during the Cultural Revolution, and the later one covers his college years and beyond.

Sounds of the River is very well written and interesting. China is a complex country and its people are also complex. Their relationship with communism and their increasingly close contact with the West are topics that are not as easy to pin down as Americans might think. I'm learning a lot about China.

Chen writes about how he was chosen to go to Beijing to learn English so he can help his country communicate with the West. But since he is from a little farming village in the Fujian region of China, he is definitely out of his element in the big city and must learn how to get along there. He is not out of his element at school, however, and finds that he is different from many of his classmates who have come from more privileged backgrounds. They don't think they need to work very hard at succeeding in school because of their political connections. But Chen knows he needs to do his best to surpass his more advantaged fellows, and fortunately he is capable of that, thanks to the lessons he learned at home about hard work and persistence.

Chen does a great job of describing his village, his region of China, his family members and other people who live in his neighborhood. I have no trouble visualizing all that he presents. He makes the place and the people seem quite wonderful, and that is what he is aiming for, I think.

Chen has written some fiction as well. I'd like to read more of his work in the future.

Jimmy's Mom

I've started a new book, and in keeping with my new theme of choosing "C" books, I'm reading Jimmy Carter's biography of his mother, Lillian, entitled, A Remarkable Mother. It's actually quite interesting so far and well written. I'm learning about the late 19th century south and farm families such as the Carters and the Gordys. I think I will enjoy it!

Shakespeare's Last Stand

Astor Place Riot, taken from Wikipedia

Well, I've finished The Shakespeare Riots and it was very interesting and well written. At the end, Nigel Cliff concludes that the dramatic Shakespeare people knew and loved in the 19th century was eventually transformed into the literary Shakespeare that we have now, partly because of the changes to American society and partly because of the rise of the popular novel. He's probably right about that, but I wonder if the riots really had more to do with lower class frustration than with Shakespeare.

I had never heard of the Shakespeare riots (or the Astor Place Riot, as it is also known) before reading this book and I was appalled at how violent they were, especially considering the ostensible cause. But then, people who are disgruntled by unfairness will find any reason to express their frustration, no matter how nonsensical it is. Examine any riot and you'll find the same underlying cause: class warfare, the great division between the haves and the have-nots. And that seems to have been at the root of the riots that took place in New York City in 1849.

The people who were killed on May 10, 1849, were mostly killed by gunfire from the New York militia who had come to quell the riot. Up to that time, however, the rioters--mostly working class folk and Irish gangs--were throwing paving stones at police officers. Those weapons could have had lethal consequences as well.

When things threatened to get out of control completely, the National Guard were called in. When the rioters wouldn't stop throwing stones, they were fired upon. Unfortunately, many of those killed (of the total of 25 or so) were innocent bystanders. The authorities were criticized for their actions, as were the National Guard troops at Kent State. Few were critical of the rioters because they came to seem like the victims when the government used its superior force.

It's interesting to me to see how little has changed since then with respect to the conflict between the rich and the poor and how it erupts into violence that ultimately has no effect on the basic structure of society. As with most riots, the outcome was pointless destruction of life and property. Life went on until the next crisis brought the tensions to a head once again.

The boiling over of anger and frustration does not change the power arrangement, in most cases, and so results in very little positive change. Those who rule are happy about that, since they believe the way things are arranged is best for society. The lower classes are not capable of governing and so should be prevented from having power. Perhaps they're right. Is there a way to give the "common people," as they used to be known, power without destroying the society we now have? That's a good question, and one not addressed by Nigel Cliff.

But we are still asking it, especially when we look at how other societies deal with their oppressive governments and the rift between one segment of society and another. We want to help those who yearn for freedom, but then we find that it's much more complex than that, because often when they get freedom, they don't use it in the way we think they should. The Shakespeare Riots were quite complex. Nigel Cliff tried to get at all the causes and I think did a pretty good job of it. But how to prevent such events from recurring? He doesn't really say.

This was a good book that I highly recommend. What's next on my reading list? I'll let you know . . .