Mysteries of Man and Nature

This week I've started Desert Solitaire and also finished John Grisham's latest, The Racketeer.  The Grisham mystery was a bit puzzling until toward the end when things started to fall into place and we were finally told what was really going on. Some interesting twists made the book a good read, but I'm still wondering who the racketeer was . . .

Desert Solitaire is compelling--more so than I expected. Edward Abbey was a strange, interesting person, apparently, and in this book gives us a unique perspective.  I have no trouble visualizing what he is describing, though I do long for some pictures.  One disturbing scene, though, was when he decided to kill a rabbit as an experiment--he wondered if he could survive in the wilderness without weapons other than what he found around him. When he saw the rabbit, he picked up a rock and threw it at the animal's head, killing him. He left the poor rabbit for the scavengers to claim and says he felt no guilt, though he did say that he had no need to repeat the experiment. I'm sure the rabbits would be happy to know that.

The book is written 10 years after the events, which took place around 1956, when Arches National Park was still pretty primitive and not very popular with tourists (mostly because of accessibility issues).  Abbey spends some pages lamenting over the government's decision in the intervening years to develop many of the National Parks and make them more tourist friendly, thereby spoiling them, in Abbey's estimation.

I kind of have to agree with him, though I would probably be one of those who wouldn't go to the parks if I couldn't drive to the sights.

Anyway, I'm enjoying the book.

She Read, Alphabetically

I haven't posted lately because I haven't been inspired to write about what I've been reading lately. I've been in the doldrums, it seems, at making a dent in my book collection, so I decided on a new tack--going alphabetically by author's name.  Being random, the choice ends up out of my hands, which is fine, since I can't seem to otherwise decide what book to read next.

The book first on the list is Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, a classic of environmental/travel writing. I've started it and I think I'm going to enjoy it. The writer's voice is soothing, poetic, unique.  It's an oldish book, first published in 1968. It's a chronicle of the author's three seasons as a park ranger with the National Park Service at Arches National Monument, work that was largely solitary. I'll let you know what I think as I go along.

I continue to read Understanding Biological Psychology, albeit slowly, and I'm also reading Nancy Drew mysteries over the phone with my mother at a fast clip.  They're actually pretty well written (though not as well written as the Little House books).  I'm enjoying them now that I've become used to the many "wrylies" the author uses. Maybe that was the style back in the thirties?

I'm beginning to notice, though, that the books have been somewhat updated from the original version, probably to make them more understandable to a modern audience of girls who are apparently still reading them.

I hope to post again soon with updates of Edward Abbey and whatever comes next.  Stay tuned.

David Crockett: A Fascinating Failure

Well, I'm finally reading something other than mystery or suspense thrillers. I started last week with the history of David Crockett, a biography by Michael Wallis, David Crockett: The Lion of the West, a book in which he emerges as a real person, and quite different from the legendary Crockett of TV and movies.  Oddly enough, though, he is more like another folksy character who seemed to have been more invented than real: Will Rogers.

The more I read this biography, the more I identify Mr. Crockett with Will Rogers.  They were both great storytellers and charismatic figures who were not overly successful in anything other than show business.  David Crockett was an interesting fellow, not the least of which because his life was so improbable.

I'm learning a great deal about the times as well as the life of David Crockett.  One of the sad facts of the early 19th century is the relentless push west and the devastating consequences for the native peoples of our continent.  The urgency of grabbing more and more land for those settling here was at the root of many of the policies of our government up to the Civil War.  Not only its policy toward the indigenous people, but also with respect to the waging of war.  Not only the Indian wars but the War of 1812 and the war to grab Texas were started with the idea of getting more and more land to settle and farm.  Such policies set the stage for later ones that helped settle lands on the Great Plains, lands not really suitable for farming, and that ultimately led to the Dust Bowl and other disasters of the twentieth century.

David Crockett was in the midst of all the changes and for a man who characterized himself as a simple country fellow, he seemed to be involved in politics to a great extent.  As successful as he was at the state level with getting bills passed that benefited the poor, at the national level he was largely unsuccessful, despite his many efforts.

Crockett was a risk taker, and unfortunately, he seldom won the bets he made with himself, especially when it came to producing income for his large family.  Nature and bad luck seemed to conspire against him as they did his father before him, so that the only time he made money was when he worked for the government as a representative.

Eventually his wife left him after many years of being neglected and forgotten at home while he was off on various ill-fated adventures that did little to help to diminish the debts he continued to accumulate or to secure his family's financial future.

I'm now at the point in the book where Crockett, having failed as a politician for the last time, decides to go to Texas and start over.  We all know how things go from there.

This is a very well written book that is quite engaging.  More later.

More Pulp Fiction

I didn't get very far with Alexander Hamilton, though it is an interesting book.  I took some time off to read a couple of novels, one being the latest by Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol.  Not much to say about this one--the usual Dan Brown effort, laced with patches of information about symbology and other esoteric topics.  It's suspenseful, though, and I'm enjoying reading it.  I'm starting to lose track of some of the plot threads, though, toward the end. 

Before The Lost Symbol, I read a Jeffrey Deaver novel that I got from the library, XO, his latest Kathryn Dance novel (with a cameo appearance by Lincoln Rhymes).  That was also suspenseful, and full of twists (a Deaver hallmark), although I must say that I had it figured early on this time.  I think he's getting predictable in his old age!

Maybe I'll get back to Hamilton after this.  We'll see . . .

Flight

I finished Flight yesterday.  What a great novel that was!  It started out kind of depressing but ended up uplifting! Interesting--a kind of mystical/sci fi combination.  And funny--Alexie is always funny, even when he's sad.  Alexie is quite a talented man.  I recommend this book highly.  Now it's on to Alexander Hamilton.

Aggravating Mozart Followed by More Pulp Fiction

Oh, I had such high hopes for Mozart: A Life, but alas! I couldn't continue with it.

There were many details in it--about Mozart's life, his work, his music, his travels, his family members.  Too many.  I found myself fast-forwarding through his performance itinerary and the analysis of his music.  The biographical details were interesting for a while, but after reading the many accounts of Mozart's father's controlling ways and Mozart's failure to do anything to do stop him, I couldn't bear it anymore.  I was so aggravated I wanted to shake Wolfie and slap his father around a bit.  When I saw there was no let up in sight, I abandoned it, saying "I find I don't care what happened to Mozart or why."

So, I went back to pulp fiction for a while to clear the anxiety generated by Mozart's dysfunctional family, finishing The Watchman, by Robert Crais, featuring his continuing character, Joe Pike, another "hero" who operates outside the law and carries out acts of vengeance in the name of justice.  It was fast-paced and interesting, but I don't think I'll be reading another one of these.  My coworker (from whom I borrowed this book and others like it) must have power issues; he doesn't have enough and so likes to fantasize that he can take out evil-doers without suffering the legal penalties our system of justice demands.  But I shouldn't pick on him; the number of current movies and television shows with a vigilante theme show that feelings of powerlessness and desire for vengeance are common in our society.

Since finishing The Watchman I have been thinking of reading Alexander Hamilton, a biography by Ron Chernow, a renowned historian.  I started it and find it interesting, especially since it begins with the story of Hamilton's being killed in a duel with Aaron Burr.

Another possibility is the latest novel by Sherman Alexie, Flight, which I took out of the library.  I may have to read that first just because I'll have to return it long before I finish the gargantuan biography of Hamilton. We'll see.

I'll let you know how it goes.  See ya later!

From Implausible Pulp to Mozart

Well, I took a break from reading anything but pulp fiction over the last few weeks, and since that type of reading for the most part does not require much in the way of comment or critique, I won't go into it here.  One book I will say something about: Cell, by Stephen King, was not that good.  The premise was not completely plausible and the characters not completely likable or very interesting.  I would not recommend it.

But I'm back to reading non-fiction now.  I've picked up the biography of Mozart that I started years ago but really don't remember much about.  Mozart: A Life, by Maynard Solomon, was published in 2005.  It is very detailed and filled with information I didn't know about my favorite composer.  I'm enjoying it so far, but it's slow going and at 656 pages, it will be a very long read.

One thing I've picked up on almost immediately is that what most people believe about Mozart comes from the movie Amadeus, a screen adaptation of a stage play by the same name.  My book's author, Maynard Solomon, disagrees with the movie's characterization of Mozart and seems to be striving in his book to dispute that view, or to at least complicate it.  I enjoyed the movie, but looking back, it did seem a bit simplistic.

So far in the book, we are learning about Mozart's parents and their histories and how Mozart's father, Leopold, controlled Mozart's development and managed his early musical performance career.  Mozart made him a rich man very early, apparently, and as Solomon contends, he was doubtless dependent upon that income by the time Mozart reached his teen years.

The book is well written and I think will be worthy of my time.

Stay tuned for more dispatches from 18th century Austria.

History, Science, and Mystery

As I thought I would, over the past two weeks I did read a library book about Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet, by John E. Miller.  It took up the subject of how Laura had incorporated the history of the westward movement into her books, especially those set in DeSmet, South Dakota. The author compared her account of how people worked and played with actual accounts published in newspapers, diaries, letters and other sources of the time.  It was interesting to see that Laura was pretty accurate in her rendering of life during the pioneer and early settlement days.

I continue to read the Little House books with my mother. We're both enjoying hearing about Laura through her growing up years.  She's about to be married now, and the original series will end, though there are two other books we can read.  One deals with Almanzo's early years, Farmer Boy, and the other tells of the first four years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage, aptly titled The First Four Years.  The latter was never published during Laura's lifetime; it was written for an adult reader and is much shorter than the others (probably because unfinished).

Besides the non-fiction literary criticism book, last week I read some of the essays in the 2005 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited by Jonathan Weiner, who wrote The Beak of the Finch, one of my all time favorite science books (reviewed in this blog). I read a few of the articles so far, ranging from psychological testing to religion to gray-hat hackers to the dubious claims of supplements.  All were interesting and remarkably timely despite being eight years old.

This week I decided to take a break from the book of essays to begin the latest James Lee Burke mystery, Creole Belle.  Burke is one of my favorites, not only because he was my teacher once, but also because his main character, Dave Robicheaux, is so complex and so wonderfully articulate.  He has a tremendous vocabulary and a true philosopher's outlook, but most of what he thinks about life and the people around him remains in his thoughts; only we, the readers, are privy to his many astute observations.  Outwardly, he's the quintessential hard-boiled detective: tough, plain-spoken, canny, brooding, drawn to the dark side.  Inwardly, he's a shrewd observer of life and society, especially as it unfolds in New Orleans and southern Louisiana, his home and beat.  The juxtaposition makes for a fascinating character.

After this, I'm back to non-fiction, I think.  But we'll see what the next week brings.

Four Weeks of Fiction and a Short Walk in the Woods

I guess I took quite a long break from my reading blog, but, as ever, I didn't stop reading!

In these past four weeks I've read two novels and part of a travelogue.  The travelogue was The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, which I picked up thinking it would be a good follow-on to the book about foundation narratives, America as Second Creation. The Maine Woods is a compilation of travel narratives Thoreau wrote about his trips to Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857, around the same time agricultural pioneers were traveling westward to realize the American dream of owning land.  In fact, in the book Thoreau mentions such pioneers and suggests that if people are looking for land to farm, they could find some in the vast forests of Maine (once all the trees are cut down, of course).  I'm glad people didn't take his advice.

After about 100 pages of the Thoreau book, though, it started to get repetitious, so I put it aside and turned to literary fiction, most notably a book many people have been reading recently, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd.  First published in 2002, this is an excellent novel; it's praise in the media is well deserved, I think.  It takes place in 1964 in South Carolina, and is the story of a 14-year old white girl who lives alone with her cruel and distant (widowed) father and her black nanny/housekeeper, Rosaleen.  She inadvertently gets caught up in the Civil Rights Movement by breaking Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is under guard after being arrested (and beaten) for spitting on a local racist's shoes.  The two of them flee to a place Lily hopes will reveal something about her mother who died ten years before.  In her mother's things, Lily had found a card with the figure of the Black Madonna and the name of a town, Tiburon, on the back.  When Lily and Rosaleen get to that town, they find that the Black Madonna is the label for a honey making business in town. They go there and are taken in by the beekeepers, three black sisters who hide them from the law (unknowingly) and teach Lily how to keep bees.  Eventually, Lily learns about her mother's connection to that place and the truth about her mother's death.

This book is very well written.  From the very first page I was struck by the strength of the voice I was hearing, that of the first-person narrator, Lily.  The characters are well developed, and there is great depth to the story, but what makes the book an exceptionally good read is the suspense that builds--not only from the fact that Lily and Rosaleen are fugitives from the law in segregated South Carolina just after the Civil Rights Act was signed, but also from the mystery of Lily's mother and her connection to the beekeepers.  Not until the end do readers learn the answer to all the questions that develop over the course of the novel. My only criticism is that at times the chain of events seems a bit implausible, especially for that time period. But for the most part, the plot kept me involved.

I've just learned that there is a movie of the novel that came out in 2008; I'm going to get it and see if it is true to the book.  I recommend the book highly; as for the movie, I'll reserve judgment until I've seen it.

After The Secret Life of Bees, I continued my foray into fiction with Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel about a Dominican American family with four daughters and one son.  The novel goes back and forth in time as well as place, taking us to the Dominican Republic and to New York City, showing the differences between the two places over the decades, following each of the four daughters from early childhood to adulthood, marriage and children.  Each daughter has her own story to tell; each reacts differently to the two worlds, to their parents, to each other, and to the challenges of adjusting to life in the United States.

The book is interesting in that it doesn't have a clear narrative path; when I got to the end, it didn't feel like the end, and I wasn't sure that the story was resolved.  But that was okay.  I felt like I got to the know the Garcia family in all their complexity, which may have been the point, and a good thing, especially from the point of view of an Anglo who might tend to lump all Hispanics into one category and make a judgment about them as a group.  In this book, all the characters are widely divergent, exhibiting characteristics of humans from any race or culture.  They are Dominican, but they are also individuals, unique and complex.

That's one of the things I like about reading fiction written by people from other cultures: I find out how complex these groups of people truly are.  The characters in these books defy stereotyping because we see them up close, noting their individual traits, their peculiar characteristics, their brilliance and their flaws.  They're not all alike; they are a part of their culture but not merged with it. They are not merely Hispanics or Latinos; they are people, complicated and therefore interesting. I recommend this book highly, but beware--it's not a conventional narrative.

The final book, which I'm nearly finished reading, is a novel I borrowed from one of my coworkers: Live Wire, by Harlan Coben.  It's a murder mystery, of the the hard-boiled (HB) detective genre, featuring the continuing protagonist, Myron Bolitar.  Myron is an interesting character; he's a sports agent who somehow gets involved in investigating murders.  Who'da thunk it?  But all the conventions of the HB genre are here, from the main character's troubled past and unbelievably skilled performance in a fight; to the edgy, dangerous, not-quite-legal sidekick; the savvy female partner; and the suspenseful, intricate, and fast-paced plot.  It's not great literature, but it's a really good read.  What more could you ask from pulp fiction?  I recommend it to those who love mysteries, especially the hard-boiled-detective type.

So, this week I'll probably go back to non-fiction.  I may read a library book about Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, or I might choose another book from my collection that I've been meaning to read for lo, these many years.

In any case, I'll keep you posted!

American Dreams of Technology's Power

This week I've continued reading America as Second Creation, and continue to learn about the more complicated history of the technology that helped America realize what it touted as its "manifest destiny"--to populate the continent "from sea to shining sea."  What seems to be the author's message is that none of these technologies delivered the promise they made summed up by that familiar phrase, "the American dream."  Each time technology was introduced to "improve" the landscape to make it habitable for white European-American settlers, consequences followed that were not foreseen or not deemed important by those promoting the "improvements."

And what may be the most surprising, yet sadly, the most predictable outcome of building all the saw mills, railroads, irrigation systems, canals and factories throughout the 19th century was that the technologies tended to concentrate wealth in a few hands instead of creating a more egalitarian society where prosperity was shared across a broad sprectrum of Americans.  We still believe in that foundation narrative: that all a person needs is the right tools and the right opportunity and he can make a good life for himself and his family.  Freedom and the free market system are supposed to provide these things without even trying--innovation comes as a result of competition and freedom from too much government intervention.  Or that's the "America as second creation" myth, anyway.

But Nye makes it clear that even in the "good old days" when the country was new and there was so much potential for development (once those pesky Indians were shipped off to reservations), it just didn't work that way.  Each time a new technology made it possible for people to move to an area of the country that was undeveloped, only a few people ended up being wealthy.  The rest got something, but certainly not what the ads and promoters had promised.

For instance, one of the ways the west got developed was through railroad companies building railroad lines through undeveloped country, while at the same time planting towns along the route to make the route profitable.  The railroads didn't pay for the land to build the railroads or the towns--they were granted it by the federal government.  Once they established the town (typically with a crew of railroad workers), they could then sell the land to people who came to live there.  Oh, there might be homestead claims at first, but there were stipulations attached to those claims--people had to live on them and farm them for a certain number of years (five, for instance), regardless of whether or not the land was good for farming.  And if they didn't have good weather or good luck, they might not make a living from the land.  They'd end up having to get a job in town just to make ends meet, and then their families had to live on the claim while the man worked in town.  If they lost the farm, it would go back to the railroad, who would then sell it to someone else for a high price.

The result was that the railroad companies got rich while many of the hopeful homesteaders lost out, having perhaps spent their savings or taken out loans from the banks or the railroad companies to pay for seed or provisions or livestock.  And later on, when mills and factories were built in these new towns, the would-be farmers had to settle for exploitative wages and poor working conditions.

Once again I see that our nostalgia for the past--the good old pioneer days--is misplaced.  Things aren't different now; they're the same as they were, with some people benefitting from free markets and technological advances, but many more people not benefitting from what seemed like a wonderful opportunity, a can't-lose proposition: They're giving us free land! All we have to do is work hard and we'll be rich! Except that the land might be very difficult to farm and there was nothing to fall back on when adverse circumstances wiped out the crop. The bet was much riskier than they were led to believe, but they didn't find that out until it was too late.

The counter-narratives have always been there, but were discounted by those who believed they had an easy path to prosperity.  But they also were discounted by those who profited from others' misplaced hopes.  Now as then, those who didn't make it were painted as lazy or not sufficiently motivated. After all, everyone knows that if a person would just work hard, use a little self-denial, he'd meet with success.  But the successful have often times gotten ahead as a result of other people's bad decisions. What would have happened to the railroads, for instance, if no one had come to live in the towns they built?  They would own land they couldn't get rid of, and there'd be no people to buy the goods that were to be shipped via the railroad.  They would've lost big, ultimately, having had no means to recoup the money spent on putting the railroad through.  That people failed at farming was part of what made the business profitable for them.

It's no surprise, then, that this book by David Nye is itself a counter-narrative, albeit a tad too late for those who risked everything in the nineteenth century.  It's not too late, however, for those of us today who might still believe a foundation narrative of America: the American dream can be yours; you just have to be willing to work hard and keep your nose to the grindstone. I mean, look at Mitt Romney!

I suspect I'll finish this book this week, and then it's on to the next reading adventure!
Stay tuned.