History for Adults and for Children

The past two weeks I finished Mayflower (along with two Sports Illustrated issues). The history of the Mayflower colonists was fascinating but also disturbing.  Those folks created some chaos by intruding upon the native inhabitants, but it was really the fact that they successfully planted a colony in Massachusetts that did the most damage to the indigenous way of life.  Having proved it could be done, the Plymouth colony showed the way for many, many more English people to migrate to New England and eventually the whole continent.  It was inevitable that they would clash with the Indians who gradually came to realize that the English were not going away, and that they were not going to be satisfied with a few acres of land. Nor were they willing to peacefully coexist with the people who had been there for thousands of years.

The war that resulted from the clash of cultures--King Phillip's War, as it was later termed--was more devastating to Americans, both native and English-born, than was the Civil War in the next century. Philbrick describes in great detail the battles and the combatants' futile efforts to make peace.  Brutality was common on both sides of the conflict. There was nothing superior about the supposedly "civilized" people from England, except in numbers and material support, which is what ultimately decided the war in their favor.

Mayflower was a sobering look at the more complex picture of our English beginnings.  At the end of the book, Philbrick takes some time to explain how we ended up with the more familiar, sentimental, patriotic version of the story--the one purged of King Phillip's War.  (The revision had mostly to do with time passing and Lincoln's desire to find a war-time narrative that people could rally around).  Mayflower was a very well-written, compelling book, though somewhat depressing, especially when considering what happened to the Indians.  I recommend it highly.

Following that book, I decided to turn to a children's book that many people my mother's age read when they were little, The Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  It was a delightful, supposedly true account of a year in the life of a young family on the edge of the wilderness.  There was no plot beyond that and precious little went wrong for the Ingalls, so there was no suspense, only wonder at the many ingenious ways people came up with for getting by with very little.  And it was a detailed picture of pioneer life in the 1870s.  Though it has a nostalgic tone (it was written by Ingalls-Wilder 60 years after the events took place), the book actually gives a lot of information about how things were done back then and what life was like.  Wilder makes it all seem very nice, though what really made her childhood wonderful, I think, was all the love and caring she was surrounded with every day.

I asked a few of my mother's fellow residents in the nursing home whether they remember reading this or other Little House books.  Two of them said they did and that they liked them very much.  My mother had not read them, so I encouraged her to read the one I'd just finished.  I'm hoping she will.

Ever since I took a children's literature course in college, I'm been a firm believer in adults reading children's books, especially those universally recognized as great.  This book was one of those and I'm glad I read it, even if I am old!

My next book will be the latest John Grisham legal thriller, The Litigators.  So far I'm enjoying it.

See  you next time.

Magazine Week II: Endangered Rhinos, Potatoes, Coptics and Goddesses

As it turned out, this past week was magazine week, so I did not finish the history of the Mayflower colony. But I did read a variety of interesting articles in Smithsonian. One I thought particularly poignant was the story, "Defending the Rhino," in the November 2011 issue. It was about an alarming increase in the poaching of rhinoceroses in Africa, due in part to a recent (false) rumor that rhino horn cured someone's cancer.  One of the photos showed a dead rhino covered with blood streaming from where his horn used to be.  But fortunately, new techniques using DNA are helping to put at least some of the poachers in jail.  When shipments are intercepted, the confiscated horns can be matched to killed animals, thereby connecting the poached horns to captured poachers.  But so far, it's a drop in the bucket; the amount of money the horns bring on the black market keeps the animals in grave danger and conservationists very busy.

Another very interesting article in that issue was about potatoes.  "The Eyes Have It" told the story of potatoes' origin in the Americas and how they became a staple food in Europe following their discovery by Spaniards in the 16th century.  It also told of the pests that have plagued potatoes (due in large part to the industrialization of agriculture), one of which was the potato blight of the 19th century that destroyed the Irish potato crop and caused famine.  Such pests still plague potato farms today and for the same reason--lack of variety in the mass-produced strains.

Other articles of interest in the November issue involved Coptic Christians in Egypt and how they are being targeted following the revolution there; Shanghai's building boom; and the repatriation of stolen ancient art treasures from Italy, most notably a large statue of a Roman goddess.

I enjoy these little interludes of magazine reading.  They remind me that magazines are still producing interesting and informative articles, and that the well-written essay has not given way entirely to the photograph or the video.

But it's back to books next week.  Stay tuned for my next post on Mayflower.

History and Mystery

Last week I skipped posting because the week before was a holiday week which I spent mostly reading a mystery novel, Night Work, by Laurie R. King, whose novels about Mrs. Sherlock Holmes I've enjoyed in the past. This book is one of her modern-day mysteries featuring Kate Martinelli, a lesbian police detective working in San Francisco.  It was well written (if a little too detailed from time to time), and though it involved a vigilante killer, that person's actions were not condoned and she does not get away with it at the end (unlike in the Lee Child book I read a couple of weeks ago). Ms. King is a prolific writer and I recommend her books highly, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The other book I started reading over Thanksgiving and continue to read is Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's a revisionist history of the Mayflower colony and its inhabitants.  It's quite good.  The writer keeps readers in suspense wondering what will happen to the Pilgrims and their hopes for a successful religious community in the wilderness.  Their encounters with native inhabitants as well as other English settlers who arrive later cause them (and us) much anxiety as they try to work through their many challenges.

I didn't recognize most of this story since only the first-Thanksgiving part (a sanitized version) was taught me in school.  Apparently, there was a great deal of work to creating and maintaining an English village in the forests of Massachusetts and ensuring not only the physical and spiritual survival of the immigrants, but emotional and political as well. Those who did survive those first few years turned out to be a tough lot, thanks in part to the help they secured from the indigenous people they met.

I must admit that so far I'm not too fond of these English interlopers.  They seem quite arrogant and not entirely honest or trustworthy.  But the Pilgrims seem decent next to the less disciplined or scrupulous English that follow--my ancestors, that is. Nonetheless, I'm learning a great deal about early American history and the complex founding of our English colonies.

I will finish this book this week, I hope.  But in any event, I'll write about it again in next week's post.

A Great Horse and a Great Book

Well, I finished Seabiscuit this week and I was wowed! What a story that is, and what a horse! Ms. Hillenbrand did a great job of bringing it all to life: the era, the horse and the people who cared for him.

For me, the book was like a great novel.  I got deeply involved in the lives of all these people and their beloved horse to the point where I got quite emotional at the end when their deaths were described.

Seabiscuit was apparently a horse like no other.  Not only did he have lightning speed and tremendous heart, he was also calm, friendly, and tolerant of all the excitement that swirled around him throughout his life.  All the people who worked with him fell in love with him, especially his owners, his jockeys, and his trainers.

The public was especially enamored of Seabiscuit.  His humble beginnings and eventual triumph was just what the country needed during the dark years of the depression.  His was a rags-to-riches story that people could connect with.  Though Seabiscuit was descended from royalty (his grandfather was Man O'War), he was early on thought to be a mediocre horse, short-legged with a funny gait who showed no promise of racing greatness.  It took a visionary (but initially unpromising) trio of owner, trainer and jockey to bring Seabiscuit to his full potential.

The story Hillenbrand tells is thrilling, filled with treachery and love, amazing races and horrifying injuries.  You'd think it would be tailor-made for Hollywood.  And indeed, there was more than one movie made about the horse's story.  The latest, Seabiscuit, starring Tobey Maguire, Chris Cooper and Jeff Bridges, probably did the best job of the three.  But there was something missing.

I saw the movie again after I finished the book and was disappointed to see that the filmmakers completely missed the point of Hillenbrand's book: the horse. Oh, sure, they had the horse there and told his story, but the emphasis was upon the three people involved rather than the horse.  While their story is interesting, it wouldn't be without the horse. He was the reason for their being there and doing what they did and caring so much about the outcome, but Seabiscuit kind of gets shoved aside.  The horse in the movie version of Seabiscuit just doesn't seem all that special.

I guess there just wasn't enough room in the movie to bring out the greatness of the horse.  It's a shame, really, because people who saw the movie without reading the book might believe they don't need to read the book.  But they do, because in the book is the whole story, the great story of a great horse.

And, I hasten to add, a great writer. I am ready now to read anything by Laura Hillenbrand.  The story of the Olympic athlete in World War II (Unbroken) is one I bought for John.  He declared it a great book, so I may get around to reading that one in the future.

What to read next?  I haven't decided yet, but I think it will be another book of non-fiction.

I'll let you know what I choose in my next post.

History and a Famous Horse

This week I continued my new campaign of reading my magazines the first week of each month.  I finished American Heritage, and then Smithsonian, and finally Colonial Williamsburg magazine.  As you can see, most of my magazines are history-centric.  I learned a number of things, but I can't remember them too vividly at the moment, so I'll just say that they proved to be interesting reading and reminded me that there is a great deal of good writing being published out there.

Following my magazine interlude, I started reading Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand.  It is a very interesting and well written story of the fabled horse who achieved fame in the 1930s. It's filled with details about horse racing, horses, jockeys, and the era.  I've already learned quite a bit and I've barely begun the book!

One of the things I've learned so far is that Seabiscuit was the son of a horse called Hardtack, which is what people call the rock-like biscuits given to soldiers and sailors to carry with them on long campaigns or voyages.  Seabiscuit, incidentally, is another name for such difficult-to-eat fare. Hardtack was an unruly horse, apparently. (Seabiscuit was just the opposite, however.)

Oddly, one of the magazine stories I read this week told of how much Civil War soldiers hated hardtack, to the point that a song was penned, "Hardtack, Come Again No More," sung to the tune of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times, Come Again No More," a popular song of the times.  Interestingly enough, that song, sung by James Taylor, is on the album Appalachian Journey (featuring Yo Yo Ma) that I've lately been using for my morning dance exercise. 

From Seabiscuit I've also learned about the transition from horse transportation to automobile transportation, and how that impacted horse racing.  Hillenbrand also details the grueling life of the jockey, especially those who worked the lesser known races for smaller purses.  Jockeys put up with a great deal of abuse, it seems, from the trainers and the horses as well as the other jockeys during the race.

So, I'm looking forward to finishing this one.  I've seen the movie, and I'm trying to remember how close it was to the book.  I may have to see it again once I finish Seabiscuit.

Tune in next week for more about the famous horse!

Worth Dying For Worth Reading?

This week I read Lee Child's Worth Dying For, and though I enjoyed it while I was reading it, disturbing questions about it changed my ultimate judgement.  It turned out to be a story in the revenge genre.  People who are evil get their just deserts, delivered at the hands of the avenging angel from out of town, Jack Reacher.  And although I disapprove of vengeance and vigilantism, in fiction I can tolerate it to some extent because I know it's not real.  It also has to be well done.

It seems to me that a revenge story has to draw clear lines between good and evil.  The evil people need to be really evil so the avenger's actions make sense and are fully justified.  Otherwise the reader might start to wonder if a less lethal alternative might have worked just as well to stop the evildoer and bring him to justice in our courts.

Worth Dying For did not meet these criteria, in my opinion.  When I finished the book and all the bad people were dead, for some strange reason the writer chose not to show us the "unretouched photo" of their evil deeds, preferring to hint at the horror instead of describing it, demurring that the details were too ghastly to reveal.  This was a major mistake, I think, since it was necessary for us to "see" the horror so that when Reacher murders all the perpetrators, we would feel he was justified. 

Not only does he murder a number of baddies (with the help of a few of their victims), he also does it in a very cold, efficient, skillful way that does not show his outrage and anger at their inhuman actions over the course of twenty years. (I'm not revealing their deeds now because someone might want to read this book.) 

Added to that was the general implausibility of his campaign.  He starts out meddling in something he doesn't understand, then ends up getting caught by the bad guys and hurt a few times, mostly because of bad luck.  But then his luck turns and his foes are all themselves caught and fairly easily dispatched.  It's a bit anti-climactic by this time, really, because we can see they're no match for our hero.

At that point the book is not over, though, and what follows is as unbelievable as it is morally ambiguous.  Our hero, after littering the countryside with bodies (without the county sheriff finding out), then leaves his accomplices, the inhabitants of the little town, to clean up the mess, which they do without compunction or worrying about cops carting them off to jail. Apparently, we're to believe they get away with it.  But I thought, "Nah, I'm not buying that." 

That's not the way I want to feel at the end of a thriller/murder mystery novel; I want to feel that justice has triumphed and evildoers will answer to the law.  But lately I've noticed a trend in mysteries toward ambiguous endings and the lack of moral neatness. Perhaps it's what writers think readers want these days--hit-man heroes, high body counts and no reason to believe law enforcement will intervene or care.

I'm not one of those readers, obviously, so I can't recommend this book. And I won't be reading any more of Lee Child's novels, either.

After Worth Dying For, I was going to move to a non-fiction book, but I'd promised myself that I would devote the first week of every month to reading my magazines, which have been piling up for years unread.  So this week I've been reading American Heritage and Smithsonian. The American Heritage had several articles of interest; one of them involved the pre-Civil War panoramic daguerreotype of Cincinnati that has been restored and enhanced and is currently on display at the Cincinnati library. John and I went to see it there recently so the article was very timely for us.  There were other interesting articles that I won't describe here but if you look at the link you can see what they were.

Since last week was a short week, I'm going to devote a few more days to magazines before turning back to non-fiction books, this time Seabiscuit.

Join me next week!

A Life Wild and Perilous: Jack Reacher's?

Unfortunately, I didn't stick with A Life Wild and Perilous for very long. The title was great, hinting at adventure, but alas, the book itself was tedious and somewhat confusing. I found myself looking ahead for the "good" parts, scanning large sections and re-reading confusing parts until I finally gave up. I'll have to read a different book on this subject, I guess, because I couldn't finish this one.

To be fair, there was a lot of interesting information about the early years of our republic, when mountain men were out trapping animals for their fur while exploring western territories that eventually became part of the United States. But the information was presented in a straight-forward way--"just the facts, ma'am"--that left me longing for a story about these men. I guess I've gotten used to the highly narrative historical accounts that many writers have provided in recent years. 

Another aspect of A Life Wild and Perilous that I found frustrating was the way it was organized--in chronological order, apparently.  While that would seem to be a good choice for a historical account, it ended up being confusing because at the same time the book seemed to want to emphasize individual mountain men. (The title, after all, indicates that people's lives will be examined.)

Because some of the men were important early in the era (1800-1820), some important in the latter years, and others important throughout, the author has to keep circling back to explorers such as Jedediah Smith (who lasted nearly the whole time) as the book progresses through time.  I wanted to focus on the individuals, but it was almost impossible because Utley kept jumping back and forth between well known explorers like Smith and a handful of other lesser lights whose lives I couldn't really imagine because they were discussed for such a brief period of time. I think the book would have benefited greatly from telling one mountain man's story at a time, or focusing on the explorations and de-emphasizing the mountain men.

I did learn some things from the book, though.  The repeated descriptions of the various people's encounters with indigenous folks (some friendly, some not) brought home the fact that American Indians west of the Mississippi did not submit quietly to their fate. I knew there were some uprisings, but I didn't realize there were so many, many attempts on the part of all tribes (even those who cooperated at first with the Europeans) to make the new interlopers' lives miserable, either by stealing from them, cheating them, lying to them, harassing them, burning their encampments, kidnapping, scalping, or murdering them.  This went on, in fact, until the numbers of European invaders were too great to successfully resist. 

Another thing I learned from this book (related to the above), is that finding South Pass in Wyoming made a very big difference in settling the west.  Being able to cross the Rockies with wagons was a big deal; South Pass made it possible.  After that, there was no stopping settlers longing to go west.  (Of course, there was still the Sierra, but that's another story.)  Mountain men helped a great deal in finding pathways for future pioneers to follow, much to the chagrin of the native inhabitants.

A third thing I learned is that Jedediah Smith wasn't exactly the way he was portrayed to be in the movie starring Robert Redford. He wasn't a loner roaming the mountains simply because they were there; though exploring was his first love, he made his living working for different fur companies as a trapper. He was economically invested in exploring the wilderness, as were the rest of the mountain men. It makes sense that they would be, of course, but it kind of tarnishes their reputation as romantic old west heroes, I think.

Robert Utley is a learned man and a well-known historian, and his book contained interesting material. I just wish he would have presented it in a more entertaining way.  I recommend this book to those of you who want to learn about mountain men and are not put off by a straightforward chronicle.

After abandoning A Life Wild and Perilous, I picked up a mystery I've had on the shelf for a while, Worth Dying For. It's by Lee Child, who is apparently quite popular in the thriller genre. There isn't a great deal of mystery to it (except for the whereabouts of a long-ago missing child), but it's a good example of the hard-boiled detective type of novel--lots of demonstrations of amazing strength and keen intelligence, lots of violence and gripping evil-vs-good action.

Child's continuing character, Jack Reacher, is on the way to somewhere else when he gets involved with some people in a town held captive by a family of bullies. He can put things right, of course, and sets about doing so, all the while uncovering a bigger secret.  The plot is intricate and the action is non-stop, so what's not to like?  I may have to read some more by this author. It's always fun to discover a new mystery writer.

After this I plan to read Seabiscuit. I've had it on my shelf for a while, so I thought it was about time.  But I might also read Mammoth next; after visiting Big Bone Lick State Park, I got interested in learning more about the ice age creatures. I'll see what I feel like when the time comes.

Until then . . .

Two Weeks, Three Books

Well, I've been guilty of neglecting my reading blog for a week, but as always, I continue to read.  I finished the memoir It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium and turned to a novel by T. C. Boyle, East is East, followed by a non-fiction book I've been meaning to read for a long time, A Life Wild and Perilous, by Robert Utley, which chronicles the lives of several American mountain men in the nineteenth century. 

The memoir by John Ed Bradley was very interesting, but somewhat sad, in that it seems he is only just beginning to come to terms with his loss.  Apparently, no matter how exciting his life as a world-traveled free-lance journalist has proven to be, he still longs for his days playing football.  He doesn't completely explain why he decided to stop playing; he could have signed on with an NFL team, it seems, but declined in order to pursue his dream of becoming a writer.  He thought that as a professional football player he would not be credible as a novelist.  Ironically, his novels have not done well, but he enjoys continued success as a sports writer, a career enhanced by his first-hand sports experience.  After reading the book, I looked on line for more information about Bradley, but didn't find much, except for his articles.  Here's one of them, about Beryl Shipley, a basketball coach who died earlier this year: SI. I enjoyed reading this book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in sports and athletes.

The novel I turned to this week was quite a departure from the Bradley memoir.  Boyle is a wonderful writer, one of my favorites, but I can't read more than one of his books at a time because they are so full. East is East was no exception; it's a wacky, satirical adventure about people living on an island off the coast of Georgia. The plot involves a Japanese teenager who jumps his cargo ship, and the denizens of an artist colony, one of whom tries to help him.  Also involved are people who try to catch the Japanese kid: an INS agent, a Vietnam veteran, a sheriff and townspeople.  All are quirky, maddening yet somehow sympathetic.  There's a serious message at the bottom (as with all good satire) and a less than happy ending, but all in all it was great fun, and I recommend it highly.  When I was finished,  it occurred to me that this book achieves what the book I read earlier, Six Suspects, attempts but fails to deliver.

T.C. Boyle has written many novels and other fiction. (One of them is the book about Kellogg, The Road to Wellville, which was made into a movie.)  He has wonderful characters and entertaining plots, but what sets him apart from many writers is his language.  He enjoys words and isn't afraid to use them, but he never comes across as wordy. I have several other books by Boyle that I got at Borders' closeouts, so I'll get back to him in the future.

The book I started yesterday is one I started years ago, shortly after buying it.  It was first published in 1997 and looks to be a very interesting book.  I know John, my husband, has read it and enjoyed it.  So I'll get back to you with my thoughts about  A Life Wild and Perilous in my next post.

See you then!

Fiction and Life

This week I finished the book, A Judgement in Stone, and I now know the answer to the question "Why?" Long before anyone oppressed her with their love of reading, Eunice was a murderer of people who got in her way.  She kills her father because he's interfering with her life and she kills her employers for the same reason. When her desire to be left in peace (and ignorance) is frustrated, she kills those who thwart her.  But it really is an accident of sorts.  Her friend, the lunatic Joan, sets the conditions under which they both step over the line.  Joan ends up in a coma, and Eunice gets away with murder for a couple of weeks, until the tape recording of the murder comes to light and the game is up.

I found this book to be fascinating and quite realistic.  As a sometime reader of true crime, I find that real criminals are pretty stupid, committing crimes in broad daylight in front of witnesses, or telling their friends what they did, or leaving a trail to their door so obvious that a child could follow it.  Their motives are often mixed up and their decision to kill spontaneous,not--as in detective fiction--thoroughly thought out and carefully planned.

Because of its realism, this novel was quite chilling.  A person who seems alright (if a bit odd) may not be the least bit alright but actually quite dangerous.  People who have such dangerous persons in their homes may not know it until it is too late.  How are we to guard against such eventualities? The fact that we really can't know who is going to suddenly turn irrational and lethal is what is so frightening.

Interesting that even though I knew what was going to happen, I was still riveted to the page until I arrived at that pre-determined end.  The narrator of the book sprinkles a number of "what-ifs" throughout the story, speculating on how tragedy could have been avoided if a different decision had been made.  When I think about that now, I realize the author was playing with us a bit, since she is the one who invented all the decisions and created the tragedy by taking us down the roads that she did.  It's almost as if she is laying out her own decision making process as she plotted the novel and asking us to admire it.  Clever!

Rendell is really quite a good novelist; I recommend her highly and this book in particular.

The book I am currently reading, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium, returns me to non-fiction.  It's a memoir by John Ed Bradley, who played center for Louisiana State University in the late 1970s.  Mr. Bradley is also a novelist, and though I have not read any of his other works, I am enjoying his account of being a star football player in both high school and college, and of his life after football, focusing especially on what it was like to stop playing football.

The book takes me back to the John Grisham novel I read recently, Bleachers, which explores the same topic: life after football.  Especially now that we're in the midst of football season, both books help to deepen my insight into the players who entertain us with their skill and talent and heart.

In my next post, I'll let you know what I learn.

More Mysteries

The second in the three-book series about Lisbeth Salander, The Girl Who Played With Fire, was very good, and also different from the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo. In this second installment, the main character finds herself attacked by violent criminals whom she successfully fights right up to the end, when she is rescued by her friend Mikael Blomqvist.  Along the way, there are a number of exciting twists and surprising revelations.

But what's also interesting about this second story is that we learn a little bit more about the character, and how she came to be where she is and who she is.  The character and her story are very compelling, and that's a large part of why we keep reading, I think, and why this writer is so popular.

I'm also learning quite a bit about Swedish society and culture from these novels. Since I knew very little before, that's a big plus.  I'm even thinking of checking out the Swedish language.

The only criticism I would have of the books is that the narrator tends to give mini-lectures on what he apparently believes are pertinent topics that sometimes go on just a bit too long and tempt me to skip to the action.

After finishing that book, I went on to a book by another of my favorite mystery writers, Ruth Rendell.  This novel, A Judgement in Stone, published in 1977, appears to be a sort of mystery-in-reverse.  Right up front we are told who dun it and why, and then the rest of the novel explains how it happened by presenting a chronicle of events that led up to that fateful day.  It's the kind of anwers people want following a shocking multiple murder and journalists try to provide with newspaper reports and TV movies that analyze how such a tragedy could have been prevented.

Though Rendell's novel is not true crime, it has the ring of truth to it, and is even better than true crime because she can give us the thoughts of the people involved, especially the dead ones.  Under real circumstances we don't get to ask the victims the question: "Why didn't you realize this person was going to murder you?"  But in fiction,we can ask and the author will give us the answer. 

I'm about a third of the way through this novel, and so far it's very good.  The simple answer to why the culprit killed an entire family is given at the start (because she couldn't read), but it doesn't make much sense. The mystery to solve, then, is how could such a reason be a motive for murder?  I'm curious and hoping the author will surprise me with her answer.

I'll keep you posted on how it turns out.

Mysteries and a Roman-Fleuve

I guess I took a break from writing about my reading, but I didn't stop reading! After finishing And Their Children After Them, I read a mystery I'd borrowed from one of my coworkers, and then a recent book by Alice Hoffman, The Red Garden.  The mystery was a quick read, but not that well written.  The Red Garden was very good, and thanks to Word of the Day I now know it to be a Roman-Fleuve, or a river novel, which is an appropriate metaphor for the kind of book it is, the story of a family over the years.  In the case of The Red Garden, it's over centuries.  As with Alice Hoffman's other books, there was a bit of the supernatural thrown in (always explainable so that you're never quite sure).  It was a very interesting book, touching on a few encounters with famous people such as Johnny Appleseed.  It was not as good as some of Hoffman's other books I've read, but I would nevertheless recommend it.

Following that book, I tried to read a mystery by Faye Kellerman, Stalker, but found it to be unreadable. There was simply too much talking! Lots of unneeded dialogue that simply served to slow things down, something an author should never do in a mystery novel. So I got rid of it and bought the second in the series by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which was 100% better.  This is a very good series of novels, although there is a lot of violence and sex. Too bad the author died; he had a great career ahead of him as a mystery novelist.

I'll let you know how things turn out with that one!

The View from Up Here

I'm nearly finished with And Their Children After Them, by writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. At first I found it to be a sad story of the fate, fifty years later, of the three families documented by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1936. It was especially hard to read about the circumstances of cotton tenant farmers in Alabama during the depression. It seemed a life of little joy and much hardship, created in large part by the people who owned the land and held nearly absolute power over their tenants' lives.  They participated in a system that was set up, it seems, to keep the farmers using nineteenth-century tools to work land they could never own; diseased, illiterate, barely managing to keep food on the table or a roof over their heads, they were convinced there was no way out.

My first impression of the book was that Maharidge and Williamson (M & W) intended to provide an update to the Agee and Evans book, but as I read on, I saw that they had something more complex in mind for And Their Children After Them. Not only do they bring us up to date on the Gudgers, the Ricketts, and the Woods, but they do so with an up-to-date viewpoint, allowing us a more balanced view of the people and their lives in rural Alabama than was provided by the earlier book.

Not having read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I can only go by what M & W tell me about the work, but it seems that throughout their time in the South, Agee and Evans maintained their outsiders' viewpoint, seeing the tenant farmers' lives as wretched and their only rational choice escape. Despite Agee's decision to live for a time with one of the families and get involved in their lives, he never seemed to change that opinion.

In contrast, though M & W are also outsiders, they seem to try to see things from the point of view of the people they meet, balancing the story Agee tells with stories from the descendants of the original families who provide not only a different view of their parents and grandparents but a different and at times quite critical view of Agee and Evans as well.  The portrait that emerges from the later book is one of respect for the people who manage to survive and even to attain some measure of happiness, despite living through decades of killing poverty.

Yet the story is still largely depressing.  I had no idea how bad it really was and still is in places like Centerboro, Alabama.  Though cotton is now harvested mechanically and thus more efficiently and economically brought to market, the jobs the crop once generated are now gone and the people who worked the land have been forced to move to a city to take primarily low-wage jobs, when they are available. A few have been lucky enough to get some education or training in better paying work, but even they are living on the edge of poverty, dependent on continued employment in uncertain times. 

This book was written in the late 80s when there was a recession similar to ours going on in the U.S., so one can imagine that times are still tough in Alabama for the poor.  I'd like to know how these families have fared, twenty years later.  I wonder if an update exists?  I'll have to check on the internet.

Once I finish this book, I think I'll take another break with a nice mystery: fiction in which good and evil are clear cut and everything works out in the end.

Stay tuned!

A Week of Fifth Grade, Football, and Farming

Well, I had a very productive week of reading.  Not only did I finish Among Schoolchildren, but I breezed through a short novel by John Grisham, Bleachers as well. 

Among Schoolchildren had a satisfying ending, in that Mrs. Zajac's students survived the school year mostly better off than when they started.  Along the way a few of her students left school because their parents moved for one reason or another.  She was particularly unhappy about the departure of her favorite student, Judith, who went back to Puerto Rico.  Judith was the smartest pupil in Chris's class and the one she had come to rely on for a kind of moral support when the other students disappointed her.

Clarence, her most disruptive student, also left, but it was because he was finally placed in a special class where he was getting the help he needed.  He stopped in to see her at the end of the year to say hello and she seemed satisfied that she did the right thing by getting him reassigned.

For most of the book, I was struck by how different teaching was back then.  Teachers seemed to have fewer requirements to include this or that topic in their lessons, and they seemed to be freer to create their own approaches to learning, and even to hug and otherwise express affection for their students.  Plus there was only one set of standardized tests per year, and Chris didn't seem to spend all her time getting her students ready for them.

The kids seemed different too--no distracting cell phones and i-pods to screen out the teacher's voice.  They had enough to distract them from their studies as it was with all the social drama going on in most of their young lives.

Of course, this was only one man's take on one teacher's class, so it contains only those things Tracy Kidder chose to reveal to us about this woman and her world.  But as with any history, we have no choice but to trust what we are getting as relatively truthful, as long as we remember that it's only one side of the story.  It would be interesting to talk now with some of the people in this story, to see if they saw things the way Tracy Kidder did back then.

I enjoyed reading this book, and I would definitely recommend it for the insight it gives into the day-to-day work of teaching.

John Grisham's book, Bleachers, is about high school football and its effect on the people who play it, coach it, and watch it.  The story seems to be set in Texas, or some other state that takes high school football very seriously.  The plot centers on Neely Crenshaw, a former high school quarterback who has come back to his hometown (for the first time in 15 years) to attend the funeral of his coach, with whom he had a love-hate relationship.  It's a typical "reunion" plot--think The Big Chill only with football players.

It was interesting, but not as suspenseful as I've come to expect from a John Grisham novel.  And it seemed to be lacking closure, somehow. I had the impression that the ending was rushed, like maybe he'd promised it for a certain date and was overdue to his publisher.  I enjoyed it, though.  It was a fast read, light and easy to understand.

My next book will be another that I've put off reading for quite some time: And Their Children After Them : The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, who were both reporters for The Sacramento Bee.  This book is a work of history, but also sociology.  Published in 1990, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction that year.

The book's authors focus on the people whose lives were chronicled in 1936 by James Agee and Walker Evans, two photographers who were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to tell the story of the Depression's effect on rural life in the South.  The photoessay they produced was the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Maharidge and Williamson, in And Their Children After Them, go back to the families that Agee and Evans visited and find out what happened to the people and their way of life.

I think it's going to be a very interesting book.  I've already started reading it and it seems very well written, as I would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

I'll let you know how it goes in my next post!

From Darkness to Light

This week I finished the second pair of stories in Full Dark, No Stars.  Both were very good, although the first, "Fair Extension," a classic make-a-deal-with-the-devil story (with a side of The Book of Job), was lighter than the second.  In fact, it was the lightest of the four, being almost comical.  King used Bangor for his setting, and I enjoyed recognizing the landmarks he described.  I didn't like the main character, though, and that lessened the pleasure for me.  Dave Streeter was far too willing to accept the happy consequences of his deal with "Elvid," that left him cured of his fatal cancer while his so-called best friend lost everything he treasured.  In the end, Dave was not punished for his bad acts, though I believe he should have been.

The last story, "A Good Marriage," was inspired by the revelations some years ago that the BTK killer in Wichita, KS had murdered women for many years while his family and friends suspected nothing.  This was the most suspenseful of the lot, and very compelling, but was as morally ambiguous as the rest. In each of the four stories, the protagonist gets away with murder, which leaves me wondering what King meant for us to learn about the stranger who dwells within.  Should we condemn or approve the character's success? If we approve, are we revealing our own inner darkness?

After Stephen King, I decided a dose of reality was in order, so I took up a book I started reading many years ago but didn't finish, another of Tracy Kidder's books about ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) people. Among Schoolchildren chronicles a year in the life of Christine Zajac, an elementary school teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1986.  We learn about her fifth-grade classroom, her pupils and some of the staff at Kelly School, one of the many public schools trying to educate students in the face of some very difficult challenges. 

In the book, Kidder paints a detailed portrait of Mrs. Zajac, as a teacher and a person, so that we get to know her and care about her as we go through the school year with her and her students.  We also get to know and care about some of her students, one in particular, Clarence, known to all the teachers as a "difficult" child.  We watch while Christine deploys her full arsenal of teaching tactics to get around Clarence's many behavioral, social and learning challenges with the hope of finding a way to help him.

Tracy Kidder is a skilled writer who always manages to get me deeply engaged in the lives of the people he profiles. I'm about half way through the book now, which means it's half way through the school year, and I'm looking forward with hope (and fear) to what lies ahead for the children.  Already it seems some of them won't make it, despite Mrs. Zajac's considerable talent and dedication.  Reading this book reinforces my appreciation of how incredibly difficult a job teaching is.  Among Schoolchildren should be required reading for those pundits on cable TV who sneer at teachers and for the politicians who write laws that make teachers' lives more difficult than they already are.

In my next post, I'll let you know what happens to Mrs. Zajac's class.  She's still alive, apparently--though she is now a retired principal--and still living in Holyoke.  In fact, in 2009 she was the Grand Marshal for the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade.  Read about it here: MassLive.

From Bloated to Bare Bones

I finally finished Six Suspects (after fast-forwarding through much of it).  I must say it's one of the worst books I've ever read.  I was slogging through the second half, intent upon reaching the end where I would at last discover who killed the politician's son, learning along the way that every one of the six suspects had gone to the party with the intent of killing the man.  So which one did it? When I finally found out (way past what I thought was the ending of the book), I felt cheated and not a little bit angry.

It turns out the actual culprit wasn't even one of the six suspects, but someone else entirely, someone not only the one you'd least suspect, but someone not even mentioned as being involved!  This unexpected killer comes in at the last minute to solve the riddle and end the book, much as the deus ex machina would arrive at the last minute to end a classical play.

When I finished the book I was left to wonder why this novel was published. Is it an example of some avant-garde trend that involves completely throwing out all the rules of good story writing? Or is it simply a marketing move?  The author of the book that became a very popular movie (Slum Dog Millionaire) writes a second book that must be exploited for its marketability before people find out how bad it is? 

When I read Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times, I was wondering where she was finding the fun in this book.  She does say that the Tribal (one of the six suspects) is Swarup's "most lovable creation" (June 24, 2009), and I agree with her on that. In fact, I was very upset when the author killed him off before the end of the book for no apparent reason. But that was just one more reason to hate this book. 

After that 470-page mistake, I thought I'd try an author I know to be a good storyteller: Stephen King. I chose his latest collection of long stories, Full Dark, No Stars.  There are four stories in it, all sharing a theme: the darkness that dwells within one's soul.  The first two were very good, both about ordinary people who find themselves capable of murder.  Neither has supernatural elements, a good thing, I think.  I've found over the years of reading Stephen King that his best stories are often those that don't include the supernatural in any overt way.

The best part is that when I read the stories, I get so involved I forget where I am.  In fact, a couple of times this past week I've almost missed my stop.  After more than a week of enduring Mr. Swarup and his bloated narrative, it's great to get back to an author who knows how to write a story.

See you next post.

Six Suspects: Wait for the Movie

This week, I did end up reading a mystery, but it didn't work out as well as I'd planned. I thought it would be fun to read a mystery from a different culture, so I settled on a novel written by the man who wrote Slum Dog Millionaire, Vikas Swarup.  The movie made from Swarup's book was very popular, and his second novel, Six Suspects, got some good reviews and sounded like it would be interesting. (Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it a "Bollywood version of the board game Clue.")  But alas, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep reading.  The only reason I'm hanging in there is to find out whodunit.

The story takes place in India, and throughout the book, the author emphasizes the corruption pervasive at all levels of Indian society.  He must be exaggerating, I tell myself.  No society could be that blatantly corrupt.  And, after all, it's supposed to be "a rollocking good read," according to the London Times.  But when every character will do anything to gain an advantage for himself, I not only lose interest in the story, I lose interest in India.

Is this the response the author is aiming for with this book?  I'm not sure.  Maybe he expects us to know what the truth is and laugh at his exaggerations.  But if we don't know the truth, well . . . how can we tell what's exaggerated?

Another aspect of the book that leaves me wondering what the author is trying to accomplish is the writing style.  Sometimes Swarup has very nice descriptions that allow me to visualize the landscape of India and its people.  But other times he is trying too hard to be clever, it seems, especially with dialogue that often comes out sounding a bit wooden.  Do people in India really talk that way? I could excuse the unnatural sounding speech if there were a translator, but no, Mr. Swarup is writing in English for British readers.

One of the six suspects is an American from Texas.  He is particularly annoying.  Not only is his supposed naivete completely implausible, his speech is a hodge-podge of cliches, country-bumpkin witticisms and well-phrased, educated sounding observations. The last is especially distracting, since these are the moments when the writer seems to be speaking in his own voice rather than the character's.  Is he deliberately doing that to destroy the reader's involvement in the character's story? I find that hard to believe and I'm left to wonder if he's trying to do something different or if he's just a bad writer.

So what's Vikas Swarup's goal?  I can only guess that he's writing a farce.  Here's the definition, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica eb.com:

farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.

Six Suspects does contain all the features of a farce, including stereotyped characters, so that must be what Swarup is after.  But if so, he fails to deliver a successful farce, in my view. 

For example, he spends six chapters of the book with first-person accounts of each of the six suspects in the murder.  (Oh, yes, did you forget this is a murder mystery?  I did too.)  Such narratives are not helpful to the plot, since the information we get could be gotten more efficiently by other means.  Moreover, first-person narration is for developing characters.  We don't need to hear what's in the head of a type.  Since he doesn't have an inner life, who cares what he thinks?  He's only there to fill a role, so we only need to see him doing it, not know why he's doing it. 

Even if Swarup wanted to give us more substantial types, he fails to do so since his characters reveal nothing illuminating in their narratives.  They remain true to form; there are no nuances, no surprises, no hidden depths.

The problem with Swarup's attempt at farce is that farce really works better in drama (as the definition indicates)--it's a visual, three-dimensional form of entertainment. On the page it pretty much falls flat.  Was Slum Dog Millionaire also farce?  I don't know, but I won't be reading it to find out.  I do plan to watch the movie, however.  And perhaps that's what Swarup was truly trying to accomplish with this book--to write a novel that would be made into a movie.

I plan to finish Six Suspects, but I'll be fast forwarding through most of it, I think.  And if I were you, I'd wait for the movie.

Our Shaky Future

Well, I finished A Crack in the Edge of the World, and it was most satisfying! We finally got to the detailed examination of the San Francisco earthquake, complete with stories from those who experienced it.  I never knew how terrifying it was until I read about the streets moving like gigantic waves toward the shocked onlookers, or the buildings falling down all around them.  I saw such wave action on a much smaller scale in 1980 in San Jose and I can imagine that people were stunned by what they saw.

Something else I didn't know was how much help the people of San Francisco got after the earthquake from around the country and the world.  Apparently, there was a huge outpouring of sympathy and cash for the devastated city. But that made me wonder if other towns and cities equally devastated but less populous also received assistance.  That's something rarely talked about with respect to that day: all up and down the fault line, communities were hurt and in some cases destroyed by the earthquake that had far reaching effects--from as far north as Oregon to as far south as Anaheim and as far east as Winnemucca.

Toward the end of the book, the author goes on to discuss other earthquake prone areas of the world, including Alaska, with its quake in 1964, and the giant caldera in Yellowstone National Park.  He's worried about all of these places, including San Francisco, since the Loma Prieta quake did not happen on the San Andreas fault, which means the pressure has been building there since 1906.

A Crack in the Edge of the World was a fun book to read!  I recommend it highly.

But what to read next?  Maybe a mystery would be a nice palate-cleanser before tackling a meatier work.  I'll see what I have in the cupboard.  Meet me back here later for a full account.

The Dance of the Wandering Plates

My latest choice for reading, A Crack in the Edge of the World, published in 2005, has proven to be very interesting. It's the second book I've read by Simon Winchester (the first was The Professor and the Madman), with one more to go (Krakatoa). 

Mr. Winchester has a gift for making the most complex technical subject not only understandable, but compelling.  I learned that when I read with relish his story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, a topic that would seem designed to excite only philologists. 

This time he's writing about an inherently interesting topic, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, yet he risks venturing off into potentially sleep-inducing scientific realms to bring his readers not only an appreciation of the complex geology of the earth and its capricious movements, but a much greater understanding of how devastating quakes like the one in 1906 could occur. 

I'm about a third of the way through, but already I understand more about the San Andreas fault than I ever did when I lived near it and experienced first hand its effects.  But Winchester doesn't limit himself to that one point of plate dynamics; he takes into account all the plates that cover the earth, the history of their movements (as far as we know it), and how we have come to learn more and more about them over time.

So, it's a fascinating book and I'm glad I'm finally reading it.  I'll let you know what else I discover in the next post.

Arts and Crafts

This week was another quick read, this time supplied by Stephen King, one of my long-time favorite authors.  The book I read this time, though, was not a scary novel; it was On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.  In it Stephen King gives an account of his life (including his horrific accident in 1999) and his work and then spends some time talking about how to become a better writer if you're already competent.  If you're a bad writer, he says, there's no hope for you.

That kind of blunt advice makes this book a bit different from others that are obviously designed to be used in a creative writing course.  King is highly skeptical of such courses, even though that's where he met his wife back when he went to University of Maine and was going through a period of writer's block, a malady he hasn't suffered from very often over the fifty-plus years he's been writing professionally.  In addition to the fifty novels he's published, he's written numerous short stories, screenplays, and other works--enough to prove that he writes almost continuously.

I have to say I agree with King's doubt about the usefulness of creative writing courses.  One of my creative writing professors once said that writing is self-taught, and I knew he was right, despite the fact that we were both there in a creative writing class trying to prove otherwise.  What creative writing classes are good for, King admits, is to provide a place to seriously discuss and engage in writing, and to provide good jobs for writers.

King's attitudes are a large part of what I find refreshing about his book; the other part is the truly useful advice he gives.  Some of it I've heard before; for instance, he says that to be a good writer, you have to write a lot and read a lot.  But other advice was new to me: don't worry about plot; put your characters in a situation and let them work their way out of it--plot will take care of itself.  That bit of advice was a revelation to me.  Hey, I can stop worrying about plot!  If anyone besides Stephen King had said that--say someone who writes "serious" novels that don't have a plot--I'd be skeptical.  But King, like most popular fiction writers, knows how to keep a story moving forward.  Writers like him are good at plot, so maybe it's not so mysterious after all.

Throughout On Writing, I get the sense that King is being honest and practical.  Here's how I do it, he says, and here's what I think writers need to succeed at the craft.  Interestingly enough, throughout the book he never refers to what he does as art (at least I can't think of a single instance).  It seems to me that he has a worker's sensibility about writing, especially writing popular fiction.  It's not high culture, but it is something valuable, something more than mere entertainment.  A good story is essential to our lives, and in order to work, it has to be accessible.  A story that hides its truth from readers is not doing its job.

Obviously, King and his stories have done their job for decades.  And he's not ready to quit yet.

If  you're interested in writing or reading, or if you're just interested in Stephen King, I recommend this book highly.

Now, on to the next.  This time I'm going back to history with a story about the 1906 earthquake, A Crack in the Edge of the World.  Another disaster awaits!

Lakes and Rivers

Well, I guess I've neglected my reading blog for too long!  I've read three books in the three weeks I've been away, so I haven't been exactly shirking my reading duties, but I now have three books to write about.

I finally finished Rising Tide, the story of the 1927 flood, last week.  I had to take a break from it while I was on vacation, partly because it's hard to focus on and partly because I needed a break from the frustration and sadness I felt reading about all the really big mistakes and the abuse of power that created the disaster.

So I read a murder mystery instead. Mysteries are fast reads, light and satisfying. Everything works out in the end--we learn who dun-it, the perpetrator gets punished, and none of the principal characters get killed.  The book I read, Motion to Suppress, by Perri O'Shaughnessy--really a pair of sisters, Pamela and Mary O'Shaughnessy--was their first novel, and it was quite gripping.  It takes place in Lake Tahoe and is about a wrongly accused woman and her defense attorney who is trying to prove she is innocent before the murder trial is over. It's a familiar plot, but it had some inventive elements and plenty of twists! I recommend it and the authors to all mystery lovers.

Rising Tide was an eye-opener on many fronts; I learned a lot about the Mississippi River's history as an avenue of commerce, about the depth of corruption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and about the immense suffering of African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the south during this time.  It's still terribly shocking to think such horrors went on in our supposedly law-revering country in full view of the public (and often with its consent if not participation), including the media!

I was also taken with how complex the issue really was--no simple solution could be found for dealing with all the warring factions that coalesced around the mighty Mississippi and its habit of flooding the land.  Even now, the river still holds sway, despite all the measures taken to contain or control it over the last two centuries.

Rising Tide is an interesting book--filled with lots of detail and human drama.  And to think that the author only talks about one small part of the vast area affected by the 1927 flood!  I recommend it, especially for those who love American history.  It's a story that everyone should know, but be prepared to be outraged.

Once I finished Rising Tide, I felt the need for something smaller, more intimate and shorter.  The book I settled on, Shadow Tag, filled the bill.  It's the latest novel by Louise Erdrich, an Ojibwe writer from Minnesota who has an amazing range. She writes about indigenous people--individuals and families--but she also writes about the non-Indians who live with and near them.  Her stories are always compelling and sometimes disturbing, but never fail to ring true.  Shadow Tag, about a couple's failing marriage and the attempts of their family to deal with it somehow, seemed especially real in that it was, I think, partly autobiographical.  As I was reading it, I couldn't help recalling Erdrich's own seemingly perfect marriage that ended after years of turmoil that no one knew about until it happened. Not long after, Erdrich's husband, himself a writer, committed suicide.  You may want to read an interesting article about the family's problems here:  A Writer's Descent.  I recommend waiting, though, until you've read the novel so you're not looking for connections.

I haven't decided what I'll read next.  Maybe another novel, maybe something else.  I'll let you know, and as always, I'll keep you posted.  Sooner this time!

The Mighty Mississippi

Despite my best intentions, I didn't get past the introduction to Henry Louis Gates' lit-crit book, The Signifying Monkey.  Perhaps another time I'll be up for reading it.  I decided to switch to another book that continues my river theme: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America, by John M. Barry, who wrote another book I have but haven't yet read, The Great Influenza. 

Before reading this book, I'd heard of the 1927 flood, but only from references to it over the years, the most compelling of which is the song, "Louisiana, 1927,"  by Randy Newman.  Here's a rendition of the song on YouTube, complete with pictures of the flood: Louisiana.

Rising Tide doesn't start at the time of the flood, though.  It starts back in the early 19th century, when people in power were trying to determine how to control the Mississippi's mighty course and its frequent inundations of the surrounding lands.  Their goal was to make the Mississippi more amenable to commercial river traffic so that goods could be transported more quickly and easily between the north and south and between east and west, to accomodate the rapid expansion of settlement to the newly acquired territories.

People of the early 19th century also knew that the land beside the river, because the river had flooded it for millennia, was particularly rich land, good for farming.  People in power wished to claim that land for farming and settlement and to bring more people, more workers, and more money to areas that were previously considered wasteland.  If only they could control the mighty Mississippi, they thought, they could make that wish a reality.  So they set about solving the flooding problem, thinking the combination of American ingenuity and American capital would be no match for even the strongest river.

Unfortunately, according to John Barry, American politics also got involved, and that's where things started to go wrong. I've read about a third of the book so far (it's a hefty 500+ pages), and I'm finding it quite informative but also suspenseful, knowing that all the bad decisions are going to result in the most devastating river flood in American history.

The book also includes a side story of civil rights and the terrible effects of Reconstruction.  Barry focuses in on the Mississippi Delta region and the efforts of some powerful families to shape it into a model of the New South, reborn with the help of better cotton and bigger plantations and streamlined river transport, with newly freed African Americans as key players, or some would say, pawns.

All the drama of greed and the machinations of powerful men make this book more of a tale than a history, which also makes it a good read. Though Barry does bring in quite a bit of evidence to back up his claims, I have to remember that this is one man's take on the events of that era.

In my next post, I'll let you know how things are going with the river and the men who seek to control it.

Reached the Pacific! On to the Next!

I finished River Horse this week, as predicted.  The last part was a bit anti-climactic, though, and perhaps deliberately so.  Once Heat-Moon and crew reached the Columbia River, there were few challenges other than to stick with it to the end, and that's kind of the way I felt about the book.

Curiously, Heat-Moon tells us more about himself at the end, especially his trouble with keeping a relationship going.  He even hints that he is emotionally reserved, possibly the reason he had two failed marriages.  It was an odd part of the book.  After reading through all those pages of physical description, I didn't really want to know all that personal information, especially because it puts him in a rather bad light. I wanted to go on thinking of him as a great adventurer, not as an emotional cripple running away from relationships.

Oh, well.  I may decide to read his Blue Highways at some point; it's the one of the four books by him that I don't own.  I have PrairyErth, but have not read beyond the first couple of chapters.  That one is also on my list.  I see from looking at Heat-Moon's Amazon.com page that he's written another travel book, published in 2008, Roads to Quoz, about looking for the peculiar in America.  He takes his wife (third?) along on that one, so maybe he got a clue about relationships after his river journey "flattened" (as he puts it) his second marriage.

When I finished River-Horse, I returned to the Dick Francis novel I was reading, Crossfire, co-authored by his son, Felix.  (I sometimes wonder how much Dick got involved with writing in the last few years of his life.) Felix is as talented as his father, it seems, and will surely continue the Francis tradition of writing compelling mysteries about the horsey set.  Crossfire was a very good read--a complex plot involving an Afghanistan veteran who lost his leg in an IED explosion.  When he returns to England to reluctantly begin his civilian life, he finds he must rescue his horse trainer mother, whether she wants him to or not.  I recommend it highly, especially to Francis fans.

But what to read next?  I think this time I'll take another turn to the scholarly, and read a book I've been meaning to read for many years: The Signifying Monkey, by Henry Louis Gates, first published in 1988.  It's a book that attempts to help readers understand African American literature through understanding African American mythology and cultural roots.

You may know Gates from his PBS specials about genealogy, African American Lives and Faces of America.  You may also remember his dispute with the Cambridge police when he was arrested for trying to break into his own house. (See report here: Gates' arrest.)  Later, he and the police officer had a "beer summit" with Obama.

Though The Signifying Monkey will not be an easy read, I'm looking forward to delving back into lit crit.  Since I am currently watching the Ken Burns miniseries Jazz, I think Gates' book will add to my enjoyment of it. 

So stay tuned!

The Rockies: All Downhill from Here!

At this point in River-Horse we're in the Rockies, boating or canoeing down mountain streams. It's a difficult way, since the water is unpredictable, and what's underneath the water even more so. But they're slowly heading toward the Continental Divide, where they will finally be going downstream, after weeks of traveling upstream on the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. 

The writer is an interesting fellow; his voice is quite distinctive.  He characterizes his crew and others he meets along the way as highly skeptical of his venture, and critical of him for trying it.  It seems in every chapter he needs to make it clear to the reader and his crew that he's the one true believer in their ability to make it to the Pacific.  Every day, it seems, he must convince them to stick with it. He keeps going despite the odds because to him it's a quest--they're just along for the ride.  I wonder if his crew would characterize it the same way.  It'd be interesting to see if their comments have been published anywhere.

Heat-Moon does seem an egotist, but he also seems very concerned about the environment and how industry and government are wrecking it.  He acknowledges the changes that are slowly taking place, though, in how waterways are treated and used.  (He gives a begrudging nod to the Corps of Engineers now and again.)  Sometimes he even seems conflicted about what is better--the improved waterway or the wild river.  The wild river is more scenic, more natural, but not very easy to navigate, and in those places where it has been made into a channel or a reservoir, Heat-Moon seems at times relieved to have a break from the natural river with all its twists and turns, variable depths, and unexpected hazards.  One can imagine that's how people in the 19th and early 20th centuries felt when the improvements were first made.

I'm still enjoying the book and the author's rich descriptions of each place with its flora and fauna and its bipedal inhabitants and their structures.  I think, though, that I too am going to be happy when we're on the downhill side of the journey, at the tail of the Snake, as it were.  The fact that I feel that way is a masterful stroke on the author's part, I think.  He is not just chronicling the journey; he's making the reader feel it as much as possible the way he felt it.  When we come to the end we will be as jubilant as he, I think.

There's an interesting part of the book that points to that effect in a way.  When he's traveling through the flat landscape of the Dakotas, instead of narrating the highlights day by day, as he has done throughout the book, he reproduces his journal entries covering several days at once.  In this way he shows us that it is so tedious, so unchanging from one day to the next, that summary is the best way to convey it.  What was most interesting to me, though, is realizing that he had been narrating one day at a time (a day per chapter)--he had purposely been going that slowly.

I hope to have River-Horse finished by next week.  I'm going to feel a little like Lewis and Clark, I think, by the time I reach the Pacific: "Ocean in view! O! the joy."

The Slow Route to the Sea

Nikawa is slowly crossing the country by waterway, and encountering many interesting people and places along the way. There have been challenges, mostly because the year they chose to make this journey was a year of exceptionally high water and flooding.  Both the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers were quite full and flooding in some places.  They've encountered people building sandbag levees to keep the water out, and they've dealt with the effects of fast moving, deep water.  One of the most nerve-wracking effects is the number of uprooted trees and the amount of other debris that ends up in the water, lurking just below or above the surface, nearly invisible until they're close to it.

They've almost run out of gas on more than one occasion, having to hike into town with gas cans to get enough to take them to the next town.  But they've had lots of unexpected help, too.  In many towns and even a few cities, people have been willing to give them rides to get gas or supplies and offer them tips on where to stay or get a good meal. A few people have even tagged along for a stretch, helping them negotiate a particular portion of the river, guiding them around its hidden dangers.  And in cafes and taverns along the way, people have provided conversation and cameraderie and interest in their project.

I'm past the middle now, as are Mr. Heat-Moon and his companions.  They're on the upper Missouri, where the river is still largely untamed.  (That has its advantages and disadvantages, apparently.)  Soon they'll have to switch to mountain streams and face all the challenges those waterways will bring.

Despite the slow pace of the narrative (which matches the slow pace of the journey), I find myself eager to see what waits for the intrepid travelers around the next bend of the river.  That to me is the mark of a good book!

See you in the Rockies!

More to Come Soon!

I'm afraid I've been remiss in posting to my blog these last couple of weeks.  I have a pretty good excuse: I was on vacation, and busy with traveling, so I wasn't able to do much reading, except for a couple of mysteries which I may discuss later.

I've returned to work this week, however, which means bus rides and reading.  I'm still working on River Horse.  Mr. Heat-Moon and his pilot are now traveling down the Ohio River, sometimes through locks and dams, past a variety of towns and cities where they encounter interesting places and people.

I'll write more about this book this coming weekend.  So stay tuned!

Dispatches from Nikawa

Well, it turns out that River Horse is a very interesting book! It's a travelogue of sorts, being the chronicle of William Least Heat-Moon's journey across America by watercraft (mainly his C-dory he has named Nikawa, an Osage word meaning river-horse).  He starts at the mouth of the Hudson River and ends at the mouth of the Columbia River, staying on rivers the whole way except for two places where he portages his C-dory for some miles, in New York and in the Rocky Mountains.

So far I've read about the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, Lake Erie, and the Allegheny River. The author describes the trip down (or up) each waterway, bringing in history and geography about the river and the surrounding areas. The first surprise I got was that the Erie Canal is still open, although no longer being used for commercial shipping.  There were interesting descriptions of how the locks work and what the towns along the way look like.

I was also surprised to learn that Lake Erie was rough sailing.  Heat-Moon and his pilot had such a tough time going across it, in fact, that they decided to get out of it sooner than they had planned.  The reason, apparently, is its relative shallowness, along with the winds that rake across it constantly.

As someone used to traveling by car or plane or train, I was struck by the different perspective one gets from a watercraft--seeing the backsides of towns, as it were.  And also striking was the realization that the country is no longer set up for water transport as it was long ago; the car has taken over as our means of getting from one place to the next, and all the commerce is geared toward attracting motor-vehicle-borne travelers.  I would imagine that in the old days, billboards and other signs could be found just outside a town, but facing the river!

Heat-Moon gives us all the details of the trip, from the technical aspects of sailing through locks to his more poetically-expressed thoughts about what he sees.  He's a man who loves words, so he uses plenty of them, yet I never get the sense that his prose is wordy in the pejorative sense. And since I love words too, I don't mind!

Next is the Ohio, which is a long river with many towns and cities along the way. Should be interesting!  Stay tuned for more dispatches from Nikawa.

From Murder Mysteries to Nature's Mysteries

I finished Body Work this week and while it did have a slow start, it picked up after a while and I got involved in the plot and some of the characters, once they were finally introduced.  It remained a plot that had trouble hanging together, though.  Loose ends were finally tied up, but by then my interest in those plot segments had waned.  I would recommend this book only to dedicated mystery readers.

So now I have to choose a new book, and I'm thinking about River Horse, by William Least Heat-Moon.  All the current talk of rivers and flooding has got me interested in reading about them.  River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America chronicles a journey the author took from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, all by river.  I bought the book quite a while ago, and have been wanting to find the time to read it.  But now it seems I have run out of excuses. The book's not short, though: 528 pages. Perhaps that's what discouraged me from reading it before; like Jackie Robinson, the daunting heft of River Horse kept it on the shelf all these years.

But no more.  River Horse will fall like the others, and I will be better for it.  And so, I hope, will you!

Who Killed Nadia? Who Cares?

Well, I finally finished Jackie Robinson, and I now know why Arnold Rampersad's biography was more than 500 pages.  Jackie Robinson lived life to the fullest.  It seems there wasn't a day in the man's life that wasn't dedicated to some higher purpose, despite the many setbacks and sorrows he experienced in his 53 years.  And though impulsive, outspoken and quick to anger, Robinson was an admirable man, I think.  I'm very glad I got a chance to learn about him and refresh my memory of the twentieth century and especially of the civil rights movement and all the people who were involved, for good or ill.  Jackie Robinson was there at the center of it all, even in his final years when his health deteriorated and he struggled just to get around.  I would recommend this biography highly, but if you read it, be prepared for the full meal deal!

I've now moved on to another murder mystery, Body Work, by Sara Paretsky, famous for her detective character, V.I. Warshawski. (Kathleen Turner plays her in a 1991 film by that name: V.I. Warshawski.)

Victoria Warshawski is a private investigator of the old-school, hard-boiled detective variety.  I haven't read many books in this series (I think this is the second), so I don't know much of the character's history, but I remember liking the one I did read, as well as another Paretsky novel (Bleeding Kansas) that wasn't a Warshawski installment and wasn't a mystery per se. 

This time, though, I'm not so sure.  The plot of Body Work seems a bit complicated and so far I'm finding it cumbersome and hard to get into.  As any mystery fiction reader knows, a good mystery should above all be gripping.  If the writer keeps me dawdling along, unable to understand who the people are or why I should care about what happens to them, I won't enjoy the book as much as one that has me hooked from the start.

I'm afraid Body Work is shaping up to be of the non-gripping variety.  The plot centers on a murdered artist who paints pictures on the nearly nude body of another artist, a woman who sits on stage in a bar and invites customers to paint on her.  Both murdered woman and body artist are unpleasant characters, and I find myself not caring much about them.  In fact, all the characters I've met so far, suspect or no, are unappealing, including the P.I. herself.  She's been hired to find out what she can about the accused murderer of Nadia (the dead artist), but she's pretty crabby about it.  The police's only suspect is an Iraq veteran suffering from PTSD.  His father, V.I.'s client, thinks he's innocent, but Victoria is not so sure. Though I'm 1/3 the way through the book, neither she nor the readers have learned much about her client (she hasn't even interviewed him yet), but he might turn out to be the most sympathetic character of the bunch.

It seems that the writer is leaning a bit heavily on the titillation factor of the nude artist, hoping that will keep her reader's attention, but I find it a bit distracting, especially when we keep returning to the bar and the body artist's rather boring act night after night.  All the people we meet there are hostile and I want to stop hearing about them or find out a little more quickly whether or not they're involved in the crime.

Nevertheless, I'll plug along and maybe finally get interested in who killed Nadia and why.  I'll let you know how it's going in my next post.

Spring Break

This past week, I must confess, I took a break from the intensity of Jackie Robinson's life story and read a murder mystery, the latest from Michael Connelly: The Fifth Witness.

I enjoy Michael Connelly's novels, and this one was particularly good. It features one of his continuing characters, Micky Haller, a defense attorney.  There's usually a current events angle in his plots; this one featured the recent mortgage foreclosure mess--the banker who is foreclosing on a home loan is murdered and the woman who is losing her house is the accused. 

Connelly gives readers an unlikable defendant and an attorney who wants to believe she is innocent.  There are many twists, some involving unscrupulous business men with ties to the Mafia, as well as a couple of romantic subplots.  I won't spoil it by telling you how it ends, but believe me, it was a quick, enjoyable read.

This coming week I intend to finish up with Jackie Robinson then move on to the next book.

By the way, I'm afraid the closing out sale at a local Borders Books store snagged me last weekend--at $2.50 a book, how could I resist?  I now have about fifteen additional books in my library!  But there's no problem.  Having plenty to read? It's all good.

Third Base . . . Won't Be Long Now!

I'm getting close to finishing Robinson's big life as told by Rampersad in his big book, and I must say that the amount of living Jackie packed into his short life is staggering! Before, during, and after baseball, Jackie showed that he would always "drink / Life to the lees" (Tennyson, "Ulysses").  Rampersad makes the connection to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses, and I think it's quite apt. ( Here's a link to the poem for those who want to take a look: Ulysses. The poem is one of my favorites.)

It's no wonder Rampersad needed 512 pages to tell Jackie's story, because it's America's story as well.  I'm finding that there's very little in the first half of our century that Jackie was not involved in, especially with respect to civil rights.  He was there struggling with Jim Crow and its effects from the twenties to the seventies, with dignity and passion and respect for anyone who cared and was willing to help, no matter their creed or color.  The book reminds me a little of Forrest Gump, though in Jackie Robinson, all the main character's brushes with history really happened.

By the time I'm finished with this biography, I'm going to feel like I know all these people.  Yesterday was Jackie Robinson Day, and I wonder if people really understand the man they're paying tribute to in baseball stadiums across the country.  He paved the way for that one area of integration, but he didn't stop there. He dedicated his life to achieving racial equality and harmony.  He was a controversial guy, and far from perfect, but he was larger than life.  Just reading about all the many things he got into and the many people he knew in his life has been exhausting. What it must have been like to know him!

Jackie died in 1972, and right now I'm in the mid-sixties, so it won't be long.  And when I reach the end of this book, I'm going take a nice break with a mystery novel, simple and short!

Halfway to Home

I'm about halfway through Jackie Robinson's biography now, and I continue to learn about the man's life.  It's now the early fifties, when Jackie has established himself as a professional ballplayer and more people of color are entering major league baseball. But while the story of his ordeal in getting there was riveting, it was also hard to read about; what Jackie had to put up with from the time he signed with the Dodgers' minor league team through his first season in the majors was appalling.  I'm deeply impressed that he managed to get through it.

By the fifties, the vocal opposition to integrating baseball has not stopped but has lessened--publicly, at least.  What was interesting to learn about the late forties period, though, was that Jackie didn't make as much money as some other star ballplayers were making at the time, so he had to take other jobs to increase his income.  He frequently went on barnstorming tours following the baseball season, and did some endorsements and work on television.

Also interesting was the fact that Jackie testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in response to Paul Robeson's statements about black Americans' patriotism.  He managed to stand up for black Americans (including Robeson) while making it clear that he did not share Robeson's views.

Right now in the book Jackie's life story is being made into a movie, The Jackie Robinson Story, which came out in 1950.  Jackie has reached the point where he is treated well by most everyone he meets, though Jim Crow continues for the rest of black America, even his wife when he is not with her. This is troubling to him, says the author.  There may be more on this subject later in the biography.

I'm still enjoying the book though sometimes the details get a bit overwhelming and I find myself "fast forwarding" through some sections.  I'm also picking up on the author's purpose in writing the book.  Much like the author of The Bounty, Arnold Rampersad seems to want to rehabilitate the reputation of his subject.  Since I know little of Jackie Robinson's reputation for other than playing baseball, I don't know what assertions the author's countering when he emphasizes again and again Robinson's restraint, kindness, good nature, and friendliness.  To Rampersad, it seems, Jackie's the model baseball player, husband, father, business man, friend, and associate.  No one could be that perfect, so it makes me think Rampersad "doth protest too much"--is he failing to tell us the bad things because he doesn't want to give the stories about Jackie credence?  Or is it true that Jackie Robinson was simply a good guy?  I don't know, but in order to find out, I'd have to read the past stories about Jackie, which I don't want to do, at least not now.

So I'll go along with Mr. Rampersad a bit further, skip over some of the details and try to take his protestations of Jackie's perfections with a tiny grain of salt.

And I'll keep you posted!

From Rain Gods to Baseball Legends

Well, I guess it's been a while since I've written about my reading adventures! Since my last post, I finished the novel about the Angel family, The Rain God, and started a biography of Jackie Robinson, by Arnold Rampersad, entitled Jackie Robinson: A Biography, published in 1997.

The Rain God was an excellent book, and much better, I thought, than its sequel, Migrant Souls. Perhaps part of the reason Rain God was a better book is that it was largely autobiographical. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Miguel Chico (little Miguel), a gay man who drinks too much and suffers from intestinal cancer. The author is also a gay man with a difficult family and so is writing from his own point of view in this first book (as opposed to the sequel, where Islas is writing from the point of view of the women).

The Rain God is also better because it is better written, technically speaking.  I was much more able to get involved with the characters, I think, because of how smoothly the novel flows. The writing style enhances rather than obstructs the imaginative process.  I guess it's hard to explain!  By the time I finished this novel, I felt like I knew the people I met there.  And I learned a lot about the desert and Mexican Americans whose families have a long history of living in the borderland region (going back to the 1500s). I recommend both books highly.

So, now it's back to non-fiction, this time with a hefty biography by Arnold Rampersad, the biographer of Langston Hughes and other noted African Americans. (I've read the one about Langston Hughes.)  Jackie Robinson is 512 pages long and densely packed with factual and anecdotal information about the famous ballplayer, from his humble beginnings in Georgia to his late life business success.  It's written in chronological order; so far I've gotten to his World War II years.

I've found from reading just this small part of the book that I previously knew virtually nothing about Jackie Robinson; what I've learned so far is impressive.  What stands out more than anything is that Robinson was tremendously gifted athletically and incredibly disciplined and determined mentally.  What he was able to accomplish against formidable odds is astonishing.

Jackie was skilled in a wide variety of sports--football, basketball, baseball, track, tennis, table tennis. He lettered in four sports at UCLA, despite being there less than two years.  If he had been white, he would have been famous when he was in high school.  He would have been signed to a professional team as soon as he was eligible. He would have been celebrated across the country and treated with dignity, instead of being ignored or passed over for honors, and made to submit to Jim Crow humiliation everywhere he went.

So, this is a very interesting biography by a writer I enjoy.  I've had the book a number of years and started to read it once before, but got overwhelmed by its size. So I'm looking forward to getting to the end . . . sometime around May, I figure.  Stay tuned.