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.

Narratives of Human Struggle

The last two weeks I've read a mystery by Nevada Barr, The Rope, a novel by Chicano writer Victor Martinez, Parrot in the Oven , and begun a scholarly book on the history of technology, America As Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings, by David E. Nye.

Nevada Barr is a great mystery writer, and she gets better with every book.  The Rope was a prequel to her sleuth Anna Pigeon's career as a National Park Ranger, detailing what happened to make a recently widowed Broadway stage manager decide to become a park ranger.  It made me like Anna Pigeon even more than I already did.  I recommend it to all mystery lovers.

The second novel, Parrot in the Oven, was a story of a boy's struggles with poverty, an alcoholic father, a mother trying to cope, problems of various siblings and the difficulties of adolescence and emerging manhood.  The title refers to the story of a parrot who is happy in the oven because he doesn't know he's in the oven and about to be cooked. It was well written, though sad and at times irritating.  Things work out okay in the end, but you feel as if they will go bad again in the near future.  The boy seems capable of getting through it though, and that gives the reader hope. I would recommend it.

The book I'm currently reading, America As Second Creation, I got from the library.  I wanted to read it because it pertains to the Little House books I've been reading to my mother for the past several months.  Reading all those stories of life on the American frontier, I got to thinking about common themes of such narratives, and I wondered what critics had to say about them.  This book talks about those narratives and the importance of technology to the "progress" they chronicle.

The book is very good, well written and enlightening.  I'm about 1/4 the way through and so far the writer, David E. Nye, has talked about the importance of a handful of technologies to the post-Revolutionary stories of settling the west: the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam.  For example, the axe was central to cutting down trees and building a log cabin and the furniture to go in that cabin. 

Nye also talks about other innovations of the 19th century, such as the decision to survey the unsettled areas and then set up parcels of land based on a grid, rather than allowing the parcels to conform to land features such as streams or hills.  The land was simply divided into squares according to lattitude and longitude, with no consideration for what terrain the boundaries might encompass.  This made for some rather strange settlement claims, with people having some good land and some not so good land in the same 64-acre plot.  The reason for it, says Nye, was to allow people to buy the land sight unseen.  Easterners eager for virtually free land would be told exactly where their land was and what its exact dimensions were.  Anyone who's ever been to or even flown over the Midwest knows what this arrangement looks like--you can still see the original grid-like design of prairie towns and homesteads and easily pick out all four points of the compass.

As you can imagine, the fate of all those people who were already living on the supposedly empty prairie was not discussed or even considered in what the author calls "foundation" narratives of the creation of America and the fulfilling of its manifest destiny.  But the effects of the settlement of the west were expressed in what Nye refers to as "counter-narratives" that were also being written during the 19th and 20th centuries and somewhat mitigated the triumphant tone of the dominant stories of the period.

Chapters ahead discuss water mills, pollution, railroads and canals, irrigation and factories.  Should be interesting! I'll keep you posted.

What Humans Are Capable Of

I finished Bound for Canaan this week, and I can't tell you how enlightening the book was! There was so much information, so much of which I didn't know, that I was dazzled!  I now know how very, very complex the whole issue of slavery was for many more years than I realized, and I have a great deal of admiration for all the people involved in making slavery the major moral issue it became.  I now look at the black people who live around me with new eyes, wondering if they are descended from slaves who benefited from or who were involved in making possible the Underground Railroad.

I really believe everyone should read this book because it will fill in all the blanks in your education about the Underground Railroad.  Most people are content to think the whole thing consisted of a bunch of brave white people who helped hide runaway slaves in their attics or cellars.  With the exception of naming Harriet Tubman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, most people probably couldn't bring to mind a single abolitionist or Underground Railroad conductor.  I was like that.  But there were hundreds upon hundreds of people needed to make it work over those decades, people who stepped up, making large and small contributions, doing it mostly for no monetary gain--courageous people who risked their lives and often their livelihoods to keep the enslavement of fellow humans from being comfortably practiced in this nation, and finally, though it took a great war, to end it.

I learned about the many cities, such as Detroit, that served as centers of underground activity from very early on.  I knew about Cincinnati and Philadelphia, but I didn't know about the many other places where slave holders and their hired kidnappers (looking for escaped slaves) were afraid to go because they would not be able to recover their "property" without a fight.  I didn't know how widespread the Underground Railroad eventually became, to where protecting fugitives was openly acknowledged and encouraged by whole towns, counties, and even states.  I didn't know that there were thousands of American black people who had to escape this country all together, settling in Canada where they lived as citizens and where they were beyond the reach of slave catchers who would kidnap them and drag them back to bondage.

But I also didn't know that slaves in the deep south had very little hope of escape, so tightly controlled was the entire region's plantation system, the slave economy and its structure so deeply entrenched in the state and local governments, and indeed the culture of the region, that anyone who wanted to help slaves or who believed slavery was wrong had no way of acting on those beliefs without taking a terrible risk.  There were few slaves, apparently, from Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia or South Carolina who escaped to freedom in those decades before the civil war. North Carolina for a while had a colony of Quakers who were active in helping the enslaved, but eventually, when the laws got more and more stringent and heavily biased toward slave holders, the North Carolina abolitionists had to escape themselves or risk death.

I have never have had much sympathy with the southern cause, but I came away from this book with tremendous anger toward the stubbornness of those slave holders and really the entire system, clinging desperately to what they must have known was an evil, evil system, and all for the sake of money, really, when it comes down to it. They wanted cheap labor, and as my mother points out astutely, they didn't want to have to work.  They fancied themselves aristocrats, I guess, like the 18th century lords and ladies of England and France, lounging about in their castles or mansions while the lowly did all the work.

Of course, the whole country benefited from the slave economy that made the production of cotton and other staple crops so cheap that we could lead the world in the manufacture of fabric and other goods. No part of our nation is exempt from blame.  Think of all the mills and factories that existed because of cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and rice, all the goods produced and sold to people who could afford to buy them because they were making money on the backs of their fellow humans.  Think of all those nice young New England girls who worked in the cotton mills, able to buy trinkets or send home money to farm families because of people who had been kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, raped, beaten, starved and, if not killed, in every way possible demeaned and destroyed their entire lives.  If they had known, would those young women have thought it a fair exchange?  I wonder.

But what's perhaps most amazing about this book is the hope that springs from every page.  Despite all the conditions that made it next to impossible to fight against this evil institution, people still did.  They risked everything to eradicate what they saw as a stain on our democracy, and they won! Eventually, they won. In this book, human deeds are shown to be both horrifying and awe-inspiring.  People are capable of both great evil and great good.  And we should never forget that.  Despite the fact that we are still fighting the battle that began when the first kidnapped Africans landed in this part of the world, we are capable of triumphing some day.

I've always believed in humans' ability to triumph, and Bound for Canaan, despite the horrors it brings to light, has only reinforced that belief.

Next time I'll talk about something more mundane--a new mystery by Nevada Barr.  See you then!

Underground Revelations

I've made good progress in Bound for Canaan this week. It's very well written, and full of interesting information about the Underground Railroad.  The first part of the book deals with the beginnings of the network, which was, apparently, never formally constituted.  It simply evolved, over the decades, from its beginnings as isolated pockets of people (principally in the North) who believed slavery was evil and should be resisted, into something widespread, well known and well organized.

The anti-slavery underground was more than just networks of people who helped the enslaved to escape to freedom.  People also helped the fugitives find jobs and establish lives in communities (mostly in the Northern states).  They helped with the cause of abolition, too, politically and socially.  Many of the people involved were members of religious groups who came to believe slavery was a grievous sin that must be eradicated immediately.  The Quakers were the most prominent of such groups, but the Methodists were also early advocates of resistance. Ministers would urge their congregations to join with them in helping slaves in any way they could and to convert others to the cause.

One major thing I learned from this book is that the Underground Railroad was not just a group of sympathetic northern wealthy whites. The author makes the point repeatedly that the Underground Railroad involved people of all ethnicities and socioeconomic groups who came from both the north and the south.  Many black people, both free and enslaved, helped fugitives escape and establish new lives.  Some helped through the courts, others through the media, through their churches or their businesses.

As with every history book I've read, what struck me with Bound for Canaan is the immense complexity of this period in our history.  There was an awful lot going on with this issue in the late 18th century into the 19th century.  After reading this book, there is no way anyone can say that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.  Everyone was talking about it; everyone had an opinion about the rightness of slavery, how the enslaved should be dealt with, what to do with freed blacks, how to help the newly freed people.  Many people were frightened by the possibility of the violence that this problem and its solution seemed to bring with it.

The author also mentions the cotton gin, and how that transformed the more diverse southern economy into the cotton monoculture economy it became, and how it changed the fate of the enslaved and the formerly enslaved.  The increased value of cotton and the outlawing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 made slaves more valuable than ever.  Owners were very reluctant to let them go, and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made it possible for slaves to be hunted throughout the United States.  For that reason alone, many slaves traveled all the way to Canada so that they could not be caught and returned. But even freed slaves or those who had been born free were not safe from slave catchers, who stood to gain from selling any dark-skinned person they could kidnap.  And of course those kidnapped people had to be rescued, too, adding to the numbers of those in need of help and the difficulty of helping them.

One important Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist was the Reverend Rankin, whose house high on a hill overlooking the town of Ripley, Ohio and the Ohio River gave hope to slaves coming through Kentucky on their way north. His house still sits there.  You can visit it and imagine how he lived and carried out his crucial mission for over thirty years.  He was only one of many, though.  Some of the people involved in this crusade helped hundreds, even thousands of slaves escape bondage over the decades.

But I guess I've said enough for now.  And I'm not even half way through! There's much more to come next time, so stay tuned!

Sticks and Stones and Devilish Neighbors

This week I finished reading the book about witches, The Devil of Great Island. Though it was short, only 207 pages, it was pretty slow going, probably due to the fact that the book seems to be truly scholarly, which means that it's well documented but not particularly compelling as a story.  But I did learn some interesting things.

One of the things I learned is that early colonial New England was a very complex and contentious place--lots of arguing and fighting among the inhabitants, whether English, French, or Indian. For the most part, the fighting seemed to be between religious factions, yet the causes stemmed more from property disputes and politics than religious practices or freedoms.  One interesting fact is that the squabbling among colonists got so bad at one point that the English government had to step in and tell the Massachusetts Bay folks that they had to be more tolerant of other religions!

But the Crown's meddling in colonial affairs did little to improve matters. In fact, their untidy method of granting land parcels was what caused some of the problems in the first place. Other problems arose from the diverse group of colonists, some of whom had widely divergent ideas about how to establish a village or a colony. Their conflicts with the natives who were displaced by their increasingly large settlements also factored into the tense atmosphere.

One result of all this fighting, the author Emerson Baker argues, was an increase in accusations of witchcraft.  According to the author, accusing neighbors of witchcraft was a way to get them out of the way and then grab their land or property.  But there was another side to the witchcraft controversy: the people who were accused probably were guilty of harming people, Baker believes, just not as witches.  The episodes of stone throwing, for instance, were probably secret attacks by very mortal neighbors who were unhappy with the victims' behavior and saw no other way of persuading them to stop.  Unfortunately, with one particularly exasperating fellow, George Walton, even repeated stonings failed to curb his bad behavior. His next door neighbor, Thomas Walford, was one of his victims. Since Mr. Walford was also my ninth great grandfather, I found the book's chapter on the Walfords very interesting, as you can imagine.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the period it covers, the late 17th century in New England, but be aware that it is a history book, not a narrative. 

For my next book, I'm going to stick with history and plunge into a book on the Underground Railroad that I've been meaning to read, Bound for Canaan.  I'll let you know how that goes next time!

17th Century New England Witches: Fact and Fiction

For the past two weeks, I haven't been reading much because I wasn't taking the bus every day, but I did manage to finish a novel by Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future.  As with all her novels, this one was about generations of women and their relationships with each other and the men in their life.  And there's always an element of magic with Hoffman's work; this story was no exception. In the case of the book's main characters, the Sparrow women, the magic goes all the way back to the 1600s in Massachusetts, with the appearance of a mysterious girl who walked out of the woods one day speaking gibberish, who attracted flocks of sparrows that perched on her as she worked in her garden, and who was later found to be unable to feel pain.  They took her for a witch, of course, and executed her for her supposed "crimes."

Her descendents all suffered in some way for their ancestor's deeds, and the story is in part about how they deal with that legacy.  It was a good story, compelling but with a nice, comfortable pace. There were mysteries to be unraveled for each generation of Sparrow women, and problems that found satisfying solutions by the end of the book. I recommend it highly.

In keeping with the theme of early Massachusetts, witchcraft and mysterious happenings, I'm now reading a history book, The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft & Conflict in Early New England, by Emerson W. Baker.  Mr. Baker is a history professor at Salem State College, and so he knows his witches.  The book tells about some strange doings in Maine and Massachusetts in the late 1600s (incidences of lithobolia, for instance) that many people of the time attributed to witchcraft; since then, they've been attributed to ghosts, poltergeists, and extraterrestrials.  It's pretty interesting so far, though I'm only about a quarter of the way through.

I started this book once before when I bought it to read about one of my ancestors, Jane Walford, who was one of the people featured in the stories.  I had put it aside because I was already involved in another book.  But now I'm committed to finishing it.

I'll let you know how things come out next time.

From a Pirate King to an Old, Bold Detective

I finished the Laurie King novel, Pirate King, then went on to the latest Michael Connelly mystery novel, The Drop, featuring Harry Bosch, aging police detective.  Pirate King finally got fast paced at the end, when the principals got kidnapped, managed to escape and unravelled the mystery at last.  It was quite satisfying and I was sad to see it end. As I've probably said before, I recommend this Sherlock Holmes' wife series highly.  Start with The Beekeeper's Apprentice if you want to get into it.

Michael Connelly is a very good writer; his plots are complex and his characters flawed and therefore quite believable. This one had me guessing until the very end--always a good thing in a mystery novel.  It was about two cases: one a cold case that caught a break when a DNA search came up with a hit. The other was about a councilman's son who took a dive off a building but it wasn't clear that it was a suicide.  There were complications in both cases: the cold case's suspect had been only 8 years old at the time of the rape and murder of a young woman.  The hot case was complicated by the councilman's son being the son of Harry's old nemesis in the department--former police chief Irving, who claimed he wanted the truth to come out, and let the chips fall where they may.

I'm not sure what I'll get into next, but I'll let you know next time!

From Nazi Beasts Back to Pirate Kings

Well, I finally finished In The Garden of Beasts and it was a very interesting book. I highly recommend it.  The Dodds managed to complete their tour of duty in Nazi Germany without being physically harmed, but in the end their eyes were opened to all that was going on and could not, by that time, be prevented. 

The Dodds actually stayed only until 1937, but by 1934 William Dodd knew that he had been wrong about Hitler and his regime.  He stayed, trying to show his distaste for the regime, but his actions changed no minds at home and he was ultimately replaced by an ambassador who somehow managed to be more accomodating to the Nazis.

Back in the U.S., Dodd spoke out about what was happening, urging people to get involved in stopping Germany's aggression.  Starting out as a neutral party who wanted to stay out of Germany's politics, Dodd ended up a hero of sorts, though one who tried and failed to get the predominately isolationist U.S. to intervene before it was too late.

I had a chance to go to a talk by the author recently, in which he mentioned the goals he had in writing the book.  It was gratifying to find that what he wanted me to get out of In the Garden of Beasts is exactly what I got. Erik Larson is a great writer; I highly recommend any book written by him.

Once I was done with In the Garden of Beasts, I returned to my Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes novel, Pirate King.  It's pretty detailed and doesn't have the breathless pace of some mysteries, but I'm enjoying it, nonetheless.  I'm about half-way done, and Sherlock Holmes has finally arrived on the scene, so it should get even more interesting from here on out.

I'll let you know how things turn out in my next report.

How the Beasts Took Over the Zoo

Well, this week I decided to stop reading the Laurie R. King book and start reading the latest book I have by Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts, about an American family's experiences in Berlin during 1933-34.  As ever, Mr. Larson does a great job making historical events seem alive to us today. I've read most of his other books, and they are all very well written.

In the Garden of Beasts is a very disturbing portrait of Germany, a country that was in the mid-1930s changing rapidly into the frightening world power that it became by the dawn of WWII. William E. Dodd was an American professor who became ambassador to Germany in 1933 because no one else wanted the job. He ended up spending seven years at his post, but the first year was during a crucial time in world history.  It is this year that Erik Larson chronicles.

What's most disturbing (and interesting) about the story is how easy it was for Hitler to convince the world to go along with him and his attacks on many of his own citizens.  Each escalation of violence and curtailment of human rights was a seemingly small step, the accumulation of which was gradual enough that people who were alarmed allowed themselves to be mollified by the excuses (some of them quite threadbare) offered by the regime.

The book really gets into detail about the principal players in government during this time, both German and American, and the discussions that were going on among the diplomatic corps over what to do about Germany's actions. What should have been seen as clear cut aggressive acts and build up for war were characterized by most officials of our government as necessary actions and Germany's business.

For some reason, we were afraid of making Germany mad at us.  Even when more and more Americans were being attacked by brown shirts and other Nazi zealots, we did not warn people not to travel to Germany because we feared tarnishing Germany's reputation in the world!

There were a few people in high office who saw the handwriting on the wall, but those who did were ignored or discredited, one by Mr. Dodd himself.

An interesting aspect of this book is the side story of Dodd's family, who accompanied him on his posting; in particular, Larson focuses on Dodd's grown daughter, Martha, who enjoyed partying with the Nazis.  She was especially averse to criticizing the Germans, and reading her words you want to just shake her and say, "Wake up!"

I'm about half way through the book and it's about to turn 1934.  Since I don't know much about this era in Germany, I'm in suspense about what will happen next.  The book is riveting.  I can't stop reading it, but it's the kind of fascination you have for a terrible auto accident or a horrific murder scene. You want to turn your head, but also to look, to see it all in its grisly detail.

I'll let you know how things are going for Germany and the Dodds next week. Stay tuned!

Murder on the Light Side

This week I went for something light. I read a Murder She Wrote novel, Gin and Daggers.  These books are written by Donald Bain and are based on the Murder She Wrote series that ran for many years in the 80s and 90s.  They're what are called "cozy" mysteries, meaning they have very little violence or sex and focus on whodunit. The protagonists are often women who are more or less amateurs but somehow manage to solve the mystery anyway because of their natural talent at detection.  The books are formulaic, but satisfying in that they give their readers what they want.

Gin and Daggers was no exception. It was actually much better than I thought it would be (once I got used to the somewhat unnatural sounding dialogue).  It really helps to envision Angela Lansbury's character acting out the part, especially since I always liked that show and others like it (e.g. Diagnosis Murder, Columbo, Matlock, Monk). I recommend it to those who enjoy a fast, fluffy mystery.

This week I'm continuing the latest Laurie R. King mystery, Pirate King, featuring Sherlock Holmes' wife, Mary Russell. That series is delightful--the main character is very appealing and the plots are complex and historically accurate (for the most part).  This one deals with some malfeasance at a British film studio in the 1920s.

Maybe following my foray into genre fiction, I'll get back to some non-fiction.

Meet me here next week for my report!

Central American Solutions

The book I read this week, The Lady Matador's Hotel, by Cristina Garcia, was a very well written novel. It's about a collection of people who are all staying at a hotel in a Central American city.  They are a diverse group comprised of the lady matador, a former guerilla, a man who committed atrocities during the most recent civil war, a Korean businessman with a teenaged girlfriend who's pregnant, a lawyer who brokers baby adoptions, and a Cuban poet and his wife hoping to adopt an infant.  Each of the characters has a particular problem that he or she must solve before the end of the book.  Each does, and in a way that I found unexpected but also strangely satisfying.

This is the first book I've read by Ms. Garcia, though she's written several.  I will definitely try to read more of her work in the future.

I highly recommend The Lady Matador's Hotel.

History of Hope and Struggle

Well, I finally finished In Hope of Liberty, and I must say it's one of the best books of African American history I've read. It was filled with all kinds of information about what life was life for the many people of African descent who lived in the northern states from the beginning of European colonization up to the Civil War.  I learned so much I can't even describe most of it, but the major thing I learned was that the experience of enslaved people, both freed and not freed, was very complex and diverse across the northern colonies, territories, and states.

In addition to that, I was distressed by how difficult it was for blacks even in the north, how they struggled to gain full liberties and rights as citizens of the United States, and how they were resisted by many, many people and institutions over the centuries. I also learned that many white people helped them and were in fact quite vocal about their views on the disgrace that was slavery. There were also many brave African Americans who risked their livelihoods, their homes and even their lives to try to be fully free.

I highly recommend this book to all people who think they know something about African American history, or even American history.  The story of slavery in this country is long and complex, and cannot be told by simply stating that the north was where slaves went to be free.

The next book I read on this topic, I think, will be the one I have about the underground railroad.  I think I'm ready to truly understand that phenomenon after reading In Hope of Liberty.

Next week I start a novel by Cristina Garcia, The Lady Matador's Hotel.

In Hope of Understanding

As it turns out, I didn't stick with The Women even one day longer. I started reading In Hope of Liberty, by James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, and I'm about 1/3 of the way through.  It's a scholarly history book, filled with many facts and details about African American life in the English colonies of the northern U.S., from the first settlements up to the Civil War. 

The story is told in chronological order, so I'm to the early 1800s now in the account. What I've learned so far is both surprising and not surprising.  What's surprising is how much information there is about how these folks fared in the northern colonies, and how well some of them were able to do, even as slaves.  What is not surprising is that they struggled to maintain the freedoms they gained and that many whites actively worked against their efforts.  Moreover, though slavery was outlawed in most of the northern states before the Civil War, the emancipation process was gradual in many of them, taking years, with some slaves not freed until the Emancipation Proclamation.

Nevertheless, the difference in the experiences of enslaved people living in the north versus the south is remarkable.  The smaller number of slaves in northern colonies helped to make whites less paranoid, it seems, and therefore more tolerant of blacks' freedoms.  So some slaves were allowed to become literate, to have time off, to travel to some extent, to make money of their own by hiring themselves out or selling their goods, to learn technical skills, to own property, and to buy their freedom. 

Some slaves were thought of as similar to indentured servants, and were freed after a certain number of years of service.  Some were freed in their masters' will, or freed by those who came to believe slavery was wrong.  The shipbuilding and fishing industries, an important part of the northern coastal economy, employed many blacks, both free and enslaved. They were valued workers and often treated as such by the ships' captains and other sailors, especially out at sea where different social customs could prevail.

Despite all that, though, those who were enslaved still suffered hardships, not the least of which was knowing they were not free.  But free blacks helped their enslaved brethren. There were fairly large populations of free blacks living in cities and towns during the 18th century, where some formed abolitionist societies.  Many blacks, both free and enslaved, along with sympathetic white citizens, wrote articles and petitioned their governors, constantly pressuring for changes to the law, for the abolition of slavery.  And when it was clear that a break with England was coming, blacks (along with non-blacks) made it known that a truly free and democratic society could not also be a slave-holding society.

In Hope of Liberty also talks about the many blacks, slave and free, who served in the wars fought, including the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. Many volunteered, hoping to be freed.  Others were sent in place of their masters who paid for the privilege of staying out of harm's way.  Some slaves who fought well in the war were freed as a reward.  Others were not, having to return to their former status once the war was over.  Some chose to fight for Great Britain when the crown offered them freedom in exchange for their service.

There was a very interesting section on Crispus Attucks, one of the first people killed in the Revolutionary War.  It's actually a much more complex story than I've been led to believe in the little history I've heard about him.  He was a runaway slave, and apparently very active politically even before he took part in what became known as the Boston Massacre. Here is a brief account of his role in that incident: Attucks. The Hortons tell a detailed story about him and many other important African-Americans of the colonial period.

Also interesting was the authors' account of African-Americans' complex relationships with Native Americans. The Hortons portray them as mostly friendly and mutually supportive.

In Hope of Liberty is very well written, and as a result of reading it, I'm getting a much fuller picture of what life what like for northern blacks in the early years of our nation's history.  I'm looking forward to learning more in the next couple of weeks.

Stay tuned!

Time Travel Times Three

Well, I didn't post last week but I did finally finish 11/22/63, though it had a disappointing ending, in my view.  It seemed a bit contrived, even rushed, as if the publisher was breathing down the author's neck to get the book finished. I won't tell you how it ends, but suffice it to say it didn't end the way I had hoped it would.

At any rate, following that book I read a book for work, Seamless Teamwork, that describes how people can use Sharepoint (a Microsoft networked website program) to collaborate on projects. Since I'm going to be helping with Sharepoint sites at work, I thought I'd read that.  It's a pretty well written book, though some of it doesn't pertain to me, but it let me see how much people can do with Sharepoint.

Once I was done with that book, I started on The Women, by T. Coraghessen Boyle, one of my favorite authors. Published in 2009, it's a fictionalized account of Frank Lloyd Wright and his wives.  Boyle has done this sort of thing before--taken a historical figure and given him an imagined story.  (See The Road to Wellness.)  In this book he's got a Japanese man as his narrator who's telling us what happened during the time he was a architecture fellowship student at Wright's farm in Wisconsin.  I've just started it, but apparently he meets all the wives while there, and focuses his narrative mostly on them.

It's an interesting premise, but I'm afraid that so far this book seems a lot like another book by Boyle I read recently (and wrote about in this blog), East Is East, published 18 years earlier.  That novel was also set in an artist's colony (Wright's farm seems that sort of place), and it too had a Japanese protagonist.  Because it seems to repeat that book, I don't know if I'll stay with it. But I'll give it a few more days, I think.

I'm looking forward to moving on to a history book about African Americans in colonial New England, In Hope of Liberty, so maybe I'll jump ship on Boyle and head for that book.  We'll see what happens . . .

Seeing the Future

Two weeks later and I'm still reading 11/22/63. I guess I was being optimistic, thinking I could finish it so quickly. Hah!  I'm nearing the end, however.  The day of reckoning has finally arrived when the protagonist, Jake, must try to stop Oswald from killing the president.  He's had to surmount all kinds of obstacles in his quest, but he is still alive and still persevering.  Unlike with many of King's novels, there isn't much of the supernatural operating here, but it seems to be lurking in the background.  Every once in a while there's a suggestion of an evil presence that mostly appears in Jake's dreams, but sometimes it can be seen by a more supernaturally sensitive character. 

King frequently has supernaturally sensitive people in his novels.  If you saw or read The Shining, you'll know what I'm talking about.  In fact, the title of that book is a term that means the ability to see things that others can't see.  Often in King's stories the people with that ability are children, old people, or people of color.  It's an interesting concept, one I'm sure King got from his own reading, but I must say I've never read anything that reveals where he gets his ideas about the paranormal.  There is a body of lore or experience that is more or less consistent, it seems, with King and other writers of occult fiction.  For instance, vampires can only enter the homes of those who want them to, a concept he used in Salem's Lot.

The protagonists in King's novels often suffer as a result of their connection to the supernatural world.  That is highly evident in The Dead Zone, where the protagonist has knowledge of the future, but it doesn't exactly endear him to his friends and neighbors, especially when he learns that a favored local politician will eventually destroy the world. (By the way, I highly recommend the 1983 movie by the same title that was made from that book; it stars Christopher Walken.)

In a way, King is repeating the element of clairvoyance in 11/22/63.  His protagonist can see the future, but only the future that has already happened. Going back in time, he takes on the role of seer for the people he meets, but the plot seems closer to science fiction than occult fiction, and once he convinces people he really is from the future, their connection to him is strengthened, rather than strained.

The only feature of the story that doesn't fit with science fiction is the mystery of where the portal to the past came from.  It's not something scientifically explainable, as a worm hole would be; instead it seems somehow sinister, evil, something he shouldn't be messing with.  He thinks the phenomenon is neutral, but I'm afraid he may find out that it's not.  And since I can't see the future, I'll just have to read on.  Maybe I'll be fooled and find that what I dread will not occur this time.  You never know with Stephen King.

Once I'm finished with this, it's on to something a little less weighty (literally and figuratively).  I haven't decided yet what I'll dip into, but it will probably be non-fiction. Meet me back here next week to find out!

Still Spending Time in King's Invented World

Well, I'm still reading Stephen King's time travel novel.  It's meandering along, but the sub plots are interesting.  We're getting closer to the time when Oswald is in Dallas and the main character will try to stop him.  I'm enjoying the slow progress more than I thought I would.  There's just enough suspense to keep me reading.  I'm glad to see King is developing his characters well, something he had neglected for quite a few years (maybe during his cocaine phase). 

He's actually pretty good at character development, when he puts time into it.  And it does take time to get to know people, even fictional ones. I'm also glad to see he's still writing, still coming up with new ideas after all these years and all the books he's written. Reading his autobiography last year helped me to understand him and appreciate his writing a little more, I think.  And I even like him a little better than I used to because of it.

So, next week perhaps I'll be back to non-fiction.  We'll see . . .

A Novel Detour

Well, I ended up taking a break from sports stories this week so that I could read a novel, this time one of Jeffery Deaver's thrillers, The Bodies Left Behind. (I must confess I got it from the library instead of my book collection.)  The book is one long chase scene, and since Deaver is a master of suspense, it was a gripping story.  I kept waiting for the twist he always provides, but it didn't arrive until nearly the end, which was great, because it was totally unexpected!  I recommend it highly.

Following that book, I launched into Stephen King's recently published tome (aren't they all?), 11/22/63. It's a time travel story in which the protagonist goes back in time to try to stop JFK's assassination.  That's all I know so far, but it looks like the story will unfold slowly, since it's 849 pages long!

After this, I will probably go back to non-fiction for a while.  In fact, if the King novel gets slow, I may take a break from it and declare magazine week next week.  We'll see what happens.  I'm feeling whimsical!

From Class Warfare to Competition on the Field

I finished Portobello this week and to my surprise, everything turned out satisfactorily for the people who met on Portobello street in London.  Well, not all the people.  A couple of them were killed (one innocent, one guilty), but their killer went to prison, so at least that part turned out well, for the reader, anyway.  The rest did manage to redeem themselves in the end, to the extent that they were no longer unattractive, just humanly flawed.  So I did enjoy the book and recommend it highly.

From Portobello I turned to non-fiction once more, choosing a volume of short pieces on sports, collected under the title The Best American Sports Writing, 2010.  This is an edition in the series, The Best American Sports Writing, which comes out yearly and prints the best stories (fiction and non-fiction) that have sports as their main subject and were published the year before in magazines and newspapers of the U.S. or Canada. Each year a large selection is narrowed down by the series editor, and then around 25 of those are chosen for that year's volume by a guest editor, who is always a sports writer of some repute.

That means that the stories in the volume I'm reading came out in 2009 and cover a wide range of sports, from boxing to baseball, from cycling to football.  I've read six of the 26 so far, and they've all been well written.  And I've learned a lot that I didn't know: Jose Canseco is really a dirtbag; an obscure Central Washington softball player is revered for having helped an opponent who seriously injured her knee complete a homerun she would have otherwise lost (see the video here); Muhammad Ali was in 50 fights and some of those men he fought are still around to tell the tale; football players at all levels take many more serious hits to the head than most people realize; the man who was the first American to race in the Tour de France was convicted of child molesting; Greg LeMond is really a nice guy.

What's interesting about these Best American . . . series is the particular angle the guest editor brings to them.  Each year there's a different collection with a different perspective.  I haven't read enough of the sports series or this particular collection to say yet what the perspective is for 2010.  But maybe when I'm done I will.

What's nice about the stories is that they're all fairly up-to-date and beautifully written.  You can't go wrong with that. The only criticism I have of the collection is that there's no way to tell whether a story is fiction or non-fiction.  They could at least say "short story" in the table of contents or something, but they don't.

Other Best American series are: Comics, Essays, Mystery Stories, Nonrequired Reading, Science and Nature Writing, Short Stories, and Travel Writing.  I have one of the Science and Nature series, one of the Essays series, and many of the Short Stories series. I must say that so far I'm enjoying the Sports series much more than I did the Short Stories.  That may be because good sports writing is evaluated differently than short story writing.  By that I mean that a certain style seems to be prized in short stories (when evaluated by short story writers) that is not my favorite--a kind of cool, cynical style that can be at times depressing.  The style of writing in sports stories is more journalistic and seems mostly celebratory--of the people and the excellence they strive for--and therefore upbeat.

But I have a ways to go with this book--twenty more stories, to be exact.  I'll let you know how I feel about them as I read.

See you next time!

Portobello: A Street of Destiny

I finished Sky of Stone this week, and it all turned out alright.  But I won't spoil it for those of you who might want to read it.  I highly recommend it!

I've started on Portobello, a recently published novel by Ruth Rendell, a very prolific writer of mysteries and other fiction.  She's a British writer, and her characters tend to be from the working class or the middle class.  There's always an element of what our politicians like to call "class warfare" that's central to the plot.  The British are well versed in class struggle, having dealt with it for most of their nation's existence.  We inherited it from them, but we like to think that somehow we rose above it when we split from them.  And those of us who don't have to confront it every day believe that if they just don't speak of it that it will go away. 

But Ruth Rendell has a way of rubbing our noses in it, to the point that some of her characters are quite unlikable and unattractive.  But despite that, Rendell keeps me reading to find out what's going to happen to them.  I guess I'm hoping they will surprise me with a quality that redeems them in the end.

Portobello is the name of a street where the classes meet--it's on the edge of a nice neighborhood, but is also a place where petty criminals can be found.  The novel brings together a variety of people who come from different backgrounds and whose paths cross, quite by accident.  There's an ominous tone to the action as the disparate threads draw together.  Something bad is going to happen--or so it seems.  I'll find out before long, as I'm about two-thirds of the way through.

I'll let you know next time how things turn out for these unattractive denizens of 21st century London.

Best Memoir I've Read So Far: Sky of Stone

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading Homer Hickam's memoir, Sky of Stone.  What a great writer he is!  He makes a work of non-fiction fascinating with all the story elements he employs.  In this coming-of-age tale of a young man's summer working in a coal mine, Hickam has managed to include action, suspense, mystery, romance, humor, history and social issues.

This is a wonderful book!  It's the third in a series of memoirs about Hickam's youth.  I haven't read the other two, but I did see the movie based on the first book, October Sky, which was very well done.  All three books were well received, as was the movie.

From this book, I'm learning a lot about what it was like to live in a West Virginia coal town in 1961, at the height of the cold war and America's industrial might.  I'm also learning about Homer Hickam--especially how well he writes.

I'm getting close to the end now, where all the questions about what happened in the mine and who was to blame for the explosion will be answered, no doubt to my satisfaction. I won't tell any more than that because I'm hoping you all will read it!

I would like to read some of his other books in the future, but for the moment, I don't own any.  So once I finish this, I'll be choosing another neglected volume from my collection.  Stay tuned!

History, Sports, and Evotourism: Magazine Week III

This week was magazine week, so I read parts of a few different magazines.  One was Sports Illustrated, the year-end double issue (December 12) that features the stories of their two Sportspeople of the Year awardees: Mike Krzyzewski and Pat Summitt, both college basketball coaches.  That feature was very interesting. I learned a lot about these two people (including how to pronounce Coach K's name) that convinced me they are both truly worthy of the award; their lives and careers are exemplary and their stories just what we needed after a year of disheartening sports scandals.

Another interesting article in the same SI issue profiled Alex Kline, a 17-year old college basketball scout, who is apparently a prodigy in that field, having started with it at the age of 14.  He's not being paid for his work, but he is certainly being paid attention to by college coaches and the many people who follow his Twitter, Skype, and Facebook posts.  It was a fascinating story!

Also in that issue was a story about Hmong high school football players (to borrow from Shakespeare, though they be but little, they are fierce!), and an article by famous sports photographer Walter Iooss Jr. discussing his work.  Both were worth reading.

In the Summer 2011 issue of Colonial Williamsburg (the Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), there was a very interesting story about the continuing excavation of Jamestown settlement in Virginia.  I also read a story about the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg.  I had not even known there was such a battle, so I enjoyed learning how the townspeople dealt with having the Yankees take over their town (after a fairly short fight).

Another magazine I read part of was the latest issue of Smithsonian.  It featured a new series called Evotourism, where different locations around the world showing some aspect of evolution are discussed as tourist destinations.  What a great idea!  I wish I could go to some of the places they point out. In that issue also I found a story about art and Gertrude Stein in Paris and an enlightening article about Roger Williams (who established a colony in Rhode Island) and his insistence on separating church and state, a new (and disturbing) idea at that time.

There was one fascinating fact I gleaned from one of Smithsonian's short pieces at the front of the magazine: woodpeckers' heads are protected from repetitive, high-impact pecking by "spongy spots in the skull, along with tissues of different sizes in the upper and lower beak" (5) that absorb the shock. Who knew?

This was a fun week of catching up on my magazines. Next week it's back to books, this time a non-fiction memoir I've had on my shelf for a while: Sky of Stone, by Homer Hickam.

Until then, happy reading!

Two Best-Selling Mysteries in One Week!

This week I was able to finish two novels: The Litigators, by John Grisham, and Kill Alex Cross, by James Patterson.  The Litigators was enjoyable, though it isn't really a mystery of the type Grisham is known for.  Kill Alex Cross is a standard mystery/thriller with a couple of interesting twists at the end. Both were fast, entertaining reads.

The Litigators taught me a lot about class action suits, especially those involving claims of harm caused by medications. Grisham brings us a flawed attorney in this one--in fact, three flawed personal injury lawyers with ethical issues, substance abuse problems, and questionable motives.  The character who ends up being the main protagonist, though, is a good but inexperienced lawyer who decides to move from a highly paid corporate position to practice with the two barely successful ambulance-chasing attorneys as they decide to take on a giant pharmaceutical corporation over an allegedly harmful drug, mostly for the big payday they see at the end.  When they combine with a big-time class-action attorney, lots of interesting consequences ensue.  There's more than one suit being filed in the book, though, and more than one ending.  All were satisfying.

I like Grisham--he can make any legal subject interesting. What was especially educational for me is learning what the plaintiffs have to go through during the suit--interviews, doctor appointments, depositions, and then if the case isn't settled out of court, testimony at trial. I can see it all taking up quite a bit of time, and if there's no money at the end, it's all wasted time and probably lost income.  Of course, the lawyers promise big paydays to everyone, but I think at the end of some of these big suits, even those with a settlement, there may be very little for each individual plaintiff, whereas the lawyers still cash in.  Of course, if they lose, the plaintiffs are better off than the attorneys who must absorb the loss of money they paid up front.  Tort  law can be very complex (though the media tries hard to oversimplify it), and the process of bringing suit to recover damages from harm done by others--though it could use some reform--is a process more people ought to understand and appreciate, especially since the right to sue is one of our most important freedoms.  The Litigators helps with that understanding and I recommend it highly.

James Patterson's Kill Alex Cross is more conventional in its aims and methods, but there is an interesting structure to the novel.  There are two crimes, seemingly related, that must be investigated and solved, as well as crimes yet to be committed that must be prevented, all within a very short amount of time (of course!).  So it's a very fast paced book, with lots of action and suspense.  I like Patterson, but he's not one of my favorites, mostly because his characters seem a little flat.  Even Alex Cross is a bit shallow, despite his flaws.  In fact, everybody is just a tad too macho and steely for my taste (even the women), but then that's the hard-boiled detective genre, I guess.  Some writers are better at transcending it than others; Patterson's not one of them.  He's wildly prolific, though, and (I'm sure) terribly rich.  And he does write entertaining novels.  What more can a reader ask?

This week is magazine week, so I'm setting aside books for now.  But when I resume, I will take up a memoir by Homer Hickam, Sky of Stone, the third in his series about growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia.  The first was October Sky, made into a very good movie; the second was called The Coalwood Way.  I've already started it, and have learned something about what it was like to live in a town owned by the coal company who employed its residents. Apparently, in order to live there, you had to work for the coal company, and if you stopped working for them, you had to leave immediately, no matter the reason for losing your job.  Even if you died in a mining accident, your survivors had pack up and find another place to live as soon as possible.  Pretty cold, eh?  Hickam's a very good writer; I'm looking forward to reading his story.

See you next week!