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.
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