Mysteries Native and Imported

I've been slowly working my way through the Best American Mystery Stories 2010 lately, and I must say it's pretty good. The stories are more on the side of literary than pulp, which is fine, though the mysteries are not true mysteries for the most part, at least not in the classical sense of whodunits. They are about crime, but get into the mysteries of the criminal mind or behavior rather than unraveling what happened.

I've also started a more conventional narrative from Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, who has followed in his father's footsteps writing supernatural/horror fiction. Nosferatu (NOS4A2) is a library book, so I'm cheating a little reading a book that isn't diminishing my book collection. Oh, well. It's a pretty good story, if a little bit wordy (Hill's like his father in that way, too).

A Country of Laws

Thurgood Marshall

Continuing to listen to Root and Branch, I continue to be amazed at the courage and intelligence of those who were fighting the legal battle to end segregation and improve the conditions under which many black people suffered because of the extreme bias of U.S. laws and the white supremacist culture that was dominant during most of the 20th century.

It had never occurred to me that the civil rights battle being waged in the courts was every bit as important as that being waged in the streets, and that in fact it was the only way to truly make headway in a society that was not changing its view of the Negro race (as they once termed it) any time soon. Non violent protest was very important, but it went hand in hand with legal battles that inch by inch made it illegal to treat our citizens in that shockingly brutal way that had been legal for so many centuries. Such treatment amounted to terrorism before that word and what it describes became so well known.

But I should have known, since I am a supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose central work involves using the law to fight civil rights battles even today--perhaps especially today. I'm thinking now that this institution continued the work started by Houston and Marshall and others like him. Unfortunately it continues to be necessary, given that the descendants and followers of the people who fought against blacks' becoming full citizens maintain their desire to put things back the way they were, when people could be tortured, beaten, jailed and even killed with impunity, with the full cooperation--and often instigation--of the law.

We're into the 1940s now in the narrative, just before things really got heated up down South. Marshall and the others have begun working on Southern criminal cases of injustice that boggle the mind they are so brutal and blatant. And the backlash is becoming quite severe, the work quite dangerous. I'm anxious to see how things will turn out, but part of me wants to turn away from the reality of those days--the horrific images tend to stick with me, a testament to the writer's skill.

I'll be back here to finish the story soon.

Root and Branch of Segregation

I've started reading one of the audiobooks in my collection this week, listening to it in my car! It's pretty cool to have a CD player in my car. They've sure come a long way since the old days when the CD players were affected by the motion of the car!

Anyway, the book is Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation, by Rawn James Jr.  It is a history of the landmark civil rights Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education and the many events that led up to it. It is in part a biography of the two men named in the title. So far, it's fascinating stuff!

As with many books of African American history, it's also painful and disturbing to read. The author doesn't pull any punches about the horrors of the early 20th century when blacks were frequently subject to or under threat of torture, murder, terrorism, and extreme injustices. The efforts of Marshall and Houston, as well as many others who sacrificed to help end segregation and its evils, are shown to be heroic in the face of many formidable obstacles.

Though I already knew some things about this era from my previous studies, I am learning a great deal more about this complex campaign. One of the things that never fails to amaze me about the civil rights struggle is how much people with the courage to take enormous risks were able to accomplish--daring to do the unthinkable was often rewarded with success!  For instance, when Charles Houston took over as Dean of Washington D.C.'s Howard University Law School, he decided to remake the entire program so that it could acquire accreditation (it did) and thereby be taken seriously by the nation. This was crucial, he believed, in order for the graduates of Howard's Law School to be taken seriously and get work as lawyers so they could help those who were hurt by Jim Crow laws and the many injustices endured by black people in America. The ultimate goal for Houston was to dismantle segregation forever, a goal that could only be achieved, he believed, by changing the laws that supported the unjust system.

One thing I learned early in the book was that Woodrow Wilson was instrumental in reestablishing segregation in Washington DC and was a avid supporter of it during his administration. It's hard to believe so many people thought the apartheid system we had in this country (and still do to a certain extent) was a good thing that should continue, especially given the evils it produced. Also eye-opening was the detailed account of how very un-equal schools were back in the early 20th century, information that was gleaned from a fact-finding trip taken by Houston and Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in preparation for the fight they would undertake and eventually win on May 17, 1954.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this book immensely and already believe it is worth reading by anyone who wants to know about America's history.

Gates to Nowhere

I'm still plugging away at A Gate at the Stairs, but it's getting increasingly more difficult. I've been fast-forwarding a lot through description that seems uninteresting and that I would describe as filler, although I don't think the writer had intended it to be filler. Maybe her audience is someone other than me. Must a "coming-of-age" story be for young people only? Urban twenty-somethings only?

There are a couple of plot threads started that seem to have been dropped--such as her boyfriend's actual nationality and goals. But they may end up being important later. But getting to that later is getting more and more tedious.

Ah, well. Remind me to read no more of Ms. Moore's books!

Middle Aged Mothers

I've moved on now to one of the "M" books in my collection, in this case, A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore. It's contemporary fiction about a young woman who works as a nanny for a professional couple who adopt a mixed race child. It started out kind of slow but has engaged my interest because the twists and turns are unexpected--always a good thing in a novel.

The book got some very good reviews and some awards as well. I'm not often swayed by such reports because they seem a little self-serving for the literary fiction crowd who seem to like a certain kind of story about the angst of modern life, especially among upper-middle-class characters. This one seems a little different from that, even though it starts out seeming the same. The writer has a good style--almost poetic with her figures of speech and turns of phrase.

We'll see how it turns out.

Coming to Light

Well, I finally finished the book on ancient chemical warfare and decided to try something more uplifting for my next read, so I settled on the book about the turn-of-the-twentieth century photographer, Edward S. Curtis, entitled Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light by Anne Makepeace, a filmmaker whose book is a companion to her documentary of the same name. Curtis is famous for photographing North American Indian subjects in the early twentieth century. He was trying to document the western Native American way of life before it had completely disappeared. Makepeace's book combines biography and appreciation of Curtis' photos.

So far, the book is very interesting as I knew very little about the man, Edward Curtis, though I had run across his photos from time to time. Last year I bought a calendar featuring his images with information about the people and activities he photographed; I enjoyed it very much.

Curtis' story is enmeshed in the political and cultural conflicts of his time and so reading about him involves reading about our country's not-quite-successful attempts to settle the question of what to do about the indigenous people who were standing in the way of Euro-Americans' goal to populate and develop the entire continent.

Reading Coming to Light makes me want to find more books of Curtis' photography.

From Work to Ancient Warfare

Well, I didn't quite finish Working, but I needed to move on so I could get to more of my books. I've chosen one of my "M" books this time: Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, by Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in the Classics Department at Stanford University. Here is her website: Adrienne Mayor. And here is her picture, which I copied from that website:

Adrienne Mayor

The book was published in 2003, but has been since updated with a new introduction by the author. It is quite fascinating so far. I had a notion that chemical and biological weapons were deployed in ancient times, but really didn't know the vast extent. This area of history is Ms. Mayor's life's work, apparently, and you can feel her enthusiasm on every page.

People are capable of quite diabolical means of terrorizing and destroying one another, a reality we continue to face. Not much has changed over the millennia, except that our methods have become ever more lethal. I'll have more to say about particulars as I read further. Later . . .

Working Winding Down at Last

Well, I've been away for a while, but I've been continuing to read Working and enjoying it. The book is so big that it's taking a long time to finish.

Some of the things I found worth noting about this book:

1.  There are a great many different jobs out there, some of them still in existence despite the passage of forty years.

2.  Almost every person interviewed liked something about his or her job.  A few people liked everything about their jobs.

3.  A few people were not very likable and were in fact despicable. A couple of people were downright frightening. But most of the people seemed to be ordinary people with some flaws and some virtues. I wonder if they weeded out all the really bad people before putting the book together. 

4.  There were a number of people who were prescient concerning the way things were going with respect to work.  For instance, some people thought that automation was slowly taking away jobs. Other people feared that unions were fading out of importance.  Some people could see the demise of mom and pop stores and independent businesses.

5.  The interviewees were steeped in their time--the early 70s, with all its hippies and counter culture and racial strife and war worries and women's lib. It was fun to get that reminder of what things were like back then for ordinary people.

6.  There are a wide variety of people interviewed, each different from the other. I appreciated that.  I think the compilers did a very good job of making it an interesting book.

I'll be glad to be finished with it, however, because I'm finally going to get done with the T's (except for one more Terkel book which I am saving for later).

I don't know what I'm reading next, but I'll keep you posted!


Studs Terkel

Mysteries of Working

I took a little detour the last couple of weeks to read a Ruth Rendell mystery--her latest, No Man's Nightingale--as a reward for staying on my diet for an entire week. (More on that in my diet blog, Following Shirley.) But yesterday I went back to reading Studs Terkel's Working and was once again reminded of what an excellent book it is.

One of the things that struck me about Working is its descriptions of jobs that are no longer available to people. There were quite a few, but those I remember the best so far are telephone operator and installment dealer.

The job of telephone operator was very important back before direct dialing was common and when people didn't have long distance because it was so expensive or because they didn't have a private line. Also very common then was to use a pay phone. So there were a lot of operators, but they weren't paid very well, probably because they were women for the most part and because it wasn't a highly skilled job (at least, according to employers). But the interviewee's description made the work sound very difficult--long days spent sitting in one spot in an uncomfortable chair with a headset on, talking, talking, talking, pulling and pushing the connectors, biting her tongue when a caller was rude or abusive.

The operators weren't allowed many breaks and they weren't allowed to waste time chatting with a caller. Sometimes that was a problem, such as when the person on the other end of the line seemed to desperately need to talk to someone. The operator Terkel interviewed said that she felt bad when a soldier would call from Vietnam and the number he was wanting was busy or not answering and she would have to disconnect even though she could tell he was really lonely and wanted to talk to her.

That made me remember the song by Jim Croce, "Operator," in which he tells the operator that she was "so much more than kind" to stay on the line with him when he was trying to call his old girlfriend who had dumped him for his best friend. I also remembered how little we cared about the soldier during the Vietnam War and how now we would bend over backward to provide the soldier with someone to talk to. Of course, these days we provide them with cell phones and Skype and every other kind of communication device such as email and Facebook and Twitter so they can stay in touch with their loved ones. It makes me feel sad that we were so indifferent to those guys during the Vietnam War.

The job of installment dealer was one I'd never heard of. The man being interviewed said that he sells credit rather than merchandise. He goes door to door asking people what they need and he gets it for them on the installment plan. He works for himself, catering to people who can't go shopping or don't want to and extends credit to them for the cost of the item. He then collects the weekly payment in person. It's amazing to think that this service was still needed back in 1970 when these interviews were being conducted. No one needs the service anymore, of course, thanks to the ubiquity of credit cards, catalogs and online shopping opportunities. And that's too bad, I think. Another opportunity for face-to-face human interaction is gone.

The dealer told an interesting story about riots in the city where he worked (Chicago, probably) following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. He had many customers in the ghetto, he said, and had a hard time getting to them to collect his weekly payment during and after the riots. A few of his customers were burned out. Some of them, afraid for his life, sent him the payments in the mail. In his description, he speaks respectfully of his impoverished customers. I think he really felt he was needed and was doing them a genuine service. When later in his career he changed to working in the white suburbs, he said, he was dealing with "honkies" who fled the city due to the changing racial mix. He didn't seem to have as much respect for those people.

This is a fascinating collection of stories and one I believe everyone should read. But it's a thick book, so I'll be dwelling in this world a while longer.

Until next time . . .

Woman Wandering in the Working Class, Wondering about Will

Well, I finished Working Class Women in the Academy, and was inspired to get back to my dissertation topic. I came up with all kinds of ideas that I could apply to a possible article or book on working class as represented in Shakespeare. I've also been reading Radical Shakespeare, by Chris Fitter. It's a literary criticism book on the element of lower class resistance in some of Shakespeare's plays. That is, of course my topic, but I see that no one is arguing exactly what I'm arguing yet. It gives me hope.

In addition to those two books, a third book that I've started reading is actually on my reading list, Working, the famous and wonderful book of oral history by Studs Terkel. It relates to my topic, and I can check off one more "T" book when I've finished it!

So, I'm steeped in working class issues at a very good time, it seems, since it's lately been a media focus: the increasingly wide gap between rich and poor giving people a cause for concern.

I'm having fun with all this. I'll get back to you with my thoughts soon.