tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29420203104504580902024-03-01T19:12:39.193-05:00Any Good Books/Mixed ReviewsMainly book reviews, mainly non-fiction, mainly positive; also including the occasional local concert, the occasional novel, the occasional outraged pan.Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-35280293454951901032024-03-01T19:11:00.003-05:002024-03-01T19:11:48.708-05:00 Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel<p>
</p><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Mr.
Sebastian and the Negro Magician: a novel</span></span></span>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Daniel
Wallace (Doubleday, 2007)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “Every
night Henry remained open to the possibility that this was the night
his powers would return.” It’s hard to imagine a more
down-on-his-luck man than Henry Walker, Negro Magician, in 1954. He’s
been with Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus for four years, and
his magical powers are long in the past. He was hired because, if a
crowd comes to see a Negro doing magic, and he can’t do any,
they’ll at least get some comedy out of it. </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <span> </span><span> </span>“How
low he had fallen. The memory of all he had once been taunted him.”
This is a story about memory and storytelling. We’re going to hear
his story as he has told it to his friends from the traveling show:
JJ the Barker; Rudy, the Strongest Man in the World; Jenny, the
Ossified Girl; and Jeremiah Mosgrove himself. </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> From
Rudy, we get the story of Henry’s family coming down in the world,
when he was ten. His mother died of TB, the house was lost to the
bank, and his father took a job as janitor at a resort hotel. Henry
and his nine-year-old sister, Hannah, had the somewhat illicit run of
the place, and Henry has a fairy-tale encounter with a magician. Mr.
Sebastian begins by teaching him tricks, proceeding to invest him,
apparently, with magic, so powerful that he makes his sister
disappear. It’s the kind of disaster a boy might never recover
from. </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Mr.
Sebastian disappears too, as you might imagine; a desultory police
search finds nothing. Henry and his father get on with their
Depression lives, and find a manager for Henry’s career as a
magician. Tom Hailey spots the pair as desperate enough to go for his
suggestion that Henry pass as a Negro, with the aid of a sunlamp and
some pills Hailey can provide. When Henry suggests that this might be
telling a lie, Hailey says “Lying? Hardly. Do you think I could be
in business for as long as I have if I were a liar? Absolutely not.
It’s an <i>illusion,</i> Henry. It’s part of the act.”</span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> It’s
an illusion that couldn’t be sustained if the black teenager had a
white father, and so Henry faces another loss, another disappearance.
“It’s not the number of losses but their size that counts….a
boy whose mother dies before his ninth birthday, whose luminous
sister is stolen from him before his eleventh, and whose father falls
into the hopeless arms of death and lies there dying a little bit
every day in plain sight of his son and the world–these are the
real losses, the ones that tear into the body and bleed the soul.”</span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> This
all sounds pretty bleak, but I found it compelling, too. The Chinese
Circus is a perfect distillation of sacrifice and loneliness, but
Henry has true friends there. The story of his life and losses gets
told enough different ways, from enough different angles, to
introduce doubt about which is the true story. The magic, for one
thing–do you want to believe that Henry could saw a woman in half,
and put her back together? Where did it come from, if it’s real,
and where did it go? Was Mr. Sebastian the Devil, or was Henry just
dazzled?</span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> And
of course, a story can be true even when it isn’t quite factual. A
story that’s all loss can still be beautiful. We go through life
accepting hearsay evidence as the best we can get; we live first, and
understand later, if we ever do.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">March 1, 2024 by email.<br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-18350375533260187262024-02-01T00:11:00.001-05:002024-02-01T22:26:58.034-05:00Tom Lake<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Tom
Lake: A Novel</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ann
Patchett (2023, Harper Collins)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Sixteen-year-old
Laura showed up at auditions for <i>Our Town</i> just to help out at
the registration table. But you never know: watching the first people
trying out gave her a strong sense that she could do a better job, so
she filled out a form (casually dropping the ‘u’ from her name),
stood still for a Polaroid headshot, and won the role of Emily for
the first time. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> That’s
chapter one of the story the now fifty-something Lara is telling her
three daughters in the summer of 2020. They have a good deal of time
for stories, because they are all home in Michigan, on the family
cherry farm, working long days to get the sweet fruit in. There
aren’t as many migrant fruit pickers as usual, but the daughters
have been in these orchards all their lives. It’s familiar work, in
beautiful circumstances.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
story they want is how their mother knew Peter Duke, before he went
on to become a dream-boat movie star. A decade before, when they were
emerging teenagers, their father had dropped a bombshell: “You know
your mother used to date him.” Since they’re now nearly as old as
Lara was then, they want the real story. And she’ll give it to
them, though not exactly all of it. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Peter
and Lara were thrown together in a season of summer stock at Tom
Lake, a pretty little Michigan town whose theater provides work for
up-and-coming actors; it’s also a refuge for third-rate television
stars whose names will sell tickets. Lara is tapped to play Emily
because she knows the part; she’s actually been to Hollywood and
made a movie already, but this role is really her wheelhouse.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Peter
is to play her father, Editor Webb. He’s not yet famous, but he’s
easily the most charismatic and athletic man in the company, the sort
of fellow who can do a handstand on the back of a chair, in the
middle of a conversation. Such casual physicality is part and parcel
of the intensity of the compressed summer season. The actors indulge
in lunchtime swimming and evening tennis, drinking and late nights,
romances and betrayals, as though they’ll be twenty-four forever.
It’s in the nature of such bubbles, however, to pop and be gone. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Though
her one movie was an artistic success, Lara is thoroughly content to
have wound up as a wife and mother in northern Michigan. The setting
is an intentional nod to Chekhov; as in <i>The Cherry Orchard</i>,
developers “are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just
enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills
or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer
houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could
never afford.” </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> At
best, growing fruit is a tough business: sometimes the crop fails.
Other times, everyone grows so much that the price craters, and
nobody makes any money. “The farm is either the very paradise of
Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in
fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The
other stuff, less so.” </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> As surely as anything, though, you can’t
leave your child only one side of the coin. For every first-act
Emily, the smartest girl in school, there’s a third-act Emily,
dying in childbirth, leaving a young husband who doesn’t know what
hit him. Like <i>Our Town</i>, this book is about growth, change, and
memory. It’s about how lovely the ordinary is, and how fleeting;
and also how mothers and daughters can never fully know each other’s
stories. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p><p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Feb 1, 2024<br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-7704894385835890532024-01-01T11:46:00.000-05:002024-01-01T11:46:18.303-05:00 An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">An
Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: a Memoir</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Elizabeth
McCracken (Little Brown, 2008)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> I’m
a long-time fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, and I’ve had
this on the to-read shelf for a while; now I see what may have held
me back. The subject is perhaps the saddest subject possible, a
pregnancy that goes to full term and ends without a live baby; on
that ground alone, I can’t universally recommend it. On the other
hand, perhaps there are people who should be required to read it,
including anyone who wants to treat pregnant people, or make laws
about them. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> You
can tell early on, however, that McCracken is going to present to us
all kinds of emotions. “As for me, I believe that if there’s a
God–and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible–then the
most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains
it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments,
like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.”
</span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> McCracken
and her husband, Edward, are both writers. In their early marriage,
which is to say, their mid-thirties, they lived between Europe and
the US, as teaching jobs or whim might dictate. For economy’s sake,
during her pregnancy, they moved to the countryside in Bordeaux. It
was a preposterous house, enormous and cold, which had once housed
unwed mothers and their offspring. “The house was surrounded by
farmland and vineyards, cows out some windows and horses out others,
and a vast patio off the summer kitchen…” But all that is lost
now, put away with the grief. It’s as if, she says, time forked as
in science fiction; on one track, she and Edward can remember this as
a happy time, and share its memories with their little boy; “on the
other track, the one I accidentally took, he died, and we left
France.” </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Edward
and Elizabeth moved to England for the summer of 2006, then back to
the US, and had a second child just fifty-three weeks after the
first, complicating the bifurcated track all over again. He’s an
eldest child, who had an elder brother once. She wrote this book
while he was still a baby, while her memory was fresh, but after it
had begun to gel into a comprehensible shape. It’s a writerly
response to the nine months that are now missing from her life,
because they were so happy when they happened, and then their meaning
flipped. McCracken doesn’t want to turn the first child into an
angel, nor to erase him completely, so we have this book. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “Perhaps
it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of
course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled
itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors
the local cuisine….I travel not to get away from my troubles but to
see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted
beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at
home we generally understand each other better.” That makes sense
to me, though I tend to do my traveling in books. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> She
went to New Orleans eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, when she
was seven months into the new pregnancy, where her sorrow had a sort
of family reunion. Not just the orange tattoos on the buildings, but
a woman who says to her, “My first child was stillborn, too.”
There’s a sort of kinship, mostly invisible, like a very large club
you never asked to join.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Obviously,
I’m sorry about the death of little Pudding, who acquired this
rather Dickensian moniker in his first days as an embryo. I’m happy
for the birth of his brother, who must be about to graduate from high
school. I’m happy that all that is so far in the past, though, of
course, we’ve all had new sorrows to be going on with, and new
joys. </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jan 1 2024 </span></span></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-12799528142628534572023-12-11T22:31:00.003-05:002023-12-11T22:31:51.932-05:00The Worst Hard Time:<p>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%;">
</p><p style="line-height: 100%;">
<span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: small;">The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great
American Dust Bowl </span>
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%;"><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: small;">Timothy
Egan (2006, Mariner Books)</span></p>
<div style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: trebuchet; font-size: small;"><span> </span>Maybe
if they hadn’t changed the name from the Great American Desert, those settlers would have known what they were getting into. Early
surveyors of the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase found “a
desolate waste of uninhabited solitude” in what would become the
northern Panhandle of Texas, the no-man’s-land Panhandle of
Oklahoma, the southeastern corner of Colorado, and the western half
of Kansas. </span></p></div><div style="line-height: 100%; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span> </span><span style="font-family: times;">After the Civil War,
though, an optimistic rebranding as ‘the Great Plains’ went some
way to concealing how inhospitable the land actually was. High and
flat, with terrible extremes of weather, it had sustained bison and
Native Americans, especially after they acquired horses; in fact, the
Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 promised Comanches, Kiowas, and their
kin hunting rights west of the 100<sup>th</sup> meridian. You can
picture how long that lasted. In the last third of the nineteenth
century, Texas slaughtered bison in order to drive the native people
out, and liberate the land for cattle ranching. There was plenty of
grass: twenty million acres of it in the Texas Panhandle alone, home
of the palatial XIT Ranch. The flaw in that program was that while
bison can stand the extremes of temperature that the desert offers,
cattle are not so hardy. “Droughts, blizzards, grass fires,
hail-storms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the XIT. A few
good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid
years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making
shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good
for anyway.”</span></span></div>
<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span>According to the Federal
government, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was good
for homesteading. Wells powered by windmills could reach the Ogallala
Aquifer, though it might take a hundred feet of drilling. “The
pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters
were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that
would never give out.” The soil under the grass seemed like another
endless resource, as the Great War made wheat farming a can’t-miss
enterprise. For a few years, every acre of sod busted with a plow
meant a twenty-fold return, and there seemed no end to it. There were
also a couple of boom years at the end of the next decade, and then,
coincident with the stock market crash of 1929, it all came to an
end. Though every city had starving people, prices for wheat were so
low in 1930 and 1931 that piles of it rotted next to the railroad
tracks.</span></p>
<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span>And then the wind began to
blow, and bring the dust with it. And in short order, the dirt, as
well. The duster was a completely new meteorological phenomenon,
rolling along the ground picking up more dirt. There were no
dwellings air-tight enough to resist the blowing dirt, even assuming
the wind didn’t break the windows, or carry the whole house away.
The storms also carried stunning amounts of static electricity,
enough to short out a Model T’s motor or blight a watermelon vine.
From time to time, they headed east to New York or Washington, D.C.,
and then on out to sea; more often, they carried Nebraska’s soil to
Texas, and right on back again. People kept shovels in their cars to
dig out of drifts on the roads, in the intervals between storms that
darkened the world too much to even try to drive. </span>
</p>
<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span>The Dust Bowl was the
worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century, but I don’t
recall ever hearing much of its history before. Egan bases his
telling on small-town newspapers, weather reporting, and interviews
with a few hardy survivors, and he does a fine job of seeing both the
human scale and the grand expanse. We
meet the high schoolers whose class play is cancelled because the
school gym has been turned into an infirmary, because so many people
are down with dust pneumonia. We meet the tarantulas and the black
widow spiders, the rabbits and the grasshoppers. We
meet the photographers who left us images of desolation, and federal
agents who promulgate
their theories of land reclamation as part of the New Deal. </span>
</p>
<p> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><span> </span>It’s a captivating
story, even when it reads like the Israelites in Egypt; we’re still
living in its aftermath, and we forget it at our peril. </span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="3" style="font-family: times;">p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }a:link { color: #000080; text-decoration: underline }</font></style> <span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p><style type="text/css"><font size="3">p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }a:link { color: #000080; text-decoration: underline }</font></style><span style="font-size: small;">Any Good Books, December, 2023</span> </p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-63883463864283448792023-11-01T18:20:00.007-04:002023-11-01T20:45:05.300-04:00You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America<p><span style="font-size: small;">You
Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in
Birmingham that Changed America</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Paul Kix (2023, Celadon
Books)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> When you think of
Birmingham in the spring of 1963, perhaps you recall a striking
photograph: a policeman has 15-year-old Walter Gadsden’s shirt in
one hand, and the leash of a police dog in the other. Gadsden looks
weirdly peaceful for someone whose flesh is about to be torn by
snarling teeth. “Despite the ferocity of the assault, his body was
relaxed and erect. His arms remained at his side…It was as if he
were giving himself to the German shepherd–and to posterity.”
The picture appeared across three columns of the New York Times’s
front page, and in papers around the world, where it took the
Birmingham civil rights protests to a new level of national urgency. </span>
</p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Paul Kix turns his
fascination with that picture to the story of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and how the SCLC decided to go to Birmingham
and challenge the beast in its own lair. A white man with a Black
wife and children, he has some skin in this game. He narrows his
focus to ten weeks of that spring, and perhaps a dozen consequential
characters, so that he can turn history back into a story. It’s a
gift for his sons and daughter, to fortify them against the horror
and despair that keep entering their home through the television set.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> We begin in January of
1963, at a secret meeting of the inner circle of the SCLC. Wyatt
Walker, the group’s executive director, handed out an eight-page
plan for “a campaign unlike any other. ‘I call it Project
X,’ Walker said. Because X marked the spot of confrontation.” Walker had Martin Luther King's trust, and his backing. Everyone present was well aware of what a run of failure the SCLC had
been experiencing, particularly in the previous year’s miserable
Albany campaign. Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had
rendered the SCLC’s protests ineffective by using non-violence of
his own, arresting people gently and courteously. </span>
</p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> In going to Birmingham, Walker was making a very reasonable bet that Bull Connor would not do
likewise. As Commissioner of Public Safety, Connor had a
well-deserved reputation for making Birmingham’s Black residents
far less safe, at any sign of their trying to exercise basic rights.
And so it would prove, though Wyatt’s careful blueprint relied on
some assumptions that didn’t exactly hold up, such as how many
marchers he could attract through King’s oratory. James Bevel, who
had been part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s
Nashville sit-ins in 1960, regarded this plan as another example of
an arrogant SCLC parachuting in and dictating what local people could
or would do, and it was this, Bevel thought, that had led to all
those failures.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> As it happened, later that
spring, it was Bevel who found the marchers who made the difference:
teenagers, who weren’t putting their jobs and their families’
livelihoods at risk, as adults would have done. Bevel led training in
non-violence, as he had in Nashville. He devised ways of spreading
word of plans, including finding a DJ who could work coded
instructions into his radio patter between R&B hits. In a short
time, there were thousands of young marchers, whom Bevel could send
out of the 16<sup>th</sup> Street Baptist Church in organized squads.
So many were arrested that some were housed in animal pens at the
state fairgrounds; uncomfortable and frightening, to be sure, but
also a sign that they were winning, because the jails were full and
the world was noticing.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Two of the most
consequential events of that spring actually took place in New York
City. The first was a March 31<sup>st</sup> fundraiser hosted by
Harry Belafonte at his palatial apartment on West End Avenue, where
wealthy and influential New Yorkers were attracted by the chance to
find out what Martin Luther King, Jr., would do next. They wound up
‘investing’ some $475,000 for expenses and bail money. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"> The second
was on May 24<sup>th</sup>, at an apartment on Central Part South
owned by Joseph Kennedy. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was trying to
shape the government’s response to the crisis developing in
Birmingham, and he called James Baldwin(!) to ask for a secret
conversation with Black leaders. He got more than he bargained for,
in anger and in hard truths; after some reflection, it caused him to
go to bat for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. </span></p>
<p> <span style="font-size: small;">Kix
makes use of the whole range of sources we have now, after sixty
years of study; not just <i>Bearing
the Cross</i>, David
Garrow’s history of the SCLC, and <i>Carry
Me Home</i>, Diane
McWhorter’s magnificent book on Birmingham, but memoirs and
biographies of Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy, Fred
Shuttlesworth, and many
others. And so on: newspaper files, oral history interviews, and FBI
dossiers. But that’s all end notes, which would serve admirably as
the syllabus for a class on the civil rights movement. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"> Don’t worry about that, unless you want to. Read
it for the story. </span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="3">p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.1in; background: transparent }a:link { color: #000080; text-decoration: underline }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-4288979905290509512023-10-01T08:52:00.008-04:002023-11-01T13:11:27.339-04:00Rules of Civility; The Lincoln Highway<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Two
novels by </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Amor
Towles:</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Rules
of Civility (Penguin, 2011)</span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
Lincoln Highway (Penguin, 2021)</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Katey
and Eve start 1938 literally without two nickels to rub together.
They have gone to a dive bar to hear some gloomy jazz, when in walks
a handsome, well-dressed man, who winds up sitting at their table.
The young women have no social standing whatever, but their new
friend Tinker Grey is a banker of some kind, and a resident of a
fancy apartment on Central Park West. </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>Rules
of Civility</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
is Katey’s reminiscence, from thirty years on, of the eventful year
that follows.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> 1938
finds New York still mired in the Depression. Katey and Eve share a
room in a boarding house and scrape an entry-level living; Katey
because she has no family left, and Eve because she’s unwilling to
accept help from her family in the midwest. The next eight months
will find Eve travelling in the south of France, and Katey
maneuvering her career into a track with a future. Katey’s social
life takes a commensurate turn for the richer, involving wild parties
in the Hamptons and a ‘camp’ in the Adirondacks. In general,
though, it’s a New York life, lived in coffee shops, offices,
taxicabs, and the occasional club.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>The
Lincoln Highway</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
occupies a much wider canvas. It begins in a tiny town in Nebraska,
where Emmett Watson is coming home from eighteen months in a Kansas
prison for juveniles. It’s 1954; his father, a failed farmer, has
died, and Emmett is now responsible for his eight-year-old brother,
Billy. They are planning to take Emmett’s car, and the ready money
that remains, and head for California. But here comes trouble: two
other young men have slipped away from the reformatory by stowing
away in the trunk of Emmett’s ride home. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Duchess
is mad enough to avail himself of such a chance. His father is a
traveling actor, the spiritual heir to the king and the duke in
</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>Huckleberry
Finn,</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
more than half a con man. Duchess is a wily kid with a talent for
picking up things that don’t belong to him; and while he hasn’t
had much practice with assault and battery, he picks it right up when
he sees a need for it. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> He
has brought along Woolly, who’s a few bubbles off plumb. According
to Duchess, “[H]e’s always running about five minutes late,
showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the
conversation is pulling out of the station.” Woolly has had some
advantages in life, but he’s temperamentally unsuited to make the
most of them: how do you get kicked out of three of the most
exclusive boarding schools in New England? How do you mess up so
badly you wind up in Kansas? He’s fundamentally a kind fellow,
though, and he makes friends with Billy, who is both smart and
knowledgeable far beyond his years.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Agent
of chaos that he is, Duchess takes off in Emmett’s car, headed in
the wrong direction. He and Woolly have business in New York,
involving some money that belongs to Woolly, which is in a safe at
his family’s camp in the Adirondacks. Emmett and Billy follow by
train, no small feat as most of their money departed with the light
blue Studebaker. How in the world will Emmett find his friends, his
car, and his money? </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>The
Lincoln Highway </i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">is
full of wonderful tangential stories. It reads like something Charles
Portis might have written, in contrast to the earlier book’s
overtones of Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, and Charles Dickens.
Towles has a precise control of his characters’ voices. Here’s
Duchess, on the notion that clothes make the man: “Gather together
a group of men of every gradation–from the powerhouse to the
putz–have them toss their fedoras in a pile, and you’ll spend a
lifetime trying to figure out whose was whose. Because it’s the man
who makes the fedora, not versa vice. I mean, wouldn’t you rather
wear the hat worn by Frank Sinatra than the one worn by Sergeant Joe
Friday? I should hope so.”</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The
books are connected, in fact, in a way that gave me particular
delight: that camp in the Adirondacks is the same family place in
both books; one character in </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>Rules
of Civility </i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">appears
offstage in </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><i>The
Lincoln Highway</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
They also share an ethos: when you need help, look for the forgotten
man, and listen to him. Emmett gets the right train to New York with
the aid of a panhandler in a wheelchair. Katey gets a beautiful cache
of journalistic gossip from doormen and elevator operators. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The
characters Towles loves most have a sense of wonder. Tinker’s
brother praises Tinker’s this way: “Anyone can buy a car or a
night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a
thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking
at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a
dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine.” That’s the kind of wonder
these books can leave you with.</span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> --</span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Codicil - the family that crosses the two books is actually part of my own; Woolly is called that because his middle name is Wolcott. The family consorts with Roosevelts in part because their second cousin married TR's first cousin - viz., my great grandparents. Wild!</span></span></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> <br /></span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-3185597764022782552023-09-01T20:17:00.001-04:002023-09-01T20:17:03.326-04:00Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Being
Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Kathryn
Schulz (2010, Harper Collins)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-size: small;">To
err is human; it’s also distressing, discouraging, and sometimes
downright humiliating. None of us is perfect, just as none of us is
immortal. Kathryn Schulz’s book is onto this right from the
beginning: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that
happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or
desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes
happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if
they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore
them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.” All true, all
familiar; we are, personally and as a society, terrible at simply
acknowledging error.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;"> So
here’s a whole book about what Schulz calls ‘wrongology,’
treating error both as an idea and as an experience. Philosophers
have thought about error for pretty much as long as there have been
philosophers. Thomas Aquinas adhered to the pessimistic view, that
error was a terrible defect, because people had a natural faculty for
truth. William James was more accepting, says Schulz: “[I]f you
believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the
human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact,
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>because</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking
glass–if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both
explicable and accept</span><span style="font-size: small;">a</span><span style="font-size: small;">ble.”</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Both
of those views have their appeal, and they remain in tension. It
seems a worthy pursuit to narrow the distance between ourselves and
truth, or perfection. That would seem to entail trying to eliminate
errors; but “to believe we can eradicate error, we must also
believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the
truth–a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves
could be wrong. Thus the catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid
of error, we would already need to be infallible.” Or else,
inevitably, we’d commit new errors in the process. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Modern
science, since the seventeenth century or so, has turned that
likelihood into a tool for truth-seeking. “These thinkers [Michel
de Montaigne and René Descartes] weren’t nihilists, nor even
skeptics. They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover i</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">t</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic
error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage
point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like
mistakes.” The scientific method, </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">the
practice </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">of
devising testable hypotheses and testing them, has brought the search
for truth a very long way. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Soon
enough, Schulz comes down from these dizzy conceptual heights. She
tells stories from all over the map, about people who have made
life-changing mistakes; or rather, had their lives changed by
understanding themselves to have been mistaken. (‘I was wrong’ is
a common enough sentence; ‘I am wrong’ is almost unheard of.)
Some cases are rare, like the Klansman who recognized that his
perceived adversary had all the same problems he had; others are as
ordinary as a divorce lawyer’s waiting room.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> This
is really my kind of book: abstract, extensive, and wise. How about
this: “When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff
them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i>aporia</i></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">:
with a sense of doubt, perplexity and awe in the face of the
complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to
embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt.” Allow
me to wish you a life of doubt, perplexity and awe.</span></span></span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></span></p><p>
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">Any
Good Books, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">September</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">
2023</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-65867856959675284942023-08-01T07:37:00.001-04:002023-08-01T07:37:32.311-04:00The Anthropocene Reviewed<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p align="left">
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">John
Green (Dutton, 2021)</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> John
Green has been a book reviewer and a novelist, and, more recently, a
podcaster. This book would probably make a great audio book, since
some of it was originally written for the podcast. I think that has
influenced the writing toward smoothness and lucidity, and toward a
very personal point of view. The fact that podcasts became a common
reality only in this century is a pretty good example of what the
essays are about: we are surfing on our own history, and it might be
well to take a good look around.</span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
Anthropocene, for one thing, is what many geologists are calling the
era we’re living in, when human activity is having measurable
effects on conditions on earth. We live in a world partly of our
making, right down to the temperature of the sky and the sea. Nothing
else on earth can escape our influence, either, which is appalling to
remember, because we have certainly set forces in motion that we
neither understand nor control. </span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
internet, of course, is one such force. There’d be almost no way to
go back and decode the algorithms that know us so well, if we have
any kind of presence online, whether we’re reading, shopping, or
listening. Google music wants a thumbs up or down, to tune itself to
my taste; Google and Amazon want reviews on a scale of five stars.
“The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists
for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard
until the internet era.” </span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> And
now it’s everywhere. “The five-star scale was applied not just to
books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers.
The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has
more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.”
Green cheekily stretches the form by applying the system to Diet Dr.
Pepper, Teddy bears, and Canada geese, but he does so in a familiar
and recognizable way. In his early drafts, he tried to write from a
disinterested, ‘neutral’ point of view, as he had when he
reviewed books in for <i>Booklist</i>. Fortunately, his wife turned
him around, pointing out that “in the Anthropocene, there are no
disinterested observers; there are only participants.” If you love
Diet Dr. Pepper, and hate Canada geese, you might as well say so. </span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
“With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking
humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most
of us.” Would you believe they had almost been hunted to extinction
a hundred year ago? Now they live nearly everywhere we plant Kentucky
bluegrass, which is pretty much everywhere, between lawns, parks and
golf courses. “Like us, the success of their species has affected
their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred
pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe <i>E. coli</i>
levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have
few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always
human violence. Just like us.” The geese end up with a lowly two
stars. </span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> There’s
a marvelous range to this book, from the minute (<i>Staphylococcus
aureus</i>) to the immense (Halley’s Comet); from the very old (the
Ginkgo Tree) to the very new (<i>Super Mario Kart</i>); from the
general (Sunsets) to the particular (Jerzy Dudek’s performance [as
a soccer goalie] on May 25<sup>th</sup>, 2005); from the sublime (Our
Capacity for Wonder) to the ridiculous (The World’s Largest Ball of
Paint.) And everything, so to speak, in between.</span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> And
what could be more in between than Indianapolis? Green lives there
because his wife has an art museum job there; they live in one of the
economically and racially diverse ZIP codes in the United States.
It’s a place so average as to be almost a joke: “The city’s
nicknames include ‘Naptown,’ because it’s boring, and
‘India-no-place.’” But it’s also a place where people meet up
with friends and ride their bikes out to the Speedway to watch the
Indy 500, along with a quarter million or so other people. In 2020,
when Covid-19 stopped the race, Green and his buddies made the trip
anyway, just for the joy of it.</span></span></p><p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Read
this book, or listen to it, just for the joy of it. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-9805410549530299042023-07-03T09:59:00.000-04:002023-07-03T09:59:35.424-04:00Furious Hours<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p align="left">
<span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Any
Good Books, May 2023</span></span></p>
<p align="left">
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">F</span><span style="font-style: normal;">urious
Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;">C</span><span style="font-style: normal;">asey
Cep </span><span style="font-style: normal;">(Alfred A. Knopf, 2019) </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Casey
Cep’s </span><i>Furious Hours</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
is a story about a story, a book about a book that </span><span style="font-style: normal;">didn’t
happen</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. It’s a thoroughly
researched and beautifully written book about loose ends, ambiguous
heroes, and lost drafts. This befits its subject, Nelle Harper Lee,
who achieved literary success beyond her wildest dreams, only to find
the fame deeply burdensome, and the wealth expensive.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">(T</span><span style="font-style: normal;">he
top tax rate was still 90% in </span><span style="font-style: normal;">1960,</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
when the royalties for </span><i>To Kill a Mockingbird </i><span style="font-style: normal;">began
flooding in</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. The book has
been in print ever since.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Cep’s
book</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> opens in Alexander City,
Alabama, in 1977, at the trial of a man, Robert Louis Burns, who shot
another man in front of three hundred people. The shooter and the
victim, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, were black, as were most of the
witnesses; the jury, the judge, and all of the lawyers were white
men. Harper Lee </span><span style="font-style: normal;">sat among the
press. She was</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> there at the
invitation of the defense lawyer, Tom Radney, whom she’d met in New
York at a party connected to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">man who was shot, the
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Reverend Willie Junior
Maxwell, lived a lavish life for a part-time preacher living in </span><span style="font-style: normal;">the
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">wide spot in the road that
was Nixburg, Alabama. In addition to preaching, he worked in a rock
quarry, reducing rock to gravel and dust, and ran a pulpwood crew,
delivering soft Alabama pine to paper </span><span style="font-style: normal;">mills</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
possibly the only man ever to do so in dapper three-piece suits. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> In
1970, Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found beaten to death in her
car, a short way from home. Her life was unusually well insured, and
her husband was the prime suspect. The Reverend had policies with
companies all over the country, not only on his wife, but on “...his
mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the
infant daughter he had only just legitimated.” The initial charges
were dismissed for lack of evidence; the following summer, new
evidence and a new indictment led to a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile,
Tom Radney was helping the Reverend sue for Mary Lou’s death
benefits, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">and taking a hefty
cut when he won.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> His
first wife’s was not the only unresolved death. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">In
the next two years, his older brother and h</span><span style="font-style: normal;">i</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s
second wife also met suspicious ends.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
Some insurance companies had begun to refuse his business, but others
paid some </span><span style="font-style: normal;">$80,000</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
on Mrs. Maxwell’s death. Then a nephew who worked on the pulpwood
crew </span><span style="font-style: normal;">was found dead in a car</span><span style="font-style: normal;">;
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><span style="font-style: normal;">then
a teenage girl his third wife had </span><span style="font-style: normal;">taken
in. It was at her funeral that Robert Burns drew a gun and shot
Willie Maxwell three times at close range. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">The
trial chapters are riveting</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
“Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns,
and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of
crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses,
and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their
benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their
neighbors.”</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Here
was a story, after all th</span><span style="font-style: normal;">o</span><span style="font-style: normal;">se
years, that </span><span style="font-style: normal;">called out to
Harper Lee</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. She had grown up
watching her father in courtrooms. She </span><span style="font-style: normal;">had
gone</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> to Kansas with Truman
Capote to dig into the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">murders
of the Clutter family </span><span style="font-style: normal;">for </span><i>In
Cold Blood.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Her interview notes,
and the way people opened up to her who found Truman Capote too
exotic to deal with, contributed immeasurably to the success of that
book. In Alex City, she spent time with Tom Radney, and became
friendly with </span><span style="font-style: normal;">a </span><span style="font-style: normal;">young
local journalist named Jim Earnhardt. She interviewed everyone who
remembered Reverend Maxwell, including his killer. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Burns</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
had been declared </span><span style="font-style: normal;">not guilty
by reason of insanity</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, but
passed through the state mental hospital in short order, and was
already home. She went home to New York to start writing with a hefty
valise full of Radney’s files, and Earnhardt’s reporting
scrapbook. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> And
then… what? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">“Nothing
writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never
transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and
interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that
matters most starts out blank.” </span><span style="font-style: normal;">The
tale was, in the first place, exceedingly tangled; where she needed
facts, she had rumors, conjectures, and lies. She was lacking the
help her first agent and editor had given her on </span><i>Mockingbird</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Those people were dead, and no one could replace them. And was the
public ready for the story of a black serial killer, from the auth</span><span style="font-style: normal;">o</span><span style="font-style: normal;">r
of </span><span style="font-style: normal;">such a</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
beloved book?</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Casey
Cep has done an exceptional job reconstructing all of this,
especially the social and economic fabric of Alexander City. If we
can’t have Lee’s book, I’ll gladly take this one.</span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-54893881607859929042023-07-03T09:41:00.000-04:002023-07-03T09:41:10.735-04:00The Art of the Wasted Day<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p align="left">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">Any
Good Books, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">July</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">
2023</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
Art of the Wasted Day</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Patricia
Hampl (Penguin, 2019)</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern
life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better.
That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that:
what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that
we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an
eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree,
that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then,
not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless,
plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a
daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that
daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious
enough to be worth going to hell for. </span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Of
course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list,
which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details.
“Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic
detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and
success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil
does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem
of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as
solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they
seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> So
Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for
more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary
leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a
couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when
Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah
Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their
seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for.
“...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’
apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies.
Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady
Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant
relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.” </span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> What
did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort
of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks,
correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience
liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This
insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life
together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.”
Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world.
Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s
top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d
prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way
of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding
from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the
possibilities.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> As
she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later
object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the
grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private
chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his
upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’
though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and
polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was
describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because
the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or
ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little
world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into
the great world.”</span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> If
the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for
you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels
my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What
characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the
opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the
quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.”
Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t
seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually,
there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in
the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship,
remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly
humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely
thing to witness.</span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-22621485752893547622023-06-01T08:17:00.008-04:002023-06-01T08:17:49.404-04:00Left on Tenth<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Left
on Tenth – A Second Chance at Life: a Memoir</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Delia
Ephron</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">(</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Back
Bay Books, 2022</span><span style="font-style: normal;">) </span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">In
2015, Delia Ephron’s husband died of cancer. She was seventy-one,
and they’d been married for </span><span style="font-style: normal;">more
than</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> thirty years, supporting
each other in diverse and successful writing careers. He died at
home, thanks to hospice, but it was exhausting and disorienting. With
the help of sisters and friends, she planned a memorial, and
reoriented her life toward taking care of herself. Her sister Nora
had died of leukemia in 2012; Delia had been seeing Nora’s
hematologist regularly, and she had seven years of ‘all clear’s.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “People
always asked ‘How are you?’ Emphasis on the <i>are</i> so I knew
it was a serious question. But I never had a clue how to answer
it...I couldn’t articulate my grief. And to try seemed to cheapen
Jerry’s memory.”</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> A
year and a couple of days after his death, Delia got a message from a
man in California who wanted to reopen an old acquaintance; old, as
in, they went on a few dates when she was in college. But in the
present, they had a number of interests in common besides their
recent widowhood. The e-mails that ensued are reproduced in the book
– they read like the first drops of a monsoon. She liked him, he
liked her, they talked on the phone like teenagers used to do. Peter
flew to New York a couple of weeks later. “Looking back, we were
already in love and possibly set up for catastrophe. The phone calls
and e-mails were almost dreams, perfect versions of ourselves.”</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> But
at the next blood test, things are not so good. “I should say that
I am someone who keeps myself nearly completely medically ignorant.
In spite of all the googling I do, I have never googled
<i>myelodysplastic syndrome </i>or <i>AML</i>...Everything else is
about to change on this day, but my attitude toward illness will
not.” Like her late sister, she has leukemia. Dr. Roboz says, not
for the first time, that she is not her sister, and her illness is
not her sister’s. Possibly more to the point, treatments have
advanced continuously, and there are new drugs and procedures to try.
It’s good news that her new boyfriend is a doctor; a Jungian
analyst, actually, but a trained scientist, who’s happy to handle
what the doctors need to tell them. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Delia
and Peter get married in the hospital where she goes for the first
treatment with CPX-351, a drug so new it doesn’t have a name yet.
It’s a optimistic move for two seventy-two-year-olds, but it
bespeaks a hope that could only help, over the coming months. This
first time is not so bad; five weeks to kill the bone marrow white
cells and hope that only healthy ones grow back. But no – her
disease comes back, and the doctors want her to have a bone marrow
transplant. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> We
know, because she survived to write this book, that it worked, but,
wow, what a harrowing ride it would be. Delia doesn’t know this,
because she doesn’t want to know it. “If I do research I will
panic, I will become hysterical, I will misunderstand, I will
obsess.” Instead, she marshals friends and friendships, right down
to a neighbor she knows from dog-walking. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The
marrow graft means another six weeks in the leukemia wing, so many
pills, so little appetite, so much weakness. Worst of all, after the
graft is in and starting to work, she’s visited with a crushing
depression. She hates it all, and wants to die–but then she
doesn’t, and lives to tell about it. Credit the doctors and the
inventors of CPX-351; credit Peter’s love, wisdom, and constancy;
credit all those devoted friends. “And luck. Is <i>luck</i> another
word for <i>miracle?” </i>Maybe not, but does it matter? She’s
grateful, and so am I.</span></span></span></p><p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p><p>
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Any
Good Books, June 2023 by email 6/1/23<br /></span></span></span></p><p align="justify" style="font-style: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-25876054713869924272023-04-01T23:23:00.001-04:002023-04-01T23:23:45.900-04:00Why Fish Don't Exist<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p align="left">
<span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Any
Good Books, April 2023</span></span></p>
<p align="left">
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Why
Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of
Life</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Lulu
Miller (Simon & Schuster, 2020)</span></p>
<p align="left">
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Lulu
Miller’s father is a cheerful nihilist. When she was about seven,
she questioned him about the meaning of life. “He turned to me
grinning and announced, ‘Nothing!’ It felt like he had been
waiting eagerly, for my whole life, for me to finally ask.” No
God, no destiny, no meaning. You don’t matter. “He seems to
permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious
hedonism, to form a kind of moral code, <i>While other people don’t
matter, either, treat them like they do.” </i><span style="font-style: normal;">As
a grown man, full of vim and bonhomie, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">he
could afford to believe that </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Chaos</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
is the bottom line, but this revelation had a </span><span style="font-style: normal;">depressing</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
effect on his youngest daughter, causing her to wonder if her life
was worth living at all.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Miller
was attracted to the story of </span><span style="font-style: normal;">David
Starr Jordan </span><span style="font-style: normal;">because he
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">seemed like a man in whom
Chaos might have met its match. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">He</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">was</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
a naturalist from his youngest days, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">on
a farm in upstate New York, obsessively drawing and mapping the world
around him. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">This was seen as
an old-fashioned and even useless pursuit by his </span><span style="font-style: normal;">mother</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">who </span><span style="font-style: normal;">had
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">a practical, Puritan </span><span style="font-style: normal;">turn
of mind</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. But in 1873, when
Jordan was </span><span style="font-style: normal;">twenty-two, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">he
had a chance to spend the summer on a small, treeless island </span><span style="font-style: normal;">off
the coast of</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> Massachusetts,
under the tutelage of Louis Agassiz. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">The
great geologist proposed to get young scientists out of the classroom
and into the natural world.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">On</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">the shores of </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Penikese
Island, on </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Buzzard</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
Bay, Jordan found his life’s work: catching, preserving, and naming
the world’s fish.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Agassiz
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">promoted taxonomy as the
study of how the living beings of the world could be ranked, to
indicate the hierarchy dictated by God. He </span><span style="font-style: normal;">saw
fit</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> to use his own moral
sentiments in the service of establishing the great ladder of being.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
“Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they
‘bestow greater care upon their offspring.’ Parasites, meanwhile,
were clear lowlifes, the lot of them.” </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><span style="font-style: normal;">The
results </span><span style="font-style: normal;">of </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Jordan’s</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
energetic collecting w</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ere</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
first </span><span style="font-style: normal;">amassed</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
at Indiana University, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">where
he ascended to the presidency at the age of thirty-four</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
In 1890, Leland and Jane Stanford came to Bloomington to recruit
Jordan </span><span style="font-style: normal;">to be</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
the first president of their new university. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">In
California,</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> his collection
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">continued to grow</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
until the earthquake </span><span style="font-style: normal;">of 1906
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">threw the whole thing to the
floor, in a </span><span style="font-style: normal;">shower of broken
glass</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. Miller </span><span style="font-style: normal;">wa</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s
greatly inspired by the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">thought</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
of Jordan picking up fish and sewing their </span><span style="font-style: normal;">tin</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">label</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s
onto them, so that when they were put back into </span><span style="font-style: normal;">new</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
bottles, with fresh preservative, the crucial information </span><span style="font-style: normal;">w</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ould
be </span><span style="font-style: normal;">preserved as well.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Such a rebuke to Chaos! </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Such
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">persever</span><span style="font-style: normal;">a</span><span style="font-style: normal;">nce!
S</span><span style="font-style: normal;">uch grit! </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Or,
possibly, such hubris! In the aftermath of the earthquake, Jordan
would write, “For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the
will of man that shapes the fates.” </span><span style="font-style: normal;">I</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s
it</span><span style="font-style: normal;">? Really? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Miller
says that this “was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell
himself. It was the kind of lie he had warned would lead to evil.”
Which indeed it did, though Jordan would never see it that way. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">He
was </span><span style="font-style: normal;">young enough </span><span style="font-style: normal;">to
accept the principles of Darwin (as Agassiz never did)</span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
but </span><span style="font-style: normal;">also these of</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Galton
thought that if natural selection was good, selective breeding–of
humans–would be better. “There’s a chance that eugenics could
have remained in the realm of speculative fiction had a small group
of influential scientists not championed its cause so zealously.”</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
Jordan had the prestige and perseverence to make eugenics a much more
powerful force in the United States that Galton would </span><span style="font-style: normal;">ever
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">have managed without him.
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">State after state passed laws
permitting the sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit,’a category
that inevitably </span><span style="font-style: normal;">reflected </span><span style="font-style: normal;">the
prejudices of those making the determination.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">In Germany, the Nazis would
read Jordan’s work, and defend their horrific acts as the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">natural</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
outcome of scientific reasoning. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Miller
points out that Jordan, like Galton and Agassiz, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">entirely
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">missed Darwin’s point. In
fact, it’s variation that gives all life its vigor. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">We
use different tools for different jobs.</span><span style="font-style: normal;">“This
was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that
there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms.” </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> A</span><span style="font-style: normal;">bout
those </span><span style="font-style: normal;">fish: drawing on the
work of Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Miller explains that the category of
‘fish’ </span><span style="font-style: normal;">doesn’t work</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
as an evolutionary category. A scientifically drawn tree </span><span style="font-style: normal;">of
descent </span><span style="font-style: normal;">would </span><span style="font-style: normal;">show
that</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> sharks and eels and
lungfish </span><span style="font-style: normal;">are</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
more </span><span style="font-style: normal;">historically</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
distinct from each other than they are from some land animals. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">If
this idea threatens </span><span style="font-style: normal;">to</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">unmoor us, it also frees</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
us from </span><span style="font-style: normal;">the illusion of </span><span style="font-style: normal;">some
cosmic moral or</span><span style="font-style: normal;">der. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Miller
has “come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this
order, to keep t</span><span style="font-style: normal;">u</span><span style="font-style: normal;">gging
at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped
underneath.” </span><span style="font-style: normal;">A purpose to
life, after all!</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-42607984997339366312023-03-01T12:32:00.004-05:002023-03-01T12:32:48.956-05:00Vintage Contemporaries: a novel<p align="left">
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Vintage
Contemporaries: a novel</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Dan
Kois (Harper, 2023)</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"> Dan
Kois’s lovely novel starts in 1991, with young Emily Thiel, newly
in New York, getting her first job as assistant to a literary agent.
Her first new friend is called Emily; in today’s terms, we might
call them Lawful Emily and Chaotic Emily. Emily T. keeps jobs, even
if they are terrible, and Other Emily is the employee of your
nightmares, until she quits on a whim. <span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-US">“She
was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett
O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was
Emma. She knew that she was the boring one. But she also knew that
Emily depended on her, and that Emily was extraordinary.” </span></span>(Kois
throws us a bone by letting Genius Emily rename Emily Thiel ‘Em’,
for the two sections of the book set in the Nineties. In the sections
set after the turn of the millennium, Emily takes her name back. To
which Emily says, “That’ll confuse the readers, but sure.”)</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"> Em
also gets to know her mother’s friend Lucy, a divorced mom with a
novel to sell. It’s less ‘literary’, that is, gloomy, than most
of the well-received novels of the time, but Em warms to it. It’s
about two young women in New York, friends with opposite
temperaments… wait a minute, are we swallowing our own tail? Well,
waving at it, certainly. Kois is not shy of the theme with
variations: he will give us two pairs of sisters, two pairs of
friends crying together after pregnancy scares, and plenty of
subtle-but-not-secret foreshadowing.</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"> Kois
has said in interviews that this book is, in part, an homage to
Laurie Colwin, a novelist and food writer of the later twentieth
century, who died too young. I’m taking that to mean that Lucy has
some of her attributes, especially the ability to write well and
seriously, without dwelling in realms of despair and gloom. Lucy’s
philosophy is optimism: “I love writing about characters who are
living the best they can, who are in love, whose circumstances may be
complicated but whose days are full of joy. I love writing about the
food they cook, the wine they drink, and the hangovers they don’t
regret.” Unfortunately, the occasion for the essay in which she
says this is an announcement that she has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease
– and her a Mets fan, with a Yankee disease! Colwin left us a
couple of great memoirs with recipes, and Emily helps Lucy write one,
as well.</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"> We
leap ahead to 2005, and find Emily with a husband and a baby, and a
much better job at a small publisher, though the babysitter costs
nearly as much as she makes. They live in Manhattan, but just
barely–they’re in Inwood, up at 207<sup>th</sup> Street. She
encounters Emily again, and they have lunch, but there’s a real
question about on what terms they could become friends again. The
next chapter, set in 1993, unpacks some of the difficulties that led
their friendship to unravel.</span></p>
<p align="left"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"> That
chapter is also a deep dive into New York’s housing situation. Em
lives in a dark, damp apartment on the Lower East Side, whose kitchen
is “the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so
advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now.” Chaotic
Emily lives a few blocks away in an actual squat: an illegally
occupied building that is as squalid as it sounds, but is also
communal and political in some ways we have forgotten about. </span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> We
also get a day-to-day view of the publishing industry, and the
terrible entry-level jobs it offers bright young English majors. We
see Emily progressing through its ranks, beginning with the tedium of
slush piles, the casual ogling and sexist comments, the lousy pay,
the general sense that this hazing has been going on forever. Later
in her career, when she has an assistant instead of being one, she is
proud to have survived tough, demanding bosses; she also sees that
some of the demanding conditions were genuinely out of line. The
general lack of respect for assistants lies too deep in the culture
to fix, but she can steer a few people away from outright sexual
harassment, before leaving for another job, herself. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Being
a mother is a delight for Emily, as little Jane progresses from being
a squashable baby to being a three-year-old who believes she can do
cartwheels. She also makes time to work with Other Emily’s
site-specific theatrical productions, which have somehow progressed
from the pipe dreams of their youth to actual shows, with actors and
sets and audiences. Emily’s editorial eye is actually just what is
needed; her questions and suggestions make the work better, and it’s
enough.</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p align="left">
<span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Any
Good Books, March 1 2023 <br /></span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-77817408813885630192023-02-01T15:12:00.002-05:002023-02-02T08:55:13.156-05:00Lost and Found<span style="font-size: medium;"></span><p align="left">
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Lost
and Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Kathryn
Schulz (2022, Random House)</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;">
</span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> In
the fall of 2016, Kathryn Schulz lost her father. He was
seventy-four, so one of the things she lost was what might have been
another couple of decades of delight in his company. The first
section of <i>Lost and Found </i>is an extended consideration of what
it means to lose things, from the smallest shirt button, through
keys, and jobs, and friends, and so on up to glaciers and species.
It’s a wonderfully personal look at a perennial and universal
problem: “Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part
of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so
long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation
against lying about finding someone else’s lost property.”</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Her
atheism, and her Jewish heritage, dispose Schulz against a belief in
life after death. Her father is entirely gone, not sitting around in
heaven. It pleases her, on the other hand, to imagine a place where
all the lost things are collected. L. Frank Baum called it the Valley
of Lost Things. “In my mind,” Schulz says, “it is a dark,
pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing:
empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps
like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s
lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their
puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground,
the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not
written down and gone by morning.”</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
period after her father’s death felt to Schulz like a visit to that
random, melancholy world. She lost her balance, she lost her way. It
was hard to know what to do, because she’d never imagined what
would happen after the worst happened. Not only could she not write,
she could scarcely read. “I did not exactly feel lost, as my father
was to me. I felt <i>at a loss</i>–a strange turn of phrase, as if
loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or
Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle
spins.” Exhaustion, irritability, boredom, occasionally sadness
itself–all these had their way with Schulz, unpredictably and
uncontrollably. </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
second section of the book, about falling in love, largely overlaps
the first section in time, beginning a year and a half before her
bereavement. I think Schulz is wise to treat them separately, but the
connections between losing and finding keep making themselves felt.
How much of either, for example, is due to our own efforts, and how
much to the larger forces of the way the world is? How much is simply
the luck of timing? For a long time, she was a single woman in her
thirties, with a quiet home north of New York City and an established
writing career. One fine spring day, a friend of a friend stopped in
her town to break up a long drive, and they had lunch together. A few
more emails, another meal a week later, and C. became the woman
Schulz was going to marry. </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> As
with loss, Schulz gives us love on all possible scales, from the
smear of jam on early-morning pancakes to the outer reaches of the
Solar System. There’s the feeling of deep, homely comfort, and a
profound astonishment, as of a new planet discovered. They agree on
the weighty matter of baby corn (they disapprove); they have vastly
different views on religion. Schulz leaves it alone, while C. is an
Episcopalian with a serious church habit, yet the matter rests easily
between them. </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Their
origins seemed worlds apart, too: Schulz came from a wealthy
Midwestern suburb, C. from Maryland’s rural Eastern shore. Schulz
started to worry about that gap on their first trip to see her
parents, but, really, she says, “Most of us fit only partially into
our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our
former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for
them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in
the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is
so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by
comparison.” </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> I
love the writing in this book, and the thinking. I love its
specificity, and its sense of spaciousness. It ends with a wedding,
which abides in a haunting photo of Schulz and her mother, and the
broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay where her father would have stood:
“In a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That
seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns
crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic
and uplifting.”</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Let the people say, Amen.</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></p><p align="left">
<span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Any
Good Books, February 2023</span></span></p><p align="left"><span style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { background: transparent }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-71617525408204646562023-01-01T08:27:00.000-05:002023-01-01T08:27:14.624-05:00 The Hero of this Book: a novel<p> </p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Hero of this Book: a novel</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Elizabeth
McCracken (2022, Harper Collins)</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “If
you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and
call it something else.” Well, all right, this book is a novel,
shaped very much like a memoir, in the same way that an epistolary
novel resembles a collection of letters. The plot, such as it is, is
a simple solitary perambulation around London, on a warm August day
in 2019. Our narrator, who declines to name or describe herself, is
accompanied by her memories of her mother, dead since November, and
several London trips they had taken together.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> They
liked London for museums and theater, but particularly for ease of
access. The mother had difficulty walking all her life. She used two
canes to get around, most of her life, graduating in later years to a
motorized scooter; but in London, all of the black cabs have ramps,
so she could go anywhere without a lot of planning and difficulty. In
a sense, it’s a book about the mother’s particular body, small
and fragile, and subject to falling; but since she’s never let it
stop her, it seems to affect other people more. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Of
course, there’s so much more to her life. There’s her marriage to
the narrator’s father, who is tall and heavy in a way that makes
them quite an odd couple. (“My parents were a sight gag.”)
There’s her interest in theater, and her professional life doing
editorial work for Boston University. And there’s her approach to
motherhood: “...on some fundamental level I’m not sure my mother,
anyhow, cared about my inner life. This was a parenting gambit:
Therefore I was allowed to do, think, whatever I wanted.” Perhaps
that’s how writers are made.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Our
narrator is a writer, a published novelist and sometime teacher of
writing, which makes the veil between author and narrator very thin
indeed. She’s wonderfully wry about it, though. Of her time at the
Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she says, “Authorial intrusion was seen
as a great aesthetic crime in the 1980s. We accused one another of it
all the time, those moments our shadows fell across our fiction. I
can’t remember why we thought it was so awful. Maybe it was
supposed to be a sign of ego.”</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> That
makes sense, as one of the tensions McCracken is exploring. How do
you celebrate your parents while preserving their privacy? You make
them characters. It’s none of our business as readers whether the
events of the story are eighty per cent factual, or twenty per cent.
As we say of the Gospel where I go to church, “Just because it
didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">She’s
just one person, but having aging parents (with their health problems
and their overstuffed, deteriorating house) is a widely recognizeable
story, verging on universal.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> As
for ego, I leave you with this gem: “As a writer, I claim to be
modest, but I have delusions of grandeur. I call them delusions in
order to sound modest.” Again, I can’t really tell, and don’t
really care, if that’s the author or just her persona. It’s as
good an explanation of the authorial impulse as I’ve ever heard.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
</p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Any
Good Books, January 1 2023</span></span></span></p><p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
</p>
<p align="left" style="orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { background: transparent }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-56033664800727912012022-12-01T23:52:00.002-05:002022-12-01T23:52:18.552-05:00An Odyssey<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and
an Epic</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Daniel Mendelsohn (2018,
Vintage)</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Daniel Mendelsohn is a critic
and classics scholar. You can't be surprised that he begins this book
with a proem, an explanation of what the book is about; he has to
cite the <i>Iliad</i>, the <i>Odyssey</i>, and the <i>Aeneid </i>to
explain what a proem is, and why he needs one. We learn that when he
was teaching at Bard College one spring term, he offered a freshman
seminar on the Odyssey, and his father asked to audit it. "At
ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the
freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or
eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the
discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long
marriages and what it means to yearn for home."</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> The <i>Odyssey </i>is the ideal
vessel for this journey they make together; the father is a retired
scientist, teacher, and autodidact who, it turns out, had studied
Latin in his schooldays; but only through Ovid, not scaling the
heights of Virgil. But he will trek in from Long Island and up the
Hudson, spending the night with his son to make the trip a little
less arduous. The two of them will even spend ten days of the next
summer on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's voyage from
Troy to Ithaca. "'Retracing the Odyssey' was an 'educational'
cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him
as a needless luxury–cruises and sightseeing and vacations–my
father was a great believer in education."</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> So this will be the story of a
literary journey, and a physical journey, and a journey of
understanding between the two men. Mendelsohn is at pains to explain
that Homer's storytelling is as full of twists and turns as the
journey itself. The technical term is 'ring composition', and it
refers to the practice of putting digressions about the past or the
future in places where they explain the current action, sometimes at
great length. "As complex as it is to describe this technique,
the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the
way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to
another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we
started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return–even
if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded
to get back to our starting point." You have to trust that the
narrator has control of the direction of the story, the way a captain
knows where his ship is, even when the passengers don't.</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> In a very satisfying way,
Mendelsohn is exemplifying everything he's telling us about. He
states his major themes and names his characters in his proem, as
Homer and Virgil did in theirs. As the class proceeds, week by week,
through the <i>Odyssey,</i> he describes the action of the story, and
how the class responds to it. His father, who had thought he'd sit
quietly, turns out to have definite opinions. Why, he wonders, is
Odysseus considered such a hero, when he lost the entire contingent
of twelve ships and their men, and staggered home alone after twenty
years? As it happens, the first four books of the epic are not about
Odysseus at all; he's still imprisoned by Calypso. They're about his
son, Telemachus, who was a small child when the Greeks forces were
assembled to besiege Troy. </span>
</p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Telemachus has his own voyages
to make, and much to learn. Mendelsohn says, "With his
unpredictable swings between endearing swagger and utter
cluelessness, the Telemachus of the first few books of the <i>Odyssey</i>
can remind you of a college freshman." At the same time that
we're meeting the (suitably anonymized) freshmen in the seminar,
we're getting more of a look at Mendelsohn and his father. The
relationship between them is unfolding, and is being set in context
of the rest of the family. Mendelsohn, a gay man, has two sons with a
friend, and spends most weekends with them in New Jersey. His father
grew up in the Bronx, during the Great Depression, which gave him a
certain pugnacious prejudice in favor of the little guy. He grew up
to be a New York Mets fan, scorning the Yankees for 'buying their
success.' And perhaps Telemachus, with the goddess Athena's
consistent support, has it too easy...</span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> I'd certainly recommend this
book as a companion to a rereading of the <i>Odyssey</i>, but I
enjoyed some of its other dimensions even more. We get a glimpse of
philology, the 'science' of word origins, and we see a classroom from
a skilled teacher's point of view. I especially enjoyed the way
Mendelsohn circles around his story like a skilled artist working a
sketch up to a finished painting. Done ineptly, ring composition is
kind of maddening, but in this case, it's delightful. The proem can
tell you what's going to happen, but you still have to read through
to find out why it happens, and what it all means. </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Any Good Books, November 2022</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p><style type="text/css"><font size="3">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-36354344579411264172022-12-01T23:50:00.001-05:002022-12-04T08:02:37.417-05:00You Never Forget Your First<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;">You Never Forget Your First: a
Biography of George Washington</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Alexis Coe (2020, Viking)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> People have been writing
admiringly about George Washington since before he died; it's
reasonable to wonder what can usefully be added to the shelf. <i>You
Never Forget Your First</i> stands out for several reasons. </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> First, it's concise. The text
is just a little over two hundred pages; the notes and index add only
another fifty-five. Alexis Coe read Joseph Ellis, Richard Brookhiser,
Ron Chernow, and all the rest of the doorstops with studiously dull
titles: "George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A
Life. George Washington: a President....With titles this stodgy,
presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of
a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents' or Father's
Day."`</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Second, as the title suggests,
it's refreshingly cheeky. For instance, Coe dubs the (invariably
male) authors of the standard biographies 'the Thigh Men', because
they seem so attached to Washington's physical stature and prowess.
Their books frequently feature covers with a head-to-toe portrait of
Washington, showing his manly thighs. </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> By no coincidence, perhaps,
they are at pains to make some explanation of the fact that
Washington had no children of his own. In all likelihood, if he was
sterile, it followed from some illness in his early life. In fact,
Coe says, "Washington's lack of heirs gave him a distinct
political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no
bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about." He
clearly had a paternal relationship to his wife Martha's two young
children. Martha's son Jacky left four children, two of whom George
and Martha took in, in turn. And, after all, he is reputed to have
fathered a whole country; what more do you want?</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> As Washington's first
significant female biographer in many decades, Coe makes some
corrections to the character of his mother, Mary. Coe cites –in a
handy chart!–Chernow's many descriptions of her as shrewish,
anxious, and demanding. "For the Thigh Men, Mary's histrionics
begin when she declines to enlist her fourteen-year-old son in the
navy and continue to the very ends with her griping about elder
care." </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Considering both the actual
epistolary evidence at hand, and Mary's economic and social
circumstances, Coe gives us a much fuller view. Her husband died when
George, her eldest, was only eleven, so a certain anxiety might be
justified; to keep and raise small children, and see her daughter
married well, was not an easy job. It was also one she'd have
precious little help with, unless she chose to marry again. Her
objection to making George a midshipman was that it was more likely
to thwart his career than to advance it, and in that she was quite
right.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Instead, he learned surveying,
in which his horsemanship and his head for math were great
advantages. It gave him a chance to see new land first and bid on it
early. He sought a position in the Virginia militia. "Despite
having no military experience, he worked his connections and
ultimately got the job–along with its annual salary of one hundred
pounds." He made a name for himself in the French and Indian War
of the 1750's - indeed, he partly precipitated it, by killing a
French diplomat with whom he was meant to be negotiating. </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> He moved from the Virginia
militia to the British army, serving with Brigadier General Edward
Braddock in the Ohio territories, and becoming a hero in the battle
of Fort Duquesne–which the French actually won. Still, there were
clearly limits to how far a colonial subject could advance in the
British forces; he resigned his commission and went back to his land.
He married Martha (and her fortune) in 1759, and enjoyed a good
decade as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon, keeping horses and
dogs, and raising cattle, fowl, and bees. (He liked butter and honey
with his breakfast hoecakes.)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Coe does not let us forget that
Washington's wealth depended on enslaved people. Coe describes their
miserable housing, their poor diet, and their general mistreatment,
often by way of ironic contrast with Washington's revolutionary zeal
for liberty. In his will, Washington directed Martha to free his
slave, which she duly did in 1801, shortly before she died. Her own
slaves, however, she willed back to her grandchildren. Coe has a
heart-breaking breakdown, again in chart form, of the known families
who were broken up by this development.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> You could certainly give this
book to a Dad; you could also give it to a feisty or bookish
teenager. (If it's banned from school libraries, it will be for all
the best reasons.) But we can all stand a fresh look at Washington's
special skills, in diplomacy and espionage even more than in battle.
We owe him a lot, all in all. </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Any Good Books, December 2022</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-91038556465247078152022-10-01T19:35:00.000-04:002022-10-01T19:35:32.976-04:00Four Thousand Weeks<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Any Good Books, October 2022</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Four Thousand Weeks: Time
Management for Mortals</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Oliver Burkeman (Farrar Straus
Giroux, 2021)</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> If you would scorn yourself for
reading a self-help book, you can perfectly well consider <i>Four
Thousand Weeks</i> to be a work of philosophy. We'll be consulting
Epictetus, after all, and Heidegger on the matter of optimizing
ourselves, and our use of time. If, on the other hand, the thought of
reading a philosophy book makes you a little twitchy, think of it as
self-help. Oliver Burkeman has substantial credentials as an expert
on time management tips and tricks. When Burke was writing a column
about productivity, he had a forum for his personal obsession with
systems and to-do lists; he knows what he's talking about here. </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> But his purpose here is to
remind us of something else: the fix is in. We are not ever going to
Get Everything Done, and what would we do if we did? "Productivity
is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and
trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster."
All the fancy notebooks and apps he loved served as a smokescreen
against the knowledge that busyness, like an empty in-box, generates
busyness. Unless you're doing something about it, the demands will
increase to offset any benefits. "Far from getting things done,
you'll be creating new things to do." If you suspect that this
problem has gotten worse in our lifetimes, you're right. If you're
connected enough to be reading this, the world unleashes a tide of
possibility on your virtual doorstep every day, or potentially every
minute; deciding what to pay attention to (or not) is a substantial
job in its own right. How will you stay on top of everything, when
'everything' increases exponentially? </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> The answer is
counter-intuitive, or countercultural, or perhaps both: "Once
you truly understand that you're guaranteed to miss out on almost
every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so
many you still haven't experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of
experiences you actually do have time for–and the freer you are to
choose, in each moment, what counts the most."</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> After all, there was every
chance (but one) that you would never have been born, to see four
thousand weeks, or even a hundred. So while our lives are clearly
finite, with respect to infinite time and space, they are
magnificently vast compared to nothingness. Yet, choices must be
made: we don't actually control the future, but we do get some choice
about the present. So, says Burkeman, pay yourself first. "If
you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters
most to you, then at some point you're just going to have to start
doing it." </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> Another principle of freedom
through limitation: limit your work in progress. The ideal number of
irons in the fire might be three, the short list of items you're
going to finish (or mindfully abandon) before putting anything else
in the queue. This brings the scope of your work better in line with
the finitude of the day, as well as helping you focus on what part of
a larger task is really the next right thing; and you can learn a lot
from noticing which items never make it onto the list. It may be that
you're never going to read <i>Moby-Dick</i>, or learn to knit. </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> We can influence the future
with choices like that, but Burkeman is at pains to point out that we
never fully control it. Good news, though: "The struggle for
certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one–which means you have
permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn't the sort of
thing you get to order around like that..." Being anxious about
it is, therefore, a waste of time in the present, which is actually
where we live. There's nowhere else. </span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> Don't be anxious about that,
either! To treat being in the moment as yet another goal is to miss
the point. "[T]he attempt to be here now feels not so much
relaxing as rather strenuous–and it turns out that trying to have
the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way
to fail." Perhaps a better way to view it is that we should
sometimes do things for their own sake. Going for a walk on a chilly
day, hanging out with a friend, or noodling on the guitar can't win
you any points in the scorekeeping of life, but they may be valuable
for their own sake.</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> As a measure of value, you
could do worse: seek out the things that are worth the time they
take. Relish the sacrifices you make in the service of joy, fun, or
companionship. You only get one life, but if you do it right, one is
enough. </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-627397631557769972022-08-31T23:35:00.001-04:002022-08-31T23:35:08.097-04:00Three Books on Race<span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">White Fragility: Why it's so
hard for white people to talk about racism</span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Robin Diangelo (Beacon Press,
2018)</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">You'll Never Believe What
Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar
(Grand Central Publishing, 2021)</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Don't Let It Get You Down:
Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Savala Nolan (Simon &
Schuster, 2021)</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <br /></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> I'm reviewing three books this
month, just for the Goldilocks fun of it.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Robin Diangelo is,
among other things, a diversity trainer. That is, she goes into
workplaces to educate people–white people– about racism; and she
almost always meets resistance. <i>White
Fragility</i> is about
what that resistance is made of. Consider:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(1) You are a terrible
person because you're a racist.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(2) You were socialized
in a pervasive and pernicious social system that benefits you as a
white person, and that system is invisible to you. </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Again and again, Diangelo has
spoken with people who hear (2) and react as though she had said (1).
Nobody wants to be guilty of racism, and we guard ourselves against
overtly demonstrating it; but not using openly racist language is
much too low a bar. If we get to the point of acknowledging that the
system has been helping us all our lives, what are we supposed to do
about it? We can't go back and make FDR include people of color in
the New Deal, even if the Southern senators of the day would have let
him. What's really possible? For one thing, we can educate ourselves;
and for another, we can work on letting go of the fragility that
makes any possible feedback feel like a direct attack on our
character.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> On the whole, though, I don't
recommend <i>White Fragility </i>as a reading experience, unless you
are already accustomed to the way sociologists write. Diangelo has
good reason for speaking in generalizations, but as a consequence,
her writing doesn't offer enough personal stories to make enjoyable
reading. It's Too Hard.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> By contrast, Amber Ruffin and
her older sister, Lacey Lamar, have gone all the way Soft. This book
would actually be a pretty good place to start the study suggested by
<i>White Fragility.</i> Ruffin has a successful career writing
comedy, notably on <i>Late Night with Seth Meyers</i>, where she
occasionally appears alongside the host. Her position as the only
Black woman in the room has yielded her a whole lot of material, but
in this book, she's focused on her sister's life in Omaha, where they
grew up. It's true, you'll never believe what happens to Lacey. </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Lacey asks the price of some
luxury good, and is told, not the price, but "You can't afford
it." Clothing, furniture, a watch, it doesn't matter: she's
Black, so she's automatically poor. She attends a seminar or a
fund-raiser: the door-keeper argues with her instead of finding her
name on the list. As a teen, she gets harassed by JC Penney security
so often, she knows their secret knock. They once tried to pick her
up when she hadn't even been in their store. Amber wants us to know
this: "When you hear these stories and think, <i>None of these
stories are okay, </i>you are right. And when you hear these stories
and think, <i>Dang, that's hilarious, </i>you are right. They're
both."</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Savala Nolan writes essays from
the in-between spaces of race, economic circumstance, and body
composition. She's a light-skinned Black woman with a law degree,
descended from both enslaved people and enslavers; she's gained and
lost large amounts of weight all her life. </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Let me give <i>Don't Let It Get
You Down</i> the last word: "Black is as ingenious, resourceful,
dexterous, and inventive as a double agent. Black people of all hues,
geographies, dispositions, and beliefs can see each other, can switch
codes, can perform and improv, and, just as women know something
about gender that is often a mystery to men, Black people know more
about whiteness–its inner workings; its underbelly; its face
without makeup, tabloid style; the wrappers and trinkets at the
bottom of its purse; its longings and emptiness–than whiteness may
ever know about itself."</span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Just Right. </span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Any Good Books, September 2022</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p><style type="text/css"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><font size="4">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</font></span></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-33082194690993778542022-08-01T22:18:00.000-04:002022-08-01T22:18:16.736-04:00If Then<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the
Future</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Jill Lepore (Liveright, 2020)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> The Simulmatics Corporation existed for only eleven
years, from 1959 to 1970; it absorbed large amounts of money from the
Democratic Party and the Defense Department, but at the end, its
'automatic simulation' business went abruptly out of fashion, and it
dissolved in bankruptcy. Yet this shoestring operation was involved,
or implicated, in several of the most significant developments of the
decade. "It's as if Simulmatics had left behind not a narrative
of the decade but a box of punch cards waiting to be decoded, a
cryptic chronicle of the unmaking of American politics."</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> The computer image is perfectly apt, because the first
big project the corporation undertook was to build a computer model
of the American electorate, for purposes of testing out Democratic
positions for the 1960 election. Using Gallup and Roper polls from
the preceding decade, they sorted the voters into 480 types, by
gender, race, religion, party, and economic circumstance; these types
could then be correlated with voting results from the same years.
They made their first report to the Adlai Stevenson campaign,
emphasizing the importance of black voters in the election, and
suggesting that the party "could succeed in winning back black
voters who'd defected to the GOP only by taking a stronger position
on civil rights. It might not have seemed to require a team of
behavioral scientists, an IBM 704, and $65,000 to make this case,
but, arguably, it had." </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> The Democrats were in transition from the age of Adlai
Stevenson, a reluctant candidate who could be nominated only in a
party convention, to the age of Kennedy, whose advantage came from
aggressive campaigning in the primaries. When Kennedy took the
nomination, Simulmatics followed. They "recommended that Kennedy
confront the religious issue head-on, not to avert criticism but to
incite it." By making the issue salient, Kennedy could draw the
sympathy of other religious minorities. Again, you might not have
needed a simulation to see this, and there's no way to know what
difference it really made.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> It is hard to remember what a novelty this use of
computers was. (Simulmatics didn't actually own a computer yet; they
rented time on one of the few big IBM machines in New York City.) Was
it cheating, in some way? Unethical, or just too clever by half? But
from that day to this, the capacity to predict, and target, voter
behavior has increased at the same dizzying rate as computer speed
itself. </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> The Simulmatics Corporation was actually a group of men
with widely varying personal assets: Ed Greenfield was an advertising
man, handsome and charming–"and like all ad men, he sold
nothing so well as himself." Eugene Burdick was a political
theorist, with a successful career in fiction on the side; Ithiel de
Sola Pool was a quantitative behavioral scientist who had worked in
the Pentagon. There was a computer wizard, Alex Berstein, and a
mathematical genius called Wild Bill McPhee. Lepore lets us into
their backgrounds, their marriages, and the other places their work
took them.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> For Ithiel de Sola Pool, that was Vietnam. The Pentagon
hired Simulmatics to try to quantify the winning of hearts and minds.
Pool was a dedicated anti-communist, but the project was farcical
from the start. The behavioral scientists were asking the wrong
questions, by means of bewildered translators, of people who had no
reason to trust them. Seldom has 'garbage in, garbage out' been a
more appropriate image. </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General William
Westmoreland, assisted by the RAND corporation, had established a way
of thinking based on numbers and more numbers. "Vietnam would be
the test of McNamara's policy, and of RAND and Simulmatics'
behavioral science: decision by numbers, knowledge without humanity,
the future in figures. It would fail. It would also endure. In the
twenty-first century, it would organize daily life, politics, war,
commerce. Everything."</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"> This book is not comforting, but it sure does explain a
lot. It's bad news, but good information.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-30588305248762724302022-06-30T20:53:00.001-04:002022-06-30T20:53:27.123-04:00The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon<p>The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened </p><p>Bill McKibben (Henry Holt and Company, 2022) </p><p> Bill McKibben moved to Lexington, Massachusetts in 1970, when he was ten. In their thirty-thousand-dollar house on Middle Street, their family of four represented the archetype of the American Dream. The town of Lexington also makes a pretty fair proxy for American suburbia, though its place in colonial and revolutionary history adds a dimension that McKibben uses to advantage in his story.
He's not primarily engaged in memoir, but what he does have to say explains a lot about his career as a journalist and activist. <br /></p><p><span> </span><span> </span>He was a teenage journalist, covering the 1978 gas crisis for the local suburban paper, before he ever got to the Harvard Crimson, and subsequently the New Yorker. "Along with gas station owners, I also got to interview the number three man in the country's energy department. John Deutch was an MIT professor, and in between Washington stints he lived in Lexington, so I talked with him the week before his boss, President Carter, was to give a nationwide address on energy conservation." Jimmy Carter had at least some grasp of how the country needed to reinvent itself in response to changing ecological conditions, but he lost the election to a sunny, confident huckster whose attitude toward such matters was 'nothing to see here.' Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, and Ronald Reagan took them down. </p><p> Another job McKibben held in high school was being a tour guide on the Lexington Battle Green, purveying tales of long-ago glory for tips from tourists. The patriotism he felt on the Green has only grown, though it's been complicated by more thought about who was left out of the stories. "If the American origin story that you're telling over and over involves a small force of ill-trained men who, feeling oppressed, decide to take on the greatest empire in the world–well, that story leaves you believing that dissent can be patriotic, that American history is ultimately the story of the underdog, that a sense of shared community and a willingness to sacrifice for it defines who we are." </p><p> McKibben got an early taste of such willingness on Memorial Day weekend of 1971, when Vietnam War protesters, led by a young John Kerry, came to town. A group following Paul Revere's ride in reverse broke Lexington's curfew by camping out in the middle of town; the police rounded up 458 protesters, of whom more than a third were local townspeople, including McKibben's father. He got out in the morning, and they all went to church, but he did put himself on the line, as his son has done many times since, protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline and the like. </p><p> That same year, as he learned while researching this book, Lexington's citizens voted to overturn a rezoning proposal for a townhouse development that would have provided some housing for lower-income families. In the pulpits, and in the letters pages of the paper, Lexingtonians were all for diversity and inclusion; in the privacy of the voting booth, they were for protecting property values. And why not? They had great schools, a fine library, sports teams and station wagons, all the comforts of home. Partly because of the young Bill McKibben, in fact, they had an award-winning high school debate team, among all the other stepping stones to brand-name college educations. </p><p> The repercussions of this kind of thinking, spread over the intervening decades, have only increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. That three-bedroom house on Middle Street is worth well over a million dollars today; but if you never had the chance to buy in in the sixties, what good is that to you? A substantial part of the difference, of course, is a residue of racial red-lining from the middle of the century, and all the doors closed to Black veterans who should have been able to use GI benefits to improve their lot in life. McKibben imagines what a compensatory wealth transfer would look like. </p><p> One big change in our adult lifetimes is the decline of main-line Protestant denominations and the rise of independent evangelical churches. McKibben has seen it for a long time: he wrote an article for the Crimson about Jim Bakker and his PTL Club, with a predictable degree of mockery; but he did find the people there both sincere and kind. Evangelicalism, he says, may just be part of a larger story of growing hyper-individualism in our time. The youth group trips he used to take, to paint houses and–literally–sing Kumbaya, pointed to a form of religion that was about more than saving individual souls. Perhaps it still could be.
The last chapter is a call for people born under Truman and Eisenhower to give something real back. "But older people also have something beyond their kids and grandkids to think about. We also have the chance to partially redeem some sense of our history as Americans, and, for those to whom it matters, as Christians."</p><p> </p><p>Any Good Books, July 2022 <br /></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-78839528414313487272022-06-01T23:09:00.002-04:002022-06-01T23:16:20.201-04:00Until That Good Day<div class="Ar Au" id=":1kc" style="display: block;"><div aria-label="Message Body" aria-multiline="true" class="Am Al editable LW-avf tS-tW tS-tY" contenteditable="true" id=":1k8" role="textbox" spellcheck="false" style="direction: ltr; min-height: 236px;" tabindex="1"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;"></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family: georgia, serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span></span></span>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Until That Good Day</span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Marjorie Kemper (2003, St.
Martin's Press)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> "The coffin was in the
living room." What a promising way to start a story! The time is
1928; the place, Myrtle, Louisiana. Five-year-old Vivian is old
enough, and perspicacious enough, to spot the paradox of putting the
dead in the living room. Her father is a traveling man, peddling
groceries to small shops in tiny towns from Mississippi to Arkansas,
so Vivian and her eight year old sister Clara move into their
grandmother's quiet, gloomy house. In another year, Grandmother
Washington, too, is dead, and John Washington goes looking for a
wife. When he tells his children he's found one, they respond in
character: "Clara wore a sweet little smile on her face the way
she might have worn a flower in her hair. Vivian studied the rug and
kicked her heels against the base of the sofa. Hard, enjoying the
thudding sound it made."</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Antoinette Malone is not
someone who could ever replace his first wife, Della, in John's
heart. She is young, tiny, beautiful, vain, and stupid. She doesn't
much care to be a step-mother, so John sends Clara to a convent
school in New Orleans, and Vivian to live with his wife's family. "As
time passed, John, without knowing that he did it, began to think of
Vivian as a Malone. That this hurt and dismayed his daughter past all
reckoning, John was too busy with his own life and with Antoinette
and their frenetic new life together to notice."</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Life at the Malones has its
compensations for Vivian. Mrs. Malone, the mother of eight, is warm
and welcoming. Her widowed father lives under the stairs in some sort
of broom closet. " 'He's no trouble,' Mrs. Malone often said of
her father, and he wasn't; a heavy drinker and an inveterate gambler,
he came home only to sleep off a bender or to hide from his
creditors." Vivian finds him soothing, his taciturnity a relief
from the chaos of the household. The youngest Malone, Willie, is
Vivian's age. He's fragile and pale, and given to sick headaches, but
the two form the bond common to outcasts and observers. Clara,
meanwhile, develops a crush on Maureen Malone, who is blonde and
beautiful, and plays the piano like an angel. <br /></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Antoinette
is happy spending John's money, and they build a new house across
town from the Malones, so the girls can come live with her and John,
awkward as that might be. Mama Malone helps her daughter hire live-in
help, in the person of Emmy Clegern. Antoinette has a horror of black
people–they threaten her in her dreams–but Emmy, with her twisted
lip, should at least be safe from John's wandering eye, in case he
has one. She has no idea that in Sylvan, Louisiana, "an island
bounded on three sides by cotton, and on the fourth by piney woods,"
John has a mistress. Odessa is a young black woman who'd like to move
far beyond Sylvan; John's gift of his mother's phonograph set lets
her take the first steps, immersing herself in </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Madame
Butterfly.</span></i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> It's not too hard for John
Washington to keep his secrets, because he's always been a traveler.
"His territory was his true home, and not even Della, on her
best day, had been able to compete with it. Nowadays, the tiny
Antoinette disappeared from his mind seconds after he got behind the
wheel." Life in Myrtle comes with costs and entanglements, but the
road, "particularly in the mornings, stretched out before John
Washington like the promise of Life Everlasting."</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> While he's gone, Antoinette is
"thrown back on her own resources. Of which she had very few.
She had no close friends and no outside interests save her house and
her clothes–and subordinate to these, John." So, like her
grandmother before her, she spends a lot of time sleeping. Emmy keeps
Clara and Vivian quiet when they come in from school, because
Antoinette is quite erratic–possibly crazy–when she's roused
unexpectedly.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Marjorie Kemper's treatment of
this unstable situation is utterly artful, combining compassion and
knowingness. I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor, quoting a neighbor to
whom she had shown some of her stories: <b><span style="font-weight: normal;">“Well,
them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do."
Probably the more apt comparison, though, would be Eudora Welty.
She'd have recognized Myrtle, and the need to occasionally leave
Myrtle for New Orleans; and she'd have appreciated the transition
from what actually happens to what the town will say about it in
later years, and what it will forget.</span></b></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></b></span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> One of my pre-readers asked the
very reasonable question of why I'm reviewing a novel, which I don't
usually do. That is to say, why this one? I first noticed Marjorie
Kemper for a story in <i>The Sun</i>, "At Prayer Level,"
which has stuck with me. She's no longer with us, but I'm seeking out
her other work, and it's all rewarding. A God-like narrator who has
compassion for the wise and the foolish, the drunkard and the little
child, somehow gives me hope.</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/415/at-prayer-level<br /></span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Any Good Books, email 1 June 2022</span>
</p><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div></div></div>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-13519213016156193782022-05-01T21:18:00.004-04:002022-05-01T21:18:46.518-04:00Pastrix & Accidental Saints<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and
Saint (Jericho Books, 2013)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
(Convergent Books, 2015)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Nadia Bolz-Weber </span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Nadia Bolz-Weber seems
like an unlikely star among Lutheran pastors. By her own account,
she's a cynic with anger issues and a foul mouth, who devoted her
early adult life to drugs, booze, and tattoos. She's now in great
demand as a speaker and preacher, and the author of two very popular
memoirs. She's also the founding pastor of a Lutheran mission church
called House for All Sinners and Saints, in Denver, Colorado. </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <i>Pastrix</i> starts
with a precocious twelve-year-old Nadia in Sunday School, discovering
that she knew more about the Bible than her teacher; in the Church of
Christ, this was not a woman's place, and she soon smart-mouthed
herself right out of the denomination. She was left with an image of
God as punitive, angry, and judgmental, consumed with drawing lines
between saints and sinners. "It did not seem to me, even back
then, that God's grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united
people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or
at least their ability to appear good. And not everyone can pull that
off."</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> When Nadia walked away
from striving to appear good, she opened Pandora's box: cursing,
listening to punk rock, smoking pot, drinking, dropping out of
college, living in a commune, and hanging out with Wiccan lesbians.
At the end of 1991, however, she was pulled aside from the path of
alcoholic destruction: "It was as if God abruptly, even rudely,
interrupted my life." God preferred that she not be dead by
thirty, because he (so to speak) had another plan for her life, in
which she would recognize grace, and feel compelled to talk about it.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Four years into sobriety,
she met the man who would become her husband, who was studying in a
Lutheran seminary. That sounds like more of God's handiwork, because
the Lutheran church offered her a completely different picture of how
God sees the world, and what we're supposed to do about it. </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The most obvious
difference was the liturgy, a structure of themes and variations
shared through centuries of tradition and practice. From week to
week, some prayers are the same, and others change with the seasons,
from Advent through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Following
those same seasons, scripture readings span a three year cycle, a
lectionary, observed in common by Catholics, Anglicans, and several
Protestant denominations. This discipline is somehow just as
liberating as it constraining. We don't have to figure out how to
pray from scratch, or get stuck in the favorite Bible verses of our
local preacher. </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> The other benefit of
liturgy is that it requires community. It might be possible to be
spiritual all by yourself, but you can't be religious. Bolz-Weber
says, in <i>Accidental Saints,</i> "<i>Spiritual</i> feels
individual and escapist. But to be <i>religious</i> (despite all the
negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of
other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven
as ourselves." That's what makes them qualified to share our
joys, hear our confessions, and offer us God's forgiveness.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"> My favorite story in
<i>Accidental Saints </i>is about the time Bolz-Weber agreed to give
a talk to a national gathering of Lutheran youth. This was outside
her comfort zone, since her regular congregants are nearly all
adults, and she was nervous about how uncool she'd doubtless appear.
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">On
the plane, she sat next to a girl with pink bangs, in whose surly
shyness she recognized her own teenage self. Suddenly, even in the
unreal environment of the Superdome, it was simple: "I told them
that this is a God who has always used imperfect people, that this is
a God who walked among us and who ate with all the wrong people and
kissed lepers...I told them that this God has </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">never</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
made sense." </span></span></span>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> But
she made sense that night to a multitude of teenagers, and she does
to me, too.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Email,</span></span> Any Good Books, May 1 2022</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-91623552172715375552022-03-31T23:21:00.004-04:002022-03-31T23:21:33.935-04:00Orwell's Roses<span style="font-size: medium;"></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Orwell's Roses</span><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> I'm
always drawn to books that serve as portals to the Infinite Library,
and this one is a classic. Delightful in its own right, it would also
serve well as a companion to a book club or an adult education class
reading George Orwell. <i>Orwell's Roses </i>is lightly biographical,
but far more than that; Rebecca Solnit is the contemporary writer who
can actually match and follow Orwell's range of interests, small and
large, botanical and political.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> I
read Orwell in high school, like most people perhaps, and some of the
essays still linger in mind: "Such, such were the joys,"
an essay about the misery of his school days, being crammed with
facts for the entrance exams to Eton; "Shooting an Elephant,"
about serving in Burma as a colonial policeman; and "Politics
and the English Language," surely still a guide to the wiles of
propaganda. But now I'd want to read <i>Homage to Catalonia
</i>alongside other people's war stories, and side by side with
<i>Animal Farm</i>, to find out how Trotsky figures in both.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
Orwell planted the roses of the title in 1936. Later the same year,
he went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side against Franco, an
experience that deeply informed him as a thinker and a writer. Ten
years later, he wrote about the roses and their outsized return on
investment: "One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes
died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit
trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and
sixpence." </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Solnit
was actually looking for those trees when she stopped, on her way
from London to Cambridge, in the tiny Hertfordshire village of
Wallington, to which Orwell and his wife moved in 1936. The trees are
gone, but two of the roses still bear flowers. Solnit felt a 'joyous
exaltation' to stand in their presence and realize that "this
man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and
propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and
an unyielding political vision, had planted roses." As she will
discover, and demonstrate, Orwell lets nature and beauty into his
writing, even at its grimmest.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> In
the 1940's, many of his essays were published in <i>Tribune</i>, a
socialist weekly. Then as now, the political Left had a puritanical,
ascetic streak, which Orwell resisted head on: "...is it
politically reprehensible...to point out that life is frequently more
worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in
October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money
and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a
class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so." At
the heart of such idiosyncratic, personal pleasures lies a
fundamental sense of liberty. There must always be things, however
small and transient, that no one can take away from us; many of the
best of them were not given to us by people in the first place.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> At
the same time, Solnit is looking into the largest possible distances
and spans of time. What trees are still standing that your
grandparents might have planted? No, go back to the Sequoias of
Solnit's native California, standing for thousands of years. No, go
back to the Carboniferous period, three hundred million years ago,
when the sunlight was captured that would become the coal and oil
deposits we've been burning for the past three hundred years. </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> And,
much as Orwell reported on the northern coal mines in <i>The Road to
Wigan Pier</i>, Solnit goes to Colombia to look into the industrial
growing of roses for the North American market. How did you think
those millions of dozens of roses got to all the local florists for
Mothers' Day? It's a far cry from picking up a few plants at
Woolworth's. </span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Still,
at least as far back as 1910, 'Bread and Roses' have been paired as
necessities of life worth fighting for. "Bread fed the body,
roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations,
psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce
argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed
and were being demanded as a right." Orwell may not have known
the slogan, but he was evidently in full sympathy with what it stands
for. In one of his greatest essays, "Why I Write," he says
this: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to
feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth,
and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless
information." What a worthy ambition!</span></p><p align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Any Good Books, April 2022, by email<br /></span></p><p align="JUSTIFY" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p><style type="text/css"><font size="4">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</font></style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2942020310450458090.post-44037593601515240402022-03-01T00:04:00.007-05:002022-03-01T00:04:59.896-05:00One Summer: America, 1927<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">One Summer: America, 1927</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Bill Bryson (2013, Doubleday)</span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Any moment can be
a historic moment, of course, and the world is always changing; but
it's pretty hard to beat Bill Bryson's choice of 1927 as the year
that changed everything. It would also be pretty hard to beat
Bryson's gift for drawing characters and spinning narratives out of
the American scene of the time.
Giants walked the earth - Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Al Capone, and,
probably first of all, Charles A. Lindbergh. </span></span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">At 7:52 on May 20,
Lindbergh took off from a muddy runway at Roosevelt Field on Long
Island, barely clearing the telephone wires in his path. 33 hours, 30
minutes, and 29.8 seconds later, he touched down at Le Bourget,
outside of Paris, France. "In that instant, a pulse of joy swept
around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was
safe in Paris." He had flown by dead reckoning through the
night, in a cloth-skinned plane with no way of looking out the front.
It was a truly brilliant feat of aviation. The degree of fame that
came with the feat was unprecedented, too. The boyish
twenty-five-year old from a modest Minnesota background was suddenly
unable to do anything or go anywhere without an adoring crowd turning
up. </span></span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">One reason that
was true was that radio had established a foothold in the United
States, thanks in large part to a man named David Sarnoff, who saw
the possibilities of the medium and helped to found the National
Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff also grasped that hearing
advertisements was a price audiences did not particularly mind
paying; NBC sold ten million dollars worth of advertising in its
second year on the air, and continued to dominate the business
through the Depression, as newspapers failed on every side. </span></span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The automotive
industry was also hitting its stride, which would change the American
landscape profoundly. Henry Ford gets a chapter, full of glorious
eccentricity and questionable business sense. By 1927, Chrysler and
General Motors were stealing a march on Ford, but he had already made
his mark by bringing cars within the reach of ordinary working
people, permitting them to move out of cities.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Twenties were
a violent time, more than we now remember. Prohibition, of course,
made criminals of citizens, and heroes of criminals. Anarchists
planted bombs, sometimes blowing themselves up in the process. Nicolo
Sacco and Bart Vanzetti were executed in 1927 for a robbery that took
place in 1920, or perhaps for being immigrants with dangerously
radical friends; historians haven't quite made up their minds. The Ku
Klux Klan enforced not just segregation, but subjugation. "The
Klan hated </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>everybody</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">,
but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional
biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest,
Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans
in the East, and blacks everywhere." </span></span>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Those biases were
found in more respectable circles as well, in the form of a eugenics
movement that bore the imprimatur of scientists from the leading
universities. In the spring of 1927, by a vote of 8-1, the U.S.
Supreme Court permitted a woman to be sterilized on the grounds of
being feeble-minded. Scientific theories about the superiority of
northern Europeans over Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians
and Africans were as spurious as they were self-interested, but they
influenced housing segregation in the U.S., and encouraged the Nazis
in some of their most deranged practices.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">For all that, the
mood of this book is cheerful, and occasionally joyful. Babe Ruth's
mighty bat brought delight to thousands; the golden age of the movies
was just getting started; and Charles Lindbergh may have had a
miserable time being thrust into the limelight, but his achievement
made America feel like anything was possible.</span></span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p><p>
</p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Any Good Books, 1 March 2022</span></p><p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Carolyn Roosevelthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02950471131741409175noreply@blogger.com0