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A Castle in Air, Truly

6/2/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the “stream of consciousness” type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.
​Barbara Pym
Author of ​Quartet in Autumn
​Born June 2, 1913
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B. Pym

My Book World

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Loe, Nancy E. Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History of W. R. Hearst’s San Simeon Estate. Aramark. Santa Barbara: Companion P, 1994.

I first visited Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California, in 1978. The tour was conducted more like an informal swirl through a friend’s home. The lighting was poor, and items seemed casually thrown together. The second time I visited the park, in 1997, it had been acquired by the state of California and a visit to the new museum was divided into separate tours. My partner and I were so fascinated that we took all four, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We became so well acquainted with the docent that we later had drinks . . . that is not true . . . I wish. He was a handsome blond man. Anyway, by that time, the entire property had been curated and updated so that it looked more as it would have in its heyday, the 1920s and 1930s.
 
Loe’s book, which I bought on that latter trip, has remained on my shelf until now, but it is no less interesting. The content is as much about the original owner, William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate, and his architect partner, the renowned Julia Morgan, as it is about the property itself. In fact, the book seems more about Morgan, an early feminist and a rare woman architect at that time. Hearst may have liked her in part because she was able to create almost every feature he wanted, even if it meant destroying a newly built basement wall to widen his bowling alley to three lanes from two—a whimsy that he scarcely utilized in his lifetime. But he also respected Morgan’s opinion and taste, because she was usually correct in her judgment. I still find the idea fascinating that a mere mortal could make his every wish come true (except that wish to live forever). What it must do to one’s psyche to get one’s way ninety-nine percent of the time.
 
To some eyes, the castle is a mishmash (or is it now mashup?) of every major historical architectural period and every major culture in the world. To others it represents the hubris of the ultrawealthy. To me it sings of the creativity of two people rich with ideas and nearly unlimited resources. Late in life, Hearst would be forced to sell off certain assets in order to take care of his $126 million dollar debt. Now that’s living! And yet he would still hold onto his Casa Grande, as he so fondly called it, for a bit longer.
​Nice work if you can get it!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marian Wright Edelman

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Gwendolyn Brooks
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Frank Lloyd Wright
FRI: My Book World | Gabor and Guttenberg, 
American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence (School Safety, Violence in Society)

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Angels Indeed

5/26/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
It reminds me to say that staying local should never be about looking at the world through a closed window, but about making a home then throwing the doors open and inviting the world in.
​Simon Armitage, Poet
Author of ​Out of the Blue
​Born May 26, 1963
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S. Armitage

My Book World

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Johnson, Denis. Angels: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2002 (1977).

I wouldn’t have thought of these words, but a blurb located on the back of the book describes the novel as being about two born losers. And I believe that is the case, unfortunately. A poor woman with two small children meets a divorced man, and they wind up in Phoenix. In the desert city, after mishaps with drugs, the woman finds herself in rehab, on the path toward a new life. The man and his two brothers, however, make a plan to rob a bank, believing their idea is brilliant. The heist, of course, goes awry, and the man winds up in prison killing someone. The account of his execution may be one of the most realistic and chilling scenes I’ve ever read in fiction. Angels makes a fine title on several levels of irony.

TUES: A Writer's Wit | Colm Tóibín
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jane Green
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Lasch
FRI: My Book World | Nancy E. Loe, ​Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History

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That Girl, Plural

3/31/2023

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A WRITER'S WIT
How did I know I was gay? When I slept with her, I had me on my mind. When I slept with him, I had him on my mind.
​​Jon-Henri Damski
American Essayist and Columnist
​Born March 31, 1937
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J. Damski

My Book World

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Lehman, Elizabeth J. Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture. Lawrence: U Press of Kansas, 2011.

Lehman centers her book around five topics: 1) how cinema treats women in the early 1960s; 2) how young women navigate leaving home in the late 1960s; 3) single women in the early 1970s sitcoms; 4) working women in 1970s action series; and last, single women dealing with sexual aggression in 1970s film. All throughout, Lehman draws from 1960s and 1970s film and television shows to explore these topics of popular culture. For example, she draws on character Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to demonstrate how, with careful tinkering by writers and directors, Mary walks a fine line between keeping her sex life on the down low and yet confronting her boss about why she is paid less than the man who has preceded her as producer of the news. But though the author’s analysis may seem like a TV Guide description at times, she uses television and film to demonstrate how US women transition from the world of their mothers and grandmothers to the mid-century world of marked change for the lives of women. In the latter part, she utilizes a book/film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar to explore how women seeking an active sex life messes with the heads of young men raised like their fathers, how such men can turn violent because they’re no longer in charge of such a negotiation. An interesting read for younger people to see how far (or not) American culture has advanced during the early twenty-first century.

​Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marguerite Duras

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Charles Cumming
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Margarita Simonyan 
FRI: My Book World | Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot

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Woman of Many Mansions

3/24/2023

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
The barb in the arrow of childhood suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.
​Olive Schreiner
Author of Woman and Labour
​Born March 24, 1855
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O. Schreiner

My Book World

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Dedman, Bill and Paul Clark Newell, Junior. Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. New York: Ballantine, 2013.

W. A. Grant builds a mining empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving his heirs quite wealthy. The youngest daughter by his second wife, Huguette Clark, makes good use of her inheritance in any number of ways. She schools herself about the things she loves: Japanese art, painting, and more. Though she commits some errors, such as marrying and then having the union annulled in a very short time, she is a prudent woman. She may be plagued, however, with one of the maladies of inherited wealth, which is a certain guilt at receiving so much for having done so little to “earn” it. As a result she seems quite generous with those she loves and trusts, almost to a fault. All someone must do is drop a hint about being short of money for some project or an upcoming bill, and she grabs her checkbook.
With that kind of naivete, she winds up trusting a crook as her money manager. In the end he bilks her out of millions, or attempts to. After Huguette dies at the age of 104, nineteen mostly distant relatives go to court to contest Huguette’s will, which leaves much of her money to those who have worked for her for years. But after it is all done, the judge awards most of her fortune to the nineteen relatives, many of whom never even meet the woman or haven’t seen her or tried to see her since they were children.
The main thrust of the book, in any case, is that W. A. Grant and his daughter (later) have as many as five large mansions built, and she never, except as a child, ever lives in any of them. She spends most of her adult life in a 5,000-square-foot apartment on Fifth Avenue across from New York’s Central Park. Instead of selling those mansions early on, however, she maintains each one of them, whether in Santa Barbara, California, or in the New York City area. Each one is fully staffed for many decades even though no one from the family, and Huguette in particular, ever abides in them. The strangest thing about her living situation is that at some point her health becomes so bad that she must go to the hospital. Once she is there, she rather likes the company and attention she receives every day, so instead of installing a nursing staff back in her Fifth Avenue apartment, she virtually moves into Doctors’ Hospital. And there she spends much of her last twenty years of life, thus expanding the motif of empty mansions. In the end, she hasn’t lived in any of them. Her story is perhaps a cautionary tale about the hazards of inheriting a large fortune. Is it really yours? And can you ever share enough of it to assuage your guilt that you might not deserve it?

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Bennett Madison

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Lara Logan
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anna Sewell 
FRI: My Book World | 
Elizabeth J. Lehman's  Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture

Vietnam: 'Bright Shining Lie'

10/28/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums . . . who find prison so soul destroying.
​Evelyn Waugh
Author of Brideshead Revisited
​Born October 28, 1903
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E. Waugh

My Book World

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​Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random, 1988.

One might wonder how the story of a single man might also tell the complete story of a war that that man participates in. Yet that is precisely what the late journalist and author Neil Sheehan does in his award-winning book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. John Paul Vann might be a larger-than-life character if indeed he were a larger-than-life person. He is not. And Sheehan takes great pains to explain to readers Vann’s poverty-stricken childhood, one in which Vann (his adopted name) is born out of wedlock and would rather take the name of his stepfather than the name of the father who brings shame upon him (although he does become acquainted with the man later). Vann begins his wannabee life by earning a good education. He is always about self-improvement as far as his career is concerned and seeks more degrees even while working full time. At a personal level, Van remains a mess for the remainder of his life. His early poverty, the rejection of him by his mother, always plays a role in his judgment.
 
John Paul Vann commits a crime he ultimately gets away with (he does no jail time) because his wife testifies on his behalf and because he teaches himself to beat the military’s polygraph machine—another blemish on his larger-than-life image. Yet the existence of this trial dogs him as he attempts to climb the military ladder of success via the back door (certainly not West point). Vann places career before his wife and children. He allows his voracious sexual appetite (as many as three acts of coitus a day in his forties) commands him to do whatever necessary to satisfy it: lie, cheat, manipulate. He all but divorces his wife (and children) to accommodate his promiscuity, keeping secret from each other the lives of his Vietnamese lover and (illegal) wife.
 
Yet all the while Vann possesses an honest and accurate perception of the Vietnam War beginning early on in the 1950s. He perceives that the U.S. military complex, since its recent victories with World War II, develops an arrogance that keeps its leadership from assessing the Vietnam War honestly. Army leaders refuse to learn anything about Vietnam: its centuries-long battles to fight off (successfully) foreign invaders. It refuses to realize that South Vietnam government is weak and corrupt and as such never fights the North with full force. It refuses to realize that the Vietnam people are one and that often the enemy looks like the ally and vice-versa.
 
The Battle of Ap Bac, in 1962, is one in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong—the American Army losing hundreds of lives in spite of its military “superiority.” The Viet Cong (North Vietnam Communists) capture abandoned U.S. equipment, expensive weaponry, and use them against the South supported by the U.S. military. Miliary leaders fail to realize Vietnam is one country, that it cannot be divided as North Korea was. The people pass back and forth over the imagined line of the 38th Parallel undetected. Vann ultimately believes that how Vietnam determines its future ought to be up to its people, a struggle that, even if it turns to Communism, is not the business of the United States. There is no such thing as the so-called Domino Theory. The lives and money being spent for nearly two decades are a wasted expense, to say the least.
 
And yet, Vann, up until the very last of his career, continues to believe that with his superior leadership, the war can be won—even after the Tet Offensive and other failures. In June 1972, unable to obtain the service of his usual helicopter pilot, Vann makes an ill-advised night flight in fog with an inexperienced twenty-six-year-old pilot and all occupants crash to their deaths, Vann believing until the end that he has won the war. It will not end, of course, for several more years, in 1975, when the U.S. finally admits defeat and vacates the decimated country. 

​Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jessica Valenti
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Thomas Mallon

THURS: A Writer's Wit | Walker Evans
FRI: My Book World | Lone Star Short Stories: Two Books

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Ackerley's 'Hindoo Holiday'

10/21/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
All reduction of people to objects, all imposition of labels and patterns to which they must conform, all segregation can lead only to destruction.
​Maureen Duffy
Author of ​The Microcosm
​Born October 21, 1933
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M. Duffy

My Book World

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Ackerley, Joe Randolph. Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal. With an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. New York: NYRB, 2000 (1932).

As a young man in his thirties, Ackerley visits India for a protracted amount of time. This book is essentially his diary of what takes place. As out as he can be for his time, Ackerley has no problem stating his admiration for a handsome man. He is not, however, a typical British tourist. He lives the life, hiring a young man to tutor him in the language. The man turns out to be more of a pest, always conniving to extract money or favors from Ackerley, like a pesky dog begging for scraps. But Ackerley learns enough to get by. He also learns the intricacies of the Hindu religion, finding, as with Christians, that some believers practice it with a certain flexibility or laxity. A still entertaining book these many decades later.

​Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Anne Tyler
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Gelek Rimpoche

THURS: A Writer's Wit | Fran Lebowitz
FRI: My Book World | Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Van and America in Vietnam

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A Writer's Wit: Peter Ackroyd

10/5/2022

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Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.
​Peter Ackroyd
Author of ​Queer City
​Born October 5, 1949
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P. Ackroyd
Coming Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thor Heyerdahl
FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett's ​The Dutch House
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A Writer's Wit: Howard Zinn

8/24/2022

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If those in charge of our society—politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television—can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
​Howard Zinn
Author of ​A People's History of the United States
​Born August 24, 1926
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H. Zinn
Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRIDAY: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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Her Name Forever

7/15/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.
​Arianna Huffington
Author of 
On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work, and Life
​Born July 15, 1950
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My Book World

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Pellegrino, Charles. Her Name, Titanic: The Untold Story of the Sinking and Finding of the Unsinkable Ship. New York: McGraw, 1988.

I’ve been a fan of the Titanic’s story since I was a child. I read every magazine article, every book I could find on the subject—even as an adult I collected books. I watched every film, fiction or documentary. This book, though dated now in some ways, does combine two strands: 1) the eyewitness details left behind by those who were there to witness the sinking: passengers, crew members, children—always the more interesting narrative, to me. Pellegrino also unveils the thread of how oceanographer Robert Ballard locates the Titanic’s remains and visits them in a, for the time (1987), innovative “submarine” equipped with cameras.

​The most astounding part of Ballard’s story seems to be that he is so overcome with emotion on seeing the pristine quality of certain artifacts left behind—china, passenger shoes, and other memorabilia—that he has no desire to lift any of it for souvenirs. Rather, he disguises the exact GPS location from journalists and the world, so that the site might remain what it has been since it all came to rest in the icy North Atlantic floor in 1912, and that is a place of memorial. Of course, other parties do locate the ship and make a commercial venture of it, but Ballard’s stance must be the higher ground, in a manner of speaking.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Ethan Canin
WEDS: AWW | Cormac McCarthy
THURS: AWW | Sarah Waters
NEXT FRI: My Book World | Ellen Summerfield's Bite-Sized Poems: An Anthology

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Taking Whacks at Lizzie's Legend

2/25/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
You go to school, you get a master's degree, you study Shakespeare and you wind up being famous for plastic glasses.
​Sally Jessy Raphael
Host of Sally (1983-2002)
Born February 25, 1935
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S. J. Raphael

MY Book World

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Robertson, Cara. The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story. New York: Simon, 2019.

If most readers are like me, what they know about one historical figure, Lizzie Borden, can be summed up in the following ditty:
 
Lizzie Borden took an ax,
Gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

 
After reading Robertson’s book, I see that there is so much wrong with this rhyming escapade. One, if  Lizzie Borden did kill her stepmother and father, Borden was never proven guilty. The actual perpetrator whacked Mrs. Borden only nineteen times. And certainly Mr. Borden did not receive forty-one chops. I had always assumed that Lizzie Borden was convicted and had served time in prison. But no.
 
This book takes readers through the entire trial process beginning with a detailed description of the murder scene. Briefly, someone axes Mrs. Borden and then an hour and a half later, when Mr. Borden has returned to the house, someone axes him downstairs as he’s napping on a sofa. The police investigators, lacking obvious clues, begin to suspect Lizzie, who remains almost preternaturally calm throughout the initial investigation, neither crying nor showing any sign of agitation, as Robertson writes (33). Andrew Jennings, Lizzie’s counsel, addresses the jury: “’your task is not to unravel the mystery.’ Instead, he said they must ask themselves: ‘Have they [the prosecution] furnished the proof, the proof that the law requires, that Lizzie Andrew Borden did it, and that there is absolutely no opportunity for anybody else?” (208). And throughout the past one hundred years there has existed such a great desire, on the part of some, to solve the mystery.
 
Near the end, Robertson summarizes these various interpretations that begin in the 1950s. For example, there is “the widely held speculation, which gained currency in the early 1990s, that Lizzie Borden committed the murders after enduring years of sexual abuse by her father [she was thirty-two]. The bedrooms that opened onto each other, the dead mother, the powerless stepmother, the special understanding between father and daughter symbolized by the ‘thin gold band’—all crystalized into a suddenly obvious solution, a solution that seemed to explain not only the identity of the killer but also the very brutality of the crimes” (284).
 
In any case, Robertson’s thorough research (some eighty pages of Notes) and lightly treading interpretation make for a fascinating read, particularly if you are a true crime fan, as I am. The book abounds with photographs, as well, mostly provided by the Fall River, Massachusetts, Historical Society.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A Writer's Wit: Douglas Brinkley

12/14/2021

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One thing “not right” on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.
​Douglas Brinkley
Author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
Born December 14, 1960
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D. Brinkley
FRIDAY: My Book World | James Clear's Atomic Habits
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Is 'Midnight' Too Late?

12/10/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
The intricacies, the problems, the trials and tribulations in relationships inspire me to give words to people's journeys.
​Umera Ahmed
Author of Aabe Hayat
Born December 10, 1976
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U. Ahmed

My Book World

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Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. New York: Random, 2021.

If one followed the two impeachment hearings of ex-president Trump, one became quite well acquainted with the rhetorical skills of Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led that trial. And one will recognize much of the material he includes in this book but also much, much more. One gets an inside view of what he experienced to reach that point where Trump needed to be impeached. He recreates important scenes on the floor in public; he recreates scenes out of view as he confers with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders. Reading his account fills out one’s view if you only watched it on TV, especially if your viewing was spotty. Most important, however, is the revelation of Adam Schiff’s character. Into his narrative are woven personal anecdotes about family members, congressional staff members, and other personalities. These reveal a wholly human and humane person who would make a great speaker of the house or president, should he desire to run.

​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | James Clear's Atomic Habits

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Cromwell Comes to Life

12/3/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.
​Francesca Lia Block
Author of The Thorn Necklace
​Born December 3, 1962
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F. L. Block

My Book World

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Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. New York: Picador, 2010.

Quite an enjoyable read, one that combines history and literature alike. I read this one aloud to my partner and was able to hear what a masterful job Mantel does with the language—quite musical. She, more than most writers, makes great use of interior monologue, by which we always know who is thinking what. This retelling of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell (among a distinguished cast of many) is worthy of all the accolades it has received (winner of England’s Man Booker Prize). Can’t wait to read the other two parts of this distinguished trilogy.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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Close to 'Road of Unfreedom'

11/26/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT:
"People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza, but that was a terrible thing, and it struck just at the time of the Great War, just when we were getting involved in it. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit as far from each other as they could" (41).
From Robinson’s novel Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Born November 26, 1943 
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M. Robinson

My Book World

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Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Duggan, 2018.

A scholarly and erudite book, The Road to Unfreedom is a plea for Western peoples to wake up and smell the borscht burning on the stove. Snyder begins with two phrases: politics of inevitability, “a sense that the future is just more of the present,” and that nothing can be done (7); the other phrase, politics of eternity “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood” (8). As Snyder develops his thesis that both Europe and American could be on the way to unfreedom, he repeatedly weaves into the fabric of his text these two terms. Russia has already traveled down this road, accepted its role as victim, that the world is always out to get Russia. If Europe and America do not pay attention to the signs of fascism or authoritarianism present in their own countries, they, too, could wind up like Russia. For the general reader, this book can be tough reading, but I invite anyone wanting to know what might be wrong with our country to take a look at it.

​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy

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Jobs for Women on 'Maiden Voyages'

11/19/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation. 
​Dick Cavett
Author of 
Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks
Born November 19, 1936
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D. Cavett

My Book World

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Evans, Siân. Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them. New York: St. Martin’s, 2020.

This is an interesting book in which Welsh author Evans focuses on thirteen women (some famous, some not) in the early twentieth century who make careers on the seas. Mostly by way of working on lines such as the White Star and Cunard, these women toil as conductresses, stewardesses, and nurses, sometimes rising to supervisory positions. During an era when women are not encouraged or even allowed to work outside a domestic situation, these women serve as pioneers who earn good salaries and are able to support families back home in the UK, where the man of the household, say, has been lost to war. Of course, their success is hard won, and it is only a beginning, but indeed there must be a thread that connects them to airline hostesses and to female astronauts such as Sally Ride. A quick but meaningful read. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Timothy Snyder's  The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

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Rise and Fall of an Institution

9/10/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion . . . . It's, what, a few months in Iraq. 
​Jared Diamond
Author of Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change
Born September 10, 1937
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J. Diamond

My Book World

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Leonnig, Carol. Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. New York: Random, 2021.

This book is one of the most fascinating contemporary reads to emerge in a long time. Leonnig, a distinguished Washington Post reporter, delves into the 155-year history of the United States Secret Service—the agency designed primarily to keep the president and family safe. She brings to light its early history: Within a period of thirty-six years, the U.S. experiences three presidential assassinations. Lincoln. Garfield. McKinley. Following Lincoln’s death, the Service is established with minimal or feeble funding. After the third assassination, the congress still refuses to provide additional protection, not wanting the president to be treated like royalty. When Kennedy is assassinated, the congress ultimately realizes it must provide more resources for the Secret Service. And presidents must adjust their thinking. Kennedy may, in part, have contributed to his own death by not adhering to the Service’s request that he not get as close to crowds as he liked. And also by not riding in an open car and by not allowing agents to stand on the rear bumper of his limo.
 
Leonnig explores subsequent presidencies to inform readers in great detail about each administration since: Ford’s two close calls. Reagan’s near-death attack. How the Service erodes during Bush’s and Clinton’s administrations. How the Service is pushed beyond its capabilities during Obama’s era when threats and attempts on him rise exponentially and when two different “jumpers” leap over the White House fence, one of them actually coming within feet of the Obama family’s living quarters. The author informs us of the unrest within the Service: the frequent change of leadership, the history of good old boy networks that reward relationships instead of meritorious service. She tells of the scandals that rock the service, including details of the one in Cartagena where at least ten agents become extremely drunk and involve themselves with prostitutes. Her conclusion: many problems still exist. The agency needs a complete restructuring, much more funding, and a coordinated effort to heartily renew its mission of always putting the lives of the president and family and other figures ahead of lives of agents sworn to protect them. Until these things occur, the Secret Service will remain stretched beyond its capabilities and perhaps remain a second-rate organization.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

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Flanders: A Rough Theater for War

5/28/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
​Patrick White
Author of Voss
​Born May 28, 1912
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P. White

My Book World

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Groom, Winston. A Storm in Flanders. The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front. New York: Grove, 2002.

The author of Forrest Gump changes his hat to historian here. In 276 pages he does a superb job of summarizing this one battle of World War I. In some ways the war is a family squabble: “England’s George V, Russia’s Nicholas II, and Germany’s William II were all cousins, either directly or through marriage, descendants of England’s Queen Victoria” (6). Mostly, Groom documents the wastage: the millions of soldiers’ lives lost on all sides, the Brits, the Belgians, the French, and the Germans. (Not to mention civilians, the Canadians, and others who aid the Allies.) The huge “puddles” caused by shelling and excessive rain. The Christmas where all fighting stops and soldiers from both sides “celebrate” together. (What? you ask.) The lack of quality leadership on all sides. One failure passes off his work to another failure of leadership. And the only people who suffer are the men in the ranks and civilians. I don’t know about the Triumph Groom references in his title (except that the Allies “win”), but there is certainly a lot of Tragedy. Millions of people of one generation are never able to see their lives come to fruition, mostly because of the hubris of a few men.

NEXT BLOG: Tuesday, June 15, 2021

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The Horizontal Near Southwest

5/21/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
​Alexander Pope
Author of The Rape of the Lock
​Born May 21, 1688
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A. Pope

My Book World

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Flores, Dan. The Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest. Albuquerque: U of NM Press.

First of all, I love that Flores takes possession of this subject right away with the term, “Near Southwest”—a region stretching from eastern Louisiana and including all of Texas and New Mexico. I come over twenty years late to reading this elegantly scripted book about the area’s ecology, but the ideas he expresses here seem to gain urgency as time passes. Flores alternates sections of family history (French and Spanish) and other histories with first-hand accounts of living, say, on the Llano Estacado, as well as poetic and lyrical sections of fiction to bring alive said histories.

Flores is always on the move. After advanced schooling at Texas A&M, he explores, to mention a few places, the Chihuahuan desert, the Southern Plains of Texas (Llano Estacado or Steaked Plains), Abiquiu, New Mexico—finally lighting in Montana. But the Horizontal Yellow of which he speaks is the once real, now metaphorical, wave of yellowing grasses that cover what locals call, with a certain inelegance, the South Plains. It is where he builds a primitive place to live in Yellow House Canyon, about thirty minutes from where he teaches at the local university. It is where he lives with two wolf-dog hybrids as their alpha male (a role he doesn’t particularly relish; it’s the critters’ idea). It is a place remaining in his heart as he makes his home up north, where he can establish and retain a closeness to nature that the Texas South Plains has mostly expunged from its existence. His is an admired life but one I’m not sure I could pursue myself. I adore my life in town—Internet, TV, central heat and air—a bit too much.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

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Elegies for Two Homelands

5/14/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt.
​Hall Caine
Author of The Shadow of a Crime
Born May 14, 1853
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H. Caine

My Book World

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Akhtar, Ayad. Homeland Elegies: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2020.

This is one of the most enjoyable and yet profound contemporary novels I have read in a long time. I had to keep reminding myself that it was indeed a novel, so interwoven is the plot with events we’ve all lived through in the last twenty years. The protagonist’s parents, both physicians, move from Pakistan to Staten Island in the early 1960s. When he is still young, the family relocates in Wisconsin. Throughout, readers get a feel for what it is like to live in America if you are not white-skinned, if you speak with an accent, or in any way attempt to retain religious or cultural customs from your former country. Not pleasant, to say the least.

At one point the car of the protagonist (by now a renowned playwright) breaks down in Scranton, PA. He is directed by a kindly highway patrolman (ah, good) to a mechanic who turns out to be related to the patrolman (uh oh). He is quoted a particular price for one problem, but when he picks up his car, he ascertains there is a second problem he’s not been informed about and is charged almost three times the original quote. He must phone his bank and make arrangements to raise his credit card level (and interest rate) to cover the cost.

The white-skinned reader must take note. This part is NOT fiction; this sort of explicit bias happens every day to dark-skinned, “other” people in America. People who work hard, people who pay their taxes, people who try hard to color inside the lines but somehow come up short in the eyes of so-called natives (whose ancestors were immigrants). The novel is really about how this man and his father handle their American lives differently: one an elegy for Pakistan and one for the USA. It is worth every minute of the reader’s time to live vicariously through these brave souls who come to American to build a better life. Theirs are true profiles in courage.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow

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A Wilde Man Indeed

5/7/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
Angela Carter
Author of Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales
Born May 7, 1940
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A. Carter

My Book World

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Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

This book of exhaustive research concerning Wilde’s life is a pleasure to read from his family history to his imprisonment years later and his resulting exile in France. Prior to reading this book, I had always had the impression that Oscar Wilde’s life (except for prison) was one wild ride (pardon the pun). And in some ways it was. He, even after experiencing financial success, was always in want of money, primarily because he was such a spendthrift, spending or giving away money he honestly didn’t have. He cared not about what people thought of his extravagant ideas, his extravagant living. Yet Wilde faced great public disapproval of how he lived his life. His only friends were other homosexual men or those liberal enough to accept him.

His downfall came in the package of one man, Lord Alfred Douglas, a much younger man, an aristocrat who both loved and used Wilde. If Wilde had never met him, he might have met his match with some other party, but I doubt it. The latter part of Wilde’s sad life was battling Douglas’s father in court. Lord Percy Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, managed to have Wilde sent to prison for two years because he didn’t want Wilde near his son. Wilde did his prison time, and it broke him, both physically and emotionally. He never wrote anything substantial again, was always begging others for money, and suffered physical ailments that eventually brought on his premature death at forty-six. Ellmann’s distinguished book, more than thirty years old now, does great justice to the life of an extraordinary writer who lived, until he could no longer bear the speed of light, entirely ahead of his time.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

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Sillitoe: Good Judge of Human Nature

4/23/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.
Arthur Phillips
Author of The King at the Edge of the World
​Born April 23, 1969
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A. Phillips

My Book World

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Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. New York: Penguin, 1992 (1959).

 
I enjoyed this mid-century collection of stories by British writer, Alan Sillitoe, because each male protagonist is a bit different, sometimes very different, from the leading bloke in one of the other eight narratives. Whether it is the sarcasm of the famed title character or one who wonders why his ex-wife has pawned a painting he thought she wanted back for sentimental reasons or the quizzical nature of a young man who narrates Eddie Buller’s sad story, each character is honed from Sillitoe’s astute observations of human nature.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go.

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Mr. Putin: As Bad As You Think

10/23/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
A diary is the response to an impulse—as opposed to an instinct—for self-preservation.
​Ned Rorem
Author of The Paris Diary
​Born October 23, 1923
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N. Rorem

My Book World

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​Hill, Fiona and Clifford G. Gaddy. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. New and 
Expanded. Washington: Brookings, 2015.
​
When I tuned in to President Trump’s impeachment trial at the end of 2019, I was impressed with the testimony of Fiona Hill, at that time former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council. Her credentials seemed impeccable, and I told myself I would read the book she co-authors with Mr. Gaddy.
 
The Hill/Gaddy team paint a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin that is not personal. They do not delve much into his upbringing or family life, only as those elements may apply to his long political life. They formulate what they refer to as Putin’s six identities, by which the book is structured: “the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the (KGB) Case Officer (18).” The man manipulates or exploits each one of these identities in order to further his own career, his own strategies, and each study is an eye-opening view into the life of the real Mr. Putin.
 
Mr. Putin declares himself to be a gosudarstvennik, “a builder of the state, a servant of the state . . . a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state” (40). The State is of ultimate importance, not the individual. Hill/Gaddy claim that “Putin continued with an analysis that echoed the language of the tsarist statist school, noting that Russia will ‘muscle up’ by ‘being open to change’ through state-sanctioned procedures and rules’” (55). The authors reinforce what President Obama once said of Putin, that Putin still maintains a nineteenth-century view of the world. He may utilize some of the tactics he learns while serving in the KGB, but his worldview is rooted in a glorified, pre-Soviet past: he aspires to be a tsar.
 
To summarize most of the other five areas, Putin manipulates history to strengthen his power. He is a survivalist who will do anything to get what he wants. Ultimately, his sense of strategy (over tactics, which only serve to fulfill his overarching set of goals) is one of his greatest strengths, one that Hill/Gaddy claim the West underestimates at its own peril. A man who creates a long-term strategy for the success of his State and is willing to do anything to see that it succeeds is to be to watched very carefully, something that the authors indicate the West has failed to do thus far. The West must see clearly how the man views himself, and the West, while not forfeiting its own values, must develop strategies for dealing with him, ones that realistically exploit his perceived strengths and weaknesses. Until the man is taken seriously, the rest of the world cannot deal with him in a realistic manner, and such a stance is not good for that world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | George C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.

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The Fight to Vote Is an Old One

10/16/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. 
​Eugene O’Neill
Author of Long Day's Journey into Night
Born October 16, 1888
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E. O'Neill

My Book World

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Waldman, Michael. The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon, 2016. 

​I wish I had read this book when it came out during the run-up to the 2016 election—when I bought it. Even though the last chapters seem dated now, considering what the country has been through, the early chapters give an excellent historical account of how this country has ALWAYS been divided into two camps: those who would like to allow everyone to vote and those who would only have so-called elites vote. White (heterosexual, one assumes) male landowners comprised that group in colonial times:

“And there were men who worked as hard to restrict the vote as others did to expand it, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, who fought to deny the franchise to men without property, declaring, ‘I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality;’” (xi)
Slowly, and only through arduous struggles, did other groups gain traction over great spans of time: African-American males, white women, African-American women and other minority groups (including the young). Still, the fight to vote has wavered back and forth, according to the whims of the SCOTUS and voter suppression activities. One group rises up and gains three feet, and another group grabs power and sends progress back two feet. And tragically . . . the struggle still continues. If readers have time, they should consider devouring this informative and at times humorous book. If you’re undecided about voting in 2020, perhaps its contents may sway you to get registered and do so now!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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She Explains Too Little

9/4/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. 
​Antonin Artaud
​Author of The Theatre and Its Double
Born September 4, 1896
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A. Artaud

My Book World

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Lardner, Kate. Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid. New York: Ballantine, 2004.
​
About halfway through this book, I realized I had read it before—not because I recognized the material but because I found little thumbnail indentions indicating where I’d stopped a reading session. My first “review,” sketched in 2004, was rather short and not very positive: Poor writing and poor editing. What could have been enlightening and touching was scattered and uninteresting. Lardner keeps an emotional distance throughout that is not very pleasant.
 
In a way, I still feel the same. The writing is fine enough; it just lacks a certain depth. Perhaps that is the point where a better editor might have helped the author. Much of the book is really about Kate Lardner’s father, Ring Lardner, Jr., a distinguished screenwriter who is blacklisted in the 1950s because he refuses to answer the question at a hearing whether he is or ever has been a communist. He spends twelve months in prison simply for attempting to practice his First (or Fifth) Amendment right to speak (or not). And, of course, such an event does have harmful effects on a burgeoning family: A wife, herself a working actor, who ceases to be offered film roles because she is related to Ring; a daughter and two sons who need him to balance out an impatient mother who, though loving, is also bound and determined to have her own career.

What is most troubling, I think, is the pacing. Of ten chapters, “The Penal Interlude,” is the longest at 120 pages. Conclusions that the author could draw about the effects on her as a “blacklisted kid” are missing or shortchanged. At the end of the book, Lardner gives a hurried account of her college years, her stumbling around to find out what she wishes to do with her life, thumbnail sketches of her two marriages, and boom, we’re done. Either the book should focus more on her father, or she should have a book longer than 272 pages, in order to discuss how being a blacklisted kid has affected her entire life (she’s about sixty at the time she writes the book). This time around I don’t notice the “emotional distance” as much as I do in 2004, but there exists rather a flippant tone that seems to reduce the import of what she is saying about one of the most destructive periods in US political history and its ramifications for her family. Perhaps it’s her way of dealing.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Paul Monette's Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise.

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Kon-Tiki: A Wondrous Naiveté

8/14/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us. 
Mary E. Pearson
​Author of Dance of Thieves
Born August 14, 1955
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M. E. Pearson

My Book World

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​Heyerdahl, Thor. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft. New York: Rand, 1950.

This book may have been written for adults, but I have to believe its adventurous tale appeals to the child inside each one of us. A Norwegian scholar develops a theory that at one time people of Peru crossed the South Pacific; Heyerdahl acquires this idea because huge statues on Easter Island so closely resemble ones found in Peru. Very quickly it seems he scrabbles together a crew of five other men and from drawings of a raft that would have been used in earlier times, the men build the Kon-Tiki essentially from nine huge balsa logs. That feat itself is a large undertaking as the men somehow receive permission from Peruvian officials to go into the forest and harvest such logs from balsa trees—even though commercial logging of balsa has been disallowed for some time.

Then there is the 4,000 mile adventure in which, at first, the raft with a sail is seized by the Humboldt Current. However, as they escape its grasp, the six men embark on a most idyllic, though challenging, cruise across the South Pacific. They worry little about food (though they’ve brought certain stores with them) as they are besieged in the morning with flying fish that they either cook for breakfast or use as bait to catch bigger fish. Creatures large and small are curiously drawn to their vessel, and, though the men are wary at first, they become friends with the aquatic beasts. The primitive raft has its shortcomings so when they finally come upon an island, because of the raft’s steering limitations, they must pass it by. Sometime later, however, they spot another island group, and this time their voyage comes to an abrupt end as the raft breaks up on a reef.

What follows may be the most delightful part of Heyerdahl’s perfectly arced narrative. Curious natives from a nearby island of 127 inhabitants see smoke from the men’s cooking fire and carefully approach them. The six men become heroes to the village and are treated royally for weeks on end before they are able to use their ham (amateur) radio and contact Tahiti and then Norwegian officials. A 4,000 ton ship is dispatched to pick them up, and then the six men and all villagers part with tears in their eyes. The book may be tinged with a childlike naiveté, but it is also filled with a certain curiosity and courage, qualities that are necessary for cultures to cross boundaries and for its inhabitants to realize they have more in common than they don’t.

FRIDAY, SEPT. 4: My Book World | Kate Lardner's  Shut Up He Explained: The Memoir of a Blacklisted Kid

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