In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

“And so once more to the wandering Road,” declares Bryson in his 2000 book In a Sunburned Country. His previous excursions were along the Appalachian Trial in the national bestseller A Walk in the Woods, and rambles through Britain in Notes from a Small Island, and now to his visits to Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, the hottest, driest weather, and the most lethal wildlife found on the planet (the ten most poisonous snakes, sharks and crocodiles in abundance, cassowary’s with razor claws, venomous seashells, spiders galore, even fluffy caterpillars and knife-like plants).

To travel with Bryson is not to simply experience a locale, but rather to enjoy his special visions and his humor – self-deprecating, but with a well-developed sense of the ridiculous, the outlandish and sublime. I lost track of how many times I laughed until there were tears running down my cheeks.  He doesn’t try to be funny at all costs, it’s just the way he is. For example, he says: “Cricket is the only sport that shares its name with an insect”, and “the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowon, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.”

Australia is fascinating, and Bryson has done an excellent job of telling us why – touching on a little bit of everything – history, politics, people, geology, biology, flora and fauna. Wherever he goes, he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, obliging, and quirky. He says that Aussies spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and there is nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how a snake bit Uncle Bob on his groin, but it’s okay now as he’s off the life support machine. Clearly, Bryson’s fascination and affection for Australia shines through.

On the other hand, Bryson tries to set the record straight about Australia's original people, pointing out that the Aborigines are the world's oldest continuously maintained culture and they were sophisticated enough to get to Australia from Asia by boat, long before Europeans even figured out how to sail. But he also writes about white Australians' racism and tragic treatment of the Aborigines, but acknowledges that, like most white Australians, he has had virtually no contact with the Aborigine population.

The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled and adventurous performance by Bryson, who combines humor, wonder and unflagging curiosity. My only negative criticism is that the book would have benefited with the addition of better, more extensive maps.  Since Bryson was constantly on the move, I found myself frequently going back to the four maps at the beginning of the book. Pictures would have helped too. For example, here’s a panorama of Uluru (Ayers Rock), the world’s largest monolith.  Words alone don’t convey the beauty one of Australia's most recognizable natural landmarks around sunset, showing its distinctive red coloration. 

I highly recommend this enjoyable and delightful book. Bryson did a considerable amount of research before heading Down Under and his writing shows it.As the Aussies would put it, he's done a fair dinkum job.— Ken Johnson

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison says she intended her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Beloved to be disorienting. And she succeeded.  She throws readers into the internal chaos faced by former slaves, who live in a constant state of grief, anxiety, and determination. This book is the ultimate definition of showing rather than telling. As we read, our minds try to make sense of a story that is non-linear to the extreme, that is usually unclear and unexplained. But Morrison wants us to experience, at least to a small degree, what it felt like to be a slave.

"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another," says the main character, Sethe, late in the book.

The details of what happens in the book can be difficult to determine empirically, especially for people who want all the pieces of a puzzle to fit. In Beloved, Morrison leaves us with pieces we have to imagine ourselves. This is a sensual book, not a logical one.

The story begins with Sethe living at 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. She’d escaped the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky with her two boys and the baby she was still nursing. She’d sent her children ahead and had a fourth baby on her way to Ohio, helped by a young white woman named Amy Denver; she named the baby Denver, after the mysterious woman.  With the help of another former slave, Stamp Paid, she made it to 124, where her mother-in-law Baby Suggs lived as a free woman, bought by her son Halle, Sethe’s husband.

Sethe has a month of freedom before Schoolteacher, who took over Sweet Home, finds her. In terror and rage, she kills her baby to keep her from slavery, slitting the child’s throat.  She is briefly jailed and then returns to 124, which is now overcome with the spirit of the dead baby. She has only enough money for the word “Beloved” to be placed on the baby’s gravestone--not enough to add “Dearly.”

The first line gives a solid clue about where we're going:

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."

The house is a character in this complex work, a haven, a protector, but also a prison and a keeper of secrets. Baby Suggs has since died and Sethe and teenage Denver live in the house alone. The two boys have run away, pushed out by the house's violent spirit. Sethe works in town, cooking at a restaurant.

Paul D., who was a slave at Sweet Home with Sethe, shows up early on. He feels the mood of the house and calls it evil. “Not evil, “Sethe says, “Just sad.” Denver disagrees, saying the ghost “is not evil, but not sad either.” What is it? "Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked," Denver says.

Paul D. may or may not be the catalyst for the arrival of a young woman who calls herself Beloved, who emerges out of the river shortly after Paul D. shows up. It’s more than 20 years since Sethe escaped the plantation, where, as slaves, both faced horrors neither can forget, or live with.

Who is Beloved? Is she actually the spirit of Sethe’s murdered child, come back to seek revenge? The clues are there—she’s the right age, she speaks with a raspy voice because she had died of a slit throat, her feet are like a baby’s, and she behaves like a toddler—an angry, spiteful one.

To Sethe and Denver, who have lived with Beloved’s ghost, it’s a given that the young woman who showed up on their porch one summer day is the baby who died in the shed behind their house.  

But to Paul D., Beloved is a threat to his happiness with Sethe, whom he has loved for decades.  And she’s a vestige of what he left behind. But Sethe’s strong feelings worry him. It’s not safe:

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.”  

Beloved's control over Sethe builds until it nearly kills her. Denver, originally under Beloved's spell, sees her as a danger and an aberration and finally leaves the house and goes to town, seeking help. She finds a community to support her, especially the women who come to 124, singing and praying in an attempt to rid 124 of the ghost. When the women see Beloved, they “surprise themselves by feeling no fear.” Mr. Bodwin, basically a good guy and protector of slaves, drives up. But he’s white, and Sethe thinks he’s coming after her “best thing,” her child, Beloved. This sets her into another rage. This time, Denver and the women constrain her.

Beloved disappears and a boy says he saw a woman walking into the river with fish for hair. Are we to make sense of this? We can try, but whatever it means, Beloved is gone.

Later, Sethe tells Paul D. that Beloved was her “best thing.”

“No,” Paul D. replies. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” — Pat Prijatel

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

In her massive, beautifully written and masterly account of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the greatest untold stories of American History – the exodus of almost six million black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities in search of a better life – forever changing the United States, especially the makeup of big cities. 

The Warmth of Other Sunsis Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wilkerson’s first book. The title is borrowed from the black writer Richard Wright who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s.

I was leaving the South 

To fling myself into the unknown ..

I was taking a part of the South 

To transplant in alien soil, 

To see if it could grow differently, 

If it could drink of new and cool rains, 

Bend in strange winds,Respond to the warmth of other suns 

And, perhaps, to bloom.  

— Richard Wright

Between the beginning of the First World War through the end of the Civil Rights Movement, 1915 and 1970,  millions of African-Americans summoned up the courage to leave their bleak lives in the Deep South in order to give themselves and their children hope for the future. Because this pattern of migration lasted for several generations and spread over many states, it was difficult to see it happening as it occurred and most of its participants were unaware that they were part of an important demographic upheaval and dynamic shift in residency.

Wilkerson is the daughter of migrants herself and showed empathy, profound affection and compassion toward her subjects, allowing the reader to share that connection. If nothing else, Wilkerson is thorough.  She interviewed approximately 1,200 people, reviewed hordes of official records, and took numerous road trips on her way to create this landmark piece of nonfiction – to tell a story she thought everyone should know.

With stunning historical detail to describe the migration, Wilkerson focuses on biographies of three very different migrants; each representing a different decade as well as a different destination and each carrying with them a different set of circumstances that factored into their decisions to leave. The details of routine racial discrimination that these people faced both before and after migrating are horrifyingly vivid and impossible to ignore.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, born in 1913, was a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi. They both were relegated to picking cotton.  They worked all day and all year, and at the end of it they usually broke even, which was considered lucky, because most sharecroppers ended up with nothing but debt to show for their labor, at least by the boss’s accounting. A woman was expected to pick a hundred pounds of cotton a day, and she hated it. Living in a Jim Crow society with no hope for the future, in 1937 she and her husband George, and their two children secretly boarded a midnight train to Milwaukee, where her sister lived. They decided to leave because a cousin down the road was almost beaten to death by a white posse that wrongly suspected he stole some turkeys.  Fearing he would be next, and tired of working dawn to dusk for pennies, George told Ida Mae to pack up the family.  

Miss Theenie, Ida Mae’s mother, then drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car. “May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

They eventually settled in Chicago’s south side, where George found work in a soup factory and Ida Mae in a hospital as a nurse’s aide. Although blue collar jobs, the Gladney’s made the most of their opportunity, never missing a day of work, and even becoming long time home owners, and their children attended a desegregated school. Chicago became their home for the rest of their lives and they never regretted their decision. 

Before setting foot on the streets of Chicago, Ida Mae had never even thought about voting. Indeed, no black person she had known back in Mississippi would have dared to talk openly about such a right. But in the Windy City she was free to vote for the first time — and did so in the 1940 presidential election, casting her ballot for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later also voted for Barack Obama when he ran for the Illinois Senate. 

Isabel Wilkerson met Ida Mae in 1996, when Ida Mae was eighty-three years old. She was still living in the second floor apartment of the house that her family had bought in 1967. She lived with dignity and respect to be ninety-one. She died in her sleep, in 2004, at home.

George Starling, a bright and ambitious man was the valedictorian of his colored high school in central Florida, but dropped out of college when his money ran out. So he went to work picking oranges in the fields. Appalled by the working conditions, he tried to organize a work stoppage for higher wages and better working conditions, but was warned that the local growers, backed by a homicidal sheriff, were planning a “necktie party” for him. He also boarded a midnight train, which was bound for New York. He lived in Harlem where he was free to live his life as he pleased. 

As fate would have it, he took a porter’s job on the same train that once brought him north. It had a route from New York to Florida, the very place where he had so longed to escape. That’s where he became an advocate for African American passengers. Surprisingly, though, given George’s intelligence and drive, he was never once promoted away from his boringly repetitious job, one that he endured for more than 40 years.Through his faith in God, he eventually made enough peace with the south to go back to live there as an old man.

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster had the most privileged background of the three main characters. The son of demanding middle-class parents in Monroe, Louisiana, he was educated as a physician at Morehouse, the most prestigious black college in America. An accomplished surgeon, Foster had no rights to practice in the south, even as the son-in-law of the president of a prestigious black college. So he decided that he wouldn’t waste his time in the south being paid with “the side of a freshly killed hog”, and knowing that other Monroe residents had moved to Los Angeles, made the decision to travel there in his red 1949 Buick. Wilkerson writes of his long, hungry and lonely drive west where he could find no motel that would rent him a room or restaurant which would serve him—all because of the color of his skin.

One of my favorite quotes in the book, Robert said “How could it be that people were fighting to death over something as ordinary as being free to go and do as you please, like sitting in a diner with everyone else and eating a meal.” 

After an initial struggle, he had established a private practice in Los Angeles and sent for his wife and daughters.After changing his name from Pershing to Robert, even Bob, he matured into one of California’s finest surgeons, with a successful medical career which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he threw exuberant parties. Revered by all of his patients for his entire career, Dr. Foster was the personal physician of Ray Charles who wrote a song about him.  Becoming addicted to gambling, Las Vegas became a second home. He lived a wild life and lost most of his wealth at the Vegas tables. Regrettably, something in his character prevented him from ever relishing the many blessings in his life.Still, at his funeral, he was mourned by his grandchildren enrolled in Ivy League schools.

Their stories are different and unique, yet they intertwine, and are interspersed with other stories of the South. They are gripping and full of life. Having spent many days and hours with the three and their families, it is clear that she became attached to them emotionally -- personalized and humanized them – making the reader hope and root for them. 

Wilkerson uses scholarship to quash the misconceptions that the migrants were uneducated, shiftless and promiscuous. She uses census data, stating that migrants from the South were on average better educated than those who stayed and soon would have a higher level of education than the blacks they joined in the North, and even more than the northern white population.  Or that migrants had higher levels of employment. And, contrary to common belief, the migrants were more likely to be married, remain married, and less likely to bear children out of wedlock.

The Great Migration shaped America’s urban cities, their culture, the geography of neighborhoods, and the beginnings of suburbanization and housing projects. Overall, this book did a lot to explain why some cities, and even some sections of those cities transformed from white to predominately black.  It did a lot to explain how those from Georgia and Florida migrated mostly to Boston and New York, and those from Alabama and Mississippi moved to cities like Detroit and Chicago, and those from Louisiana and Texas went to California. Wilkerson is superb at minding the bends and detours along the way.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable and riveting account of an unrecognized immigration throughout the United States, and nearly impossible to put aside. Through the beauty of writing, the depth of her research, and the fullness of the people and their lives portrayed, the book is a classic.  It serves as an important tool for better understanding of the trials and tribulations of black Americans in the 20^thcentury.  At 622 pages, it is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing, but so immensely readable as to, what one reviewer said, “would land her on a future place on Oprah’s couch.” —Ken Johnson

The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway

The Road from Coorainrevealed layer after layer of fascination. The cover notes let you know what to expect: young woman grows up in the Australian outback, goes on to a distinguished academic career, and ultimately serves as President of Smith College. 

Jill Ker Conway is a thoroughly engaging writer.  She brings to this already exotic outline evocative description of time and place and penetrating analysis of herself and others.  She puts us on the sheep station where she grew up and makes us feel the landscape, the characters that inhabit it, and the highs and lows of life at the margins of the social and economic world of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. She memorably describes the Australian national myth as exalting “epic failure,” typified by her family’s struggle against natural forces that would inevitably prevail.  

Against that often bleak landscape, Conway shows the evolution of her family’s complex relationships and her own growth in awareness and competence.  When extended drought pushes her family to move into the city, she has already formed a solid base of independence and curiosity.  Building on that, Conway vividly describes her experiences through high school and university that impelled her into a distinguished academic career as a historian.  Ultimately the limited academic opportunities and sexual discrimination she encountered in Australia led her to leave for graduate school at Harvard.  

The Road from Coorainis the first of three autobiographical works. It is followed chronologically by True North, covering a decade of academic work in Toronto, and A Woman’s Education, dealing with her time as the first female President of Smith College and a reinvention of women’s education.  — Bill Smith

---

[*]Full disclosure:  My mother, sister, and daughter attended Smith.

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, by Sharyn McCrumb

The Hangman is a rock formation in Wake County, a rural community in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. In this charming natural setting, Sharyn McCrumb creates the second book in her Appalachian ballad series, a mystery surrounding the murder of four members of one rural family. She introduces us to a loose-knit community of independent yet interdependent locals who live along a carcinogenic river full of toxins from a paper plant and in hills once covered by chestnut trees that were all killed by a blight decades before.

This is a story about humans and nature, trials and resilience, destruction and resurrection, change and adaptation.

But who is the Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter?

Could it be Nora Bonesteel, the woman who lives on the top of Ashe Mountain, who knows her neighbors’ news before they do because she has The Sight? No, not Nora. She is an incomparable character, but the description “beautiful daughter” falls a little short of incapsulating her rare personality and her inimitable power.

Or maybe it’s Laura Bruce, who ends up taking over her husband’s ministerial duties when he is sent to the Gulf War? No, she is a bit of an angel of mercy, rescuing kids of all ages from floods and fires and human suffering. But, again, “beautiful daughter” doesn't capture her. She’s more the mother.

How about Maggie Underhill, one of the two surviving children of the slain family? No, Maggie is an important character, but not a main force in the book. Sadly, like her mother, she tends to be a follower until, at the end, her life depends on forging her own way.

None of these women feels right as the Hangman’s child. If not them, though, who?

The clue to that puzzle is in McCrumb’s love of folklore and folk music, which she weaves throughout this and her other ballad novels, and in the music of a band that shares her Scottish roots. In 1967, 25 years before this book was published, the Incredible String Band, self-described as a “Scottish psychedelic folk group,” released an album titled Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. At the time. singerMike Heron explained the title: "The hangman is death and the beautiful daughter is what comes after.”

Death does permeate this novel, yet the book ends up being about life. About what comes after. This is not a grim read, but a loving, hopeful one.

McCrumb introduces bits of history and geography that add depth and intrigue to her tale. She explains that, while people in the nearby cities fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War, those in the mountains supported the Union. They had their land, their sustenance, and they wanted to keep it and to be left alone. Yet they got embroiled in the war and in what came after.

As a side story, McCrumb introduces Tavy and Taw, childhood friends, now retired, who are embroiled in a fight with the paper mill. Tavy has been diagnosed with incurable cancer that the doctor ties to the toxic river on which he has spent his life fishing. Turns out the Tavy and Taw are also the names of two rivers in Cornwall, which some locals say are enchanted.

Plus there’s Laura’s baby and Nora’s prediction and the sheriff’s fixation on Naomi Judd and her retirement from music because of hepatitis. In the end, the community pulls together, survivors helping survivors. Thanks to the generosity of his dispatcher, the sheriff sits in bliss watching Naomi in concert.

The book was written in 1992 and the themes of environmental degradation have only gotten worse. But Sheriff Arrowood would be happy to know that Naomi has gotten much better. 

— Pat Prijatel, with thanks to Jeanie Smith for asking the original question, "Who is the hangman's beautiful daughter?" and to Annie Waskom for her research on 1960s psychedelic folk bands and rivers in Cornwall.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A gorgeous, elegant, wise, and heartbreaking book, destined to become a classic. The author is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In poetic prose, she shows how Native-Americans understand botany on a personal level. 

Her intricate essays explain that the land feeds and heals us and, when it is healthy, so are we. But when it is broken, we are as well. 

I kept thinking, "what if" throughout the book. What if we had followed Native American custom and respected the land, returning as much as we have taken, and giving thanks for the gifts of nature, instead of seeing it only as something to use for our own gain? — Pat Prijatel

Between the World and Me, by Ta Nehisi Coates.

This book is a letter addressed by the author to his 15-year-old son: Samori. 

Ta Nehisi Coates relates the fears of his youth while growing up in West Baltimore. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid..… The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats… which was their armor against their world. “

Everybody knew someone who had lost a child or adult life violence, jail, or drugs. “I saw it (fear) in my own father, who loves you.” But if the young Coates got in trouble, which he often said he did, his father would crack the belt, “which he applied with more anxiety than anger. “

Coates tells his son that “fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into a television sets. “

The author explains that the law did not protect the Black community. “And now in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping in frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. “

Coates repeats several times in his letter that he had been a curious boy. His mother taught him to read and write when he was very young. His father was a research librarian at Howard University; his father loved and owned many books by and about Blacks.

Coates suffered at the hands of both the streets and the schools. He believed the schools “were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance…. When the elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning, but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Schools did not reveal truths, they can concealed them. “

Ta-Nehisi questioned the need for school: “Their are laws were aimed at something distant and vague.” It was not the classroom but the library that he loved. “The library was open, unending, free. “

Coates wants his son to ask many of the same questions as mother had put to him: “Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher; why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect; how would I want someone to behave while I was talking?” author goes on to state that his mother’s assignments did not curb his behavior, but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness… she was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing— myself. “

It was later at Howard University and especially The Mecca, that Ta-Nehisi he was formed and shaped. 

The Mecca: A machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body… We have made something down here. We have taken the one drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here at the mecca under pain of selection, we have made a home as do black people on summer blocks marked with needles, violence, and hopscotch squares. As do black people dancing it out at rent parties, as do black people at their family reunions where we are regarded like the survivors of catastrophe.

—Lauri Jones 

The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

In an author interview at the end of The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh says of her inspiration for the novel, “I’d been a foster parent for many years, and I felt it was an experience that had not been described well or often…. With Victoria, I wanted to create a character that people could connect with on an emotional level—at her best and at her worst—which I hoped would give readers a deeper understanding of the challenges of growing up in foster care.” As someone who worked for seven years with kids in foster care, some of whom aged out like Victoria, and as someone who was briefly a foster parent, I think Diffenbaugh does a terrific job.

We meet Victoria on her way to her “last chance” placement with Elizabeth. “I pressed my forehead against the window and watched the dusty summer hills roll past. Meredith’s car smelled like cigarette smoke, and there was mold on the strap of the seat belt from something some other child had been allowed to eat. I was nine years old. I sat in the backseat of the car in my nightgown, my cropped hair a tangled mess. It was not the way Meredith had wanted it. She’d purchased a dress for the occasion, a flowing, pale blue shift with embroidery and lace. But I had refused to wear it.”

Diffenbaugh’s language as she tells Victoria’s story is full of this kind of rich sensory detail that puts the reader in the backseat with Victoria when she shows us the mold on the strap of the seat belt. And that one tiny, dirty, carefully observed detail suggests larger truths about the foster care system. For that trip to her “last chance” Victoria is still in her nightgown. Because we all feel vulnerable in our nightgowns, we take Victoria’s vulnerability into our own sensibilities.

Victoria is a very specific girl; she’s not a type, and that’s where the charm and intelligence of the story lies. She is memorable. She speaks the language of flowers. She burns down the vineyard and lies to the judge. Against all odds, she becomes a successful business person with her language of flowers. She lives in weird places. The scene where she wraps her baby in moss to give to Grant is such a wonderful, fresh, memorable scene. As is her almost Homeric battle with Hazel to get nursing routine under control. I will never forget Victoria, just as will never forget Dellarobbia in Flight Behavior. 

Yet Diffenbaugh also achieves her goals of giving readers an understanding, generally, of the hardship of growing up in foster care. Victoria’s anger (which is really a mask for terror), her ravenous hunger (a sign of her emotional emptiness), her inability to learn in a normal school setting are normal behaviors of foster kids. The kids are usually terrified, emotionally drained, and unable to concentrate. Victoria makes these generalities specific in the most compelling way. 

We say goodbye to Victoria when she’s a mother and a small business owner and on the cusp of beginning a new and hopeful life with Grant, Hazel, and Elizabeth. And the journey from hello to goodbye is steered by the language of flowers. Victoria finds that language clear and unambiguous—Hazel means reconciliation; moss means maternal love; purple hyacinth means please forgive me. And where there is ambiguity, Victoria sorts it out, nails it down, and records it on two cards. One for her; one for Grant. The language of flowers, which Elizabeth introduces her to, connects Victoria to Elizabeth, Grant, Hazel, and her customers. And that’s where her hope lies at the end of the story. —Sharelle Moranville

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow

Published in 1975, Ragtime is an amazing tapestry capturing the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & WW1, when … “patriotism was a reliable sentiment … everyone wore white in the summer… the only thing more irritating than immigrants is black folk, specially when they start acting like they was white folk.”

It’s aptly titled too, for Doctorow manages to capture the ragtime music energy of the era. A quote by Scott Joplin, a famous ragtime musician, at the beginning of this novel, affirming that “It is never right to play Ragtime fast”, gives away the style and tone.  It starts very slowly, with descriptions of the main characters, where they live, and what they do., and then proceeds forward.

This colorful semi-historical novel is jam-packed with a myriad of characters, some fictional and some real-life, revolving around the fortunes of three families; a white family who are unnamed (simply referred to as father, mother and mother's younger brother), a Jewish immigrant family and a black family. Their lives intersect in both happy and tragic ways. Interspersed are a cast of real life authentic figures such as magician Harry Houdini, Admiral Peary, tycoons Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, anarchist Emma Goldman, Sigmund Freud, Booker T. Washington, and even a brief mention of Tom Thumb.

There is no inkling of a plot or hint that the book will be anything more than disparate descriptive passages for several early chapters. When interconnections between the characters intermingled with their encounters with some of the famous historical personages of the age begin to appear, these are the first indications that it will evolve into the veneer of a novel. 

These strange characters are inextricably linked by unexpected and unforeseen events seemingly outside their control; the young boy’s uncle is in love with a woman who meets a revolutionary who is arrested for creating anarchy when a criminal holes up in J.P. Morgan’s library after his fiancé is killed when she leaves the house of the mother of the young boy’s uncle. And so on.

Maybe it is Doctorow’s genius that he can link together as many characters as he chooses, keeping them intertwined in the fine fabric of turn-of-the-century New York. Or maybe it is because this bedlam and turmoil is intentional, reflecting perfectly the chaos and confusion of the era.

There is an undercurrent of radicalism in the novel and a strong sense of the inequality of society. What I found most stimulating was the fictional character of Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime pianist, and his fight for his rights stands out against an obvious injustice. His fanatical pursuit of justice drives him to revolutionary violence at a great cost to himself, but also to those he loves. It’s about this time that the book begins to become very interesting, and his story dominates the rest of the novel.

Ragtime definitely delivers. This is extrovert writing – witty, active voice, strong verbs, present tense. It is beautifully crafted, a stylistic tour de force, ingeniously pulled together and craftily presented, worthy of the era it captures, and should be enjoyed by anyone interested in the period.

“Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L Doctorow

By Ken Johnson, June 23, 2018

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is known for creating strong, smart, passionate, and occasionally eccentric female characters. In Daughter of Fortune, this includes Eliza and her adopted mother Rose, plus several bit players that make this story like none other of the California Gold Rush of 1849. And the men are no slouches either.

Baby Eliza shows up on in a soap crate at a wealthy family’s home in Valparaiso, Chili—with or without a mink blanket, depending on who’s telling the story—and Rose, who lives alone with her stodgy brother Jeremy, takes her in and raises her as her daughter. For 15 years Eliza is a model child, dressing like a beautiful and delicate doll and following Rose’s guidance on how to become a proper young lady. Womanhood, though, takes her for a wild ride, and she has a torrid affair with one of her Uncle Jeremy’s lowly employees, the serious and romantic Joaquin. She gets pregnant, but Joaquin has already left to find his fortune in California. Eliza, of course, follows him as a ship’s stowaway and spends the next four years impersonating either a Chilean boy or a Chinese boy searching the High Sierras for her lover.  

Rose, a spinster at the age of 25, surreptitiously pens lusty stories that eventually also make their way to California to help miners get through the misery that greets them in the gold fields. As it turns out, Rose has her own secrets, mainly a love affair with one of the proteges of the Marquis de Sade, which gives her plenty of material for her books. Rose secretly wishes Eliza luck with her love affair with Joaquin because she herself was banished from England to Chili to save her reputation, and she’s quietly resentful.

Meanwhile Pauline de Santa Cruz, daughter of a wealthy landowner and wife of an entrepreneur, decides to buy a steamship, fit it with dried ice, and use it to transport fresh fruits and vegetables to the gold fields. She makes a fortune. 

We’re never clear about the fate of Joaquin—did he die in California early on, or did he become an outlaw? Jacob Todd, who we first meet in Chili when he pretends to be a missionary, ends up in California, changes his name and calls himself a journalist. He earns his living making up stories about Joaquin, so nobody actually knows what’s what. Even, possibly, Jacob.

Eliza’s friend Tao Chi’en is a Chinese doctor who saves her life aboard the ship and also earns the respect of the California community because of his medical wisdom. He helps Eliza maintain her secrecy and hides his own love for her, which, we’re sure, will eventually be requited. 

Rose’s other brother, the dashing sea captain John, adds mystery to the plot. Plus there’s the prostitutes who have learned to stay safe in a dangerous occupation and even more dangerous country and the Singsong girls who Tao Chi’en tries to save, earning a reputation as a reprobate because others think he’s using them in one awful way or another—and are fine with it.

The book is a primer on Chinese and Chilean culture and the horrors of the goldrush. We learn much about human nature while reading this book, in which nobody is entirely who we think they are. Except, possibly, boring Jeremy. — Pat Prijatel    

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

We had one of our most engaged discussions ever while reading Willa Cather’s classic,  My Antonia. In the book’s epigraph, Cather quotes Virgil: “Optima dies…prima fugit,” which translates to “The best days are the first to flee.” The quote has two meanings. First, the book is a romantic look back at childhood and the happiness of the past. Second, the Virgil poem itself is about appreciating and living off the land.The book was first published 100 years ago and new editions continue to be marketed. More than 30 different versions, all with different covers, are available on Goodreads. Most BBB members had a different cover, some showing just the land, others showing Antonia, others combining the two, others using only type and graphics. 

Some topics of our chats:

  •How and why did Cather become such a successful writer at a time when other women were writing under pseudonyms? One reason: She found a home at McClure’smagazine, one of the most active muckraking publications, which gave her credibility as well as a platform.

•Did Cather choose to write the book from the point of view of Jim because having a man tell the story might have been more acceptable to male editors? Perhaps, but maybe she did it simply because she felt that was the best was to tell the story.

•Jim clearly loved Antonia, but their lives were defined too differently for the two to be together in that world at that time. To be a success, Jim had to leave the land and get more education, which pushed him farther away. To Antonia, however, success meant staying on the land.

•Some of the “hired girls” also found success away from Nebraska, where they could redefine themselves and live on their wits and talents without the social restrictions of the city-country divide of class and status.

•If Antonia’s father had decided to stay in the city after leaving his native Bohemia—settling in New York instead of Nebraska, for example—would he have had a fuller and longer life? Antonia’s mother, however, knew she could not fit in and moved the family far enough that her past could not follow them. Her husband paid the ultimate price and her kids had a life that was far more difficult than it needed to be.

•While Antonia’s life was hard and often harsh, she was one of the happiest characters in the book. She knew who she was and where she fit in, and she embraced her own truths.

Cather’s descriptions of people and the land are so rich that I reread several passages just for the pleasure of the words. This book has one of my favorite lines, which I remember every time we spend the day traveling through Nebraska on our way to Colorado. When Jim first encounters Nebraska as a child, he observes, “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was, still, all day long, Nebraska.” Nevertheless, he clearly loved that land, as did Cather. —Pat Prijatel

TATTOOS ON THE HEART, by Gregory Boyle

In this uplifting and intimate memoir, Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle recounts his three decades of working with “homies” in the barrios of East Los Angeles, an area with an extreme concentration of murderous activity, including over 1,000 gangs with almost 90,000 members. I was by turns mesmerized, horrified, and enthralled as I read.

In each chapter, we benefit from Boyle’s hard-earned wisdom, inspired by his faith, serving alongside the gang members and loving them as Jesus intends us to love others (our neighbors), amply demonstrating the impact that unconditional love and compassion can have on lives. Father Greg, or G-Dog as he is called by the homies, saw the need for a rehabilitation center and started Homeboy Industries in 1986 to provide jobs, tattoo removal, job training and encouragement for members of rival enemy gangs. Their motto, printed on tee shirts is “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

Homeboy Industries has grown to a $8.5 million headquarters, housing Homeboy Bakery, a beautiful Homegirl Café, a catering service, various craft industries, and a Homeboy Diner.  It currently employs about 300 former gang members, daily serving about 1,000 customers, and monthly provides 500 treatments for tattoo removal.

The book distills his experience working in the ghetto into a breathtaking series of stories which capture and convey the lessons he learned from kids who have struggled through challenging times and tried to turn around their lives. In each Chapter the reader benefits from Boyle’s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. With an ear for dialogue, he deftly captures the expressive flavor and colorful language of the Spanglish patois spoken there.  That alone makes Tattoos of the Heart remarkable literature.

The individual stories he tells are woven into parables that will break your heart, as many are about young gang members who start to get on track, only to be randomly shot and killed. It’s difficult to keep a dry eye. Manny was a boy covered with tattoos caught in the crossfire of gang warfare and died on the emergency room operating table. He had enrolled in community college, but was cut down before he ever attended a class.  A nurse who was evidently disgusted by his tattoos, told another “Who would want this monster’s heart?” The other nurse reacted angrily, “How dare you call this kid a monster. He belonged to somebody.  Shame on you.”

Then there was Jason, a young crack dealer, the son of two addicts, who, after rejecting several of Boyle’s invitations, finally got a job with Homeboy Industries. He left his anger behind him, eventually had a home and family, and was looking forward to his daughter’s baptism and had bought her a new dress. But then he was gunned down in the streets.

Luis, also a drug dealer, came to Greg after his daughter was born. He was hired to work in the bakery.  He got a car, a home and a whole new life. One evening, while loading his car, he was shot and killed by some gang members who ventured into his neighborhood barrio.

There are other stories like those of Manny, Luis, and Jason, kids who Greg befriended, turned their lives around, looked to the future with hope, only to end up one more victim of the violence of the LA streets

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But then there are other stories of some who turned their lives around. Bandit came to see Greg after being locked up for selling crack. Boyle got him a job in a warehouse, and Bandit got married and had three kids.  He told Greg he was proud of himself, showing people were wrong who called me a “Bueno para nada” (Good for nothing).

Boyle sees beyond these experiences and reminds us that we are all deserving of God’s love. These young people are not monsters, but scared kids who want a purpose in life. He challenges the reader to “stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” This is a holy book about the power and impact of unconditional love and compassion.

Considering that he has buried more than 150 young people from gang-related violence, many of which he has known since childhood, and called them by the names their mothers used, the joyful tenor of the book remains an astounding literary and spiritual feat. Tattoos on the Heart, which reminds us that no life is less valuable than another, is destined to become a classic of contemporary spirituality. But, be careful -- reading it may change your thinking, and your ministry! —Ken Johnson

P.S. The book left a tattoo on my heart too.