Burn Scars, by Patricia Prijatel

COMMENTS FROM BBB MEMBERS:

As I read this beautifully written memoir, it was like having my own sense of loss affirmed by someone who truly understands. When a landscape we love and are intimate with (whether it's splendid mountains and valleys or our own backyard), is destroyed by the freakishness of our changing climate, it hurts. It changes us. We stop trusting nature. We feel stress. Maybe we get sick. We need to recover. Patricia Prijatel's beautifully written account of the burn scars on "her" mountain and on herself is a must read if you care about climate change. It's well researched and informative, fast paced and vivid. And perhaps surprisingly, in places it's laugh-out-loud funny. — Sharelle Moranville

This is a beautiful book. The author has infused the opening chapters with descriptions of this land and its people she so loves. But there is a clear sense of suspenseful foreboding for a catastrophe that you know is coming. Her descriptions of the fire and the response of the human beings who are affected by it gain weight the farther we get from the event itself. Far from going back to normal, she chronicles the work of the people to prevent land erosion, how difficult and sometimes impossible it is, and the emotional toll it takes. What grows in the wake of the fire is not a regeneration of what was there before but in some cases harmful plant life that will change the landscape forever. We watch human emotions as they deny, accept, grieve and try to move on. What we learn in the process of reading this book is how precious our earth is and, in taking it for granted, how much we have endangered it. — Jeanie Smith

"Burn Scars" tells the true personal story of a Colorado family’s love for the land and the mountains. They enjoyed a wonderful life near the East Spanish Peak. Then fire erupted. They fled for their lives. Courageous firefighters saved most of the homes but the trauma lasts to this day. Prijatel talks about the personal grief. She tells the impact of fire, wind and flood on the plants and animals. She describes the increasing danger. Each year spawns higher temperatures and dryer forests. Each year sees more and bigger fires. Her well researched story flows easily. Read this book. — Ray Gaebler

The author did an extraordinary job of giving us a personal account of climate grief and educating us. Very readable, relatable and touching. — Karen Peters

Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven (1994) is a sequel to Kingsolver’s debut 1988 novel The Bean Trees—in which Taylor, a young woman whose driving ambition is to graduate high school without getting pregnant, finds herself traveling alone cross-country in a car with serious needs. She falls into sudden, unexpected, and unwitting possession of a Cherokee toddler who has been badly abused. Taylor names the toddler Turtle and sets about forming a chosen family to raise Turtle and help her heal from the abuse she suffered. This involves getting “legal” adoption papers with the collusion of a young central American couple who are in the U.S. illegally. Readers can’t help but love adorable Turtle and spunky Taylor and the whole supporting cast. And the novel ends happily with Turtle having been saved by a bunch of white people (plus Esperanza and Estevan). 

But. And there needs to be a but.

What happens in The Bean Trees is good, but perhaps needs a second, more nuanced look. Is it in Turtle’s best interest to separate her from her Cherokee roots? Could Turtle endure the second trauma of being taken from the white mother with whom she has bonded?  Pigs in Heaven is a moving and beautifully written “second thought” about The Bean Trees.  

Young, smart attorney Annawake Fourkiller decides early on that a tribal injustice has been done, and she resolves to undo it –which naturally strikes terror in Taylor’s heart. So she goes on the run with Turtle, living on the edge, meeting fascinating characters like Barbie and the goose man and Jax. Taylor’s mother, Alice, with largely unacknowledged—up to this point—Cherokee roots, gets drawn into a quest to find her own happiness and broker a peace for Taylor and Turtle. 

Kingsolver shows the differences between the expansive tribal family structure and the constricted nuclear white family structure brilliantly. And through all the characters, but especially through the character of Alice, who has a foot in both worlds, the reader is given a more thoughtful look at what might be best for Turtle. What might be best for everybody.

I quote the novel’s ending because it is such a perfect example of Kingsolver’s inimitable style. Cash, who is conveniently both Alice’s soul mate and Turtle’s grandpa—and now Turtle’s legal guardian—as a token of his deep and true love of Alice, leans the TV against a stump and shoots it.

“The woods go unnaturally still. All the birds take note of the round black bullet wound in the TV screen, a little right of center but still fatal. Alice’s heart performs its duties strangely inside her chest, and she understands that her life sentence of household silence has been commuted. The family of women is about to open its doors to men. Men, children, cowboys, and Indians. It’s all over now but the shouting.”

A truly righteous ending of sweet Turtle’s story. — Sharelle Moranville

Songs of America, by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw

In Songs of America, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Presidents Jon Meacham and Grammy-winning country singer Tim McGraw teamed up to trace America’s history through patriotic songs that shaped and reflected the country’s mood amid wars, social movements, and other times of conflict from before the American Revolutionary War up to the election of President Obama. Anyone who enjoys reading history or listening to music – or better, both – will find it irresistible. 

Meacham writes a celebration of the history and songs of the eras while McGraw reflects, as an artist and performer, on the songs selected in a series of sidebars. The two form an irresistible duo, connecting us to music as a force in our nation’s history. They begin their narrative early on, when tensions first arose between England and the 13 colonies. From there, they recount the next two-and-a-half century journey over our history’s rocky road. 

From the Star Spangled Banner and Yankee Doodle Dandy, to I Wish I was in Dixie, America The Beautiful, This Land is Your Land and He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, in early years, to the more current We Shall Overcome, Blowin’ in the Wind, Okie From Muskogee, and Born in the USA, to name a few, they connect us with music as an unsung (no pun intended) force in our country’s development. 

McGraw’s engaging commentary fits well with Meacham’s artful delivery in writing about each song and how it fits into the era. Rarely do such diverse talents mesh in a way that produces a result of a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

In summary, they have written a wonderful and moving account of how the sounds of America have inspired us and contribute to our understanding of our past.

Toward the end, Meacham quotes Shakespeare:

The man who has not music in his soul
            Or is not touched with Concord of sweet sounds,
              Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils,
             The Motions of his mind are dull as Night,
             And his affections dark as Erebus.
             Let no such Man be trusted.

Perhaps this is why the authors halt their story just before the 45^th President….

p.s. A personal note of a segment of my early history and music.  While a ninth-grader in 1956, I joined a group of boys who were skipping school to travel to Memphis to hear Elvis Presley at the Cotton Carnival, an event much like the Mardi Gras. Elvis had recently made the scene with his hit “Heartbreak Hotel”, and we were entranced by his sideburns, swiveling hips, ducktail haircut – all of which we quickly tried to emulate. We got back home well into the wee hours of the morning, and of course my parents had been extremely worried and now mad, but glad I was safe.  I think I was grounded forever. Several years later, Elvis and I were both serving in the Army at the same time in Germany. — Ken Johnson

The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver

I knew I was going to get some good chuckles out of the book when I read the opening paragraph of Bean Trees:

                  “I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw 

                  a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father

                  over the top of the Standard Oil sign.  I’m not lying.  He

                  got stuck up there.  He wasn’t killed, but lost his hearing 

                  and in many other ways was not the same afterwards.” 

And I kept chuckling throughout the book.  It’s funny but it also is a good story, really a series of good stories from beginning to end.  The stories are intriguing, clever and wise.  Barbara Kingsolver has written a number of books but this is her first. 

The “heroine,” Taylor Greer is a determined, spirited, and very likable young woman.  She has two goals in life:  To move away from her home in rural Kentucky and not to get pregnant.  She heads off on her getaway adventure in her newly-purchased 1955 Volkswagen bug which, besides being unreliable mechanically, has no windows.  No starter either, so it has to be push-started, preferably on a hill.  She stuffs all the money she has into one pocket of her jeans and heads off.  

Taylor grew up poor, but she is resourceful. Her plan is to drive west and never look back until her car stops running, then settle wherever that takes her.  She lands on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona on a Cherokee Indian reservation.  She manages to drive her wobbling car off the highway and find a much-needed auto repair shop with the interesting name of “Jesus is Lord Used Tires.”  

Somewhere along the way, her trip takes a very unexpected turn.  A woman places a small child wrapped in a large pink blanket into Taylor’s car, insisting that she must “Take this baby.”  Taylor is too stunned to refuse and so becomes the instant mother of a three-year-old Native American Cherokee girl, a round-eyed child with a “cereal bowl haircut.”  The child’s tiny hands grab and hold tightly onto everything she can reach, especially her new mother’s long braid  She also realizes that the child has been horribly physically and sexually abused. 

Perhaps because Turtle needs security as the result of the fear and pain she has suffered, her tiny little hands grab and hold tightly onto everything she can reach, especially her new mother’s long braid.  So Taylor names her little girl “Turtle” after mud turtles who also hold tightly to everything they can grab.  Turtle becomes fascinated with beans, especially the purple beans from Wisteria trees and loves to collect and plant the beans, then dig them up. The little girl is also fascinated with horticultural magazines and books, anything that pictures vegetables and plants.  Her quick mind helps her memorize the names and types of vegetables.

In Tucson, Taylor meets and becomes good friends with Lou Ann Ruiz, whose husband has lost a leg in an accident. Lou Ann also has a child and the two women agree to move in together with their families.  From there on the book is filled with the sometimes touching and always humorous lives of the two women, their families and the events and everyday miracles in their lives. 

The Bean Trees is witty and wise and funny - a good read from start to finish.  I did not want it to end.— Gail Stilwill

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

Dillard’s opening anecdote of the old fighting tom leaping through the window onto her bed at night and kneading her chest while she’s half-asleep is borrowed from someone else. But the reaction to the event is pure Dillard as poet and theologian. 

“I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign or the Passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . ‘Seems like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

In this opening, Dillard poses the question of the book very colloquially. Seems like we’re just set down here and don’t nobody know why. The opening also puts the reader on notice that her writing style is going to be poetic. She’s going to use words that need to be paused over and considered. And she’s going to use them abundantly in sentences with rhythm and repetition that convey feeling as much as they convey meaning. And she’s going to make lots of allusions to Scripture (just give a second glance to the quotation above as an example).

In her younger years, Dillard had turned away from organized religion because she couldn’t reconcile the easy, pious answers about Why? with the suffering she observed in the world. But in her mid-twenties, Dillard dared take a crack at answering the question of Why? herself. And she won the Pulitzer for her efforts. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the young poet took on the absolutely biggest question of all, suspecting it was impossible to answer, but daring to try.

In her year-long, up-close observation of nature along Tinker Creek, Dillard does her best to show us “here” (as in Seems like we’re just set down here . . .) in blinding color, shifting shadow, ice and heat, big and small. Animal, vegetable, mineral. She serves up details of nature both adorable (the juvenile muskrat floating past with his feet over his stomach) and ghoulish. She observes the abundance of the natural world as something not altogether positive (all those parasites and predators). And trying to draw a conclusion about the nature of God from all this, she concludes merely “the creator loves pizzazz.” –which, honestly, made me laugh. And reminded me of the Psalmist claiming God made the great leviathan just for fun.

In her poetic, abundant way, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard show us nature in which the Creator must be because He is omnipresent, so He has to be in there, right? 

But questions linger. 

And in her later book, Holy the Firm, Dillard tries to answer them. That book was written while she lived on Lummi Island, off mainland Washington, where nature is sparse. She called Lummi Island “the edge of the known and comprehended world . . . the western rim of the real . . . the fringes’ edge . . . where time and eternity spatter each other with foam—a place, in other words, where nature stops and the darkness of Divinity begins.” Or, put more succinctly: “If God is in the abundance of creation, take away creation and get a better look at God.” Or, put a bit more esoterically, perhaps Creation was the fall.

Dillard invites us on a pilgrimage to understand God. But she also quotes Augustine: “If you do understand, then it is not God.” 

Or as Anne Lamott prays at the beginning of her day: Whatever.

Seems like we’re just set down here, and don’t nobody know why.— Sharelle Moranville

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Considered by critics to be Cather’s best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a full-color portrait of the southwestern United States, especially New Mexico, and its people in the second half of the 19^th century. As she has done in other books, Cather catches a culture on the cusp of huge change—the “new” world pushes against the “old,” indigenous religions fight to maintain their beliefs while integrating with Catholicism, the strength and beauty of nature begins to face those who want to control it. The Americans are pitted against the French, the Spanish, the Indians, the Mexicans, although it is not clear who, in this context, actually is an American.

At the center of the story are two French missionaries, Jean Marie Latour and his good friend and assistant Joseph Vaillant. Their lives mirror the men on whom they are based: Latour on the first bishop of New Mexico, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Vaillant on the first bishop of Colorado, Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.

Latour is sophisticated, thoughtful, and cool. Vaillant, who is a few steps beyond homely, is warm and engaging, enthusiastic about raising funds for missions and, ultimately, for the bishop’s dream: the cathedral. The two men are yin and yang, each showing strengths that combat the other’s weaknesses. Vaillant helps Latour establish himself in a land in which priests have been settled for hundreds of years, although those priests have been on their own, with no oversight from Rome, and they've created their own rules, or lack of them. They flagrantly take advantage of the local people and grow ostentatiously wealthy while living a life of pleasure, marrying, having children, and building a bit of a family business. Latour carefully and slowly forces the errant priests out of their parishes, and Vaillant is there to care for the parishioners, wherever or however he finds them.

The book is episodic, less like a novel and more like a series of short stories tied together by the missionaries and some continuing characters. Kit Carson plays a prominent role and, through him, Cather shows this country’s relationship with its earliest settlers, the Indians. Carson is married to an Indian and, in most cases, he acts like their friend. Yet, when the U.S. government wants to find a hideout where the Navajos stay safe, Carson leads the troops right there, causing the death of more than 100, and leading to the death of their way of life. Cather offers a poignant overview of that way of life:

They seemed to have none of the European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. 

Perhaps the biggest contrast Cather creates is between the first chapter and the rest of the book. In that initial chapter, she introduces us to "three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America," in an opulent villa overlooking Rome. The four men are fed exceptionally well and drink fine champagne, which feeds the Cardinals' already overblown egos. They are committed to sending more missionaries to America but are not interested in the least in learning just what America is or who its people are and assume Indians all live in wigwams. Their evening ends over brandy and a sunset. These cardinals wouldn't last a half hour in the territory to which they are sending missionaries, nor would their arrogant attitudes achieve many converts.

Characters throughout the book are compelling, real, and beautifully flawed, but the exquisite scenery is the real star, and Cather captures that with breathtaking clarity; the book is full of a love of the land and with descriptions that take the fine hand of a master.  Perhaps her most-quoted description:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky.

Death finally comes for the archbishop, after he has lived a long and full life. When one of his friends shows his obvious grief and wants to heal him from what looks and sounds like pneumonia, Latour simply says, 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.” —Pat Prijatel

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This book accomplishes several things at once.  It gives us superbly researched accounts of three intriguing stories that peaked in the first decade of the 1900s – the familiar career of Theodore Roosevelt, the less known path of William Howard Taft, and the misunderstood investigative journalism of that period.  It shows how these three stories entwined with each other and fed each other.  It gives us a comprehensive feel for a period that echoes our own in many ways.  It is a long but wonderfully readable work of history.  

Teddy Roosevelt was a huge and energetic personality, a scholar, a prodigious reader and writer, and a man dedicated to progressive domestic policies but flawed by an impetuous temperament and muscularly nationalistic foreign policies.  After some initial political success, personal tragedy triggered a depression that he conquered by physical activity during an extended ranching sabbatical.  He returned to the meteoric political career we are familiar with.  In just over a decade he served as a reforming U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, New York City Police Commissioner, Governor of New York, Vice-President and President of the United States.  Goodwin gives us well-documented explanations of why and how he achieved a number of progressive social policies in each position.  

Goodwin gives us a welcome picture of Big Bill Taft.  We typically know him as an oversized president who was the regular Republican Party nominee in 1912, opposing Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign that allowed Woodrow Wilson’s campaign as the Democratic nominee to win.  But the full story is far more vibrant and impressive.  He was a popular and productive public servant in Ohio, especially in judicial service, which was his own preferred path.  He developed a close personal friendship with Roosevelt while working at the Justice Department; Roosevelt and Taft’s wife kept pushing him in political directions.  He served admirably as the first Governor General of the Philippines and the leader of Roosevelt’s cabinet.  He was a natural choice, and Roosevelt’s choice, to succeed TR in 1908.  Somewhat trivial bureaucratic squabbles during Taft’s presidency produced a serious division between them that led to Roosevelt’s third-party run in 1912.  Touchingly that rift was healed in 1918, shortly before Roosevelt’s death and Taft’s eventual appointment as Chief Justice of the United States.  

The rise of investigative journalism in the 1890s and 1900s is the third story Goodwin tells.  An increasingly educated and urban America provided a market for more thoughtful and probing journalism than daily newspapers could provide.  Goodwin introduces us to McClure’s, a monthly led by S.S. McClure and featuring well-researched articles by writers such as Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White.  Despite their documentation of social issues with high standards of scholarly journalism, these writers were often included in the maligned category of muckrakers and yellow-press. 

Roosevelt was the perfect foil for these writers.  He invited them into his thinking, and in return used the relationship to project his policies, and not incidentally his personality, to the general public.  This relationship of press and politics gave Roosevelt the Bully Pulpit of the title.  It was unprecedented in American government but has become a necessity for successful governance ever since, and continues so with the evolution of the press to broadcast and electronic media.  Taft’s inability to understand and use this resource – due to his personal temperament and his judicial approach to public leadership – was a major barrier to his presidency and to his 1912 campaign.  

The period echoes themes of our own times.  Economic growth since the Civil Wat resulted in extremes of wealth and poverty, and the political divisions were equally extreme.  Industrial powerhouses of that day – railroads, oil companies, and meat packers – were eventually tamed, income taxation was introduced, popular election of senators was adopted, and labor and housing conditions were addressed.  Goodwin shows how these accomplishments were the result of Roosevelt’s political skill, breaking legislative deadlocks by using the press to apply public pressure 

It is an extensively documented period of history.  People still wrote meaningful letters and left thoughtful diaries.  Public documents are generally preserved.  Goodwin has distilled these resources to tell powerful stories, full of credible and nuanced characters, motivated by strong beliefs and purposes.  One member of our group stated that the book should be read by any current Republican as a reminder of what the party once stood for.  — William H. Smith Jr.