Category: Nonfiction

Rosemary:  The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

By Kate Clifford Larson

Published 2015

Read June 2019

Kate Clifford Larson is a historian and writer who offers her readers a unique view of Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy.  Many, including this reader, have some awareness that Rosemary was mentally disabled/challenged and suffered an unsuccessful treatment for her condition—which this reader understood to be a lobotomy.  That the public eventually learned this means that Rosemary was not the “forgotten” daughter of the Kennedys but the term “hidden” certainly applies well.  Larson’s careful choice of words even for the title emphasizes her careful handling of this topic.

Larson’s book provides useful background on Rosemary’s parents, especially the upbringing of Rose Fitzgerald who eventually becomes the wife of Joseph Kennedy.  Rose was raised in an educated family and Rose fully expected to attend Wellesley College but was denied this opportunity by her father, then mayor of Boston, when the local archbishop strongly discouraged it, implying negative political ramifications if she completed her plans.  Rose instead attended the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart where her well embedded Catholic faith was further crystallized.  She married Joseph Kennedy, son of a business and politician, who was a rival of her father’s, after a seven year courtship. 

Rosemary was the third of nine children.  The opening section of Larson’s book explains her condition:  she was held in the birth canal too long, awaiting the doctor for delivery.  He was detained due to treating others for the 1918 Spanish flu raging through the area.  This limitation of oxygen for too long impacted Rosemary’s cognitive abilities which allowed her to reach approximately fourth grade reading, writing, and math levels but not beyond.  

In 1918, support systems for families of children with various physical and cognitive challenges didn’t exist outside asylums.  Especially since Rosemary was as beautiful as the rest of the Kennedy children, and had no substantial physical limitations, Joe and Rose frankly didn’t acknowledge  her challenges until she was in grade school and wasn’t keeping up with the other students nor with her bright and active siblings.  Rather, they reprimanded Rosemary for not trying hard enough. 

Eventually Rosemary was in enrolled in the first of a long series of boarding schools that promised to address her problems.  Unfortunately incomplete communication by Rose regarding the extent of the problem and the frankly callous (this reader’s opinion) dismissal that being moved abruptly from her family to a boarding school (and on to the next and the next) would be emotionally challenging for any child, especially one with some cognitive challenges, resulted in boarding school X’s expulsion of Rosemary from their student body.  Only when the Kennedys were in Great Britain, when Joe was sent there as US Ambassador to the UK, did Rosemary find a school that provided her a sense of belonging and purpose.  She came to view her position there as assistant teacher as her day included reading to and caring for the younger children.  Unfortunately she was pulled from that school when the UK came under grave threat from Germany.

Although Rosemary had cognitive challenges, she grew into a beautiful young woman with similar feelings about her appearance, social engagements, and boys shared by her sisters and other young women.  Rose included Rosemary in presentation of her daughters to the Queen early in Joe’s tenure as Ambassador. Of course there were concerns that Rosemary might not fully understand how to behave so she was always closely monitored by her siblings and her brothers Joe and Jack provided the majority of her dance partnerships.  Sister Kit (Katherine) (2 years younger than Rosemary) initially provided Rosemary much support and guidance.  Eunice (3 years younger than Rosemary) took those reins and provided Rosemary much sisterly support throughout her life. 

Although Rose indicated in her autobiography, Times to Remember (1974) “I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and a duty, but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.”, she certainly benefited from the growing wealth provided by Joe’s businesses.  She took many long vacations by herself, leaving her children in the care of the household staff.  She certainly spent time and substantial money on finding schools and later nursing care for Rosemary as attested by the letters and detailed invoices she saved and that were given to the Kennedy Presidential library.  However she seemed to remain distant from Rosemary.  Late in Rose’s life, after Joe’s death and after Rosemary was put into care at a nursing home in Wisconsin, Rose requested her children provide Rosemary nice gifts for her birthday.  It’s not clear she actually visited Rosemary at this home, although the Kennedy wealth did build a small home for Rosemary on the facility’s ground and provided her the full-time caregivers she needed.

Larson provides the reader a very thorough look at Rosemary’s life.  This reader was impressed by and appreciated the lack of judgement of any of the Kennedys regarding their care of and interactions with Rosemary.  She fully leaves that type of conclusion to be drawn by the reader if they so choose. She leaves to the reader how to digest the information that Joe Kennedy was drawn to recent articles about the success of a type of brain surgery to cure many ails, including those Rosemary suffered.  We learn, through written correspondence, that he was cautioned by his daughter against this procedure for Rosemary.  But in his desperation to protect the family and, hopefully, to help Rosemary, the procedure is applied.  Unfortunately this left Rosemary further cognitively damaged and physically disabled as well.  She regains some of the physical capabilities lost by the cutting of her brain, but she needs full time care for the rest of her life.

 Larson acknowledges the extraordinary amount of information she found in the Kennedy Presidential Library where all of Rose’s correspondence and many invoices regarding Rosemary’s care landed following Rose’s death.  This reader is struck (again) that such information will likely not be so readily available for future historians researching subjects born and raised in the electronic era.  This reader is grateful to Larson for reviewing and using this information to provide such a detailed and view of Rosemary Kennedy and for the context of her life against the historical era in which she was born and raised.   Without that context, it would be impossible for current readers to understand how and why she was treated as she was.

Fortunately there is a positive part of this story.  Sister Eunice (Shriver) became a strong advocate for cognitively and physically challenged people.  As Executive Vice President of the Joseph P Kennedy, Jr Foundation, she shifted the organization’s focus from Catholic charities to research on the causes of mental retardation and humane treatments of it.  She was instrumental in initiating the President’s Panel on Mental Retardation in 1961 during her brother, John’s presidency.  A result of this panel was the establishment, in 1962, of the National Institute of Child Health and Development, as part of the National Institutes of Health.  In 1963 she disclosed information that Rosemary was developmentally disabled.  Her brother, the President, also spoke about this.  Eunice’s numerous efforts included establishing the Special Olympics in 1968.   Thus Rosemary Kennedy’s legacy includes prompting a radical change in how the cognitively impaired are viewed and treated.  Eunice applied her family’s prestige and wealth, and her brothers’ political positions to ensure that not only would Rosemary no longer be hidden, but that the world’s view of cognitive and physical challenges would be forever changed.

While this reader has provided much information she learned as a result of reading this book, this reader strongly recommends you read this book yourself to benefit fully from Larson’s research and writing. This reader benefitted from discussing the book with others, including a retired “special education” teacher.  These discussions helped this reader more thoroughly appreciate the wealth of information and perspective that Larson provides and the vast shift in society’s views of persons with these challenges—that are, in part due, to Rosemary Kennedy and her family.

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh:  The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

By Carl Zimmer

Published 2018

Read:  July 2019

This large (672 pages) book is quite a treasure.  Zimmer, a Yale graduate with a BA in English, has been writing about science since 1989.  He’s written 13 books including two text books:  The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (first edition 2009, second edition 2013), the first textbook on evolution written for non-science majors, and Evolution: Making Sense of Life (coauthored with evolutionary biologist Douglas Emlen) (first edition 2012; second edition 2015; third edition to be published in 2019), a textbook for science majors.  He’s written countless articles about a range of science topics and is author of a weekly column Matter for the New York Times.    This particular book has received a large number of awards and honors from various literary organizations and this reader understands why. 

Carl Zimmer manages to help us understand how vast the concept of heredity really is and he then makes this huge field interesting and approachable.  He starts with a historical perspective about why we originally cared about heredity (who is the father, who gets the inheritance), proceeds through the concepts of bloodlines and genetics, confronts the messy eugenics movements over the ages, explores the power and problems associated purchasing your genetic information with products like Ancestry.com, and confronts us with significant concepts regarding babies’ DNA becoming part of mom and perhaps her future offspring.  This is just a small sampling the huge number of concepts that are part of the concept of heredity.  He teaches about basic biology,  miosis, genetics, and the new gene-editing technology, CRISPR, among many other biological, evolutionary, human developmental concepts in understandable, digestible,  and engaging ways.  He uses real-life stories—his own and others—to enable understanding of the concepts and challenge the reader to understand the complexity of heredity. 

My sole criticism of the book is that the chapter titles are meaningful to Carl Zimmer, and the phrase does eventually comes up during the chapter, but the Table of Contents and chapter titles are completely useless if you’re interesting in efficiently trying to re-explore concepts in them. The index provides some help in this regard. 

While a major volume to digest, it’s well worth the effort.  This reader was fortunate to be introduced to the book through a book discussion group at a local library.  Certainly having a deadline for the conversation provided some motivation to continue reading, but the book is very extraordinary so it was easy to meet that book discussion preparation goal.  Discussing this book with others was highly useful as each reader latched onto different concepts differently and sharing the experience of reading this book and what was learned was frankly quite thrilling. 

White Rage:  the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

By Carol Anderson

Published 2015

Read July 2019

Carol Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.  Her academic prowess as a historian is exemplified in this concise but thorough review of the continuous barrage of barriers white Americans have placed in the path of progress of their brethren black Americans.  This was a difficult book for this (white) reader to read, not because of her exceptionally clear writing, but rather because her work makes clear how much this reader didn’t know about the history of the United States.  She starts her work during the Civil War and continues through the Obanna administration.  While this reader had some familiarity with Jim Crow laws, methods to prevent blacks from voting (various techniques utilized over the decades), red-lining, unstated Jim Crow in the north, using the “drug wars” to incarcerate blacks at an unimaginable, Anderson describes the systematic aspects of these attacks clearly and concisely.  Among new learnings for this reader include the meeting Abraham Lincoln had with leaders in which it was proposed that all black Americans agree to leave the United States and make a homeland in Panama and the liberty his successor, Johnson, gave southern leaders to trod upon blacks in order to keep them happy.    These learnings are the tips of the iceberg of what Anderson has to teach. 

This book is one that should be widely read so that our understanding of the history of the United States is more accurate and so that our understanding of the on-going struggle for equality has been horribly difficult and still is. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Published 2010

Read Jan 2019

Rebecca Skloot first heard about Henrietta Lacks when taking a community college biology course.  Her professor encouraged his students to– step back and view the amazing complexity that happens in each and every cell in our body, realize that the activity is directed by the DNA in our chromosomes, and understand that an exact copy of this DNA is made during each cell division.  He explained that a small mistake in that division process can cause cells to divide uncontrollably, manifesting in what we recognize as cancer.  He explained that we know this by studying cancer cells in culture in the laboratory and that cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks were the basis of much of this study.  Skloot’s curiosity in learning more about Lacks was initiated in this class.  Her interest continued to grow and about 10 years after taking this class she initiated a focused 10 years of research about the woman Henrietta Lacks, the HeLa cell samples taken from Henrietta Lack during her treatment for aggressive cervical cancer, the history of cell culture, the revolution that HeLa cells allowed in conducting human biological research, and the ethical questions that have arisen about the use of human samples in biological research.  The eventual product was this book.

In the initial section of the book entitled “A Few Words About This Book” Skloot indicates that this book is a work of nonfiction, that the words attributed to people in the book were theirs, either recorded or written, that she maintained the dialogue they used, and that she used extensive interviews, records both public and private, peer-reviewed journal articles, and published books on relevant topics  to piece together the history of Henrietta Lacks, the history of HeLa cells that were samples of her tumor, and to describe the worlds of Henrietta and the various researchers she describes.   

This book seems to be the first to provide a full picture of Henrietta’s short thirty-one years of life.  Skloot’s reporting requires the reader to face the challenges of obtaining adequate medical care as a poor black woman and the approach of medicine in dealing with cancer at this time. 

Two ongoing themes in the book are 1)  the depersonalization that can occur when a sample is taken from a patient and it’s turned into a specimen for biological study  and 2) the financial implications of human samples that enable biological knowledge that beget life-saving commercial diagnostics and medical treatments.   Skloot pulls no punches when she describes the focus of the scientific community on the science that could be accomplished as a result of George Guy’s discovery of the immortality of the HeLa cell line and the cell culture techniques he perfects to allow its study by, eventually, myriads of laboratories world-wide.  Interestingly, Guy willingly shared the HeLa cell line and his culture techniques very broadly before devoting any energy to publishing his findings thus nearly losing any credit for his role in establishing this valuable tool set.  Although Henrietta’s cells enabled substantial biological discoveries, life-saving treatments for many diseases, and profits for cell line services, pharmaceutical companies, and royalties for inventors, the Lack family received no compensation and remained unable to afford medical treatment for themselves.  Skloot discusses the very slow recognition by the medical research community and its governing bodies that a patient should play some sort of role in determining how his/her clinical specimens be used aside from the diagnostic studies planned to directly support their medical treatment.  In the last section of the book she finally devotes attention to this particular aspect and shows that regulations actually remain somewhat murky and many questions remain unresolved, especially those regarding the millions of samples in various sample banks that were acquired before any sort of informed consent was involved or privacy concerns considered. She discusses the case of John Moore who unsuccessfully sued for ownership of the cell line created from his cancer.  Not discussed in this book are the intellectual property cases regarding patentability of DNA as the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on these cases before publication of the book.  This situation remains murky as well.  

A substantial section of the book is devoted to the journeys she took with Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, as they together work to learn about Henrietta’s life.  Skloot describes their road trips to places her mother and family lived, the institutions that studied Henrietta’s cells and later samples from her family members, and record holders of pertinent information.  At times this reader was uncomfortable with the detailed picture Skloot provides of Deborah, a woman then in her seventies, as almost manic on this desperate journey to learn about her mother and what happened to her and her cells.  Near the end of this section Skloot indicates that she learns late in their journey that Deborah is suffering from very high blood pressure and uncontrolled diabetes, medical issues that may explain some of her behaviors.  Did she cross the line of confidentiality?  

Unlike other works of nonfiction, Skloot does not use footnotes in the text to specify individual sources, but rather choses to describe the various types and some specific sources in a section at the end of the book.  Similarly, there is no index to contents.  Despite these “non-academic” attributes, I did not detect a clear Skloot “stand” on the ethical issues raised generally or particularly about this particular case.  Similarly, Skloot’s intentions to factually document Henrietta’s family members’ struggles to understand the situation seem to be authentic and delivered.   Sklott indicates her objectives and methods clearly in the opening of the book and the Notes sections at the end.  She has certainly delivered a piece of work that fills a big void in our understanding of the HeLa cell line, the woman from which it was derived, and the unanswered ethical questions of using human samples to understand our world. 

Locking Up Our Own:  Crime and Punishment in Black America

By James Forman Jr.

Published 2017

Read Nov 2018

Forman divides his thoughtful and thought-provoking book into two parts:  Origins and Consequences.  Having read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, I already was aware of at least some of the consequences of arresting and convicting persons on drug possession:  an extraordinarily large percentage of the black population behind bars, sometimes for decades, lives forever damaged for pleading to felonies to avoid being jailed and losing their children to the foster system being but two.  This book tells of similar outcomes but provides a new perspective on some of the origins of the evolution of drug laws that had these impactful and unintended consequences.

The author is a son of former SNPP (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) members, schooled in NYC and Atlanta schools, and a graduate of Brown University and Yale University Law School.  After clerking for Sandra Day O’Connor when she was on the Supreme Court, he was a public defender in Washington, DC from 1994 to 2000 and co-founded the Maya Angelou School which opened in 1997 to 20 students selected from the DC court system to provide them education, counseling, and employment opportunities.  These experiences provided him a front-row seat in a majority black city with a black mayor, a black police chief and majority black police department, black judges, black bailiffs, black court reporters, and black lawyers, including Eric Holder, the US Attorney General for DC.  He taught law at Georgetown University from 2003-2011 and is currently a Professor of Law at Yale University.  His training as a law clerk and as a scholar is apparent in this book which is well referenced and indexed.

In this book he explores a painful question:  how did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?  The book often focuses on laws enacted in Washington, D.C. and their corresponding consequences but the author ties this together well with trends in law enforcement, drug law evolution, and their impact in other states and nationally as well.

I provide here some highlights of what I learned from this book:

• The Home Rule Act was passed by Congress in Jan 1975 giving, for the first time, the ability of Washington, D.C. to elect a mayor with substantial executive authority and for a city council with significant legislative power. The city was approximately 70% black at the time.
• In 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana an Drug Abuse published its findings in a report entitled “Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding” which indicated “experimental or intermittent use of this drug carries minimal risk to the public health and should not be given over-zealous attention.”
• Jimmy Carter suggested in 1977 that Congress consider decriminalizing the use of marijuana
• Marijuana was not decriminalized in Washington, D.C. nor in most states nor nationally at this time:
  • The heroin crisis was wreaking havoc in the black community. Crime was escalating as addicts stole to support their habits.  Safety from crime was and remains highly desired.
  • Black church leaders campaigned against decriminalization.
  • A message that marijuana was a gateway drug to harder drugs was spread and heard despite lack of evidence for this.
  • The Black community was hesitant to support legalizing additional drugs that, like alcohol, might “keep black people drugged and down”.
• There was a huge push for increasing the fraction of black police officers in the Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.
  • Blacks were eventually hired into the police department where they found good pay and benefits but continued discrimination and limitations on their authority and where they could police.
  • The fight against discrimination within the police force was a long and hard road but eventually police were promoted into higher ranks and became police chiefs in many cities including Washington, D.D.
  • It was supposed that black police could “tell the difference between criminals and non-criminals” and apply appropriate force when policing. Moreover there was an expectation that black policemen would use their role to help the overall movement for black equality.   In reality, blacks were attracted to the pay, benefits, and stability of the job but didn’t generally join the force with a social agenda in mind.
• Washington, D.C. did pass laws prohibiting sale or use of handguns. This did not slow the use of guns which were widely available across city boundaries. Many black-majority cities considered laws restricting guns but chose against them to prevent their population from being at a disadvantage to whites in the surrounding suburbs.
• As crack cocaine hit the streets, crime rate soared even higher and the murder rate exploded.
• The phenomenon of blacks hurting blacks (most black murders were committed by other blacks; blacks distributed drugs to black; etc) was not ignored. The black community saw safe streets as a primary goal.
• Although political leaders advocated for drug treatment programs, and more beds in the existing ones, and for better health care, schools, job opportunities etc that would hopefully address some of the causes of drug use and crime associated with drug distribution as a one of the few viable “careers” available, drug laws and drug enforcement were seen as the main tools available to make streets safer.
• Eric Holder was US Attorney General for Washington, D.C. and implemented an automobile version of New York City’s famous “stop and frisk” policy. Holder wanted to finding guns in cars.  He knew, and stated such, that there would be a very large number of innocent people stopped.  A consequence was a tremendous amount of fall-out for those who didn’t have guns with then but had small amounts of marijuana.
• The call from politicians for longer minimum and maximum sentences was long echoed by black leadership as a primary mechanism for dealing with the issue.
• Tougher policing and tougher sentences did not stem drug use or crime. The first black Washington, D.C. police chief resigned after the murder rate rose instead despite his efforts otherwise.
• In 2014 a poll of whites and blacks regarding crime and criminal justice policy showed that 73% of white thought that courts in the D.C. area did not deal harshly enough with criminals and 64% of black had the same opinion. Although the racial difference is significant, it is also interesting that 64% of the black population thought criminals were not treated harshly enough although the vast majority of inmates were black.
• The beds available for drug treatment remain insufficient. There is sometimes heard “well person x failed despite their drug treatment program stint so maybe they don’t deserve another chance because it won’t work this time either.”  We rarely hear that “jailing doesn’t work so let’s do less jailing”.
• Marijuana was decriminalized in Washington, D.C. in 2014.
  • Crime had come down dramatically
  • The harm inflicted by marijuana criminalization was now apparent
  • Black ministers now concluded that marijuana was a gateway to the criminal justice system. Previously they voiced an opinion that marijuana was a gateway drug to harder drugs.
• The trend to release federal prisoners convicted of non-violent drug crimes is meant to undo some of the harm inflicted during the height of the 80’s war on crime but may not be enough—it’s too easy to cross the line to “violent” crime accidentally. Also recall most prisoners are in local and state jails, not federal ones.

 

Not surprisingly the author doesn’t have any known solutions to offer.  He does warn us not to be complacent thinking that we are in the right having a “no tolerance” for those who have committed violent offenses, since violent offenses include any crime committed with any weapon whether it’s used or not.  It’s important to figure out how to help people get past their previous unlawful acts and allow them lives beyond those acts.  This isn’t going to be easy but is worth figuring out.   He challenges us to believe that everybody does deserve a second chance and help in making that chance happen.  We can play a role in this on many levels.  Voting for returning voting rights to felons who have completed their sentence is a meaningful example.  Giving someone committed of a felon a job after they have completed their sentence is another extremely meaningful example.  Do we need to call anyone convicted of a felony a “felon”?  Can we call them a person who has been convicted of a felony instead?  The author tells of a young woman who lost her job simply because she was arrested while on probation even though she was not prosecuted—a fallout victim of Holder’s stop and search policy.  Think about whether it “just makes sense” to not hire felons, to allow them to vote, etc etc.  These “sensible” things aren’t really so sensible-if we believe people shouldn’t be condemned as less than human for life for acts committed in their past for which they have served out their penalty.   We can all play a role in being part of a solution if we are willing to think and have an opinion we form ourselves thoughtfully and not just because someone else has proposed it “just makes sense”….

 

I strongly recommend this book.  Although it is clear that the author was personally impacted by the stories of his clients and the students his school served, Forman’s language is even-handed and non-judgmental, and his statements are backed up by references from credible, often scholarly, resources.  The notes section forms about 1/3 of the total length of the book.  This book has added to my understanding of the difficult challenges facing the black population in the US, and therefore the entirety of the US, and did provide me a sense that I can be part of the solution if I choose.

Out of Africa

By Isak Dinesen

Published 1938

Read Oct 2017

The “about the author” information provided in the Vintage International edition I read gave me useful but not excess information:  “Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885.  After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation.  She was divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931.  There she began to write in English under the nom de plume Isak Dinesen.”  I will refer to the author by the name she chose as author of this book.

The information was useful because it gave me a sense of how long Dinesen had been in Africa.  Most importantly, however, it told me that the language in Out of Africa is Dinesen’s and not a translator’s.   The language is marvelous.   That she used all her senses in living her life in Africa is clear on the second page of this book:  “The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life it, was the air. …Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought:  Here I am, where I ought to be.”

The book is not an autobiography.  Instead, Dinesen tells us about her experience in Africa while she tried to succeed in the coffee growing business, which was difficult.  She tells us early on that the land was a little too high for coffee.  “But a coffee-plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let you go, and there is always something to do on it:  you are generally just a little behind with your work.”

The opening chapter draws you into her experience quickly—her descriptions of the landscape, the sounds, the animals, coffee-growing, and the people.  Some aspects of her descriptions and comments on the Natives are somewhat surprising to us in 2018 but they reflect views of a European come to farm coffee in East Africa in 1914 as various European countries were continuing their conquest of Africa.  Her comments do, however, point out that the Natives were not homogenous but that her farm employed or interacted with persons from several tribes/communities with different cultures including customs, beliefs, approaches to economics, and more.  She claims, and we believe her claim, that she had genuine affection for them and it’s clear they respect and appreciate her.

Absent a viewing of the 1985 movie by the same name (which is more of a biography of Karen Blixen during her time in Africa), one would not know much about Dinesen’s relationship with Denys Finch-Hatton.  The first chapter she devotes to him is titled “Wings” as much of the chapter is about the flying they would do together in his small aircraft and the view of Africa from the sky.  The second chapter about Denys regards his death, funeral, and burial on her property and is part of the section called “Farewell to the Farm”.

The section “Farewell to the Farm” is some 60 pages and it has no parallel about her arrival to the farm.  She spends some effort relaying the various tasks associated with selling off the furniture and belongings, the house and land, separating from the people who lived and worked on the farm, and especially her efforts to resettle “the squatters” to new land elsewhere in East Africa so that they could remain together.  She provides much detail about her last days there and especially the day she left.  Clearly leaving Africa was extremely painful for her and she describes very well the sensation one has when one is making an end to a part of their life which must end but whose end is not fully chosen.  And then she is Out of Africa.

Gertrude Bell:  Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations

By Georgiana Howell

Published 2007

Read June 2018

One of the book clubs to which I belong gave an assignment:  choose, read, and present a biography (or memoir or autobiography) of your choice.  I choose biography to learn about the person through research done by someone else vs self.  I actually enjoyed working on the selection of the book to read.  I had learned about Gertrude Bell, and the meeting of 40 that divided up the Middle East into countries to be controlled by Britain, France, and Russia, through a historical fiction book.  Although many are familiar with the name “Lawrence of Arabia”, far fewer are familiar with Gertrude Bell, including myself.  I chose this book to learn about the person of Gertrude Bell and how she influenced the course of Middle East history/conflicts.

Apparently this book differs from other biographies of Gertrude Bell by NOT focusing on the part of her life devoted to the Middle East.  Rather, this book tells a rather complete history of Gertrude from her early youth through death.  The chapters are arranged somewhat chronologically but also tell about discrete aspects of her life.  Since during her adult life she was both climbing mountains and travelling in the Middle East and involved with two loves of her life, the chapters are helpfully focused on individual aspects.  While some reviewers complained about the amount of detail provided, I rather enjoyed it

Gertrude never married.  Her first love, to whom she hope to become engaged, was not deemed suitable by her family as a marriage partner.  Gertrude was understandably heart broken.  Her near finance died a few years later.  Her second love was a married man, a military hero turned military counsel.  Their acquaintance turns into friendship and then love.  Gertrude hopes he will leave his wife but he won’t; she doesn’t become his mistress although they pursue their unconsummated love affair through letters for quite some time.  Dick Doughty-Wylie also leaves Gertrude’s life completely through death, this time in 1915 in France in a battle.

The world may be a different place if Gertrude had married or if she had not had a substantial income by way of inheritance of family wealth.  Unburdened by a home to manage and children to raise or the need to work to make her own living, Gertrude literally traveled the world and became expert in many skills.  She became an expert mountaineer, gaining a reputation for both skill and courage.  She studied archeology and co-authored books on ruins she helped excavate.  These efforts win her election to Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society and becoming the first woman to receive a RGC award.   She traveled extensively and took on a quest to understand the geography and culture of what we now call the Middle East.  By means of her solo expeditions (she and her company that carried her equipment, set it up, and cooked for her) in 1900, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1911, 1913 she traversed (current day) Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  Her travels demonstrated once again her focus, courage, and lust for learning.  Despite sometimes ferocious heat, cold, sun, and sand, she journeyed on atop her camel and successfully covered the routes she carefully planned.  She learned, through trial and error, how to gain audience with tribal chiefs and, by learning their language, was able to converse deeply and knowingly with them about their art, literature, and politics.

The knowledge she gained during her adventures provided her unique capability to serve in a variety of mainly non-commissioned military counsel roles in various parts of the Middle East and India.  She writes numerous papers on the governance structure her Middle East travels revealed to her.  She participates directly in the Paris Peace Conference on the future of Mesopotamia as well as the Cairo Conference that defines how Britain, France, and Russia will “divide up” the Middle East.  She influences and acts directly in establishing borders in the Middle East and in setting up governments in Syria and Iraq.  She drives for a referendum in newly formed Iraq regarding its leader.  As a result of the referendum, Faisal ibn Hussain ibn Ali, who she recruits after being deposed in Syria and recommends for the role, is crowned Faisal I of Iraq in 1920.  She continues to support establishing Iraq as a nation until she dies in 1926.  She is accorded a military funeral and is buried in the British Cemetery, Baghdad.

This book relies substantially on Gertrude’s correspondence as a primary source for the details provided.  Gertrude wrote at least weekly to her family whether or not she could post the letters during some of her travels.  Her correspondence with Dick Doughty-Wylie is also frequent and revealing of their feelings and actions.  I’m not sure such correspondence exists for current political, cultural, or business leaders or that it can provide the depth of understanding of their thoughts or character as we have of Gertrude Bell.  Fortunately Georgina Howell read her correspondence and used it, and other sources, to weave a fascinating look at this important, but little hyped, Shaper of Nations.

A Midwife’s Tale:  Based on the Diary of Martha Ballard 1785-1812

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Published 1990

Read Aug 2018

This book came my way as many do, through a book club.  This time I was the assigned facilitator.  This book provided some challenges to me as a discussion facilitator as it is not only non-fiction but also a scholarly work that was a Pulitzer Prize winner (among other honors) for its accessibility to the non-historian.

The book is quite extraordinary.  The author was willing to read the entirety (27 years, 9975 entries) of the actual handwritten diary of Martha Ballard as no complete transcription exists.  While a few others have referenced the diary and used it to support their scholarly history of the area, no other author has so painstakingly uncovered the rich information available to us through Martha’s writing.  We learn of specific events in the rural Maine settlement that others chose not to discuss because of the potentially unsettling or embarrassing nature (rape, potentially a gang-rape, of a minister’s wife; murder/suicide event perpetuated by a man against his wife and 7 children and subsequent reaction of the community; the existence of a bastard child of the local Justice of the Peace, that the father acknowledged the child and paid Martha for nursing services during the child’s illness resulting in death).  But even more importantly, through Martha’s diary we learn about her life and the life of her community. We learn that as wife, mother, and homemaker she is literally making the home.  She and her daughters  prepared  thread from flax grown on their property and then wove it into cloth which then became towels, diapers, quilts, and garments.  Women managed their gardens so that fruit and vegetables were available to the family nearly year-round.  Women tended domesticated animals to prepare milk, butter, and meat for the family.  And of course they continuously cooked, cleaned, and washed for the family and the (surprising in number) guests that stayed with the family in highly cramped quarters.

In addition to being a wife, mother, and homemaker (more than a full time job at that time) Martha was also a midwife and in this role she played many other roles: nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, keeper of vital records, and chronicler of medical history.

We learn of the cycle of life for families at the time:  courtship and marriage rite customs, early part of married life during which many children are birthed and cared for, the mid-stage of married life when children become useful labor for the men’s work of clearing land and farming and for the women’s work of gardening, raising animals, weaving, cleaning, cooking, washing, and tending children.  During this period the family was made or not with regards to their ability to make a living that enabled both “home grown” and purchased goods.  It was during this time that Martha’s career as a midwife was made possible.  Her teenaged daughters (the ones that survived to that age) attracted other teenaged girls to work for the family for trade or money to tend the household, spin thread, and weave cloth they used and sold.  This allowed Martha to be away for deliveries and to provide other medical needs to her community as well as tend her herb garden and prepare the salves and ointments that comprised the medicines of the day.  In later married life, after the children had married and established their own homes, the married couple once again became devoid of “free” labor to help them manage the myriad of tasks that persisted.  Martha’s diary reflects the increased burden she felt as the washing, cleaning, cooking, garden tending, and animal management continued regardless of her ability to recruit and retain paid help.

As this is a midwife’s diary, readers are also enlightened about the state of medicine and the special career available for a few women in the community.  We learn that the state of medicine is quite crude by our current standards—various botanical ointments and salves—which both midwifes and doctors used.  In parallel, the medical profession was beginning to claim a special standing based on their education and involvement in newly forming medical associations.  While Martha and her fellow healers/midwifes retained their botanical approach to healing, male doctors became more “heroic” using bloodletting, leeches, opium,  and harsher applications of the botanicals used by their midwife counterparts.

Ulrich provides an account of Martha’s success as a midwife based on her diary:  831 births, only 46 of which have comments about some kind of complication (5.6%).  Only 5 patients died—one who suffered from measles at the time of labor and delivery, one who was in apparent eclampsia and delivered a stillborn child, and three of probable puerperal fever when there was scarlet fever in abundance in the community.  Ulrich’s research allows her to compare and contrast Martha’s record with records of doctors in the area and region.

We learn that premarital sex is nothing new to the United States.  Of the 106 first births by women that Martha attends, 41% of the children (40) were conceived before marriage.  In most (31) of these cases the mother eventually marries, usually, but not always, the baby’s father.  We learn that midwifes perform a significant role in ensuring that babies conceived out of wedlock were recognized by the father and supported by him.  The midwife actually took the name of the farther from the mother as she delivers.  Martha’s own son, Jonathan, was named in one of these cases; he eventually marries the mother several months after the baby is delivered.

The book provides additional views of the life and times of Martha Ballard which we surely would not know without this diary and this author’s willingness to do the archeological “dig” necessary to unearth the details.  We learn about the remarkable fortitude of Martha Ballard, the monetary and, more importantly, personal rewards of providing midwifery services to the community as well as the challenges she faces over the course of this period of her life.

The author provides extensive notes that either indicate her sources (which include not only Martha Ballard’s diary but diaries and records kept by local townspeople for either personal or critical records purposes as well as other relevant scholarly books and articles) or provide additional detail about the topic at hand.

I strongly recommend taking the time to read this book and learn about the life and times of Martha Ballard.  Although not a short or easy read, it is a remarkably approachable scholarly treatise and one that has and will enlighten all who read it.

In Cold Blood

by Truman Capote

Published 1966

Read Aug 2017

The assigned topic for a book discussion group of which I’m a member was “True Crime”.  That’s not a genre I read, but of course the purpose of the book discussion group is to introduce new reading possibilities so I decided to join in.

I decided on “In Cold Blood” for two reasons:  1)  Capote’s book is one of the largest selling “true crime” books of all times and is a “classic” in this category; 2)  I attribute this book to the reason I locked my parents out of our rural home multiple times in the early 1970’s after reading this book at age 12.  I really wanted to see how I would respond to the book when reading it several decades later.

Bottom line:  the book is so well written I again read it in very few very long sittings. 

In the first section “The Last to See Them Alive” we meet the community of Holcomb and each member of the Cutter family, and learn what family members were doing on November 15, 1959, their last day alive.  His writing allows us to see vividly the landscape of the area, how ordinary the day was for the community, and how each family member was connected to the small community.  We are introduced to the killers’ activities that day.  We experience the shock of Nancy’s friends when they discover the families’ bodies and that of the community as they deal with the initial duties following the crime.

In the second section “Persons Unknown” we meet the crime investigators and feel their commitment to their task and the frustration they feel as the killers’ left little with which to trace them.  We begin more in-depth interactions with the killers as they start their post-crime “travels”.  We begin to see how damaged Perry Smith is and wonder at Dick Hickock’s capacity for compartmentalization of his actions.

The third section “Answer”, the investigators get a break and learn the identities of the killers through a cell-mate of Dick Hickock.  But it takes time to actually apprehend the killers and during this time the community continues to suffer.  We learn more of Perry and Dick’s story of their travels post-crime as well as their pasts. We learn the peculiarities of small-town jails and how the killers are kept separated during their incarceration before and during their eventual trial. Perry Smith’s correspondence is provided us and gives us an increasingly deep view of his past.   We experience with the investigators their surprise that the killers will and do confess to their crimes.   Perry’s confession finally provides us the simple specific details of the crime.

The fourth section, ”The Corner”, details the post-trial period.  Frankly the depth of details about the other death-row inmates felt unnecessary but this is Capote being consistent about providing the whole story of the killers’ background and experiences.  Apparently Capote provided the killers some help during their appeal process although his involvement is not discussed in the book.  Aspects of the appeals and conclusions drawn by various appeal boards are provided.

Capote’s writing enables us to learn much about the killers.  I use the term “killers” throughout this piece because that’s what they were as a result of this event.  They weren’t killers before but somehow they became killers and we never really know why.  Perry’s life was clearly horrendous and he is left a substantially damaged individual as a result.  Dick’s life was much more normal and he entered into criminal acts initially to simply pay his bills.  But something happens that tips the balance.  We don’t ever understand what causes that and likely neither did he.  The senselessness of the killings is remarkable and it’s not surprising that the members of Holcomb lost some of their sense of security.  Some moved from the empty countryside and some never fulfilled their dreams of building a home in that empty countryside.

Capote’s book remains “a classic” not because it’s a “what happened and who did it and keep you on the edge of your seat” kind of book.  It’s a classic because readers of this book will be left with sorrow that something so terrible could happen to such nice people; that individuals can become killers and we and they really don’t know why; that there are such damaged people in our society and that their damage is caused by other deeply damaged people; that there are people that grow up in good families that can take such a horrible path.  That there is nothing obvious we can do to prevent further incidents or prevent becoming victims ourselves.  We’re only left with locking our doors at night even when it seems we shouldn’t need to do that.