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Gertrude Bell: Shaper of Nations Plus

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 and More

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.

So It Goes

Cat’s Cradle

By Kurt Vonnegut

Published: 1962

Read: August, 2018

I first read Cat’s Cradle while in late high school or early college (as a full-blown science geek) when I read a number of Vonnegut’s books. At the time I was enchanted by his irreverent style and outrageous characters and his apparent scorn for religion.

As I now read this book about 40 years later, I can see a number of things I couldn’t fully appreciate then. When I entered the work force, there were a number of companies, including the one I joined, that had “pure research” groups. Coming directly out of a post-doctoral fellowship, joining a Research Lab with essentially no direction regarding my work was extremely attractive. The big companies that could afford this luxury really valued the fact they were contributing to the knowledge of the world and let their highly geeky have a lot of rein, asking only that they patent their discoveries (for which they were paid a small recognition award). We currently benefit from this—Xerox, Kodak, GE, Bell Laboratories, among others, invented technologies that we rely on today—the computer mouse, graphical user interfaces, digital photography, much of the technology in cell phones, etc. None of these companies now have “pure research” labs now and companies rely on academics and start-up companies, which are developing academic findings into something attractive to bigger companies, to produce the novel technologies they buy and utilize. Their “Research and Development” labs are really Product Development labs that are focused on using technologies, occasionally creating needed enabling technologies, to create products for the marketplace. So it goes.

Vonnegut likely didn’t realize this would be the course of industrial research given that he wrote Cat’s Cradle when pure research in big companies was driving many of the benefits noted above. He does put his finger on an important aspect of those heady days of pure research at big companies. These companies, and the few that can still afford “pure research”, provided scientists the ability to not worry about funding for their work (unlike the research sources of today—you understand this if you have any friends on faculty of universities trying to get their grants funded) which allows for great new technologies to be discovered. What a perfect situation for truly creating lots of knowledge! However, it can also lead to a total apathetic view of the scientist to what he/she is creating and the potential downsides morally and ethically to what their discovery allows. The pursuit of “knowledge” has always both driven great technological gifts to mankind as well as potentially dangerous ones—the atomic bomb, the ability to alter the genetic makeup of anything living for example. Note that the latter concern noted is a product of academic research so apathy reins there as well. It’s interesting that Goggle’s values include “do no evil” which sounds great but certainly puts the company and the country in an interesting dilemma—to participate in the knowledge race that others with less noble values are driving or not…. Vonnegut’s Dr. Felix Hoenikker was certainly a well-constructed portrait of the pure scientist in industry—brilliant, allowed to work on whatever he felt like, whenever he felt like it and wherever he felt like it, and being totally oblivious or totally uncaring with regards to the uses of the knowledge he discovered and the technologies he created (Vonnegut indicates Hoenikker is the father of the atomic bomb). He also apparently cared about nothing beyond his work as evidenced by his interactions with his children. A telling aspect of the two is that the day the atomic bomb was dropped, Dr Hoenikker asked if his children would play “Cat’s Cradle” with them. They didn’t understand his question as they’d never heard him ask to interact with him before.

Vonnegut uses his book to comment on another enduring foible of mankind—how to gain, retain, and use power for power’s sake. He has characters that have given up power to do good, starting a hospital in the middle of the jungle, for instance, or that recognize they don’t have a real interest in wielding power–Frank turning to Jonah to take over as successor to the current ruler of San Lorenzo so he could avoid the people related expectations of the role and he could devote himself to the “introverted” hobbies he had. Johan, once convinced by Frank to become “Papa’s” successor falls prey to the “rewards” of power—getting the beautiful daughter and ensuring he would have her all to himself, for instance.

In the end, a creation of Dr Hoenikker (Ice-Nine—a concept that has been picked up by many in various art forms over the last 50 years and the name of which we’ve probably all heard somehow somewhere) has the unintended consequence some powerful inventions have and we are left to ponder a question Vonnegut poses in his book—can religion really help mankind be better or does it only provide essentially unproductive relief from the big questions facing mankind’s long-term existence. So it goes.

A Novel of the Great War

The Care and Management of Lies: A Novel of the Great War

By Jacqueline Winspear

Published 2014

Read July 2018

I read this while waiting for my turn for the library’s copy of Winspear’s newest Massie Dobbs novel. This is the only book in her canon that isn’t a Massie Dobbs novel but it satisfies similarly. Winspear writes engaging historical fiction providing interesting characters, many details of life in that time, and a story in which the characters struggle with issues confronting people in that time. The Massie Dobbs novels start with Massie post-WWI although the impact of WWI or WWII is usually felt by both Massie and other characters in each book. In this novel Winspear dives directly into the lives of people dealing with the early onset of the “Great War”, in particular the pressure felt by all to either enlist or “do something” for the war effort and the resulting consequences.

Taking leave of Massie Dobbs, Winspear was able to create 4 new characters of whom we learn about their thoughts, dreams, concerns, and fears: Thea and Tom Brissenden, siblings who have known Kezia Marchant since Kezia and Thea (then Dorritt) were scholarship classmates at a girl’s boarding prep school, well before Tom and Kezia marry, and Edmund Hawkes, current generation owner of an estate from which Tom’s father obtained their farm through a wager with Edmund’s father. Each of these characters is simultaneously strong and self-doubting. Kezia and Tom write regularly to each other once Tom enlists and take care in their letters to manage some lies of incomplete truths to enable their beloved to carry on through the trials they are facing. Winspear was unburdened from resolving a mystery that Massie and her team must solve so she was free to bring her story to an appropriate close that is true to each character and the time in which they lived.

I advocate for Winspear to continue writing non-Massie Dobbs books so we can experience other aspects of modern English history through her well-constructed and well-rounded characters. I appreciate that Winspear is productive but not overly prolific—her production pace allows her to provide us rich details and context about the historical backdrop for her interesting stories and avoid being formulaic. And of course I look forward to more works about Massie Dobbs…

You are Here in a Crevice of the Earth

Sycamore

By Bryn Chancellor

Published 2017

Read July 2018

Jess is a newcomer to a small town in Arizona, moving there with her newly divorced mother from Phoenix. They are both processing, in private, their loss of father/husband after he chose a younger woman and baby daughter issuing from that relationship instead of them.

Laura Drenna is a newcomer to the same small town in 2009, 18 years after Jess goes missing. She too is mourning the loss of her husband to another woman. While on one of her many walks to forget and think she finds the skeleton in a crevice. Is this the remains of Jess who went missing 18 years earlier?

Chancellor spins her story via two parallel paths.

One part of the weave is Jess’s story in in 1991—her loneliness as a new high school girl from the “big city” in a small town she didn’t choose, making one good friend who drops her for unknown reasons, making a second good friend, and beginning to find her way… for awhile… This story line is fairly straightforward and progresses through the year ending with the night she goes missing. The interesting element of this storyline is that the reader learns about what’s happening to Jess during the year and that final night, but the other characters are privy to very little of her life or thoughts and are not at all aware of what happens the final night of her life.

The other part of the weave consists of individual chapters focused on each of a dozen characters who play some role in Jess’s life including her mother, several friends, a couple of adults, and Laura who finds her. These chapters often includes their perspectives of the happenings in 1991 as well as revealing more about the character either before or since Jess goes missing or both. The form of each chapter is different. The chapter about the father of the friend is a letter he writes. The chapter about the mother of the friend, a professor of theater at the local college, is provided in the form of a script of a play. Through this set of chapters, an overall picture of the backdrop of Jess’s story in 1991 and what happens to these characters thereafter slowly evolves.

Chancellor’s approach provides an interesting approach to consideration of a not uncommon situation: an act by one causes pain to others, sometimes resulting in long-lasting damage that may never be undone.

More from Elizabeth Strout

Anything is Possible

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2017

Read June 2018

I keep reading Elizabeth Strout for the same reason her other readers do. She provides us characters who have survived difficult to dreadful family situations as children or as adults and who become or remain real people who are living real lives and trying to make the best of it. She writes beautifully. We believe her characters could be real—people really go through these trials and people really survive them although usually not fully intact—which is true for her characters.

Strout enjoys the format of short stories that have some connection with each other and through those connections we more deeply learn about the various characters she’s chosen to consider in this particular work without being told too directly. Her previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, touched on some of these characters (she didn’t need to do this and in some ways the “gossip” the mother conveys about these characters is almost distracting in that book) and her readers aren’t surprised this novel follows so she can more deeply consider their stories. Strout directly brings Lucy Barton back to her home town for one of the stories of this book while exploring more about her siblings and neighbors in other stories.

Strout’s stories are heavy. Her characters are sad and struggling. But we read them because they are well written and her characters are believable. Strout gives us a little relief in the final story in which one “mature” (over 60) character strongly confronts another “mature” character. In the final sentence of the story we do believe Strout’s character when he decides” Anything was possible for anyone.”

Nora Webster—A Solitary Tower?

Nora Webster

By Colm Toibin

Published 2014

Read Feb 2018

This is a book about nearly nothing. There is no major drama, no significant reckoning, no birth nor death happens during the course of the story. It’s about nothing except a 44 year old woman who lost her husband of 20 years through a painful but not wholly revealed disease and who now has to figure out how to preserve her private self in a very small town where everyone knows much (too) about everyone else. Her two daughters are in college and boarding school, both paid for by their aunt and uncle. Her two sons, approximately 9 and 12, have returned home after spending several months with their widowed aunt while their mother focused on her dying husband.

Nora resents the smallness of the village. She looks forward to the time when the residents stop coming by to offer her comfort for her loss. She really just wants to be left alone. She even considers leaving but economics don’t favor it She’s challenged by needing to find employment as the Widow’s Pension is very small and she and her teacher husband had no savings. She abruptly sells their summer cottage without consulting with or regard for any of her family to create some cash flow, and perhaps to seal off that part of their life, to a neighbor’s relative who now lives abroad but always wanted a coastal cottage. Nora succumbs to a stern local nun’s urging to seek employment with her former employer, the rich factory owner in the small town. She dreads returning to work there as her boss will be someone with whom she was a co-worker 20 years ago (whom she offended then and never liked) and because it will be returning to an existence that she had so happily escaped when she married Maurice. She mourns her husband—his ability to engage in lively conversations while she enjoyed being in the background of those social engagements, and his deep love for being with her. She also mourns that gone will be the freedom she had as a homemaker to define how she spent her day.

Our current views of parenthood can lead us to think she is not a very good parent. She decides the boys can manage on their own after school for a few hours before she escapes the office at the factory. When she had left the boys in the care of her aunt while she tended her sick husband, she never interacted with them at all during these months. The older boy returned with a stutter and the younger boy started bed wetting but she has little demonstrated concern, expecting that these things will work themselves out. She realizes she knows little of what they think or feel but makes no real effort to change this. She does however clearly care about them. She takes them out of school for a day to go to Dublin where they can see their sister among other adventures. She fights strongly for the younger boy to be returned to the “A” classroom when he’s moved to the “B” classroom. She allows them to stay up late to watch movies with her—Gaslight and Lost Horizon—although she realizes evenutlaly that they could be disturbing to them.

We start having some sense of the time of the novel when Nora’s Widows Pension is increased and her sister becomes politically involved in what became known as The Troubles. My quest for understanding more about the context of the novel led me to do a limited amount of research about Irish politics which helped establish the timing of the novel in the late 1960’s. Knowing the timing helped reset my view of Nora’s world a bit. I no longer expected Maurice to be treated with potent pain killers. I no longer expected Nora to be anything close to a “helicopter” mother. I had more compassion for Nora’s sorrow at having to return to a workplace where women workers were single—either before they married, were unmarriageable for some reason, or like herself, forced back into the workplace due to widowhood. I developed much more compassion for Nora’s struggles in trying to find some kind of bearable life in the face of being a widow of limited means and while being an intensely private person, not understood well by her family nor understanding of her family members either. The good news for Nora is that she achieves a bit beyond that. She creates a space to enjoy in her home and she fills it with music she is discovering with the help of others.

Apparently Toibin’s mother was widowed when he was about 12 and he grew up in a home where there was a “great deal of silence”. Nora Webster may be somewhat modelled upon his mother and the stammering son upon him. If this is the case I find the novel even more interesting. He provides an extraordinarily non-judgmental view of Nora Webster. She is cool but not icy or abusive. She is appropriately frugal but generous when it matters for her children or herself. She has strength but she’s only slowly discovering that to be the case. She is an extremely private person and generally closed off to others, but she’s slowly discovering that she can choose to have connections with people beyond Maurice and it might be worth the effort. She’s pragmatic about her situation and she is finding a way to make that situation an interesting one for herself. While Nora Webster is not a character for whom you readily feel any warmth, when the novel ended I continued thinking about her and eventually decided that the feeling I have for her is respect.

Uncle Tom is Actually a Great Model

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

By Harriet Beecher Stowe

Published as a serial 1851-1852

Published in book form 1852

Read April 2018

I had heard the term “Uncle Tom” used in a derogatory way, and like the term “Babbitt” mentioned in an earlier essay, I decided the only way to understand what it meant, or could mean, was to actually read the book. However, Uncle Tom’s cabin is a book I’ve avoided reading primarily because I find reading dialect difficult. Fortunately, listening to the book overcame this issue and I discovered what an extraordinary book this is and how inappropriate I find derision of the Uncle Tom character.

Stowe did an amazing service to mankind in writing this book. Using compelling story-telling, she thoroughly dispels the myth that the black race is less human than the white race and teaches that slavery should not be legal anywhere anytime.

A primary thesis is that all humans feel deep love for their children and their spouses and that forced separation from them is truly heart-breaking. A central character, Eliza, literally risks live and limb to prevent her toddler son from being sold and separated from her. (Stowe personally knew the impact of losing a child, hers to death by disease, so can write extremely convincingly on this topic.) Several slave owner and trader characters insist that their new slaves take up another spouse upon being sold and are astonished by their reaction to this directive.

Another thesis is that all humans desire the ability to read and write to enable them to read important books (most notably for her the Bible) and communicate with loved ones. Uncle Tom learned some reading skills that enabled him to do some reading of the Bible on his own although he relied substantially on others (Master George Shelby and Eva in particular) to read to him. George Harris obtains an education as quickly as he can once he reaches freedom in Canada.

A critically important thesis is that it was NOT true that the black race preferred to be enslaved and held by a kind and just master than to be free. Even ever-faithful Uncle Tom surprised his kind master Augustine St. Clare with his response to being told he would be freed: “The sudden light of joy that shone in Tom’s face as he raised his hands to heaven, his empathic “Bless the Lord!” rather discomposed St. Clare; he did not like it that Tom should be so ready to leave him.” St. Clare did learn that Tom did appreciate his treatment from St Clare “Mas’r’s been too good; but Mas’r, I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have ‘em mine, than have the best, and have ‘em any man’s else,-I had so, Mas’r; I think it’s natur, Mas’r.” In fact, Tom was willing to stay with St. Clare while he was “in trouble”—St. Clare’s trouble would be over when he became a Christian.

Stowe is quite relentless in her promotion of Christianity throughout this book. However, I was not in any way disturbed by this this aspect of the book. Tom’s faith in his vision of Jesus and heaven is what enables him to bear the separation from his family and the tremendously bad treatment by his final owner. Whether you share these beliefs, it is very likely you will appreciate the “bright line” that Tom draws regarding what work he will and won’t do for his master. While Tom demonstrated multiple times he was a faithful and valuable servant, willing to do most any work that required of him in an honest and trust-worthy way, he was unwilling to whip other slaves or do them any harm on his master’s behalf. He demonstrated his faithfulness to “do as Jesus would do” in this regard.

In addition to the character of Tom, on whom Stowe bestows nearly Christ-like willingness to suffer on behalf of others, Stowe gives us the character of Eva. So compelling is this character to be loved by readers for her freely given love to all servants in the house and to her flawed parents, that Eva became a very popular name given by readers in the 1850’s to their own children. Eva goes to church with her mother weekly, but, unlike her mother, clearly truly absorbs the message to love others and to love her Lord. She is sad that she will leave her father before he becomes a Christian but is convinced he is good and will eventually turn to her Lord as well.

Stowe shows us Christian action by the Quakers who help Eliza, George, and their son escape from the clutches of slave-hunters. When one of the slave-hunters is hurt, but fortunately not killed by George, the Quakers do not leave him to die but rather take him to a home of one in their community who tends to him while he heals, despite his initial protests.

However, Stowe is quick to chasten Christians who do hold prejudice in their hearts or unjust actions towards slaves in her story (consider St. Clare’s aunt’s reaction to Topsy and Senator Bird’s need to change his mind and go against the Ohio version of the Fugitive Slave Act which he supported). In her final chapter, which, interestingly is a small sermon to her readers, Stowe both provides facts supporting theses discussed above and damns Southern views of slavery. She equally blasts Northern tolerance and promotion of slavery to appease unity across the states. She calls to task the unstated prejudice of Northerns which they harbored against blacks then and which will surprise those migrating from the Jim Crowe laws of the south when they reach the north during the Great Migration. Her book continues to raise an unflattering mirror to us even in 2018.

Stowe’s book was hugely popular when released in serial form and after its publication in book form. It was originally published in a time when the general population was not a reading one, yet it sold over 300,000 copies in the year of its publication. The popularity is not surprising. I myself raptly listened to the sorrowful death scenes and the exciting scenes of flee from relentless slave-hunters. I cheered when several characters are reunited after years of separation. I dearly hoped for Tom’s return to his wife and family. I understood the arguments for sale of Tom and Eliza’s George by Mr. Shelby and rejoiced when Mrs. Shelby deters the slave-hunters long enough to give Eliza a head start.

Stowe’s story-telling is riveting. Stowe’s messages are clear and strong. The strong appeal of her serial gave her license, of which she fully took advantage, to write a final chapter that is a clear and unflinching sermon to her readers then and her readers today.

I wish this book would be taught more frequently in schools but its length is likely a deterrent. It needs to be read to dispel the inaccurate views we have of the book from such sources as the play put on for the King in “The King and I”. Misunderstanding of the novel was promoted through the numerous dramatizations of the book in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s which eventually twisted some of its characters and themes. During my lifetime, term “Uncle Tom” is considered a derogatory one, likely developed because Tom doesn’t fight his oppression the way George Harris does. I personally found Uncle Tom to be a very noble person and one who provides a welcome model of living according to a strong moral compass—be honest, be respectful, be devoted to your family, love others, help others, do no harm to others and be willing to lay down your life rather than cross a moral “bright line”. This is a book that needs to be read to be understood. Just as we learned that listening is a practical way to read by Master George and Eva reading to Tom, listening is a practical way to read this powerful book.

American War

American War: A Novel

by Omar El Akkad

Published 2017

Read March 2017

This is a remarkable book. I am having great difficulty separating myself from it to return it to the library although I most certainly want others to read it and be impacted by it as well. This, however, is not a pleasant nor easy book. It is frankly disturbing on a number of levels. On one level, the story of the Chestnuts of Louisiana could become a successful 2 hour movie but if it is actually filmed, I hope it is in a long series so that the viewer can experience what the reader will experience—the other levels that Akkad explores in an engaging and powerful way that will leave you unsettled and, hopefully, thinking.

The book starts with a Prologue, written by an unidentified narrator who indicates he was born in Georgia but was transplanted to Alaska as a child and has spent his professional life as an academic. He has studied many historical documents and has published about the Second American Civil War, including an account of the “infamous events of Reunification Day, when one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death. It is estimated that eleven million people died in the war, and almost ten times that number in the in the plague that followed.” The narrator indicates he is now dying from cancer and is taking this time to “say what needs to be said”. He refers to a mysterious “she” who he still loves. He reveals the story he will provide isn’t about war, but rather about ruin.

Akkad tells the story of Sarat Chestnut in four sections: Part I April 2075 in Louisiana; Part II July 2081 Iuka, Mississippi; Part III October, 2086 Lincolnton, GA; Part IV 2095 Lincolnton, GA. Interspersed between and within these sections Akkad provides excerpts from various historical documents, books, and speeches that the narrator has used in his research. These provide various kinds of views about the history of the war and the people who drove it. They provide an interesting sort of context for Sarat’s story. Sections I-III are told through a narrator in third person. Section IV is told in first person by the narrator we met in the Prologue, as he is in this section but not the earlier ones.

We meet Sarat when she is 6 in April 2075, about 18 months after the assignation of the President of the United States of America by a suicide bomber, now a famous martyr, and about 6 months after the Declaration of Independence by the MAG (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama), fueled in part by opposition to a law banning the use of fossil fuels. We also learn that by 2075, climate and political forces discussed in 2018 have had substantial impact by 2075. The geography of the United States has been vastly altered including the coasts having been substantially reduced (including the complete loss of Florida) driving immigrants from the coasts to the center of the country and the requiring relocation of the US capital from Washington, DC to Columbus, Ohio. The scorched and parched southwest, including much of Texas, has been given over to Mexico. Civil and inter-country wars in the Middle East have given way to a new Bouazzi Empire which, in conjunction with China, is sending aid to the MAG. South Carolina isn’t part of the MAG primarily because a biological agent unleashed on it earlier has resulted in the need for a wall to keep it forever quarantined from the rest of the country. In the opening chapters, Sarat loses her father as collateral damage in a guerrilla attack as he is seeking a work permit to go north and secure employment that will allow him to take his family north to a better life than they currently have. The Chestnut family and their neighbors feel substantial pressure to leave the area as fighting just west of them is expected to envelop them soon. The Chestnut family is allowed, although they are in a “blue/purple state” , and for substantial cost, to go to a refugee camp on the border of Mississippi and Tennessee.

In the subsequent sections we learn about Sarat at various time points in her life: as a refugee in the camp that was the destination at the end of Section I, as a product of radicalization/recruitment by Albert Gaines, as a detainee following arrest for actions she undertakes for the war effort, and after release from this detention camp. I won’t give away further aspects of the plot.

While reading the book, I pondered what life was like for other people in the United States and in the MAG at that time. Since the book focuses on Sarat, we are limited in our understanding of these questions to what Sarat personally experiences. This is an interesting aspect of the book. As I write there are presently people who were born in a refugee camp, or fled one with their family at a very young age, and who are growing up in a refugee camp and have little or no idea of what life is like for anyone not in a refugee camp. They have limited or filtered information about those on either side of the conflict that has driven them to be in the refugee camp and have unclear prospects for where or how they might live in the future.

I became aware that this book provokes the realization that our understanding of what war is really like for those living in the presence of war, whether in a refugee camp, in the cross-fire of the front, or in a rubble left after the fighting has moved on, is close to non-existent.

But the author provokes even more—why do we fight in wars? Gaines tells Sarat “I sided with the Red because when a Southern tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.” I was confronted by the reason Sarat’s driver, working for a coordinator of a group of Southern rebel groups, had for joining: “I just wanted to be something.” His desperation for meaning in his life is haunting, especially since he didn’t have much interest in the “cause” at all. I wondered how many “recruits” have joined rebel groups, “terrorist” groups, or even the “official” military for this reason (whether living in a refugee camp, in an occupied territory, or even in “regular society”). Sarat’s reason for her actions evolves over time and eventually echoes a reason for continuous conflict over the eons of human existence: vengeance for wrong done to one’s family by others.

The author continues to keep us uncomfortable throughout the book. Sarat’s story is very difficult to read at times. We are reading about the United States of America being in the state of civil war—a situation that currently only happens “over there”. But most of all, the author effectively holds a mirror up to the USA regarding the role it’s played in civil wars elsewhere.

Read this book to be uncomfortable. Read this book to begin to confront what you know and think about war. Read this book to begin to comprehend the drivers for desperate acts we brand “terrorist”. Read this book and pass it on to others and talk about it and how it makes us feel.

Radio Waves

All the Light We Cannot See

By Anthony Doerr

Published 2014

Read Jan 2018

This wildly successful book (100 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller List, Pulitzer Prize) is a somewhat puzzling book, evoking a range of disparate reactions from readers and reviewers. I was compelled to read the book as part of my book club’s 2017-2018 season. We waited for the clamor for the library copies to die down a bit and then launched into it.

The author provides three primary characters: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the only daughter of the widowed keeper of keys at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and who goes blind at age six; Werner Pfenning, an orphan who lives with his sister, Jutta, at an orphanage in Germany and exhibits great aptitude for engineering and building and repairing radios; Von Rumpel, a German officer assigned to seek and obtain French treasures for the Reich. The stories remain generally distinct until late in the novel.

The author tells the parallel stories of two children growing up in very different homes in very different circumstances.

Marie-Laure is well loved and protected by her widowed father and a frequent and charming figure at the museum demonstrating great appreciation for the natural science on display at the museum. Her father provides her Braille versions of books including Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea which stimulates her curiosity of the sea. He also makes a miniature version of the neighborhood to teach her how to navigate her surroundings. Once Paris’s invasion is certain, Marie-Laure’s father is asked to transport a diamond of great value, The Sea of Flames, or one of three fakes made of it (he doesn’t know which he has). The destination of father and daughter is in flames when they arrive so they are forced to continue to his brother’s home in St Malo on the sea. The father builds another miniature of their new neighborhood for his daughter and is then summoned back to the museum. Unfortunately he is arrested and never returns, although the pair somehow exchanges a few letters over time. Marie-Laure draws her uncle out of his shell a bit (he’s still suffering from shell-shock from the Great War) and enjoys a warm relationship with the housekeeper.

Werner and his sister are housed at an orphanage. They find a broken wireless set which Werner repairs and they secretly listen to broadcasts at night including one from a French professor who discusses science. Unfortunately Werner faces a life in the mines once he grows up so he jumps at the opportunity to compete for a place at the National Polital Institutes of Education in Essen. He wins a spot and takes it despite his sister’s objections. He attends the school and withstands the physical and emotional ordeal of the education, including the wounding of his friend, Frederick, after he refuses to participate in a brutal tradition. At age 16 he is told that he is now 18 and begins conscription — seeking radio transmissions by enemy supporters starting in Russia.

Marie-Laure’s housekeeper forms a resistance effort and her uncle agrees to transmit information using his radio in the attic. Thus the connection between Marie-Laure and Werner is made—-Werner discovers the transmissions and recognizes The Professor from his youth. Von Rumpel’s story focuses on his attempt to find the Sea of Fire diamond. The three stories eventually collide as St Malo is bombed in Aug 1944.

The author chooses a short to very-short chapter approach to keep us turning the pages to learn what happens next to the primary characters. The short chapter approach is generally effective. By usually revolving amongst the main characters and delivering short bursts of information, the author creates and seeks to maintain our engagement to see the story through. The lush language sometimes got in the way for this reader who sometimes found the book dragging on a bit. The author also chooses a flash-forward, flash-back format to tell the story. This choice is tolerable but not necessarily needed except that the form is perhaps expected in a novel written today.

The characters are variably engaging for this reader. Werner’s story, aside from the precociousness of his sisters’ warning, is very compelling. Werner’s expected fate is working in the mines which he truly wants to avoid; the special school seems his only route to education and stimulation of his engineering brain. While he does learn and is put to work using his special talents, he, along with all of the other boys, suffers from a brutalization of the soul and the horrors of the German Reich as part (focus?) of their education. The character feels very real, genuinely engages, and for whom this reader feels much compassion. The general demise of health and heart Werner experiences as he does his job to track down transmissions of the Resistance is well drawn and very believable as is his basically criminal reaction to the transmission he discovers in St Malo (which he doesn’t report). We see his mind and body broken and cheer his small resistance and hope he can survive.

Von Rumpel is on a relentless mission to find the diamond for the glory of the Reich and which he hopes will somehow safe him from the cancer that is eating his body. The device of the exotic diamond seemed a bit strained—was it really needed? I would have been more engaged with Marie-Laure’s father carrying a valuable document to further then Resistance and Von Rumpel seeking to find that document. Perhaps this device is to show that wars include those driven more by greed than policy.

This reader found the character of Marie-Laure to be the flattest. She is blind but is beloved and cared for and seems to be in a bubble separate from the rest of reality. The reason the author chose to make the character blind is not clear to me. A non-blind 16-year old girl would have also been in distress at the climax and the interactions between her and Werner likely similar. While there would be no need for the miniature neighborhood to teach her bearings, the relationship with the father could have been as strong and a puzzle hiding place for the diamond still a possibility.

I understand the appeal of this book. Despite my criticisms I agree it is a good book that highlights the kind of destruction that war can bring to property, body, and soul.