Blog

Mother and Daughter and Caring

One True Thing

By Anna Quindlen

Published 1994

Ellen Gulden is 24 and a Harvard graduate employed by a magazine in New York City when, during a visit home to see her brothers before they left for their next years in college, her father informs her that her mother has advanced cancer and will need her.  Ellen resists and suggests they hire a nurse.  But she leaves her NYC life behind and comes home to care for her mother.  She tells us this is not because she loves her mother, but because she felt she had no choice.  Kate Gulden was the mother who made everything from scratch, was on a first name basis with the hardware store employees, was on many community committees, and always designed and executed the best decorations for her assigned tree in the town square.  Kate Gulden’s life as wife of English Professor George Gulden of Langhorne College, a small liberal arts school in the small town of Langhorne, was one Ellen knew would never be hers.  But she agrees reluctantly to take care of Kate Gulden, in large part because it was another case of trying to achieve something her father demanded.

Quindlen tells the story of the months Ellen spends with her mother as the cancer slowly destroys her body, but not her spirit.  The descriptions of cancer’s impact are quite vivid although not in a way that causes recoil but rather draws you closer to Kate Gulden, her daughter, and all who suffer from cancer and all who take care of cancer victims.  The hospice nurse is carefully drawn and the compassion she brings to Kate, and indirectly Ellen, is clear whether or not Ellen can accept it.

Also during this period, Ellen learns much about and from her mother.  In the early stage of the caregiving, Ellen has “the childhood I might have had, had I been a different sort of girl, my mother a different sort of woman, and both our needs to woo my father less overwhelming”.   They start the Gulden Girls Book and Cook Club with only two members—mother and daughter.  They read Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Anna Karenina, all books Ellen has, of course, read.  Ellen learns eventually her mother had already read them too.

Eventually the disease begins to take a huge toll on Kate including losing strength so that Ellen needs to help her with more and more movements and activities.  The relationship between Kate and Ellen starts to shift more towards Kate as the child needing care and Ellen as the mother to provide it.  Pain becomes an overwhelming aspect of Kate’s life and her need for and use of morphine increases.

During this time Ellen’s relationship with her father also takes a shift and she becomes less all-adoring and more critical of him.  The biggest shift, however, occurs after her mother passes and it is determined that Kate’s death was due to a bolus of morphine well above and beyond what her morphine dispenser would allow.  Ellen is arrested for murder of her mother, although she hadn’t given her the overdose, and her father doesn’t even post bail for her.

The second half of the book deals with Ellen’s life immediately after Kate’s death and how it is impacted by the murder investigation and court proceedings.  I won’t spoil your reading by detailing how this goes.   There is some discussion about the ethics of supporting and/or hastening the end of life in this kind of case but fortunately the author doesn’t peach a line on this.

One review of this book suggests the epilogue makes the ending too tidy.  I somewhat agree with this view for the reason given—the author knows life, especially family relationships, grief, and loss, is untidy so a tidy ending is somewhat inconsistent with the rest of the book.

I very much appreciated the intelligent language of the book, its exploration of care giving and receiving care for such as devastating disease, and it exploration of the untidy nature of mother-daughter, father-daughter, mother-father, and mother-daughter-father relationships and how none of these relationships are static over time whether we want them to be or not. These aspects will enable the book to remain relevant for many decades (it’s already 23 years since publication).  Only one scene would definitely be different if occurring in the day of cell phones vs telephone land lines but by clearly stating the story occurs in 1985, this isn’t an issue.    I put this book on my “recommendation to others” list although not immediately for others whose life situation involves cancer and/or recent loss as a result of cancer.

 

History and Mystery: A Recommended Series

In This Grave Hour

By Jacqueline Winspear

Published 2017

Read May 10, 2017

I discovered Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear’s “psychologist and investigator” a few years ago when I read Pardonable Lies, the third in a series of historical fiction/mysteries.  I’ve now read all thirteen books published to date (starting in 2003) in this series and look forward to more.

If you have encountered and viewed multiple seasons of BBC’s Foyle’s War, you will likely find this series of interest.  The Maisie Dobbs series is set in England and starts in 1929, some years after Maisie returns from serving as a nurse in WWI.  In This Grave Hour starts on Sunday September 3rd, 1939 as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tells the nation Britain has declared war on Germany.  Each book has an interesting mystery for Massie and her employee, Billy, to solve, often with a range of encounters with Scotland Yard, and occasionally other British agencies or their counterparts in other countries.  Of equal importance to each book and, I anticipate, a draw for her fans, is a description of the setting of the story—Britain dealing with the aftermath of WWI and eventually entering another war.

The continuing story of Maisie’s life is important to her approach to her work and the particular mystery at hand, but its telling is not a focal point of any of the books.  In fact, several years of her life including important events of marriage and loss of her husband and a pregnancy are handled in a few pages of a prologue of one of the books.  What Winspear does provide voice to are Maisie’s doubts and fears as she struggles to overcome the demons haunting her as a result of experiences in WWI and personal loss it imposes and the later losses of husband and child.  Maisie is painted as a strong and independent woman but one with much depth and many dimensions.

It’s not important to read the books in any particular order.  Winspear brings you up to appropriate speed quickly and clearly.  In various ways we are reminded briefly that Maisie Dobbs was born to a family in service and enters service herself when her mother dies.  Lady Rowan Compton learns that Maisie reads in the manor’s library late at night after her work is done and the house is quiet.  She decides to send Massie to university and engages  Dr Maurice Blanche, a family friend and neighbor to be a mentor to Maisie.  Maisie’s education is interrupted by World War I when she enlists as a nurse.  After the war, she apprentices with Maurice, an investigator with strong connections to Scotland Yard.   Lady Rowan provides Maisie some support while she gets her own business going Maisie remains close to her father who still supports Lady Rowan’s estate and to her school friend Priscilla, who is married to a wealthy WWI veteran who suffers with some war wounds.   This part of the back story provides us a vector to view the interaction of the “upstairs” and “downstairs” and corresponding changes induced by the progression of British society.

In summary, each Maisie Dobbs novel stands alone well as an interesting mystery with strong historical fiction attributes.  As a series they tell the story both of Maisie Dobbs and, of equal interest,  of Britain as it moves from post-WWI into yet another war that threatens country,  it people,  and its culture.

 

 

What We’ve Been and Can Be Again

That Used to Be Us:  How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented and How We can Come  Back

By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

Published:  2011

Read:  May 7, 2017

We all know the US is facing significant challenges.  Some think it seems somewhat adrift currently.  These authors put together a useful look at the principals that made America great for two centuries, the challenges that face it now, the basic changes the US must make to correct course, and a possible way to start on that path.  Their book is written for the layman but is filled with acknowledgements for the various sources they used to synthesize their points.  It uses stories about individuals, companies, and countries to expand their points in a digestible and instructive, but not overly preaching manner.

The authors lay responsibility for our current state in the laps of both political parties and in the laps of all US citizens that elect them.  They relate that the federal, state, and local governments’ inability to act fiscally responsible reflects the general attitude of the public they serve—“we want everything right now; we can’t afford it but we want it now anyway”.  The authors are frankly more effective at delineating the issues the country faces than in providing specific prescriptions for “How We Can Come Back” but frankly getting a highly specific prescription to fix our problems is likely unrealistic.   The authors vigorously do encourage us to understand our own history and the principals that have served us well to make us a magnet for dreamers everywhere and learn from them to get back on track.    This is an appropriate plea and not an insignificant request.  We didn’t think about consequences of all our actions that got us where we are when we took them.  We DO need to stop and think about our past and we DO need to learn the lessons it can teach us.

The following summarizes some of the highlights of the five sections of the book that I want to remember and share to kick start that thinking process for myself and for readers of this article.

In Part I:  The Diagnosis, the authors define four major challenges facing the US:

  • How to adapt to globalization
  • How to adjust to the IT revolution
  • How to cope with large national debt and soaring budget deficits stemming from the growing demands on government at every level and unwillingness to raise enough money through taxation to cover those demands
  • How to manage energy consumption and rising climate threats.

The authors also delineate five pillars of prosperity that led the US to two centuries of increases in living standards and that made the US the “world’s greatest magnet for dreamers everywhere”:

  • Public education
  • Building and modernizing infrastructure
  • Open door for immigration, adding low skilled but high aspiring immigrants and adding the best minds in the world
  • Support for basic research and development
  • Implementation of necessary regulations on and incentives for private economic activity to safeguard against financial collapse, environmental ruin, and to encourage capital flow to the US

Several formula builders are called out from our history.  This list is a small sampling of the history recalled for us by the authors:

  • Alexander Hamilton: established a budget and tax system, a custom service, and a coast guard; developed plans for a peacetime army; and promoted the need for a strong and active although limited government
  • Thomas Jefferson: in addition to writing the Declaration of Independence and authoring the Virginia state statue for religious freedom, emphasized the importance of education by starting the University of Virginia
  • Abraham Lincoln: spurred the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society;  during the course of the Civil war oversaw significant Acts of congress:  Homestead Act of 1862 opening the west for settlement; Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864 that connected the eastern and western parts of the country; Morrill Act of 1862 establishing the land grant college system; and in 1863 started the National Academy of Science to bring together the best researches to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report on any subject of science or art whenever called upon by any department of government”
  • Theodore Roosevelt: established a system of rules and regulations to prevent abuses and hold business accountable; it is also remarkable that in 1907 1, 285,349 people came to the US from other countries, the largest annual intake in American history to that point
  • Franklin Roosevelt: significant public investment in building infrastructure (dams, roads, parks, airports, power stations, schools, libraries, etc) and education as part of the New Deal; the Securities Act of 1933, called the “truth in securities” law; re-regulation of the banking system; introduction of Social Security and unemployment insurance programs.  The authors suggest we recall that the free-market economy produces losers as well as winners and these programs provide some protection to the losers, thus stabilizing our overall system.  The “brain wave” of immigrant scientists, writers, artists, musicians, historians, and intellectuals occurred during this time as Europeans were fleeing Nazi Germany (ie recall the US behave home to Albert Einstein).
  • Harry Truman: a 1944 act known as the GI Bill of Rights provided training to 7.8 million of 16 million WW II veterans by 1956.  The National Science foundation was initiated in 1950
  • Dwight Eisenhower: initiated the Advance Research Projects Agency (later known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)) from which flowed the technology powering many of today’s tools (ie the internet, GPS, weather satellites among others).  Eisenhower also won support for the creation of the interstate highway system.  He also was a defender of the immigration and pushed for liberalization of restrictions on immigration.

In Part II:  The Education Challenge, the authors discuss significant forces on jobs we must recognize, the current state of our preparedness to meet the challenges resulting from these forces, and what we need to do to correct course.

Globalization and the IT revolution are here whether we want them or not.  “The genie is out of the bottle” and there is no going back.  A huge impact of these is the loss of jobs in the US.  The authors remind us that after the last three recessions (1991, 2001, and 2007), the time required (or projected) for jobs lost to come back to the peak prior to each recession has progressively increased.  Jobs are being automated, digitized, and outsourced.  The authors argue that “blue-collar” and “white-collar” are no longer the ways to describe jobs.  Rather, they suggest there are two types of workers:  creators and servers.  Creators are driving productivity and servers service these creators.  They caution” many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers, and by changes in how business operates”.  They describe a model of 4 types of job holders:  1) “creative creators”, people who do non-routine work in a non-routine way—the best of the various creators.   2) “routine creators”, people who do non-routine work in a routine way—the average of the various creators.  3)  “creative servers”, non-routine low-skilled workers who do their work in an inspired way—the extraordinary servers; 4)  “routine servers” who do their work in a routine way, offering nothing extra.  They caution that types 2) and 4) are the job holders most vulnerable to job loss.  So the focus for individuals—and the educational system that prepares them—is to “be “present” all the time, in whatever we do, so that we can be either creative creators or creative servers.”

A good fraction of the book is focused on the current state of education in the US and how the US stacks up against the rest of the world.  It’s not a pretty picture.  US fourth grade students perform reasonably well in standardized international math and reading tests but US high school student perform in the middle or towards the bottom in standardized tests applied globally.  Basically, the longer US students are in school, the worse they perform against international peers.  The authors suggest students either attend bad and/or dangerous schools or they attend “nice” schools that aren’t very good either.  The author’s prescription to address this:  “We believe six things are necessary:  better teachers and better principals; parents who are more involved in and demanding of their children’s education; politicians who push to raise educational standards, not dumb them down; neighbors who are ready to invest in schools even though their children do not attend them; business leaders committed to raising educational standards in their communities; and last but certainly not least—students who come to school prepared to learn, not to text”.

Part III is titled:  The War on Math and Physics.  In short, the US has pretended that routinely running budget deficits doesn’t matter and that human-driven global warming and corresponding climate change “is an invention of a global conspiracy of left-wing scientists and Al Gore”.

Ronald Reagan’s first term cut taxes substantially but deficits ballooned because the revenue base was reduced by 5% of GDP while domestic spending fell only 1% of GDP and defense spending soared.  In response, Reagan enacted five “revenue enhancements” which took back about 40% of the lost revenue.  Neither George H.W. Bush nor Bill Clinton wanted to raise taxes but they did to keep the deficit under control.  Simultaneously they either did not add new spending programs that can be seen as “entitlements” or they reduced spending on ones that existed at the time.  The outcome of their actions meant that America’s debt-to-GDP ratio improved, decreasing from 49% to 33%.

Unfortunately the administration of George W. Bush took us in a different direction.  The new generation of Republicans were no longer concerned about controlling the deficits and believed that the economy would outgrow the deficit if “plied with enough tax cuts”. We entered wars without increasing revenue to pay for them (the first time ever in US history).  Massive tax cuts combined with no spending cuts, an added a new spending/entitlement program—Medicare prescription drugs, and increased defense spending for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to enormous deficits, funded by borrowing from other nations, especially China.  Spending further increased under Obama to prevent collapse of the US (and global) economy just as he came into office.

Also unfortunately, state and local governments are generally in a poor situation as well as they continued to sign contracts with their workers to pay generous defined benefit pensions and associated retiree health care benefits and now find themselves unable to pay for the promised benefits.

And finally and unfortunately, the willingness of the public to accept that human-driven global warming is occurring and the impact will be massive climate and geography change is a hoax is spilling over into general disbelief of experts of all types if their message is inconsistent with “truths” found in unsubstantiated sources on the internet and in the media.

A very brief summary of the authors’ prescriptions:

  • Get serious about our problems
  • Accept that we will all have to sacrifice
    • Raise revenues through various types of taxes
    • Cut spending overall
    • Shift spending by cutting some programs (ie Medicare and Social Security need to be reined in and likely reduced) and increasing spending in others—in particular education, infrastructure, and research and development
  • Start debating on how to generate more clean energy to slow climate change and stop debating whether to do so.

Part IV:  Political Failure provides interesting insights on the evolution of US politics.  In the 1950s and 1960s, both the Democratic and Republican parties were coalition of liberal and conservatives.  In these days, cooperation and compromise existed within and across political parties.  Opposition to the civil rights movement meant that Southern conservatives begin to defect to the Republican Party.  Social conservatism within the Republican Party over issues including abortion, school prayer, feminism, and gay rights pushed some Northern Republicans into the Democratic Party.  Centrist groups began to disappear while liberals and conservatives remained quite active in politics and became more impactful in their respective parties.  Redistricting every 10 years has been subject to “gerrymandering” since its initiation (the descriptor was coined in 1812).  Combining these effects means that the most extreme parts of each party are most likely to win primary elections and choices for voters in the general elections are between two extreme candidates.  The center has essentially evaporated.  Once elected, the extreme candidates face pressure to remain extreme or be removed by other extreme candidates within his or her own party leading to little moderation and compromise with the other party.  Fund raising is non-stop—there is no time to just focus on governing. The “24 hour news cycle” means every word an elected government representative makes is scrutinized, analyzed, and discussed.  This all makes for a pretty broken system.

The authors suggest that both Democratic Party has to move from a “you can’t touch Medicare, Social Security, and other similar programs” and the Republican Party has to accept that tax cuts alone will not solve our problems.  The authors suggest some “shock therapy” is needed.  Preferably the shock comes from within, not from a devastating circumstance such as an external foe, global economic crisis, or from Mother Nature.  The authors hope that a serious independent presidential candidate can capture sufficient traction to help moderate the parties and influence the governance following an election, likely won by one of the two major parties.  The authors teach about three times this has happened in the twentieth century.

George Wallace won 13.5% of the popular vote and five Deep South states in 1968.  He ran against the civil rights laws passed between 1963 and 1965, for “law and order”, and as a populist hostile to the federal government and liberal establishment.  The Nixon administration, although actually quite liberal by today’s standards, adopted some of these policies and attitudes including opposing compulsory busing of schoolchildren to desegregate schools.

  1. Ross Perot won 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992. Bill Clinton won with 43% of the vote beating out the sitting president George H.W. Bush (who polled 37.5%). Perot focused on the federal budget deficit and raised the public’s awareness of it and concern with it.  Clinton’s presidency did work to reduce the deficit.

Theodore Roosevelt ran as an independent candidate in 1912 to regain the presidency which he held from 1901 to 1909 as a Republican.  He felt that the reform agenda he devised while president to support a successful transition of the nation from an agrarian society to and industrial one was not being pressed by his Republican successor, William Howard Taft.  Woodrow Wilson won that election although Roosevelt won 27.5% of the popular vote and earned 88
Electoral College votes.  Roosevelt’s ideas regarding regulation of business, a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday and a six-day week, unemployment, and old-age pensions were eventually enacted.

Running for president is expensive and both Perot and Roosevelt were primary sources of funding for their campaigns.  The authors hope that successes of Howard Dean in 2004, Ron Paul and Barack Obama in 2008 to raise substantial funds from small individual contributions can propel forward a new independent candidate.

In response to the question “But does it have a happy ending?” the authors remained positive in their conclusions.  By rediscovering our American history and the “5 pillars of prosperity” noted earlier, they believe the US can find its footing to remain a global leader.   They propose that mproving our educational system, addressing glaring infrastructure needs, resolving the status of  illegal immigrants and making it easier for new immigrants with needed talents and aspiration to come and stay in the US, and modernizing our regulations and incentives for business can and must be done and will make us successful.

Comments on the 2016 election:

As this book was published in 2011, it wasn’t possible for the authors to comment on the most recent election.  It’s interesting that an outsider candidate was chosen by the Republican party and ran on principals that  are in some cases  opposite to some of the “5 pillars of prosperity”:  anti-immigration and general relaxation of regulations on business.  Additionally his promises were consistent with a continuation of “we can have it all and have it not cost us anything”, specifically lower taxes and better health care with less cost to individuals.  At least he has promoted significant spending on the aging infrastructure, but with no increases in revenue to support it.  An outsider candidate running for the Democratic nomination pushed the successful Democratic nominee to be even more extreme than she would have been otherwise including a “we can have it all and not cost anything” plank as well with low or no-cost education for all.  The new president’s personality and approach combined with a continued attitude of “whatever that party is for we will block at all cost” doesn’t bode well for the US soon being on the path these authors promote.   We have much to re-learn and little time to do it before we are a has-been nation with a standard of living that takes an even bigger dive that is happening now.

 

Classic Dandelions

Dandelion Wine

By Ray Bradbury

Published  1957

Read May 3, 2017

Ray Bradbury published this collection of short stories, some previously published, some not, in 1957 when he was 36.   The book is set in 1928 in Green Town, IL.  Bradbury acknowledges it is based loosely on his childhood town of Waukegon, IL and on his childhood, although by 1928 his family no longer lived in IL but rather LA.

I’ve classified this book “Classic”. It year of publication (1957) is my year of birth and I’ve read this book for the first time when I’m nearly 60.  While the book is can be considered “Modern Fiction,  I classified as “Classic” because I anticipate that people will read this book in another 50 years and have it resonate as strongly for them as it did for Bradbury when he wrote it and when I read it 60 years later.

The book describes the summer of 1928 for Douglas Spalding, 12, and his family and friends.  In this summer, Douglas realizes “he is alive”.  He recognizes he’s never appreciated anything in his environment as he is now—sights, sounds, smells, events, and relationships.  Douglas recognizes that this summer will be like other summers, at least to some extent, but will be a summer unlike any other summer too.  He decides to document in a “nickel pad” summer rituals that happen every year as well as special events and new events that may happen moving forward and encourages his younger brother, Tom (10) to help him recognize each so that his record can be complete.

Over the course of the summer significant things happen in the town and we see them through the omnipotent narrator and especially through Douglas.  Technology is changing:  The trolley makes its last trip through town and will be replaced by a bus system.  The “green machine”, an electric runabout, owned by a pair of aging sisters is put away after forever after a near accident.  Relationships are changing:  Doug’s best friend, John, announces that he will be moving away and will be leaving that night.  Great Granma dies, but not before she speaks with Doug and then his family while literally on her deathbed.  The community loses members:   Colonel Freeleigh, a civil war veteran and source of colorful oral history that Doug and his friends enjoy hearing, dies after spending his last days under strict nursing care.  All of these events are timeless.  Although we hear about them as they occur in 1928 in Greentown, IL, they are the kinds of events that we all experience at some time.  Bradbury captures this timelessness with beautiful and descriptive language that is a treat.

Bradbury uses these events to point out Doug’s “coming alive” and how differently he is experiencing them  now that he “is alive”.  He drills this home when Douglas is very sick near the end of summer.  His brother, Tom, describes to the local junk man that Doug has had an especially hard summer and that’s maybe why he’s suffering so now.  The various trials that Tom recounts include such things as losing a precious aggie marble, having his catcher’s mitt stolen, and making a bad trade of his fossil stones and shell collection for a clay statue toy.  But they don’t include the significant events noted above that Doug has experienced so differently than he has in the past that he is truly overwhelmed by it all, especially the recognition that he too will die someday.

This can be viewed as a book about a boy’s summer (and one critic at the time indicated that no summer is like this for any real boy).  But this book speaks to us about our own evolving experiences with the realities and mysteries of life, with growing up, and with growing old.  The chapter/story about Mrs. Bentley and her interactions with the neighborhood children is especially revealing in this regard.  The children refuse to believe she was ever a girl but rather that she’s always been old.  She tries to convince them that she too was once young including showing them things she’s save from her youth including a photograph.  They remain unconvinced and she eventually agrees that 50 years ago she was the same age as she is now.  This declaration allows her to release the precious saved memorabilia and validate her dead husband’s view of focusing on the present vs the past.

The book includes a number of remarkable stories.   The chapter/story about old Miss Helen Loomis and young Mr Bill Forrester and the relationship they can’t have now but might have had if only the timing of their lives was different now (or later??)  is another example of Bradbury’s ability use a short story to tell so much more than storyline.  His “horror” story about Lavinia Nebb and her friends walk home from the movies the night of a recent serial killing draws us to the edge of our seats.  The next chapter of the book tells us about the outcome and the boy’s reaction to it.  After reading the chapter/story about Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes, I will never put on a pair of sneakers again without wondering if they have the magic that Douglas’s pair had.

One of Bradbury’s early commercial successes of significance came when a publisher suggested Bradbury collect together some of his stories—they became The Martian Chronicles.  When Bradbury put together a collection of stories about Green Town, IL, his publisher convinced him that it was too long so Dandelion Wine was published first (1957) and a follow-up, Farewell Summer, was eventually published in 2006.

Both Bradbury and his readers are lucky that he decided to be a writer at a young age and was able write daily essentially up to his death at age 91.  His work has been published in many forms and formats (stories in magazines, collections in books, plays on the radio, TV, and as movies.)  He received many awards over his life, including the National Medal of Arts in 2004, nominated by the National Endowment for the Arts and presented by then president George W Bush.   Although he was credited by the New York Times for being “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream” (1),  this book demonstrates his range and poetic capabilities.

 

An English Classic–Detectives and Society

The Moonstone

By Wilkie Collins

Published:  1868

Read:  12/26/2016; Re-read 4/4/2017

The Moonstone was originally published in Charles Dicken’s “All the Year Round”, a weekly magazine, between Jan 4, 1868 and Aug 8, 1868.  In July 1868 it was published in three hardback volumes and in revised form in 1871.  Wilkie adapted it for the stage in 1877.  It’s been the subject of several radio, movie, and television versions, the most recent in 2016.  It earned a place on the Guardian’s 2003 list entitled “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” and its 2013 list “The 100 Best Novels Written in English”.    Fortunately for this reader, a book club to which I belong selected it for part of its 2016-2017 season.

There has been some debate about whether or not The Moonstone invented the English detective novel so I expected to read a (very long) detective novel that wouldn’t provide much discussion material for our club.  On the contrary, I found The Moonstone to be a really wonderful read.  I actually pitied the original readers who had to wait for weekly installment and found myself “binge reading”.  I listened to the book and looked for excuses (ie drive the long route vs the short way) to extend my listening time.  When preparing for our book discussion I ended up re-reading (re-listening) to the whole book again and loved it just as much the second time through.

The Moonstone certainly has a mystery to solve—theft of a valuable gem, just gifted to a young woman from her deceased uncle who obtained it while in a battle in India, while the family’s English country home is filled with birthday well-wishers (providing lots of possible thieves).    A famous detective is hired to investigate the crime after the local police muck things up a bit.   The mystery is eventually solved after several plot lines involving financial issues, marriage proposals and engagement ruptures, and a suicide (among others…) play out.

The book form is interesting.  Telling of the story of the loss and recovery of the Moonstone has been commissioned by Mr Franklin Blake, the cousin who was tasked with delivery of the gem to Rachel Verinder on her 18th birthday.  Blake requests several persons to record the parts of the story for which “our own personal experience extends, and no farther”.   Thus sets up the progression of narrators and/or their letters:  Gabriel Betteredge, long-time servant to the Verinder household and steward/butler at the time of the story; Miss Clack, niece of the late Sir John Verinder and evangelist; Matthew Bruff, Soliciter and long-time lawyer for the Verinder family; Franklin Blake, nephew of the late Sir John Verinder and cousin and suitor of Rachel Veridner; Ezra Jennings, assistant to the Mr Candy, doctor of the local community; Sergeant Cuff, the famous detective engaged by Lady Verinder to solve the mystery of the theft;   a letter from Mr Candy; and an epilogue from Mr Murthwaite, an adventurer.    With this device we hear the parts of the story with which each narrator has direct knowledge through their varied voices.  Not only do we learn about the particulars of the case, we also learn much about the various layers of society—those “upstairs”, “downstairs”, and professionals serving the community.

The narratives from Gabriel Betteredge are quite delightful.  He wanders a bit and apologizes for this tendency but this reader much enjoyed the wanderings as we learn about the family, servants, and happenings as well as get his views on various aspects of society.  He has a wonderful and dry sense of humor and avid devotion to DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a guide to life.   Wilkie was quite progressive in his thinking and uses Betteredge to convey some of his thinking about the relationship between the various strata of society.

All of the women in The Moonstone are strong and intelligent figures.  Lady Verinder quickly engages her Solicitor upon her husband’s death and constructs a financial structure for her daughter to both support her but more importantly minimize the chance of falling victim to a “gold-digger”.  The arrangement proves an important plot element.  Rachel Verinder knows her mind and protects her secret about the theft even though this choice could block her recovery of the missing gem.  Miss Clack, although a less sympathetic character, has quite strong convictions to which she stays true, working tirelessly to aid all around her to live pure lives and have a sure path to a greater glory after death.  Three additional women, Roseann Spearman, a house servant with a mysterious past, Penelope Betteredge, house servant and daughter of Gabriel, and Lucy Yolland, a local girl with a handicap and friend of Roseann Spearman, play important roles in the story and are presented to us as courageous and strong.

The men in The Moonstone, especially those of the “upstairs” are portrayed as less noble.  One character steals the Moonstone as part of war plunder, setting up the story we are told.  Another character seeks to solve his money problems, caused in part by an inappropriate relationship with a lady, by seeking a marriage only to provide him quick access to capital.  One character has a difficult disease which leads him to turn to opium for respite. Even Mr. Franklin Blake, ultimately a sort of hero of the story, is portrayed as one who has flitted about with limited financial prudence, even borrowing money from the servants.     Only Gabriel Betteredge comes across as fully honest and true, and his moral compass interestingly comes from Robinson Crusoe.

I won’t be surprised if I choose to listen to this book again.  It’s filled with great characters, great narration, a fun mystery, and an interesting look at English society in the mid 1800’s.  I agree that it’s a book to put on a list of classics, regardless of how you define “classic”.

People and politics

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Published 2013

Read 4/2/2017

This book followed Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of connected short stories, Olive Kitteridge and preceded her novel  My Name is Lucy Barton.  Strout returned to novel form for this book and sets the story between Shirley Falls, Maine and New York City.

In this book Strout opens with a prologue in which a woman and her mother talk about people from her hometown, where the mother still resides.  Both women are widowed, the younger one losing her husband the year after her kids left for college.  Their discussion sets up the characters of the novel.  1) Jim Burgess is a  lawyer made famous by his successful defense of a well-known singer accused of paying to have his wife killed, a case followed by the nation.  After the trial, Jim and his Connecticut born wife leave Hartford and Jim does not pursue a political career as expected but rather moves to New York City to work for an expensive law firm and defend white collar criminal cases. 2)  Bob Burgess is Jim’s younger brother, who accidentally killed his father when he was four.  Bob lives in Jim’s shadow in New York City, also as a lawyer.  He is currently divorced from his wife, Pam.  3) Susan Burgess Olsen is  Bob’s twin.  She is the only Burgess who stayed in Shirley Falls.  She  was left by her husband seven years ago when he moved to Sweden .  Susan lives with her 19 year old son, Zach, and an elderly renter.   Zach pulls a prank that lands Shirley falls on the national news.  This problem pulls Jim and Bob back to Shirley Falls.  The woman in the prologue, a writer, decides to write their story.

The conversations between the woman and her mother and their relationship (small town girl moves to NYC and marries someone not well accepted by her family leading to an estrangement that lasts many years) are clearly of interest to Strout.  Strout explores a similar, although not identical, scenario and expands on it in her next novel, My Name is Lucy Barton.

The Burgess Boys covers a lot of ground with themes ranging from trying to leave an unhappy past by moving away, the bond of siblings being strong but relationships not easy, abandonment by a spouse and resulting impact on the spouse and children left behind, PTSD (although not verbalized this way) resulting from a childhood tragedy, guilt associated with secrets kept for decades, feeling “I am living the wrong life”, sexual harassment, and the stresses of children leaving home, among others.  These human themes are considered while the story is told of the prank Susan’s son Zach plays at a Somali mosque which escalates into a civil rights case and potentially a federal hate crime case, thus providing additional themes of small towns dealing with immigrants of a substantially different culture, politicizing of crimes and the impact of this on small town police, prosecutors, and the communities within the small town.

Strout works to tell a number of story lines simultaneously.  In Olive Kitteridge, the separateness of the related short story chapters allowed her to do this very successfully.  In this book, the switches are more jarring at times for this reader.  Strout is very good at peering into real human relationships.  A wonderful quote near the end of the novel:   “You have a family”, Bob said.  “You have a wife who hates you, kids who are furious with you.  A brother and sister who make you insane.  And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now.  That’s called family.”  Zach’s prank and resulting turmoil in the town for many parts of the community reminds us that while we work at living our lives and dealing with our personal issues there is also a broader set of issues and conflicts in the world that are actually not far from our doorstep.   That is jarring too— so maybe Strout has actually hit a tone that reflects the reality in which we live our lives.

What Does It Mean to Be

A Calculated Life

By Anne Charnock

Published 2013

Read 3/12/2017

I’m not sure when I bought this book for my Kindle, but likely shortly after I got it in 2014.  I certainly don’t remember why I bought it, but likely it showed up on the screen and I was compelled for some good reasons to purchase it.  Fortunately I bought this book before I reigned in the tendency to purchase ebooks in such a manner.  Much more importantly, however, it’s fortunate that 47North, a publishing arm of Amazon, saw this book after it had first been self-published as an e-book and then as a paperback and decided that much more of the reading population ought to get to read it than might find it otherwise.

I started reading this book without knowing anything about it or its author.  I actually really like starting books under these circumstances although to increase the probability of it being a useful journey I generally reserve this approach for recommendations from reliable sources, specifically a few friends with whom I spend many hours discussing books.   Although this book didn’t come from one of my reliable sources, I heartily endorse it for others.

My experience with this book was not dissimilar from my experience with “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.   In each case, you are introduced to a character doing what seems to be a usual type of job living a usual nondescript life.  In both cases the novel slowly unwinds a different reality.  In this book the job is to find relationships between things so predictive algorithms can be developed.  We slowly learn the algorithms aren’t just about predicting trends in financial market but also such events as violent acts and very unexpected measurable variables such as wind speed.  The goal is to develop predictive algorithms of value to someone or some organization that will purchase it, although how they exploit it is apparently not of great concern to the employer and certainly not the to the analyst.  The person doing the job isn’t actually a human being but rather a “stimulator” created, programmed, and made available via contract to her employer by the Constructor.  Jayna is a version which has benefited from learnings from earlier versions, some of which are still functioning in different roles under contract to various employers.

In each case, the world around the characters is a not inconceivable and doesn’t even seem terribly distant in time from our own.  This characteristic is what, for me, separates “speculative fiction” from “fantasy/science fiction”.  Margaret Atwood has spun a number of terrifically well-written novels in this genre and Anne Charnock is certainly committed to playing in this territory and does it very nicely with this offering.

The plane that both Ishiguro routinely visits and Charnock’s “A Calculated Life” is now on is the one in which the primary questions being addressed are “what does it mean to be x” and “what role does memory play in our being x” (x=human or otherwise).    Not surprisingly, perhaps, these authors help us realize answers to these questions are ones they don’t claim to own and ones that will keep us reading great literature as we continue to consider them.  Like “Never Let Me Go”, in “A Calculated Life” the plot evolves slowly.  Some readers have found this trying.  I think it’s a helpful attribute because the questions being poised are profound and require slow careful consideration which is supported by the slow speed of the novels.

I will not further compare and contrast these books as they do take different trajectories with their characters and plots and to say more there will further spoil it for readers.  Take the dive yourself and consider “what does it mean to be x” (human or otherwise).

Can We Ever Say the Unsaid

My Name is Lucy Barton

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2016

Read 3/3/2017

I was walking through the library on the campus where I am an adjunct faculty member and saw this book on the “new books” shelf.  I previously experienced the author through her books Olive Kitteridge, a novel written through a series of short stories, and Abide with Me so I immediately checked out this new offering and devoured it quickly.  Then I  re-read parts of it more slowly, savoring its form and content, as I try to provide this column some ideas about it.

Strout draws the reader in quickly with a description of the view from the hospital room of the narrator and how the narrator longs to be on the street with the other young women instead of being where she is, and how she expects to give thanks when she was again.  The narrator tells us her story is a “simple” one–recovery from a simple appendectomy is stalled mysteriously resulting in a nine week hospital stay.  Her mother visits for five days, the visit being arrange by her husband who visits infrequently both because he is functioning as a single parent for their two young daughters and because he doesn’t like hospitals.  That he arranges the visit by the mother is somewhat remarkable for several reasons.  The narrator’s parents disapproved of the narrator’s chosen life—to attend college, to marry a man clearly descended from German stock, and to live in New York City.  The disapproval has led to little contact between daughter and mother and no contact between daughter and father since her marriage.  In addition, the narrator’s family is desperately poor and they have led a very isolated life outside a small town in Illinois.  Travel of any sort, especially plane travel, is far from the ordinary for her mother.  But the mother suddenly appears in the narrator’s room and spends five days and nights there. The book primarily describes their conversations and corresponding various thoughts of the narrator about topics including the characters in the gossipy stories she and her mother share, her family, her childhood, and her marriage.

Their family lived outside a small poor rural town, first in the garage and eventually in the house of an uncle.  They were even poorer than most and certainly considered oddities.  They lived in isolation physically and socially.  The narrator lets us know she is haunted by dark memories and slowly meters out the source of some of them but always in an incomplete way, leaving much to be imagined but not verified.  This is classic Strout which we saw in Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me:  childhood forming us; memories from that time keeping us in that form unless and until we find a way to free ourselves from them—realizing them for what they are—memories but not life policies.

In Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me we saw the characters only from the outside.  In My Name is Lucy Barton we are deep within Lucy.  She is our narrator and she chooses what to reveal to us, or actually keep to herself.  We are witness to her as she unwinds her memories.  The conversations with her mother are primarily about people they knew when Lucy was growing up.  Lucy learns about her mother’s view of these people as the mother describes them and fills in their history since the narrator left home.  The narrator tells us directly that she is unreliable in telling us about the conversations.  She says “but maybe that wasn’t what my mother said”.  But she also doesn’t tell us what might have been more accurate nor when and why she is inaccurate.   The narrator does tell us, however, that she specifically chose not to ask her mother the questions for which she most desperately wanted the answers, including “do you love me” and “does her father ask about her”.

This is the first book Strout has written via a first-person narrator.  She crawls inside the character so far that one of course wonders if the book is autobiographical.  Both Strout and the narrator wanted to be writers from a reasonably young age.  However,  Strout was surrounded by books her whole life in her home while the narrator only had books at school where she stayed to do her homework and read when finished to avoid going home to where it was desperately cold.  The narrator was also so socially isolated that when she attends college, possible due to the intervention of a counselor who recognizes the promise of this girl with nearly perfect academic performance (because if you just stick to doing the work, it gets done), she imitates people to learn how to do things.  The narrator decides to become a writer because she takes the learning that books make you feel less alone and she wants to make other feel less alone also. Strout takes us fairly quickly through later years of Lucy’s life—writing, publishing, leaving her husband and the impact that has on her relationship with her children, which is far less than she hopes it would be.   At least one trace of Strout show up here—-Strout indicates publically that while her family was growing, she only had a few hours a day to write.  Lucy Barton also tells us “the two or three hours a day in which to write were terribly important to me”.

We learn about Lucy’s last interaction with her mother as the mother lay on her deathbed.  Once again Lucy doesn’t say what she wants to say.  Once again she hopes her mother hears what Lucy says to her in the hallway.  Once again we see a real relationship between two people as we do when Lucy recounts, with acknowledged lack of reliability, her last encounter with her father.

Strout has a remarkable way to telling us stories about real people and their real, painful relationships where so much remains unsaid but not unfelt.

I look forward to reading more from this author.

Best Sellers from Sinclair Lewis

Mainstreet (published 1920) (finished reading 10/28/2016)

Babbitt (published 1922) (finished reading 4/30/2016)

by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

Babbitt was the first Sinclair Lewis book I read, being drawn to it to learn directly about the character that led to the term “Babbitt” becoming part of the English language.   Oxford English Dictionary 3rd edition:  Babbittry is “behaviour and attitudes characteristic of or associated with the character George F. Babbitt; esp. materialistic complacency and unthinking conformity.” Meriman-Webster:  Babbitt is “a person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards.”  I am glad I went to the “source”—Lewis’s book– to directly understand Georg e Babbitt and the meaning of this expression.

Many reviewers speak to the nearly complete lack of plot it this book and in his earlier Main Street. Lewis spends many chapters describing George Babbitt’s daily routine, residence, family, and his interactions with business associates.  Lewis enjoys painting his character, George Babbitt, and his surroundings– physical, social, and professional.  After a detailed description of his five year old Floral Heights house which possessed “laudable architecture and the latest conveniences” Lewis add this lament:  “in fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house:  It was not a home.”  But eventually George Babbitt does engage in a story—he goes through a painful mid-life crisis during which he turns away from social norms and expectations, has an affair with a beautiful client, attends parties with her and her non-business and non-professional friends, “the Bunch”, and even wonders if Seneca Doane, a candidate for mayor of Zenith on “an alarming labor ticket” has some useful things to say.  He nearly earns complete scorn and disowner ship from his colleagues and isn’t initially invited to join the new Good Citizen’s Club.  Eventually he returns to and is accepted back into the fold and he is mainly happy to have returned to popularity and security.  However, at the end of the book he has interesting words for his son who is more interested in mechanics and inventing than business and earning a college degree.

Having been well engaged by Babbitt and interested in reading more of Sinclair Lewis, I turned to his previous novel, Mainstreet.

Mainstreet is also said to have minimal plot but my view is slightly different.  The story covers the main character’s evolution from early girlhood through about ten years of marriage.  Lewis’s style is to focus in a detailed way on particular instances and string these together to progress the story.

Mainstreet centers on Carol Miliford who we meet as a young college senior, orphaned in early adolescence, to whom we are introduced as “a girl on the hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life.  The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth”.    While attending Blogett College, a small religious college on the edge of Minneapolis, she considers a number of occupations (teacher, law, nursing, motion picture writer, marrying an unidentified hero), turns down a marriage proposal from a school mate who sees her as a great lawyer’s wife, and finally decides to attend professional library school in Chicago.  She spends a year or so as a librarian in St Paul where she is disappointed by the patron’s less than lofty interests.  She meets Dr Will Kennicott at a dinner party given by friends of Carol’s older sister.  He is a doctor in a small town (Gopher Prairie) in the Minnesota plains, is about 12 years Carol’s senior, and is besotted with Carol.  Kennicott paints an appealing picture of Gopher Prairie and suggests that the town would welcome her assistance in improving it.  She is eventually convinced and marries him without ever actually visiting Gopher Prairie until after their honeymoon trip.

Once arrived, she is appalled at the state of the town—tidy but extremely dull– and is convinced she’s made a mistake.  She steels herself to enjoying becoming a homemaker in her own home and sets off to improving the town.  Of course the town is not so interested in her assessments and plans and she suffers a number of blows.   She should find comradery with Vida Sherwin, an unmarried but well educated school teacher, and does to some extent, but Vida understands the pace at which things can happen in Gopher Prairie and is willing to press her plans for a new school at the rate the town will tolerate. Even Kennicott moves from his courtship declaration of “Come on! We ready for you to boss us!” to his statement the day after arriving in Gopher Prairie “Scared? I don’t expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St Paul.  I don’t expect you to be crazy about it, at first.  But you’ll come to like it so much—life’s so free here and the best people on earth”  Fortunately he is quite tolerant of his wife’s pursuit of intellectual stimulation and interest in improving the town, and the town is willing to have her fit in to the various social circles, but she finds them generally unsatisfactory and boring.   Carol befriends the town handyman, Miles Bjornstam, “The Red Swede”.  He is content to be totally unobligated to anyone and anything and freely speaks his mind.  Miles marries Carol’s maid, Bea, who was as new to being a maid as Carol was having a house and a maid.  They became friends while Bea was in her employ and Carol remains friends with Miles and Bea after their marriage.  Carol becomes friends with Erik Volborg, a Swedish farm boy who is working for the local tailor.  He is desperate to become educated and pursue a career in fashion design and seeks her mentorship.  There are some town tongues that cluck about their interactions.  Carol is tempted to pursue an affair with Volborg, but stops after Kennicutt picks them up in his car while they are taking a walk one evening.

The story fast forwards a few years after Carol bears a son and becomes enamored with him, although she was not interested in hearing that this would be true from the various town women.  She sets up a room of her own in the extra bedroom of their house.  She eventually can no longer bear what she feels as oppressive but dull town life and takes a leave from the town in Washington, DC where she takes a job and lives with some other women working in Washington, DC during the war.  She and Kennicott correspond and he visits her after a separation of over a year.  Carol eventually decides to return to Gopher Prairie and Kennicott welcomes her back as does the rest of the town.   She retains a spark to improve the town and declares things will change eventually and her new daughter will see a very different world from the one in which they live.

Unlike Babbitt, Carol does not revel in being part of a great community.  However, like Babbitt, at the end of the story both Carol and Babbitt return to their initial relationship with their community—want to be change agent and booster.

I initially engaged with both of these books via audiobook editions.  For Babbitt, this was very helpful as the narrator delivered the slang of the 1920’s that Lewis documents in this book to a greater extent than in Main Street.     Lewis’s view of his characters—-the Mainstreet of Gopher Praire and the city of Zenith—can be missed if only listening, however.  Lewis’ use of capitalization (“a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession…”) so visual reading to at least supplement audiobook reading is useful.

Both Mainstreet and Babbitt gained best-seller status when they were released.  Mainstreet sold 180,000 copies within six and more that 2 million copies within a few years.  Babbitt also found wide commercial success.  I find this quite interesting since Sinclair’s writing is quite biting and his disdain for the Mainstreet of Gopher Prairie/all small towns and for George Babbitt and “booterism” in small cities is quite clear.  This tone was likely instrumental in Columbia University’s decision to overturn the judges’ recommendation to award Mainstreet the 1921 Pultizer Prize for The Novel which they did again regarding Babbitt in 1923.  The timing of their publication—when serials in magazines and novels were primary forms of entertainment (in addition to “stunts” performed at parties) is likely a driver for the commercial success of these novels.   I’m not sure these books would have achieve this same level of success today but I am glad they were published and became “must reads” for me as they give a view of life of that time, certainly through a particular lens.

Finding the Value of Literature in Trash

The Rent Collector by Cameron Wright

Published 2012

Read Feb 27, 2017

This book was inspired by the documentary, River of Victory, written, directed, produced, and photographed by Cameron Wright’s son, Trevor Wright.  Trevor Wright’s film explores a young family, mother Sang Ly, father Kim Lim, and their son, Nisay, as they live in and make their living from scavenging recyclables from Stung Menchey, the largest municipal waste dump in Cambodia.  Nisay is chronically ill with diarrhea and Sang Ly believes living among the stench and filth of the dump is a driver of that illness.  However, the family seems to have few choices for making a living as revealed when the family returns to their homeland to visit a healer.  As she reunites with family and friends there she is reminded that the financial situation in her homeland is as dire as theirs.

Cameron Wright decided to take this real-life story and retell it adding a fictional story regarding the woman who collects rent on their shack in the dump.  This framing provides Cameron Wright a platform for describing in words and book form the difficult life the documentary reveals:  the filth and danger in just existing on and in the dump, the hand-to-mouth level of existence of collecting and selling bits of material “picked” from the dump.  The book includes the trip Sang Ly and her family make to their homeland and the trip to The Healer.  The treatment is not discussed, but apparently it is effective while treatments received in the city from both western and homeopathic medical practices have not worked.

Sang Ly discovers that the dreaded, usually drunk, and mean Rent Collector can read.  Sang Ly and asks the Rent Collector to teach her to read.  The Rent Collector eventually agrees and Sang Ly progresses from learning the alphabet to reading words and eventually reading stories and poems and experiencing the riches that great literature can provide.  This is possible as it happens that the Rent Collector was a teacher educated in the US and, most probably, a professor of literature.  Soriyan (the real name of the Rent Collector) lost her husband and baby to slaughter by the Khmer Rouge during their “cleansing” missions to rid Cambodia of all intellectuals.  Soriyan’s housekeeper, Sopeap, is killed instead of Soriyan when she pretends to be her so Soriyan is doomed to live under a false name and pretense.  Soriyan eventually is able to provide for Sopeap’s family and does so for many years without the family knowing the identity of their benefactor.  This story allows Cameron Wright the ability to remind us of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and other similar regimes that have risen to power in various times and places in history.  It touches on the theme of self-sacrifice and  the reality of the resulting survival guilt and the burden accompanying it.

A primary purpose Cameron Wright seems to have for bringing together the Rent Collector and Sang Ly is to discuss the role and value of  literature:   the universality of many of the important stories that various cultures tell in various ways (ie Sarann in Cambodia, Cinderella in North America, Ye Xian in China,  etc); dreams as inspiration for and subject of various works of literature; the indistinct boundaries between good and evil, heroes and villains,  and especially the ability of literature make us think differently than we ordinarily would or could.

Through teaching Sang Ly, the Rent Collector regains her connection with humanity.  Although she had provided for her housekeeper’s family, she had isolated herself from everyone and everything, finding solace only in alcohol.  The Rent Collector leaves Sang Ly a collection of essays and stories as lessons for her after the Rent Collector leaves for a reason she is unwilling to articulate.  Cameron Wright decides to tie everything together for us and the characters; I won’t detail the ending here.  He does let us know, however, that Sang Ly and her family remain in the dump although Sang Ly is certainly in a different state than we found her at the beginning of the book.

I was sometimes unconvinced by the tenor of the Sang Ly’s voice as narrator and had to accept the seemingly rapid rate of learning of Sang Ly to progress from alphabet to the study of serious literature.  I also found some of the subplots almost distracting as they were not fully developed so we only got a very brief hint of the theme they carried.   Cameron Wright touches on multiple human themes including:  what a mother will do for a child; what a father will do to protect his family; surviving dire financial circumstances; self-sacrifice; survivor guilt.  Cameron Wright’s book was primarily written to enable us to learn about life in Cambodia post- Khmer Rouge and the challenges the Khmer Rouge wrought on the population.  An even better version would have more fully developed all of the themes which interest him while telling it within the framework of the post-Khmer Rouge situation.

Some describe the book as one with a message of hope.   An apparent goal of the Khmer-Rouge was to wipe out all sources of education and thinking not authorized by the government. There is certainly a warning in this book that all must diligently oppose any kind of force that seeks to fulfill such a goal.   However, if there is a trace of literature available and any willingness to share it, that literature will enable humankind to continuously grow, learn, and expand its capability and capacity to make a positive difference in the world regardless of current circumstance.  That is truly a hopeful message.