The Round House (2012) By Louise Erdrich

The story told in The Round House by Louise Erdrich is constructed on a plot involving the rape of a Native American woman living on a reservation in North Dakota.  People who shy away from picking up this book fearing the topic will be unbearable will be missing a brilliantly written work that while it contains a great deal of hurt, also entails a great deal of humanity. 

The main characters of the book are the woman, her husband, and their son.  How each of them deals with the brutal attack and its aftermath could be stand-alone novels yet Erdrich has skillfully woven them together. 

The father is a tribal judge, though the legal system on the reservation is as defined and imposed by treaty, and obstructs justice as often as it finds the truth.  It is important to note that as recently as 2009  86% of the rapes of Native Americans were perpetrated by non-Native Americans, and prosecution is rare, with a success rate that is even rarer.

The mother's story is critical, her silence is not merely reaction, it becomes a important part of the plot.

The son is your typical 13-year old, until he is not – the rape and its impact become an all-encompassing subplot in his coming of age story.  I won’t go into detail about how this story unfolds, because doing so would require a spoiler alert. Let’s just say, the book goes where it needs to go.

Writing about “Rez Life” has become a significant genre in literature. Louise Erdrich, with her lineage as a Chippewa, is one of several authors from this genre I have read.  Others include what could be categorized as the Rez “pop culture writer" Sherman Alexie author of SmokeSignals and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, who grew up on the Spokane reservation; and David Treuer, an Ojibwe raised on the Leech Lake reservation in Northern Minnesota, whose novel titled Prudence details the lasting impact of reservation life well beyond the days of the American Indian wars.

Recommendation:  Yes, excellent book, do not be afraid of the topic.

The Nature Fix (2017) By Florence Williams; The Blue Zones (2012) By Dan Buettner

I’m not sure if this applies to everyone my age, but pending retirement is dramatically changing my perspective on living.  I’ve stopped thinking about the manic need to “get ahead” or even to “survive until I can get out.” I now find myself dwelling almost exclusively on quality of life issues.  For my retirement, I’m way more interested in having less stress, enjoying what I like to do, and hopefully doing so in relatively good health.  The “next phase” of my life is mine to design, and it’s an important decision because it’s likely to be my last major one.

Topping the list of quality of life issues occupying my mind has been the “where” aspect of retirement – most particularly the urban vs small town vs rural choice (unfortunately all three isn’t a financially viable option).  I’ve touched on this dilemma in an earlier book review: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

Two recent reads have added many new points for me to ponder.

Florence Williams’ The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Heathier, and More Creative is a thought provoking book that views one’s relationship to the outdoors in measurable medical and mental health terms – ranging from its impact on stress & blood pressure, to its therapeutic impact on veterans suffering with PTSD, and on “troubled” children.  As a big fan of Frederick Olmsted, William’s does not automatically disqualify urban environments as unhealthy – though as someone who lives on the edge of Chicago’s “front yard,” a.k.a. Grant Park, I would find the neighborhood less stressful with more trees and fewer drunken/drugged concert goers, and don't get me started on the subjects of car alarms and endless sirens.  However, where Chicago will always score high is in the devotion of its residents to its beautiful lakefront and refusal to let “philanthropists” with big ego’s and connections to City Hall further desecrate it. 

William’s “ultrasimple” coda:

Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places.

Bring friends or not. Breathe.

And speaking of Grant Park, when I first moved to the city Dutch Elm Disease was devastating hundreds of trees in the park (since replaced with hardier stock).  Williams devotes a lot of time to documenting the positive impact of, in fact the necessity of, trees to the health of the environment, justifying the sentiment behind “tree-hugging” -- we should hug them, they do good work!  My one and only complaint with The Nature Fix is the standard placement of the Epilogue which contains a brief recap of Tim Beatley’s (Biophilie Cities Project at theUniversity of Virginia) “nature pyramid.”  This discussion would have made an excellent opening chapter, before heading into the case studies.

While what we see, breathe and experience in Nature plays an outsized role in the quality of life, so too does what we eat and how we live.  Dan Buettner’s New York Times Bestseller The Blue Zones is a treatise on demographic pockets from around the world where people have a life expectancy well above the norm.  While I’m not particularly interested in living to 100, I am interested in what might help one maintain a healthier life in retirement.

In his book, Buettner examines the diets and lifestyles of people in: Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea; Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda, California; Hojancha, Costa Rica; and Ikaria, Greece.  Shared by these very different communities is not only a longer life, but a healthier one.  What he found was not a common denominator “miracle” food, but a combination of diet plus other important influences, including social and genetic – call it a holistic approach.  

Since the publication of his (two) books on the subject, numerous communities around the world have begun work at emulating them.  One of those communities is Paducah, Kentucky, which is high on my retirement list for multiple other reasons.  

Recommendation:  If you are prepping for retirement, or just looking for a way to lead a less stressful, healthier life, you should find both of these books interesting.

The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates (2016) By James L. Haley

Unless you have a degree in American History hanging on your wall, the period between the Revolution and the Civil War is likely to be a blur – covered in a chapter, maybe three, in any history class you were required to take – although, you might know about Dolly Madison taking the portrait of George Washington out of the White House as the British arsonists closed in.  Author James Haley has taken on the task of filling in part of that blank space with a two-volume work of historical fiction, the first of which covers the war against the Barbary Pirates, the war that gave the U.S. Marine Corps hymn the line “to the Shores of Tripoli.”

Haley has created the character Bliven Putman, a young farmer living in Massachusetts who joins the fledging U.S. Navy in 1801, at the time a rag tag group of ships barely able to put boats to sea as training boats, rather on mount a war in the Mediterranean Sea.  His career in the Navy is an adventure story that gives us an understandable and exciting how-to (and how not-to) lesson on building and staffing a Navy.  Plus, he’ll participate in sea battles and also the legendary, though aborted, desert march on Tripoli, Libya, providing him (and us) a bitter lesson in the workings of international diplomacy, as shaped by domestic politics.

The book touches on many topics – the budding abolitionist movement, political battles between Madison and Jefferson, religious puritanism and antisemitism at home.

A second major character in the book is Sam Bandy, also a new recruit – while Putnam is the representation of the northern states, Bandy, a plantation owner’s son is the stand in for the South. Their respective reactions to meeting a black man named Jonah, who serves as the chamberlain to the dey (Ottoman Regent) of Algiers, are interesting, busting multiple stereotypes.  Jonah, once a slave on a plantation in Virginia, speaks fluent English & Arabic, and is obviously better educated than either of them.

 

Throughout the war with the Barbary Pirates, the U.S. Navy is constantly bumping into elements of the much larger and stronger British Navy, which display arrogance and commit acts that are just short of belligerent.  Detailing these interactions is the lead-in to the next volume of this “Bliven Putnam Adventure” series, which will cover the War of 1812, a book now on my reading list.

Recommendation:  Yes.  It's a totally fun adventure book with a dose of American history thrown in. 

Slade House (2016) By David Mitchell

The first book I wrote about when I started my TEDrake Book Blog several years ago was David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a historical novel about a young Dutch merchant stationed in Nagasaki, Japan in the early 1800’s, the only port open to foreign traders at the time.  Based on that memory, I recently picked up Mitchell’s Slade House, a book that turned out to be as far from what I was expecting as one could imagine, though by no means a disappointment.

While Thousand Autumns is an epic, Slade House is a gothic novel, set in England. It is also a page-turner. The only commonality between the two books is that the writing is superb in both.

Slade House is a place, well more accurately was a place, in the English countryside. Once every nine years, exactly, it can be accessed through a small iron door in a brick wall along an alley.  You visit Slade House by invitation, and then you are never seen again. That’s really about all I can say without giving away the book.

Mitchell’s novel runs the spectrum of the Gothic genre.  It has the House (consider the houses in the book-based black and white horror film classics like The House of Seven Gables, or House of Usher, or even Rose Cottage in Dark Shadows). It has the villagers, who know something is going on, but don’t know what it is (think: Frankenstein or Dracula).  Perhaps most important, it has empathy for the “bad” guys, in this case a brother-sister duo wronged by the world and just trying to make their way.  If you’ve read and felt the angst of Anne Rice’s characters, you will recognize these two.

Recommendation:  Great, short (238 pages), read.

Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution (2002) By Cyril Aydon

Like many biographers, author Cyril Aydon fawns over his subject, Charles Darwin. but It’s easy to understand why.  Darwin’s famous journey on the second Voyage of the HMS Beagle, encapsulates everything a wide-eyed person could ask for: adventure, discovery, nature and science – an early example of “join the Navy, and see the world.” 

From a wealthy family, and well educated, Darwin was not a sailor.  He earned his place on the Beagle because of its need for a trained geologist – the primary purpose of the voyage was to survey the coasts of South America and the South Pacific – areas “discovered” by earlier explorers, including: William Dampier, Captain James Cook, and Sir Francis Drake.  Darwin would keep a journal of the voyage and serve as collector of animal specimens, duties that would earn him a place in history.  

The log ended up covering five years, 1831 to 1836, as the ship circled the globe, though what is remembered most by history is the five weeks spent surveying the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles west of Ecuador.  His specimen collections and keen observations on the oddity of the animal wildlife in the Galapagos would linger in his mind.  Later, after returning to Scotland, those memories would form the thesis of what is arguably the most important scientific book of the all-time, On the Origin of Species, first published in late 1859.  The impact of the book was the development of the theory of evolution – still debated, by some, to this day.

Last summer I blogged on The Immense Journey (1957) Part I from the Library of America book Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos.  Like Darwin, Eiseley was multi-faceted, an anthropologist, naturalist, and budding astronomer. Parts II and III of the Collected Essays, The Firmament of Time and The Unexpected Universe contain several of Eiseley’s essays dissecting the evolutionary debate as it continued into the middle of the 20TH Century.  These essays compliment the Darwin biography quite well.

Recommendation:  Yes, definitely. The first half of the Darwin biography covers the voyage and reads like a first-class adventure novel, and the second half, covering the publication of On the Origin of Species and its explosive reception in the scientific community is equally compelling.  And I’ll also give a second favorable recommendation to Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays.

Empire of the Sun (1984) By J. G. Ballard

I guess I’m developing a new favored genre because Empire of the Sun fits comfortably with several other of my reads over the past few years, let’s call it the Pacific Theatre genre.  This story is perhaps better known because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name – both the book and movie are excellent. The book, and to a lesser extent the movie, is depressing from its opening chapters.  It is also completely engrossing.

The plot is how a 10-year British boy, living in the International Settlement near the Bund (Huangpu River front) of Shanghai, gets separated from his parents as the Japanese invade the city concurrent with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  He survives the duration of the war in a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the city, his parents, if they are still alive, are in a different camp.  While the British and citizens of multiple other colonial powers are prisoners in these camps, they also realize that their Japanese captors are the only thing protecting them from the Chinese peasants – “coolies” who for decades have been virtual slave labor to the Europeans.

Childhood, spent under Japanese occupation and/or imprisonment is also the “big picture” theme of the excellent The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, both by Tan Twan Eng, and set in the author’s native Malaysia.  They, like Empire, have a fascinating psychological subtext involving the personal relationship between captive and captor.  In Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, the British boy, this time from Kotakinakulu (Malaysia) is sent, alone, back to Britain just before the onset of the war.  While all of these books are excellent and important reads, The Gift of Rain stands out as the best – I’d love for Spielberg to make it into a movie.

I’m not normally complimentary of movies as they too often tend to rewrite the story to commercially fit a larger audience, who after all are in the theater for entertainment, not a history lesson.  In Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, rewrites are kept to a minimum, tweaking only to make the film fit, not to change the plot.    

Movie Trailer

Perhaps because the movie was true to the book, Empire of the Sun did not rake in any major Academy Award nominations.  This is a pity because John Malkovich was stellar in the film; and Christian Bale, who as a child himself played the lead role of Shanghai Jim -- who aged from 10 to 14 during the book -- was shamefully overlooked because of the Academy’s historic tendency to devalue the work of child actors.

Recommendation:  Watch the movie, and read the book if you are a history major – and by all means, read The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

The subtitle of The Gilded Age says it all: A Tale of Today.  When Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner penned their book, that "today" was 1873, and the country was recovering from the Civil War, "reconstructing" the South, and stretching ever westward with its railroads. The book was so successful at portraying the country, that it gave name to an era of American history.

It was a era of endless ambition, often blind; an unprecedented accumulation and flaunting of wealth by an oligarchy; institutionalized poverty, viewed indifferently; and corporate greed on a monumental scale, greased by compliant and highly creative governmental corruption. In other words, it was much like today, 2018.

While the book includes unmistakable political commentary, it’s bigger picture is a social commentary on a nation of people looking at unlimited opportunity, yet frequently forsaking it with a mad quest for immediate gratification, and a single-minded worship of the dollar, and little else.

The key storyline of book involves the ownership by the Hawkins family of a large tract of land in eastern Tennessee.  Unable to immediately make much of the land, they, like others in the post war period, follow the path of westward expansion to Missouri, then the gateway to the frontier. There they attempt one get-rich scheme after another, and fail at them all.  Importantly however, the elder Hawkins maintains ownership of the Tennessee land, and reminds his children that it would one day make them rich.

“Cashing in” on that land is the main plot of the book, and it goes like this (an over-simplification). The U.S. Senator from Missouri, working with the Hawkins family, devises a plan to create an economic development tract on the Tennessee property to help recently emancipated black folk.  This benevolent goal however is never anything more than a public relations cover for a scheme which in its fine print enriches everyone but the poor black folk. 

Looking at this 135 years later, what you have is a how-to manual for the recent so-called reform Tax Cut and Jobs Act – a nice sounding name for a huge tax break for corporations and the already wealthy, with table scraps for the middle class and further service cuts for the poor.  In the book, just like two weeks ago, the bill is even legislatively advanced in the middle of the night, with no one having a chance to even read the bill they were voting on.  And, as much as I’d like to pin this strategy on the current administration (on loan from Goldman Sachs), this legislative blueprint has been used multiple times in U.S. history – because “we the people” haven’t stopped it.

Recommendation:  Yes.  The book is vintage Mark Twain and completely readable.