A Sand County Almanac (1949) By Aldo Leopold

At age 63, I keep telling friends my retirement plans involve moving to a rural environment and becoming a hermit. They question my ability to do so, not to mention my very sanity. I follow-up with a question of my own: have you read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac?

Their questions address a legitimate concern, and I confess I share it. I’ve spent 40-some years living in urban environments -- Chicago, New York, and DC -- and mostly in high-rises. I can tell you in minute detail how the city comes alive in the morning. As the sun just begins to peek at Chicago from across the lake, the garbage trucks shift into gear, the El trains increase their schedules, and the birds begin to chirp (yes, cities have birds other than pigeons). By the time the rising sun starts to reflect off the glass towers, the coffee baristas and maintenance crews start arriving for work, joggers head for the lakefront, and the celebrants from the night have stumbled home. These raw urban scenes have their own beauty, and hold many memories – I have loved the city.

This contrasts sharply with Aldo Leopold’s description of sun rises on his farm in Sand County, Wisconsin.

Leopold is a founder of what we call the environmental movement. He’s credited with the philosophy of Land Ethic – viewing the natural habitat not as a commodity to be harvested, but as a community that we are a part of. The Almanac is about his farm from January through December. It is beautifully written, in a calming, folksy way.

It is interesting to note that John Muir, who is considered the “founder” of Yosemite National Park, was raised on a farm in Portage, Wisconsin, not far from Leopold's. This area, known as the Wisconsin Dells to most Chicagoans, can arguably lay claim to being the birthplace of the American environmental movement.

Members of my family will recognize that an interest in nature, botany and environmental issues is not new to me – though it has been an interest largely neglected most of my adult life because of a need to live in a big city. Throughout my Northwest Indiana childhood the big local debate was environmental: did we want “progress” defined as Bethlehem Steel, or “tree-hugging” defined as the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. The grand compromise won out – we got them both -- and for the most part it has worked out well, the exception to the rule on similar compromises.

So the question remains, when I retire in a few years, what do I want to wake up to: coffee in a garden, or coffee on a balcony?  I’m leaning heavily toward the garden.

The Taxidermist's Daughter (2014) By Kate Mosse

I am not a particularly fast reader, yet I sped through The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate Mosse in only two sittings.  It’s a rather compelling and fun blending of several British literary genres save one, it spares readers any lead characters from the self-absorbed aristocracy.  Oh, and it includes nursery rhymes.

The book is equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist, and Macbeth; stirred into the cauldron with a sampling of British women mystery writers from Agatha Christie forward, and then adding a bit of American Edgar Allan Poe for spice.

The main character is named Connie, and as one can guess from the title, she is the daughter of a taxidermist, a once respectable occupation that has fallen out of fashion to the point that its mere mention frightens people.  She lives with her widowed father in Blackthorn House near the coast of England, an area heavily impacted by tidewaters and summer storms.  Her aging father is losing his faculties, and Connie, in her twenties, is still trying to piece together her past, she had some kind of accident when she was young, resulting in amnesia.  Her father has not been helpful in providing information about what happened, and she suspects that what little she has been told has been fabricated. 

Without a spoiler alert, I can go no further, but you should. 

Recommendation:  great summer read.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) By Sherman Alexie

My first exposure to author Sherman Alexie was through the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Film Festival many years ago.  I went to see his movie The Business of FancyDancing.  It was multi-cultural at its strongest.  The main character grew-up on a reservation, but “abandoned” the tribe by taking school seriously and winning a scholarship to college.  In college, he comes out as a gay man, and ends up in a relationship with a white man.  The book covers his return to the reservation for the funeral of a friend.  Based on the book, I started being a regular at the annual pow-wows that are held in Chicago – fascinating events when you take them more seriously than as a mere tourist attraction.

Alexie would go on to become quite the independent film director, prominent poet, and novelist.  His credits include the movie SmokeSignals & book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the autobiographical book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The Absolutely True Diary tells of his childhood on the Spokane reservation in the northeastern corner of Washington State.  He, as were the other kids on the “rez,” was culturally raised to expect nothing out of life.  When he independently decides that he is going to the high school in Reardon, an entirely white school 22 miles from the reservation, it changes his childhood and life.  He is accused of abandoning his tribe, and becoming a white-lover … an “apple,” red on the outside, but white on the inside.  Yet, at Reardon High School, he’s the Indian kid that shouldn’t be there.  RHS’s school mascot of course is the “Redskins.”  He’s caught in-between two cultures, which will become a running theme in Alexie’s body of work.

The trials and tribulations that he faces as a kid were endless – teenage angst, coupled with unquestioned and often internalized racism.  To tell the story, Alexie uses comedy to make it bearable.  (See my review of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka to see how this formula plays in a different cultural setting).

Arnold, the Alexie character in the novel, turns out to be extremely good at comedy.  Arnold draws cartoons, and they are sad, hilarious and on-target.  The book has enough cartoons to qualify as a comic book, and needs them.

It would be easy for me to relate this book to so many “other” of America’s ills – not the least of which is the subject of what society does to psyche of people raised on the reservation, or in the inner center “ghetto,” or in the “white-trash” trailer park.  Hope is destroyed.  One of my favorite passages in political literature is Harvey Milk’s “Hope Speech.”  The crux of the speech is that you must give people hope, because “without hope, life is not worth living.”  Sociologists point to this need whenever discussing alcoholism or drug abuse, or suicide.  Part-Time Indian puts this in personal terms.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.

Click on the movie trailer for The Business of FancyDancing and watch an interview of Alexie by Bill Moyers.

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (2003) By Martin Dugard

For my long Fourth of July weekend I was looking for something relaxing to read, something in my usual lines of interest, only as far removed from the year 2016 as possible.  I found it with Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. by Martin Dugard.

For those of you living in the modern day equivalent of “the heart of Africa,” Dr. David Livingstone, a Brit from back when Great Britain was at its greatest (the Victorian Age) is one of the world’s most renowned explorers, ranking with the likes of Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin.   The ultimate and final exploration of his career was to be determining the source of the Nile River. While on that quest, he went missing. Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh born American and journalist, was secretly tasked by the publisher of the New York Herald to find Livingstone.  The rest, as they say, is history, not to mention one of the best quotes of all recorded time: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

The book is a fictionalized history of the story that kept government administrators, the science community, and everyday newspaper readers throughout the British Empire, the rest of Europe, and the United States on edge in the 1870s.  It’s not the first fictionalized version of the Stanley & Livingstone story – that distinction, as explained by the author in the epilogue, belongs to Joseph Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness.  

Dugard’s Into Africa excels as an adventure story – despite the fact that most readers know the ending before turning the first page.  It covers a range of topics: empire building, the slave trade, the American civil war, the height of newspaper wars, cultural racism, the coming colonialism, the inner working of the British Geological Society, Gladstone & Disraeli; and serves as an incredible geography lesson for readers (with maps).  I’ll quote one paragraph to show the book’s period setting and topic range:

“It was October 31 when Stanley traveled onward again.  In America, Cochise and his Apache warriors were being hunted in the Arizona Territory, Chicago had just been destroyed by fire, and President Grant was about to issue a proclamation making the Ku Klux Klan illegal.  In England, Darwin’s The Descent of Man was just days away from publication.  In Paris, the first exhibition of impressionist painting was about to get under way.  If Stanley were back in the world, he would likely have been covering one of those events for the Herald with great gusto and self-importance.”

Dugard’s telling of this story never lost my interest.   And as it turns out, he is quite the eclectic author.  While his body of work includes Farther than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook and other books about explorers, it also includes a book about running, a book about sailing, and a series of “Killing” books he co-authored (ghost wrote?) will Bill O’Reilly:  Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing … fill in the blank.  When he’s not writing, he’s a track & field coach at a high school in California.  

Recommendation:  a great summer read.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book.

The Secret Agent (1907) By Joseph Conrad

While Joseph Conrad is highly regarded as an author, I’ve not previously read any of his works, not even his classics Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.  A friend however sent me a copy of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, so I decided to give it a try. 

The book had many good points and a solid story line, but I found it very difficult to read.  While it is only 249 pages, it took me a couple of weeks to complete, partly because I’ve been busy, and partly because I found it a challenge to maintain interest long enough to finish each chapter.   And believe me, he’s not the type of writer one can put down mid-chapter, because if you do, you must start the chapter over again at the beginning.

Conrad, one could say, likes compound sentences.  In fact, he excels at them.  They are grammatically correct mind you, but several of them are two and three pages long.  I often found myself losing the noun and verb, long before I found the period.

This is not to say the story itself was bad, quite the contrary.

Set in London, the main character is a Mr. Verloc.  He is a secret agent in the employ of a never named foreign embassy. In reality however, he’s not a secret, in fact he has a close working relationship with a London police inspector – a sort of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back” kind of relationship.  The plot commences when both of them end up with new bosses. They share in common an exceedingly low opinion of their new directors.

Verloc is pressured by his new boss to find someone who can set off a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory (don’t ask why, it’s detailed, in detail, in an early chapter).  When he does, the story unfolds, and the final chapters read as fast, as the early chapters read slow.  The chapter near the end of the book when Verloc’s wife finds out what is going on is an excellent and memorable piece of literature.

The book does touch on some fascinating issues however: the difference between an anarchist and a revolutionary, the role of women in the late 1800s early 1900s, and (no spoiler here) the character Stevie.  

Recommendation:  For literature majors only; and even then just long enough to finish your coursework.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book. 

Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet (English, 2013) By Mutlu Konuk Blasing

While Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s biography of Nazim Hikmet makes for an interesting read today, my guess is it will be an even more interesting and educational read 100 years from now when removed from the lethal politics of this era.

The book’s subtitle is: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet.  It is one part literary critique, and one part political history.  Some might think that an odd combination, but it’s not.  Literature has always played a central role in political movements.  Could democracy be understood without “When in the course of human events” or communism without “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” or the forever relevant: “What happens to a dream deferred?” 

Literature defines society, and more often than not, it is penned by a poet.

Hikmet is a Turkish poet revered by the Turkish people. He spent much of life as a political prisoner, or in exile in Soviet Union.  As an unrepentant communist, he was feared by the Turkish government because his writings could steer the hearts of the country as it was still trying to find its way in the world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Hikmet died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried there, though his request was to be buried in a village in Anatolia.  His love affair with his native country and its native language is what has endeared him to its people.  His verse, particularly his epic Human Landscapes from My Country, tells of the average citizen, without romanticizing their existence – an antidote to the “orientalist” viewpoint of Turkey exported to the western world.  Significantly, his work was banned in Turkey until two years after his death.  It was through illegal copying and sharing that Hikmet was widely read in his home country.  He was read by both the intelligentsia and the working class – he spoke to both of them.

Linguistics is not usually my area of interest; but it is covered in depth in Blasing’s book.  Her chapter on Turkey’s conversion to the Latin alphabet is fascinating.  The Turkish language has never been Arabic, but because the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state, Arabic was used for the alphabet.  Problem was, a lot of the sounds used in the Turkish language, don’t have counterparts in Arabic – and a lot of the sounds used in Arabic, aren’t used in the Turkish language.   One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s, founder of the Turkish Republic, lasting modernizations was converting Turkey’s alphabet, to one which more closely matched its spoken language.

Why is that important to this story?  Because Hikmet wrote his work in this new alphabet, making it accessible to the entire population, not just the elite who could read Arabic.

I mentioned earlier that my belief is this book will become more interesting in the years ahead.  I say this because so much of Hikmet’s life’s story is tied up in the politics of his time, the peak of Communism, and the rise of Fascism.  What is lost when one reads through these filters is that Hikmet was popular with the people because he spoke to their needs, which were not being met by any of the powers of the day – and this included his disillusionment because of the unfulfilled agenda personified in Lenin.

For an American who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, these are powerful and hard to undo filters.  The meanest taunt one could use when I was a kid was “pinko commie…”  The politics of this was black & white, there was no gray area.  While Hikmet was a “card-carrying” communist, his actual philosophy veers closer to socialism – an ideology that Americans are still not able to differentiate.

Recommendation:  One has to have a strong interest in either poetry or political history for this book.  I recommend it highly. 

American Treasure (1994) By Harold J. Drake

In many ways American Treasure is your typical war memoir – though for me there is an important distinction: the author is my uncle, Harold J. Drake.  He was an Infantryman in World War II.  While reading about his military record was interesting, it was not the reason I read the book.  I read it because I don’t recall having ever met him (or most of my other Drake relatives for that matter) -- maybe once, I’m really not sure.

If I did meet him it would have been at his father’s, my grandfather’s, funeral.  I was quite young then, and I’m pretty sure it was my first funeral.  I’d never met the man in the casket before either. My paternal grandfather, Elmer Drake, was a World War I veteran and is buried at Camp Butler, just east of Springfield, IL.

Let me explain.

My father was born in Lincoln, IL, one of six children.  My paternal grandmother died in a TB sanitarium in Ottawa, IL when they were all still kids.  My grandfather took off for who knows where, and the kids became part of what at-the-time amounted to Illinois’ foster care system -- which explains the lack of tears at this funeral. In Harold Drake’s book he touches on this subject the one and only time he mentions my father, his older brother.  It was during a conversation he was having with his foxhole buddy their first night on European soil, as part of the second wave of Americans soldiers, sent in to fight in the Battle for Normandy, once the path had been made possible by the D-Day invasion.

“I tell Herman that my home town was in Illinois and that I lived and worked on a dairy farm.  My family had become scattered around and only my brother, Kenny [my father], a Marine now in the Pacific, maintained a family relationship through letter writing.  I didn’t miss anyone except my mother who had died in 1932 leaving my father the impossible task of supporting six kids when she entered the sanitarium.  The State had been forced to place the whole family in an orphanage during the Depression.” 

The point in reading the book was to find clues about what happened in the lives of my father's siblings.  Some information was gleaned, but not much – it was clear Harold’s childhood was an unpleasant experience that he’d rather not talk about, he states as much in the book, explaining why he avoids the subject.  In those days, foster care for boys usually meant being farmed out as child labor for all practical purposes.

Harold, it is worth noting, was a redhead (as am/was I) and went through much of life being called “Red,” and, as was the case with me and all of my siblings, often called “Ducky," or a variation thereof.

I know my father lived with a family in Marengo, IL and worked in a bakery.  From the book I’ve learned that Harold and their younger brother Jackie went to live on a farm near Morris, IL.  But, Harold did not get along with the foster family, and ended up working on a farm in Hebron, IL and living in a hotel/boarding house while finishing high school, before joining the Army.  One of the girls, Betty (Elizabeth Jean) apparently was adopted by a family in Aurora, IL – my Uncle Bud (Leo), the only one I actually knew, isn’t mentioned, nor is the other sister.

In addition to the genealogy aspects of this book, it ended up being an interesting read.  Harold was wounded twice.  On the second occasion he was used by his commanding officer as a guinea pig to see if there was a possible path through a minefield outside of Brest, France.  He lost one of his legs as a result of that.  The book covers in great detail the two years of repeat surgeries he went through for his wounds, including the amputation, plastic surgery on his nose, and being fitted for and learning how to walk with an artificial leg.  Next to nothing is mentioned in the book about his post-Army years, though we know that he worked for the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Washington, DC and lived in Maryland. 

Recommendation:  I will share the book with my siblings, finding another copy is probably not possible.  The one I obtained was decommissioned from the National Library of Scotland, and it shows up on the “out of print” list everywhere else.  As it was printed by Minerva Press, a vanity publisher, there probably weren’t many copies to begin with.