The stacks: 818

I had a true "Dewey Decimalist" moment while at the public library the other day.  I found myself wandering the stacks, and stumbled upon the 818 section.  Here, I found lots of old looking somewhat encrusted books, but with very fabulous titles such as Onions in the Stew, My Sister Eileen, Oranges, and, Life Among the Savages.  I wasn't sure what the common thread was (memoirs?  light reportage?), so when I went home I found out that 818 refers to the quite general "American miscellaneous writings in English."  It is very rare for me to pluck books off the shelf with reckless abandon, having no idea what these titles might contain, but I quickly perused them and they all looked like gems.  In just a few hours, I polished off My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney.  Come to find out, McKenney had a fascinating life.  Raised in Ohio and a precocious student (French, debate team, etc.), she was a tomboy with a sardonic wit to boot.  She studied journalism in college and wrote for the student newspaper, the Ohio State Lantern.  She survived one suicide attempt, and eventually moved to a moldy apartment in Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen.  Their real-life experiences were featured in a series of essays published in The New Yorker.  Anthologized in My Sister Eileen, they are highly readable and entertaining, with essay titles such as "No Tears, No Good," "A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends," and "Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus."  Here are a few lines from "The Prince:"

He was handsome enough, if you like that dark, beady type.  Personally, one Georgian prince was enough for me....even Eileen, the belle of the Midwest, hadn't been able to gather in, during her heart-smashing career, so much as a Belgian count.  

So, having told one whopper, I went on, as is my unhappy custom, and told several more.  

An Inspiration: Diana Nyad

I've been telling everyone I know to read long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad's memoir Find a Way, which recounts her childhood and family relationships, her travels and interests, as well as her many attempts, and finally her success, in swimming from Cuba to Key West.  It's the best kind of memoir - intimate, vulnerable, inspiring, with moments of triumph.  I was rooting for Nyad from the very first page.  It's also a very well written book (Nyad studied for a PhD in comparative literature). 

I found all of the details and challenges of her swims to be totally fascinating - how she ultimately was able to stave off delirium, sharks, jellyfish, asthma, pain, currents, weather, and other seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve her dream on her fifth attempt at the age of 64. 

Her absolute commitment to achieving her lifelong dream despite many setbacks, and her overcoming the circumstances of her childhood and adolescence serve as an inspiration and pushes the limits of what we think we may be capable of, and for that I'm grateful for having read this fascinating book. 

NYC: Gangsters in the Guilded Age

If you are looking for a fast-paced, intelligent caper, look no further than Charles Belfoure's House of Thieves, which captures 1886 New York City high society as well as its underworld.  Family secrets, deceptions, crime, glamour, gangsters, heists - it's all contained in this very entertaining novel, centered around John Cross, a successful architect, and his son who finds himself in over his head with gambling debt.  Part historical fiction, literary thriller, and family character study, this is a book you will stay up late at night to finish! 

Mankiller: A Chief and Her People

I highly recommend Mankiller:  A Chief and Her People, written by Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, a fascinating autobiography of Mankiller's life interwoven with her engaging telling of the history of the Cherokee people.  Mankiller spent her early childhood in Oklahoma before her family moved to San Francisco as part of the Bureau of Indian Affair's relocation plan.  Mankiller became an activist in the 1960s in San Francisco, got very involved in working to support the Native American community, was part of the Alcatraz Island occupation, and eventually went on to work for the Cherokee Nation, and made history by becoming the first female leader of a major Native American tribe (the Cherokee tribe is the second largest tribe in the U.S., after the Navajo tribe).   She was a champion of education, gender equality and creating economic opportunities for women, indigenous solutions, health access, job creation, and worked tirelessly for the rights of the Cherokee people as well as other indigenous groups.  She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1998.  This was a very interesting, well written book, by and about an inspiring leader!

Old Timey Greatness from Stegner

I'm attempting to read all of Wallace Stegner in order of publication, though I had to give up on Fire and Ice (not my cup of tea).  But, I really enjoyed On a Darkling Plain, published in 1940, which is one of Stegner's early and lesser known works.  It tells the story of a young man injured during WWI, who, upon his return, decides he wants to live out all by his lonesome on the endless Saskatchewan prairie.  While he hopes to maintain little contact with society, surviving out alone on the plains necessitates him working in cooperation with his neighbors in times of harvest, illness, and winter preparation.  It's a fascinating look at a young man's psyche, and an old fashioned take on living "off the grid." It also has some old timey passages and beautiful descriptions that I greatly enjoyed, as follows:

Interesting-looking chap, pleasant but reserved,  all of him gathered up and held in, none of him spilling over in the garrulous small talk of lonely homesteaders come to town. 

He felt it himself all about him:  the good earth, old and tired and resting, veined with rivers almost too tired to flow; nature restful and healing as sleep in the sun to an old man, quiet as afternoons in an empty house.  That was the best of it:  the quiet, the aloneness.

You could probably feel a man as a person in this country, not as a mote in a dust storm, a figure in a multiple sum, a uniform in the marching ranks. 

His whole life was slowed to a timeless, vegetative placidity...with hours to hunt a thought down and exhaust it. 

In the delicious cool of the water he felt the hot pump of his heart ease up.  He ducked his head under, came up to throw back his hair in a water-slick pompadour. 

The harsh and beautiful brotherhood of death would drip away, and the war which settled no problem of nations would not even have settled the minds of the men who fought it. 

There was a tightening in the earth, a drawing in, a sense of little time remaining and much to be done.

It was a good feeling to feel a shoulder next to you when the bolt hit close. 

There was something about Vickers that calmed you down.  You felt the strength in him like a tempered wire, and it strung up your own slack and trebling nerves in sympathy. 

The Hidden Wound

I picked up The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry, and quite simply could not put it down.  Berry writes about racism from his own personal experiences growing up in Kentucky.  The work is lyrical, bold, and self-reflective, and I believe it would make a very interesting read in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a stunning work.  Some of the passages that I found the most thought provoking are as follows:

There is a peculiar tension in the casualness of this hereditary knowledge of hereditary evil; once you begin to awaken the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and the events of your own life. 

I believe she had great intelligence, which had been forced to grow and form itself on the strange struggling wildly heterogeneous bits of information that sifted down to her through various leaks in the stratification of white society.

The crisis of racial awareness - the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak. 

She was always showing you something:  a plant, a bloom, a tomato, an egg, an herb, a sprig of spring greens.  Suddenly you saw it as she saw it - and it entered shadowless into you mind.  I still keep the deepest sense of delight in the memory of the world's good tings held out to me in her black crooked floriferous hands. 

Whites fear what they feel, secretly or otherwise, to be the righteousness of the anger of the blacks;  as the oppressors feel, secretly or otherwise, morally inferior to those they have oppressed.  

...real healings and renewals in human life occur in individual lives, not in the process of adjusting or changing their abstractions or their institutions.  

In America...getting the job done is good.  Pondering as to how the job should be done, or whether or not it should be done, is apt to be regarded as a waste of time. 

We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything - of ourselves, of each other, and of our country.  We did not enslave African blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving them.  They were economically valuable and militarily weak....We decided that blacks were inferior in order to persuade ourselves that it was all right to enslave them.