The Help

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  Amy Einhorn Books (2009), 451 pages.

Set in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, this novel lays bare the dynamics underlying the lives of white women and the black maids who take care of them and their families.  While the white women of the Junior League hold a bake sale to help “The Poor Starving Children of Africa” the black maids who work for them struggle to feed their own children and pay the electric bill on their meager salaries.  The maids cook the food and change and bathe the white babies, while the white women in the living room make plans to introduce a  bill that “requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help.”

These separate but intertwined lives are narrated by two of the black maids and a young white women named Skeeter who has recently returned from college.  As Skeeter talks to the maids and begins to see the world she has grown up in more clearly, she decides to put the black women’s stories down in writing.  Since she is not supposed to be talking with them, much less visiting their part of town and listening to accounts of life with the white employers, the possibility of discovery has the potential to destroy their lives.

Though at times these characters can become a little too one-dimensional, Stockett’s strength—a plot that makes the book impossible to put down—easily overcomes the few drawbacks.  She also has a great ear for dialogue and whether it is Skeeter, the wealthy Junior Leaguers, or one of the maids speaking, it comes across as absolutely authentic.

EXCERPT:
“You already up, Baby Girl?  Why you didn’t holler for me?”

She laugh, dance a little happy jig waiting on me to get her out.  I give her a good hug.  I reckon she don’t get too many good hugs like this after I go home.  Ever so often, I come to work and find her bawling in her crib.  Miss Leefolt busy on the sewing machine rolling her eyes like it’s a stray cat stuck in the screen door.  See, Miss Leefolt, she dress up nice ever day.  Always got her makeup on, got a carport, double-door Frigidaire with the built-in icebox.  You see her in the Jitney 14 grocery, you never think she go and leave her baby crying in her crib like that.  But the help always knows.

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

Lavinia

Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Mariner Books (2009), 284 pages.

Rome has not yet been founded; it doesn’t even have a name but is referred to at times as the village of Seven Hills, where only a few farmers and shepherds live. To the southwest, on the coast, lives Lavinia, the daughter of a king who rules Latium (a region of ancient Italy).  Le Guin blends this historical setting with a specific piece of the story told in Vergil’s The Aeneid:  the Trojans have left Troy and are now sailing to Latium to fulfill a prophesy that Aeneas must marry Lavinia and lead a terrible war between the Trojans and the people of Latium.

The unique setting had me completely entranced at first: I was telling friends they must read it, I was spending time researching pre-Roman history to see how accurate the descriptions were, and I was carrying it around with me wherever I went. These are usually the signs of an award-winner, but…it all falls apart in the last 75 pages or so. Part of the problem is with plot and pacing, both of which slow down considerably: the war is over, the king is dead, there’s a strong sense that there’s nothing else left to say, nothing else left to happen, but the author clearly intends to bring us all the way up to Lavinia’s death of old age, just because.

The other problem is that the writing actually changes toward the end. What had been quite good writing turns genre-ish, specifically the bad historical-fiction variety in which people’s eyes “flash,” a sex scene or two is thrown in, and people are saying things “wryly” and “drily.” This is a strange phenomenon that seems to be prevalent in genre writing. There must be a word for it, but I don’t know what it is—this meticulous focus on the way each person says a thing. Ideally, a thing that is said should be interesting enough to just be said; if we have to be told it was said “drily” or “wryly,” there’s a problem—the foremost being that in stopping to puzzle over how exactly a person says something “wryly” (does the face pucker up a bit?), I’m pulled out of the story.

I had higher expectations because I know that Le Guin writes quality children’s books and she’s won countless awards—even a National Book Award, as I learned from the back cover of Lavinia. I went online to find out which book had won the award, and found that she has collected over fifty awards. Tellingly, however, they seem to be entirely for genre writing with the exception of her National Book Award, which was for a young adult book (makes sense).

My recommendation is mixed. People who love The Aeneid should certainly read this, as should anybody with a particular interest in ancient Italian history, Roman legends, and/or the Trojans.  I’m glad I read the first half, but I’m also grateful I borrowed instead of bought it. So if, like me, you would love to read about a young girl growing up over two thousand years ago in the wilds of Italy where there are still bear and wolves and the people worship pagan gods, then it will be well worth your time to borrow Lavinia from a library rather than buy it, and just plan to stop reading on page 181.

EXCERPT:
(from the good half)
If my daughter had lived she never could have run safe and free through fields outside our domains or along the hillsides among the grazing herds, as I used to run. When my son was a boy the forests were safer for him than the pagus fields. But when I was a girl I walked the open hillsides and the wilderness paths to Albunea with no companion but Maruna. Sometimes she accompanied me all the way, sometimes she stayed the night with a woodcutter’s family at the edge of the forest while I went alone to the sacred glade. We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear on any path in Latium. Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer’s hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.

EXCERPT:
(from the bad half)
I could not speak, but blushed the way I do, turning red all over. He saw and felt that and kissed me, gently at first, but with arousing passion. We were in the small courtyard of our house, no one about. “Come on, come!” he said, and still red as fire I followed him into our bedroom, where the conversation took a different form.

Reviewed by Donna Long

Bright-Sided

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.  Metropolitan Books (2009), 235 pages.

Ehrenreich is making all kinds of really excellent points in this book. Yes, being told you must face your chemotherapy treatment with optimism and good cheer would be extremely annoying.  And yes, it must be very tiresome to work for a company that makes its employees attend conventions run by manically energetic motivational speakers.  And it is without a doubt truly nauseating to listen to prosperity theology evangelists speak about God wanting them to be rich.

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything Ehrenreich writes about in Bright-Sided, and yet, at the same time, her larger thesis strikes me as completely wrong.  We are not a nation of delusional happy people who believe we can “manifest” whatever we wish, but even if we were, is being negative, disdainful, and sarcastic an improvement?  I can’t help but notice that Ehrenreich has made a career out of sharing with us all that is wrong with the world (she is the author of over fifteen books on misery: war, greed, sickness, poverty, etc.) and in the one exception, a book on joy, she criticizes us for not having any. She also seems to be almost uniformly contemptuous of and patronizing toward cheerful people. Anyone who is happy, according to Ehrenreich, is either a greedy, self-satisfied, wealthy person who cares nothing about the suffering of others, or an ignorant poor person, to be pitied for believing that their situation could improve.

I have enjoyed Ehrenreich’s books in the past (particularly the scathing Nickel and Dimed) as she is a very good writer—clever, smart, and often enjoyably sarcastic—but I am beginning to tire of her relentlessly negative point of view.  I will, however, join her in her fault-finding mission by noting that the cover of Bright-Sided is one of the most unappealing, uninspired, ugly covers I have ever seen.  There is nothing about it that works.  Not only is this shade of yellow migraine-inducing, but it is also too literal, as is the smiley balloon.  It is a disaster, a nightmare, a blight upon my bookshelf. Despite my unhappiness, I will be applying positive thinking to this book (you can thank me later, Ms. Ehrenreich) in hopes of manifesting a new and improved cover when the paperback is designed.

EXCERPT:
Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy and races to train for.  Even the heavy traffic in personal narratives and practical tips that I found so useful bears an implicit acceptance of the disease and the current clumsy barbarous approaches to its treatment: you can get so busy comparing attractive head scarves that you forget to question whether chemotherapy is really going to be effective in your case.

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

The Children’s Blizzard

The Children’s Blizzard, by David Laskin. HarperCollins (2004), 318 pages.

From On the Banks of Plum Creek, by Laura Ingalls Wilder:
“Then I’d better get the wood up before we go to town,” said Pa. “I don’t like the sound of that wind, and they tell me that Minnesota blizzards come up fast and sudden. I heard of some folks that went to town and a blizzard came up so quickly they couldn’t get back. Their children at home burned all the furniture, but they froze stark stiff before the blizzard cleared up enough so the folks could get home.”

Who doesn’t remember the lessons learned in the Little House books—the breathtaking danger of the prairie and the way in which a bright blue sky can darken in a second, engulfing children on their way to or from school? Anybody who loved this series simply must read The Children’s Blizzard. It’s a whole book devoted to one blizzard, which occurred on January 12, 1888, across Minnesota, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Iowa.  This was not one of Laura’s childhood blizzards—she was twenty-one in 1888—but it was a truly epic blizzard that killed several hundred people, most of them children. Within days it had been dubbed “The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard,” because throughout the region all the children headed across the prairie to school that morning without any warm clothes, rejoicing in the unseasonably warm weather that they had awoken to.

The author sets the stage in the first part of the book by introducing the many families and individuals that will soon be affected by the storm. I appreciate very much that he focuses on people for whom there was an abundance of detailed information (from diaries, letters, newspaper articles, etc.) on their daily lives and family histories, even going back a generation or two to their European origins. This gives incredible depth to the personal stories, making the litany of the many different ways in which they died heart-breakingly sad.

It’s not all death, though. There are instructive digressions on geology and science—such as nineteenth-century weather-forecasting technology and the unique meteorological features of this blizzard—and the author also describes the political fallout after the storm as blaming began.  Apparently, journalists throughout the country vigorously argued in the papers for months not just about whose fault it was that the storm wasn’t forecast properly, but also what the final death count was (one paper insisted that the actual toll of almost a thousand was being “covered up”) and whether or not the northern prairie was fit for human habitation.  Many journalists defended Dakota Territory, pointing out that even with its deadly blizzards it was safer than “the fetid cities of the East Coast or the malarial swamps of the South.” Others were accused of making things up in the press to scare away new settlers.  It’s all a fascinating slice of history; readers who can’t bear the descriptions of children freezing to death can skim those parts and still find a great deal here to enjoy.

EXCERPTS:
It’s hard to fathom how children who walked to and from school a half mile or more every day became exhausted to the point of collapse while walking a hundred yards that afternoon. Hard to fathom until you consider the state of their thin cotton clothing, their eyelashes webbed with ice and frozen shut, the ice plugs that formed inside their noses, the ice masks that hung on their faces. This was not a feathery sifting of gossamer powder. It was a frozen sandstorm. Cattle died standing up, died of suffocation before they froze solid….

We’ll never know how many spent that night out on the prairie. It had to be at least several thousand, most of them in the southern and eastern parts of Dakota Territory, in the eastern half of Nebraska, and in southwestern Minnesota. Northern Dakota was largely spared because the storm blew through so early that people remained home and kept their children in. …The catalog of their suffering is terrible. They froze alone or with their parents or perished in frantic, hopeless pursuit of loved ones. They died with the frozen bloody skin torn from their faces, where they had clawed off the mask of ice again and again. Some died within hours of getting lost; some lived through the night and died before first light. They were found standing waist deep in drifts with their hands frozen to barbed-wire fences, clutching at straw piles, buried under overturned wagons, on their backs, facedown on the snow with their arms outstretched as if trying to crawl. Mothers died sitting up with their children around them in fireless houses when the hay or coal or bits of furniture were exhausted and they were too weak or too frightened to go for more….

[Three days after the storm, a farmer walking in his field discovers five frozen bodies. Three of them are Johann Kaufmann’s missing sons.] Night was falling by the time Johann returned home. Anna stood at the door with her three little blond children and stared as her husband carried the three bodies inside. Johann set the rock-hard bodies on the floor next to the stove. Anna looked at her dead sons and began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Her husband and her two little boys turned to her in disbelief but Anna didn’t stop. It would be days before they could get the bodies into coffins. Anna laughed. Emma was still a baby, too young to know what was happening, but Julius and Jonathan were old enough to understand that those frozen blocks next to the stove were the dead bodies of their brothers. For the rest of their lives, the two brothers would never forget the peals of their mother’s agonized laughter.

This review first appeared in November 2004
By Donna Long

Strength in What Remains

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder.  Random House (2009), 277 pages.

Kidder tells the story in Strength in What Remains of Deo, a young man from Burundi who survives the Hutu/Tutsi massacres in 1994 and arrives in New York City with only $200, no knowledge of English, no friends or family, and a psyche so traumatized that he doesn’t always know if he is living in the past or the present.  Though Deo manages, miraculously, to find a job, learn English, and eventually go to medical school, I did not set this book down with the kind of hopefulness and optimism that the title suggests.  The chapters describing the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda are so emotionally overwhelming that I never really recovered from them enough to take any satisfaction in Deo’s accomplishments.

Part of what makes genocide so much more difficult to read about than other sorts of massacres is that it is not random or spontaneous.  It is the planned slaughter of an entire people.  And since this particular genocide was carried about by people living in poverty, the weapons at hand were not guns, but machetes and gasoline.  How people actually pour gasoline on their neighbors and set them on fire, how they chop the heads off of children—children they know, from their own neighborhoods— is something my mind can not absorb.

Though the content of this book is unbearable, both the writing and the way Kidder structures the book are perfect.  In the first half, he tells Deo’s story in the third person, then in the second half switches to first person and writes about his experience of meeting Deo and traveling back to Burundi with him.  He describes the history of the animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi in a way that makes it absolutely clear how such rage could have developed.  (As usual, a colonizing country—in this case Belgium—turned a few difficulties between the two groups into a split that destroyed them but served the Belgian’s needs well.)  Kidder also answers a question I had almost immediately after learning that Deo was taken in by total strangers in New York.  Who are these people who took it upon themselves to rescue a homeless man who didn’t even speak English?  The author’s chapters about these saints (really, they are), Sharon McKenna and Nancy and Charlie Wolf, helped to counteract, at least a tiny bit, the desolation I was left with after reading the sections on the genocide.

It’s hard to recommend a book that is sure to leave the reader in a state of hopelessness and despair—nevertheless Strength in What Remains is one of the best books of 2009.

EXCERPT:
Here Deo describes what he saw upon arriving at the airport in New York City: “Wheeled carts in which infants rode like little princes, their parents pushing them.  And people in suits, so many people in the uniform of preachers and government ministers.  Almost everyone looked happy.  Or at least no one looked alarmed.  And no one looked terrified.  These were people just going about their business, greeting their friends and their families, as if they didn’t know there were places where dogs were trotting around with human heads in their mouths.”

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

Zel

Zel, by Donna Jo Napoli. Puffin Books (1996), 234 pages.

This young adult retelling of the classic fairy tale Rapunzel follows the familiar storyline—a witch, a tower, a rope of hair, impassioned jealousy, a lover—but the tale is expanded and given great depth. It is set in Switzerland in the mid-1500s and reads like first-rate historical fiction, as though it’s an account from our shared history that really did happen, and this version has only been slightly fictionalized.

Alternating chapters are told from three points of view: Zel, her “mother” (and captor), and the love interest. Interestingly, only Mother’s chapters are told in the first person, allowing us insight into her personal history and peculiar motives.

Since there is surely no reason to provide some sort of synopsis, I have instead selected several excerpts that give the flavor of the writing, which is both evocative of centuries-old pastoral life and occasionally surreal.

EXCERPTS:
I ease around a barrel of eels and find myself looking at the translucent eyes of newly dead fish. The fishmonger extols their virtues: The whitefish bring intelligence; the bream ensure healthy livers; the chub give vibrant skin. Our Aare River and Thuner Sea yield in abundance, and I am appropriately respectful. The sound of wood slapping wood jerks me away. An old man has just been locked in the stocks behind me. A small crowd gathers. I listen. The man is called Wilhelm. His crime? Playing cards. The church police are foolish indeed, that they don’t understand how evil comes in more subtle guises than card games.

Zel brought all that I ever hoped for from love. I never intended to name her Rapunzel. I thought of Heidrun, Lore, Annelie. I thought of Brynhild, Gretel, Aurelia—even, in all their irony, Christa and Constance. Yet something within forced the name; something forced me to remember the source of the child. That same thing that forces me to come to town at intervals of no more than six months to touch an iron stone near the well in the marketplace and know its solid coldness.

Once Zel had a colony of lice. Her impeccable searching led to their discovery in the paper covering her boiled eggs. Mother must have set the freshly gathered eggs near the paper before she cooked them, for these lice were of the kind that live on hens. Zel kept the lice rolled up in plum skin. She fed them daily, a drop of blood from her tongue, which she would bite. She invited them onto her head. If they would only have taken up residence in her hair, she could have persuaded Mother to shave her head. But they preferred her tongue blood. She tried denying them blood altogether. They waited patiently. One day she dropped them into her crimson ink. Zel, who had once considered all life to be admired, wiped out the lice colony.

This review first appeared in May 2005
By Donna Long

House of Cards

House of Cards: Love, Faith and Other Social Expressions, by David Ellis Dickerson.  Riverhead Books (2009), 369 pages.

Sadly, I must begin this review with a tirade against the cover art.  There are other things to say, much of them positive, but the cover is so astonishingly bad (especially given the nature of the story inside) I feel I have no other option.  First you must understand that the author of this memoir is writing about his time working for Hallmark.  In the creative department.  Where drawing happens.  Granted, he was hired as a writer, not as an artist, but still—everyone he works with is thinking and talking all day long about design.

Ironically the publisher of House of Cards—also a business in which good design is essential—opted to throw out all of the (presumably) inspired ideas that were offered and go instead with this mish-mash of scribbles. I couldn’t even tell what the picture was supposed to be until I stared at it for a few minutes.  And then when I did understand—a man falling (climbing?) into a card—my reaction was still, “Huh?”  And the font.  Is it supposed to connote cleverness?  Maybe it’s meant to mimic one of the Hallmark lines?  Whatever.  All I see are some really ugly words that are sloppy and unreadable.  It’s not remotely charming or funny and it doesn’t convey anything about the content of the book.  Even the square drawing that is meant to be a cubicle doesn’t make sense since the author never worked in a cubicle and even if he had, I never got the impression it would be in this condition. If we had an award here for Covers That Suck, I would be nominating this one.

This cover is so bad I actually decided to send a note to Riverhead Books imploring them to design something new (and hopefully better) for the paperback version.  I clicked over to their site to get the editor’s address when I discovered, to my dismay, that House of Cards was not an unfortunate misstep by the design staff but apparently a fine example of their whole aesthetic. Needless to say I won’t be sharing my thoughts with them after all. What would be the point?  I don’t have time to re-design all their books.

Let us now proceed to the inside of the book—which I am pleased to say is a huge improvement over the pointless cover.  The author, Dave Dickerson, gets a job at Hallmark in Kansas City, Missouri.  He is 27 years old and he is a Christian—the kind that doesn’t have sex before marriage.  Which means that even though he has a girlfriend he has been seeing for six years and they are engaged, he is a virgin. Although Kansas City is a very conservative town, his friends at Hallmark think he’s crazy and keep telling him, “Jesus Christ, Dave. Fuck her already.”

Dickerson can be funny—not remotely in the same league as David Sedaris which the back cover compares him too—but still very entertaining.  He also has the ability to look at himself with some real psychological insight which makes his sense of humor much more interesting than it would be were he just trying to make us laugh.  The relationship between Dickerson and his girlfriend is one of the most interesting sub-plots in the book (along with his metamorphosis from Christian to atheist) but the main story revolves around life at Hallmark and the daily struggle to come up with a new card. The absurdity of attempting to be creative in a corporate culture that forbids anything “different” makes this memoir a must-read for anyone trying to make a living as an artist.

EXCERPT:
“Edith, I’ve got one word for you: bunnies,” I said proudly. “It looks like they’re absolutely killing with images of bunny rabbits.”
“In our competition?” said McNicely.  She was in the wings, at her computer, and looked distracted. “Maybe they’re trying.  But that’s not what does well.”
I froze in mid heel-click.  She hadn’t even looked at my charts.
“What do you mean  Bunnies don’t do well?”
“Unless you’re doing Easter, no.  You must be looking at the wrong things.” She wheeled in her chair to face me and counted off on her fingers. “Bears and chipmunks are always number one.  Then mice, then bunnies, and then squirrels.  Then pandas.  Every so often our artists give us skunks, just to be different, I guess.  I wish I could just tell them, ‘Guys, skunks aren’t cute!’ They just aren’t.  Even pandas are a risk, I think because they’re black and white.”
I tried a bad joke. “Why? Are our customers against miscegenation?”
She shrugged off my comment gently, the way you would ignore a friend who’d just farted. “Pandas are two colors, and the most popular animals are one.  And with pandas, the colors are in odd places, like black around the eyes. They’re more confusing to look at.”
“But bunnies and squirrels are one color.  They should be popular.”
“Bunnies have long ears, and squirrels have long tails.  Depending on the artist, it can throw off the proportions.  That’s why chipmunks work.  They’re like squirrels with no tail.”
But chipmunks have stripes, I wanted to say, but I knew she’d have another answer, and I knew it would be something I’d never thought about and probably didn’t understand.  Christ.  I felt completely overwhelmed again.  So I made another joke.
“What about snakes?”
She smiled politely. “We don’t do snakes,” she said. “That would be terrible.”

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

The Captured

The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, by Scott Zesch. St. Martin’s Press (2004), 382 pages.

This is a book about child abductions, perpetrated by the Native Americans against the settlers, in a very specific place and time: Texas hill country in the 1860s-1870s. With child abductions so prevalent in the news this month (Elizabeth Smart facing her abductor in court for the first time; Jaycee Dugard sitting for her first interview and photos), this is the ideal moment to read The Captured.  This book actually sat on my waiting-to-be-read shelf for over two years, for no particular reason. I’m glad I remembered it. Now is the time to read it, because learning about these nineteenth-century children in light of the Smart and Dugard cases is incredibly thought-provoking.

The title is misleading, as it gives the impression that the book is about just one abduction. True Stories would have been better than A True Story, because nine cases are explored in depth, including two pairs of siblings. The shortest of these abductions was five months, the longest twelve years—unless you count the guy who refused to go back to his family and spent the rest of his life with the Indians, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

I had previously assumed that the taking of children during Indian raids was either a retaliation against the whites for crimes the whites had committed, and/or a strategy meant to frighten and drive off the settlers. Actually, the Native Americans in this region—Comanches,  Kiowas, Kickapoos, Apaches, and Quahadas—all routinely abducted children simply as a customary aspect of their culture. Before Europeans arrived they abducted from enemy tribes; afterwards they abducted immigrants, whether Mexican, German, or American, simply because they were there. The biggest surprise in the book is this: the stolen children were generally not harmed but were adopted into the tribe and raised by a loving adoptive “mother,” usually one who had been unable to bear her own children and who protected them and taught them. Stealing children was simply a way to increase the size of the tribe, because birth rates were fairly low and young warriors were greatly needed.

Because the abductees were treated well and given the freedom to ride through the country all day on their horses, hunting and playing, the author makes the case that these children preferred their new life with the Indians.  All nine were children of German immigrants and came from a culture in which extremely hard work around the farm was expected of them from sunrise until sunset, with no opportunity for school or play. Of course they would rather ride free all day in a completely unstructured manner and socialize with friends, the author proposes. He also explains that the children must have been grateful for the love and instruction the Natives provided—while the German families had no spare time to spend with their children, the Indians “spent much time training them, making them feel significant in tribal society…. Banc Babb’s Comanche mother taught her to swim, took her to religious ceremonies, and instructed her in tribal lore. Perhaps the captives, in turn, felt a need to prove that they were worthy of their Indian parents’ investment in them.” This is a compelling point of view, but doesn’t take into account Stockholm syndrome as a result of the horror of seeing one’s family murdered during the raid, and being thrust into a radically different culture that doesn’t even speak the same language. Each of the children came to identify very strongly with their Native families, defending them even in their old age, fifty years after being reunited with their relatives. And very few of the children wanted to go back home after being found. Several refused outright but were forced home; one boy of eighteen subsequently ran back to the Comanches and stayed with them until his death 64 years later.  To what extent did Stockholm syndrome play into all of this? The book’s biggest flaw is that the author doesn’t explore this in any depth—in fact he more or less poo-poos the whole idea: exactly two paragraphs in the 382-page book are devoted to the topic, with the conclusion that the syndrome simply “doesn’t explain” the children’s behavior.

The Captured is another must-read for American-history lovers, or anybody interested in Native American-European relations, with the caveat that the lack of research into Stockholm syndrome is rather strange and impedes a fuller understanding of these children’s lives.

EXCERPT:
The temperature had dropped sharply after sundown, but eight-year-old Minnie Caudle was too much in shock to notice the numbness in her hands and face. The Indians who had taken her moved fast and spoke little. Minnie was tied behind one of the women in the raiding party, a fat Comanche who was to become her adoptive mother. The woman drew a blanket around her so that she didn’t suffer terribly from exposure. The Indians and their seven captives hadn’t gone far when Samantha Johnson’s infant daughter, Fielty, started to cry. Everyone tensed. The noise would give away their location if a search party was following them. The man who was carrying Fielty choked her, trying to make her stop. Samantha was riding behind him on the same horse. In a panic, she tried to take her baby away from him. He got so angry at both of them that he grabbed the infant by the ankles and dashed out her brains against a tree. Minnie Caudle saw it happen. The murdered infant was her niece, her half sister’s child.

The two older children, Minnie and Temple, realized that they mustn’t cry, not even when they saw worse sights the second day. Shortly after they left camp the next morning, the Indians decided that they didn’t want to risk traveling with a wailing infant. One of them grabbed Rebecca Johnson’s three-year-old daughter, Nancy Elizabeth, and slit her throat. They held up her body by the feet as blood flowed out, letting her head dangle right in front of Rebecca. The child’s mother screamed and fainted. The Indians laughed at the spectacle. Then they took off again. Around noon they stopped. The raiders held a conference. The five remaining captives couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they knew the Indians were debating something. Finally, the men grabbed the two Johnson women. Before Minnie could see any more, her Comanche mother threw a blanket over her head.

Reviewed by Donna Long

How to Raise the Perfect Dog

How to Raise the Perfect Dog:  Through Puppyhood and Beyond, by Cesar Millan.  Harmony Books (2009), 303 pages.

This is not a book that will teach you how to train a puppy.  There are no detailed instructions for housebreaking, leash walking, or any of the other many challenges the owner of a puppy will face.  It does, however, have a great deal of useful information on the stages a dog will go through from puppyhood to adolescence  (eight weeks to eight months) and describes well how to use one’s energy and leadership with a new puppy to create a well-balanced dog.

For those familiar with any of Millan’s other four books, a great deal of How to Raise the Perfect Dog will be redundant.  The application of “rules, discipline, and boundaries” to puppies looks much the same as it does when Millan is dealing with adult dogs who already have problems.  Nevertheless, if you are a fan of Millan’s approach, (particularly one who is planning on adding a puppy to the household), this book is an excellent reminder of how to bring calm, assertive energy to your relationship with your dog.

EXCERPT:
As White House staffers held back the dozens of press corps photographers wildly snapping away, the curly-haired, midnight black Bo—already a large dog at six months of age—proceeded to lope about the South Lawn on his white, bootlike paws, pulling Malia behind him.  I was watching the live feed of Bo’s first official appearance from my Burbank offices, talking via satellite to Wolf Blitzer in CNN’s Situation Room. “Uh-oh,” I blurted out, forgetting I was on mic. “They’re gonna need a lot of help.”  I’m not sure Wolf understood what I was trying to express.  While much of America was seeing simply a happy, playful, picture-perfect puppy, by virtue of what I do for a living I was seeing something else. Bo’s first impression of the Obama family was as an overexcited pack of somewhat disorganized followers.

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

People of the Book

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks. Penguin Books (2008), 386 pages.

Geraldine Brooks is an exceptional writer of nonfiction (Nine Parts of Desire was shortlisted for a Gustine in 2008) and historical fiction (Year of Wonders, set during England’s 1666 plague, is one of the best plague novels ever written), but apparently she cannot write modern fiction. This fact is made very clear in People of the Book, a novel in which the chapters alternate between historical and modern fiction.

The historical chapters tell the story of a 500-year-old book called the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book with extraordinary illuminated illustrations. This book is real, and is currently on display in Sarajevo. Little is known about it except for a few dates and places where it appears in the historical record: it was created in Spain sometime in the mid-1400s, changed hands in 1492, was saved from being burned in the Spanish Inquisition in 1609, showed up in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1800s and was sent to Vienna for expert assessment in 1894, and was mysteriously saved from the Germans in 1941. Brooks uses this spare information as starting points for five chapters in which she brilliantly brings to life casts of characters for five specific times and places: Seville in 1480, Tarragona in 1492, Venice in 1609, Vienna in 1894, and Sarajevo in 1940. Each setting is described vividly, and each of the people who owned the book (or who somehow had a hand in the book’s fate) is fully realized, their stories absorbing and gripping.

And then there are the other, modern, chapters, all centered on a dreadful character called Hanna, a rare-book expert who has been hired to research the Haggadah. These chapters read like chick-lit. Hanna is a young, clever, independent, single woman (with such an exciting job! At such a young age!) who would like to fall in love but won’t admit it to herself, who doesn’t get along with her mother, and who narrates these chapters with a breezy, self-centered, “I’m so cool” attitude. The affair she will have with the museum curator in Sarajevo is so obvious it’s truly painful. But then they have a terrible fight…oh no! Will she get the guy in the end, or not? I didn’t care. This is not literary fiction.

People of the Book is definitely worth reading for the five historical chapters. Fortunately, they are clearly marked (with the places and dates outlined above), so ignoring the modern chapters is quite easy.

EXCERPT:
(From “Sarajevo, 1940”)
Lola loved listening to Mordechai when he talked about all the practical things a pioneer had to know, like how to treat a scorpion bite or stanch a bad cut; how to site a sanitary latrine or improvise a shelter. Lola knew she would never leave home to pioneer in Palestine, but she liked to think about the kind of adventurous life that might demand such skills. And she liked to think about Mordechai. The way he spoke reminded her of the old Ladino songs her grandfather had sung to her when she was a little girl. He had a seed stand at the open-air market, and Lola’s mother would sometimes leave her there with him while she worked. Grandfather was full of tales of knights and hidalgos, and poems from a magic place called Sepharad, where he said their ancestors had lived long ago.

(From “Tarragona, 1492”)
The youth had claimed a small patch of ground at the edge of the market, hemmed in by the city wall. It was a damp, windy spot at this time of year; a poor place to attract customers, which was why the local merchants left it for the itinerant peddlers or the ragtag of war-fleeing Andalusians who drifted through the city. The wars in the south had set so many adrift. By the time they reached this far, what little they’d had of value was already sold. Most of the refugees who found places on the market’s edges were attempting to sell worthless things: threadbare cales and surcoats or a few worn-out household goods. But the youth had a piece of leather unrolled in front of him, and on it, bright and arresting, was a collection of small painted parchments. Ben Shoushan stopped and fought his way through the press to get a better look. He squatted, pressing his fingers into the chill mud for balance. It was as he thought; and the pictures were dazzling. Ben Shoushan had seen illuminations in the Christians’ prayer books, but never anything like this.

(From “Hanna, 1996″)
I had a wicked hangover, which is just what you don’t want on a seven-hour plane trip. At least I was in the pointy end again, courtesy of the bezillionare. I took the piece of seared salmon the flight attendant offered me, thinking of all the poor sods in the back struggling through their cardboard chicken and rubber pasta. But even in first class, airline food is crap.

Reviewed by Donna Long

The Snakehead

The Snakehead:  An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, by Patrick Radden Keefe.  Doubleday (2009), 414 pages.

In June of 1993, in the middle of the night, a ship ran aground a few hundred yards off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York.  Two Park Police officers doing a routine patrol saw the ship, and moments later, heard the screams of the passengers who were throwing themselves overboard.

“The officers charged into the water.  It was cold—53 degrees—and the surf was violent, big swells breaking all around them and threatening to engulf the people in the distance…. Then the officers turned around and dragged the shipwrecked strangers back to shore.  There the four collapsed, panting, on the sand. They were Asian men, the officers saw, diminutive and cadaverously thin.  When Somma spoke to them, they didn’t appear to understand.  They just looked up, with terror in their eyes, and pointed in the direction of the ship.

So begins The Snakehead, a story (and it is indeed an epic one) that starts with a ship carrying a cargo of 290 Chinese immigrants and ends with the trial of Sister Ping—one of the the biggest, most successful human smugglers in New York’s Chinatown—who helped bring the ship to the shores of the United States.  Between these two events that bookend The Snakehead, Keefe juggles a multitude of other characters and storylines that literally spans the globe.

Unlike human trafficking, smuggling is done at the request of the person wanting to relocate.  A Chinese would-be immigrant would make a down payment on the $30,000 fee (this was the cost in the 90’s.  Currently it is more like $80,000) to the smuggler (aka “the snakehead) who would then transport this person through various countries into the United States.  At this point the immigrant would collect the remainder of the fee from relatives in New York, pay the snakehead, and then work for the next several years to pay off the relatives.

As the snakehead business became more and more lucrative, gangs got involved, which led to immigration authorities cracking down on smuggling, and then to immigrants finding themselves trapped for months at a time in “safe houses” waiting for transportation into the United States. The underground operations used to smuggle Chinese into the United States becomes so convoluted in The Snakehead that at times it really was impossible for me to follow.  This is not necessarily the fault of the author—I’m not sure anyone could really describe all of this manuevering solely through text.  Which is why the absence of maps that would have made things so much more clear, was a serious miscalculation.

I am baffled by the decision to include a tiny diagram depicting a 12-block area of Chinatown in New York, but not a single map of any of the other places which are central to the story.  I had to keep putting the book down to google maps —China, Fujian Province (where the vast majority of the immigrants came from), the straight between Fujian Province and Taiwan, a larger map of New York, including the area where the Golden Venture ran aground, and the location of the York County Prison in Pennsylvania (where many of the immigrants were held.)  And even with all of this online assistance, I was still on my own when it came to trying to visualize the hundreds of smuggling routes and  locations of safe houses.

I also feel compelled to say a few words about the cover art.  First of all, the image of a snake is completely unnecessary since we already have the word “snake” in the title.  There is really no need to beat the reader over the head with a second snake reference.  Secondly the photograph of what I guess is supposed to be New York inside of the snake, is worse than useless—it is completely misleading.  It suggests: thriller, action, mystery, police procedural—certainly not the serious, scholarly, nonfiction work that it actually is. In addition, the cover is derivative, uninspired, and boring.  Which is possibly even worse than being misleading.  I hate this cover.  I suggest tearing it off, using color crayons to create your own cover on a piece of cardboard, and taping that onto the book.  It can’t be any worse than what the publishers have done.

So.  Having conveyed my map and cover complaints at length, I do want to make it clear that The Snakehead is a fascinating book and absolutely worth reading.  I can’t imagine any lover of general nonfiction being disappointed (once the cover has been properly disposed of).

Note: The Chinese from the Golden Venture who were imprisoned in Pennsylvania for several years while awaiting immigration hearings started to be visited by members of a local church.  The church members brought magazines for the prisoners who began folding the pages and other scraps of paper into designs.  The objects the prisoners created were so remarkable that people in the community asked to buy them, and as word spread, they began to be auctioned off for thousands of dollars. I found a collection of these figures online (unfortunately the link has since vanished) and was so charmed and amazed by them, I felt compelled to include one here.  This is called “horsedragon.”

EXCERPT:
One senior immigration official said in the early nineties that ‘at any given time, thirty thousand Chinese are stashed away in safe houses around the world, waiting for entry to the United States.  Sources within China’s own Public Security Bureau put that number at half a million…

Immigration officials marveled at the tenacity and adaptability of the Fujianese; Mexican border-crossers, the traditional targets of the INS and the Border Patrol, looked hopelessly amateur by comparison.  The Fujianese flew into JFK, into Toronto, into Vancouver, San Diego, San Francisco.  When they couldn’t fly directly to North America, they obtained visas, and often passports, from corrupt Central American way stations where the snakeheads had developed a stronghold—Belize, Guatemala, Panama—and flew there, then crossed the border in Texas, Arizona, or California.  One Hong Kong triad, the Sun Yee On, was said to have arranged an operation in which its members chartered jets and sent whole planeloads of illegal Chinese to Belize, from which they could continue overland through Mexico…. INS agents often heard stories about Chinese migrants crossing the border from Mexico, but their apprehension rate of Chinese was always very low compared to that of the Mexicans they stopped every day.  One reason for this, it emerged, was that snakeheads at the border were paying poor Mexicans to run across en masse as a diversionary tactic to tie up the migras while the Fujianese migrants strolled across unnoticed.

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

Another Cover Art Disappointment

Who doesn’t love a vintage photograph from the author’s childhood on the cover of her memoir? When the image is just right, these covers are among the best. But if a photo that speaks directly to the story does not exist, why force an inappropriate one upon the book? Better to have a completely different sort of cover than to make the book (and reader) suffer from the publisher’s conviction that only a childhood photo will do.

For example, in the hardcover copy of Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood, a cow is shown standing on a bed, which is mildly intriguing, until we find out that the cow is not in this story at all. There is one sentence in which the grandfather references the cow, now long gone (presumably before the author was born), and Granny smiles at the memory. That’s it.  Placing this nonevent on the cover is misleading to the reader and, more importantly, creates an incongruity between the cover and interior that is disorienting.

The paperback version is no better. We see a laughing little girl holding a creature (or a toy?) that is aggravatingly impossible to identify until we get to Chapter 7, where we learn that it’s a chameleon—and we find out that the girl is not the author. I felt deceived by this. For seven chapters I looked at the cover and thought this was the girl telling the story.  Because why else would she be prominently featured on the cover? After all, it’s not an attention-grabbing picture in any way, nor does it say “Africa.” It’s just an ordinary snapshot that could have been taken anywhere.

Click here for a complete review of Twenty Chickens for a Saddle.

By Donna Long

A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddhism

A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddism: Notes from a Practitioner’s Journey, by Bruce Newman.  Snow Lion Publications (2004), 212 pages.

This is the must-have manual for any Westerner trying to understand the Vajrayana path.  In the introduction, Newman says he wanted to call this book “Tantra for Dummies” because he hoped to write that kind of straightforward guide that “leads you through everything you have to do, step by step.  It doesn’t assume you know anything and it leaves nothing out.”  He has definitely succeeded in creating that kind of book.

If you have struggled and failed to make your way through Reginald Ray’s enormous two-volume work on Tibetan Buddhism (Indestructible Truth and Secret of the Vajra World—which, despite its dense, sometimes incomprehensible text, remains the unrivaled source for those compelled to know every detail), Newman’s book is the antidote.  He summarizes the basic ideas, goes into detail where necessary, gives a lot of “insider” information beginning practitioners don’t usually run across, and makes a compelling case for why this most complicated of Buddhist practices is worth the effort.  The fact that he does all of this in an eminently manageable 212 pages makes the book something of a miracle.  I can’t recommend A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddhism highly enough.

Reviewed by Cindy Blackett

To Siberia

To Siberia, by Per Petterson. Picador (2009), 246 pages. (Originally published in Norway in 1996.)

The unnamed narrator in this book dreams of moving to Siberia when she grows up. She has read all about it, has studied photographs of it, and at the age of nine knows—and practices pronouncing—the names of all the cities she will pass through on the TransSiberian railway.  In her obsession with the cold and how best to survive it she reminds me very much of the little-girl narrator of Shadow Baby, who also fantasizes endlessly about survival in a harsh, snowy environment.  Strangely, however, the girl in Petterson’s novel is already living in a viciously cold landscape—she and her older brother (who more sensibly is fixated on moving to Morocco when he grows up) live in northernmost rural Denmark on the eve of World War II.  Their village is tiny, their parents have no money, and danger from drowning, freezing, or falling through the ice is ever-present. But even while describing her cold and difficult life, her thoughts always return to Siberia and its obviously superior qualities:

Here everything is brickwork and cement. The water seeps in through
the cracks and spreads in damp flowers through the wallpaper so it
peels off and the kitchen floor is icy to the feet even in summer with the
sun shining in. There is no glow in bricks. In Siberia the houses are
built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer,
and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never
fades.  …They have different clothes in Siberia that I can learn to wear
instead of now when I have only my thin coat against the wind that
comes in from the sea between Denmark and Sweden and blows straight
through everything. They have caps made of wolfskin and big jackets and
fur-lined boots, and lots of the people who live there look like Eskimos. I
might pass as one of them if I cut my hair short. And besides I shall sit in
the train and look out of the window and talk to people, and they will tell
me what their lives are like and what their thoughts are and ask me why I
have come all the long way from Denmark. Then I will answer them:  “I
have read about you in a book.” And then we’ll drink hot tea from the
samovar and be quiet together just looking.

Clearly, Petterson has nailed the voice of an authentic, likeable, intelligent, and funny little girl. Later (about halfway through the book), when we jump to World War II and our narrator is now fourteen, the author successfully navigates this change; his dialogue and descriptions of the girl and her friend, as they sit on the pier watching German soldiers swim, are true to life and entertaining: “‘But he is good-looking. He’s bound to have a young wife in Germany. She sits at home listening to Sara Leander on the radio and knitting warm socks with a blond baby inside her. And now he’s going up to those ferocious Norwegians, and maybe the socks won’t get there in time. Poor thing.’” The second and final jump occurs in the last third of the book, when she is twenty-two. Again, she is just as she should be: significantly more complex, peculiar—even aggravating—in a way that makes sense if you knew her as a young girl, and with her unique humor intact but more subtle.

Perfectly capturing the multi-faceted emotions of a girl at three different ages would be problematic for many male writers, but Petterson succeeds, which is a testament to his writing talent and clear understanding of female relationships. You would think that a male writer talented enough to depict this girl so convincingly would succeed with the male point of view as well. All the more strange, then, that to me it’s the boy (the narrator’s brother) who doesn’t really ring true. Throughout the book I had trouble seeing him as a real person. He strikes me as merely a caricature of a young, idealistic, charismatic hero obviously doomed in some way.

The mother was also a problematic character, though I liked her very much. At issue here is the believability of the relationship between her and her two children.  Both parents are odd and extremely aloof, but the children nonetheless struggle mightily to forge some sort of relationship with their dad (understandable) while seemingly not caring about their mother one whit (hard to believe).  She is a religious zealot and sings annoying hymns at the piano that go on for much too long, but those annoying traits are not sufficient to explain the children’s complete disdain (actually, near hatred) for her.

These problems did not, in the end, hinder my enjoyment of the book. Petterson’s descriptions of the setting are so vivid I really feel as though I just visited Denmark in the 1930s and ’40s. And his way with words is so poetic I often found myself rereading sentences.

EXCERPT:
Lucifer just kept on trotting through the town along Danmarksgate, across the church square, past the Loveapotek and past our road where I stood on the corner in my coat, waiting and stamping my feet to keep warm. I had been waiting a good while and finally he came, sitting big and stiff in the trap behind the horse on his way to the Aftenstjernen to get drunk. That was the first place he stopped at, with a thick rubber band round his wallet. I had seen that wallet. The rubber band was red, and when he had taken some money out and was folding the wallet up again, he held the rubber band between thumb and fingers and slapped it back with a snap that was meant to be heard.

Lucifer’s hooves clattered on the cobblestones, but there was no need to hide, Grandfather never looked to the side, and I was freezing and pushed my hands up the sleeves of my coat like a muff, and if he had seen me he would not have recognized me, because he didn’t really see anything.

Reviewed by Donna Long

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.  Doubleday (2002), 240 pages.

This book is narrated by an autistic boy who discovers his neighbor’s dog has been murdered.  As he sets out to find the the killer, he uncovers the painful truth behind the loss of his mother.  Because he is autistic, however, he is unable to feel the emotions of the situation he is describing to us.  This incongruence between what the narrator describes and what the reader understands is actually happening creates a story that is simultaneously heartbreaking and very funny.  Haddon’s writing is flawless, the plot is full of unexpected turns, and the dialogue is dead-on.

In addition, the cover art is a perfect example of what a cover should be. It expresses the originality of the story, the point of view of the narrator, something of the plot itself, and is a delight to simply sit and look at. In a world of banal, derivative, and sometimes completely misleading cover art (the horribly titled Learning Joy from Dogs without Collars, for example, has a photo of a girl and her dog on the cover but not a single dog within its pages), it is important that good design be recognized. Congratulatons to Maria Carella for her fine work on the cover.

EXCERPT:
It was 7 minutes after midnight.  The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house.  It’s eyes were closed.  It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream.  But the dog was not running or asleep.  The dog was dead.  There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.   The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over.  I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

This review first appeared in August 2003
By Cindy Blackett