Once more, who knew ... perhaps attending private Catholic schools for the last 10 years of my education kept me from being exposed to the history and tenets of the Latter Day Saints, but, I mean, I did take comparative religions -- even if taught by a Jesuit.
Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.
Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.
The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.
Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.
Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A "Vacation" Abroad
Over the past week, I unexpectedly was away from work, out of State, with time on my hands, so headed for Barnes and Noble and other airport book sellers. Two books transported me to South America and Europe, well off the beaten path of our 50 States.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Picked Up a Hitchhiker
It's been over a month since I posted any State review for the Slackers, but after I read The Women, T. C. Boyle sort of hitched a ride along my route, and like Bobbie Magee and Janis Joplin, he lured me into his storyteller world. Since he took me to three States, I am tempted to add them as better alternatives to the current picks, if everyone wants to be a Boyle junkie like me. (Coincidentally, my "face to face" book club read Water Music at my recommendation for June, but since that is about Africa, I won't go that far afield. Except to say, that Boyle's humor, erudition and style has given me my theme for the 2010 version of the Slackers: picaresque novels.)
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
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