Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading this book was like sitting on the porch with my favorite elderly aunt, and asking her to tell me her life story. There were no dramas, no excitement to speak of – just Hannah Coulter’s life, “This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed…. This is my story, my giving of thanks.” Born in Kentucky in 1922, Hannah leaves her home and her beloved grandmam to work as a secretary in a nearby town. She meet marries Virgil at the height of WWII and soon loses him to the war. Some time later, she marries Nathan Coulter, a hard working WWII vet and farmer who shelters her and loves her in a quiet way. She tells of her 3 children who grow up and leave home, of the heartbreaks and proud moments, of growing up and growing apart; of becoming empty nesters and enjoying their time together. Of old age.

I don’t think I would recommend this for the under 40 crowd. It moves very slowly and the themes would be hard to recognize unless you’ve lost a kid or two to college or a big job in the city. But for the older crowd, Berry is lyrical and thought provoking and puts on paper what has been rattling around in your head for ages, only hard to express.

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Two stars.  A million stars for Corrie and her family – that absolutely goes without saying.  But as for the book itself?  That’s the best I can do on a book that came highly recommended and that I read with relish as I had just been to Amsterdam and surrounding areas, visited the Museum of the Resistance and the old Jewish Synagogue referred to in the book.  So why two stars?

I just didn’t believe a lot of what I read. Here’s what I do believe.  I think Corrie, her sister Betsy, her father and other family members were courageous, passionate, religious, pro-active and bold.  They did what many in Holland did, but what many chose not to do.  They put their lives on the line to help with a very unpopular cause.  They risked their necks to hide jews, feed them, comfort them and resist the authority of their German invaders.  In that I find them commendable.  The father figure was an admirable man, a man of principle who lived truly an exemplary life and imparted his teachings to not only his family, but all who surrounded him.  A man of peace, but of strong determination.  A man of immensely strong faith which he passed along to his children.  So far, so good.

So what’s my squabble?  The book was written a full 25 years after the facts, and I think it shows.  Corrie was in her late 70’s when the book was written, and it was written by two people who weren’t there.  The narrative at times becomes too convenient, too sugar coated.  There were no fights amongst the throngs of people living in the beje.  I think the old saying that “time heals everything” clearly applies to this book, as  it seems to be a bit whitewashed in the veil of faith in Jesus to solve all, in prayers that constantly come through and in the miracle of the never ending vitamins.  Call me a sceptic, but I found the constant references to Jesus annoying.  I most certainly think we all believe in God when in the trenches, but I don’t believe in the Santa Claus God who gave to Corrie, but withheld from others who were praying just as hard.  It came across as preachy and childish all these years later. So many people were hurt, humiliated, beaten, and brutally murdered — and I am sure just about each and every one of them prayed to their Jesus as well.

To end on a positive note — the faith that this family had, the true faith in doing the right thing — is admirable; when Corrie wrote “released” in her jail cell to signify the death of (blank so as not to print a spoiler), she showed a deep and profound faith in that death is not the end, only a fresh start in a better place.  Her fortitude and strength were truly remarkable.

The mere fact that this book will bring awareness to the need of the Kenyan people for education and books gives it my vote of appreciation.   The storyline takes a 30 something year old woman, Fi, away from her Brooklyn home to seek a more meaningful life as a wandering librarian in some of the remote areas of Kenya. She services groups of semi-nomadic people who are mostly illiterate and still clinging to a way of life that they know and treasure, but which is fast disappearing.  Change is looked upon with suspicious eyes, especially when brought

in the form of English books by a white woman on the back of a camel.  Fi has an almost naive sense of her ability to make change for the better, she understands the importance of an education through books and wants to at least expose these people to the possibility of opening their horizons through books. Many of the elders see her and her books as a threat to their own way of life, and an encroachment by the West on their values.  The novel focuses on one village, Mididima, where Fi learns as much as she teaches.  She meets Kanica, a young girl with dreams of more; Scar Boy a young man who faces rejection because of deformities caused by a brutal attack.  And then there is Teacher, Matani, with whom she feels a special kinship.  Along the way there are culture clashes and lessons to be learned both by the teacher and the students.

I liked the book, enjoyed the story and was left looking for more information – which is always a great way to end a book.

The mere fact that this book will bring awareness to the need of the Kenyan people for education and books gives it my vote of appreciation.   The storyline takes a 30 something year old woman, Fi, away from her Brooklyn home to seek a more meaningful life as a wandering librarian in some of the remote areas of Kenya. She services groups of semi-nomadic people who are mostly illiterate and still clinging to a way of life that they know and treasure, but which is fast disappearing.  Change is looked upon with suspicious eyes, especially when brought in the form of English books by a white woman on the back of a camel.  Fi has an almost naive sense of her ability to make change for the better, she understands the importance of an education through books and wants to at least expose these people to the possibility of opening their horizons through books. Many of the elders see her and her books as a threat to their own way of life, and an encroachment by the West on their values.  The novel focuses on one village, Mididima, where Fi learns as much as she teaches.  She meets Kanica, a young girl with dreams of more; Scar Boy a young man who faces rejection because of deformities caused by a brutal attack.  And then there is Teacher, Matani, with whom she feels a special kinship.  Along the way there are culture clashes and lessons to be learned both by the teacher and the students.
I liked the book, enjoyed the story and was left looking for more information – which is always a great way to end a book.

My second book of the new year and our book club’s first choice of the year.  I really wanted to love this book, and while I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t really love it either.  I thought it was overlong, and long-winded.  It reminded me of my aunt telling a story and going off on one tangent after another, ignoring the fact that no one was making eye contact and in fact, had she looked closely she would have seen us rolling our eyes, but she was so inspired with her stories within stories that she didn’t realize that she’d totally lost our interest.  Well, this author did the same for me.

This was the first book of the year 2010 and I was so looking forward to it.  It came to me  as a ring through bookcrossing.  I really enjoyed the author’s last book, The Time Traveller’s Wife and was hoping to be swept away with my first read of the new year.

The Premise: Twenty-one year old American twins, Julia and Valentina, receive a letter from the UK informing them that they have inherited everything from their mother’s sister, including a flat in London.  The catch is they have to live there for a year, and their parents are not to step foot in the flat. Their mom and the aunt were estranged and there’s quite a bit of a hush-hush as to why, but the twins don’t ask too many questions and go on to their adventure.  Julia seems to be the more assertive twin and Valentina feels a bit upstaged.  Neither of them are focused and both come off as a bit ditzy, but genuinely kind and concerned girls.  The flat is in a building with an array of offbeat characters, one an over-the-top but loveable man with OCD; another, Robert was the aunt’s lover and is working on a thesis involving the history of Highgate Cemetery, which is right by their building.

So here’s what I thought:

The good stuff first:

The relationship between identical twins was handled very well in 90% of the aspects.

The character of Martin, OCD to the max, was lovingly written and his wife, credible.

The locations were interesting, twins from Lake Forest IL (about 3 miles east of where I lived for 13 years) go to London and take it all in — well done, well described, the British cemetery bits were also fascinating and the behind the scenes of the tours were amusing.

The Kitten of Death was excellent, as were the scenes in the desk drawer (and pardon me for being so cryptic, but otherwise I’d reveal too much).

Where the book lost me:   SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE DOWN

The lack of an autopsy when a 21 year old asthmatic woman dies – that would be a given and therefore the rest of the plot goes to hell in a handbasket.  You just can’t make that up and pretend that an autopsy wouldn’t be performed just to suit your plot, not in this day and age.  Valentina’s lack of sensitivity to the feelings of a) her sister whom she didn’t really hate, she just wanted to have the gumption to stand up to her, and more importantly, to her parents and the grief they would feel at her death.  I found that ridiculous, given the personality the author had painted her with previously.  Who would want to put someone they love through that kind of grief, knowing they think you are dead, while you are actually living a secret life away from everything and everyone you know?

Valentina knew that she could possibly die, yet that was preferable to moving to another continent to get away from her sister, or just maybe ummm, telling her to F off?  Silly.Go to therapy, go to assertiveness training, kill your twin… all would have made better alternatives. Well, maybe not the kill your twin part, but you get the idea. Also what kind of a man was Robert? If he hadn’t agreed to the idea in the first place,  Valentina couldn’t have pulled it off. If he had just said, “if you die, don’t come looking to me to help you.” that would have been the end of it.

It was a page turner with plenty of twists and turns all the way to the end, but it left a bit of a sour note.  So in the end, my first book of the  it just didn’t do it for me, but I was hopeful that my next read would be excellent!

 

If there was a way to give this book 6 stars and 2 stars for the different components, I would. The book started out with a bang, in fact I mentioned to my husband that I thought he would like it, even though he’s allergic to the word “love.” The story had me at the first sentence: “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.” And it got better from there.

 

Leo is an old man, a Holocaust survivor whose entire family was murdered. He’s a survivor , hysterically funny at times, a writer and a sentimental fool. The story opens in New York where Leo lives in a small apartment and longs to be seen, to be loved and to love someone visible and tangible. He walks through the city attracting attention to himself to avoid the pain of invisibility. This is what Krauss does best. She puts us in Leo’s shoes and allows us to feel his loneliness and isolation. The pain and sorrow of finishing up a long life with little human contact and realizing he had been tilting windmills for his entire life.

 

Leo has written a couple of books, but his last book, “The History of Love” was given to a friend in manuscript form for safekeeping. This friend, thinking Leo has died with the rest of his family in the Holocaust, years later rewrites the book in his own hand, changing a few names but leaving the most important name intact. Alma. Alma was the love of Leo’s life, they were sweethearts before the war, but as wars tend to do, become separated and go their separate ways. Alma, pregnant with Leo’s baby, waits for Leo until finally she marries another man who brings up Leo’s son as his own.

 

Leo drifts through the days of his life wishing and pining for these two people who have moved on. He no longer writes and seems to just be waiting to die.

 

So that’s the part that I loved. Leo’s story, his narrative and the voice that the author gave him, a man with no voice.

Enter the rest of the cast.

 

Young Alma, is a 15 year old girl, and thank you God, not precocious, overly bright, or obnoxious in any way. In and of itself, she would have had a sweet little story, but as the narrative switches back and forth from Leo to Alma, it becomes impossible not to compare Leo’s compelling story with Alma’s young, naïve voice. And this is where the book peters out. Alma has lost her father to cancer at a young age and she misses him. She writes lists of his memory, she tells her brother stories about the dad he doesn’t remember, whether true or not, to boost his memory and love. Poignant, true – I’ve been there and Krauss got it spot on. But then Alma becomes a little detective, trying to figure out who the characters are in the book that her mother has been paid an outrageously generous amount of money to translate. And the book? Yes – The History of Love.

 

The narrative comes and goes and at times it becomes difficult to follow. There’s a lot of new age writing going on with fragmented sentences and plenty of blank pages. I kinda like that. It doesn’t detract from the book – but the twists and turns and the fact that the author throws red herrings in the first 10 pages of the book – that bothered me.

 

At the end of the book, another narrator surfaces, Bird – Alma’s younger brother, whose character is never really developed; he checks out Alma’s personal notes and decides he needs to interfere and help her out.

 

Then the book ends. Loose ends everywhere. Stunning, obscure turns of events

 

Now for the nit-picking. The guy who kept Leo’s manuscript, wound up in Valparaiso Chile. I lived there for many years and there were a few mistakes. Two that come to mind. The author talks about the intense heat. Nope. Never. It rarely goes above 85 degrees – and that’s a royal heat wave. It also rarely goes below 38 degrees. Which leads me to mistake number 2: His wife Rose was planting Tulips. As much as that whole country is flower crazy and they would LOVE to plant tulips – at least in the central valley it’s just never going to happen. The winters don’t get cold enough for the bulbs and they wind up getting mushy and not surviving. OK. That’s

NOTE:  I wish I knew how to line up pictures on word press

I found this book fascinating, creepy, horrific, and historical – all in one.   It’s two stories actually, intertwined — both well researched and cited. One portion of the book centers on the creation of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and John Burnham, the chief architect. The book showcases the rise of modern architecture as we know it and outlines all the pitfalls, difficulties and ego-centric problems that an endeavor of this huge magnitude entails. The author writes this portion of the book in a way that is technically precise, but not boring – although I might be biased as I lived in the area for many years and just loved hearing about the city of Chicago and how it grew.  This fair brought about changes in how we view cities which are still with us today.  Burnham wanted to create some big and he certainly did; the landscapers and designers also collaborated to out-Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower and the World’s Fair that had recently been held in Paris, but you’ll have to read the book to see if they succeeded or not.  In any case, Burnham’s architectural style is to this day revered by the American School of Architecture and copied world wide.  Many of his buildings, such as the Union Station in Washington DC, the Burnham Hotel in Chicago and the Flat Iron Building in New York City – are still standing.  Any many of his ideas are used all over the United States.  Technology, commerce, education were proactively pursued for the first time.  The pledge of Allegiance was coined, hamburgers were invented, as well as Shredded Wheat, Cream of Wheat,  Pabst Beer, Aunt Jemima syrup, and Juicy Fruit gum.  DisneyWorld was highly influenced by the Fair, of Allegiance to hamburgers and Disney World.

As far as innovations brought about by the World’s Fair – the incandescent light bulb

Daniel Burnham

Chicago World's Fair 1893

the Administration Building

 

The City of Chicago a few years earlier in 1871

above, The Lagoon

The first Ferris Wheel ever built

The other portion of the book deals with a notorious serial killer who went by the name of H. H. Holmes. He operated his gruesome “hobby” at the same time that Burnham’s group was creating a masterpiece. The true crime section is riveting and kept me up way past my sleep time.  Holmes was an astute con man, handsome, gracious and charming; and he flew under the radar for many years.  He wooed his victims into believing he was a kind and generous man, but inside he was evil incarnate.  He devised absolutely horrific methods of disposing of the bodies and the evidence, and seemed to be completely at ease with his passion.  At a time when crime in Chicago was 4 times what it is today (and with a much smaller population) the Chicago police had their hands full just patrolling the area surrounding the World’s Fair.  The poor women who were lured into Holmes’ clutches never stood a chance.

To me a good book leads to great discussion and further reading — I totally enjoyed looking for images of the buildings created by the architects of the time, and furthering my reading on the creation of cities, as well as looking for additional information and images of H. H. Holmes, his “castle” and his victims.

H. H. holmes

 

Holmes' Murder Castle - the building where he committed many of his crimes

Two of his youngest victims, Alice and Howard Pietzel

 

This book was my introduction to Edith Wharton. I’ve seen the movies based on her books, but had never picked one up to read. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to pick up another one. I realize that this particular book has been lauded as her “masterpiece” and at the time it was written, when the social mores were part of the social make up of the readers, it might have been. In today’s world, what the author takes for granted, I had to really think about. The times, the constraints, the culture she writes about is so foreign that it seems like the book was written in the 19th C, rather than in the 20th. My Dad was a young man when this book was written, his mother (my grandmother) a divorcee who remarried. Their lives, were so different that there was a disconnect for me. The plot, the diaglo and the characters seemed one-dimensional and stiff, a bit flat.

Ethan nursed his father and then his mother, giving up his youth and his dreams of going to the university and leaving his small town, until his parents died. He farms a land which barely provides subsistence living, and marries Zenobia. She is a hypochondriac, manipulative, cold, distant woman and together they live a dull, unbearable life until Mattie, Zennie’s cousin,comes to live with them and brightens up their lives, or at least Ethan’s.
The book is tragic, sad and the characters seem to just take their destinies in stride without any ability to do what it takes to make changes. I wanted to slap all three of them, as well as the friends and neighbors who seemed immune to their suffering.

OK – I lied. Bad Dog Bad Dog would have made a better title. Early Sunday morning the synchronized pooches needed to go out. Synchronized, you ask? Yes. When one just has to go out, the other one does too. One poops, and so does the other.

So, back to my story. George (my DH) leaned over to put the leash on Cheyanne and Boomer bumped him in the knees and Cheyenne took off with no looking back and no regrets. Boomer, of course, took off after her and no amount of screaming, yelling, begging and pleading brought them back. They were off to discover hidden rabbit hang outs, get rid of the entire Minnesota squirrel population and run through the creek at the bottom of our ravine. An hour went by and nor sight nor sound of these two, so I grabbed my car keys and went looking. Since I live close to a fast street, I had visions of finding them splattered on the road, agonizing in pain and of me picking up their limp bodies and holding them in my arms as they looked at me to save them. No such luck. They were nowhere to be found. I drove up the road down the road, in one subdivision and out another, over to the corn fields and back through the soy fields with no luck whatsoever. After an hour of driving around calling them, I went home, and heard a tinkle. A very faint tinkle. I called and I called and lo and behold the tinkle sound got stronger – Boomer’s tags were tinkling! And with that they were home. I could have cried to see them with every inch of their bodies covered in burrs, but instead of crying I got the camera, a whole bunch of towels and a pail of warm water and got to work!!!

MISS CHEYENNE

.
Clean girl

Pretty boy

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This isn’t my favorite genre – thriller/mystery. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, but it had received so many rave reviews that when we voted to read this book for book club, I thought I’d give it my best shot. I must admit that after 25 pages I was rolling my eyes wondering what all the hoopla was about; by page 35 I realized that I had to reread most of it more carefully because I had zoned out.

And then all hell broke loose. I spent every spare minute of the next few days engrossed in this novel. I found the whole thing fascinating, the characters believable if not likable and the plot with all the twists and turns, not one easily figured out. The two main characters, Lisbeth and Mikael are very different but brought together to work on a case. Mikael is a journalist whose name is mud; he’s a decent guy who reported on the wrong person and got into a bit of trouble. He gets an offer to ghost write the history of what must be Sweden’s most dysfunctional family with a caveat – that he research the disappearance of the patriarch’s niece; a case over 40 years old. He reluctantly agrees and is soon drawn in to the inner secrets, awful truths, secrets, quirks and anomalies of this family. Mikael needs the help of a top notch assistant and Lisbeth comes into the picture with her not-quite-all-legal, but highly useful skills, piercings, tattoos and unusual demeanor.

So there is a mystery, and it does get thrilling; but underneath all this are two underlying themes: Corporate greed and the hatred of women – two separate issues. The vulnerability of women throughout the book is compelling, as are the statistics which start out each part of the book. Scary stuff and very sad in this day and age to read about the violence against women in Sweden.

One other part of this book that I really enjoyed is the ending – and no spoilers here. The author opens up quite a few different possibilities but doesn’t lead you incessantly towards one, only to bait and switch at the end. You follow the investigators on their journey hand in hand with some suspicions here and there, but it’s not as though there’s a huge surprise culprit at the end. It’s logical, it makes sense and the action leads up to it.

Can’t wait to read the next book in the series.

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