• Uncategorized

    Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson *** (of 4)

    Dogland is a lighthearted romp through the world of elite dog shows. As Tomlinson makes clear from the outset, the relationship between dog and human is a companionship born at the dawn of civilization. Beginning with the first wolves hanging about campfires, Dogland looks at the evolution of dog breeding. Dogs have been bred to herd sheep, hunt rats, pull sleds through snow, sit on laps, retrieve hunted waterfowl, and dig up truffles.

    The dogs that go all the way to the Westminster dog show are bred to stand still and look as much as possible like the judges think that a breed should appear. Elite show dogs are bred like elite race horses invested in by multiple owners. Professional trainers might work with more than 20 dogs at a time, often showing multiple dogs (for multiple owners) in a single show.

    Tomlinson asks some important questions. Are show dogs happy be fluffed and combed and poofed and perfumed and eating cheese treats right from their owner’s mouths? Isn’t it important for dogs to be, well, dogs, sniffing butts, chasing tennis balls, and sneaking food from under the table? And what is it about the relationship between dogs and humans that is so unique that we project human feelings onto dogs? They make so many humans happy and what do they get in return?

    The questions are good and having to ponder the nature of an interspecies relationship that for many people is stronger than it is for their own species is valuable. There aren’t many answers in the book, but insofar as a romp on a lawn with a favorite pet is satisfying, so is Dogland.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  NON FICTION,  Politics,  Uncategorized

    Keeping the Faith by Brenda Wineapple **** (of 4)

    What makes this account of the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee so compelling–in which a school teacher was arrested for breaking a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution–is its contemporaneity. The trial featured super-attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense versus William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a populist presidential candidate (three times) whose belief in his own rectitude and the infallibility of the bible was unshakeable. Bryan was a powerful orator with unwavering support from southern, rural Christian nationalists.

    Making the book even more insightful is the effort that Wineapple puts into contextualizing the trial. Fully, the first half of the book is setting the global and national stages. World War I had concluded in unimaginable carnage: more than 20 million dead, largely because of advances in science and technology that increased killing efficiency. Americans fought in Europe and emerged without benefits, feeding isolationism. Tech millionaires on the east coast were making money hand over fist. Elites, intellectuals, and college educated urbanites were condescending and dismissive of rural and southern Americans.

    The trial was a cultural and political clash of unparalleled magnitude pitting the ruthless progress of science and capital against the book-banning, but necessary return to faith of Christians looking for meaning in a world moving beyond their grasp.

  • Book Reviews,  Europe,  History,  NON FICTION,  Suspense,  Uncategorized

    The Wager by David Grann *** (of 4)

    The Wager is the name of a ship launched by the British Navy in 1742. It was part of a small fleet sent to the southern seas to chase down a Spanish galleon loaded with plundered riches. Aside: it is difficult to know for whom to root in a situation where two colonial powers pillage indigenous populations and then attack one another’s ships in a game of never-ending one-upmanship (one-upmanships?).

    The Wager was poorly built, led by inexperienced captains, and crewed by criminals and sailors who could not escape press-gangs. Scurvy destroyed many and the weather was horrible. Rounding the dangerous seas south of Cape Horn, the ship foundered. What was left of the crew washed up on an isolated island off the coast of Chile. For weeks and then months, surviving crewmen starved, froze and and turned upon one another, weapons drawn.

    Remarkably, a small handful of survivors cobbled together a boat and floated to safety 1,500 miles up the Atlantic coast of South America. An opposing set of survivors floated up the west coast of South America. Enough documents of the captain and crew were carried back to England that a court martial was engaged to determine whether the captain had failed his crew or the crew had committed the most heinous of crimes: mutiny. A decent adventure, but missing some of the edge since we learn about the outcome in the opening pages.

  • Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Memoir/Biography,  Prize Winner,  Speculative Fiction,  Uncategorized

    Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro *** (of 4)

    Spooky. Kids in a residential British school called Hailsham are raised to be donors. Their days are filled with what you would expect: studying, confidential discussions among friends, bullies, first loves, rules and rule breaking, secrets after dark, favorite and despised teachers (called guardians), and the slow dawning of adulthood and the ensuing responsibilities.

    The world is seen through the eyes of Ruth and her two best friends Tommy and Kathy. Ruth recounts her memories from their earliest days in grade school through their adult years as full-fledged donors. We learn, as Ruth and her peers slowly learn, what it means to be a donor.

    I spent most of the book certain that the book was an allegory. Perhaps it was a story of how we are all trained by guardians to donate our lives to a Neo-economic system that saps our bodies as well as our souls. Or, maybe Never Let Me Go is an indictment of factory farmed animals. Or, just maybe, it is really just a very eery story about kids who don’t fit in with the rest of society and whose lives culminate in mandatory donations. Ishiguro is a Nobel prize winner in literature and his characters are perfectly rendered. His meanings, however, are by his own description, left to the reader.

  • Asia,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  Uncategorized

    The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese **** (of 4)

    In the fictional riverside town of Parambil, in Kerala, India, 12-year-old Big Ammachi is taken from her home at the beginning of the 20th century to marry a widower. The marriage goes well and Big Ammachi is a protagonist around whom many of the village’s 31 additional characters revolve. Big Ammachi lives into her 70s and through her we observe the integration of rural villagers into the development of modern Indian life.

    Additional stories include a century-long investigation into a mysterious genetic ailment that makes many male descendants of Big Ammachi’s clan fear water and suffer vertigo when their heads are submerged. There is a nearby leper colony whose inhabitants and doctors are fully lovable. A young female artist, Elsie, must fight sexism to practice her artistic gifts. A Scottish physician sent to work in Britain’s colony on the subcontinent serves as an intermediary between British exPats and Indians. The regional environment of canals, forests, tea plantations, rivers, and individual trees are also important characters.

    At times the 775-page book feels like it has no beginning, middle, or end. Though never tedious, it can be as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Still, Verghese, as he says in his afterword, has culled and retold the stories of his ancestors. He has done so in exquisite fashion.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  NON FICTION,  Politics,  Prize Winner,  Uncategorized

    These Truths by Jill Lepore **** (of 4)

    It is no small feat to write a history of the United States. Choose any event, say, for example the Presidency of George Washington, The Civil War, the long, and ongoing struggle for Civil Rights in America and you will discover that on just a single subject there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books on the subject. What Jill Lepore does so expertly in this book is summarize key events, lots and lots of them, and place them in a political continuum that is America’s history.

    Lepore says at the outset that her focus is politics and beginning in 1492 when Christian Europeans planted flags on the American continent in the name of Christian conquest for Europe. At nearly the same time America became a far away home for Europeans, and then others, some of them enslaved, seeking freedom from religious and state orthodoxies. America started as a country of contradictions. A country of immigrants, wherein a very significant portion of the population today is anti-immigrant.

    From the first days when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…” Lepore makes clear that internal inconsistencies and conflicts were going to be papered over with daub and wattle. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, a first of its kind, the notion that citizens were not inferior to noblemen was truly revolutionary. Yet, “all men” failed to include enslaved men, or women.

    The title of the book is so multilayered as to become an unbreakable wire threading the entire book together. Especially interesting are the final fifty years of American politics (perhaps because I have lived them and can observe how Lepore selects and summarizes the events she highlights) when the notion of truth has become so personal that the question of whether we can hold together as a nation that believes in something unifying feels like it might be hanging in the balance. The expansion of the Internet and with it Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Truth Social (Trump’s personal twitter), has allowed both the insertion of genuine Fake News (see the work of Russian troll farms during the 2016 election) and the selection of personal, unedited news selected by each and every consumer to suit her or his preconceived beliefs. The book was published before the January 6 uprising and attack on Congress, which is the predictable outcome.

    These Truths is not an optimistic book, and the work of right wingers to promote hundreds of years of inequality, racism, sexism, anti-foreigner sentiment, misinformation, and objection to facts is wholly dispiriting (I suspect the right dismisses Lepore’s book precisely because it raises uncomfortable truths). The new Left’s closed-door approach to speakers and writers whose views they find dangerous to insecure minorities or their definition of an illegitimate history is scarcely more encouraging. Still, there is nothing like observing a master putting history into a clear and readily accessible context.

  • Uncategorized

    Sourdough Naan

    Is there any more perfect combination than freshly baked dough schmeared with melted butter (ghee in this case), finely chopped baby herbs (cilantro in this photo), and crushed garlic?

    Naan is so simple, but this recipe from Maurizo Leo’s new book, The Perfect Loaf, produced exceptionally poofy breads.

    Started with these.
    Fry in a skillet.
    Have the toppings ready and apply as soon as the naan leaves the pan.
    And make plain.
    With charnushka seeds.
    With seeds and garlic.
    Or with the works.

    Are you hungry now?

  • America,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  History,  Uncategorized

    The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian *** (of 4)

    A somewhat predictable, but well-told story about a motherless, white daughter with an abusive father living in a 1920s Mississippi swamp. Once Dad disappears from the picture she is joined by an also motherless Black girl with a history she does not want to reveal. The two teenagers take on the swamp, their neighbors, a newborn, and deadly Jim Crow racism. They find their footing and gain their independence, or, at least the white girl does. To be Black and live in the south under Jim Crow apartheid laws is a balancing act between hopelessness and subversive defiance.

  • African American Literature,  America,  Book Reviews,  Civil War,  History,  NON FICTION,  Politics,  Uncategorized

    How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith *** (of 4)

    Clint Smith educates white Americans who likely never learned the true extent and depth of slavery in the foundation and enduring legacy of the country. He does so, however, with poetic passages rather than a two-by-four across the side of your head. He applies the same gentle approach as he makes clear that never in America’s history – today included – has a Black person ever felt complete freedom. Skin color defines every interaction on the street, in a store, at a bank, during an interview, or in front of a jury. Consider for even sixty seconds, the strain that must induce.

    Using the same understated approach, while visiting seven important landmarks in the history of enslavement, Smith establishes that there never was, nor could have been, such a thing as acceptable or benevolent enslavement of other human beings, despite numerous enduring attempts to suggest otherwise. If enslavement as it was practiced in America cannot be justified by any rational or compassionate human, how, asks Smith can any veneration of The Lost Cause, Confederate Soldiers (and their reenactors), so-called defense of state’s rights, or idolization of Confederate leaders be tolerated? Wasn’t every Confederate, in essence, a subversive fighting to overthrow the rule of law. Wasn’t the Civil War fundamentally an armed insurrection in defense of the right to hold other human beings in conditions to which they could be flogged, starved, detached from their families, or worked to death?

    At his best, Smith interviews white tour guides at Monticello (working to teach anti-Racist history) and white Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy and does so without malice or confrontation, an act of noble restraint. He reminds each person he speaks with, however, what it has meant to him to grow up in a country that has never taught him, or itself, about its true history.

  • America,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Suspense,  Uncategorized

    The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke *** (of 4)

    Dave Robicheaux is a Cajun detective, poet, and philosopher with no patience for corruption or injustice. When a young Black woman floats to the surface, face down, of a bayou Robicheaux uses for fishing he reasonably concludes foul play led to her death. Just as quickly the coroner determines she drowned following a drug overdose, suggesting that a young very poor Black woman hooked on drugs and trying to climb in society as a sex worker is not worth additional effort on anyone’s part.

    Robicheaux cannot let it go. While he moves up the food chain of pimps, hustlers, and local dons, he gets wrapped up in what turns out to be an international arms smuggling operation that is much more credible than it sounds summarized here in just a couple of sentences. The book is the first in what would become an exceptionally long writing career for James Lee Burke, dated to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is evident from the start why Burke would enjoy such a successful career. Robicheaux’s descriptions of bayous and waterways of southern Louisiana, race and class relations in New Orleans, and doubts and desires of men and women trying their best, all rise from the page in steamy, evocative images that are indelible.