This week’s Best Book is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson!
Category: books
Day 810: The Round House
The Round House looks back to 1988, to traumatic events in the life of 13-year-old Joe Coutts and his family. Joe has had a comfortable life for a kid living on the reservation. His father is a tribal judge, and his mother is a social worker. They live in a homey, not fancy house, and his mother keeps a beautiful flower and vegetable garden.
Joe is enjoying the summer as any 13-year-old might, sometimes running around with his friends, sometimes helping out at home. One Sunday he is digging out saplings that have worked their way into the foundation of their house. His mother has run out to the office to pick up a file. She is usually very punctual, but he and his father realize she has not returned at her usual time. The two decide to go get her.
They pass her coming home, but it is not until they arrive home that they discover something horrible has happened. Joe’s mother has been raped and brutally beaten. They rush her to the hospital.
When the police come, she will not talk about what happened except for the broadest outlines. She was kidnapped from the old ceremonial Round House and taken somewhere else to be assaulted. She escaped after her attacker doused her with gasoline and went for matches. After she returns from the hospital, she retreats to her room.
Because of complicated laws related to who has jurisdiction over what type of crimes and where they are committed, Joe’s father begins trying to sort out how a prosecution could be pursued when they find the rapist. This task is made more difficult by the insistence of Joe’s mother that she doesn’t know where she was when she was raped. Joe himself starts looking for evidence of who could have committed the crime.
Like most of Erdrich’s novels set on the reservation, this novel is as much about heartbreaking experiences as anything else. Erdrich points out in the Afterword that up to 1/3 of Native American women are raped on the reservation, mostly by men who are not Native American. She says that this number is almost certainly an understatement, because Native American women don’t want to report rape. Many of these incidents cannot be prosecuted because of jurisdictional problems.
There were a few things that bothered me about this story, particularly that Joe doesn’t connect some money he finds near the scene of the crime with the crime or that he and his friends drink some beer they find even though they think it is connected with the crime and could be a clue. Even at 13 and in 1988, they had to have watched more crime shows than that.
In general, though, this is compelling reading, about the change in Joe’s family, about how fast he is forced to grow up, about the limitations of justice on the reservation.
Related Posts
Day 809: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Best Book of the Week!
The Warmth of Other Suns is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s remarkable book about the migration of nearly 6 million rural African-American southerners to northern and western cities from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson began her research because of her perceptions that the migration was largely unrecognized and that when recognized was misunderstood.
What makes this book so remarkable is how she manages to humanize it. Although she presents us with facts and figures and results of studies as well as examples of experiences taken from newspapers and the like, the bulk of the book is taken up with three representative case histories. She identified and interviewed three people who ended up in three of the cities usually targeted for migration. Their stories are both representative and extraordinarily interesting.
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was the wife of George Gladney, a sharecropper in Mississippi. The state of sharecroppers was deplorable. After a solid year of work, the sharecropper would hand over half the crop to his landlord and then settle up accounts, the plantation owner subtracting the cost of the seed and supplies from the sharecropper’s share. The records were the landlord’s, and even if the sharecropper kept his own books, he didn’t dare oppose his landlord. Many of the plantation owners routinely added extra goods onto their tenants’ accounts and otherwise cheated them. George’s plantation owner was considered a good one simply because George ended up with a couple of bucks for the year instead of breaking even or ending up in the red.
Still, it was not because of the unrewarding grind of sharecropping that George decided to leave but because his cousin was beaten nearly to death for stealing turkeys that had just gone to roost some way away. Though George felt safe enough to tell the plantation owner he was leaving, he and Ida Mae still had to sneak away from home, taking the train to Chicago in 1937.
George Starling also had to sneak away from his job picking oranges in Florida but because he was in peril for his life. During World War II, oranges were at a premium and so many laborers had gone north already that the growers had difficulty finding pickers. Still, they wanted to pay the pre-war wage of 10 cents a basket to the pickers. George and two of his friends who had worked briefly in Detroit talked the pickers into letting him bargain for them and got their pay more than doubled. But some of the pickers were terrified and informed the growers what was going on. George heard that he and his friends were going to be lynched, so he had to smuggle himself out of his home county before he could take the train to Harlem in 1945.
Robert Foster was a surgeon from Louisiana in 1953 with a need to succeed. He had married Alice Clement, the daughter of a prominent African-American family in Atlanta. The Clements made it clear that they thought Foster was inferior and did their best to control Alice during the early years of their marriage. After serving as a surgeon in the army, Foster found he couldn’t get admitting privileges to any southern hospitals unless he accepted his father-in-law’s help and settled in Atlanta. Knowing that his family would always be under Clement’s domination, he decided to go to California, where he had always wanted to live. He set off for Los Angeles in 1953, driving in his car.
Wilkinson’s contention is that the causes and the results of the migration have been misunderstood. For example, some studies posited that mechanization in the cotton industry was a major cause. But Wilkinson shows that the industry was forced to mechanize as a result of losing the bulk of its laborers, not the other way around.
Similarly, she shows that contrary to belief, the families who migrated were in general better educated than white emigrants, less likely to divorce, and more likely to have a work ethic than African Americans born in the north, putting to shame the idea that the migrating families ruined their host cities. In fact, many of those who failed did so because of the conditions that already existed in their new home cities.
This history is an amazing book that will keep your interest from beginning until end. I became totally involved in the stories of these three people and wanted to know if they would succeed.
Related Posts
Day 808: The Fatal Flame
I was sad to learn that The Fatal Flame would be the last book in Lyndsay Faye’s Timothy Wilde series. On the other hand, it is better to wrap up a series than let it go on until it becomes perfunctory. Still, I could have spent a lot more time with Timothy, his erratic brother Val, and his friends.
The novels are set in a gritty 1840’s New York City. This one deals with several issues that were controversial at the time: slavery—particularly whether Oregon would join the union as a free or slave state; the development of feminism; and the treatment of the mentally ill.
Timothy Wilde is one of New York’s newly formed Copper Stars, the police force, now two years on the job. At the beginning of the novel, he encounters a few of his colleagues at a wharf, where they are watching Ronan McGlynn. McGlynn is known to offer factory jobs to young, naive Irish women straight off the boats only to forcibly imprison them in brothels. When the men follow McGlynn and his latest victim to the Queen Mab, a brothel, they find there a Tammany Hall boss, Robert Symmes.
Timothy finds Symmes despicable, so he is not happy to be assigned to a case involving him later that day. Symmes is receiving threats from someone. He believes that person to be Sally Woods, a woman who used to work in his textile factory and led a strike against it for higher pay for the women. The threats Symmes is receiving are printed flyers promising to burn down the buildings that Symmes owns.
Although Timothy is disturbed by Sally Woods, he is still looking for evidence when one of Symmes’ buildings burns down, thankfully with no one in it. Why? Because the inhabitants were warned by another woman, Ellie Abell, who used to be Sally Woods’ best friend. A burning building is a great horror to Timothy, because two years earlier he was severely burned in the great New York fire of 1845.
Timothy soon becomes preoccupied by another matter. His great love Mercy Underhill has returned from London (much to my dismay). He is concerned to find that not everything she says makes sense.
The fire investigation gets more complicated, but that’s not confusing enough. Something Timothy tells his brother Val about Symmes causes Val to decide to run against Symmes in the upcoming election for alderman. Symmes is a dangerous man who enjoys inflicting pain. Timothy knows that there is danger for all Val’s intimates.
This novel is complex, exciting, and interesting. I am waiting to see what Faye will do next. But meanwhile, I’ll miss the Wildes, Bird, Jim, and other characters from this series.
Related Posts
Day 807: Life on the Mississippi
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s nonfiction book about the Mississippi River. Sort of. Although part history, part memoir, part travel account, it also includes a chapter from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, some folk tales, and many tall tales. So, it’s not just nonfiction. And not the best of Twain.
Twain begins with a few chapters about the history of the river’s discovery and exploration by Europeans. These first chapters are followed by reminiscences of Twain’s life as a boy along the river (including the excerpt about Huck) and his career as a riverboat pilot, including a description of what is involved in learning to navigate the river. This section takes up about half the book, by far the best half.
From there, the book loses focus, and if the kitchen sink had anything to do with the Mississippi, it would be in there. The last half of the book is supposedly centered around a trip Twain takes down the river to New Orleans and all the way back up to Minnesota. It describes the people he encounters and the towns he visits during his journey, 20 years after his time as a pilot. But it also goes off an every manner of digression and tells many anecdotes, some of which are frankly corny and a few of which are offensive these days. I don’t want to make too much of this because it is judging a book unfairly by the standards of another time, but some of the pictures especially, reprints of those that appeared in the 1883 version, are insulting to African-Americans.
Finally, my edition, a replica by Dover, was loaded with typos, especially in the last half. I can only hope that the errors weren’t really in the originally published edition.
Related Posts
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Day 806: Silent Nights
Silent Nights is a collection of classic mystery stories set at Christmastime. Represented are well-known writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers as well as writers who are not as well known now, such as Ethel Lina White and Leo Bruce. At least, I am no expert, but I have not heard of them before.
Like most mystery short stories I’ve read, these are more concerned with posing a puzzle. They are not long enough for much serious characterization or detailed plotting. Still, I found some of them surprisingly effective.
In “Waxworks” by Ethel Lina White, for example, atmosphere is created in a story of a female reporter who decides to spend the night in a haunted wax museum. She is stalked there by a jealous coworker.
“Stuffing” by Edgar Wallace has an ending reminiscent of “The Gift of the Magi” in which the ill-gotten gains from a robbery that are hidden in the crop of a Christmas turkey end up in the hands of a poor, innocent couple about to depart for Canada. They think both the turkey and the money are gifts from the woman’s rich uncle.
In “The Unknown Murderer,” H. C. Bailey’s detective Dr. Reggie Fortune figures out the game of a pathological murderer. In “Cambric Tea” by Margery Bower, a jealous man tries to frame two innocent people for murder.
Not all are that successful. “A Problem in White” by Nicholas Blake doesn’t tell the solution (which I guessed) unless you turn to the back of the book. “The Name on the Window” by Edmund Crispin depends its puzzle on which side of the window the victim supposedly wrote the name of his attacker. Yet for this solution, we must suppose that the victim was stabbed and then walked around a building and down a long hallway for no apparent reason than that he could collapse on the other side of the window. Not, I think, the behavior of a dying man. (And, typically, he didn’t just write the name of his attacker; he hinted at it.)
In any case, this collection made me interested in looking for some of the longer works by some of these authors.
Related Posts
Best Book of the Week!
This week’s Best Book is Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck! Also recommended: Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken!
Day 805: Blood & Sand
Rosemary Sutcliff was a prolific writer of historical novels from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. She is best known for children’s literature, and most of the books I’ve read by her are set in Britain during or shortly after the Roman occupation. She also wrote a series of Arthurian novels, placing Arthur in the time just after the Roman withdrawal, which is a much more likely time period for him than the Middle Ages, if he existed at all.
Blood & Sand is for adults, however. It is based upon the life of Thomas Keith, an actual Scottish soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, who was captured in Egypt while fighting for Britain. Keith converted to Islam and went on to become the governor of Medina.
Blood & Sand is full of adventure and fighting, but it also depicts a sincere conversion to Islam and a love for the desert. It has beautiful descriptions of the desert landscape. Several times I was reminded of the line in the movie Lawrence of Arabia, where Prince Feisal describes Lawrence as “another of these desert-loving English.”
Thomas takes the name Ibrahim and makes a good friend of Tussun, the younger son of the Viceroy of Egypt. Part of his decision to convert is because of the opportunities for advancement with the Sultan’s army, and he becomes involved in trying to free the holy cities of Arabia from a group of religious zealots called the Wahabis. Some of the issues in the latter part of the book have echoes for us in modern times, showing us that these kinds of battles have been going on for hundreds of years.
I mildly enjoyed this novel. The characters are concerned with issues such as honor and are not terribly well rounded. The descriptions of Thomas’ life in Egypt and Medina and the customs of his new people were more interesting to me than the action scenes. There is a small bit of romance in the novel as Thomas marries a girl to protect her and ends up loving her, but it is not very important to the novel, and she herself is not fleshed out. The writing is at times, especially in the descriptive sections, quite beautiful, however.
Related Posts
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Day 804: The King Without a Kingdom
When I first read Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings series, I didn’t even know there were seven books. I read the first six, which told of the destruction of the Capet dynasty and ended with the death of Robert of Artois, a prime mover of events. But Druon still had one more tale of incompetent royalty to tell, that of King John II, the third Valois king.
The entire novel is written as a monologue by the Cardinal of Périgord, who tells the tale as he travels to try to mediate peace between King John and Edward, Prince of England. The Cardinal is a sharp old man with many a sarcastic observation to make to his audience, his nephew. King John is actually in captivity to the English, and the cardinal’s story is about how this situation came to be.
Unfortunately, I found this change of narrative style to be irritating, uninterrupted as it is by anything except references to arrivals, changes of horse, and other details of the journey. Although the story he has to tell is certainly interesting—about how the king threw away certain victory in battle because of his own stubbornness and incompetency, and about how he alienated his allies by reneging on deals in order to give honors to his favorite—the narrative style just seems too artificial.
In The Accursed Kings, though, Druon draws a devastating portrait of how a series of bad monarchs brought France down within a few years during the 14th century, from the greatest nation in the world to an impoverished, poorly run country that was considerably smaller.
Related Posts
Day 803: Thunderstruck and Other Stories
Note: Survey results. Some of you may remember that about a year ago, I had a link up to a survey created by Ariel of One Little Library. If you are interested in viewing the results of the survey, she has now posted them on her web site.
* * *
Elizabeth McCracken’s stories combine a minute observation of ordinary life with a sensibility that is just a little perverse. Not very perverse, like the stories of Margaret Atwood or Karen Russell, but just a little. People disappear, someone down the street is murdered, a boy is almost starved to death by his grandfather—things that do happen but are unusual.
In “Something Amazing,” Missy Goodby, a girl who died of lymphoma, is said to haunt the neighborhood, but it is Santos Mackers who disappears after locking his little brother Johnny up in a trunk. Once Johnny gets free, the Goodbys are happy to care for him.
In “Property,” a recently widowed man leases a house sight unseen for his return to the States after his wife’s death. When he arrives, he finds the house filthy and full of trash. It takes some time for him to learn a different perspective about the house.
A woman who records novelty songs finds out more than she wanted to know about her audience in “Some Terpsichore.” The library employees see the effect both on the friends of a murdered woman and on the accused boy’s family in “Juliet.”
These stories are beautifully written with vivid imagery. I enjoyed this collection very much.
What? Me Read? 