Colony Library Lady

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Here’s another book I enjoyed reading while I was looking for non-fiction I thought you’d like. The Worst Hard Time is about the Dust Bowl—the southern Great Plains, particularly the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and Kansas—during the Great Depression.

I think you’ll like it  just because it’s hard to believe the sheer enormity of the Dust Bowl—the idea that dust storms could roll in like 10,000-foot high mountains and suffocate all the farm animals (and people stuck outside) in their paths. That people could lock themselves inside on a regular basis and tape around all the window and door seams, drape wet sheets over all, and still come out coughing and spitting up black muck, could die of the ‘dust pneumonia’ that these “black blizzards” caused. (The animals outside would die because their lungs were so full of dust that they literally suffocated, unable to breathe air.)

Egan tells us many times that the environmental disaster was manmade. Settlers who came in and tore up the grasslands—which had been intact for thousands of years—created the perfect ingredients for a plague of Biblical proportions once a drought came. And ‘plague’ isn’t hyperbole—the loss of farms and livelihoods led to hunger and even starvation. The loss of arable land, the constant streams of dust led to other plagues—of rabbits, clubbed and killed in the thousands in Sunday recreational round-ups; of grasshoppers in the millions, eating everything in their paths; of centipedes crawling through the walls of houses.

It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could have managed to stay through years of the dust bowl conditions, but some people did. Egan makes the book interesting by following them from the early days when the land was plowed and wheat was planted through the 1930s when all their dreams were shattered.

My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

“When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.”

So, Jamaica Kincaid has written a small book about the death from AIDS of her youngest brother. At 198 pages, this memoir comes so close to that 200 page minimum for a book project that you might get your teacher to overlook those last two pages. After all, Kincaid is an established literary writer and she has all the stuff your teachers hope you’ll enjoy in literature—a style of her own and the many literary elements you are taught and tested on, especially wonderful figurative language. This book is as much a writing exercise as it is a memoir, as much the story of Kincaid’s love/hate relationship with her mother as her relationship with her brother.

I first came in contact with Kincaid’s writing through The New Yorker, which was regularly publishing her short works. I loved her style and would always check to see if she had something published in the weekly magazine. If not, I would toss it aside to read later. If so, I sat down and immersed myself in the story immediately. That said, I’d also like to note that her style would be a lot of fun to parody, if you should get such an assignment. While everyone else in the class is imitating Hemingway and Faulkner, you can try something like this passage from My Brother:

“It must have been wonderful in Miami then, but I will never really know, I can only repeat what other people said; they said that it was wonderful in Miami and they were glad to be there, or they wanted to be there. But I myself was in Miami, and I found Miami not to be in the tropical zone that I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between, but its in-betweenness did not make me long for it. I missed the place I now live in, I missed snow, I missed my own house that was surrounded by snow, I missed my husband, the father of my children, and they were all in the house surrounded by snow. I wanted to go home.”

The Courage to Grieve was donated to our library, and I became interested in it. I thought it might be helpful to students who are grieving over the death of a loved one.  It’s quite short and covers both the grief experience and the recovery process.

Tatelbaum starts each chapter with a quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a book clearly meaningful to her. She tells us that the problem with the western view of death is that we deny it or are obsessively afraid of it. Her goal in the book is to help those in grief to a “healthy awareness and acceptance of death as a natural reality that gives our lives context and meaning.”

Beginning with the mourning period—which varies depending on individuals and their connection to the deceased, Tatelbaum describes grief as a “time of convalescence . . .for facing the loss and all the feelings that the loss evokes in order to at least begin to heal the great wound created by the death of a loved one.”  She takes us through shock, suffering and disorganization, aftershocks and reorganization, to the recovery process that includes helping others with grief and recovery from grief. She has set aside a chapter for children’s grief, which includes adolescents’ grief.

If you are looking for some help in dealing with your grief, The Courage to Grieve may be an option.

I took the book quiz to see what I am–and this is it. Oh well, at least it’s a classic by a Nobel Prize winner!  The link follows if you’d like to see what book you are.

Ms. W.

You’re The Sound and the Fury!
by William Faulkner
Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips
with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue,
but you’re mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you’ve lost. People often have a hard
time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant
anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

“The Reader” by Bernhard Schlink , translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway

Although “The Reader” is one of those books about which little can be said without giving away the ‘secret,’ it’s a great novel in the way that it approaches guilt and moral responsibility. Since it has been made into a movie that’s coming out in a few weeks (January 9, 2009), I thought I’d review it now.

“The Reader” is set in post World War II Germany, starting in the 1950s. Michael Berg, a 15 year old becomes so sick from hepatitis that he vomits in the street. Hanna Schmitz, who is much older than he—in her thirties–helps him. After months of recovery, Michael goes to Hanna’s house to thank her for her assistance. The two begin a love affair. Right away, we wonder about the moral ambiguity of the characters as Michael is only a minor. (Note that this is not a book with any sexual description; the things that the reader will find offensive or at least question are the decisions and actions of the characters, not graphic scenes.)

Soon Hanna makes Michael read to her each time he visits. When Hanna disappears without a trace, Michael is forlorn. Several years latter, when Michael is a law student, he is assigned to follow a trial in which Hanna is one of the defendants, accused of Nazi war crimes as a former SS officer.

When other defendants place the blames for many atrocities on Hanna in order to mitigate their own guilt, she is both evil and a scapegoat. Why she allows this is one of the secrets of the novel. “The Reader” raises questions about whether a person can be both evil and benign and about society’s responsibility to remember its history, including its atrocities. Though a quick read at just over 200 pages, the novel is thought provoking.

“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert

Although you are younger than Elizabeth Gilbert and, hopefully, have not experienced the kind of life crisis that prompts the journey detailed in this memoir, I think you’ll be able to relate to the idea of trying to pull your life together after some sort of loss. Since Gilbert is an excellent writer, you’ll also enjoy the wry way she is able to poke fun at herself at the same time that she works through some serious life changes.

When she was thirty years old, Gilbert realized that her marriage wasn’t working and that she had no desire for children. She spends nights crying on her bathroom floor, wondering what she should do. She comes to understand that she should get a divorce, and then all hell breaks loose. Her husband makes it as difficult as possible, and she gives him all her assets (house, etc.), just to get out. At the same time, she falls in love with a man whom she describes as wonderful, but who is also a bad choice for her. She’s a human shipwreck—too thin, too sleepless, lost and sinking fast.

Gilbert decides to go away for a year and visit three countries for four months each—Italy, India, and Indonesia (specifically, Bali). In Italy, she learns to speak Italian simply because it is such a beautiful language—and she eats the most delicious food she’s ever had, gaining some much needed weight. In India, she stays in an ashram to learn how to meditate and pray with the intensity that she believes spiritual life requires. In Bali, she befriends two traditional healers and falls in love.

All of the author’s experiences help her along a journey of self-discovery where she gains spiritual insight and finds the balance she seeks in her life. Her good-humored writing style will make you feel like she’s just chatting with you across the table, and yet will help you gain insights into life as well. A good choice when your teacher assigns a biography/memoir—or when you seek balance in your own life.