Mary Coin

 

Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good historical novelization of the depression. Mary Coin is the subject of an iconic photograph by Vera Dare who documented immigrant workers. These are the stand-in names of Florence Owens Thompson and Dorothea Lange. Silver does a good job of painting a picture who Mary is, and the circumstances of immigrant workers during the depression. I also enjoyed the story of Vera who was the photographer. Both of these women were strong in different ways. Silver also throws in Walker Dodge in the present day who has a connection with one of these women that slowly reveals itself. Silver can give herself free reign since she has used pseudonyms and I think she accurately portrayed the conditions of that era, but there is enough similarities to the real-life counterparts (both photographers were married to painters, both subjects had some American-Indian lineage), that it was hard to know what was based on the real characters and what was made up.

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Engineering Eden

 

Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature by Jordan Fisher Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an interesting look into the two different schools of thought in managing wildlife areas--should we try to maintain nature the way we found it when colonists arrived or should we manage it based on what makes it safe and manageable for the uses which civilization has evolved (including tourism). It's a complicated subject and obviously has good and bad points with each school of thought. Smith covers these arguments while also narrating a trial about a bear attack. Should the national park be held responsible for the bear's actions? Or is this part of the danger of interacting with nature? Unfortunately, Smith gets bogged down in a lot of distracting minutiae that doesn't clarify what he is talking about. In an effort to have us get to know the victim, he gets way too involved in who he is and his life before he entered the park. He also gets brings in fire control, deer and elk maintenance, and personnel squabbles which could strengthen his thesis but he doesn't quite tie things together and the back and forth with the trial just doesn't work. However, the question of how we manage wildlife and nature in general is a subject that can be looked at from a lot of different angles and despite Smith's haphazard approach (or maybe because of it?) the complexities and difficulties in trying to do what's best for the natural areas AND for the tourists who enjoy it are revealed.

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For the next half century, the perception that each ecosystem has some preordained ideal state, to which it always seeks to return, informed both ecology and attempts to restore nature in national parks.

because human hands were always unintentionally doing something to nature, they ought to do something carefully planned as well.

Build Your House Around My Body

 

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This just ticked all the boxes for me. It was delightfully imaginative and weird while not coming too much off the rails. It had bits and pieces that fit in other narratives and clicked satisfyingly into place. It explored issues that days later still make me ponder--I'm still not sure what it all means, but I like trying to think it out. What does it mean to have a body? How do spirit and body affect each other? How do we see others and how are we seen? Plus, karma. Also the location of Vietnam played a significant role which I enjoyed learning about. This was another book I had a hard time not just reading all day.

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Men We Reaped

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Memoirs are hard to review and I say I don't really like them but I read a lot of them. I do think I learn a lot about how different people think and what they learn from experiences that are so different from mine and then not so different. Witnessing them work through their traumas and relationships can kind of feel like voyeurism and sometimes I don't come to the same conclusions they do and how do I judge that? This memoir of Jesmyn's early life and tribute to five young men who died young is tragic and sad. But it is so well written. You can see Ward's talent jumping off the page. My one purely editorial criticism is that I wish she would have woven in some more of the young men's lives with her own narrative a little bit better. We often only meet these persons in the pages of their tribute chapter The death of her brother which she memorializes last and does show up in her narrative passages made his death really hit you. Again,it's not a happy book but she writes with such candor and beauty that it transcends the sadness of the material.

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If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn't this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it's not here?  Doesn't it?

We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were alive even as we did everything to die.

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother's hands.  How unfair it all seemed. 

The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this in graduate school but couldn't remember how it ended so I read it again. The ending is ambiguous and supremely unsatisfying so no wonder I didn't recall it. But even with careful reading the first time, the second time around uncovers so much of James' genius in writing the inner life of his characters. His extended metaphors and sly foreshadowing are delightful. His characters shine--Ralph is so witty and sardonic, Henrietta so forcible and opinionated but a true friend, Lord Warburton so gallant, Caspar so laughably hopeful and earnest, and Osmond so snakily smooth and cruel. How does an American girl, educated, open, and now even unfettered by material wants, and who longs for experiences and freedom so much get herself so thoroughly and fixedly trapped? The fact that we don't really know what Isobel decides to do in the final act makes it harder to conclude the point James was making. But the compassion and depth of understanding for his protagonist makes this not just a great psychological thriller but a feminist exploration as well. I did not like the ending, but I could re-read this again, I'm sure and be stimulated by James' writing.

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The Beast

 

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Martinez follows migrants from Central America through Mexico as they try to cross the border into America. In the afterword, he points out that this treacherous journey may not even yield a better life--there will still be economic hardships coupled with violence and the fear of discovery will always haunt them and yet they still come in droves. He says he hopes his book will at least give Americans a sense of respect for what these migrants have been through. But while obviously being sympathetic to migrants, this book also helped me to understand why some people would want to tighten the borders. I don't think I realized the prevalence of gangs, violence, and drugs that permeate the whole of this migration. Migrants don't stick around, or are too scared to make a difference in the court systems and so justice does not exist. They are vulnerable and desperate and those wishing to make a profit at the expense of their fellowman is rampant. Without tighter borders those drugs, gangs, and ensuing violence will follow because migrants are in the same situation: unable to report or to prosecute. Riding the trains was surely a new aspect about migration that I didn't know about, but it was the unending violence and fear that really opened my eyes. Yes, I have respect for those who make the trip, but I also see that the problem we need to address comes way before the border.

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Warlight

 

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The coming of age story of a young man whose mother was a spy during and after WWII, only he didn't really realize it at the time. His mother left him and his sister in the care of some unorthodox and unusual guardians who introduced them to some interesting lifestyles and philosophies. His mother returns when "the enemies" try to abduct him and sister, and she leaves the spy service. The second half of the book seems to be him trying to put the pieces of new knowledge with what happened back then--why his mother left, who the guardians were both during the war, and after, and what happened to everyone. It was an interesting and unusual book although I can't say I really liked any of the characters or sympathized much with them which is why it is a lower rating.

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The Moth was often away, but his absence, like his presence, rarely mattered.

Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

I felt I too had disappeared. I had lost my youth.

Only a thin line of light under the door I had just closed behind me.

I retreated from arguments as if I had those epicanthic eyelids that birds and some fish have, that allow them to separate themselves silently, almost courteously, from present company.

speaking of the mystery of chalk hills, where “whole faunas come and go, while the layers of the chalk are built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures working in almost limitless time.”

She was once more back in a small repeating universe that included few outsiders

We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time.