Tony Hillerman. The
Wailing Wind. ©2002 Joe Leaphorn is still retired, and this one
is more about “the legendary detective” than it is about Jim Chee and Bernie
Manuelito. There’s a lost gold mine that
leads to a couple of murders. It’s a
good read, as always with Hillerman. November
2013
.
Edward P. Jones. The
Known World. ©2003 The author won a Pulitzer for this novel
about the lives of slaves and their masters in the 1850s in fictional Manchester
County, VA. It is a series of
interconnected or layered stories that take place on two plantations, one owned
by a white planter named Robbins and the other by Henry Townsend, who had been
a slave on Robbins’ spread until his father, Augustus, bought his freedom. After manumission Henry began to buy land and
slaves and enjoyed some financial success until he died unexpectedly of an
illness at age thirty-two. His wife
Calodinia tried to keep the place going, but gradually it fell apart. Jones digs deep into his characters and
brings them to life in ways that are unforgettable. While he was a student at
the College of the Holy Cross, he learned that there had been a few African
American freemen who had owned slaves.
He researched the subject for about 10 years before writing the
novel. Throughout the book he cites local
historical sources, troves of letters, and obscure local regulations. All of these are his own inventions, but they
are obviously based on what he learned in his research. Besides the fact that some African Americans
owned slaves, there were three things that especially interested me. First, slave owners insured themselves
against loss of income when slaves were injured. In the novel the insurance company is Atlas
Life, Casualty and Assurance of Hartford, Conn.
Second is his description of the work of the patrollers who were tasked
with running down fugitive slaves and who sometimes sold free blacks back into
slavery. Third is the efficiency and
power of the language the slaves spoke among themselves. It is often unpleasant and even brutal, even
when they meant to be kind. Their speech
patterns, which Jones seems to have reproduced accurately, reflect the source
of their knowledge of “English," the slave owners and overseers who had nothing
to say to them except step ‘n fetch it. November 2013
.
Thomas Pynchon. Inherent
Vice. ©2009 I may have started this thing once before, so
this is the second time I’ve quit after one disk. The detective is a pothead; his lawyer
practices marine law when he’s not getting him out of jail; and his frequent
companion is another pothead, “?Denis? rhymes with penis.” I have read only positive things about Thomas
Pynchon, but he is not for me. November
2013
.
Edward Rutherford. Paris,
The Novel. ©2013 I’m not sure this is a novel, but it is a
great read that reminds me of Ken Follett’s Fall
of Giants and Winter of the World,
parts I and II of a trilogy in progress.
Edward Rutherford skips back and forth over 700 years of French history
from around 1300 through WW II to tell the intertwined stories of several
families, each from a different social class.
They know when they interact, and they are sometimes aware of
connections that go back a generation or two, but they are rarely if ever aware
of the long term connections among their families. That’s as it should be, because the
connections are really a literary device to give meaning to what the author has
to say about interactions among classes of Paris society over those 700 years. There’s no way to summarize 30 disks of material,
so I’ll just mention what were highlights for me: What it was like to be a Jew in Paris around
1300; St. Bartholomew’s Day during the reign of Henry IV when thousands of
protestants were slaughtered in Paris; Life at the court of Louis XIV; The construct
ion of the Eiffel Tower; How Petain handled the mutiny in the French army in
1917; Life in Montmartre; and a long section on the French resistance in WW II.
At some point Rutherford has one of his
characters tell us that “bistro” came from the time when Russian troops were
quartered in Paris after Napoleon’s defeat, and this is what they shouted in
restaurants to demand faster service.
(Bistro is the Russian word for quickly). Two other nuggets: French workmen cut the elevator cables in the
Eiffel Tower so that Hitler couldn’t go up and look down on Paris, and the
British sent the French troops evacuated at Dunkirk back to France. Most of them were snatched up by the Germans
for forced labor and many perished.
November 2013
.
Alan Weisman. The World
Without Us. ©2007 A few years after Weisman wrote an article for
Harpers about how wildlife rushed in
to populate Chernobyl after the humans had to leave, an editor suggested he do
an article about what the earth would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. That idea grew into this book. We humans aren’t going away anytime soon, but
the premise is still interesting, because it gives Weisman an opportunity to
write about all the things that humans have done to affect our flora and fauna,
our climate and weather and oceans. In
his “coda” at the end of the book, he runs through all of the authorities that
he consulted all over the world, and it becomes clear that we need to take him
seriously. I can’t say that the book is a
well organized presentation of his case or even exactly what his case is. Clearly he thinks we should be taking better
care of our environment, so perhaps that is the whole message, even though some
passages seem anecdotal. Early on he talks about a primeval
forest, the Puszcza
Białowieska on the border between Poland and Belarus. Because it was a Czarist hunting preserve, it
has almost never been disturbed by humans and as a result it is rich in flora
and fauna that have disappeared everywhere else in Europe. It is a model of what most of Europe would
eventually look like if humans disappeared.
He goes on to talk about a Greek owned resort that ended up in the
Turkish part of Cyprus after the partition.
The Greek Cypriots left, of course, and the Turks sealed it off behind
chain link fences. A maintenance expert
was allowed in 20 years later to try to get one of the hotels ready to
open. Weisman describes in detail what
he found. Nature had taken over. In another chapter, hee talks about the
communities carved in the tufa in Cappadocia in more detail than I have seen
elsewhere and it’s all very interesting, but I’m not sure where he was going
with it. He checks into north America in
Clovis times and says that the the conclusion of some scientists that the
migrating people ate all of the large animals and caused their extinction is
pretty convincing. While he’s here he
mentions that Mount Rushmore will be the human artifact that lasts the longest,
perhaps 22 million years. These things all tell us that theworld is different
because of human activity and that much diversity has been lost, but they don’t
seem to bear specifically on the future if humans remain here. However, when he discusses plastic waste in
the ocean, nuclear waste, and the
deterioration of barrier reefs because of global warming, it becomes clear we
are in trouble. This is a fascinating
book covering all sorts of subjects one would like to follow up on to learn
more. November 2013
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