repost: No Son of Mine by Jonathan Corcoran

Posted on April 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This is a repost of an earlier review, because this moving book has just become available today.

Disclosure: Jon has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program. I admire his work and he is a dear friend.

I found this memoir remarkable. It encompasses much in terms of its time span and the bigger events in the world, and Jon accomplishes something special by being raw and vulnerable, and never self-indulgent. I think the struggles he portrays here will offer something to any reader, because we are all struggling to navigate even the closest of relationships. I am impressed by the writing in terms of that larger storytelling and meaning-making, as well as line by line.

Corcoran grew up in a small town in West Virginia that is just a few minutes’ drive from where I live now. (It’s always a little exciting to read a place written well that you personally know, and I did enjoy that part here. Elkins is not perfect, but I think this author has handled it with respect for both positive and negative qualities.) As a gay kid, he suffered in the town, in the evangelical church his family attended, and in his family itself. He did some secretive explorations of sexuality in West Virginia (not too dissimilar, I think, from those in The Rope Swing, which is however fiction), but did not live as an openly gay man until he left for college at Brown University. Coming from poverty, Brown was both a great accomplishment and a shock: a wider world, but rarified, and Jon was a foreigner to many of his peers and professors there. It’s at Brown that he met Sam.

In his second year at Brown, Jon is in Portland, Maine, with his boyfriend, Sam, meeting Sam’s family for the first time. It’s his twentieth birthday when his mother calls, seething with what she’s discovered. Jon confirms that he is gay. “You are no longer my son,” she says, and she hangs up. This leaves him traumatized, trying to finish college with no financial or emotional or any other kind of support, with no family, and no options, surrounded by Ivy League administrators whose understanding of what all this means is so poor that he is advised to take a year off and travel. His mother spends the next six months calling in the early morning and waking him up to tell him he will die of AIDS or go to hell, or both.

Jon and his mother spend years–fifteen years, the rest of her life–being estranged and trying again, having massive, blow-up fights and years of silence, and abuse and toxicity and cautious attempts at peace and acceptance. Her bad behavior is horribly, shockingly bad. But tangled up with the bad is the fact that this is his mother, his caretaker, whom he has loved, and who still (somewhere, twistedly) loves him, and misses him when they are on the outs. It’s a level of trauma that’s hard to fathom if you haven’t lived it. But as a narrator, he does a good job of describing its effects, including a mistrust of memory and various physical ailments. It also poses some challenges for his relationship with Sam, which will continue until they eventually marry, and into the present.

This is a memoir of trying to reconcile a parent that the narrator loves, his memories of her and of his hometown, with the pain inflicted at the hands of that same person (and place). It’s all a puzzle, to question the causes, to wonder how much forgiveness is due to such a figure. It’s a memoir that is also an assay, both a personal narrative and an exploration of ideas. “…some part of my brain is perpetually trying to explain her actions, to find the root cause for them, and what this really comes dangerously close to is the notion that her actions have an excuse, that if I searched hard and long enough the hurt and pain she caused me can be written away. But she hurt more, a voice says, and I don’t doubt that. So here I am, operating the world’s worst justice system from the recesses of my brain.” “I do not know how to balance all the pain she caused with all the pain she felt.”

There’s a lot to appreciate here, and a lot of wisdom that I think will help just about anybody. Not to say answers, but wise observations about one man’s experience. Most of us are wrestling with difficult, tangled-up relationships where abuse and love meet; many of us are struggling with what to take and what to leave about a family or a place. “I hear her laugh, hear the crinkle of her dyed-blonde hair. I rub her cracked feet, feel her hand on my back. I smell her nicotine fingers. There is her cup of Lipton tea in the little ceramic mug that is white with flowers around the brim. I taste the milky black tea. And I say, I don’t want to lose this all. I don’t want to lose what made me.” There is also some lovely writing here. If the story itself is often difficult, there’s a remarkable amount of grace, beauty, and hope. I think it’s a book for anybody and everybody. Thank you, Jon, for sharing so much in a way that feels both raw and wide-open, and careful and thoughtful. I’m awed.

Rating: 9 paper bags.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Posted on February 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.

Definitely one of the best of the year, Braiding Sweetgrass is a big serious one that I fear I won’t do justice. In good company, it reminds me of Pieces of White Shell and Soil. The good news is, many more thoughtful than I have also written rave reviews. It’s not a new one (original publication 2013) and the praise has been coming for years.

This is a beautifully written book, with poetry and metaphor and gentle, thoughtful articulations of big, important ideas. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a highly trained scientist – a botanist and a college professor; she is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, with a background in thinking about the world in very different ways from the standard, Western, materialist, human-centered culture that many of us (including me) are more familiar with. Part of her life story has been the reconciling of those two parts of herself, or the training of them to work in concert, when one did not always welcome the other. But it’s to our great advantage that she’s been working so hard at that intersection, and sharing it here. I’ll characterize that work as the integration of a sense of interconnectedness, and the idea that other-than-human entities hold their own identities and importance aside from what they offer to humans, with modern “hard” science.

I love the structure of this book, which progresses through Kimmerer’s life and perspectives on the natural world and humans’ relationship with it, always with sweetgrass as an organizing principle. The preface, whose first line introduces this review, succinctly describes the importance of sweetgrass to the culture Kimmerer comes from. The braid “is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story–old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” There follow five sections–“Planting Sweetgrass,” “Tending Sweetgrass,” “Picking Sweetgrass,” and braiding and burning it–each composed of individual essays. The first essay, “Skywoman Falling,” begins with an origin story of North America as Turtle Island, starting with “a great turtle” that holds the earth on his shell, an origin story that holds significance for me; the first few pages of this book won me over completely. And I remained captivated throughout.

Any book about the natural world and human relationships and responsibilities these days is bound to contain some bad news; I find myself shrinking back from some of this reading, while I’m also still drawn toward it, because of the pain I feel at that bad news. But Kimmerer has some real wisdom to offer about the choice between despair and joy, the question of whether we can view hard truths and still find good parts too. “What could such a vision create other than woe and tears?… it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Thank you, Sweetgrass, for that gift.

Gifts are an important topic throughout, too. The Native American culture of gift-giving, the importance of reciprocity, and the emphasis on giving with a faith that things will come back around applies not only to interhuman relationships but the ones with the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants too. The difference between a capitalist, materialist, consumerist culture and one of gifts and reciprocity is profound. An essay titled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in part about language (and the near-extinction of the Anishinaabe languages Kimmerer might have learned to speak as a child, “had history been different,” and which she now studies as an adult), is also about some of these cultural concepts, and the fact that language shapes the concepts we’re even capable of comprehending. Like some of the best books in the world, Sweetgrass is about paying attention, and the importance of the choice of what we attend to.

Individual essays tell stories from Kimmerer’s family life (from childhood through motherhood), from the different communities in which she’s lived, from her experiences as a student and as a teacher. They take place in different parts of Turtle Island, including New York state and the Oregon rainforests, and integrate some pretty serious science with traditional storytelling and Kimmerer’s own. There is so much to learn here, and I love science made accessible by story. I won’t begin to try to tell you what all is available here; I really want you to discover it yourself.

This book might just change the way you look at the world. I hope it does. Please give it a chance.

Rating: 9 raindrops.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

No Son of Mine by Jonathan Corcoran

Posted on January 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: Jon has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program. I admire his work and he is a dear friend.

Also, I am teasing you about a book that will not be published for months (April 1 of this year, no foolin’), but I’ll repost then to remind you.

Now on to the show.

I found this memoir remarkable. It encompasses much in terms of its time span and the bigger events in the world, and Jon accomplishes something special by being raw and vulnerable, and never self-indulgent. I think the struggles he portrays here will offer something to any reader, because we are all struggling to navigate even the closest of relationships. I am impressed by the writing in terms of that larger storytelling and meaning-making, as well as line by line.

Corcoran grew up in a small town in West Virginia that is just a few minutes’ drive from where I live now. (It’s always a little exciting to read a place written well that you personally know, and I did enjoy that part here. Elkins is not perfect, but I think this author has handled it with respect for both positive and negative qualities.) As a gay kid, he suffered in the town, in the evangelical church his family attended, and in his family itself. He did some secretive explorations of sexuality in West Virginia (not too dissimilar, I think, from those in The Rope Swing, which is however fiction), but did not live as an openly gay man until he left for college at Brown University. Coming from poverty, Brown was both a great accomplishment and a shock: a wider world, but rarified, and Jon was a foreigner to many of his peers and professors there. It’s at Brown that he met Sam.

In his second year at Brown, Jon is in Portland, Maine, with his boyfriend, Sam, meeting Sam’s family for the first time. It’s his twentieth birthday when his mother calls, seething with what she’s discovered. Jon confirms that he is gay. “You are no longer my son,” she says, and she hangs up. This leaves him traumatized, trying to finish college with no financial or emotional or any other kind of support, with no family, and no options, surrounded by Ivy League administrators whose understanding of what all this means is so poor that he is advised to take a year off and travel. His mother spends the next six months calling in the early morning and waking him up to tell him he will die of AIDS or go to hell, or both.

Jon and his mother spend years–fifteen years, the rest of her life–being estranged and trying again, having massive, blow-up fights and years of silence, and abuse and toxicity and cautious attempts at peace and acceptance. Her bad behavior is horribly, shockingly bad. But tangled up with the bad is the fact that this is his mother, his caretaker, whom he has loved, and who still (somewhere, twistedly) loves him, and misses him when they are on the outs. It’s a level of trauma that’s hard to fathom if you haven’t lived it. But as a narrator, he does a good job of describing its effects, including a mistrust of memory and various physical ailments. It also poses some challenges for his relationship with Sam, which will continue until they eventually marry, and into the present.

This is a memoir of trying to reconcile a parent that the narrator loves, his memories of her and of his hometown, with the pain inflicted at the hands of that same person (and place). It’s all a puzzle, to question the causes, to wonder how much forgiveness is due to such a figure. It’s a memoir that is also an assay, both a personal narrative and an exploration of ideas. “…some part of my brain is perpetually trying to explain her actions, to find the root cause for them, and what this really comes dangerously close to is the notion that her actions have an excuse, that if I searched hard and long enough the hurt and pain she caused me can be written away. But she hurt more, a voice says, and I don’t doubt that. So here I am, operating the world’s worst justice system from the recesses of my brain.” “I do not know how to balance all the pain she caused with all the pain she felt.”

There’s a lot to appreciate here, and a lot of wisdom that I think will help just about anybody. Not to say answers, but wise observations about one man’s experience. Most of us are wrestling with difficult, tangled-up relationships where abuse and love meet; many of us are struggling with what to take and what to leave about a family or a place. “I hear her laugh, hear the crinkle of her dyed-blonde hair. I rub her cracked feet, feel her hand on my back. I smell her nicotine fingers. There is her cup of Lipton tea in the little ceramic mug that is white with flowers around the brim. I taste the milky black tea. And I say, I don’t want to lose this all. I don’t want to lose what made me.” There is also some lovely writing here. If the story itself is often difficult, there’s a remarkable amount of grace, beauty, and hope. I think it’s a book for anybody and everybody. Thank you, Jon, for sharing so much in a way that feels both raw and wide-open, and careful and thoughtful. I’m awed.

Rating: 9 paper bags.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

Posted on January 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is everything they say it is. I’ll start with some adjectives from Roxane Gay’s front-cover blurb: “astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered.” Some books – well-regarded, reviewed by smarter, better-qualified folks than me – are hard to write about. I can only add my voice to the chorus.

I think I’d already begun hearing about Laymon when I read an essay of his in Oxford American, which featured (if I remember) Outkast and his Grandmama. I was impressed then and I knew I needed to read this; I’m just sorry it’s taken me this long.

Laymon comes from Missisippi, raised by his mother and grandmother with infrequent contact with his father. He comes from financial insecurity, and a black* American experience that knows it is wildly insecure in the face of white America. His mother and father are both politically minded, and he has plenty of exposure to questions about race and racial (in)justice, but no exposure to the kinds of questions that bother him from a young age: questions about gender and sexuality and safety, consent, bodies, sexual violence, physical health, eating, economic insecurity, housing discrimination, memory, honesty and lies. He has to pursue these questions himself, and while Heavy is the story of his coming-of-age, it’s much more about figuring out how to interact with some of those questions. Truthfulness, bodies, relationships. How to love responsibly, as he puts it.

*I am following his use of the little-b black here even though that’s a change for me.

I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir.

That’s his first paragraph. The book is written in the second person to a specific reader: his mother. The narrator and his mother love each other hard, but there is a lot of harm in their love. The reader gets to see young Kiese grow up, from age eleven or so (it jumps around a bit) to an adult professor earning tenure (in traumatizing fashion) at Vassar College. He keeps his reader up to date on body weight, as he tries to cope with his pain by eating his way up to 319 pounds and then by punishing his body with exercise and anorexia down to 150-something pounds. “I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old.” The title is not only about body weight, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s about the heaviness of life and responsibility. “To white folk and the police, you will always be huge no matter how skinny you are,” his mother tells him.

I love how carefully he cares about words. His mother pushed him to speak a certain way, to keep him safe: no contractions when talking to white people and police. But he defends the unique language that he and his friends use in school, rebelling in their majority-white eighth grade year by using speech patterns that make sense differently. His mother, an academic, has pushed his writing and revision since childhood, but he’s choosing a different language than the one she pushes. “I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage.” WHEW. This book begins and ends with short sections titled respectively ‘Been’ and ‘Bend.’ He writes at the beginning, in ‘Been,’ to his mother: “I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.” There’s something powerful in writing down what’s that hard to say.

Heavy is artful, lyric, deathly serious, loving, stark. When Laymon becomes a young professor, he catalogs the ways in which he fails his students, and it’s absolutely raw and horrifying, and therefore brave. (I and most of us have failed worse.) It’s radical, in both senses, and I’m going to have to keep thinking about it. I didn’t do this book justice here. Go read it.

Rating: 8 miles.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Winter Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin

Posted on December 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

The solstices are for fire. Summer flames say Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far).

I was overjoyed to find out about this book in time to get it for the winter solstice last week. I really enjoyed Nina MacLaughlin’s Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter some years ago, and I was pleased to have such an event planned for my day: this little book, a batch of hot mulled wine, and my usual solstice/equinox tradition of a backyard fire. At just 80 pages, Winter Solstice is well designed to be read on the single day in question. I am choosing to share many of MacLaughlin’s lovely words here, so my review winds up practically as long as her book (not really…).

It’s an essay in four parts, each longer than the last, plus an afterword, plus an addendum. “Inhale the Darkness” begins: “Two boys strung the lights on houses in Ohio.” It’s a detailed description of that weekend job, the installation of light against darkness. “It’s an old impulse. To honor the dark with festivals of light, to battle it with same.”

Henri Bosco describes this almost-winter moment of the year, “when the world was poised on a pure ridge,” balanced between two seasons, casting “a glance back at the aging autumn, still misty with its wild moods, to contemplate deadly winter from afar.” The misty mood is behind us. We’re looking now at something dark and wilder.

Next, “The Shadows Below the Shadows” surveys traditions across time, Persephone and Demeter, Krampus, Saturnalia, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Newgrange. It ends: “Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe. We’ll leaf with life and pass below the secret places of this earth.” I love the way MacLaughlin integrates stories, legends, traditions, and the connections to nature, the plant life they are all in relationship with.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

were meant to elevate people above the human sphere. They were meant to launch them divinewards. As Cicero says: “In very truth we have learned from [the Mysteries] the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with better hope.”

“In Winter We Get Inside Each Other” is about the danger and elemental fear of cold and darkness, and how we deal with those feelings. Describing sledding down a hill on the grounds of an institution for the criminally insane:

…it never felt crazy to cry out, there by yourself, going faster and faster, in your own private moment of fear and glee. Is that what made the lunatics yell inside their cells? Some same combination of soaring down a mountainside unstoppable? I’m happy, I’m afraid, I feel too much, I have to let it out. A cracking open in the descent.

Also sex, sensuality, connection. From a Mary Ruefle poem: “When it snows like this I feel the whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.” (You will have noticed that MacLaughlin makes reference to many others’ wise words.)

“Burn Something Today,” part four of this longform essay, brought me great pleasure as my fire was well underway and I was cozy and warm right up against it, just three or four feet from the remnant snow off to my left, and the page lit up by my headlamp.

Depending on where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crops, or fed to cattle to fatten them and boost fertility in the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder and lightning, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The lights we string on bushes, that glow on the trees in the center of town–something of these ancient fires lives in them, too. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves.

MacLaughlin’s afterword is “The Timing of the Light,” in which she as a child watched for an approaching car before switching on the electric ‘candle’ in a window, so as to offer hope, light, a bright moment for passersby. “I did not know about conference calls in middle school, but sensed adulthood could be possessed of certain drear.”

The addendum is “Plant Matter,” with a few entries for the plants most important to the winter solstice: holly, blessed thistle, mistletoe, cinnamon, yew, oak. (Others named but not featured: cedar, clove, rosemary, nutmeg, birch, pine, chamomile, juniper, frankincense, and wintergreen. A few of these went into my mulled wine. I considered a chamomile tea before bed but had a beer instead, a kettle sour with cranberry, rosemary, orange peel, salt, and coriander.) In the addendum’s final entry, Oak, which closes the book:

…an end here does not mean the end. The original fire lives in all fire. On the stove and in the hearth, in the bonfire on the beach, surrounded by stones in the woods by a river, in the explosion after the crash, between your ribs and behind your eyes, on the struck tip of the match, on the burning surface of the stars, the source of our fire, and us all. The fire goes out and lives on.

I can’t imagine a better way to observe the changing tide of light and dark. Thank you, Nina.

Rating: 9 timely moments.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” (essay) by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on October 30, 2023 by pagesofjulia

After reviewing the story collection on Friday, I felt the need to go find the essay which gave the collection its name. I’ve decided to just repost it here for your pleasure rather than muddying it with my own words. I think it’s important. Please take the time to visit Jemisin’s site for…

Filed under: miscellaneous | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy

Posted on September 22, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others.

This is the best book I’ve read this year.

Soil has an appropriate subtitle, succinctly naming some of the most important elements of what it offers. Camille Dungy is Black, a woman, a mother, and she is determined to grow a garden in the backyard of the home she moves to with husband Ray and daughter Callie in 2013. Their new home is in Fort Collins, Colorado, an overwhelming white city in an overwhelmingly white state*, which is also Dungy’s home state. “Black people are, and always have been, planted everywhere in this country.” They come from California, where Callie was born; Ray is from New York.

Dungy, a respected poet and academic, comes to Fort Collins to teach at Colorado State University. She has always appreciated gardens, gardening, flowers; she comes from gardeners. As a Black person, and as a woman, she has no choice but to track the unjust and frightening trends in the world around her. As a mother, she must balance her work life – her entire life – against the needs of a child. These intersections of identity define the experience she describes in this book, which is a memoir of gardening, as a Black mother, in Fort Collins, in the United States, in a time that includes the 2016 election, the COVID pandemic, numerous murders of Black Americans by police and vigilantes, climate change and environmental degradation, and increasing wildfires in the American West. These are a few of her concerns. In the same sense that every space is political and every person with an interest in humanity’s direction is politically engaged… of course gardening is about race. Everything is about race. “One thing always leads into another here,” she writes, but that’s everywhere, too.

I see this book as a braided essay, in chapters. Dungy chronicles her life, and snippets of Ray’s and of Callie’s, mostly in terms of her garden; but gardening is inextricable from the history of Fort Collins, of Colorado, of the country, of Black Americans. She interrogates history and also literature, particularly nature writing, whose tradition is overwhelmingly white, nearly as overwhelmingly male, and largely free of domestic details, as in, do any of these people ever do laundry? Did you know John Muir had a wife and kids? “What folly to separate the urgent life will of the hollyhock outside my door from the other lives, the family, I hold dear. My life demands a radically domestic ecological thought.” Annie Dillard receives special attention, as does poet Anne Spencer. Dungy writes about the fear her family feels on the night of the 2016 election, and the fear they feel–achingly, that her young child feels–when they hear yet another story like that of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was killed by police in Aurora, Colorado in 2019. It’s all interconnected.

The craft of Dungy’s braid is exquisite, and her points are razor-sharp, wise, true. Because she’s a poet, her writing is obviously strong, too, lyric and imagistic and color-saturated and lovely. She wields metaphor to great effect. “Some large part of gardening, like some large part of living, is figuring out what to cut and when.” It’s just an all-around beautiful book. It made me cry, and it made me pause; it wasn’t always joyful, because nothing true is. Whew.

“I am no angel,” writes Dungy, about her own failure to live flawlessly with regards to “build[ing] a more equitable and sustainable world.” Nobody’s getting it exactly right, but we should still try. Similarly, she wrestles with being a gardener and nature lover when there’s so much she doesn’t know–but she’s learning. “When I told Ray I didn’t know the proper name for the broken digging tool, he didn’t laugh at me. He accepted the fact that I am still and always learning.” (This is one of the attributes I love most in a human: to be still and always learning. Also, there are some sweet notes about a good marriage in this book, too.)

On the simplest literal level, I loved Dungy’s writing about her garden. She works to reclaim the yard of the house they purchase from sedately manicured garden plots, lots of lawn, and river rocks over plasticized landscaping fabric. The aim is to restore more native plants and those that will be drought-resistant, pollinator-friendly, and friendlier to more wildlife in general. These are goals I share in principle, at my own little house, but in practice I’m pretty daunted by the work involved. I do not love the work of gardening nearly as much as Dungy does, and she is honest about how much work it is. I wish I were more like her, in this respect and others. It’s inspirational.

Thank you, Liz, for the recommendation. Like its lovely dust cover and endpapers (I had to go back and tell Liz, who listened to the audiobook, to get a print copy!), this is just a gorgeous book.

Rating: 10 blooms.

*84.5% and 86% “white alone,” respectively, according to the 2022 US Census Bureau QuickFacts sheets for city and state.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage by Philippe Sands

Posted on August 21, 2023 by pagesofjulia

The 2018 freeing of an Indian Ocean archipelago from British colonial rule is both a complex case of international law and a stirring tale of injustice and homecoming.

In The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage, Philippe Sands combines a moving story of human tragedy and injustice with the complexities of international law to great effect.

The Chagos Archipelago is a little-known collection of islands in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius, colonized over centuries by the Portuguese, Dutch, and French before becoming a British colony as part of Mauritius. In 1973, the British forcibly removed its longtime residents, ostensibly to make way for a United States military base on a single island. Residents for generations, in many cases descended from enslaved coconut oil workers, were deported en masse with no notice, forced to leave behind their homes, memories, pets, and any possessions that didn’t fit in a single small trunk. Among them was Liseby Elysé, recently married, 20 years old, and four months pregnant. Decades later, in 2018, Madame Elysé would be present for the decision of the International Court of Justice in The Hague that would allow her to return to her home island, for which she’d yearned all those years. Her testimony would be an important part of that case.

Sands (East West Street; The Ratline) was part of the legal team representing Mauritius in its bid to free the Chagos from British control. With decades of international law experience and an intimate knowledge of many of the judges and lawyers involved, Sands brings authoritative expertise to this subject matter; as an actor in the case at hand, he acknowledges his personal perspective, including an admiration of Madame Elysé and other Chagossian activists. Madame Elysé cannot read or write, but in Sands’s recounting she is a natural storyteller, has an excellent memory, and speaks eloquently and unwaveringly of her strong feelings for her home. This sense of place and feeling of loss for her homeland, even nearly 50 years after leaving, strikes a common chord of human connection to the place from whence one came.

With a lawyer’s careful research and methodical laying out of the facts, Sands rewinds to 1945 and Ralph Bunche’s work on decolonization at the founding of the United Nations; briefly reviews Chagossian history over centuries; and then zooms into the finer points of international law on separation of colonies after World War II. The Last Colony is both a neat work of detailed legal points and history, and a deeply felt narrative about the injustice of deportation and the dwindling number of Chagossians with strong ties to their homeland. Madame Elysé is an impressive, courageous figure and emblem, putting a human face on colonialism’s continuing wrongs, both for the International Court and this book. There is much to appreciate about this little-known story in Sands’s sensitive telling.

This review originally ran in the August 1, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dogs.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire by Clare Frank

Posted on May 29, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This exceptional memoir shows wide emotional range in spanning the complexities of firefighting and fire prevention in California and the American West, gender issues, family, work, love, and loss.

Clare Frank’s Burnt: A Memoir of Fighting Fire is a heart-racing, heartfelt story that will make readers laugh, cry, and consider what matters most in life. The author is an indomitable character, from self-supporting teen through a decades-long career in California firefighting (beginning in 1982, when women were few and generally viewed askance), with impressive achievements in her career and personal life. Frank’s memoir is packed not only with adrenaline but with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and creativity. Beware the impulse to race through these 300-plus pages in a single sitting.

After talking her unorthodox parents into emancipating her at 16, Frank becomes a firefighter at 17 (faced with an age requirement of 18, she simply leaves her birthdate blank on the employment form). Despite being “the youngest, shortest, and lightest person in an academy for the brawniest of professions,” she is indefatigable: stubborn, hardworking, short-fused, and tenacious, earning nicknames like Flipper, Tiger, and Poindexter–as well as degrees in fire administration, law, and creative writing–along the way. Frank rises through the firefighting ranks in her 33-year career (with a five-year doctor-mandated medical break), finishing with the lofty position of State Chief of Fire Protection, six ranks above captain, the highest she once thought she would be willing to attain. She works on structure fires and wildfires, in small firehouses and large ones, in the field and in positions of leadership, on labor and legal issues, prevention, forestry, and more, across the behemoth California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, aka Cal Fire (the largest fire department in the state).

While she does meditate on firefighting’s gender issues, her response to the question for much of her career is encapsulated in an anecdote: “While I pulled hose through tangled manzanita, the reporter jammed a microphone in my face and yelled, ‘What’s it feel like to be a female on the line?’ I yelled back, ‘The same as it feels for the guys, except I have chee-chees.’ ” She hoped that if she ignored what made her different, everyone else would as well–a strategy that worked frequently but not always.

Frank is a renegade overachiever in all areas: athletic, career, and (after a late return to the classroom) academic. Her writing is not merely serviceable, but thoughtfully constructed; her memoir’s sections are labeled for stages of fire development: ignition, sustained heat, free burn, growth, full development, and decay. Fire is present in every aspect of Frank’s life and work, including writing, but this always feels natural rather than effortful. By the end of this memorable book, readers will reconsider fire policy as well as family, risk, and hard work. With thrilling momentum and a heat of its own, Burnt is a sensation and an inspiration.

This review originally ran in the April 27, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 bird’s nests.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Wanderer: An Alaska Wolf’s Final Journey by Tom Walker

Posted on May 5, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This unforgettable portrait and travelogue of an individual Alaska gray wolf gorgeously and thoughtfully illuminates issues for the species and for all Arctic wildlife.

Tom Walker (Wild Shots; Alaska Wildlife; The Seventymile Kid), an accomplished photographer, author and longtime Alaskan, turns his naturalist expertise to a single individual animal emblematic of a larger story in The Wanderer: An Alaska Wolf’s Final Journey.

“On the northern frontier of Canada and Alaska sprawls a wilderness largely devoid of human imprint.” Walker outlines his subjects broadly: the land, its natural and human histories, flora and fauna and variations in land use over centuries. He transports his readers to early November of 2010, to the slopes above Copper Creek, where two gray wolves roam: an older female, already collared as Wolf 227, and her younger male companion. Biologists spot them from a helicopter and descend to tag him as Wolf 258, although Walker will call him the Wanderer (with some protest from scientists, who prefer the impersonal numbering system over names, even the archetypal). Over the following 11 months, GPS tracking shows the Wanderer traveling nearly 3,000 miles, earning his nickname in a lengthy quest for prey, territory, and a mate.

Walker narrates this journey in detail, with lyricism and a clear love for the land and life forms he describes, using his informed imagination to provide specifics where the GPS collar cannot. “The Coleen tumbles through treeless highlands that in summer are resplendent with wildflowers. Between storms, the crystalline waters rush lyrically over the cobblestones…. In summer, lupine and fireweed bloom in willow thickets alive with breeding songbirds and ptarmigan.” In Walker’s telling, with the benefit of expert biologists’ opinions, the Wanderer makes repeated inexplicable decisions: to turn away from abundant prey and to move into areas of greater risk from humans or other wolves–although he will generally be lucky in avoiding threats. Through his choices and movements, readers consider broader questions about habitat, climate change, predator/prey relationships, and the rights of human vs. animal hunters. (Walker relates the history of predator control policies in Alaska and throughout the U.S.)

Stunning photographs and essential maps help readers follow the Wanderer’s ramblings. Intermingled with his meticulous account of the wolf’s wanderings, Walker handles related subjects: geology and natural history; Alaska politics; remarkable stories of animal and human life in the Arctic; pack dynamics; and the changing habits and habitats of species the wolf interacts with, including caribou, grizzly bears, Dall sheep, Arctic ground squirrels, moose, and muskox. The Wanderer is a deeply enjoyable example of creative nonfiction and nature writing: literary, lovely, meditative in its pacing, informative and clear.

This review originally ran in the April 6, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 artic ground squirrels.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Next Page »