Meat Eater by Steven Rinella

Posted on September 17, 2012 by pagesofjulia

A loving exploration of hunting–and meat–in human history, and its role in our lives today, from the host of the Travel Channel’s The Wild Within.


Steven Rinella (American Buffalo) grew up hunting, trapping and fishing with his two older brothers. Hunting has played many roles in his life, from a source of income and food to a form of recreation and lifestyle. In a world that increasingly gets its meat from a supermarket, Rinella offers a passionate and reasoned ode to what he calls humankind’s oldest endeavor.

In a series of vignettes, Rinella recounts experiences from childhood through parenthood. He relates the first buck he didn’t get and the experience of trailing mountain lions in Arizona and Dall sheep in Alaska. He describes his first entrepreneurial scheme to trap small mammals and sell their fur, as well as a regretted dalliance with illegal hunting methods. He discusses hunters’ ethics, the rules upon which they do not universally agree, and the idea of “fair chase.” Occasionally, he offers tasting notes on various animals’ flesh, which may be useful to his fellow hunters along with his instructions on preparation–they may also help non-hunters understand the appeal of eating, say, squirrel (not to mention “camp meat”).

“Hunting stories are the oldest and most widespread form of story on earth,” Rinella observes; thus historical anecdotes about Daniel Boone and early hunter-gatherers accompany him in his evolution from hunting for fun and profit to hunting as a way to feed his own family efficiently and mindfully. Meat Eater is a book for the nature lover or the hunter as well as the uninitiated.

This review originally ran in the Sept. 10, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Further thoughts: I just wanted to expand upon the above review, written for Shelf Awareness, and share my personal reaction. I came to this book not entirely ready to ally with the idea of hunting (or even meat eating) as a lifestyle. I eat meat – but I am sympathetic to the vegetarian’s and the vegan’s position, and I was curious about Rinella’s perspective. So what did I find? I found that his arguments and his outlook were both reasonable and well-presented. I was able to sympathize with just about all he had to say. Even my best vegan buddy states that, if he were to eat meat, better that it should be hunted in the wild than captured from one’s grocery store. Still, the facts of our present-day situation – a limited amount of land space and a huge and still-growing population – make a plant-based diet much more efficient. It takes less land to feed a human plants than it takes to feed the animals that will then feed the human. This is more an argument in favor of agriculture than against hunting wild creatures, I know. But still, Rinella’s method works best because he is the tiny minority that he is. We can’t all go hunting in the backcountry for our dinners; the world would not support us all in that way. And just because our ancestors did things a certain way for hundreds or thousands of years, doesn’t mean we should do it that way today. In fact, just the opposite: the world has changed so greatly that it requires different methods of us.

Also, I had to part ways with Rinella when it came to hunting mountain lions. I’m going to stick firmly with Edward Abbey on this issue.

But all that said, this was a good book: well-presented arguments, relatively convincing (even though I’m not ready to sign up for the Rinella Way, he earns my agreement with many of his points), and enjoyable to read, not to mention educational. I had no problem writing the complimentary review, above.

Rating: 7 squirrels.

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The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White by Daniel Sharfstein

Posted on September 13, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I recently read Isabel Wilkerson’s very impressive The Warmth of Other Suns, about the migration of black Americans out of the south throughout the 20th century. And then I immediately read Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain, about Thomas Jefferson and the more than 600 slaves he owned throughout his life, and his treatment of them. (That review will post closer to the book’s publication date in mid-October.) This was a neat coincidence, and had me on a roll, thinking about slavery in the United States and the aftermath for freed slaves and their descendants; so I moved smoothly on to The Invisible Line, in which Daniel Sharfstein follows the transitions made by three families from being seen as black to being seen as white. It raises some interesting questions about the lines we draw and our tendency to think of race as having sharp corners and firm divides.

The mixed-race men and women Sharfstein tracks and studies in this book include “colored aristocrats” in Oberlin, Ohio and Washington, D.C. who hold public office, practice law, and exercise great influence on local politics. They also include back-woods residents of Appalachia whose lifestyles resemble those of hundreds of years ago, and Confederate soldiers and commissioned officers. Sharfstein follows these families to the present day, when their descendents represent a great range of professions, levels of education, and lifestyles. Some are more aware of their heritage than others, and they have different reactions to being accused of having “black blood.” Their experiences raise a number of interesting questions. It seems that it’s always been easy to view race as having cut-and-dried boundaries; but this book makes it equally clear that nothing could be further from accurate.

I liked that, like The Warmth of Other Suns, this book followed three individual stories – in this case, three families rather than three individuals, because it spans more than a lifetime. Again, this approach made the subject personal. It allowed Sharfstein to show the diversity of ways in which the process under discussion – the crossing of the color line – took place, and the diversity of ways the protagonists saw their own lives. The three families here represent different starting and finishing points in geography and in social and economic standing; and they represent different understandings of their own pasts. The book opens with a very powerful short scene involving a present-day white man who confesses to being a racist, and then discovers in his genealogy research that, what do you know, his own great-grandfather was a black man, a former slave.

My impression of The Invisible Line is that it includes solid research, and I thought it fairly and thoughtfully tackled this subject – one that has not been well-examined, or at least that I was not much aware of. I liked the personal element of the individual families. It made me think about some things I hadn’t considered before: how intertwined we all are, for one thing, and – not for the first time – how sad are certain elements of our national history. This was an excellent follow-up to my recent reading, and I recommend it if you’re interested in the subject matter.

Rating: 6 branches on the family tree.

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Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson (audio)

Posted on September 12, 2012 by pagesofjulia

A.Word.A.Day recently sent me, among other valuable tidbits, a quotation that perfectly describes Einstein (thought I, being in the middle of his biography):

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.– Charles Caleb Colton; Lacon: or Many Things in Few Words; Longmans; 1837. Quoted by A.Word.A.Day, August 31, 2012.

And here’s the poster child for that very thought: hilarity and cheerfulness (among other qualities) combined in one of the geniuses of the modern era.

Walter Isaacson is a well-respected biographer. (His other works include biographies of Kissinger, Ben Franklin, and most recently Steve Jobs.) This well-regarded biography of Einstein appears to be very well-researched and thorough, and I thought the audio narration by Edward Herrmann was well-done and well-suited.

What I liked best about this book was its characterization of Einstein, the charmingly rumpled, distracted, unique genius with the twinkling eyes and the mad wild hair who rode a bicycle. There were times I didn’t like Einstein, too: in the course of separating from and later divorcing his wife, he didn’t treat his two sons very well. It felt like he expected them to behave like little adults – or perhaps more accurately, he behaved like a child. He wasn’t entirely sweet to his wife, either, which is of course common in divorces but no less charming for that. But Isaacson’s portrayal of of Einstein’s mental style was lovely to read: how he thought in pictures, in objects in action, in “thought experiments” and not in words; the way his aversion to authority and accepted truths freed him to think such outlandish thoughts that he revolutionized science; these are the singularities that made Einstein Einstein, and that was an important lesson to take away. Also, it was fun to read the story of his life with the advantage of hindsight – that this is Einstein we’re talking about here – and see all the rejections and belittlings he underwent, and sort of chortle at the irony. (Correction of a well-known myth: Einstein did not, in fact, fail math. He did rather well. However, there was that teacher that said he would “never amount to much.” That part is true.)

I observe that my decision not to pursue a subject like theoretical physics was a very, very good decision. I can follow all sorts of things, grasp all sorts of concepts, but not this. My eyes glazed over within moments of the science-talk beginning (dangerous for driving). I positively cannot “get” Einstein, and I’m comfortable with that. But it made this book a little more difficult than I would have liked, because the book is rather science-heavy. I think there are different ways to do this job, of writing a biography of a scientific figure, or other science-based nonfiction. I think of Soundings or even The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, both lovely narrative works about science and people that treated the people more heavily, and in more depth, than they did the science. The science was there, present (necessarily), and well explained, made accessible by explanation, but the people shown brighter. That worked for me. Here, in Einstein, it was Einstein himself that I was most interested in, and I liked it when his personality, his public image, his family dealings, etc. were at the forefront. Isaacson lost me entirely and quickly every time he wandered into physics and relativity. One way is not better or worse, but different; and it’s clear which style I prefer for my scientific nonfiction.

That said, the man played a starring role, and I believe Isaacson’s intention was to put in the science needed to place Einstein in context. I learned a lot about Einstein, I was entertained by his foibles and eccentricities (the not wearing of the socks! oh my), I was charmed. I was provoked to contemplate some of the troubling moments in world history that Einstein witnessed and participated in (Germany in the 1930’s, fascism, McCarthyism, the atom bomb, on and on). In a nutshell, Isaacson captures well the humanity of Einstein: his charm, his flaws, and his genius, all in one. This biography is moving, entertaining, and very informative. If you’re so inclined, you might even learn some physics from it. 🙂 I can see why Isaacson’s stock as a biographer is high, and I forgive him for baffling me here and there.

Rating: 7 quanta.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Invisible Line by Daniel Sharfstein

Posted on September 11, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

I’m reading an impressive work of nonfiction today; but for my teaser I’ve chosen an especially *fun* quotation for you. It’s not entirely indicative of this book’s content, but it’s such a neat picture of another sort of writing that I couldn’t resist.

His plays were a garish parade of socialites, bounders, frauds, thieves, and gold diggers. Unhappy husbands tried to hang themselves. Long-lost lovers were reunited. The embraces were always “passionate,” the kisses unfailingly “violent.” A pistol placed on the mantel on page six was fired by page thirteen.

Isn’t that precious? Just a few sentences but I think it perfectly communicates exactly the sort of plays this man wrote!

And what are you reading today?

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Almost Somewhere by Suzanne Roberts

Posted on September 7, 2012 by pagesofjulia

A contemplation of women relating to one another in nature, nestled within the tale of a backpacking trip.


In 1993, Suzanne Roberts was a college graduate lacking a firm plan for the future when she agreed to hike the John Muir Trail with two other women. Almost Somewhere is a travelogue of that month-long hike, but it’s also a woman’s foray into the male-dominated worlds of hiking and nature writing and a contemplation of the cattiness and competition that limits women’s attempts to connect with one another. Roberts is not gentle to herself or her companions as she describes their flaws and failures to support one another; she is frank about the bounds of their friendship. But she has a triumphant story to tell, because despite swollen joints, bugs, infighting and the doubts of fellow trail users, these three women hiked the John Muir Trail in its entirety and lived to tell about it.

Roberts writes plainly about gender issues, as the women (“we had gone through puberty a long time ago and, really, we were no longer girls”) consult a guidebook written by a man filled with language of “conquering” or “assaulting” mountains. She seeks not only meaningful relationships with other women, but also a feminine understanding of nature, having read nature writing only by men (Muir, Thoreau, Edward Abbey) up until this point. Her understanding of her experience is clear-headed and self-aware in retrospect, and she is considerate of her companions even in her criticism. Almost Somewhere is a contribution to the growing body of women’s nature writing, and a worthwhile, entertaining and occasionally funny story of the California wilderness.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the Sept. 4, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 small but important steps.

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (audio)

Posted on September 3, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I didn’t really know what this book was about when I picked it up – only that it was well-regarded. I’m so glad it found its way into my hands. Isabel Wilkerson has taken on a large-scale, ambitious subject here, and rendered it beautifully. And the audio reading by Robin Miles is lovely to boot.

The “great migration” in the subtitle refers to the movement of black Americans out of the South and into the northern and western United States in 1915-1975. Wilkerson starts from the very beginning, looking at the experiences of former slaves just after Emancipation in an impoverished region struggling to rebuild with a new order of things. The creation and expansion of Jim Crow laws designed to hold blacks down took time after the end of the Civil War to take effect. In the new caste system, former slaves and their descendents were unable to move up in the world and were in constant fear for their lives if they were to misstep around Southern whites. By 1915, they had begun to move out of the South, in what became a mass migration along lines so distinct that enclaves of blacks from specific towns and states were recreated in new locations.

Wilkerson shifts between two ways of studying the Great Migration. Sometimes she takes a broad view of history, in which she cites her own interviews (she states that she did over 1,200) with migrants and their descendents as well as a number of historical sources, to render the story of the Migration generally. And sometimes she follows the specific personal stories of three individuals who she interviewed at great length over a long period of time, traveling the country with them and becoming part of their lives. (In this respect, the journalist/author becoming part of the family of her subject, I was reminded of Rebecca Skloot’s amazing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) George Swanson Starling moved from Eustis, Florida to New York City, later sending for his wife Inez to join him there. He had to leave Florida suddenly because a friend tipped him off that a lynch mob was coming for him; he had been involved in organizing his fellow citrus pickers to demand higher wages. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney moved with her husband George and their two children, with a third on the way, from Mississippi where they had been sharecroppers. They would eventually end up in Chicago, by way of Milwaukee. And Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was an ambitious surgeon and veteran from Monroe, Louisiana, with his heart set on Los Angeles. Known as Pershing in Monroe, he would resettle as Robert (or Bob, or Doc) in LA and send for his wife and daughters to join him there, where he built a new life in high society with the big house and booming practice he’d always wanted.

I found this shifting back and forth between the broad view and three personal histories extremely effective. Anecdotes from the lives of Southern blacks drove well home the misery of their bottom-rung status there; some of these stories are horrific, but important to show the desperation some migrants felt when they left their homes in the South. National trends played a role – for example, during WWII demand for Florida’s citrus was high while the supply of labor to pick the fruit was low, with everyone off at war, and this imbalance led to George Starling’s ability to demand higher wages. And the history of Chicago’s race relations and residential segregation puts Ida Mae Gladney’s home ownership into the proper perspective. You get the point. The history is well-documented and, I’m convinced, well-researched; and the personal stories make it all, well, personal. I was deeply involved with our three representative individuals by the end of the book and, yes, I cried.

I love that Wilkerson brought such a large-scale, important trend, that has had such huge effects on American history, to life the way she did. I also like that she examined the broad effects of the Great Migration, in terms of the cultures of both white and black residents of the North and the South, and took the time to show that black migrants were really far more like immigrant groups in history than like migrants within their own country. I recommend this book as part of a study of American history – but one need not be an academic to appreciate it. The story of the Great Migration is made accessible here, and I’m glad I know more about it now. This 19-disc audiobook (over 600 pages in print) went by easily. This is how I like to take my history lessons. Check it out.

Rating: 8 train rides north.

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The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick

Posted on August 31, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I came to this book from my reading (listening) of Escape From Camp 14, which I… ‘enjoyed’ is not the word, but I was very impressed by it. That was the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in a North Korean political prisoner labor camp and lived there until he escaped in his early 20’s. It was shocking and informative. I believe it was in the closing of that book that the author mentioned Charles Robert Jenkins and his unique life story, which he tells in The Reluctant Communist. And thanks to my local public library, here we are.

Jenkins was a sergeant in the US Army stationed in South Korea in 1965, and he was miserable. Clouded by exhaustion and alcohol, he concocted a scheme: he would desert and earn himself a short jail stay, and end up home in North Carolina. He crossed the demilitarized zone into North Korea, turned in his rifle, and waited to be offered up to the Russian consulate, then to be shipped out. But things didn’t work out that way for him. His greatest mistake was his ignorance of North Korea. He would later come to describe it as “a country that is little more than a giant prison.”

Jenkins was kept in North Korea for 40 years. “As a POW?” asks Husband. No, just as North Korean citizens are kept, more or less – better off than most, in fact. The country’s own citizens are captives; leaving is not an option. Rather, propaganda and starvation are the norm in this militarized, destitute country. Jenkins was settled with three other US deserters in a little community so that the “Organization” (the government and the party, as a collective force) could guard and guide them. They receive educations in propaganda just like any good North Korean; they are given some work, here and there, and a tiny living. In fact, the treatment of the four Americans is well above average in this poor country, but would be considered inhumane by Western standards. Eventually they are given “cooks” – women who cook for them and provide sexual services – and later, wives. These wives are abducted foreigners. Jenkins is presented with a Japanese abductee and told fairly straightforwardly that he should rape her, but instead he takes his time getting to know Hitomi, teaching her English, and finally convincing her to marry him of her own free will. This is a remarkable story, under the circumstances, and perhaps the most surprising part of the book.

Hitomi and Jenkins have two daughters together, who are something like 18 and 20 years old by the time their situation begins to change. In a strange turn of diplomatic events, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il admits to Japan that his country had indeed abducted a number of Japanese citizens, as suspected, and named Hitomi as one of them. This eventually leads to Hitomi’s being sent home to Japan, and twenty-one months later, Jenkins finally leaves North Korea and with their two daughters, joins his wife in Japan, where they live at the time of this book’s publication and (as far as I can tell) today. The family also got to make a trip to North Carolina to reunite with Jenkins’s living relatives: his mother (suffering from Alzheimer’s and only mostly aware of his return) and several siblings. Along the way, he turns himself in to the United States Army, faces trial for desertion, and serves his sentence: one month in jail. Jenkins is very contrite and emphasizes the wrongness of leaving his troop of men without a leader and deserting his post. He addresses the idea that a one-month sentence was rather short, but points out that he was offered clemency for a few good reasons: he feels remorse; he never intended to join or aid the enemy; and he had already suffered 40 years of imprisonment.

This is a hell of a story. After a Foreword told in journalist/coauthor Jim Frederick’s voice about the role he plays in its construction, the book is told from Jenkins’s first-person perspective. As Frederick states is his intention, this voice is simple and straightforward. There are mannerisms that indicate Jenkins’s lack of formal education, but if anything, this unpolished style makes the story he has to tell all the more powerful. (In fact, I was reminded a little bit of Jaycee Dugard’s A Stolen Life.) I can’t overemphasize how moving his tale is. Go read the book. It’s extraordinary to think about the privations and hopelessness, the extent to which Jenkins is cut off from the world. And then, to imagine something like a modest love story developing under those circumstances… Hitomi abducted from her hometown, thrown to a man who doesn’t speak her language, convinced to be his wife as a means of self-preservation… the whole thing is disturbing. We only have Jenkins’s own perspective on their relationship, of course, but it sounds like they developed a loving relationship in an awful environment. It’s charming to read about their quiet life at liberty in Japan today.

Charles Robert Jenkins has a very unique and odd life story, and I found it both moving and educational to read about. If I had the chance to speak to him, I’d thank him for sharing it with us.

Rating: 6 pieces of sushi.

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Before the Rain by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

Posted on August 30, 2012 by pagesofjulia

An impassioned memoir of love between two journalists, set amid travel and revolution.


Luisita López Torregrosa (The Noise of Infinite Longing) is a New York newspaper editor when Elizabeth comes aboard as a new reporter in the 1980s. Her quiet, self-contained, slightly mysterious air draws Luisita’s attention. When Elizabeth lands a sought-after position as foreign correspondent, she builds a home for herself in Manila. Luisita joins her there, and the two women throw themselves hesitatingly and then wholeheartedly into a passionate affair against the backdrop of the fall of Ferdinand Marcos.

As a love story, Before the Rain is spellbinding and heartwrenching, but Torregrosa’s highest feat is perhaps one of poetry. Her tone is haunting, lyrical and sensuous. Readers will feel the equatorial heat of the Philippines and the beat of the Manila Blues, smell the mangoes and squatters’ camps, taste the margaritas and then feel the biting cold of New York winters as the story returns to the United States.

Before the Rain is a memoir of revolution as well as love: the beauty, upheaval and political turmoil of the Philippines are handled sensitively and lovingly. Besides Manila, Luisita and Elizabeth live and travel in New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Miami, Rio and Washington, D.C.– and each of these places leaves its mark. But their relationship is always the book’s main focus. The two women travel, move, work various jobs (some rewarding, some soul-draining); and throughout, their ardor has a momentum all its own. Even in its painful finale, that love is this book’s most lovely evocation.

This review originally ran in the August 10, 2012 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 sheets of newsprint.

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Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt

Posted on August 22, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I’m so glad I picked this book up (and bought it for the library where I work). It sounded like just the sort of thing I appreciate: a biography of a little-known historical figure who made an important contribution to the world as we know it but was herself forgotten. In this case, the “remarkable woman” of the subtitle is Marie Tharp, whose meticulous study and cartography of the ocean floor established the concept of plate tectonics that science now recognizes as fact, but was at best a blasphemous and ridiculous notion before Tharp came along. Her achievements, however, were minimized by a scientific culture in which women did not belong. This biography is additionally appealing to me for its mood: author Hali Felt takes a whimsical, dreamy, almost fanciful tone at times. She describes her own attraction to Tharp’s story (born in part of Felt’s mother’s, and her own, fascination with maps) and the relationship she felt to her subject. She dreams of Tharp coming to her to explain the mysterious and unspoken parts of her life. This book is nonfiction, but it’s honest, personally related, and warm.

There is also an enigmatic love story of sorts hiding within Soundings: Tharp’s career and life were both tied to a man named Bruce Heezen. Heezen was her coworker, then her technical superior; but they shared a partnership in work, in science, in discovery, and apparently in all things. It is known that they were a couple, although they never married and the details of this side of their relationship are very few.

Felt follows Tharp from her childhood with a science-minded father she adored, through her education in English, music, geology, and mathematics, and to her first job in the oil & gas industry (oh, how familiar to this Texas girl). But she was held back: this was the 1940’s, and women in science were mostly expected to make copies, compute numbers, and brew coffee. Eventually Tharp found her way to New York, to Columbia University and the Lamont Geological Observatory. This is where she would meet and work with Heezen and quietly make history.

The science in this book is very friendly and accessible to a general reading public; the story that Felt set out to tell is more that of a woman’s life and accomplishments despite the limitations of her society, than that of tectonic plates per se. For that matter, Felt shows that it was Marie’s combined backgrounds in art as well as science that made her perfectly suited to play the role she did in history. Her meticulous re-checkings of data and attention to detail were indispensable – but so was her interest in visually representing the data available in a way that would show the general public (not just academics) what she’d discovered. So her achievement was artistic as well as scientific. Soundings does make the science side clear, but doesn’t dwell, and is never dry. Rather, Marie Tharp comes to life: she is a precocious child; an ambitious, able, frustrated student; a dedicated scientist; a life partner; an eccentric aging woman caught up in her own past, campaigning to honor and preserve the legacy of her other half.

Hali Felt was honest about the role she plays in the story she relates. She begins in her Introduction by briefly describing her own attraction to maps, and then follows a chronological format, beginning with Tharp’s childhood and following her life, and eventually her death. And then Felt returns to the story: her discovery of Marie Tharp’s existence, her interest, her decision to follow that interest, her research, her relationships with the living descendents of Tharp and Heezen’s world (the “Tharpophiles”), and in the Acknowledgements at the end, she even hints at the process by which she came to write and publish this book. I found all of these Felt-related details interesting too.

In a word, this is a lovely biography, and the style and tone of it may be my favorite part.

Rating: 9 double-checkings of data.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Posted on August 21, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

I think we’ve all heard a lot about this bestselling work of nonfiction; I’m going to end up adding my voice to those recommending it, and I can say that Robin Miles’s narration of the audiobook is worthwhile as well. Check out this piece of writing:

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, farther than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas, not to mention Tijuana for California, where a wind from the south could blow a Mexican clothesline over the border.

Aren’t the hyphens lovely? And I appreciate the geographical detail, that these migrants within their own country traveled further than the international ones we hear so much about. This makes me think of an experience I had at the Rio Grande down at the Texas-Mexico border. I hope you’ll indulge me…

I was down in & around Big Bend National and State Parks with friends, mountain biking and checking out the hot springs. We visited one hot springs right on the Rio Grande, and the enterprising Mexicans across the river had set up a little honor-system sale of arty crafts: they had set out scorpions twisted out of wire and the like on a rock, with prices labeled, and we were to leave our money behind (I was told) and they would paddle over after dark to retrieve it. We looked across the river, some 15 feet, and saw people in the trees watching us back. This drove home to me how small, how subtle is the physical border between two political states, and made me marvel at the huge difference our governments expect us to see between someone born on one side of this little trickling dirty stream of a river, and someone born on the other. It seems like an cruelly arbitrary way to decide who gets what advantages in life. I had to conclude that if I were born on the “wrong” side and thought I saw opportunity on the other, I too would wade across. What’s a little muddy water, anyway? That image, of the tiny Rio Grande as border, was recalled to me by Wilkerson’s point about the wind blowing a clothesline across.

I’ve been distracted. Call this a teaser of the feelings and musings that Wilkerson has evoked in just the first few tracks of this lovely (audio)book. I recommend her.

And what are you reading this week?

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