community safety

One Book a Week-42: “Where There Is Fire”, John Manuel Arias

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Before and since my two trips to Costa Rica, I thought Costa Rica had miraculously escaped the Banana Republic fate of many other Central American countries. This historical novel enlightened me to just how wrong I’ve been and how some of this continues today–huge US agricultural corporations controlling much of the agriculture.

In the 1960s, large US corporations invaded Costa Rica and controlled large blocks of land to raise bananas and cause havoc among large segments of the population. To increase yields the American Fruit Company doused their giant, lucrative, banana plantations with Nemagon, a pesticide that causes cancer and sterility. The novel includes letters indicating that both this company and Dow, the producer of the pesticide, knew this, did nothing about it, did not inform workers (until they had no choice), and continued its use.

The novel contains the story of one family’s history who lived near the largest plantation, the father and grandfather who worked there, a devastating fire, and the effects of this company’s policies on several generations.

Note: As recently as last year, the BBC reported on the use of this pesticide and its effects on workers and people living near plantations where it is still being used. Online you can find numerous articles about how these practices (the American Fruit Company is now Chiquita) fueled neocolonial exploitation and drug cartels.

Disappearance and Murder

/ Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

A 450 mile stretch of highway runs between two cities in British Columbia, Prince George and Prince Rupert. As part of the Trans-Canada Highway, it was completed in 1969. This event increased the disappearance and murder of First Nations (indigenous) women which began in the 1800s with the influx of miners near First Nations lands. More than 1200 First Nations women have disappeared or been found murdered in recent years. These women are 7 times more likely to be raped and/or murdered than any other group in Canada.

The United States fares no better. Approximately 7000 Native women have gone missing since 2016. If a non-Native person murders a Native person on tribal lands, tribal police cannot arrest the person; other law enforcement often fails to respond. In the US a Native women is 4.5 times more likely to be raped and/or murdered than any other group.

4 out of 5 First Nations, US Native, and Alaska Native women report experiencing violence.

For more information see “Hunted” on Al Jazeera English, powwow times.com, cnn.com, YouTube: Searching for America’s Missing Women. There are many other sources as well.

One Book a Week-30: “Deacon King Kong”, James McBride

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

It takes genius to write a novel about serious topics, e.g. racism, poverty, addiction, drug dealing, crime, which is also very funny. This is the first book I’ve read this year where I found myself frequently laughing out loud. In the projects of South Brooklyn in 1969, an elderly church deacon shoots a young drug dealer, who is also a star local baseball pitcher. Thus begins a saga about the Black and Hispanic residents who live there, the cops who patrol the area, the Italian mobsters who control the docks, and the church where the shooter is a deacon. The “New York Times” listed this as one of the ten best books of 2020. Indeed it is. This is the third book I have read by this author, and I will soon progress to another one.

One Book a Week-29: “We Are Not Like Them”, Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A heart wrenching Prologue begins this contemporary novel about race, family, and friendship. Two children, one white (Jen) and one black (Riley), became best friends in kindergarten. Their close friendship endures to adulthood and through distance. Finally, once again in the same city, their bond is tested when Jen’s husband, a police officer, shoots an unarmed 14 year old black boy. Riley, a TV reporter, is assigned to interview the boy’s mother.

Their story, told from the viewpoints of both women, covers the effects of such a tragedy on family and fellow police officers and the community, illustrates the trauma of current events, and demonstrates how such a disaster tests all involved.

One Book A Week-27: “Lucy By The Sea”, Elizabeth Strout

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A short, honest, realistic view of life, this book by Strout, written from the viewpoint of Lucy
Barton, continues the story started in her book, “Oh, William”, where Lucy and her ex, William, go to Maine to seek out his long lost sister whom he did not know existed until he took a DNA test. Once again they head to Maine, but for a much more stressful reason, the Covid pandemic. They both live separately in NYC where Covid hit early and hard. After accurately assessing the danger, William finds a large, old house to rent on the Maine coast and convinces Lucy to go with him there to save their lives. He convinces one daughter to leave NYC but the other insists on staying.

The book addresses the issues of isolation brought on by the pandemic and how people deal with stress and isolation differently and with the difficulties which arise when once close families can no longer see each other. It also shows that isolation can bring the positives that can be found in a more quiet life. Strout’s uniquely simple style emphasizes the emotions and stresses as well as the joys life can bring to all of us.

One Book a Week-19: “The Round House”, Louise Erdrich

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Winner of the National Book Award in 2012, and narrated by the 12-13 year old son of a tribal judge and a professional, tribal woman, this novel details the story of a family nearly destroyed by the brutal attack on the boy’s mother. Even after the identity of the attacker is known, he is set free because she will not tell or cannot recall where the attack occurred, whether on tribal land or just outside its boundary. This leads to the boy’s determined quest to obtain justice for his mother. This page turner perfectly illustrates the continual problem of justice for indigenous women who are 2-3 times more likely to be raped (and often killed in the process) than white women and with no one ever charged.

Given the seriousness of the novel, it is surprisingly funny at times with the antics of teen boys and other characters, including some colorful and interesting older tribal members and an ex-Marine priest. The reader will also learn a lot about Ojibwa culture. Once you start, you have to keep going in hopes that somehow justice will prevail in the end.

One Book a Week-11: The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

This unusual novel features identical twin sisters, inseparable as children, living in a small town in rural Louisiana. The town’s founder, a light skinned Black man, insisted on maintaining a certain character for the town–only light skinned Black people should live there. At sixteen the sisters run away to New Orleans where they ultimately choose diametrically opposed lives, one passing as white, marrying a wealthy white man who knows nothing of her true past. In spite of the deception and lies, years later their lives become intertwined in unexpected ways. The novel not only addresses themes of race but also sexual identity and who we are as individuals and a country.

One Book a Week-7: “Memorial Drive, A Daughter’s Memoir” by Natasha Trethewey

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Published in 2020, and a must read for anyone who cares about abused women, their rights, and how law enforcement often fails them, this book by Trethewey, 2007 Pulitzer Poetry Price winner for “Native Guard”, voices her struggle to deal with her mother’s untimely death. When Trethewey was nineteen and in college, her mother was shot and killed by her step-father after the police officer assigned to protect her mother left his post early. Additionally, the memoir details the effects of the racism she experienced as the child of a white father and black mother (married when it was illegal where they lived) in Mississippi and later in Atlanta in the 1970s and 80s before her mother’s murder in 1985. The book gets its title from the street on which her mother lived when she was murdered. Through this memoir Trethewey discusses how her parent’s divorce, her mother’s remarriage to an angry, abusive man, and her mother’s murder has informed her life and affected the enduring love she holds for her mother.

One Book a Week-6: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Even though I try to keep up-to-date on Nobel Prize authors, I was unfamiliar with this one until I saw this book on a table at Barnes and Noble. First, the title intrigued me; then the blurb added more mystery. I bought it–so glad I did. Once I started, there was no stopping–fascinated.

Written in first person, it is contains the thoughts and experiences as related by an older woman. Once a bridge engineer, she now resides in the Polish countryside near the Czech border. Winters are harsh; most of the people who live there live there only in summer. She stays and cares for the houses of the summer people while they are gone all winter. She also teaches English part-time to children at the local school. Her passions are animals and astrology. Even though a science type, she is totally convinced that astrology contains life’s secrets even to the point of predicting the time and events of a person’s death. The book is also a murder mystery with an ending totally different from what I expected.

Now I am going to purchase the author’s book, Flights, which won the Mann Booker prize in 2018.

One Book a Week-2

/ Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

One book a week? To date this year it has been more like 3-4, depending on the book and week. I wrote reviews for four books today on Goodreads including The Sea of Tranquility, Little Fires Everywhere, An Imaginary Life, The Woman They Could Not Silence. I mentioned the first one in my last post.

I noticed that Little Fires Everywhere is now a series, streaming. I will not watch it because it is one of the few books that made me cry. I rarely cry. Is it worth reading? Yes. I view it as recommended reading for parents. How do you treat your child who is different, the child who is not how you want your child to be? Is conforming the best way to live? And at what cost? Is a poor minority child better off with wealthy parents from a different ethnicity who can provide everything?

Next I read a non-fiction book, The Woman They Could Not Silence, The Shocking Story Of A Woman Who Dared To Fight Back, by Kate Moore. Apparently I did not know as much about women’s history in the US as I had thought. This is the true story of the life of Elizabeth Packard. Here are some of the things I learned:

  1. In the mid 1800s if a woman was married, her husband could place her in a mental asylum as insane and she could do nothing about it even if she was sane. She could not get out even if relatives and friends tried to come to her rescue.
  2. Her husband could confiscate all her property and do with it whatever he pleased. She and everything she owned now belonged to him.
  3. People in mental asylums were terrorized and treated with methods now considered even illegal treatment for actual terrorists, e.g. water boarding.
  4. A common, accepted treatment for “difficult” and “emotional” women was clitoridectomies, female genital mutilation. Prominent psychiatrists viewed female genitalia as the cause of female insanity. Dr. Isaac Brown, a prominent London surgeon, stated that it was easy to cure female insanity, just cut off her clitoris. This was practiced in both the US and England.

Elizabeth Packard’s husband placed her in an asylum because she disagreed with his religious views and her outgoing nature. This book details her life in the decades she struggled to be released from the asylum and her struggles to make life better for those who were placed in asylums. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of women in the 1800s and the treatment of those deemed insane.