A young woman, Alexandra, travels to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a job as an English teacher in part to help her recover from the strange disappearance (and probably death) of her brother. She has barely arrived when she helps an elderly couple and the man with them. By accident she ends up with an urn of ashes in a bag when her luggage and theirs gets a bit mixed up. The ashes are inside an ornately and unusually carved box with the name Stoyan Lazarov engraved on it. She sets out to find them with the help of a young cab driver.
As they set out on this journey, they discover they are being followed but have no idea why. The cab driver whom she calls Bobby has keen observation skills which mystify her at first. They find part of the family and then unfortunate things occur to many they meet who are relatives or are connected to the man whose name is on the box. Without initially realizing it, they become involved in Bulgarian politics and political corruption as they try to unravel the story of the box and the man whose ashes it contains.
As I read this novel, which is both a lesson on the horrible Soviet occupation of Bulgaria and human determination and resilience, I became entranced with the history and culture of Bulgaria. If you want a glimpse into another culture and its history and the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape, I highly recommend this book. It is also a mystery story that keeps the reader going.
The author also wrote an earlier book called “The Historian” which is a novel about the history of Vlad the Impaler who is the real person behind the Dracula stories. I plan to read that novel as well.
Published in the US in 1928, banned in England, this is the first, well known lesbian novel and without doubt one of the saddest books I have ever read. Hall was already an award winning and popular novelist when she decided to write this novel. The main character, Stephen Gordon, was born to upper class English parents. Her parents had hoped for a boy and chosen the name Stephen. When she was born a girl, they decided to call her Stephen anyway. From an early age, she was different and preferred to ride horses and do outside activities with her father who adored her rather than wear frilly dresses and do the activities common for English girls at the time. Her mother found all this off putting and never showed any love or nurturing toward her. Later in life, after an unpleasant incident with a young woman who uses Stephen as a distraction from her boring life, Stephen’s mother throws her out of the family home and she moves to London where she writes a highly successful novel.
During WWI, they are desperate for ambulance drivers and Stephen is assigned to an all female ambulance regiment in France. There she meets another young woman who becomes her lover.
An English friend, a successful playwright, convinces Stephen to move to Paris where there are no laws against homosexuality and where there is a large community of similar people, many of whom are highly successful in their careers. She and her lover live there for many years, and Stephen successfully continues her career as a writer. Then an old friend from her childhood shows up and everything changes.
Joan, the main character, is an astronomer obsessed with the stars since childhood. She is content with her life as a physics professor until she sees an ad seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space program. While her initial attempt fails, she applies again and succeeds.
In the summer of 1980, she begins her astronaut training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, along with other trainees, including some from the military and others chosen because of their specialist expertise. She is one of those. Some of the top military pilots are nice and some like to make jokes at the expense of women. The women know they won’t all be chosen to go to space. As a consequence one woman in particular becomes excessively competitive. Others help each other and hang out together.
The novel details the rigor of astronaut training both mentally and physically, how trainees behave under stress, and how all the stress makes some people nicer and others increasingly rude. In the midst of all this Joan continues to care for her beloved niece and discovers a love she never dreamed of in her wildest dreams.
This novel surprised me by being a page turner. Once I read through the first couple of chapters, I had to keep going. In Southern California the Salton Sea, once much larger and the home of a thriving resort, now has shrunk and only a few people live there. Not far away lies the Imperial Valley, one of the largest agricultural regions in the US which is close to the Mexican border. This is the setting of the story of the little town of El Valle, the surrounding areas, and the tale of two families, one rich, white landowners, the other Mexican-indigenous. Mal, one of the main characters, has always lived on El Valle, worked hard, tried to forget the disappearance of her sister, and raised two daughters alone. Another local girl goes missing, then a week later her youngest daughter also goes missing. Frantic, she searches for answers, wonders if there is a link, and keeps dreaming of the local, indigenous legend of the horse headed woman, El Siguanaba. Meanwhile readers learn about the long friendship and affair between Mal’s oldest daughter, Griselda, and the son of the valley’s largest, white landowner, Mal’s difficult, disabled mother, her father, and brother’s, one of whom is running for office after going to Stanford, and the youngest brother, Benny, who is now a detective. Not only does this work of fiction combine Latinx and indigenous cultures, it also addresses environmental collapse, family secrets, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.
This autobiographical novel was written by a good friend of mine whose own family experienced some of the horrors of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. The main character, Hope Winterfield, and her husband make their living as antique dealers in Texas when her elder brother, Robert, a doctor with HIV, convinces them to move with their three daughters to the LA area to help him out. Because their antique business is not doing well and she wants to help her brother, they move, thinking that if it does not work out, they can move back to Texas.
Robert has an ex, Anthony, who is also his business partner, who hates Robert’s new love, the charming, handsome, younger man, Cody. Hope takes the job Robert has offered her, only to discover the dynamics surrounding the job, her brother, friends she has known for years, and many others are nearly overwhelming and that quite often nothing is as it seems. Added to all this is Hope’s difficult mother who often denies the realities of her own life. This is the tale of a family and complicated family dynamics where the main characters have to decide what it most important in life and what they should value the most and fight for.
Translated from French and written by a Senegalese author, this novel takes place during the time of colonialism and the slave trade. In Paris of 1806, a famous botanist, Michel Adanson, is dying. He never has finished the botanical work to which he dedicated his life, and as he lays dying, his last words are the woman’s name “Maram”.
His daughter finds an unpublished memoir hidden in a cabinet. It is the story of his younger life, what happened to him in Africa, all addressed to his daughter so she can understand his story and the meaning of his last word. It is a tale both strange and sad, filled with healers and magic and tragedy. Maram, a fabled revenant, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, was captured and sold into slavery but managed to escape. While working on his quest to find new plants, Adanson hears about this woman and becomes obsessed with finding her. His guide, Ndiak, the son of a chief, accompanies him everywhere and they become friends. This is a story of adventure, romance, and the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade.
Note: The author won the International Booker Prize for his other novel, “At Night All Blood Is Black”. Readers of this will miss several books I am reading because I am a judge for a literary context and cannot discuss what I am reading for the next several weeks.
“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars. Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil your chest.”
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big and grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be a nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough…People don’t know what’s enough. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
In a rather ordinary, small, dismal Connecticut town an elderly woman, suffering from dementia, saves a 19 year old boy from committing suicide. She takes him in and this act of kindness transforms both their lives in unexpected ways. While taking care of her, he also finds a job at a local fast food restaurant where his cousin works as well as several others whom many would consider lesser people. They help each other, form tight bonds, and develop unlikely friendships that reveal how caring and empathy can make all the difference in people’s lives.
This novel is touching, sad, and joyful all at once. These are poor ordinary people trying to survive the best way they know how. For many readers it will be a glimpse into the way many people in this country (and, indeed, the world) actually live–poor, struggling to survive, but also kind and caring.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
Rather than summarize or evaluate, I am going to provide some quotes from the book. I will say that if you want to understand the current state of affairs in the United States of America, this book provides excellent insights based on history.
From the Introduction:
“America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior…it was a key figure of the new democratic republic…the ringing phrase ‘all men are created equal’ did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies were capable or worthy of self determination. In their mind, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men like themselves…So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it would be equal. The principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox–that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality–shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.”
From The Triumph of Equality:
“The accomplishment of white male equality under the law was extraordinary…They argued that their new system made their new nation different from the Old World, which was split between a corrupt aristocracy and the lazy poor.”
“On March 4, 1858, prominent South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond gave a speech in the Senate–to which he had been elected the year before despite the fact that he admitted two years earlier he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces…The greatest strength of the South was not its economy…but rather ‘the harmony of her political and social institutions.’ Every society had ‘a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life’…the people who make up the ‘mudsill of society supporting that other class that leads progress, civilization, and refinement.’ The men in the latter group are wealthy and well connected…In the South whites had made an ‘inferior race into mudsills, dull but loyal people who are content to have their labor directed by their betters.”
“Now a national figure, Lincoln articulated a democratic vision for America, one that refuted the mudsill version of Senator Hammond…he explained that Hammond’s theory divided the world into permanent castes: capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom.”
The West:
The last stand of the Alamo became the foundational event for western American history, offering a vision of self-sacrifice and heroism. It prompted the formation of the Republic of Texas, and inspired Texans under Sam Houston to defeat Santa Anna’s troops…In the retelling of what happened at the Alamo, what got lost was the reality that the defenders were rebelling against the Mexican government in Mexican territory, and that they were fighting to defend the right to enslave people. The myth also ignored the fact that many of the defenders were Mexican opponents of Santa Ana, and that some of the defenders–including Davy Crockett–surrendered.”
Cowboy Reconstruction:
After Lincoln’s death, Johnson wanted no part of Lincoln’s and the “Union’s democratic vision. To rebuild the South, Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but 1500 Confederate leaders…states codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865. As employers cheated workers out of wages, gangs beat and raped African Americans into submissive behavior, and whites attacked their black neighbors, southern state legislatures created the Black Codes.”
The West and The South Join Forces:
“The resurgence of the South’s ideology came from the nation’s new bloc: the western states. Easterners had made the mistake of thinking the westerners would join their coalition, only to discover that due to their peculiar history and extractive economy , westerners had more in common with white antebellum southerners than with easterners. By the 1890s a few wealthy men dominated western society. Poor white men had little opportunity. people of color and women even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way. Still, as in the East before the Civil War, the myth of the individualist convinced Americans that the west was the land of opportunity…Theodore Roosevelt’s war record took the western ideal and put it on the national stage. By the end of the century, Americans embraced the cowboy image and vowed to spread it across the globe, putting into law that some people are better than others. Once again freedom was hierarchical.
“In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues of Confederates, making them into western style heroes and individualists. The rewriting of the past created momentum for women’s suffrage…Rebecca Latimer Felton was a reformer who wanted educational and prison reform as well as women’s suffrage. She was also in favor of lynching her black neighbors who wanted equal rights…The Ku Klux Klan reformed and rebounded in the 1920s…Meanwhile in the West, immigrants and Indians were falling victim to a legal system that established castes. In Texas, officials were hardening a racial system that classified migrants across the Mexican border by race. In Arizona, a state law singled out ‘treason against the state’ as punishable by death aimed at Apache and Navahos who might fight the legal system ensnaring them. In Oklahoma…corrupt legislators arranged affairs to steal valuable land from Indians.
In the late 1800s there is a photo of a group of Black babies lined up with the caption Alligator Bait. This trope goes back to the antebellum South but came into its own later. This photo, created in 1897 and popular with white Floridians, started an entire industry. There were even postcards of alligators chasing terrified Black children. Fishermen could buy lures that looked like a Black baby protruding from an alligator’s mouth. There was even a song called “Mammy’s Little Alligator Bait” and mechanical toys showing alligators swallowing Black babies. Thankfully, there is no evidence of Black babies actually being fed to alligators, but still…
Now we have Alligator Alcatraz and the president and his buddies even make jokes about why they put it in the middle of a swamp–anyone trying to escape will be alligator food. Who are the people there? Not any rich white people. They say it is to make the country safer. Data shows the place is not filled with criminals, even though some are there and maybe deserve to be there, but most are not criminals, just ordinary people who are darker–brown and black. It would seem that the trope of feeding certain sorts of people to the alligators never went away. How “sick” can we become.
writingontherim 