books

Book 10 for 2024: “The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice”, Elizabeth Flock

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This book raises these questions: Can women gain true safety and equality without violence? Can we end misogyny without fighting back?

The book details the stories of three women, one from Alabama, a woman from northern India, and a Kurdish fighter in northern Syria. All use a form of violence to overcome abuse and mistreatment they have experienced and see other women experiencing. The author personally interviewed all of these women and others close to them and visited them repeatedly.

The first is Brittany Smith, who shot the man who had raped her and was trying to kill her brother. Her story details how Stand Your Ground laws work for men, but often fail for women, especially in areas of the US South where men are protected by their beliefs in a male Code of Honor.

The second is the story of Angoori Dahariya, a Dalit woman, from Uttar Pradesh, India. Fed up, she creates a group called the Green Gang (they wear green saris) dedicated to defending poor, under caste, female victims of abuse. Note: Dalit refers to the lowest caste.

The third is the story of Cicek Mustafa Zibo, a Kurdish fighter in the female militia that fought ISIS in northern Syria. She and many others follow the teachings of Ocalan, a Kurdish leader imprisoned by the Turks for leading the Kurdish militia who for years have fought the Turks for independence. He teaches equality between men and women and women’s rights, which is anti the general cultural beliefs in this area of the world. Note: Ocalan is labeled a terrorist by many.

Book Eight for 2024: “Being Heumann”, Judith Heumann

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Judith Heumann contracted polio as a child and was subsequently confined to a wheel chair. Doctors suggested to her parents that they send her off to live in a place for the disabled. Having escaped Nazi Germany, her parents were horrified and refused. There were no laws protecting disabled people when she was a child. Her parents, especially her mother, fought for her to go to regular school. This is how her story begins as she tells it. The rest is the story of her activist life.

When the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was passed, it took months for Section 504 regulations to be signed into law. At this time the author was a young woman living in the SF Bay area. She lead a days long sit-in at the federal building in San Francisco. When this did not work, she went to DC. The entire book is her account of her life as an activist for the rights of disabled persons, beginning with her childhood, her becoming a certified teacher after attending college, and her endless activism for Section 504 and the ADA.

This is an important book for anyone interested in the history of civil rights for the disabled.

Book Seven for 2024: “After Eden, A Short History of the World”, John Charles Chasteen

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Want to learn a lot in less than 400 pages? Read this book. Published this year, it is the most recent book by a prominent Latin American scholar and historian. After humans learned agriculture and built cities, most of the population of the world became increasingly patriarchal and warlike. The divide between rich and poor increased. Egalitarian foragers and wandering hunters existed only in more remote areas. A few still exist in those remote and less modern corners of the world, often places where few others want to even go. This quote says a lot about the current state of affairs:

“Our civilization has thousands of years practice making war. We have almost NO practice making global peace, but without it we are doomed. Today’s pervasive nationalism and rearmament is unlikely to help us make global peace.”

And a page later:

“Only a true unanimous global effort has any chance to preserve our common home.”

He notes that saving Earth will take huge social transformations, including curbing the excessive consumer capitalism that currently pervades plus overcoming a world wide history where half of humanity mistreated the other half, a practice that still continues.

Book Six for 2024: “Look At The Lights, My Love”, Annie Ernaux

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Who would have thought a person could write an entire book about a hyper market? I never heard of Auchan until I read this book. For those not in the know, located in France, it is described as a hyper-market on search engines. From Ernaux’s description and those on the Internet, I think there is nothing like it in the US. The author refers to it as a Supermarket, but it is nothing like what we call a supermarket here. It is a superstore, somewhat like the big box stores here but much more. It sells food, clothes, books, you name it, but not like Target or Costco. The bookstore is a separate area, as are many other little shops within the giant store, e.g the fishmonger. It is three stories, open 24/7, and according to the Internet, works toward being something for everyone while caring about the environment and such. The employees wear a uniform so in that regard they all look the same. The store attends to the needs of all the various religions of the people of France, Muslims, Jews, Christians, everyone. This is especially true when it comes to food. During certain holidays, the preferred food for that religious holiday becomes available.

Ernaux decides to go shopping there in 2012 and 2013 over a span of a year. She deliberately goes at different times of day to see if there are differences. There are. Certain groups of people shop early in the morning–like older people. Young singles go later, mom’s with children at a different time. When there is a no school day, gangs of teen girls show up to hang out and shop. When the weather is bad, people go there to escape. Once in a while someone recognizes her, tells her they love her writing, and they have a conversation. At the first floor entry where there are places to sit, she notices that older North African men seem to like to hang out there and watch the passerby’s.

She notices that while a person can shop in a sort of anonymity that is impossible while standing in the checkout line. Here your eating habits, what method you choose to pay, whether you have elderly people at home or babies or children are all on full display laying there on the conveyor belt for all to see. If you have to ask for help with the money, it exposes you as a foreigner. Yet people pretend they do not notice or care–perhaps they do not.

I occasionally go to Target, never to Walmart or Costco. Nevertheless, reading this book has made me notice things I never noticed before, and normally I am quite observant. Now even when I go to smaller grocery stores, I notice who is there, what they are buying. Sometimes people will ask me a question about something in the store. At places near my house, I sometimes see people I know and chat.

Books 3-5 for 2024: “Happening”, “The Young Man”, “Simple Passion”, Annie Ernaux

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In the last few days, I’ve read three books by Annie Ernaux who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022. Although she is a major writer in France, I had never previously heard of her. Since the local library possessed none of her books, I drove to Claremont and checked out all of her books that were available. The publication dates range from 1974 to 2022.

Most of her books defy categorization. The librarian helped me find them because some were in fiction and some nonfiction. From just reading them, it is impossible to determine whether what I’m reading is real or imaginary or a combination. She writes about women’s lives mostly and issues that only women experience.

“The Young Man”, copyright 2022, tells a detailed account of a love affair between a young male student and a 50 something woman, thirty years older than he. They meet on weekends often at his apartment, make fervent love, visit sidewalk cafes, wander. The narrator notes that people sometimes look askance at them in a way they never view an older man and a younger woman. She finds love making helps her write, “Often I have made love to force myself to write.” At the end of the book are photos of Ernaux over the years (she was born in 1940) and a detailed biography.

Next I read “The Happening”, (2001) a detailed account of a young female student seeking an abortion when it was illegal in France. She manages to hide her state from most people including her parents. She finally finds an elderly nurse, but later experiences complications and ends up in the hospital where a young doctor, who thinks she is just some poor woman off the street, treats her badly. When he discovers she is a university student, he finds her and apologizes. It seems mistreating the poor is okay but not someone from his own class status.

Then I read “Simple Passion” (1991), a short (64 pages) detailed account an illicit love affair between a young, married man from Eastern Europe and the narrator. The telling part of this story is the narrator’s (the author?) obsession with this man she calls A. She waits for his calls 24/7. She thinks about him every waking moment and dreams about him at night. I kept thinking of myself and many women I know who have become obsessed with some man to their own detriment.

A a writer, I find her work totally fascinating in its extreme courage. She writes in detail about experiences few would dare to even talk about, but many experience and keep silent. Much of it is autobiographical, an even great demonstration of bravery. Who dares tell the truth of many of our own experiences? Very few of us.

One Book a Week-51: “The Watch”, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

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I could not stop reading this book. The setting is a US military outpost during the Afghan war in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Kandahar. The weather is brutal–extremes of cold and heat, sand storms, heavy fog early in the mornings. Suddenly, after a brutal battle where they lose some soldiers, a young Afghan woman, Antigone, with stumps for legs shows up pulling a cart. Her brother, who the soldiers think was part of the Taliban, was killed in the battle; she wants her brother’s body for a proper Muslim burial. The soldiers do not know whether she is who she says she is or a suicide bomber. It confuses them even more when she plays hauntingly beautiful music on her rubab every night. All this leads to a lot of confusion over and raises many questions about morality and duty. Each chapter is from a different viewpoint, the young woman and various soldiers in the outpost.

Note: The rubab is a traditional Pashtun 12 string guitar-like instrument. You can find recordings on YouTube.

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

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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-10: A Solitude of Wolverines, Alice Henderson

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The perfect book for those who love suspense, Montana, wildlife, wildlife conservation, Alice Cooper, the protagonist, is a young, wildlife biologist who spends most of her life going from one remote research site to another. Here she’s located in a remote area of the high country in Montana, 26 miles from Bitterroot, studying wolverine populations for a wildlife conservancy/trust which now owns a defunct ski resort. While a few of the locals support her work and the conservancy, many more see the trust and her as endangering their way of life, and they are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way.

Filled with suspense, reading this page turner will also inform readers about wildlife biology and research, wolverine study, and life in the northern high country.

If you are looking for a fun read where you actually also learn something, this book is the perfect fit.

Note: This is one of three books I have read this month so far. I will post about the other two in the next few days.

One Book a Week-3

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While wandering around Barnes and Noble looking for something new to read, I read the blurb for An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, an Australian writer. I bought it. Of course, I had heard of Ovid, seen parts of Metamorphosis, his most famous work, but knew little about him. Emperor Augustus exiled him to the remote regions near the Black Sea for reasons not totally known but perhaps due to the nature of Ovid’s erotic poetry which was very popular. Written in the first person, this book relates Ovid’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings while in exile. The urbane and educated Ovid now has to learn to live with superstitious, illiterate, poverty stricken people whose language he does not know, who possess none of amenities to which he is accustomed, who live in a bare survival mode. They find a “wild child” and Ovid becomes determined to catch him and teach him. The Child has lived with the animals and speaks their language, seems immune to weather even though naked, knows nothing of humans. As Ovid lives with and teaches the Child, he begins to question what it means to be human, to be civilized, to be different. What is the true meaning of life?

Note: If you look up Ovid, you will find a birthdate but no date of death. No one knows exactly when or where he died or where he was buried.

You’re Gonna Eat That?!

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This is the title of my newest book which currently resides at the designers for formatting, placing the photos in the correct place and position, making sure everything is just right.  The subtitle is:  Adventures with Food, Family, and Friends.  It includes family and travel stories, adventures, poems, and recipes. Here are a couple of food photos which will be in the book with recipes.

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Every Sunday until publication, I will post an update as to progress.  My goal is to have it available for purchase for Christmas presents for those who love food adventures.