Book 41 of 2024: “Crazy Horse”, Larry McMurtry

October 25, 2024October 25, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

One of the saddest books I’ve ever read, this short piece of nonfiction details not only the life of Crazy Horse but also the demise of the traditional lifestyle of the Plains Indians. Crazy Horse has been the subject of endless legends and myths, many of which apparently have nothing to do with reality. He was not a chief; he often defied traditional Sioux customs. He was very much his own person. Among his people, he was especially known for his kindness and support of the poorest and weakest and for his prowess as a warrior. Crazy Horse died young due to not only white betrayal but also that of some of his own people.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in this particular period of US history. At the end is a comprehensive list of sources with notes about each one of them.

An Abecedarian Poem for Sudan

August 6, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

While a lot of the world is focused on Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, since April 2023, two groups, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, have been fighting for control of Sudan. 11.1 million people are displaced and more than 17,000 killed, mostly civilians including children. Currently, for the second time since 2003, famine lurks at the door of Darfur state. Although I wrote the poem thinking about Sudan, a lot of the same conditions apply to Congo.

Amidst the denuded trees along a wide

boulevard walked a tall, dark-haired girl

carrying a large basket filled with a few

deep red pomegranates, two brown

eggs and three delicate pastries

filled with pineapple, cinnamon, and

guava, her favorite. She felt lucky.

Her mother sent her to the market, her mother

ill with ague, shivering, fevered,

jaundiced, too young to be dying, her father

killed in the endless wars which had

leveled so many cities and villages.

Men filled with the desire for revenge, for power,

never thinking how forgiveness and love could

overcome the endless devastation.

People plagued by angry men, men so

quick to condemn all not their tribe, their own,

retribution driving them week after week.

Some lay dying on the streets or dead as

the girl walked around their bodies

under the relentless, tropical sun.

Void of relief, fearful but determined, she

walked on toward the remains of her home.

Xenophobia once again stalked the streets,

young men brandishing assault rifles. Animals in the

zoo seem kinder, more caring.

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

February 6, 2024 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

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.

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

December 6, 2023 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

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.