All About Books

May

Such a weird month for reading, along with everything else.  Once I read through my final stack of library books (which I can’t return until the library reopens), I turned to a backup pile of books I own or have been given, and discovered some gems.  Then I moved on to my Kindle, and I have to admit that while I would prefer to have a physical book in my hands I am grateful that I can at least download e-books from the library.  (One of my worst nightmares, I have come to realize, would be to be quarantined in an inside cabin on a giant cruise ship for weeks, with nothing to read!)  I notice that all the books I originally paused for staggered periods of time at the library are now paused until Jan. 01, 2049.  News flash – I won’t be around to pick them up!

In light of what is happening right now, you might want to refer back to my February write-up of “White Fragility:  Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” by Robin Diangelo, and “So You Want to Talk About Race,” by Ijeoma Oluoyou.  They couldn’t be more timely.

Fiction:

At the KCLS Gala last year, I bought Washington author Karl Marlantes’ book, “Deep River,” but because it’s so long and books with due dates kept showing up from my library hold list, I just never got to it.  But guess what – with my beloved library closed, suddenly it was the only book left on my usually crowded bedside table, and I want to tell you its length was a bonus, as I became so engaged with a world I knew little about I was sorry when it ended.  Based on Marlantes’ family history, “Deep River” is a rich saga about Finnish immigrants who settled in Washington during the first labor movements, World War I, and the upheaval of early 20^th-century America.  In the early 1900s, as Russia’s imperial rule took its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings – Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino – are forced to flee to the U.S., settling among other Finns in a logging community not far from the Columbia River in southwest Washington State, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests spawned rapid development and radical labor movements began to catch fire.  The brothers pioneer this frontier wilderness, while Aino – foremost of the book’s strong, independent women – devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions.  Struggling to reconcile her political beliefs with her latent desire to build a family – complicated by trauma from her past – Aino finds herself pulled between two very different suitors, both of whom struggle with their own painful secrets.  Marlantes is terrific at bringing the tough and dangerous world these people lived in to life.  “Logging is less about cutting down trees than about moving them.  Ideal logs are four to eight feet in diameter and up to forty feet long.  These logs weigh over twenty tons.  The bigger logs, if left at forty feet, would weigh more than fifty tons, requiring that they be cut to thirty- two-foot or even sixteen-foot lengths.  To move a log from where the tree was felled to water deep enough to float it requires bravery, brute strength, and endurance.  More importantly, it requires extremely creative engineering.”  Aino herself faces danger in recruiting for the International Workers of the World (known as the Wobblies), which opposed the American Federation of Labor’s acceptance of capitalism and its refusal to include unskilled workers in craft unions.  Both the story and the time period are fascinating and unforgettable.

I have begun to read Anita Brookner’s fine novels (such as Hotel du Lac, which won the 1986 Booker Prize), and just enjoyed “Look At Me,” written in 1983.   Frances Hinton works in the reference library of a London medical research institute that investigates human behavior.  She also aspires to being a novelist, and has achieved some small successes.  “Writing is my way of piping up.  Of reminding people that I am here.”  Her parents are dead and she lives alone, except for an elderly maid, in a large furnished flat. Her parents never changed anything, and neither has she, as she is as incapable of impressing her personality on a room as she is at turning into the life of the party.  Still, she would love to be the latter – “Look at me, look at me” is her continual, silent plea.  Frances is young and “quite pleasant-looking” (her description), and one day catches the eye of the beautiful and irrepressible Alix Forbes, who has stopped by the library to pick up her handsome and charismatic husband Nick, one of the two young doctors whose research the institute is funding.  Alix is bored, so invites Frances for dinner, then throws her together with the other grantee, James Anstey, believing they might prove to be amusing.  The two are well suited for each other, happily poised between love and like.  Not good enough for Alix, who relishes action and drama.  Frances, private and silent, is unequipped to participate in such passions, but she can at least write about them.  As she says, “It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me.  It is your penance for not being lucky.  It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.”  What I especially like about Brookner’s writing is that she so effectively immerses us into her main characters’ thoughts and feelings that we fully understand why they do what they do.

Non-Fiction: 

I have to start by saying that “The New Arab Wars,” by Marc Lynch, a professor of political science at George Washington University, is probably more than we want to know, even as he helps us to understand the ever widening wars that began in 2003 with American tanks heading north toward Baghdad and culminated with the disaster that is Syria.  Local wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen became proxies for larger conflicts:  Saudi Arabia vs. Iran (with Qatar and Turkey thrown in, and Israel still eyeing Iran).  Shia fought Sunni.  Britain, France, and a reluctant America fired shots in Libya.  Egypt’s revolution gave way to a military coup.  Russia shored up the president of a Syria torn apart.  Lynch says President Obama, to whom he was an advisor, did not see the Middle East in America’s existential interest, while Obama’s critics felt that if he had pursued an earlier, more muscular policy, he would have both lessened suffering and checked the further rise of terror.  Given subsequent events, it’s impossible to know which approach could possibly have made a difference.  Lynch sees Libya as a decisive turning point in the transformation of the Arab uprisings from domestic peaceful uprisings into a regional proxy war.  Its subsequent collapse into civil war then became an object lesson in the dangers of intervention and state failure, and in many ways set the stage for Syria’s descent into catastrophic civil war, leading to what he says is now an entire regional order in freefall.  Instead of democratization, we have an increase in regional interventionism, proxy war, and resurgent repression.  Optimists about the Arab uprisings failed to appreciate just how far the region’s autocrats would go to prevent positive change, and that, with few exceptions, they would do virtually anything to hold on to power.  Writing in 2016, Lynch was not an optimist, seeing no end to the fundamental struggles by Arabs over their future.  What should America do?  His answer – “Stay out.”   The details of this book can be skimmed periodically, but by the time you finish reading about the Middle East as a region where local forces dominate, interbreed, and fester, you can’t help but appreciate the wisdom of that conclusion.

Because Jack is an avid milk drinker, I gave him the book “Milk,” by Mark Kurlansky, whose previous books “Cod” and “Salt” we found so entertaining and informative.  According to the Greek creation myth, we are basically spilt milk:  a splatter of the goddess Hera’s beast milk became our galaxy, the Milky Way.  But it is actually the milk of other mammals that humans have cultivated ever since the domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago, originally as a source of cheese, yogurt, kefir, and all manner of edible innovations that rendered lactose digestible, and then, when genetic mutation made some of us lactose-tolerant, milk itself.  It was once common for families to keep dairy cows and produce their own milk, but when mass production and urbanization made it readily available, the health controversies that had always surrounded milk grew in number and severity.  Milk became the first food to be tested in laboratories, and is now the world’s most regulated food.  It is at the center of food politics, raising questions about everything from industrial farming and animal rights to GMOs, the locavore movement, and advocates for raw milk, who controversially reject pasteurization.  Kurlansky traces milk’s provocative history from antiquity to the present, detailing its crucial role in cultural evolution, religion, nutrition, politics, and economics, and includes historical images and authentic recipes throughout.  If you find yourself stimulated by reading something that keeps you saying, “I didn’t know that!” this is the book for you.  You’ll never again take that carton in your refrigerator for granted.

When Naomi Minegishi invited us to an event at the University of Washington Press, we were given a copy of “Too High and Too Steep:  Reshaping Seattle’s Topography,” by David B. Williams, who introduces current residents and visitors in today’s Seattle to the landscape that its founding settlers first encountered, one we would barely recognize.  As the city grew, its leaders and inhabitants dramatically altered its topography to accommodate their changing visions.  Williams uses his deep knowledge of Seattle, scientific background, and extensive research and interviews to illuminate the physical challenges and sometimes startling hubris of these large-scale transformations, from the filling in of the Duwamish tideflats to the massive regrading project that pared down Denny Hill.  He also helps us find visible traces of the city’s former landscape and better understand that Seattle is a place that has been radically reshaped.  The book’s illustrations, maps, and historic photos bring home that this was a strange place to build a city, and show us how – and why – the founders coped with its difficult topography, one that had been influenced by glaciers, faults, and tides.  This is a lively journey from native middens to the creation and then modern dismantling of the viaduct and what will become a total transformation of our magnificent waterfront.  James Moore, the son of a wealthy builder and shipowner in Nova Scotia, arrived in Seattle around 1886 and quickly became a leading developer.  In his papers found at his death was a quote on urban planning by architect Daniel Burnham:  “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood . . . Make big plans, aim high and hope and work.”   That is exactly what Seattle’s forefathers did, and we are the beneficiaries.

Mysteries:  My brother, Bob Pike, suggested I check out Lawrence Block, who has written more than fifty books and numerous short stories and won multiple awards and literary prizes.  I have now happily read two of the books from his Matthew Scudder series, and intend to work my way through many more, as Block is a fine storyteller with a good ear for dialogue.  Scudder, a deeply flawed and deeply moral ex-policeman, recovering alcoholic, and unlicensed private investigator, has walked New York’s streets for almost thirty years, during which a lot of change has come both to him and to his city.  In “Eight Million Ways to Die,” he is supposed to protect a young prostitute named Kim, who wants out of the life, but someone slashes her to death on a waterfront pier.  Now Scudder’s penance is to find her killer, but there are secrets in her past that are dirtier than her trade.  Her pimp actually seems admirable.  “In the Midst of Death,” bad cop Jerry Broadfield didn’t make any friends when he volunteered to squeal to an ambitious D.A. about police corruption.  Now he’s accused of murdering a call girl, and Scudder sets out to prove he didn’t do it – with no help from the cops.

We lose ourselves in books;  we find ourselves there, too.