Happy Thanksgiving!

 

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah: A review

This book was, in many ways, a depressing read but then it is primarily about the Great Depression of the 1930s and its effect on the lives of ordinary people. The story is told through the character of Elsa, a young woman from West Texas, who was forced into a loveless marriage after getting pregnant. It was the way things were done then and, in some cases, still are.

Elsa was a gangly, rather unattractive young woman, but she had great reserves of courage and moral strength. She would need all of that when she was abandoned by her feckless husband and had to make a life for herself and her two children.

The marriage may have been loveless in regard to her husband, Rafe, but there was plenty of love from her in-laws, Rafe's parents, Rose and Tony. They recognized her quality and worth and supported her. In return, they became the beloved parents she had really never had.

As the middle of the country became the Dust Bowl, Elsa, like thousands of others, had to make a decision of whether to stay and fight to keep her land or to go and seek her fortune in the West. In the end, circumstances forced her hand and she headed west to California.

In California, she became a migrant worker hoeing and then picking cotton in the fields of the landowners. It was a hard life but it afforded a living for herself and her children and she found friendship and love among her fellow laborers.

She and her fellow migrants also found prejudice and discrimination. The landowners who needed their services viewed them as somehow a lower class of humans and sought to keep them from enjoying the full benefits of citizenship. But some rebelled against such injustice, including the man Elsa fell in love with, a young labor organizer, who fought for better working conditions and pay for the migrants.

Hannah gives us a stirring picture of the lives of the "Okies" who made the move west and of all the obstacles they faced, primarily the unreasoning prejudice with which they had to contend. It must have taken great courage to make that move, or maybe it just took the fact that they didn't have any other viable option. Perhaps that is the case with many of the great "migrations" in human history.

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet: A review

 

In 2020, I read and loved Lydia Millet's last book, A Children's Bible, so obviously I was going to read her new book as well. This one was a different kind of story, but Millet has lost none of her edge as a writer.

The protagonist here is named Gil. He is an extremely wealthy forty-five-year-old man. His wealth is inherited and he apparently has never actually held down a job except for a very short time as a bartender. He seems to feel quite guilty about his wealth and he tries to expiate that guilt by doing a lot of volunteer community service type work. 

Gil was orphaned as a child and was raised by his grandmother, but she, too, died when he was still a teenager. Now, he has no family and few friends and no really strong ties to Manhattan where he lives. He surprises those who do know him by deciding to move to Phoenix. Even more surprisingly, he decides to walk there! A 2500-mile walk will take about five months and will allow him to experience life as he never has before.

Millet does not waste much ink on the actual walk, but Gil makes it to Phoenix and moves into a suburban home, meets his neighbors, and begins to form friendships. He learns to relate to Nature and spends much of his time alone and watching the birds in his neighborhood. He muses about these birds and about the world of Nature:

“But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself. You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone. Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant. Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.”

Interestingly, the writer names each chapter of the book after a bird that occurs in Gil's environment. Her descriptions of Nature in those chapters and of Gil's reactions to it are quite lyrical.

This is a book to be read slowly and savored. There's very little drama here; it's just a story about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. Well, maybe most "ordinary" people are not quite as wealthy as Gil and they do have to worry about jobs and how the bills are going to get paid, but he tends to eschew most of the trappings of wealth and simply tries to become a part of the everyday life of his neighborhood.

I only had one complaint about the book and that was in regard to its structure. The narrative switches between past and present and that, of course, is not unusual in literary fiction, but I found the transitions to be rather abrupt and even disruptive to the story at times. Still, that was a fairly minor quibble and, on the whole, I liked the book very much. Maybe not quite as much as A Children's Bible but close.   

 

Poetry Sunday: Bless Their Hearts by Richard Newman

"Bless his/her heart!" 

That's an observation that one hears not infrequently in the South and those of us who grew up with it are well aware that quite often it means exactly the opposite. Richard Newman understands.  

Bless Their Hearts

by Richard Newman

At Steak ‘n Shake I learned that if you add
“Bless their hearts” after their names, you can say
whatever you want about them and it’s OK.
My son, bless his heart, is an idiot,
she said. He rents storage space for his kids’
toys—they’re only one and three years old!
I said, my father, bless his heart, has turned
into a sentimental old fool. He gets
weepy when he hears my daughter’s greeting
on our voice mail. Before our Steakburgers came
someone else blessed her office mate’s heart,
then, as an afterthought, the jealous hearts
of the entire anthropology department.
We bestowed blessings on many a heart
that day. I even blessed my ex-wife’s heart.
Our waiter, bless his heart, would not be getting
much tip, for which, no doubt, he’d bless our hearts.
In a week it would be Thanksgiving,
and we would each sit with our respective
families, counting our blessings and blessing
the hearts of family members as only family
does best. Oh, bless us all, yes, bless us, please
bless us and bless our crummy little hearts.

This week in birds - #527

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Everybody's favorite backyard bird - the Northern Cardinal.

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Indonesia, one of the world's largest consumers of coal, a major pollutant, has agreed to sharply reduce its use of the fossil fuel in response to what is essentially a $20 billion bribe from developed nations.

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We may still have more than our share of deniers in this country but in other parts of the world, people are well aware of the changing climate and freely acknowledge it.

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Four dams on the Klamath River will be destroyed to improve the habitat for native salmon. It is the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.

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How can we prevent the extinction of amphibian species in a changing climate? 

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A new study has found that weather disasters of one kind or another have occurred in at least 90% of the counties in this country within the last eleven years.

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The dainty little Piping Plover is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. The good news about the plover is that its numbers are increasing.

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It hardly seems possible that a great river like the Amazon could dry up, but in fact, the river is in trouble.

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The world's melting glaciers are releasing a vast mass of microbes some of which may be harmful to life on the planet.

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Another potential for harm to life is deforestation which pushes bats into closer proximity to humans and horses making a crossover of virus a more likely event.

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Boreal forests are the world's largest intact forest ecosystem and one of the biggest stores of carbon. Canada is seeking the help of Indigenous communities to aid in fighting climate change by managing the forest and keeping the carbon where it is.

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An examination of fish fossils has shown that humans were cooking their fish dinners at least 780,000 years ago. That's much earlier than had previously been believed.

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The National Park Service is studying the feasibility of reintroducing the grizzly bear to the Cascades in Washington state where they formerly roamed. 

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The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas has had to endure harassment from right-wing extremists in recent years, but it has persevered and is making a comeback.

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It seems that chimpanzees enjoy showing off their finds to other chimpanzees.

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There are about 2.5 million ants for every human on Earth. In a very real sense, one could say that ants rule the planet. 

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Extreme heat will change us and change the way will live. It is already having an effect.

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Coral reefs of the world have already suffered catastrophic losses because of the effects of climate change.

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A glorious palette of autumn leaf colors at the New York Botanical Garden. And what happens to all those leaves that fall?

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Fruit flies have a unique organ that helps them both eat and lay eggs. Scientists are studying just how that works.

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The treasured antiques of Egypt's ancient history are being damaged by climate change and human activities.

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The ruins of an ancient submerged city on the Tigris River in Iraq are being revealed as drought dries the river up.

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One way to help guard against future pandemics is to protect wildlife habitats and keep them intact.

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Island countries have been shown to become more vulnerable to government oppression following climate disasters. There is a concern that weather-related events resulting from climate change could create a rise in the number of autocracies around the world. 

Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer: A review

 

When I read the first book about this character in 2018, entitled simply Less, I loved it and him. Apparently, my tastes have changed somewhat since then because, in this latest entry, I often found him quite irritating and didn't like him so much. I still mostly enjoyed reading about his misadventures, but I sometimes got quite impatient with him, and, in the end, debated with myself about what rating to give.

Arthur Less, as we meet him this time, is in a committed if somewhat fraught relationship with his lover, Freddy Peleu. Things are going well for him professionally as well. He has achieved some moderate success as a novelist and the future suddenly looks if not rosy at least a light shade of pink. But with Arthur, disaster is always just around the corner, and as he sees it peeking around that corner, he decides to take action.

He has been offered a series of literary gigs that will take him on an extensive tour of the country and provide funds to alleviate his current financial crisis. He decides to accept the proposal and so off he goes, traveling in a rusty camper van named Rosina.  He meets an ever-changing cast of writerly characters along the way and takes on a black pug named Dolly who will be his constant companion.

Arthur's journey begins in what he calls the "mild, mild West" and continues through the South and finally up the Atlantic Coast. Along the way he grows a handlebar mustache and begins dressing in the bolero and cowboy hat costume of his idea of a true "Unitedstatesian." His disguise is not entirely successful, however, as he continues to be mistaken as either the wrong writer or a Dutchman.

His travels lead to encounters with his estranged father and with his own personal demons. What he learns along the way is that he can never escape himself.

As with the first novel in the series, Greer tells this story with a light touch and a lot of humor. There were instances of laugh-out-loud moments as Arthur continually gets himself into seemingly impossible-to-escape situations. But he is undaunted. In spite of everything, he perseveres, determined to dig himself out of his financial hole and to live his best life. Okay, maybe I do sort of like Arthur after all. 

Poetry Sunday: Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson

No need for autumn fires here just yet, although we are experiencing cooler and somewhat more seasonable temperatures. But leaves are falling, summer flowers are dying back, and in all other ways, autumn is definitely on our doorstep. Of course, in most of the country, it didn't stop at the doorstep but barged right on in, and there, those autumn fires might be quite welcome.

Autumn Fires

by Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
   And all up in the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
   See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over, 
   And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
   The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
   Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
   Fires in the fall!