This book was published in 2013, written with Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld and political columnist. It has about fourteen pagThis book was published in 2013, written with Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld and political columnist. It has about fourteen pages of glossy photos mostly of the recall period when protesters took over the state capitol in Madison. The pictures are frightening, of angry people in a democratic system appearing to come apart. The final third of the book after the photos is a victory lap, comparing Walker to Reagan, and even once to Obama:
“President Obama and I could not be philosophically further apart…But in some other respects, President Obama and I ran similar campaigns. We even had the same slogan: “Forward.” (…“Forward” is the Wisconsin state motto.)
The arrogance of this comparison is almost too much to bear. One wonders who paid for this book to be written. The publisher is Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Random House established in 2003.
Scott Walker was responsible for the passing of Act 10 in Wisconsin which increased the contribution from public employees to pension and health care, limited their right to collectively bargain for wages, and eliminated the requirement that beneficiaries of union bargaining pay dues. Police and firefighters were not included as public sector employees in any restriction to rights. Walker proposed the legislation immediately after taking office in 2011, with no explanation and no warning.
Later, Walker would write in this book that even his wife Tonette had no idea what he was trying to accomplish. He asked himself, “If even my own wife didn’t see why we needed to change collective bargaining, how could I expect the voters of Wisconsin to see it? I was obviously doing a lousy job of explaining our reforms.” This man is dead serious.
“Before we had introduced Act 10, we had methodically gone through every aspect of our plan of action with my cabinet. We had the legislative plan mapped out to the smallest detail. We had prepared for every contingency—even down to having the National Guard at the ready to take over state prisons if correction officers went on strike. But the one thing we had not done was to prepare the people of Wisconsin for the changes we were about to enact.”
This stunning admission that Walker considered force before explanations is terrifying. And I don't like the use of "we" because it deflects initiative and blame. The public unions were willing to increase contributions to pensions and benefits and would have discussed loopholes in the system. Even the Democratic stronghold of Rahm Emanuel’s Illinois required adjustments to excessive and unfair overtime payments, among other collectively-bargained agreements that had gotten out of hand. It sometimes happens in the best-intentioned agreements. They need adjusting, not wholesale elimination.
Walker kept repeating the mantra that jobs had increased in his state after Act 10, but to my knowledge he never asked himself whether the jobs were good jobs with wages high enough to sustain families and pay taxes. Did he replace higher-paying jobs with lower-paying jobs? “I knew I had done the right thing, but I had not taken the time to explain why it was the right thing to do….Tonette is an excellent political barometer for me because she is like a lot of Wisconsin voters…” This is a real political animal at work, with a range of opinions coming to him from the far reaches of his bedroom.
Then the argument changes: “For some, it’s difficult to change. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess points out, ‘It’s really hard for Pan Am or TWA to just turn into JetBlue’… That’s why charter schools are still important. They give innovators a chance to start the educational equivalents of JetBlue.” There is too much here to unpack & argue with—we are being hit from every direction with ink in a fan. We really need to debrief these folks and figure out what their real problem is with public schools. I think I know but would like to hear it from them. I believe they want to obscure the reasons for their support of charter schools because they know we cannot support them…it just isn’t teacher’s salaries. I think Jane Mayer gave us the explanation in her book Dark Money: indoctrination.
Six weeks before his recall election in June 2012, a year and a half after he took office, Walker went to Illinois. “This election is way bigger than me,” he said, and I think that is probably true. Lots of money and support—outside money and support—was riding on his ability to show that breaking the unions and furthering the cause of charter schools made a difference in a formerly Democratic stronghold.
“Without the recall, I would never have had the opportunity to campaign across the state to defend our record. I would never have had a reason to air television ads across the state explaining the success of our reforms…It just goes to show that the extremism of your opponents is often your greatest weapon in the fight for what is right.”
Let’s concede that last one. And give him a fight he will never forget....more
Scott Walker could be likened to a sharpened pencil. He does what he is told to do, but appears wooden. This is clear even from the words he uses in hScott Walker could be likened to a sharpened pencil. He does what he is told to do, but appears wooden. This is clear even from the words he uses in his own memoir of his time in the governor’s office, when he faced a recall vote a year and a half after taking office. This man, after fighting the most bitter and divisive fight in his state’s history against collective bargaining rights for public unions, wants to take his show national. The mind reels.
Having previously been a Milwaukee County Executive before running for Governor in 2010, Walker was undoubtedly aware of problems Milwaukee faced. His plan to cut benefits (retirement & health care contributions) to public employees would initially cause a financial transfer to wealthier counties who saved more in cuts to employee compensation than they lost in state aid. “… the city of Waukesha, Milwaukee Public Schools, and Milwaukee County—Walker’s old charge—lost more than they saved, at least in the short term.”
“In the long term, there was a clear advantage for the budgets of Milwaukee Country and the Milwaukee Public Schools, which faced problems funding retiree health care and pensions far in excess of the typical local government in Wisconsin…An actuary found that the district lowered its projected obligation to retirees by a whopping $1 billion, or 42 percent, between 2009 and 2011.”
However, Walker did not keep another of his campaign pledges to the working poor. Walker cut the earned income tax credit by $40 million over two years and froze the homestead tax credit, which helps low-income homeowners and renters. Additionally, he cut aid to local governments by $1.25 billion because he refused to raise taxes while trying to balance the budget. But “…we are providing almost $1.5 billion in savings through our budget repair bill,” Walker explained. It's difficult to decide but Walker sounds like he is too thick to get it. Saving money that people need to live may not be productive.
Anyway, this book is quite nuanced in its examination of just how the protests played out, how less than two hours’ notice was given after 4 p.m. to convene state Republican legislators to force a vote upon quorum requirements, which allowed them to bypass Democrat approval, and to finally pass a bill limiting collective bargaining for public employees. Because the legislature refused entry to some citizens wishing to view proceedings when the bills were presented, the new law faced legal challenges and the bitter enmity of Democrats. It was a very ugly business.
I don’t think this is what our founding fathers had in mind, though maybe it is. We’ve read of vicious battles fought in the name of governing that have come before. Procedures here were challenged, declared null, challenged again…just like happened when voting districts were drawn in the middle of the night by WI Republicans alone to favor their own party & limit debate, using maps made up by the national GOP. This gerrymandering was declared unfair by the state supreme court, challenged again by Republican lawmakers and sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, only to be pushed aside in this summer’s session, undecided.
What is amply clear is that events in Wisconsin presage the division we now see splitting states around the union. Clearly there are differences of opinion about who “deserves” more, which is something we really do need to reach agreement on. Considering Republicans have only money and not even smart spokespeople or good ideas (if their ideas are so good, why is it so hard to convince people of their efficacy?), we who do not agree with the way they cut the cake are going to have to show that money is not the most valuable thing we can own.
The truth is, I would go along with some ‘conservative’ ideas if wages were higher and more equitably distributed. We can’t force companies to change their wage scales, but we can make it impracticable to give enormous bonuses to a few while forcing virtual enslavement (and state assistance) upon the rest. Tax them. If we take taxes off the table, the ‘Republican’ budget packages go bust because after all, they are protecting corporations, not people. Now, our economy is based on corporations, so everyone wants them to succeed. We just have to be honest about who we’re looking to serve. All of us, or just a few? Are we a nation or a rug for billionaires?
The hateful disregard among dissenting points of view that we experience now is very difficult for me to take. This book shows us how bad things can get, and what we have to face if we can’t control people’s anger. We should all be trying to lower the level of acrimony, learning as much as we can so as to find some answers that work for all of us. This book allows us to make decisions on what can happen without having to go through it ourselves. It is very useful....more
This is the perfect book to give someone trying to understand what exactly happened in Wisconsin over these past thirty-or-so years so that a staunchlThis is the perfect book to give someone trying to understand what exactly happened in Wisconsin over these past thirty-or-so years so that a staunchly progressive and friendly state who looked after their own fell prey to a group who wanted to break that sense of community and, as Scott Walker told the national Republicans, “divide and conquer” the unions. Well, that they did, and a whole lot more and now the state is so heavily gerrymandered even majority Democrats don’t have a chance to elect their preferred candidates.
Kaufman manages to get us up to date on the state of the economy there, the threat of environmental degradation, and the lack of funding for public projects like universities. We learn which candidates who have run in the past and who is running now, including Braveheart Randy Bryce in District #1 who took on the “head of the snake” Paul Ryan and managed to slay Ryan's political future.
Bryce still has a battle with Steil, Ryan’s handpicked successor, but he’s got national support and attention for his fight. What Kaufman does particularly well is the backstory—why certain candidates ended up on the ballot, what they bring, and who supports them.
Norwegians instilled a kind of communitarian ethos in the area southwest of Milwaukee where they settled in the mid-nineteenth century, moving up from Chicago. At the same time northeast of Madison abolitionists gathered and decided to call themselves Republicans after the Latin for “the common good.” How much has changed! in the years since.
Chippewa Indian tribes, also called Ojibwe, who have retained some land rights in Wisconsin, have been strong proponents of environmental conservation and preservation. This has put them at loggerheads with people who call themselves conservatives but who have supported open-pit mining in the headwaters of Indian land, a poor site that had been rejected many times over by previous prospectors looking for good sites.
One of the more heartbreaking stories Kaufman tells is that of the tar-sands pipeline that crosses under the free-flowing Namekagon River in northern Wisconsin. Owned by the Canadian company Enbridge, it was responsible for several hundred spills in the past decade, including one in 2010 that counts as the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history.
Like the Keystone pipeline, Enbridge’s pipeline carries tar-sand, which needs to be mixed with chemical solvents so that it will flow. When exposed to air, these chemicals release a toxic gas, and the sticky tar sands sinks in the river & requires dredging to remove it. Here we have proof that tar-sands pipelines invite environmental disasters and we are still hearing about that will not happen with Keystone because of all the protections. We really must place that particular lie where it belongs and expose the damage this absurd refusal to see alternatives is leaving us.
Very quickly Kaufman sketches the strong progressive values inculcated in state residents since the earliest days and draws a line to present political incumbents. Despite Paul Ryan being a native son growing up in Janesville, he calls progressivism “a cancer.” Scott Walker’s family moved in from Colorado by way of Iowa. He was a religious crusader who felt God had given him a mission in Wisconsin to break the unions. Randy Bryce, a veteran and cancer survivor, on the other hand, became a strong proponent of the labor movement just at the time Walker was looking to cripple it.
For years before Scott Walker came to office, there had been an assault on public institutions in Wisconsin, including universities and public schools. Walker instituted Act10 in 2011, which limited the right of public employees to collectively bargain, and then in 2015 attempted to change the mission statement of the university system from “to educate people and improve the human condition” to “meet the state’s workforce needs,” showing us the limits of his imagination. We do not know why Walker appears to have failed out of Marquette University, but we can see that he appears to fear what comes and so looks backward, to what he learned in childhood--not facts perhaps, but beliefs. No soaring rhetoric for him, by God.
The portraits of individuals becoming desperate to put up a fight against the prevailing winds in Wisconsin are both heartening and discouraging. National opposition parties to the GOP, like Democrats, have their national goals wound so tightly around their axle they can barely cast a glance at states not putting up a good fight on their own.
Which is why, once Bryce broke a certain level of consciousness nationally, the Democrats were willing to contribute some money and some people. But Bernie Sanders recognized a fellow traveller in Bryce, someone whose values are in line with Wisconsin’s historical Scandinavian ethos of progressivism and in contrast to his states’ current conservative climate.
Finding and funding candidates is a huge step towards putting up a good fight in Wisconsin. I used to be disappointed well-trained and -spoken lawyers didn’t make more of an effort to help lead, but no more. Voters in Wisconsin are going to have to fight for what they want, and one of the first steps to effective forward movement is a fire in the belly and an awareness of history. Kaufman does a brilliant job of making key elements of this history come alive with personality and human foible. We can, we must fix this. Wisconsin is not just the heartland, it is our heart....more
Egan separates a couple of salient facts by the length of a book, but I here eclipse the space between them:
The Great Lakes are the largest expanse
Egan separates a couple of salient facts by the length of a book, but I here eclipse the space between them:
The Great Lakes are the largest expanse of freshwater in the world.
The Great Lakes are in the midst of a slow-motion ecological catastrophe begun by opening to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic.
Freshwater is the world's most precious natural resource.
“The intuition is that a very large lake like this would be slow to respond somehow to climate change. But in fact we’re finding that its particularly sensitive.”
After the last election I became laser-focused on Wisconsin. I watched as a traditionally blue state voted red, and kept Governor Scott Walker and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in office through severe gerrymandering that could not be reversed even by mandate from federal judges. The Wisconsin gerrymandering case was forced to our country’s highest court, and SCOTUS's decision on the fairness of such twisted districts should be heard before the November 2018 election. But decisions made by the severely gerrymandered Republican legislature has been allowed to impact and will continue to impact Lake Michigan’s watershed at a time when it needs urgent attention.
A proposed $10 billion investment in Paul Ryan's District #1 by Taiwan's Foxconn, maker of touch screens for the iPad, was inked in 2017. Foxconn will use 7 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan per day, five billion of which will be used outside and not returned to the lake's watershed area. By the end of Egan's book, contracts like this and that made with Waukesha city, a suburb of Milwaukee and also outside the watershed area, take on far greater meaning.
Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes have been under pressure from invasive species from the Seaway to the north, and from the south through the Sanitary & Ship Canal to the Mississippi. Just when scientists managed to tackle the problems caused by one devastating species, they would encounter another, even more overwhelming, until we arrived where we are now, with toxic algae blooms regularly threatening the water supplies of major cities that use lake water for drinking water.
Besides that, we discover the increases in the lake’s winter temperatures means increases in the lake’s summer temperatures, encouraging evaporation and shrinkage of water area. This, along with pollution of existing supplies and inevitable demands from rapidly drying areas of the country who have gone through their aquifers is increasing the pressures on scientists to refresh and preserve this enormously important natural resource. It requires attention and political support, and one fears what would happen should business-influenced politicians force through compromises that have short-term gains for the few and long term consequences for the many.
Dan Egan is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has been researching and reporting on the Great Lakes for at least a decade. He has done something we rarely encounter: he has made science and history come alive. As I did my own research into the political conditions in Wisconsin, I thought it would be important to learn more about Lake Michigan which plays such an important role in the life and economy of the state but I expected Egan’s book would be struggle to read. Instead I found it completely riveting and hard to put down. When was the last time you said that about a science/geography/history book?
A few years ago I read another nonfiction title, Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown that was similarly involving. Although the history of the Washington crew team competing in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany is long over, Brown made the book completely propulsive and un-put-down-able. That is the way I feel about Egan's book.
One threat to the lakes follows another, and our hearts squeeze as we hear of dangers and disasters in the last couple of years. It feels absolutely critical that we pay attention to the resource--freshwater--scientists have been telling us for half a century is in limited supply and which has everything to do with life on earth.
I can’t recommend this title more highly. Egan should definitely be on award lists for this title, and indeed has already scooped a couple. The W.W. Norton paperback came out last month (April 2018) and the Random House Audio production is likewise terrific, narrated by Jason Culp. ...more
Wow. Every bit as earthshaking and meaningful as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, this graphic novel by Craig Thompson publisheWow. Every bit as earthshaking and meaningful as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, this graphic novel by Craig Thompson published in 2003 by Top Shelf is one thoughtful Americans do not want to miss. Christian evangelical notions of life on earth and what comes after are a huge part of the narrative of our nation. Even today when our population is more diverse than ever, the history of these core beliefs within our citizenry continue to affect the direction of our politics.
Teenagers instilled with these notions rarely have the intellectual wherewithal to question those received ideas. Paradoxically, perhaps because of those early teachings and the constraints of his upbringing, the author--the main character in this memoir-- has the discipline and strength to look squarely at his life, the beliefs of his parents, and think again.
This graphic novel won two Eisner Awards, three Harvey Awards, and two Ignatz Awards in 2004 and a Prix de la critique for the French edition a year later. A strict Christian evangelical family raises two sons in rural Wisconsin; we watch the boys grow up, from sleeping together in the same room/same bed they move to their own rooms, go to summer camp, get harassed at school, romance a girl.
Sometimes graphic novels get a few things right, like the artwork, or the pacing. In this case, Thompson seemed to get everything right. The growing up story is poignant and real and revealing about farm life in Wisconsin in a close-knit religious family. Craig goes to visit his girlfriend Raina who lives in the snowiest city in the contiguous United States, in the Upper Peninsula of far north Michigan....in winter. We are treated to Raina's home life as well, another Christian family who struggles under enormous pressures.
Graphic novels are especially impressive because they must portray characters from an endless array of angles, and in this case, we recognize a character as he grows over a period of years. Moreover, we are feeling that character struggle with the promises and constraints of his religion and the actual manifestation of those teachings that he can see. When Craig’s pastor suggests he consider a religious calling, Craig seriously contemplates the idea.
The graphic novel drops into lower gear here and we see the quality of the intellect behind the work. Craig’s thinking and research into the Bible is Jesuitical, deep and challenging, and he is left with too many unanswered questions and lingering doubts. Different mentorship probably would have produced a different result. This portion of the book is careful, allowing Craig to slip away, leaving the door to his family open, and conflict at bay.
Thompson’s drawing skill is exceptional and smart, unmistakably capturing movement from life. The group scenes are especially exciting; for example, he might draw a high school cafeteria with many tables of students doing all manner of shenanigans. It is Bruegel, in ink. Thompson didn’t hold back on this book: it is 582 pages, not including the credits. He took the time to draw out his religious questioning and didn’t rush us through his moments of insight and revelation.
I especially appreciated the belly laughs he led us to near the end of the memoir when some of the church elders in his hometown warned Craig not to consider going to art school, lest it lead him to sin. Our hearts nearly break with what the teen will miss if he doesn’t follow his passion, but again he manages to avoid confrontation while following his dreams.
Thompson has continued his remarkable success, and in 2011 Pantheon Books published Habibi, a book Thompson had begun working on in 2004 after traveling in Europe for a time. Influenced by Arabic calligraphy and Islamic mythology, Thompson tells us "I'm playing with Islam in the same way I was playing with Christianity in Blankets.” [Wiki].
On my blog I have posted two videos of Thompson demonstrating and discussing his work. The first is short and covers his childhood and all books. The second is a 56 minute interview, with slides, of Thompson discussing Habibi. I am completely wowed by this man, his work, and the depth and scope of his intellect. Highly recommended....more
Thomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistThomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistic to describe Kansas voting for conservatives against their own best interests. His arguments are extreme and unsettling. You’d think Kansas was the most unholy place on earth with pollution, unemployment, and immigrant slave labor, but actually conservatives have only slowly been crushing the lifeblood out of the state. This last election voted 60%-40% for Trump.
20% is a lot of votes, but there are still reasonable people in the state. After all, Kathryn Sibelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, was elected governor of Kansas in the year just before this book came out. I am reading this now because I was lately introduced to a YouTube clip of Frank talking about his new book Listen, Liberal. I had the same reaction to him in person as I did in print. This book could have been an excellent essay without all the pyrotechnics.
I note Frank said then
"Ask a liberal pundit what ails the red states, what has induced them to work so strenuously against their own economic interests, to vote Republican...and he will probably tell you it's all because of racism.
There are undeniably a great number of places where this...[is] true, but Kansas is not one of them."
Interesting. Where did that come from, more than halfway through his book-length argument, the first mention of race. Why raise it at all? I wonder what he would say now, knowing what we all do about Kansas and their not-race problem....more
This book infuriated me but also lowered the decibel level of my political retorts. I can clearly see now the utter cynicism with which Republican strThis book infuriated me but also lowered the decibel level of my political retorts. I can clearly see now the utter cynicism with which Republican strategists set about grabbing as many seats as they could with the intent to hold onto them for a decade or more by controlling the redistricting process. “When you have power you exercise it.” The gerrymander is the reason Blue states can appear to vote Red. What is so pitiful is that we can still hear voters talking about what they believe like it actually makes any difference to the operatives in Congress.
It is difficult to keep the partisanship out of discussions of politics, but I am going to try because the issue discussed in this book, gerrymandering, was/is really practiced by Democrats as well as Republicans. The Republicans, under the leadership of a legendary Republican campaign strategist called Lee Atwater, recognized in the 1980s that controlling the right to draw the lines of voting districts could mean greater Republican representation in local, state, and national races.
They began a strategy which would not see results for thirty years. This decade it has come to fruition. Several states are laboring under gerrymanders so severely skewed to the Republicans that although Democrats win a majority of the votes, their representation actually falls. This book gives some of the background, especially for those states we watch closely in the national elections: Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania.
An international non-profit which specializes in vote monitoring around the world turned its analytic eye on the United States, the “greatest democracy in the world” according to some, and discovered that North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had electoral representation more skewed to favor one party than many third-world countries.
Wisconsin, the state that brings you Speaker Ryan, has greater than 50% Democratic votes but has 60+% Republican seats. Wisconsin’s redistricting is currently handled by their Republican legislature, which allowed the national Republican party, with funds provided by Koch Brothers, to draw their redistricting maps. In closed sessions, deep secrecy, late night and storm days they would gather to prevent transparency of their process and to ensure Republican voters were the largest voting block in most districts. Even in a largely Democratic state, they managed to break, stack, crack, pack the districts with enough Republican voters to grab Congressional and state seats, and the governorship. Wisconsin used to be a Deep Blue state.
In November 2016 a federal court ordered that the voting districts in Wisconsin be redrawn by November 2017. Wisconsin Republicans (including Paul Ryan) refused, and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). Meanwhile, voters in Wisconsin are seriously disenfranchised. This is happening now, folks, and can be watched as it progresses through the courts.
Pennsylvania is the third most voter-obstructed state. Last year a youth pastor, Carol Kuniholm, noticed extraordinary discrepancies between the schools in some city districts and suburban schools and discovered one of the main reasons was underrepresentation due to gerrymandering. Kuniholm began a movement in PA which has taken on enormous momentum within the state and is garnering national recognition. You can watch progress of her attempt to introduce a bill to require an independent nonpartisan committee to decide contiguous, compact districts that do not break communities, cities, or racial blocks at fairdistrictspa.com. She wants nothing less than the democratic process to work as intended.
Daley shows that state legislature-managed redistricting can be severely partisan. Citizens in some states have managed to pass referendums requiring nonpartisan independent committees to manage redistricting. The independent committee works well in Iowa but is still subject to vicious partisan wrangling in Arizona. Some academics have taken on the challenge of trying to envision a better, more democratic process and Daley discusses these at the end of his book.
And this is the part of the book that I liked best of all. At the end Daley points out that gerrymandering has been ‘stealing people’s votes’ for centuries and it may have come up against its logical limits this decade. Because of the advances in computer modeling, coupled with voter awareness and rage at the government we have been handed, it may be possible to do something completely different. He points out that if Hillary had won the electoral college vote, she would have faced the same intransigence in Congress that stymied Obama. Instead, we got Trump. Daley quotes a Republican operative, Grover Norquist, talking with utter cynicism to a Conservative Political Action conference in 2012:
”We are not auditioning for a fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”
The GOP will keep Trump around as long as he can sign stuff and listens to what they say. So, okay. This is what we are dealing with. It means we need to pay attention, focus our energy, rely on each other, and tell our legislators we want fairness and representation. This book is a very easy read because it is so eye-opening. It gives you the basics, suggests a fix, and points a direction. What more do we need?...more
Dan Flores has done something fascinating in this book, rehabilitating the image of a persecuted carnivore lowest on our opinion roster of animals, in Dan Flores has done something fascinating in this book, rehabilitating the image of a persecuted carnivore lowest on our opinion roster of animals, including cockroaches and rats. He makes the case that coyotes should be America’s national avatar, displacing the bison or buffalo. Extremely clever, adaptable, and pioneering, the coyote was designated a principal deity by American Indians--North America’s oldest deity, responsible for creating all of North America.
Flores tells us that coyotes live within a couple miles of us at all times now…even those of us in major metropolitan areas. Coyotes are cosmopolitan, and have been living in urban areas since the time of Columbus at least. They are perceptive, wily fellow-travelers with us.
”Suffice it to say here that as we humans head off into an uncertain and probably dangerous future of our own making, it might be wise to keep an eye on [coyotes]. I, for one, am going to be very interested in how coyotes cope with the twenty-first century and what insights we might draw about our own circumstances from a coyote history that so often seems to mirror ours.”
Coyotes are predators, feeding mainly on small mammals, birds, or fruits and they are sociable, hunting in packs. Contrary to the notion that coyotes were responsible for cattle kills, they were nearly always scavengers of large animals as befit their position in the ranking of predators in the larger ecosystem. Very nearly killed off as pests since the end of the nineteenth century, they have none-the-less persevered.
Flores suggests we look to the Indian coyote stories, of which there is a rich seam, to understand human nature: “who better to illustrate that than self-centered, gluttonous, carnal Coyote?”As we began to understand our own animal natures, the study of other social animals leaves “little doubt that…canines also understand equality and inequity…and experience both a rudimentary form of empathy and some basic theory of mind…an essential sense of what in human terms we would call 'right and wrong.'”
Employees of the Wildlife Services’ Predator Research Center, whose greatest advocate is the American sheep industry, is responsible for killing by aerial shooting roughly 35,000 coyotes from the air annually. Even they readily admit that coyotes have personality: “They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.” Sheep farmers claim to lose some percentage of lambs to coyote packs every year. The federal government spends an equal amount of money (the cost of the lambs) to kill or sterilize coyote. Hmmm...a good use of federal tax dollars?
This book is a wildlife biologist’s dream. Readable, eloquent, well-argued, it looks at coyote history from many angles and leads even those of us with reason to dislike the disruptive canines to a grudging admiration and wonder. Of course, sport hunters probably don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles, but Flores points out that ecosystems tend to develop some balances in response to threats and flourishing in their environment. Trying to kill coyotes takes natural balances out of the equation.
Flores ends with examples of coyote in art, and reminds us again how the animal is portrayed as a caricature of human nature, for example Wile E’s comic overconfidence (remind you of anyone?), unswerving obsession with a goal, and unfailing faith in technology. (Even that swath of red-gold hair has something of the coyote about it.) But I don’t want to carry the metaphor too far. After all, coyote in modern day parlance means a person who sneaks illegal aliens into the U.S. from Mexico.
Dan Flores is a historian, A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus at University of Montana-Missoula, who has written several books about the American West and the animals who reside there. This year he also published a book called American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, perhaps in conjunction with the movement by Sean Gerrity, president of American Prairie Reserve, committed to wildlife conservation and hoping to create the largest wildlife complex ever assembled in the continental United States. "When complete, the reserve will comprise some 3.5 million contiguous acres (more than 5,000 square miles) of native grassland in northeastern Montana, with a goal of restoring the wildlife abundance the landscape once contained." [National Geographic bio].
Here is Dan Flores addressing the 32nd National Cowboy Poetry gathering about the history of America's Serengeti, and here is Sean Gerrity at an Aspen Institute gathering to elicit donations for his project....more
Mike Paterniti is slyly profound. It is hard to pick a favorite among these essays, and it gets harder the more distance one gets from reading them. TMike Paterniti is slyly profound. It is hard to pick a favorite among these essays, and it gets harder the more distance one gets from reading them. They stay around like a seed planted. They grow. It is easy to underestimate Paterniti because his writing voice is self-deprecating and meant to be goofily funny. But a couple of essays in this nonfiction collection prove his bonafides as someone who knows what seeing is, what wonder is. These essays range the world, and though early on I’d picked one or two I thought showcased his talent, two near the end of the collection spoke to me most directly. Ask me again in a week and I will choose a different set.
A GR friend pointed to this title, and his enthusiastic review made me want to see what he saw. The two essays David points to in his review, “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow” and “Driving Mr. Albert,” are two I wish all the pundits and newscasters had read before the presidential campaign started in the U.S. Paterniti tells of warring motels along an ignored stretch of road in Kansas, one motel owned by the whites, and two on either side of that owned by the yellows. It is a transcendent piece of writing because both sides are understandable in their resentments and there seems no solution in sight unless they get to know one another to see what suffering is.
In his review David points to that bit in “Driving Mr. Albert,” a horrible and ghastly story about driving across country with Einstein’s brain in the car trunk, where Paterniti points out “Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying.” There is a stench of formaldehyde in his words throughout which makes one want to wretch, and nothing he writes along the way makes it better. It is a kind of grotesquerie but we cannot pull away. This man went and witnessed and we can just say, “how about that?”
One essay—I want to say story because it reads so much like fiction—that stood out for me was “The Suicide Catcher,” set in Nanjing, China. A man takes it upon himself to try and keep people from jumping to their deaths along a stretch of bridge over the Yangtze River. Paterniti flew there to meet Mr. Chen:
"He had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker—and he never stopped watching, even when he allowed himself a cigarette, smoking a cheap brand named after the city itself. He wore a baseball cap with a brim that poked out like an oversized duck’s bill, like the Cyrano of duck bills, the crown of which read They spy on you."
The piece is mesmerizing. Paterniti caught that “China feel” precisely, down to the eight-table local restaurant near the bridge, the walls of which held side-by-side posters of Buddha and liquor ads, and the cloudy glasses of which held beer or grain alcohol that Mr. Chen slammed down with a greedy satisfaction and pride. Paterniti caught the feel of suicide-catching, too, as he stood without Mr. Chen on the bridge later. A man, boozed to the gills, decided he could no longer take the pressure of caring for a sick relative and his family as well. He very nearly succeeded in rolling himself over the balustrade…
“Never Forget” made me shake with fear and brought me to tears. For the first time since our presidential campaign started this time I realized that we human beings have many documented cases—here is another one—of mass delusion and slaughter of fellow humans. It can happen again. It makes no sense, but no matter how remote it seems, we must be vigilant. In this essay the author is in Cambodia with his wife and child. He walks in the park with his son “clutching him like a snake-spooked chimpanzee,” while everyone smiles and points at them. Everyone smiles so consistently he starts to get paranoid. “Why is everyone smiling?” he wonders. “Was the joke on me?…Or are they smiling because they can?” Chum Mey, a survivor of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, smiles too, though we may never understand how.
"In the first spasm of violence, everyone wearing glasses was killed. Everyone who spoke a foreign language was killed. Everyone with a university education was killed. Word was sent to expats living abroad to come home and join the new Cambodia; when a thousand or so arrived on special flights from Beijing, they were killed. Monks, so revered in Cambodian society and long the voice of conscience there, were killed. Lawyers, doctors, and diplomats were killed. Bureaucrats, soldiers, and policemen, even factory workers (Who in the minds of the Khmer Rouge were equivalent to industrialization itself), were killed."
I am not equating what is happening here with what has happened elsewhere. I am merely pointing out that people can be led to madness. Dystopia has its roots in that fear. In fiction it can be thrilling. In real life it is unqualified horror. Paterniti ended up returning to Cambodia for the trials which had dragged on so very long that everyone on both sides of the case were dying before sentencing. Chum Mey was there, smiling. Paterniti was strong to witness this episode in history, and brave.
It may be worth pointing out that this type of nonfiction storytelling is kind of an unusual genre. Or is it? I mean, it is not journalism exactly. Where does a quirky, interested, interesting voice writing nonfiction fit in the canon unless one is telling news? He writes magazine pieces for GQ. But this is still an unusual category: not travel writing or memoir-writing or straight journalism. The author barely appears in these pieces except for playing straight man or adding an occasional editorial comment or two. It is more like the pieces published in The New Yorker, I guess. Anyway, if someone else were as quirky and observant as Paterniti and could write as well, they might find an audience. My guess is that Paterniti would say, “No, don’t. It ain’t that easy…” But he’d say it with a smile....more
The grace and fluency with which James Beard Award-winning Chef Barber relates his experiences in his Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, walking tThe grace and fluency with which James Beard Award-winning Chef Barber relates his experiences in his Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, walking the fields of his Stone Barns organic farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and in his travels to Europe and throughout the United States left me wide-eyed with wonder. This extraordinary memoir and field notes is engrossing in a way that few writers achieve. Barber is gentle in his instruction, but he is telling us what he has learned about the inadequacy of the current concept of food sustainability, and it is a lesson we really need to assimilate and organize around.
Happily, his lessons are filled with well-cogitated thought, possibilities, solutions, humor, and beautiful images. I’d heard Corby Kummer interview the New York restaurateur on the New York Times book podcast back in the spring of ‘14, and thought it sounded like something I’d like to look at. I felt no urgency. Only when I obtained a copy for someone else and began to browse through it did I discover the can’t-put-it-down page-turning clarity, and the irresistible humor in Barber’s writing. I am trying now to figure out how many copies of the book I can give away for Christmas without repeating myself.
This book is divided into four sections, called Soil, Land, Sea, and Seeds. You won’t have heard these stories in quite this way before, and if they seem familiar, you will find it enlightening to see what Barber has chosen to highlight. Barber moves gradually through his dawning realization that the way we have been eating, in restaurants and at home, is not actually going to be able to sustain the land, the ocean, nor the planet, no matter that we gradually move from pesticide-grown vegetables to organics. There has to be a greater understanding of the web of interconnections between the soil and our eating habits. We have to be willing to increase the diversity of our diet and think about eating foods that replenish the balance in the soil along with ones we use more commonly.
It may be obvious to those who have paid attention to the concept of sustainability that we haven’t yet come around to actually managing the task ahead of us. Barber suggests it is more than simply changing our diets from meat-centric to vegetable-centric. He concludes that we “cherry-pick” our vegetables and therefore limit the amount a farm can sustainably produce for a given community. A farm has to grow cover crops on at least some of the land, and that is part of the cost of crops we actually eat. He urges us to think about how this works in fact, and what this reality means for pricing, output, and consumption.
But I may be making it sound boring. In Barber’s hands, it is anything but that. His work is filled with enlightening vignettes about the places, the people, the restaurants that led him to learn so much about sustainability and its opportunities. Barber awakened me to certain understandings about plant pairings that I’d sort of heard about, but never really believed possible: like having four different crops growing in the same space at the same time to preserve and replenish soil vitality. Especially, or perhaps only, in small scale operations where crops are harvested by hand might this be possible…but it is possible, in fact desirable!
Vignettes about the fish farmers and restaurants featuring fish were particularly interesting. I hadn’t followed the latest developments in that field and am astonished, pleased, and heartened to know that there are some doing things which enhance wildlife rather than diminish it. He tells of a fish farm in Spain which hosts vastly increased numbers of migrating birds as well as produces exceptional-tasting fish for market. It gives me hope that the work on the west coast of the USA to preserve and restore the tidal salt marshes near San Francisco might be successful for life of all kinds, including our own.
Barber outlines his own learning curve, his oversights and humiliations, and he is very funny in places, showing the reactions of people with different world views meeting (at Barber’s behest) face to face and trying to be civil, or in speaking of finely tuned chefs at their most passionate or most perplexed:
’Dan,’ [Ángel] said, turning to me, ‘have you ever cooked naked in your kitchen?’
Ángel features in another very funny bit:
”[Santiago] goes to different ponds in Veta la Palma [Spain] at different times of the year. Always at the full moon,” Ángel said.
Thinking of Steiner and his lunar planting schedule, I guessed, “Because the fish have better flavor when the moon is full.”
“No,” [Ángel] said, looking puzzled. “So he can see what he’s catching.”
The section on wheat farming was completely new and fascinating to me. In the very beginning of the book Barber reproduces a photograph of the perennial Midwest native prairie wheat (with root system) alongside higher-yielding grain varieties planted to replace it. I was truly shocked by the difference in the profiles of the two plants, and thought it indicative of what modern agriculture has done, in every aspect of our food profile, to the concept of sustainability. The good news is that there are folks around the country thinking about our food future. Barber managed to create an international community of thoughtful practitioners striving to figure out how we can best produce what we will need to live on earth.
This completely fascinating book happens to be very easy to read. Someone in your family, not just the foodies, will love reading of Barber’s researches and spending time with this thoroughly decent guy who is willing to share his successes and failures in the field. ...more
“It seemed to me a good day to be dead and by that I mean that if the dead cared no more about the worries they’d shouldered in life and could lie bac
“It seemed to me a good day to be dead and by that I mean that if the dead cared no more about the worries they’d shouldered in life and could lie back and enjoy the best of what God had created it was a day for exactly such. The air was warm and still and the grass of the cemetery…was soft green and the river…reflected the sky [like] a long ribbon of blue silk…”
The thirteen-year-old narrator of William Kent Krueger’s new mystery juxtaposes death and bucolic beauty, but we know the dead can’t see. Set in a small town north of everywhere in America and south of Canada, this is a tale of an extraordinary summer in an ordinary town in Minnesota--the summer when everything seemed to come untethered and God drew His awful grace (vengeance?) like a sword. There is always something dark or threatening about mysteries by William Kent Krueger. It has to do with half-hidden resentments that may flame into retribution, or ugly prejudices on the lips of town folk or law keepers.
Krueger has created characters that sharpen our instincts: Doyle, the small town cop with no more sense of right than a hormonal teenaged bully; Redstone, the tall, taciturn Dakota whose greatest compliment is that one “might have Sioux blood”; the WWII veteran-turned-preacher who had spent all his pride and was left only with generosity. Our narrator, Frank, is impulsive and on the cusp of discoveries about life. He may not be entirely reliable.
“Happiness…is only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for…wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”
Imagine an aerial shot of three boys pedaling their bikes as fast as they can along a country road in high summer. We can’t hear the buzz of insects in the fields, nor the frogs burping along the river, but we can see the boys. We don’t know where they are going, but we imagine the excitement of the day’s first swim, or the urgency of finishing a tree fort, or the need for an ice cream soda at the drug store. Then we notice a car speeding behind…in pursuit or accompanying the boys, we do not know. Now we begin to suspect something may be wrong. They are all going too fast.
Krueger continually confounds our expectations of “ordinary” by placing it next to extraordinary: high summer small town in southern Minnesota, a fish-filled river, a clergyman’s nuclear family. But there are flaws in the picture: the daughter, a ravishingly talented musician, has a hare lip. The world-famous pianist teaching her lost his sight in the war. His sister is deaf from birth. No wonder we don’t trust the sunshine. There is darkness here and wisdom has a terrible price.
This engrossing novel is a great success for Krueger, who is best known for his Cork O’Connor mystery series set in northern Minnesota. ...more
Harbach had me laughing by page five and cheering for these folks by page ten. Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last. I should have known, with the bHarbach had me laughing by page five and cheering for these folks by page ten. Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last. I should have known, with the book as long as it is, that it would contain too many words, and that is exactly what I concluded midway through. Half would have been nicer, more discreet and literary, but instead we got a bloated narrative illustrating the maturing process that many humans experience. If I say it was a well-written bloating, would that matter?
For instance, Harbach captures completely the absurd descent into anger that occurs between two people in a relationship, desultorily exchanging half-serious barbs which gradually become pointed, then toxic, then positively vicious. Harbach’s writing is reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen in that he uses a huge scale but the people are still lifelike, if not completely believable. It’s just that Harbach appears to lose the point part-way through, which diminishes his accomplishment somewhat.
The chronology we recognize is as follows: First, we think we might be “special” at something, then we discover that the world is filled with “special” folks, and finally we realize what “special” means and wonder if we can handle success. It’s a familiar story and Harbach tackles it with great enthusiasm and even skill. But the story takes on a life of its own, and introduces relatives and friends and even neighbors and becomes unwieldy. Going against the grain of reviewers who thought this a masterpiece, I have to say that I think this book might have better served had it been half its length. Henry lost his mojo. We get it. Do we need to wallow in the aftermath quite so much, since this reader felt abandoned. The author was off fighting wars on other shores while I stood bereft on this one.
Perhaps college-aged kids will find this book a revelation, but anyone older has little time for wallowing in failure. We’ve all experienced too much of it to have much time for a long wallow. For those who strive and take risks, failure is just the flip side of success. It’s part of the process. Both have their good points, both have their bad. If we don’t get over whatever we get dealt, we don’t move on. This is the art of fielding after all, isn’t it? ...more
It doesn’t take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout…it’s mostly soul. --Norman Maclean
Perhaps it is not so strange in this day and age to
It doesn’t take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout…it’s mostly soul. --Norman Maclean
Perhaps it is not so strange in this day and age to want to have time alone to think about the world and one’s place in it. It may be necessary to first take that step away to appreciate the benefits of solitude. Some of us imagine we would revel in it, but surely one must also have a sense of loss—a sense of disconnectedness and of strangeness with the world. Perhaps this sense of being apart is the treasured thing.
Philip Connors has written a curious memoir about his years (eight at the time of this writing) 10,000 ft above sea level in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest from spring until fall, watching for fire. He claims successful fire spotters have “an indolent and melancholy nature,” and he should know. He spends long days gazing over the ridges, spotting smoke which heralds a cleansing clearing of dead brush, or a devastating hurricane of wind, smoke, and fire that eats all things manmade and natural in its path.
There are only a handful of fire spotters left in our western states, paid $13/hour for the dry summer months, but Connors is one of them. He relishes his 10 days on, 4 days off sojourn from April to August, catching up on reading, thinking, writing, while he casts an eye out from a 55-foot tower high above Apache Peak. He admits to a "perverse and loathsome envy" for those lookouts whose peaks are higher and more remote, and whose stories are better than his.
He tells of famous forest fires and naturalists that changed U.S. Forest Service policy, first one way, and then another. He reminds us of Norman Maclean’s classic Young Men and Fire detailing the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana in which twelve smokejumpers were killed or fatally burned as the result of a poorly-understood “blowup.” He researches the jottings and writings of Jack Kerouac, fellow fire-spotter from years before, and muses on his own solitary path and the love of a woman willing to grant him the freedom to be on his own.
As long as the job exists, someone has to do it. But I couldn’t help feeling there is a degree of self-indulgence for a man (or woman) in middle life to take the time to watch for fire. Isn’t it even more so for a young man, so full of energy and promise, to do the same? I believe in contemplation, learning one’s limits, taking time to think through one’s path and one’s purpose. But isn’t it even more sacred to give oneself time to do that and then use that knowledge to engage the world?
I thought this as I listened to Sean Runnette read the Blackstone Audio edition of this book. But I came to challenge my position at the end. In the fire off-season, the author is a copywriter for The Wall Street Journal. A jarring note is struck at the end of the book, when the author tells us of his experience on 9/11, at the time of the Twin Towers’ fall. Here a man, who watches for fires in the natural world, finds himself in an inferno most unnatural. It is a weird, dislocating juxtaposition, just as a plane striking the World Trade Center in New York was for people around the world. But it leaves us unsettled again, just as we were at the time, for it brings home the arbitrariness of one’s location in the big scheme of things, and makes us think that watching for fires is not so indulgent after all.
This book was published in 2011, right about the time the devastating fires began which eventually engulfed Connors' section of the Gila National Forest, and burned nearly one million acres in Arizona and New Mexico.
Final note: fire spotters work in Canada as well, and Alberta is rebuilding fifty lookout shacks: article in the Vancouver Sun dated August 2011....more
A couple of years ago I wrote that it takes a brave man to create a novel that parallels and paraphrases the greats like Shakespeare and Dante. But JoA couple of years ago I wrote that it takes a brave man to create a novel that parallels and paraphrases the greats like Shakespeare and Dante. But Johnson takes it on handily: everybody in this new addition to his Sheriff Longmire series reads Dante—a paperback copy makes its way through backpacks and winter whiteouts to mountain peaks and cabin hideouts. It makes me want to go back and wrassle with The Inferno some more. FBI agents, Indians, cops, murderers and gang-bangers--everyone finds something in Dante to quote and apply to their own situation. It helps, I suppose, to have created a long-running character called Virgil, but Johnson also gave us a Beatrice. Perhaps Johnson is letting us in on his grand scheme when he created such memorable characters in this series in the first place.
There is a Homer, too. Homer doesn’t have a starring role, but comes back in with a refrain now and again—a friendly voice with words of warning for Sheriff Longmire who was tasked with turning over a group of misanthropes to a team of FBI taking them to jail sentences far from Wyoming. The turnover goes wrong, a winter storm closes the mountain pass, the convicts escape, and hostages are taken. Hell, it turns out, is not hot, but cold, just as Dante tells us.
Johnson has created characters in this series that make one so glad that we have a west so very different from our eastern shores. Lawmen, Indians, horses, wild animals—Johnson makes trekking big mountains palpable, and we wish, really wish, that we could actually meet people with such depths of compassion and friendly openness as we meet in his books. In this way, he reminds me of Maeve Binchy, who is one of the greats for translating everyday life into conversation. Both Binchy and Johnson write fiction that hints at romance, simply because we know it cannot be true, or real, but we wish it were so. Would it sound silly if I said he makes me proud to be American? Proud, not in the political sense, but in the sense that he has created people and a place and a history that I am glad I can claim is at least partly mine, if only because I am American, too. And I can go to Wyoming whenever I want.
I listened to this audiobook with great pleasure. Narrated by George Guidall, it seems a perfect vehicle for his voice. The reading is a perfect pairing of great writing and great reading. ...more
Ah, the Midwest. One has notions of the Midwest that the characters in this novel try to disabuse one of all the way through, but in fact, it's prettyAh, the Midwest. One has notions of the Midwest that the characters in this novel try to disabuse one of all the way through, but in fact, it's pretty much the way I imagined it: overgrown family farms gone to ruin; empty, neglected storefronts on main streets; young kids dying to get out. This novel follows an extended family through the 1960s to the new millenium, and isn't lavish with descriptions of beauty or of success or even of happiness. But the author does treat us to moments of transcendence: Norman and Martha dancing at a wedding, and Martha again, dying, stopping her niece from leaving her side. One gets the sense, as the characters age, that this is pretty much the way it is, for all of us, wherever we are: tension, struggle, outcome. Some outcomes are good; some not so good.
Moments of revelation and consequence are scattered through the novel like a hilly drive. One feels a ratcheting of tension and a concentration in focus, requiring a held breath to get us through. A headstrong young girl, determined to pain her parents, drives carelessly away from a funeral; a graduate student teaching a course invites a student to his house for dinner; a wife attends an AA meeting and brings another co-dependent home; a trip to Italy turns surreal. After, we turn our eyes and our thoughts to another character's life to catch our breath. These hills and valleys seem familiar, and when the book winds down we feel as though we could have been looking through the album of our lives: "Have you heard from so-and-so lately? I heard (s)he'd..."
Craig Johnson's books, read by George Guidall, have something of the wise old dad about them. No matter that Walt Longmire, sheriff of Wyoming's AbsarCraig Johnson's books, read by George Guidall, have something of the wise old dad about them. No matter that Walt Longmire, sheriff of Wyoming's Absaroka County, is not so old he doesn't lust after his deputy, the apple-assed Vic Moretti. That just makes him more of a man. And man he is. Bearing all manner of physical insult, he comes out on top once again, chasing his quarry through an 18" snowstorm high in the hills surrounding Red Lodge, Montana.
The ridiculous nature of the events that set off a chain of murders can only be based in truth because no novelist would create such stories for fear his tribe of readers would leave him for dead. In interviews Johnson tells us that he gets the basis for his outrageous stories from his friends in the police, so the one about the man cleaning the chimney in the middle of the winter with a rag soaked in kerosene, and tied with a rope to the bumper of a Durango, has got to be true. Hard as it is to believe. But it is the home-smoked flavor of these great western stories that make this series so...home grown.
This is a series I allow myself to savor like a fine cigar. I pace myself, withholding the pleasure of beginning a new story until I feel I have earned a special treat. They are soothing to the soul, funny to the bone, candy for the brain, and oh-so-reassuring for those among us who fear wisdom eludes our public servants....more
The language was sumptous and the idea of a walled garden and conservatory in the wintertime midwest extravagant. It felt like an old-fashioned story The language was sumptous and the idea of a walled garden and conservatory in the wintertime midwest extravagant. It felt like an old-fashioned story of greed, lust, and rage and was interesting enough for that. However, really, the story never really held together that well. One didn't believe the characters nor their motivations. It is possible to know in the depths of one's soul the depravity of man, and the depth of human forgiveness, but it is another thing to be required to believe these things in order for the story to work. It seemed impossible that the main male character wouldn't know about his wife if he knew so much about his son, and sure enough, he in fact did know. In any case, glorious language in search of a story....more
This history does what every nonfiction title aspires to do: makes the reader want to run out and read as much as they can on the subject. That is exaThis history does what every nonfiction title aspires to do: makes the reader want to run out and read as much as they can on the subject. That is exactly what I found myself doing today--looking in my public library for more. The Last Stand doesn't so much slake your thirst as inflame it. When I looked over the books on similar subject matter, I can see why. It was clear Philbrick used primary sources, but also built on what had come before: he consolidated information and didn't impede the forward momentum of the story. He added maps in the right places to clarify movements, and included photos which flesh out the characters.
This book is about the last stand of the Indians in America. Although the Battle of Little Bighorn was ostensibly a rout of the uniformed troops sent by the American government to move the Lakota off their given land to make way for gold rush settlers, it was also the end of Lakota way of life and was the last concerted attempt to save it. The story is mired in myth, due to the death of all in Custer’s party, though there were other battalions there led by surviving commanders. Due to the personalities involved, and the necessarily self-serving nature of their reports, these “truths” can be difficult to reconcile, one with the other. At the same time, the American government in Washington also had reason to interpret the facts so as to preserve the notion of manifest destiny, westward expansion, and the heroics (rather than the possible disgrace) of their fighting force. Surviving warriors from the Indians tribes were interviewed extensively in the years following the Battle, and much richness of detail (and contradiction with evidentiary evidence) can be gleaned from their accounts.
What does come clear from the story as told by Philbrick is the great-man nature of Chief Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader and warrior of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux. Many wise words are attributed to the man from reports at the time, and Sitting Bull’s attention always seemed to focus on the safety and welfare of his people, rather than on revenge or rage at betrayals. Later, after the battle recounted in such detail here, we learn that Sitting Bull did finally lay down his arms, and was shuttled to a reservation, where he was killed in 1890 by a Lakota policeman.
The apparently first-hand testimonies of survivors of The Battle of Little Bighorn do not paint complimentary portraitures of their commanding officers. The sound, smell, heat, and intensity of the battlefield come to life in this account, and we squirm with the uncomfortable knowledge of the end even as we begin reading. Learning the details of any military engagement brings its own horrors, but the facts of this devastation is particularly poignant when realizing that troops were being led by one commander deranged with drink, and another who felt no sense of urgency. All fought bravely in the end, to the end. ...more
Kansas, really? This murder mystery is set in Kansas, and not a city either. It is set in the plains of Kansas, so flat and dry a stand of trees risesKansas, really? This murder mystery is set in Kansas, and not a city either. It is set in the plains of Kansas, so flat and dry a stand of trees rises like a heat mirage and the wind is an ever-constant companion. J.M. Hayes, Arizona resident, grew up in Kansas and has managed to escape our notice for a long time. He is possessed of a keen eye, a coruscating sense of humor, a literate pen, and a devilish sense of the absurd. When reading this story I had to slow down. He is liable to turn suddenly in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.
The group of characters Hayes created stand on their own, and from this novel he has created a series. I liked the unfamiliar setting and the doses of history and local culture. He has teenager-speak and cadence just right and a lame police station with plenty of questionable characters and pistols full of blanks.
What I didn’t particularly like was mixing the absurd with the painful reality of the mystery: dismemberment murders by slashing razor blades, rampant sexual abuse of entire families, chasing down a black man simply because he is black, little-old-lady suicide by shotgun—I mean, really, is this meant to be funny? It is hardly the stuff of a lighthearted read.
Take the first suspect, for instance. A man, a reverend in fact, is slashed and genitally dismembered in the morning. When the town deputy goes to his house to look for clues, he happens across an unfamiliar black man, who he immediately decides must be the killer. He chases him across field and river, finally cornering him in an old barn, only to discover he is a professor of history at a nearby university whose car had broken down on the highway several miles out of town. Funny? It is meant to be, judging from the telling and the character of the deputy. It is edgy. True-to-life? Unfortunately. The reverend, we learn later, is a child molester. Unfortunately, we know this could also be true-to-life. We sense the author using a razor on us for our societal ills.
The setting in the fields of Kansas make it logical and perhaps necessary, I suppose, to place the final scenes in a grain silo, necessitating this paragraph in the middle of mayhem:
"Municipalities tend to have the larger elevators, and it was with this hope in mind that the beast of Buffalo Springs was built. It was 408 feet in length, 48 feet wide, and 90 feet high at the roof, or 110 feet at the roof of the head house. It was a monolith, formed by one continuous pour of concrete that took almost two weeks and involved 250 workers. It contained 36 circular bins, 17 star bins and 35 outer bins, so that only one empty space between the work floor and the distribution floor was unavailable to store grain. That space contained the preferred route for humans to travel to the head house and the distributing floor. The fastest, if not necessarily the safest, was by way of a pulley in the head house and was driven by an electric motor on the work floor. On an adjacent wall there was a runged ladder, positioned in case of a power failure or failure of the mechanism. There was also a circular metal staircase in that unused bin, the safest route, but a slow and tiring one….The fourth and last way to and from the top…"
You get my point I think. Too many words? It’s kind of interesting, but…perhaps we could have learned something about silos before the events in the final chapter required us to use our knowledge.
I’d like to have another look at the books this author has written. There are many things about this book that indicate the author is a thoughtful, learned man with a deep vein of humor and a clear eye for grim realities. And the setting and characters are unique. I am reluctant to pass up the chance to use my new knowledge of grain silos on another of his quirky mysteries. ...more
For years I've been looking at new titles accumulate under the name Krueger, and have wanted to see how mysteries unfurl in the midwest. Only this weeFor years I've been looking at new titles accumulate under the name Krueger, and have wanted to see how mysteries unfurl in the midwest. Only this week have I had the chance. This is the first in a series, and sadly, I didn't feel that well-aligned emotionally or intellectually with the main character Corcoran O'Connor. I know this is not because he is a man, nor because he is clearly of Irish descent. I think it may have something to do with the dark history of the midwest, and the way people interact there. It seems so foreign and unfriendly to me--me, who has spent much of my adult life overseas. A year ago summer I spent some time in Minnesota, just passing through, and I got another glimpse of that darkness. Although all my life I'd heard about the open and friendly way of midwesterners, I was positively spooked by the weird vibe of the northern woods to say nothing of the unfriendly way people play on the lakes in loud motor launches in summer and skidoos in winter. If I were a fish, living on a midwestern lake of any size would be hell on earth.
The author speaks to this manner of living in his book, and doesn't reassure outsiders that being new, and white (non-Indian) is a good thing in the northern woods. He spends some time outlining the alignments of the tribes, and I should have found this more fascinating than I did. It didn't integrate as well as I would have liked with the story, which wasn't as compelling as I would have liked, either. My guess is that it will be some time before I venture in the Minnesotan northwoods again, though I may, just to see if I can be less of an outsider....more
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