"Alice Munro confesses to not having been there for her small children and knowing that they suffered for it. 'When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. ...' " (p. 113)
If this is your subject matter—if you are someone who doesn't want children—this might be a terrific read for you, as it was for me....more
Compelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those deCompelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those decisions are made.
The author writes about how before the American Revolution there was a greater sense of community that made it possible for children to live amid large extended families. This made it easier on biological parents while allowing those with no children a chance to mother.
But we lost this strength largely because of the myth of frontier individualism. We pulled away from community. So caregiving shrank to the size of today's nuclear family. Many today still view the nuclear family as the epitome of family. In truth, the author writes, the nuclear family actually represents a diminishment of the outsize child rearing capacities of far larger, now no longer extant community-based extended families.
With those extended families no longer in existence, the author believes we have to support women by way of government programs. The European Community already does some of these things. The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the Child Tax Credit is a good example of our own national failure to do so.
"The child tax credit (CTC) was a monthly payment of $250 or $300 per child that was given to eligible families in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. . . According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, reducing the child poverty rate from 9.7% to 5.2%. . . [Conversely] without the CTC [when Congress failed to renew it] the child poverty rate rose sharply to 12.4% in 2022, an increase of 41% from December 2021 to January 2022. This means that 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line." (Source: Conversation with Bing, 1/10/2024)
Add to this example our lack of daycare, Medicare cuts, food stamp cuts, school lunch programs cuts, afterschool programs cuts, etc. — and you begin to glimpse why the decision not to have children is being made by so many women. I pulled the following quote from today's NYT: "Note that more than eight million children will be left out of a new federal food assistance program for needy families . . . because they live in one of the 15 states [whose] governors . . . refuse to participate."
There is simply no support system such as existed when large, extended families were prominent. Right now we have only NGOs or states to provide relief. But as the author says.
"Over the past two centuries . . . we jettisoned expansive ideas of kinship, isolated parents, disinvested from communities, and replaced community care with a kind of care that individuals have to pay for. . . . [But] that's not to say we couldn't rebuild systems of community support if we wanted to, or that we lack examples of how we might do it." (p. 70)...more
It's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic countIt's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic counterparts. Like the latter's soul though, the Mahayana Buddhists believe in a form of post-death consciousness called mind. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been available to me for years, but I've never made sense of it. As usual, author Chödrön distills the complexity down to a few cogent chapters. That's a gift I prize. I think Chödrön's best text for those new to Buddhism is Start Where You Are. Let me also suggest Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind....more
The book is a gold mine for readers who know something about humanism but may not have grasped its historical development. It has the feel of an excellent graduate seminar. Bakewell exlores the fuzzy concept of "humanism" from late Middle Ages to the present by telling us of its history and proponents.
So the book points you toward others you might not have thought to read. Moreover, books like this are interstitial reads. They help you to tie together seemingly disparate bits of information gleaned from other readings into a more or less coherent whole. This time the focus is humanism. Fascinating....more
I haven't read much of Morris, it's true, but in this book it is mostly descriptions of cityscapes, neighborhoods, gardens and such. The author never I haven't read much of Morris, it's true, but in this book it is mostly descriptions of cityscapes, neighborhoods, gardens and such. The author never introduces characters for local color. I mean living characters, not historical figures. Of the latter there are plenty: Maximilian I, Baron Pasquale Revoltella, Casanova, James Joyce, etc. This is not to say I'm not enjoying the book. The best parts are when she delves into the city's history: as the Austro-Hungarian empire's sole deep-water port, its post World War I transfer to Italy, etc. Or it's peculiar geographic location, shoehorned in among Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and the rest of Italy. She's a nimble writer. She started as a reporter and was the only journalist to accompany the first successful expedition to Mount Everest in 1953. An early multivolume work was her Pax Britannica Trilogy. So there's a uninformed temptation to think of her mostly as a historian; moreover, one who somewhat aggrandizes empire....more
What a story! Superficially it's a tale of gender affirmation. But so much more. It's revelatory to hear how author Morris came to understand that sheWhat a story! Superficially it's a tale of gender affirmation. But so much more. It's revelatory to hear how author Morris came to understand that she was in the wrong body. But during the many years of what she calls her conundrum, she joins the army, travels widely, marries and fathers five children. Morris was the only journalist to accompany Sir Edmund Hillary's expedition to Mount Everest. There's a sequence on how she gradually made her news public, painstakingly it turns out, for Morris was highly social and the reactions of almost everyone are given. What the memoir reveals is how she handled the information mentally and emotionally, and came over the course of many years to act upon it. My only quibble with the book is the author's too frequently declarations of her happy life. Henri de Montherlant said "happiness writes white." Morris's many recapitulations on this theme are hardly reassuring. Certainly this is something she as a writer should know....more
An astonishing new book! The main myth that the book refutes is that in colonial American the Indians were just a sideshow. Author Hämäläinen shows thAn astonishing new book! The main myth that the book refutes is that in colonial American the Indians were just a sideshow. Author Hämäläinen shows that, in fact, it was the indigenous populations who were in charge most of the time. Therefore the book fills in many gaps left in the standard American histories and expunges many false claims.
This is not a review — the book's four-century scope won't allow that— rather it's a gathering of a few quotes that support the main themes of the book.
"The dual threat of Indigenous power and English expansion from the east terrified the French inhabitants in Louisiana to their core. The Natchez war had shown, with graphic immediacy, what disregard for Indigenous sovereignty, traditions, and needs could bring. Cataclysmic violence, massive loss of life and property, the utter collapse of colonial institutions. The violence discouraged French investments in the colony and impeded France's empire-building in the lower Mississipi Valley. It also taught the colonists how little they could do without Native approval. In Louisiana, Indigenous customs prevailed, turning a colonial space into a hybrid one. Choctaw, Illini, Quapaw, and Apalachee societies were all intact, and they expected the French to comply with their traditions. The consequences for Louisiana were far-reaching. Métissage — cultural mixing — became the norm, shaping the most intimate aspects of the colonists' lives: sexual practices, gender roles, and child-rearing. The French in Louisiana came to realize that to survive in North America, newcomers needed to embrace its Indigenous inhabitants and convince them to become allies. The French had been doing so elsewhere, and by the early eighteenth century, all the European empires had grasped, if not necessarily accepted, that reality. They had also learned that the most effective way of building alliances was generosity and trade, which could turn enemies into kin." (p 226-7)
This is a dense text, but a well written one. For me, a general reader, the key to conquering it was to sound out the sometimes complex Indian personal and place names early on: Thayendanegea, Michilimackinac, Meshekinnoqquah, etc. Happily, all Indian names are not this complex, but some are, and unless you are a scholar the book is probably not skimmable.
——
"ALL ACROSS THE CONTINENT, from the Southeast to the Southwest, from the deep interior to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, colonial ambitions had crashed into Indigenous geographies of power. . . . Fundamentally, it was a matter of distance and geography. North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior, where Native territories extended deep into what, to Europeans, was a great unknown. The two Americas were almost complete opposites. In the interior, the Columbian Exchange often worked to the Indians' advantage. Deadly germs were brought inland by European traders, but their impact remained limited, whereas new military technology guns, powder, metal, and horses became available through colonial border markets and extensive Indigenous trade networks. In a transitional belt where the Indians were neither too close to European colonies to fall under their epidemiological shadow nor too far away to reap the benefits of their commerce, several geographically privileged Indigenous regimes rose to challenge colonial expansion on their own terms. This emerging belt was where great fortunes could be amassed, and where empires were won and lost." (p. 258)
——
"The Lenapes fought back. The sachem Shingas thought that if they stopped the English, 'we may do afterwards what we please with the French, for we have [them] as it were in a sheep den, and may cut them [off] at any time.' Ohio Country Indians kept attacking English settlements, forcing Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to focus on protecting their borders at a time when they should have been fighting the French. Highly mobile Native squadrons killed or captured hundreds of settlers, sending them into a chaotic retreat to the east. Soon the frontier was only a hundred miles from Philadelphia. The sudden contraction of British America became an opening for the French." (p. 278)
——
"THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR, Pontiac's War, Lord Dunmore's Was, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The 1783 Treaty of Paris extinguished that long-standing ambition. The thirteen colonies were severed from the British Empire and recognized as the United States of America. Native Americans had not been invited to the treaty talks, and they knew to expect an undesirable outcome. Still, when the news arrived, they were shocked and appalled. The treaty gave the United States an enormous territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, including the southern Great Lakes. The United States was an instant empire, claiming lands far beyond its effective borders. . . .
"Contemporary Europeans saw the 1783 treaty as a decisive turning point in the North American continent's history that spelled doom for Native Americans, who could no longer play rival colonial powers against one another. That view of the situation was wishful thinking. The fledgling United States may have claimed an enormous swath of Indigenous territory, but it controlled very little of it. Native Americans . . . had retained their territorial supremacy in North America throughout the long war. The Great Lakes region and nearly all of the Trans-Mississippi West remained under Indigenous rule, with catastrophic consequences for the British Empire. . . ." (p. 318-9)
——
There can be no doubt about the genocide British, Spanish, French, and American colonists gradually brought against the Indians. President Andrew Jackson and Congress in the mid 1830s moved indigenous nations off of prime agricultural land in the south and onto far less arable tracts in the west. (The Third Reich was inspired by the accomplishment; during WW2 they wanted to move the "untermenschen" to less productive land in Asia, but they didn't have the luck of working in a news vacuum as early American colonial powers did.) The United States compelled marches in winter which killed off a good number of Indians either by extreme cold or germs. Although this book is about the triumph of the indigenous nations over the colonial powers — and that power over the colonizers was immense — it is in the end about the killing of the American Indians and the massive expropriation of their lands. (See Claudio Saunt's powerful Unworthy Republic).
"GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON BECAME president in 1829 and announced "Indian removal" — a euphemistic term if there ever was one — as his main ambition. He did not acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty, having once argued that Congress had 'the right to take it and dispose of it.' Events accelerated dangerously for the Cherokees. The Georgia General Assembly strove to extend its jurisdiction over the Indians' territory, and a year later gold was found in the Dahlonega region in northern Georgia, triggering the first gold rush in American history. The land belonged to the Cherokee Nation. Jackson argued that 'though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits.' The Cherokees sent envoys to Washington, D.C., in March 1830. They stayed in Brown's Hotel, equidistant from the White House and Congress. The House of Representatives debated the expulsion of Indians from the South for two weeks before passing the Indian Removal Act by a paper-thin margin of 102-97. The Senate vote was 28-19 in favor of the act. Jackson declared that the new Indigenous domain in the West would be called the 'Indian Territory'" (p. 394)
——
The biggest surprise for this reader was the description of Indian-on-Indian slavery. It's made me think differently of the African slave experience, which I had previously thought without parallel in North America. But Indigenous peoples had been trading captives with each other long before Europeans arrived in North America. So extensive was such slavery that I have been unable to find a summarizing quote that might give you a sense of its scope, which was vast. Indian enslavement was eventually helped along by confederations Indians formed with the colonizers, once, that is, they grew powerful enough to participate.
——
"In October 1867, the Cheyennes, led by Black Kettle, signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty with U.S. representatives. Only a month later, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, burning with ambition, attacked Black Kettle's village on the Washita River, killing dozens of solders and women and children. U.S. Indian policy was misguided, vicious, and incompetent all at once, entangling the nation in unnecessary wars that only weakened its authority in the critical midsection of the continent. All in all, it was a massive miscalculation that would quickly come to haunt the U.S. Army. [W2 emphasis]. The central plains became dangerous to Americans, and soon a U.S. official complained that the Kiowas and Comanches 'have been doing much of this wrong. I shall however, continue to exert myself to prevent these acts of violence.' The Americans were making far too many enemies." (p. 440)...more
The thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and thThe thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and then to nation states — or did it? The authors cite the rich complexity of recent research which the archaeological community as a whole has — paradoxically — yet to embrace.
There are hundreds of a-ha moments in this book. Perhaps the biggest one for me was a result of something called the "indigenous critique." That is, the valuation of European society, institutions, and mores by well-known indigenous Americans, the foremost example being Kandiaronk of the Wendats. Kandiaronk said many wise things of which this is one.
"Come on, my brother. Don't get up in arms . . . It's only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they've heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit [Jesus], any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I've always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly . . . He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true." (p. 53)
*Cited here from Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled (1703), by Louis-Armand de d'Arce, Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan).
This "indigenous critique," gleaned from figures like Kandiaronk, was published by a number of European authors, some of them Jesuits. That's how it made its way from wilderness America to the salons of Paris and into the heads of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, et al. — therby having a major influence on The Enlightenment....more
The cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie in Chatauqua New York (12 August 2022) sent me this memoir of the fatwa years, whiAstonishing, searingly candid.
The cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie in Chatauqua New York (12 August 2022) sent me this memoir of the fatwa years, which had been on my backlist for some time. It turns out to be a dazzling text. Suddenly one looks up and it’s 4 a.m.
Rushdie evinces a great sense of humor, at times appropriately black. On 14 February 1989, for example, he was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his supposedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses. The very day he heard about the fatwa he had to attend travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s funeral. He writes about himself in third person.
Rushdie and his wife Marianne Wiggins “were seated next to Martin Amis and his wife, Antonia Phillips. ‘We were worried about you,’ Martin said, embracing him. ‘I’m worried about me,’ he replied. . . The novelist Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew behind him. ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,’ he said.” (p. 9)
What surprised me were the long periods he mentions when nothing was written. Being hunted down by an Iranian death squad will do that to you. Rushdie estimates that his state-sponsored cloistering stole two complete novels from him.
The account of the refusal of the Thatcher government to plead Rushdie’s case — that of the freedom of the writer to write as he wishes — is appalling. Thatcher’s government said nothing while he twisted in the wind; that is, while he was in isolation. No wonder Elvis Costello sang so fervently of how he longed to “tramp the dirt down.”
And let’s not forget the hostility of the tabloids too, which sympathized with local homicidal Muslim wack-jobs, and unconscionably called into question the cost of the protection services Rushdie “enjoyed." He didn’t get any traction on the British side until John Major gets into office, but by then he had, with the help of various GMOs, reeled in Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel.
President Clinton would not commit in advance to meeting Rushdie, who was ready to settle for cabinet member Warren Christopher. Once in the White House however the two men met and Clinton promised his support. This was a huge breakthrough. America had spoken. Suddenly, the European states couldn’t wait to make some sign of their own support, whereas for the previous three years they had been quaking in their boots at the prospect of being executed by Iranian assassins. But the cowards soon backed down.
Meanwhile Rushdie couldn’t promote his own books. The first paperback version of The Satanic Verses had to be brought out by a nonprofit consortium because Random House was too afraid to publish.
His second wife Marianne Wiggins — also a novelist — didn't like living under a sentence of death, and she resented that her husband was taking up all the oxygen in the literary room. Her cruelty takes the breath away and it's a running motif through the first ⅔ of the book. Here’s one example. At one point early on she leaves him still in hiding in UK and returns to America. He calls her.
"He was in a red telephone booth on a Welsh hillside in the rain with a bag of coins in his hand and her voice in his ear. She had had dinner with Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky and the two Nobel laureates told her they would not have changed their lives as he had. ‘I would stay home and do exactly as always,’ Brodsky had declared, ‘and let's see what they could do.’ ‘ I explained it to them,’ she said on the phone. ‘I told them, "the poor man, he's afraid for his life!”’ Thanks a lot, Marianne, he thought. Joseph Brodsky had given her a foot massage, she said. Hearing that made him feel even better. His wife was with the two alpha males of world poetry getting foot rubs and telling them that her husband was too afraid to live as they would, in the open, courageously. She had been wearing saris everywhere, he said. So, not very low profile, then. He was about to say that perhaps the saris were a little obvious when she dropped her bombshell. She had been approached in her Boston hotel lobby by a CIA agent calling himself Stanley Howard. He had asked to speak with her and they had had a cup of coffee together. ‘They know where we were,’ she said in a heightened voice. ‘They have been inside the house. They took papers from your desk and your wastebasket. They showed them to me as proof that they had entered and looked around. The font and page setup and the work were all definitely yours. The people you live with didn't even know they'd been there. You can't trust the people you have with you now. You need to leave at once. You need to come to America. Mr. Howard Stanley wanted to know if our marriage was real, or if you just wanted to use it as a convenience, to get into America. I stood up for you, so he said then that was ok, you would be allowed to enter. You could live in America like a free man.’” (p. 190)
Rushdie tells all this to his British security detail who immediately move him, which is a colossal pain in the ass. Since, if the CIA knows, as Wiggins claims, then his cover is blown. Anyway, it turns out she was lying. She lied a lot apparently. He came to feel he could no longer trust her.
The use of the third person POV is, I think, needed. The story is powerful. There is so much chaos, danger, cruelty, so much grasping for the rational amid despair. The third person insulates the reader a bit from the madness. This reader cannot imagine the emotional contortions and assaults upon Rushdie’s dignity by his so-called peers, not to mention those wanting to murder him.
“There was an evening at Isabel Fonseca's apartment with Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Daryl Pinckney, and Martin depressed him by telling him that George Steiner believed he had ‘set out to make a lot of trouble,’ and Martin's father, Kingsley Amis, had said that ‘if you set out to make trouble you shouldn't complain when you get it’ and Al Alvarez had said that he had "done it because he wanted to be the most famous writer in the world.’ And to Germaine Greer he was a ‘megalomaniac’ and John le Carré had called him a ‘twerp’ and Martin's ex-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard and Sybille Bedford thought he had ‘done it to make money.’ His friends were ridiculing these assertions but by the end of the evening he felt very upset and only Elizabeth [West]'s love brought him back.” (p. 396)
Add to this the ups and down of everyday life; writing, of course, or not writing, but also his long cohabitation with Elizabeth West, who was to become his third wife; the growing up of his first son; the birth of his second; buying the big house on Bishops Avenue which was filled with armed policemen; the bother of doing something as commonplace as seeing a friend, dining out, walking down the street. And of course regular assessments of the “threat level.”
Though the themes vary greatly between the two books, for sheer punch-you-in-the-mouth impact, Joseph Anton reminds me of Nien Cheng’s astonishing Life and Death in Shanghai. Cheng’s ordeal was more squalorous — she was tossed into a Chinese prison during Mao’s Cultural Revolution —but what she and Rushdie endured is equally beyond conception. That’s really the only parallel between the two books.
Before you know it he's estranged from Elizabeth West and moves on to Padma Lakshmi. Of course she’s beautiful, but she’s also a narcissist. And so astonishingly icy she might have been a candidate to play the role of The Night King in Game Of Thrones.
“She was capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn't know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud. When the Indian movie star Aishwarya Rai was named the most beautiful Indian woman in the world in some glossy magazine or other, for example, Padma announced, in a room full of people, that she had ‘serious issues with that.’ Her moodiness was unpredictable and extreme. About him, she was guarded. ‘I'm just giving it the summer and then we'll see.’ She blew cold and hot and he was beginning to be unsure if the hot made the cold worthwhile. She was dark and closed off for days at a time and then one morning the sunlight streamed out of her face. His journal was full of his own doubts. ‘How long can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her most prominent characteristic?’ One night they sat in Washington Square Park after a quarrelsome dinner and he told her, ‘This isn't working for me.’ After that for several days she was her sweetest self and he forgot why he had said what he said. She met some of his women friends and most of them approved. When he told her what they had said the positive remarks about her character mattered less to her than the comment about her perfect breasts. French Playboy found nude photographs of her and ran one on the cover, calling her his ‘fiancée.’ She didn't care about the words and she didn't mind the picture being there, but she wanted to be paid for it, and he had to hire a French lawyer to work for her. This is what I'm doing now, he thought, bewildered. My girlfriend is on the cover of Playboy in the nude and I'm negotiating the fee.” (p. 606)
The cultural references throughout the book: novels, plays, pop songs, news events, etc. all evoke moments in this reader's own life. It’s a neat feature of the text, if you’re of a certain age. Lastly, and somewhat obliquely, after reading the book one tries to imagine the author’s carbon footprint. It must be vast. He flies everywhere and his books are printed on paper.
When you’re up and around again, dear Mr. Rushdie, you may want to plant some trees....more
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