The Tree of Red Stars - Tessa Bridal

Few Americans know about Uruguay, but perhaps we should pay more attention to these countries where the US CIA and business have found so many reasons to interfere with the lives of the people who live there.

The book is about a young girl and her friends who grow up in an affluent neighborhood in Montevideo and their observations of life around them.  Each of the neighbors is a story within a story and the girls grow older and more entwined with the complex threads that lead from each neighbor.

There are student protests, unfaithful men, women trapped in their sexist roles, young girls growing into puberty and adulthood.  The narrator grows up with connections to the underprivileged and poor without understanding why there has to be such a difference between them.

She encounters the prejudice against Jews, the power of the landed, the oppression of the workers and the conflict between Russia and the US that makes pawns of the small countries.

Here are wonderful characters, none fully developed, but each with enough personality to make us care and think about who they are.  In the time when this nation has openly engaged in torture it is still frightening to see the use of torture that is put in place in these countries of revolution and the way that its presence is swept away by government and media.

Power and frustration, individuals and the state, business and power all play a role and somehow individual lives still go on.  The girls find love and purpose in their lives and yet each, despite the play that surrounds them, becomes individuals who stand alone even when they stand together.

It is so fun to delve in to another land and culture, but in this case the fun evolves to a tension and power that flows in to the lives of the principle characters and that power and oppression is never really resolved.  For each person, it just is.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher - Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan has followed up his Worst Hard Times with a biography of a significant photographer who, like Ansel Adams, left us with images that will stand forever.  These are images that speak more than the image.  If Adams taught us the power of wildness – Curtis taught us the beauty and depth of the American Indian.

Edward Curtis found himself in photography and in photography he found the skill to capture what others walked by or missed all together, beginning with his photo of the daughter of Seattle – who lived in squalor at the edge of the city named after her father.  The difficulty of her situation coming from the law that prohibited Indians from living in the community named after their chief.

At that time she was an interesting subject and he had a great career going in photography.  A school drop-out, he was becoming an important entrepreneur.

Thanks to a climbing encounter with C Hart Merriam and Bird Grinnell Curtis developed connections and mentors.  Bird Grinnell had a cause – the preservation of the traditional life of plains Indians who were going the way of the bison.  It was 1900 and America had defeated, stolen from, and destroyed as much of the American Indian cultures, land and life as it could so far.  Now it was intent on going the last step and the unholy alliance of religion and politics would take that next step.  Grinnell wanted a record before all was lost and Curtis and his camera were the best hope.

Through a lifetime of persistence he became more than a recorder of images.  He found the time to become accepted, to hear and understand their stories and to respect their beliefs and culture.

The following passage describes the forces that Curtis and the Indian people had to fight against:

“The Sun Dance was considered savagery, matching the law’s description of an ‘immoral dance.’  Under the Indian Religious Crimes Code, anything deemed unwholesomely pagan could be banned – dances, feasts, chants led by medicine men. The regulations were specific: ‘any Indian who shall engage in the sun dance, scalp dance, or war dance, or any other similar feast, so called, shall be deemed guilty of an offense.’  As punishment, the agents could withhold food rations and imprison participants of traditional religious ceremonies for up to ninety days.

“The churches had been given broad discretion from the government to spread doctrine and charity among the Indians, a clear violation of the First Amendment’s religious establishment clause.  Few politicians seemed to mind.  ‘The Indians,’ said Thomas J Morgan, the man appointed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889 to oversee their affairs, ‘must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.”  The churches would give them spiritual sustenance; the government agents must dole out food and goods. The system was fraught with corruption and enforces by patronage hacks and militant missionaries.  ‘This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get,’ said Morgan.  ‘They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.’  Forced assimilation never had a more clearly stated goal.”

Writing the first volume of his North American Indian Curtis tried to avoid talking about all the wrongs that had been visited upon the Indian nations.  He did not want to rehash all these events, his goal was to capture a disappearing set of cultures while they were still with us and he had a race against the government and church that was taking away the basic first amendment rights just as they insisted that the Indians meld with American society and become assimilated.  But even with his archivist goals he had to state one basic truth,

““Through the treatment accorded the Indians by those who lay claim to civilization and Christianity has in many cases been worse than criminal, a rehearsal of those wrongs does not properly find a place here”, he wrote in Volume I.  He saved his loftiest passages, as in his magazine journalism for native spirituality.  “Ever since the days of Columbus the assertion has been made repeatedly that the Indian has no religion and no code of ethics, chiefly for the reason that in his primitive state he recognizes no supreme God.  Yet the fact remains that no people have a more elaborate religious system than our aborigines, and none are more devout in their performance of the duties connected therewith.  Thre is scarcely an act in the Indian’s life that does not involve some ceremonial performance or is not in itself a religious act.””

Then Curtis added this poignant capsule of truth: “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rights possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.  It is this need that has inspired the present task.”

Curtis ended up with 20 volumes of magnificent anthropological images and stories.  He saw the true spiritual depth of his subjects and attacked the myths that denigrated the Indians.  His passion and commitment ruined his business, destroyed his marriage and made his years an odyssey of finding support and wandering the mountains and deserts to find the remnants of magnificent tribes.

During this time he even worked in Hollywood where he filmed the Elmer Lincoln Tarzan series – this silent film was the beginning of the Tarzan franchise that would last for decades, but he was not interested in pursuing it.  He just wanted the money to follow his dream.

Egan does a good job of showing us the lifestyle and the challenges that Curtis was facing and the greatness of the final product.  

The Children's Blizzard - David Laskin

 The Children's Blizzard - David Laskin

 January 12, 1888 - the date of disaster on the great plains, the culmination of immigrants being mislead and following dreams of black soil, mild weather, and great crops, the date that the weather service - then run by the military failed miserably and changed the weather bureau forever - taking the service out of the military and putting it in the Department of Agriculture.  

This was the Children's Blizzard because so many of the horrid stories of death, involved children.  It is a storm that went from Canada to Mexico, a cold spell that surrounded the blizzard and impacted the south and their economy, but gathered the worst elements in SD because of the timing when the storm struck. 

Laskin does a great job surveying historic sources and telling the intimate details of the people and the suffering.  The impact changed depending on where you were along the storm track as he shows in this quote, "Chance is always a silent partner in disaster. Bad luck, bad timing, the wrong choice at a crucial moment, and the door is inexorably shut and barred. The tragedy of the January 12 [1888] blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population. The storm his the most thickly settled sections of Nebraska and Dakota Territory at the worst possible moment - late in the morning or early in the afternoon on the first mild day in several weeks, a day when children had raced to school with no coats or gloves and farmers were far from home doing chores they had put off during the long siege of cold. But the deadly quirks of chance went deeper and farther than circumstance or time of day. It was the deep current of history that left the prairie peculiarly vulnerable to the storm."

“Even in a region known for abrupt and radical meteorological change, the blizzard of 1888 was unprecedented in its violence and suddenness there was no atmospheric herald. No eerie green tinge to the sky or fleecy cirrus forerunner. One moment it was mild, the sun was shining, a damp wind blew fitfully out of the south—the next moment frozen hell had broken loose.”

St. Paul Daily Globe: “STUNG TO DEATH: Several Persons Put to Sleep Forever by the Blizzard's Viper Tongue.” The blizzard claimed some 235 lives across the frozen prairie; an estimated 20 percent of the dead were children. Amidst the many tales of tragedy and horror that came from the blizzard of January 12, 1888, stories of survival against the odds and the elements stand out, including the following account published in the St. Paul Daily Globe:

Particulars come in this evening of a terrible experience, the result of yesterday's storm. A son of Henry Oeder, a farmer living about ten miles northwest of here, started out in the morning with a team and sleigh to take four of his younger brothers and sisters to school. He reached the school house with his load and had started home when the storm struck him. He started back to the school house to get the children. The two older expressed a desire to remain, but the others started home with the young man. They had not gone far when they lost their way and finally unhitched the team and covered themselves up with robes and lay down in the sleigh. There they remained twenty-six hours until they were discovered this morning, all three being almost dead. The other members of the family stayed in the school house all night, and returning home this morning gave the alarm. The sufferers were brought to the nearest farm house. They are in bad shape, but it is thought all will survive. One of the horses was dead when found. It is thought other reports of a similar nature will come in after the storm. The blizzard which raged was the worst ever experienced by the oldest settler. To-night the thermometer is away down and the wind still blows.  http://www.weatherwise.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2012/January-February%202012/retrospect-full.html

“After the storm subsided, the few dirt roads that could be found among the white, treeless landscape were blocked by 5- to 10-foot-high drifts. One York County drift measured 30 feet deep and a mile long.

"The snow drifts were frozen so hard that even a horse could walk on top," wrote Ernest Nyrop of Neligh.”  http://journalstar.com/news/local/the-blizzard-of----the-force-of-a/article_546c2c74-5780-5d73-9f77-76495246d412.html

As much as this is a story of the storm and settlers it is also a story of the weather service  and the leadership of the service - then, as often happens, caught in politics and economics and bureaucracy.  Here is an excerpt about  First Lieutenant Greely who would become a brigadier general in charge of the signal corp (early weather bureau) as a result - a pretty questionable promotion.  What they accomplished was putting a self-recording spirit thermometer in a nine foot  rock cairn in Western Greenland four miles further north than any other explorers had ventured.

"Almost everything else about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was a disaster.  In 1882 and again in 1883, supply ships failed to reach Greely's camp at Fort Conger on the east coast of Ellsemere Island - one ship sank with all the provisions and the other, encountering thick ice, returned home with its full cargo of relief supplies.  The expedition's orders, drawn up in the comfort of Washington, D. C. specified that in the event that the  relief ships never showed up, Greely was to move the party south by September 1, 1883 and ono August 9, that is exactly what he insisted on doing, despite the fact that nearly every other member of the crew vehemently objected to leaving the comparatively well-supplied camp.  In the best of circumstances, Greely, when crossed could be a waspish martinet: He was a dogmatic, stubborn, uncompromising commander who led not by natural authority or  earned devotion, but by rigid enforcement of rules and orders.  But the rigors of the Arctic brought out his worst.  By the time he gave the order to break camp at Fort Conger, most of his men hated him to the point of violence.  But they had no choice: Since Greely controlled the supplies, it was either obey or die.  After nearly two nightmarish months on drifting ice pack, with winter fast closing in, the party made camp on the desolate wastes of Cape Sabine, some two hundred miles to the south.  MADNESS one of the men scrawled in his diary.  They had lost several boats and much food on the trek south- and there was no resupply cache and no big game to hunt.  As the dark frigid months dragged on, they ate their belts and boots and trousers - and then they ate the clothing of men who had died.  They ate the filthy oil-tanned covers of their sleeping bags, warming them in a nauseating stew of lichens and seal skin.  Finally, in desperation, some of the survivors were reduced to dragging the corpses of the  dead out of their shallow graves and carving off strips of flesh to swallow in secrecy.  In the course of that grim winter and spring, the parties third inside the Arctic, eighteen men died - of starvation, exposure, suicide and in one case military execution that Greely ordered as punishment for stealing food and insubordination."

Six men survived by the time they were rescued, along with Greely and one of them died after having limbs and fingers amputated on board the ship - by that time he weighed 78 pounds. And then Greely was honored and put in charge of the signal corp as a brigadier-general.

Laskin covers the storm in details that are stunning and shows us the weather prediction (Indications in 1888) changes that resulted.  It is a riveting book, but it does have a flaw - where are the Indians of the plains?  What happened to them?

Jungleland - Christopher S. Stewart

"I began to daydream about the jungle...."  That is the beginning of a wonderful adventure story that is a great short read – those of you who read my blog regularly know that I think the ideal book is 250 – 350 pages – beyond that the author has lost track of the story they want to tell or they are just impressing themselves.  There are exceptions, of course, but a good story , like this one, doesn’t just invite you in, it pulls you in and makes you want to stay connected right up to the last page.

The story is based on an earlier explorer and adventurer Theodore Morde who on April 6, 1940struggled to fall asleep at the Paris Hotel in La Ceiba, Honduras with his adventure into the jungle preying on his mind. The book takes the author to the same hotel almost 70 years later. Christopher S. Stewart was pulled in to the story of the white city, the discovery that brought Morde fame and notoriety.  It was a lost civilization with monkey gods and towering temples and walls, even gold and it sparked the American imagination.  But Morde was caught in other circumstances –WWWII was beginning, Hitler was threatening the world and the secret service (pre-CIA) was recruiting people to spy.  Who better than a man who could find his way through the jungle, deal with pirates and still wild tribes?  Morde went out, got caught in a plot to assassinate Hitler and had other adventures that would have provided him with the stimulation that he needed.  He returned, married, had children and committed suicide at 43 – the call to adventure could not be reconciled with his new domestic life.

The author fighting his own internal battle left his daughter (who would turn four during his expedition) and wife to find the White City in the jungle.  A writer who has traveled extensively and often has been in harm’s way, this was as much a need to satisfy his wanderlust as a desire to make discovery. 

The adventure involves pirates, natives, snakes and bullet ants, graveyards, rapids, mud and rain.  It is not glamorous and the author shares his own frailty and misgivings along the route.  His is lucky to have competent companions who not only aid the trip, but deal well with his occasional boughts of frustration and depression.

Yes he discoveries some magnificent possible white cities, but are they the same one that Morde found?  Does it matter?  Does the author discover some personal truths that are most important?  Guess you will have to read to find out. 

Wizard - Marc Seifer

This biography is fascinating for the stories of this amazing inventor who deserves a much higher recognition for his electricity and communication creations, but it is more than the story of a  great scientist and inventor, it is also the story of a Serbian who did not recognize the challenges of capitalism.  It is about losing his inventions and fortune to Astor, Morgan, Marconi and Edison.

He was a man of great knowledge and amazing discovery, but his personality was his worst attribute.  He did not know how to complete a project.  He always found something to divert him before he completed the project that had been funded.  He was captured by his own imagination and consequently he never made the impact he should have.

Actually his discoveries did make an impact, but only when they were pirated and put in to a fiscally sound project by someone else.  It is an amazing, but in this case too long a book.  I really enjoyed it, but the author needed to do what Tesla did not do - come to the conclusion.   The repetition of Tesla's failures gets boring after a point.  We can anticipate that each new and great discovery will result in his frustration with his backers.

Over and over he is bankrupt.  His personal life is boring, he is a workaholic and the best we can see of other affections is with the pigeons that he feeds and develops a love for.

And yet we can sympathize with the backers who wanted him to do the one thing that they funded.

The conclusion of the book is my much increased respect for Tesla and his role in the electrical impact on our society and economy.

West of Here - Jonathan Evison

Set in the Olympics the book begins with a wonderful narrative of a new settlement - Port Bonita - that seems to be the key to the future and it brings in the native people, a crusading female pregnant with an unwanted child, a tavern owner with his whores who only wants to meet the lowest denominator of instincts and make money from them - whiskey and whores.  Then there is the dandy who comes to a pristine wilderness and sells out his homestead and instincts to Eastern Money so that a dam can be built and the wilderness ravaged.  All this is in the 1890's and then we jump to 2006, the year we see the dam come toppling down.

I have to admit I am also getting bored with this popular form of writing where the author jumps back and forth between time periods and narratives.  We went through a phase where the flashback was the rage, now we have to check the date at the beginning of each chapter.  Why?  There was nothing in one narration that made the second narration more enlightening.  It could have had one thread completed and the second done consecutively.

Throughout this very long narrative there are many people who become central to the story, but unfortunately I could care less about any of them.  I do not find one I would want to befriend, not one I have great sympathy for.  It is a story of people who move in and challenge a wilderness and somehow the story attempts to go full circle back to the wilderness with and ex-con and his parole officer who both commit to hiking in the Olympic wilderness.  But it does not work. The only character I like is Rupert the dog.

Yet all 480 pages compelled me forward.  I like the writer.  And then the end came - inevitable I know, but in fact it was totally unsatisfactory and I continue to wonder about the purpose of the Indian child who is known as the Storm King and his modern counterpart - Curtis.  Because in the end they do not matter.  But then what does.  Sorry.  I enjoyed reading, but I am trying to figure out why.