Another good reading month with some real gems. Please note - I read books from all years - I am not partial to new releases.My favorite was The Homesman, a book that is about to be a movie - I only hope the movie comes close to the quality of the writing.
This book depicts an aspect of American Life that I first encountered in Pioneer Women, a book that still haunts me. Women brought west and following the dreams of their husbands, often just newly married. They are brought to the prairie where wooden houses are replaced by sod structures and often just holes in the ground.
Without neighbors, without libraries or any form of entertainment the women are kept in these prisons where they are to provide sex, meals, and mothering. The result is that many women lose their mines in the isolation, desolation, and suffering. They raise their children without a true vision of a better life and watch children die in childbirth and from diseases and accidents. It is a life that is truly helpless and hopeless and the author is able to convey this and the even more devastating image of how society, as it exists on the plains, reacts to the insanity that is visited on these former wives and mothers.
In this epic an unmarried woman takes on the task of taking these women to Iowa where they might find care and this requires journeyed across the prairie, carrying for the women, and responding to Indians, weather, and emergencies.
She tries to enlist one of the men, one of the husbands, but they are anxious for the women to leave and to be rid of the burden. With no success she engages an outsider, a claim jumper, who is hated, about to be hung and without any visible salvation.
The insane women are pariahs to their families and their community and even to strangers. The group cannot even find comfort by the fire of a wagon train. There, the men fear that their women might glimpse a future for themselves.
The unlikely duo presents some enjoyable moments of exchange - the pragmatist loner and the optimistic care giver. Their relationship plays out as they cross this lonely landscape and I cannot give away how it develops - that must be encountered through reading. But all of the change, the women in their care have endured an unspeakable set of circumstances without real promise of better days and in their continuing presence we are reminded of circumstances that are hard to envision today unless we think of life in some remote desert areas where time has a different meaning. The character focus is on the man and woman leading the trip, the background is the women, and the primary character is the demanding land.
Since Kate and I have done this on the Mississippi River and around Lake Superior we can relate to what Philip Caputo writes. A former newsman, he and his wife are now seniors with a world of experiences of their own, but these do not intrude on the stories they tell.
Of course the Airstream they live in is part of the story too. Jump aboard and take a ride with them.
The trouble is, Longmire does not like the solution. He does not believe the woman's confession, and neither does the sheriff of the district where the murder was committed.
Longmire's need to put things right, puts him in the sites of a lot of unsavory characters and introduces us to a connection with a horse that sits at the heart of the mystery.
In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes is an excellent memoir of a woman raised in the woods of Oregon and Idaho by a family that does whatever work is needed to survive. It is about a woman who faces the fiery force of evangelical preachers and churches, and numerous events that she must come to grips with to find her own place and history.
Lost Duluth was a gem. A record of old building that no longer exist (and ones you will wish still did). But the real value is in the stories that surround these buildings. The people who would build monuments, their stories are the story of Duluth.
Fitgers is a similar book to Lost Duluth, but it captures the brewing history of the city and the downfall to the economy that was generated by the Prohibition era. Micro-brewing is now filling these niches, but not with the magnificent structures of the past.
The Story of Earth by Robert Hazon was an excellent book of Earth history that captures the complexity of geology and the beauty of the planet in terms that paint pictures and enlighten the read to complex ideas. It is also a warning that what we are doing as a species is devastating to our own existence on this magnificent planet.
The Last Outlaws, by Thom Hatch is a historical search to know Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As such it is good history, but I am still fascinated by the story and the telling of the history lacked the bold strokes of a story teller and therefore was not as enjoyable as I would have liked even though any historian of the west should read it.
Natchez, is a book I picked up in Natchez (surprise) and it was filled with stories of this southern town on the banks of the Mississippi. It survives today as an interesting town, but at one time its location on the river and at the beginning of the first great Southern Road - the Natchez Trace - made it a pivot-able point in the history of the Mississippi River region.
The New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook written in 1967 has a good compliment of recipes, but its value is in the history of the famous restaurants of this gourmet paradise.
The Explainer by Slate Magazine was neither entertaining nor informing in my opinion.
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