Shantyboat - Harlan Hubbard

This classic book is one every river person should read. Harlan and his wife Anna take seven years aboard a shantyboat that they built themselves to go off the grid and explore the land and the waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi River. They are not in a hurry - every spring they pull in, plant a garden, settle into a new community of people, fish, pick berries and show us a wonderful life that is beautiful in both the scenery and the way of living.

He is an artist and both are musicians. They find pleasure in meeting people discovering new locations, gathering wild vegetables, eating from the land and the river they interact with drifters and fishermen as they go.

Moving with the current and no motor they are truly adrift and vulnerable to the whims of the great rivers.   This is after both the 1937 and 1927 floods and before the big box store invasion so the picture of the places is really valuable to our collective consciousness and image of the rivers. 

I just wish I could have met them and gone on board!

The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story and writing.  McKinely is mostly known for being the man who died so that Theodore Roosevelt could become president, but as this political biography of the man, his assassin and the times proves, he is worth studying too.

It was a turbulent time when we had oversized power in the hands of corporations and the uber rich - a time so similar in some ways to what is happening now that we really have an obligation to look in the mirror of history.

It is a time of anarchists - people who will and did you violence - in response to repression and strike breaking violence.  People like Emma Goldman put to voice important issues and frustrations and an obscure immigrant Czolgosz reacted to both his personal frustration and the anger in Goldman's speeches and kills the president, as a result.

McKinely is portrayed as a very charismatic man, but one thrust into wars in Cuba and the Philippines and struggles in China.  While not a man hungering for war like so many of his colleagues, he is driven by Capitalism to find a way to keep the factories humming and production up which means taking an imperialistic stance to accumulating lands offshore and across the globe.

Hawaii, China, Guam and many other locations appear in this story alongside the Haymarket violence and other domestic stories.  I am delighted that I came on to this book and discovered the depth I did not anticipate.

Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

This was almost a perfect five star book. The pace was terrific, the dialogue was compelling, the combination of characters worked well together and were interesting people to read about and interact with. 

Set in Natchez where I travel regularly in my work on the Cruise boat I felt the community - actually both communities - Natchez and across the river Vidalia. The author gave us his familiarity with the place and people. This was outstanding.

The tension was charged with the racial context of KKK and a past of killings and burnings that were part of the sixties, but that continue today barely beneath the surface. The title suggests the legendary movie Mississippi Burning with good cause. Hatred is a vile element of the human story and racial hatred is especially vile since it does not respond to a person, but to a bland and stupid sense of superiority based on nothing but color.

This kind of hatred leads to violence, but it does not lead to dialogue and peaceful resolution. It is a blind rage and when the KKK and putrid offshoots begin to lash out it escalates to even more violence. 

So we have a mayor who has feels the compulsion to protect his father, a doctor, who would seem to have been the Mother Teresa of the region, but is now confronted with a racial murder charge, a potential half brother who wants the doctor prosecuted despite age and infirmities.

The Doctor has a close friend in an ex-Texas Ranger and the Mayor has a finance who is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. Outside the family bonds is a crusading investigator who wants to nail the KKK for killing his friend and mentor and a DA who has a vendetta against the mayor.

Then there are the evil men insinuated into community wealth, the Louisiana Police force and a pack between murderers and torturers forming a formidable group of adversaries.

Normally I hate books that exceed the good taste of a 400 page novel and this almost doubles that, but it is written so well that it flies by and pages are gone in a breathless desire to get to the end. And luckily, the pages are so well written that you do not want to skim, you want to read and be involved.

So why only four stars? Well it is the ending. Only a part of the loose ends are tied up. There is not even an attempt to put some of the story lines to rest when it comes to a halt. For me, it is not even the most compelling storyline that ends. So what comes next - another book, I assume and if that is the case I would have liked to see PART One somewhere at the beginning.

Nebraska - the movie

Every once in a while you find a movie that just stays with you, you replay lines and scenes in your mind, and find that the movie just reached in and connected with you. Not guns and wild chases, not wild women and breathtaking scenery, but a part of life comes across in subtlety and charm. The humor not slapstick nor coarse, but straight from the homeland. Such a discovery was Nebraska - Bruce Dern - a black and white movie which was perfect in its lack of color. Color would embarrass these people of the plains. The scenery was flat as possible, the images of the town were of a dying community, still hanging on with a cast of characters that are almost interchangeable with any other small town on the great plains.

The images of the old guys sitting on the couch, all asleep, all with their mouths agape, the jealousy when it looks like one of their own might rise above the crowd...all painted an amazing set of pictures.

This movie is certainly not for everyone. Some will read my first paragraph and say no sex, no violence, no phony patriotism, why bother, but for those of us with Midwest backgrounds from Ohio to the Rockies it is a set of scenes from our childhood, our neighbors, our life's.

An old man thinks he won a million dollars not understanding that this is another of the millions of scams that come in the mail (and now on the internet) and a son so hungry for his father's love that he will sacrifice his own comfort to help in a Quixotic journey.

These are people who have their life, their passion, their emotions bottled up within themselves. Unable to express things directly there is an internal conflict with bigger ideas and bigger emotions. I loved it and still smile at the mental images it gave me.