Slouching toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Ages ago, a friend recommended Miami, an extended essay by Joan Didion.  Try as I might, I could not keep my mind on the text.  Something about the style drove me away.  A page from my daily Book Lovers Calendar, a comment from my wife, and a book that had fallen behind a shelf all conspired to my reading Didion’s acclaimed book of essays, Slouching toward Bethlehem.  I decided to give her one more chance. 

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The first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” tells the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, who, apparently, suffered from depression and other ailments and wanted to die.  Joan began the essay with a description of San Bernardino, California, site of most of the story, when Lucille Miller visited a 24-hour minimart.  She writes, “…on the night of October 7, 1964, […] the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:30 a.m., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn.  For an hour and fifteen minutes Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan Street calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came.  At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been put out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen.  ‘What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket,’ she cried to the friend called to comfort her.  ‘How can I tell them there’s nothing left?’” (6).  Quite a story, but as Didion unwinds the tale, numerous pieces of evidence do not add up.  Miller ends up in the San Bernardino County Jail charged with first degree murder.  I could not stop reading this 28-page essay. 

Other essays involved a portrait of John Wayne, whom Didion admired since she was a child.  Eventually, she meets the Duke and recounts dinner at an exclusive restaurant with her husband, when suddenly three men appeared playing guitars.  She writes, “…all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they had been playing, what they had been playing all along: ‘The Red River Valley’ and the theme from The High and the Mighty.  They did not quite get the beat right, but even now can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this” (41).  I have met a few people I really admired, John Updike, John Cheever, and Joyce carol Oates to name a few, and I can vividly recall the time, the place, and the topics we discussed.

Finally, I would like to share the opening paragraph of the title essay for the collection.  Dion writes, “The center was not holding.  It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.  It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.  Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.  People were missing.  Parents were missing, Thos left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. // It was not a country in open revolution.  It was not a country under enemy siege.  It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967” (84).  How could I not continue reading an essay that began this way. 

I think I see another visit to Joan Didion’s Miami in my near future.  5 stars

--Chiron, 2/2/16

Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen ranks high on the favorite list of not only non-fiction readers, but writers as well.  My first encounter with Peter came in the form of a book I choose for the title: The Snow Leopard.  I have always loved the big cats, and snow leopards were early on my favorite.  Sadly, Matthiessen died on April 5, 2014.  In a strange coincidence, I heard an interview with Peter on the radio on Friday, April 5.  The host, Terry Gross of Fresh Air, mentioned he was suffering from Leukemia, and they aired an interview from a few years ago.

The publication of Peter Matthiessen's final novel In Paradise came only days after his death at the age of 86.  Matthiessen was a naturalist, as well as writer, a spy, and a Buddhist monk.  His fiction and nonfiction books were often inspired by his travels to remote corners of the globe. In addition to Snow Leopard, he wrote Men's Lives, and Far Tortuga, and The Tree Where Man was Born, an interesting study of the Masai tribes of East Africa.  Peter, along with George Plimpton and Harold L. Humes, founded the noted literary magazine, The Paris Review.  Zen Buddhism provided the central tenets of his life and greatly influenced his writing.

The Snow Leopard, which recalls Mattheissen’s 1973 trek to the Himalayas to see the elusive cat, opened a whole new world of nature writing and provided the seed for my interest in the philosophy of Buddhism. His prose is as gentle and relaxing as a Buddhist monk softly murmuring his prayers.  A good example is in the Prologue to Snow Leopard, he writes, “In late September of 1973, I set out with [the zoologist George Schaller] on a journey to the Crystal Mountain, walking west under Annapurna and north along the Kali Gandaki River, then west and north again, around the Dhaulagiri peaks and across the Kanjiroba, two hundred fifty miles or more to the land of the Dolpo, on the Tibetan Plateau.”  … I knew [George] first in 1969, in the Serengeti Plain of East Africa … When I saw him next, … in 1972,  he had started a survey of wild sheep and goats and their near relatives the goat-antelopes.  He wondered if I might like to join him the following year on an expedition to northwest Nepal, near the frontier of Tibet, to study the bharal, or Himalayan blue sheep,” which were plentiful and protected by the Crystal Monastery. … where bharal were numerous, there was bound to appear that rarest and most beautiful of the great cats, the snow leopard” (3). 

This introduction filled me with wonder and curiosity.  Before the days of computers, I created a list of animals, and names of places, mountains and rivers.  I spent an afternoon in the local library pouring over books, to try and capture a glimpse of what Peter saw on this “mythic journey.”

Along with his vivid descriptions, he genously sprinkles philosophical musings.  In true Buddhist form, the journey has far more importance that the destination.  He wrote about his “own idea of freedom, the possibility and prospect of ‘free life,’ traveling light, without clining to or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes, free because without defenses, free not in an adolescent way, with no restraints, but in the sense if the Tibetan Buddhist’s ‘crazy wisdom,’ of Camus’s ‘leap into the absurd’ that occurs within a life of limitations” (112).

Over the years, I have heard many a writer praise the non-fiction of Peter Matthiessen.  Many of them aspire to writing something which approaches his powers of description.  Ironically, Mattheissen preferred writing fiction, and only, -- as he said in an interview on Fresh Air—wrote non-fiction to pay the bills.”  For lovers of animals, nature, adventure, and philosophical musings, The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen will provide many enjoyable hours in a comfortable chair.  5 stars

--Chiron, 4/9/14

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Winter King by Thomas Penn

During my days at LaSalle University in Philly back in the 60s, I took a bunch of history classes, because I was always fascinated with the subject. I reveled in a couple on the ancient Greeks and Romans, but my heart fell in a class on Tudor England.

Since then, I have been consumed with the Tudor dynasty, which began in 1485 after Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field, thus ending the War of the Roses between the Royal Houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose). The family reign ended with the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.

Over the years, I have collected biographies of every major figure in the Tudor family – all the kings and queens, all six of Henry VIII’s wives, and a number of other peripheral figures around the court. However, I lacked one important piece of the puzzle – King Henry VII, the founder of the dynasty. Late last year, I discovered a new biography of Henry by Thomas Penn, who holds a PhD in early Tudor history from Cambridge University.

One of the fascinations I have with history revolves around the amazing discovery that history repeats itself over and over. Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England amply proves the truth of that statement once again.

Following the defeat of Richard at Bosworth Field, Henry became King of England. Many people in England resented his crown, and numerous plots to dethrone him popped up over the next 20 years. Numerous factions, especially those with connections to the defeated York family, complained that Henry illegitimately claimed the crown.

The corruption, back-stabbing, spying, treachery, and extortion, which were the hallmarks of the Tudor family throughout its existence leaves me gasping in fascination. In the “Introduction,” Penn quotes Francis Bacon, who wrote, “Henry VII was ‘infinitely suspicious’ and he was right to be so, for his times were ‘full of secret conspiracies and troubles’. Perhaps the most telling verdict of all,” Penn writes, “is that Shakespeare, omits Henry VII altogether from his sequence of history plays – not for want of material, but, one suspects, because the reign was simply too uncomfortable to deal with” ( xxv-xxvi).

Penn tells us, the idea of Henry VII as a “time of transition, one in which the violent feuds of the previous decades gave way to a glorious age of renaissance and reformation … was a myth the Tudors themselves built” (xxv). Most scholars now see him as “the unifier of a war-torn land, a wise king who brought justice and stability, and who set the crown on a sound financial footing. Nonetheless they were unable to eradicate the lingering sense of a reign that degenerated into oppression, extortion and a kind of terror, at its core a Machiavellian king who inspired not love but fear” (xxv). Bacon, his first biographer, referred to Henry as a “dark prince” (xxv).

A splendid biography for anyone interested in the history of one of the most famous – and infamous – families in English history. 5 stars

--Chiron, 10/26/12

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

This recently published work of non-fiction has elements of history, the politics of the cold war, ecology, biology, and botany all while spinning a terrific adventure story. None of this, however, gets bogged down in a morass of technical jargon, but the reader does become immersed in the mysterious and magical world of the “taiga” -- which is Russian for forest. This vast tract of evergreens has the distinction of being the largest biome in the world. It stretches across Eurasia and North America. The winters in the Russian portion drop as low as -60 degrees below zero. The summers are warm, rainy, and humid, with temperatures rising as high as 70 degrees. An enormous variety of insects invade the taiga in the summer, followed by a wide variety of birds to eat them. No roads, no buildings, no power lines – virtually nothing mars the landscape

The taiga also provides a home to wolverines, mink, sable, the lynx, and what most people know as the Siberian tiger, however, the “Amir” tiger is the correct name. The males frequently hover near 800 pounds, and 500 to 600 pound females commonly stalk this enormous forest.

John Vaillant, a writer frequently found in the pages of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and National Geographic, builds his tale around a hunter in the taiga, Vladimir Markov and Yuri Trush, the squad leader of a SWAT team known as “Inspection Tiger.” This unit has the responsibility of dealing with crimes in the forest. Sometimes those crimes involve tigers – either because of poaching or attacks by tigers on humans in and around the edges of the taiga.

As the story opens, several friends of Markov find his remains in the forest. No doubt exists in their minds that he has fallen victim to a huge tiger. In fact, some of these tough, hard-bitten men, who live a life just barely out of the stone age, become physically sick at what they saw. They file a report with the local authorities, and Yuri Trush, part hunter, part policeman, part special forces soldier begins an investigation.

He assembles details of the last few days of Markov’s life by considering anecdotes from local hunters, loggers, and poachers, and most importantly, by tracking the tiger from the scene of the attack. Vaillant describes a tiger attack this way: “The impact…can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning” (270).



Some elements of the story stretch believability to extremes, but the stories of the men who know the taiga, the physical evidence, and historical records about the tigers, make for an interesting, fascinating, and exciting story. Vaillant does spend some time on the political and historical background of his unit and the taiga, but it did help my understanding of this wild and forbidding place. The last few chapters have a level of excitement far above anything I have read in a long, long time.

This story fascinated me from the moment I heard the author interview on NPR. The subtitle says all I needed to know: “A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.” 5 stars

--Chiron, 7/30/11

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Neither Wolf Nor Dog by Kent Nerburn

I wasn’t sure I would like this book. A good friend who is really into some New Age things recommended it for our book club. I had read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee years ago and found that horribly tragic tale of genocide moving and unforgettable. As I began Nerburn’s book, I became absorbed from the opening pages. This first person account of atrocities and the underlying philosophy of Native Americans, takes its place as an important supplement to Dee Brown’s book. While some of these incidents had a vague place in my consciousness, Nerburn brought them into clear focus with his collection of “talks” by Dan, an elder of the Lakota tribe.



Quite a few passages really stuck out. Here they are – without comment – because they clearly speak for themselves.

“Our elders were schooled in the ways of silence, and they passed that along to us. Watch, listen, and then act, they told us. This is the way to live” (65).

"‘Look out there, Nerburn’ he said. I surveyed the lavender morning sky and the distant rolling foothills. “This is what my people care about. This is our mother, the earth.”
"‘It’s a beautiful place,’ I offered.
He snubbed out his cigarette. “It’s not a place. That’s white man’s talk. She’s alive. We are standing on her. We’re part of her’” (131).

“'Whenever the white people won it was a victory. Whenever we won it was a massacre. What was the difference? There were bodies on the ground and children lost their parents, whether the bodies were Indian or white. But the whites used their language to make their killing good and our killing bad’” (162-162).

Dan’s granddaughter weighed in, when she met Nerburn during one of the author’s trips around the reservation with Dan. She said, “They ignored us. We were just women. But we were always the ones to keep the culture alive. That was our job, as women and mothers. It always has been. The men can’t hunt buffalo anymore. But we can still cook and sew and practice the old ways. We can still feed the old people and make their days warm. We can teach the children. Our men may be defeated, but our women’s hearts are still strong” (249).

I did find some minor faults with the book. I felt the book went on just a bit too long -- the last few chapters were really over the top. I got the message clear as a mountain stream without them. While Dan often complains about how “Hollywood Indians” sounded, he frequently sounded like a Hollywood Indian to me.

But overall, a touching and shameful account of the genocide this country perpetrated against Native Americans. At times, it had a rather Zen-like feel to it, but it was always, honest and from the heart. 4-1/2 stars

--Chiron, 1/26/11

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