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Category Archives: Books and literature

German Winter Nights by Johann Beer

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Quotation from one of the strangest books I’ve read, German Winter Nights (1681) by Johann Beer. When the characters aren’t pulling off frat-level and sometimes sadistic, cruel pranks, they’re moralizing. Ludwig is one of the cruelest of the “brothers.” Here he moralizes.

What does it help us humans that we invade countries in war, lay waste to them, even bring them under our dominion? Many a person fights and defeats his outer enemy and nonetheless permits himself to be so cravenly conquered by his inner and invisible foe, who often can be driven back and away by a single pious thought. What did the miserable Veronia gain through her wantonness? Her desire was brief, her pleasure imperfect, her delight sinful, her marriage stained, her life shortened, and, what I don’t want to believe, her soul perhaps lost forever! Carnal depravity bears such fruits, and she did enjoy it because she never acknowledged the sin in which she was so frightfully lost.

Ludwig in German Winter Nights by Johann Beer

North and South, Mrs. Hale on Milton (Manchester)

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Mrs. Hale, the woman displaced by her husband’s conscientious concerns from the bucolic south of England to the industrial northern city of Milton (Manchester), has opinions about Milton and its residents. From the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South:

The people here don’t want learning. They don’t want books and culture. It’s all money and smoke. That’s what they eat and breathe.

Not just in 19th-century Milton.

“Far more happier” (The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes)

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I just realized (or remembered, now I think about it) Kindle has a visual quotation feature. This one refers to Tahiti, “paradise” to the early sailors who landed there and found a different and less restrictive society, not so much after a few visits.

JB Journal, (end) August 1770. Cook’s entry of the same date describes the natives as ‘in reality … far more happier than we Europeans’ Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Book review: Bridge to Terabithia

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Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. New York, NY: HaperCollins Children’s Books. 2003. 176 pages.

If there was one thing I loved about school, it was the Scholastic Book Club. I’m not exaggerating when I say getting the Scholastic catalog and placing an order was a highlight of my childhood. I didn’t walk 10 miles through blizzards and hungry packs of wolves to school like the previous generation half-jokingly claimed, but unlike many of today’s children I didn’t have much stuff. We had neither money nor room for “junk,” as my dad would say.

When I was allowed to buy a Scholastic book, it was a treat to be savored. I had to choose carefully. Some of my favorite titles: The Snow Ghosts. Mystery by Moonlight. The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost. The Mystery in the Pirate Oak. The Mystery of the Great Swamp. The Girl Who Ran Away. The Magic Tunnel. The Arrow Book of Ghost Stories. I remembered a few others by their covers, although I can’t swear I read them: The Ghost Rock Mystery. Deadline at Spook Cabin. The Stolen Train.

I liked mysteries and stories with a hint of the otherworldly. Some ended prosaically — as with Scooby Doo adventures, the ghost turned out to be the equivalent of the creepy lighthouse keeper. Others — the ones I liked best — ventured into the child’s version of the Twilight Zone: The Snow Ghosts. The Magic Tunnel. A non-Scholastic book in this cdategory merits mention: The Secret Pencil by Patricia Ward, which tops my list of children’s books.

Some of these stories have a common theme — a child who feels like a misfit in his or environment or circumstances. The only girl in a family dominated by rowdy boys. The loner. The city boy who doesn’t know to wear rubber-soled shoes because he’s never learned how to play. The girl with imagination who wants to be a writer. If you were a child who liked to read, these stories seemed to have been plucked from your soul.

Since my Scholastic Books days, I haven’t read many (if any) contemporary children’s books, such as The Baby-sitters Club. I get the impression they’re more realistic and issues-oriented. The literatures changes with the times and sensibilities, and I imagine the newer stories appeal to more than just sensitive, lonely spirits.

Bridge to Terabithia, from 1977, seemed like a step in the evolution of children’s books from the 1960s to today. In his rural, working-class world of seasonal employment and social conformity, Jess tries to hide his artistic proclivities from his family even as he uses his limited means to nurture them. In his father’s view, real men don’t draw. In a telling simile, Paterson writes, “Jess drew the way some men drink whiskey.”

While his parents are mired in the day-to-day concerns of poverty, and his older sisters in their acquisitiveness, Jess dreams of greatness — of running, of being the “fastest, the best” so “even his dad would be proud” and “forget all about how tired he was from the long drive back and forth to Washington.” His parents yearn for the money, stability, and security that will always be beyond their reach. Jeb yearns for the recognition, approval, and love that they keep out of his.

As a swan among ducks, Jess doesn’t have many friends beyond his little sister, May Belle, to whom he is kind and cruel. “Why couldn’t he quit picking on her?” She’s the one person who looks up to him, and the one person he can dominate. She’s also a “durn lucky kid” — she gets hugs and kisses from their father while Jess looks on enviously.

That, along with a crush on a young music teacher, another swan among ducks, is Jess’s life when Leslie Burke and her parents move in next door from the city. Upper middle-class urban hippies, they’re not like anyone Jess has known. To his horror, Leslie is faster than he is — faster than any boy. Jess soon finds out that her self-absorbed mother, a writer, pays no more attention to her than his parents pay to him.

Overcoming their differences and difficulties by focusing on her experiences and his dreams, Jess and Leslie create their own world, Terabithia, where they rule. Here, they come up with schemes to “slay” one of the giants of their real life, Janice Avery. Jess, who has never been a free spirit like Leslie, can’t always maintain his kingly manner. While she appears to listen “respectfully to someone talking to her, Jess was shivering, whether from the cold or the place, he didn’t know.” She isn’t afraid to take risks. Like his parents, he is.

To me, the problem with Bridge to Terabithia is that I could not cross it. Paterson’s portrayal of the meanness of home and school life in a struggling town is detailed and devastating. Like Jess, I wanted to escape to Terabithia, but like Jess I never fully experience it. Words like “kingly” and “Spirits” and “knightly” can’t evoke emotion when used sparingly without context. I can’t share Leslie’s passion for this land over the creek or why she’d risk so much for it. Jess knows what she thinks and wants to understand what she does, but he doesn’t feel it, and neither could I.

Bridge to Terabithia’s power lies in its transformational ending, when Jess can tell May Belle, “Everyone gets scared,” and his teacher can talk about her late husband that he never imagined she had. Even Leslie’s parents come to life at last; “Bill didn’t sound like himself” as he expresses his awareness and gratitude. We see Jess in the anger phase; “she had made him leave his old self behind” but she had “failed him.” At the same time, though, there’s a hint of Terabithia’s potential — to “make him see beyond to the shining world — huge and terrible and very fragile.”

Bridge to Terabithia’s underlying gritty realism carries the book. Its inability to get beyond Jess’s limited, but growing perspective — his frustrations, his emotional poverty, and his narrow frame of reference — mutes its power.

22 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Thirty Indian Legends of Canada

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Thirty Indian Legends of Canada by Margaret Bemister. Illustrations by Douglas Tait. Vancouver, British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre. 1997. 160 pages.

In her preface to Thirty Indian Legends of Canada, dated September 15, 1912, from Winnipeg, Margaret Bemister notes that many of these stories are printed for the first time, while others are “adapted from well-known authorities.” She mentions one tribal name on her list of sources (“the Okanagan chief, Antowyne”). Other than this single reference and some names (Chippewa, Cree, Iroquois, Osage, Ottawa) and geographical places (Assiniboine River, Manatoline Islands, Lake Huron, Missouri River, Niagara Falls) sprinkled among the stories, there is little to help the lay reader understand where they originated, how, and why. Canada covers a lot of land from east to west and north to south, and embraces many cultures, but that diversity is sometimes lost in this collection.

Not surprisingly, animals and plants—or what appear to be animals and plants—figure strongly in many of the tales. It may be a dormouse, which was “once very large;” butterflies that carry messages from whispering grass (not suburban lawn grass, but tall grass deeply rooted in prairie soil); bears, squirrels, birds, and three animals that evoke the northern wilderness—beaver, lynx, and wolverine. As you would expect, manitous and magicians appear and sometimes disappear.

More notably, a few stories feature giants and fairies. Most of us can picture a giant or fairy as portrayed in western literature, but what were these entities to Canada’s first peoples? One can only imagine from descriptions such as “He saw all around him queer, little fairies, each one with a tiny war club. They peeped from out the bark of the trees, from amidst the grass, and even from out his pouch” and “At the call of Weeng his sleep fairies had come forth, and now with their clubs were knocking their enemies on the head.” Clearly these aren’t the ephemeral winged sprites that a Victorian girl may have doodled in the garden. The problem here may be time and translation. How do you convey ancient, alien concepts in a language that was never meant to express them?

While there are villages and large families (for example, the ten brothers of “The Giant Bear” and the ten daughters and husbands of “The Fairies’ Cliff”), some stories have a lonely, isolated feel. In “The Daughters of the Star,” hunter Waupee (the White Hawk) lives in a deep forest and one day reaches a wide prairie, where “no trace of footsteps was to be seen.” In “The White Feather,” an old man and his grandson are so isolated on an island that the boy “had never heard any one but his grandfather speak.” “The Lone Lightning” evokes shades of the Grimm Brothers’ Hansel and Gretel; a “lonely little boy” is raised by his uncle, who intends to stuff him with bear meat and fat, then kill him. His sad, lonely fate “may be seen in the northern sky on autumn nights.”

Some stories tell of beginnings, like “The Five Water-spirits,” whose play gives rise to Niagara Falls, where in the “sunny spray you may see their sandals and their wings.” “The Stone Canoe” addresses grief, the afterlife, and the idea that you cannot stay in the “Land of Souls” until your work is done and your life is meant to end.

I wish I knew more about these stories, how they arose, and if they were influenced by outside cultures (ponies make an appearance, as does a cabin built and abandoned by white men). Without context, phrases like “laughing like girls on a holiday” (“The Five Water-Spirits”) sound oddly English. What would that simile mean to the people who told it and heard it told? Thirty Indian Legends of Canada left me feeling isolated and lonely and wanting more—more legends and more knowledge of the peoples who brought them to life.

6 July 2017
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring

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The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston. New York: Random House. 2007. 320 pages.

In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston delves into the lives of giant trees, primarily coast redwoods, and some of the people who seek and study them. The adventure starts well with three footloose college students, a beater car, and the open road before them. The first man disappears within pages of his introduction, and the second surfaces only sporadically later. The author starts to narrow his interest to the third, Steve Sillett, and then the college dropout son of a millionaire, Michael Taylor. After a four-year-old Canadian girl makes her appearance, her story begins to dominate the narrative.

When he isn’t elaborating on Sillett’s childhood with his grandmother; Taylor’s origins and the trouble with his father; and Marie Antoine’s entire childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood (whether the recounted experiences are relevant to the greater story or not), Preston weaves in interesting facts about the biology of giant trees and old-growth redwood forests, including what was and wasn’t known about them.

At some point, I recognized Preston’s style from The Hot Zone, another novel-like depiction of science. I wondered how he could make redwoods and other tree giants as gory as Ebola, but I soon found out when he describes what happens to a human body that has the misfortune to plummet from one of the world’s tallest trees. (Hint: During a fall, the body is weighted toward the head like an arrow.)

The strength of The Wild Trees is not only its emphasis on the age, size, and beauty of coast redwoods and other giants, but on the ecosystems that thrive within their trunks and branches. When a single redwood giant is cut down, an entire community of plants, fungi, and animals is lost, including amphibians that in theory shouldn’t be living hundreds of feet off the ground. There’s also a spiritual loss as well. Scientists like Sillett and Antoine and explorers like Taylor have more than a dispassionate interest in their subjects; they are spellbound by them, compelled to find them (Taylor) and climb and study them (Sillett and Antoine).

Preston loses his way in minute depictions of details. Human interest adds to any tale of science, but I would have preferred fewer intimate details about Michael Taylor’s every job and relationship issue (such as his career as a knife salesman) and Marie Antoine’s happy, then sad childhood and more about how the redwoods evolved, what has been discovered about them, the threats to them and how they’re being addressed, and the passion Sillett, Antoine, Taylor, and others have toward them. Sentences such as, “A helicopter from the Life Flight Network touched down on a nearby road, and the team carried Hillery to it, and he was loaded into the helicopter and it lifted off and flew toward Portland” distract from the horror and drama after a man falls 100 feet out of a tree.

Despite the depth of background, Preston never quite gets to the heart of Sillett’s personality and character, rendering him as uninteresting as a man who climbs trees hundreds of feet tall can be.

Preston knows how to choose a good story, even if he does need an editor to keep him focused on what’s compelling. The Wild Trees is educational and informative, and if you’re like me you’ll want to learn more about coast redwoods and other giants while we still have them.

Copyright © Diane L. Schirf
3 November 2016

Book review: The Return of Martin Guerre

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The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1983. 176 pages.

In today’s science-based world, where simple DNA tests can help free the innocent on Death Row, the story of Martin Guerre might have ended before it began. Inheritance and money were involved, and then as today we take both very seriously. The risk of exposure is greater now, but at least your life doesn’t depend on guarding against it.

In Davis’s own words, the book is an attempt to go beyond the film, “to dig deeper into the case, to make historical sense of it.” In fewer than 200 pages, Davis takes the reader along an exploratory journey into the past that includes a surprising wealth of lessons about geography, local economies and law, culture, beliefs, and customs and practices. She mixes facts such as what is known about Martin Guerre, his wife, and her family, with the conjecture necessary to build a plausible story.

Why did each player act as he or she did and how? What did each hope to gain (or not lose) and how? How did each manipulate public beliefs and opinions? Davis runs through various scenarios, focusing on the village but also referring to broader, changing political and religious issues where they can help answer the larger questions, for example, about Catholic law on marriage and what it meant at the village level, or how the new Protestantism may have been spreading in Artigat and affected the people and the case.

Although the motivations of the actors can’t be known, for the most part Davis’s conjectures seem plausible against the sketchy context she is able to provide. Like Davis, we can only guess at the emotions that must have wrenched the family members when Martin Guerre left and when he returned (and returned again) — the anger, fear, perplexity, concern, and acrimony that can accompany any unplanned or unwelcome change in a life course that has been accepted, especially when that change affects future status, comfort, and security. The older Martin Guerre’s refusal to lead a “life of quiet desperation” upsets the equilibrium the village and the families have achieved and thwarts his own objectives.

In a conclusion that’s as interesting than Martin Guerre’s case, Davis covers the relevant history of Jean de Coras, an officer of the law who found himself compelled to tell the story from a legal perspective, but can’t quite put his finger on the kind of story it is. Davis’s tale of his origins, life, career and writings (including Arrest Memorable), and own demise nearly overshadows that of Martin Guerre. For Coras, “the outcome was wretched . . . at least it makes it hard to tell the difference between tragedy and comedy.” His end, no less tragic than that of the man on trial, combined with his ambivalence toward the case and his selective account of it, made me wish I’d spent less time on Guerre and more on Coras and his rationalizations and changing sympathies.

The Return of Martin Guerre is a great way for a non-historian to learn about a time that we’d like to think was simpler, but in which a seemingly straightforward case could raise religious, judicial, and even philosophical questions around one village, one family, and one man — and whether he was, and was believed to be, Martin Guerre.

Book review: A War Like No Other

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A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. New York: Random House. 2006. 416 pages.

In my 50+ years on Earth, I’ve lived through the middle and end of the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and wars waged from the depths of tropical forests and the expanse of deserts using everything from automatic weapons to automated drones. While the war veterans of 1782 and 1865 wouldn’t recognize much of today’s weaponry or some of the new tactics, “War is hell,” as it has always been.

In A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson outlines the cause, means, and results of the Peloponnesian War and how the strategies, tactics, and technologies evolved as the war dragged on, changing how the Greek world approached fighting and the military even as classical Greece tore itself apart. Hanson organizes his history by the war’s essential elements, such as fear, fire, disease, terror, armor, walls, horses, and ships.

This may sound discombobulating if, like me, you’re not familiar with the classical Greek era. By taking this approach, Hanson brings into relief the critical points and factors in the war’s agonizing progress and evolution, for example, the insufficiency of ravaging, the growing reliance on lightly armed troops, the need for horse troop support, the increasing desperation on both sides of sieges, and the inclination of democracy to make awful decisions and punish the leadership that carries out those decisions.

While aw is a survey, rich details draw the reader into the horrors of the war and its political background — the confusion and noise of the hoplite battle at Delium, where in the chaos Athenians kill Athenians, and the desperation at Syracuse, where men stranded on Sicily hundreds of miles from home are hunted down and slaughtered even as they drink the water of bloodied rivers. Later in the war, sailors are “speared like fish” as their triremes are destroyed.

At the beginning of the war, the expectation is that some land, mainly in Attica, will be ravaged; some cities may be besieged; some triremes may be sunk; and some hoplites will be killed honorably in a few decisive battles. As the war drags on, the rules are ignored, then forgotten. The war, which could have been a series of decisive battle and events, becomes a chronic, progressive disease with no cure but the destruction of one host or the other. Even when it’s in remission, such as during the Peace of Nicias, it’s festering within the Greek body.

By the time Athens is finally defeated, left to watch its vaunted Long Walls torn down, thousands of Athenians, Spartans, allies, and bystanders have died, hundreds of triremes have been rammed and sunk, and the Athenian treasury has been depleted, yet no clear victor has emerged. Athens and her aspirations have been reined in, but Sparta is weaker, while its enemies are not. In the meantime, war, once waged ostensibly according to conventions and rules (even if often broken) has turned into a nursery for ideas and technologies aimed at killing the most people most efficiently.

Why should you care about a war fought thousands of years ago over fear of an empire that faded soon after? Throughout Hanson refers to many wars that have happened since — Ottoman, the American Civil War, the first and second world wars, Vietnam, and Iraq. In some ways the Peloponnesian War set a precedent for why and how modern conflicts are fought, who participates, and how conflicts are marketed and perceived during their up- and downswings.

As Hanson recounts critical miscalculations made by the leaders, peoples, and combatants on both sides, it’s hard to forget that future historians and peoples will look back and marvel at our own errors and blunders and wonder how we could be so oblivious to so much that is obvious. After all the years, money, and lives lost, perhaps the Peloponnesian War’s clearest legacy was helping to make future conflicts easier to sell to people who want to be winners and ever more coldly and efficiently deadly — at which point, no one wins.

Book review: The Last Witchfinder: A Novel

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The Last Witchfinder: A Novel by James Morrow. New York: Harper Perennial. 2007. 560 pages.

The last dodo. The last passenger pigeon. The last wilderness. The last fill-in-the-blank usually evokes a sense of sadness, loss, and finality. The Last Witchfinder, the over-the-top epic about a sister and brother dedicated to opposing world views in a time of rapid advancements, celebrates the last — we hope — of ignorance at a truly devilish level. Unlike the harmless dodo, the pretty passenger pigeon, or the soul-searing wilderness, the last witchfinder is an repulsively compelling creation, a stubborn holdover from an irrational time, when as much evil was committed in the name of the Good Lord as Satan could hope for.

Jennet Stearne and her brother Dunstan arrive on the scene in England just as the Age of Reason is taking root. Their story isn’t told by the standard omniscient human narrator. Instead, it’s recalled by a more lasting, if questionably reliable, witness to the Enlightenment and all that’s happened since — Newton’s Principia. That this novel requires a little more imagination and suspension of belief is obvious when a book takes the place of a human author, while the humans are the mere subjects. Sometimes Morrow’s odd device breathes a little academic vitality into the narration, but more often the Principia‘s interjections and commentaries are too intrusive, forced, awkward, and lengthy to be effective. The imagination carries one only so far.

Jennet and Dunstan are molded differently by their shared experiences. Their father, a witchfinder, makes his living by producing the proofs that condemn marginal or eccentric members of society, usually women, to gruesome state executions. His sister-in-law, a half-informed but intellectually curious devotee of Newton, becomes a threat to the beliefs of the past that fuel his existence. When she is condemned as a witch, Jennet makes it her mission to use Newton’s work to disprove the concept of demons and witches. Her brother, his father’s son and blinded by his lust for Abigail Williams (the star witness at the Salem witch trials) and religious ecstasy devoid of spirituality, clings aggressively to the past, seeking witches where there are no hints of any and becoming the last witchfinder even as the practice is dying in the shadows of the Englightenment.

Morrow uses some of the same devices found in early English novels like Tom Jones (Henry Fielding) and Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne), with chapter summaries and narrator intrusions and commentaries. At points, The Last Witchfinder is engaging, amusing, interesting, imaginative, and thought provoking. In his effort to emulate the likes of Fielding and Sterne, however, Morrow overdoes the diversions, ancillary incidents and characters, and irrelevant details. Never quite clearly defined, Jennet’s mission is too easily sidetracked by too many improbable adventures and events, and the center section bogs down in its lack of focus. It’s only when Dunstan, in his crazed unspiritual righteousness and deformity, returns to the scene that the plot picks up and the story comes back to life. The final meeting between Jennet and Dunstan is electrifying.

In a society that seems to be becoming more anti-intellectual, The Last Witchfinder is refreshing to the mind. Its premise and execution are flawed, but much of Jennet’s journey is at least disturbing, interesting, and fun.

18 August 2012
Copyright © 2012 Diane L. Schirf

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