Book Review: Clay's Quilt

Clay's Quilt, by Silas House 

    If you want to know Kentucky, you have to live Kentucky.

    But for those born and live outside the commonwealth, know that it has spawned an extraordinary group of native writers. One of these is Silas House, born in Corbin, the heart of Laurel County, and reared in nearby Lily, a town of some 3,000 people. House was schooled at Eastern Kentucky University, and Lousiville's Spalding University. He currently teaches at Berea College.

    So he has a taste for the soul of the state, an ear for its finely turned music and  language, and an eye for the dignity and exuberance of its people.

    That talent is on firm display in Clay's Quilt, the first of three books that showcases the coal country and mountains of Southeastern Kentucky. The trilogy is not a series, although it is related in charcters and story lines.

    In House's debut novel, Clay Sizemore is a good-ol'-boy but a righteous one. He has a job in the coal mines, a hankering for country music, and a rowdy best friend. But he's a youth adrift and uncertain about his future. He yearns to know more about his mother, who died when he was a toddler. But his loyalty to his family, and his sense of place, gives him something to grasp and aspire to. But he struggles to find more.

    The writing in this tale is superb. You can hear the Eastern Kentucky accents in the voices and the setting. House is a master of storytelling, and the book reveals its secrets in every chapter.

    The setting explores the creeks and hollers of the mountains, and the breadth of Eastern Kentucky culture. It's all there: the diverse and beautiful music, the sometimes smothering nature of its religiosity, its joys of home and community, its random, often brutal violence.

    House tells it all without fear or favor. It's his culture, so he knows its strengths and lives with its scars.

    It's a portrait that only an honest and loving native son can paint.

Book Review: Later

Later, by Stephen King

    You read Stephen King for the writing, of course. His is elegantly simple, using a working class language of good, useful words and descriptive phrases. It's not a style in which you pause and savor every word, but it gets the job done.

    And you read King's books for the stories, and the plots. Sure, sometimes he repeats anecdotes or plays with different perspectives of the tale, but it's always a story where he pulls you along and has you eager to get to the end. 

    King is typecast as a horror writer, but that has rarely been true. And now that he's often switching genres -- he's really gotten into detective and mystery tales recently -- it's even less true. He is, as one critic wrote, just a guy who puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances -- usually with a twist of the supernatural, or tearing a hole in reality to show another dimension.

    But mostly, you read King for the characters. One never tires of, or forgets, King's characters. Sometimes, they come back.

    I won't deny he uses tropes -- the magical Negro, the disabled child with mental superpowers. But he has has a cast of characters that often look like Ameica -- and he is getting better at that. He shows strong people who are good, and evil people who are bad. Mostly, though, you can identify with his characters because you know them. They are based on regular people, with their thoughts and fears and biases

    And sometimes those ordinary people have a mystical or supernatural power. It's a King thing, OK?

    Which gets us to Later. It's about a boy who sees -- and can hear and talk to -- dead people. We first meet Jamie Conklin as a young child, but it is his older self telling the story. He introduces us to his mother, Tia Conklin -- a white woman of privilege and single mother who had fallen on hard times. We also meet her lover, Elizabeth "Liz" Dutton, a police officer with questionable ethics.

    This being King, we can probably tell what is going to happen -- someone will want to exploit Jamie's abilities. But that's something King can tell us, better than I could, and better than most writers.

    It's a short book for King, clocking in at less than 250 pages. 

    So pick it up and enjoy. You know you will.

Book Review: Buck O'Neil's America

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, by Joe Posnanski

    Buck O'Neil is a story teller.

    Joe Posnanski is a listener.

    Together, they created a book that is many things -- a pleasant read, a learning experience, an emotional tour through the United States from the eyes of a Black man who experienced the best of the country and the worst of its racism.

    In the end, it's an uplifting story, one of hope and happiness migled with meloncholy. It shows the heights Black men reached while leaving the tantalizing potential of what could have been.

    One scene, which occurred in 2005, has O'Neil and Willie Mays taking a tour through the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo. They are talking about Oscar Charleston, who from 1915 through the 1940s was a center fielder and manager in the Negro Leagues, and who many consider the greatest player ever.

"How good was Oscar Charleston, Buck?" Mays asked the old man standing next to him.

"He was you before you," Buck O'Neil said. 

Mays nodded as if he had heard that before, and he looked again through the chicken wire at the bronze statues of mostly forgotten men who had played baseball in the Negro Leagues. They had played at a time when Black men were banned from the Major Leagues. Segregation was an unwritten rule and mostly unspoken.

    Throughout the 1990s and until his death in 2006, O'Neil was the living, breathing embodiment of Negro Leagues baseball.

     He wasn't the greatest to ever have played the game, but he was pretty damn good. He was a first baseman and manager, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs. He was known as a fast runner and a decent hitter, who twice led the Negro American League in batting. In his later years, he became the representative of a group of men who were finally getting their recognition as players equal to those in the Major Leagues. O'Neil played a major role in establishing the Negro Leagues museum.

   But mostly, O'Neil was chosen because, as he told Posnanski at the time, "I'm alive."

    In 2005, O'Neil, at the age of 94, planned to tour the country as the Major Leagues began to promote the history of the Negro Leagues in an effort to right some wrongs. Posnanski, then a columnist at the Kansas City Star, asked to tag along. O'Neil's response was, "Don't be late."

    This book is the result. It's a road trip story, the tale of a youger white man and an older Black man traveling the country, talking baseball and life and jazz, another of O'Neil's passions. Mostly, O'Neil talked. Posnanski listened. and took notes.

    One of the stories told has O'Neil talking with Monte Irvin, perhaps the only man to be a star in both the Negro Leagues and later in the Major Leagues. They sound just like what they were at the time -- two old men talking, kinda lamenting how things had been.

"I'm not complaining," Irvin said. "I mean, I lived a good life. Better than most guys in the Negro Leagues. I got to play in the Major Leagues. I got to play in the World Series. I'm not complaining. It's just that people used to tell me how good I was, and I would tell them, 'You should have seen me when I could really play.'"

"I saw you, Monte," Buck said.

"And?"

"You could really play."

"That's all I was saying," Monte said, and he smiled too.

    The book is not a biography, but there is a lot in there that tells you about the man Buck was -- and also makes you want to search out more about him and his life. While on the tour, and right up to his death in 2006, O'Neil still felt he had a lot of work to do, and he wanted to do it.    

    So O'Neil told the stories of the Black men who played the game, and the lives they lived. He was proud of his playing days. He knew he and his teammates could have played alongside the white guys on any Major League team. He rejected the notion that the players were a ragged-ass bunch of clowns playing pickup ball. He knew they were professionals who worked hard and played hard, and who were as good as -- often better than -- any of their white contemporaries.

 

Book Review: Kissing the Witch

Kissing the Witch, by Emma Donoghue

    The best way to read this book is to forget your previous images of fairy tales, and with the author's help, let your imagination run wild.

    Donoghue's rewritten fairy tales are extraodinary. She ties them together with wee little blurbs at the end of each story and the beginning of the next. She twists them a bit to give them a sense of freshness.

    I suspect many people's knowledge of fairy tales comes not from reading the originals, but from watching Disney movies or other cartoon animations. Such treatment often infantalizes the stories to simple tropes. Donoghue returns then to their truer nature -- part of a mythology that tries to explain the world and why things happen or may go wrong.

    The writing here is superb. The characters are new but familiar, often redrawn to fit Donoghue's feminine perspective. The stories are written in keeping with the old style, She uses her love and understanding of language to invigorate each tale, and weaves them to create a loosely tied longer tale.  

    As someone who is not an expert on fairy tales, I am unsure if these are rewrites of older tales, brand new legends, or both. Some seemed familiar, while others did not.

    All but one were absolutely wonderful.

    I could not get through The Tale of the Cottage, which was written as by one with subpar language skills -- perhaps an animal? -- but in a collection of 13 stories, one miss is allowed.

    To make up for it, there was Tale of the Voice, about an introverted woman the community sees as a witch. She is not. Instead, she observes and advises. She doesn't cause the curses people suffer through as the price they pay for their desires, but rather she understands and informs them what would be the consequences of their actions. It's a subtle but too often ignored distinction.