TWIB: 14th Edition

 

Palabras Bilingual Bookstore sits in an older urban neighborhood
threatened by gentrification, just north of downtown Phoenix

    PHOENIX, Ariz. -- In this desert city in the western United States, I discovered a diverse collection of bookstores.

    Although generally a conservative place, history might give a reason for this -- it was colonized by the Spaniards, became an eventual settlements for many of North America's indigenous populations who were driven from their more eastern or southern lands, and was the migration point of enslaved people after the U.S. Civil War -- by some estimates 25 percent of cowboys were Black.

    Later, as the city's population exploded with white residents, the Latino population continue to lead the pack, with the Black and Asian population also increasing. Today, the non-white population comprises 57 percent of the city's population. 

My TBR stack from Arizona

    My first stop was at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore, off downtown in a place known as Casa Caracol, which includes a small café and Andria's Tienda. It was love at first sight.

    I really had to stop myself after gathering a number of new tomes, including Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis, the tale of a Native American -- a Kanien'kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne -- who left the reservation when he turned 18 and returned 25 years later, suffering from a rare disease and a failed marriage, and persuaded to undergo a tribal remedy. I also grabbed The Body Farm, by Abby Geni, a collection of short stories about people's relationships with their bodies.

    I moved on to Grassrootz Books and Juice Bar, a Black- and worker-owned place in Eastlake Park, also near downtown, which includes shops featuring African and African-American art and clothing. It was another delight, full of books I would love to read but know I could find in few other places.

    There, I bought All Eyes are Upon Us, by Jason Sokol, a history of Black life and politics in the northeastern United States, an area often considered amenable to but also showing a hostility to civil rights. A Man Called Horse, by Glennette Tilley Turner, tells us about the life and times of John Horse, who founded and ran the Black Seminole Underground Railroad. Trees, by the superb Percival Everett, weaves a story of magical realism when he tells what could happen if Black men and woman who were brutally lynched and slaughtered throughout U.S. history somehow rose again and turned the tables on their killers.

    I moved on to the Poisoned Pen, a shop over in the wealthy suburb of Scottsdale that specialized in mysteries both cozy and dark. Here, I found tales by two Irish writers. Northern Ireland's Stuart Neville, dubbed "the king of Belfast noir," brings us The House of Ashes, about a hapless family that moves from England back to Northern Ireland into a house with an, shall we say, interesting history. And the always compelling Colum McCann pens Twist, a story that introduces us to the men who repair broken underwater cables, and winds up delving into the sum of human existence.

    My final stop was a place called Changing Hands Bookstore, at the base of Camelback Mountain. It's a bookstore and a bar. Or a bookstore with a bar. Or, perhaps a bar with an attached bookstore. I'm really not sure -- and hell, does it matter? It was a fun place to visit.

    So not only did I but a T-shirt, but I found a few books to add to the collection, inclding The Children of Jocosta, by Natalie Haynes. She is one of the best writers in the re-told Greek myths genre, and this is one of her earlier tales. She's also a scholar, broadcaster and comedienne, but, truth be told, her writings are her best work, including several non-fiction discussions about women in Greek mythology. Finally, The Possibility of Life, by Jaime Green, is a look at the search for and the possibility of finding life out there in the vast universe.

Book Review: 1666

  By Lora Chilton

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Historical fiction

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Lexington, during the Kentucky Book Fair 

• Why I bought this book: The author talked me into it  

 ********

    The thing you have to understand about this book, and what affected me the most, is that these were real people who survived the horrors within.

    The PaTow'O'Mek tribe of what is now called Virginia actually existed, and because of the people written about and their descendants, exist again. That is no small thing, considering how America was built on the wanton destruction of the native people and their lifestyles.

    The novel begins with the tribe living in a time of change, when the Strangers have come and expressed an intent to take the land, regardless of the desires of the current inhabitants. Several tribes live on the land, with similar lifestyles but with shifting interests and coalitions. The Strangers take advantage, and with superior weaponry and numbers (not to mention the diseases they bring), take what they want.

    In doing so, they massacre all the male members of the PaTow'O'Mek tribe -- now known as the Patawomeck. They capture the women and children they don't kill, and sell them into slavery in the sugar fields of Barbados.

    The survival story is told in alternating chapters through two women who lived through the massacre and whom we meet again aboard the slave ships. Ah'SaWei and Xo, tribal friends, are split up when they arrived. Xo has the harder enslavement of the two, being regularly subjected to rapes and beatings. Ah'SaWei's enslaver is a Quaker, who is less vicious in the treatment of the people he enslaved.

    Several parts are particularly difficult to read, as the author spares little in documenting the violence inflicted on those who were kidnapped and enslaved. But it's necessary to lay it all out, as it explores the inhumanity of the original colonists, and the suffering of those whose lives and lifestyles were uprooted and destroyed.

    Chilton, the author, is a member of the tribe, and she interviewed tribal elders, studied the language, and researched documents from the colonial era and beyond to put together the tale. It's quite an amazing work that reads like literary history, and marks the trauma, pain, sadness, and eventually triumph.

Book Review: There, There

By Tommy Orange

• Pub Date: 2019

• Genre: Native American Fiction

• Where I bought this book: The Newsouth Bookstore, Montgomery, Ala. 

• Why I bought this book: I was pondering if I should buy his second novel, Wandering Stars, when my wife told me this one, his first, was much better  

 *****

 

  This debut novel, dealing with the urban lives of several Native Americans in Oakland, Calif., has a lot going for it, but in the end, it's a disappointment.

    Oh, the writing is vivid. The individual stories are well told and compelling. Orange gets into their heads, describing their fitful experiences living life on the edge. 

    This is not a tale for white people who see Indians as stoic and spiritual, as more natural and earthbound. These are urban Indians, with problems like trauma, addiction, boredom, loneliness, and isolation.

    The anger and resentment they live and express for the treatment of the Indigenous population -- and the continuing negative effects of that -- comes out loud and clear. I weep for them and for the abuse and scorn and hatred we heaped, and continue to heap, on them.

    But, much like the Gertrude Stein quotation that gives the book its title, the overriding theme gets lost in the details. The character studies are wonderful. But they never coalesce into a whole. They drift in and out of the tales, and their connections with each other get lost amid the confusion.

    Maybe that is the point. Maybe it's me who doesn't understand. But I can see what make the characters tick -- and what they are ticked about -- but feel lost trying to follow what the story is ticking about.

    The book explores the histories and biographies of the various Indian characters, most of whom have tribal or familial relationships. It does so in successive chapters, sometimes following the characters. showing new experiences or bonds. It leads up to, and climaxes during, something called the Big Oakland Powwow.

     Too many make it hard to keeps up with who is who, and if their memories collide with  their actual experiences. There's no single protagonist or antagonist. There is a cast of characters list at the beginning, and it's useful, but it often means having to flip back and forth to determine the changes in relationship. 

    And the ending is a mishmash of those experiences that, once again, tell individual stories well but miss the full picture of what happened,

Book Review: The Wordy Shipmates

•  Author: Sarah Vowell
• Pub Date: 2008

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth, Norwood, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I heard the author on NPR once, and she seemed amazing 

*******

    You might not think that a history book exploring the lives of some of the earliest immigrants to the United States -- the somber Puritans who came to Boston in the 1600s because the religious figures in England were not strict enough -- would make for a witty, rollicking tale of adventure and petty in-fighting.

    But you would be wrong.

    Vowell's tale, complete with the letters and journals of the men -- and the few women -- who made an impact on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is a joy to read. It's history come alive, as reported by a somewhat snarky, knowledgeable reporter who, with a wry grin sadly shakes her head at the goings on.

    She brings in popular culture -- from the Brady Bunch to Bruce Springsteen, to Thanks, an oddball situation comedy that lasted six episodes in 1999 -- to help show how we've gotten it all wrong and entirely misunderstand the point of the first English colonists and their relationships with each other and the native culture. When one of them, John Winthrop, spoke about building a "city on a hill," they also missed the point, much like candidate Ronald Reagan misinterpreted Winthrop and Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. in 1984.    

In the U.S.A., we want to sing the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues.

      So, Vowell aims to set us straight. Chockful of primary sources, she covers the Puritans' voyage from their leaving of England in 1630 to their first years in what they called New England. The title is acknowledgement that the Puritans weren't stuffy, ignorant people, (well, they tended to be stuffy, but ...) but serious men and women who knew their religion, had a specific interpretation of their Bible, and could argue and explain exactly what they wanted and why. Along with fighting evil and burning Indians, they wrote and collected books and created colleges of learning.

    And they did it their way.

Book Review: Summerland

 

•  Author: Michael Chabon

• Where I bought found this book: Kenton County Public Library giveaway at the Pride Festival, Covington, Ky.

• Why I bought collected this book: Magic. Baseball. A perfect double-play. And it was free.

******

    A motley crew of young children, faeries, giants, and assorted folkloric creatures inhabit our four worlds, but a combination of ecological destruction, meanness, and a bored creator who wants to end it all threaten its very existence.

    Enter baseball, a game with a mythology all its own, which could either make things right or cause further destruction.

    Indeed, baseball is already at least partly responsible for the latter. Author Chabon -- obviously a fan of the traditional game --  posits that the introduction of the designated hitter tore a hole in the fabric of the universe, leading to its current downward path. 

    This is a fun, if sometimes unwieldy undertaking. At 500 pages -- precisely the number of lifetime home runs that once ensured enshrinement in Cooperstown -- it's sometimes overwhelming. And its characters -- including a girl who loves the game and plays it well, and a boy who is uncertain about it all, but accedes to his widowed father's wishes that he play -- tends to be, shall we say, tropes of the trade.

    They include a mournful Sasquatch -- don't call her bigfoot! -- a mean giant, a changeling boy who feels lost in our world, and a ferisher scout who may not be immortal but has Seen It All. Also, a Major League star -- a ringer!! -- who defected from Cuba, a car that can fly and runs on moonshine, and a magical bat taken from the tree that feeds the worlds.

    They come together to save the universe in a novel that is themed, inspired, and timed by baseball. It's enjoyable -- the writing is (for the most part) crisp, the characters are wonderful (if a bit predictable), and the story is a magic fable tied together by a love for baseball.

Book Review: A Parchment of Leaves

 

• Author: Silas House

• Where I bought this book: The 2021 Kentucky Book Fair, Lexington

• Why I bought this book: House is the new Wendell Berry

*********

   

    This novel is a stunning work of art -- the story, the characters, and the connection of place to person is a phenomenal achievement.

    House, an Eastern Kentucky native, knows the language of Appalachia and how to use it subtly, nobly, and to its best effect. He knows -- indeed, he is -- the characters, and you can feel their pain and their joys through his writing. 

    And he understands that connections that tie the characters to the story through the expressive use of  language.

    House can teach everyone a thing or two about Eastern Kentucky -- about its stalwart people, its sometimes sad but always provocative history, and its rich culture. 

     In Parchment, House tells a feminist story in the voices and actions of its women. The main character and voice is Vine, whom we meet as a young Cherokee tending to her garden along Redbud Camp, a small community in a hollow of the Eastern Kentucky mountains. Other strong women whose voice we hear are Esme, Vine's mother-in-law and the matriarch of the Sullivan family, and Serena, a midwife and iconoclast who forges her own trails in the sometime judgmental Appalachian communities where they live.

    They find strength in each other, in the strong family ties, and in the isolation in Appalachia. Individuality is necessary to survive, although it is often frowned upon.

    The Native Americans, such as Vine and her immeniate family, survived the slaughter and forced removal duirng the Trail of Tears by hiding out in Eastern Kentucky, where they were later joined by the Scots-Irish settlers. By the time of this novel, set in the early 20th Century, the groups formed an uneasy alliance.

     Esme's son, Saul, woes and weds Vine, bringing her back to the Sullivan homestead in a neighboring hollow, God's Creek. She must deal with his brother Aaron, who has his own desires for Vine, and on Esme's sometimes suspicious nature toward her. She also seeks to find her place in the new community, while keeping her inate goodness for all.

    It's a tall order, but House is an extraordinary writer who reaches high and achieves the stars.