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The Twelve Mile Straight- A Southern Saga

January 12, 2019January 12, 2019 ceilstriplin2 Comments

In the first five pages of Eleanor Henderson’s novel, The Twelve Mile Straight, an innocent black sharecropper is lynched for allegedly raping a white girl. It hit me like a brick wall because I have just been fortunate enough to hear Bryan Stevenson speak for the second time. One of the many things, Bryan Stevenson is involved in is the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice honors 4,000 men, women, and children lynched in the twelve Southern states between 1877-1950. If Genus Jackson was a real person, he would be honored here. If Genus Jackson was a real person, there would be a container of dirt from under that gourd tree at this memorial.

As I was reading this novel, I kept thinking that Henderson writes with such familiarity of the Deep South- the history, the complex relationships between blacks and whites, the time period of the 1920s and 1930s. What intrigued me was that her bio blurb said she was born in Greece, raised in Florida and lives in New York. She writes with a connection to the land that was deeper than just research. On her website, I learned later that Henderson’s father is from Ben Hill County, Georgia and in the 1930s her grandparents owned a country store at a crossroads in Georgia. Henderson has a Pinterest board called ‘Georgia on My Mind’ filled with old photographs of the South. Now I understand her heart connection with the land and her characters.

The Jesup family is headed up by Juke Jesup- a poor, sharecropping, gin running bootlegger who lives on the farm of George Wilson, the father of Juke’s best boyhood friend. George basically runs and owns the crossroads community in Cotton County, Georgia. Juke’s daughter Elma has twins- Gemini twins- one is white and one is not. So how is this explained in an uneducated rural community in the Deep South? Well, people have to die as part of the so-called explanation. Henderson writes, ” ‘Any faithless fool tells you your babies ain’t kin,’ Juke said to Elma, ‘you tell them the only sin the Lord don’t pardon is the sin of nonbelieving.’ So they believed that the babies were twins. Because if they didn’t believe, then they didn’t believe Genus Jackson was one of the daddies. They’d have to believe that the daddy was someone else. They’d have to believe that a mob of white men killed a black man for no reason. And they couldn’t believe that. Except the black folks. They knew what their white neighbors were capable of. They believed in the same things the white folks believed in, except they didn’t believe in the white folks.”

The main characters of Juke, his daughter Elma and Nan, the black girl who lives with them are so well written you can almost hear them breathing. These three characters and their intertwined and complicated relationship are one of the aspects of this book I enjoyed the most. Their relationship is a triangle that gets more convoluted as the story moves along while revealing the sick mind of Juke.

Henderson writes so poetically it is a joy to read her words even while reading of lynchings, poverty and violence. Her words flow through the dialect of these country people, as in when Elma tells her daddy that he “is crazier than a rat trapped in a tin shithouse.” Or when Elma remembers Genus’s words creeping “back to her like a hungry dog.” And then George Wilson telling Juke, “You got a heart full of hate. You wanted to keep him there, where you could see him. You’d rather have a man in that shack you were born in who’s lower than the low-down white trash you are. You wanted someone to beat on. You wanted to feel the size of your own pecker.” Also concerning Wilson, Henderson writes of him saying, “As long as he breathed, George Wilson would do God’s business himself.”

There is a lot of violence in this book- racial violence, the violence that surrounds bootlegging and Prohibition, violence that surrounds rural poverty at this time. It feels authentic and realistic. Henderson captures this era in the Deep South very well. It’s a fine story.

eleanor-henderson.com

BryanStevenson.com

PONDERINGS: I was in Montgomery on New Years Day and even though the lynching memorial was closed, I walked along the sidewalk seeing it from the outside. It’s open-air, and I could see the columns hanging from the ceiling. Even from this limited viewpoint, it still gave me cold chills. The US has finally passed an anti-lynching hate crime law. “For over a century, members of Congress have attempted to pass some version of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is: a bias-motivated act of terror,” Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “Today, we have righted that wrong and taken corrective action that recognizes this stain on our country’s history.”

There is a conservative religious group upset that the LGBTQ community is on this hate crime list because these folks should not be protected since in this group’s opinion homosexuality is immoral. Liberty Counsel chair Mat Staver argued that references to sexual orientation and gender identity in the bill would make it easier for the government to pass additional protections for LGBTQ people. “The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can’t stop them from coming the rest of the way in,” Staver said. “And this would be the first time that you would have in federal law mentioning gender identity and sexual orientation as part of this anti-lynching bill.”

We can change laws, but unfortunately that doesn’t change some people’s attitudes.

Francophiles- How About A Little Revolution?

January 5, 2019 ceilstriplin1 Comment

If you are ready to start the New Year off with some excellent historical fiction, I have just the book for you! Where The Light Falls: A Novel of the French Revolution by Allison Pataki and her brother Owen Pataki is an well researched and well written novel of the bloodiest time in French history. The siblings are the children of former Governor George Pataki of New York. Allison is an author and former news writer and producer and has a degree in English from Yale. Owen has a history degree from Cornell and served with the army in Afghanistan. He is now a screenwriter and filmmaker. These two have combined their education and talent in making this incredible story. The authors write, “Like the American Revolution, this was a conflict that, at times, brought out some of the highest ideals of humanity…In our story we hope to convey…the better angels of human nature and the horrifying excesses of violence and extremism…we hope that this novel of historical fiction can be educational and enlightening…”

The book begins three years into the Revolution as debate begins as to whether to execute the former king and his wife. As you remember France does behead both Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette as well as approximately 20,000 others. An estimated 2500 people are guillotined in Paris alone. These beheadings take on a carnival atmosphere with hundreds coming to witness these executions, and blood flows through the streets of Paris. The Patakis do an excellent job in making this Reign of Terror palatable. Two of their main characters, Andre Valiere and Sophie de Vincennes are of aristocratic birth and have pledged their loyalty to the new Republic of France, but is it enough? Is it enough for any aristocrat to save his/her head in this death frenzy that has gripped France? As you will see, personal vengeance can be hidden in accusations of treason.

The authors’ knowledge of French history enables them to develop their characters based on some of the real players of the time period. Two of the novel’s antagonists are based on the bad guys Maximilian Ropespierre and General Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine. However, some of the characters play themselves such as General Christophe Kellerman, the hero of the Battle of Valmy. There is just enough military history to usher Napoleon Bonaparte into the plot. Fans of French history will breathe a sigh of relief when he arrives with his Period of the Directory which begins to bring some law and order to French society. At least until he decides to be emperor of the world by spreading war across Europe.

Two of the best fictional characters are Jean-Luc St. Clair and his wife Marie St. Clair. Both are commoners who move to Paris hoping their lives improve under the new French republic. Jean-Luc is a idealistic administrative lawyer working for the new government who asks his wife “Would it not be shameful…to be born in this era of history and yet shrink from the glorious undertaking of a free people rising up in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity?” Yet Jean-Luc soon learns he may be expected to give to the cause more than he thinks possible. And Marie? There is much more to her than meets the eye!

As a former history teacher who loved teaching both the American and the French revolutions, I was engrossed with the book. It is so well done. One does not need to be familiar with the French Revolution to enjoy this book, so no worries there. The authors achieve their goal of writing a story that is both educational and enlightening.

I hope everyone had a happy holiday season. I read several books I look forwarding sharing with you over the next few weeks.

Holiday Reading- Family and Redemption

December 8, 2018 ceilstriplinLeave a comment

I just finished reading two short but impactful books about family and role redemption plays in our lives. The first book The Deal of a Lifetime is by one of my very favorite authors, Fredrik Backman. The second book is by Courtney Miller Santo and is entitled The Roots of the Olive Tree. Both books are centered on family relationships and human frailty.

Backman’s book is told from the perspective of an highly successful, emotionally and physically absent father who is far too self-absorbed to have any kind of relationship with his son. After meeting a brave little girl suffering with cancer and the woman in the gray sweater with the folder, this man questions his legacy as he receives a diagnosis no one ever wants to hear. The woman in the gray sweater is not Death, she says it’s not her job to determine who lives and dies. She tells the man, “I’m not death. I just do the picking up and the dropping off…It’s not down to us who goes and who stays.” Obviously the woman is here to pick up someone, and the man begins negotiating the deal of of his life. He finds the terms of this deal are bigger than he expects. The woman in the gray sweater tells him the terms are a life for a life. The woman says, “it’s not enough for you to die. To make room for the girl’s entire life, another life has to cease to exist. I have to delete it’s contents. So if you give your life, it’ll disappear. You won’t die, you”ll never have existed. No one will remember you. You were never here.” As the man and the woman in the gray sweater visit his son on Christmas Eve, he has to decide if he will make the ultimate sacrifice.

The Roots of the Olive Tree is about five generations of Keller women, most of whom live under the same roof of Hill House in the olive grove. Anna Davison Keller, the matriarch is 112 years old and wants to be in the record books as the oldest living person. She is patiently waiting on an old woman in France and an old man in Japan to die so she can achieve her goal. Enter into the plot, Dr. Amrit Hashmi, a geneticist who is interested in longevity as related to genetics. As Dr. Hashmi begins blood work on the extended Keller family, both males and females, family secrets begin to spill forth about parentage. Genetics do not match the names on birth certificates. How do we look into the murkiness of childhood and see uncomfortable truths? How do we reconcile our ideals and our realities? How do we extend understanding and compassion when we are all hiding secrets? These incredible women move through the secrets with redemptive grace as they begin reconciling what they have always believed with what they now know to be the truth.

Redemptive grace- something to remember and practice this holiday season with family and friends. Both of these books will speak to this in a worthwhile way.

I’ll see you back here on Saturday, January 5, 2019. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and all that jazz!

Mr. Dickens and His Carol

December 1, 2018 ceilstriplin1 Comment

Happy December! A wonderful way to begin your holiday season is by reading Samatha Silva’s fictional biography Mr. Dickens and His Carol. Silva is a writer, screenwriter and a lover of Dickens. She calls the book a fan letter to Charles Dickens. She has taken liberties for sure, but in the most delightful way. She writes in the Author’s Notes, “This is a work of fiction. It is spun out of threads from the lives of Charles Dickens, his family and friends, and even a nemesis or two. It is meant to be a playful reimagining…I have twisted, embellished, and reordered the facts…nearly all the characters are based on real people…Most of the rest I made up from whole cloth.” Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See, writes, it “is a charming, comic, and ultimately poignant story about the creation of the most famous Christmas tale ever written. It’s as foggy and haunted and redemptive as the original; it’s all heart, and I read it in a couple of ebullient, Christmassy gulps.” Sums it up beautifully!

The redemptive theme of the original tale is evident in Silva’s remake. Life offers all of us opportunities to redeem ourselves and certainly gives Ebenezer Scrooge a chance. It is a New Testament theme at play. Charles Dickens is ahead of his time culturally with his concern for the plight of the working poor and of children being tossed to and fro by societal ills. The Industrial Revolution in England occurs earlier than in the US, and the cracks in society are already apparent to Dickens and other British progressives. Dickens himself experiences some of this in his own life. At the age of 12, Dickens’ father is put in debtors prison, and Dickens is forced to sell his beloved books and go to work in a shoe blackening factory. As an adult, he visits Field Lane Ragged School and other schools established for the hundreds of London’s street children. Dickens is very sensitive to the injustices to and sufferings of these children. He is an avid walker, taking nightly walks of 15-20 miles through the streets and alleys of London. He writes in his head while walking, and thus captures the haunted fogginess of London with his words.

Dickens writes his tale in six weeks in 1843. He is financially strapped at the time because his latest work is not selling well. He has written three Christmas tales before this one and writes four more afterward. A Christmas Carol is first published December 19, 1843 and sells 6000 copies by Christmas Eve of that year. By December 1844, thirteen more editions are released. It has never been out of print. In early 1844, a British magazine attributes a rise in charitable giving to Dickens tale. Beginning in 1849, Dickens begins giving public readings of his Christmas tale to packed houses which proves to be very profitable. He continues this tradition until 1870, the year of his death.

So begin this season with first reading Silva’s heartwarming retelling and then move on to rereading the original tale. We all need reminders to live with our hearts and arms wide open in making the world a better place. To misquote Mother Theresa, if you can’t help a 100 people, then help one. Silva writes, “I hope this is a book about Dickens as much as it’s a book about all of us…I’m keenly aware that a good biography tells us the truth about a person; a good story, the truth about ourselves. That, I think, is what Dickens did best.”

Of Music and Song

November 25, 2018 ceilstriplin2 Comments

“Music takes us out of ourselves, away from our worries and tragedies, helps us look into a different world, a bigger picture. All those cadences and beautiful chord changes, every one of them makes you feel a different splendor of life.” Miss Primrose Trent, Choir Mistress of The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir

I just finished a lovely book, especially for this time of the year, which has been on my reading list for quite some time. The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir by Jennifer Ryan hit the spot for a cheery read as we kick off the holiday season. The all-female choir is formed when the Vicar disbands the church choir with so many of the male villagers engaged in the World War 2 effort. Some of the now defunct female choralers felt it was right to disband because what is a choir without tenors and basses, yet there were enough forward thinking women who supported an all-female choir. This time period in this little Kentish village was a very traditional patriarchal time when women did what the men expected. As these women defy traditional expectations they begin to grow into themselves as confident, assertive and strong women. The war gives the women a chance to challenge societal norms. They enter and win in choral competitions where they are the only all-female choir. They even serve as pallbearers when one of their beloved members is killed in a bombing raid. This was one of my favorite scenes- they sang the processional hymn of Abide With Me as they carried the coffin down the aisle. Ryan writes, “…the simple and yet poignant tune pouring softly from the organ, urging us to sing as a united front…for our small yet resilient community, for our dear, collapsing country. Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. Thus it was that a shuddering chorus of twelve deeply saddened women, singing at first softly, then more resolutely, advanced slowly down the aisle. We sang as if our lives depended on it, as if our very freedom, our passions and bravery were being called forward to bear witness to the atrocities that were placed before us. We were united and strong, and I knew right there and then that nothing, nothing could ever break the spirit of the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir.” Of all the times these women carry the load of grief and courage in their village, this scene is one of the best!

The story is told through letters and journal entries of the choir members. Margaret Tillings’ journal entries are my favorite. You see her personal growth as a grieving widow with a son fighting in France into a woman courageous enough to let herself discover love again. Margaret adores her son, like many of us adore our’s, and as Margaret watches David leave for the front, she thinks, “…I studied his broad back, his lazy lilting walk, his state of being that would no longer be mine to watch, mine to grasp. A vision came back to me of him as a boy, scampering down this very path, late for school, turning and grinning, lopsided by his heavy satchel. And just as I remembered, he turned back to me with that same look, as if the world were a great adventure for him to behold and relish, and I felt the rain washing the tears down my face for all our precious years together.” Sweet mama love and memories. Margaret also says, ” I suppose I am just one of the millions of mothers around the world standing by a door watching our children walk down the road away from us, kit bag on backs, unsure if they’ll ever return. We have prayer enough to light up the whole universe, like a thousand stars breathing life into our deepest fears.”

Ryan writes so poignantly and poetically. She is a joy to read. She also has Prim, the choir mistress say the most wonderful things, such as “Sometimes we do things without fully understanding. You shouldn’t try to know everything…Often it’s beyond our comprehension…Sometimes the magic of life is beyond thought. It’s the sparkle of intuition…” I wish someone had told me that decades ago! I might not have spent so much time living in my head.

The rich choral traditions of high church will make music lovers and choir members so happy. Ryan writes that she uses her grandmother’s stories of the war in her village in Kent, England. Her grandmother often told her “choir stories” that “dramatized the camaraderie and support…” On Ryan’s website, she calls this grandmother “Party Granny” who “was always up for a laugh and a Pink Gin, donning her high heels and finding a nice frock to wear. It was this delightful and warm lady who shared her exciting and often scandalous stories about the war.” What’s not to love, right?

jenniferryanbooks.com

Julia Reed- Hilariously Southern

November 10, 2018 ceilstriplin2 Comments

Recently, I had the great pleasure to hear one of my favorite writers who spoke at a fundraiser to establish an Interventional Radiology lab at Thomas Hospital, my local hospital. Julia Reed- writer, cook, entertainer extradinaire, hilarious person, cool girl, the list goes on. Presently, Julia writes a Southern culture/lifestyle column for Garden and Gun, as well as entertaining (in more ways than one) books full of stories and recipes from the Mississippi Delta. Julia says that Southerners are always considered by non-Southerners to be great story tellers and bourbon drinkers. She is a great story teller, but grew up drinking Scotch because that’s what the local bootlegger sold in the dry Mississippi Delta. She says everyone in the Delta drank scotch. However she does use bourbon in her pecan pies, which this Southerner thinks is the only way to truly make a proper pecan pie.

In her book, But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!, Julia writes, “Not being in bourbon’s camp is sort of like saying you don’t like blues or jazz or Creole cooking…” Bourbon, blues and jazz are some of the South’s greatest cultural contributions to the world at large. Hard for a Southerner to bravely admit to not liking one of these! In her newest book South Toward Home, Julia lists her “entirely arbitrary Southern Playlist” including I’ll Take You There by The Staple Singers, Baby, Please Don’t Go/Gloria by Van Morrison, Turn on Your Love Light by Bobby “Blue” Bland, The Band’s The Weight, Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry, What’d I Say by Ray Charles, Edgar Winter’s I’ve Got News for You, Polk Salad Annie by Tony Joe White, Tom Petty’s Here Comes My Girl”, and the iconic Sweet Home Alabama by, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Julia’s taste is not all in her mouth! This playlist is a party in the making! Her joyful living is contagious.

In But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!, Julia writes and she recounts the story for us of her Plymouth-style Thanksgiving dinner where she served what would have been close to the original food served that first Thanksgiving Day. She writes, “…it didn’t have much of anything we now equate with the Thanksgiving table. There was no stuffing (the dearth of flour meant there was no bread to make it with), no rolls (ditto), no potatoes (most Europeans still thought they were poisonous), no pumpkin pie (pumpkin and winter squash were served boiled), not even any cranberries (they’d yet to be introduced).” There was fowl of some kind, lots of venison, mushrooms from the forests, corn, watercress from the creek banks, and seafood from the coastal waters. So what was Julia’s menu? Grilled oysters, venison and duck sausages, duck, wild turkey (she says “just in case”), shrimp and crab dressing, a cornbread dressing with chanterelles, corn pudding with caramelized leeks, and a watercress salad with pecans. Oh and everyone had to wear either a feathered headdress or Pilgrim hat. Sounds like a really fun Thanksgiving celebration!

Some of Julia’s philosophy of life includes recognizing how fragile, precious and short life is, to treasure everyday, to “make your own fun” which she saw people doing while growing up in the Delta. She says life is funny even in the worse of times, so laugh. It’s truly the best medicine. Thank you Julia for sharing yourself with us for such a worthy cause!

Thank you Kathy, Pat and Linda for your help in making this blog post possible.

Sarah Smarsh: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country of Earth

November 3, 2018 ceilstriplinLeave a comment

After reading Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, I couldn’t wait to read Heartland by Sarah Smarsh. To be so well connected and “informed” in today’s world, both books make me realize how little we actually know of the lives people have who are different from us. Her story rings of Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Smarsh came from a five-generation Kansas wheat farming family and yet lived below the poverty line. People assume that this way of life for poor rural people died out a long time ago, but Smarsh writes, “We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applies to us even if they didn’t make sense”- like hillbilly, redneck, cracker, roughneck. “We were so willfully forgotten in American culture that the most common slur towards us was one applied to poor whites anywhere: ‘white trash.’ Or since, we moved in and out of mobile homes, ‘trailer trash.'” She says the image of this poor white female is one of a woman standing in the doorway of a trailer with a cigarette in her mouth and a baby on her hip. Smarsh says that could be her mother and her. Smarsh never saw herself in the pop culture or news about white girls which magnified her feeling of failure and shame. Generational poverty isn’t easily eradicated by pulling oneself up by her bootstraps. I recently read a blog about the difference between being broke and being poor. When one is broke, there are still resources available, but to be poor implicates there aren’t resources and life is very unstable.

Part of this instability is the high rate of teenage pregnancies. Smarsh comes from a long line of teenage mothers. “Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.” Smarsh determined early in life to break that cycle, and she did. Even though she attended eight schools, often poor rural schools by the time she was in 9th grade and struggled to keep up academically, teachers recognize her intellectual ability and encouraged her. She states, “If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school’s desk you’ll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food. Teachers, for such children, become mothers; schools become houses; and cafeterias become hearths. It can be brutal, then, to exit a school for what an adult has informed you will be the last time, when that school has been the steadiest place you’ve ever known…primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need too. It is often denied to the poor.”

Smarsh recognized as a child that education and future jobs was a way to break the poverty cycle. “Sensing that mission was up to me alone, as the American Dream will tell a poor child, my ability to do the right thing rather than the wrong one hung on my shoulders. She worked through high school and held 2-3 jobs in college. “I looked at my family then and felt I had two choices: be a relentless worker with a chance at building my own financial foundation or live the carefree way so many of my friends did. The latter, by my estimation, almost assured my becoming a young mother and an underpaid worker, too. It was an easy choice.” She writes that her high school and college years were “the most tired years of my life.” She is accepted into a federally funded program which paid for graduate school for minority, first-generation, and low income students. They were referred to as the “White Trash Scholars.” The United States talk about being a classless society. We are a democracy where all are created equal, but in reality we’re not. Smarsh says our country has a “lack of awareness about its own economic structure.” Also “Class is an illusion with real consequences…Financial poverty is the one shamed by society, culture, unchecked capitalism, public policy, our very way of speaking. If you’re poor in a wealthy place, common vocabulary suggests that economic failure is failure of the soul.”

Today, Smarsh is a tenured college professor with a lifestyle vastly different from her upbringing. Smarsh concludes, “I did not leave one world and enter another. Today I hold them simultaneously-class being a false construct, like any other boundary or category we impose. You don’t really climb up or down, get in or out. Mine isn’t a story about a destination that was reached but rather about sacrifices. I don’t believe anyone, certainly no child, should ever have to make.”

http://www.sarahsmarsh.com

#sarahsmarsh #heartland #poverty #kansas #childhood #scribner

Jessica Shattuck: The Women in the Castle

October 26, 2018October 26, 2018 ceilstriplin1 Comment

Jessica Shattuck was fascinated as a child seeing photographs of her German grandparents and their lives as younger people. In a NPR interview, Shattuck writes, “I loved to look at the old photo albums with my grandmother, and at some point we came across some pictures of my grandfather in Nazi uniform, and suddenly I had a whole different sense of what they had been a part of. I knew they had led these kind of agricultural youth programs, but seeing that he was wearing a Nazi uniform while leading the programs really drove home the point that their “ordinary German” experience was that of the Nazis.” Shattuck does a great job telling a story of three German women during the Fascist years who live together in a rundown, basically uninhabitable Bavarian castle immediately after WW2. These women are war widows whose husbands had been part of the resistance against Hitler. The men plot to assassinate Hitler in what we now call the 1944 July Plot or Operation Valkyrie. Much as been written about this plot, but never from the perspective of the wives and families left behind after the plotters are caught and executed.

Marianne von Lingenfels, the wife of one of the plotters and an aristocratic anti-Nazi promises the men that she will find their widows and provide for them after the war. Marianne is a privileged, controlling mother of three children and whose moral compass becomes a bad case of self-righteousness. However, she makes good on her promise and finds Benita Fledermann, a beautiful, flighty, apolitical young woman who married her childhood friend, Martin Constantine Fledermann. She rescues their young son Martin from a Nazi re-education home. Marianne finds another widow she doesn’t know but whose name appears on the list- Ania Grabereks and her two boys, Anselm and Wolfgang. Ironically, Ania was a true-blue Nazi, though years later she will tell her grown daughter she was too busy or too stupid to have really heard all the terrible things the Nazis were doing. All three of these women with varied backgrounds and belief systems are forced to live with choices and their consequences made during the war years. They are not all who they seem to be. These women represent three different experiences of Germany at the time. They represent the complexities of life for ordinary Germans under Nazism. And following the war, the women represent the aftermath of the Nazi horrors: shame, denial, complicity, self righteousness, trauma, forgiveness, reconciliation, guilt, survival, sacrifices.

What makes this well-written book even more fascinating is Shattuck’s family history. “What I felt was really relevant when I was writing this book was the question of, what did ordinary Germans…experience during that time, and how did they let this happen?” In the post-war years, we look at this whole experience through many lens, like the Holocaust, the Righteous Gentles, the political leaders and alliances, but Shattuck wants to “look at the German experience, the experience of the complicit and the enablers…What did ordinary Germans- the people whose lives sort of touched very peripherally on the darkness- experience during that time, and how did they let this happen? How did they either not see it, or blind themselves to it?”

I wanted to read this book because it kept showing up on Pinterest reading lists as excellent historical fiction. It did not disappoint.

Go to http://www.jessicashattuck.com and read the bonus chapter on Ania.

#jessicashattuck #thewomeninthecastle #germanhistory #nazism

Joanna Cannon- Three Things About Elsie

October 20, 2018 ceilstriplinLeave a comment

“…I suppose losing your mind can prove quite helpful sometimes, because it does hint there is a possibility, however slim, that you may find it again.” Florence Claybourne

Dr. Joanna Cannon is a psychiatrist and the author of this poignant and compassionate novel about four elderly people in an assisted living facility. The fifth main character is dementia. Florence Claybourne’s dementia to be quite specific. Florence lives at Cherry Hill Home for the Elderly against her wishes, and now she may be moved to Greenbanks, a memory care facility against her wishes as well. Her lifelong best friend is Elsie who came to live at Cherry Hill right after Florence moved in. Florence says there are three things about Elsie: 1. She is Florence’s best friend; 2. She always knows the right thing to say to make Florence feel better; 3. It’s hard to explain and sometimes Florence can’t remember it anyway. What throws Florence and Elsie into a tailspin is when a man named Gabriel Price moves into Cherry Hill. The ladies knew him as Ronnie Butler who drowned in 1953.

Florence feels threatened by Gabriel/Ronnie’s sudden appearance but can’t remember why. She and Elsie along with their friend General Jack begin putting the pieces together. Ronnie was the boyfriend of Elsie’s sister, Beryl. Ronnie was a hard-drinking violent man who ran over and killed Beryl one night in 1953. Florence tells Elsie and Jack that Ronnie is out to get her but again she has to put the memories together to know why. The reader experiences Florence’s frustration when she tries to explain that Gabriel/Ronnie is not who he says he is and that he is behind all these memory and judgement mishaps that begin happening to Florence. She didn’t buy those 23 Battenberg cakes! There are great quotes by Florence as Elsie helps her remember the night Beryl was killed and the other terrible things that happened afterwards. Florence confesses, “I tried to find the memory and pull it back in, but it felt very far away, and the elastic was too loose…Sometimes, you feel a memory, before you see it. Even though your eyes can’t quite find it, you can smell it and taste it, and hear it shouting to you from the back of your mind.” Yes, Florence would be what we would call an unreliable narrator who believes she was the one who caused Ronnie to drown. She has been tormented by her memory gaps for years. Elsie tells her to find forgiveness for herself. Elsie says, “There is so much more to us, Florence than the worse thing we have ever done.” General Jack tells Florence that “Everyone of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines…However else would all the light get in?” Jack reminds her we can’t define our lives by a single moment. It’s everything else in our lives that define us.

This is all I’m going to tell you because I don’t want to post this with a bunch of spoiler alerts. There are twists and turns everywhere. I will end with two wonderful quotes by sweet Elsie and one more tidbit of wisdom from Florence. Elsie has an expression she calls the “long second” which is “when you catch the clock, holding on to a second for just a fraction longer than it should. When the world gives you just a little bit more time to make the right decision. There are long seconds all over the place. We just don’t always notice them.” Also Elsie once told Florence that “you can’t tell how big a moment is until you turn back and look at it…” Elsie- full of wisdom about how to live with ourselves. And Florence, who has lived long enough to lose the people she has loved most, says, “I think the hardest part of loosing anyone is that you still have to live with the same scenery. It’s just that the person you are used to isn’t part of it anymore, and all you notice are all the gaps where they used to be. It feels as though, if you concentrate hard enough, you can find them again in those empty spaces. Waiting for you. ”

Dr. Cannon writes of life, friendship and old age with such knowledge, compassion and wisdom. You will love Florence who always tries so hard to do the right thing and to be a good person. She does and she is, more than she remembers.

#joannacannon #threethingsaboutElsie #oldage #dementia

Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

October 13, 2018October 13, 2018 ceilstriplin1 Comment

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better than answers you cannot question.” Yuval Noah Harari

Let me begin by saying Harari’s newest book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is rocking my world. It is a call for discussion/debate/conversation about what kind of world we want in the middle of the 21st century. It will not be the world most of us have grown up in, but what will it be? How will “Big Data”, algorithms and artificial intelligence to name just a few impact our lives and the lives of our grandchildren? We need to begin discussion now. Harari writes, “…it’s hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are…because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts.” We all have to participate.

We humans love our stories; stories help define us, tell us who we are as individuals and as societies. Harari notes that the overall historical story of the 20th century has been reduced to the fascist story, the communist story and the liberal democracy story. Let’s remind ourselves of the definition of liberal democracy from our high school government class. “Liberal democracy is a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of liberalism, i.e. protecting the rights of the individual, which are generally enshrined in law. It is characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all persons” (Wikipedia). The Allied victory of WW2 eliminated the fascist story. The collapse of the USSR did away with the communist story, which leads us to the discussions of liberal democracy that “celebrates the value and power of liberty.” It has long been accepted by America and the West that peace and prosperity are brought about by liberal democracy and global economies.

However Harari writes that today with the rise of nationalism, xenophobia and the disillusionment with globalism, we are suddenly left without a story for the 21st century. Who are we now? Humans have always defined ourselves by our stories, myths and legends. Harari says we “lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality. Disorientation causes [us] to think in apocalyptic terms, as if the failure of history to come to its envisioned happy ending can only mean that it is hurtling toward Armageddon. Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches onto catastrophic scenarios… portend the end of human civilization.” Add to this toxic thought life, the reality of instant information, artificial intelligence, bots and fake news, cryptocurrencies and blockchain revolution, biotechnology- Whoa! It’s overwhelming. We’re hamsters on a treadmill struggling to keep up with these vast changes and their impacts on our lives. “Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by…The liberal [democracy] story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?…We are consequently left with the task of creating an updated story for the world. Just as the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the novel ideologies of the twentieth century, so the coming revolutions in biotechnology and information technology are likely to require fresh visions. The next decades might therefore be characterized by intense soul-searching and by the formulation of new social and political models.” We will not be successful in formulating fresh visions while we are telling ourselves the sky is falling. As Drs. Leaf and Amen from last week’s blog would say that we are stopping the toxic chemical flow in our brains when we stop the panic-driven thoughts. We could definitely benefit with less toxic brain chemicals.

We need “a new and meaningful narrative” with no blaming, hollering, finger-pointing and snarling. We need to work not only one on one but government to government because many of these challenges are global. They don’t just effect one country. Defining a new and meaningful narrative could be more difficult in this season of nationalism and isolationism that America is experimenting with. These challenges have universal implications and will take nations working together, not withdrawing their little heads into their shells. We are not turtles, and we don’t need to pretend to be. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if America leaves a void in defining the narrative for the rest of the 21st century, we will live with the consequences of someone else filling that void. Harari puts it brilliantly when he writes, “If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair, but who said history was fair.”

Let’s look at these challenges as possibilities instead of problems. Let’s take heart, find our courage like the lion in the Wizard of Oz- it’s already inside of us. Our little planet has lived through many world-changing revolutions- in politics, industry and civil wars. We have written many new and meaningful narratives since time immemorial. We can do it again.

#yuvalnoahharari #21lessonsforthe21stcentury #spiegel&grau