Forgiving your flaws. Embracing your virtues. 5 Stars for The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards at its heart is about forgiveness. David, a doctor, husband, father, and once a child growing up poor with a sick sister makes the choice to give away his own daughter (Phoebe) because she is sick. She simply is born with Downs Syndrome a condition that results because a child is born with an extra chromosome. Notable characteristics of this condition are eyes that slant upward, short stature, and a flat nasal bridge.

Developmentally they are behind their peers and they often make poor judgements combined with impulsive behavior. They are prone to many health issues including heart defects that cause them not to live long; however, there are exceptions to this. David, the protagonist of the story and the memory keeper knows all the this the moment his daughter is born and he combines this knowledge with the sister who caused his family so much pain due to physical defects.

Once being drawn into this book because of the premise, I was further drawn into effects of David's choice to give his daughter away. I wanted to know if happiness and forgiveness is possible after such a choice. Edwards wove the human condition of not just David's feelings, but an intricate pattern of his wife's, son's, surrogate mother's, and finally his own tragic quilt piece into a beautifully odd blanket highlighted by Phoebe's open embrace.

A few years ago, I met a young man with Downs Syndrome and was lucky enough to be in his life on a daily basis for the course of one year. After knowing him, I concluded that his extra chromosome was like an extra sight into the human emotional psyche. He seemed to understand someones's happiness, sadness, and anger before even they did, and often he placed someone else's happiness above his own. He genuinely wanted to make those around him happy though his very simple and rose colored glasses. 

Often I have found myself cynical pondering the flaws of the universe I cannot explain. This young man was like rope in an endless space of darkness. He gave me hope reminding me not of vices but of virtues. Fortunately, his family saw him in the same hope filled light. Kim Edwards understood this with Phoebe, and it was why even the darkest secret can often be forgiven. If you want a story about real forgiveness, read The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

Stephen King and Bob Dylan

For me, a good Stephen King book is like a Bob Dylan concert. Sometimes it's a Subterranean Homesick Blues night, other times it's Blowing in the Wind. Doctor Sleep was far from Blowing in the Wind. It is fast paced scare-the-bejesus out of you horror that is my kind of book. A great many things worked it in this book from plot, tone, minimal imagery allowing the reader to fill in the gaps, to characterization.

The story was told by Danny from King's first book, The Shining; however, Danny is Dan and all grown-up and ready to deal with the monsters of the past and present. Problem is Dan is a recovering alcoholic who has some of his own demons to battle first. He's not hero material and gosh I love a well-flawed character to meet a super villian. King knows how to create those. I'm thinking of Pennywise and the Master Vampire from Salem's Lot. Doctor Sleep has Rose the Hat, a seductive beauty when she's not killing and drinking the steam of the young. She has a single tooth then and a wicked appetite.

I understand The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe's White Witch is playing Rose in an upcoming movie. I can't think of a better person for the role.

I'd love to see this movie!
I highly recommend the book!

BUT.. save the movie for after. I still haven't read The Shining by King, but have watched the movie. I regret that. Always read the book first.

War painted in Fauvist Reds and Grays - 5 Stars for The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

Fauvism is style of painting that used pure, brilliant color aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas. This is what the imagery in The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara looked like when I read it. Of course, it is a book rooted in war and there seems to be nothing more explosive - other than the grief and silence of death. The explosion of color paralleled Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, but it also favored Crane’s book with blooming characterization from seed to wintery death.

“It was like the gray floor of hell.” Gettysburg as described by Joshua Chamberlain, Union commander.

“War, the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill.” Red Badge of Courage

Gray or red each color describes the aftermath of war like ash and fire. Both Crane and Shaara leave the reader with infinite fauvist portraits of war.

The characterization of Lee, Chamberlain and Longstreet, unlike Henry in Red Badge of courage, began in full bloom rather than innocence, men already full of age and wisdom with stubborness as a crutch to choose poorly or not. In Shaara’s retrospective study, Lee’s stubbornness caused the turning point in the war at Gettysburg; whereas, Longstreet saw a better path, one not filled with human pride. The dynamic presented between Longstreet and Lee did not define one man as right or wrong. Shaara did an amazing job of showing the beauty in both of their choices.

My favorite character was Chamberlain. His character examined the reasons for the war exploring not just slavery, but the essence of the human condition which is Shakespeare - and also where the title of the book seem to come from:

“Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: “What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!” And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, “Well, boy, if he’s and angel, he’s sure a murden’ angel.”

This line is from Hamlet where Hamlet glorifies man and then finds man and the world around him as mere dust. It reminds me again of the men that fought and then the imagery presented, gray and red; man comes in like a fiery angel only to turn to dust leaving a gray floor of hell. At its heart, Killer Angels begs the question of why any man may fight and kill another sacrificing his own life. It is worth the read and maybe a second one.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is a great source for young people who want to pursue a dream without being ridiculed. After reading Krakauer's intense journey into the psyche of Chris McCandless which unraveled with meticulous journalism; I found myself doing everything but poking fun at Chris. In fact, I ended up admiring his deep passion that unfortunately led to his death. And in the end, this is what a good writer does - they change your mind.

I often wonder if a great many people who live an entire life lived the full life Chris McCandless did in twenty-four years. Krakauer did an admirable job of following Chris's journey to Alaska and then his stay there allowing the reader to make their own mind up about whether or not Chris was a kook, an idealistic idiot, or a passionate youth who made a couple of wrong choices. Sure, there was some biased. It was obvious from the author's note in the beginning Krakauer made his mind up early on about Chris. Krakauer even compared his own youth when he climbed a hazardous mountain called Devils Thumb. Krakauer was only a year younger than Chris when he followed what he described as a "scattershot passion of youth and a literary diet in works of Nietzsche and Kerouac." 

But the parallels Krakauer made to Chris scoped way beyond his own youth, but that of other daring adventurers following their dreams. So, even though Chris's story seems unbelievable at first glance; it is not original. There seems to be a Jack London fascination with the harrowing outdoors that extends into the core of mankind. Without bold strokes of generalization, this fascination makes Chris like so many other youthful men his age. 

For myself, the virtuous characteristics that separated Chris into the individual were those that extended to others outside of his dream. Despite the pain his family went through, Chris possessed an empathy towards others especially those starving and homeless. It was a generosity that bled from him infecting everyone who encountered him on his journey to Alaska. Even though Chris rebelled against the need for others; he embraced it along his journey and in the end his discovery of his need of others was his ultimate epiphany. 

"Happiness only real when shared."

Krakauer had a similar discovery:

"I convinced myself for many months that I didn't really mind the absence of intimacy in my life, the lack of real human connection, but the pleasure I felt in this woman's company - the ring of her laughter, the innocent touch of a hand on my arm - exposed my self-deceit and left me hollow and aching."

Into the Wild is about self-discovery, and no matter what your age; we should always be open to growth. 

5 Stars for Strange Weather

x

Strange Weather by Joe Hill is a collection of four, short, horror novels with little to do with the actual weather and more to do with innate fears erupting from monsters found in everyday life. Weather seems to symbolize the over-arching theme of our worst enemy (self) which ties the four seemingly different novels together. Our inner thoughts (fears and beliefs) are the catalyst to the kind of weather we have to endure. Just like the weather (a snowy day is opposite of one that is sunny) these stories are different at first glance, but if you dig deeper, and I think Hill did, you discover real monsters are created out of our own paranoia and fear. And it is here, we should be afraid.

In the first story, Snapshot, the fear of memory loss and growing older plagues us in diseases -Alzheimer. This fear is embodied in a creepy guy called the Phoenician.

“But he was feverishly ugly, his chin sunk most of the way back into his long neck, his cheeks corroded with old acne scars.”

“Don’t let him take a picture of you. Don’t let him start taking things away.”

I can’t think of a scarier way to lose my memory, but to a guy that looks like the Phoenician and steals memories with a click of a camera. And the Phoenician’s descriptive doesn’t stop with his physical appearance, it infiltrates his voice, actions and mean, heartless words he often spits out at every one he encounters, especially the narrator, a young boy named Michael, a good kid who wants to do the ‘right’ thing. The story follows a straight forward almost predictable ending, so this is not what makes this story interesting. It is the motive behind the Phoenician that is interesting and it is a genuinely fun read, scary, but fun. I’m an eighties girl, so the references made me laugh out loud.

“He grinned wolfishly beneath his Tom Selleck mustache. And – look – even the Trans Am was there.”

OMG, I remember that mustache, needing charisma, and Magnum P.I. cheese stud. I became nostalgic over other Eighty fun memorabilia, G.I. Joes, Artic Blu, and the Polaroid camera. Snapshot reminded me of a shorter version of Hill’s NOS4A2, a book about good versus evil with a little digging into what we hold as humanly important and traditional. In Snapshot it would be sanity, memories intact and in NOS4A2 Christmas traditions are turned inside out distorting the complimentary reds and greens to greys, and poop brown, turning vile and freakishly horrific. Both stories make you afraid pulling at your inner fear and paranoia.

The second story, Loaded, focuses on our fear of guns, and our need to embrace them out of fear. Sure, there seems to be some politics from Hill here, but not in way that bothered me. The story pointed at not the gun, but the monster behind the trigger. The ending is worth the read on this one, and I couldn’t see it taking another direction considering the foreshadowing that lead up to it.

The third story, Aloft, strange indeed, about a man getting hijacked by a cloud while parachuting from a plane. Aubrey, the man kidnapped, is afraid of heights, but this is not the larger fear at work in this story. Are we not afraid of floating through life, as if on a cloud, and then later waking up knowing we never parted our hair differently or ate the peach life presented to us. Are we afraid of wasting so much time, there will be no time? Are we afraid of leaping off our cloud-like home and reaching a bigger potential within ourselves? This story may have taught me to be less afraid after reading it.

The last story, Rain, was the results of fear and loss. Loss was the reason for the killer rain, and fear augmented it.  Once the killer rain fell, everyone began to theorize without fact and solely based on inner fear, inevitably causing a war among men. The ending came as unexpected until right before it was revealed. I like being surprised. Characterization was interesting. Honeysuckle Speck was completely flushed out in a short span of time with lines like the ones below, and heck, I just liked her.

“One look at the strappy white muscle shirt and the trucker haircut and you’d spot me for a bull dyke.”

Honeysuckle was true to her name, after wearing her sexuality out with big chunks of love for her lover Yolanda, the sweet smell of honeysuckles was left revealing real reasons to love, an invisible force that moved Honeysuckle on her journey to live, despite the grim circumstances the rain had left the world in. Rain could have easily been my favorite of the four stories, but I felt it needed to be a novel. The end, although complete, needed more flushing out. For example, the character of Ursula needed more background to play the key role she did. It was way too interesting to just be a short novel.

Strange Weather is highly recommended to those who want a good psychological scare by taking a look at reality.

5 Stars for The Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Summary: 

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Review:

I read The Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance because it is on my daughter’s reading list this summer and reading what she reads allows me to connect with her through our life long love of books. The Hillbilly Elegy is the best book I’ve read in a long time. The last book I read on my daughter’s list was Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and the classical rhetorical laced with her “I” agenda made me graze pages like a fat cow eager for slaughter. Kill me, please! No offense to Rand, she has her merits, but I wanted a story. I am a big tootsie pop (sucker) for good stories. Now several key ingredients make up a well-constructed story beginning with a Shakespearean understanding of the human condition.

1.    Vance understands the human condition. The human condition are the characteristics, essential events, and particular events which evolve around birth, growth, and inner and outer conflict.

“Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart.”

Vance understands what motivates the anger behind his Mamaw’s words, and it cuts at the core of the human condition. Vance’s book is loaded with this understanding, not just Mamaw, but his father and the reason he gave him up in the first place, his mother and her continuous struggle with drugs and men, his Aunt Wee, and his sister Lindsay, and finally his own human condition revealed in the monster dream at the end.

2.    Themes of forgiveness bathed in hope and the strength to overcome adversity. Vance came from dirt poor and turned Ivy League Yale graduate now living the American dream. He didn’t make that journey with the human feelings of anger and resentment that often blames others for their circumstances; He made it with love, forgiveness and understanding.

“For me understanding my past and knowing I wasn’t doomed gave me the hope and fortitude to deal with the demons of my youth.”

3.    Humility: Vance credits his success hugely to his mamaw and papaw. “Few of even my closest friends understood how utterly hopeless my life would have been without Mamaw and Papaw. So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due.”

He doesn’t only credit Mamaw and Papaw, but a whole slew of blue-collar workers who helped him to achieve his Ivy League dream. These people include his sister, his cousin Gail, his Aunt Wee and even his mother, despite her many problems, instilled in him a lifelong love of education.

Vance says, “Remove any of these people from the equation and I’m probably screwed.”

4.    Accessibility: The Hemingway/Shrunk in White style of writing has a conversational syntax that can be grasped by anyone. Vance may be Ivy League now, but he still has the heart of his hillbilly ancestors and he knows how to speak to them and for them.

5.    Humor: This book will make you laugh out loud despite some of the horrific circumstances in Vance’s childhood, the laughter was the hope as conveyed in many of Mamaw’s speeches, especially this particular one on bullying.

“And she said something I will never forget: ‘Sometimes, honey, you have to fight, even when you’re not defending yourself. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.’ Then she taught me a move, a swift hard (make sure to turn your hips) punch right to the gut.”

6.    Solutions: Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is similar to Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy because it shows a tough upbringing turned successful; however, as good as that story was, Walls did not offer any solutions for the homeless. Now, I’m not saying Vance offers great solutions for the problems with poverty in our country, but he does offer simple solutions, ones involving self-examination and our role in society. Recently, someone told me to read Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell (the title made me hesitate reminding me of a book Tom Buchanan liked in The Great Gatsby), now while this book probably offers great solutions; It was not what I looked for with Vance’s book. In Vance’s book I looked for a story about a poor boy who went Ivy. Vance’s book is a memoir and the parallel to Sowell’s non-fiction book just doesn’t work here. I recommend Vance’s book to all of those people who still believe in the American Dream and the hope and love where good family support fuels the dream. Vance’s tone is so optimistic for those wanting to follow a similar path, and even more so to everyone who wants stability, a home, a family and love.

3 Stars for Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer is a heartbreaking tale about the lives lost on Mount Everest in 1996. Krakauer was one of eight clients lead by Rob Hall, a well-known guide to climb Everest. Rob Hall did not make it back. Some of those clients did not make it back. Krakauer barely made it back. Why would anyone want to climb Mount Everest? After reading, Into Thin Air, again I asked why would anyone want to climb Mount Everest?

Krakauer states, “Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.” 

Krakauer seems to be a romantic, though not necessarily a hopeless one. His descriptions of Everest are at times breathtaking, but not misunderstood as a Romeo/hopeless romantic with a shaky hold on reality.

“The glacier’s continual and often violent state of flux added an element of uncertainty to every ladder crossing.”

At the same time, there is an understanding of “reality”.

“But if the ice fall was strenuous and terrifying, it had a surprising allure as well. As dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional landscape of phantasmal beauty.”

The descriptions and Krakauer’s obvious respect for Everest especially after the disaster in 1996 made me appreciate Into Thin Air. Krakauer’s respected guys like Rob Hall and his abilities. Hall is described as a fast learner with the ability to soak up skills and attitudes from anybody revealing a humility in the narrator to recognize the tremendous abilities of another climber, further recognizing his own short comings in that area. Despite the obvious unreliable narrator present in the memoir, Krakauer’s compassion for others and his unwillingness to ‘toot his own horn’ made me want to believe his account.

Still, Krakauer’s mind at the time of this disaster was in dire need of the oxygen only found at ground level. As pointed out in his book, high altitudes often rob the best climbers of their rational sense, and awareness of what is going on around them.

I ended up giving this book a three, not because of the writing. Krakauer is a skilled writer with the style of a journalist – I gave it a three because of the plethora of facts thrown at me on every page without transition to let me absorb, the list of names switching often from first to last names made my head spin, and last, the lack of emotion that Krakauer presented until the very end, which could be the journalist in him.

Still, even with my head trying to wrap around all the names and facts, some stayed with me as scary interesting. I didn’t know HAPE meant High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, where the lungs fill with fluid and the only cure is to descend. In the story there are several camps leading to the summit of Everest, at camp one a climber named Ngawang was lost to HAPE and that’s after he was flown off the mountain. Ngawang had a wife and three daughters. At camp one, already foreboding circled the air around the climbers, and yet they continued to ascend.

Other facts that plagued me were the amount of dead bodies all along the trail, bodies that could never be buried properly, bodies to remind you of the dangers, bodies to push you onward, in my case, downward. The other fact that remains with me is the ethical one: How do you let someone die? How can you not help your fellow man? I can’t imagine having to make a heartbreaking choice to leave a man to die in order to keep on living yourself.

I can’t imagine ever undertaking a journey like Everest that would leave me with those choices, or losing a limb due to frostbite, or worse, dying. I can’t imagine climbing Everest; however, I can recommend this book to others to climb Everest within the pages of Krakauer’s story Into Thin Air. This is the safe way. I will be using this book as a non-fiction piece in my classroom this year giving the kiddos a break from Shakespeare and Homer.