Chasing Ray

She asked me: "Who is buried in my father's grave?"

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:31:11 -0800

When I first started researching my family history way back in the late 1980s there was no internet and it was mighty expensive to find things out. So when my grandmother and her sister (my great aunt Marion) asked me to look into the mystery surrounding their father's grave it took a while to sort things out. First, you have to know that in NYC it is common for multiple bodies to placed (stacked) in one plot. In the case of Tom Lennon it was a three body plot but I have found as many as six bodies in plots owned by my grandfather's family. So having someone else in there with your loved one is pretty common but you usually know who you ended up with. My great aunt Agnes had visited Tom's grave a couple of years before and taken note of the woman buried beneath him: Margaret Rowland. No one in the family had a clue who Margaret was.

How do you resist a challenge like this one?

The first thing I did was write to St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx and ask for the full names of everyone buried in my great grandfather's plot. I got back that Tom and Margaret were there together and also that the grave had been bought by Edward Rowland, husband of Margaret, when she died in 1918. (It cost $38 if you're wondering.) With the exact date of death I was able to send away for a copy of her death certificate for genealogical reasons (no Ancestry.com back then). We were thinking she was an aunt or cousin of my great grandfather but the death certificate proved to a be a bit more complicated. Margaret was born in the U.S. in 1875 (and only 42 when she died of uterine cancer). Her parents were both born in Ireland and their names were Bridget Waldren & John Lennon.

On one hand you have to take the names of deceased parents & circumstances of birth on a death certificate with a grain of salt, because they can often be wrong. But John Lennon was the name of Tom's father and my grandmother thought he had been married twice (maybe - all of her Lennon grandparents were dead long before she came along). Tom's mother was named Catherine (and we had his baptismal certificate along with his siblings' from the Church of the Sacred Hearth in the Bronx so we knew the names of John & Catherine were true.) So maybe Margaret was from the first marriage and thus his half sister? Bridget is such an unusual name and the Irish are infamous for keeping names for generations (we are knee deep in Catherines for example). For the past couple of decades we just looked at it all this way and put a big question mark next to Bridget and when she might have died.

Until I got all busy recently on Ancestry.com.

I was looking in the 1900 census for another family member - supposed sister or aunt of Tom - who had an unusual married name (more on her later - but she's another Catherine). And I found her, as a widow in the 1900 NYC census, living with her children and her sister Margaret (born 1874 - which is close enough) and her brother Robert (Tom had an Uncle Rob my grandmother knew quite well) and her mother, a widow named Bridget Lennon.

Talk about a shocker.

Bridget was not the first wife of John Lennon and her children were not Tom's half siblings. She was Tom's grandmother - married to John Lennon, Sr who was apparently Tom's grandfather (we had never gotten that far back but I'm so not surprised to find yet another John). Tom was buried with his aunt - not his half sister. Here's how it looks:

John Lennon married Bridget Waldren and they had at least four children: Catherine, Margaret, Robert & another John. (My grandmother personally knew Catherine & Rob.)

The younger John married Catherine Nolan and they had lots of kids (like another John, a James, a Catherine, etc) including, in 1888, Tom Lennon. (And both died before any of Tom's kids ever knew them.)

Tom Lennon married Julia Pressl in 1910 and had eight children - including my grandmother (another Catherine) (and yes - there is another John in there as well).

So after twenty years, Margaret finally led me to Bridget who all this time was a generational leap that I never recognized. My great great great grandmother died in New York City - she seems to be the first generation to come here from Ireland. She is the one who made the trip and now I know her - I know who she is.

Days like this, I miss my grandmother more than you can possibly imagine. She would have loved this. Now, I just need to find where Bridget was buried and when she died and exactly who all those kids were. But still....I'm a lot further along then I used to be!

PS. Is this the perfect St Patrick's Day post, or what?

[Post pic of St Raymond's Church & Cemetery in the Bronx in 1905 - where my great grandfather is buried. The church is still open; Tom Lennon, 1928. He died five years later at age 43.]

Thoreau fatigue

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:27:47 -0800

I have been reading a lot about Thoreau lately because when writing about people who disappear into the wilderness, Thoreau is generally pretty front and center in their lives. What's interesting though is that once you become aware of Thoreau you start to find him everywhere. I am knee deep in Thoreau lately, to the point that I actually laugh when I find him quoted on the page. At first it was funny but last night when I opened a new book I'm reviewing for Booklist on a lost Amazon tribe I almost threw it across the room when I saw the opening quote - yes, it was all about wilderness and it was from my dear friend Henry.

(Don't worry, I didn't actually toss it and I'm not holding it against the author. It was just momentary wig out.)

In Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury she has a great passage where she describes the annoying American obsession with Thoreau (or what I've come to term "Thoreaumania):

The mention of Walden in polite society inevitably elicits great praise. "My favorite book," someone says. Or "I live by that book." What they mean is that they know about the book and take it to be a handbook for the simpler life they might want to lead, if they ever got tired of making money and going to parties, or if they ever came to believe that the status in their community that makes them comfortable was really not important at all.

I decided we had all jumped the Thoreau shark when I recently read one of the new "Bright Young Thing" interviews in Vanity Fair with a twenty-something debutante I've never heard of who, of course, mentioned Walden as one of her favorite books of all time. (I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when this month's pick actually mentioned Harry Potter.)

What bothers me about all this Thoreau love is not that I don't like him or what he wrote; after reading The Thoreau You Don't Know I'm even more intrigued then ever by how interesting he was. But I don't ever read about him in other books in anything other than an idealized way. He is always out in the woods - way way way out in the woods - and his quotes are used to sell the idea that only out in the woods far from humanity and technology and any sort of modern society can you truly find out WHAT MATTERS. There is a superiority to many of the ways I see him quoted as in, "just like Thoreau I get what life is all about and you people, who are reading about my perfect life, don't."

It makes one want to grab a copy of Walden and go smack someone with it.

As annoying as this can be (and it really does get annoying); it has also been very interesting to see how Thoreau has become short hand for a trendy life style choice. People throw out his name or quote from Walden to attach their own words to an ideal they think he espoused. Basically, you slap his name into a book and that is short hand for "serious nature writer" or "true nature lover" or, when used more than once, "wilderness guy or girl lives here". When I saw it in the Amazon book though I wondered if this was all the author's fault or if editors were part of the problem as well. Have we all become so used to the lazy name dropping of Thoreau that we expect to see it in any book that might be about wilderness and thus publishers make sure it is there? On some level it's like he's become the fast food element of nature writing - the fries with your story of inner peace and beauty in the woods.

The thing is, I remain deeply impressed by Thoreau. It's everybody else I"m starting to have issues with.

[Post pic of Walden Pond.]

Seen, heard and passed along: the somewhat British edition

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:32:37 -0800

It has been a mad blur of reading and note taking and reviewing here of late - because everything I read seems to be either as research (thus the notes) or the for future columns (thus the reviews). Hmm. Except for Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor which I'm just reading because it is funny. But I'll probably blog on it at some point too.

Booklist likes the latest Maisie Dobbs, The Mapping of Love and Death, which is a relief. This one focuses on the true story "about the discovery of a collapsed dugout from World War I containing the bodies of a cartography team and their equipment."

Booklist also recommends the Molly Murphy series by Rhys Bowen (latest title, The Last Illusion) to fans of the 1920s time period & Dobbs series, although it is set in the US (the new one includes Bess Houdini).

I wish Vanity Fair had their excerpt up online of the new Waugh biography Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne as it is quite a good read and really made me look forward to the book. (That is a charming cover too, isn't it?)

I am reading Kate Milford's The Boneshaker and all of you who have heard early Newbery rumblings about this one would do well to heed them. It certainly has some Bradbury (ala Something Wicked This Way Comes) touches, but also a delightful bit of Wright Brothers bicycle invention/repair, Robert Johnson at the crossroads and Dewey Kerrigan (via The Green Glass Sea). I am most pleased with this one (about one third of the way through) and will have a review in my May column.

Just finished Joan Didion's Where I Was From as she mentions Jack London a few times and he is a current subject of study (along with Stegner and Kerouac and Thoreau and George Mallory and several lost climbers and hikers and those who seek adventure in the west and on mountains). (Do you see a theme emerging?)

There is some fascinating stuff in this essay collection on class and California - I'll leave with a bit that resonated quite strongly with me as it explains so much of the social confusion the country seems to be grappling with today (the initial quote comes from an LA Times article Didion pulls from about a string of crimes committed by teens in a middle class community that can not believe what has happened):

"But we had a our class differences before the immigrants. One of our sons was on the football team in the high school in Costa Mesa about twelve years ago. They had a great team and they were beating the pants off one of the schools in Newport Beach and the Newport stands started to cheer 'Hey, hey that's OK, you're gonna work for us one day.'"

That is what it costs to create and maintain an artificial ownership class.

This is what happens when that class stops being useful.

ETA: Do go see the mad book binge Jenny D., is on - is that a wondrous library pile of light reading, or what?

Seeking truth in a place where everyone reports lies

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:02:10 -0800

My column this month is about truth and includes several nonfiction titles that I think all tell stories worth knowing. One in particular though, People Like Us by Joris Luyendijk, really impressed the hell out of me. Here's a bit of my review:

As he [Luyendijk] riffs on one level of insanity after another (“Egypt’s dictator is called ‘President’ even though he inherited his job from his predecessor who, in turn, used force to gain power. This particular dictator leads the ‘National Democratic Party’ which is neither democratic nor a party.”), Luyendijk maintains an attitude of wit and bemused sarcasm that will be particularly appealing to older teens. He isn’t talking down to his readers at all, but in fact is actually trusting them to be smart enough to be talked up to. This is a journalist who says: Let me tell you how it really is, even though it isn’t easy to hear. The mind reels with one revelation after another. Those all too commonly displayed images of protestors damning America, and burning its flag in spontaneous riots, that instill the conviction of “them vs. us” into our national conversation? “Guys,” he writes, “you probably think that a demonstration is something citizens use freely to express whatever they are for or against, but in a dictatorship such ‘outbursts of anger’ are often staged or are at least heavily managed by the regime.”

...With every word, Luyendijk provides a different perspective on what we think we know, and challenges head on what we are accustomed to believing. Killer smart and devastatingly direct, this is journalism at its best. A book for back pockets and backpacks, for classroom discussion and those determined to take on the world, People Like Us is not to be missed.

I know a lot of people are intimidated by books on current events - especially in the Middle East - but this is a very easy book to read. Luyendijk knows his audience and he speaks to them in a hip, casual tone - as someone who wants to hang out and talk international politics like it's football or the latest American Idol results. In other words, he's not pontificating, he's not some politician or partisan talking head demanding that you see things only his way. He's simply a guy whose been there and seen it and is smart enough to write about it all in a very appealing manner. And you want to hang out with him, because he really has some very interesting things to say. Consider this from an interview he gave last fall with ABC Australia:

ELEANOR HALL: And Joris Luyendijk, how have your journalistic colleagues responded to your book?

JORIS LUYENDIJK: They have tried to drive me out. They have been really angry and I think it had to do a little bit with that many journalists these days feel very much under siege you know with the economic crisis and the internet and all these things.

And I think it is also because it is male dominated and the journalists are very often machos and they like to stand there and pretend that it was wildly heroic to make it to Baghdad even though they just hopped on the GMC vehicle with five other journalists and all they had to do was sit, get out at the studio and climb the roof.

They'd like to pretend that it is all very heroic and then someone comes up and just says well actually, um, it wasn't heroic at all. You just exposed a politician for what he really does. He won't be grateful either.

I really meant what I said in my review - that People Like Us belongs in backpacks and back pockets. It's the kind of truth that I think will be embraced by anyone of any age who wants to know what is going on - that just want a straight shooter with no political ax of their own to grind to tell them how it is or if they don't know then admit that and explain what they do know. If I was 17 and dreamed of changing the world this is the book I would reach for, hands down. I can't wait to see what this very talented journalist does next. (Oh - and no surprise, it's the fabulous Soft Skull Press who published the U.S. edition.)

[Post pic of the man himself. Is it wrong that I find this photo wildly appealing? :)]

A reviewing dilemma concerning racism by omission

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:24:19 -0800

One of the things that came up in the past couple of months during the flurry of postings about whitewashing covers and diversity in reviewing, etc. was a brief mention that I was accusing some authors of "racisim by omission". This one gave me pause - serious pause - and because of it (and because I was really tired) I pulled back from the subject for a little while. The accusation came up because I had posted that reviewers should mention when a book has an all Caucasian cast that would be just fine if it had characters of a different race. In other words (and I'm ONLY using this as an example) Bella could have been African American or Latina or Pakistani and Twilight still would have worked just fine. Her ethnicity doesn't have anything to do with the story and yet because Caucasian is all too often the default in publishing (especially YA) she is, of course, White.

But upon reflection I realize that in essence I was saying we should note when authors omit characters of different ethnicity from their books which, yes, would be accusing them of racism by omission. That is, in effect, saying you have written a perfectly fine book but as it is not the book that I want to read it is wrong. And as all we all know that is never a good thing for a reviewer to do. Plus, I'm not the diversity police. And yet. And yet. I can't just let this go.

The thing is, if every single book published had Caucasian characters and we never said anything because we didn't want to accuse authors of racism by omission then that would be laughable. Obviously everyone would think it was absurd not to cry racism in such an obvious circumstance. As it is now, the preponderance of teen books published have straight Caucasian (mostly blonde) characters. But we have entered into a period where it is not AS bad as it used to be and so reviewers only point out the obvious (whitewashed covers for example) and tread softly on the rest. We might say we personally wish Bella was African American or that she and "Edward" were lesbians but we don't review the book that way because it's not all about what any one reviewer wants. I don't want to pick on Meyer for race. (I'll happily pick on her for creating a spineless character, however.) But do we ever say anything about books excluding non-White characters? Is there ever a correct instance to point this out?

I'm asking because I have a problem with a book I recently read. Here's my straightforward review:

Richard Sala has created romp of a British boarding school mystery with a major Lemony Snicket spin in his graphic novel Cat Burglar Black. Orphan “K” was raised in a foster home with a Faganesque housemother who forced her charges to commit crimes. K has become quite the crafty cat burglar but is delighted as a teen to have an unknown aunt surface and invite her to a life of comfort out in the country in her boarding school. Unfortunately the aunt has taken grievously ill by the time K arrives and instead she is met by a bizarre group of teachers, three slightly strange fellow students, and the news that all classes have been canceled. Immediately suspicious (of course, of course), K. starts snooping and the house of cards that has been built for her benefit rapidly falls to pieces. There is a big huge conspiracy of thievery in place and K. has to help steal some old paintings in order to solve a puzzle and hopefully recover a fortune in gold and jewels. She also has to stay alive which is not so easy (this would be when a lot of the Snicket-touches play into the plot). Multiple mysteries unfold such as the location of her ailing aunt and the source of a ghostly voice emanating from an old statue. K is plucky and determined though and equally adept at scaling a roof or outrunning scary beasts. In the end, in the best Nancy Drew fashion, the bad guys are identified and the good ones rescued. There is still the question of what happened to K’s schoolmates however, but Sala handily leaves their fates open to a sequel. Overall Cat Burglar Black is a fun read with lovely illustrations and a snappy, guilty pleasurish plot.

So, there you go - all sounds fine, right? Except when it comes to the four teenage girls. With a blonde, brunette, redhead and K., with solid white hair, Sala seems to have gone out of his way to keep the girls Caucasian while struggling to make them distinguishable. (The only difference is hair length.) It would have been a lot easier to actually make this a multicultural cast of characters and I wish I knew why Sala didn’t go that route because honestly you can't tell the supporting cast apart. Was he trying to make the three other girls so similar they didn't matter? I don't honestly know - I just know that they spoke the same, had similar backgrounds, never stood out from one another as being nicer or meaner or funnier and dropped on cue like flies. I actually paged back and forth at first to see which was which and then just gave up. It became a nuisance to me that I couldn't keep them straight so if he did it on purpose he succeeded but it affected my ability to enjoy the book. So why not have at least one of them be a different race?

That's how I read the book and what I thought when I was done. But when it comes to reviewing a title like this, what should a reviewer do? Do you skirt the racism by omission topic and let it go or do you mention it? Do you just say that you couldn't tell the girls apart and leave it at that? Isn't that kind of wimping out though? Is it wrong to say these girls were four Caucasian cliches and ask why the author/illustrator did this?

Bottom line, is it ever appropriate to discuss racism by omission in a review?

This wolf is my buddy & it's about damn time

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:47:52 -0800

I've been paging through the very delightful Big Wolf & Little Wolf: The Little Leaf That Wouldn't Fall and wondering just how to fit in a picture book review in my column when I received the current issue of National Geographic and realized I really needed to be talking about this one here and why it matters on multiple levels. Wolves are the topic in Nat Geo again this month, as they have been off and on. The war over killing, then saving and now having successfully saved them turning to kill them again, has been part and parcel of the wolf story in America for quite some time now. And as I've written here before (and here about dogs and wolves and stories) much of how we feel about wolves is wrapped around the stories we've told about them for centuries. The wolf stories are all bad, every single one. We just don't have cute and fuzzy wolf stories and that is part of why I think the Big Wolf & Little Wolf books are so important.

They are also very sweet and lovely to look at.

Betsy reviewed Big Wolf & Little Wolf last fall and nails much of what I liked about it on the head:

Most recently, in has slipped an understated but infinitely charming little series starring two wolves with childlike neuroses. Big Wolf and Little Wolf comes straight from the sunny shores of France and for those parents looking for a new sibling book, this may be one of the less common alternatives out there. One of the sweeter too.

The "sibling" relationship is worked out in the first book and in this second title Nadine Brun-Cosme turns to finding the perfect gift for a friend (in this case a leaf) and also the beauty of a simple act of kindness. The two wolves are dear friends and spend fall and winter studying a nearby tree and its slowly falling leaves. Big Wolf goes through all sorts of peril to climb and get Little Wolf the leaf he wants so desperately and Little Wolf is deeply appreciative. It's about being good friends (or brothers) but mostly it's about taking time to really know the person (or wolf) you care about. And Olivier Tallec's gorgeous pastel pictures (with the wolves wearing mittens and hats this time - way too cute) complement this lyrical story to perfection. It's direct and obvious on one level but also elegant and deep on another. Simply put, there is no talking down to the reader and I think a lot of kids will appreciate that a lot, just as much as they will getting to know these two characters a little better.

But more than all of that - beyond a lovely story that is so pretty to look at - Nadine Brun-Cosme has created nonthreatening wolves. She gives us the stories that lions, tigers and bears have had but wolves have missed out on. It's a simple thing really (and I wonder if Brun-Cosme even thought about it) but can you imagine if we had books like these for the last 200 years? Maybe we wouldn't be so terrified of wolves. Maybe we wouldn't think they were evil. Maybe we wouldn't think they don't deserve to live. Consider this from National Geographic:

After an earlier federal decision to delist Western wolves in 2008, Wyoming essentially defined the animals as varmints, or pests, allowing virtually unlimited shooting and trapping year-round. A resulting lawsuit forced the wildlife service to temporarily put wolves back on the endangered list. (Since then, the service has refused to take them off in Wyoming until that state comes up with a different plan.)

On the one hand, Big Wolf & Little Wolf are just characters in a couple of very well done picture books. But on so many other levels they are quietly revolutionary. Watch a leaf that would not fall, meet a friend who seeks the perfect gift, read about a little wolf who says "That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw." Fall in love with a couple of wolves and be as happy about it as I am.

ETA: Just out of Alaska comes news that the state will be using helicopters to shoot wolves in the Fortymile region near Tok to boost moose & caribou numbers for hunting, "The state wants to cull almost 200 of the estimated 300 wolves that biologists said range in the control area." And also, the Game board has approved for the "buffer zone" around Denali State Park to be opened to trapping so the protected packs on federal land may be trapped if they stray outside the park: " The wolf population is the lowest it has been since 1987, park authorities say. While they don't know for sure why the numbers have plummeted, they say there has been trapping pressure on the animals.

There are about 70 wolves left in the 6-million-acre park."

The safest place for a wolf in Alaska is the Anchorage Zoo, period.

[Photo by Jeff Vanuga from Nat Geo.]

Some lies, some truth - not sure if it works

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:33:11 -0800

I am a bit conflicted on Randy Powell's YA novel Swiss Mist. There are parts of it that I thought were spot on but others that did not read as true but rather convenient. But I have to wonder if what I perceive as weaknesses based on my reading experience would register the same to teen readers. In other words, just because I have seen something one too many times, would they see it as well?

The book follows Milo who initially is in the fifth grade and deeply impressed by his teacher's stories of how she lived in Switzerland for a period during college. As his parents break up and his hippie father leaves (always staying in loving contact but not offering concrete support), those stories gain greater significance to Milo who clings to them as an ideal of what could life be. Over the next five years he loses his childhood home, moves to a crappy apartment in a nearby town with his mother who works like a dog to put herself through dental tech school leaving Milo to fend for himself. He stays out of trouble but certainly becomes bored, dull and on the road to trouble. Throughout this period he sees his father and the women he lives with and the various things his father does while on a self-directed path to enlightenment and happiness (you remember that whole hippie thing I mentioned?). Dad is okay but he's not really much. Mom is a decent person but so determined to get the perfect life in order for her son that she misses the point that he is growing up and floundering while she spends her time on the happy family plan. Then bing, bang, boom, Mom meets a high school boyfriend, falls in love, gets married to new decent guy who is - you guessed it! - fabulously rich and so she quits work to become super mom to high school aged Milo and the step daughters.

Yeah, all those years working her ass off and then the minute she gets married she quits. That just drove me crazy.

The old teacher returns to his life and Milo reveals how much her stories meant to him - only to be disappointed in a major way and then the book goes in another direction where it becomes about creating your own stories, your own myths and finding your own truth. Essentially you aren't supposed to believe anyone, even yourself. You just have to go live life and see what you find. (This is exemplified by the father who is off on another grand adventure in the final pages.)

What I liked was Milo's frustration by his mother's behavior. After struggling in the apartment for a while he asks her if he can get a motorbike but she says no - that it's not a good choice. He wonders why he has spent so much time being a good son (and he has been) after she and his father made so many bad choices and yet his good behavior is not being rewarded. Then later when she falls in love he remembers how she asked him to help her so often, doing chores around the house, staying close to home so she didn't worry and then his reward - again - is that she moves on without him. She gets a new life and tells him he has to fit into it because it is good for her and as the parent that is supposed to mean it is good for him as well.

I can't begin to tell you how much that resonated with me.

So does the good make up for the bad? Ah...I don't know. For every moment when I nodded my head, a few pages later I wanted to throw the book across the room. And it was so convenient that the mother would find a rich guy and just quit, thereby disappointing Milo even more. In fact it was hard to find anyone in this book who didn't prove to be a huge disappointment for Milo. Even his old friend/sort of girlfriend is odd (to say the least) and doesn't seem to grasp the things that matter to Milo. In fact, he is written as more thoughtful than everyone else which might work for teens who identify with him (and think they are the only ones who know what's going on in their own lives) but was hard for me to take.

In the end I think Swiss Mist suffers from being a shallow book that teased with real depth but couldn't commit. It might still work well with the 12 and up crowd though - especially the ones who are genuinely pissed off at their parents. Thinking of my own fourteen year old self, I don't know if it would have worked for me or not. Thus I am still conflicted on this one.

[Hey FTC - this copy was provided by the publisher!]

The Truth is Out There

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:43:31 -0800

I've been thinking a lot about truth lately, and how accustomed we have become to accepting lies. It seems that in many ways, we receive more truth through fiction these days than we do from anything else. We seek out stories that will tell us what we want to hear, rather than what we need to know -- it's a cowardly way both to learn and to live. I've recently been reading in search of truth, and found some titles that have enlightened me in more ways than one.

Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk knows all about manipulating truth -- he has seen it happen again and again from his station in the Middle East. In his new book for Soft Skull Press, People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, he blows open all the things we think we know about the region, and demands that we accept the hard and difficult choice of not always knowing. In the very beginning he writes:

"I didn’t want to write a book explaining how the Arab world could become democratic, how tolerant or intolerant Islam is, or who is right or wrong in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I wanted to write the opposite -- a book that shows how difficult it is to say anything meaningful on such as major issue as the Middle East."

From his base in Cairo, he traveled to Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and more, covering stories of war and peace as a correspondent. It quickly became clear that while there was a narrative that his editors (and Western readers in general) sought in Middle East stories, life on the ground there did not support it. A member of Hezbollah who contributed to the tenuous situation for Palestinians and “was responsible for the children orphaned by Israeli bombardments” was delighted to pleasantly pass the time and discuss soccer with Luyendijk. The pressure to conjure up articles of oppression found him noting that the women of Egypt face stringent travel restrictions, while ignoring their casual grocery store conversations so similar to female discussions around the world. In other words, there was always more than one story to tell, but he quickly learned there was only one version of those stories anyone in the West wanted to hear.

As he riffs on one level of insanity after another (“Egypt’s dictator is called ‘President’ even though he inherited his job from his predecessor who, in turn, used force to gain power. This particular dictator leads the ‘National Democratic Party’ which is neither democratic nor a party.”), Luyendijk maintains an attitude of wit and bemused sarcasm that will be particularly appealing to older teens. He isn’t talking down to his readers at all, but in fact is actually trusting them to be smart enough to be talked up to. This is a journalist who says: Let me tell you how it really is, even though it isn’t easy to hear. The mind reels with one revelation after another. Those all too commonly displayed images of protestors damning America, and burning its flag in spontaneous riots, that instill the conviction of “them vs. us” into our national conversation? “Guys,” he writes, “you probably think that a demonstration is something citizens use freely to express whatever they are for or against, but in a dictatorship such ‘outbursts of anger’ are often staged or are at least heavily managed by the regime.”

Oh. Should’ve seen that one coming, right?

With every word, Luyendijk provides a different perspective on what we think we know, and challenges head on what we are accustomed to believing. Killer smart and devastatingly direct, this is journalism at its best. A book for back pockets and backpacks, for classroom discussion and those determined to take on the world, People Like Us is not to be missed.

Although I have reviewed books on the effects of coal mining on the environment in the past, I read the personal essays in Coal Country: Rising Up Against Mountaintop Removal Mining with equal parts shock and despair. A companion to the documentary of the same name, the heavily-illustrated Coal Country largely focuses on people living in Appalachia who are directly affected by this intensive method of coal removal. It is far more effective than many titles on the subject because the words here are not from distant (and so often easily-dismissed) environmentalists, but by residents who have called the region home for generations. Consider the story told by Larry Gibson, whose family has owned their land on Kayford Mountain for over two hundred years. He refused to sell, but is surrounded by one of the largest mountaintop removal sites in history:

“We lost about eighty, well, close to a hundred headstones in the family cemetery, because every time the coal company would blast, they’d blast debris over into the cemetery. It would bust some of the headstones, turn some of them over. Then they’d send a crew of men over to clean them up. And then the old sandstone headstones that had carving on them, we caught them actually throwing them away, destroying them as well. And the simple reason behind that was to try to prove that we didn’t have as many graves there on the ground as we had. And so if they could reclaim some of the grave sites, well, the mountain had thirty-nine seams of coal. There’s a lot of wealth underneath there… And on the other family cemetery across the ridge we have mine cracks right through the graves that’s three and four feet wide, that you can see down in and there’s no casket, no body -- all that’s left is a headstone.”

Gibson has been repeatedly threatened with violence for refusing to sell, and his dogs have actually been shot and killed as punishment. Dead family pets is a common thread in Coal Country, as more than once a dead dog is used as a stark message to sell or shut up. Essay after essay recounts struggles not only against the mining itself, but also the damage to roads, rivers, houses and the larger landscape. In 2002, “three so-called hundred-year floods happened in ten days.” The sheer difficulty of living in coal country is too much for some. Consider Debra and Granville Burke:

First the blasting above their house wrecked its foundation. Then the floods came, four times wiping out the Burkes’ garden which the family depended on to get through the winter. Finally on Christmas morning 2002, Debra Burke took her life.

Because Coal Country is focused on individual voices telling their own personal stories, it humanizes the difficulty of standing up to Big Coal in a way that will cut through to readers no matter where they live. It also does an excellent job of explaining why there is so much about coal mining, and why, even in the face of such strong environmental damage, it still has a following among people who need industry jobs to survive. A lifetime of supporting coal mining starts young here, as activist Shannon Elizabeth Bell explains: “Because of special coal education materials and curricula created by the West Virginia Coal Association, schoolchildren throughout the southern coalfields are taught the ‘many benefits the coal industry provides in daily lives.’ Students of all ages are encouraged to enter projects in the Coal Regional Fair which awards cash prizes in the categories of science, math, English/literature, art, music… etc.” All of those projects must, however, be about coal.

Energy is a huge topic in our national conversation, and it's not going away. For all its emotional weight, Coal Country is a clear, bare-bones look at what coal costs, and who is paying. Other books have tackled this subject effectively as well, but few can approach the immediacy of a man discussing the disappearance of his ancestors’ bones. One of the bigger lies to have been propagated against the American people is that of cheap energy. The editors of Coal Country sweep that away in an instant. This is incredibly timely and significant writing. All high school teens living on the grid need to read it.

Historically, some journalists have gained enormous fame for telling the truth, and one of the most acclaimed was Elizabeth Cochran, otherwise known as “Nellie Bly.” In her new photobiography of Nellie, Bylines, author Sue Macy tracks her life from a childhood in western Pennsylvania to professional success in New York City. Elizabeth was born in 1864, when there was little opportunity for a young woman to achieve financial independence. She was educated, but more importantly, curious and bold. Living with her mother (who took in boarders to make ends meet), Elizabeth took issue with the opinions about women expressed by a columnist in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She wrote a letter to the editor -- a very good letter, in fact -- and was offered a job. Her first published words appeared on January 25, 1885, and she never looked back.

Nellie is most famous for a piece of “stunt” journalism. She chose to mimic the adventure of Jules Verne’s Phineas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days in 1889. With only a single bag and no chaperone (scandalous!), she departed New York with promises to update her readers as frequently as she could along the route. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World carried her dispatches and made her a celebrity. By the time she returned, Nellie had made her mark, and easily written her way into history.

And yet, for all the drama of her great trip, as Macy explains, there are other things Nellie accomplished that are far more admirable. She had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York for ten days so she could document the abusive treatment suffered by inmates (many of whom were not insane at all, but rather did not speak English). Her subsequent exposè on the facility resulted in immediate improvements, and marked her as one of the period's “muckraking” journalists. She investigated murders and police corruption, interviewed radical activist Emma Goldman and women’s rights crusader Susan B. Anthony, and traveled to Chicago in 1894 to cover the violent Pullman Strike. Even after she married, she continued to work and ask questions and do whatever she could to directly change people’s lives. She was fearless and tireless and dedicated. Her fame might have been due to a stunt, but her worth was found in her unflinching honesty. Macy does her great credit with this heavily-illustrated and lively volume, and hopefully (oh please God) it will find its way onto the desks of the next century’s crusading journalists as well. We could all do a lot worse than to emulate Nellie Bly.

On another historical subject, in the wake of recent discussions by the Texas State Board of Education on textbooks, which, due to the state’s education market, have national implications, I have become a bit obsessed by Senator Joe McCarthy. There has been movement from some of the Texas board’s social conservatives to rehabilitate McCarthy in the texts, and show how he has been “basically vindicated.” My recollections of teaching McCarthy included no way in which his methods could ever be deemed admirable. Fortunately, James Cross Giblin recently completed a thorough investigation of the senator, now published as The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy -- and now if teens are subjected to incorrect information by dint of Texan buying power, they will have a highly readable title to turn to for the actual historical truth.

After a brief prologue introducing McCarthy as, at one point in his career, “more powerful than the president,” Giblin then goes back to the senator's humble Wisconsin beginnings, and provides an excellent exploration of his childhood, education and decision to embark on a law career. He also shows the long roots of McCarthy’s daring approach to life’s challenges, and his penchant for raising the stakes in card games -- habits that would later serve him well in politics.

As it was such a significant part of his personal biography, Giblin pays special attention to McCarthy’s World War II experience, and the manner in which he embellished his military record. Then things turn to politics, and the book takes off as McCarthy lands in the capitol during the height of the “red scare,” and embraces the mission of fighting communism infiltration, real or imagined, in the government. It is this mission that would make him one of the most popular and infamous leaders in U.S. history, while simultaneously destroying countless lives, and ultimately bring about his own downfall. Giblin knows all this and he shows it, but he does it with very personal stories, both of those who were McCarthy’s innocent targets (the case of Annie Lee Moss is particularly riveting) and those who worked by his side. It’s fascinating and terrifying history, not only for what McCarthy accomplished, but how the echoes of his fear-filled attacks can still be heard today.

Giblin includes a personal touch from his school years in his narrative, slightly buried but easily discovered through checking the copious back matter. Mostly he stands back, however, and lets McCarthy tell his own story -- which is plenty to freak out the average reader. I do wish he had relied less on Wikipedia -- but his candid admission of this resource is a minor quibble. If Texas wants McCarthy as a hero, that's their choice, but Giblin makes clear how wrong such a decision would be, and how much the rest of the country should resist it.

In case you wonder just how far a nation will go to keep the truth from its people, consider the perspective on Iraq presented by journalist Ahmed Mansour in Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story. Mansour is a reporter and talk show host for al-Jazeera, and was lucky enough (if you want to call being an unarmed reporter in the middle of a war lucky) in 2004 to get around a U.S. military blockade and into the town of Fallujah before a battle took place there between American troops and “insurgents.” He backs up a bit and explains some of the history of Fallujah, its often contentious relationship with Saddam Hussein, and how and why it became a specific target of the U.S. Readers might question a few of Mansour’s assertions about how things were playing in America before the attacks (he is a fan of Nancy Pelosi, which conservatives will almost certainly dismiss) but his perspective on America is important, because it represents the viewpoint of millions of other people. Most of the book focuses on Fallujah itself, however -- on how Mansour got in, where he stayed, and the reports he filed. Mansour’s story is significant because no other reporters got into the city, and thus while the U.S. military controlled the story in the American press, Mansour was able to send out a very different look on who the victims were and how the fighting went.

One of the most frustrating things for me about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is the very different ways in which they have been covered from past wars. Teenagers who grew up watching these wars on the nightly news likely have no idea how direct media coverage used to be, and how the whole notion of being “embedded” goes against journalistic integrity. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather made his career in the jungles of Vietnam in 1966, which is was what journalists used to do. With few exceptions, this level of journalistic integrity is unheard of in the twentieth century, and we have all suffered for it.

There has been pushback on the canned reports that became all too common in recent years, but reading Mansour’s story is one of the biggest in-your-face rebuttals to accepting at face value any official government response you are going to come across. Journalism keeps government honest (consider the street journalism in Iran last year), and Mansour, through his credible coverage, is able to bring a great deal of honesty to what we now know was a bungled mess that involved a devastating convergence of politics and military might, with tens of thousands of people stuck in the middle with no way out. For readers concerned that the author will be one-sided in his approach, be aware that Mansour is not an Iraqi, and he often speaks quite highly of different Americans he met and interacted with. He could have made this a book that wholeheartedly blamed the U.S. military, but instead he ponders the egomania of U.S. politicians and leaders (Paul Bremer in particular) who sought to punish the masses for the crimes of a few. He is stunned by what he sees but records it so we, years later, can see it too. A lot of young men, both Iraqi and American, were wounded or died in Fallujah, and he saw many of them and recorded the horrors of all of their deaths. This is what journalism is all about, and it proves why one side of a story is never enough.

Finally, Olive Branch Press has released a new updated edition of Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. This is a staggering look at films dating back to the turn of the last century, and includes brief plot overviews and bulleted lists of inaccurate and racist portrayals of Middle Easterners in American cinema. Some of the entries are short, as in The Fifth Element, a science fiction film that begins with a brief ten-minute segment set in 1914 Egypt, with “lazy children and a frightened high priest.” Much more detailed are the nearly endless stream of entries for B-movie action flicks that relied heavily on scary pseudo-Arab terrorists. Analysis of Delta Force fills more than two pages (for reasons obvious to anyone who ever sat through the Chuck Norris flick) but the more recently released Mummy trilogy with Brendan Fraser doesn’t do too well either.

The book is eye-opening on multiple levels, both in the blatantly racist aspects of many films from the past, and in the more subtle moments that many moviegoers have likely not noticed. (I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to note Arab mice dressed in fezzes for the Disney cartoon The Rescuers, however.) Reel Bad Arabs is a book for paging through (the entries are alphabetical after a thorough introduction from Shaheen), but for cinemaphiles and film students, it is an enormously valuable text. You don’t need a “best of” book when you are serious about movies; what you need is a book that will alter the way in which you watch film. Shaheen accomplishes that and more here, with a straightforward, analytical, quote-heavy text that is unbelievably well-researched. The man has done a lot of work; if you are a student of pop culture (or cultural studies), then you need to see what he has discovered.

Notes From No Man's Land by Eula Biss

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:40:22 -0800

When you begin reading the essay collection Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss, you are lulled into what appears to be a history of the telephone and telephone poles in America. Biss discusses a so-called war on the poles fueled by private property rights, and allegations they appeared as urban blight. This is a comfortable, intriguing review of cultural history, and readers will find the initial pages diverting if not deeply interesting. And then, on the seventh page, Biss kicks you in the gut and unleashes the real point of her observations. She writes:

"In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets."

The lists continue, the events are recounted, the dark and dangerous alternate history of telephone poles is revealed. And the reader realizes that Biss has an ulterior motive with her very innocuous-appearing collection. She has written a book about race -- only it is written in a wholly unexpected way, and thus packs a wholly unexpected punch.

If Biss were only a careful observer, then her historical references and careful musings about the poles; the town of Buxton, Iowa; Hurricane Katrina; or reparations would be interesting unto themselves, another American’s perspective on an always problematic aspect of our collective memory. But Biss inserts herself, and her own history, directly into these essays. She writes about jobs she has held, places she has lived, family members, living and dead. Her grandfather was a lineman who “broke his back when a telephone pole fell”; a cousin is biracial; her Caucasian mother had more than one long term relationship with an African-American. Biss is white, but her personal history and interests find her laying claim to more than one racial line. So even when she writes about a cultural or news event, such as the infamous 1999 case of a white woman who gave birth to twins via in vitro fertilization only to discover one was white and one was black, the author still spirals it around to a personal connection. She still finds a way to make the story connect to her, and through that effort, she brings it home to the reader as well.

From New York to Mexico, from the Midwest to California, Biss ticks off geographical destinations that serve as guideposts for a journey into individual and collective understanding. She writes about her teaching jobs in the Bronx and Harlem, and the issue of education for freed slaves during Reconstruction. At a job writing for an African-American community newspaper in San Diego, the dark specter of former government programs on eugenics and race-based sterilization rears its ugly head. She writes of the gardens of Babylon and nonnative plants in California, and immigration from Mexico and urban gardens in New York City. Biss twists us around from what we think we see and know, and demands we reconsider, reconstruct, redirect. “Graffiti is one way to claim a place you do not own,” she writes. “And so is planting a garden. Because we are all forever in exile, or so the story goes, from the original garden.”

A writer will reel at the elegance of Biss’s seemingly effortless connections; a historian will be spellbound by the constant collision of past and present -- which is a historian’s dream, after all. But all readers will be impressed by the ease with which we are escorted along this new trip across America, with how we see ourselves and our country with fresh eyes again. We see so many telephone poles everyday, and yet, have we ever seen them for what they once were, for how they were so casually used?

"When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadway was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he said, "My dad could raise a pole by himself." And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle."

Why would any of us think differently, seeing them there, so ubiquitous, so ordinary, so deeply ingrained in our lives? How would we ever be expected to connect all of these dots, across so many miles and so many years? Why would we expect horrors of the past to bring us crashing back to the present? And yet, that is exactly what happens in No Man’s Land.

Biss has a clarity about the American experience -- it is the most stunning aspect of her collection. She sees things that the rest of miss, or worse, ignore. While occasionally the essays seem forced, or personal experience exaggerated, Biss rights herself quickly and regains the understated tone that is so effective. On the whole, she has put together something both relevant and visceral -- a collection that is more than the sum of its parts, and stirring on all counts.

Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss
Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555975186
208 Pages

The moment that her heart broke

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:23:39 -0800

Sometime in the late 1960s, after my great grandmother Julia had moved in permanently with my grandparents (for years she traveled from one child's home to another until they kept her even though she was no easy person to live with), she dropped a bombshell on my grandmother. As I was told years later, they were watching television together, some innocuous program my grandmother could not even remember and Julia let out with the startling admission that she had come home one day and caught her husband in bed - in their bed - with another woman. She was furious at him, angry still beyond reason even though Tom had been dead and buried more than thirty years at that point. She gave this deep dark secret up and then sat back in the chair and my poor grandmother, who had a decent relationship with her mother but by no means one that involved personal revelations of any kind, did not know how to respond. Based on the woman he was found with though (and I won't share that here), my grandmother was finally able to understand a serious rift with this person that had occurred in her childhood. And she also knew what else had happened at very nearly the same time: Julia had met the woman who helped women lose their babies.

Finally, we understood why.

Unfortunately, my grandmother was so shell shocked by what her mother told her that day that she didn't follow up on it, ever. This kills me and my mother, (seriously - we have talked about it for years), but my grandmother said it was such an ugly admission - Julia was still so very upset that she didn't feel right poking and prying. Everyone else involved was dead anyway, so there seemed little point. She let it go and only told my mother and then years after that, told me. I don't even know if anyone else in the family is even aware that Tom cheated, or who he was found with.

What I have started to wonder in the past few years though is if this was the first time. Also, Tom was known to come home and pass out drunk. (My great aunt Agnes told a very sad story of coming home from school one day and happily seeing her father waiting for her near their building; when she got closer she realized he had passed out leaning up against it.) It is entirely possible that he was so out of it that he didn't even know who he was with that day, although I think that if this was the case Julia might have forgiven him for it. Or if it was the first time she might have been more understanding. What is clear though is that it was the end of Tom and Julia and all they could have been. Her anger at him was so great, her pain so complete, that she could not bear to carry his child. Can you wrap your head around what it must have been like for he to come to that conclusion? It's staggering. We know they did get together again at some point later because my great uncle Eddie was born in 1931, after that long gap. He was the last though because Tom drank himself to death and died at 44 years old in 1933. (The doctor told him if he did not stop he would be dead before his next birthday and he was.)

"Nana" died when I was four so I have only the barest of memories of her (we sat out a tornado together - not the sort of thing you forget). My mother knew her quite well and she was regarded as a stern no-nonsense woman by her and her cousins. She did love babies though and always remembered them; I still have some of the birthday cards she sent me. I can't imagine who she would have been without Tom Lennon - if she had met a man who loved her enough to put down the beer and pursue a life together, or at least attempted to do so. Like every other Irishman in my family though (and they were Irish on both sides of my mother's ancestry), Tom drank until the end. He drank so much that as the father of seven children, in the middle of the day, he took another woman into his wife's bed. It's almost like he didn't care - like nothing about Julia or his children mattered enough anymore.

But that's not fair. I know he was dearly loved by all of his older children (who remembered him well) but also a subject of pity. They might have been afraid of their mother at one time or another, but they knew she would keep them alive. In Tom, history had taught them to have little faith. After he died Julia fed and housed her children which is amazing when you think about it. Not one of them ever spent a night in an orphanage or was farmed off to relatives. Julia might not have been able to control her husband but she was damned if she was going to lose one of his kids. That sort of strength is beyond admirable - it is the backbone of our family.

But still. Knowing that even decades later she still harbored such sorrow for what he did makes me immeasurably sad. I wanted a happily ever after story for them - so young and so beautiful and so happy for so long. And more than anything, I wanted him to be a man who was worthy of her. I wanted to change history a bit, I guess, which is the genealogist's curse. A happier story next time, promise.

[Post pics:Julia, circa 1910 (after her marriage); Tom with son Thomas Jr, 1916; Tom & Julia, circa 1921]