This One Made Me Kinda Sad

My husband and I have an observation we sometimes make about people in history - "People used to be a lot tougher." The book I just finished, The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg, is another example. The book tells about a 4,000-mile journey Clara Estby and her mother, Helga, made on foot across the country from near Spokane to New York City on a wager to try to save the family farm in 1896. Sounds kind of unbelievable - except it really happened. Helga was the author's great-grandmother, and Clara was her great-aunt. The book was based on newspaper accounts written during the trip, since the two women's journals were apparently destroyed. They took very little with them, instead depending on the kindness of strangers for food and lodging (and usually getting it). The book tells about several of their adventures along the way, including surviving a flash flood in a canyon, charming a band of Indians with a curling iron (which, oddly, was one thing they took along), and meeting President-elect William McKinley.

I enjoyed the story. Seventeen-year-old Clara is the narrator, and there are the usual "coming of age" issues, as she wonders what she's going to do with her life. The relationship between Clara and her mother is interesting. Based on the way Helga is portrayed, I believe she would be diagnosed today with bipolar disorder - she apparently had periods of severe depression when she couldn't get out of bed, alternating with periods of manic energy (including her decision to undertake this walk). Some of the adventures border on unbelievable, but it's fun to suspend disbelief and go with it. We also see the physical toll walking 25-50 miles per day takes on the women. Clara has to continue walking on a badly sprained ankle for them to have any hope of making their deadline to earn the $10,000 prize the sponsor had offered (a huge amount in 1896).

So where the "sad" part? SPOILER ALERT! It was basically a scam. The sponsor was betting the two women would never make it across the country and never had the $10,000. She just wanted a book idea that would make her some money in the era of dime novels. So every step and all the hardships they undertook were for nothing. As Clara points out, they actually ended up $22 worse off than they were when they started. Helga's husband sold the farm equipment to the neighbors to be able to keep the farm, even though they then had no way to raise crops. The author's note at the end made things even worse - Clara and Helga were stuck in New York with no way to get home. They went to the Norwegian community in the city and were able to make enough money to live by doing laundry, etc., but couldn't get enough ahead to get a train ticket home. It was two years before they got back. And the experience turned out to be so bitter for them that they destroyed their journals and notes from the journey and didn't really talk about it. Clara was apparently estranged from her brothers and sisters for years (although they had reconciled in time for the author to have met her).

 

Not every story has a happy ending.

More Than I Thought I Was Getting

When I set out to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, I thought I was going to be reading a biography of the woman whose cells were used as the basis of a multitude of scientific studies that led to some breakthrough medical discoveries, such as development of the polio vaccine. I got that, but what I hadn't expected were all the other stories that were wrapped in with Henrietta Lacks' story.

First, the biography. It was relatively brief, because Henrietta Lacks was quite young when she died of aggressive cervical cancer. But Skloots used the sources she had available to try to reconstruct the life of the woman, not just the medical phenomenon. Henrietta had five children at the time she contracted cancer, including a baby who was born after the tumor was already growing. Skloot's narrative does a good job of portraying the struggle Henrietta and her husband had in trying to maintain family life while Henrietta's health rapidly deteriorated. The parts about the pain Henrietta was in and the extent of the cancer were heartbreaking.

There's also the story about the cells and the doctors and researchers who took them - without Henrietta's consent. What started as a "routine" collection of samples of the cancer cells and healthy cells became anything but routine when the researchers discovered that these cancer cells, unlike other human cells that had been tried, not only survived in culture but thrived and continued to grow. The cells were labeled "Hela" for the first two letters of Henrietta's first and last names, and they were the first "immortal" cells; they are still growing and being used for biomedical research today, more than 70 years after Henrietta herself died. Skloot's book reviews the tissue research field that exploded because of Hela.

Another layer of the story is the consideration of justice and rights. Henrietta was black and poor, and she was sick in an era when informed consent didn't exist. Some people feel she was exploited, since Hela cells made billions of dollars for biomedical corporations ,yet her family received nothing and lived in desperate poverty. Henrietta wasn't even widely recognized as the "donor" of the cells until more than 20 years after her death. It really wasn't until Skloot's book that Henrietta received any kind of recognition as the source of this invaluable research tool. The book tells how the media swooped in at different points to do a feature story or whatever, but there was no real effort to know Henrietta Lacks, just her name (for a long time, the cells were attributed to "Helen Lane"). Henrietta doesn't even have a tombstone; it's not known for sure where her grave is, only that she's buried near her mother.

This discussion of justice and rights went beyond just Henrietta and her family, though. Skloot outlines the development of the concept of informed consent in research and medicine, as well as laws and court cases related to the use of tissue collected from individuals. Basically, there's no ownership of your tissue once it leaves your body and you leave the doctor's office. That little biopsy I had done once to test for skin cancer may be in a lab somewhere, being used to develop the next cure. However, if that cure were to make huge amounts of money, I'm not entitled to any of it. (There was an afterword to the book that discussed this issue in depth.)

Finally, there was the story of how the story came to be told. Skloot tells about her efforts to contact Henrietta's children to give her interviews for research about Henrietta. The family had been so ignored and exploited (including by a con man) that getting their cooperation was a hard sell. No one, it seems, before Skloot, really took the time to explain what was going on with their mother's cells when researchers came to collect blood samples from the offspring for genetic testing. There's one story about a researcher who hands a genetics textbook to Henrietta's daughter - who hadn't graduated from high school - like that would explain everything. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Skloot takes the daughter and one of her brothers to the lab of a young cancer researcher named Christoph Lengauer, who took the time to explain things and actually to let the family look at the cells under the microscope. It was pretty touching.

Skloot ends up having a relationship with the family, especially the daughter, (Deborah) and this book is partly about the development of that friendship. The climax of the book, in a way, is a road trip Rebecca and Deborah take to find out what happened to Deborah's older sister, who had mental retardation and epilepsy and had been committed to a hospital for the "Negro insane." (I'll give you a hint - it wasn't pleasant.)

So, to sum everything up, I thought I was getting a simple story and instead found layers and layers of story. I can't say I understood everything about the Hela cell research, but it was pretty fascinating to think that so many of the things we take for granted in the medical field today, from the polio vaccine to those consent forms we sign every time we go to the doctor, resulted from the "immortal life" of Henrietta Lacks and her cancer.

 

A LOT to Process Here....

 Once in a while, I will read a description of a book on a blog or something, think it sounds like something that might stretch my reading experience, and add it to my ever-growing list of books to read. That's what happened with The Words in My Hands by Asphysia. I added it to the list for three reasons: 1) I thought it was a graphic novel, and I've never read a graphic novel; 2) it's contemporary young adult, which is a genre I don't really frequent; and 3) it's about a Deaf girl, and I thought it would be interesting to learn something about the experiences and perspectives of the Deaf. I got more than I bargained for! 1) Yes, there are some illustrations because the main character is an artist, but this is not a graphic novel. 2) Yes, it's contemporary young adult, with all the romance, friendship and coming-of-age struggles that are typical of the genre, but that's not all there is. 3) I learned a LOT about the experiences of Deaf people, including that trying to appear "normal" by lip-reading and learning to speak is stressful and exhausting. I also learned that the word is capitalized when referring to the community of people who are deaf, and (at the risk of sounding kind of dumb) that there is not a universal sign language; sign language, just like spoken language, comes in different variations depending on geography (ASL is AMERICAN Sign Language, duh....).

Beyond those three things, there was a lot of interesting content to think about. The book is set in Australia in the somewhat near future, when food and fuel are scarce. A giant corporation called Organicore has created a food supplement that people receive through a subscription, and people have come to fear "wild" (meaning natural and non-processed) food because the official word from the government (which is controlled by Organicore) is that "wild" food gives you food poisoning. Besides, Organicore's food supplements have been enhanced with agents that prevent cancer and cure the common cold! Never mind that as the story begins, there are some side effects emerging, such as Energy Deficiency Syndrome in young people. It's also illegal to grow your own food on public land (I guess you can still grow food on your own land), so most people have become dependent on the rations supplied by Organicore. Their apartments don't even have kitchens, because who needs one when Organicore ships you a box with everything for a ready-made meal?

Piper McBride is the daughter of a top scientist with Organicore. She's also deaf, and is struggling to fit in at her school and to understand what people are saying, even though she has hearing aids. When the story begins, Piper's mother has just been fired from Organicore as the scapegoat for the side effects, which upends everything in Piper's life. She and her mom go from being financially comfortable to renting out their home and living in the guesthouse with only one small Organicore meal per day. While looking for some form of transportation to get to school (they can't buy fuel for their car), Piper meets Marley, a hunky guy who works in a bicycle shop. Marley just happens to be the son of a Deaf woman. He introduces his mother  (Robbie) to Piper, which sets off a chain of events that completely changes Piper's thinking about her life. For one thing, Robbie grows her own food, which is magical to Piper, who by this point is starving trying to survive on one small preprocessed meal per day. For another, Robbie is comfortable with being deaf and doesn't try to fit in with "normal" people; she uses sign language as her primary means of communication and is not at all apologetic about it.

Another person Piper meets through Marley is Kelsey, an activist who is organizing a movement to allow people to grow their own food as a means to address the food and fuel shortages the country faces. Piper becomes more and more drawn into the movement, starting with starting a community garden on her street, eventually being arrested for her activities but ultimately having a triumphant moment when she is a featured speaker at a rally.

What I thought was going to be a fluffy little teen romance about a girl who was different from other YA heroines because she was deaf ended up having a lot of depth. Here are some things the story made me think about:

1. Our food system - The pandemic a few years ago showed some of the vulnerabilities of the food chain in the U.S. (and maybe around the world). I've also read articles that talk about the small number of large corporations that control agriculture and food production in this country. The majority of what we eat in the U.S. comes from six crops - corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, potatoes and sugar beets (all carbohydrates). Plus, there's Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food that points out how much of what we eat is ultraprocessed - engineered in food labs to contain the "right" nutrients, along with other ingredients to make them tastier and, Pollan contends, more addictive. Yet, he argues, with all of this nutritionally-"perfect" food, rates of conditions like heart disease are higher than they've ever been. His solution? "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." We need to turn away from the convenience of an Organicore-style system to eating more "wild" food.
   
2. Government corruption - In this semi-dystopian story, the one large corporation influences key aspects of society through their "ownership" of the prime minister. I guess Organicore was instrumental in getting the woman into her position, so she favors policies that will benefit Organicore, even if they aren't good for the people. Organicore also has control of the communication system (Quest Tool, which everyone in the book, even Piper's corporate-employee mother, calls Cesspool); only stories that favor Organicore's perspective make it to the news feed that everyone gets on their personal wrist device. When Kelsey and Piper are trying to spread the word about their rally in favor of growing food, any message they submit, whether to the general public or to each other, is deleted. Sound familiar?
3. Piper's identity crisis - At one point, Piper thinks of herself as split into halves. One half is the one who pleases her mom and wears her hearing aids and speaks with her voice; the other half is the one who doesn't use her voice, who doesn't wear her hearing aids, and who uses sign language or other means (like mime or writing) to communicate with people. She is struggling with which half is the "real" Piper. She doesn't want to disappoint her mother, who has spent so much money and effort to try to help her daughter be "normal." But what is "normal" for her mother is oppressive and uncomfortable for Piper. A key part of the book is her journey to decide who she is and wants to be. 
   
4. Deafness - As I said above, I learned a lot about the Deaf community from the book. At the end, there is an additional note from the author that talks about how hearing people can interact with the Deaf in respectful ways. Very informative.

There's probably more I could pull out of this, but this post is already long enough, and I have a social event to get to. I'll just wrap it up by saying this book vaulted from pretty low expectations to being one of the contenders for "best thing I read this year."

I Did It!

One of my post-retirement activities has been to join the community band that my husband directs. It meets in a town about an hour and a half away, where he also teaches private music lessons at the public school. In the past, I've driven up in the afternoon for the once-a-week rehearsals, but this year I decided to just ride along with him, saving gas money - and making it so I don't have to drive back after dark (the real reason).

But what's a girl to do all day with no car in town? Fortunately for me, this town has an outstanding public library, so I've been bringing my laptop and spending the day catching up on things like my digital scrapbooking and organizing my list of things I'd like to read.

One of the things that has been on my list for a long time is Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer. I've had a hard time finding it, though. Fortunately (again), this library has it! Since today is the last day until January that I will be coming for rehearsal, I decided to take the book off the shelf and see if I could finish reading it during the time I'm at the library while my husband is at lessons.

And I did! I actually would have finished in the morning hours, but he got away early for lunch, so I had to finish the last bit after coming back. It wasn't a little easy-reader chapter book, either; this is a young-adult novel with 265 pages (ok, ok, young-adult books are not difficult, but hey, I still feel accomplished).

The book tells the story of Anne Hathaway, who married William Shakespeare when she was 26 and he was 18. It's about the sort of miserable life Anne had growing up after her mother died of the Black Death when Anne was only 8 and after her father remarried. In the tradition of the wicked stepmother, Anne and her stepmother clash over just about everything. Anne has a few romances that give her a hope of escaping that miserable life - one with a migrant farm hand, one with a reserved schoolmaster, one with her stepmother's nephew (which the stepmother pushed on Anne; Anne didn't choose that one), and finally, the one with Will Shakespeare that had simmered below the surface of all the others. Sadly for Anne, once she did end up married to Will, she didn't get the dream marriage she had hoped for - after only a couple of years, Will was off to London to become the Shakespeare we all know, returning home for only an occasional week or two. I couldn't help thinking how much happier Anne would have been if she had been able to marry the schoolmaster, who was "safe" and "boring," but a genuinely nice guy (he died in another epidemic), instead of the passionate and romantic Will.

One thing that struck me as I read was the limitations women faced during that time period. There's this statement from Anne's best friend:

“I pray God that you will soon find such a man,” Emma said kindly, “for a woman without a husband is no woman at all.”

 And Anne's schoolmaster, when she asks him to help her learn to write, responds:

“Reading can be useful as well as pleasurable, ‘tis true,” Ned allowed. “But what use has a woman for writing?” 

Really glad I wasn't born in the 1500's!

So now my library days are over for a while. I will miss them.

 

A Simple Story with Philosophical Underpinnings

 

I picked this book off our home bookshelves for a couple of reasons: 1) I wanted something that would be a quick read to fill the gap until I was able to get to the library; 2) I used to offer it as an extra-credit assignment in my Persuasion Theory class, and I figured it was time I actually read it. As it turned out, it wasn't quite the quick read I expected because the switch on my bedside lamp gave out, and so I wasn't able to read at bedtime (one disadvantage of physical books). And I will say that although the point related to persuasion was made quickly in the book, I guess it was appropriate for extra credit.

What I was hoping students would take from the book is an understanding of the arbitrary nature of symbols (like words) and the social mechanisms that lead to a symbol becoming an accepted tool for communication. In the book, Nick, a 5th-grader, is inspired by what his teacher, Mrs. Granger, said about the dictionary. After pointing out that the animal we call a "dog" is called by other words in other languages, she said,

"...if all of us in this room decided to call that creature something else, and if everyone else did, too, then that's what it would be called, and one day it would be written in the dictionary that way. We decide what goes in that book." (p. 31)

Nick, ever the practical joker, decides to test her statement by coming up with the word "frindle" to use instead of the word "pen." The rest of the story traces how "frindle" gains acceptance as a symbol, first among the other fifth-graders, then the whole school system, then across the country.

Since this is a children's book (grade level = 5.4), it doesn't go deeply into the philosophy of symbol creation and use. It's kind of neat that this concept is introduced in a kids' book at all. I spent quite a bit of thought in my Ph.D. program and in the college classes I taught talking about the same issue.   

The Odd Couple (of Books)

 I just finished reading a couple of books that, on the surface, have nothing in common. The first is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, the sprawling epic based on the Cain and Abel story. The second is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a parody of conventions in British literature. But as I think about them, it seems to me Cold Comfort Farm could be seen as poking fun of East of Eden - if Gibbons hadn't written her book 20 years before Steinbeck wrote his.

            

First, there is the way each book handles its "source material." Both of them stick pretty closely to the work they are following. Steinbeck's story of the twin brothers is a very close replica of the biblical story; at one point, Cal (Cain) basically says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" just as Cain did. The elements are all there - the rejection of Cal's gift, the "murder" of Aron, the follow-up conversation between Cal and his father that determines Cal's future. SPOILER ALERT! Fortunately for Cal, Adam (his father) gives him a chance at a brighter future than Cain got (but maybe that's because Cal had an advocate, Lee, pushing hard for it).

In Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons takes on a lot of the conventions of books like Wuthering Heights (I don't know that's one of the books she had in mind, but I can see how her book uses elements that are in Wuthering Heights). There's the gloomy, brooding physical environment. There's the irrational group of characters - part of a big family - who respond melodramatically and hysterically to circumstances. There's a big mystery and a character who is hidden away in a room in the huge, decaying farmhouse. There is the male character who oozes sexual energy and the innocent, sweet maiden.

The difference, as I see it, is that Steinbeck was taking his source material very seriously. He spends a significant section of the book having Lee explain his study of the Hebrew word timshel, which Lee (and through him, Steinbeck) sees as the key to understanding the Cain and Abel story. It's very scholarly. Gibbons, on the other hand, is laughing at her sources. Early in the story, the main character (Flora) and one of her friends are speculating what the farm will be like, and they agree there will probably be an oversexed guy named Seth. When we get our first introduction to the farm, we meet the brothers who run the farm - Reuben and...Seth. Here's the opening description of Seth:

"...a tall young man whose riding boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge....His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man."

Within a few paragraphs, Seth is undoing another of his buttons. It's pretty funny - you know the type, or at least the stereotype.

A second similarity between the books is the "character haunted by trauma." In East of Eden, Adam Trask is debilitated by the cruel betrayal of his beloved wife. He spends more than a year in a stupor, ignoring his farm and his newborn sons. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Aunt Ada Doom who isolates herself in an upstairs room, only coming down to be with the rest of the family two times a year. For 20 years, she's constantly reminded everyone that she saw "a nasty thing in the woodshed" as a child. Steinbeck's Adam is pathetic; Gibbons' Aunt Ada is ridiculous. 

In each case, there is someone who pulls the character out of their funk. In East of Eden, it is Samuel Hamilton, the good-hearted, philosophical, sort of bumbling Irishman who literally knocks some sense into Adam. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Flora, the sophisticated, calm, pretty much perfect young Englishwoman who sees through Aunt Ada's hysterics and persuades her flying to Paris is much better than sitting around in a bedroom. Everything Flora puts her hand to succeeds - everything.

I could go on, but you probably get the point. The main difference, I think, is that Steinbeck took it all so seriously. East of Eden is epic, in every sense of the word. Gibbons turns "epic" on its ear and shows us literature doesn't have to take itself so seriously, after all. Which side of the debate do I take? I'll have to get back to you on that....

SPOILER ALERT! One of the ways Gibbons flaunts literary convention is that she refused to give us all the answers to the mysteries in the book. What was the "nasty thing" Aunt Ada saw? We never find out!

A Good Stretch at an Unlikely Time

My husband and I just returned a couple of days ago from a trip of 11 days to New England. He was invited to be the guest conductor for an adult band camp (yes, there is such a thing) in Maine, so we made a vacation of it. Our original plan had been to go into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after the camp, but we changed our minds at the last minute and went west instead of east, to New Hampshire, Vermont and Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The area is beautiful!

We did several hikes over the 11 days, plus visited a couple of historic sites/museums. Although we were busy, I am happy to report that I maintained my reading streak, and actually had a really productive two weeks. During that time, I read three books! Well, more like two and a half, but that's a story for a little later in this post.

#1 - The Airplane Book to Get to Maine

Knowing that we would be flying for about 5 hours plus layover time, I checked out a book for the trip. Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome is a book I saw mentioned on some book blog, and I'm so glad I put it on my list! All I knew was that it was a travelogue story about three friends who sail on the Thames and comment on the countryside and their experiences on the way. What I didn't know is that the book was written in 1889. I also didn't know it would be so funny! It does comment on the countryside along the trip, but Jerome also throws in stories that have nothing to do with the trip but that develop the characters of the three men in the boat (himself included) - and, of course, the dog, Montmorency. You might think something written in the Victorian era would be stuffy, but Jerome makes it a point of puncturing "stuffy."

The book also had some good life observations that I added to my quotes collection, such as the following:

“It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness…Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.” – p. 41-42

#2 - The Book I Picked Up at a Bed and Breakfast Stay

A couple of years ago on a different trip, we stayed at a bed and breakfast house that had books everywhere, even on the windowsills. I took one off a windowsill to pass time in the evening, and since then, I've decided to do that whenever the opportunity presents itself. For this trip, we stayed at the Old Iron Inn in Caribou, Maine (VERY interesting place - the husband of the pair collects old irons. It was also a wonderful B&B). The wife of the pair of owners is a former English major, so she had one wall floor to ceiling with books. Lovely is the Lee by Robert Gibbings doesn't have a cover that really stands out, but it is a thin book, and I thought I might be able to finish it during our stay (more on that in a minute). 

My luck held! This is another older book (written in 1945) that is a collection of short sketches Gibbings wrote about his experiences traveling around the western part of Ireland, especially the coastal islands. It is part nature guide (Gibbings seems to have really liked birds), part Irish history and folklore, and part studies in human nature. As with Jerome's book, there is a sense of humor that I find really delightful. Again, there were some quotes to collect, like this one:

“It seemed to me a happy thought that when all our loves and pains are over and the tired old brain has gone back to earth, perhaps, from the most unmusical of us all, blackbirds may sit in the hollies and sing the spring day through.” – p. 102

I haven't finished this book yet. Yes, it was a thin book, but I didn't want to spend the whole two days we were in Caribou ignoring my husband so I could read! The host told me I could take it, but I didn't feel right about that, so I found a copy online and ordered it so it would be waiting for me when I got home. 

#3 - The Book to Ease the End of the Vacation

It's odd. I'm always ready to get home when a trip is nearly over, but I also miss the freedom and excitement of traveling. I decided a good ol' Victoria Holt novel might be just the ticket to ease the transition back into ordinary life. I selected The Secret Woman, about a governess (of course) who falls in love with a handsome ship's captain who is haunted by scandal and mystery (of course).

You know how a cup of hot soup feels on a cold, drizzly winter day? Warm. Comforting. Satisfying. The Secret Woman was, for me, the literary equivalent of that cup of soup. I know it's not "great literature that will expand and improve my mind," but it's not literary slop, either. Even if they are sort of similar from one book to another, Holt knows how to develop characters. For example, the governess in this story was raised by an aunt who was a dealer in antique furniture, so throughout the book, there are descriptions of furniture, completely on track with what the character would notice. Holt also knows how to drive a plot. I've read enough of her books that I was able to predict where the plot would end up - except I wasn't. I did pick up on which character was going to be the villain, but the mystery resolved in an unexpected (and satisfying) way. 

 So I feel quite happy with where both my body and my mind went over the past two weeks!