Mary’s Comments (group member since Jan 06, 2017)

Mary’s comments from the Challenges from Exploding Steamboats group.

I have just read "Life Among the Qallunaat" by Mini Aodla Freeman and totally recommend it. Mini was born in 1936 in St. James Bay and she is Inuit. Her world has changed completely during her lifetime. Her way of life was still very traditional when she was a little girl, her family was nomadic and followed nature. They were pressured to send her to boarding school, and eventually she ended up in Ottawa working as a translator. In 1978 her book was published to great reviews, but the Canadian government feared it might cause a scandal. They purchased more than half the books and hid them in a cellar. Think of the books we have been denied! She had been put forward for literary prizes, but they never happened. It had been thought, her book might have become a best seller. Alas, that didn't happen either. It was reworked with her permission and cooperation and brought back closer to her original manuscript and republished in 2015. I was quite pleased to find it in a Scottish library!

“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles - utterly charming.

I have chosen "The Story of the Treasure Seekers" by E. Nesbit. I found it on a list of books which JK Rowling loves. Pleasant book classed as a children's story, but with plenty there for the adult. It was first published in 1899, so is set in Victorian Greenwich, London. Avoid reading any foreword by Julia Donaldson. She reveals spoilers. Very annoying in a foreword.

Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry

The colors are what first caught my eye, but what sold me was the following quote on the front cover: "I couldn't stop. It's like 'Broadchurch' written by Elena Ferrante.' from Claire Messud. I loved 'Broadchurch'.

Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy

This scares me not only because of what COULD have happened, but because of what could still happen. Fukushima still happened, although it used a totally different technology than Chernobyl. And as the author points out at the end, the world's population is still growing rapidly, mostly in Africa, India, China. These areas might well be tempted to build nuclear power plants to meet increasing demand, but how well equipped will they be to deal with a nuclear disaster? The world was incredibly luck in 1986 that the Chernobyl disaster wasn't worse than it was, because those dealing with it were totally unprepared and inept and were mostly looking out to save their own necks and reputations.

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs, sequel to Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

I’ve just finished ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children’. I saw the movie a couple of years ago with my kids. The movie is quite a lot like the book, but the ending is different. I don’t know if it is simply different, or if it drew from the two sequels to this book.

I read "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Despite having read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy when I was younger, I had never read any of her books. This was an easy read, as her writing style drew me in.

I read Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston.

I have just completed The Broken Shore by Peter Temple. I live in Europe, it is set in Australia. For me it could fill at least one other prompt (first learnt about on the internet, for example), but I'll leave it at that. It is a murder mystery, but I really like the way Temple describes little things, which made me almost feel as if I were there. For example, he described perfectly how the main characters dogs romped around the countryside whenever he took them for walks, how they interacted with him, etc. I'll be looking for more of his work. The one thing that detracted a bit from the story for me was, this obviously wasn't the first book with these characters.

I read "The Tattooist of Auschwitz" by Heather Morris as told to her by Lale Sokolov (born Eisenberg). Lale was taken by the Nazis to Auschwitz to be a laborer. His first job there was putting roof tiles on new barracks the prisoners were building as Auschwitz-Birkenau was being expanded. He managed to catch the eye of the French political prisoner who was the camp tattooist, who took him as his assistant. Any prisoner who survived initial selection upon arrival was given a tattoo on their left arm. This was how Lale survived, and helped others survive. It was also how he met the love of his life. They both managed to survive the remaining three years of the war and Soviet occupation and find each other again afterwards.

I read The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (by Shona MacLean), which is a murder mystery set in 1626. Most of the story takes place in Banff, about 50 miles from where I live, although Seaton travels to Aberdeen via Fyvie, Turriff, and other places I have been. I found the book a slow starter, but eventually didn't want to put it down.

I read "Prayers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I speak and read German, so thought I'd look for something originally in German but now translated into English. I searched first for German poets, then looked what was available through my county's library service. I came across this book.

Bonhoeffer was a theologian who spoke out against Hitler, and was imprisoned in a Gestapo prison in Tegel for more than 18 months before being moved to Buchenwald briefly. Just a month before the end of the war, he was moved again to Flossenburg, where a hastily called tribunal tried and convicted him. He was hanged at the age of 38.

Usually when I read things translated from German into English, I wonder at some point what the original had been in German, but not with these poems. The translation is very good.

The poems are very spiritual. The author was a Lutheran theologian, so the prayers are to the Christian/Judean God. With this in mind, they might not be for everyone. They spoke to me, though, and gave me much to ponder. So much so, I have purchased a copy of the book to keep. I was pleased to find several copies online to choose from, considering this translation was published in 1977.

The eleven poems cover just 35 pages. The rest of the book is mostly "An Interpretation" by Johann Christoph Hampe, followed by a poem by W. H. Auden (which I didn't care for!).

In the last few days, I have seen Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover mentioned more than once. It was published just last week, so maybe that is why. The blurb says it is set in Idaho.

I have "Black Tudors, The Untold Story". I started reading this on 18 December 2017 and didn't get back to it until 3 February. This was partly because of the holidays and having other books to get back to the library, but also because certain parts of each chapter are actually rather dry for my liking. The author has taken ten black people found in records of Tudor England, told about how they came to be recorded, how they *may* have come to be in England, the people they knew and interacted with, what their jobs were, and what their social standing may have been. There were quite a lot more black people in Tudor England than many realize, and they were treated a lot more like anyone else (As long as they were baptized, non-Catholic, Christians. Most Catholics and non-baptized people were not accepted into society.). They were accepted as witnesses in legal cases. They were sometimes valued tradespeople or skilled workers. Slavery was NOT accepted in Tudor England, so if an enslaved person were brought to the country or somehow joined an English sailing ship, they were considered free. This was upheld in the courts, as there were cases of people who had illegally purchased a slave then complained when the slave absconded. The courts stood on the side of the former slave and did not make them return to their master. I think this is a valuable book, although I only gave it three stars because of the writing style (although in places it is fine!). That's a personal thing. Others might have no problem with that.

Both Replacement Child by Judy Mandel and In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume cover the crashes of three commercial passenger planes crashing on the same town in New Jersey in the space of a couple of months. Blume’s book is a novel based on the true events. Mandel’s is a bit of a memoir as she tried to discover the history of her own family. They lost one young daughter in one of the crashes, and another child was severely injured. Mandel discovered that she herself was her family’s replacement child.

I claim "A Woman's Work" by Harriet Harman for this prompt. I started it in October and read it in fits until 7 November. Other things and the holidays got in the way. I picked it up again on 23 January and finished it today. It is actually 405 pages, although Goodreads thinks it is 416.

I just finished A History of Britain in 21 Women by Jenni Murray. She started with Boadicea who died in 60 or 61 AD and finished with two women still alive today: Mary Quant and Nicola Sturgeon. Of all these women, the only one I wouldn't have included is Sturgeon. I can not abide her politics. Several of these women I had never heard of. All of them are very strong characters. Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the most controversial one (today), although simply by being the first female PM is probably enough to include her. She did not do much beyond that to promote women.

Thank you!

BCer ArJohn is getting ready to publish a second book.