A moving testimony to a loved life. What I like most: the strength of the community that embraced Alexander when her husband died. The writing is supeA moving testimony to a loved life. What I like most: the strength of the community that embraced Alexander when her husband died. The writing is superb. Some paragraphs may be read as poems....more
Summersby's first memoir, published in 1948, ghostwritten by Frank Kearns, who was the head of U.S. Army Counterintelligence in Paris, later a noted rSummersby's first memoir, published in 1948, ghostwritten by Frank Kearns, who was the head of U.S. Army Counterintelligence in Paris, later a noted reporter/journalist. The memoir tells the story of Summersby's professional relationship with Eisenhower, omitting their personal relationship. A unique firsthand view of the war in North Africa and Europe from a woman's perspective. ...more
I enjoyed (very much!) this inspiring collection of vignettes on writing, storytelling, and the challenges of a creative life. Practice and disciplineI enjoyed (very much!) this inspiring collection of vignettes on writing, storytelling, and the challenges of a creative life. Practice and discipline are the basic principles of her craft. Each polished little piece is a prime example of the short personal essay. Much to learn from here; she has much to teach....more
Loved this collection of linked personal essays, all focused on Kimmerer's scientific work with mosses but reaching into her life as a teacher, motherLoved this collection of linked personal essays, all focused on Kimmerer's scientific work with mosses but reaching into her life as a teacher, mother, and Native American. Lovely metaphors here for being present to a community of species that lives in a different world, yet shares the world we live in, too....more
A tender, revealing memoir about a woman (a long-time feminist/pacifist activist) at mid-life, dealing with a divorce and a new lover and trying to fiA tender, revealing memoir about a woman (a long-time feminist/pacifist activist) at mid-life, dealing with a divorce and a new lover and trying to find a place for herself in nature....more
Brash, strong Southern voice, compassionate picture of a mother doing her best to make do for her three boys and an alcoholic father who disrupted theBrash, strong Southern voice, compassionate picture of a mother doing her best to make do for her three boys and an alcoholic father who disrupted their lives....more
In this unusual book, Diane Tye reads her mother's recipes as if they were her mother's biography, using the techniques of folklore and feminist studiIn this unusual book, Diane Tye reads her mother's recipes as if they were her mother's biography, using the techniques of folklore and feminist studies. I picked up this book because I am writing about my family's food in the 1950s, and am finding that it provides some new insights into the reasons for the food my mother put on our table and allows me to see her in the larger context of extended family and community. Recommended for folklore, women's studies collections....more
In its time (written in 1936), a surprisingly candid & revealing memoir of ER's childhood, courtship and family years, through FDR's illnesss andIn its time (written in 1936), a surprisingly candid & revealing memoir of ER's childhood, courtship and family years, through FDR's illnesss and her entry into politics. Ends in 1928, when FDR becomes governor of NY. Written at Lorena Hickok's urging to define herself to her public and to earn money, most of which ER used to bail her children out of various scrapes. This is the book on which most ER biographies are based....more
ER's second memoir, covering the years between FDR's courtship and his death and her reentry into public life afterward. More guarded than the first mER's second memoir, covering the years between FDR's courtship and his death and her reentry into public life afterward. More guarded than the first memoir, but still unusually candid in her reflections and her assessments of people and events. A primary source for many other biographies....more
Joan Gussow's new collection of personal essays, Growing, Older, is a free-ranging exploration of a wide number of issues: the loss of her husband ofJoan Gussow's new collection of personal essays, Growing, Older, is a free-ranging exploration of a wide number of issues: the loss of her husband of forty years and her reassessment of her marriage; her experiences of growing her own food in the garden of her Hudson River home; her concerns about climate change and resource depletion; and her thoughts about entering into her ninth decade. Gussow knows what she's talking about, for she developed the nationally acclaimed Nutritional Ecology program at Columbia Teachers College and was one of the earliest writers to speak out about the dangers of industrialized agriculture (Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture, 1991)—a subject that has been recently popularized by the likes of Michael Pollan, Paul Ford, and Barbara Kingsolver. Growing, Older is a lively book, energized by Gussow's straightforward, often blunt observations that are by turns witty, argumentative, cranky, and funny—but always interesting, enlightening, and provocative.
The collection opens with the death of Gussow's husband, her reaction to his loss (she "simply didn't miss him"), and her difficulty in sharing this truth with people who asked how she felt. What she actually felt was a "strange liberation," she says, "from things I hadn't known I was imprisoned by." (Some readers may find this measure of her marriage startling and perhaps even uncaring, but it is honest, direct, and authentic, qualities we value in a memoir, and which are characteristic of all Gussow's writing.) But if she is not devastated by her husband's death, there are other issues that do bring her nearly to despair: the frenzied consumerism of our culture, the media's "furious silence" about peak oil, the hidden costs and the obvious vulnerabilities of our food system, and climate change.
But Gussow is by temperament an optimistic and hopeful person, as well as a determined gardener, and she never despairs for very long. This trait becomes clear as she describes her skirmishes with the Hudson River, which regularly floods her garden, requiring her to rebuild and replant. But she sees these battles as simply part of her "self-provisioning adventure," for Gussow is resolute in her determination to grow as much of her own food as possible and to continue to live in the home she loves as long as she can. Hence her wonderful chapter called "Potatoes and Escape," in which she meditates on the tendency of the potato to "stay put," and her own conviction that everyone should stay home and work on making the places they live livable. "If the planet is to remain inhabitable," she writes, "we can't give up on the homes and communities we live in, but must turn them into places where our hearts rejoice."
And that, for me, is the great virtue of this book. Now in her eightieth year, Gussow, a natural-born teacher, shows us by her example how we can live in an endangered world without losing hope; how we can learn and practice skills of self-reliance; and how we can coexist with our often-annoying fellow journeyers (the skunks, woodchucks, and muskrats, for instance, that regularly raid her garden). While we might not agree with all Gussow's practices, we have to admire her spunk, her determination, and her courage. "Did I get what I wanted?" she asks herself, musing on the challenges of a long life and years of hard work. "I'm pretty sure I did," she answers. Which seems to me to be a very good way to sum up a life. ...more
For most of us, history is made up of Big Events: life-changing inventions, wars that alter the course of nations, famous men making momentous decisioFor most of us, history is made up of Big Events: life-changing inventions, wars that alter the course of nations, famous men making momentous decisions. But history is also what happens to the rest of us. That's what makes As a Farm Woman Thinks such an extraordinarily valuable book. It is history as ordinary rural Americans lived it, documented by an ordinary West Texas woman who recorded the ordinary events of her daily life and the lives of farmers, ranchers, and friends on the Llano Estacado: the Staked Plains.
For three decades (1930-1960) Nellie Witt Spikes wrote columns for four local and regional newspapers under the title "As a Farm Woman Thinks" (perhaps borrowed from Laura Ingalls Wilder's columns of the same name, written for The Missouri Ruralist, 1910-1924). Spikes' newspaper pieces, compiled from the archives of Texas Tech University and selected and edited by Geoff Cunfer, are organized topically into eight chapters. The chapters are arranged in a rough chronological order, as are the items within the chapters, so that the book gives us a sense of time passing, from the pioneer adventure of "Settling the Llano Estacado" in the 1890s to the "Drought and Dust Storms" of the Dirty Thirties and "The Modernization of Farm Life." This latter section begins with the 1937 consideration of whether to lease crop fields for oil drilling and ends with the installation of an air conditioner in 1950, documenting a remarkable change in life style for these rural residents. Each chapter is thoughtfully introduced by the editor and illustrated with photographs of people and places from the period. The introductions and the photographs help to situate Spikes' writing within its larger geographical, historical, and social context, and a list of further readings provides a broader scholarly frame.
But it is the individual pieces themselves—jewels of closely observed life—that are the real treasures in this wonderful collection of treasures. Nellie Spikes is a woman who care about the people she knows, is intrigued by who they are and what they do, and records their doings—and her own—in astonishing detail. And because she is a woman, she focuses most often on small things, domestic things that get lost in the grand sweep of history as the historians tell it. She is that rare diarist who understands the value of the mundane and the ordinary, and she gives us a glimpse into life as it was actually lived in her place and time.
Often, she writes about her childhood in the 1890s, buttressing her vivid memories of her father's general store with the actual records of purchases. Mrs. Mertie Ishamel bought a dress pattern, she tells us—"not a paper pattern but ten yards of material." Bob Smith bought a handkerchief for 85 cents ("must have been a silk one," she remarks), and George Mayes purchased a bottle of "hair vigor" for a dollar. There are also remembrances from the school where she taught, where Christmas was celebrated with a community tree and a party, the fiddlers playing breakdowns and waltzes, schottisches and polkas, accompanied by the "long wail of a lobo and the staccato barking of coyotes" that came into the room when the window was opened for air.
Spikes loved community doings and recorded as many as she could, from the gatherings in the pioneer settlement to later visits to the big city of Lubbock. Some of these are remarkably (and often unconsciously) poignant, like the 1941 dairy show at Plainview, where she "patted the little Jersey calf but had a better time watching a cow get a bath and being groomed for the judging ring," while in the nearby park, 800 young Army recruits were preparing to be shipped out to war. Or the 1952 shopping trip to Ralls, where she thought back to a time two decades before, when people from the country came to town to shop but "never bought electric light bulbs, for we never had any electricity."
But Spikes' true heart was in her home, her garden, and the fields surrounding the little house that "looked like a piece of yellow cheese" on the December day in 1906 when she and her new husband crossed the prairie in a wagon pulled by four mules and settled in for a long life on the land. In some of her columns, she celebrates family holidays, in others the beauty of the Texas landscape and the abundant food it produced: black canyon grapes, purple mulberries, quail and prairie hens and antelope, dried beans and peas and pumpkin, strings of dried red chiles and green dried okra. But the prairie could also bring disaster: floods and snowstorms and drought and clouds of fine sand that blackened the sky and blew into the house, so that Nellie and her children left footprints when they walked across the floor.
What Spikes' newspaper columns reveal, above all, is the indomitable spirit of the people who lived through those times. Looking at a cactus blooming on a stone wall, Nellie marvels that it can grow without water or soil, and then realizes that it has stored up enough nutrients to weather the bad times. She wonders, then, if she has stored up "enough faith and hope and love to meet life" when things get bad—and decides that she has. "And my courage returned," she says simply.
And so will yours, as you read Nellie Spike's remarkable record of the way she, her family, and friends met the daily challenges of life in a challenging place. Highly recommended for women's studies and local history collections. ...more
"The deepest memoir is filled with metaphor." —Maureen Murdock, Unreliable Truth
Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey is one of those rare memoirs t "The deepest memoir is filled with metaphor." —Maureen Murdock, Unreliable Truth
Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey is one of those rare memoirs that is much more than a life's story (as if that were not enough). It is a memoir that not only tells us about a lifetime's worth of experiences, but shows us how experience is shaped by knowledge, how knowledge is experienced through nature, and how nature can guide a human being to a fuller, healthier understanding of her place in the world.
The constellations are the most important guiding metaphor of this elegantly-crafted book. Throughout her life, Susan Tweit has oriented herself by the stars, using them to remind herself where she is in space and time: "I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars." So it is natural for her to use the constellations as chapter markers in her life's journey, from Orion the courageous (her "stellar talisman") to Virgo (the "unowned" one, own woman, belonging to none), to the familiar Dipper ("you can chart your course by it"). Each of these stellar constellations creates a constellation of meanings and significance in Tweit's life, marking, defining, charting, guiding.
And she needed their guidance, for at twenty-three, married to her college sweetheart and already embarked on an exciting career as a plant ecologist, Tweit learned that she was suffering from an autoimmune disease that (the doctor told her) would claim her life within five years. Learning to live with that diagnosis, learning to treat her illness as the subject of research demanded more of her than she thought she could give. But she borrowed strength from Orion, a sense of self from Virgo, and the help of the other constellations. And as she learned more about her illness, she understood that it was not the end of life, but the first step toward becoming herself.
The title of Tweit's memoir, Walking Nature Home, offers another important metaphor for her life. Throughout the book, walking is not only a powerful image for purposeful forward movement ("Orion striding across the black heavens"), but for her own growing confidence and personal independence: walking away from her first marriage, for instance; or making an arduous week-long, hundred-mile trek, with a dog for companionship, through the Wyoming mountains. "Walking the days alone," she says, "forced me to pay attention. If I kept my awareness tuned within, I might yet hear what I needed to understand my health and, more importantly, my life." And years later, walking with her new stepdaughter Molly allowed them to develop a caring, trusting relationship:
"Walking gave us a territory of our own, a place we could start fresh, away from the disputes that regularly rocked our household. Rambling with no agenda forced Molly and me to leave our baggage at home. Walking provided time together, and it got us outside to learn the landscape where we lived."
As the book comes full circle, we find Tweit watching Orion again, strengthened by the love of a man who shares her understanding of the wholeness of nature, in the home they are building themselves on a "half-block of decaying industrial property" in a small Colorado mountain town, where together they have restored a ravaged creek to health. Health, restoration—another constellation of metaphors here.
In this spare, elegant, and compassionate little book, Susan Hand Shetterly takes us with her into the wild world at the unsettled edge of a small vilIn this spare, elegant, and compassionate little book, Susan Hand Shetterly takes us with her into the wild world at the unsettled edge of a small village in Maine. She and her husband went there in the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s, "idealistic, dangerously unprepared, and, frankly, arrogant." But when others moved on, they stayed, having brought with them the willingness to do hard physical work, the desire to practice patience, and—perhaps most importantly—"the ability to pay close attention."
It is the paying attention that accounts for so much of the quiet grace of this book, for Shetterly passionately wants us to see and smell and touch and taste what she is paying attention to: the daily small affairs of birds, periwinkles, green crabs, and clams; a porcupine stripping tender young branches from her willow tree in an April night; a rescued raven; a baby snowshoe hare threatened by a bobcat—the wild things that populate her life on the edge of what's left of wildness in this rapidly urbanizing world.
But it is not just the wild things that Shetterly brings to us from the margins: it is the people who live in the village and share the "hard, dangerous gift" of this place. Danny, who doesn't believe in throwing things away. Clarence, who died upside down in the water, weighed down by a trap he'd thrown overboard. Jack Dudley, counting loons, living a sense of place. Settled in the wild, Shetterly is also settled in community, a small community made up of a few utterly unique human individuals, dwelling in a "neighborhood of millions of lives, depending on how and whom you count."
In some important ways, the community itself, long ago settled on the shore of the wild bay, remains an unsettled place. When Shetterly helps to create an association to protect the surrounding wetlands, many of the villagers are threatened and antagonistic. Living in a world of private property, where land is worthwhile only when it can be "developed," they find it hard to believe, as does Shetterly and her conservation colleagues, in the "self-renewing community between wild land and human beings," in the "wild commons."
But at its heart, that's what this book is about: the need that we all have to be a part of the wild commons, to recognize and share the bonds that exist between species, ours and all the others who live in our neighborhoods, inhabit the wild hours of the night, roost in the trees, and hide in the grass and plants in our gardens. It is also about our need to watch and listen and observe for a long time, for a very long time, until, as Shetterly says, we become, "instead of watchers, witnesses, heavy with the gravity of what is revealed to us and what we have chosen to carry of it."
I love this book because it teaches what I take to be the most important thing a human being can do to be at home in the world: to simply watch, and look, and listen—to become witnesses...more
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the funniest, wittiest book I have read in a very long time. Briskly entertaining and nearly pitch-pLife Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the funniest, wittiest book I have read in a very long time. Briskly entertaining and nearly pitch-perfect, Meghan Daum's memoir is the story of her decades-long obsession with unaffordable apartments in New York, unmanageable farms in Nebraska, and houses (suitable and un-) in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It is also the story of too many of us, people whose lives are defined by media-spun dreams of high-class, high-priced, high-maintenance houses that are projections of the selves we long to be and can never quite become. Unless, of course, we are able to find the perfect house, in which our lives would suddenly become perfect.
Daum's house-driven obsession begins in her childhood, with an "alarming fixation" on the pioneer fantasy houses of Little House on the Prairie, fueled by her parents' equally alarming obsession with New York. They don't live there, but they pretend that they do, to the point where her father (who writes musical jingles for a living) maintains a telephone line in a one-room office in Manhattan, which rings through to their suburban Ridgeway, New Jersey house. Her mother (who is driven to decorate the family home as a way of overcoming the "yokelness of her upbringing") tells Midwestern relatives that they live "in the city"—New York, of course. "Two-facedness," Daum says, was the "family crest" and the family weekend getaways are visits to "open houses," as her mother fantasizes about the life she might lead—the person she might be—if she lived in each house.
Daum's troubled relationships to place (her "lifelong housing neuroses") continue through her college years at Vassar (where she majors in English and minors in moving from one dorm room to another) and then through her relocation to New York, where, she believes, she will be able to "slough off" the residue of her mother's and father's disenchantments with who they are and become, finally and triumphantly, her own person, in her very own enchanted place. It doesn't quite work out that way, she discovers as she "rotates" through one roommate after another in an apartment on West 100th Street, then moves to her own apartment. And then—improbably, after writing and selling a novel about a girl who moves to a small town in the Midwest—she relocates again, this time, to Lincoln, NE, where she settles—improbably—on a farm. But (let me be brief here) when her novel is optioned for film, she moves to Los Angeles, accompanied by her large, yak-like sheepdog, Rex, her constant and uncomplaining companion in all her moves. Then back again to Nebraska, where she actually buys a farm, and then back to Los Angeles, where—
But really, you must read this to-and-fro story for yourself, because no summary of it could be nearly as funny as Daum's manic telling of the back-and-forthness of her life. She is at her wittiest when she is making wild (but compassionate) fun of herself and the transient habits which, she says, were her "default setting," and describing the frenzied bubble of the Los Angeles real estate markets of the early 2000s.
If the memoir were just the recitation of Daum's obsession, however, it would not be anything more than a highly entertaining read. What makes this memoir truly and intensely interesting is the writer's insight into her inherited house-habiting angst and her understanding that this desire is woven deeply through our transient culture, dating back (at least) to the constant movements of pioneer families like that of Pa and Ma Ingalls, of Little House fame. Daum is by nature and nurture fickle, she says, a "house slut" who passionately loves houses, lives in them briefly, and then leaves them for other houses, when all the time what she really wants, deeply and painfully, is the perfect home, where she could be perfectly and permanently housed. Such a place would, she writes, confer on her an "I.D. badge for adulthood, for personhood even. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human."
Daum's candid description of herself could well be the description of a large segment of the American home-buying public, collectively united in the belief that the perfect house would confer upon them the perfect life. In the early years of this century, the real estate and finance industries conspired to hype this irrational, cultish belief, ratcheting up home prices until they soared into the stratosphere. Realtors and bankers were aided and abetted by the advertising and home decorating industries: "The Home & Garden TV cable channel," Daum writes, offered "a round-the-clock infusion of house porn for wretches like me." As a result, people in search of personhood found themselves in possession of million-dollar houses with adjustable-rate mortgages. These houses quickly sank underwater, leaving their buyers stranded, bankrupt, and (presumably) unpersoned.
Daum's story has a happier ending, for she manages at last to find an almost-suitable Los Angeles bungalow that she can almost afford, one that brings her real life and her ideal life together under one roof. Never mind that it costs nearly half a million dollars, or that the garage resembles the "ruins of Pompeii" and the plumbing was installed during the Coolidge administration. She buys (wisely, on a standard thirty-year mortgage) and begins to remodel. Two years into the process, she meets a man who amiably consents to help her shop for antique drawer-pulls on their first date and eventually becomes her roommate. Now married, she is again contemplating a move—this time, for reasons that have a lasting importance to both of them: "Because the house is not our house, it's my house. It may be my home, but it's not really our home."
This is a book about one woman's lifelong game of house, but it is about also our American obsession with houses, with the dream of owning something that will transform us into the persons we dream of becoming. But as Daum says, maybe owning the perfect house (which seems so difficult to so many) is actually easy, when the "hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life." ...more
Marriage memoirs are difficult to write. It's a tough balance: the writer has to tell both sides of the story, and tell them fairly and in a balancedMarriage memoirs are difficult to write. It's a tough balance: the writer has to tell both sides of the story, and tell them fairly and in a balanced way. And marriages are anything but fair and balanced, as you know if you've been married. The writer (in this case the wife) has to dig deep into the secret places of her own heart, mind, and body to find truths that are hers; and also undertake a similar excavation in the heart, mind, and body of her partner. It's a challenging proposition.
And this marriage—oh, my! A marriage between Sophia, an idealistic peacenik, an anti-nuclear protester, a confirmed Democrat, and a dope-smoking hippie—and Barrett, a super-realist who is a by-the-book West Point graduate, an Airborne Ranger, an Oakland cop, and an officer in the Army Reserve. Their breakfast choices at Lois the Pie Queen tells the story: Barrett orders the Reggie Jackson special (steak and eggs) while Sophia orders the tofu scramble and grits. Recipe for domestic trouble? You bet. But while this does indeed seem an unlikely marriage (as it must have to the families and friends of the bride and groom), Love in Condition Yellow shows us a marriage in which both partners appear to work as hard as they can to keep their lives on an even keel, even after the jolt of 9/11, Barrett's recall to duty, and Sophia discovery that she has become a military wife.
The storyline of this unusual narrative (traced in such martial chapter titles as "Spark," "Constructive Engagement," and "Hearts and Minds") is urgent and insistent enough to carry the reader through the book. But what is really compelling and vivid about this memoir are the characters themselves: the woman who insists on looking deeply into her own conflicts as she studies—in an amazingly conscious and thoughtful way—the conflicts within herself; and the man she has come to love, with all his own conflicts and contradictions, and his efforts to reconcile personal desire with professional and patriotic duty. Through these characters, we come to understand that love doesn't mean "trying to make yourselves into a matched set" and that even passionate, deeply held differences of opinion don't have to tear committed partners apart. We're given a privileged look into the often barricaded world of the military family, where danger waits at the doorstep but where there are important lessons of self-reliance and inner strength to be learned. And we see in a single marriage a microcosm of the differences we all have to work out in our own hearts and lives, if the union of our nation is to be saved.
This is a brave book, because it dares to reveal so much of the internal workings of a very private and extraordinarily complex relationship—revelations that took far more courage than we have any right to require of a memoirist. It is a lyrical book, with artful, attention-getting images ("a wilted smile," a mouth "pulled together like a stitched scar," the "rush hour traffic of my thoughts"). And it's also a funny book that makes you smile while you swallow down the hurt.
Altogether, Love in Condition Yellow is a remarkable memoir. I hope you will read it, whatever your take on nuclear threat, excessive police force, legalized marijuana, and the war in Iraq. You'll be surprised. And glad. ...more
I love this book, both for the exquisitely detailed drawings and for the intimate look into life in wild country. Gorgeous nature journaling.
A sample:I love this book, both for the exquisitely detailed drawings and for the intimate look into life in wild country. Gorgeous nature journaling.
A sample: "Spirits are revived by the constancy of the real. And what do we really know of all this--the substance of light, the inner lives of creatures, the forming and dissolving of couds and mountains, the countless events playing out simultaneously, ceaselessly? I find it soothing to be rendered insignificant. And am cheered just to be at home on the planet, upright and walking around, in the midst of the vast unknowable."
Nature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdNature writing is changing. The surest mark of that change is the fact that Gretchen Legler's book, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, was chosen as the best book of environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
On the Ice is the story of what it means to find home, and heart, in the frozen place at the bottom of the world. With other artists, Gretchen Legler was offered the opportunity to spend a season in Antarctica under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program, to tell the story of the land, to try her hand "at making some human sense of its vastness and its terrible beauty." It was a quest, she says, not only to explore and discover new lands, but also inner worlds, "places that I hoped being so far from my ordinary self would help me find."
Antarctica as a place is extraordinarily far from the places our ordinary selves inhabit, and Legler wants us not just to know but to feel the distance, and to feel it as the explorers of a century ago must have felt it. She sleeps in a room that is only a stone's throw from the hut where Robert Scott set off in 1911 for his tragic bid to reach the Pole: "Good God, this is an awful place," he wrote. She spends time with other explorers who are looking even farther back, into the unthinkably remote geologic past of the Polar region, into samples of sea floor at Cape Roberts, goes naked into the coldest water on the globe, and ventures into ice caves in the Erebus glacier, blue caves, blue, blue "like an endlessly deep hole in your heart . . . a color that is like some kind of yearning, some unfulfilled desire, or some constant, extreme joy." And then there is the sea ice, glowing "peach and pink, nearly neon, buttery yellow, lavender, jade, and indigo," colors painted by Edmund Wilson, Scott's chief scientist, whose watercolors, she says are filled with, focused on light and color, color and light. And finally, there is the Pole, a "sacred destination," she says, not only for explorers but scientists and, yes, artists and writers, who find it the perfect place to look down into the mysteries at the earth's heart and up, into the mysteries of the universe, "the very farthest edge of darkness."
On the Ice is a luminous study of a remarkable place, a place that is so sublime as to almost defy human description. But as humans, we must place ourselves: we long to live in place and to make even the remotest place a home. And so the book is also about the men and women who live there, about the scientists, support staff, builders, workers, engineers, electricians, cooks, communications technicians--all the people it takes to make a home in an inhospitable place. These are people, by and large, who are willing, perhaps even anxious, to shed their ordinary selves and live in an extraordinary way, coping with the isolation and the cold and the loneliness, building a community of fellow-travelers, each with his or her own sometimes desperate reasons for coming to a place so unimaginably distant and different from the places where the rest of us live. These are funny people, weird people, misfits, heroes, people who live on hope and thrive on hard truths, people who have come away from the "real" world to invent themselves in a different reality.
But On the Ice isn't just about the place or the people. It's about Legler's own journey to the frozen wastes within herself, into her own frozen heart, which is thawed, incredibly, by the power of love. "How do you come to know place?" she asks. "How do you come to know self? . . . How do you let go of wounds and resentments and fierce anger, not begrudgingly, but as an act of grace?" She finds the answer to this age-old question in her relationship with Ruth, an electrician who helps her to shed "all that junk . . .all those layers of old self" and discover a new and loving self, a warm and passionate heart, in this frozen world. Some readers, particularly those who believe that books of natural history ought to exclude the historian's experience, may think that this part of the journey should have been omitted, as not quite worthy of the heroic spectacle that is the Antarctic. But that's the way it's always been, Legler reminds us: the personal has always been defined, she says, as "somehow gossipy or small, beyond or below the reach of proper recording." But why? Why do we deny the human perspective of place, since this is the only perspective we have? And why exclude the innermost experience, merely to focus on the outer? "Why obscure the intimate?" Legler asks. "Why shorten the story of the glorious complexity and depth of the human in order to make a neater, grander tale?"
Legler's journey--and her record of it--is all the more remarkable because it is an intimate journey, not only to the farthest place on earth but into the deepest desires and dreams of the human spirit. It's a singularly brave journey, as heroic in its way as the journeys of Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen, one more exploration of the truest human question: what it means to be at home on this earth. There are a great many books that will give you the cold, hard facts about the Antarctic. But as a book about place, a chronicle of life at the bottom of the world, and an intensely honest record of a spiritual journey, On the Ice is the most richly illuminating of a...more
The Rabbi's Daughter is a book about carnality, the often uncontrollable desires and appetites of the body, and the religious codes that are used to cThe Rabbi's Daughter is a book about carnality, the often uncontrollable desires and appetites of the body, and the religious codes that are used to control them. It is not for the faint-hearted reader, or for people who prefer to have sex with the lights off, or for those who are offended by open lewdness. That said, this memoir is a beautiful book, written by a woman whose life has been a bridge between the holy and the profane.
Reva Mann is the father-identified daughter and granddaughter of important rabbis in London and Jerusalem. As a teenager, she rebels against the strictures of her Orthodox family's faith, indulging in drugs, sex, and exhibitionist behavior. Repentant and seeking redemption, she goes to Israel to train as a midwife, has a religious experience, and enters a yeshiva (a school for ultra-Orthodox Jewish women). At twenty-five, hoping that marriage to an ultra-Orthodox man will help her fix what is wrong with her and get closer to God, she goes to Mrs. Frankel, the matchmaker ("And vat kind of a husband are you looking for?"). After a few false starts ("Reva, darlink...making a match is harder for God than parting the Red Sea"), Mrs. Frankel provides Simcha, an American Hasidic Jew whose ultra-observant piety seems to Reva to open the path to purification. Within two months, Simcha proposes and gives her a prayer book as an engagement present. Mazel tov.
But the constant rituals soon become meaningless, especially those that require sexual separation during the weeks she is a niddah, unclean. Six years, three children, and one affair later (with the hunky Mr. Fixit, who comes to remodel the kitchen), she finds herself in the Rabbinical Court, seeking a divorce. After that, there is sexy Sam (a fixer of a different kind), her father's death, breast cancer, her mother's death, and a reunion with a brain-damaged sister. As the years go on, Reva ceases to ricochet between desperate piety and equally desperate promiscuity and eventually finds a middle way, a true path to redemption, "creating a synthesis of the sacred and the secular...bringing together the holy and the profane."
Reva Mann has a deft touch with description, particularly the ludicrous. After her ritual cleansing mikveh, the matron of the bath pronounces her clean: "And I know I am now as kosher as the salt beef sandwiches at Bloom's delicatessen, the ones made by the proprietress, an overweight ballbuster with long white whiskers growing on her chin." When she meets Mr. Fixit, she is impressed by "the way his sex juts out like a mango." Reva's father thinks her ultra-Orthodox husband has a bad case of "messianic fever," and the rabbi who pronounces her divorced wears a frock coat with tails that "flap like bat wings." The erotic scenes might be overpowering if they weren't so over-the-top and downright funny, reveling in the ecstatic messiness of whole-hearted, redemptive sexuality.
The Rabbi's Daughter exploits (and sometimes overuses) many of the clichés of the "bad-girl-turned-good" memoir. But while there is a very great deal (for some readers, too much) sensational unruliness as well as intricate descriptions of what it takes to be "truly good" by Hasidic rule-bound standards, the story somehow survives its excess baggage. It is a rabbi's daughter's courageously honest attempt to answer the unanswerable and universal question: How do we live fully in our carnal bodies while we nourish our immortal souls? It is a compassionate book about our fragile, faulty human efforts--never quite right, never quite enough, but always heroic--to find a way to the Divine. ...more
For Keeps is not an easy book to read. It is not about pretty women with perfect bodies who find easy acceptance in a beauty-obsessed culture. It is aFor Keeps is not an easy book to read. It is not about pretty women with perfect bodies who find easy acceptance in a beauty-obsessed culture. It is an impolite, impertinent, irreverent collection of essays written by twenty-seven much-published and gifted writers who are not afraid to tell the truth about the imperfect bodies they have learned to live in--and learned to love.
These are hard truths. "My Mother's Body Image, My Self" (Sara Nelson), tells us that our obsessions about the size and shape and appearance of our bodies are often taught to us by our mothers--who may have been obsessed with their own bodies. An unhealthy preoccupation with physical image and the desire to use bodies to please men can be passed from mother to daughter.
"Dead Bone" (Aimee Liu) is the story of a young woman who became first an anorexic, then an "exercise zealot" for whom physical suffering was a path to perfection. A series of disabling injuries at least teaches her a necessary lesson. "My body finally, definitively, forced the message over my perverse will: I could no longer afford the fallacy that pain would make me better."
"What I Gave Up" (Ellen Sussman) follows the life of a woman who (pushed by her father) went from being a "killer tennis player" to being a compulsive competitive runner to the practice of yoga--each transition accompanied by the rupture of a spinal disk. Now facing her third spinal fusion, Sussman can say, "What I hope for is this: that I can live in this body without pain; that I can use it as well as I'm able to; and that my mind can accept these changes with the grace of an athlete." It's a prayer that we might all etch on our bathroom mirrors.
Victoria Zackheim, the editor of this splendid and often unsettling anthology, remarks in her introduction that most of us spend our lives "worrying more about taut stomachs than about healthy aging" and care more "about society's expectations than our own personal growth." But the women who contributed to this collection show us that it is possible to face our imperfections and confront the daunting prospect of aging in a culture that places a high premium on youth. "It's a new experience, living in a body that feels old," writes Joy Price in "Making Love and Joy in Seasoned Bodies." "My body surprises me every day: What parts will and won't work today?"
And yes, we are asked to own up to death. One of my favorites, "Death Becomes Her," begins with the Monty Python line, "Cake? or Death?" In it, Louisa Ermelino writes about the nearly simultaneous deaths of her mother and her husband. How does a daughter, a wife, live through something so impossible, so terrible? With grace, with compassion, with humor, with love. At the end, Ermelino writes: "I have a vision. My mother is at the stove; my husband is at the kitchen table. The sun is coming in the window. She is making him something to eat. Cake, please..."
Several of the writers had to confront the terrifying prospect of their own deaths. "One of the hardest things about having cancer was leaving the old me at the border, the innocent, healthy me, eater of broccoli and tofu, and facing my own mortality." That's Barbara Abercrombie in "The Best Birthday of All." And then there's Margot Beth Duxler, who learns (in "Impossible Geometry") that she has a tumor on her heart. "No, actually," her doctor corrects her as she wrestles with the news, "it's in your heart."
I wish that every woman could read and take to heart each of the stories in this anthology. It is a rare collection, uncompromisingly honest, ruthlessly real, uncomfortably raw, yet warmed with a very human compassion and brightened by the triumphs, small and large, that make each of these writers a heroine in her own right. ...more
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