A Gathering of Old Men

In A Gathering of Old Men Ernest J. Gaines gives us a story of redemption, a tale in which more than a dozen old black men who grew up in rural Louisiana during the worst of the Jim Crow years finally find the courage and the will to stand together with dignity against a culture that had deprived them of their very manhood. Gaines himself was born on a plantation near New Roads, Louisiana, in 1933 and picked cotton in the plantation fields before he left Louisiana at age 15 to be with his parents who had moved to California. He never forgot Louisiana, eventually returning to the area as a University of Southwestern Louisiana professor and writer in residence, and made it the subject of his novels, stories and essays.

In the novel, Candy, a white woman who lost her parents as a child, was raised as much by Mathu, a black man employed on the plantation as she was by the white family who owned it. When she discovered a white man shot to death in front of Mathu’s house, her love for Mathu and her determination to protect him immediately suggested a plan to her. She will confess to the killing. And she will round up as many of Mathu’s old black friends as can be quickly gathered and will have them do the same thing. When Sheriff Mapes arrives on the scene and wants to take Mathu to the town jail he finds a group of elderly black men who are equally determined to confess to the murder in the face of any physical or mental intimidation that Mapes throws at them. The confrontation between this white lawman and these elderly black men has given the old men what they see as their one last chance to die as men rather than as the cowards they suddenly consider themselves to have been for their whole lives.

Gaines tells his story through the first person accounts of its main characters. It proceeds in straight chronological order, but as seen through the eyes of the various men and women intimately involved in what happened during the half a day that changed all of their lives forever. In the process, the reader gains a clear understanding of how society has formed each of these characters and what it is that motivates them to take a stand at this point in their lives regardless of what the consequences may be. A Gathering of Old Men packs numerous lessons and observations into what at first glance appears to be a simple story of just over 200 pages and proves what a fine novelist Ernest Gaines is.

Rated at: 5.0

Dickens on the Shelf

By moving more books to one of the closets (my wife is not thrilled, believe me), I was able to make room for the Dickens books in the center of my bookshelves. My Dickens books don't fit on one shelf anymore, but every book on this particular shelf is a Dickens book, the three little green ones going back to 1867. Those three are signed and dated by their original owner, one Mattie Barnes.



The second shot is just to give a little perspective.



I can't wait to read one of these vintage copies because there are some things in the set that I haven't seen before. Some of it is labeled as "Miscellaneous" and some as "Reprinted Pieces."

Ripley Under Ground

In 1970, some fifteen years after her great success with the Tom Ripley character that she created for The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith released her second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground. This second novel of the five-novel Ripley series, finds him living a charmed life of leisure in France where he has managed to marry into a wealthy family. But, of course, someone with Ripley's desires for the wealth of others and who has no conscience about taking whatever he decides will better serve him than it serves its owner, is not content to live in the French countryside as the mediocre amateur painter that he appears to be.

As in the first novel, Ripley becomes involved in a scheme that requires him to represent himself to the police as another person while he scurries around cleaning up the mess in which he has placed himself. I don't want to risk spoiling the book for any potential readers by getting into the details of the intricate plot that Ripley and a few co-conspirators have devised in order to exploit gullible art collectors in Europe and America. I will leave it at saying only that Ripley's sociopathic personality once again serves him well and that he obviously survives this situation to appear in three subsequent novels.

I found myself much less sympathetic and intrigued by the Ripley character this time around. Perhaps that is because I read the details of this novel in the Patricia Highsmith biography, Beautiful Shadow, which I finished last month and that left few surprises for me. Highsmith never quite made me believe that the British and French police could be as unobservant and unimaginative as they were required to be in order for Ripley to pull off another of his schemes. The vision and theme of Highsmith's work is still fascinating to me and it is probably time for me to leave Mr. Ripley behind for a while and move on to novels and short stories of hers that don't involve that particular character.

Rated at: 3.0

Disgraceful Book Neglect in East St. Louis

I'm starting to believe that libraries are a dangerous place for the average book. We all expect that library books will suffer the same kind of abuse, and for the same reasons, that we associate with rental cars. If it's not that, we've seen enough stories about large numbers of books ending up in dumpsters to know that strange things can happen to books in the place that one would least expect those things to happen. Well, here's one more story that has to be a huge embarrassment to the library system in East St. Louis.

For the 7,000 books sitting in a storage unit on State Street, it's abandonment all over again.

The books were among at least 10,000 items including magazines and albums left in a shuttered city library for more than three years. Many of the items became makeshift beds or fire starters for homeless people, who broke into the library for shelter. A leaky roof damaged or destroyed many of the books in the building, at 409 North Ninth Street.

Library officials admit that they erred in leaving the materials behind when they moved to a new site in January 2001.

...

Outraged city officials, who said they assumed the old library was empty, shooed away the homeless and boarded up the building in August 2004. Two months later, the city got inmates from the nearby Southern Illinois Correctional Center to box up the books and take them to a public storage facility, where they were to stay until the city could work with the library board and archivists to assess what should be salvaged and what should be tossed out.

That never happened.

From the sound of the rest of this article, I doubt that there is much left to salvage. The books have been allowed to fall apart as the result of an incompetently run system that apparently places very little value on books. This is disgraceful.

More Dickens Lust

Some of you will recall a post that I made last month regarding the two 1885 Dickens volumes that I picked up via a couple of eBay auctions. I was excited about getting my hands on two of the ten volumes that were being auctioned on eBay in February and posted some pictures of the two books and an inscription that the original owner placed in one of the books during the 1886 Christmas season.

As it turns out there were some 15 volumes in this set, and a very generous lady from California has taken the time and trouble to box up the whole set and send it to me here in Houston.



This is an example of the type of illustrations that each book contains:



And this picture is an example of the front covers of the various books (they are all the same):


One of the books even included a small set of instructions on how one should properly open a book in order to best preserve its binding:



This last shot shows an 1875 volume of Dombey and Son that was included in one of the boxes of books. It is one volume of the Globe Edition of Dickens' Works.



I'm in the process of finding these 16 books a proper home on my library shelves and plan to give them a prominent spot because of the great respect that their age and content demand. I'm also happy to report, that unlike quite a few books of this age, the print is large enough that I will actually be able to read the books rather than only to display them. My sincere thanks go to the previous owner of the books who so generously passed them on to me.

Connecticut Teacher Tries to Sell School Libraries

A Wethersfield special education teacher has apparently tried to sell, one book at a time, parts of the libraries of the two schools in which she works. According to the Norwich Bulletin, local police were able to buy one of the missing books on eBay and prove both that it belonged to one of the schools and that the seller was the arrested school teacher.

Kress is accused of stealing more than 600 books from Hanmer and Charles Wright elementary schools, where she worked as a special education teacher, police said.

Police began investigating a report about a year ago that books from various classrooms were missing. Police say some missing items turned up on the eBay online auction site and they were able to identify Kress as the seller.

Police purchased a book and the police lab identified it as property of Hanmer Elementary School, police said.

They obtained and executed a search warrant for Kress' home where they said they found 600 of the school's books. Police said they have no estimate on how many books had been sold.

This whole incident is bizarre but I have to wonder how in the world this woman managed to carry away several hundred books from the two schools without anyone noticing.