Wherever You Go Read-Along

I'm familiar with 24-hour readathons (having failed miserably two or three times at Dewey's already) but I've just become aware of another take on group reading - a "Read-Along" that is being hosted by a Canadian book-blogger.  Avis at She Reads and Reads is hosting the event and it is not too late to sign up if any of you want to give it a shot.  I can tell you that the book they have chosen, Wherever You Go, is one of my 2011 favorites.

In fact, I just reviewed it a few days ago.  Here's a quick link to that review that might help you decide whether or not you want to participate in Avis's readalong.  It sounds like fun - and this Joan Leegant book is one you should consider even if you don't have time to participate in this group event.

Lunch Bucket Paradise

It was a simpler, more innocent, time – a time when people were as enthusiastically optimistic about their own futures as they were about the future of the country.  Most would also argue that it was a better period in America’s social history than the one we find ourselves enduring today.  But whichever side of the argument one might come down on, those of us who came of age in the 1960s will certainly find a lot to like about Fred Setterberg’s Lunch Bucket Paradise.

Lunch Bucket Paradise is Setterberg’s novelization of his childhood days in California suburbia.  This was a period during which whole neighborhoods were being carved from the open spaces surrounding America’s cities and towns, a time when carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and other craftsmen worked hard just to keep up with the demand for new housing and schools.  World War II and Korean War veterans were ready to get on with life.  These men and women were well acquainted with what sacrifice and persistent effort could achieve, two habits that would serve them well for the rest of their lives.

 It was their children, however, who reaped the most immediate benefits of all that hard work.  Slick (as his uncle most often calls him) and his buddies grew up very differently than their parents had grown up only one generation earlier.  Their days were spent playing “war” as they fought their way from one green lawn to the next firing rubber bands from the elaborate wooden pistols they created.  Their bicycles, combined with what seemed to them to be an endless length of newly paved surfaces, gave them the kind of freedom boys their age only dream about today.  They explored the world together and probably knew more about each other than they would ever know about another human being.

Fred Setterberg

Lunch Bucket Paradise, though, is more than just a novel about what it was like for a boy like Fred Setterberg to grow up in 1960s suburbia.  Perhaps more importantly, it is Setterberg’s appreciative tribute to what his parents and others of their generation achieved for themselves and those who follow them.  Here, for instance, the author closes a one-page aside about how ants tend to invade homes in the heat of summer, with these words:

            “That’s what your kids need to understand.  Everybody does their bit.  Liking it or not doesn’t figure into the equation.  Every little one of us, shoulder to shoulder, oblivious mostly to one another’s feats and valor, losses, failures, wasted efforts – though nothing’s ever really wasted, is it?...It’s all part of the mix.  It’s what we call civilization.”

The bottom line is that “an ant alone is an ant in trouble,” words that will serve one well for a lifetime.  In the end, our parents - inadvertently or not - prepared us to live a life different from their own.  They made it possible for us to dream and they gave us the support we needed to achieve those dreams.

Rated at: 3.5

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Memories of Miss Devine

I have featured an animated short or two from the StoryCorps people already but I couldn't resist embedding this new one about Miss Devine - she is a character I will definitely remember for a while.
(StoryCorps is a project to help people record the stories of their lives.  To date, some 70,000 people have participated in over 35,000 interviews and the results can be heard on National Public Radio and at the group's website.  If this is something that touches your heart, please consider contributing to the project.

The link takes you to the main page of the StoryCorps site.  I purposely linked to that page because it explains everything about the project and includes links that allow you to get a real feel for the quality of the product being produced by the group.

The Ballad of Tom Dooley

The Ballad of Tom Dooley, the latest tale in Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Series, retells a story that most people only know through the old Kingston Trio song of the same name, if  they know even that much.  There is, however, a huge difference between the details of the song and what McCrumb’s research indicates really got young Mr. Tom Dula hanged for murder on May 1, 1868.  While the song paints Dooley as a man more upset that his escape has been foiled than by the murder he has committed, the novel’s Tom Dula is even colder.  The biggest difference between the song and the book, however, is that McCrumb does not believe that Dula actually killed anyone.

 McCrumb’s detailed study of the Tom Dula trial transcript led her to believe that there was a fourth person intimately involved in the “love triangle” that ended with the deaths of two of those involved in it.  McCrumb noticed the mention of a third Foster woman, Pauline, in the transcript and further research led her to believe that this is the real villain in this story.  Surprisingly, according to McCrumb’s version, Tom Dula was having his way with all three of the Foster cousins: Laura, the woman he was accused of stabbing to death; Ann Foster Melton, his longtime lover who was also implicated in the murder; and Pauline, a woman so spiteful and angry at the world that she meticulously and callously manipulated the ultimate fates of the other three.

McCrumb tells her story through the alternating voices of Pauline Foster and a lawyer for the defense, Zeb Vance.  Vance (twice governor of North Carolina, a Confederate officer, and a U.S. Senator) in his portions of the book admits more than once that he is working the case pro bono for career and political reasons of his own.  McCrumb has him repeat that he was out of practice when he took the case, and she portrays him as a man with a big ego and high expectations of great personal success, not a man who cares much about his client or the fate Dula is likely to suffer.

Sharyn McCrumb

Pauline Foster is portrayed in a similarly frank manner.  She carries the bulk of the narration and, in her own words, she exposes herself as an egocentric maniac with a great desire to punish anyone who even inadvertently slights her.  Pauline comes to the Happy Valley settlement seeking treatment for syphilis and, although her cousins barely remember who she is, she soon manages to worm herself into the most intimate parts of their lives.  Resentful of the way Anne and Tom treat her, Pauline thoroughly enjoys plotting their downfall – and if anyone else gets caught in the crossfire, so be it.

The Ballad of Tom Dooley is an interesting recasting of an old legend into a story that might well be closer to the truth than the original legend, or than even what has been commonly accepted as fact about the real case.  McCrumb, though, takes a leap of faith or two that, although they move the story along, are impossible to prove.  It all makes for an interesting, if dryly told, story that combines with the repetitiousness of some of the narration to make The Ballad of Tom Dooley into a bit of a slog to get through.

Rated at: 3.0

If Trouble Don't Kill Me

A month ago I had never heard of Clayton and Saford Hall, twin brothers from the boondocks of Virginia.  Now, thanks to the dual biography, If Trouble Don't Kill Me, written by Clayton’s grandson, Ralph Berrier, Jr., I feel as if I have known them all my life.  The Hall twins are representative of a distinct era in country music and American history.  They were born in 1919 into a culture that leaned heavily on local musicians when it came to socializing and entertainment.  These mostly self-taught musicians seemed to be everywhere, and they passed their skills on from one generation to the next.  If a boy could get his hands on a fiddle, a banjo, a mandolin, or a guitar, someone was there to teach him what to do with it.

Clayton and Saford were bitten by the music bug when they were just boys and, even in a section of the country crawling with good pickers, Saford’s way with a fiddle and Clayton’s with a banjo soon enough turned the boys into local celebrities.  Like so many others of the period, the Halls used low-powered, regional radio stations to build their reputation.  These stations knew their audience well and gave it what it wanted – live country music at the beginning of the long workday, and the same again at mid-day when it was time to stop for lunch.

The boys were on top of the world by 1940.  They were able to quit their jobs in a furniture factory and were making a nice living by working fulltime with Roy Hall (no relation) & His Blue Ridge Entertainers, the best known band in the region.  Their future was golden - and then it happened.  The U.S. got involved in World War II and Uncle Sam came calling for the Hall twins and so many others like them.  First to go was Saford, but just 16 months later it would be Clayton’s turn.

Ralph Berrier, Jr.

Saford and Clayton were in the thick of some of the war’s heaviest fighting but both of them managed to beat the odds and make it back to Virginia.  Saford, who was involved in some of America’s earliest action in the war, would eventually fight his way from North Africa to Sicily, and on through Europe, ending up finally in Germany.  Clayton would endure some of the war’s most brutal Pacific theater fighting, including the key battle on Okinawa. 

The boys came home to a different world and, being the heroes they were, they got on with life as best they could.  Music remained one of the most important things in their world, but they had missed their chance at real fame and they knew it was time to move on.  Saford, somewhat of a hard-drinking scoundrel, summed up his life this way not long before he died:

            “I know I ain’t been the best person all the time.  But I did the best I could.  I’ve seen and done things that not a lot of country boys ever get to do.  I know I ain’t got much time left, but I know where I’m going when my time comes.  I did my best to live a good life.  That’s all any of us can do, ain’t it?  Just live a good life?  When all is said and done, ain’t that enough?”

Yes, sir, it most certainly is.

Rated at: 5.0

Books I Can't Wait to Read Again

I know that I shouldn’t do it.  I am well aware that I cannot possibly read all the new books that deserve my attention - books that I would enjoy, books that I would remember forever, books that might actually change my life or the way I view the world.  And there are more of them published every day.

So why do I want to go back and re-read a bunch of books that I read years, or even decades, ago?  Easy.  I loved the first experience, or they changed my life, or they changed the way I look at the world. 

All I have to do is stand in front of my bookshelves and I see books that call out to me for another chance to have their pages turned and appreciated:

1.     Black Boy – Richard Wright – This 1945 memoir (which I discovered during the sixties) made me think about what it was like for Blacks to grow up and live in the Jim Crow South.  I remember what it was like to grow up in the South before the Civil Rights era – and this book should have been required reading in those days.  I am a different person than when I read this all those decades ago, and maybe, just maybe, this book is part of the reason why.

2.     Andersonville – MacKinlay Kantor – This 760-page novel about the infamous Civil War prison camp located just a short drive from Plains, Georgia, humanized that war for me like no other book I’ve read on the subject (and I’ve read dozens and dozens of them).  I think it is sad that so many people think of the Civil War as ancient history.  Just think about this for a moment: the book was published in 1955, only 90 years after the war ended.  Yes, those 1950s.

3.     The Prince of Tides – Pat Conroy – I loved this 1986 book so much that I bought paperback copies the next year as Christmas gifts for every person who worked in my department (almost 25 copies, from what I recall).  The book turned me into a lifelong Pat Conroy fan.

4.     Black Cherry Blues – James Lee Burke – This 1989 Burke novel served as my introduction to Cajun detective, and ex-New Orleans cop, Dave Robicheaux.  Finally, someone was writing about the Cajun culture without resulting to cartoonish stereotypes – and Dave Robicheaux was actually a hero, not someone to laugh at…what a concept.  I’ve been hooked on the series (this was the third book) ever since, and I greatly admire Mr. Burke.

5.     The Longest Walk – George Meegan – This one, from 1988, describes Meegan’s walk of almost seven years, a walk that totaled over 19,000 miles and took him from the southern tip of South America all the way to the northernmost point in Alaska.  Meegan’s walk was a great adventure that tested him in every way.  It made me into a confirmed hiker for a while and might be exactly what I need to get myself seriously walking again.

This is why I keep my favorites where I can see them and put my hands on them quickly.  The few minutes I spent handling them this evening brought back some great memories, both about the books and about who I was when I first read them.  I promise myself tonight that I will read them again sometime soon.