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407. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Ronan Farrow

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Politics

448 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Catch and Kill is the story behind Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking story in which he helped to expose the powerful interests, including his own employer NBC News, who conspired to protect serial predator Harvey Weinstein and how that scandal ignited the “Me Too” feminist movement.

Quotes 

“In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories – the big ones, the true ones – can be caught but never killed.”

 

“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”

 

“I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”

 

“Look at what’s happening! No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”

 

“I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.”

 

“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”

 

“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”

 

“Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”

 

“All the women before feel I am their fault,” she said. “And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”

 

“The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.”

 

“She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige.”

 

My Take

I had loosely followed the Harvey Weinstein story while it was all over the news and therefore had an interest in reading Catch and Kill.  Ronan Farrow narrates a compelling story of just how hard and how many obstacles had to be overcome before dam burst and Harvey Weinstein got his due.  It was especially troubling to see how corrupt NBC News was in covering up for Weinstein and Today show host Matt Lauer.  Hopefully, the world we be spared from future Harvey Weinsteins.

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388. American Wolf

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Nate Blakeslee

Genre:    Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Science, History, Environment

320 pages, published August, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

American Wolf follows the story of Rick McIntyre, a park ranger in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, who spends all of his time studying and teaching about wolves.  We also learn a great deal about the different wolf packs that inhabit Yellowstone and the legal fight to protect them.

Quotes 

“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”

 

“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”

 

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”

 

“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”

 

“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?

There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”

 

My Take

Well, I learned a lot about wolves after reading this book.  If you have an interest in them, then I highly recommend this book.  If you don’t, you still might like it.

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379. There There

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Tommy Orange

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

294 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

There There is a story of twelve characters, all of whom are traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time.

Quotes 

“If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.”

 

“The spider’s web is a home and a trap.”

 

“This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.”

 

“She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.”

 

“Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited.”

 

“That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.”

 

“The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?”

 

“The problem with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief.”

 

“We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people. We have the sad, defeated Indian silhouette, and the heads rolling down temple stairs, we have it in our heads, Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne’s six-shooter slaying us, an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies. We have the litter-mourning, tear-ridden Indian in the commercial (also Iron Eyes Cody), and the sink-tossing, crazy Indian who was the narrator in the novel, the voice of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We have all the logos and mascots. The copy of a copy of the image of an Indian in a textbook. All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image. Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people—which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.”

 

My Take

While generally well written with a few interesting characters, There There is such a downbeat tale of victimology that I was happy to finally be finished with it.  It reminded me a lot of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie (author of the highly recommended The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).  I get that Native Americans have had a raw deal in this country and feel betrayed.  It is  just a downer to read these tales of woe.

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358. Southern Lady Code

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Helen Ellis

Genre:  Non Fiction, Essays, Humor, Memoir, Short Stories

224 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Southern Lady Code is a collection of 23 essays by Helen Ellis, a Southern woman living in New York City.  She takes on topics such as marriage, manners, thank-you notes, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the art of living life as a Southern Lady.

Quotes 

“One of Mama’s parenting mantras was: “Oh, Helen Michelle, I have yet to begin to embarrass you.”

 

“If you don’t know what to do with the rest of your life, make your bed. If you’re going to be a couch potato, at least fluff the pillows. If you can’t afford pearls, red nail polish is your best accessory. If you don’t have time to do your nails, smile and stand up straight.”

 

“Mama says, ” Helen Michelle, a lot of women have trouble saying no and then find themselves in worse situations because they were afraid of being rude. So, if you have trouble saying no, say ‘No, thank you.’ Let’s practice.”

 

“No fairy tale begins: “Once upon a time, he blindfolded me in the back of a car.” No fantasy suite has another woman’s hair clogging the drains. A suitcase full of gowns doesn’t make you a princess. Be careful what you wish for, Cinderella’s house was infested with mice. If a man doesn’t kiss you, he doesn’t want to kiss you. If a man doesn’t kiss you on the mouth, he doesn’t find you attractive. A fist bump is not a kiss. An ass pat is not a kiss. Don’t trust a man who keeps your kisses a secret.”

 

“Because it turns out, “If it happens, it happens” is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.” 

My Take

A fun, fluffy diversion.  I especially enjoyed the story of how the author’s parents staged a home invasion when she was a teenager as a party trick to see what she and her friends remembered.

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330. The Library Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Susan Orlean

Genre:  Non Fiction, History

336 pages, published October 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library experienced a devastating fire.  It reached 2000 degrees, burned for more than seven hours, destroyed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more.  A thorough investigation failed to solve the mystery of whether someone purposefully set fire to the library.   Author Susan Orlean set out to answer that question and also incorporates her love of books and reading, as well as a history of the Los Angeles Library, into this book.

Quotes 

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

 

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

 

“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.”

 

“It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries — and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up–not just stopped but saved.”

 

“books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”

 

“A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press — a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, …”

 

“I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”

 

“People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

 

“There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.”

 

“The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.”

 

“librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”

 

“Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

 

“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

 

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”

 

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.” 

My Take

As a dedicated and appreciative patron of my local library (the remarkable Boulder Public Library), I am already a big library fan and was interested to read this book, a love letter by author Susan Orlean to books and libraries.  Her beautiful prose and well researched passages made me appreciate libraries even more.   If she had focused on that, I think the book would have been better.  It gets off track when she reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the prime suspect in setting fire to the Los Angeles Public Library.  Despite this, The Library Book is still an interesting read and I recommend it.

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306. Warlight

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Michael Ondaatje

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

304 pages, published June 7, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Using a shifting time narrative, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel as he attempts to piece together and make sense of the story of his past.  Also present in this shadowy novel are his sister unforgiving sister Rachel, his Mother Rose (a British spy during and after World War II) and the enigmatic characters nicknamed the Moth and the Darter by Nathaniel and his sister.  All is not as it seems as this novel of intrigue, familial relationships, search for meaning and forgiveness.

Quotes 

“Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”

 

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”

 

“I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in;”

 

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe.”

 

“a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.”

 

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”

 

“the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out”

 

“We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….”

 

“Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?…Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back?”

 

“Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.”

 

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.” 

My Take

Warlight is a beautifully written novel by author and poet Michael Ondaatje, who also wrote The English Patient, another mesmerizing book.  While I enjoyed the story of Nathaniel, a young British boy who slowly discovers that his mother was a famed British spy, I was even more captivated by the self discovery Nathaniel engages in as the truth unfolds in a variety of ways.  It was also a treat to read Ondaatje’s lovely, poetic writing.

 

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269. The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Historical Fiction, Biography

242 pages, published November 1, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The King’s Speech is the story of Lionel Logue, a speech therapist from Australia working in London, and King George VI (aka Bertie) of England, Logue’s most famous patient.  For several decades, Logue helped Prince Albert (who would become King George VI when his older brother, the Duke of Windsor, abdicated the English throne to marry Wallis Simpson) overcome a lifelong stammering problem.  In this historical novel, we learn how Logue accomplished this feat as well as a lot of British and Australian history from that era.

 

Quotes 

“When the fresh patient comes to me the usual query is: “Will I be able to speak like the King?” and my reply is: “Yes, if you will work like he does.”

 

“Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study.”

 

My Take

A few years ago, I saw the movie version of The King’s Speech and really enjoyed it.  I was, therefore, keen to read the novel upon which it was based.  Like the movie, I found the book to be a very interesting, behind the scenes peek into history.  I always like learning more about history, especially British history, and was pleased to learn more about King George VI , the Duke of Windsor and the pre-World War II period.

 

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207. Men Without Women

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:   Haruki Murakami

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Foreign

240 pages, published May 9, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Men Without Women is a collection of short stories from Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  All of the stories take place in Japan and, as the title instructs, all have a theme of men without women.

 

Quotes 

“Once you’ve become Men Without Women loneliness seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet.”

 

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

 

“There were two types of drinkers:  those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to take something away.”

 

“Here’s what hurts the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her–or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”  Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.  “But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

 

“But he doubted the dead could think or feel anything. In his opinion, that was ones of the great things about dying.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed a few of the stories in Men Without Women, overall the book did not do it for me.  It was a bit of a slog to finish it (never a good sign), especially as the quality level of the stories declined precipitously towards the end of the book.  More than once, I wondered what point the author was trying to make.  This will probably be my only experience with Haruki Murakami.

 

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104. H is for Hawk

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Helen MacDonald

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Animals

300 pages, published March 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Written by Helen MacDonald after her father’s sudden, devastating death, H is for Hawk is two books in one.  An account of MacDonald’s training of a vicious predator goshawk whom she names Mabel and a touching, insightful meditation on grief.  Through the demanding and difficult goshawk training process and her research into the life of The Once and Future King author and fellow falconer T.H. White, MacDonald gains new insight into the meaning of life and death.

 

Quotes

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

 

“Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.”

 

“In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”

 

“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”

 

“When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe anymore. Being an expert opens you up to judgment.”

 

“It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”

 

“We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”

 

“Hands are for other human hands to hold.”

 

“Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own conscious certainty that t his was the cure I needed. Hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

 

“the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.”

 

“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

 

“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.”

 

“Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”

 

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

 

“Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It’s a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn’t serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn’t. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.”

 

My Take

Helen MacDonald has won numerous awards for her reflective and moving memoir including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year and the acclaim is well-deserved.  Reading H is for Hawk, I not only learned about the intricacies and challenges of training a hawk, which is an entirely new and fascinating subject for me, but I also gained keen insight into what it means to be a human and the nature of grief.  I also give the book bonus points for the best cover artwork of books I have so far read in my quest.  MacDonald is a fine writer and it was a pleasure to read her book.

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5. The Revenant

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Michael Punke

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Western

Info:  272 pages, published June 10, 2002

Format:   Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary 

Based on a true incident of heroism in the history of the American West, The Revenant tells the story of Hugh Glass, a Philadelphia-born adventurer and frontiersman.  Glass goes to sea at age 16 and enjoys a charmed life, including several years under the flag of the pirate Jean Lafitte and almost a year as a prisoner of the Loup Pawnee Indians on the plains between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.

In 1822, at age 36, Glass escapes, finds his way to St. Louis and enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River. After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.  His throat nearly ripped out, scalp hanging loose and deep slashing wounds to his back, shoulder and thigh, Glass appears to be mortally wounded.

Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible. Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger (who lived to become a frontier hero) to stand watch and bury him.

After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians. Taking Glass’s rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridget, leaving Glass. Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

 

Quotes

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

“He would crawl until his body could support a crutch.  If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead.”

“Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.”

“Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions.”

“No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human.”

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.”

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