BOOKPATHS

JUST BROWSING

Ghost Wars : the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll (New York : Penguin, 2004).
For almost 700 pages, Steve Coll follows the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan. It is an enlightening read for anyone struggling to understand today's world.

"In history's long inventory of surprise attacks, September 11 is distinguished in part by the role played by intelligence agencies and informal secret networks in the preceding events." -- from Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll

Lovesick, by Angeles Mastretta (New York : Riverhead Books, 1997. Out of print, but available from used book sources.)
A little bit romance novel, a little bit soap opera, Lovesick rises above both with its compelling characters, historical background, and strong sense of place. Set primarily in Puebla, Mexico, at the time of the revolution, readers are drawn into the characters' lives and loves. A charming, passionate book.

"Josefa Veytia had always said it was not necessary to pursue destiny, because nothing was less foreseeable yet so surprising in its innate predictability than fate." -- from Lovesick, bu Angeles Mastretta

"Puebla is like my mythical territory," [Mastretta] says. "I think things happen there that don't happen elsewhere. A part of me sincerely believes that. Setting my stories there makes them possible because Puebla for me is endearing. At least the Puebla that I invent. I hear the stories and a part of me lives there, in the Puebla in my head, the imaginary."

Old School, by Tobias Wolff (New York : Vintage, 2004)
Set in an eastern prep school in the early 1960s, this quiet book is filled with insight and truths. If you love books and writing, read Old School.

"No true account can be given of how or why you become a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: This is when I became a writer." -- from Old School, by Tobias Wolff

BOOKPATHS: Wyoming-Colorado Borderland

The Meadow, by James Galvin (New York : Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1992)

The real world goes like this: The Neversummer Mountains like a jumble of broken glass. Snowfields weep slowly down. Chambers Lake, ringed by trees, gratefully catches the drip in its tin cup, and gives the mountains their own reflection in turn. This is the real world, indifferent, unburdened.

Two rivers flow from opposite ends of Chambers Lake, like two ends of yarn being pulled off a spool at the same time. The Laramie River flows through its own valley, through its own town, then into the North Platte. From the opposing end of the lake the Cache la Poudre gouges into a steep canyon down to the South Platte River. At North Platte, Nebraska, the two forks of the Platte conjoin and then separate, long-traveled waters of Chambers Lake remarry.

The real world goes like this: Coming down from the high lake, timbered ridges in slow green waves suddently stop and bunch up like patiently disappointed refugees, waiting for permission to start walking out across the open prairie toward Nebraska, where the waters come together and form an enormous inland island, large parts of three large states surrounded by water. The island never heard of states; the real world is the island. -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin

There is a blurring of borders in James Galvin's The Meadow -- between Wyoming and Colorado, between fiction and nonfiction. The stateline matters little in The Meadow; it is the landscape and weather that determine lives. Galvin's home, near Tie Siding, Wyoming, is part of this landscape, reaching along and out from Highway 287 between Laramie and Fort Collins -- the Medicine Bow Range, the Snowy Range, Deadman Peak, Sand Creek, Sheep Creek, Eaton Reservoir and, of course, "the meadow."

"The Meadow was not meant for publication. It was intended to be a simple record, for my daughter, Emily, of a landscape, a way of life, an environment, an ethic, I saw disappearing," Galvin explains in the book's reading guide. For Emily, he began recording the lives of people who had lived on the land during the last 100 years -- Hazel, Clara, App, Ray, Frank, Ferris, and most of all, Lyle. "It was Lyle's last year on earth," Galvin explains, "I wanted my daughter to know, when she grew old enough to understand that these extraordinary people had existed, that the land had once been unspoiled and dignified by its human guests."

Readers move back and forth between past and present, meeting Lyle, and other "characters," at different times in their lives. We picture Lyle as a young boy living in his family's sod house on the Colorado plains. At 14, we follow him to "the meadow" on Sheep Creek purchased from his mother's frugal savings. As a man, we watch Lyle grow into the work required to live and make a living at 8,500 feet, the grace and skill it requires. He comes to know the land intimately, somehow "rais[ing] his consciousness almost up to coyote level." Dying from emphysema, we see him slow down, still dignified and alert to the world around him. Some of the most beautiful passages simply follow Lyle's gaze out the window, as he watches the meadow "the way people watch television while they eat -- looking up to the TV and down to take a bite and back...he's hooked on the plot, doesn't want to miss anything. He looks out over the rim of his cup as he sips." Through his gaze, readers see wildlife come and go -- coyote, elk, white crown sparrows, chickadees, Steller's Jays, barn swallows, and other creatures; the whiteness and silence of winter; and "how completely the meadow changes with respective seasons, how much it can change under light and clouds." Readers feel the weather through Lyle and learn the importance of water, that "you need a bad winter to have a good year." By the end of The Meadow, when Galvin describes Lyle's death, funeral, and burial, readers understand what has been lost.

You can visit the landscape described in the book by exploring Highway 287 and its side roads. Eventually, you may even find "the meadow" and "see the barn," Lyle crafted, "from the county road." If you visit, take The Meadow with you and read from it along the way. It is a perfect merging of book and place. But, even from a distance, The Meadow rewards readers with glimpses into a beautiful, but challenging, landscape; of the people who attempted living there; and the one who succeeded, who "lived so close to the real world it almost let him in." Readers have Galvin's wife, Jorie, and friends to thank for the publishing of The Meadow. They understood that the "record," with its mingling of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, started for his daughter should be shared.

Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow's widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around with the boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky's blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun.

Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie is scorched yellow. But Lyle's meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up by the sky in its ring of ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too.

The granite boulder is only there to hold it down." --from The Meadow, by James Galvin

"Lyle said, 'If you want to know who really owns your land, don't pay the taxes for awhile. Then if you want to know who owns it even more, just look out the window in a blizzard. That's the landlord's face looking in, snooping.'" -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin

Related Website

Reading Guide http://www.henryholt.com/readingguides/galvin.htm

More by Galvin

Elements : Poems
Fencing the Sky : a Novel
God's Mistress
Imaginary Timber : Poems
Lethal Frequencies
Resurrection Update : Collected Poems 1975-1997
X : Poems

"Lyle learned to pay attention, to think things through and not get ahead of himself, not to lapse into inattention ever. After a while he couldn't not pay attention, shaking a stranger's hand, tasting Mrs. So and So's pickles, setting fenceposts. It endowed all his actions with precision. It gave him total recall. It obliterated time." -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin

DETOUR: Orion Magazine

“Orion explores an emerging alternative world view. Informed by a growing ecological awareness and the need for cultural change, it is a forum for thoughtful and creative ideas and practical examples of how we might live justly, wisely, and artfully on Earth.” -- from Website

Orion Magazine, published by the Orion Society, is well worth your time. Each issue is a gift, full of wisdom, beauty, spirit, and activism. Take a look at the current issue by logging onto http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/04-6om/Berry.html. Read Wendell Berry’s article, “Compromise, Hell! : Economic WMDs Are Being Used Against Our Own People in a Version of ‘Freedom’ That Makes Greed the Dominant Economic Virtue.” Subscribe if you can. It is the only way that magazines like Orion will continue. It is a form of activism – keeping voices heard -- especially now.

But, whether you subscribe or not, enjoy perusing the website, then bookmark it for future journeys into the pages of Orion.

“There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction, and we have allowed them to be used against us.” – Wendell Berry

“And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land – for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace.” – Wendell Berry

2004 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst

“I shall be grateful for the rest of my life.” – Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst has won the 2004 Man Booker prize for his book, The Line of Beauty. For an excerpt, review, interview, and “guide” to Alan Hollinghurst, turn to the Guardian Unlimited at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2004/0,14182,1127217,00.html

There is also information on the other nominated books, long and short lists, and on the Booker Prize itself, including a link to their official website.

WEBPATH: Robert F. Kennedy Memorial

"Robert F. Kennedy boldly faced tough problems and challenged the comfortable and complacent. He believed that individual action could overcome injustice and oppression, and inspired a generation to change the world. To keep his vision alive, his family and friends founded a living memorial in 1968. Today the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit charitable organization that works to realize his dream of a peaceful and just world through domestic and international programs that help the disadvantaged and oppressed, build our next generation of leaders, and tackle the toughest problems facing our society." --from Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Website

To read about the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and all that it sponsores, see http://www.rfkmemorial.org/index.htm and click on the various links. One will take you to The RFK Book Award.

"The Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was founded in 1980 with the proceeds from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s best-selling biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times. Each year the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial presents an award to the book which 'most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes -- his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.' The RFK Book Awards have received international recognition as one of the most prestigious honors an author can achieve." --from Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Website

Read about the current recipient and view a list of award winners dating back to 1980. The list is impressive and inspiring.

BOOKPATH: Mt. St. Helens, Washington (and other places on earth)

Danger on Peaks, by Gary Snyder (Washington, D.C. : Shoemaker/Hoard, 2004)

"St. Helens' summit is smooth and broad, a place to nod, to sit and write, to watch what's higher in the sky and do a little dance." -- from The Climb, Danger on Peaks

Gary Snyder's new book of poetry, Danger on Peaks, is written from the heart. His work is revealing, personal, and very wise. Memories of family, friends, plants, animals, his life, fill this book. Places are important, too, with Snyder ranging wide.

California figures significantly in many of the book's poems -- from Snyder's Nevada County home in the Lower Yuba River watershed; Davis where he taught; the vast Delta with its wintering birds; Drake's Bay; the Five Lakes Basin and Sand Ridge of the Northern Sierra; San Francisco; Berkeley; Buttonwillow, and other stops near Interstate 5. Aravaipa Canyon in Arizona inspires, as does "the end of the season, Warm Springs, Oregon." And farther from home -- Athens, Greece; a reading in Ireland; Japan; and the beautiful poems for Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley and those who died at the World Trade Center. But, standing over all is Mt. St. Helens -- "Loowit, from Sahaptin/lawilayt-Lá/'Smoker, Smoky.'"

In Danger on Peak's timely first section, Snyder returns to the first time he saw Mt. St. Helens and "Spirit Lake when I was thirteen." Poems of later visits and climbs on the "shapley mountain" follow. We read the request he made of the mountain in 1945, "Please help this life," and the promise he made after returning from the climb to news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I swore a vow to myself," Snyder shares, "something like, 'By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.'" In Letting Go, Mt. St. Helens erupts, "8:32 AM 18 May 1980." Snyder concludes with four exquisite poems of returning -- Blast Zone, To Ghost Lake, Pearly Everlasting, and Enjoy the Day. "I had asked Mt. St. Helens for help," Snyder recalls in Pearly Everlasting, "the day I climbed it, so seems she did." "If you ask for help it comes/But not in any way you'd ever know/--thank you Loowit, lawilayt-lá, Smoky Ma." The Mt. St. Helens poems bring the mountain to us. We can imagine it as it was in 1945, feel the blast of its eruption, and return to it as it is now, ever changing. The poems can also remind us of places in our own lives, places that have been a presence and inspiration throughout our years.

Lovely, sweet, powerful poems. Danger on Peaks is a book to be grateful for.

"Sit on a rock and gaze out into space/leave names in the summit book,/prepare to descent/on down to some fate in the world." -- from Some Fate, Danger on Peaks

"swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles/she goes" -- from 1980 : Letting Go, Danger on Peaks

(Later bookpaths will, no doubt, return to individual poems in Danger on Peaks.)

BOOKPATH: Hay-on-Wye, Wales

"The town of Hay-on-Wye lies on three borders. The national boundary with England, and the county boundaries of Brecknockshire and Radnorshire run through the town. Typically of Hay, the county boundary is marked by the famous River Wye, while the national boundary is hidden away, marked by the Dulais Brook which trickles down the valley a hundred yards or so away from the remains of the old Town Wall. The third boundary is that with the Brecon Beacons National Park, in whose corner Hay sits." -- from Official Hay-on-Wye Website

Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books, by Paul Collins (New York : Bloomsbury, 2003)

"Not long after setting up shop in Hay, Booth vowed to make it the bookselling capital of the world, a pledge that was met with great hilarity. But one by one in the late sixties and early seventies, the local cinema, firehouse, and factories were filled with books." -- from Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books

Paul Collins, his wife, Jennifer, and their one-and-a-half-year-old son, Morgan, abandoned the high cost of living in San Francisco for the country living and antiquarian bookstores of Hay-on-Wye. Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books is a charming account of their time there, a book for both lovers of travel and lovers of books.

Through Collins' adventures readers get acquainted with Hay, a town of 1500 people and 40 bookstores, near the banks of the River Wye. As Collins and his wife look at potential homes, including Sixpence House, readers learn about the local architecture and the frustrations of home buying in Britain. When he accepts a job in Richard Booth's bookstore, it's a chance for readers to learn about Booth's role in creating "the bookselling capital of the world" and to get a sense of what it's like to work in his "madhouse." We wander in and out of bookstores with Collins, stop at Oscar's Bistro and Spar Market, take a walk along the River Wye, imagine the castle rising over the town, and the clock tower at its center. There are reality checks, too, as some businesses close, unable to benefit from Hay's status as "the town of books."

There are many detours in Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books. Something as simple as taking a bath or reading the newspaper can detour readers into the woes of British plumbing or their "worship" of "papers." But the detours that are the most fun are those that divert readers into the pages of books. Collins is a lover and student of books, particularly little-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Anything can remind him of a book, or a book-related event. Finding a book "squirreled away" by a customer, Collins recalls some of the books he "secreted away", including A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, written, we learn, by Harriet Beecher Stowe as "a justification of why Uncle Tom's Cabin was written." Struggling with a title for his own soon-to-be published book, Collins takes us on a detour into the world of titles, informing us that: "Any title is a balancing act. Your title cannot be too obscure, for nobody will remember what they are looking for when they go to the store. But it cannot be too familiar, because someone else will most certaily have used it." Always, though, readers are returned to Hay and "the stores stuffed to the rafters with old books...."

Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books ends with Collins' humorous account of his return to the United States. His time in Hay served him well. His first book was published, experiences were gathered for his second, and books were added to his always expanding library. Paul Collins' time in Hay served readers well, too, giving us a book that is a perfect travel companion and an introduction to the landscape, history, architecture, people, and bookstores of Hay.

"To look for a specific book in Hay is a hopeless task, you can only find the books that are looking for you, the ones you didn't even know to ask for in the first place." -- from Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books

Websites:

Hay-on-Wye (Y Gelli) http://www.hay-on-wye.co.uk/

Richard Booth's Bookshop Ltd. http://www.richardbooth.demon.co.uk/

The Hay Festival http://www.hayfestival.com/2004/
("The Hay Festival is now one of the world's largest literary events...." - from Sixpence House : Lost in a Town of Books)

The Collins Library http://www.collinslibrary.com/
("The Collins Library is a reprint series by McSweeney's books of unusual out-of-print literary works. Each volume is newly edited and typeset, and is selected and introduced by series editor Paul Collins.")

More by Paul Collins:

Banvard's Folly : Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World. New York : Picador, 2001.

Not Even Wrong : Adventures in Autism. New York : Bloomsbury, 2004.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2004

"for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace" (Nobel Prize website)

And, the Peace Prize awarded to Wangari Maathai. Read about this extraordinary woman at: http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/index.html

Nobel Prize in Literature

“for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power” (from Nobel Prize website)

Austrian writer, Elfriede Jelinek, has won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Why she was selected, biographical, bibliographical, and other information can be found at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2004/index.html.

BOOKPATH: Southwestern United States and Mexico

The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536. New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944; previously published as Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. (Out of print. Available used or, perhaps, through your Library.)

"My account of Nuñez is not the account he sent the King, apart of course from the actual facts. But I believe it to be the account he wished to send the King." -- Haniel Long

When Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City, after eight years of wandering, he wrote La Relación, a report for the King of Spain. In it, he shared what happened during an expedition meant to bring prestige and fortune to the King. From the King's point of view, the expedition was a disaster, but for Cabeza de Vaca it was a story of spiritual triumph.

Believing that Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had something to say to "us four hundred years later, in this world of ours where human relation is still the difficult problem, and exploitation the cancer," Haniel Long composed a short Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, a reading between the lines of La Relación, reflecting on what Cabeza de Vaca might had shared had he felt free to do so.

Readers follow Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca on an expedition led by the greedy and ignorant Pámfilo Narvaez. Six hundred men dwindle to 400, then 40, and finally only a "handful...crawled ashore" near present day Galveston, Texas. The native people care for the starving, depleted men, even though they have little themselves. The more the Spaniards lose, however, the more they gain spiritually. At first, Cabeza de Vaca feels that the worst loss is "in parting little by little with the thoughts that clothe the soul of a European, and most of all of the idea that a man attains strength through dirk and dagger, and serving in your Majesty's guard." Gradually, though, they "surrender such fantasies." "Several years went by," Nuñez recalls, "before I could relax in that living plexus for which even now I have no name; but only when at last I relaxed, could I see the possibilities of a life in which to be deprived of Europe was not to be deprived of too much."

Reduced to four, they move farther westward -- "no trails," "lost," healing the native people who ask for help, feeling a "power to render life and happiness to others." It is a new thought to them, this helping, "but," he tells the King, "after one accustoms oneself to the idea, it is good to be able to give out health and joy...." "Your Majesty," Cabeza de Vaca writes, "I found myself treating all human beings alike."

Haniel Long, following the "core" of La Relación, ends Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's eight years of deprivation with "a sign of our countrymen," countrymen who had "burnt all the villages." Back in "civilization," Cabeza de Vaca begins to feel a "reluctance...to do good to others." And, so, he ends his letter to the King by writing: "If one lives where all suffer and starve, one acts on one's own impulse to help. But where plenty abounds, we surrender our generosity, believing that our country replaces us each and several. This is not so, and indeed a delusion. On the contrary the power of maintaining life in others, lives within each of us, and from each of us does it recede when unused."

Haniel Long, a poet as well as a prose writer, considered The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536, "the dearest of all my books and I believe that it expresses best the key idea of all my writing, namely: that each of us has, in a degree, the power of giving health and happiness to others." Haniel Long's book still speaks to us today, during a time when "human relation" remains "the difficult problem."

"My attention wanders from the perfunctory narrative to the thing he refrains from confiding to the royal ear. That thing is a mystical feeling about the increase of life in a man from effort and from taking thought of his fellows." -- Haniel Long

Websites

Both websites contain information on Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and the text of La Relación.

The Center for the Study of the Southwest Texas State University and The Witte Museum in San Antonio
http://www.english.swt.edu/CSS/Vacaindex.HTML

Southwestern Writers Collection
http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/cdv/