November 30

Homeless Bird (2000)
By Gloria Whelan

Thirteen-year-old Koly goes with her family to wed a man with whose family a marriage has been arranged.  Koli's family sacrifices to provide her dowry.  When she meets Hari, she discovers he is very young and gravely ill.  Her dowry money was needed to finance a trip to the Ganges River to cure Hari.  Despite his illness, Koly likes Hari and is truly sorrowful when he dies.

Koly develops a close friendship with Hari's sister, though Koly realizes her life as a widow will be a harsh one.  She continues to hone her embroidery skills and also asks her father-in-law, a teacher, to teach her to read.  When Koly's father-in-law dies, her mother-in-law, destitute, takes her to another holy city, where she deserts Koly.  A kindly richshaw driver, Raji, takes her to a home for young widows, where Koly finds a welcome, friends, and a job.  Her embroidery skills and literacy help her overcome poverty.  Raji saves enough money from his richshaw work to buy some farmland and the two look forward to a future together.  This short, hopeful book gives insights into many Hindu customs (dowries, family obligations, etc).  Helpful glossary.

I always enjoyed selecting books for the young adult collection and this was a lovely story.  For older adults, the film Water is a wonderful, poignant story of young widows in 1930s India.

November 29

The Last Train North (1992)
By Clifton Taulbert

A young man heads north from rural Mississippi to find work and integration in St Louis.  Clifton Taulbert becomes one of the millions who took part in the great African American migration of the 20th century.  The incentive for his journey, besides to make a better future for himself, is to meet his absentee father. He arrives in the midst of the civil rights movement and finds support and friendship along the way.  He relates his experiences shopping for clothes, his first jobs, and his first trip home to Mississippi, where he is welcomed as the home-town hero.  This story is a good choice for young adults, as well as adults, and offers one man's account of the migration experience, told with humility and without rancor.

November 28

A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (1988)
By Ellis Peters

Three interconnected stories tell how Cadfael left the Crusades for the monastic order.  Ellis Peters actually wrote 20 books featuring Brother Cadfael, a Welch monk who has found a calling as an herbalist during the first untamed century of English history - and even the cover illustration seems to refer to his various "lives".   A Rare Benedictine was written late in the sequence, in order to provide readers with the origin of Cadfael's calling.  The series includes lots of 12-century detail, including descriptions of monastic life, early English village and rural life, and references to early English history.

Monk's hood, the third book in the series, is a good example.  "Monk's hood" is a healing herb used by Bro Cadfael for rubbing into aching muscles.  Unfortunately, it's lethal if swallowed, and someone has apparently laced Master's Bonel's dinner with oil of monk's hood.  Cadfael works to exonerate Bonel's young stepson Edwin (whose mother, much to Cadfael's surprise, turns out to have been Cadfael's sweetheart from his teenage pre-monastery years).  The atmosphere and descriptions made me think of Tintern Abbey.

November 27

To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last (1997)
By Connie Willis

This book has it all: science fiction (the genre for which Willis is best known), history, humor, romance...

The premise of this story is that a wealthy donor is trying to rebuild Coventry Cathedral.  The gothic cathedral, built in the 15th century, was mostly destroyed by bombs in WW2, and the donor hopes to restore it to its pre-war appearance, including an ornate pulpit (the bishop's "bird stump").  She calls on time traveler Ned Henry to travel back to 1940 to recover these relics that were lost in the war.

Henry, however, is on time travel to the 1880s (where he hopes to get some R&R, exhausted by too many trips back and forth in time) by living the life (unknown to him) described in Jerome K Jerome's classic Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog (c 1888).  Eventually he meets fellow traveler Verity Kindle and together they have to resolve a glitch in the time-travel sequence that can have drastic consequences if they should fail.  Humorous events unravel as the two work together to find the bird stump and save the day.  A delightful and original story!

November 23

The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)
By Jeannette Walls

Journalist Walls was raised by parents who flouted conventions, working at odd jobs (including gambling) and finding housing in run-down and deserted, mostly unsafe, buildings.  The story opens as 3-year-old Jeannette is boiling hot dogs on a gas stove and her dress catches fire.  Unsupervised, she is badly burned by the time she finds her mother and they get a ride to the hospital.  After 6 weeks her father, Rex, declares her sufficiently recovered and removes her from the hospital (without an official discharge).

Rex lives by his own rules,  His wife, who seems to bounce from depression to exuberance (manic-depressive?), puts her artwork before mothering, and their children (Laurie, Jeannette, Brian and Maureen) fend for themselves.  Thankfully, the kids are both bright and resourceful - and they survive the many moves, eventually finishing high school - Laurie in Welch, WV (where the family live in a shack without plumbing or electricity), Jeannette in NYC (where she has joined Laurie), Brian in Welch (I think) though he joins his sisters in NYU after graduation, and Maureen in NYC (where her sisters support her).  Jeannette goes on to college at Barnard and starts a career in journalism.  The ne'er-do-well parents join the kids in NYC, at first freeloading, but eventually becoming squatters in an abandoned building.

Though cause for resentment, the author never appears to hold rancor toward her crazy parents.  Her father was probably a brilliant man and always wanted to build a "glass castle" for his family; his ambitious were thwarted by alcoholism and stubbornness.  Her mother, who had a teaching degree, put everything on hold to pursue panting, a career that never took off.  Toward the end of the book, Jeannette is astonished to learn that a parcel of Texas land her mother owns is valued at $1M - but her mother just wants to keep it "in the family" and would not considering selling, even though her children went without shoes.  Interesting story!

November 22: Happy Thanksgiving!

Fidelity: Five Stories (1992)
By Wendell Berry

Reviewers have said of Berry, "Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness.  We would do well to hear him" (WaPo)  and "What a pleasure it is to read about decent people who love or like or at least tolerate each other...and who try, and sometimes succeed, to live by 'virtue'" (Wallace Stegner)

These stories, set in fictional rural Port William around the mid-20th century, bear out the decency and common sense so often absent from today's dialogue.  We read of small farmers using old-fashioned equipment, homemakers, families - those who revere the land and one another.  In each story, we see goodness, kindness, forgiveness - some trait that brings forth good in the community.  When I had trouble getting back to reading after a time of some discouragement, Wendell Berry cured me.

November 21: A belated tribute to veterans

Soldier from the War Returning (2009)
By Thomas Childers

Military historian Childers, a professor at the Univ of Pennsylvania, tells the compelling stories of soldiers returning from World War 2 and how they are forever changed by their experiences in the war.  He zeroes in on three specific servicemen and their very different backgrounds, wartime experiences and coping mechanisms.  Surprisingly this is a page-turner.

We learn that not all soldiers return from the front and go on with their lives as before.  Many struggled, never able to come to terms with what they'd seen and done.  Childers tells the story of his own father who, though a responsible family man who stayed in his marriage, was always distant.  Allen Willis lost a leg and struggled to cope with his changed life and his marriage.  Michael Gold was a Jewish POW in Germany.  After the war, he married, had 3 sons, and earned an MD; although he had a successful practice, he struggled and, as with Allen, his marriage failed.  He did eventually come to terms with his wartime experience, remarried and moved to Barrington, where he participated in book discussion group led by Lauri Burke and me.  During the course of the discussions, he mentioned that he was doing interviews for this fascinating book.

As a member of the baby boom generation, I knew plenty of men who fought in the war, but I don't recall any - even my own father - who readily spoke about their experiences.  This book tells the story of at least some of the soldiers whose lives were forever changed by the pain and suffering of war.

Childers also authored the comprehensive World War II : a military and social history, part of the Great Courses series.