Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (4 stars)
This book is exceptionally thought provoking. The world is such a messy place, and we are all obligated to do what is right amid all that mess. It is, unfortunately, so rarely clear to me what the right thing to do is, and Nelson Mandela's life seems to be one where he felt his way through the cloudy ambiguity with amazing skill, so as to come through the mess not untouched or unsullied, but clearly having made things better in the world. Sometimes it is the right thing to fight against injustice, even if it means people will die and you must ally yourself with imperfect, power-hungry men. Ah, but when and how and to what degree, and especially when the outcome is anything but certain? What if, heaven forbid, you make things worse through your compromises? And at what cost to your family? So many heavy questions play out through Mandela's life. He does an remarkable job in his memoir of allowing those questions to live in the background, although he himself does not seem to be as troubled by them as I was, which is why I suppose he will leave the world so changed for the better for so many people, and I will not. I do not have the heart of a freedom fighter, I fear.Other issues the book raised for me include:
1. Communism. The ANC allied themselves with communist groups, which of course made them none too popular with either the CIA or black Africans wary of white communists using them. In hindsight people were perhaps overly paranoid, but the Soviet Union was no laughing matter. And what if those alliances led your people into Soviet style communism? A serious matter indeed.
2. Being the kind of person the other side could imagine talking with when change became inevitable. Mandela seems to have been hand picked by the white government powers as the one person they wanted to deal with. They actually started talks and negotiations with him while he was still in prison after moving him to a private house with a swimming pool and private cook for the last several years of his imprisonment. And it's not because he was a pushover, clearly. But they could talk with him. There is so much value in being the sort of person people want to talk with.
3. While there was systemic racism and inequality in South Africa essentially since the Europeans showed up, apartheid was not legally encoded until after WWII. That was when a party made up of Nazi sympathizers came to power in South Africa on explicitly racist platforms. Blew my mind. Who knew there were enough people who sympathized with Nazis after WWII to form a political party, much less be elected?! People can be seriously nuts.
4. Despite apartheid, South Africa was a pretty awesome place to be accused of treason. I'd imagine in the vast majority of the world you would just be "disappeared". Mandela and his associates got a full on public trial. The incongruity between so many basic rights being denied while others were so carefully guarded was really surprising.
This book is long and a bit tedious in parts, but Mandela's life is amazing. He fought the good fight, paid a high price for it, and changed the world.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (3 stars)
Ahh, Appalachia. What a miserable place, especially for a smart, spunky woman with beautiful red hair named (awesomely) Dellarobia. I really enjoyed this book and thought the characters were likable and believable. The clash between the academic and redneck cultures was empathetic and illuminating in both directions. I thought the global warming diatribes were a little over the top, but also the point of the book.Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (2 stars)
There is a way of writing sparse, almost mythical stories that works. Mister Pip does not, unfortunately, hit that mark and instead it seems like the author forgot to add in all the details that would invest the reader emotionally in any of the characters. As it is, it feels more like a bunch of stereotypes on an island reenacting Dead Poets Society, until things very suddenly get ultra violent. (I'm not kidding about that; I felt like there should be some sort of trigger warning on the front of the book. If graphic, senseless violence bothers you, do not read this book.) Then ten to fifteen years go by in the course of a few pages where things get explained kind of. Just nothing in the structure or plot worked for me. There were some lovely descriptions of the tropical island, however, and it was pleasant and breezy enough to read except for the parts that included machetes. But as far as believing or caring about what was happening, no.The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (2 stars)
More than anything else I've read or seen, this book made me feel like the 1960's were a strange, far away, completely foreign culture. People cared about different things, they were scared of different things, and there was lots and lots of LSD. And really, it was half a century ago, a long time ago. Hitler was as recent to them as Gorbachev is to me.At any rate, I didn't get this book. I know that's partly the point of the book; it's notsupposed to be gotten because it is a postmodern masterpiece. But I didn't think it was funny, like, ever, and it's supposedly hilarious. So many of the allusions were lost on me, and I just didn't care enough to discover them. The crazy characters Oedipa meets on her descent/ascent were annoying and tedious. All these people living their postmodern, post-moral lives, floating around having a miserable, drug-laden time of it were neither funny nor provoking nor challenging to me. What is real, Oedipa is forced to wonder. Not all that trippy messed up junk, that is for sure.
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (3 stars)
It is like the bar in Cheers really happened! Moehringer was raised outside NYC in a very difficult family, and as he grew up the most solid support in his life was the slew of characters who populated and ran the neighborhood bar. I don't drink and the experience of hanging out in bars, and really all of drinking culture, is totally foreign to me. This book reinforced a lot of my naive, stereotyped imaginings of what a culture based around alcohol is like, and what I'm missing out on. Some glorious, glowing, un-reproducable moments of bonding and hilarity and human connection. A mind-blowing amount of money being spent. Quite a lot of pain and failure and anxiety being ignored and plastered over.It was so much easier to read this knowing that Moehringer comes out with some successes in the end, having won the Pulitzer Prize previous to writing this memoir, because his life takes some pretty tough turns. His writing is poignant, honest, and insightful, and it is encouraging to see the many times in his life that a gentle hand reached out and caught him just as he was teetering on a precipice.
1 comment:
I always look forward to these. Although you are killing me with how much you read. ;)
Post a Comment