What do you think?

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Paradise...

My apologies to my followers (both of you) for my long delay in blogging. I hate to admit defeat. I gave up on Five Germanys. Sorry, Dr. Stern. Honestly, I tried to finish reading the book but I just lost interest in it. I thought it was going to be a kind of eye-witness account of war time Germany, and it was until Stern and his family moved to the U.S. when he was a teenager and his story became less historical and more conjectural. So...I've started another Michener novel: Hawaii. It begins in typical Michener fashion with the formation of the land out of the boundless deep. Did you know that the Pacific Ocean covers almost 1/3 of the earth's total surface? This is 64 million square miles. Its average depth is 14,000 feet, or about 2 1/2 miles. About 25,000 islands are scattered throughout its expanse, most of them south of the equator. Michener gained intimate knowledge of the south Pacific during his service as a lieutenant commander in the USN during the 2nd World War, hence his breakthrough novel Tales of the South Pacific published in 1947. Once the islands are formed, a tortuous process of birth, destruction and rebirth encompassing "millions upon millions of years" (page 3), the human story begins with a small band of Maori tribesman on the island of Bora Bora sometime during the 9th century C.E. The tribal leader and divinely appointed "king", Tamatoa and his rebellious, hot-headed brother Teroro are engaged in a power struggle with the neighboring tribesman of Tahiti. The spiritual leaders of Tahiti have introduced a new god, Oro and are attempting to enforce strict observance of this new god over the worship of the islander's traditional god, Tane and thus secure their territorial influence. Both traditions engage in the brutal Kapu system of human sacrifice, but the worshipers of the new Oro have embellished the practice with added cruelties. The Bora Borans have grown increasingly opposed to these sacrificial rites and rightfully suspicious of the Tahitians use of such tactics to intimidate the villagers. Tribal warfare ensues and eventually Tamatoa decides that the Bora Borans must flee their home island in order to avoid extermination by the worshipers of Oro. From here, Michener chronicles their migration from Bora Bora to the chain of volcanic islands north of the equator that we know as Hawaii. Tamatoa, Teroro and about 60 islanders embark on a harrowing, 2,000 mile trek on the open sea in a waka taua: a double-hulled, twin mast canoe named Wait-for-the-West-Wind. Michener makes it clear in his dedication of the book that all of this is pure fiction, but it "remains true to the spirit and history of Hawaii". His version of the Maori migration may be loosely based on the island folk tale of Kupe, or other Polynesian mythologies. Teroro, captain and navigator of the West Wind uses only the constellations to guide the refugees to their future home. They nearly starve to death in route, but miraculously arrive at Havaiki-of-the-Manifold-Riches (page 105), establish a settlement and prosper. Then strangely, the story jumps to the 19th century, bypassing 1000 years of history and not even mentioning the landing of James Cook in Hawaii in 1778. I thought this was a bit uncharacteristic for Michener who was such a meticulous historian. This novel was first published in 1959, fairly early in Michener's career so it was probably his editor's fault, thinking the book would sell better if it were shorter and thus carving out the more tedious parts of the story. That would be unfortunate. At any rate, chapter 3 takes up the saga in the farm village of Marlboro, Massachusetts and a young, Yale divinity student named Abner Hale. I don't know if this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Revoluntionary War spy and Yale prototype ideal Nathan Hale, or not. Abner certainly doesn't come from an aristocratic family, nor is he handsome or especially gifted, but will he emerge as a hero? We shall see...

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Memories

Last week I started reading Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). Winds of War kind of piqued my interest in European history of the time, so I picked up some nonfiction works from abebooks.com. Stern is a German born, mostly American educated author of European history. Five Germanys is a memoir. Stern was born in 1926 in Silesia, then part of Germany, now part of Poland inhabited by Poles, Germans and Czechs. He and his family emigrated to the United States in 1938 and settled in Queens, New York. He attended Columbia University. As the title indicates, he describes the five tumultuous periods in modern German history: the German Reich (what we now call the Weimar Republic), the Third Reich, the divided Germany (East and West) and Germany after unification in 1990. Stern was born into an educated, not necessarily wealthy but reasonably comfortable family of Jewish ancestry. He and his sister were baptized as infants, but he does not mention attending church or synagogue at any time. His father was a physician and his mother a teacher. I've read the first two chapters: Ancestral Germany and Weimar, covering roughly 1919 to 1933. Indeed this was a turbulent time in Germany and all over the world. The planet was awash in militant revolution: Russia, Argentina, Ireland, Estonia, Egypt, the Punjab and probably other places less well known, spiraled into general anarchy. Workers were striking and rioting all over the place, crippling railroads, shipping docks and steel mills. These were the days of Pancho Villa as well as Albert Einstein. In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died and Sir Edmund Hillary was born. Toward the end of this period of course was the great economic depression. Things were bad everywhere, but especially so in Germany. Apparently the German currency was so devalued that people used stacks of German marks as scratch paper. And we think we've got problems. So far, I am enjoying the book. I was afraid it might be boring. It's not.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

A Tale of Two Cultures

I finished reading Caravans last night. This novel is different from all the previous Michener novels I've read. First of all, it is considerably shorter: only 336 pages. While it has many of the usual elements--relationship of the people to the land, the forward march of history through time, the triumph of ordinary people--it is a complex, psychological drama that develops through the relationships of a handful of characters at a specific time in history. The year is 1946 and the setting is a remote, isolated yet critically important region in Central Asia. The terrain is harsh: enormous, jagged mountains and brutal dessert plains that stretch for miles. In 1946, Afghanistan is at the crossroads of history, literally and figuratively. The protagonist is a young American named Mark Miller (a.k.a. Marcus Meuhler), a Yale graduate and U.S. navy officer, assigned to the State Department for a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan. (Does this sound familiar? I had to remind myself that I was reading Michener and not Wouk!) The story is told from Miller's perspective, another departure from Michener's usual format. Miller's superior at the American embassy, Captain Verbruggen is impressed--"You've got brains." (p. 6)--and gives him a special assignment. Miller is to locate and retrieve Ellen Jaspar, a 24 year old, gifted American college student who has "disappeared" after marrying an American-educated Afghani engineer who takes her to Afghanistan. Her prosperous, influential parents who have connections to a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, want her back. Ellen is the epitome of the American beauty: tall, blond, flawlessly beautiful and poised. I imagined she resembled Grace Kelly. How could a woman like this disappear in a country where most of the population is ethnic Pastun or other Persian ancestry? Miller, assisted by an Afghani aid to the embassy named Nur Muhammand, or "Nur", embark on an agonizing journey through the Dasht-i-Margo or "plain of the dead" in search of Ellen. When Miller finally gets a chance to interview Ellen's estranged husband Nazrullah, the Afghani is mysterious and evasive, as are all of the Afghan people that Miller has to work with. This is a chronic source of frustration for Miller (and the reader!). Caravans is a story of an epic clash of cultures: the unabashed, myopic, provincial American vs. the enigmatic, methodical and often dogmatic Asian. All of the major characters in this story are complex and emotionally conflicted as they attempt to cooperate in the search for Ellen. To the American, the Asians are a race of violent brigands; to the Asian, the Americans are just "hopelessly stupid" (p. 328). There are two incidents of unimaginable violence that occur early in the story, one of which Michener claimed to be an eye-witness and the other he claimed to have viewed photographs taken of the incident. As horrific and grotesque as it is, corporal punishment is not exclusive to remote and primitive societies like rural Afghanistan, but is blatantly condoned even in sophisticated, civilised cultures in the west. This paradox is personified in the character of German physician and Nazi operative Otto Stiglitz (with no intentional reference to the famous American photographer Alfred Stieglitz). Altogether, I would not consider Caravans to be my favorite, nor one of Michener's best novels, it is Michener, so it's still a pretty darn good book.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

The end of the beginning...

I finished reading Winds on Thursday evening. It's a great story and I've learned a lot from reading it. The fateful day arrived. The suspense was killing me. Janice is a witness to the attack at Ford Island (Battleship Row) from her Pearl City suburban home and she has a tough time convincing her Chinese housekeeper that it is not a drill. I said previously that I found the character of Janice to be sort of one dimensional. That was back in Chapter 12. Now, forty-seven chapters and 777 pages later, we finally get to see what she is made of. She does not disappoint. She remains remarkably composed throughout the ordeal. Even when her husband Warren shows up at the front door, bloodied from crash landing his SBD Dauntless dive bomber, she remains calm and dutifully tends to his wounds while he recounts the Enterprise's interception of the attackers and the subsequent aerial "dog fight" that ensues. Curiously, Warren seems only minimally disturbed buy the death of his crew mates DeLashmutt and Plantz. "Poor DeLashmutt..." he says, "I yelled but he didn't answer...he was certainly dead." Perhaps it was the adrenaline that kept these two from falling into panic; then again, perhaps military families are trained for this sort of thing. As for Byron, that restless, underachieving middle child, he is fighting for his own and his submarine crew's lives in a similar attack at Clark Air Base, on Luzon Island in the Philippines. This installation was also destroyed by the Japanese on December 8, 1941, just 12 hours after the infamous attack at Hawaii. We don't hear much about Clark Field in the history books. As Wouk acknowledges, the destruction at Clark was at least as catastrophic as at Pearl Harbor but the incident is virtually ignored by historians because "Clark Field was half a day late for immortality." Meanwhile, Pug is taking every form of transportation available in order to get out of Moscow and to Hawaii for his new assignment. I won't say what that assignment is (because I want my readers to read the book!), but I will say that while the bombs were falling on Oahu and Luzon, other kinds of bombs were falling on Pug, even though he was safely thousands of miles away from the action. My heart aches for this guy: a fine, honorable man who just can't get a break. Later in conversation with Warren, Pug describes Tokyo, Japan as a pathetic shantytown that "smells from end to end of sewage and bad fish." This image of "the ugliest city in the world" runs contrary to my perceptions of pre-war Japan. I don't know why I should think so, but I thought that by 1940, Tokyo was a thoroughly sophisticated modern city. Evidently, it was not. As for Natalie and Uncle Aaron, that's another nail-biter. They are still stuck in Italy when the bombs start falling on the other side of the world and Mussolini stupidly declares war on the USA. Natalie has to make some agonizing decisions. I caught myself shaking my head in disgust when she finally realizes her recklessness (rather, foolishness) in trying to fetch her uncle out of Italy. Then, when she makes what seems to make a safe and sensible decision (for the first time in a long while) regarding their plans for departure, it turns out to be a mistake! I won't even begin to share my frustrations about Rhoda! By chapter 57, The Bouleversement (in English: The Reversal), the story moves very quickly, as if Wouk is tying up lose ends in preparation for the next installment of the saga, War and Remembrance. Winds of War, a mere 1047 pages, packs a lot of historical detail into the story of Pug Henry, and I must say that I never once grew weary or bored while reading it. In fact, my experience was quite the opposite. Steve says that Remembrance is much more graphic and descriptive of the crimes and atrocities that when on during this war. This makes me cautious about reading it. I abhor violence and cruelty, and even the one or two incidents described in Winds tend to haunt me. I may skip reading Remembrance for now. Steve got me a whole stack of Michener novels that I'm anxious to start on. I started reading Caravans last night. Its about Afghanistan and I already think its awesome!

Monday, July 19, 2010

U-235, Lend-Lease and Barbarossa

Ahh...chapter 46 and I am finally past all the lurid details of sordid love affairs and on to the real meat of the story: the race to harness the uranium isotope U-235, the machinations of FDR via the Lend-Lease Act and Operation Barbarossa. In these chapters (40-46), Wouk paints a pretty realistic picture of history. I understand this period in our nation's history better now that I ever have. It helps me appreciate the complexity and precarious nature of geo-political relationships, and I'm left with a broader perspective regarding our nation's current international engagements. As the war in Europe heats up, Pug is called back to the U.S. to take on a job in War Plans: the division of the military responsible for, well...planning a war. He is glad to be out of Berlin, especially after the insulting bribe proffered him by the inscrutable and duplicitous German banker, Wolf Stoller. Pug's American-style rebuff made me proud. Men of his integrity were as rare then as they are now. The Lend-Lease Act (PL 77-11) was something I didn't recall much about from my history classes. This says as much about me as it does about my public school education. The legislation was highly controversial in its time but critical to the outcome of the war. Starting in March, 1941--before the U.S. had officially entered the war--in an act to "promote the defense of the United States" the U.S. supplied the U.K., U.S.S.R. and other allied nations with materials for making war against Nazi Germany. This Act gave President Roosevelt exclusive and unusual powers to provide materials (for making planes and ships) to any nation he deemed worthy. It is frightening to think that one man was actually granted that much power. By 1945, when the war was ending and the program expired, the U.S. had shipped close to $800 billion (today's dollars) worth of supplies and materials to the U.K. The materials, without which the U.K. would most certainly have lost the war, were shipped via merchant marine vessels under the watchful escort of American destroyers. These "convoys" enabled the U.S. to subsidize England's efforts to fend off the Nazi's while remaining in compliance with the Neutrality Act. This legislation prohibited the U.S. from selling any supplies or materials to "belligerents" no matter whose side we were on. The Lend-Lease program also enabled the construction of air fields in Canada and Alaska for the purpose of supplying materials to the U.S.S.R. via Siberia (the Arctic Convoy). Michener writes about this in Alaska. In Winds, FDR invites Pug to sail on a north Atlantic convoy mission to Iceland as a guest, but not as an officer. Pug accepts of course, and is happy to get out from behind his desk and out to sea. He wants to command his own ship, but getting a flag rank always seems just out of reach. Most of Pug's contemporaries have received this promotion, but for some reason Pug has not. I haven't figured out why; he seems to be the most honorable man in the bunch. Barbarossa was the German code name for the Nazi invasion of Russia. Most historians consider this move to be the Fuhrer's greatest mistake because at the time (June, 1941) he could have invaded the exhausted England and probably won the war. Instead, he gambled and made a grab for the oil fields of Romania. Although initially successful, he ultimately lost, albeit four years later. The loss of life, Russian and German, has never been fully accounted. I have read estimates that 70 million people died during this war; most of them were civilians. I have a feeling that pretty soon the war will hit closer to home for the Henry family. Warren Henry, now Navy Lieutenant Henry, United States Pacific Fleet is stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Briny is somewhere in the Pacific on a submarine. Natalie and Uncle Aaron are on their way back to the States. Pug and Rhoda have just purchased a house in D.C. so they can stay put and enjoy their new grandson. Daughter Madeline is well on her way to a successful career at CBS, and December, 1941 is approaching.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Move over Lucy VanPelt..

While I admire Wouk for his thorough and honest portrait of historical events and his gift for story telling, I suspect he does not have a high regard for women and this troubles me. The female characters in this story all seem to emulate the worst of feminine attributes. Of the five women in this story--Pug's wife Rhoda, daughter Madeline, daughter-in-law Janice, future daughter-in-law Natalie and the English WAAF Pamela Tudsbury--only Madeline seems to have her act together. And she's a career girl! She is intelligent, independent, in command of her emotions and her priorities. (She even dates a Communist!) She did not inherit these characteristics from her mom, Rhoda, who is often hysterical, self-absorbed, tends to drink too much and is hypercritical of everyone. Just when I think she can't complain, she does. Poor Pug. Natalie Jastrow is a real piece of work. She is spoiled, arrogant, attention-seeking to the point of being reckless, and also given to histrionics. Like Rhoda, she fusses and complains about the state of her hair, her clothes, the food, the servants...She seems to be selective with regard to her Jewish heritage. She boldly orders a "bacon sandwich" in a cafe to the surprise of Pug and Briny and explains that "most Jews" don't heed traditional dietary laws. However, when her father dies suddenly and she goes into mourning, she insists on wearing black to Warren's wedding and postponing her own engagement for a year, all in accordance with Jewish custom and ceremonial law. Just as Briny is about to enter submarine school, she hops on a plane to Italy! I think Briny is too good for her. As for Janice, she is sort of a one dimensional character. The only child of a powerful Florida legislator, she decides to marry Warren Henry literally days before (the pilot) is sent overseas. Pamela Tudsbury is needy and given to whining. Only a day or two after her fiancee is declared MIA, she's hitting on Pug! I'm left wondering: Wouk must have had some really bad experience with women. I hope it gets better. I'm on chapter 33: Pug's in London and the Nazis are bombing the heck out of the Brits.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

A pugnacious Pug named Pugsley...

I'm enjoying this book. The story is intriguing, but some of the character nicknames are peculiar: like "Pug" and "Briny". I can understand how Victor might have acquired a nickname like Pug which might be applied to a football player or a boxer (or a funny looking dog), but how do you get "Briny" out of Byron? Some of the acronyms are tricky, like CNO and BOQ. I got the first one (Chief of Naval Operations), but haven't figured out BOQ yet (Bureau of Overseas Quadrants? Border of Quai d'Orsay?). And what are "BatDiv" and "BuOrd" supposed to stand for? If Wouk explained these, I missed it. He also uses strange euphemism like "pink-tea job" and "cookie pusher". These occur especially when the navy guys are engaged in shop talk. I haven't a clue what they mean. Wouk must have had an interest in fashion because almost every scene includes meticulous descriptions of the characters' wardrobe or attire. The women are almost always wearing some shade of pink, reportedly Hitler's favorite color. And, it seems that everybody except the head-strong Jewess, Natalie, is blond. Chapter 14, which describes the siege of Warsaw and narrow escape of the "neutrals" is disturbing. Anyone who might be ambivalent with regard to Arizona HB 2162/SB 1070 should read this chapter and be mindful that history has a subtle and surreptitious way of repeating itself.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

I Wouk up and smelled the coffee..

After Alaska I was thinking about what to read next. Should I start Hawaii or try another author? My sweet hubby, best friend and literary soul-mate suggested The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. I took his advice: now I'm more than 100 pages into the novel and I'm hooked. "Winds" is one of 18 novels Wouk composed between 1945 and 1980 and is the second in a series. The main character is a WWII naval attache in Berlin. I remember the ABC miniseries back in '83 got lots of publicity and critical acclaim. Unlike Michener, all of the characters in Wouk's story are fiction, with only references to historical individuals like Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin for obvious reasons. The clandestine activities of Victor Henry and his family, the Jastrow's and the Tudsbury's are not based on those of any particular historical figure, although I'm sure they could be. The story has piqued my interest in the period so I've ordered two books from Abebooks (each under $4.00), one on German history and another about the Treaty of Versailles. Admittedly, my knowledge of this period of history is shameful, so I aim to educate myself, and enjoy a good romance novel in the meantime.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Only the rocks and the sea live forever

Finished reading Alaska this afternoon; took me 23 days, but it was worth it. I thought it was going to take me the rest of the summer. What an incredible story! With J.M. you not only get a history lesson, or what we used to call "social studies" when I was in elementary school, you also get a science lesson. I've learned a lot about geology, geography, volcanoes and tsunami just in the last chapter, "The Rim of Fire". That's what makes a Michener novel so great. The story has enough character development, relationship tension and action-adventure to keep the reader captivated. They (the novels) are never boring and always educational and entertaining. You can't ask for more than that from fiction. The last chapter takes us into the more recent past, late 1970's & '80's with a number of historical events that most of us (at least those of us born before 1970) will have some memory of. The story ends sometime between 1985 and 1991: after the great Mexico City earthquake, but before the ANCSA expires. The acronym refers to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the 1971 legislation that was intended to address aboriginal land claims and serve as a kind of "economic stimulus" for Alaska. This novel was first published in 1988, so we don't get to learn (in the novel) what happens to ANCSA. However, as acts of congress have a curious habit of self-perpetuation, I suspect that this law has not expired, but rather has been amended and preserved for posterity. At the conclusion of the novel, J.M. seems to suggest that the law will expire and Alaska and its native people will again become vulnerable to shameless exploitation by absentee, Lower Forty-eight industrialists. Perhaps the most fascinating folks in this chapter are the mountaineers. In his disclaimer at the beginning, Michener states that the Japanese climbing team is fictional, but the climb he describes is historical. The summit of Denali/Mount McKinley is the focus of this section and after some sleuthing I learned that there was a famous Japanese adventurer who ascended the 20,320 foot beast, not once, but twice. However, the second time, he disappeared on his descent. His name was Naomi Uemura. He was the first to reach the summit solo. The first people ever to reach the Denali summit were the Sourdoughs. The story of Uemura is quite fascinating itself. I should look for a book about him. The final event in this incredible saga by J.M. is kind of a shocker, but it illustrates perfectly that, in spite of everything humans have done or can possibly do, the land always wins. Only the rocks live forever.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Verboseness

I've been blogging for less than a month now and each time my post gets longer, and longer...

Monday, June 28, 2010

Gold, Salmon and Glaciers

Chapters 8, 9 & 10 describe the discovery and exploitation of the two most lucrative strategic commodities in Alaska: gold and salmon. There is a third "commodity" that is certainly treated as ruthlessly as these two, but it is not unique to Alaska. I'll attend to that subject later in my review. One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading Michener is that I always learn something. I know more about the life cycle of the sockeye salmon than, I'll bet anybody else I know. J.M. illustrates for us the trials of one fish, Oncorhynchus nerka, or Nerka, for short, from alevin to fry to fingerling to smolt. There are no grilse or kelt stages in Pacific salmon as in their Atlantic cousins because Pacific salmon die after spawning only once. (Bet'cha didn't know that.) Anyway, J.M. weaves the story of Nerka the salmon within the story of Tom Venn, our young proletariat, now fully immersed in the Ross & Raglan monopoly. Of all of the characters, Tom is the most conflicted. he is uneasy with the way the company exploits the available resources to near extinction, and hates having to work with the malfeasant Washington worm Marvin Hoxey. The Hoxey character is fictional, but is allegedly based on a genuine wor...(I mean) person named Alexander J. McKenzie, who really was pardoned by President McKinley. Tom, however doesn't hate his job enough to quit. He in fact marries the boss' daughter and seals his deal with the devil. I'm hoping that somehow Tom will redeem himself, like Captain Schransky in chapter 7. The story about the Matanuska Valley was also new to me. Matanuska isn't really a town, as in the novel, but is rather the name of a river, a glacier and a borough (or county) in Alaska. The Valley, or rather the Matanuska Colony was a real settlement; part of a New Deal agricultural experiment during the Great Depression. Impoverished families were imported from Minnesota to the Matanuska Valley as homesteaders. They became known as "Alaska Sourdoughs". The Valley is apparently the only place in Alaska where the land can actually support farming. As if the Russian names weren't bad enough to pronounce, now I'm trying to master Scandinavian names: like Vickaryous, Vasanojas and Sjodin. I didn't know that the U.S. government was actively engaged in resettlement and repopulation. Didn't Germany try that in Poland in 1939? When I wrote about a third "commodity" I was referring to the exploitation of the indigenous people of Alaska. As I said, this is not anything new or unique to Alaska. It seems that wherever the white man goes, his arrival is a harbinger of death and destruction for the people and culture of the original inhabitants. To call it racism is to minimize the reality. It's like saying the events of 9/11 were a "misunderstanding". The treatment of the native Aleuts, Athapascans, Tlingit, Eskimo and immigrant Chinese by white American (perhaps I should say, Caucasian) prospectors and industrialists in Alaska was deplorable. I think it is a part of our history that few acknowledge, if they even know about it at all. Sadly, once the damage is done and the indigenous people and their heritage are decimated, they are lost forever. I think J.M. hints at this sentiment in these chapters.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

There's gold in them hills!

Yesterday I was chatting with a friend about books. She talked about how she hates to part with a book even long after she has finished reading it. "I like to see them up on my bookshelf" she said. "It's like remembering time spent with an old friend." I couldn't agree more. I just made some new friends that I will think about each time I see Alaska on my bookshelf. John Klope, Tom Venn, Missy Peckham and Matt Murphy: ordinary people who lead extraordinary lives in the most desolate and inhospitable region on the continent. The austere, Norwegian reindeer herder turned gold prospector, Lars Skjellerup and his colorful side-kicks Mikkel Sana, a Laplander, and Arkikov, a Siberian Chukchi are so oddly matched, yet so loyal to one another, you can't help but love them. Then there are the big, strong, rock-solid guys, Sergeants Kirby and Steele of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who usher folks through Chilkoot Pass. You just know the country is a safer place when these guys are around. I will remember these people for their integrity, tenacity, determination and faith in the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush. They are all heroes; all worthy of honor and applause; and all purely fictional. Yep: not one of them is an actual person, nor the stories even based on an historical individual. However, I have faith in the integrity of the author and I'm confident that what I have read is indeed an accurate representation of what life was like for the thousands of people (men and women) who risked life and limb to get to the gold fields of the Yukon, and the fortunate few (very few) who actually found gold. I've always thought that money is a powerful motivator: people will do crazy and even criminal things in order to obtain it. Now, I'm convinced. Every elementary school history book had a picture of Chilkoot Pass at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush: a long line of human-like figures, marching, single-file up a snowy mountain like ants crawling up a sand hill. What I didn't know then, or at least can appreciate now is that Chilkoot Pass is a remote corridor through the Coast Mountains in Alaska and British Columbia. It was the route used by prospectors to access the gold mines on the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. In order to lawfully enter Canada, the prospectors were required to bring enough food and supplies to last 6 months. The trail was too rough, too cold and too steep for dog sled or pack mule, so prospectors had to make the trek on foot with all of their belongings carried on their backs. The trail was 33 miles from Dyea, Alaska to Bennett, British Columbia. The Pass itself is 3,500 feet above sea level. Some people literally dropped dead from exhaustion in the middle of the trail. (The site is now the Klondike Gold Rush International Historical Park. For a fee, you can attempt the climb yourself). Fictional or not, this story is a testament to the incredible fortitude of the human spirit. Michener sums it up eloquently (page 522): "Missy...developed into a woman of towering strength, beautiful in her integrity, and Tom Venn had grown from a callow youth into an amazingly mature man, but they achieved this through hardship and failure, not success, and the lessons they acquired would last them through life." This is an incredible story.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Sad Saga

Each time I have said to someone that I'm reading a Michener novel their response is "Oh...his books are really long." Yep: I'm on Chapter 8, page 366 of Alaska and I'm not even half way through the novel. I would not at all characterize this as drudgery. Michener has done such a good job developing the characters and weaving fact and fiction that I actually feel like I'm part of the community where these people live! I was made aware of this while reading Centennial: I cried when Hans Brumbaugh died. Thus...don't judge a book by the number of pages it contains! These novels are worth every page. Given the enormous amount of research he had to do for these novels (yea, I know. He probably had a team of graduate students helping him), his book list is impressive. Michener wrote 26 such novels in his 40 year career, 13 of which were adapted to film. He also wrote volumes of non-fiction and was extensively involved in television and radio. He might still have been teaching at the University of Northern Colorado while he was doing all of this. I've just finished Chapter 7: Giants in Chaos, a bittersweet saga about two controversial pioneers who (individually and together) left an indelible mark on the Alaska territory. Captain Mike Healy and Reverend Sheldon Jackson are both historical figures. Healy was the first American of African descent to command a ship of the United States government. He was the captain of the USS Bear, a real steam powered sail ship in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (predecessor to the Coast Guard) that patrolled the Alaska coastline in the latter 19th century. Captain Healy became quite a local hero and even has a modern USCG ship named for him, the USCGC Healy, commissioned in 1999. Reverend Jackson was an irascible Presbyterian missionary with boundless energy. He traveled extensively and established hundreds of missions and churches in the western U.S. While he was very successful in achieving his goals, his methods almost always infuriated his superiors. He too became a local hero and there is today, a college on the island of Sitka, Alaska named after him. Both were men of integrity, capable of profound generosity and compassion; tireless in their commitment to justice and passionate with regard to their respective calling. Both were deeply flawed: arrogant, incorrigible and sometimes down right abusive toward their subordinates and colleagues. In spite of their truly heroic achievements on behalf of the indigenous people of the region, they are regarded by their colleagues only for the mistakes they make and their good works are undermined by powerful factions in the church and the government. It made me sick to read the court martial proceedings, but near the end of the chapter, there is a heartening turn of events that gives me hope for the human race. Chapter 8 is simply titled: Gold.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Michener update

I am really enjoying "Alaska". The Russian names are a challenge: Petropavlovsk, Kuchovskaya, Praskovia Kostilevskaya...the native American tribal names aren't much easier. Cidaq, Alaxsxaq and Tlingit to name a few. The story is, of course, classic Michener: a blend of history and fiction. Alexandr Baranov was a real person (for whom the Alexander Archipelago and Baranof Island are named). There really was a Battle of Sitka in 1804, and the island's name really was changed from Sitka to New Archangel and then back to Sitka. However, the sad island of Lapak is fictional (thank God!). The Tlingit leader Kot-le-an is real, but Raven-heart is fictional. Father Vasili Voronov is fictional, but some of the pivotal events in his life echo that of a Russian missionary priest who later became the supreme leader of the Orthodox church in St. Petersburg. So, I'm enjoying a great story and getting a history lesson to boot.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

More Michener

Hubby Steve surprised me with two new books yesterday: "Alaska" and "Hawaii" by James A. Michener. I'm well into "Alaska" and am already completely absorbed in the story. I am amazed at the tremendous amount of research that has gone into producing these excellent novels. Michener was not only a master of his craft, but a relentless perfectionist with an obsession for accuracy. The list of acknowledgments is replete with geologists, paleontologists, volcanologists and a passel of historians and anthropologists. Although the story is fiction, I'm thinking it is a highly realistic representation of the evolution of life and the history in this God-forsaken region called Alaska. I happened upon some interesting information this morning. I learned what a pasquinade is: a satire or lampoon posted in a public place. It can also means to assail. I thought of the incorrigible and self-indulgent French trapper, Pasquinel in "Centenniel". I like Michener's sense of humor.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Centennial

Just finished reading "Centennial" by James A. Michener. I highly recommend it. It's a long story--1038 pages--but well worth reading. Although it is fiction, I think I've learned more about the history of the American west from this one novel than I learned in all of my American history classes put together. The saga begins in prehistoric times with a thorough explanation of the geological formation of the Rocky Mountain range. Unless you are some sort of geology geek, this part can be rather tedious. Hang in there: it's a relatively short part of a fastinating saga. What I really love about Michener (I've also read "Chesapeake" and "Poland") is that he is an expert at mixing actual history with engrossing fiction. While the characters are fictional, certain background events and people are real. For example, there never was a Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, but there really was a John Chivington, a Union soldier and leader of the Colorado Territory Militia who lead a massacre of Native Americans on their reservation at Sand Creek in Kiowa County, Colorado in 1864. I also like the way Michener engages in subtle play on words, especially surnames. For example, the greedy and unscrupulous Thespian-turned-real estate baron named Mervin Wendell. In the name "Wendell", I think Michener may be alluding to a risky, trick-taking card game in which players must be cunning in their calculation of risk. The name of the card game: Wendellhead. Then there are the irritable and flatulent Mexican Colonels Frijoles and Fabregas.