Historian Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee recounts the genocide that made the United States possible. It is not so much a novel as it is a chronological inventory of the brutal viciousness the Manifest Destiny doctrine emboldened as the US expanded. The book saw 21 editions in its first three years and […]
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Read More »
I pulled the 1960s Golden Library of Knowledge on Mathematics off a shelf at the Green Gypsy Thrift Shop because I wanted a bird’s-eye view of the subject. Surely, a survey written for 8-year-olds would present an uncluttered picture. And it did—until I came upon its conclusion. According to the pronoun allocations appearing here and
Imagine Mathematics Without Pronouns Read More »
Alexandra Bergson, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, is a father’s daughter, programmed at his deathbed to continue his work and secure the family and their estate. Alexandra is bold, pragmatic, driven and willing—an empty vessel. She accepts of course, and in just 16 years accomplishes his vision, single-mindedly and single-handedly increasing the land for herself and
Cather’s O Pioneers! (O Fathers’ Daughters!) Read More »
On its surface, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is an immigrant’s tale. Beneath, the plot details the ways fathers’ and husbands’ violent indifference and indifferent violence subjugates wives and daughters—turns them into property, not people. The men in this novel cajole, coerce, corral, and at times beat women into marriage, endless child-bearing,
A Reflection on Juliet Grames’s The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Read More »
The first time I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game I was eight years old. Let’s see—that would put us around 1981. This murder mystery features an ensemble of characters, everyone with a part to play, but what I remembered then and enjoyed most this time (older and wiser) were the two sisters: The eldest
Normal possibilities: Remembering Raskin’s The Westing Game Read More »
There is a passage in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees that set my hair on end. She describes a town, like any 1950’s town in South Carolina. A town that, with a few contemporary substitutions could describe many towns across the US today. Those comfortable with the prevailing power structure of the
No, but I might hide: Thoughts on Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees Read More »
In August my way of being met an abrupt halt. The activities that had defined my daily routines, weekly schedules, monthly obligations and yearly itinerary for 16 cycles stopped, leaving me alone with myself. And my beloved. And a couple of cats (also beloved). Okay, it wasn’t that abrupt. The end had been coming for some
Ceded: Emily Dickinson Read More »
I went to the library seeking a woman’s voice and pulled from the shelves Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (SLC Public Library | Find a Library | Amazon). I chose it because of the excellent printing — hardbound with a ribbon to mark my place — and because I remembered buying a book by Cather many, many years ago by mistake. O Pioneers!
My Ántonia: A memoir by a woman, about a man, remembering women Read More »
I watched the film “The Big Short” hoping to understand what it means to “short a stock.” I learned this — and received an education about the global economic collapse of 2008 which, being privileged, I had largely missed. The film’s narrator delivers a fairytale ending in the epilog: banks are held accountable and wealthy bankers sent to jail. Just kidding! That moment of
Thou Shalt Not Be Poor: The American Way of Poverty Read More »
