Category Archives: Books

Aug11

Book Review: A Prairie Populist

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I really enjoy books about pioneer women in the United States. I enjoy reading about their spunk and grit, especially if the women get to tell their own stories in the first person. I had A Prairie Populist in my stack of things to read for quite a while. (I think I picked it up in a free pile somewhere in New Mexico, but I can’t remember the details.) I finally read it in the early days of this season’s camp hosting. The following is a review I wrote of it:

This book contains both the personal and political memoirs of Luna Kellie, the prairie populist of the title.

The stories Kellie tells in her personal memoir took place when she was a young mother on the prairie of Nebraska, before she was politicized. She and her husband moved from Missouri to Nebraska to farm the land, in hopes of providing a good life for the big bunch of kids they hoped to raise. They experienced happy times, but hardships as well.

Kellie was a great storyteller, although her writing was often difficult for me to follow. She mostly eschewed commons, and her sentence structure often seemed odd to me. However, I could typically figure out what she was trying to say.

This book is great for any adult who grew up reading the Little House series, but be warned, the trials and tribulations were not edited out of this one. Several babies died and even the ones who did survive had close calls. Animals dropped dead too. On more than one occasion, the family barely had enough to eat. Crops failed. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kellie struggled with illness. Pioneer life really weeded out the weak.

One aspect of the book that really surprised me was the number of liars, cheaters, and swindlers encountered by the Kellies. Most pioneer authors focus on the the we’re all in this together attitude of their good neighbors, but Kellie writes of the woman who stole the author’s quilting fabric, the man who sold her family dead sweet potato and grape starts, and the “friends” who tricked the Kellies into taking on a hear of cattle–promised to be good milkers–which gave hardly any mild at all. It seems like for every good neighbor the family encountered, there was someone trying to pull a fast one on them. The trusting family was often taken advantage of.

The personal memoir ended abruptly, leaving me with many questions. What happened to Kellie’s beloved brothers after they headed West? What other children did Kellie have and when? Did Kellie and her family have more exciting experiences?

The political memoir is much shorter than the personal one (thirteen pages vs. 126 pages), but reading about the labor organizing of farmers in the late 1800s was interesting. Unrest wasn’t invented by industrial workers in the early years of the 20th century!

The editor gives context to incidents in Kellie’s life in the afterward. She give more information about Kellie’s early life, and explains “The Political, Economic, and Social Climate” of the 1870s and 1880s. She also included information about the Farmer’s Alliance in Nebraska and Kellie’s role in it.

All in all, this was an enjoyable, if sometimes sad, account of pioneer life on the U.S. prairie.

[amazon template=image&asin=0877453683]

 

Jul20

Book Review: Hawkes Harbor

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[amazon template=image&asin=B005EP277K]I wrote the following book review in July of 2009. The review is basically one big spoiler, so if you think you may want to read the book, don’t read this post.

Really?

The woman who wrote The Outsiders wrote this mess of a novel. Ok, I am no longer under any illusion that The Outsiders is great literature. I appreciate it for what it is, but I can see its faults too. I also cut S.E. Hinton some slack with The Outsiders, as she wrote that book when she was 16. She was all grown up when she wrote Hawkes Harbor, so I don’t know what her excuse is with this one.

She’s still basically writing about the same character: handsome young man; difficult childhood; no parental figures; lives rough and takes care of himself; gruff, but with a good heart. Who is this guy she’s still obsessed with? Her father? Her brother? Her first love? Whoever he is, he was still on her mind when this book was published in 2005.

The handsome young man is in a mental hospital. He’s been shot. He has had a mental breakdown. What, oh what, has happened to him?

The story is spun out slowly, in a series of flashbacks. The young man is a criminal. A pirate of sorts. He loves the sea. Ho Hum. Then the vampire shit starts!

A vampire? Are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe it. A vampire. In 1960s New England.

It’s as if Hinton were trying to think of some gimmick to make this book popular in an early 21st century market and hit on the popularity of vampires, so decided to go that route.

But it gets even dumber. The vampire becomes human again (through some rituals never fully explained to the reader). Although the vampire originally had total control over the young man, threatened to kill him if he didn’t do what he was told, by the end of the book, the vampire becomes the young man’s best friend. Weird. Weird and corny!

As I read this book, I kept laughing aloud, because the premises of the story were so ridiculous.

I realize that the theme of this book is redemption. Redemption is a good theme. But a vampire! Give me a break. If the captor had been a military torture expert, the young man the torturer’s captive soldier, the plot may have worked, but a vampire? That’s just silly.

Jul9

No Baggage

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[amazon template=image&asin=0762457244]Recently, the Divine Miss M had Amazon.com send me a couple of books. I hadn’t asked for the books or even heard of them until they showed up in my stack of mail. One was a novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which I haven’t read yet. The other was nonfiction, a travel memoir called No Baggage.

In No Baggage, author Clara Bensen tells the story of the existential crisis she had in her early 20s when she concluded she might not be able to follow her bliss and live her dreams. Heck, she was barely able to complete applications to grad schools. She had a prolonged mental health meltdown and spent quite a long time wracked with anxiety and unable to eat much more than choked-down peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

She slowly pieced her fragile psyche back together while living in Austin, TX, and decided she needed to start dating. She joined OkCupid, posted her own profile, and began looking at the profiles of men on the site with advanced degrees. She encountered the profile of an intriguing college professor and emailed him. They went on a date, immediately hit it off, and started having fabulous times together.

The first part of the book read a little much like a teen romance novel to me, and I was a bit turned off. I have to admit, I was more than a little jealous and a bit bitter. I haven’t met a decent, unmarried man to date in years, but this gal met an incredible man on her first try. (It probably helps to be young, thin, and live in a major metro area.) But I stuck with the book to get to the good part, where Bensen and her beau went on The Trip.

The fellow was already planning on taking The Trip when he met Bensen, then invited her to go along with him. While it was risky enough to go on a multi-country journey with someone she only knew a short time, the No Baggage of the title refers to no suitcase, no backpack, no tote bag.

Here’s what Benson took with her on the three week expedition: in a “small leather purse,” she somehow puts three pairs of underpants, a deodorant stick, a toothbrush, a retainer, a contact lens case, a pair of glasses, two tampons, an iPhone, an iPad Mini, a notebook, a pen, her passport, a tube of ChapStick, and “a stack of cowboy magnets to hand out as Texas souvenirs.” (There’s no mention of a credit card or traveler’s cheques or cash, so I don’t know how purchasing food and transportation tickets worked out. Maybe the money the guy carried was for both of them?)

Since I live in my van, I have fewer material possessions than most Americans, but I still have so much stuff! The part of me that makes do with less was intrigued by the minimalist approach to travel introduced by Bensen’s guy, but after all, it was only for 21 days, not a lifetime. I’m pretty sure I could make it on no baggage for three weeks, especially if I had a new love interest to keep me company. (I’d leave behind the iPad Mini–which I don’t even own–and the deodorant and the cowboy magnets, and take my water bottle with me.)

I like travel stories, and I enjoyed Bensen’s. I enjoyed her tale of spending the beginning of her time in Istanbul not knowing if she were in Europe or Asia. I liked hearing about the positive experiences with Couchsurfing.com, especially what happened in Turkey, when Bensen and her guy arrived unannounced at a dark train station, only to be met by a woman on a bicycle who said, “I recognize the hat from your Couchsurfing profile.” She was one of the many hosts they’d emailed, and she’d somehow known when and where to meet them, even though they hadn’t known when they might arrive.

The book was full of such stories of traveling serendipity. Some call it luck, and the Rainbow Family refers to it as “Rainbow magic.” Hikers of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails know about it too. Sometimes it’s as if the Universe is conspiring to get people where they need to go and make beautiful things happen.

In fact, this book is not just a love story or a travelogue or a treaty on minimalism. It’s also about coincidence and serendipity. It’s about What are the odds? and What are the chances? What are the odds that two people so well-suited to be together would meet on OkCupid and find a “weird, magical thing” happening between them? What are the chances a Couchsurfing host would appear exactly when and where she was desperately needed? Bensen’s guy “was in the preliminary stages of developing software to measure the experience of coincidence,” so they ended their three week journey with a visit to a “professor of Risk at Cambridge University…one of the premier researchers on the subject.” The book asks what causes the “connections between seemingly random intersections?”

The day before I finished reading No Baggage, I wrote a blog post partially about a road trip song by Dar Williams and partially about an idea of SARK’s about managing expectations. To illustrate my point, I told a story about a road trip I took in the late 1990s. In telling that story, I mentioned my friend who owned the car and did all the driving on that journey to a women’s gathering in an adjacent state. My friendship with the woman was intense during our time on the road, but mellowed out when we got back to the city. We still liked each other, but our everyday lives kept us busy, and we saw little of each other. When I moved away from the city the next year, I thought of her fondly when I thought of her, which wasn’t often. I could only remember part of her name, so there was no Googling her or looking her up on Facebook. And then suddenly there she was, driving through my blog post.

The next day I finished reading No Baggage on the afternoon of my day off, while lying in my bed with the back doors of the van open to the meadow. That was a good book, I decided after I’d read the last page. I liked it. I’m glad I read it.

Then I flipped the page and saw the heading Acknowledgements. I’m the kind of book geek who at least skims an author’s appreciations. I’m not sure why. I never see a name I recognize. Only this time I did. There among the four names thanked for their “generous feedback and critique” was the name of the woman I’d written about the day before, the woman with whom I’d shared a road trip and not communicated with for nearly twenty years. What are the chances of that?

I know in my heart of hearts that I’d not glanced at the last page of No Baggage and seen my friend’s name, not even for a split second. I know that Clara Bensen didn’t mention my friend in the book in any recognizable way, wrote nothing that would have made me think of her.  And yet, as I read a book about travel written by a mutual friend, I wrote of my own long-lost, seldom thought of friend and a time we traveled together. What are the odds of that happening?

I plan to write to  Clara  Bensen and tell her of this coincidence and our connection. Maybe she’ll tell me how to contact my old friend.

 

 

Jul8

A Time

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Were you ever really excited about a road trip in the preparation phase, only to find the actual time on the road left a lot to be desired? Maybe your traveling companion(s) annoyed you. Maybe the food you ate left you feeling sick. Maybe the roadside attractions were boring and not worth the money. Maybe you couldn’t wait for the entire “adventure” to end.

As an adult, I always had high expectations for road trips. I wanted my travels with friends to be so much better than the boring trips full of bickering I was forced to go on with my family when I was a kid. (Dad often got lost, then tried to pass it off as taking the scenic route.) As an adult, I wanted my road trips to be full of singing along to the radio and stops for ice cream. Other than “Take It Easy” with Mr. Carolina, I don’t recall much singing during road trips as an adult.

I remember a journey to a women’s gathering when I was in my late 20s. I was riding with two other women, and only the owner of the car knew how to drive. I thought the other non-driver and I would take turns napping so someone would always be awake to keep the driver company, but after the first couple of high excitement hours on the road, the other non-driver passed out and was pretty much comatose for the rest of the trip. The only time I remember her awake was when we stopped at a diner for breakfast, and an old man in the parking lot insisted on telling us a joke about a “polecat.” We couldn’t decide if he were actually trying to be funny or if he were trying to offend us.

We got lost in a large city in the wee hours of the night, and a man approached the car while we were stopped at a red light. He didn’t seem to want to give us directions. The driver and I were terrified, but the other non-driver—of course—slept through it all.

The trip took hours and hours and hours longer than it should have, and once we were close to our destination, the driver nearly fell asleep at the wheel, then got caught in a speed trap to the tune of a $300 ticket. The old man cop then asked the driver if the pressed leaf in glass hanging from her rearview mirror were marijuana.

When we finally arrived on women’s land, I was exhausted and overly emotional. I cried when I had to cross a rain-swollen creek to get to the main gathering spot. I do not remember singing at any point on the trip.

Now that I live in a van, road trips aren’t the big deal they once were. I usually travel alone, and time on the road is a means to an end, the way I get from point A to point B. Sometimes I eat ice cream, and I always sing at the top of my lungs, at least for a little while.

In one of her books (which I must no longer own, since I couldn’t find the exact quote), SARK writes about managing expectations about parties, but the same could be said about road trips. SARK says we often go into parties (and road trips) feeling pressure to have a good time. If we don’t have a good time at a party (or on a road trip), we feel disappointed, maybe even as if we have failed somehow. SARK suggests that instead of pressuring ourselves to have a good time, at a party (or on a road trip), we simply expect to have a time. Expecting only to have a time removes the pressure we may feel if we think we are obligated to have fun. Expecting only to have a time allows us to feel whatever we are authentically feeling, whether that is happiness, irritation, joy, exhaustion, boredom, sadness, elation, or some other emotion.

So if you are traveling this vacation season—whether alone, with your children, with strangers, with your parents or your partner or your friends—I wish you a time. And I hope there is singing.

[amazon template=image&asin=1587612348]

May26

Review of a Book I Didn’t Like: Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You

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[amazon template=image&asin=0306815486]I like to read. I love to read. Books have saved my life on more than one occasion. But sometimes books fuck me up too. Case in point, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You by Sean Thomas.

I’d never heard of this book until I was poking around on BookMooch, looking for books to request. I saw a listing for this book, and the premise of the true story of internet dating from a man’s point of view seemed interesting. So I mooched the book. Then I read the book. Then I wrote the following review.

This book depressed the fuck out of me. It depressed me as in I don’t want to ever wake up because them I’m going to have to get out of this bed and deal with this awful world we live in.

It all starts harmlessly enough. The author is single. The author writes for Men’s Health magazine. The author’s boss tells him to write an article about internet dating. The author researches internet dating for the article by actually dating women he meets through dating websites.

The book is written in a sort of chatty, tell-all style. Each chapter relates not only to the author’s current dating dilemma, but to the author’s history of dating, love, and sex.

I thought the book was funny. I laughed out loud many times while reading it.

It’s also easy to read. I tore through it in about twenty-four hours (including a slow work day).

But when I finished reading it, I wished I’d never picked it up.

The author wants the reader to think he’s a nice guy. He wants the reader to wonder how a guy as nice as the author can be nearly 40 years old and still single. When he starts sharing his most private thoughts, the reader comes to understand why the author is almost 40 and still single. The author is almost 40 and still single because he is a cad. (Need a quick example of his dishonorable behavior? As he is contemplating dating a Chinese woman, he writes, “At least Asian girls will do the dishes.” I suppose that was meant to be funny.)

The first hint of the author’s boorish ways is his obsession with female beauty and body parts. He mentions the beauty of every woman he wants to meet. He mentions the breasts of nearly every woman he dates. He doesn’t enjoy a particular date because the woman involved misses her homeland and is maudlin and teary throughout the evening. However, she has a great “arse,” so the author thinks he really should see her again. The obsession with physicality gets a bit ridiculous when the author rejects a woman he seems to get along well with because she’s only a few inches shorter than he is. Maybe you’re alone, you idiot, I wanted to tell him, because you’re too concerned with how women look.

He says he likes short, thin women. He enjoys feeling as if he can protect them. (I wouldn’t trust this guy to protect me from a mosquito.) Apparently, he likes to be with small women so he can feel big and strong. (He refers to his “caveman” brain way too much.) It turns out that not only does he like small women, he likes young women. When he was in his early 20s, he was sexually and romantically involved with a young woman who was only 17. Then, when he was thirty, he was sexually and romantically involved with another seventeen year-old woman child. (His math concerning this relationship was a little confusing. He claims he got together with this woman when she was 17, was with her on and off for five years, then broke up when she was twenty.) Maybe he likes to be with young women because he’s immature. Maybe he likes them so he can dominate them and push them around. I don’t know. But maybe he ends up single because his girlfriends grow up and move on when they decide they want to try new things.

As we get deeper into the author’s story, we learn he has been involved in not one, not two, but three unplanned pregnancies. Ummm, condoms? Keep it in your pants? But apparently not, because then he’s involved in a paternity kerfuffle.

He frequents prostitutes, which I don’t think is necessarily morally wrong, except he frequents prostitutes in developing countries where women have limited economic choices. Sex slavery…how enticing. What really pissed me off was the sentence where he refers to “the whore my American friend had in Kenya.” The words “whore” and “had” make it all seem so ugly. If men are going to pay for sex, they should be respectful of the sex workers (even when the sex workers aren’t around to hear what the men have to say). But I guess one of the reasons (some) men pay for sex is so they don’t have to be respectful of the women they’re fucking.

I thought the most interesting chapter in the book is the one dedicated to the author’s foray into internet porn. I knew little about internet porn. I didn’t know people stream their live sex acts so other people can watch. I didn’t realize people watch “normal” folks have sex. The author didn’t know those things either. Of course, he spends so much time viewing internet porn that he ends up in the hospital. (No joke.)

So yeah. The author is a cad. But he’s an honest cad, and he shares with the reader everything that goes on in that cad brain of his. And you know, I appreciate honesty. And I support the author’s right to live his fucked up life the way that makes him happy. (Although he doesn’t seem happy through most of this book.) I even support him writing a book about it all. I’m just sorry his book fell into my hands. And I’m sorry that it was funny and well-written enough to keep me reading it. Because if the book jacket is right and this is “a book that reveals what men really think about love, sex, and dating,” a bunch of us ugly, fat, middle age (and older) woman are doomed to be alone. But after reading this book, I’m certain that being alone is preferable to being with this guy or someone of his ilk.

May7

Happy Birthday, Bill Kreutzmann

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Bill Kreutzmann is a drummer. He was one of the two drummers for the Grateful Dead. (Mickey Hart was the other one.) The band’s keyboardists came and went. Mickey Hart left the band for several years. There was even a period when the rest of the band kicked out Pigpen and Bob Weir because they didn’t feel those two were taking their jobs seriously. But Bill, Bill was there through thick and thin. Oh, he might have been high as a kite, but if you hear a drum being played in a Grateful Dead song, you can bet Bill was on board.

According to Wikipedia,

Kreutzmann was born in Palo Alto, California, the son of Janice Beryl (née Shaughnessy) and William Kreutzmann, Sr. His maternal grandfather was football coach and innovator Clark Shaughnessy.[3] Kreutzmann started playing drums at the age of 13.

At the end of 1964 he co-founded the band the Warlocks, along with Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. Their first real gig was May 5, 1965, two days before Kreutzmann’s nineteenth birthday. In November 1965, the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead.

Kreutzmann remained with the Grateful Dead until its dissolution after the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, making him one of four members to play at every one of the band’s 2,300 shows, along with Garcia, Weir and Lesh.[6]

Bill is currently playing with his band Billy & the Kids, which includes

Aron Magner on keys, Reed Mathis on bass, and Tom Hamilton on guitar, with additional special guests and surprises along the way.

Bill’s Wikipedia page also says,

Kreutzmann’s memoir, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead, was published by St. Martin’s Press on May 5, 2015.[25]

[amazon template=image&asin=1250034000]I read the book last summer. Here’s the review I wrote of it:

This book is an absolute must-read for any Grateful Dead fan. (If you just like a celebrity tell-all memoir, it’s good as that too.)

In this book, Bill Kreutzmann–the first, last, and every time drummer for the Grateful Dead–tells his stories from his days with the band. It feels like he holds nothing back. He tells of the drugs. (It’s kind of a wonder Bill can remember anything at all, after all the drugs he took over so many years.) He tells of the sex. (Thirteen ladies in one night, and I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you which sexy revelation made me scream out loud.) And of course, he tells of rock-n-roll.

Bill doesn’t stand behind the door to say which Grateful Dead songs were his favorite to play, which ones he most liked to listen to, and which ones he didn’t care for. He offers his two cents on the debate about Donna Jean’s singing. He’s not shy about saying which keyboardists he thinks were truly members of the band and which ones were just filling in. He tells how he felt when Mickey returned to play drums with the Grateful Dead, and what he thought of the related bands that came along after Jerry died and the Grateful Dead disbanded. I don’t agree with Bil on all counts, but I sure enjoy knowing his opinions.

The stories in the book are told in more or less chronological order. In lots of cases Bill tells a story, then says, “that reminds me of the time…,” then tells about something that happened years before or after the original event. It works though. It’s like listening to your grandpa’s stories (if your grandpa were involved in one of the best rock-n-roll bands in history): the telling might be rambling, but the stories are so good, you barely notice.

At the end of the book, the reader realizes this whole story is a love letter to Bill’s wife Aimee. It’s also, of course, a love letter to all the Grateful Dead fans. And it’s even a love letter from Bill to the other members of the Grateful Dead, his brothers, Bill calls them many times throughout the book.

This book has an index, which I find super sexy. (Oh! How I love a rock-n-roll index.)

Happy Birthday, Bill, and for all our sakes, I hope you have many more.

 

Apr17

Vulnerability and Gratitude

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[amazon template=image&asin=B01K3O7QRC]I’m currently reading “A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow,” by Tim Brookes. I picked up this Ocean Beach Library discard from the free pile at the 2016 Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR). Three months later, I actually started reading it.

It ‘s the perfect book to read after a long day of mentally exhausting work. The writing is not overly challenging–no words I need to look for in a dictionary, no complicated sentence structure to contend with–but not simplistic either. The story is upbeat (no abused family members, nothing to send me down a spiral of depression) and interesting to me.

Here’s the plot: Author Tim Brookes grew up in Great Britain. In 1973, he bought a cheap ticket to NYC and hitchhiked clear across the United States and back again. After this tour of the U.S. he settled in New England. Twenty-five years later, he recreated his first trip and hitchhiked across the country and back a second time. (He had more resources the second time around and could buy a bus ticket or rent a car when he needed to, but he still relied extensively upon the kindness of strangers.)

I’m about halfway through the book now, but something I read last night rang so true that I wanted to share it here.

Brooks is telling a wealthy twenty-one year-old man about his adventures hitchhiking.

The young man says he doesn’t understand the appeal of hitchhiking. He tells Brooks that he prefers to ride in limos and stay in five-star hotels.

Brooks answers, The problem with that kind of travel…is that you’re never vulnerable.

The young man asks, Why should I want to be vulnerable?

Brooks says, Because otherwise you’ll never feel grateful for anything. You’ve got to make yourself vulnerable before you need something from someone else, and you’ve got to need something before you can feel gratitude. And unless you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you never have any chance encounters.  All the most remarkable people I’ve met on this trip, I’ve met by chance.

I could say the same thing.

IMG_5540

I took the above photo.

Mar15

Happy Birthday, Phil Lesh

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Today is the birthday of Phil Lesh. He was born in 1940. Don’t know who Phil Lesh is? Well, he’s most famous for being the Grateful Dead’s bassist.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Lesh,

Philip Chapman Lesh  is a musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he played bass guitar throughout their 30-year career.

After the band’s disbanding in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with side project Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead’s music by playing their originals, common covers, and the songs of the members of his band. Phil Lesh & Friends helped keep a legitimate entity for the band’s music to continue.

According to http://www.dead.net/band/phil-lesh,

One of the strongest intellects and most extraordinary musical talents in rock history, Phil Lesh re-defined what the bass could sound like, and in so doing heavily influenced what the Dead sounded like. Instead of being part of the rhythm section, Phil’s bass was a low-end guitar, and his improvised interplay with Garcia and Weir made the Dead the not-quite-rock-band rock band that it was. Raised in an eastern suburb of San Francisco, he began his music studies with classical violin before switching to “cool jazz” big-band trumpet a la Stan Kenton. Later he studied with Luciano Berio and composed avant-garde music in the realm of Stockhausen. In 1965 he attended a Warlocks [the name of the Grateful Dead before they were called “Grateful Dead”] show at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park, and afterwards his friend [Jerry] Garcia informed him that he was the new bass player in the band. Fortunately for future Dead Heads, he said, “Why not”?

[amazon template=image&asin=0316009989]In 2005, Phil’s book Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead was published. Here’s a short review I wrote of the book:

I can’t possibly convey how wonderful this book is. Every Deadhead needs to read it.

Phil Lesh is a geek in all the best ways! I have to read this book again with a dictionary on hand so I can learn all the unfamiliar words he uses. And of course, he talks about playing music in terms that I (as a non-musician) simply don’t understand.

But don’t let either of those things deter you. Most of the this book consists of stories about the band, the history of the Grateful Dead and Phil’s place in it.

Did you know that Phil was the last of the original members to join the Grateful Dead? Did you know the first song they played as a band (in a rehearsal) was “I Know You Rider”?

From stories of the Acid Tests in the early 1960s to the loss of Jerry in 1995, this book is essential reading.

 

Mar6

Book Review: Honeymoon in Purdah

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[amazon template=image&asin=0312263449]Last month when I was putting together the post about books and articles by and about traveling women, I came across the review I’d written for Honeymoon in Purdah: an Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing. The review was a bit long to go into an already long post, so I decided to save it for another day. That day has come!

Honeymoon in Purdah is the true story of a young Canadian woman traveling in Iran in the 1990’s. (I don’t believe the exact year of her travels is mentioned, but I vaguely remember a reference to Clinton as the US President, and the book’s copyright is 2000.)

The back of my copy of the book includes the huge spoiler of how this woman is able to travel extensively in Iran. (I HATE it when the back of a book tells me something I would rather not know before I start reading.)

I appreciate how Wearing manages to be funny without making fun of the folks she encounters. I was able to smile along with her because her writing shows a great love for most of the people she met. The majority of Iranians (and expats who stayed after the country’s Islamic Revolution) are portrayed as warm, affectionate, generous, caring, curious, concerned human beings. Wearing shows Iranians as a people who will go above and beyond, who will inconvenience themselves and their families, to make Canadian tourists comfortable .

I also appreciate that Wearing lets the Iranian people speak for themselves. Some folks she meets think life was better before the Islamic Revolution, when the Shah was in power. Others (of course) think life is better since the Shah was overthrown. Wearing allows both sides to have their say in her book.

However, I wish the author had woven historical facts in with her travel stories and character sketches. More facts about both the Shah’s reign and the Islamic Revolution would have put the people she met and the adventures she had in a historical context. Of course, maybe she expects me to do my own research. In that case, a bibliography would be nice, as I’m assuming she had some ideas about helpful references when she started writing.

Very interesting to me was Wearing’s experience of proper dress for traveling in Iran. Even as a Western tourist, she was expected to dress modestly, which really meant staying covered up, even in the desert heat. In many situations, she was dressed appropriately when wearing long pants; a long coat that came nearly to her ankles; and a scarf covering every bit of her hair, but in some situations (such as visiting Islamic holy sites), she was expected to further cover up by wearing a chaador on top of the whole outfit. While she writes extensively about feeling hot and confined by all of the black polyester fabric, about the sweat constantly rolling over her skin during the day and having to wash the salt deposits from the fabric at night, after months of dressing this way, she is uncomfortable in Iran when any stray bit of hair or skin shows.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will probably never travel in Iran, so I was glad to live vicariously through Wearing. This is a book that I want to loan to friends, then read again when it finally makes its way back to me.

Feb27

Women Travel Book Reviews

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Almost as much as I like to travel, I like to read what others, particularly women, have written about their own travels. Today I will share some of my reviews of writing by women travelers.

I really enjoy The Best American Travel Writing series. Although I never like all of the pieces in those books, there is always something (usually several somethings) that I do like.

In The Best American Travel Writing 2001, edited by Paul Theroux, the piece I liked best was “The Place to Disappear” (about Bankok’s Khao San Road)  by Susan Orlean. It was so good, I read it twice.

The aforementioned Susan Orlean is the editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2007. My favorite piece in that collection is “Long Day’s Journey into Dinner” by Elizabeth Gilbert. This piece is about walking the Grande Randonnee in France. Although I have practically nothing in common with Gilbert and her traveling companion (he spoke French, I’ve got nothing but English; they had money to eat sumptuous meals at expensive restaurants and sleep in charming, cushy little inns each night, while I am poor; they drank bottles of wine each day, while I am a teetotaler), Gilbert described the journey as so wonderful, so magical that I wanted to (literally) follow in her footsteps. (It was only when reading the book’s writer bios did I realize the author is the Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame. I have avoided Eat, Pray, Love for years, but after reading “Long Day’s Journey into Dinner,” I’ve added the memoir to my stack of books to read.)

[amazon template=image&asin=1885211929] Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road (edited by Jennifer L. Leo), is a collection of short travel stories from the Traveler’s Tales Humor Books series. I picked it up from a free pile, and I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. I actually wasn’t expecting much, as I had read at least one other book in this series and wasn’t impressed. If by “funny” the publisher means “mildly amusing,” this collection is right on target. I laughed out loud exactly once while reading these stories. (Unfortunately, I cannot remember which author made me laugh.)

I actually read More Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road, Again! (edited by Julia Weiler ) before I read Sand in My Bra. I picked it up on a whim at the library, and it turned out to be not so good. Sigh.

The subtitle, Funny Women Write from the Road is a lie. Well, the from the Road part is true and the women part is too, as far as I could tell, but funny? No.

A few of the pieces were well-written, but some were embarrassingly amateurish. None of them were memorable.

I really wanted to like this collection, but I just didn’t.

I also borrowed Curves on the Highway: A Self-Help Guide for Female Automobile Travelers by Gerry Davis from the library on a whim. I read the first two chapters and skimmed the third.

This book was not written for women who have any road trip experience. This book was written for women totally new to the idea of traveling alone in a car. This book was specifically written for women who like to stay at fancy hotels and go shopping.

Some of the advice was pretty good. Davis encourages women not to broadcast the news that they are going out of town, and she point-blank tells women not to dress in a way that calls attention to themselves.

But she also gives weird advice like “Shoulder pads: a must!” and “Take starched cotton shirts.” She also says that during travels is a good time to lose weight and suggests women snack on “…a bag of crisp chopped lettuce, kept cool next to your baggie of ice.” Sounds like the worst road trip snack ever!

I guess this book might be helpful for someone, but it sure wasn’t helpful to me. Well, I did take one thing I read here to heart. Davis advises women to never let their gas gauge go below a quarter of a tank. I’ve started taking this precaution, and I stress a lot less about running out of gas.

Around the World in a Bad Mood!: Confessions of a Flight Attendant by Rene Foss was supposed to be funny, but it really wasn’t.

The author had been a flight attendant for over 15 years when she wrote the book. The book is based on a musical review also written by the author. Maybe it’s better as a song and dance…Some parts did amuse me, but nothing made me laugh out loud.

This book is mostly a manual on how not to act. It’s also mostly a yawn.

I couldn’t tell what author Polly Evans was trying to do with Fried Eggs with Chopsticks: One Woman’s Hilarious Adventure into a Country and a Culture Not Her Own. Was she trying to discourage Westerners from visiting China by showing it as a dirty place, full of disease and people with questionable hygiene habits, a place with weird, bad food and a difficult-to-speak language? Was she trying to be funny by poking fun at a culture she’s not a part of? Was she only trying to tell about her own experiences? I think most of all she was trying to sell her book.

I didn’t hate this book, but it did come across as if the author thinks living in the West is better and China is a strange and dangerous place. I did like the way the author seamlessly worked Chinese history into her story.

I’ve never really longed to visit China and after reading this book, it’s even lower on my list of possible travel destinations.

In the graphic novel French Milk, Lucy Knisley tells her story of spending a month in Paris with her mother. This was the journal and sketch book of her day-to day-life as a young women in a new place. I liked that. I liked getting a glimpse of what she did in Paris, where she went, what she ate.

The attitude about money bugged me. The author/artist mentioned several times that she was worried about her finances and couldn’t afford to buy things, yet did manage to buy things. My guess is that her parents picked up the tab for the trip, but how did they afford it? She also mentioned only receiving little presents from her parents for Christmas because the trip was a big deal, which also led me to believe her folks footed the bill. However, one of the little presents she got was a brand new digital camera; not a little present at all where I come from.

Ah, class issues. They can’t be escaped, even in comic books.

[amazon template=image&asin=1580056016]The last book for today is No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late by Ayun Halliday. Ah, Ayun Halliday. I should write her a fan letter.

I enjoy her self-deprecating wit. I enjoy any author who is not afraid of showing her weaknesses, because seeing them makes me feel a little bit better about my own.

I like that this book explores the downside of budget traveling, doesn’t only show it surrounded by the halo of happy coincidences and good vibes and swell luck. A lot can go wrong when traveling, and Ayun is not afraid to share it with us if it gets her a laugh.

I also really adore the title of this book, and have taken many opportunities throughout my life to shout at random,  NO TOUCH MONKEY!