Staff Book Review: "The Hunger" by Alma Katsu and "The Best Land Under Heaven" by Michael Wallis

This past winter I read two books about a topic in American history that still has the power to elicit a strong emotional response. The Hunger by Alma Katsu and The Best Land Under Heaven by Michael Wallis both describe the ill-fated Donner Party. The story lingers in our imagination and can instantly set an eerie mood as represented in our popular culture at the beginning of The Shining when Jack Nicholson’s character explains the story to his wife and little boy as they’re driving through the mountains. The short version is that a party of covered wagons gets stuck in snow in the Sierra Mountains and resort to cannibalism to survive.

The taboo and grisly nature of the story make these events ripe for horror stories. The Hunger by Katsu is one of these horror-interpretations, but a mighty good one! The Best Land Under Heaven is a narrative nonfiction. It was interesting to read the nonfiction before the fictionalized account because it gave me some sort of historical basis and litmus test to weigh the Katsu book against. Both of the stories were excellent reads as I really felt like I was in the head of these early pioneers. 

Katsu’s tale jumps right into the trip, later revealing backstory (or inventing it) only to develop characters. She chose to focus on only a handful to keep the storyline tight. We get romantic tensions, jealousy, machismo, and back-stabbing among the party. As I felt she took liberties with a lot of the characters, it was also clear that she did her homework, as many of the journals from the party have survived. As the party moves west and they encounter natural disasters, they begin to feel like some other kind of force is following them. As party members are attacked, and these attacks can be quite gruesome, we learn of some possession taking over these individuals. Fans of horror who like atmosphere will really enjoy the eerie setting and the suspense of the party being plucked one by one. Knowing even a little bit of details from the real story adds to the suspense as you wait to see how Katsu will arrive and resolve the final harrowing chapters. Although this tale is horrific, and she does take liberties with the characters—possibly making some nastier then they actually were—her attention to historical detail gives her story credence. The romantic tension between characters also adds another element of emotional depth.

As much as I enjoyed The Hunger, I feel the Wallis book was exceptional and one of the best books I read in 2017. This factual account of the disaster is far more terrifying than having a supernatural explanation. He ties the story with the theme of Manifest Destiny, the reason why even people of means left everything behind to seek more. We meet many historical figures along the way—including a young Abe Lincoln when he was a lawyer in Illinois. This book definitely moves at a slower pace— I mean they only averaged about 10 to 20 miles a day in covered wagons— but you get to follow the Oregon Trail and experience the awe and difficulties of traversing this country in the mid-19^th century. The historical detail and the story of each character humanizes the tale and, in my opinion, makes it more satisfying than any of the sensationalism often reported around the event.

Neither of these books are comforting reads. Obviously one isn’t after that when they pick up a book on the Donner Party. They do have the power to transport one to another time in our recent history and put in perspective some of the motivations of settlers seeking better lives, for better or worse, and what they risked to pursue their dreams. These books, especially the Wallis text, paint a picture of the hardships they faced on a daily basis before even reaching the Sierras. While I’ll take the nonfiction over the zombie story, I can recommend reading either book. Though the setting can arouse a bit of romanticism in many, including myself, it’s difficult to take our modern comforts for granted when reading these books.

~Ben, Adult Services

Bingeworthy TV: Call the Midwife

Recently I've needed a gentle, upbeat escape in the evenings, so I started watching Call the Midwife. This historical drama about a team of young nurse midwives and Angelican nuns in the late 1950s takes its inspiration from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth. Worth served as a nurse midwife in an impoverished neighborhood in London's East End where she encountered both great hardships and a supportive community.

The characters do face enormous challenges. Pregnancy and childbirth still pose a medical danger to this day, but sixty years ago there were even more unknowns and fewer medical interventions possible. One of the most frequent tasks undertaken by the midwives in this program is to visit the homes of expectant mothers and ensure that the environment is suitable for giving birth. It's only in later seasons that hospital births become an option.

A good part of the optimism and good cheer of Call the Midwife comes from the fact that the characters are taking an active part in improving the health care for their patients. There are frequent reminders of just how much more grim things were a generation ago (even without taking the Blitz into consideration). New tools, new techniques, better hygiene, cutting edge medicines, and a talented and dedicated staff all work together to create a better chance for happy endings in each episode.

~Sarah, Adult Services

Staff Review: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is approaching its one-year anniversary on the New York Times bestseller list. Having just finished it, I can attest that it deserves every week it has spent there.

For the crime of being an aristocrat after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is placed under life-long house arrest. The "house" to which he is confined, however, is vast: Moscow's majestic Metropol Hotel, where he is sentenced to a 100-foot attic room though he's free to move about the hotel.

Rostov is in his early thirties as the novel opens and through the course of its 480 pages we inhabit thirty-plus years of house arrest with him. And what a time we have of it. Within the space of one building Towles has created a very full world, peopling it with an extensive cast that pivots around the appealing Count and includes international hotel guests, an unctuously evil hotel manager, a beautiful actress, a former Red Army colonel, a prodigious young child, a temperamental chef, a revolutionary friend, an orphan, and many others. The cast is delightful, with most characters assisting the Count in providing this enchanting book with its large heart.

The Count himself is the epitome of grace under pressure. Without ever surrendering his gentility or his humor, he accommodates himself to his newly restricted life, which he manages to lead to the fullest, even embracing a new career as headwaiter at the hotel's premiere restaurant (the Bolsheviks allow the hotel to function in its grand old style to impress foreign visitors who stay there).

The novel often reminded me of a fable or tale and as such it's very much in the Russian tradition. There are table legs filled with gold coins, a clock that tolls but two times a day, a key that opens all doors, a shadowy cat, fine wines by the hundreds, brandy snifters by the score, sumptuous meals and exquisite pastries galore. Yet amidst all these trappings of the old aristocratic life, we are also given a clear view of the new Soviet regime with its endless bureaucracies and Siberian gulags, its negation of the individual in favor of the collective, its privations and Orwellian turns of phrase.

The novel concludes very satisfactorily in 1954 and about that I will say nothing more. From start to finish this book is an impressive piece of architecture; many years of planning went into its construction.To my mind, the novel's two greatest pleasures are the sublime delight Rostov takes in literature, from Montaigne to Russia's great literary masters, and the consistent intelligence and civility of the prose (Towles's debut novel, by the way, published in 2011, was titled Rules of Civility). No small part of this new book's success may be due to its timing. With public discourse these days tending to the divisive and vulgar, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a far more charming world.

Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2015 I chose Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates as my best book of the year. It was a difficult book to read given that it tackles -- in a very personal way -- the race problem in America, a problem older than the country itself, its roots going back to the earliest colonial days. What impressed me so was Coates's intellectual vigor and how well he put it to use trying to make sense of the world he and his son inhabit as black males. He's a clear thinker and a clear writer. As brain food alone, the book was a pleasure.

His new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, is even tougher to read. The foundation of the book is a series of essays Coates wrote for The Atlantic magazine, where he is a national correspondent. These well-known essays cover such topics as the making of the first black president, the mass incarceration of blacks, and the strong case for reparations. The essays are strung together with new material, a series of memoir-like pieces relating Coates's thoughts and feelings each year of Obama's presidency, an event that buoyed him considerably, bringing hope for the future.

The book's final piece tackles the election of Donald Trump, a near-fatal blow to Coates's hope for Coates believes that Obama's successor is intent on negating the legacy of the country's first black president. By the time Trump is elected, within the book's trajectory, the reader has been educated on the real stories -- the truths -- of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the exclusion of millions of blacks from the provisions of the New Deal, and the horrific and intentionally broad scope of institutional racism. It was a painful education for me and I wondered why I had never known so much of it before.

Coates concludes his new work in a grim mood, but a hopeful ending would probably ring false. Many Americans aren't feeling very hopeful these days, which brings me to my only quibble with the book, which is Coates's reluctance to consider the enormous impact globalization, deregulation, outsourcing, inflation, automation, monopolistic practices, and a host of other economic and political factors have had on everyone, white, black, and every shade in between. There's an underlying presumption on his part that if you're white, the gravy train's still more or less available to you. Many would beg to differ. But this is indeed a quibble; the plight of whites is not Coates's topic. He does all of us a great and needed service by increasing our awareness of the hard lives of others and reducing at least some of our historical ignorance. Who knows what any of us might do differently if only we knew the whole truth?

~Ann, Adult Services

Staff Review: The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn

As the temperature drops, what better way to spend your leisure time than with a gripping true-crime story? The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn is a true-crime story for those who need more than a sensationalized re-telling of the crime itself. The Jonestown massacre looms in our country’s collective consciousness as one of the great disasters of the 20th century. The horrendous nature of the event leads us to look at the characters involved with equal parts fascination and contempt. This book brings the reader into the environment in which the massacre's instigator, Jim Jones, grew up, the people around him who believed in him and his cause, and his rise to power and gradual corruption. Guinn, a former journalist, uses his investigative skills to tell this nuanced story with gripping prose.

In the first part of the book, there are surprisingly few red flags foretelling of looming disaster. Jones had a tendency toward unusual behavior, but didn’t appear to be a complete sociopath early on. We do see a child who takes an unusual interest in religion (neither of his parents were religious) and who has the desire and ability to control people. Jones discovers he has a talent for preaching and manipulating people and he creates congregations to effect social change. 

Peoples Temple, which Jones established in his twenties, had the positive mission of helping the disenfranchised. In the eyes of his wife, Marceline, who stayed by his side until the very end, Jones’s mission was akin to Christ’s and even though she didn’t approve of his means, she witnessed the positive change he was making in the world. In the first half of the book, the Peoples Temple appears to be a force for good. According to Guinn, the Temple played a large part in integrating blacks and whites in the Jim Crow Indianapolis of the 50s. They opened nursing homes and created social outreach programs to help troubled youth. As Jones brings in the disenfranchised by helping them, he gradually unveils his primary objective: the creation of a socialist utopia where everyone gives up their personal property and takes care of each other. It appears that Jones believed in his mission and that he was fighting for equality. He wanted everyone to live as he said God intended—to resist the material temptations of our capitalist society, which glorify the individual, and to take care of each other.

As the story goes on and gets darker, Guinn remains objective and never claims to know Jones’s intentions. Whether or not his heart was in the right place early on, it becomes difficult to believe Jones is fighting for a better world as his cruel and deceitful behavior starts to add up. Physical punishment and humiliation, sexually abusing members, keeping members’ income, selling and taking the property of members, stashing away his fortune in foreign accounts, indulging himself in comforts he denies other members, threatening blackmail for those who try to leave—these are just a few of the acts we find Jones guilty of. Guinn remains objective in his exposition so that the reader can almost understand why Jones's paranoia, grasp of reality, and ego get out of control. A large percentage of his members remain committed to his socialist utopia and want to be examples to the world. They demonstrate, well before the disaster, that they are willing to die for the cause. Their unwavering devotion, mixed with Jones's belief that he is destined to make history, create a toxic cocktail.

Jones started the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis, set up another location in San Francisco, and, spurred by his paranoia of nuclear war, ultimately set up a colony in Guyana. When the media finally caught on to Jim Jones’s misdeeds, he hid in the Guyana camp, Jonestown. The final harrowing chapters in Guyana where a senator and members of the media are murdered and nearly 1,000 people commit mass suicide (whether willingly or not) are equally heartbreaking and allegorical. The Road to Jonestown is a demonstrative story, not as much about fanaticism as about power. Guinn points out that Jones was a demagogue “who ultimately betrayed his followers whether he always intended to or not.” Guinn doesn’t glorify or sensationalize any of the dirty details; instead he treats Jones and the Temple members fairly, revealing Jones as a person gradually corrupted and divorced from reality. With Jones as their infallible leader, most members followed his alternate reality. Guinn handles all these themes and asks the big questions with an eye for the telling detail, bringing both the characters and their setting to life.

~Ben, Adult Services

#ComicsWednesday: Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown

There is no shortage of acclaim for the perfection of Tetris*. Its cultural impact cannot be overstated. Tetris has wormed its way into the life of anyone who’s been in proximity to a computer, Gameboy, Nintendo, arcade, etc. Despite its influence, the Tetris story has not been properly canonized. Box Brown succeeds in doing so with Tetris: The Games People Play. He begins with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and his friend Vladimir Pokhitko musing on the origin of games and puzzles, their connection to art, and their capacity to enhance our humanity. He then goes through an in-depth history of the politics, business, and controversy of Tetris. The story is surprisingly deep and convoluted for a game so simple in design. The tale, warmly colored in yellows and blues, is constructed fluidly with mixed styles that fit together like squares. The book succeeds alongside other great graphic novels in that the arrangement of the story seems like it could not have existed in another medium.

Outside the historical narrative, Brown discusses the purpose and role games have. They exist not just to escape, entertain, or pass time. Brown poses that the experiences and strategies used extend to our higher-order thinking (namely the prefrontal cortex); we assess a task, accomplish it, and feel good from it. He further argues that games are about connection and the depiction of human drama, all in the pursuit of fun. Tetris: The Games People Play pushes in the much-needed direction of games as art and culture. As Box Brown says, games “define our human identity.”

~Garrett, Circulation

* see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnztj1UlkQs if you need convincing

Staff Review: The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams stands a very good chance of being my 2017 best book of the year. I loved it so much I'm about to read it all over again. The book combines all my favorite genres: history, nature writing, memoir, travel. Published in 2016 to coincide with the National Park Service's centennial celebrations, The Hour of Land is a very personal tour, conducted by Williams herself, through a dozen of the nation's 58 national parks.

And what a tour guide she is. A naturalist, writer, and native of Utah, Williams is probably best known for her 1992 memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place about losing her mother to cancer just as the Great Salt Lake floods, threatening the migratory birds Williams treasures. She's extremely knowledgeable, she loves wild places with a passion, and she possesses what I can only call a beautiful spirit: generous, gentle, peace-loving, compassionate. Plus, she's a terrific and highly poetic writer.

It's a pleasure to tour the country in her company, even when she's surveying wrenching scenes like the damage inflicted on Gulf Islands National Seashore by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 or the encroachments of the Bakken oil fields on Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. More often what she surveys is sublime, from Alaska's Gates of the Arctic and Wyoming's Grand Teton to Acadia National Park in Maine. She even makes a stop at Effigy Mounds National Monument here in Iowa.

Particularly pleasurable is the variety of approaches Williams takes to her park descriptions, focusing closely at times on ecology or American history, then shifting her lens to her own life and family. She includes letters, emails, and journal entries to fine effect and provides a wonderful personal anecdote about Lady Bird Johnson. Modern readers, who may be unaware of how our great park system got started, learn about the unflagging philanthropic and environmental efforts of such National Park greats as Laurence Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Stewart Udall, and many others. This book's a lavish banquet of luscious park detail and I, for one, could not get enough of it. How I wish Williams had visited all 58.

~Ann, Adult Services