River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon by Buddy Levy -2011 is a fascinating exciting account of the first voyage by Europeans to transverse the Amazon.  Years ago I made a photographic expedition the Amazon.  I saw pink dolphins, Indigenous villages, and much more,  My trip began in Iquitos, Peru, the biggest city in the world with no access by road. I am very glad I came upon Buddy Levy's fascinating book while browsing in Libby.

"From the acclaimed author of Conquistador comes this thrilling account of one of history’s greatest adventures of discovery. With cinematic immediacy and meticulous attention to historical detail, here is the true story of a legendary sixteenth-century explorer and his death-defying navigation of the Amazon—river of darkness, pathway to gold.

In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America’s rumored Land of Cinnamon, and the fabled El Dorado, “the golden man.” Driving an enormous retinue of mercenaries, enslaved natives, horses, hunting dogs, and other animals across the Andes, they watched their proud expedition begin to disintegrate even before they descended into the nightmarish jungle, following the course of a powerful river. Soon hopelessly lost in the swampy labyrinth, their numbers diminishing daily through disease, starvation, and Indian attacks, Pizarro and Orellana made a fateful decision to separate. While Pizarro eventually returned home barefoot and in rags, Orellana and fifty-seven men, in a few fragile craft, continued downriver into the unknown reaches of the mighty Amazon, serenaded by native war drums and the eerie cries of exotic predators. Theirs would be the greater glory.

 

Interweaving eyewitness accounts of the quest with newly uncovered details, Buddy Levy reconstructs the seminal journey that has electrified adventurers ever since, as Orellana became the first European to navigate and explore the entire length of the world’s largest river. Levy gives a long-overdue account of the native populations—some peaceful and welcoming, offering sustenance and life-saving guidance, others ferociously hostile, subjecting the invaders to gauntlets of unremitting attack and intimations of terrifying rituals. And here is the Amazon itself, a powerful presence whose every twist and turn held the promise of new wonders both natural and man-made, as well as the ever-present risk of death—a river that would hold Orellana in its irresistible embrace to the end of his life.

Overflowing with violence and beauty, nobility and tragedy, River of Darkness is both riveting history and a breathtaking adventure that will sweep readers along on an epic voyage unlike any other." From Batam Books, the publisher 

The first European to ever set foot in the Amazon was Francisco de Orellana, a cousin of famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro. On a joint expedition with Pizarro's brother in 1541, de Orellana set off from Quito in search of the mythical El Dorado, a city allegedly overflowing with gold and riches 

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Amazon, European exploring and exploitation of the area.

In the elegant epilogue Levy details the on going degradation of the region in search of profit as well as efforts to safeguard this precious resource.

"Buddy Levy is the author of nine books and his work has been featured or reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Kirkus Book Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, The Daily Beast, The A.V. Club and Library Journal. He was the co-star, for 25 episodes, on HISTORY Channel’s hit docuseries Brad Meltzer’s DECODED, which aired to an average of 1.7 million weekly viewers and is still airing as reruns today. In 2018 he was an on-camera expert on the 4-part TV Series THE FRONTIERSMEN: The Men Who Built America (HISTORY, Executive Producer Leonardo Di Caprio).

Levy’s most recent book is Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)-- https://bit.ly/RealmOfIceAndSky. His other books include Empire of Ice & Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk (St. Martin’s Press, December 2022), winner of the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award. His 2019 book Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition (St. Martin’s Press), won the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in Adventure History.

Levy is also the co-author of the National Bestseller No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon (with Erik Weihenmayer; Thomas Dunne Books, 2017); GERONIMO: Leadership Lessons of An American Warrior (co-authored with Coach Mike Leach, Simon & Schuster, 2014) and River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage Through the Amazon (Diversion Books, 2011, 2022). His other books include the critically acclaimed and Amazon #1 Bestseller Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell, 2008), which he is currently developing for a television series; American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005, Berkley Books, 2006); and Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998). His books have been published in ten languages.

Levy was a contributing writer on the 2018 documentary film The Weight of Water. The film was based in part on the book No Barriers, which Levy co-authored with blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer. The film premiered at the 2018 Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prize and the Best Mountain Film Award. It has since won The People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the 2018 Denver Film Festival; Best Sport and Adventure Film at the 2018 Mendi Bilbao Film Festival; and Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Waimea Ocean Film Festival.

As a freelance journalist he has covered adventure sports and lifestyle/travel subjects around the world, including working with TV impresario Mark Burnett on numerous Eco-Challenges, and other adventure expeditions in Argentina, Borneo, Europe, Greenland, Morocco, and the Philippines. His interests are wide-ranging: discovery and

adventure, the mountain men, arctic exploration travail, clashes of empires and civilizations, conspiracy theories, and riveting human stories of survival." From the author's website.

Mel u

The Reading Life

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin - 2024 - 432 Pages

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin is an incredibly interesting beautifully written account of the amazing linguistic diversity of New York City with native speakers of over 800 languages in resident, many of the languages are Endangered.

"Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.

On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. At the same time, Language City celebrates the profound linguistic diversity of a single city and the joy of tuning into this unprecedented Babel." From the publisher Grove Press

New immigrants arriving New York City are caught in extensial delima.  The want to Preserve their cultural identity, make sure their children know their heritage language while having to learn English to thrive in New York City.  Perlin shows how numerous communities of language Speakers develop communities.  

" I am a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City - 

My book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is now out with Grove in the US and the UK.

As a linguist, I serve as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, where since 2013 I have overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for my PhD, I created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. I also teach linguistics at Columbia. 

As a writer, I have written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and I published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). I have given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others. 

As a translator, I work primarily from Chinese into English. I translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). I have recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.

I have a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. My PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. I was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin talks about the anti-immigration attitude of many Americans, exposing the hateful history and deep racism from which this is  derived.

The Reading Life Review- August 2024 - Future Hopes

 

The Reading Life Review- August 2024

Novels Featured in August

1. School for Love - by Olivia Manning

2. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride- 2023

3. Faithful by Alice Hoffman- 2016

4. Speedboat by Renata Adler- 1976

5. Yellowface by R.K Kuang - 2023

6. The Poppy War by R.K Kuang - 2018

Nonfiction Featured in August

1. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013 - 

2. Provence 1970 by Luke Barr- 2016 - 226 Pages

3. I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad - 2019 - 423 Pages

4. Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

5. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend- 2023

The Short stories Featured in August were four works by Carol Shields 

I also posted upon three science fiction movies from the 1950s

Blog Stats

There are as of today our posts have been viewed 8,012,930 times.

There are currently 4600 posts on The Reading Life 

Home Countries of August Visitors

1. Hong Kong

2.Singapore

3. United States

4. India

5. Philippines

6. Russia

7.Canada

8.Brazil

9.Finland

10. France

The most viewed posts are on short stories 

Eight August authors are Americans, one is English and one Canadian.

 Only two are deceased. 

Eight were featured for the first time in August,  Three are men.

Future Hopes and Plans

I plan to read both of Olivia Manning's trilogies, more short stories by Carol Shields and will continue my attempted read through of Alice Hoffman.  I will read selected nonfiction as well as works related to Jewish history and culture,

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

 Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver - 2003

This is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the Holocaust and the history of Jewish Life in Berlin.  Silver goes back to about 1350 when a restricted number of Jewish families were allowed to settle in Berkin, processing to periods when Jews were welcomed. By about 1940  over half of the economic productivity in Berkin was generated by the activity of Jews. (Silva goes into details on who was seen as a Jew by the Nazis and explains his own use of terminology.)  As German antisemitism grew worse some how a Jewish Hospital with almost all Jewish Doctors and staff survived, Some employees were saved by being married to Christians and for a while from being World War One Veterans.  They began to see family members deported to death camps.

The Germans actually sent Jewscto the hospital to be treated and once they recovered they sent them to death camps.  The hospital used to treat everyone.  If you could not pay you were welcomed.  Then they were told they could treat only Jews so they lost a large percentage of their paying customers.  Food rations were cut but still the hospital stayed open.

"Dan Silver, a lawyer and former general counsel to the CIA, tells the astonishing story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital during WWII. For decades before the Nazis seized power in Germany, the hospital had served Berlin's Jews as their principal medical resource. At the war's end, it was still functioning, delivering what medical care it could and sheltering a large percentage of the city's few remaining Jews. Silver asks how a Jewish institution, located in the capital city of a regime dedicated above all to obliterating the Jews, could possibly have survived. To answer this question, Silver has gathered the available documentary evidence and interviewed the handful of hospital staffers still alive. According to these sources, the institution's survival hinged on an amalgam of factors, including sheer, blind luck and bureaucratic infighting among Nazi organizations. As Silver explains, the Nazis' bizarre system for classifying persons of partly Jewish ancestry played a role as well, since some hospital personnel with mixed ancestry were not treated with the same implacable hostility as full Jews were. Silver acknowledges where gaps in the evidence make certainty impossible, as in assessing Dr. Walter Lustig, the hospital's chief during the war years. Lustig may have been a betrayer and collaborator, as some staffers think, or he may have manipulated the system as best he could to save at least some Jews from destruction. The balanced analysis of Dr. Lustig's record typifies the author's careful use of evidence throughout this absorbing book." From Amazon

Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel B. Silver greatly expanded my knowledge of Holocaust and Jewish history.

Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

 

Faithful by Alice Hoffman - 2016 - 288 Pages

Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

" From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.

What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.

Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel." From Simon and Schuster

The Bookish Libra has a marvelous review 

I love the work of Alice Hoffman and hope to eventually read all of her works.  

As I read Faithful I did so from my perspective as the father of three daughters in their 20s.  I could not but think how negatively I would have reacted to two of the three men Shelby was involved with. In one case of an ex-convict covered with tattoos I would have been totally wrong,  

Shelby has a hard time bonding with people.  Her shaved head does not help.  She steals dogs and a cat and provides them with a loving home.  

We follow Shelby as she evolves into a less inward bound person.  I found the ending very gratifying after much previous pain for Shelby.  There are lots of interesting side encounters throughout Faithful.

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic, The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Book of Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.

School for Love by Olivia Manning. - 1951- Introduction by Jane Smiley 2009

School for Love by Olivia Manning - 1951

OLIVIA MANNING (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R. D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. In World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as The Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later." From The New York Review of Books. Publisher of School for Love 

School for Love is a very powerful exquisitely rendered work of art. It also has by far the best portrayal of a Siamese Cat in a literary work ever. (Sadly I cannot find her book on Burmese and Siamese cats on Amazon.)

This novel centers on Felix, a British boy whose mother has just died. Felix and his mother lived in Baghdad back when Iraq was a British colony, so Felix, whose father is also deceased, has to make a long journey home by ship at a time when berths on ships are reserved for service members, diplomats, and others who are directly working to bring the second world war to a close. He has a sort-of aunt in Jerusalem named Miss Bohun, and she offers to take him in while he waits for a place on the ship. Miss Bohun was an orphan herself and was taken in by Felix’s paternal grandparents, so she grew up with Felix’s father, as a foster-sibling. Felix has never met Miss Bohun before, but he has heard his mother grumbling about her. Felix who seems about thirteen, is first and foremost a lonely, grieving child who desperately needs love. One might think that Miss Bohun, an orphan herself, would be sympathetic to Felix’s feelings, but you would be wrong.


There is a lot of drama involving the other casts in the house.


It soon becomes clear – to the reader at least – that Miss Bohun is a manipulative monster, a rather absurd and disillusioned creature who considers herself a paragon of virtue when in fact she is anything but. She appears to have taken over the running of the house from its former occupant, the Polish refugee, Frau Leszno. Having been relegated to the position of Miss Bohun’s cook/housekeeper, Frau Leszno is currently residing in the servants’ quarters, a reversal of fortunes she deeply resents. In this scene, Miss Bohun tells Felix how she came to live at the house, clearly implying that she was doing Frau Leszno a huge favour by taking control of the situation. Or, if one looks at it another way, Miss Bohun saw an opportunity for personal gain which she seized without a moment’s hesitation. Felix falls in love with Faro, the resident Siamese cat.


You can decide for yourself if Miss Bohun knocks a pregnant war widow boarding in the house down the stairs, causing her a miscarriage, because of jealousy over others in the house liking her.


The close of School of Love really an amazing partially happy ending.


"Read today, it seems a work of uncanny prescience. The grave concerns of our own age—religious fanaticism, passionate competing territorial claims—are here in embryo, set into the precisely rendered, everyday texture of an era that has vanished. The alien British feel that Du Bois complained of in 1956 was not, in fact, cultural—it is a characteristic of Manning’s unique vision and style, her cool way of dissecting her world and her experience, in which even the most pitiable or terrifying circumstances are worthy of interested and detailed scrutiny." From Jane Smiley's introduction

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

 

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride - 2023- 512 Pages

YouTube has numerous very well done videos focusing on this book.

I was totally drawn into the lives of the characters in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store from the intriguing open to the beautiful close.

"From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird." From the publisher 

Pottstown, Pennslyvania in the 1930s is a very diverse divided community with African Americans who still look on South Carolina or Georgia as home, immigrants from Jewish communities in Europe and white people who pretend their ancestors came over on the Mayflower.  I really appreciated how McBride showed us the difference between various Jewish immigrant communities, from Romanians, Hungarian,  Russian to the want to be a "real white person" arrogant Germans.  Many of the white people look down on African Americans and are not crazy for immigrants.

At points the novel is heartbreaking,  at other times (especially during the concerts) it is tremendous fun and the ending is so beautiful and moving. 

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

I hope to read all of his novels and his memoir.

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War –2013 - by Deirdre David

 

Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David- 2013

Olivia Manning 

Born: March 2, 1908, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Died: July 23, 1980 (age 72 years), Isle of Wight, United Kingdom

Partner: R. D. Smith (1939–)

Notable works: Fortunes of War Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy 

"Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is the first literary biography of the twentieth-century novelist Olivia Manning. It tells the story of a writer whose life and work were shaped by her own fierce ambition, and, like many of her generation, the events and aftermath of the Second World War. From the time she left Portsmouth for London in the mid-1930s determined to become a famous writer, through her wartime years in the Balkans and the Middle East, and until her death in London in 1980, Olivia Manning was a dedicated and hard-working author. Married to a British Council lecturer stationed in Bucharest, Olivia Manning arrived in Romania on the 3rd September 1939, the fateful day when Allied forces declared war on Germany. For the duration of World War Two, she kept one step ahead of invading German forces as she and her husband fled Romania for Greece, and then Greece for the Middle East, where they stayed until the end of the war. These tumultuous wartime years are the subject of her best-known and most transparently autobiographical novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy.

Olivia Manning refused to be labelled a 'feminist,' but her novels depict with cutting insight and sardonic wit the marginal position of women striving for independent identity in arenas frequently controlled by men, whether on the frontlines of war or in the publishing world of the 1950s. However, she did not just write about World War Two and women's lives. Amongst other things, Manning published fiction about making do in Britain's post-war Age of Austerity, about desecration of the environment through uncontrolled development, and about the painful adjustment to post-war British life for young men. As the author of thirteen published novels, two volumes of short stories, several works of non-fiction, and a regular reviewer of contemporary fiction, she was a visible presence on the British literary scene throughout her life and her work provides a detailed insight into the period.

Grounded in thorough research and enriched by discussion of previously unexamined manuscripts and letters, Olivia Manning: A Woman at War is a timely study of Olivia Manning's remarkable life. Deirdre David integrates incisive critical analysis of Manning's writing with extensive discussion of the historical contexts of her fiction." From Oxford University Press 

Olivia Manning: Writer and War introduced me to an Writer I should have long ago read. Manning was friends or at least acquainted with many well known literary figures. She was very close to the poet Stevie Smith. Her novels deal extensively on marriages. Her own was problematic but shaped her life. She was totally into the reading life from her childhood on. David showed what Manning's life was like during World War Two and in the highly rationed days in post War London. Manning was seen by some as a "difficult" person, judgemental and superior. She had numerous sexual partners as did her husband. She became pregnant at 36 but the child died in her uterus at seven months but she has to carry it until it was delivered at nine months. She never emotionally recovered from this.

Deirdre David is Professor of English Emerita at Temple University. She has been a member of the faculty at Smith College, the University of Maryland, and Temple University. At Temple she was chair of the department for five years and, throughout her teaching career, has offered undergraduate and graduate classes in Victorian Literature, the History of the British Novel, Postcolonial Literature, and British Literature Since 1945.

Professor David is the author of Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981), Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (1987), Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (1995), and Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (2007).  She is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) and co-editor (with Eileen Gillooly) of Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State University Press, 

"Hinterland" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 20 Pages - included in The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

"Hinterland" is the 30th short story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.  The story centers on a middles aged married couple with two grown daughters.  One of the daughters has recently moved back home after a fight with her husband.  

"EVERYONE SEEMS TO HAVE STAYED PUT this year except Meg and Roy Sloan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin...Although both Meg and Roy are patriotic in a vague and non-rhetorical way, and good mature citizens who pay their taxes and vote and hold opinions on gun legislation and abortion, they’ve chosen this year to ignore the exhortation of their president to stay home and see America first. The Grand Canyon can wait, Roy says in the sociable weekend voice he more and more distrusts. The Black Hills can wait. And the Everglades. And Chesapeake Bay..."

They have decided to spend three weeks in Paris. 

"Over the years, in the seasonal rounds of business and pleasure and special anniversaries, Meg and Roy Sloan have set foot on most of the continents of the world: Asia, Australia, South America—and, of course, Europe. They have, in fact, been to Paris on two previous occasions...And now, in the autumn of 1986, an uneasy, untrustful time in the world’s history, the Sloans have returned. “But why?” quite a number of their friends said. “Why Paris, of all places!” .

Shields packs so much into twenty pages, a terrorist scare at a museum, exploring shops, dining, and an account of the dynamics of a marriage.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs - by Camilla Townsend- 2019 - 320 Pages

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs - by Camilla Townsend- 2019 - 320 Pages 

The commonly accepted view of preconquest Aztec culture is that of a savage society in which thousands of people had their hearts cut out by priests in order to appease their Gods. Montezuma is depicted as a coward. In her amazing book Professor Townsend uses her knowledge of indigenous languages to give us a much more nuanced view.

"In November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars.

For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.

This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists." From Oxford University Press

I was very moved by Townsend's reinterpretation of views La Malinche as a traitor to her own people, criticizing her collaboration with the Spanish conquistadors. She is seen as complicit in the downfall of the Aztec Empire, facilitating the invasion and subjugation of her own culture. As Townsend says Malinche had no ties to the Aztecs, the enemy of her people who she had every reason to hate. Townsend goes into details about the lives of women as well as the role of marriage among royalty.

If you have any interest in Meso-American history, this is a book for you.

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017- 320 Pages

 

Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters - 2017 - 320 Pages

This week's menu at Chez Panisse

YouTube has a number of videos on Alice Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse.

"New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant.

 

When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity.  Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food." From the publisher 

I highly recommend Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters.  It is numerous things combined,  a  memoir of growing up in middle class America in the 1950s and 60, a marvelous account of the counter cultural anti-Vietnam war era, her transformational time in Paris, her several romances and of course her love of food culminating in the opening of her restaurant in 1971.  

"Alice Waters (born April 28, 1944, Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American restaurateur, chef, and food activist who was a leading proponent of the “slow food” movement, which billed itself as the healthy antithesis to fast food.

Waters studied French culture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She participated in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and the idealism that was then prevalent at Berkeley was reflected in her ideology throughout her career. She studied abroad for a time in France, and it was there that her love of farm-to-plate dining took hold. Following graduation, Waters spent a year studying at the International Montessori School in London before returning to California to teach.

In the 1970s the United States was still years away from the “foodie revolution,” which by 2009 had brought farmers’ markets and organic foods to a larger audience. Waters’s prescient passion for whole, unprocessed foods inspired her and her friend Lindsey Shere to found a market-inspired restaurant in Berkeley, California, despite having little capital and no experience as restaurateurs. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, it was with a relatively untrained staff, a set fixed-price menu that changed daily, and an uncompromising dedication to a vision that seemed to many untenable: Waters wanted to create meals that used only locally grown seasonal ingredients, and she wanted to forge relationships with the producers and suppliers of these items. 

The advocacy venture for which she became best known was the Edible Schoolyard, originally established in 1995. Waters began the program by planting a garden in the yard of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. A cooking classroom was installed a few years later, and by 2009 the Edible Schoolyard was a thriving educational tool, though not a source of lunchroom produce. The program expanded to include affiliates in other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the Edible Schoolyard grew Waters’s new cause, that of persuading the government to increase funding to improve school lunch programs. Her indomitable dedication to providing schoolchildren with more healthful-eating options earned Waters a fair share of detractors, who argued that seasonal food was a dispensable luxury for already underfunded schools. As with her restaurant, however, her philosophy regarding the project was “If we do it right, the money will come.”

The James Beard Foundation named Chez Panisse outstanding restaurant and Waters outstanding chef in 1992; the foundation also presented her with a lifetime achievement award in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, received the French Legion of Honor in 2009, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015. Waters wrote a number of cookbooks and We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto (2021; written with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller). Her memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, was published in 2017." From The Encyclopedia Britanica

I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad - 2019 - 423 Pages

 

I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad - 2019 - 423 Pages

YouTube has several informative videos on this book

I Am A Filipino and This is How I Cook by Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad is a combination cookbook, history of the Philippines, a memoir and the story of how a passion for Filipino food produced a highly successful restaurant.

"Named a Best Cookbook of the Year by The New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, Houston Chronicle, Food52, PopSugar, and more

Filipino food is having its moment. Sour, sweet, funky, fatty, bright, rich, tangy, bold—no wonder adventurous eaters consider Filipino food the next big thing (Vogue declares it “the next great American cuisine”). Filipinos are the second-largest Asian population in America, and finally, after enjoying Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese food, we’re ready to embrace Filipino food, too. Written by trailblazing restaurateurs Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad, I Am a Filipino is a cookbook of modern Filipino recipes that captures the unexpected and addictive flavors of this vibrant and diverse cuisine.

The techniques (including braising, boiling, and grilling) are simple, the ingredients are readily available, and the results are extraordinary. There are puckeringly sour adobos with meat so tender you can cut it with a spoon, along with other national dishes like kare-kare (oxtail stew) and kinilaw (fresh seafood dressed in coconut milk and ginger). There are Chinese-influenced pansit (noodle dishes) and lumpia (spring rolls); Arab-inflected cuisine, with its layered spicy curries; and dishes that reflect the tastes and ingredients of the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who came to the Philippines and stayed. Included are beloved fried street snacks like ukoy (fritters), and an array of sweets and treats called meryenda. Filled with suitably bold and bright photographs, I Am a Filipino is like a classic kamayan dinner—one long, festive table piled high with food. Just dig in!" From the publisher 

Speedboat by Renata Adler- 1976 - 192 Pages - with an afterword by Guy Trebay

 Speedboat is an American classic, a classic for American readers steeped in life in New York City in the 1970s.Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. 

"When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it." From the New York Review of Books 

Timelines move backwards and forwards giving the novel a sense of elasticity and fluidity as we flit from one situation to the next, from one topic to another. One of the pleasures of reading Speedboat stems from not knowing where it is going to take us and whether we will return subsequently to the same period in this woman’s life or move on indefinitely. In this example, Jen touches on her days as a student in Paris – It’s a brief stopover, and we don’t know if we’ll hear more at a later stage:

"One night, in Paris, during the last days of the Algerian crisis, I was studying in a common room at the Cité Universitaire—where I used to live and where four apparently interchangeable Americans incessantly played bridge. A bomb went off. The explosion was enormous. Windows smashed. Doors fractured. The reception desk blew up. The lights went out. The first words after the thunder and reverberations in the darkness were an imperturbable, incredulous, “Two hearts.” (pgs. 30-31)

Adler’s slices of prose vary in length—anything from a sentence or two to a couple of pages. And they vary in tone, too—some are underscored with laconic wry humour, others convey a darker mood. Several fragments are keenly observed:

"The wallflower sat reading in the Paris restaurant. There used to be so many categories of wallflower: the anxious, smiling, tense ones who leaned forward, trying; the important, busy, apparently elsewhere preoccupied ones, who were nonetheless waiting, waiting in the carpeted offices of their inattention, to be found. There were wallflowers who clustered noisily together, and others who worked a territory, resolute and alone. And then, there were wallflowers who had recognised for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody’s brother, somebody’s usher, somebody’s roommate, somebody’s roommate’s usher’s brother, or, worst of all, with that male wallflower who ought—by God who ought—to be an ally, who could, in dignity and the common interest, join forces to make it through an evening, but who, after all, had higher aspirations, and neither the sense nor the courtesy to conceal it, who in short, scorned the partner fate and the placement had dealt him, worst of all. The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody’s brother, somebody’s usher, somebody’s roommate, somebody’s roommate’s usher’s brother, or, worst of all, with that male wallflower who ought—by God who ought—to be an ally, who could, in dignity and the common interest, join forces to make it through an evening, but who, after all, had higher aspirations, and neither the sense nor the courtesy to conceal it, who in short, scorned the partner fate and the placement had dealt him, worst of all. The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book. (pg. 151)

       

Renata Adler was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d’E.S. from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an honorary LL.D. from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of The New York Times, remained at The New Yorker for the next four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986); Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Decision That Made George W. Bush President (2004); and the novels Speedboat (1976, Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and Pitch Dark (1983), both available as NYRB Classics

Provence 1970 by Luke Barr- 2016 - 226 Pages

 I highly recommend pairing a reading of Province 1970 with a viewing of the movie Julia and Julia (currently available on Netflix). 

 This is the second nonfiction work by Luke Barr focusing on French food upon which I have posted. My first of his works was Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class. (Both available at the Boston Library via Libby.)

"Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping today’s tastes and culture, the way we eat now. The conversations among this group were chronicled by M.F.K. Fisher in journals and letters—some of which were later discovered by Luke Barr, her great-nephew. In Provence, 1970, he captures this seminal season, set against a stunning backdrop in cinematic scope—complete with gossip, drama, and contemporary relevance." From Penquin House Press

Provence 1970 includes detailed descriptions of meals and even a few recipes.

 

"Today Is the Day" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - 3 Pages - Included in the Short Stories of Carol Shields

 

"Today Is the Day" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - 3 Pages - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields 

Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

"Today Is the Day" is the 27th Short Story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.  It is among the briefest of her stories,  It shows the tremendous versatility of Shields.  "Today Is the Day" reads like an ancient folk tale.  Here is the opening:

"TODAY IS THE DAY THE WOMEN of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies. They set off without breakfast, not even coffee, gathering at the site of the old well, now paved over and turned into a tot lot and basketball court. The air at this hour is clear. You can breathe in the freshness. And you can smell the moist ground down there below the trampled weeds and baked clay, those eager black glinting minerals waiting, and the pocketed humus. A September morning. A thousand diamond points of dew."

As fitting for a folk tale we have our troll:

"All the women of the village take part in the fall planting, including, of course, scrawny old Sally Bakey. Dirty, wearing a torn pinafore, less than four feet in height, it is Sally who discovered a new preserve of virgin blisterlilies in a meadow on the other side of the shiny westward-lying lake. There, where only mice walk, the flowers still grow in profusion, and the bulbs divide year by year as they once did in these parts. Sally lives alone in a rough cabin on a diet of rolled oats and eggs. Raw eggs, some say. She has a foul smell and shouts obscenely at passersby, especially those who betray by their manner of speech or dress that they are not of the region. But people like her smile. A troll’s smile without teeth. In winter, when the snow reaches a certain height, the men of the village take its measure by saying: The snow’s up to Sally Bakey’s knees. Or over Sally Bakey’s bum. Or clear up to Sally Bakey’s eyebrows. No one knows how old Sally Bakey is, but she’s old enough to remember when churches in the area were left unlocked and when people could go about knocking on any door and ask for a chair to sit down on or for a cup of strong tea."

"Today Is the Day" is a brilliant work.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust has biographical data and accounts of her novels,

"Hazel" - A Short story by Carol Shields- 22 Pages - included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

"Hazel" is the 26th story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted. Hazel is a recently widowed woman in her 50s with two married daughters. She has enough money to live comfortably but she feels bored now that she lives alone. Never having had a job, she applies for work as a kitchen product demonstrator. To her surprise, she gets the position.  

We follow Hazel as she advances in her career.

 My main purpose now in posting on the stories of Carol Shields is to keep a record of my reading.