Tag: FICTION

PERSONAL IDENTITY

Susan Faludi concludes one’s personal identity is not fixed but changes based on our parents’ influence and life experience.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

In the Darkroom 

Author: Susan Faludi

Narrated By: Laurel Lefkow

Susan Charlotte Faludi (Author, American feminist, and journalist. Received the Kirkus Prise for “In the Darkroom” in 2016.)

“In the Darkroom” is an interesting exploration of Susan Faludi’s remembrance of her father. Every parent who has a child thinks about what their influence is or will be in their children’s life and memory. Faludi’s memoir shows parents have an immense influence on who our children become.

Steven Faludi, Susan’s father, passed away on May 14th, 2015.

Faludi shows her father as a chameleon who refuses to be identified as one thing or another.

Susan Faludi’s father was Steven Faludi, a Holocaust survivor who made his living as a professional photographer. “In the Darkroom” Susan Faludi explains her father chose to become a woman at the age of 76 by undergoing sex reassignment surgery in Thailand. Her father became Stefánie Faludi living in Hungary. As an author, Susan recalls her childhood and the volatile relationship her father had with her mother. Steven Faludi was a domineering husband and father who is eventually divorced by Susan’s mother. She recalls a violent incident after the divorce where Steven crashes through their front door to stab her mother’s presumed boyfriend. He is arrested but manages to turn the attack into a rescue of his ex-wife from an intruder to avoid criminal charges.

Despite Steven Faludi’s survival from the Holocaust, he aligned himself with right-wing nationalist politics when he returned to Hungary.

Hungary had a reputation for anti-Semitism and anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Surprisingly, he became xenophobic and anti-Semitic despite being Jewish. Faludi suggests her father may have rejected his Jewish identity as a way of distancing himself from what he had been through. Like his decision to become a woman, he recreated himself. His irrational fears may have made him dislike people from other countries, cultures, or ethnicities. Susan Faludi believes it is his way to defend his self-identity from the Holocaust’ trauma, shame, and loss of people he knew, loved, or cared about. It is impossible to comprehend what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust. Anyone who has visited Auschwitz or a concentration camp site understands how unbelievably horrible that experience must have been. On the other hand, Ms. Faludi interviews grade school friends of her father before the war and notes Steven Faludi was a difficult student with which to be friends.

Susan Faludi is considered among the top 20 influential modern feminist theorists.

Not surprisingly, Susan Faludi becomes a feminist with gender identity being an important experience in her family’s life. She uses her journalistic talent to look at her father’s past and her personal experience. Her memoir looks into the nature of personal identity, how our identity is made, and what we do with it. Not surprisingly, much of who we become is from genetic inheritance and interaction with our parents. Faludi is an investigative journalist which drives her to dig into the details of her family’s past to better understand herself. Faludi’s father is shown to be abusive, controlling, and emotionally distant husband and father, a characteristic not uncommon in this patriarchal world.

“In the Darkroom” is an ironic title to Faludi’s book because much of one’s family life takes place in the “…Darkroom” of one’s mind.

Does one’s identity come from what you choose or is it a consequence of your experience as a child born into a family that is either nurturing or neglectful? Her memoir offers no formulaic answer. She suggests close examination of our family childhood reveals we are witnesses to the strengths and weaknesses of our parents. However, as witnesses we live in a “…Darkroom” of the mind that obscures any truth that explains how children are influenced by parental relationship.

We are not puppets of our parents, but neither are we free.

We choose to become ourselves through acceptance or rejection of up and down experience with parents but that is not the only experience that influences our lives. As we grow, we meet others who impact and change our views of life. Faludi explains she initially rejected her father because of his violence, abuse, and distant behavior but as she learned of his gender confusion and transition, she recognized her father’s pain and reassessed her relationship with him. Our parents experience and growth to adulthood have the same ups and downs of life that every human being experiences. They had their influences and choices just as their children will have in their lives.

Unlike the development of an image in a dark room, one’s life is never fixed by the solution in which it is placed.

Susan Faludi concludes one’s personal identity is not fixed but changes based on our parents’ influence and life experience. Of course, this is a subjective process, and “truth” is hard to pin down. Ignorance or the influence of others often distorts “truth”. Faludi suggests life is shaped by memory, trauma, the stories we tell, and the life we live. The story of her father’s life is the example of one who reconstructed his/her life. Change does not erase the past, but her father’s reinvention of his identity changed Faludi’s feelings about him. Faludi’s memoir shows how life is contradictory and complex.

OLD SCHOOL INDIAN

“Old School Indian” is returned without being completed. It would have been interesting to know more about what it is like to be raised in America as a descendant of a Mohawk Indian Tribe but experimenting with gender identity are steps too far for this reader/listener.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Old School Indian (Novel)

Author: Aaron John Curtis

Narrated By:  Jason Grasi

Aaron John Curtis (Author, essayist, member of the Akwesasne Kanienkehaka, a Mohawk tribe.)

Curtis begins a rye, mordant, and witty novel that gives one an idea of how an Indian descendant might view themselves as a part of American society. Curtis’s main character is Abe Jacobs; raised in an Indian family deeply rooted in their Mohawk culture. He grows to attend college at Syracuse University in New York with an ambition to become a writer. He becomes concerned about skin sores that develop on his skin that itch, suppurate, appear, and disappear.

Abe is a handsome young man in Curtis’s story. He is troubled by skin sores and anxious to find out what causes them and how they can be treated and cured. He meets his future wife while going to college. She is a free spirited, attractive woman who is drawn to Abe because of his good looks which become more attractive when she finds he is a descendant of a Mohawk tribe. They become lovers on the day they meet. As their relationship grows, life goes on. They have times when they are apart, living life on their own terms but staying in touch by phone and recurrent rendezvouses.

The seriousness of Abe’s disease is finally diagnosed. The symptoms can cause artery inflammation leading to organ failure and dementia at an early age. This fictional disease (though there is a true similar disease) prepares readers for a story about what it is like to be in the prime of one’s life to face a disease that can disfigure your appearance and shorten your life. Aside from the point of having a potentially deadly disease, a listener/reader wonders what it is like to be a descendent of an Indian tribe in America.

As the book progresses, the story of Abe and his girlfriend are shown to have been raised in families struggling with poverty. Abe and his soon to be wife begin revealing the hardship of their lives. Poverty diminishes life in so many ways that the author’s clever beginning is not enough for this critic to complete his story. His hero tries to commit suicide at 12 years of age. Abe’s poverty is something many generations have experienced but being drawn to suicide and willingness to experiment with gender identity are steps too far for this critic.

“Old School Indian” is returned without being completed. It would have been interesting to know more about what it is like to be raised in America as a descendant of a Mohawk Indian Tribe but experimenting with gender identity are steps too far for this reader/listener.

RIGHT & WRONG

The story of “…Belle Lettres…” inelegantly reminds one of the effects of Trump on America’s reputation.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Belles Lettres Papers (A Novel)

By: Charles Simmons

Narrated By:  Alex Hyde-White

Charles Paul Simmons (1924-2017, Author and former American editor for The New York Times Book Review, graduate of Columbia University in 1948.)

“The Belles Lettres Papers” is a fictional account about the destruction of an American book review company. Written by a person who worked as the editor for the NY Times Book Review gives credibility to its author. One wonders how the nationally famous paper felt about his book. Simmons writes a story of a magazine company that exclusively reviews new books that become literary successes, sometimes bestsellers, or dead or dying dust gatherers.

To this book critic, Simmons certainly seems to know what he is writing about but “The Belles Lettres Papers” falls into a dust gatherer category of books.

Book reading or listening is an educational, sometimes entertaining, experience. There are so many books written that it is impossible to know what to read or listen to without someone’s review of what has been newly or recently published. Of course, there are genres that a reader/listener will choose that influences their book choices. Even when one limits themselves to a genre, there are too many choices that require a way of limiting one’s choice.

Experience reveals “best seller” is not a consistently reliable way of choosing a book, but it is one of the most commonly used methods of selection.

What “…Belles Lettres…” reveals is the potential corruption that can inflate a books placement on a best seller list. Book review publications, like all business enterprises, have owners and employees that have various levels of honesty, capability, and ethical standards. What Simmons shows is how every business owner and employee is subject to the influence of money and power.

The potential weaknesses of humanity play out in every organization that provides service or material to the public.

Simmons shows how a fictional book review company has employees who are corrupted by the power of their positions and the money they make. The fictional company has a male business manager who thinks his female secretary wishes to have sex with him because of natural attraction. Ethically, no employee reporting to a manager they work for should have sexual relations with a direct report. This is particularly egregious in Simmon’s story because of sexual inequality that permeates society. As Lord Acton’s observation about power (power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely), a person who has power over another is always at risk of self-delusion.

Simmons goes on to explain how undercompensating employees can corrupt an organization by incentivizing theft and other ways of undermining a company’s integrity.

Simmons addresses the incentive of owners or those in power of an organization to cut personnel employment to save money at the cost of product quality or service. America is experiencing that today with the actions of the Trump Administration in arbitrarily firing federal employees, regardless of what they do for American citizens.

In a last chapter, Simmons addresses the revisions that can occur in a company that decides on a wholesale turnover in employees.

The integrity of a company’s mission can be sorely challenged. In the case of “…Belle Lettres…” a decision for publication of salacious books replaces the company’s former studied reviews of good writers. The organization loses its reputation as a reviewer of high-quality publications.

Trump’s assessment of immigration.

The story of “…Belle Lettres…” inelegantly reminds one of the effects of Trump on America’s reputation as a supporter of western society by reducing foreign aid, undermining university independence, denying global warming, arbitrarily firing government employees, and expelling American immigrants.

SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

The author makes a point in “The Dream Hotel”, but her book is a tedious repetition of the risk of human digitization that is a growing concern in this 21st century world.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Dream Hotel (A Novel)

By: Laila Lalami

Narrated By:  Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan

Laila Lalami (Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor, earned a PhD in linguistics, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for “The Moor’s Account”.)

Laila Lalami imagines a “Brave New World” in which algorithms predict probabilities of lethal criminal behavior. She creates a nation-state with a human behavior monitoring and detention system for every human that might commit a lethal crime. The growing collection of data about human thought and action suggests a level of truth and possibility.

Lalami creates a state that monitors, collates, and creates probability algorithms for human behavior.

To a degree, that state already exists. The difference is that the algorithms are to get people to buy things in capitalist countries and jail or murder people in authoritarian countries. One might argue America and most western countries are in the first category while Russia, and North Korea are in the second.

Lalami’s description of the detention system, like many bureaucratic organizations, is inefficient and bound by rules that defeat their ideal purpose.

A young mother named Hussein is coming back from a business trip. She is detained because of data collected on her about where she has been, what she did on her business trip, her foreign sounding name, and the kind of relationship she has with her husband and twin children. An algorithm has been created based on a profile of her life. It flags the young woman so that she has a number slightly over a probability threshold of someone who might kill their husband. Of course, this is ridiculous on its face. Whether she murders her husband or not is based on innate errors of behavioral prediction and bureaucratic confusion.

Every organization or bureaucracy staffed by human beings has a level of confusion and inefficiency that is compounded by information inaccuracy.

That does not make the organization bad or good, but it does mean, like today’s American government’s bad decisions on foreign aid or FDA bureaucracy throws the baby out with the bath water. Lalami’s point is that detention because of one’s name, family relationship, and presumed prediction for murder, based on a digitized life, is absurd. Algorithms cannot predict or explain human behavior. At best, an algorithm has a level of predictability, but life is too complex to be measured by a fictive number created by an algorithm.

The author makes a point in “The Dream Hotel”, but her book is a tedious repetition of the risk of human digitization that is a growing concern in this 21st century world.

PSYCHOSIS

The imagination of Han Kang gives reader/listener’s an explanation of how a human being can become psychotic. Kang’s characters show how psychosis comes from many sources, a major one of which is family relationship.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Vegetarian 

By: Han Kang

Narrated by: Deborah Smith, Janet Song, Stephen Park

Han Kang (Author, South Korean writer, awarded the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.)

A listener/reader may be tempted to put this book aside with the thought that it is a titillating pornographic tale that is not worthy of one’s time. However, after an hour or two, one realizes this is a journey for something difficult to describe.

In Kang’s fictional story, two sisters are raised by the same parents. One is the older of the two and becomes a successful small business owner with a video artist husband; the other is a housewife who lives with a husband that seems to neither love nor respect her. Both marriages fail but for different but interlocking reasons.

The younger sister becomes a vegetarian later in her married life. She explains her vegetarianism is based on a dream she has about something that is not clearly defined. One gathers the dream has something to do with the source of meat that involves the killing of animals while vegetarian food comes from nature’s abundance. The husband reluctantly goes along with the change but becomes more and more unhappy in his life with the younger sister. The unhappiness grows to something greater when his wife begins to complain about how her meat-eating husband’ smells. The breaking point comes when the husband asks his wife’s mother, father, and sister-in-law to convince his wife to abandon vegetarianism and begin adding meat to her diet. At dinner in their house, the father forcefully demands his daughter to eat meat. She refuses and the conflict becomes violent. Her father pries her mouth open and shoves meat into her mouth. The daughter rebels and cuts her wrist with a knife in an act of defiance. Her brother-in-law grasps the younger daughter who is profusely bleeding and rushes her to the hospital.

The brother-in-law that rushed to save the vegetarian is a video artist.

The main characters of the story and the substance of their conflict is now made clear to the listener/reader. The next portentous development is the older sister’s husband (a video artist) begins to fantasize about the younger sister whom he had rushed to the hospital. His fantasy grows to the point of asking the younger daughter to pose nude for an art video he wishes to create. She agrees. A listener/reader begins to understand the younger sister is slipping into a psychosis. Her brother-in-law paints her nude body with flowers that make her feel that she is becoming part of nature, i.e., something growing like the vegetarian diet upon which she relies. The brother-in-law’s sexual desire becomes more aroused by the video and his relationship with the younger sister.

The deepening psychosis of the younger daughter grows when the brother-in-law hires a nude male model to be a part of a new video.

The male model resists but agrees to pose with her but refuses to go beyond allowing flowers being painted on his nude body and a video of the two without clothes but with painted bodies. The brother-in-law’s sexual fantasy grows from this experience but is disappointed in the male actor who refuses to have sex with the sister-in-law while the video is being filmed. The male actor did not want to be viewed as a porn star.

The brother-in-law’s fantasy leads to the sister-in-law’s agreement to have sex with him on film as long as he allows her to paint flowers on his body that are similar to what he had painted on her body. They become sexually entwined at the sister-in-law’s house. The older sister discovers them in their sexual rendezvous where the video is being produced.

The younger sister has crossed a barrier between sanity and insanity. It is not a matter of remorse for the sexual relationship but from a reinforcement of her obsessive need for being a vegetarian as an integral part of nature. She refuses her humanity. She has crossed the Rubicon between sanity and insanity. She refuses to eat anything and only wishes to drink water to feed her growth as a plant. Both her husband and the husband of the older sister-in-law essentially drop out of Kang’s story. The older sister’s husband does not forgive her husband for his sexual transgression and the younger sister’s husband never loved the vegetarian in the first place.

This amazing book, “The Vegetarian”, offers a vivid portrayal of a human beings’ descent into psychosis.

The imagination of Han Kang gives reader/listener’s an explanation of how a human being can become psychotic. Kang’s characters show how psychosis comes from many sources, a major one of which is family relationship.

LIFE’S LOTTERY

The randomness of life and what we make of it is the most important theme of Weston’s insightful memoir about being “Alive”.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Alive (The Richness and Brevity of Existence)

By: Gabriel Weston

Narrated By: Gabriel Weston

Gabriel Weston (Author, English surgeon, television presenter.)

Gabriel Weston’s “Alive” is an intimate, blunt, and enlightening explanation of her experience as a woman, surgeon, mother, and member of the human race. For some, Weston’s story contains more information than one is prepared to take.

It begins with a self-effacing assessment of her early education in liberal arts where she achieved an MA in English. However, she decides to go to medical school in London where she qualifies as a physician in 2000. Her very personal memoir explains a great deal about being educated as a physician but more about being a woman.

Some reader/listeners will be put off by Weston’s blunt explanation of the human body. However, some will find much of what she writes as revelatory.

Weston explains what it means to be human and a woman who becomes a mother of twins at the age of forty, with two younger children.

It is hard to imagine a younger person who is uninterested in science, technology, engineering, or math, who receives an MA in English, would be interested in becoming a surgeon.

However, Weston chooses to become a doctor and graduates from a London medical school in 2000. She briefly explains her journey in “Alive” by reflecting on her classes in body dissection to explain the details of the human body and differences in sexual anatomy. Some will choose to leave her story, but others (if they stick with it) will be enlightened and surprised by her observations and opinions.

Weston notes the equivalent of the male penis is a woman’s clitoris. This is an interesting observation that most would be unlikely to publicly discuss or write about.

Presumably, Weston is making this point to show there is a great deal of similarity between men and women. However, she notes a significant difference. Menstruation is a sluffing process where the uterus sheds a layer of bedding material that exits the body through the vagina, i.e., something unique to women. The purpose of menstruation is to prepare the body for possible pregnancy by providing a thickening to the uterus that supports fertilization. That thickening is removed (sluffed off) approximately once per month. As is often noted, only women give birth, a singular difference between the sexes.

Weston goes on to explain her experience of birthing twins.

The two girls come late in her adult life. They are delivered in a caesarian operation. Children are born in amniotic sacs. This is likely a surprise to most men because birth of a baby is thought of as a delivery with a squirming body through the birth canal rather than a body within an amniotic sac. However, Weston notes the second twin is delivered within its amniotic sac which suggests she is a fraternal, rather than identical twin.

Syria’s use of nerve gas to murder their own citizens.

Weston’s story moderates in future chapters with notes about nerve gases used by governments to suffocate their own people as well as perceived foreign enemies. The point she makes is that oxygen deprivation in the 21st century and beyond is increasing with rising pollution on earth. She notes oxygen deprivation is the same suffocation caused when governments used lethal gases to kill their own citizens as perceived enemies. The obvious inference is today’s denial of earth’s environmental degradation risks the lives of all oxygen dependent lives.

Weston is an example of a working mother who succeeds in England despite the world’s history of misogyny.

Some women become a success despite the many obstacles they face. Weston symbolizes human grit and determination in the face of sexual inequality of opportunity but, as a human being, she is subject to the physical limitations of every life. She mentions during the course of her story a heart murmur that is caused by a defective heart valve. The last chapters of her book explain Weston is on a transplant list.

The randomness of life and what we make of it is the most important theme of Weston’s insightful memoir about being “Alive”.

BLACK & WHITE

One wonders if Abdulrazak Gurnah is proffering an opinion about race relations in the world or just leaving a lifeline for those disappointed by relationship failures.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Admiring Silence 

By: Abdulerazak Gurnah

Narrated By: Unnamed person from Zanzibar

Abdulerazak Gurnah (Author, Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic, moved to the UK in 1960.)

A little context for “Admiring Silence” will help understand Abdulerazak Gurnah’s interesting and troubling story. Gurnah received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. “Admiring Silence” is the latest book published by Gurnah in 2020. He had written four earlier books: Memory of Departure (1987), Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005).

“Admiring Silence” is not a biography but an interesting story about a long-term relationship of a Black emigrant and a white woman who meet in Zanzibar (an island archipelago off the coast of Tanzania) and move to London. The two had met in a Zanzibar’ restaurant where they both worked. The Black emigrant leaves his native country with his restaurant mate.

Gurnah describes the two as lovers who are struggling restaurant workers who wish to improve their lives through higher education. An opportunity to attend a university leads the two to decide to emigrate to London because of their similar academic ambition. The two are enrolled at a university and both become teachers in England. Gurnah sets a table for understanding what life is like for an unwed mixed-race couple in mid-twentieth century England.

Their life together is complicated by the birth of a daughter and the father’s decision to visit his homeland when he is in his forties.

No one in Zanzibar knows he has a teenage daughter with an unmarried white woman he lives with in England. His mother wishes to fix him up with a future Black Muslim wife. The interest one has grows with the circumstances of Gurnah’s imaginative story.

  • What is it like to be in a racially mixed marriage in 1960s England?
  • How does a mixed-race child feel about her life in a predominantly white country?
  • What does a Black family think about their son having a mixed-race family?
  • Having lived together for 20 years and had a child, why haven’t they married?
  • How does the relationship between different races affect the feelings of a couple that chooses not to marry but have a child born to them?
  • Is Gurnah’s story representative enough to give one the answers?

The first question is largely unanswered. The last question is impossible to answer but the other four imply Gurnah’s opinion. Marriage is always a work in progress whether it is of a mixed-race couple or not. However, there is a distinction based on race when it comes to a man’s and woman’s personal relationship because of the dimension of racism. Every couple chooses to work through differences and become more or less committed to staying together but two people of different races face discrimination associated with racism, unequal treatment, and economic inequality existing in a country’s dominant racial profile.

Gurnah does not address how a mixed-race child deals with life in a predominantly white country, but one can imagine it depends in part on how distinctive a difference is in the color of their skin in relation to the dominate racial profile.

In terms of the daughter’s relationship with her parents, one presumes it is likely the same parent/child conflicts of all families. Some fathers are more distant than others just as some mothers range from helicopter to equally distant parents.

That these two lovers who have been together for so long without getting married, after their daughter is born, seems like a flashing yellow light, a cautionary notice of something is about to change.

When the father’s mother writes from Zanzibar to have him visit after being away for so long, flashes a yellow light that eventually turns red. He returns for a visit to Zanzibar at the encouragement of his partner. The partner’s encouragement seems disingenuous, i.e. more like a desire for a relationship break than a supportive gesture. The last chapters confirm that suspicion. A break-up occurs soon after the father returns. There is a brief father/daughter reconciliation, but the daughter also decides to separate from her father.

An interesting point is made by Gurnah about a Muslim Black person leaving a poverty-stricken country of his birth to a country of wealth and a different culture.

It is the wish of his Zanzibar’ family for the father to return to help with the disarray and economic disparity of his home country; as well as marry a local Black Muslim girl who wishes to become a doctor. The presumption is that if one leaves their poor country to become prosperous in a wealthy country, they have some magical power to help their poverty-stricken home-countries. It is of little concern to the family about his committed relationship to another but more about what his life is like in his newly adopted country and what he can offer to his homeland from what he has learned. The Muslim girl the mother wishes him to marry is twenty years old. Her son is in his 40s. Tt appears the primary reason for such a marriage is to help the young woman become a doctor. In the end, the son recognizes this is not practical but clearly understandable considering the poverty in Zanzibar.

Gurnah cleverly injects a conversation with a Nigerian Muslim woman on his plane ride back to London before his white lover’s rejection of their relationship.

The Nigerian woman has been divorced from her English husband for several years. It was an emotionally difficult divorce for her. A mix-up on a missing passport allows the father to find contact information for the divorcee. One wonders if Gurnah is proffering an opinion about race relations in the world or just leaving a lifeline for those disappointed by relationship failures.

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PARENTING

Tara Westover’s trials are distressing for a listener/reader of her memoir, but all children are born into a struggle to find their own identity. “Educated” is evidence of Tara’s escape from prejudice and ignorance. It is an encouraging story of recovery with an education she acquires from a lived life.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Educated (A Memoir)

By: Tara Westover

Narrated By: Julia Whelan

Tara Westover (Author, memoirist, essayist and historian.)

“Educated” is a memoir of Tara Westover’s childhood in America. Her story is personal but universal. Some children are born in caring and nurturing families, all are subject to parents’ strengths and weaknesses. Tara reflects on the life of her family with a father, mother, and siblings raised in a family with a survivalist father who has strong religious beliefs and antigovernment views of life. He raises his sons and a daughter with a wife who conforms to his wishes and a mother-in-law who believes he is wrong about public education and the value of extreme beliefs in independence.

Tara Westover reminds listener/readers that every culture in the world is blessed and cursed by diversity.

Westover’s father would be called an American “antigovernment extremist” and “survivalist”. He does not believe in institutions of government or public services and argues all forms of regulation outside the family distort the natural state of society. He believes it is necessary to hoard food, fuel, and human necessities to assure self-sufficiency in the event of natural disasters or government-imposed laws.

The Weaver Family Tragedy in August 1992 is an important symbol to Tara’s father.

Randy Weaver held antigovernment and white separatist views. His wife and son were killed by FBI agents on Ruby Ridge. A settlement of $3.1 million for wrongful deaths is awarded Weaver on August 15, 1995.

The Westover father grooms his children to support the family in a scrap metal business that evolves into a contracting company. As the children of the family mature, some leave while the father expands the family business with employment of outsiders. As Tara matures, she reluctantly becomes a worker in the family business to earn enough money to go to college. As Westover writes her story one wonders if her father will be the cause of the next Weaver Family Tragedy.

Westover shows how work and American life is not a fairy tale but for most a struggle for survival just as it is in every culture.

Desire has no limits. Freedom allows one to cope with life and, in some cases, exceed its limitations. Some cultures offer more freedom than others. Whether raised in America or somewhere else, one’s education comes from the culture in which they live. The circumstances of family are a part of a child’s education, but formal education varies within and between nations. Most nations have some form of public education, but education occurs whether publicly or privately pursued. The Westover family, in their children’s grade school and high school years rely on their mother’s home schooling.

The Westover’ family is neither a “Leave it to Beaver”, “My Three Sons”, or TV produced fantasy.

It is a reflection of a family dealing with the hardship of life in America that is sustained by a culture of independence and self-determination. Every child is impacted by the family in which they are raised. Whether government supported education or not, every child becomes an educated adult in different ways. Some like Tara Westover grow to adulthood with an education that comes from self-determination and grit despite her father’s influence and her sibling’s erratic behavior toward her.

Children do not choose their parents. Every child grows to adulthood in their own way.

There is always some level of care and nurturing in every family. The level of care they receive varies but ultimately it is how they deal with the circumstances in which they live that determines who they become. Two nearly fatal car accidents for Tara’s family and her near ejection from her family at age 16 seem to make her stronger. Her ability to write this memoir is a tribute to her determination to live a fulfilling life. The genetics of life have magnified and fortified the Westover children’s successes and failures in life.

Breaking free of prejudice and ignorance, whether one is formally educated or un-schooled, is difficult.

Prejudice is difficult because it is founded on emotional blindness shared by fellow travelers. Ignorance is founded on refusal of facts and knowledge of history. Two of the Westover sons and Tara seem to break the cycle. The first boy to leave the nest is on his way to Purdue after graduating from BYU. The second boy is believed by his father to be a genius and given license by his father to apply to BYU. One wonders whether the second boy will escape the curse of prejudice and ignorance of his remarkable family. Tara Westover’s trials are distressing for a listener/reader of her memoir, but all children are born into a struggle to find their own identity. “Educated” is evidence of Tara’s escape from prejudice and ignorance. It is an encouraging story of recovery with an education she acquires from a lived life.

CULTURE

Paulette Giles offers a story of America’s unique racial, ethnic, religious and experiential culture.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

News of the World (A Novel)

By: Paulette Jiles

Narrated By: Grover Gardner

Paulette Jiles (Author, poet, finalist for the National Book Award for “News of the World”)

“News of the World” is a story of a young German American girl abducted by Indians in the 1860s, near San Antonio, Texas. She is recovered by a 71-year-old veteran of the Civil War. The author’s contextual research is impressive. Having personally lived in Texas for several years and knowing there is a small Texas town north of San Antonio with a large German ancestral population,”News of the World” becomes immediately credible.

Jiles fictional story is about a young white girl who is 10 years old when she is recovered from an Indian tribe by a Civil War veteran.

The young girl was abducted when she was six. Her four years of captivity were in the formative years of life. She successfully adapts to her tribal environment but does not completely lose knowledge of her younger past. Jiles hero is a Texas oldster who travels the country making a living as a reader of newspapers to citizens interested in news of the world. Many American citizens did not have the money, or the education, to read news of the world. To have that news read to them became an entertainment for many willing to pay a penny, a dime, or as much as a quarter. The former veteran, as an officer in the Rebel army during the war is well educated with experience of combat during the Civil War. That combat experience becomes important in the return of the captive to her German immigrant family.

A bounty of $50 is offered for return of the abducted girl.

The veteran takes the job. Jiles writing is excellent, but the narration of Grover Gardner gives the story an extra level of interest. Experience of life is a trial by fire for most human beings. Imagine being abducted from your family at the age of six by a culture different than your own and how traumatic it would be but how life expanding it could become. This six-year-old represents the melting pot of America. Jiles creates a fictional representative of three cultures, i.e. German, Indian, and pioneer that influences the melding of American culture.

Though Giles may not have meant to illustrate the melding of cultures by her entertaining story, much of what American culture represents is an amalgam of older cultures.

America’s Civil War, the Indian wars, and living life makes American culture unique. Every nation is made up of different races, ethnicities, religions, and experiences that make them unique. Paulette Giles offers a story of America’s unique racial, ethnic, religious and experiential culture.

LIFE

The eradication of inequality is in the eyes of beholders. We are mere humans struggling to be better than we are.

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Female Persuasion (A Novel)

By: Meg Wolitzer

Narrated By: Rebecca Lowman

Meg Wolitzer (Author)

Many “sexual awakening” books of the past are about men and boys. Nabokov’s Lolita, Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Baldwins “Giovanni’s Room” to name three. “The Female Persuasion” gives listener/readers a glimpse of what “sexual awakening” is for girls. That is not to say “The Female Persuasion” is only about sexual awakening. Wolitzer’s story illustrates there is little difference between young men’s and women’s interest in sex and their ambition for success in an adult world.

“The Female Persuasion” gives voice to the equality of women despite historical misogyny.

Two women roommates at a fictional college talk about their lives and explain their frustration with unequal treatment in society. One has sexual relations with women, the other with men but each feel their opportunities in life are limited by being women in a Mans’ world. Greer Kadetsky complains to the University about a male student who sexually assaults her and is ignored by the administration. She is characterized as an intelligent woman who is eligible for admission to Yale but is rejected because of her parents’ mistakes on a financial disclosure form about scholarship assistance. Her unhappiness about not getting into Yale is compounded by the student assault she reports that is essentially ignored by the local college she attends.

Men and women are equal and should be afforded all the rights and opportunities available to men.

The heroine of the story has a boyfriend, Cory Pinto, whom she met in high school. They became lovers at some point in their relationship. She notes in a college dorm where her boyfriend undresses her and expresses admiration of her body. She appreciates her lover’s comment. The author’s perception of beauty reinforces the similarity between men and women and their sexuality. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whether male or female, but every person appreciates positive comment about their appearance.

Another element of interest in “The Female Persuasion” is a reinforcement of the saying “Birds of a feather flock together”. Cory and Greer come from lower middleclass families while showing higher than average intelligence in high school that leads them to a college education. After graduation, Cory and Greer move-in together with Cory finding a job while Greer volunteers at a non-profit while pursuing a writing career. Is it a surprise that a person with a college degree has a hard time finding a job after graduating? No, but it seems men are luckier, or one might conclude men are beneficiaries of a built-in gender bias.

Not to read too much into Wolitzer’s story, it seems most job opportunities are better for men than women.

Greer has a chance meeting with a feminist who speaks at the university she attends. In that serendipitous contact, Greer makes a positive impression on the speaker. After graduation, Greer is contacted by the famous feminist with a possible job interview. However, the potential employer dies, and the interview never happens. Meanwhile, Cory has found a job and is pursuing his career. Greer is living at home with her parents to cut down on expenses.

Greer is contacted by a New York feminist organization and is offered an interview that results in a job in New York.

Cory is working outside the country for his company, but the couple continues a long-range relationship. Greer is gaining some success and experience in her job. An interesting incident is noted that gives listener/readers insight to women’s competitiveness when Greer exhibits reluctance to show a letter to her employer for her former gay friend looking for a job. Greer chooses not to proffer the letter to her employer and lies to her friend about having given it. This seems a petty incident, but it is present in all human beings, i.e., the feeling that a person who has found their step on the ladder of success should care about others when they might be competing with them if they go to work for the same company. This seems a matter of personal ambition, not a gender or sexual orientation issue.

The end of the book offers an unsatisfying “bow tie”. The ending has a fairy tale quality that will appeal to some, but the real world is different. Life happens, jobs change, people’s relationships fall apart; some mend, others do not. The eradication of inequality is in the eyes of beholders. We are mere humans struggling to be better than we are.