The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

This is the story of Captain Cook's final voyage, which was mostly a triumph, except that he was killed in action on his way home. He also did not find a way over the top of North America, which he sought, but we know that was an unfulfillable goal. He was more of a cartographer than anything else, someone who those who followed him could emulate (including the young captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy--these talented captains mapped the world and also furthered science). The part that is controversial about these voyages, that they brought native populations disease and eventually war, conquer, and colonialism is, I think, both tragic and inevitable. That people were enslaved and purposely exposed to disease is unforgivable--the part that is inevitable is that they would be discovered. Cook had made two world voyages by the time the book opens. He was a celebrity, having who had risen from virtually nothing. At sea, he’d bucked the Royal Navy’s tradition of violence and cruelty, therefore he kept crew members who both trusted him and wanted to follow him to sea--he brought them fortune and he brought them home alive. He’d figured out how to avoid scurvy and brought home information of incomparable value, had mastered new nautical instruments and served as an expert scientist, anthropologist and navigator. As mentioned above, his mapmaking skills were superlative. He brought a talented artist in order to best capture what they found that could not come home. The story is an excellent one, and the story teller does it justice.

Crouseville Cemetery, Maine

There are 5 cemetaries in Crouseville, which is an unincorporated town within the town of Washburn in Aroostoock County, Maine. The population of all of Washburn in 1,500, so fewer still in Crouseville, and clearly more dead people than alive there as well. In 1800 the future Crouseville, Maine, did not have any particular name. In 1826 it was first surveyed by Joseph Norris and the early settlers living along the Aroostook River could not be certain if they lived in New Brunswick, a North American British Colony, or the United States. In 1839, the United States formed Aroostook County. This was an effort by the United States to lay claim to the area. In 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty firmly established the area as United States territory, yet some townships in Maine were administratively part of Massachusetts, the mother state. My great grandmother was a Crouse, and the cemetery has more than its share of Crouse's buried there, but so too are there Woodman's. It sits atop a hill (there is another cemetery across the street, so this is clearly a better spot, or if not that then at least the better view. When my brother was buried there in 1969 you could see all the way to the river, but the pine trees have grown up and obstructed the view, but it is a beautiful location, none-the-less. It is well-tended and, something that is both important to Crouseville and important to my dad--there is a potato field that borders the cemetery just a stone's throw from our family plot. According to my cousin, it is farmed by a 2nd or 3rd cousin.

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

I very much enjoyed this--which I should qualify by saying this is my first book by this author, and so if you are a fan of her other work, I am not sure how this compares. I also do not read widely in fantasy in general, so I may not be the best judge of this genre--but I thought it was great. The story is set in late-16th-century Spain, and is centered on a young servant named Luzia, who has the power to create milagritos, or small miracles. She may be a kitchen maid, but she is an educated one, but she hides that for her own safety. She also hides that she has the power to heal, rightly guessing that could lead to her enslavement based on that gift alone. When Luzia’s power is discovered by her mistress, influential people want to use her for their own advancement, and soon she’s entangled in political intrigue, which includes the entry of her into a competition with other miracle-workers. Through it all, Luzia must hide the true nature of her power, which comes from reciting refranes, or old sayings, in Ladino — a Sephardic dialect of Spanish mixed with Hebrew and other languages. Nobody can know that Luzia is a conversa, a Jew whose family was forced to convert to Catholicism. There is a strong undercurrent about class, culture, and religion that runs through the story, as well as a romance. It is a very good story that is well told.

Burying My Father

I have been lucky in parental support. My parents always made it known that they supported me, and they did so both financially and emotionally, for a long time. I wasn't an orphan when I signed up for Medicare, but I did lose my father that year. The fact that it was a long time coming didn't help. That surprised me, and I am still struggling a bit with it. So it has come to this--the time to bury him, whether I am ready or not, it is time to make it final. My father was not ready to die. The last conversation I had with him was when he agreed that it was time to enter hospice. Intellectually he agreed that he did not want to go back and forth to the hospital any more, but emotionally he was nowhere ready to die. He was, we all agreed, a terrible patient. He became moribound from his congestive heart failure, get rushed to the hospital to diurese, and then wake up and become ever so grouchy about why he was there. He made me promise that when he died that I would bury him next to my brother in a family plot he had bought when he was in high school in Northern Maine. That turned out to be a bit tricky, because the geography of the gravesite left only one spot next to my brother, and my mother was definitely pulling rank and wanted to be buried next to my father--thankfully, they both are opting for cremation and they can share a spot, allowing both of them to be next to my brother. On the other side my brother, who died as a child, is flanked by my grandmother, who died long before I could ever meet her, but I have her genetic mutation. It killed her, but not me, at least so far, but being in that place, with all of them, me and my mother alive, my brother and father dead, was emotionally complicated for me. I feel grateful to have had them, even for the short time my brother live, grateful to be alive, and grateful my family came with me to say goodbye. My father was disappointed that while his mind was clear, his body failed him--I am happy to say that we did not.

The Road To The County by Chigozie Obioma

I read a review of this book that quoted Viet Thanh Nguyen (who recently had a book named as one of the best books of the 21st century by the New York Times) as saying, “All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” The Biafran conflict ignited in 1967, which was seven years after Nigerian independence from British colonial rule. The country was not built on historic boundaries that existed before the Europeans arrived, and the three largest ethnic groups are the Hausa, who make up 25% of the population; the Yoruba, who make up 21%; and the Igbo, who make up 18%. The war was fought between the Nigerian government and the secessionist state of Biafra, triggered by a declaration of independence by the Igbo-dominated region. Britain supported the government. However, news reports of starvation in Biafra, under blockade by the government, provoked public outrage. The war ended with the defeat of Biafra. By then up to 3 million people, mostly Biafrans, had died from starvation, disease and violence. That is the historical structure upon which this novel is written. It opens with a young student, Kunle, feeling responsible for the accident that crippled his younger brother Tunde, so he buries himself in his studies. On returning home from his studies, he discovers that Tunde has disappeared into the land now known as Biafra, where an armed conflict is going on. Kunle becomes obsessed with finding his estranged brother and bringing him back home. He is not a soldier, nor is he even truly aware of what he is undertaking and he is soon captured by rebel forces. Their commander, on learning that Kunle’s mother is an Igbo, instead of ordering his execution offers him the chance to fight. And fight he does. I am not much for novels that are largely about fighting, but this is a very good story that is well told.

Barton Street, Presque Isle, Maine

When my spouse and I envisioned the trip to bury my dad, we did not have a crowd in mind, but our kids saw it differently. My parents had spent the eight years before he died living nearby and my folks had been a constant in my children's lives--they came annually if not more often, and this was the first death in our family since my FIL died over a decade earlier. So there was quite the crew and instead of staying in one of the hotels in town, I got three Airbnb's and one of them was on the street that my mother grew up on, just down the block from the church she got married in. The house here is the one that I knew, but it turns out that my grandparents built it when my mother was in high school and she only lived there a couple of years. They had the property long before that, but were unable to build during WWII--so what I thought of as the family homestead was not so much that, although my grandparents lived there until the mid-70's. The house she lived in growing up was just down the block, and one of the very fun things about the trip for all of us was my mother reminiscing on each and every drive we made between the three houses and to and from restaurants the whole trip--it is very likely her last trip here, and it was really great to see it once more through her eyes. My kids had the opportunity to fall in love with Maine as adults, and we all had a chance to see it as my parents did.

The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz

I had never heard of Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia at the young age of 36, prior to reading this book. He was born on Martinique in 1925 and while he hated that his island was being governed by white men in Paris, he bought into the French ideology of liberty and equality. Educated and speaking better French than the French themselves, he fought for France against the Nazis and stayed in Paris after the war to make a life, marrying a white French woman. But while studying medicine in Lyon, he grasped that despite France's lip service to colorblind equality, he would inescapably be seen there not as an individual but as a Black man. And he opposed the idea of identifying by race. So he to moved to Algeria to run a clinic in 1953, and found himself joining forces with its National Liberation Front, or FLN, which was fighting to win Algeria's independence from France in a brutal struggle. He wasn't Algerian and couldn't speak Arabic, so he was never a leader or fighter. A brilliant sympathizer, he became a ruthlessly passionate advocate for the cause outside Algeria. This experience would lead Fanon to write his most famous work, "The Wretched Of The Earth," a poetically messianic volume whose publication has been called a historical event. His legacy is remembered to be that of a bloody revolutionary, but he also tried to explain why that is inevitably seen as the only solution to racist oppression. Ever since it first appeared in 1961, Fanon's book has inspired everyone from Latin American guerrillas and African revolutionaries to Palestinian militants and the Black Panthers. It's best known for its opening chapter, which champions the power of violence to liberate the oppressed both politically and psychologically--it is unpalatable, to be sure, but also may be impossible. Cultures do not shift seismically, but his work related to understanding the downtrodden has also been buried with him. I did not realize that the war for independence in Algeria was revving up at the same time that it was in Vietnam, and would love to read something equally cynical to this about the unraveling of colonial France.

Ode to the New England Lobster Roll

Lobster is not quite part of me, but it is certainly in my culture. My parent's come from immigrant stock--we all do, of course, except for the vanishingly few of us who were here to begin with, and even they most likely immigrated themselves, albeit centuries earlier. My kin came with the early settlers to the Massachusetts Colony and were part of the City State of Boston before the Revolutionary War, and moved gradually northward--My mother's family English with a bit of Norman blood, and my father's more what 24 and Me calls "northern Scandanavian" origins--the Scots. They came for reasons of religious independence, but they were certainly living off the land and the lobster was easily caught prey. I learned to both cook and eat a lobster at an early age--as a child my favorite part was the legs--and as I grew older I gained an appreciation for learning to love the crustacean. So on a recent trip to New England, one where we left my dad behind, my mother, my spouse, and I all ate a lot of lobster, mostly as a lobster roll (my favorite, and one of his), and thought about how much he would have enjoyed joining us, and how I will never eat lobster without thinking of him.

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

In this book Tóibín takes us back to his real home town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, Ireland and he also takes us back to Eilis and her life 20 years after 'Brooklyn' ends. Back then, in the 1950s, Enniscorthy has little to offer the novel’s very young, soft-spoken but increasingly confident heroine whose older sister encourages her to go to America, where she meets and falls in love with Tony. Eilis is now in her 40s, the mother of two teenagers. She and Tony live on Long Island, in an enclave of private houses, all built for and inhabited by Tony’s very Italian family. Eilis has a keen emotional intelligence and independence of spirit, along with a deep love for her children. Her relationship with Tony fluctuates over the years, but she considers it solid. All that is disrupted when Tony reveals a secret that throws Eilis off her axis and she returns to Ireland to see her mother. She goes home and while she finds herself pining for the days of her youth, she is also arriving in the midst of her old flame Jim being on the verge of marrying the widow he has been seeing in secret. So much was left unsaid but the passions of youth run deep.

Never Forget

September 11th, 2001 We were like everyone else--maybe more aware because we were not at work--glued to the television, watching planes hit one then the other tower of the WTC in New York City. It was a shocking event and all Americans remember what they were doing that day--the similar day for me was Kennedy's assasination, but I remember it because cartoons were cancelled the day after he was shot and that was what my 4 year old self was struck by. In addition to what everyone was feeling, I was also watching my youngest son get his last dose of chemotherapy. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor 15 months before, and had undergone surgery, radiation, followed by a grueling year of chemotherapy. I was, and remain, grateful for the medical care he received as well as the research that went on before his diagnosis to give him the chance at living beyond 5 years old, but it was the hardest thing that I have ever done. The terrosit attacks on our country cut short any sort of celebration that was planned to mark the momentous day, but in some ways that turned out to be fitting. When treatment ended so too ended the prolonged periods of compromised immunity, bloow transfusions, deadly infections, and prolonged hours in the hospital, but it began what every family who has had a family member survive cancer--the waiting period. The time is fraught with anxiety, and almost nobody gets it. The general public thinks the hard part is over, and it is true that the physically grueling part is (hopefully) behind you--but the emotionally draining part continues. So today we celebrate the 23 year anniversary of a successful end of cancer treatment.