Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin

I have been reading first hand accounts of life in Cuba, and this is the one I enjoyed the most. The author is an American who lived in Cuba for four years--with her husband who had business there, but also with her children. That is important, I think, because she does not come across as all that much of an adventurer here, but in fact, it takes a lot of guts to move your kid to a country where people are rumored not to get enough to eat. She included in this memoir lists of what she brings with her--which made it very clear to me that if I definitely want toilet paper on every leg of the journey, I should probably devote a little suitcase space to paper products that could double as toilet paper as need be. This was emphasized by her repeated descriptions of how much diarrhea was involved over the time they were there. Better safe than sorry.
The relationships that the family forged there, and the nature of their friendships was very interesting, as were the tales of trips to various towns were great, and made me eager to get there. The food seemed good, and their persistently seeking out paladares, the family-run restaurants, tipped me towards packing the guidebook with the most recommendations of those establishments. She does not delve into the dancing, the bars, or the drinks, but highly recommended, none-the-less.

¿Por Que Cuba?

Cuba: Jewel of the Caribbean. The island is well known for being a hub of creativity with its rich cultural roots, music, aromatic cigars, sugar, Cuban rum, beautiful beaches and hospitable people. Is that why I want to go, now, while Cuba still lives in the shadow cast by Castro?
No. Maybe. Partly. But the reasons are much more complicated. Cuba is unlike any other place on earth. What draws people to this fascinating Caribbean island is much more than beaches, sun, and cheap drinks, though there are plenty of all three for those who want them. Cuba is a land steeped in tradition, along with stunning natural beauty and unique architecture.
Its rich culture, unique political history, and continued economic hardship make it one of the most potentially eye-opening countries. Seeing the best of Cuba means grooving along to its intoxicating music, marveling at how Cubans improvise on a daily basis to make ends meet, and visiting a land in which the past 50 years seem to have crept by.
Cuba is the largest of the Caribbean islands and is inhabited by people with a mixed race of Caribbean, African and Spanish heritage. It has a contrasting landscape ranging from beautiful and mesmerizing beaches to sprawling and craggy mountain ranges. Limestone Mountains loom over the fields of tobacco, utilized for their famed cigars, providing a stunning scenic view. The natural beauty of Cuba and its history has shaped the country to what it is today. This is one Caribbean island that has been left unspoiled by technology and modern day living.
Then there is Cuban Art. Cuba's rich cultural and artistic heritage is a legacy of a turbulent history that has turned Cuba into the cultural melting pot that it is. Cuba was the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere and remains one of the last standing bastions of Communism. Fidel Castro Ruz introduced Communism to Cuba in 1959 and remained the Head of Cuba until stepping down due to ill health in 2008.
The government places huge emphasis and value on the arts, so a large amount of funding is devoted to the development of arts programs. Through all this additional funding of the Arts, Cuba has produced major international figures in fine arts, music, theatre, dance and literature.
Cuban dance rhythms were originally transported from Africa with slaves and melded with Spanish and indigenous elements to create the unique sound of Cuba. This comprises of an array of integrating elements and shapes ranging from African, Hispanic and Haitian traditions to the most popular national music and dance of son, danzon, bolero, rumba (guaguanco, yambu and columbia) and the more commercialized salsa made popular for the tourists.
These are but a few of the things that make Cuba so alluring. I am so looking forward to experiencing what is available there!

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

'Wolf Hall' is so magnificent it is hard to know where to start. The contrast with other period pieces, both recent and past, is not even close--this book so outshines the competition. Mantel chooses to focus on Thomas Cromwell, pictured here in the most famous of renditions of his earthly being, rather than on other characters in the fame and folly that surrounded King Henry VIII and his break from the Catholic church and other shinanigans. this is not necessarily the key to the glorious production, but it does allow her to unravel all of the ambitions and hopes of the major plaers--the king, the church, the Boleyns, and all the rest.
Cromwell is familiar as a secondary figure to his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII”; a villainous antagonist to the noble Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”; and the powerful fixer who enabled his king to repudiate the Roman Catholic Church in order to marry Anne Boleyn. But he has usually been overshadowed, perhaps for a lack of noble qualities and perhaps because much about his early life is unknown.

The Cromwell in 'Wolf Hall' is appreciated for his toughness, his keen political instincts, his financial acumen and his intimate knowledge of the workings of power. Almost unimaginable, in the midst of Henry’s impetuousness, Anne’s ambition and More’s self-righteous condescension, Cromwell emerges as the most sympathetic member of the wolf pack that prowls through the story.
This witty, densely populated book, while dealing with historical events of monumental importance, presents them in the form of conspiratorial small talk rather than action. A fall from grace may be represented by the uprooting of a household or the repainting of a coat of arms. None of these stylistic affectations is accidental. To deliberate effect, Ms. Mantel means to suggest that history itself is ever mutable and difficult to grasp. But her book’s main characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

This book has been short listed for the Man Booker prize, which is an excellent indication of quality, and it is a beautifully told story. For me, it suffered in comparison to Isabel Allende's book, set in Haiti (whereas this book is set in Jamaica), and if you haven't read either of them, I would try reading this one first and hers second to see if that helps.
Ms. Levy is born of Jamaican immigrant parents and has written of the island and it's complicated relationship with Britain before. In “The Long Song,” she, like Allende, focuses on what the final days of slavery in ­early-19th-century Jamaica brings to the people brought to farm the land. Packaged with a preface and an afterword purporting to have been written by Mr. Thomas Kinsman, a well-to-do black printer living in Jamaica in 1898, and occasionally punctuated by editorial suggestions from that long-suffering man, the novel is presented as the memoirs of his octogenarian mother, Miss July, who was born into slavery on a sugar plantation known as Amity.
Miss July’s narrative switches between a third-person past and her first-person present, adroitly contrasting the earthy Jamaican patois spoken by a high-spirited, ambitious young slave with the deadpan Victorian intricacies and more sophisticated historical perspective of her later self. The gift for dialogue is the best part of the writer's story.
She was conceived, Miss July informs us with withering relish, when Amity’s boorish Scottish overseer thrust himself unwanted upon a field slave — a “rude act” that, according to the New World’s perverse color code, gave her higher status than the children of long-established unions between slaves.
“Me be a mulatto, not a negro,” is the proud young woman’s persistent claim, whether she’s fighting for admission to a Friday night assembly in which only “colored” partners are allowed to dance the quadrille or trying to seduce Robert Goodwin, the naïve new overseer of Amity.
After the uprising known as the Baptist War erupts in 1831, leading to the emancipation of Jamaica’s slaves, Miss July becomes the intermediary between Goodwin, now the plantation’s owner, and a freed work force newly empowered to demand wages and days off in which to tend their own crops, bring their cattle to market and look after their own children. “We no longer slaves,” Goodwin is told, “and we work what suits.”
Of course, this agrarian utopia is not to be. His liberal principles quite forgotten, Goodwin hires white thugs to drive the sugar cane workers from their homes, trample their vegetable gardens and massacre their livestock. Her new role does not save her, which is no surprise to the reader.
Although “The Long Song” is packed with historical drama, Levy’s closer concern is with life as it’s actually experienced. Ms. Levy writes with an ironic voice and a sardonic eye about the island's troubling past. Well done.

Dear John

It needs to be said right up front that this is just an average movie--the actors are above average, but the script and story line are below average, and so it just evens out to 'watch this if you want something romantic and not at all challenging" rather than what I usually write about, which are things that I have read or seen that I would recommend. There are two things that stop me from totally dismissing this, however. THe first is that in this story of Savannah and John, there is a harsh element of truth about today's soldier. John is a Special Forces soldier, and he has a fierce loyalty to his fellow soldiers that does not allow him to rationally make career choices related to his young love and his life goals. That would not be enough to carry the moive, however, because the issue is not articulately teased out.

What is remarkable is the portrayal by Richard Jenkins of a man with Aspberger's syndrome. His son does not even realize that his father is anything more than odd and quiet, quirky and set in his ways. Savannah recognizes his pathology for what it is, and she finds ways to forge a friendship with him--she takes what is a liability and makes it the basis for thier interactions. She has him teach her everything he knows about his coin collection. He makes meatloaf on Saturday and she comes to dinner expecting to eat meatloaf. It is a template for how to work with the pathology. Jenkins is emerging as a nuanced and gifted actor who has much to teach us, and while this film has fatal flaws, it also has some saving graces.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

THis author is truly phenomenal--and not only is every book great, every book is wildly different from the other. He is gifted and magnificent--the fact that I did not love Starting with "Ghostwritten" and "Number9Dream," Mitchell fused coincidence and fate, reality and fantasy in nested, refracted stories that could drive M.C. Escher mad. In 2004, his American publisher timidly brought out "Cloud Atlas" only in paperback, but readers in this country were just as enthusiastic as his British fans, and that mind-bending masterpiece was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Then in 2006, as his reputation was starting to coalesce as a writer of super-sophisticated speculative fiction, he repressed his trademark trickery and released "Black Swan Green," a perfectly charming autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old boy.
And now he startles us again with a rich historical romance set in feudal Japan, an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won't rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out. Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses.
"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" draws us into the redolent atmosphere of those grand 19th-century epics by Melville, Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. Japan remains a favorite subject for this peripatetic author, who began writing fiction in his 20s while teaching English in Hiroshima. But this time Mitchell sits still in Japan, abandoning his time-traveling, world-spanning, intertextual sorcery for the satisfaction of a single (and singular) time and place.
It's 1799, and the Dutch East Indies Company maintains the West's only trading post in Nagasaki. Or rather, near Nagasaki. Employees of this potentially lucrative monopoly don't live on the mainland or even visit it except on special occasions. Instead, they work and sleep on Dejima, a fan-shaped, man-made island, surrounded by a high wall and connected to Nagasaki by a heavily guarded bridge. This gracious prison is a striking manifestation of Japan's determination to avoid exposure or contamination, a policy set down almost 200 years earlier by the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu. Jacob is an engaging focus for a story about a place and a time, a world view of both a culture and a place--it is wonderful.

Sangria

1 (750-ml) bottle red wine
1/4 cup brandy
1/4 c. vodka
1/4 cup Triple Sec
1/4 cup grape juice
1/4 c. orange juice
1/2 orange, thinly sliced
1/2 lemon, thinly sliced
1 (750-ml) bottle sparkling water, chilled
Mix it all about--do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about and that is what it is all about. We have had both a red wine and a white wine version of this wonderful cocktail at each of our annual fall barn parties and it is a festive drink that is both refreshing and delicious. Not to mention a wonderful way to use up all the wine that people have brought to your house in the past year that was less than perfect to drink straight from the bottle.

Barn of My Dreams

The Third Annual Barn Party was a thing of beauty. The Secrest Barn, built in 1883, is an architectural marvel in and of itself. It is massive, with plenty of indoor space, which was an excellent asset for this year's party, as it was raining the entire party and not terribly warm either. Not to worry, all our guests fit easily inside, and we were able to keep the barn warm enough to be comfortable for the span of the party. So we were largely able to ignore the inauspicious weather and enjoy ourselves.

There are four key elements of this party that I love, beyond the space itself (which is the whole reason for doing it--to enjoy what such a wonderful place can allow you to put together). The first is the music--the acoustics of the barn are very warm and charming, and Jim put together exceptionally stellar talent to entertain us all. The second is the guests--between the nine hosts, we were able to have representatives from every quadrant of Iowa City and I always meet someone I never knew and am so thankful one of my friends invited and brought me together with. The third and fourth are food and drink, which is a community effort, and always delicious. The whole package is greater than the sum of it's parts, and every year I am sorry that the party has passed and that it will be a whole year before we have another one.

Princess Ka'iulani

There are real issues related to Hawai'i and this film is set in the time that all that happened, but it does not scratch the surface of the real history.
This is a kind of Disney approach to history--ie. do not confuse me with the facts. The person depicted here is a real person, who dies at a tragically young age, and who was involved in the civil war in Hawai'i. The impreialist vision of the events is well depicted, and certainly a piece of the story, but not the whole story, and when President Clinton apologized for the United States intervention, he acknowledged we didn't do a good job. Not for the first time, nor are we repairing that damage, of siding with non-native plantation owners over all others.

Victoria Ka’iulani Cleghorn was born in Honolulu in 1875, the daughter of Princess Miriam Likelike (sister of the reigning King Kalakaua) and Archibald Scott Cleghorn, a prominent Scottish businessman. Since both King Kalakaua and Lili’uokalani, the sister who was to succeed him, were childless, the birth of Ka’iulani (meaning “royal sacred one”) assured the future of the dynasty.
As a child, Ka’iulani led a charmed life. She lived at Ainahau, a sprawling estate in Waikiki, a then-pristine rural area east of Honolulu. Her mother was a wonderful entertainer who welcomed many people into their home, including the poet and author Robert Louis Stevenson, who befriended the young Ka’iulani. It was Stevenson who first referred to Ka’iulani as “the island rose” in a poem he wrote for her and inscribed in her autograph book. She died at age 23, at a time when her country was subsumed under U.S. rule.

Moosewood Restaurant: Cooking for Health

When the first Moosewood Cookbook came out my freshman year of college, it was really novel. The cookbook was whimsical appearing to the point of almost distraction. Certainly the indexing was done by a rank amatuer when it came to cookbooks (and is sharply contrasted by the obsessive Mastering the Art of French COoking, which was in wide circulation long before this came out). It was a vegetarian cookbook that was easy to use, fun to cook from, and with the exception of just a handful of other cookbooks published at about the same time, one of a kind. It changed my cooking life.
Now, 30 plus years later, the Moosewood Collective is still putting out quality cookbooks that provide new ideas for cooking vegetarian and vegan food. THis book has some great additions to what has been published before, more vegan recipes than they often do, and as is their usual, good nutrition data, easy to follow recipes, and delicious sounding. Bravo!