Octavia Butler’s Precipice is Now

In the early 1990s an American science fiction author wrote her way through a vision of dystopian societal collapse. More nuanced than Mad Max but lacking the Hollywood-handsome and heroic Mel Gibson, broader in scope than The Handmaid’s Tale but lacking the fetching costumes, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, and set in the near future of 2024, is a bone-chilling cousin to the reality of 2021.

In the beginning, many readers dismissed Butler as a naysaying pessimist telling an unbelievable and impossible story. Twenty-seven years later, many of us wonder:  How did she know?

In case foretelling the future as if it were a YouTube video in a crystal ball weren’t enough, Butler launched a religion; real or fictional depends on your perspective.

Wikipedia: Earthseed is a fictional religion based on the idea that "God is Change". 

GodIsChange.org: Earthseed is a real religion inspired by the science fiction of Octavia Butler, specifically her books, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).

Story: Near Los Angeles is Lobredo, an isolated community walled against ever-increasing crime and violence resulting from the crashing waves of greed and corruption, climate change, and rampant, isolating technology. As the foundations of society are eroding, hope for the future is lost.

Teenager Lauren Olamina tells the story of the disintegration of her world and her family in her journal, while also writing verses for a new religion she calls Earthseed.

• In 2024, Lobredo and the world around it is sliding toward a precipice.
  

• In 2021, we are coming to grips with massive change and the enemy within, seeing the unimaginable happening in real time.

The catalyst of this collapse is a basic lesson we’ve yet to learn, and is the first precept of the Earthseed religion:

"All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change.”

In the “rational” world, we call this The Law of Unintended Consequences and believe that if we just think through the situation carefully enough, we can outsmart it. We can’t. The minute we touch it, it’s changed and requires changed thinking.  Rinse. Repeat

Butler’s prophetic insight crystalized 

in her words about power: 

“All struggles are essentially power struggles.”

This is the essence of the struggles of 2021. Our country’s attempt to balance power with a two-party system is crumbling as one party weakens and becomes desperate to hold onto power by using whatever means necessary. We are becoming bifurcated in too many ways: Republican/Democrat, black/white, rich/poor, male/female, urban/rural, straight/gay, old/young, violent/non-violent … an endless game of this or that, them or us, where what is lost is our sense of connection to our neighbors and unity of purpose as a country.

"All struggles
Are essentially
power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles
Are essentially power struggles,
And most are no more intellectual
than two rams
knocking their heads together."

Butler’s answer is science fiction: head for other worlds. This is the third precept of Earthseed, the religion: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”

In spite of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, I don’t believe colonizing other planets or space offers us much of a solution. We are earthlings … and there are too many of us. The only real choice we have is to collaborate, work together and take care of each other. However, in a world with too many guns and a climate growing more hostile to agriculture and economies, desperate people will resort to violence and self-protection. The more desperate people there are, the more violence we will experience.

We in the rich nations of the world talk of rising seas as if we might lose a few coastal mansions. In Bangladesh, however, the next several years will see as many as 18 million people forced to leave their homes. 18 million people without homes, without jobs, without resources. We give it a scientific sounding term: climate displacement.  However, it’s as if everyone in Florida were forced to move to Georgia (population 4 million). They wouldn’t fit.

Two-thirds of Bangladesh is less than sixteen feet above sea level. But, Bangladesh is over there. They’ve always been poor. We can’t worry about them. The question that affects us all though is: where will they go? Europe? India? India is already trying to build a fence around their overpopulated country. And, Bangladesh will not be the only victim of climate change. Change is God in action (Earthseed). And, change is not benevolent nor malevolent; it just is.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave us some hints about how we might handle future massive changes. Some people sacrificed, hunkered down, protected themselves and their family and friends, made do with less. Amazing generosity flowed from unexpected places. Other people grabbed their guns, burned their masks, and blamed everyone outside their small circles. 

Most likely, this is the way it will go. 

More division rather than less. 

More fear. More violence. 

Less all for one, one for all.

This is the precipice. Now is the moment when we still have a possible alternative future. We still have time to think of Earth as a neighborhood and all of us on it as neighbors. The Biden/Harris administration has committed to making 80 million doses of COVID vaccine available to the world in the understanding that COVID is a global challenge requiring vaccination in Bangladesh as well as Florida.

None of us are safe unless all of us are safe.

 

 https://concernusa.org/news/bangladesh-underwater-humanitarian-crisis/

Workampers and a broken security net

Jessica Bruder website

I love entrepreneurship: people who see a possibility that fills a need and then build a business around it, creating jobs and opportunities for others.

Because of this life-long fascination with entrepreneurship, my ears perked up when I heard a story about a guy who wrote a business plan for a new idea as his wife drove them cross country to their new home on the west coast. It was an outrageous idea made feasible by a growing web of technology combined with financial and transportation systems all geared to deliver convenience in an ever more fast-paced world.

From the beginning, this entrepreneur was a big thinker. Struck by the incredible growth of the internet in the mid 90s, he imagined the largest river on the planet as he set forth to build the largest bookstore in the world: amazon.com. 

To most it made no sense. The very word store conjured up a confined space with shelves, doors and cash registers, and everyone knew bookstores were gathering places filled with low margin products bought with tiny slices of disposable income. 

How could this invisible river of books ever make a profit? For several years, it didn’t, only turning a tiny profit after sales skipped past the billion dollar mark. After that, though, it became the river that flooded the world, changing the way we buy everything and offering shopping convenience that is closing retail malls across America. 

However, behind this tidal wave of instant gratification, 

hairline cracks began to appear.

• Retail Amazon became the place where you could find anything and have it the next day. Mom and pop stores either went online or went out of business. Thousands of people started their own Amazon stores only to have the company later change the rules leaving them out in the cold.

• Amazon publishing system opened up the world to writers, giving us a world of often poorly edited books with life-time sales of less than 100 copies, while also devastating the old-world where editors carefully chose, printed and marketed books through bookstores.

• “Next day ‘FREE’ delivery” depended on super human systems that exacted a toll on mere mortal bodies. Mega warehouses were built along major transportation routes, bringing new jobs to small towns. However, those jobs involved long hours of grueling physical labor at entry-level pay and few benefits. 

 And, that’s where and when 

the second part of this story begins.

One of the books on Amazon’s own digital shelves is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. It is one of the books chosen for 2020 by Nevada Reads, a state-wide bookclub, and will be released as a movie later this year.

2008

                          

Most of us remember the time span called 2008, also known as the Great Recession. We talk about that period in hushed tones of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, bankruptcies, lost savings, and financial chaos. For the fortunate ones who managed to hold onto the four key elements of life: jobs-homes-health-marriage, it was “back then,” the past, a survived brush with danger. For others, many others, it was a freefall through the safety net.

Many of those freefallers were seniors … people in their 50s 60s 70s and 80s … who took to the roads in their cars, vans, and rusty RVs. They became a barely visible wave of “houseless” migrant workers reminiscent of the Okies of the 30s, often with only a minimal Social Security check standing between them and total destitution and homelessness.

From a review By Timothy R. Smith, Special To The Washington Post

Seventeen years into the 21st century, the news for the middle class is bleak. As one expert puts it in the book, the “three-legged stool” of retirement security — Social Security, private pensions and personal savings — has given way to “a pogo stick,” with Social Security as the single “wobbly” leg. As the election made clear, the erosion of factory work is taking its toll on many Americans. These days, many decent jobs are in cities with absurdly high rents.

Nomadland tells the story of this largely invisible segment of our society … too poor for standard housing … too proud to be homeless. They have become “workampers” following the call of seasonal jobs: park camp hosts, oil fields, amusement parks, sugar beet fields, or, coming back to our story, the warehouse meccas of next day delivery.
Amazon has a marketing outreach to the world of workampers called:



It’s website invites “enthusiastic RV’ers" to choose from seasonal assignments involving "picking, packing, stowing, and receiving.” CamperForce advertises “the chance to build lasting relationships with your coworkers” although the micro-managed schedule involves walking up to 15 miles a day and, as one person in the book said, “about a thousand squats a day.” All for $11 - !2 per hour (as of 2017).

Gradually, as I read this book, it seemed as if the workamper day could be described as: Arrive. Take Tylenol. Walk-bend-squat for 12 hours minus two 15-minute breaks and 30 minutes for lunch. Go home. Take Tylenol. Fall into bed. Repeat. I’m not sure where they find time to build "lasting relationships."

The majority of workampers are women who typically have significantly lower Social Security checks because of motherhood and the gender pay gap. The main character in Nomadland is Linda May, at the time, a 64-year-old grandmother with a history of interesting but lower paid jobs and a SS check in the neighborhood of $600. She is living in a tiny trailer she calls “Squeeze Inn.” As her children were having their own problems maintaining standard housing and she didn’t want to further burden them, she set out on the hard road of being a migrant workamper. Her first tour with Amazon left her with a wrist stress injury from hours of using a hand scanner.

Three years and many seasonal gigs later, Linda still has a dream: she wants to build her own, self-contained earthship in the desert. As the book ends, she has found her piece of dirt and, using her savings from her last tour at Amazon, she has started clearing the land. However, the “check engine” light is showing on her Jeep.

Nomadland is a distressing book, but it is also a book about the creativity and resilience of the human spirit. It was compelling to me on many levels. Two of the seasonal job sites mentioned were places I identified with … one close to Reno where I am now and one in Coffeyville, Kansas, where I grew up.

It also sparked memories of my own 2008 when the work I was doing as a consultant in the field of innovation suddenly disappeared as companies scrambled to survive. Around the same time, my husband died and the loss of his income threw me into the financial abyss. Since then, I’ve had a series of downsizings, some relatively optional but all focused on making ends meet in a more and more difficult housing market.

However, I’m one of the lucky ones. I've wound up in a stable and affordable micro home with a doable SS income. I keep thinking, though, about Linda May and the other women I met through Nomadland, women who live in a tiny space, subject to freezing temperatures (or blazing heat), stretching a budget that barely covers food, walking for long hours on the concrete floors of an Amazon warehouse, or cleaning campground toilets, or bent over picking strawberries. My heart goes out to them.

This book made my recognize my own anxiety and fears, as well as theirs. Fear that comes with living in an aging body and the constant possibility of financial disaster in a society whose safety net has already been broken. For me, all of this is an occasional worry; for them, it is every day, as close as a “check engine” light, a wrist injury, or an empty cupboard before the next check.

There are no villains in this story. Since the book came out, Amazon has raised its minimum wage to $15/hour. Right now, it needs its workampers. However, it also has over 200,000 warehouse robots. Will they eliminate this “opportunity” for seasonal workers?

The current administration is talking about reducing Social Security. For many of us that might mean tightening the belt a bit. For workampers, it could be a death knell ... literally. 

*****

Interview with author: The Rough Lives Of Older Americans In ‘Nomadland'


Book reviews:

https://thenewswheel.com/book

https://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/18/nomadland-

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book

/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/

Book Review: The Feather Thief

Amazon: As heard on NPR's This American Life

“Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor

A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

JW: This is a book about obsession and beauty.  It is a unique story that opens up worlds I wasn't aware of and is told by a master storyteller. I not only fell in love with the book; I became a fan of the author who is a deeply troubled person, plagued by PTSD from Iraq and committed to rescuing the Iraqi translators whom we left behind when the war ended. He becomes the obsessed chasing the obsessed and writes a powerful story that I will long remember. The opening quote captures it perfectly:

"Man is seldom content to witness beauty.

He must possess it.

-- Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare,

Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, 1979

From book: "Before the Hermès bag or Louboutin heel, the ultimate status indicator was a dead bird." (43)

"a shawl made from eight thousand hummingbird skins." (45)

"With demand for birds like Herons and Ostriches far outpacing supply, entrepreneurs around the world set up feather farms. Since Herons weren't redisposed to life in a cage, farmers blinded the birds to make them more docile, running a fine filament of cotton thread through the bird's lower eyelid and tugging it over its upper eyelid." (46)

For a better idea of the birds that were decimated by the feather craze prior to laws preventing the collection and exportation of rare bird feathers, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTR21os8gTA

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 23, 2019)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1101981636
• ISBN-13: 978-1101981634
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars 315 customer reviews
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #197 in True Crime (Books)
  • #14 in Bird Field Guides
  • #40 in Adventure Travel (Books) 

Other reviews:

flybirder

5.0 out of 5 starsA sad but brilliant commentary on the greed of men

August 9, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I read this well written book with tears. Being both an avid fly Fisher and birder, I found this book to be a timely epiteth to all those species that are vanishing before our eyes. The few who care and look upon these species with wonder are also vanishing. Soon, this earth will be decimated of its beauty. It is so difficult to go birding now and enjoy it as I once did because every bird I see now I realize will soon be gone. As for Kirk and his valiant efforts, thank you for shedding light on this weird, fanatical, useless hobby that has raped the world's jungles and forests all to glue shit on a hook to hang on a den wall. I just feel boiling anger after reading about this. Sad.

Katherine Y

VINE VOICE

5.0 out of 5 starsTrue crime book that reads like a mystery novel

July 19, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is a startling true story about the lengths a man will go to satisfy an obsession. The reader is introduced to the world of fly-tieing, the art of creating intricate fishing lures from bird feathers. What is remarkable about this activity is there is a subset of these tiers who collect extremely rare and valuable bird feathers and pay exorbitant prices for the most exotic ones. The subject of this book is such an individual. Edwin Rist is an accomplished student musician and avid fly-tier who steals hundreds of rare birds from the British Museum in 2009.

The book is a study in obsession as the author himself, an Iraqi war veteran, becomes fixated on the crime and the man who committed it. The story is immersive. Johnson, the author, has spent an incalculable amount of time researching the history of fly-tieing and the lure of exotic feathers to the point of even surreptitiously attending a fly-tiers convention undercover. He becomes a principal investigator in solving the details of Edwin's crime, identifying accomplices and tracking bird skins.

The book grabbed my interest from the first few pages. Johnson's book has all the pacing of a well-crafted mystery novel and manages to hold the suspense of exactly what happened and who was involved throughout the entire book. He covers this story with all the zeal of a professional investigative journalist. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes psychological character studies and true crime.

Naslund fan

3.0 out of 5 starsHalf a book would have been a blockbuster

May 1, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I loved the crazy nature of the crime and the way it was reported, including the background about the small group of fly-tiers, most of whom don't even fish, whose obsession provided the raison-d'être for a very bizarre crime. The crime was wrapped up about half-way through the book, so I wondered what the rest would entail. It turns out that the author spent time, energy and money on the un-asked-for pursuit of the birds that had not been accounted for by the authorities or by the museum from which they were stolen, both of whom assumed that most had been dismembered and sold as "parts." This mission has its moments, as the thief himself is interviewed at length, but, overall, this section is less satisfying. I'd give the first half of the book five stars, but the second half just two. IMPORTANT: When reading this book on the Kindle its not clear that there are many plates and illustrations at the end of the book showing the birds and the flies, along with pictures of the principals.

 

Book Review: The Clockmaker's Daughter

A rich, spellbinding new novel from the author of The Lake House--the story of a love affair and a mysterious murder that cast their shadows across generations, set in England from the 1860s until the present day.

My real name, no one remembers.
The truth about that summer, no one else knows.

In the summer of 1862, a group of young artists led by the passionate and talented Edward Radcliffe descends upon Birchwood Manor on the banks of the Upper Thames. Their plan: to spend a secluded summer month in a haze of inspiration and creativity. But by the time their stay is over, one woman has been shot dead while another has disappeared; a priceless heirloom is missing; and Edward Radcliffe's life is in ruins.

Over one hundred and fifty years later, Elodie Winslow, a young archivist in London, uncovers a leather satchel containing two seemingly unrelated items: a sepia photograph of an arresting-looking woman in Victorian clothing, and an artist's sketchbook containing the drawing of a twin-gabled house on the bend of a river.

Why does Birchwood Manor feel so familiar to Elodie? And who is the beautiful woman in the photograph? Will she ever give up her secrets?

Told by multiple voices across time, The Clockmaker's Daughter is a story of murder, mystery, and thievery, of art, love and loss. And flowing through its pages like a river, is the voice of a woman who stands outside time, whose name has been forgotten by history, but who has watched it all unfold: Birdie Bell, the clockmaker's daughter.

JW: Disturbing book but compelling. Kaleidoscopic. "The Art of Belonging" manifesto by Edward Radcliffe about the connection between human beings and places; places and art. "The land does not forget. Place is a doorway through which one steps across time." Do we find our belonging in a place? Do we belong to a place.

From School Library Journal

Although Lily Millington, the titular character of this novel, is a smart and compassionate ghost, she's unreliable: Was she the victim or the perpetrator of a murder that happened one night in 1862 at Birchfield Manor? To escape stuffy London for the summer, Lily and her lover, acclaimed artist Edward Radcliffe, and assorted bohemian youth went to Edward's house in the country. Then his proper Victorian fiancée showed up-and someone died. Another guest was Lucy, Edward's beloved little sister, 13 at the time. A conventional murder mystery might have ended there, with readers believing Lily, but tough, sympathetic Lucy must carry on this epic that spans generations, eras, and wars. Her famous brother, Radcliffe, unable to recover from the tragedy, has disappeared. She grows up, eventually inheriting Birchfield, which, she learns, is over 400 years old, and reinvents it as a school for young girls. That's where readers meet Ada, yet another impressive character, whose accidental proximity to a death repeats the pattern. Whodunit fans will gobble up this work, trying to solve the multiple mysteries. This best-selling Australian author's absorbing saga of family, love, and history has much to offer eager readers. VERDICT A must-have for all collections.-Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NYα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. 

Product details

• File Size: 7494 KB
• Print Length: 497 pages
• Publisher: Atria Books; Reprint edition (October 9, 2018)
• Publication Date: October 9, 2018
• Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
• Language: English
• ASIN: B07BKRGQTY
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Word Wise: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,169 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #5 in Historical Australian & Oceanian Fiction
  • #75 in Historical Mysteries (Kindle Store)
  • #56 in Ghost Mysteries 

Customer reviews

3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5 out of 5

874 customer ratings

5 star		39%
4 star		17%
3 star		18%
2 star		12%
1 star		14%

nashvillegirl

VINE VOICE

5.0 out of 5 starsBrilliant historical mystery

July 1, 2018

Format: HardcoverVine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Ever since I read The Lake House, which I loved, I have been meaning to read another one of Kate Morton's books. The Clockmaker's Daughter, her latest book, does not disappoint. It's told primarily from the viewpoint of Elodie, a woman in the present day who discovers a leather satchel containing a mysterious photograph and sketchbook, and from a group of artists in the mid-1800s, who were spending a summer at Birchwood Manor, an English countryside house with a long history. There are other characters from different points in time that weigh in as well, helping to build the narrative.

Morton is especially skilled at building these types of historical stories, that are part mysteries, part historical fiction,and part love story. The pacing is almost perfect - just enough information is given that the story keeps on building and the reader is engaged, but nothing is ever revealed too early or too quickly. In fact, I didn't realize what would happen at the end of the book until the precise moment when Morton hinted at it in the last pages. Additionally, the setting is wonderful, and I could really feel myself at the Manor both in historical times and in the present day. There are little historical details woven throughout the book that really help build the setting. Furthermore, the character development is fantastic - I really felt like I knew Elodie, the artists, and others.

Confused

2.0 out of 5 starsI'm not dumb, just very lost and confused

October 19, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I love Kate Morton's previous novels and didn't want them to end. So when this one came out, I began reading it as soon as I could. But I am not enjoying it like I should, like I did the others. I am so lost and so disappointed. I get who Elodie is and her set of characters, and Edward and most of his set of characters, but who the heck is Leonard and Jack? And somebody new I ran into last night, they just sort of appear out of nowhere and I don't know who, where or when they are. I need somebody who understands this book, if there is someone like that, or the author herself nearby to answer my questions! Maybe I just need to start over and take notes, if that will help, or just give up. Maybe a reader's guide to each chapter. Gosh, reading one of my favorite authors shouldn't be this hard!

Book Review: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Normally, my reviews of anything Barbara Kingsolver writes are filled with superlatives. As I approached the end of this book, picked up by happenstance at the library, my only words were: brilliantly boring.

Boring isn’t exactly the right word … maybe normal? A perfect family … a perfectly imperfect family … with no happy ending in sight. 

 

Kingsolver skillfully skips back and forth between two families more than a hundred years apart, sharing only a town and a falling down house between them, never depending on the novelist’s grab bag of dramatic arcs to manipulate the tension. 

 

The metaphor of the lives of both families is a failing house deteriorating under the relentless assault of time with little hope of repair or renovation; a home that does not shelter and holds no hopes for the future.

Reading this book is like having coffee with a friend whose luck has been on a long-term downward slope: a train wreck in progress. It is an uneasy feeling, made worse by caring about your friend, but wishing you could just walk away or snap your finger for magic to appear. 

Kingsolver is not a Hollywood writer. 

You just know that no one is going to gallop in and save the day.  

So how will it end?

The ending begins in the middle of page 400, in a cemetery where a mother-daughter sit talking in a way that made me want to run away as the truth unfolded and I saw myself as both mother-daughter and as human being in the current state of our world. The next fourteen pages are some of the most honest I’ve ever read.

It wouldn’t be fair to even give a glimpse of their content. I just hope you don’t miss them.

For more of a detailed description of the Amazon Best Book of October, 2018:  In her insightful and politically charged new novel, Barbara Kingsolver finds deep resonances between the Victorian era’s attitudes towards science, and our own. Unsheltered begins on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, when Willa, a freelance journalist whose family has fallen on hard times, discovers that the house they’ve moved into has a “nonexistent foundation.” Hoping to enlist restoration help from a historical society, Willa traces the origins of the house to Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher who lived there in the 1870s, and his neighbor, a real-life woman biologist named Mary Treat, whose research supported Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. Just as Darwin’s theory challenged the Victorian belief in the Judeo-Christian creation myth, so too, in Willa’s era, does global warming challenge prevailing myths about the future of civilization. Kingsolver, whose 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, carries off this cleverly structured dual narrative with aplomb and with a certain degree of rage at charismatic politicians, both past and present, whose disregard for science puts humanity in peril. –Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review

Book Review: “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek”

Sometimes a book comes along that grabs you with a powerful story, makes you fall in love with the characters and place, and allows you to discover a bit of little-known history. "Book Woman" is one of those books, deeply researched, honest and lovely on so many levels. Bluet, a mule named Junia and a dozen other characters will stay with me for a long time. This would make a great book club read.

Among the big, splashy programs of the New Deal there was a little known program called the "Pack Horse Library Project as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that delivered books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943.”  - Wikipedia.

 

Most of the librarians were women who were paid $28 a month and had to provide their own mounts. 

 

That could have been the story: book women traveling through the remote mountains of Kentucky to deliver books to families with no access to the outside world. However, there's another layer: the heroine, Bluet, is a an outcast, a woman of color ... blue, to be specific. She, and generations of her family, shared a rare blood disorder that turns their skin blue.

An aside: In the early-60s as I was walking across Oklahoma University campus, I saw a woman with blue skin and a week later I saw her again. None of my friends had seen her and there was some skepticism about the story. A few years later scientists discovered an enzyme deficiency that caused methemoglobinemia, which causes methemoglobin levels in the red blood cells to rise above 1 percent. It turns the skin blue, the lips purple, and the blood a chocolate brown. 

Papa Smurf

 

I have also since learned that a form of silver poisoning can turn skin blue. This man, known as Papa Smurf has skin color like what I remember about the woman from OU. 

Anyway, the point is that when I read the description about this book inspired by the blue people of Kentucky and a woman librarian who delivered books on horseback, it was a must read.

 

Fugate family of Kentucky

The book is an Oprah's Buzziest Books Pick for May (who knew there was such a thing) and Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, says it is "...a hauntingly atmospheric love letter to the first mobile library in Kentucky and the fierce, brave pack horse librarians who wove their way from shack to shack dispensing literacy, hope, and ― just as importantly ― a compassionate human connection."

 

Some books transport you to a different time and space. In Book Woman, we find life as hard and hungry as the mountains, meet a cantankerous mule named Junia who is always one step away from being shot, and wonder at the connecting power of books, and the unending dance of generosity and discrimination, love and hate.

Book Review: Democracy in Chains, The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America

by Joyce Wycoff

Nancy MacLean is the award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry (a New York Times “noteworthy” book of the year) and Freedom is not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best.” The William H. Chafe Professor of History and Pubic Policy at Duke University, she lives in North Carolina, a once moderate state now radically changed.

Introduction:

(This is a well-written, important book that deserves to be read in full. This synopsis is offered for those who may not have the time or inclination to read the entire book. Any errors in interpretation are my own. JW)

Not quite a hundred years after the Civil War ended, a second civil war began in 1955. I was ten years old and didn’t notice it. Actually, almost no one noticed. There were no brothers fighting on opposite sides of battle fields, no cannons, no bloody uniforms. 

Instead, it was sparked by a Supreme Court action and launched in a quiet office of a respected southern university, when a young economics professor, requested funding for a new project and it was granted by the university president who had already answered for himself the question that would fuel the new war: which is more important - private property or public good?

The original players in this story are:

• Colgate Whitehead Darden, Jr., President of the University of Virginia
• James McGill Buchanan, thirty-seven year-old chairman of the department of economics for the University
• Brown v. Board of Education, Supreme Court Ruling, 1955, calling for the dismantling of school segregation  
• Charles Koch, billionaire entrepreneur who would become an avid player later in the story.

The second civil war began and continues to be fought in stealth, underground, watered by massive amounts of money and organized and dedicated efforts following a carefully constructed plan. It took decades before people started looking around wondering what was happening. 

When I first read an article about this book by Nancy MacLean, it was like the curtain parted, revealing the wizard … only it wasn’t a small man with a lot of technology … it was a megalithic, insatiable, Hydra-headed monster  with “property rights” tattooed across each head. 

It sounds like a comic tale, or the worst of conspiracy theories, but it’s the all-too-true story of US politics over the past sixty years, uncovered by a historian who stumbled upon the pieces and assembled them into a picture that revealed a terrifying assault on our democratic principles.

It wasn’t until 2010, the author states, that we began to notice troubling actions that seemed to arise with unusual vehemence in unexpected places ...

• Wisconsin, 2011, newly elected governor Scott Walker introduced legislation to strip public employees of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights, even after the unions had already expressed a readiness to make concessions. 
• New Jersey, Chris Christie started attacking teachers.  
• Citizens United, Supreme Court decision which granted personhood to corporations allowing them to support candidates with donations and Super PACs.
• Several states wounded public schools with deep budget cuts and support for unregulated charter schools and tax subsidies for private schools.
• In 2011 and 2012, 41 states introduced 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how.
• Affordable Care Act, developed as suggested by a conservative think tank and tested by Republican Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, was denounced as “socialism."
• Vicious partisanship became the norm.
• Mitch McConnell refused to even consider a Supreme Court nominee named by President Obama.
  
• Secretive organization ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) produced model laws with a 20% success rate in red states.
• Charles and David Koch poured 100 million dollars into a “war against Obama." 

This book, according to the author, is the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right following a plan formulated by James McGill Buchanan with the specific objective of rewriting the rules of the game in a way that would elevate property rights over any idea of “public good.”

The author’s involvement with this project involved a lot of synchronicities, including finding Buchanan’s archives in an untended state after his death. Slowly, she unraveled the linkage between Buchanan and Charles Koch. “What became clear is that by the late 1990s, Koch had concluded that he’d finally found the set of ideas he had been seeking for at least a quarter century by then —ideas so groundbreaking, so thoroughly thought out, so rigorously tight, that once put into operation, they could secure the transformation in American government he wanted … to save capitalism from democracy — permanently.”

Both Buchanan and Koch recognized the importance of stealth.

"Since we are greatly outnumbered," Koch conceded to the assembled team, the movement could not win simply by persuasion. Instead, the cause’s insiders had to use their knowledge of the “rules of the game” — that game being how modern democratic governance works — “to create winning strategies.” A brilliant engineer with three degrees from MIT, Koch warned, “The failure to use our superior technology ensures failure.” Translation: the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.

What animated Buchanan was his vision of the past when men were unrestricted in their efforts to create wealth and the current state where the government felt entitled to force individuals with wealth to pay for a growing number of public goods and social programs they had no personal say in approving. 

"To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempt to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.”

Buchanan identified the main source of the problem as all collective actions intended to change public policy: social movements, labor unions, groups wanting fairness and equality. The justice of their cause did not move him. As a collective, they had power to vote out politicians who did not respond to their needs. He felt this was unfair and unAmerican. He called it "coercion of the minority and a violation of the liberty of individual taxpayers. A form of government corruption.”

“His study of how government officials make decisions became “public choice economics”; his analysis of how the rules of government might be altered so officials could not act on the will of majority became “constitutional economics.” The enemy became “the collective order,” a code phrase for organized social and political groups that looked to government."

Buchanan was disappointed in the implementation of his theory as presidents such as Nixon continued to expand government, the opposite of what he intended. Then Charles Koch stepped in with his "unrealized dream of liberty, of a capitalism all but free of governmental interference."

Koch formed the Libertarian Party to run against Reagan in 1980 and failed, sending him on a journey to figure out how to change the rules of politics. He wanted to find constitutional ways to shackle pubic officials so they would not be able to respond to the will of the majorities. These shackles had to be binding and permanent.  He wanted a "constitutional revolution."

Koch knew his cause was radical; knew that he was not a "conservative." He deliberately learned from Vladimir Lenin how to form a revolutionary organization. He also knew he need a following larger than the few dedicated libertarians, so he camouflaged some of his more radical intentions in order to be accepted by the conservatives. 

This same motivation made him decide to make peace "-- at least in the short term --" with the religious right although Buchanan was an atheist who looked down on those who believed in God. However, Koch's most successful move was to "wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party."

The author states: "the cadre's loyalty is not to the Grand Old Party or its traditions or standard-bearers. Their loyalty is to their revolutionary cause." Their entire loyalty is to unfettered capitalism, and to the protection of private property. They had no problem going after old time Republicans who didn't share their views: Senator Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, John Boehner are mentioned by the author with Boehner calling Ted Cruz, "Lucifer in the flesh."

The author laments: "We don't understand that the old Republican Party, the one my own father voted for during most of his life, exists no more. ... The Republican Party is now in the control of group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word. 

"Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government -- and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom of the many.

"In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success." Orrin Hatch said after they funded his opposition, "These people are not conservatives. They're not Republicans. They're radical libertarians ... I despise these people."


Prologue: The Marx of the Master Class

Chapter  1: There Was No Stopping Us

Part I: THE IDEAS TAKE SHAPE

Chapter 2: A Country Boy Goes to the Windy City

Chapter 3: The Real Purpose of the Program

Chapter 4: Letting the Chips Fall Where They May

Chapter 5: To Protect Capitalism from Government

Chapter 6: A Counterrevolution Takes Time

Chapter 7: A World Gone Mad

Part II: IDEAS IN ACTION

Chapter 8: Large Things Can Start from Small Beginnings

Chapter 9: Never Compromise

Chapter 10: A Constitution with Locks and Bolts

Chapter 11: Democracy Defeats the Doctrine

Chapter 12: The Kind of Force that Propelled Colmbus

Part III: THE FALLOUT

Conclusion: Get Ready