News, TBR, Quilts

We have been in social isolation but for me it's not been a boon time for reading. It has been hard to concentrate, but I am getting better. Luckily, I read my review books before the last minute.

We have been taking walks around the neighborhood, rarely seeing anyone. There have been dog walkers and some children on bikes, and parents with little ones in strollers. The school across the street is closed down.

But, Spring is showing its face here in S.E. Michigan. The crocus are in bloom, the daylilies and Sedum and daffodils and tulips are growing quickly.

The fitness center is closed, so no working with my coach. The community center is closed and so no visiting with the quilt group. The library is closed so book club is cancelled. The dentist office is closed. The restaurants are closed.

What isn't closed is our kitchen and I have baked a pie and cookies over the last week!

My mother-in-law majored in pie-making and shared this easy recipe with me years ago. Here is the recipe from her recipe book:

I have been making these cookies for close to forty years. I had no chocolate chips in the house so skipped the cocoa powder and substituted butterscotch chips.

I am also practising the piano again. I can almost play as well as I did as a teenager, lol. One music book I pulled out is Herb Alpert songs. I learned them in the summer of 1965, and playing them brings back a lot of memories.

I have finished reading 36 books this year! But of course there are lots more waiting for me.

In the mail:

• The Preserve by Ariel S. Winter. I read the author's novel Barren Cover and my review is quoted in the paperback edition!
• Little Family by Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Reading Now:

• Pelosi by Molly Ball
• The King of Confidence by Miles Harvey, about the leader of a cult on Michigan's Beaver Island
• Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution by Jerome Charyn
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury was the book club read, now cancelled. Since I haven't read it since the 1970s I want to finish it...sometime...

On my NetGalley and Edelweiss shelf:

• The Story of More by Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah
• Chasing Chopin by Annik LaFarge
• The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
• Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers
• American Follies by Norman Lock, author of Feast Day of the Cannibals, The Wreckage of Eden, and A Boy in His Winter
• Bronte's Mistress by Finola Austin about Branwell Bronte
• The Truth about Baked Beans: An Edible New England History by Meg Muckenhoupt. (At university, I wrote a paper on the roots of American cooking when colonists had to adapt their traditions to new foods.)  

On my physical bookshelf still to read are review books:

• Simon the Fiddler by Jeanette Jiles
• The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson, author of Dead Wake 
• Country by Michael Hughes

Not a great photo, but I finished my yellow roses sampler and it is at the machine quilter.

I am working on the hand appliqued borders for my Hospital Sketches quilt. So many talented quilter have shared their completed quilts on the Facebook page run by the quilt designer Barbara Brackman.

I have three blocks of my many-faces-of-Emily Dickinson quilt. The one I am working on now was my first idea, Emily in her white dress and half hidden behind a curtain, looking out at the world.

The worst part of social isolation is not seeing our son, his girlfriend, and the grandpuppies! Sunny is getting SO BIG!

They are patterning social isolation for us.

I am sad to think that next month's book club may be cancelled. We are to read Miracle Creek and have a Skype visit with the author, Angie Kim.

But we all must do what we must. 

Stay home. Read good books. Enjoy your hobbies. Love your family. Stay safe.

In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

In Hoboken by Christian Bauman centers on a returning army vet and folksinger "born fifty years too late."

The novel is a study of a group of diverse friends bound by a shared history and a love of music and is informed by Bauman's experience as a vet and "itinerant guitar player." (You can hear the author sing online, including Waiting for the Fun here.)

The novel is set in 1995 in Hoboken, NJ and the city comes alive through the characters and story. I was reminded of Seinfeld or Friends, how the story keeps your interest because you like these characters.

The focus is on Thatcher, army vet and son of a famous mother and secretly the son of a famous folk singer. His old bandmates are forming a new group. They have day jobs so they can live, but music gives them life. Thatcher finds work at a mental health clinic, friending the patient Orris.

Bandmates include Thatcher's old friend James and the older, talented but crippled Marsh. Thatcher has a warm relation with the talented female singer Lou.

Even the supporting characters are terrific such as the landlady Mrs. Quatrone with her memories of Hoboken in the 1970s and 1980s, the decline and resurrection of flowers in the window boxes signifying the economic and social changes.

Bauman has a subtle wit that brought chuckles.

By the time first rounds were drunk and guitars tuned it was 1:30 A.M. They put themselves into a loose circle in the middle of the room, eyeing one another. Thatcher couldn't decide whether it reminded him of Old West gunslingers or lonely hearts at an eighth-grade dance.~ from In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

Crisis moments come to my favorite characters with a death and near death and accident. In the end, Thatcher must face his demons.

Tell me, what part of any of this isn't disturbing?~from In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

Thanks to the 'Net, I was able to find a copy of this 2008 novel. Bauman's other novels include The Ice Beneath You and Voodoo Lounge.

 book description:

The son of a feminist icon and a folk singer whose suicide gained him cult status, Thatcher Smith was born potential royalty in New York’s music scene. Instead, he keeps his parentage secret first by disappearing into the army then by taking his guitar across the river to working class Hoboken, New Jersey to form a band. There, amidst the dive bars and all-night diners of 1995, Thatcher and his friends struggle to make meaningful music in a culture turning away from it. A wicked sense of humor is key for the motley crew: Marsh, the beloved, polio-stricken local rock and roll kingpin; lesbian songwriting chanteuse Lou, to whom Thatcher is both deeply attracted and loves like a sister; James, guitar virtuoso, daytime World Trade Center employee, and owner of the floor Thatcher sleeps on; and locals like Orris, the overweight, half-blind, mad prophet of Hoboken’s west side, and patient at the mental-health clinic where Thatcher is a clerk. As in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, music is the heart of the story, but in In Hoboken the place and the people are what make it vibrantly come alive.
 
“While the book is a work of fiction, it aptly captures the early music scene—namely the musicians who came to Hoboken with little else but a dream and a guitar strapped over their shoulders.” —Hoboken Reporter

Emily Dickinson III: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

The intriguing title and image (or, should I say the provocative title and image) caught my eye before I had read my first Jerome Charyn novel. I knew I had to read it as I developed my Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is the culmination of Chrayn's life-long love of the poet. "I never quite recovered from reading her," he writes in the "Author's Note".

His portrayal of the poet will shatter your received image of Emily Dickinson. Narrated by Emily herself, the novel imagines the men and women who rocked her world and inspired her explosive output of secret love poetry.

Emily's voice is singular and alive, studded with images from her poems. The poems themselves do not appear, but are clandescently scribbled off-screen, although some were secreted into the public's hands against her wishes. We don't need them much; Emily's voice speaks her poetry.

Solving the mystery of Emily's love life has long baffled her readers. Was she lesbian, her sister-in-law Sue or their friend Kate Scott Turner Anthon her great love? Or was she enthralled by 'her Philadelphia', the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Arch Street Presbyterian Church? She heard him preach while passing through Philly and corresponded with him. Or was it her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was a rare chosen recipient of her poetry? Or local newspaperman Sam Bowles?

Or someone lost to history? Like a handsome handyman at Mount Holyoke seminary?

She falls for the lowly orphaned handyman (later turned thief and circus clown). She would have eloped with the Amherst College tutor. She wants to hold the Rev. Wadsworth's hands, scarred from the manual labor that paid his way through school. Society--and the Dickinson patriarch--deem these men unfit for Emily's hand.

In the novel, Emily stalks the objects of her desire. She arranges secret meetings and roams the streets. She is wracked with unfulfilled desire, willing to cross Victorian lines of propriety.

The novel is an amazing marriage of fact and poetry and imagination that might just blow the top of your head off.

I purchased a paperback copy.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
by Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton & Co.
Paperback Price$14.95
ISBN: 978-0-393-33917-8

Up in the Haymow: Lynne O. Ramer Memories of Mifflin County in the Early 20th C.

My grandfather Lynne O. Ramer wrote hundreds of letters which were published in the Lewistown Sentinel by Ben Meyers in his column We Notice That. Many were filled with memories of his boyhood in Milroy, PA.

Today I am sharing his letter which appeared on September 7, 1968, in the Lewistown Sentinel. He recalls boyhood in the haylofts of barns in the early 20th c.

*****

Lots of Work and Fun-Making When Barns Flourished

Up in the Haymow

Being a Blue Hollow lad back in the days when every farm had its great big and roomy barn, filling it was a lot of hard work. But there was something to compensate for it. There was lots of fun-making too.

Up in the haymow there were also sheaves of wheat, oats, and corn stalks. The mow’s floor consisted of scanty, open-face planks where the food for  the livestock had to be handled with tender care or it would be ruined.

To prevent spontaneous combustion and heatings and excess molds, causing fire to break out and perhaps burn the building to the ground, there had to be proper ventilation.

So the kids had to heap the hays and straws and sheaves in the most intricate manner. After those things began to settle down, the puzzle of getting out of it would have challenged the skill of an escape artist like Houdini. The kids had a job trying to untangle the mess.

It was hard on the kids too on a smootheringly hot day. In the haymows the harried youths dragged and tramped the hays until they actually dropped from sheer fatigue.

Remember, it was 100 degrees and more up there beneath the tin roof. Then the kids sweated, but in the winter time they almost froze up there, chutting the feeds down through the mow hole, down to the ever-hungry horses and cows.

Yet, despite all this, it was like a paradise up there next to the cool tin roof on a rainy day. It was pleasant and relaxing, listening to the pitter-patter of the rain. Or the clank-clank of hail stones in sweet music as they descended on the corrugated galvanized roof.

‘Twas no place to linger on sub-zero days, dragging the food supply to the mow holes. It was fully a 50-foot drop from the top of the mows to the barn floor below.

wnt

Knocked Out Cold

So the muscle-power of the cows and horses had to be called on to help. A one-inch hemp rope around the neck of Old Daisy, Old Bessy or Old Dobbin or Old Mary would pull the pitchfork-holding sheaves up to the top.

The arrangement worked real well. But then one day Mary’s colt whinnied at an unguarded moment. The rope was tightened as Mary tried to go to her baby and it caught the farm boy, who was tossed through the air “with the greatest of ease.”

When he hit bottom he bounced off a heap of limestones. Result: The lad was knocked out cold. It was a long sleep for him before he woke up with the help of old Doc Boyer. Unconscious he was from 2 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day.  The youngster had the “ride of his life,” nearly the last ride.

When the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed and the rain and hail pummeled the galvanized roof, nobody had to worry about being up in the haymow. They felt perfectly safe. No electrical charges landed there. There were four lightening rods. Ben Franklin proved a point with his kite.

If a lad got careless when the mows were being filled he might disappear in the hap, falling through an unfloored section of the floor, reappearing again in the stable below—scaring a horse or cow half out of its wits.

wnt

Thresher Comes Around

The time came when Homer Crissman* brought his threshing rig to separate the chaff from the grain. The thresher was set up. And soon the barn floors were littered with dust and chaff and the wheat and oats sheaves did fly.

The cone-capped stack grew bigger and even bigger in height and width. There the livestock could munch later, but meanwhile the chickens followed the sifting chaff and grains away out into the meadows and fields.

Yes, the kids had lots of useful things to fill their lives. Unlike the youths today, they didn’t need thrills such as some do nowadays—pulling over mailboxes, prowling rural lanes, scaring the people by the noise of their motorcycles.

Gone are the days and gone also are many of the old-fashioned barns which furnished to much work and play, not only for kids, but for all the family.

*Samuel Homer Crissman was born in 1858 in Mifflin County, PA. He was a farmer in 1910. In 1930 he ran a saw mill. He passed in 1940 at age 82.

*****

My grandfather lived with his mother and Ramer grandparents in Milroy. Joseph Sylvester Ramer and Rachel Barbara Reed are shown below with their house and an outbuilding behind them. Joseph ran a saw mill.

After the death of Joseph's first wife Anna Kramer he married Rachel Barbara Reed. Their daughter Esther Mae gave birth to Lynne in 1905. When Joseph died, Esther and Lynne continued to live with Rachel.

When Gramps was nine he lost both his mother and his grandmother. His mother's siblings stepped in to care for him. He lived with his aunt Carrie Ramer Bobb and aunt Annie Ramer Smithers.

Carrie Bobb (52 y.o.) and Lynne Ramer (24 yo.)

Annie and Charles Smithers in the 1940s

Charlie Smithers encouraged my grandfather's academic success. Gramps worked his way through college and seminary at Susquehanna University and Columbia Teachers College. Later, he earned his Masters in Mathematics from University of Buffalo.

*****

My husband's maternal grandfather John Oran O'Dell was a farmer with a thresher in Lynn Township, St. Clair Co., MI.

He had a farm in the upper left corner of Lynn Twsp. almost to Brown City. The 'old homestead' had a large barn.

*****

Although my first home was an 1830s farmhouse, we didn't have a barn, just a series of 'sheds' or 'garages'. But across the street was another 1830s farmhouse with a barn. When my dad was a boy, he would help John Kuhn. Below is John with a load of hay, his barn in the background.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

I am a long-time reader of Nicholas Kristof's articles in the New York Times and I have read Half the Sky by Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. I was interested in their newest book Tightrope. A few weeks ago while waiting for a talk at a local library, I picked up Tightrope from the new books shelf and started reading. The next day, I went out to a local bookstore and bought the book.

Yet those kids ended up riding into a cataclysm, as working-class communities disintegrated across America, felled by lost jobs, broken families and despair.~ from Tightrope by Kristof and WuDunn

Tightrope is a deeply personal book; Kristof writes about the kids who were on the bus he took to school, people who were his neighbors and friends, and what became of them. One of out four died from drugs, suicide, alcohol, recklessness, drugs, and obesity. One is homeless and one is in prison for life. And yet Kristof left that bus and became a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Their stories become the vehicle to ask the hard questions about what has happened in America.

What went wrong? What goes right for the kids who end up successful? Who, or what, is to blame? And most importantly, what can we do prevent people from falling off the narrow tightrope?

After breaking my heart, and reading the lofty goals that could change the lives of Americans, I was pleased the Appendix shared "10 Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes to Make a Difference." Political and social change takes time. But these steps are within our personal control.

We have blamed the poor for their poverty, criminalized addiction, threw troubled kids out of school, allowed health care and sound education to become an option only for the wealthy, watched children grow up with food insecurity, and punished people rather than give them the tools to be contributing members of society.

Americans need to change their minds and their policies. Kristof and WuDunn share success stories of successful local programs that have changed lives and which could be adopted on a larger scale.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," after all, originally meant "do the impossible."

Some of us were lucky with parents who offered a firm foundation, teachers who took an interest and encouraged us; some of us had opportunities for education, vocational training, or qualified for the military. When a child has none of these advantages--no boots with straps to pull--their chances of success are slim.

Americans need to shrug off the paradigm of blame.

The paramount lesson of our exploration was the need to fix the escalators and create more of them to spread opportunity, restore people's dignity and spark their ingenuity.~from Tightrope by Kristof and WuDunn

from the publisher:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. 

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. Taken together, these accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

Tightrope:Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and SHeryl WuDunn
Published January 14th 2020
Knopf Publishing Group
$27.95 hard cover
ISBN0525655085 (ISBN13: 9780525655084)

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

Foreshadowing began with the opening sentences, narrated in a voice that brought to mind Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode, setting up the story.

A girl sitting beside a swimming pool behind her newly built home. The neighbor boy welcoming her to the neighborhood. A typical day in a typical good neighborhood, upscale and friendly, a place where women gather for book clubs and teenagers can safely run in the local park.

But underneath the 'tenuous peace' simmers the possibility of fracture, the conflict of class and money and race and values. For some, conspicuous wealth is the goal. For another, environmental concerns are primary.

And probing deeper, there are secret desires and blooming love and the blindness we hold on to for self-protection.

Lives will be destroyed.

"No. Yes. Of course. I am going to be a good neighbor."~from A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

Xavier was good looking, a National Honor Student. He had won a scholarship to study classical guitar. He was also biracial. His white father died tragically. His mother Valerie was a professor whose hobby was more than 'gardening', it was environmental restoration and preservation. She was especially proud of the towering oak tree in her back yard.

The oak tree whose roots had been harmed when the house behind was torn down and replaced with a showcase McMansion.

New girl Juniper never knew her dad. Her mom Julia struggled before she lucked out, catching the attention of a self-made man with a lucrative business. Brad Whitman set 'his girls' up in a sweet deal of a life. But Brad's easy-going charm hid his motivation of self-interest and sick obsessions.

Valerie includes Julia into the neighborhood while Xavier and Juniper discover friendship is turning into something more.

Valerie cannot allow development to destroy the environment--she must make a stand and decides on a lawsuit. Juniper doubts the Purity Pledge her parents shepherded her into taking and secretly meets Xavier. She knows something is wrong with her dad's attentions but Brad justifies his obsession and plots ways to take action.

I will tell you this: the culmination will make you shudder and you will cry.

A Good Neighborhood is a reflection of the social turmoil of our time.

I had to consider my own 'good neighborhood,' a two-square-mile city highly rated on lists, with quick selling properties, a safe neighborhood. A predominately white neighborhood with a small demographic of foreigners and split in half politically. A city that voted out a mayor who used tax money to dig up dirt on her opponent and fired long-time city workers who would not cooperate with her plans.

And yet...every tree-lined avenue may shade secrets.

I received access to a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read an excerpt here.

A Good Neighborhood
by Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date 10 Mar 2020 
ISBN 9781250237279
PRICE $27.99 (USD)

John Adams Under Fire; The Founding Father's FIght for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial by Dan Abrams

250 years ago the Boston Massacre marked the beginning of the American Revolution. The mythos handed down tells how British Redcoats fired into a crowd of Americans, resulting in the death of freeman Crispus Attucks and other men.

The soldiers and their superior were put on trial separately. Samuel Adams wanted to capitalize on the incident to inflame anti-British sentiment and support the Sons of Liberty.

John Adams was part of the team to defend the Redcoats. He wanted to keep politics out of it and to prove the fairness and impartiality of American justice.

I knew it was a pivotal trial in American judicial history and I thought it would be interesting to learn more.

Dan Abrams' book John Adams Under Fire follows the incident and the testimonies at the trials in meticulous detail. The trials set new precedents in the length of the trials, extending over days, and in the judge's warning of 'reasonable' doubt' tending toward a verdict of not guilty.

I have to admit that with pages and pages of testimony reproduced in the book I scanned over many pages without a thorough  reading. It was...frankly, boring...

But I am not a scholar or a lawyer.

I appreciated many aspects of the book including a deeper understanding of the roots of the riot.

British soldiers stationed were in Boston, one lobsterback to every three citizens. Bostonians resented their presence and their conduct toward the colonists. Some soldiers took jobs to supplement their meager income, and some courted young women, but they also pushed their weight around harassing Bostonians and raped women.

Young Bostonian men decided to give the sentries a hard time, taunting them to lash back and fire their guns. The youth threw ice balls and carried clubs and struck the guns. They knew the soldiers could not fire in anger.

Propagandistic rendering of The Boston Massacre
By Henry Pelham (American, 1749–1806) - New York Public Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12960467

Until they did.

Since Americans did in the end sent the Brits back across the pond, our history is biased. Paul Revere's picture of soldiers firing and citizens dying shows Americans as victims. Crispus has become a hero, even if he was likely one of the men out to stir up trouble in the first place.

A book not for the reader who prefers narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel, I am still pleased to have increased my understanding of this pivotal moment in America history.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial
by Dan Abrams; David Fisher
HARLEQUIN – Trade Publishing
Hanover Square Press
Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 9781335015921
$28.99 (USD) hardcover