BookThoughts: The Company of Companionable Narrators
BookThoughts: By
Nancy Casey
from the March 2005 Newsletter
I read when I wake up in the morning, I read before I go to sleep. You go through a lot of books that way. I almost always have a big pile checked out from the public library. This column grows out of that reading habit: each month a few picks and recommendations, some of them new, some of them not, all of them available in the Moscow Public Library. This month: three books I enjoyed for many reasons, but especially for the pleasure of keeping company with their narrators.
For actual and armchair travelers, I heartily recommend Theroux’s tome Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. Theroux takes a sentimental journey without being sentimental. Nearly 40 years after a Peace Corps stint in Malawi, he travels the length of the African continent the way few foreigners do—overland, availing himself of the same forms of transport as ordinary Africans. From the mouth of the Nile to the tip of South Africa you take in the perplexities and the discomforts, visit with literati and government officials, get robbed and shot at, keep up with what Theroux is reading, and most importantly, fall into a rhythm and a lifestyle outside the demands of time and achievement as we know them.
The question that dogs his journey: Is Africa better off now than 40 years ago? He answers with a sigh.
The book is thought-provoking rather than depressing. Often funny. You don’t necessarily have to read the chapters in order.
In the company of Ian Frazier in On the Rez, you drive around the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota a lot, frequenting local haunts, chatting, buying beer, working on broken-down cars, missing appointments, eating, sitting in living rooms, and being the butt of more than a few jokes.
Surely you know that deaths occurred at Wounded Knee, both a long time ago and in recent history; that AIM stands for the American Indian Movement which itself is linked to a history of controversy surrounding the Black Hills and the name Leonard Peltier (who is still in jail) – but why? Ian Frazier will fill in those gaps of your American history if you take up with his wanderings. He’s not quite an insider but no longer an outsider in the community of the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux. You’ll begin to understand the shared experience, compassion and humor that comprise the cultural glue of a people living out the legacy of land theft and genocide.
When Barak Obama set out to write the memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, he thought that the question at the center of the project was “How did you become the first African American to be elected editor of the Harvard Law Review?” But it’s obvious that what Obama is working on here is a puzzle and the conundrum of the puzzle is this: born into a world that is not of your own making, you still have a responsibility to act—but how?
His book is the engaging (as opposed to egotistical) tale of Obama’s personal, moral, and political development. His mother was an intrepid white girl from Kansas. His father, whom he hardly knew, grew up in Kenya. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent his boyhood with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, from which he retains vivid, fond memories of running in a pack of barefoot brown boys—until he left to attend private school in Hawaii. It’s when he’s a college student in LA that the stark incongruencies of his mixed heritage and the wide geographic and cultural span of his upbringing come into focus. There is no group of folks “just like” him. He doesn’t whine, just keeps carrying us through this compelling portrait—a stint of community organizing on Chicago’s dispossessed south side and travels to Kenya to connect with his father’s family. Presently, Obama is a US Senator from Illinois. I’m not used to national politicians engaged in such lucid and complex thinking as to be found in this book.
I would spend time in the company of all of these voices again. Frazier is warm and inquisitive, factual and journalistic. Theroux is wry, even grumpy. Obama is vivid and honest.
These books, like compelling guests, left me feeling humbled. And enriched.
Nancy Casey has lived in the Moscow area since the late 80s. These days she divides her time between Moscow and a rural community in Haiti. Find her on the Web at http://personal.palouse.net/Nancy. For this column she welcomes reader input. What’s on your must-read booklist? What themes would you like to see treated here?
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