Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier

I’ve actually been to Astoria, Oregon. Years ago, I was slated to cruise Mexico, when an outbreak of swine flu sent the ship north instead of south (Hello, Seattle; Good bye, Cabo). I remember it was a pretty town, highly picturesque, but don’t believe we learned much of its history in the roughly six hours we were there. In reading Peter Stark’s Astoria, I set out to rectify that, and what I learned was fascinating. 

Astoria was John Jacob Astor’s dream: a man ahead of his time, Astor recognized the importance of the Pacific and especially of international trade, particularly of the transpacific variety. Astoria was to be his base, the geographic location by which the world’s richest man would become even richer. From the start, though, the venture was beset by trouble, and no small amount of tragedy. The Overland Party, which intended to cross the continent Lewis and Clark style, met with countless delays before being forced to split up and make their way as best they could.

Those who went by boat, and in the pre-Panama Canal days, the Tonquin had to round the tip of South America to sail from New York to the Pacific Northwest, fared little better. (Except for the stop in Hawaii in its royal heyday. That I wanted to read more of, no question.) And once they made it, those who did, found themselves face-to-face with the tribes who had hunted, fished, trapped, and for all intents and purposes, owned this land for time immemorial. To say their encounters did not often go well is to understate things.  

Once the U.S.declared war on the British, things got really interesting, for not only did the British trading companies have their eye on this same piece of land, but many of Astor’s partners and agents were, themselves, British subjects. For those wondering how it all ends, here's a hint: the title of the book refers to a "lost Pacific empire."

All of this Stark recounts succinctly and with an engaging style that kept me turning the pages and plowing through the text. Compared to the “Wild West,” which was peopled with the likes of Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, the opening and history of the Northwest was tame. Likely for the same reason, its history is often overlooked, an omission Stark works to correct with Astoria. Anyone with an interest in American history should enjoy reading his work very much.

Four stars.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

I don't believe I've ever previously uttered the words, "Gee, I think that book would actually be better as a movie." In the case of Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, though, that really is my sentiment. It's not - and I want to say this unequivocally - that this is in any way a bad book. Far from it. It is true, though, that Shetterly devotes nearly as much time to the differential equations, physics, and aerodynamics research as she does to her main characters. That's a shame only in that Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, in particular, are fascinating individuals about whom I hungered to learn even more.

Let me back up for a minute. Hidden Figures is the story of the female mathematicians, and especially and more specifically the black female mathematicians, whose contributions and calculations were pivotal in the early days of NASA (and its predecessor, NACA), but were largely unrecorded. In this way, it is not unlike The Girls of Atomic City, which records the history of the "girls" whose work on the a-bomb was so crucial, and yet generally unknown. What makes Hidden Figures is more fascinating, and its protagonists that much more amazing, is that these were black women working on some of the country's most pressing issues - and doing it from an office in the Jim Crow South.

To a woman, they are outrageously smart, strong willed, gender-busting, race-busting, pioneers and - dare I say - heroines. They certainly would not use those descriptors themselves, but reading of what they overcame, endured, and accomplished, the adjectives seem apt. Shetterly brings these women to life. Although her writing can alternate between mighty dry (here's looking at you, differential equations) and wonderfully vivid ("sounding shockingly calm for a man who just minutes before was preparing himself to die in a flying funeral pyre"), this is a highly readable and utterly fascinating story. Going back to my initial comment that I'm sure this story is even better as a movie is an assumption (I haven't seen the movie) that on screen the focus is more on the "girls" and less on formulas.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Easter Island

Admittedly, I read this book for one reason and one reason only: I was on my way to Easter Island. I say this by way of acknowledging that from the beginning I was less interested in the story than I was in the setting. That said, I have an open mind and I was willing to be swayed.

Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island is the story of Elsa Beazley and Greer Farraday. In 1913, Elsa sails from England with her new, much older, and generally unloved husband and mentally diminished younger sister. They are headed to Easter Island to make a study of the flora and fauna, Charles Darwin-style. Elsa is not my favorite character - or so I thought, until I met Greer. Greer is a palynologist, or one who studies pollen. Sixty years after Elsa, Greer, too, sails to Easter Island to conduct research, and as an escape from grief over her recently-deceased husband. Naturally, Vanderbes creates an intersecting narrative such that women's histories become intertwined on this speck of an island, which still in Greer's day is largely unchanged from the era of Elsa. (Side note: Most of the roads on Easter Island were not paved until the late 90s. The 1990s. This part of the story is no stretch.)

I have complained about the intertwined narratives schtick in the past (Sandcastle Girls springs to mind, for example), so it would be unfair of me to lament that here, knowing my reading preferences and having selected Easter Island anyway. What I will complain about, though, is the characters. It's been a long, long time since I've encountered two more unsympathetic characters. What I can't say is exactly why I felt that way. Elsa, being from another era, is harder to judge, but I still couldn't help but feel that she was, for lack of a better term, a total sour sop. And Greer, well she just struck me as naive, weak, and, for lack of a better term, pathetic.

So what did I like? I am a nerd, and I enjoyed learned about the field of palynology. Also, the setting did not disappoint. Vanderbes does a fine job of weaving the essence of Easter Island - language, culture, geography, history, weather patterns, and people - into her novel. In that sense, it more than delivered for my purposes. And that, I suppose, is the crux of it: read this if you're interested in reading about Easter Island, and particularly the natural geography of Easter Island, in novel form. (In the acknowledgements, Vanderbes references David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo, which automatically earned her bonus points in my world.) You will learn a bit of history, more of the culture, and plenty of the spirit of the place.

The bottom line: ignore the stories and read it as travel writing. Easier said than done, perhaps, but that is my advice.

The Dreaming Suburb

What R. F. Delderfield does well is to evoke a sense of England goneby. Writing from the distance of 40 or so years, he captures the zeitgeist of England between wars: the daily routines, the language, the small moments that add up to a life well lived - or not.

As in Delderfield's other works, the protagonist is a veteran of the Great War. Unlike either David/P.J./Pow-Wow or Paul Craddock, Jim Carver is neither scarred by the war (physically or mentally), nor single. He returns home to his seven children and the still-warm body of a wife who has just succumbed to the Spanish flu, determined to make a better life for his family.Although there are several characters to whom Delderfield has given starring roles, if you will, Jim is ultimately the soul of the book; Delderfield deftly portrays both his striving for a better world, as well as his aloofness from his family, particularly oldest son Archie with whom his relations are tenuous at best.

Also not unlike either To Serve Them All My Days or Long Summer Day, Delderfield is at times extremely long-winded. I plead guilty to occasionally needing to skim his work, rather than read closely. That said, Delderfield succeeds marvelously at the goal which he has laid out himself in the introduction: his "attempt to photograph the mood of the suburbs in the period between the break up of the old world and the preambulator days of an entirely new civilization."

Perhaps in another year, I'll feel up to the sequel, The Avenue at War.

A Man Called Ove

Ove really just wants to die. He's not picky about how; really, he'll try anything: hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, being hit by a train, pulling the trigger...and yet, every time he gets close to carrying out his plans, something goes wrong. Or rather, someone needs something, and Ove, in his cantankerous, hilarious way, is the only one who can do it right.

There is, for example, the new neighbor who is so incompetent as to be unable to back up a moving truck without crashing it into Ove's mailbox. To say nothing of the community recycling room that must be monitored constantly for the least transgression. Who but Ove can ensure that the metal caps are unfailingly separated from the glass bottles? (Oh, those Scandinavians!)

Ove is charmingly, lovingly curmudgeonly. He is also desperately sad since the death of his wife, and longs for nothing but to join her in the hereafter, although this must certainly be done properly: subscriptions canceled, affairs in order, the lights shut off. Ove is nothing if not firm in his principles, a staunch believer in routines, in the world being a black and white place, in order, and the belief that right must always prevail. Have I mentioned that I loved Ove?

Yes, I loved Ove, and I loved A Man Called Ove. I especially love Fredrik Backman's voice, the inappropriate hilarity that crops up regularly, yet unexpectedly, the layers and layers of Ove that Backman reveals almost begrudgingly. In both the hilarity of non-hilarious situations and the depth of emotion, all emotions, that Backman strikes so well, I was reminded of one of my old favorites, A Prayer for Owen Meany. 

If I have read a better book anytime recently I cannot recall it.

Five stars.

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

Oh, but Fitzgerald could write. The Cruise of the Rolling Junk must be one of his lesser known works, unattainable but from a university library, discovered as a passing mention in Deep South, barely the length of a respectable short story, but fine writing on every page.

Young Zelda hankers for peaches and biscuits; F. Scott, in one of those fantastically spontaneous and crazy episodes that will mark their collective lives and demise, proposes driving from Connecticut south to Montgomery to obtain just that. And so they do. While some of the story has been dramatized for effect, much is true, particularly the myriad automotive disasters. In fact, it's rather amazing to think that driving cross-country was possible almost 100 years ago, particularly through the rural South that was still so marked by the Civil War.

The story, in and of itself, is fine. The writing, and particularly the writing of the south, is what makes it lovely. Many of the characters who people the pages can recount specific battles to the Fitzgeralds; when he writes that "we had added one more rattle to the ancient bridge over which the fugitives from Bull Run had streamed on an afternoon of panic and terror," one doesn't doubt that it was, in fact, the same ancient bridge. Likewise, Fitzgerald writes of "the Wilderness where slain boys from Illinois and Tennessee and the cities of the gulf still slept in the marshes and the wooded swamps," one understand this to be the literal truth - and that did they not, they might still number among the living. Even the imagery of the present (1922, mind you), harkens back to the war they are still fighting: "The for an hour we passed group after group of negroes bound singing for the cotton fields and the work of the hot hours." The war may have ended, and slavery officially, but the condition of "the negroes" is ever worse.

As both Julian Evans in the Introduction and Paul Theroux in the Foreward note, there's something, too, of a premonition about this book, of the way it all will end for Scott and Zelda, the bight shining future turned to frenzied rot. Still in his 20s when he wrote this, some two years after the adventure itself, it is as if Scott already understood that the best was behind him. For early in the story, he writes the story of his life: "To be young, to be bound for the far hills, to be going where happiness hung from a tree, a ring to be tilted for, a bright garland to be won - It still a realizable thing, we thought, still a harbor from the dullness and the tears and disillusion of all the stationary world."

May we all be young and bound for the hills and tilting at rings of happiness. And may we do it in so many beautiful words.

A Piece of the World

Christina Olson was the muse, if you will for Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World, which depicts a female of indeterminate age situated in tall grass, half-reaching, half-crawling toward an unremarkable farmhouse on a hill spreading before her. The farmhouse, one can learn, was located in Cushing, Maine, as was Christina Olson. In A Piece of the World, author Christina Baker Kline has imagined the backstory for Christina, complete with decades of physical and emotional hardship, creating a complex, and frankly fascinating character.

Although there are similarites between Kline's work here and such fictionalized biographies as The Paris Wife or The Aviator's Wife, Olson was a relatively unknown woman, and Kline was therefore freer to invent a backstory for her that fits hand-in-glove with the harsh-but-lovely Maine landscapes she paints so clearly. (No pun intended.) In fact, in making a quick search for Olson in my own efforts to learn more about her and separate fact from fiction, I learned only that she likely suffered from a degenerative neurological disorder, one formerly thought to be a form of muscular dystrophy. Kline obviously had lots of room to imagine.

Kline's prose, like that of her previous novel, Orphan Train, is rich, crisp, and highly readable. She has again created a multi-dimensional character who is alternately maddening and worthy of deep sympathy, and has written a book set at a quiet time in history, if you will, no wars, no depressions, just regular folks doing their best to get on with their lives. This is a wonderful work of fiction, beautifully crafted and highly enjoyable.