Beginning ~ with birth pains

Moses, Man of the Mountain ~ by Zora Neale Hurston, 1939, fiction

"Have mercy!  Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!"  Women gave birth and whispered cries like this in caves and out-of-the-way places that humans didn't usually use for birthplaces.

Years ago, I read Zora Neale Hurston's seminal 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, so I'm excited to read another of her books.  This one appears to be very different, not about a town populated by blacks in Florida, but about Moses.  Yes, the one in the Bible.  From the back cover:

In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.  Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses's life from the day he is launched into the Nile river in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation into the heroic rebel leader, the Great Emancipator.  From his dramatic confrontations with Pharaoh to his fragile negotiations with the wary Hebrews, this very human story is told with great humor, passion, and psychological insight — the hallmarks of Hurston as a writer and champion of black culture.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.

The Returned ~ by Jason Mott

The Returned ~ by Jason Mott, 2013, fiction (North Carolina), 8/10

I told you about this book when it was still on order.  It's about people's loved ones returning from beyond, and one knows how or why.  What would it be like if someone you love came back one day?  I've read the book now and rate it 8 of 10, a very good book.

This novel has one character who is very interested in words, learning them and improving hersel by learning words.  Here's one of her word choices, when her husband and son are being held by the government (p. 115):

"But it's been weeks," Lucille replied.
"And they're both healthy and alive.  Aren't they?"
"I suppose so. ... But they're..."  She hunted for a good word.  She would feel better if she could find a quality word right now.  "They're...immured."

Okay, I rarely come across a word anymore that I don't know.  Even this one seemed like one I ought to know, but I'm sure I haven't read it or heard it used in years.  Do you know what it means?  Confession:  I had to look it up, but I'm sure I've never used this word and probably never will.  I did learn something though.

immure = enclose or confine (someone) against their will.  Example: "Her brother was immured in a lunatic asylum."

synonyms = confine, intern, shut up, lock up, incarcerate, imprison, jail, cage, put behind bars, put under lock and key, hold captive, hold prisoner; detain, hold.  Example:  "His first wife was immured in sanatoriums for most of her adult life."

This next quote stopped me in my tracks.  I had to read it several times, wondering where in the world the author came up with these lines.  This is from the perspective of the pastor in the story, trying to get someone out of confinement.  (Or would that be "immurement"?  I wasn't sure that was even a word, so I looked it up.  It means "a form of imprisonment, usually for life, in which a person is locked within an enclosed space and all possible exits turned into impassable walls.")  Okay, here's the quote (page 262):

He'd talk to whomever he needed to talk to about having her released into his custody.  He could throw his spiritual weight around when he needed to.  Apply a little emotional guilt, as all men of the cloth are trained to do.

What???  Trained to apply guilt?  What "men of the cloth" would that be?  Not my denomination.  I have never run into anything like that, ever, and I'm an ordained minister.  What a strange idea.

My father died in a traffic accident when he was only 45.  The "returned" people in the book came back at the same age they were when they died.  If my dad returned now, he would be younger than my three children.  Hard to imagine.  One of the book's characters dreamed about a loved one returning.  A few years (or months?) after my dad died, I dreamed about meeting him on the sidewalk outside my church, knowing he had died.  I rarely recall actual words from my dreams, but I remember saying to him, "Does Mom know you're back?"  That's sort of what this book was about.  Here's a photo of my dad about twenty years earlier, as a 20-something soldier during World War Two.  A couple of my grandchildren are older than he was in this picture.

The dustjacket photo

I don't know what the photo on the cover means, unless it implies a world turned upside down.  The boy appears to be about eight years old, just like the boy in the novel who died on his eighth birthday.

Library Loot ~ October 16-22

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture ~ by Peggy Orenstein, 2011, society

The rise of the girlie-girl, warns Peggy Orenstein, is no innocent phenomenon. Following her acclaimed books Flux, Schoolgirls, and the provocative New York Times bestseller Waiting for Daisy, Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults.

My great-granddaughter likes everything pink:  her hat, her clothes, her lawn chair, her hair bows, her valentines, her art work.  Why must everything be pink?  It didn't used to be this way, when my girls wore greens and yellows, reds and blue, plaids, stripes, and polka dots (maybe not those).  Here's the table of contents:

1.  Why I Hoped for a Boy
2.  What's Wrong with Cinderella?
3.  Pinked!
4.  What Makes Girls Girls?
5.  Sparkle, Sweetie!
6.  Guns and (Briar) Roses
7. Wholesome to Whoresome:  The Other Disney Princesses
8.  It's All About the Cape
9.  Just Between You, Me, and My 622 BFFs
10.  Girl Power — No, Really

The New Mind of the South ~ by Tracy Thompson, 2013, culture

There are those who say the South has disappeared.  But in her groundbreaking, thought-provoking exploration of the region, Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native and Pulitzer Prize finalist, asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition:  an ability to adapt and transform itself.  Thompson spent years traveling through the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child.  African Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory.  Though Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evangelical Protestantism that defined Southern culture up through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological schisms.  The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.  Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today — a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own people.

Here's the table of contents:

1.  It's Complicated
2.  Salsa with Your Grits
3.  The Big Lie
4.  Shadow History
5.  Jesusland
6.  The Sorting Out
7.  Atlanta
8.  Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Yep, I'm sure there's some interesting stuff in this book.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.  They encourage us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.

This is the sign in front of my branch of the library.

Sunday Salon ~ theoblogian edition

Just this Sunday afternoon (yes, I'm running late today), I learned a new word:  theoblogian.  I love it!  I'm a reader and a blogger and a word person and a theologian.  That much I knew.  But now that I've found the word, I realize I'm all of those in one.  I'm a theoblogian.  Yes!  I'm also a feminist and just found the Jesus Feminist page on Facebook.  Sarah Bessey has a book by that name coming out in November.  Sounds interesting, though I don't know enough yet to tell you anything about it.

BOOKS

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" ~ by Rachel Held Evans, 2012

Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4).  It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.  See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as “master” and “praises him at the city gate” with a homemade sign.  Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife.  Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women.

In trying to send a link to a friend, I discovered I had failed to blog about this book.  I had told you about her first memoir:

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions ~ by Rachel Held Evans, 2010

And this one today is similar to one I read a couple of years ago:

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible ~ by A. J. Jacobs, 2007

I'll tell you more about Rachel's books when I finish reading them.

The Sunday Salon's Facebook page has links to other blogs.

Beginning ~ with a killer

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust ~ by Immaculee Ilibagiza, 2006, memoir

I heard the killers call my name.

They were on the other side of the wall, and less than an inch of plaster and wood separated us.  Their voices were cold, hard, and determined.

"She's here . . . we know she's here somewhere. . . . Find her — find Immaculee."
There were many voices, many killers.  I could see them in my mind: my former friends and neighbors, who had always greeted me with love and kindness, moving through the house carrying spears and machetes and calling my name.

From the dust jacket:

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished.  But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide.  Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.  Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter.  For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.  She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers.

A dozen years ago, more or less, I read another book about the genocide in Rwanda.  A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche is a novel, published in 2000.  I also saw the movie.  Although it was fiction, it was all too real to me.  I knew about Immaculee's true story, but having met a man whose family died in the Rwandan slaughter, living right here in my town, I didn't feel that I could read any more about what is now almost two decades in the past.  I ran across this pristine copy of Immaculee's memoir in a used book store, so clean and "new" that it surely has never been read.  I'm ready to read it now.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.

I Am Malala ~ by Malala Yousafzai

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban ~ by Malala Yousafzai, 2013, memoir

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out.  Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.  On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price.  She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.  Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York.  At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.  This book is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.  One person's voice can change in the world.

Malala's Swat Valley

I am very impressed with Malala Yousafzai.  So young, yet so wise.  She is already changing the world, even though she's only 16 years old.  Learn more about her:

• Wikipedia article
• This excellent Jon Stewart video is short (6:13 min).
• The Taliban still wants to kill her.
• Tomorrow, Malala may win the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Malala Yousufzai's blog.

Library Loot ~ October 9-15

Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through a Country Church ~ by Richard Lischer, 2001, memoir

Fresh out of divinity school and bursting with enthusiasm, Richard Lischer found himself assigned to a small conservative church in an economically depressed town in southern Illinois.  It's an awkward marriage at best — a young man with a Ph.D. in theology, full of ideas and ambitions, determined to improve his parish and bring it into the twenty-first century, and a community that is "as tightly sealed as a jar of home-canned pickles."  Lischer tells not only his own story but also the story of New Cana and its inhabitants.  He brings to life the clash of cultures and personalities that marks his pastoral tenure, including his own doubts, as well as those of his parishioners, that a twenty-eight-year-old suburban-raised liberal can deal with the troubled marriages, alcoholism, teen sex, inadequate farm subsidies, and other concerns of the conservative, tightly knit community.  But the inhabitants of New Cana — lovable, deeply flawed, imperfect people who stick together — open their arms to him in their own way, and the result is a colorful, poignant comedy of small-town life and all it has to offer.

Moses Man of the Mountain ~ by Zora Neale Hurston, 1939, fiction

In this 1939 novel based on the familiar story of the Exodus, Zora Neale Hurston blends the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song to create a compelling allegory of power, redemption, and faith.  Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English, Hurston traces Moses's life from the day he is launched into the Nile river in a reed basket, to his development as a great magician, to his transformation into the heroic rebel leader, the Great Emancipator.  From his dramatic confrontations with Pharaoh to his fragile negotiations with the wary Hebrews, this very human story is told with great humor, passion, and psychological insight — the hallmarks of Hurston as a writer and champion of black culture.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.  They encourage us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.

This is the sign in front of my branch of the library.