Wintertime: bring along those books!

Who Will Love Me Now
by Maggie Hartley

What was amazing about this book came towards the end; I always like fostering books, but this one included something I’d never seen before. A little girl of 10, so obnoxious that her previous foster parents, plus her school, had rejected her; and who had been dangerously neglected by her teenage druggie birth mother – is about to be rejected once more, by the next foster mum; the author.

In a heartbreaking choice, the author decides to put aside a baby she loves (another foster mum gladly takes him) and instead give this girl a 6-week home schooling that is in fact a concerted focus on giving undivided attention, all day every day, to the child. They play with paint and clay, and the child finally gets experience in having her real feelings heard and recognised – also by her own self.

I thought of my own infancy and childhood; often while I’m reading these books I long for some element of the caring described in them! I knew from birth and before that there was absolutely not enough of anything for me: food, clothes, attention, love. It was unthinkable that I could hope or ask for that. My mother was already exhausted from 4 sons and a husband, no money, no comforts, constant stress. I knew that I was just not ever going to get what I needed: peace, space, attention, doting, princesshood, listening, conversation – only in bits, only sometimes, and that freighted with Mom’s Puritanism. She tried very hard, she martyred herself, she knew what babies needed, but it just wasn’t possible.

So I was very moved by the author’s dedication, wisdom, and heroism.

Told in a clear, straightforward way, as always. And – the method worked!

When Our Plane Hit the Mountain
A True Story
by Suzanne Barnes

In 1946 the Girl Guides of Ireland invited a couple dozen Girl Guides from France and Netherlands to come for a holiday, to rest from the travails of the war. The French contingent flew in a wartime Junkers, manned by a well-thought-of young French pilot; but he was given weather predictions that turned out to be untrue, and got lost in a terrible storm over the Wicklow mountains – and crashed near the top of one. A peculiar set of circumstances meant that everyone survived, though many were injured.

What really stayed with me about this book is the kindness and gentleness of the Irish as they searched, rescued, treated and succoured these young girls. Ireland had been neutral in the war and they had enough to eat; they then fed the girls totally. In 3 weeks treating many girls and the crew a bill was run up to the tune of £559, apparently a colossal sum; the author could find no record of it ever being paid.

Fifty years later 12 of the girls-become-grannies went back to see the place, and any surviving people they had known, again.

The other reason I was touched was because of a trauma around Brownies when I was a little girl. At school the whole brownie-girl-scout thing was introduced and I decided I wanted to be a brownie. My mother had her doubts, but I insisted. We were desperately poor and the uniform cost 3.99, a terrible huge sum for us, plus the belt added a bit more. With huge stress and scraping, my mother managed to get me the uniform. (It was one of only three new dresses I remember being bought during my whole childhood.) I went to my first meeting.

I was bored witless; I perceived too that they were trying to instil virtues in us; and it seemed as if it was all about Work: learning skills and earning badges. This went 100 percent against my own inclinations. So I did not go back. The trauma comes from the look my mother gave me: she said nothing, but what it had cost her to procure that uniform was all in that look. And of course it could not be worn for daily wear. Arghh!

Anyway, the French and Dutch and Irish girls seemed to have thrived with those same virtues I felt so allergic to.

Adventures of a Young Naturalist
by David Attenborough

This charming and fascinating book is the story, written at the time, of the author’s travels for the BBC and the London Zoo, in 1954, to Guyana, Borneo, and Paraguay. The writing is great, the characters colourful and engagingly described, the animals adorable and funny.

AND we are much struck by the incredible, innocent hubris of a tall blond handsome westerner and his backers all apparently feeling that it is just fine and dandy to go striding into any remote fastness in the world and haul out any manatee, orangutan, armadillo, wolf, or anything else they like; with total disregard as how that creature might feel about leaving the only home it’s ever known, and all its kin.

Nobody seems worried about habitat loss or extinction either, for the most part. Nor do they get particularly upset about a job/adventure that results in malaria, animal bites, and broken ribs! I was born in 1952 so I can remember the tenor of the times – though not any privileged strata thereof – and I can imagine this cushy view as to the seemingly inexhaustible wealths of the natural world.

An enjoyable, informative read steeped in quaint nostalgia.

Ghosts of the Orphanage
by Christine Kenneally

This amazing, indefatigable Australian journalist spent 10 years researching this book. I had previously read bits on the subject, books here and there, but this one takes on the whole world of Catholic-run orphanages, plus some Protestant ones. She describes the phenomenon as an archipelago of edifices, institutions, a shadow-world behind closed doors, while a totally different face is being shown on the surface. She thinks that from the very beginning orphanages were seen as a resource: for fund-raising (only a portion of the money ever going to the orphanages), for pedophiles’ enjoyment, for labour, for babies to sell, and even for the ten-dollar fee a corpse would fetch from a medical school. And for punching bags.

It’s bizarre to see how each orphanage, whether in Australia or Canada or Vermont, came up with the same ‘solutions’ to deal with the inconvenient facts of kids being kids: if a child vomits, force it to eat the vomit. If it wets the bed, make it parade in the wet sheets, whilst the other children are told to laugh at it. If it laughs in the supper queue, smack it down and kick it in the head repeatedly. If it protests at being made to masturbate a nun or priest, shout at it and then dangle it over the stairwell from 4 floors up, by the heels; and if it is accidentally dropped, and dies, no problem, nobody will ever know, and even if anybody told, the police would not believe it.

So, this is a murder mystery too: kids drowned, smothered, beaten to death, thrown out windows from very high up. Orphanage after orphanage, that happened. Death certificates, if any, showed some childhood illness as being the cause. There are caches of bones near many orphanages the world over.

Nuns were often farm girls from huge families, given to the church, to a life where the human animal was denied yet still squirmed and festered underground: no sex, no love, no friendships, no intimacy, except with Jesus; no kids of their own, no freedom – the bishop had to be consulted for every move they made. Just servitude and sacrifice forever. But, great reverence coming their way from people, and absolute power over the little hapless young.

There is much documentation here, many interviews, a focus on a particular orphanage in Burlington, Vermont; where out of 8 chaplains over a 50-year period, 6 were known to the men who placed them there to be pedophiles; but those boss men were too. We see internal tribunals for abusive priests, we see incredibly smarmy guidebooks for the nuns about never punishing children, we see letters written by victims, depositions by clergy and their stonewalling, attack-mode lawyers. It’s enough to dent one’s opinion of the human race considerably.

Because of this book and lawsuits it describes, laws have changed in many states – statutes of limitation on sexual and physical abuse wiped off the books. Victims got together and agitated, wrote books, created plays – the ones who didn’t kill themselves, end up in prison, or become addicts.

A very well-written tome which I think should be required reading for pretty much everybody in the world over the age of 15 or so. (Too scary for kids.) The one thing she does not address is why so many Catholic clergy become sexual abusers. Perhaps that’s out of the scope of the book.

Molly the Pet Detective Dog
by Colin Butcher

I found this thoroughly enjoyable – and a great antidote to any current woes that might be trying to cast their spell over us. The author is retired from both the Royal Navy and the Police Force, where he was a detective; and he’s doing what he really longed to do: he acquired a working cocker spaniel and trained rigorously with her so that together they could become an ace detective agency for… finding people’s lost kitties!

I was impressed by the thoroughness, dedication, and enormously detailed and tireless training that went into all this! And it’s fun to read all the tales of this or that cat-person and what happened to their cat, and how exactly the search for it was carried on. The author seems to be a stand-up guy, integrity bristling gently from every animal-loving pore. (He grew up in Malaysia and Singapore and trod the jungles and the villages, bonding with pai dogs.)

I read recently that many breeds of dogs languish these days for want of the work they were bred to do. So it was nice to read about an employed one.

The Pants of Perspective
by Anna McNuff

Not so long ago, an ‘adventurer’ was a man who trekked to the North or South Pole, or canoed through Borneo, or rode a camel across the desert like a Bedouin. Then he’d come home for a lecture tour and to plan his next trip. An ‘adventuress’ was a woman who made her way in the world via liaisons with men, often powerful ones; whom she might or might not marry. It was not an approved of thing to be; just ask Agatha Christie.

But now! There are ‘adventurists’, and they can be male or female. They set ambitious tasks for themselves: walk the length of Britain in your pyjamas! Cycle from Alaska to Patagonia! Push a shopping cart from Nome to Rome! And these kids (they are often, though not always, young) connect in international communities via their phones. The phones help them find a place to sleep at night, people to run with for a day, schools to give talks at, directions at the next junction. So, a device with a reputation as a zombie-maker is helping people wake up to making their bodies and spirits more alive.

This young adventurist, daughter of two Olympic athletes, decides to run the Te Araroa trail in NZ, with a backpack on. Takes her 148 days. I have been to the north island but not the south, and so I was envious of her immersion in such gorgeous scenery (I wish there’d been photos). I began to pine to walk (not run) in that beautiful, friendly land. But probably not to stay in the hikers’ cabins dotted along the trail – rats! Mice! Snoring hikers full of junk food! …Though they would probably be very nice to know otherwise.

This same young woman had previously cycled all over all 50 US states, and after NZ she next headed to the Andes. It’s an independently published book, not too many boo boos, not too shabby. She seems to be extremely bouncy – she typically says she “bounded off up the trail” instead of just “ran up the trail.” So it’s quite breathy, but it’s okay – a nice combo with her endurance feats.

In Pieces
by Sally Field

A superb autobiography by a passionate artist of the actor species. She writes with delicate fervour of all the clumsy bumping and thrashing and stumbling that humans do; and of the almost obligatory (it unfortunately seems) sexual abuse she suffered as a child; and of what it was like for her to find her way as an actor – inside as much as outside.

In the beginning she was given silly roles, and she had to fight her way out of that stereotype. There are romances (Burt Reynolds is not remembered very fondly) and obligatory beddings by at least one director – but the way she examines her own unconscious motivations, and the way she looks at the milieu of her times, is brilliant. A very human book by a very alive being. Descriptions of childbirths are given the same exacting descriptive care as other milestones and events.

I have never seen any films with her in them, so I approached the book with hesitation. But I was soon pulled in and very much touched by it all.

Bitch
What does it mean to be female?
by Lucy Cooke

When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether or not to marry his first cousin Emma, he made two lists on the back of a letter to a friend: Marry, Not Marry.

Con: He’d miss out on ‘conversation of clever men at clubs’ and might succumb to ‘fatness and idleness’. Or, ‘banishment and degradation with idle fool’.

On the plus side: ‘someone to take care of the house’ and a ‘nice soft wife on a sofa’ was ‘better than a dog anyhow’.

Basically, he, and generations of male scientists after him, thought that females of any species were just passive baby-making factories and thus inherently uninteresting – and so they just didn’t study them very much. Any studies with results which went against this bias were ignored or rationalised as flukes in some way or other.

This book sets all that to rights.

It is extremely funny, absolutely fascinating, quite mind-blowing, and extremely important! We all suffer from those long-held prejudices in some way or other, and as a result women are marginalised, devalued, etc. BUT! Across species, females are really, really not weak and passive things! Also, the very notion of what female is and what male is turns out to be limited: there are many creatures who can move from m to f and back again depending on the situation.

I loved so many of the examples of female wild weirdness in this book that I dog-eared about half the pages! And underlined passages! I’d love to quote lots of them, but I’ll settle for one: there’s a sort of gazelle which mates on only one day a year. All the males and females gather for a ‘lek’, and the males stake out little parking spaces for themselves using poop. The rock star males are in the centre.

The females go shopping, cruising around and picking which guys they like; each female mates with 9-15 males. They fight over the rock stars.

Loser males are apt to make the noise that means, “LION NEARBY!” A cruising female will stop for a moment at that, and Mr Loser jumps on her!

In fact, less than 7 percent of species are monogamous. Birds, primates, felines, etc etc are promiscuous, often extremely. Apparently this protects against young being killed by the males: if it’s possible they might be his, he’d better feed them. (Certain wrens give babies exact numbers of mouthfuls of food depending on how many copulations they were able to get in with the mom.)

Females can also be aggressive, huger than males, bossy, etc etc. (Oh yes – the size of males’ testicles are in exact proportion to the promiscuity of a species’ females. Big balls = loose babes.)

And wow, what a lot of interesting details about clitorises (yep, lots of species have them).

I heartily recommend this book – written by a female zoologist. Not only will it bring things back into realistic balance, it will widen your eyes and make you laugh (don’t get me started on spider sex!) I think it should be required reading in junior high biology classes worldwide.

It also made me feel quite a lot better about certain things I got up to between 1966-2003.

Buried in the Sky
The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2’s Deadliest Day
by Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan

Someone made a t-shirt saying K2: A Little Shorter. A Lot Harder.

K2 means Karakoram 2, and refers to the tallest peak in that range; next in height to Mt Everest, but in another country: Pakistan. This book helped me understand the layout and the difficulties like none other I’ve come across.

The mountain is buffeted by high winds nearly always; a couple of days in a year, or every two years, are calm. Expeditions employ meteorologists at 500 dollars a day to sit in, for example, a canal barge in Utrecht monitoring the weather and predicting when there might be a window of calm.

In this case there were well over 100 climbers from many countries waiting at base camp for that window.

And there were the HAPs, or high altitude porters, and ‘porters’ really is the wrong word, for they are fully-fledged mountaineers, often big men in their communities. Like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire does but backwards and in high heels, these men climb and tote and rescue and assemble camp and everything; even to handing over a life-giving oxygen tank from their own lips to a climber whose own is empty.

They were also from different countries: Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet via Nepal; and often did not understand each other’s languages.

The most important man among them, who coordinated them and bridged the language gap (the many expeditions had decided to work together) fell deathly sick and could not climb. And many many things went wrong then…

This book is one of the best mountaineering accounts I have ever read. It was written by two cousins, one a friend of one of the Pakistani mountaineers who died. It is utterly egalitarian, compassionate, exhaustively researched, and very well told. I greatly liked the approach: from the perspective of the high-altitude porters rather than just the white guys – and the fact that the authors spent three years travelling and interviewing is evident on every page.

I was gripped, edified, awed, touched – and so glad that I don’t want to climb mountains like that. (There were women on the mountain, that day and night and day when it all went to hell, though.)

A superb book. It won a prize as well.

Flora’s Lot
by Katie Fforde

I was in bed with a mild flu for a couple of days, and slept a lot. And read, but was happy to leave the tragic mountains people kept falling off of, and other fraught things, and repair to the English countryside and a deft and engaging chick-lit book of a good standard.

A confident and quite grounded young city woman inherits half of a country auction house and takes herself and her pregnant cat off to the bucolic village where it lives. She is not welcomed, and things go on from there. The cat is a large presence – also her kittens – which of course made me happy. A restful read with nothing horrible going on in it, and much to enjoy.

All reviews previously posted on Facebook – featured image by Logan Kuzyk on Unsplash