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Books

This month’s reviews by Madhuri of books by Hafiz, Barry Long, Joseph Wambaugh, Mavis Marsh with Andrew Crofts, Pete Goss, Catherine Cookson, Michèle Knight, Rebecca Musser with M. Bridget Cook, Ralph Barker

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The Gift by HafizThe Gift
Poems by Hafiz
Translations by Daniel Ladinsky

One of the most luminously beautiful books I’ve ever read. It’s one to have and to hold, to come back to again and again.

250 poems, cozy and friendly and frank and ecstatic, take us out of our limited way of seeing ourselves and this life and catapult us into song and dance and gratitude.

This Sky
This
Sky
Where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love,
Love.

Knowing Yourself by Barry LongKnowing Yourself
The true in the false

by Barry Long

Sometimes, if I’ve been filling my head before sleep with some story of human tragedy, avarice, romance, or whatever, I feel the need for a little dry sanity instead – and then I pick up this.

Barry Long was an Australian mystic (surely a contradiction in terms?) who famously made a wonderful audio recording called Making Love, that many of us in Poona listened to in the 90’s; it gave lovemaking squarely back to the divine female, and taught the male how to honour her. (I looked at Long’s Human Design recently and saw that he was a very refined Projector, in case anybody wants to know!)

Anyway, this book is basically a series of lectures telling us what’s what, and what isn’t what. There are no entertaining stories in it. It’s just Whump, in your lap.

An example:

“Man is not as complex as he often thinks he is (with a glimmering of satisfaction). He is complex in the sense that a tin of worms is complex. To the observer it is just a tin of worms. What the tin of worms is doing might be complex to the worms but the observer can tell without looking that they are wriggling and squiggling, like a tin of worms.”

Lines and Shadows by Joseph WambaughLines and Shadows
by Joseph Wambaugh

Wambaugh brings his full brilliance to bear on a subject that in 1984, when the book was published, was already fraught enough – and is now 100 times more so. The ‘line’ referred to in the title is the border between the USA and Mexico, specifically that section at the edge of San Diego. This is a true story, and it concerns an almost freakish year of unusual do-goodery: a pure-hearted San Diego cop thought that the undocumented migrants struggling in their hundreds and thousands to cross into the States, deserved a better deal than what they were getting: a nomansland of canyons, polluted watercourses, cacti, tarantulas, hills – and bandits. The migrants would try to cross at night, and the bandits (many of them Tijuana policemen, some junkies, and all sorts of other evil opportunists) would rob, rape, and murder with no fear of reprisal: the US government had effectively ceded the filthy territory to them.

The compassionate San Diego cop managed to get a task force created to go out into the canyons at night and do battle with the bandits. Quickly the public eye was caught and the guys became famous, with all the perils that implies. There were also mistakes, and hilarities, and so on, in the usual Wambaugh way of seeing the world.

What particularly touched me was the portrayal of the migrants – sweetness and goodness and humbleness and diffidence; parents who just wanted to go to LA and make money to take back home and be good to their kids with.

This writer, as we know, is simply ace – and here he brings his courage and thoroughness to a vitally-important subject. It’s also a really rollicking read.

Shattered by Mavis Marsh with Andrew CroftsShattered
by Mavis Marsh with Andrew Crofts

If you are a brilliant, adventurous, peaceable, gorgeous-looking, happy young astrophysicist with sumptuous dreadlocks who has just delivered his PhD dissertation and takes his girlfriend out to a pub to celebrate: don’t decide on a whim, while walking home, to climb a fire escape up 40 ft to a roof where there’s a flat place atop a former window, about the size of a double bed; there to show her the stars. And if you do all that, don’t start fooling around as well.

The doctors said the young man would always be a “cabbage, a vegetable.” (The girlfriend was fine, if heartbroken. She didn’t fall.) And the parents got mad. Finally, it’s the dad – calm, deep, devoted, reasonable – who eventually takes on most of the rehab, month after month, year after year. With amazing effect, though the astrophysics is tragically gone.

The cover of this book is a pity: it looks like another miserable-childhood story, and it isn’t that at all. It’s a story of happiness and ordinariness and lots of dancing, written by a woman whose dad was a contented bin man and whose son benefitted by the government’s scheme for free university tuition. The ghostwriting is good, I only saw one typo throughout, and the story is incredibly touching.

Just don’t do that thing. Okay?

Close to the Wind by Pete GossClose to the Wind
by Pete Goss

An ex-Royal Marine prepares for 10 years to enter a round-the-world single-handed race, in a beautiful little sailboat he helped to build. Down in the Roaring Forties he gets a Mayday call from a fellow competitor, whose boat is sinking 160 miles behind our hero, and that distance is against the wind in the middle of a terrible storm with 60-ft waves. He doesn’t want to give up his race, but he goes to help the other sailor.

The last third of the book tells this intense tale very well, detailed and totally involving, with plenty of swearing (my favourite expression: “Shitty death!”) He had never written before that trip; he had to send articles to newspapers as part of a sponsorship deal, and found he liked it.

This book is written very well; it’s just that in the first 2/3 there is a lot of sailing lingo I skipped over, and lots of long awful frustrating trudges where he’s trying to get sponsorships. I thought I wouldn’t review it, but the last part was so good I couldn’t just let it go off to the book-trading booth unremarked.

I somehow resonate with these stories where someone gives their all, sells their house, scrabbles around for huge sums of money, in order to passionately do something almost impossibly difficult and utterly useless. It’s like self-publishing books.

The Tinker's Girl by Catherine CooksonThe Tinker’s Girl
by Catherine Cookson

So. I’m going to give this rather unlikely-looking book a glowing review.

I’d been reading a lot of memoirs, and wanted a novel next, wasn’t sure why. And it was like putting down a newspaper I’d been reading, going into another room, closing my eyes, and listening to some really masterful music. Folk music maybe, or Blues. I felt myself relax and expand and begin to tingle gently in my aura. It was also like going to a really good movie, or maybe looking at an Old Master, painted in a time before electricity, depicting the interior of a peasant’s house. I felt bathed in both sound and texture, Earth tones, rich organic substances. The fact that I live not too far from the landscapes she describes is probably a contributing factor in my appreciation.

This writer’s themes are in a way ordinary – passion, survival, Tribal law and the penalties for breaking it. But her music is not ordinary, it welcomes you and pulls you in and gives of itself in rhythm and a very reliable and consistent sound-bath; it never hesitates. I feel safe with it, I can let go and let it take me. And I am again and again surprised at the sophistication of both the emotional shadings and the plot turnings. I was just in awe as I read it – Wow! She’s doing that? Right then? Superb!

So that is how a novel is different than non-fiction (though much non-fiction is also wonderfully told): its reason for being is Beauty, that is its fealty.

Here it is 1870 and we have a teenage orphan of 14 who is hired out of the Workhouse to go work on a remote and primitive farm. All is not well at the place, and she has immediately to call upon her reserves of resistance and feistiness: she is determined not to be messed with on any level. One son of the place admires her, the other is a baddy with lead poisoning from the mines, and the master and mistress are both what the Brits call ‘pieces of work.’ Then there is the son of gentry who comes calling…

I felt pulled into a meaty soothing, in medieval light, hit by smells and aware of textures, watching emotion on a half-lit series of faces – and was cradled and strangely healed by the rich cadence of the prose. I usually don’t like historical fiction because I can’t believe in the modern writer’s take on things, particularly the dialogue. But this writer absolutely inhabits the times she describes, and we are edified and nourished by our own rough past, sometime back when, before the bright lights and noise machines came along.

Touched by Evil by Michele KnightTouched by Evil
The true story of the psychic powers that saved me from a life of abuse
by Michèle Knight

I’ve read memoirs by psychics, and by gay women, and by women abused in childhood, and by women who went from rags to riches. But never before a memoir by a gay, abused, rags-to-riches psychic.

Her tempestuous Italian mother fell down two flights of stairs in the London Underground while 8 months pregnant, and a caesarean revealed twins, one dead. The dead twin was thrown in the waste sluice by the doctor and never spoken of again. The kindly British dad died not too much later, and the surviving twin was at the mercy of the evil couple next door as babysitters. The man was a sinister, stinking, vile kiddy-diddler, and his wife knew it and simply festered with hatred for him and the world.

The Italian mother came from a line of psychics and passed the gift to her daughter. So the author knew she had a friend in the spirit world; knew her name; talked with her and listened to her all the time; as the spirit tried to help her avoid danger; but only knew the helpful spirit was her twin when that dead twin told her at 13. The freaked-out mother confirmed it.

The mother took a series of lovers, most of whom abused the child, who grew up enraged and rebellious. And so grim things unfold… a hellish teen-time indeed; but we always know that she is going to emerge in a good place eventually – she is mentored and helped and eventually goes on TV as a psychic and has lots of good times. She is saved also by crystal healing and past-life regression and meditation.

The writing is fairly basic, the drama unrelenting – including an epic Italian tornado-plus-demonic-visitation – and we are very glad when things get educated, grounded, uplifted, and peaceful towards the end.

The Witness Wore RedThe Witness Wore Red
by Rebecca Musser with M. Bridget Cook

Whatever self-absorbed, insensitive, or even mildly nefarious things any of us might have done, we are not going to be able to be in remotely the same league as Warren Jeffs: he ‘married’ 24 child brides age 12-17, married a total of 78 women illegally, arranged 67 marriages between older men and child brides – many of them his own daughters; facilitated 500 bigamous marriages, destroyed 300 families by reassigning wives and kids to other men; hid women away in remote places, used his followers’ tithes to buy all kinds of man-toys, raped his own sister and daughter, and justified all this by being the prophet of god, etc etc blah blah blah.

The heroic author of this book knows all this because she was there – married off as a teen to a rancid old buzzard of 85, who happened to be the prophet until he kicked the bucket (he managed to get 45 more wives in first). Then Warren, his son, took over, and, well, absolute power corrupted absolutely.

Polygamy has an obvious drawback: what to do with all the extra males? If desiccated barracudas are snaffling up all the ignorant virgins, just declare young males apostates, and kick ‘em out! Then the uneducated, bewildered, culture-shocked, betrayed young men can go out into the world and fend for themselves, jump off bridges, or whatever.

There is one good thing about it, as detailed in my immortal book A Colorful Dessert of Flowers:

“…that while with one wife you meet
the rest don’t have to smell your feet.”

Anyway, it seems to me that any culture where women are controlled and suppressed requires an astonishing amount of work on the part of the males: monitoring, controlling, punishing, spying on, lecturing, misunderstanding, projecting, invading, raping, etc etc – ill-equipped blunderers trying to keep an eye on silken, strengthy, subtle, intelligent beings, and barely having time left over to make a living. They probably feel sorry for themselves about this.

The author, after the death of her ‘husband’, was about to be auctioned off to some other opportunistic shitweasel, and she managed with great scary difficulty to flee. We read of her bafflement at the outside world, her terribly missing her family and trying to help as many defected, and later her taking the stand more than 20 times in trials against various child-marrierers, including Warren Jeffs; even as she was being heavily reviled by those back in her old haunts. And going through very challenging times as a parent. She comes across as brilliant, very loving, honest, determined, and an amazing survivor. She went on to campaign against slavery and exploitation, giving talks and forming an organisation.

And we say, good for her!

The Last Blue Mountain by Ralph BarkerThe Last Blue Mountain
The Great Karakoram Climbing Tragedy

by Ralph Barker

A mountaineering chronicle first published in 1959. A team of five – four Oxford students and a British Army officer – attempt an unclimbed mountain, Haramosh, in the Karakoram.
The usual elements have their sway: gravity, avalanche, snowstorm, extreme cold, heat, altitude, valour, exhaustion, frostbite, lost crampon, food, no food, lost cache… and The Conquistadors of the Useless have their tragedy.

The writing is steady and spacious, clear and compassionate. The author was not on the expedition but interviewed survivors later. Still, it really works. I felt very much there with them too. Five happy men, strong and gifted and energetic, went mostly up a mountain; saw what was what, were joyously satisfied with their recognisance, knew they could go no further; but before descending, two of them decided to take a last wee jaunt up atop a certain notable cornice. And therein hangs a tale.

Artwork: a card received by the author

Madhuri

Madhuri is a healer, artist, poet and author of several books, Reluctantly to Kunzum La being her latest one. madhurijewel.com

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