Old Mole Reading List Larry Bowlden

Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian-born theater owner, opens the small town’s first integrated dance hall. His wife Chona runs The Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill, which caters to Blacks and European immigrants, mostly Jewish. Chona is generous and warm-hearted, and though the store makes little profit, she is loved by all the residents of Chicken Hill. All of this wonderful novel,  by James McBride, and entitled The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is devoted to the description of the lives of the poor and discarded residents of Chicken Hill. Chona extends credit to the poor residents in spite of knowing she is unlikely ever to be paid. McBride, as a novelist, is able to describe the racism and anti-semitism of the white community in ways neither journalists nor anthropologists could. While in many ways the residents of Chicken Hill struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America, McBride’s story is full of humor and warmth. Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules  of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ. Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only , whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling  vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their Yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored , as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists gone, wasted.   Americans cared about a money. And power. And government. Jews had none of these things, their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk an honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard , you might gain some opportunity, maybe even a shop  or business of some kind. While much of this novel is social criticism, there is much joy in McBrides description of  music and dance in  the daily lives of the poor on Chicken Hill. Most of McBrides’ prose in this and his other novels is wild and fantastical and full of warmth. Chona takes it upon herself to watch over the life of a deaf black child, and when the state comes looking for him claiming he needs to be institutionalized, Chona’s black neighbors help her to hide him away. The boy is eventually caught and sent to an insane asylum called Penhurst . Many of the workers at the so-called hospital are black folks from a nearby community; they are called the Lowgods.  We is in the same place, you an I, being colored. We are visitors here. Thing is , us Lowgods, wherever we is from, the old Africaland, I suppose, we were keepers of our fellowman. That was our purpose. We’re still that way. That’s all we know of our history, the one was moved from us before we were brung here. You know what Lowgod means in our language? Little parent. A local black worker named Nate Timblin, with the help of the Lowgods,  is able, nearly miraculously, to spring the boy from Penhurst. This is a wonderful big-hearted novel by an incredible story teller. McBride’s writing is so unusual and non-sequential that some readers may find it difficult to follow his narrative, but the effort will be well rewarded if you do.

This story begins in 1469, in the fifth year of the Chenghua emperor’s reign, when Tan Yunxian was eight years old. So begins Lisa See’s superb account of Chinese medicine in the 15th century. On one level it is a simple story of a girl, Tan, who wants to become a doctor and is tutored by her grandparents who are both doctors. Her best friend Meiling is in training to be a midwife, and the two girls pursue their dreams under the kind but demanding eyes of Tan’s grandparents. The book is worth reading just for this simple and lovely story, but See’s real intent is to talk about Chinese medicine, and especially male Chinese doctors. Confucius made clear that any profession in which blood is involved is considered below us…A midwife’s contact with blood places her in the same base level as a butcher. Furthermore, midwifes are disreputable. They are too much IN THE WORLD. “Perhaps.” Grandmother sighs. “But since we physicians acknowledge blood is corrupt and corrupting, then how can a woman give birth without the aid of a midwife?” This appears to be one of the only issues the grandparents disagree on.  “Child look at me,” she says softly. “Respect your grandfather in all things but know as well that midwives are a necessity. A more pleasing phrase we use for a midwife is she who collects the newborn” As absurd as it may sound to our western ears, Chinese doctors were not allowed even to touch a woman’s body. Insofar as they are involved in pregnancy and child birth it is only behind a screen set up between doctor and patient. A doctor “might attend to a woman in labor—giving her herbs to speed  the delivery and make the baby slippery” but that is all. Each of the young girls envies the other. Tan envies Meiling because she can actually be in the world and help women have safe deliveries. Meiling envies Tan both for her wealth and position and because she  able to train to be a doctor. He grandmother doctor tells Tan: I’m irritated with men. I’m lucky to love your grandfather, but most men—other doctors especially—don’t like us to succeed. You must always show them respect and let them think they know more than you do, while understanding that you can achieve something they never can. You can actually help women. Both girls are successful in their studies and, for different reasons, are invited to attend women in the emperor’s court. If they are successful, male doctors will be credited, and if they fail, their very lives may be at stake.  Besides the history of Chinese medicine during this period, See gives the reader a long look at caste systems in China and the incredible history of foot-binding among the higher castes, and the ways in which higher caste girls are kept almost entirely out of the daily world of commerce.  Tan continues to envy Meiling’s ability to look at the real world rather than living a shuttered and sheltered life.  After giving birth, the upper cast women do their month attended by a doctor and perhaps the midwife who assisted in the delivery. Watched over during the dangerous four weeks following birth. Grandmother and I visit Lady Huang every morning to make sure she isn’t affected by noxious dew—old blood and tissue that refuses to leave the child palace…We bring with us different warming medicines. Grandmother has been  strict with Cook to make sure Lady Huang is offered warming food only. Her blood has transformed into milk, and the baby suckles well. Western doctors have certainly had their dismal history of denigrating midwives and failing to progress in the treatment of pregnant women, even for a time refusing to release their patented grip on the use of forceps to aid in delivery.  I loved this book on so many levels: the story, the researched history and the strong feminist bent the narrative takes. I hear the sound of voices. Miss Zhao, Lady Kuo, and Poppy come into view and begin to cross the zigzag bridge to reach Meiling and m

We are told not to judge a book by its, cover, but I invite you to judge this book by its delicious cover, the content as rich and colorful as its cover. Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, is deeply insightful, sad and transformative. The book begins and ends with the same refrain:I live my life forward and backward. Seems like my body remembers what I can’t afford to forget Here I am alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it.Ranita Atwater is finishing up a four year term at Oak Hills Correctional Center, about to be set free and determined to win back the parental rights that have been stripped from her.I stand up, like I’m told. And as I approach the gates, the CO who’s opening them up gives me a last bit of scorn: “ Hasta luego; see you back here soon.” I throw some shade his way and walk through. And here it is, what I’ve been wanting and fearing. Freedom.The novel goes forward and backward: forward to her struggle to remain clean and sober, to convince the courts that she is fit to visit her two children and eventually perhaps even to win back the right to raise them. And backwards to the four years of imprisonment and the events that led up to it. Without looking for it, and surprised at finding it, Ranita (Nita) finds her first real love in prison. Maxine, politically astute and living through the lens of politics 24/7, is the first person to love Nita for who she is and not simply for what she can give. The few visits she gets from her kids and her daddy are both treasured and feared. Jesus. Struggling to get my balance in this present-past jumble. I’m just praying not everything my kids remember is bad. Reaching for the safety of low expectations, I own that nothing good will come of this. They’ll look right through me. I’ll say something stupid, something wrong. I’ll find nothing at all to say.Amara, 13, and Theo, are nearly as anxious on these visits and in the early home visits once she is free, as Ranita is. They listened for their names. Visualized their people coming through the trap. Bargained with their higher powers, Today, God willing, they would get a visit. If they heard their names, they answered with relief and often tears. If they didn’t, there was another absence to add to all the others, as they receded further and further from the free world.Ranita is lucky in some ways, she had a father who loved her and stood by her until he died during her last years of imprisonment. She had two aunties who had taken in her children, and were now charged with determining if Ranita was fit even to see her children, let alone live with them. And her mandated psychotherapist with immense power in the process of determining her fitness to parent turns out to be a good man and one who understands her on many levels, including her addictions. Ranita learns to see the world politicly via her friend cum lover, Maxine who urges Ranita not to frequent the prison canteen, spending her pitiful earnings on sweets. Everyone had to find a way to do their time, and the lens of politics was part of Maxine’s. She had no choice but seeing, and speaking what she saw. “Seriously, Ranita” Maxine said “think about all the products we make inside ... electronic cables and T-shirts, mattresses and flags. American flags, if you can believe the grotesque irony of that. Locked up all the Black folks and then make us produce flags for the country that’s been demeaning and exploiting us since they captured and enslaved us ... after they’ve kept us from voting and owning anything, trapped us in city food deserts next to toxic waste, with shitty schools and shitty jobs and shitty food and shitty places to live ... no access, no exit ... policing every breath we take ... feeding us menthol cigarettes and drugs and blocking us from health care ... and pitted us against each other and against the folks who should be allies, hoping we’ll kill each other off ....”Auth

1900, Travancore, South India She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.“The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.”So begins Abraham Verghese’s masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, I think, a great novel. There is a huge cast of characters, a dizzying number of locations and episodes, and the sure hand of a compassionate doctor behind the pen. It would be impossible to overview this monster of a novel in a few pages, but I will dip in a bit and tell the reader about some of the major themes. In his Notes at the end of this 700 page wonderwork, Verghese tells us: The story in these pages is entirely fictional, as are all of the major and minor characters, but I have tried to remain true to the real-world events of that time.Certainly it reads like a carefully researched historical novel. There are many doctors in this story, and each of them expresses some of the views and the overall compassion of Dr. Verghese himself. The primary family in the novel has a weird connection with water. Each generation has at least one son who dies by drowning, and even the males who fear water and never cross over it find bizarre ways of dying due to water. Big Ammachi is the matriarch of the family and devoted to keeping her first son away from water. Some of the language in this novel is wonderfully mellifluous. For most Westerners, Malayalam’s rolling ”rhha” scrapes the mucosa off the hard palate and cramps the tongueHowever a Scottish doctor by the name of Rune, banters with the children outside his clinic with a Scandinavian lilt to his Malayalam. “Rune’s fees are nominal for the poor and painful for the rich.” I learned so much about medicine and disease in this novel. For example, I learned just how diphtheria kills. I learned what life is like in a leprosarium, and was surprised to read that leprosy is far less contagious than I had thought, but also how it attacks nerve endings and leads to lepers injuring themselves without feeling it at all. There are love scenes in this novel that are so beautiful, but nothing like the steamy scenes of western pornography. Verghese describes how simply seeing a naked foot or feeling the breath of a lover on ones skin can be so erotic. The political content of this novel is both profound and subtle. It is obvious that Verghese favors democratic socialism. His many descriptions of the caste system are pointed but cognizant of its long history. “Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp…You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere , were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavey. Their kindness , their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. I’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable right of the Brahmins. And the absence of any right for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except; the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.This is such a rich novel, and it is not unremittingly sad. If you take on this lovely book, try not to read it in short snippets before bedtime. The complexity of the narrative and the huge cast of characters would, I think, make it

Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel: My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery—a place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some terms—such as “mulatto” and “Negro”—that are offensive to many people today, myself included. There are also characters who express deeply racist views., which were widespread at the time. I do not use these terms or write these characters to condone them, but I want readers to be clear-eyed about the extent of the brutality and oppression that enslaved people faced. As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable futureAlthough I won’t reveal much of the story of Rachel as she searches the islands for her children who were taken from her and sold, I will sketch out some parts. When the King of England announced the end of slavery for Barbados in 1834, that did not mean the slaves were free, it simply changed their title from slave to apprentice, But they were still bound to the plantation owners who went after, caught and often executed so-called runaways. Rachel has two sons and two daughters that were taken from her and sold. During the course of this harrowing but beautiful story, she finally finds two of her daughters and the one son who lived, the other having been killed during an uprising. When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest tree; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mother’s arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain. Hope hurts…She [Rachel] had survived for so long by suppressing hope, but when she left, she dared to believe her children might be found…Hope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrested from the white man’s unwilling hands, or a family reunited.On her journey from island to island, Rachel is assisted by others One man, Abraham, has lived as a hermit. Me don’ think about it when me was young. When me first get here. Me think about going home. But that’s why the white man love to keep us on islands—how can me get home? The sea help them keep us here.I found myself wondering why Shearer adopted the odd grammar and the pronoun Me instead of I. She answers that question in her author’s note. The other bit of historical accuracy I grappled with for this novel was how to write the dialogue. I wanted the characters to speak in a way that reflected the wonderful creole languages of the Caribbean, but also was accessible to non-Caribbean readers. In the end, I went with dialogue that is not always perfectly in line with how someone like Racheal or Mama B would have spoken at the time, but that still follows some of the rules of Caribbean grammar. Language such as Bajan creole do not conjugate many verbs, which lends an immediacy to Caribbean storytelling…This novel reads as a kind of epic, and at least for this reader, there was no problem with suspending disbelief at some of the wild adventures. There are grisly scenes of chase and horrible descriptions of some punishments meted out. But as Shearer herself says, “I hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from the novel.” Both her academic training and her own history lend authority to this historical novel. I agree whole heartedly with Shearer’s evaluation: Women like Rachael (and the real Mother Rachael) set out to make a kind of freedom for themselves when they brought their families back together again. There is something so wonderfully hopeful in those stories. They are histories that need to be told.

The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance: First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.Here is Barbara Kingsolver showing her genius again, managing to take on the voice of a young boy and keeping that voice with all its grammatical blunders and peculiar wording for seven hundred pages of monologue. I can imagine writing a short story in the voice of my younger self, but to be able to convincingly hold that voice not just for a short story but for a very long novel simply astounds me. There is no way I could do justice to sketching out the whole story of Demon’s life, but I could easily assemble a series of terse bits of advice he gives to the reader. Although it says his name is Damon Fields on his birth certificate. “Did she think she’d even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?” And once he got his copper-wire hair, he became Demon Copperhead. Like Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon is passed from foster home to foster home and works dangerous, low-paying jobs from the age of eight on. His mother loses custody and regains it several times, but takes in stray men one after another. The worst of these men, Stoner, beats on both him and his mother until Demon is taken from her by Children’s Services. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” Demon’s great talent is drawing, and he loves to draw super-heroes. He draws his friends and tells them what super powers they have. While he is with one family, the McCobbs, Mrs. McCobb takes him to Walmart and using money he has made sorting junk for a junk-dealer, she buys him new clothes, not so much for him but to protect her family’s good name. But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.At one point, in desperation he seeks out his grandmother, hoping to be taken in and cared for. My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men, “Any of them that stands up to make water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.Still, his grandmother, his father’s mother, does provide for him and an uncle who lives with her encourages his art and provides sage adv