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Too Many Stories, Too Much Drama

Oct20

Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves edited by E. Kristin Anderson and Miranda Kenneally.

Bullying Under Attack: True Stories Written by Teen Victims, Bullies & Bystanders by Stephanie Meyer, John Meyer, Emily Sperber, and Heather Alexander.

These are two similar collections of teen angst. In the first book, Dear Teen Me, YA authors write letters to themselves as they were when they were teens and in the process they tell some of their own back-story and give advice they wish they had taken when they were teens. It would have helped me to know how old the author who was writing any given letter is now. I would have been able to evaluate the advice in the letters better had I known the length of time elapsed since the events occurred. On the other hand, most of the advice was of the “hang-in-there” and watch out for hairstyles that you will later regret variety, so I guess it was all valid as far as it goes.

The second book, Bullying Under Attack, is a collection of stories of contemporary teens who have experienced bullying in some way. Some of the teens who contributed essays, poems, and photographs to the book were harassed and tormented by bullies, others were themselves the bullies, and others recount stories of standing by and being called upon to help. Again, the advice is fairly standard. Hang in there. Survive. Stand up for yourself. Show compassion for the bully. Change schools. It’s all good advice, if perhaps a bit inadequate in some situations. Generally, the adults are fairly useless in most of the teens’ experiences, which may sadly be the the way it really is on the ground in our schools and families and on the internet (some of the stories involved cyber-bullying).

Maybe my compassion fatigue while reading these two collections of teen drama shows a lack in me, but I must be honest. After a while the stories in these two books and the advice given by the authors and the teen victims and the teen bullies and the teen bystanders all started to blur together and convert itself into one big cliche. I wanted to feel for the kids who told horrendous stories of abuse, tragedy, cruelty, and bad hair-dos, but it was all too, too much. First of all, I shouldn’t have read both books back-to-back. In addition, I would even suggest to anyone who is interested in reading either book that they take it in a little at a time, perhaps one story per night. Although since Dear Teen Me has letters from seventy different YA authors, including Lauren Oliver, Ellen Hopkins, Sara Zarr, and Tom Angleberger, to name the ones I recognize most readily, reading one story per day would stretch the book out over two or three months. That’s a lot of angst in daily doses.

Then, one could move on to Bullying Under Attack, but that’s a lot more sadness, and I’m just not sure it would accomplish the stated goal of the latter book, which is to end bullying and the culture of bullying. To end bullying, kids (and adults) need a change of heart, and I’m not sure that reading a book about the sources and effects of bullying will really make anyone stop being a cruel, abusive person or will help anyone to escape the bullies. But maybe I’m wrong.

From Amazon’s book description: “Stories of regret, promises, and encouragement that will help readers find solace during their teen years and show them how—as adults—their words and actions can provide strength and reassurance to others experiencing all aspects of bullying. Ultimately, they will learn to find their voices in order to break the cycle for good.”

Many of the reviewers at Amazon say that the bullying book in particular should be “required reading.” I think a more radical prescription is called for: conversion to the ethic of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit for bullies and for their victims.

As for adults who are wondering what their role should be in regard to bullying, this piece and others like it by Dr. James Dobson speak directly to the point and instruct adults who are too often “bystanders” in the face of teen bullying. My weariness in reading these books does not mean that I believe that bullying is OK or not a real problem or that adults should become weary in confronting and stopping it when it happens.

Andew Jenks: My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker by Andrew Jenks

Oct19

Before reading this book I had never heard of Andrew Jenks, and now I’m something of a fan, albeit a fan who has never seen an episode of his MTV series, World of Jenks. I’ve also not seen either of the two documentaries that jump-started his filmmaking career, Andrew Jenks, Room 335 and The Zen of Bobby V. So I classify myself as a fan on the basis of the book and the video series I watched on YouTube called It’s About a Girl. (I recommend the video series. It’s sweet.)

The book grabbed me. From his childhood as a geek who carried around a video camera everywhere he went, to his first documentary in which he arranged to live in a nursing home for a few weeks, to his next project which took him to Japan and Japanese baseball, to his debut on MTV, I followed Andrew Jenks as he followed other people and made films out of the stories of ordinary, and extraordinary, people. And I started feeling all motherly toward. I hoped he wouldn’t get himself into trouble when he filmed a former criminal, turned rap producer, and a “houseless” young woman on the streets San Francisco. I wanted to give him some advice about slowing down and savoring the moment and being careful not to let his success go to his head. (I’m not sure he needs my advice, but I wanted to give it anyway.)

I guess you could say I was invested in the book and the young man who wrote it and who had all of the adventures. I know three twenty-something young men who want to make movies. One of them is my nephew, and two others go to my church. I think they would enjoy reading through Andrew Jenks’s adventures. It’s inspiring to read about or watch someone who is living his passion. In a way, it wouldn’t matter that Mr. Jenks has been so successful as a filmmaker at such a young age (except that it takes money to make movies so most of the adventures in filmmaking wouldn’t have happened without the initial success); I would just enjoy reading about someone who is doing what he wants to do and having so much fun and working so hard at it.

“The reward for all this work isn’t fame. . . No, the reward for working hard is getting to do more work. And better work. . . For me putting the world down on film is living. Giving people a voice.”

I like that, and I wish Mr. Jenks all the best in his filmmaking endeavors. Even if he is an Obama fan.

Andrew Jenks: My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker has been nominated for the Cybils Award in the category of Young Adult Nonfiction. The thoughts in this review are my own and do not reflect the thoughts or evaluations of the Cybils panel or of any other Cybils judge.

C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

Oct17

In this new (2013) biography of well-known the Medieval scholar and Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, Alister McGrath states his purpose in the preface to the book: “This book aims to tell the story of the shaping and expressing of Lewis’s mind, focussing on his writings . . . exploring the complex and fascinating connections between Lewis’s external and internal worlds.” McGrath says his book will be “firmly grounded in earlier studies, yet able to go beyond them.”

Well. I did glean several tidbits of information from Mr. McGrath’s biography, information about Lewis and his work that either was new or new to me. I’ve read Surprised by Joy, Lewis’s own account of his early life and his conversion to Christianity. I’ve also read The Narnia Code by Michael Ward, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis by George Sayer, The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, and various other sketches, articles and most of Lewis’s writings, too. So I come to this biography with some background in the subject, although I’m certainly no C.S. Lewis scholar.

First, the (random) things I learned:

Lewis thought writing was a cure-all for depression.
“As he once advised his confidant Arthur Greeves: ‘Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.'”
I tend to agree. I think better when I write down my thoughts, and I feel better afterwards, too.

C.S. Lewis not only had trouble typing accurately because of having only one joint in his thumbs, but he also chose not to type.
“This mechanical mode of writing, he believe, interfered with the creative process in that the incessant clacking of the typewriter keys dulled the writer’s appreciation of the rhythms and cadences of the English language.”
Maybe that’s why I can’t write decent poetry.

Tolkien said that he would never have finished The Lord of the Rings without C.S. Lewis’s encouragement.
“The unpayable debt I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
And the world would have been much impoverished by the lack of that book and all that stemmed from it.

Lewis heavily annotated his books and may have thereby gained a depth of knowledge that most of us don’t even understand.
“Nobody who has worked through Lewis’s heavily annotated personal library can doubt the intensity or quality of his engagement with the texts he studied. . . . Lewis increasingly seems to witness to a lost age of scholarly methods, above all the mental inhabitation of primary sources, which does not appear to have survived his generation.”
Wouldn’t I love to have Lewis’s copy of one of my favorite pieces of medieval or ancient literature with his annotations to guide me and pique my interest and make me think of things I wouldn’t think of on my own? Joy.

So those are the passages I marked with sticky notes. I noticed, too, however, that Mr. McGrath and I do not agree on some basics. He is rather dismissive of Lewis’s attempts at apologetics, saying that most “critics” and “academic theologians” are able to poke holes in Lewis’s arguments quite easily. All I can say is that Lewis not only convinces me, most of the time, but he’s also influenced and convinced quite a few people who are probably much more erudite and learned than I (Chuck Colson, Peter Kreeft, John Piper, Randy Alcorn, Joseph Pearce, Anne Rice, Francis Collins, Phillip Yancey, and many, many more).

Then there are things that Mr. McGrath glosses or skips over completely. Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, and George Macdonald, to mention a few of the major influences on Lewis’s writing, are all mentioned only very briefly. Tolkien is, on the other hand, given center stage. Now, as I said above, I love Tolkien, but I consider that in a book about influences on C.S. Lewis’s life and thought, Tolkien is only one of the people who should be featured or emphasized.

And in another example of misplaced emphasis, McGrath writes about the Narnia books in excruciating details while speeding by the Space trilogy and The Great Divorce with indecent haste. These books constitute some of Lewis’s best writing in my estimation. The balance just feels off, but what there is there is interesting and informative.

For a more extensive and scholarly review of C.S. Lewis: A Life, see this article by Arend Smilde in The Journal of Inkling Studies.

By the way, I went with Eldest Daughter this past weekend to an academic conference on Walker Percy, the Southern author best known for his novel The Moviegoer, and my thoughts about Mr. Percy and his works became entangled with my thoughts about Lewis, to some benefit perhaps. More on Percy and Lewis and the intersection thereof in a later post.

YA Nonfiction: Two Holocaust Memoirs

Oct15

The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the impossible became possible . . . on Schindler’s list by Leon Leyson with Marilyn J. Harran and Elisabeth Leyson.

Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp by Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel.

Both of these accounts, written by Jewish Holocaust survivors about their teen years in Nazi-occupied territory, were quite absorbing and harrowing, each in its own way. Mr. Leyson’s book has a two-fold purpose as evidenced by the dedication: “To my brothers, Tsalig and Herschel, and to all the sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, parents and grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. And to Oskar Schindler, whose noble actions did indeed save a ‘world entire.'” There has been some controversy over whether the hero of the movie Schindler’s List was really a an unequivocal hero since he was something of a contradiction, a womanizing Nazi businessman who nevertheless saved the lives of perhaps more than one thousand Jewish workers who were slated for extermination by the Germans. Leon Leyson has no doubts about the heroism of Oskar Schlindler since Leon was one of those workers who was on Schlindler’s famous “list”. The memoir begins with Leib Lejzon, now known as Leon Leyson, living in the rural village of Narewka in northeastern Poland. Leon says that when he was a boy “[l]ife seemed an endless, carefree journey.” First, Leon’s father moved to the city of Krakow to work, and then in 1938 when Leon was eight years old, his father sent for the family to join him in Krakow. In 1939 the Leysons’ idyllic and upwardly mobile life came to an abrupt halt when the Germans invaded Poland.

The Boy on the Wooden Box is an excellent story for young adult readers about the Holocaust and about the survivors, particularly the work of Oskar Schlindler in saving many of the Jews who worked for him. Leon Leyson’s mantra for survival could be useful to anyone who is going through suffering and hard times, even if they never have to survive something as horrendous as the Holocaust:

“a new phrase surfaced: ‘If this is the worst that happens.’ My father and mother also adopted this saying as a tool of survival, perhaps as a way of keeping darker thoughts at bay. . . . Whenever a German was near, we whispered to ourselves, ‘If this is the worst . . .'”

Helga’s Diary is the story of the Czech/Jewish Helga Weiss’s childhood spent in the concentration camp of Terezin, and then later at Auschwitz. The Terezin portion of the diary was written at the time of the events and edited later for clarity by the author. Helga’s uncle hid the diary for her at Terezin when Helga and her mother were sent on a transport to Auschwitz. Then, after the war, Helga retrieved the diary and added the details of events that happened to her and her mother at Auschwitz and on their final journey through Poland and Czechoslovakia on a “death train” as the war was drawing to a close.

Helga’s childlike confusion over what was happening to her family and to the rest of the Jews in Czechoslovakia, and then her growing understanding and horror, lend her story an immediacy that pulls the reader into the story in a way that Mr. Leyson’s story is unable to do, written as it was long after the events took place. At the same time there are questions left unanswered in Helga’s account, as there must be in any child’s view of the war. An interview with Helga Weiss in the back of the book brings her story up to date and answered a few of those questions. Other uncertainties in the story simply must be left open since we are reading the story from young Helga’s point of view.

Finally I leave you with Helga Weiss’s words on why her book (and by extension Leon Leyson’s book, too) is important and should be read:

Why should we read another account of the Holocaust?

Mostly because it is truthful. I’ve put my own sentiments into it as well, but those sentiments themselves are emotional, moving, and most of all, truthful. And maybe because it’s narrated in that half-childish way, it’s accessible and expressive, and I think it will help people to understand those times.

The Boy on the Wooden Box has been nominated for the Cybils Award in the category of Young Adult Nonfiction. Helga’s Diary, although eligible in the same category, has not yet been nominated. The thoughts in this review are my own and do not reflect the thoughts or evaluations of the Cybils panel or of any other Cybils judge.

Outcasts United by Warren St. John

Oct4

Outcasts United: The Story of a Refugee Soccer Team That Changed a Town, adapted for young people by Warren St. John.

Great story. Luma Mufleh, a Jordanian-born, U.S. educated soccer coach, takes on a group of misfit immigrant boys from half a dozen different, mostly war-torn, countries and makes them into a soccer team—actually three soccer teams the Under Thirteens, the Under Fifteens, and the Under Seventeens. Collectively, they’re known as the Fugees.

It’s a feel-good sports story. I can see it being made into a movie. But I wish I had read the adult version. This YA adaptation felt “holey”, as if there were missing motivations and explanations that would have made the story more understandable. Maybe it was just a true story about real people, and maybe some of the inconsistencies and questions that were raised in my mind were just a result of real life being inconsistent and not as conveniently close-looped as fiction. But since I knew that the author had abridged the adult book of the same title, I kept wondering what was left out.

There’s lots of play-by-play soccer commentary on the Fugees’ critical games. I skimmed over those parts to get to the final score, but soccer fans would enjoy the details.

Here’s a 2007 NY Times article by Mr. St. John that gives the basic outlines of the Fugees and their story. The book mostly focuses on the 2006-2007 soccer season for the Fugees, the tension between the town of Clarkston, Georgia and the influx of refugees, and the coach, Luma and her dedication to the refugee boys she coaches.

From the Fugees Family website:

“The team that Coach Luma established in 2004 has grown to four teams, a tutoring program, an academy, an academic camp, and more. The Fugees Family is the only organization in Georgia that provides programming specifically for refugee boys. By tapping into soccer, the most popular sport in the world, the Fugees Family undertakes its mission to level the playing field and give our kids the same chance at being successful as everyone else’s.”

I would suggest the adult version of the book for adults and young adults who really want to know all of the background on the team and the refugee “problem” in Clarkston. The YA adaptation is for soccer fans who maybe are reluctant readers or want an easier, quick-to-read version of the story.

Gettysburg by Iain Cameron Martin

Oct3

Gettysburg: The True Account of Two Young Heroes in the Greatest Battle of the Civil War by Iain Cameron Martin.

I wanted to like this book, and it had a lot going for it: lots of good, well-placed photographs, an absorbing subject, apt quotations from numerous primary sources, a good flow to the story, for the most part, thorough attention to details without getting bogged down.

However, take this sentence . . . please:

“Ewell reconsidered his options and ordered Johnson to take Culp’s Hill with his division when they arrived but was only to advance if the hill remained unoccupied by the enemy—a discretionary order.”

Ouch. There were several awkward sentences and grammatical constructions, and I began to wonder if the book actually had an editor–or a proofreader. The publisher, Sky Pony Press, is not one I’ve ever encountered, but I looked at their website and they seem like a decent small publisher/imprint. The design and layout and most of the text are all quite above average. So it was even more jarring to read sentences like the one above or come across paragraphs with mixed verb tenses.

In addition, the book was unsuitably titled since it didn’t really focus on the “two young heroes,” Daniel Skelly and Tillie Pierce. The two eyewitnesses to the battle are quoted, and their stores are told. But the book includes so much more from so many more witnesses. The subtitle is not a good reflection of the scope of the book.

It’s sad because I became fascinated with the battle of Gettysburg in a bittersweet sort of way long ago when I read Killer Angels and then all over again when I saw the movie Gettysburg. Is there anything more tragic, and just sadder, than Pickett’s doomed charge? There can hardly be too many books about Gettysburg, but the subject shouldn’t be marred by infelicitous prose and bad syntax.

Cybils 2013 Young Adult Nonfiction

Oct2

I am a Cybils panelist for the Young Adult Nonfiction category this year, so I’d like to see lots of great books nominated in that category. The category is aimed at young adults, ages 13-18, who like to read the real stuff, the ones who only want to read it if it really, truly happened–or is happening.

“We are looking for the best of the best for nonfiction. We are seeking nominations for outstanding nonfiction that reads so much like a story, readers cannot believe it is nonfiction. Narrative nonfiction reads like story because the information is blended into a well written and meaningful text.”

Here are some possible nominees for the 2013 Cybils Young Adult Nonfiction category:

“The President Has Been Shot!”: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James L. Swanson. NOMINATED

Looks Like Daylight: Voices of Indigenous Kids by Deborah Ellis. NOMINATED

Shanghai Escape (Holocaust Remembrance Series) by Kathy Kacer.

Gettysburg: The True Account of Two Young Heroes in the Greatest Battle of the Civil War By Iain C. Martin.

Open Mic: Riffs on Life Between Cultures in Ten Voices by Mitali Perkins, Editor.

The Nazi Hunters: How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi by Neal Bascomb. NOMINATED

Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans during World War II by Martin W. Sandler NOMINATED

Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Women of Action) by Pearl Witherington Cornioley.

Master George’s People: George Washington, His Slaves, and His Revolutionary Transformation by Marfe Ferguson Delano. NOMINATED in the Elementary/Middle Grade Nonfiction category.

The Brontë Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne by Catherine Reef. Semicolon review here.

Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty by Tonya Bolden.

Once Upon A Road Trip by Angela N. Blount.

Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain by Russell Freedman.

Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron by Mary Losure. NOMINATED in the Elementary/Middle Grade Nonfiction category.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World by Michael French.

Trafficked: My Story of Surviving, Escaping, and Transcending Abduction into Prostitution by Sophie Hayes.

This is Not a Writing Manual: Notes For the Young Writer in the Real World by Kerrie Majors 07/09/2013

For the Good of Mankind?: The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein.

Tillie Pierce Teen Eyewitness To The Battle of Gettysburg by Tanya Anderson.

Andrew Jenks: My Adventures As a Young Filmmaker by Andrew Jenks.

Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp by Helga Weiss.

The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible . . . on Schindler’s List by Leon Leyson. NOMINATED

My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History’s Forgotten Battlegrounds By Robert Sullivan.

A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City by Jonathan Schuppe.

Your Food Is Fooling You: How Your Brain Is Hijacked by Sugar, Fat, and Salt
By David A. Kessler, MD. NOMINATED

Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) by Miranda Kenneally and E. Kristin Anderson. NOMINATED

Bones Never Lie: How Forensics Helps Solve History’s Mysteries
 by Elizabeth MacLeod.

Holy Spokes!: A Biking Bible for Everyone
 by Rob Coppolillo.

The Hatfields and the McCoys by Bruce Wexler.

I haven’t read, or even seen, all of these, but if you have read one and liked it, please take the time to nominate it—or another of your favorite young adult nonfiction books from 2013—at the Cybils website. A couple of these might fit under middle grade and elementary nonfiction category, but it’s OK. If we get the category wrong, the organizers will fix it. Nomination time.

The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef

Sep20

The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne by Catherine Reef.

Brief, indeed. Emily was 30 years old in December 1848 when she died of tuberculosis. Anne died of tuberculosis a few months later in May 1849. She was 29 years old. Their older brother Branwell had predeceased them by a few months (September 1848). He was 31 years old.

Charlotte wrote: “A year ago–had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849, had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through—I should have thought–this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams.”

Charlotte managed to outlive her siblings by a few years. She died at the age of 39—probably of tuberculosis. Oh, and by the way, the Brontes had two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died when they were young. Want to guess what killed them?

Therefore, one thing I learned from reading this tragic, true story of Victorian genius was that tuberculosis was (is?) really, really deadly, and I’m glad I didn’t live back then, before antibiotics. And I hope I don’t live to see a resurgence of TB, post-effective antibiotics.

I’ve alway found the Bronte family to be fascinating, even before I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I read a different book when I was just an elementary school student called The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. Ms. Clarke’s fantasy about the Brontes’ toy soldiers who come to life and try to return to the Bronte home in Yorkshire won the Carnegie Medal in 1962 (British title The Twelve and the Genii). Anyway, I loved that book, and it’s the story about the Brontes as children and about the stories they told to each other that first got me interested in the Bronte family.

I didn’t actually read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with understanding and enjoyment until I was in college. And I also read Mrs. Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte when I was in college. What an amazing family! Even Branwell, with his Heathcliff/Mr. Rochester/Byron alcoholic character, hold a certain fascination.

This biography by Catherine Reef was more than decent, and I did learn a lot about the Bronte family. The book mentions the toy soldiers, and the friendship between Charlotte and Mrs. Gaskell, and several other details that were familiar to me. I also gleaned some new information. For instance, I had forgotten that Charlotte married, after Emily, Anne, and Branwell died. And I never knew how very dissolute Branwell was.

Nevertheless, I’m not sure Ms. Reef really understood the Christian faith of Charlotte and Anne, and perhaps Emily, although Emily seems to have been more private and perhaps less orthodox. She writes several times about how “religious” Anne was and about how Charlotte’s faith was “unshaken.” But their faith comes across in the book as a kind of quaint Victorian notion, rather than a real conviction and solace in grief. The author does quote Charlotte’s reaction to atheist Harriet Maritneau’s apologetic for atheism, Letters on the Law of Man’s Social Nature and Development. Charlotte wrote in response to Ms. Martineau’s lack of faith in God:

“The strangest thing is that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank, to welcome this unutterable desolation as a pleasant state of freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could?”

Still, if this biography doesn’t capture the fullness of the Brontes’ faith, it does give a reasonably detailed picture of the life and times of this remarkable family suited to readers age 12 and up. After reading Ms. Reef’s biography, I am wanting to read Charlotte Bronte’s other novels, Villette and Shirley, and Anne’s two books, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I’d also like to re-read Wuthering Heights and The Return of the Twelves, but not until after Cybils season is over.

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq by Bill Swan

Sep19

Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq, The Story of Donald Marshall Jr. by Bill Swan.

This Real Justice book is the second by author Bill Swan in a series of nonfiction stories about Canadian teens who were wrongfully convicted of serious crimes and only exonerated after many years of incarceration. Swan’s first book in the series was about the case of Stephen Truscott, a high-profile murder conviction in which the convicted fourteen year old, Truscott, was exonerated after forty plus years in prison.

Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted of killing his friend/acquaintance Sandy Seale in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison in Nova Scotia, Canada. Donald Marshall Jr. was of Native American (Mi’kmaq) extraction, and his alleged victim was black, or “African Canadian” or “racialized”, as the book calls him. The author takes a statement from the Royal Commission that studied the case and makes it the centerpiece of his story:

“Donald Marshall Jr. was convicted and sent to prison, in part at least, because he was a Native person.”

Mr. Swan effectively ignores the “in part” part of that statement, and tells the entire story of Sandy Seale’s murder as if Mr. Marshall were completely trustworthy and totally innocent, while acknowledging that Marshall was in trouble with the law and had an explosive temper and lied, both before and after the alleged crime took place. I’m not denying that a dreadful miscarriage of justice happened and that Donald Marshall Jr. was unjustly imprisoned for a crime that he did not commit. However, the author’s attempts to make Marshall into an innocent victim of racial bias, and even a hero for his supposed “courage” and “integrity,” fall flat.

The book calls Donald Marshall’s story “deeply troubling” and says that “conviction for a crime he did not commit scarred him for life.” Maybe. But this book did not convince me that Marshall was a hero–just a sad victim in a sordid case. I never got a sense of who Donald Marshall was —just a sense that he wasn’t the one who murdered Sandy Seale.

I received a review copy of Real Justice: Convicted for Being Mi’kmaq from NetGalley.

There is an adult nonfiction book about the Donald Marshall case: Justice Denied The Law Versus Donald Marshall by Michael Harris, and the book inspired a movie, also called Justice Denied.

Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson

Sep18

I can’t review this book for a couple of reasons. First of all Mr. Wilson’s writing is intimidating in its brilliance and cleverness. I’m not that clever. Secondly, I read Death by Living on my Kindle. I can’t put my finger on the difference, but something about reading a book on the Kindle makes it feel different, lesser, and difficult to capture. I think it has to do with not being able to easily flip back and forth and re-read parts, or something. Anyway, I am finding it hard to evaluate books fairly that I read on my Kindle, even if I enjoyed them, as I did this one. I just think maybe I would have enjoyed it more in print, on paper.

So, in lieu of a review, her are a few excerpts that I found noteworthy or highlight-worthy:

“Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.”

“I began to see the world more like a cook than a writer. There were boundless ingredients out there, combinations waiting to be discovered and simmered and served. There were truths and stories and characters and quirks that could clash badly, and some that could marry and birth sequels. I began to feel a lot more comfortable. It wasn’t all on me to create. It was on me to find. To catch. To arrange.”

“When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story.. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday School teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality.”

“The world never slows down so that we can grasp the story, so that we can form study groups and drill each other on the recent past until we have total retention. We have exactly one second to carve a memory of that second, to sort and file and prioritize in some attempt at preservation. But then the next second has arrived, the next breeze to distract us, the next plane slicing through the sky, the next funny skip from the next funny toddler, the next squirrel fracas, and the next falling leaf.”

“Imagine a world that is truly and intrinsically and explosively accidental. Explain time in that world, in the world with no narrative and no narrator. Why time? Why progression?”

“Time is that harsh current that thrusts us down the rapids of narrative causation. Every moment leads to another moment and those moments pile together, boiling and rolling in falls, creasing skin and blinding eyes and breaking bones and wiping minds. Why are we old? Because we were young. Why do we die? Because we lived.”

“No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with through death.”

“We are authors and we are writing every second of every day. A child scissors a couch, and that action is forever and always. It cannot be undone. But now it is your turn. What you say and what you do in response will be done forever, never to be appealed, edited or modified.”

So yeah, it’s a book about time and living abundantly and stories and choices and dust motes and upchuck. Yep, all of those things. So read it. But maybe not on an eReader.