Day: November 8, 2011

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver, 2000

An ecological tale from Appalachia. The main characters are two educated women.

Deanna Wolfe is a forty two year old forest service ranger – game warden who guards the mountain overlooking Zebullon Valley and the town of Egg Fork where she was born and raised. Her master’s thesis was on the role and importance of predators in the balance of nature. With the extinction of the red wolf from her area, a replacement is needed and for the first time she has spotted signs that coyotes may have arrived. She desperately hopes that the coyotes will stay and successfully raise families on her mountain. Young Eddie Bondo, a Wyoming rancher out to see the rest of country arrives on reclusive Deanna’s mountain, rifle in hand. From birth Eddie has known that the coyote is the enemy of the rancher and must be hunted down. Eddie and Deanna spend the rest of the book arguing about the proper role of the coyote in the grander scheme of things. Neither can convince the other but Eddie for the first time has met his match in a woman and the two become lovers. Deanna knows Eddie will disappear some day.

Lusa Maluf Landowski, descended from Polish Jews and Palestinians, is an entomologist teaching at the U of Kentucky in Lexington where she meets Cole, a farmer from Egg Fork, sent by local farmers to her workshop on integrated insect management. They fall in love and Lusa moves to Cole’s sixty acre farm where she finds herself immersed in the Widener family and its many daughters. Cole is the youngest and only son and inheritor of the farm that has been in the family for generations. To make ends meet on the struggling farm, Cole drives and truck and soon dies in a road accident. Cole leaves no will but Lusa as his widow inherits the farm.

The Widener family expects Lusa, the city girl, to pack up and leave but she shows little sign of doing so. The farm house is haunted by friendly ghosts, both Cole and his sister Jewell and, strangely, ghosts from her own family. Lusa decides that since both sides of her family lost their farms, the Jews in the holocaust, and the Palestinians in the settlement of Israel, that Cole was sent to her, not to be her husband, but to deliver to her a farm. She just has to figure out a way to keep it. Lusa’s brother-in-laws arrive to inform her that they will be back on the weekend to plant tobacco. The plants don’t arrive and she is on her own. While tobacco remains the safest way to earn a living in the area, Lusa is glad she will not be growing it.

She notices that the calendar for the year has the Christmas-New Year and Easter Ramadan holidays aligned and the valley has many goats no one seems to be minding. She asks her 17 year old nephew who is one of the only relatives she can talk to about the goats. He says there was a school teacher and 4-H adviser, Mr. Walker, now retired at 80, who got everyone into raising goats for their 4_H projects even though no one in the valley eats goat or uses goat milk. Walker seems to have done this simply to irritate his neighbors. As a result almost every farm now has a few goats no one knows what to do with. Lusa does know what to do with goats, places an ad for free goats, contacts a special butcher in New York, and goes into the goat business. Lusa has seen Coyotes on her property but figures the loss of a kid is a small price to pay and much else can go wrong.

For comic relieve, Kingsolver introduces us to two feuding neighbors, Nannie Rawley, a 75 year old spinster and organic gardener who sells produce at the local Amish market and who sells her apples to an organic apple juice plant in Georgia. Her neighbor is retired widower and goat expert Mr. Walker who never met an herbicide or pesticide he doesn’t love. For some years he has been trying to cross an Asian chestnut with the American to get a strain resistant to the blight that killed almost all the region’s chestnut trees in the 1940s. Walker is real curmudgeon constantly fighting with his neighbor over weeds, fallen trees and other problems. Nannie always gets the upper hand. Since this is a small community we learn that Nannie practically raised Deanna after her mother died, and Mr. Walker’s no good son married Cole’s sister Jewell, gave her two children, then vanished. Mr. Walker has nothing to do with his grandchildren.

A good tale of struggling farm life, what life is like in a small community, and man’s ignorance and impacts on ecological balance. Educational and entertaining. For example, this reader learned that the coyote families we see in the preserve in front of our house consist of multiple female adults, not the male and female we assumed were raising their pups. One Alpha female has her litter and her sisters help her raise the pups and ensure their survival even if something should happen to mom. The male remains a loner. No wonder the coyotes are successfully spreading from their natural home in the West throughout the US. The Indians believe the coyote is more cunning than other animals.

The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams, 2009

An enjoyable page turner about modern print journalism (the news room) and CIA black operations (headed by the chair). We have the lightly disguised Washington Post news room with its Watergate famous investigative reporter Woodward (Don Grady), executive editor Adam Sanger, and night editor Stanley Belsen, a raisin passing for white. The three interned together at the paper and we understand Stanley didn’t advance, not because of his color which few even know about, but because he is overly considerate and kind.

A plane or helicopter has just crashed into the Potomac directly across from the Watergate and an anonymous caller from the (Bush) White house has informed someone at the paper that a helicopter with POTUS (President of the United States) on board has gone down. At 2AM Adam and the important editors all converge on the newsroom relegating Stanley to the background. They quickly dismiss the POTUS report but can’t get any more information and are left to run a picture of a fire with the Watergate in the background.

Mary Goodwyn, Air Force Captain, pilot of the F16 Viper, that she has ejected from when the plane stop responding to the controls and heads for the Potomac, awakes in a giant oak. She notices the great view of the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting pool before going into shock. She wakes up later in Walter Reed Hospital. There is no explanation for the plane’s malfunction and she is not charged with pilot error. Soon she is flying again and heading for her second tour of duty in Afghanistan. On her first mission she is directed to a target where she drops a 500 pound pound. Pictures are later released of girls dressed in white who were killed by her bomb. The novel and Mary quickly forget this incident.

The air force admits that it was an f16 that crashed but do not reveal the name or fate of the pilot. The story dies.

We meet the chair, Will Holmes, CIA black ops, former military, current head of MECS Media Exploitation Component Services housed in an unmarked office in Vienna Virginia. His group has originated a technology to remotely take control of a fly by wire modern plane such as a commercial airliner (or an F16) The program is code named “Potomac Pilot”. No more need for the VP (who Will call the Mean Man) to order the shooting down of hijacked commercial airliners. The CIA can just bring any plane down at will once the technology is fully deployed.

A secret document the Sissy (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) report is leaked to the competitive paper who publish a report of surveillance of the President. There is great embarrassment in the news room and heads will roll. Don has had a copy of the Sissy report all along but is saving it for his next book, unknown to Adam. When reports don’t appear, another copy is leaked to Don’s wife Mabel who is a columnist for the paper. She attempts to deliver it to Adam but he is too busy to see her so he puts it into Stanley’s mail slot at home. Only Stanley among all journalists at either paper who seems to have actual read the report where he finds buried the “Potomac Pilot” program.

Stanley has assigned a black reporter, Vera, on the metro police beat to investigate the F16 crash. She finds a 14 year old street prostitute, Baby, who was on Roosevelt Island when the crash occurred and saw the pilot in the tree and her rescuers (dressed in black). Vera finds a sign on the Island saying he park is closed. Implausibly the Letters MECS are on the bottom of the sign. It later transpires that the newly promoted Managing Editor of the paper is a regular customer of Baby and other underage prostitutes. No consequences for the Managing Editor – some tale huh! Now Stanley gives Vera the Sissy report so she can wrap up her story of the “Potomac Pilot” program and the crash. Vera never uncovers Mary. The VP gets the paper to kill the story. The end? Not quite.

Now a side plot in the already thin tale; In a previous incarnation, Will ran spies and his highest value recruit was Persian Nuclear Scientist Hoseyn who supposedly died but recent intelligence reports indicates may be alive. Will conceives a plan right out of the Carter administration to go into Iran snag Hosein and fly him in a stolen commercial airliner to Iraq. He picks Mary as his pilot and they will disguise themselves as Kurdish peasants until the snatch.

The book is filled with overly smart and sometimes incomprehensible language and expressions. It is best on the inner dynamics of the news room where the author worked for several years and where no reporter or editor reads the paper any more. The expose on the almost total absence of investigative reporting, the repression of news, the new focus on writing books as opposed to reporting the news sounds about right. Disappointing in that nothing is ever resolved, or reported, or corrected. Life at the paper blunders on. It is not only the Internet that is killing print journalism.