Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science is a nonfiction book about the history of taxonomy. It falls into a category that I call “science lite,” written for a nontechnical audience. I really like these kinds of books but good ones are hard to find. I think they must be hard to write. It’s tricky to achieve just the right tone – accessible but not condescending. I will say that this book could have been shorter. Yoon is so enamored of her topic that she repeats herself sometimes, and she tries a bit too hard to make us appreciate the cosmic interconnectedness of it all.

On the other hand, it is kind of cosmically cool. Did you know that civilizations all over the world and throughout history classify animals and plants in similar ways? For example, native tribes people in remote parts of Asia put the same plants into the same categories that the Oxford botany department does, without either group being familiar with the others’ methods or choices. Yoon hypothesizes that humans evolved the ability (and the desire) to classify things very early on in history as a survival skill. After all, it’s important to know what kinds of things you can eat, vs. what might eat you.

Yoon provides delightful sketches of the fathers of taxonomy, including Carl Linnaeus (a big ego) and Charles Darwin (obsessed with barnacles). She follows up with good explanations of the current state of the field, which focuses on analyzing DNA to decide for certain which things are related to which others. I also enjoyed her digressions about folk taxonomy, which describes categories like pets, and her ideas about why children are obsessed with dinosaurs (again, an innate desire to sort and classify).

(Book 28, 2010)

Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido

Within the space of a few weeks several people recommended that I read Barbara Trapido. Because I always do as I’m told (!) I picked her 2003 novel Frankie and Stankie, in part because it was set in 1950’s South Africa, a time period/location combination that was completely new to me. Despite the fact that it’s fiction, it’s impossible not to read this book as a memoir of growing up white under apartheid, and it’s really fascinating.

Frankie and Stankie are childhood nicknames of Dinah and Lisa de Bondt, the daughters of a left-leaning Jewish Durban mathematics professor and his German Christian wife. The book is narrated by Dinah and is in many ways a typical coming-of-age novel. We follow Dinah through childhood, adolescence, and her years at university in Durban. While Dinah’s day-to-day experiences are what you might expect (girlfriends, boys, school, parents, teachers), life under apartheid provides a constant dissonant background noise that continually intrudes into the narrative. Thus as some girls in Dinah’s class develop crushes on rugby players, another girl is “racially reclassified” and disappears overnight from their whites-only school. Dinah’s father refuses to build a fence around their property and he allows black workers from a nearly settlement to cut through their yard as a shortcut to their jobs in the white neighborhood. His actions are viewed by the neighbors as subversive and the family is treated with suspicion; Dinah’s mother fears a visit from the police.

This book offers no great climax or cathartic event. It’s clear that Dinah will eventually leave South Africa (as Barbara Trapido did also), but that’s not really the point. Trapido manages to illustrate the tyranny of South Africa’s oppressive regime not through one large event but through a continuous series of small observations and reflections--death by a thousand cuts rather than through one blow, if you will.

(Book 27, 2010)

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

More nuns! I wasn’t trying to read two books in a row about nuns, but I did. (See Angelology by Danielle Trussoni.) In Sacred Hearts the sisters can’t summon angels, but they do have power, in their own limited (but more realistic) way.

In Renaissance Italy dowry inflation caused trouble for aristocratic women. Grooms’ families demanded dowries that were so large, most families could only afford to finance one daughter’s marriage. While one girl (usually the oldest, but not always) could marry, her sisters were out of luck, and most of these girls ended up in convents, as there was no place for them within their own families once their parents died. I read one statistic that said that nearly 50% of women in Renaissance Italy were nuns.

Sacred Hearts is set within this milieu. As you can imagine, many of the women who ended up in convents were there under duress, or even against their will. Their interest in God and service was minimal. Lucky ones lived in convents where the rules were lax, and books, music, and frequent visits from friends and family made their days bearable. Others found some solace in meaningful work in the community of sisters. In Sacred Hearts this is the case of Suora Zuana, who acts as her convent’s apothecary, mixing medicines from plants and healing the sick. Her friend, the convent’s Mother Superior has also found her niche. Running a convent is a complex task requiring diplomacy, financial acumen, and political sophistication. Together these two women must deal with the case of the rebellious novice Seraphina, a 16-year-old whose father has banished her to the convent after her indiscretions with her handsome music teacher. Zuana and the Mother Superior (whose name escapes me, is it Benedicta?) must use creativity, common sense, and compassion to resolve this issue.

I liked this peek into a community of women who must make the best of their lot in life. Sarah Dunant writes good historical fiction that is neither weighed down with too much detail nor too anachronistic. It would have been easy to make this story a crusade against the oppression and patriarchy of the church and all that; Dunant avoids this while still telling a tale of injustice and survival.

(Book 26, 2010)

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

I like books where fantasy and reality intermingle. Where you can pretend that maybe there really is a race of angels (called Nephilim) who live secretly among us, descended from the biblical union of heavenly angels and human women (the “sons of God and the daughters of men”) as described in Genesis. Except wait, maybe not, because these guys are seriously scary and not very nice. For thousands of years the power of the Nephilim has been held in check by the Angelologists, a band of priests, nuns, and scholars who must stay one step ahead of the Nephilim in order to maintain the celestial balance. Now the Nephilim are close to acquiring an artifact that will tip the balance back in their favor. It's up to the Angelologists to thwart the Nephilim, much to our entertainment.

I think any thriller that deals with the Catholic Church can’t help but be compared to The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. While Angelology shares some of that book’s obsession with secret societies and historical mysteries, Angelology is a better book, or at least a better-written book. Some of Trussoni’s plot strands (like Brown’s) can really exercise your disbelief-suspension muscles to the point of exhaustion. But never mind. I loved it. It’s got tons of action and a cast of powerful women: The current leader of the Angelologists is a 70-something designer-clad Frenchwoman who lives in a chic Manhattan apartment and drives a Porsche. Her granddaughter Evangeline, a novice nun, joins her grandmother’s quest to defeat the evil Nephilim, and together they match wits and firepower against them, aided by a formidable group of elderly nuns (srsly!). Yes, you will never look at a wheelchair-bound Sister the same way again, I swear.

This is a fun read, long but not slow moving; as close to a good beach-read as I ever get. I hear it’s been optioned by Hollywood. Look out!

(Book 25, 2010)

Just Shovel them Up

I’ve identified why I haven’t been blogging. See that list over on my sidebar labeled Currently Reading? A more accurate title would be “Currently Reading, OR, Have Finished Reading but Haven’t Yet Blogged About it.” That list (which, at this writing, contains seven books) is causing me stress, and the truth is, when something causes me stress, I avoid it, ostrich-like. Hence, no blogging.

I read Angelology back in April. It’s now the middle of June. While I still remember what the book was about (evil Angels live among us!), and whether or not I liked it (I did!), my impressions are no longer fresh, and I’m afraid that my post won’t be nearly as helpful as I would like it to be.

However, dodging the problem is not a solution (as I tell my children). I must meet it head on. Thus over the next few days I am going to write short posts about each of these books and just get that list cleared out. I apologize in advance if the posts aren’t up to their usual level of crispiness.

The Man from Saigon by Marti Leimbach

I read this for the War Through the Generations blog challenge. Having studiously avoided most Vietnam War literature, I thought I could try one book written by a woman, about a woman. Okay, I tried it. It was good but it sure didn’t make me want to read more about that awful war.

The Man from Saigon is a novel about Susan Gifford, a reporter sent to Vietnam in the mid-1960’s by a women’s magazine to cover the “female angle” of the war. At first Susan spends her time following the nurses around the hospital but she quickly gets drawn into the larger aspects of the conflict and soon she’s going on patrols with the infantry, riding around in helicopters, and eventually being captured by a rogue band of Vietnamese soldiers. And who is the man from Saigon? He’s called Son, an enigmatic Vietnamese man who works as Susan’s photographer, translator, and guide, who is captured along with her, and who may or may not be working for the North Vietnamese. Susan and Son endure a harrowing march through the jungle before they are eventually rescued. The story is told in a combination of bloody realism and dreamlike flashbacks. Leimbach is a good writer and if you like this kind of thing, it’s an excellent book, complete with a gripping plot, interesting characters and lots of suspense. It just wasn’t for me.

I kept asking myself “why can I read so many books about World War II and can barely cope with the stress of this one Vietnam book?” I realized that much of what I read about World War II falls into the category of “home front” or “civilian” literature: stories (fiction and nonfiction) about regular people (not soldiers) whose lives were disrupted by the war, books about the resistance, books about the persecuted. Are there “home front” Vietnam books? The few that I’ve read keep the war at such arm’s length that they are almost not about the war at all but rather about the people who are decidedly NOT in the war. I’m thinking of In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason as one example. I have yet to find the Vietnam equivalent of a book like The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. Maybe it would have to be written in Vietnamese.

(Book 24, 2010)