Books and Ideas (42)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Best American Essays of the [20th] Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan.

Alice Walker. “Looking for Zora.” 1975. In looking for the place where Zora Neale Hurston was buried in Florida, the author meets a number of people who knew her. Their stories sometimes contradicted each other. But Zora’s personality, her ability to look at life as it is, without tears, and her independent thinking, seem to have separated her from her family, from her husband, and from the majority of other blacks. “She was not a teary sort of person.” And she was a great writer and collector of African-American folklore, who died in poverty.

Adrienne Rich. “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” 1977. Using the technique of Pascal’s Pensées and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, the author jots down random thoughts on the phenomenon of women and lying, which most often occurs in order to survive in a male-dominated world.

Joan Didion. “The White Album.” 1979. The author tells about and reflects on her experiences in 1968, experiences with the Black Panthers and college takeovers. She summarizes by saying that another author had said he put his experiences in writing so he could find meaning in them, but she has put these experiences in writing and still finds no meaning in them. Reflects the mood of the time.

Richard Rodriguez. “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood.” 1980. The author noticed that the sounds, not the words, of his native Spanish communicated intimacy with his family, that the public language, English, did not convey that intimacy. It’s not the words, but the spirit behind the words that conveys intimacy among the family. It’s not the language, per se, that communicates intimacy, but the sounds and the spirit communicated through those sounds that enclosed the world of his family.

Gretel Ehrilich. “The Solace of Open Spaces.” 1981. Living in Wyoming required the author to adjust to the wide open spaces, the laconic conversations and the feeling of being sealed in by isolation. In general, space is a good thing, enabling people to welcome all kinds of ideas, whereas we in the East build obstructions against space by filling up our spaces with the things we can buy.

Annie Dillard. “Total Eclipse.” 1982. Impressions of the world as it looks during a total eclipse of the sun. The world no longer looks ordinary, setting off reflections on that changed world. A dead world. The world when the sun burns out. But then the eclipse is over and people hurry back to the now familiar world of their daily lives.

Cynthia Ozick. “A Drugstore in Winter.” 1982. The author tells how she became a writer—through reading. Beginning with a lending library in her father’s drug store, all kinds of people either gave her or loaned her books and she consumed all of them.

William Manchester. “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All.” 1987. Manchester vividly describes the conditions under which his company of marines fought on Okinawa, the island from which, if there had been no atomic bombs, the invasion of mainland Japan would have been launched. The statistics of loss are staggering, more than Hiroshima, more Americans than at Gettysburg.
He pleads for Americans to remember those who died in war on Memorial Day. And he makes it clear that he has not forgiven the Japanese for what they did to his friends and fellow marines and to him personally. I think this essay should be read aloud at Memorial Day ceremonies. Americans need to understand the realities of war. They need to appreciate the conditions under which those who gave their lives—and those who survived—fought.