Nevermore: The Burning, When I Fell From the Sky, A Piece of the World, Night Fall

 

Reported by Garry

 

This week Nevermore leaned heavily into non-fiction books, spanning the 1920s to the late 1990s, with a sprinkling of poetry and fiction stirred into the mix.

 

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline was our first reviewed book. This historical fiction is based on the life of Christina Olson, the inspiration for the iconic Andrew Wyeth painting “Christina’s World,” now widely considered one of the foremost paintings of the mid-20^th century. Christina Olson lived a very austere life on a dilapidated farm in Maine. Disabled due to a degenerative muscular disease, she nevertheless continued to run the family farm with an iron will and unending fortitude. Refusing to use a wheelchair, Christina crawled to get around town. Wyeth met her when she was in her early 50s, and immediately made himself at home on her farmstead, turning two of the upstairs rooms into his painting studio. Kline takes the bones of the historical record and fills out the inner life. Our reader found this to be a very well written and intriguing novel about the subject of one of the most famous American paintings of all time.

 

Night Fall by Nelson DeMille was up next. This also happens to be a fictionalized re-telling of a true story – the crash of TWA flight 800 off the coast of Rhode Island in 1996. DeMille uses the crash and the many coincidences around it as the skeleton of this taut, fast paced thriller in which Elite Anti-terrorist Task Force Agents John Corey and Kate Mayfield search for clues to the crash and discover a cover-up and corruption reaching to the top levels of the FBI. Our reader liked this book and pointed out that it is a great summer read.

 

When I Fell from the Sky: The True Story of One Woman’s Miraculous Survival by Juliane Koepcke is an autobiographical account of surviving a plane crash.17-year-old Juliane was on a flight from Lima to Pulcallpa in Peru when the plane flew directly into a thunderstorm and was ripped apart. Tumbling from the sky into the jungle below, Juliane was the only survivor out of 92 passengers and crew. Injured and alone, she fought her way through the jungle for an astonishing 11 days with no supplies or medical care. Our reader was amazed by the tenacity and ingenuity shown by a 17-year-old fighting against the odds to survive in an environment that would easily kill her had she not kept her wits about her. Juliane used knowledge learned from her scientist parents to survive in the rough jungle terrain. Our reader says that this true-life story is a real page-turner and highly recommends it.

 

Another true story, but one with much more sinister overtones was The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Tim Madigan. On June 1, 1921 a white mob attacked and destroyed the Greenwood division of Tulsa, Oklahoma, then known as Black Wall Street. The official number of dead is 100, but unofficial estimates are as high as 300. The massacre has mostly been erased from the remembered history of the United States, but recently it has been returned to the spotlight with such books as this one by Madigan, as well as a number of investigations. To date, the massacre remains the only time that bombs have been dropped on American citizens on American soil. Our reader was infuriated and saddened by this book, all the more because this part of history was never taught in schools and was hidden for so long. She highly recommends The Burning to anyone who wants to know more about the erased history of the United States.

 

 

Also mentioned:

 

Saint Patrick’s Battalion by James Alexander Thom

The Buses are A Comin’: Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person and Richard Rooker

The Hiding Place by Paula Munier

The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

The Sonnets of Michelangelo Buonarroti by Michelangelo Buonarroti

Reflections in a Clockshop by Nell Maiden

Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World’s First Talking Dog by Christina Hunger

Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going by Neil deGrasse Tyson and James Trefil

Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

Writers:  Their Lives and Works by DK and James Naughtie

Nevermore: Balkans, Bosnia, Obama, Sally Ride, Gorky Park, and More

Reported by Jeanne

Two books from previous meetings were brought up again but by new readers.  Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail by Jonathan Chait was called “marvelous” by our member who said that Chait made a good case that Obama’s presidency will be viewed as a success by historians. 

The second book, Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan was also praised by a new reader.  Kaplan divides the book by country, visiting Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.  While there is some personal perspective—Kaplan worked there as a journalist in the 1980s—most of the book is devoted to the history and culture of the region, giving the origins of some of the modern conflicts whose roots extend back for centuries .  Although the book came out originally in 1993, our reader found it timely and informative.  

The Bosnia List by Kenan Trebincevic is a personal memoir of the Balkans.  At age eleven, Kenan’s life was suddenly turned upside down when the ethnic cleansing began.  His father and brother were sent to a concentration camp, former friends turned on them, and the family was forced to flee the country simply for being Muslim. Some twenty years later, he reluctantly returns toYugoslavia at the behest of his aging father who wants to see his homeland once again.  Kenan wants to reconnect with some people, but he also wants to confront those who turned against his family.  Our reader found it to be a difficult but ultimately hopeful book about the resilience of the human spirit.

Next up was Sally Ride by Lynn Sherr.  This biography of the first American woman astronaut was deemed quite good by our reader, but she wished that there had been a timeline included.  She also felt that the author didn’t do a good job of explaining Ride’s love of physics, but did show how Ride compartmentalized her life.  She kept much of her life private, even as she worked tirelessly to encourage opportunities for girls and women in science. 

A second biography concerned a lesser known individual but is a book our reviewer felt everyone should read.  The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is the story of a brilliant young black man who went from living in a New Jersey ghetto to studying molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale.  His hardworking mother had struggled to secure a better life for her son, enrolling him in private school while his drug-dealer father was incarcerated for murder. Robert was a top student who worked in the dining hall but who supplemented his income by dealing drugs which led to his untimely death at age 30.  The book was written by Jeff Hobbs, Peace’s college roommate who sought to reconcile the two worlds that his friend inhabited. Our reader felt this was a powerful book and deserving of the many awards it earned.

Two novels were up next, championed by different readers.  The first was a new title, A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline, author of the best-selling Orphan Train.  Kline imagines the life of Christina Olson, a handicapped woman who inspired Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christine’s World. Olson suffered from a genetic disease which made mobility difficult. Although she often had to crawl, she was able to run the family farm. The story begins in the 1940s, when Olson views the painting, then moves back and forth in time to tell her story.  The book is emotionally moving and evocative, causing our reader to recommended it highly.

1981’s Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith is set in Moscow during the Soviet era, when detective Arkady Renko finds several corpses in Gorky Park.  The bodies have been disfigured to make identification difficult, but Renko is determined to see justice done. Our reader said it wasn’t profound but it was quite the page turner.