NonF MAKE YOUR BED by Admiral William McRaven (US Navy Retired)

Admiral William H McRaven served 37 years as a Navy Seal, commanded US forces at every level and is currently the Chancellor of the Univ of TX System.  His commencement speech at the Univ of TX in Austin in May of 2014 became an inspirational viral hit.  I'm not a fan of the self-help guru, tell you what to do genre. I am fascinated with the psyche & physical stamina of those who conquer consummate obstacles to achieve a Navy Seal rank.  Navy Seals are the elite in the upper echelons of physical & mental toughness and their little known testing of endurance is intriguing.  I was curious e to read Admiral McRaven auto-bio novella imparting his experiences, insights & motivational hooyahs.  However, I take issue with the military mentality that goes unquestioned at the cost of so many lives and immeasurable pain.  Putting one's life at risk and the taking of lives is not to be abided without a coherent understanding of its purpose.   McRaven's explanation for an insane regiment of physical rigors and humiliation is to separate the wheat from the chaff or as he puts it, to determine "those who can lead."  But the oxymoron of this parable is to lead, you must follow blindly.  There's essential logic to a unit functioning by following orders in combat while at war, but at present, we are entangled in five "undeclared wars" with Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen & Somalia.  Advanced military technology now enables the US to fight "such wars" in a covert less transparent manner and to sustain operations over several years.  Battles are more often being waged without troops physically being engaged.  As for McRaven's inspirational wisdom, I found it pithy. "Stand tall and strong against the odds.  Then life will be what you make of it and you can make it great." I adhere to the Admiral's comment. "SEAL training was a great equalizer.  Nothing mattered but your will to succeed; not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status."  But I give the Admiral demerits for not calling out the merits of a required nat'l commitment to service.  Education and economics are currently the major factors for those who enlist; those with fewer options are more likely to opt for the military.  The Admiral should advocate for our country needing to be physical fit and assigned humanity services.  He boasted of his fearlessness in training on a timed obstacle course.  "I pushed my fears aside, mounted the top of the rope and thrust my body head first down the slide for life."  I denounce a heedless, reckless mentality.  It takes courage to think for one-self, to question authority and proceed with caution.  I will not join the ringing bell of praise t clanking for McRaven's precepts.   I learned early on to make my own bed and to seize control of my own course of actions.  

Jesmyn Ward's "Sing Unburied Sing" Wins 2017 Nat'l Book Award

Jesmyn Ward (b MS 1977) just received her 2nd Nat'l Book Award for her brilliant & haunting novel  "Sing Unburied Sing" (2017).  She received a Nat'l Book Award for "Salvage the Bones" (2011).  Ward uses her home state and pulls from its past history of slavery, its present oppressive racial prejudice & in equality and stumbles towards a dismal future of mass incarceration & racial inequality.  In "Salvage" Ward's heroine is a young black teen without a mother subjected to neglect, abuse and sexual supplication in a futile search for tenderness.  "Sing Unburied Sing" the hero is JoJo a 13 year old boy.  His black mother Leonie & white father Michael are both in high school when she gives birth.  They also have a daughter Kayla who clings to her older brother for protection rejecting her mom.  JoJo gets his moral compass & familial love from his mother's parents Pop & Mam.Mam knew "Leonie never had maternal leanings."  Leonie leaves the raising of JoJo & Kayla to her parents.  Leonie and Michael stay with her folks.  His parents will have nothing to do with niggers & their son's mixed race abominations.   Leonie,  JoJo & Kayla share blood & the paranormal ability to see & converse with the dead; those who've not found solace in passing.  There are 2 ghosts tied to JoJo's family; Leonie's brother Given killed by his white classmates & Richie connected to Pop as a young boy while both were sentenced to the same brutal prison. The novel begins with Leonie's road trip to get Michael who is being released from prison.   Leonie's poor decision making & reckless parenting determines that JoJo & Kayla should come with her.  She brings her friend & co-worker, Misty who shares loving across color lines.  Misty's black boyfriend is in the same prison as Michael.  The disastrous trip includes a stop to at a crack house.  An officer pulls their car over on the return trip.  Leonie swallows a bag of meth to avoid arrest.  JoJo is the one the officer tackles & cuffs before begrudgingly releasing them.  Richie is an uninvited passenger returning with them from the prison.  He haunts JoJo relentlessly for answers from Pop. Ward divides her chapters into the different characters, including the ghosts but JoJo is the novel's reckoning voice.  The barbarities of past lynchings are present in the cover-up killing of Given, the oppression, inequalities & racial hatred that shackle us cutting deep within our psyche tethering our spirits to social demise.   Ward's writing is in league with Angelou, Baldwin, Faulkner and Morrison with her painful prose and stagnating social commentary.  After slavery, "White people couldn't get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying for it." "It ain't natural for a colored man to master dogs.  A colored man doesn't know how to master because it ain't in him to master."   This is a masterful work by Ward well deserving of this year's Nat'l Book Award.  

PERFUME RIVER by Pulitzer Prize Novelist Robert Olen Butler - War, Family and Relationships Run Deep

Robert Olen Butler is a prominent writer of historic & psychological fiction and family dynamics all entrenched in emotional credibility.  Butler (b Amer 1945) writes with clarity & understanding for his characters who tend to put up barriers rather than build bridges to benefit relationships. PERFUME RIVER is Butler's latest forceful & engaging novel is a reconnaissance mission aimed at family dynamics, marital relationships, familial obligations & deterioration.  Butler also addresses philosophical issues of war, religion and relevant social issues such as homelessness & gun laws.  The Quinlan brothers, Robert & Jimmy come to a major crossroad during the Vietnam War.  Their tyrannical father fought in WWII and his glory days are behind him as part of the Greatest Generation.  Robert is older & enlists to earn his father's approval.  Jimmy chose to avoid the "illegal & murderous" war justifying himself & those who said no to their county as heroes.  Robert's never served in battle in Vietnam but bares the scars of having killed a man.  H grapples his act & tries to convince himself he was justified along "Stand your ground laws".  Both he & his wife Darla hold this view in contempt.  Robert never confides to his wife Darla about the Vietnamese woman he loved or the man he killed out of fear for himself.  PERFUME RIVERS brims with gleaming insights and murky reasonings.  The major dilemma Butler battles is the question of how soldiers in battle reconcile their lives apart from their killings as humans who are not, in fact killers.   Butler did serve in Vietnam from 1969-71.  In addition to a Pulitzer he has been given the Vietnam Vet's Literary Award for outstanding contribution to American culture.  Relationships between spouses, parents & siblings remonstrate their breakdowns which may have been salved were it not for the loss of connection in mind and heart buried too much incommunicado.  Small things bind men at war as certainly as they are bound by spilt blood.  Simple acts of kindness and spilling of our innermost secrets with  loved ones are the bonds that cement us to each other and make us stronger.  Every page is laden with abandoned mournful precepts.  PERFUME RIVER catapults the reader to consider preconceived notions from different perspectives.

Poetry by Pulitzer Prize And Nat'l Book Award Winner Galway Kinnell STRONG IS YOUR HOLD

I only recently uncovered the elegiac genius of Galway Kinnell's (b Amer 1927-2014) clever and haunting poems on the subway with MTA's Poetry in Motion.  Kinnell is a national treasure whose poetic largess is a legacy of intuit emotion.  STRONG IS YOUR HOLD was published in 2008.  In this masterpiece collection Kinnell pays tribute to those killed "When the Towers Fell"  "Often we didn't see them, and now, not seeing them we see them."  "Some left hand in had that their fall down the sky might happen more lightly."  Kinnel dedicated STRONG IS to Walt Whitman from whose poetry he titled this collection & quotes within When the Towers... "City of the world!...Proud and passionate city".  He also wrote personal elegies to his loved ones.  Many of the poems reflects on mortality and his legacy. "Sometimes, rising from my desk thick with discarded wretched beginnings the only way I know I'm alive is my toe- and fingernails grow.  Oh what I could have written!  Maybe will have written...Tonight I will work late, then bed, then up, then...then we'll see."  The poem I first noted HIDE-AND-SEEK demonstrates his keen witticism of pitting pride against humility: "Once when we were playing hide-and-seek ant it was time to go home, the rest gave up on the game before it was done and forgot I was still hiding. I remained hidden as a matter of honor until the moon rose." His wry & poignant humor is pervasive. "Do you feel a draft? It could be a lost moment, unconnected with earth, just passing through.  Or did I forget to shut the front door?"  The depths of Kinnell grasp on the human condition expands the bounds of expressing our own emotions wrapped within our souls.  His poem WHY REGRET?  "Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding each other's hand in our sleep?"   My favorite example of conflicting & shifting moods of glee and self-admonitions & purpose came in his poem  IT ALL CAME BACK.  Kinnell writes of the outburst of laughter at his young son's expense when the boy inadvertently sat upon his own birthday cake.  "-he was so muscled and so outraged...And it came to me:  I was one of his keepers.  His birth and the birth of his sister had put me on earth a second time with the duty this time to protect them and to help them to love themselves.  And yet here I was locked in solidarity with a bunch of adults against my own child, heehawing away."  STRONG IS YOUR HOLD is a stirring collection of poems that intermingle warring feelings that give rise to a firm grasp of what unites us and allows us to be remarkable in & of ourselves.  "Everything startles with its beauty when its assigned value has been eradicated."

MANHATTAN BEACH by Pulitzer Winning Author Jennifer Egan Misses the Boat Big Time

MANHATTAN BEACH is a novel whose heroine, Anna, is a young woman living in NY during WWII with the audacity & drive to become the sole female trained as a scuba diver.  Anna is an admirable as a young girl for the care she bestows her severely disabled sister.  Her sense of character & self-assuredness serve to guide her.  She's an impressive maverick with a healthy disregard for norms imposed by society & for authority.   Jennifer Egan (b Amer 1962) received the Pulitzer Prize for A VISIT from the GOON SQUAD in part for her innovative storytelling that disregards timelines or conventions to great effect.  LOOK at Me was a Finalist for the Nat'l Book Award with penetrating character studies.  In MANHATTAN BEACH, Egan's format is conventional storytelling and muddled cardboard character stereotypes.  Unfortunately, Egan's timepiece novel ventures to sea during WWII, waddles through puritanical double standards and gets mixed up in the underworld dealings of criminal hierarchies.  Anna is admirable & ahead of her time.  It's the plotting of the story that is tedious.  Anna is the central character tethered to an odd triangle involving her father Eddie & gangster Dexter Styles. Eddie bails on the family after becoming meshed in a crime syndicate. He  reported to mob boss Dexter.  Anna first encounters Dexter as a young girl at his home along the shores of Manhattan Beach by her father during a brief business dealing.  The novel jumps years at a time (which is not a crime).  Anna has an adulterous affair with Dexter after her father abandons the family & Anna runs into him at one of his nightclubs.  Dexter leaves Anna in a family way.  This relentless scenario is disastrous for unmarried women of the era and proves fatal for him.  {Buzz kill} Dexter is riddled by bullets from a hit most likely ordered by his wealthy upper crust father-in-law who lets others do his dirty work.  I did relish the training Anna received as a scuba diver and the sexism she battled.  Eddy's tale of survival after his war ship is torpedoed is also absorbing.  Issues of racial & ethnic prejudice & woman's oppression drift in and out but without an anchor.  This WWII epic on land & at sea felt adrift and misses the target of a compelling story.  The misfired trajectories were weighed down upon the shore.  MANHATTAN BEACH is a major bore; a disappointing read from a gifted writer.      

The French Novel THE HEART by Maylis de Kerangal - A Lyrical Contemplation of Human Connections

French novelist Maylis de Kerangal (b 1967) received the Grand Prix Lire & Student Choice for Best Novel (2014) for THE HEART.  The nucleus of this exquisite elegy to life and the fibrous interconnections we create circulate around a heart transplant.  Simon is a virile 20 year drawn by the pulse of the tides.  He surfs & revels in the thrill of becoming one with the ocean.  The energy he draws from his passion cresting the waves is boundless.  However, our ties to life are tenuous.  Simon is returning home from an early exhilarating morning of surfing with his friends when the car crashes sending Simon head first through the windshield.  The force of the impact causes a complete loss of brain function.  Simon's heart continues its function of pumping blood throughout the body.  Simon's traumatic head injury proves fatal.  His mother is notified of her son's accident and fears for the worst.  Hastily, she leaves Simon's young sister with a neighbor & phones her ex, Simon's father.  After seeing their son who appears to be in a deep sleep, they're ushered into a private room where a surgeon informs them Simon is in an irreversible coma; mort.  The anguish of his parents is unbearable, emotions raw.  His parents are then pressed (as there is limited time line) if their son would have wanted to donate his heart & organs to enable others to go on living.  Maylis' lyrical writing intwines Simon's life with those lives he impacts going forward: medical staff involved in removing & transplanting his organs and the woman who will be the recipient of the life saving gift of his heart.   The constraints of the novel are driven by the pressure of time that is limited in order to carry out successful transplants.  The reader is rushed along the hospital procedures & guidelines with trajectories flowing into a vast divergence of lives that become joined.  This isn't a technical examination of scientific & medical technologies.  It's a profound understanding of the ephemeral ties we make in life, the constant flux of emotions and our unattainable mortality.  Maylis writing is mournful and poetic.  "What will become of everything that filled that heart, its emotions slowly deposited in stages since the first day, inoculated here & there in a rush of enthusiasm or a fit of rage, its friendships & enmities, its grudges, its vehemence its serious and tender inclinations?"  People's lives are splayed in infinite possibilities but our human essence bonds us all.  THE HEART is a life affirming novel and stirring homage to the adage, wake up & smell the coffee.