(5) = Best; (4) = Better; (3) = Good; (2) = Fair; (1) = OK
These abstracts serve as reminders to myself; they serve to "jog" my memory on what a book was all about. That's all. This is not a literary critique, not a social commentary, and certainly nothing profound to warrant further discussion.
(5) = means that I really enjoyed this book; (1) = means I finished reading it but wonder if my time could have been better spent elsewhere.
This is actually a third part of a trilogy following the lives of key characters of the Civil War from the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, through the surrender at Appomattox, and beyond. The book follows three men: Robert E. Lee, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Ulysses S. Grant.
After Gettysburg there is a change in the way men see the war, and in the way they fight it. There is little enthusiasm now for the traditional assault, sending dense lines of men across open ground into the massed guns of a heavily fortified enemy. Gettysburg has badly wounded both sides, and though it is clearly a defeat for Lee’s army, neither side is quick to pursue another fight on such a huge scale.
It is the job of the historian to tell us what happened. To provide the dates and places and numbers, all the necessary ingredients of textbooks. It is the job of the storyteller to bring out the thoughts, the words, the souls of these fascinating characters, to tell us why they should be remembered and respected and even enjoyed. While this is a novel, it is not false history. The time line, the events, and the language are as accurate as the author made them. This is a great book. (5)
There are detailed day by day descriptions of the Vincent Chin murder in Detroit, detailed specific descriptions and events of racism experienced by the Hmong, the Japanese, Philipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese - all Asian Americans - everywhere in the United States. It includes the racism in the entertainment industry and the media and belies their liberal hypocrisy. Helen Zia leaves no room for the imagination! The author lays out the underlying conflict in the Civil Rights movement between Asians and African Americans – “Afterall, it is about Blacks and Whites.” “Asians are white…” (Ergo: they do not count)
Growing up in a sheltered environment the author experiences pervasive racism when she leaves home; she becomes part of a social activist movement to protest racism. She quotes Maya Lin, my favorite heroine of that generation – Of her own ethnicity, she wrote in Art in America in September 1991, “If you ask, I would identify myself as Chinese American. If I had to choose one thing over the other, I would choose American. I was not born in China, I was not raised there, and the China my parents knew no longer exists…I don’t have an allegiance to any country but this one, it is my home.” This is an informative book for anyone curious about the experiences of Asian Americans in the United States (5).
“At the end of Valhalla Rising, Dirk Pitt discovers that he had two grown children he had never known about, twenty-three year old fraternal twins born to a woman who he thought had died in an underwater earthquake. Both have inherited his love of the sea: the girl, Summer, a marine biologist; the boy, himself named Dirk, a marine engineer. And now they are about to help their father in the adventure of a lifetime.” (3)
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