A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

At 700 pages, this book has kept me quiet for many weeks now, interspersed with a couple of lighter reading moments. It should be required reading. We’ve all heard people complaining about bias in history books; well this one tries to address that bias by telling the history of America from the point of view of everybody other than rich, white, powerful men. Zinn writes about class warfare in the USA, which began with the enslavement of blacks and the annihilation and displacement of the Indians, and continued with tenant uprisings, slave revolts, abolitionist agitation, the feminist upsurge, the Indian guerilla warfare. ‘After the Civil War,’ he writes, ‘a new coalition of southern and northern elites developed, with southern whites and blacks of the lower classes occupied in racial conflict, native workers and immigrant workers clashing in the North, and the farmers dispersed over a big country, while the system of capitalism consolidated itself in industry and government.’ The book is the story of land grabs and economic favouritism, unconscionable governments (both Democrat or Republican) favouring the wealthy elite who were and still are integral to their rule, their flagrant disregard of laws that were instituted to protect ‘the people’ and their rights and, at the centre of all this, war: imperialist war motivated by the desire for markets, the desire to keep a war economy ticking over, the desire to impress the world with America’s military might. Zinn includes a chapter on hope, where he details the small but determined groups who stand up to the government on behalf of the ‘little’ people, the women, the migrants, the blacks, the Indians, the poor and disabled. But this book was written in the 1990s and revised before the second invasion of Iraq and I seriously wonder how Zinn would view the changes to the American psyche as a result of that.

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

Well he’s done it again. I could not put this book down. It sustained me through an hour’s wait in the doctor’s waiting room where I was so enthralled that I didn’t even hear the fifteen screaming children climbing all over the chairs, and back home to an afternoon on the couch with a handful of Easter chocolates. So what’s so good about Ian McEwan? Well, for starters the moral issues he raises. And in this book they are doozies. The protagonist, Fiona, is a senior judge in the family court and during the course of the novel touches on a couple of cases including religious education choices for the children of separated parents, one of whom is a member of a fundamentalist Jewish sect. Fiona’s judgment on this case is detailed and fascinating. The main story though revolves around a boy, Adam Henry, a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who is underage and refusing a life saving blood transfusion. Fiona becomes involved with him, and her handling of the case changes both his life and hers. Every word counts in these McEwan novels. In this one, it was the introspection, Fiona’s detailed thoughts, captured in a voice so intimate that I felt as if I had a window into her mind. And of course rational and intelligent as she is, there are no easy answers to all the questions that beset Fiona in this novel. The other thing I noticed was the timeframe, small and gem-like, which reminded me of another favourite novel Saturday. There were hints of Enduring Love as well. Altogether this is one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in a while.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My reactions to this story oscillated between sadness and amusement. The story is about a psychologist father who raises a chimpanzee as his daughter, alongside his human daughter of the same age and his older son. When things fall apart, the family falls apart as well but it’s never really spoken about openly within the family. While the consequences sit with these people for the rest of their lives, it’s only when the human sister Rosemary becomes an adult that things become clear. It’s a sad tale because everybody suffers from the father’s earnest, but I believe misguided, quest for understanding. It rang all together too true following the publicity about the fate of Nim, a chimpanzee raised in similar circumstances and about whom there was a film made recently. Heart breaking stuff really. We are thrilled by the humanity of these animals and exploit them in our search for more knowledge and then junk them, despite their recognizably near-human emotions and intellect, when our research purposes are fulfilled. At the same time this story is whacky, filled with extreme and very odd characters undertaking all sorts of crazy adventures. I didn’t really find that part of it believable yet it was in the middle of another story line (the chimp one) that was very close to reality. An odd mix.