Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory – Claudio Saunt – 97800393541564 – paperback – W.W. Norton – 416 pages – $26.95 – February 23, 2021 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This is a book that should be required reading for all Americans. Even those of us who think we know the story of the Trail of Tears and other important efforts by our white antecedents to eliminate Indians from the eastern United States will learn from the incredibly well researched and carefully documented story told by a brilliant historian.

Unworthy Republic documents the reprehensible story of the “Indian Removal” of the 1830s, which resulted in the forced migration of Native Americans whose ancestral territories include what is now North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and to a lesser extent Ohio and western New York state.

On May 28, 1830, the United States Congress authorized the forced expulsion of indigenous people then living in the east to a new Indian territory west of the Mississippi, under the false notion that they would be free to live their lives away from white settlers and farmers then pouring into their unceded lands.

The US government then set out to forcibly move at least 80,000 Native Americans from their homelands west, usually on foot, and always at their own expense. It was a disastrous undertaking that was shot through with fraud and a racist disregard for the health and well being of the Indians by the white citizenry and politicians who wanted to steal their land, as well as by the military that was used to administer and enforce the effort.

As Saunt exhaustively documents, fraud, intimidation, murder and theft were the common tools of the day. Rich planters and politicians created a fictional hypocritical story line to justify their greed and theft. In the course of the removals, many thousands of Native Americans were killed, many more suffered horribly, and almost all lost their lands and what few possessions they had at the time. In the end, the “removal” can be seen for what it was, an unofficial US policy of extermination constructed to benefit southern slave owning planters with the active participation and support of greedy financial speculators, mostly from New York.

In this book, Saunt makes three related core arguments: “The state-administered mass expulsion of indigenous people was unprecedented, it was a turning point for indigenous peoples and for the United States, and it was far from inevitable.”

It is impossible to read this book and to not be angered, even now that we are almost two hundred years removed from this decade of horror. The actual events that underpin the history ofd the United States must be reconciled with the manufactured myths that we use to tell our own stories to ourselves. It is not a matter only of white guilt (though there is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with guilt, if it can be harnessed to positive ends) nor is an intellectual hand wringing a useful response to learning the hard lessons of our history. What we can take from these stories is an understanding of how to be better at living our ideals, and transforming what we have been to something different, that gives voice to the actual people whose land we live on today. The acknowledgment of indigenous people can not be simply gestural. A book like Unworthy Republic must draw us closer to action – as Buddhists often point out – no one is free until all are free. The American correlation is that no one can live comfortably with the land until all of us do. Our history is with us still.

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize
Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2020

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things; Black, White, and Indian; and West of the Revolution. He lives in Athens, Georgia. It was an honor for me to have the opportunity to speak with Claudio about this important and powerful book.

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern

The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics – Sydney Ladensohn Stern- 9781617032677 – University Press of Mississippi – 480 pages – 88 b&w illustrations – October 2019 – Hardcover – $35 – ebook version available at lower prices

There are any number of characters and influencers in the history of modern American film-making, but among the many greats who contributed to its evolution into the dominant form of our popular culture, the Mankiewicz brothers stand out. Between them, they played critical roles in an incredible array of films that comprise our film canon today. Herman (1897–1953) and Joe (1909–1993) either wrote, produced, or directed (sometimes both or all) more than 150 films, from late era silents to almost modern era big budget productions.

Herman is credited with writing the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles (though the amount of work done by each of them has long been disputed) and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe won four Oscars altogether, including two for writing and directing All About Eve, which also was awarded Best Picture in 1950.

Both the older Herman and the much younger Joe started as writers and then became successful as producers and in Joe’s case as a director as well. They came to Hollywood as upwardly mobile children of immigrants, brilliant intellectually and wildly witty, and feeling extremely ambiguous throughout their careers about the value and importance of their work in film – concerned it seems, to not be recognized as serious artists, as their novelist and playwright friends had been. The conflict between art and popular culture defined their lives and caused them each great suffering.

Herman was an early member of the renowned Algonquin Round Table group of wits, and in his unhappiness and self destructiveness, frequently lost all his money gambling. He alienated all the major film studios, and was dead by the age of 55. At the same time that Herman was ruining his career, Joe found significant success as writer, producer, and director, although he was almost addicted to deeply felt romances with the stars he worked with, including Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford, causing terrible suffering to his wife and family.

Biographer Sydney Ladensohn Stern spent ten years in researching and writing this comprehensive portrait of twentieth century American film through the lens of two of its most important and compelling figures. She’s written a thorough and highly readable narrative that gives us a chance to understand the complexities of her characters, and for anyone with an interest in modern film history, this book will be irresistible. The Mankiewicz brothers are among the titans upon which the movie business was built – their writing helped to define the language we see now as emblematic of an entire era in American history. This was a very fun book for me to read and I very much enjoyed talking to Sydney about her book. I think you will enjoy hearing our conversation and you should read this book (now available as an audiobook too).

“one of the best of the recent biographies of screenwriters … One thing I love about her book are the footnotes that trace the lineage of some of the great Mank stories (“The white wine came up with the fish” and “Imagine that, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass”…) ” –Tom Stempel

Sydney Ladensohn Stern worked as a reporter for Fortune and Money magazines and as an editor and award-winning columnist for the Scarsdale Inquirer before she started freelance writing. Her column, “Suburban Exposure,” covered politics and contemporary culture as well as her family and community, but she discontinued it after her sons left home and stopped providing her with material. She has freelanced for numerous publications including the New York Times. Her first biography is Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique.

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas: Jeffrey Ostler

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas – Jeffrey Ostler – 9780300255362 – Yale University Press – Paperback – 544 pages – September 22, 2020 – $25 – ebook versions available at lower prices

“A landmark book essential to understanding American history, Surviving Genocide is an act of courage. Ostler’s brilliant concept of reconstructing ‘an Indigenous consciousness of genocide’ is significant for its insight into how American Indians understood, discussed, and resisted genocidal threats to their families, communities, and nations. His modern vocabulary of ‘atrocities’ and ‘killing fields’ is not for political effect but appropriate to the brutal reality of Indian policy in American history.”—Brenda Child, Northrop Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota

Even though many of us feel we are familiar with the story of the “settling” of America by Europeans and the dispossession of indigenous people, reading Jeffrey Ostler’s book, part one of a major two-volume history, will educate every single one of us to a better understanding of the full scope of the takeover of a continent by invading Europeans. Conquest and genocide are terms we seem unable to apply to our own history, preferring still a more sanitized version of the centuries long overwhelming of the people who lived here before Europeans arrived in force.

Ostler has spent years of research documenting the governmentally sanctioned use of force to remove or kill the indigenous people who were inconveniently in the way of the relentless expansion of the American republic. In this book he documents the losses from the violence – massacres, destruction of habitat and lifeways, diseases and cultural upheaval suffered sequentially by native peoples for hundreds of years as first colonial settlers and then Americans flooded the continent. This volume covers the story of the eastern United States from the 1750s to the beginning of the Civil War that set the stage for the post-Civil War expansion that is perhaps the better known narrative – buffalo, horses, trains, Crazy Horse and the Lakota being so much a part of popular culture imagery. As Ostler shows, the way this played out was not “inevitable” and Manifest Destiny was neither. The indigenous people were outnumbered, but often not out maneuvered or outwitted, and their ability to survive the nightmares of dispossession and attempted genocide is heroic.

As Americans, it is sometimes difficult to look at our own history with honesty. It is often said that the “original sin” of America is slavery, but I think we must grapple with the actuality that there are two essentially economic-based social and cultural wounds at the heart of the American project. First, there is the forced dispossession of the people who were on the land itself, and second, the forced migration and enslavement of Africans for the benefit of white Americans and their economic development. We must learn as much as we can about the history of the last five hundred years in North America in an unromanticized, clear-eyed effort to fully comprehend what our forebears did in the course of creating the American dream all of us are allowed thereby to enjoy. The truth in all its complexity should serve as counterweight to the false narratives and self-serving images we choose to live by, all created as a form of ongoing social control.

Indigenous people have survived despite the many attempts to extirpate them or to forcibly transform and bend their cultures into the conquerors’ image of what “civilization” looks like. Still, the traumatic effects of conquest need to be recognized, acknowledged and repaired and it would be no small thing to recognize formally that a genocide was in play, with all the social and political results that term carries with it. This book and presumably the subsequent volume in Ostler’s work, should help us move in that direction.

The book is well written, hard to put down and completely engrossing; its authoritative and well-researched approach makes it a powerful document and well worth your time to read.

I’m grateful for Jeffrey Ostler for taking the time to talk to me about this book and for Yale University Press for alerting me to it.

Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon and the author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills and The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

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Even as We Breathe, A Novel: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

Even as We Breathe, A Novel – Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle – 9781950564064 – University Press of Kentucky – Hardcover – 240 pages – September 2020 – $24.95 – ebook versions available for sale at lower prices

This has been a good year to read fiction, and I am really pleased to have discovered this author. She is a fine writer whose storytelling is powerful, yet restrained.

While this novel has some elements of a mystery, it is really a very personal story about family, love and growing up into the world of western North Carolina during World War II. The book’s main character is nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah, who has grown up in the woods of Cherokee land, raised mostly by his grandmother. The novel is set between the upscale Grove Park Inn, an Asheville resort serving as an internment camp for diplomat prisoners of war and their families.

The Inn provides Cherokee men and women with employment off their reservation, and this is Cowney’s first real time away from home. At the core of the story, Cowley is accused of being involved in the disappearance of a diplomat’s daughter and must move back and forth to home as he attempts to understand the basis of the the unfair accusations, and prove his innocence while at the same time wrestling with his newfound love for another young Cherokee, Essie Stamper, and figuring out his complex family history.

There is alot going on in this subtle and quietly told novel! And a number of surprises are in store for the reader that bring the story to a remarkable and rewarding close.

Even As We Breathe is filled with details and moments that identify the Cherokee tribe and its homeland. The story gives Annette the opportunity to express the meanings of the Cherokee culture as it has survived into the modern world, sometimes still with the values of its people in conflict with the world of white people.

A secret room in the Grove Park Inn becomes a place where Cowney and Essie can escape the white world and try to imagine their futures independent of outsider influences. For awhile, it can feel to them that they have a place of their own. But racism and prejudice are constantly present, and both Cowney and Essie must face disappointment, and struggle to define their identities as Cherokees within a complicated environment that does not give them the space they truly need to be themselves.

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), graduated from Yale University and has a masters from the College of William and Mary. Her unpublished novel, Going to Water won the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. After serving as Executive Director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette (National Board Certified since 2012) returned to teaching English and Cherokee Studies at Swain County High School. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.

“Debut writer Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle lifts the curtain to show us a South we don’t know, revealed through the struggles of Cowney Sequoyah, a young man growing up within the Cherokee Nation of far Western North Carolina, and yet another surprise setting when he takes a job at Asheville’s fabled Grove Park Inn while it is being used by the US military as a place of internment for Axis prisoners of war during World War II. Even As We Breathe is a wonderful novel, complicated as life itself — thrilling, mysterious, and finally, a revelation!” — Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Marlin

This novel was impossible for me to put down and is one of my favorite books I have read this year. It was a deep pleasure for me to speak with Annette about this book and her writing.

I believe you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Purchase Even as We Breathe from Bookshop.org to support independent bookselling.

Author’s website here.

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American Gospel, A Novel: Lin Enger

American Gospel, A Novel – Lin Enger – 978-1-5179-1054-9 – University of Minnesota Press – Hardcover – 248 pages – October 27, 2020 – $24.95 – ebook versions available for sale at lower prices

I read Lin Enger’s last novel, High Divide, a few years ago and was really taken with his writing and the mythic fictional structures he loves to tell. Storytelling is certainly humanity’s oldest art form. We use stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. Lin seems to breathe storytelling like air. His new novel is very different than his earlier books, at least that it is set more or less in modern times and in northern Minnesota, a place that Lin is completely familiar and comfortable with.

American Gospel begins in 1974 while the rest of the country is fixated on the Watergate scandal, on a north woods Minnesota farm, where Enoch Bywater, a self-styled preacher has had a vision of the Rapture. It is all so real for him, he believes that the end of the world is about to be upon us. His millennial dream is shared by his followers, and then as word spreads about the impending end of the world, his Last Days Ranch attracts a polyglot of dreamers and believers in a completely American quest for emergence.

Enoch’s son, estranged both from his father, and from Minnesota, is an aspiring reporter with his own dreams and ambitions who is attracted back home by the potential for a big story – and the possibility of reconnecting with his high school love who is now a Hollywood star, the biggest thing to ever happen to their small rural town.

And there is still more intrigue involving other characters with their own complex agendas, and the backdrop of the denouement of the Nixon saga.

Lin Enger enjoys telling stories that involve men and their fathers. And he is taken with mythological, almost Jungian figures. In this book we have father figures of all kinds – God, the president, the preacher, and even his son. The psychic wounds of America are on full display and the resonance with our current time is unmistakable.

Enger is a compassionate and perceptive writer whose prose is clean and clear. He plainly loves to shed light on who we are and what we must do in order to live together as humans in a complex, disparate modern world. American Gospel is a quietly brilliant novel that I hope will find a large audience.

Lin Enger grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Moorhead, where he teaches English at Minnesota State University. He’s won many awards for his fiction, which include the novels, The High Divide (2014) and Undiscovered Country (2008). During the 1990s Lin and his brother, the novelist Leif Enger collaborated (as L. L. Enger) on a series of mystery novels for Pocket Books.

I always enjoy speaking with Lin. We had a terrific conversation about this book, and much more for this podcast episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Author’s website is here.

You can buy American Gospel from Bookshop.org.

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The Vanishing Sky (A Novel) by L. Annette Binder

The Vanishing Sky (A Novel) – L. Annette Binder – 9781635574678 – Bloomsbury Publishing – Hardcover – 288 pages – July 21, 2020 – $27.00 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

I did not know what to expect when I started reading The Vanishing Sky. Initially, I was looking forward to reading a book that did not focus on the victims of Nazi Germany, but on Germans themselves. Yet I found that it was much more difficult for me to get into than I anticipated. I am not sure why, but I resisted the book and almost set it aside. I wanted to not like the characters. I wanted to not be sympathetic to them, or their situation, my deep-seated antipathy toward mid-century Germany and its people emerging from my psyche.

The Vanishing Sky is about a family struggling to survive at a time when World War II is coming to an end. The focus of the book is on Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a small town, whose eldest son had joined the army and gone to fight in the east, now coming home a broken man, and whose younger son, is dreamier and unmilitaristic child-like, and struggles with the country’s expectations for a German male. At the same time, Etta’s husband is a difficult, quite traditional German man, a veteran of WWI, but who does not know how to act in his stage of life during wartime.

Binder is a fine writer who builds a slow burning fire from a few tiny sparks and I found myself fully engaged with her characters, and immersed in their lives as I continued reading this book. The story and the characters bring us face to face with uncomfortable realities. These are humans struggling to find their identities in horrible circumstances, where there is nothing approaching normality. And of course, as it is set in Germany in the very final months of World War II, it is not a typical war novel. The book is about the people on the home front and it becomes impossible to not feel an uncomfortable resonance to our own time.

It was truly a pleasure to speak with Annette about this remarkable novel and I will be looking forward to reading her next book.

The Vanishing Sky quietly sneaks up on the reader and makes us confront our understanding of ourselves with carefully wrought details and a surprising story line. It’s a rewarding novel that requires attention from the reader that is fully rewarded in the end.

“The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I’ve never seen it in fiction… Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn’t one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty.” — Larry Zuckerman, Historical Novels Review

Annette Binder was born in Germany and grew up in Colorado. The Vanishing Sky is her first novel, inspired by her family’s experiences in World War II Germany. Her collection of short stories, Rise, received the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Literature. Annette has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in New England.

Author’s website here.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org.

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Why We Revolt: A Patient Revolution for Careful and Kind Care by Victor Montori MD

Why We Revolt: A Patient Revolution for Careful and Kind Care – Victor Montori, MD – 9781893005624 – Mayo Clinic Press – paperback – 192 pages – $14.99 – September 29, 2020 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Victor Montori is an incredibly empathetic and kind clinician, whose commitment to creating a better form of health care than we have today in the United States shines through every page of this short, but extremely powerful book. Dr. Montori is an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is originally from Lima,Peru, where he went to medical school before coming to America for postgraduate study and staying here to practice medicine.

Why We Revolt was originally published as part of the work of his nonprofit organization, The Patient Revolution, and has now been published by the Mayo Clinic, where Dr. Montori is on staff. In the book, he gives us a practitioner’s view of how health care has become corrupted through corporatism and the industrialization of medical care. This conceptual framework resonates for me – modern medicine treats our bodies as products.

Dr. Montori points out that our medical/healthcare system makes doctors and patients accountable for “delivering care” instead of systematically supporting the work of caring. Our emphasis on efficiency requires the health care system to process instead of care for people. And that the emphasis on standardizing diagnosis and treatment alike disables the core caring relationship between doctors and other caregivers and the patient. As Montori puts it, the system “offers care for people like you instead of care for you.”

The book proposes that we build a health care system that is based not on greed but on solidarity – this is the revolutionary idea at the core of the book, one that is incredibly energizing and moving.

Dr. Montori proposes a transformational effort. Why We Revolt was written long before COVID19, of course, but the book clearly predicts how the response to COVID19 would favor the economic interests of medical industrial complex to profit from the pandemic. It also predicted policies that left ill patients away from loved ones, to suffer and die alone. It also predicted how clinicians, patients, and citizens would come together, going beyond personal self-interest and in support of our communities to help and to protect each other, resulting in the production of homemade masks and the nightly celebrations of healthcare professionals in major cities.

Why We Revolt very clearly documents how the American healthcare system has become both exploited and industrialized. The United States lags behind many other countries on patient outcomes, as the emphasis in our system is on profit rather than the core values of patient care. There is no question that change is needed and this book is a valuable stimulus and handbook for the change we can make together before the whole system collapses under the weight of capitalism.

This book should be an inspiration to physicians, policymakers, and of course to all of us who are patients. There is no question that we can find ways to transform our healthcare system to make it compassionate and humane and affordable for all.

Author proceeds from Why We Revolt go directly to Patient Revolution, a non-profit organization founded by Dr. Montori that empowers patients, caregivers, community advocates, and clinicians to rebuild our healthcare system one bit at a time.

Dr. Montori has received the Karis Award, a patient-nominated recognition for his compassionate care. A researcher in the science of patient-centered care, Victor and his colleagues have authored over 580 research articles. A full professor of medicine at only 39 years of age, Montori is one of the most cited clinical researcher in the world.

Victor is a passionate and powerful advocate for his work and for his ideas, and caregiving and kindness are central to him as a human being as well as a doctor. Speaking with him is inspiring, and I hope that through this podcast, you will enjoy this brief opportunity to hear him speak and yourself be inspired to help bring his ideas to fruition.

Buy the book from Bookshop.org to support independent booksellers.

Visit The Patient Revoution website for more information about Dr. Montori’s work.

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Writerscast: David Wilk interviews Roger Angell

A couple years ago, in the process of researching the mostly unknown and under-appreciated New Yorker writer Robert M. Coates, I reached out to Roger Angell, who knew Coates during his many years of writing for and working at The New Yorker (and whose mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, and stepfather, E.B. White, knew Coates well from the earliest days of the magazine in New York and elsewhere). I wanted to learn as much as I could about Coates, and in the process, had the distinct pleasure of talking to one of the greatest writers of our time.

After telling me some interesting first-hand remembrances of Coates, Roger was kind enough to sit or an in-person interview with me in his apartment in New York along with his wife Peggy Moorman. It’s my honor to publish this interview now to celebrate Roger Angell’s 100th birthday. His prodigious, meticulous, and far-ranging memory is a match for his remarkable abilities as a writer.

Roger has always lived in New York City, and spent summers in Brooklin, Maine. He graduated from Pomfret School and Harvard University, served in the Air Force in World War II, first as an instructor in machine guns and power turrets, and then, in the Pacific, as an editor and reporter for the GI magazine Brief.

In 2014 Roger was inducted into the writers’ section of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and then in 2015 he was deservedly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

It is impossible to speak about and with Roger Angell without mentioning his writing about baseball, for which he is best known, including the classic books, The Summer Game and Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, as well as a number of great shorter pieces that appeared first in the The New Yorker.

Angell’s earliest published works of short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in early books, The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970).

Roger first contributed to the The New Yorker in March 1944. He began writing about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, then the editor of The New Yorker sent him to Florida to write about spring training and over the course of several decades produced some of the best baseball books ever written, inspiring countless readers with his brilliant descriptions of baseball games and players, and of course, fans of the game.

In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that “Gone for Good”, Angell’s essay on the career of Steve Blass,”may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport”.

While Angell has been praised fulsomely for his baseball writing, I’d prefer to think of him as simply one of the better literary stylists of our time. Listening to Roger Angell talk about books, writers and his writing life was one of the great pleasures of my own literary life, which I am pleased to share with you here.

Roger turned 100 on September 19, 2020. Happy Birthday Roger! And thank you and Peggy, for giving me the opportunity to speak with one of my literary heroes.

“Angell writes about baseball the way M.F.K. Fisher did about food, as a metaphor for life’s complexities of desire, defeat, utility and beauty.” — Phillip Lopate

This article in The New Yorker by David Remnick – “Roger Angell Turns 100” – is a must-read piece.

7 Must-Read Roger Angell Books: Legendary essays on baseball, reflections on aging, and so much more. Stephen Lovely, The Archive.

List of Roger Angell’s Books

A Day in the Life of Roger Angell
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion
Game Time
Late Innings
Let Me Finish
This Old Man: All in Pieces
Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader
A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone
Season Ticket
Selected Shorts: Baseball, a Celebration of the Short Story
The Summer Game

Roger Angell Day – Celebrating Roger Angell – a 100th birthday celebration was held at the Friend Memorial Public Library in Brooklin, Maine, August 8, 2020                                                   Photo by Bill Ray

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Helen Zuman: Mating in Captivity [A Memoir]

Mating in Captivity: A Memoir – Helen Zuman – 9781631523373 – She Writes Press – paperback – 248 pages – May 8, 2018 – $16.95 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

When I was in my younger hippie Whole Earth Catalog reading period of life, I became intensely interested in communes and alternative social structures, what are now often called “Intentional Communities.” Such utopian constructs have been in existence in America for many years (think about the Shakers in the 19th century) and the dream of a better way of living together than nuclear families persists to this day. I spent a couple summers on a working farm commune in Oregon, and over the years have studied and thought about the challenges and rewards of these communal work and living communities. Given the stresses that modern corporate capitalism places on individuals and families, it makes sense for us to explore different structures, despite the complexities of living together after the common experience of growing up in much narrower family units.

When Helen Zuman graduated from Harvard, searching for a better way to live, she too wanted to learn about and explore alternative intentional communities. After considering a variety of options, and getting a fellowship to study alternative structures, she moved to the North Carolina-based Zendik Farm in 1999. Initially she was unsure of whether it would be the right place for her, but it did not take her long to feel that she belonged. She gave the commune all her money and made the commitment to become a full time, permanent member of what she believed was a meaningful alternative to what the members called “dealthculture” – meaning anyone outside of the group itself. For her, as a inexperienced social being, the Zendik experience, based on sharing work, love, life and sex, made sense. But it turned out that the lived experience of the farm commune was not quite what it seemed, and without realizing it, Helen had become a member of a personal cult run by Arol, the Farm’s matriarch, who manipulated and controlled the members to meet her own needs at the expense of all else. Mating in Captivity is an illuminating and compellingly personal story of how a person can become a member of a cult, so simple, and then how one can escape, so difficult.

It’s ironic that the widespread desire for redefining social structures created by the tensions of modern capitalism has so often led to such fraught and misshapen group think. But Helen’s story is actually an optimistic one, as she was able to come through this experience and to make a life for herself that is, in fact, meaningful and defining outside the narrow structures laid down for us by the imperatives of industrial life.

This is Helen Zuman’s raw and honest confession and exploration of how a cult works and what it takes for an individual to escape one, and become her truer self. Mating in Captivity shows how cults work and both why people join and how they must escape in order to grow into fully functioning beings. I really admired her honesty throughout, and her storytelling is adept and strong. It’s a terrific memoir and one that readers of all kinds will appreciate.

Despite the ways in which things go off the tracks for us all too often, we can and must hope that a meaningful form of communalism is possible. If humans are going to live sustainably on this planet, it is likely a necessary adaptation for us to make.

“Just as the Zendik community, a cult, pulled Helen Zuman in and held her, her account of her time there will pull you in and hold you. Her clear-eyed observations of her fellow idealists—and of herself—are honest, compelling, and sophisticated.”
–Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir

“How timely, how telling this story of an inexperienced young woman who fell prey to a cult because of the abuse to which she’d been subjected by male strangers. Only within the fold, where there were rules protecting the women, did she feel safe enough to explore her sexuality and learn to love. So she surrendered her possessions, her will, her youth. Read Mating in Captivity as a cautionary tale, one I hope will spark a desire to create a better world for our daughters.”
–Leah Lax, author of Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home

Mating in Captivity, which she calls “a cult memoir for smart people” is Helen’s first book. It was named a Kirkus Best Indie Memoir of 2018, was a finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ 2019 Firecracker Award, and was both first runner-up in memoir and a finalist for First Horizon and Grand Prize honors in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Awards. Other work has appeared in The New Farmers Almanac, in Communities and Livelihood magazines, and on the Foundation for Intentional Community’s website. She was born in London and raised in Brooklyn, and with her husband, Helen currently homesteads near the Hudson River in Beacon, New York.

Helen and I had a terrific and broad ranging conversation. I also recommend reading her post, linked above at the Foundation for Intentional Community site.

Author website here.

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Blackwood: A Novel by Michael Farris Smith

Blackwood: A Novel – Michael Farris Smith – 9780316529815 – Little Brown – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 3, 2020 – $27.00 – ebook versions for sale at lower prices

This is pretty much a stunningly written book. I discovered the writing of Michael Farris Smith serendipitously through the southern culture magazine, Garden & Gun. I read a short piece they published called “How a Steadfast Pup Helped an Author Find His Voice,” which is just a fantastic work of personal memoir. That one essay prompted me to learn about Smith and to get a copy of his latest book. Yes, this is how literary discovery works today. There are so many good writers in the world, and we are blessed with a plethora of books to read. But at the same time, how do we find out about them? I had not heard of Michael Farris Smith before. Blackwood is his fifth book, and his work has been well reviewed and praised by writers whose opinions I respect. I was surprised I had never run across his work before, and pleased I did.

I started reading Blackwood without knowing very much about this writer or his past work, or the kinds of stories he tells. There is no doubt that Blackwood can be pretty dark at times – funnily, it reminded me of the great Netflix series, Stranger Things – though much more powerful in the way that only fiction can convey mystery. It can be scary at times, and there are characters in this book who are just terrible, dangerous figures. I don’t think you have to be a southerner or to have lived in the south at all to appreciate this book, or the kinds of people who inhabit the fictional Red Bluff, Mississippi, but it helps, I am sure, as the landscape and the mysteries Smith explores are very much “of the South” and the pain and suffering that resides in its countryside. That suffering is an integral element of the history of the people and the land that is palpable in this novel. The collection of characters is interestingly diverse, combining a bit of Faulkner with a touch of Stephen King, it seems.

I tend to think of this book as a novel of magical realism that taps into a mysterious darkness that inhabits the land itself. It is chthonic – almost literally. There is a part of this novel that is mythic, subliminal, deeply psychic in a wounded way, and the people who live in this strange place have become part of the mystery and part of the land as well. I wondered at times if Smith is telling a story that even he may not fully understand, almost like a Druid priest channeling voices from another reality. The book is very powerful, and that power makes it difficult sometimes to get your bearings, as a reader, you can feel outside the realm of your own experience enough that you must allow Smith’s language to transport you to this other place, and dream alongside and almost within the author’s psyche.

Some of the words used by reviewers come to mind – “brutal,” “supernatural,” “startling,”. All are accurate. I felt the pain of this novel deeply. And yes, it is a southern novel, but that should not ever be considered a limitation. This is just a great novel that happens to be set in the south.

I am really pleased that I discovered Blackwood and the work of this compelling writer, Michael Farris Smith. I’d like to especially thank the magazine Garden & Gun for doing what they do so well — exploring and expounding on modern southern culture. And thanks to Michael Farris Smith for taking the risk to write this difficult book, and for talking to me about it. We had a great conversation together.

“Lurking over Blackwood is a family of itinerant grifters—a version of Faulkner’s Snopes clan, forces of chaos, human kudzu except for the youngest of them, a mysterious boy in whom Colburn sees his young self. As in the best noir, A soul-strangling inevitability hangs over Red Bluff, yet somehow Smith gives his doomed characters a dignity in the face of forces well beyond their control.” Booklist (starred review)

Michael Farris Smith website.

Buy the book at RJ Julia Booksellers.

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