extracted text

~Women's Literature Review
t\

A Book Should Be Chosen As Carefully As 9ne's Friends
March 1997

Silences
by Tillie Olsen
Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1965
Fiction/Women's Studies 283 pgs., $12.95
"SILENCES draws on the lives, letters,
diaries, and testimonies of many writers,
and on the author's own life, to examine
the needs and work of creation, and those
circumstances that obstruct or silence it.
Circumstances - which include one's sex,
economic class, color, and the times and
generation into which one is born - crucially determine whether creative capacity
is used and developed or impaired and
lost." (from the back cover)
The premise of Silences is that many
writers and potential writers have been "silenced" because they did not have the
luxury of spending long periods of time
without income and/or did not have the
mental and physical space in which to focus. These factors, which contribute to
writers being "silenced" by circumstance,
are exacerbated for women, who, even today, are expected, at the end of a long day
of work, to carry out domestic chores.
Their time is rarely their own.
In her essay A Room of One's Own,
Virginia Woolf speculates that woman will
never be free (to create) until she has a room
of her own in which to work and the financial means to support that work. This conclusion was reached based on her own experience. Tillie Olsen took a different path
- that of research - to reach much the same
conclusion in Silences. Olsen notes that
the number of women authors who produced work, before the 20th century - including George Elliot, Jane Austin, Emily
Bronte, Louisa Mae Alcott - was small indeed. None of them married or had children. All had servants. The circumstances
that allowed the means to concentrate on
that work, either family money or a husband with wealth, were not available to

most women. Even well into this century,
in the 1940s and 1950s, women writers
were far overshadowed by men. Children
were still very much a burden, not only in
the physical requirements of their care, but
also in terms of the mental energy required
by their caretakers. "More than any other
human relationship, overwhelmingly more,
motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children
need one now. The very fact that these are
real needs, that one feels them as one 's own
(love, not duty); that there is no one else
responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that
becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil." (p.19)
As well, there were a number of writers who
were only able to publish once - not necessarily because their books were not popular, but because they could not afford the
luxury in their lives of producing another
work of art.
Another topic which Olsen delves into
is that of inclusion. Until the 1970s, and
the rise of the Second Wave of feminists,
few women authors were included in college literature courses and they were a select few. (George Eliot and Jane Austin,
for example, were included time after time.)
It appears that life, as experienced by
women, was a topic apparently not worth
noting. " ... appearance in twentieth-century literature courses, required reading
lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the
year's best, ... consideration by critics or
in current reviews - one woman writer for
every twelve men (8 percent women, 92 percent men). Why are so many more women
silenced than men? Why, when women do
write (one out of four or five works published is by a woman), is so little of their
writing known, taught, accorded recognition? " (p. 25) Even among women authors chosen for inclusion, (there is) a preponderance of popular, genre, "fluff"

women writers." (footnote,
pg. 188) This very issue - inclusion of
women writers - is
currently a topic of
hot debate at St. Johns
College, a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, and one of the last bastions of Dead
White Men.
(Continued on page 2)

contents:
Silences con't

2

Advisory Group

2

Natasha Saje Column

3

Book Darts

3

Stones From the River

4

Regeneration
Review
5
Book Group Comments 5
Bebe Moore Campbell

6

Children's Literature

8

What It's Like To Live Now 9
Let's Hear it for the Girls

9

Map of the World
Point
Counterpoint

10

Pull of the Moon

11

J. California Cooper

11

More Reading Weekends

12

Written & Published by
Suzanne Shaw
with help from many supporters
4908 Crowson Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21212
(410) 323-5782

What harm then? Literature written by
men has been portrayed as representing the
universal human experience. In fact, it is
"restrictively male," the female characters
are portrayed as one dimensional and the
attitude of the author is often hostile toward women. In short, male writers cannot know the experience of women. A
writer can only know the world they have
experienced first hand and that experience
is very much determined by one's sex.
Encouragement given to the potential
writer is a related consideration. "How
much it takes to become a writer. Bent,
circumstances, time, development of craft
- but beyond that: how much conviction as
to the importance of what one has to say,
one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store ofbelief in oneself to be able
to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's
own life comprehensions. Difficult for any
male not born into a class that breeds such
confidence. Almost impossible for a girl,
a woman." (p. 27) Elaine Showalter writes
in her pioneering study, Women and the
Literary Curriculum: "Female (students)

are estranged from their own experience
and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity, in part because they do not see
it mirrored and given resonance in literature ... They are expected to identify with
masculine experience, which is presented
as the human one, and have no faith in the
validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in
literature, or accepted in criticism . . . (p.
29)

There is much in this book to convince
the reader that what we have experienced
as literature, until the very recent past, has
been far from a representation of life, but
rather the musings of a privileged few who
had the means, access to free uninterrupted
time and, belief in the importance of their
words. Thus, our "literary tradition" resembles the history we learned as children;
a history which included only those in
power. Only through awareness can this
change. Complaints to newspaper book
sections about the lack of inclusion, demands by college students that their experience is not represented in what they, and
others study are two ways in which to pro-

test. Other means of changing the status
quo include a personal decision to read
books by others who speak to our experience and then books which open up to us
the experience of others who have been
"silenced".
"Tillie Olsen helps those of us condemned to silence ... to find our voices."
Maxine Hong-Kingston, author of The
Woman Warrier
"There are few writers who manage
in their work and in the sharing of their
understanding to actually help us to live,
to work, to create, day by day. Tillie Olsen
is one of those writers for me." Alice
Walker

Tillie Olsen was born in Nebraska in
1912 or 1913. She has taught or been
writer-in-residence at Amherst College,
Stanford University, M.I.T. and Kenyon
College. She is the recipient of five honorary degrees and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in
California.

Meet The Advisory Group
Stephanie Shapiro -Feature writer for The Baltimore Sun and Visiting Journalist at Loyola College. She has two children, Ben
age 8 and Henry age 5. Her husband Tom Waldron also writes for The Baltimore Sun.
Charlotte Taggert - is the librarian at Gilman Middle School. She is in two book groups, one with older women and one with
women in their thirties. She has two grown children.
Debbie Helfeld is a prodigious reader who is in two book groups in the Silver Spring area. Debbie thinks that books written
for older children are some of the best literature there is. She was the first director of Baltimore's Sexual Assault Recovery
Center. She has two children, Daniel, age 9, and Anna age 8.
Linda Schwartz is a Branch Manager at the Enoch Pratt Library - Waverly. She is in a book group in the Charles Village area.
The patrons of Linda's branch successfully stopped their library from being closed an additional day by staging a sit-in.
Lauren Dale - also known as Canada Lauren - is on hiatus in the US for five years. She is in two book groups - one at Park
School and the Feed and Read Bookgroup in the general Northeast Baltimore area. Mother of three children, Sebastian, age 14,
Zoe, age 12 and Ariana age 8. She is a former free-lance photographer and has lived in Africa.
Jan Westervelt is the Branch Manager, Enoch Pratt Library - Northwood branch. She is in a book group in Takoma Park. She
is an aspiring fiddler, birdwatcher and gardner.

The purpose of the advisory group is to assist me with newsletter decision making, help with the production, and make suggestions
for layout, design and contents. At our first meeting in January, the conversation flowed with article ideas, books read and their
relative merit and different ways of looking at a book. Each member has agreed to help using her talents - book reviews, proofreading, contacts, resource access etc. Several members of the Advisory Group have contributed to this issue.

2

•~69 k£1 6iii•1#~• ii
=

Plot and Personification in Narrative
Adapted from J. Hillis Miller, Aristotle, Peter Brooks and Freud

Telling stories is a universal human activity. The stories that we tell reveal our particular values or those of our
culture. This is because desire is the motor that drives narrative, as it does life (see Freud on "unquenchable striving").
The writer desires to tell a story, the reader to learn and derive pleasure from it, while the characters' desires fuel the plot.
Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot: Knopf, 1984) calls characters "desiring machines."
The protagonist is (usually) a main character who desires something, and the antagonist is the force or person that
prevents the protagonist from achieving that desire. For example, Isabel Archer is the protagonist of Henry Jame's
Portrait of a Lady, a young woman who wants to do great things with her life, and her antagonists are variously herself,
her suitors and husband, and the 19th century society that confines women to narrow roles.
Every narrative also contains a "witness" who learns. In the most satisfying stories, that witness is the protagonist.
In other stories only the reader learns. Occasionally protagonist, antagonist, and witness are rolled into one character.
Moreover, complex stories can be read flexibly, by inserting different agents for the three slots. For example, in Faulkner's
"A Rose for Emily" one reading makes Emily the protagonist who wants to marry Homer and Homer her antagonist. But
also: the town is the protagonist who wants to understand and thus discipline Emily, and Emily (and her class privilege)
becomes their antagonist.
'
Another way to think about narrative is through plot. Every story begins with an initial situation and involves some change or
reversal of that situation. The change can be subtle. Susan Minot's story "Lust," at first seems merely a catalog of lovers. However,
because the narrator's attitude alters--in the very process of making the inventory--she herself changes, and her tone at the end of the story
is very different from the beginning: the list has made her question her life.
Sometimes characters think they want one thing, but really want another. The change in the story is an increased understanding of
themselves. Characters can be their own worst enemies, by preventing themselves from achieving their desires. Aristotle in the Poetics
(1452 and 1453) argues that the "change in the hero's fortunes must be not from misery to happiness, but from happiness to misery; and the
cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part."
Asking "who is the protagonist and what does he or she want" gets to the core of the narrative. When stories don't satisfy us, there is
either not enough change or not enough desire, and the story feels flat. And although certain human desires--love, power, self acceptance,
etc.--seem universal, examining the particular way they are blocked in stories reveals history. For example, Maggie Tulliver in George
Eliot's The Mill on the Floss wants love and learning, and Zenia in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride wants power. The differences in
antagonists proclaims changes in the condition of women in the last 150 years.
Natasha Saje, Ph.D, is the author of a collection of poetry, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and many essays. She teaches at
Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Book Darts
Since books are my obsession I have
become the recipient of many interesting
accoutrements designed for the book reader
- cushions to lay on one's lap and hold the
book while reading in bed, calendars with
the birth dates and deaths of famous authors, books about books etc .. This Christmas I received a truly revolutionary, but oh
so simple, item - Book Darts. These are
small (one inch) clasps, with an arrow on

one side which can be easily slipped over
the edge of a page to point to a passage or
sentence one wants to go back to. They
eliminate the need to turn down pages and
underline.

cyclable. For a book group reader they are
the perfect way to easily flip to the page
and passage one wants to quote. When the
book group has discussed the book, remove
them and start marking the next book.

A gimmick? Not if one reads the pagelong description written by the designer.
Book Darts were designed for teachers to
help in marking passages to be read to
classes. They are a way to return to a book
time and time again and easily locate what
one is looking for. Best of all they are re-

Book Darts can be ordered from the
makers at a cost of $9.95 per 100 at
3945 Willow Flat Road, Hood River, Oregon 97301. Buy 100 and share them with
friends. They can also be purchased at
some book stores in sheets of 15.

3

•,J•X•Biii1 •3 f d•41

stones Fram The River • Ursula Hegi

Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw with help from
Debbie Helfeld
Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, 525 pgs., $12.00
Stones from the River is a multi-layered
novel which covers topics as diverse as the
ways in which being different affects one's
life, to the meaning of the human condition
and its potential for good and evil. It views
Hitler's rise to power in Germany through
the lens of a small German town, in which
Trudi Montag, a Zwerg - dwarf - is the
spokesperson. Trudi has a duel role as the
narrator. She outlines the catastrophe of
Nazism as it .unfolds, from the first hints of
prejudice to the point at which she becomes
aware (through defectors hiding in her
house) of the atrocities in the KZ's - known,
after the fact, as concentration camps. She
is also the town's storyteller because she
knows the secrets of many of its inhabitants.
From an early age, Trudi Montag is
aware that her physical difference will
greatly affect the rest of her life. In her early
years she believes that she can change physically by hanging onto door frames and
stretching herself out. While still hoping for
normal growth, she discovered that her
differentness held a power because: "Most
grown-ups didn't look right at Trudi: they
acted as ifshe were invisible and said things
they would never say around other children.
She found if she stayed very quiet they often
kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized . . . The feelings
they tried to hide sprang into their voices,
and she could discern fear, joy, impatience,
rage." (p. 72)
As the assistant to her father in the paylibrary she is in a position to hear many of
the stories while staying in the back shelving books. Over the years she learns to ask
the questions that will elicit secrets from
adults they didn't mean to tell. Her talent
gave her a connection to how others were
different as well. Hegi juxtaposes Trudi's
differences with those of Jewish residents
who are being dismissed and punished by
the Nazis. In both cases, the town residents
don't look beyond Trudi's dwarfism or Frau
Abramowitz's Jewishness to see who the
person really is. Because of her astute powers of observation and her role as storyteller
she is in a unique position to observe the
ways in which the town's Jewish residents
are affected. As an outsider herself, Trudi's
connection to the Jewish residents is amplified.

At first the harm of the Nazis was not
clear, except to a very few. "Who really paid
much attention to the frequent speeches that
were delivered? ... So what if their flags
were in every public building?" (p.194) The
fuhrer was ending unemployment and improving the economy. He was helping the
youth to find a new purpose and direction.
"Frau Weiler saw a fresh enthusiasm in her
son Georg, and his friends. How much damage could the Nazis really do, she wondered.
... She stilled her misgivings by saying, 'At
least let's wait and see what happens.'" (pg.
195)
But Trudi, being an observer, had doubts
from the beginning. At a public speech by
Hitler, "She fought the excitement ofhis gaze
and voice because what he wanted from her
was only too familiar - beliefwithout doubts
... She fought him by reminding herselfwhat
her father had said - that they lived in a
country where believing had taken the place
of knowing.'' (p. 167)
The power of the Third Reich unfolds
from the beginnings as Germans and Jews
are separated into different and distinct
groups. Gradually, the ability of the Jews to
live is taken away. Jewish doctors are no
longer reimbursed for the patients they treat;
Jews are not allowed to buy many food
staples like sugar and coffee.
Those who are not Jewish are chastised
for any wrongdoings against the Partei: Frau
Weiler, a Catholic, is admonished when she
helps a Jewish child who is beaten up by a
gang of Nazi youth; Trudi ends up in temporary confinement when she makes disparaging remarks about being forced to sing the
national anthem of the Third Reich. Any indiscretion which indicates less than full support for the Third Reich will be noticed by
the eyes and ears of the supporters who have
been trained to tattle on their fellow countrymen.
There is also, in this book, the courage
of a people under siege. The ordinariness of
their lives and ties to one another are revealed
in ways which give hope. In spite of great
loss the people of Burgdorf recognize that
those who hid Jews and those who collaborated with the Nazis must live together after
the war is over. They choose to turn a blind
eye to the actions of other town residents.
Pointing out the collaborators would not
benefit anyone in the long run.
Ursula Hegi, having grown up in postwar Germany, reveals with great insight the
ways in which ordinary people act under a
4

force greater than their will
to resist. One is left with the
question, "Would I have ·acted
differently than these ordinary
German citizens? Or, would
the fears and uncertainties
they faced have kept me from speaking out,
from acting out of principle in spite of the
consequences.
The question of the German character
comes into play. Did their temperament feed
into this blind following? A careful reading
of the book shows that this is the case. Interestingly it is Trudi's father who is often
the bearer of these truths: "We Germans have
a history of sacrificing everything for one
strong leader . .. It's our fear of chaos." (p.
112) and: "... / worry about the German
attraction for one strong leader, one father
figure who makes you obey, who is strong
enough to make you obey. . . . Who tells
you: This is the right thing to do. I worry
about the belief that our strength is a military strength.'' (p. 166)
In the narrative itself, Hegi asserts her
belief: " ... the long training in obedience
to elders, government and church made it
difficult even for those who considered the
views of the Nazis dishonorable - to give
voice to their misgivings. And so they kept
hushed, yielding to each new indignity while
they waited for the Nazis and their ideas to
go away." (p. 207)" and: "Most practiced
the silence they were familiar with, a silence
nurtured by fear and complicity that would
grow beyond anything they could imagine. .
.. To justify this silence they tried to find the
good in their government . .. They knew how
not to ask questions ; they had been prepared
for it by the government and church. Over
the years they had forgotten that early urge
to question.'' (p. 239)
One member of the book group felt this
was the best book she had read in the year or
so since joining. Unlike some discussions
in which the same points come up over and
over again, each person had something new
to contribute, because there is so much in
this book which one can discuss. Everyone
agreed - "definitely a great read".
Many thanks to the members of the
Sunday Evening Chocolate Society Book
Group for contributing, through discussion
of the book, to this review. They are: Claudia
Leight, Francie Weeks, Mary Skogland,
Martha Benson, Janice York, Ruth Draper,
Mary Jo Kirschman, Anne Walker, Anne
Blumenberg and Jevne Diaz.

Regeneration - Pat Barker
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
with comments and additions from
Mary Jo Kirschman, Claudia Leight and
Patti Carrington
Plume/Penguin Book, 1991
Fiction, 252 pgs., $10.95

This is the first book review, in a series, parts of which will be taken from the
contributions of book group readers. Regeneration was read, almost simultaneously, by three book groups in the Baltimore area - the Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society (SECS) Book Group, the Original
Northwood Book Group, and the RadnorWinston Book Group. The SECS Book
Group has been together for over five years
with many of the original members still in
the group. Original Northwood is a relatively new book group that is focusing on
books which have won the Booker Prize
and/or books by authors who have won the
Booker Prize.
Regeneration, named by the New York
Times as one of the nine best novels of
1992, is the first of a trilogy about World
War I. The other two books are Eye in the
Door. which won the Guardian Fiction
Prize for 1993, and The Ghost Road. which
won the 1995 Booker Prize. This first book
focuses on a psychiatric hospital in the
North of England where soldiers, who have
become "shell-shocked," are sent to recover. It is, as the back cover states, "a war
saga in which not a shot is fired." Many of
the characters in the novel are based on real
people. The therapies practiced by the doctors were actually used at the time.

,.

The story revolves around Dr. William
Rivers, the psychiatrist, whose job it is to
get to the bottom of the emotional problems of his patients in order to make them
mentally stable enough to leave hospital
and, more importantly, return to the
trenches where their mental collapse began.
The atrocities which have brought Rivers'
clients to Craiglockhart are ones not easy
to forget. As the Washington Post review
asks, "ls he making these men 'well' or
taking them from a healthily honest recognition of the horror their situation, into a
sort of repression and madness which is
necessary for army services. So does regeneration come from remembering or forgetting?" The descriptions of the events
which lead these young men to be excused
from the war indicate only too clearly how
World War I was truly a war fought in the
trenches, man to man, body to body.

The most famous of the clients is
Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero
and noted poet, who enters the hospital after having declared that he will no longer
fight in a war which has reduced the troops
to acts of senseless slaughter. Unlike his
fellow patients, Sassoon is in hospital because his superior officers don't know what
else to do with him. He has sent the officers a letter in which he states that his abandonment is "an act of willful defiance . ..
because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the
power to end it." (p. 3) The letter is written
on behalf of his fellow soldiers. He believes that they have been deceived into
fighting not for the cause of liberation but
rather to prove that England can conquer.
Sassoon's sessions with Rivers are
word plays in which Rivers pretends that
he is trying to get to the bottom of the psychosis that has brought Sassoon there.
Based on the experiences of his other pati en ts. Rivers fully understands that
Sassoon's position may be justified. Rivers, the neurologist, undergoes the major
transformation in the book as he thinks
about issues of repression, masculinity, patriotism, and the work he is doing to patch
up war victims only to send them back to
the front.
Aside from the conflict between
Sassoon and his superiors, Barker also
writes of the conflict between patient and
therapist, class conflict and the conflicting
feelings of wives who are relieved to have
unwanted husbands sent to war - at times
expressing the sentiment that they are not
sure they want them to come back. Barker
presents us with the wartime paradox that
leaders in battle become the nurturers and
care givers of their men, while the women
left at home are free to take on the "male"
roles of breadwinner. One of the gender
issues was the comparison between the
breakdowns men suffer in wartime and the
anxiety disorders women suffer in peacetime. Both, the book explains, develop not
from trauma or horror alone but from prolonged stress and powerlessness.
The interplay between the patients, as
they probe one another's emotional
wounds, is worth the read, aside from the
political issues of the justification for war.
The author has a remarkable ability to create what is essentially a male voice about
the experience of war. It is hard to remember that this book, so entirely about men,
5

was written by a woman.
She captures the ambivalence about the horrors of war
versus the thrill and comradeship of the trenches - a comradeship difficult to find in
civilian life.

BOOK GROUP
COMMENTS
Mary Jo - Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society Book Group "Our book group
had a very lively discussion of Regeneration. One of the issues we focused
on was the responsibilities of individuals whose eyes are opened to evils, such
as the war machine, to go along, to
question, or to protest or to remain in
silence. We asked one another who the
heroes were.if any. There was much
disagreement about this issue.
We saw Rivers' evolution from detached practitioner to questioner and
self-doubter as the central development
of the novel. "
Patti - Original Northwood Book
Group - "Our book group found this
book a "rich read." That is, worthy of
discussion on several levels, with complex, well-drawn characters. I have
never been drawn to works of war fiction, though found Barker's exploration
of the many internal conflicts of her
characters gripping. This occurred
most strikingly with Rivers. as the book
progressed, intensified by his increasing discomfort with the work assigned
to him.
There was homosexual tension
throughout the book. hinted at between
Sassoon and Rivers and more explicitly with the Pryor character. This
dovetailed with Barker's ideas of masculinity, femininity and the roles that
war assigns to our gender. All the more
interesting because this was written by
a woman, a fact that surprised several
members of our group. Barker clearly
has some clinical background - her psychiatric knowledge and historical context were sophisticated. to say the
least." (This book group includes both
a psychiatrist and medical doctor.)

Kil i=t11 ii 4•> ii ti= iI
Bebe Moore Campbell
by Suzanne Shaw

BIOGRAPHY
Bebe Moore Campbell grew up primarily in Philadelphia with her mother and
grandmother. During the summers of her
childhood she lived in the North Carolina
with her father - a paraplegic as a result of
a car accident. She graduated from an all
girls' high school in Philadelphia with honors and went on to receive a B.A. in Education from the University of Pittsburgh.
Recently she received the institution's Distinguished Black Alumna award.

Like Mine is a social commentary, on the
relations between whites and blacks in the
South: a portrait of living in a rural Southern town during the early Civil Rights era
in which the ground was shifting - not fast
enough for the blacks and too fast for the
whites. Brothers and Sisters is the story
of a modern black woman trying to make
it in the corporate world - hoping to crack
the glass ceiling, but not really believing
that it is possible. It explores the tensions
that exist between blacks and whites in the
world of work.

SWEET SUMMER, WITH
AND WITHOUT MY DAD
Ballantine Books, New York, 1989
Autobiography, 272 pgs. $12

news - the dogs, the hoses
and nightsticks against black
flesh - and we seethed . .. In
the schoolyard and the
classroom we saw the sea of
white surrounding us and
we drew in closer. We'd been fooling ourselves. It didn't matter how capable we
were: it was their school, their neighborhood, their country, their planet. . .. Our
bitterness exploded like an overdue time
bomb. (pg. 178)
The thing that sets this book apart from
other books written about growing up female and black is Campbell's expression
of love for her father and the importance of
black men in her life. "... as I look back,
I realize that this is what I know: My father took care ofme. Our separation didn't
stunt me or condemn me to a lesser humanity. His absence never made me a fatherless child. " (p. 271)

After college, Ms. Campbell taught
elementary and middle school for five
years, was married and had a daughter.
Sweet Summer is about Bebe Moore
During this period she began writing. She
Campbell's years growing up in Philadelwas unsuccessful at getting her fiction pubphia during the 1950s and 1960s, in a world
lished but, had better luck working as a free
whose scope and rules are ever changing
lance writer. She published non-fiction
for blacks. It is the story of many black
pieces in Essence, Parents and Glamour
and the now defunct SaV1ry. An article
There are, as well, other men in
for Sa"'-Y, "Successful Women, Angry
her life who encourage her. She is
"If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be
Men" generated such response that
perhaps more tuned into them beremembered as the most important African-American
Ms. Campbell decided to temporarily
cause
of her father's absence. There
novelist ofthis century --except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison
abandon her fiction-writing. "I could
is Pete the man who lives upstairs,
and James Baldwin. She's smart enough to see everynot sell fiction, but I got such a reher Uncles who live in Philly and
thing and courageous enough to write it down." Carolyn
sponse from that article that I thought
much
later, Mr. Logan, whom she
See, The Washington Post Book World.
I would concentrate on it," she said.
babysits for. It is he who provides
The outcome was the book Successthe role model of a father in her late teens children, at that time, whose winters were
ful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the
teaching her to cook fried chicken, giving
spent in the North and summers in the
Two Career Marriage. (Random House,
her advice, watching out for her, being as
South with relatives.
1986)
proud as any parent when she graduates.
The absence of a father in her cousin
Her prose is lyrical and enchanting.
After this book was published
Michael's life and the subsequent results,
She writes in the poetry of spoken black
Campbell quit her teaching job to write.
reiterate the importance of her own father's
language. Some examples follow:
Her second book, Sweet Summer: Growrole and the difference it made in hers.
ing Up With and Without My Dad was pub"My mother viewed speaking impeclished in 1989, followed by Your Blues
"Touching . .. With this candid account
cably proper English as a strategy in the
Ain't Like Mine in 1992 and Brothers and
and loving tribute to a special man,
overall battle for civil rights." (p. 15)
Sisters in 1994. She has already started a
Campbell breaks through all the stereotypes
fifth book, but remains mum on the subabout black family /ife and reveals candidly
"When he tired of reading, he'd lean
ject. She is also a regular commentator for
how her parents - although divorced - susback in his chair and sing. Mr.Abe's readNational Public Radio.
tained her." New York Daily News
ing wasn't so hot, but his singing was better than any television show. The music
eased out ofhis half-parted lips effortlessly.
OVERVIEW
YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE
Mr. Abe moaned hymns so old and handed
MINE
down, so syncopated by human rhythms
Each of Bebe Moore Campbell's books
Ballantine Books, New York 1992
that there was a clink of chains in each
is different, not only in the subject matter,
Fiction, 332 pgs. $12
verse." (p. 55)
but in the way it is approached. Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine is essen"The little band of Negroes at Logan felt
Dad, is an autobiography, full of the love
tially the story of a black youth, Armstrong
something more than puberty. Fierce new
and memories of a happy and secure childTodd, from the North, visiting relatives in
rhythms - barn de barn de barn barn barn! hood, punctuated with the longings for a
the South for the summer and the trouble
were welling up inside us. We were figurfather who is not always there, but an everhe gets into not understanding the local cusing things out. . .. We watched the nightly
present part of her life. Your Blues Ain't
toms with regard to black and white rela6

Literary Works of
tions. He makes the mistake of speaking
French to the wife of the white pool hall
owner, Floyd Cox. Within hours the relatives of the white woman - husband, fatherin-law, and brother-in-law, are on the doorstep of the boy's grandmother looking for
him. Shortly thereafter he is found dead
from a horrific beating. For those who remember Emmet Till, the incident is similar, in the spirit of what happened. Despite
the fact that Floyd Cox is not found guilty
of murder, his life and that of his family
are as inextricably changed as that of
Armstong's family.
Because of action by Armstrong's
mother, Doletha, the story is published in
the newspapers - a story that would have
been hushed by the Southern press. As a
result the spotlight shines brightly on the
way the town is run and on its residents,
who see their behavior in new ways. "The
realization that people all over the country
had witnessed their oppression, encouraged
new dreams. In subtle ways the death of
Armstrong Todd began to change them." (p.
122)
As the story unfolds the thinly disguised superiority the Coxs felt, as whites,
begins to show up their own weaknesses.
Both of the brothers soon face financial
crisis. The town has turned its back on them
for bringing disgrace to the white community. Floyd's life falls apart piece by piece
and in the decay, his wife Lily begins to
question some of her assumptions about
men. Each of their children, Floydjunior
and Doreen, is affected - one of them
drowning in bitterness and hate, the other
growing in strength and character.
Armstrong's parents come together and
for a brief time appear to have risen above
the loss of their son. But, the birth of another son reaps its own destruction in an
overprotective mother who can see no
wrong in him, and a father who gives up
because he has been given no role in his
son's life. Doletha reflects: "She remembered the old days when she andArmstrong
waited for Wydell to come and he never
showed up. More and more often these
memories plagued her and why shouldn't
she remember. Wydell had deserted one
son. Does he think she was fool enough to
trust him with another? (p. 271)
In the end, both sides begin to see the
part they have played in their own destruction and that the way out of their circumstances is strength of character and forgive-

Bebe Moore Campbell

ness. Doreen, the Cox's daughter says,"/
was raised around here and even though I
went to school with them, I always felt I
was different from them, like I was better
than they were ... but Momma, you know
one thing, it's getting to where I just can't
afford thinking like that no more. Them
feelings just ain't practical." (p. 290) In
Chicago, the second son of Doletha and
Wydell is in a great deal of trouble. Doletha
says, "All I ever wanted was for W.T. to be
safe, for white people not to kill him like
they done Armstrong." (p. 313) Her
brother-in-law Lionel replies, "The streets
are killing more black boys than white folks
ever could." (pg. 313)
"Wonderfully imagined .. Campbell's
deeply sympathetic, ecumenical, and unsparingly honest book will not comfort racists in their disease, nor victims in their passivity; but it will open up a new kind of
discourse, in fiction at least, where writers
work harder to create understanding for the
characters they, the authors, are most unlike." Raleigh News and Observer

BROTHERS AND
SISTERS
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 1994
Fiction, 476 pgs., $6.99
I remember in social work school when
Dr. Cyprian Rowe told our Racism class,
composed primarily of white students, that
they should assume every black person they
encounter dislikes and/or mistrusts them.
Those students were dismayed that someone who doesn't even know them could
have an opinion about them, never questioning the preconceived notions they had
about blacks. If any of these students are
still in a quandary about the reason behind
the mistrust reading Brothers and Sisters
should give these students, and other
whites, the insights they may be lacking.
Bebe Moore Campbell has more to say
in the first chapter of this book about race
relations - in particular black and white than many authors say in an entire book.
She does not hold back the emotional content of her characters feelings or the
thoughts running through their heads, even
as the words coming out of their mouths
are those used in the corporate world of
banking.
The setting is the aftermath of the
Rodney King trial, in which four white
police officers are acquitted after beating
7

King,andthesubsequent
eruption of violence in
the black community.
Racial tension is at an all time
high in Los Angeles, a city
which truly reflects the diversity of America.
The drama is played out in the corporate world of banking. Esther, the protagonist, is a black woman who has reached
middle management through hard work.
She is hoping to move up the corporate ladder and solicits the help of a white woman,
Mallory, to do so.
The second character of primary importance is Humphrey Boone - an up-andcoming mover, who has all the qualities the
corporate world wants, and, in the aftermath
of the riots, with the public demanding a
more diversified face in the corporate community, he has the added bonus of being
black. The president of the bank, for which
Esther works, sees in Boone his replacement. After being used as a pawn in the
racial game, Humphrey Boone sees for the
first time, a crack in the glass ceiling and
takes the job as manager of the lending
department, with an enthusiasm he thought
impossible.
Boone replaces Kirk, a white male,
who has worked hard to pull together his
department and is completely thrown off
balance when he is demoted and replaced
by a person he feels is only being hired to
appease tensions in the black community.
While everyone gives the appearance of accepting this change, there is a great deal
going on behind closed doors.
The last several chapters of the book
bring the characters into a riveting climax,
as they play out their roles in the corporate
climate of dog- eat-dog. One's sensibilities are thrown hither and yon as the reader
are forced to sympathize on one page with
one character and on the next page with
their opponent. I found the ending as good
as many mysteries I have read - better than
most. I could not put down the book, despite it being the middle of the night.
Captivating. With wit and grace,
Campbell shows how all our stories -white, black, male, female -- ultimately intertwine." Time

_ _ Children's Literature
The following books have been recommended by more than one reader. I will be publishing write-ups of each of these books
in the next issue, as well as reader comments. IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE - EITHER COMMENTS, OR
YOUR OWN VERSION OF WHAT A BOOK IS ABOUT, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. Books which are underlined have won the
Newberry Prize for Children's Fiction. Those which have an* were listed by adults as one of their favorite books.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS OR SEQUELS
JULIE OF THE WOLVES 1973
MANIAC McGEE 1991
JACOB HAVE I LOVED 1981
ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS 1961
MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH 1972
RACSO AND THE RATS OF NIMH
THE CAY & TIMOTHY OF THE CAY
THE DOOR IN THE WALL
THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS.
BASILE. FRANKWEILER 1968
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
& MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
HARRIET THE SPY
MATILDA
THE GIVER
ROLL OF THUNDER HEAR MY CRY 1977
*BRIDGE TO TERABITHA 1978
A WRINKLE IN TIME 1963
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
HATCHET
***THE SECRET GARDEN
GOODNIGHT MR. TOM
WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS
TUCK EVERLASTING
ARE YOU THERE GOD,
ITS ME MARGARET
WISE CHILD
DIAMOND IN THE WINDOW
CRAZY LADY
THE GREAT AMERICAN ELEPHANT
CHASE
*DEAR NAPOLEAN I KNOW YOU'RE
DEAD,BUT ...
OLD YELLER
SERIES
NANCY DREW
*THE DARK IS RISING
*LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS
REDWALL
**WIZARD OF EARTHSEAS
PRYDIAN CHRONICLES

JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
JERRY SPINELLI
KATHERINE PATTERSON
SCOTT O'DELL
ROBERT C. O'BRIEN
JANE LESLIE CONLY
THEODORE TAYLOR
MARGUERITE DE ANGELI
E. L. KONIGSBURG
JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
LOUISE FITZHUGH
ROALDDAHL
LOIS LOWRY
MILDRED D. TAYLOR
KATHERINE PATTERSON
MADELINE L'ENGLE
MARK TWAIN
GARY PAULSON
FRANCES HODGES BURNETT
MICHELLE MAGO RIAN
WILSON RAWLS
NATALIE BABBIT
JUDY BLUME
MONICA FURLOUGH
JANE LANGTON
JANE LESLIE CONLY
JILLIAN CHASE
ELVIRA WOODRUFF
FRED GIBSON

CAROLYN KEENE
SUSAN COOPER
LAURA INGALLS WILDER
BRIAN JACQUES
URSULA LE GUIN
LLOYD ALEXANDER

QfHER FAVORITE CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF ADULTS
****LITTLE WOMEN
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
LYNNE REED BANKS
THE FARTHEST AWAY MOUNTAIN

If you would like to be sent copies of write ups about these books, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope (55c stamp)
and I will send them to you. In the next issue I will include a list of other recommended books.

8

Boak summaries
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO LIVE
NOW
by Meredith Maran
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
Bantam Books, 1995
Women's Studies/ Sociology
352 pgs., $11.95
What can you say about a book that is
recommended by the owner of Ben and
Jerrys, the President of the Ms. Foundation
for Women and the Editor of Mother Jones
magazine? It is obviously politically correct. But, it is much more than that. It is,
as the reviewers, say "chock-full of laughter . . a recipe for life . . . exposes the
naked truth of our existence . . . down to
earth."
Meredith Maran, herself, is, "the most
irresistible force I have ever had the good
fortune to meet ... wise, resilient, loving
and funny . . . charming and confrontational." (quotes from the back cover).
While you the reader may not be bisexual, or live the hip life-style of the Oakland/Berkeley corridor, or have the pleasure
of working in Smith and Hawken 's art department, there are in this book many of
the truths of life for women in their forties
(and maybe fifties and thirties as well).
There is the issue of where to live so that
our children will not be isolated from the
real world, while at the same time worrying about the dangers in that very same real
world. Maran analyzes what it means to
have long-term female friends who mean
more to one than life itself, but also provide much of the angst in our lives. She
explores the difficulties of putting all of
one's eggs in a basket when the world today is so fluid. She discusses the pain of
raising children in two households with
different rules; the sharing of children between two parents.
She agonizes over how to present Judaism to her sons, as well as the subsequent issue of decidi~g where Jewish religion and culture fit into her own life ..
Maran grew up in a family which did everything it could to get away from being
identified as Jewish which complicates her
feelings and decisions. These issues are

presented in chapters titled: What It's Like
To Love ... To Be Family ... To Stay Alive.
.. To Pursue Happiness Now.
Maran has a breezy, self-reflective,
honest approach to her life. She analyzes
each and every aspect and comes out with
self-revelations that make the reader think
of how it applies to their own lives. For me
the book was worth the read just for the
section on friendship. On the one hand,
"is it just too damn scary nowadays to love
a friend enough to last a lifetime?" (p. 94).
On the other hand, "With each birthday I
am more aware ofhow difficult it is to make
the kind of new friends who will someday
be old friends. As my past becomes the
greater portion of my life it becomes increasingly important to me to have friends
who have lived at least some of it with me."
(p. 95)
Try it, I think you'll like it. The issues
she deals with - breast biopsies, friends
dying of AIDS, the breakup of a marriage,
facing the prospect of growing older etc.
are serious ones, yet, her writing is full of
humor and hope.

LET'S HEAR IT ~OR THE
GIRLS
By Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith
Penguin Books, New York 1997
Education/ Children's Literature,
224 pgs., $10.95
Following their highly acclaimed 500
Great Books by Women: A Readers Guide,
Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith address the need to provide children with role
models who are fearless, fair-minded, funny
- and female. Just in time for Women's History Month in March, LET''S HEAR IT
FOR THE GIRLS: 375 Great Books for
Readers 2-14 reaffirms the author's belief
"in the power of books to give children a
vision of what is possible."
As in their previous book, Smith and
Bauermeister recommend a rich and wideranging selection of books that take us
around the globe and across history. They
introduce girls and women, both fictional

9

and real, who are strong
and resourceful, whether
they are outwardly tough or
quietly brave, ordinary or extraordinary. Here are the
best-loved females of literature, from Eliose and Miss Rumphius
to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harriet the Spy;
and accomplished women such as Jane
Goodall, Harriet Tubman, Golda Meir, and
Louisa May Alcott. And there are many
new discoveries as well. These are girls
and women who hunt fossils, swim with
sharks, outwit dragons, learn to read, win
the Nobel Peace Prize, make friends. These
are characters, the authors note, who "teach
us that 'greatness' can be defined in many
ways."

I NEED YOUR HELP
• What are your favorite biographies/
memoirs/autobiographies? Would you
be willing to contribute a short writeup either about the book and/or why
you like it so much?
• Suggestions for bedtime reading to
the older child - those over nine or ten
who can read to themselves. Books
that are longer than they might choose
to read alone and/or a little more difficult than they are ready to tackle.
Books that are a pleasure to read out
loud.
• Do you have comments on the books
that have been presented thusfar? What
books has your book group read that
they really liked and/or lead to a great
discussion? I'd Jove to get feedback
on Book Group Books?

Cortstdeft a Qtbt S;ubscfttpttort
noft a Sisteft. bhiend. motheft to the

WOMEN'S
LITERATURE
REVIEW
u4C8Utthda~. CJ'fteat Oft

CJhan~ <]ou noft a speciaQ nauoft

Map of the world - Jane Hamilton
POJNT
by Suzanne Shaw
Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1994
Fiction, $12.00, 390 pgs.
Map of the World has elicited ~any
responses from its readers. As noted m the
first newsletter (November 1996) it can be
said to be both "deeply depressing" and a
book that some "loved." It is true that the
book begins with tragedy and, through a
tumbleweed of events, it continues down a
path of further disasters. In the first chapter it is Alice Goodwin's tum to watch the
two young _daughters of her friend and
neighbor, Theresa, as well as h~r ow?.
While upstairs looking for her bathmg smt,
Lizzie Theresa's two-year-old, wanders out
the mtlocked screen door to begin her swim
in the pond. Alice realizes as soon as she
gets downstairs that Lizzie is missing. She
finds her face down in the pond, no longer
breathing.
For parents of young children, the
death of Lizzie is more than they can bear too close to home. Some cannot continue
from there. But, for those who stick with
the book, there is much to be gained, as the
reader watches Alice's life and sense of
security disintegrate piece by piece. Aside
from the stigma she now faces, as a result
of Lizzie's drowning, what is at the core of
her problems is her "differentness." She
says from the beginning that she has not
made friends in this small rural, turned suburban, community, in which she, and her
husband Howard, are running the last family farm. It is this lack of commu?ity c?nnection that makes her vulnerable m her JOb
as school nurse. She allows her hostility
toward a difficult child to push her beyond
reasonable behavior. Because of this error
in judgment and restraint, Alice once again
finds herself in trouble - this time with the
law, rather than just her conscience.
Jane Hamilton is a terrific writer. She
is eloquent, poetic and truth telling. The
thoughts that are expressed in Alice's narrative are poetic versions of thoughts the
reader could imagine having themselves.
Alice in vulnerable in many of the same
ways we all could be - subject to the whims
of the majority when her feelings and opinions are very much outside the norm. If
this statement seems far from reality, consider the litigious nature of our society and

the vulnerability of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Behavior which may
seem perfectly natural in a supportive environment, may appear sinister when ones'
observers are hostile. Think of the House
Unamerican Activities Committee; imagine being a pacifist in a gun-toting NRAsupporting small town.
You may very well ask, "Why read a
book which is so clearly painful, when there
is so much else to read?" My answer would
be that Map of the World forces one to look
at their own lives, their own vulnerabilities
and examine how they would act and think
under the circumstances. It is so easy to be
judgmental when someone else appears to
be at fault, but what if the same things happened to us? At its best, it brings out the
compassion and empathy of the read~r. It
is also a pleasure to read Jane Hamilton
once you get beyond the grief of the events
described.

ity, the balances and dances be~ween
spouses, and between parents and children.
There is no shortage of meaningful material in this novel, but the power of the writing makes the repeated calamities, which
sweep away the characters, literally too
much to bear. The reader can either close
the book with a sigh of relief and tum gratefully to some mundane, but safe, task or
deliberately distance and detach from the
characters in order to be able to finish the
story.
Neither approach is very satisfactory.
It is a bizarre conundrum for Ms. Hamilton
to write so well that she becomes unreadable.

I am aware of at least three book groups
which have chosen not to read this book
because of comments in the previous newsletter. BUT, my book group, which includes many women with young children,
overall, felt positively about the book.

"Hamilton's chillingly accurate prose
keeps her fine novel buoyant. She is superb in her observation ofthe natura_l world
and in her examination ofpsychological nuance." Washington Post

COUNTERPOINT

"It takes a writer of rare power and
discipline to carry off an achievement like
Map of the World. Hamilton proves here
that she is one of our best." Newsweek

by Lauren Dale
It is a rare experience to say of a book,
"This is a very well written book, and I
don't want to read another word." Are the
shortcomings within the book or the reader?
In A Map of the World by Jane
Hamilton, Alice and Howard Goodwin and
their young daughters, Emma and Claire,
live on a dairy farm, the last in their part of
the Midwest, a sanctuary of four hundred
cheap acres. The land around them is being devoured by housing tracts and suburban development. The Goodwins are oddities, outsiders,, vulnerable to the forces of
the surrounding community even before a
disastrous accident occurs.
A Map of the World is a grueling book,
the kind of vivid book that swallows you
up and takes over your emotional state: ~e
difficulty with that degree of persuasion 1s
that the events within the story are grim in
the extreme and deteriorate with every
page. The themes tackled are significa~t:
loss, responsibility, friendship, vulnerabll10

Jane Hamilton's first book, The Book
of Ruth won the Pen/Ernest Hemingway
Foundation Award in 1994 . It is currently
on the paperback best seller lists, because
it was a featured book on Oprah.

NEXT ISSUE
Charms For The Easy Life by Kaye
Gibbons
Author Lee Smith ...
In The Time of Butterflies by Julie
Alvarez ...
Balimore Blues, by Laura Lippman ..
The Liars Club by Mary Karr . . .
Memoirs - An Analysis ...
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice
Munro . .

•~t-:,, fi,-1,a ,a" o, 11

The Pull Of The Moon Review & Book Group comments

by Elizabeth Berg
Reviewed by Mary Ann Dunevant
Fiction, $21.00 (hardback), 224 pgs.

I was too smart to do this, that a
chimpanzee could do what I was
doing - better!" (p. 98)

The Pull of the Moon is a novel composed of letters, written by Nan, a 50 year
old woman, to her husband. whom she has
temporarily left in order to take a trip by
herself. Each letter is followed by an entry
into the turquoise journal that was the inspiration for this trip. It is the expression
of Nan's feelings and memories, as articulated through the letters, that so moved me.
On nearly every other page, I had to pause
while I realized that I, too, had felt exactly
the same as she.

On dying: "Let it be this way:
Let me be eighty-eight. Let me
have just returned from the hairdresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn
chair beside my garden, a largeprint book of poetry in my hands.
Let me hear the whistle of a
cardinal and look up to find him
and feel a sudden flutter in my
chest and then - nothing. And, as
long as I'm asking let me rise up
over my own self, say, "Oh. Ay."
(p. 80)

The discussion was very personal and
thought-provoking. We talked about the invisibility of aging women and how loss of
youth and beauty gives women "one less
card to play" in a society that values youth,
wealth and marital status. This book
brought out more people on a cold February night when snow was forecast than any
other book has for years. Read it. Read it
with your group. Maybe even buy it ...

On motherhood: "Of course
there were some bad days. Remember the time Ruthie was napping on a Saturday afternoon and
I sat in the living room literally
tearing my hair out and saying that

Since the book touches on issues of
aging, marriage and classism, it made for a
great, passionate book group discussion.
Like me, several people unabashedly loved
the book while other despised it. Among

I would welcome other reviews of this
sort - a summary, or review of the book and
book group comments. For the next issue I
would need to receive them by May 23rd the Friday before Memorial Day.

those who didn't like
book, Nan was described as
"spineless and vapid," "narcissistic,", "wasteful," and
"unable to take responsibility for her life."

J. California cooper at The Pratt
Contributed by Charlotte Taggart
Five hundred enthusiastic fans greeted
author J. California Cooper at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel on Saturday, February
22nd. While enjoying a buffet breakfast,
her audience laughed, sighed and voiced
approval at her words of wit and wisdom.
Ms. Cooper is one of America's foremost fiction writers who tells moral tales
and parables rich in insight and wisdom.
In her works she writes of simple people
living complex lives and of complex people
whose actions reveal simple tales of life.
Her two novels are Family and In Search
of Satisfaction. In addition, she has created four collections of short stories: the

winner of the 1989 American Book Award,
Homemade Love; Some Soul to Keep; A
Piece of Mind; and The Matter is Life. She
has been honored as Black Playwright of
the Year (1978), received the James
Baldwin Writing Award (1988) and the Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association (1988). J. California
Cooper now lives in Texas.
According to Ms. Cooper, she was a
solitary child who took delight in observing others. "I've always loved wisdom; I
didn't want to make mistakes." When she
wanted to go out to play her mother would
say that any fool could have fun and that
she should stay in the house and learn something.

J. California admonished her listeners
to look at their lives and take control of
them; to build their world and make their
own happiness. Ms. Cooper views the Ten
Commandments as directions for life.
When a young man once remarked that
everything fun was a sin, this author replied
heatedly, "Is lying fun? Is stealing fun? Is
murder f un? Is adultery fun, (pause) after the first few times?"
After a spirited reading of two short stories, Ms. Cooper answered questions from
the audience. In strident tones Ms. Cooper
concluded her presentation by advising her
listeners to do the things they love. This
energetic woman confided that she is currently enjoying both tap dancing and piano
lessons.

Subscription: Three issues annually, plus an additional mailing, for $15
Name _______________ Phone# ________________
Address---------------------------------

Send payment and this farm to: Suzanne Shaw• 4908 Crowson Avenue• Baltimore) MD 21212
11

More Reading weekends:
by April Seitz
(interspersed with
quotes from "The
Bookworm's Weekend
Retreat", by Barbara
Beckwith, US Air
Magazine, March 1994)
In the last issue of this newsletter,
Suzanne introduced the glorious experience
of "reading weekends". I too am a devotee
of this perfect melding of good books, good
food, and good companionship, and it is my
assignment to elaborate on the preferred settings for such a literary escape.
Since the essential focus of the weekend
is to immerse yourself in the worlds of your
favorite books and authors for Jong, uninterrupted blocks of time, comfort is primary.
(The quality of your reading choices are just
as important, but that is a topic for a future
article). Also, as in many fields of endeavor,
remember the importance of: location, location, location! Select a destination that does
not have the typical tourist or activity distractions - you don't want your surroundings
to lure you away from the purpose of your

~

-

The most important consideration for
me, however, is the comfort level of the place
you settle into. Soft, cushy, but supportive
furniture is a must (the more cushiony the
sofa or chair available the better!). Also, make
sure good lighting is present. Movable lamps
with wattage sufficient for reading are a necessity. Bring extra light bulbs with you. Is
the indoor temperature controllable by you?
Lighting, temperature control and comfort are
all things you want to check out before you
commit yourself to staying at a particular
place. If you don't want to bother with cooking, and have the money to eat out all weekend, the proximity of good restaurants conducive to conversation should be considered
as well.
I believe the best times of year for reading weekends are fall and winter. What could
be better than cocooning in front of a fireplace with a juicy novel, your favorite cookies, and a friend interested in hearing all the
good parts?! Spring is a wonderful time,

Women's Literature Review

~
~

retreat. A cabin in Hedgesville, West Virginia, and a bed and breakfast in rural Carroll ,
County, Maryland have both served us well
on past trips.

~

4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21212

though, if you like taking a walk to exercise
your legs and discuss what you've been immersed in.
Whenever, and wherever you go, though,
is really besides the point- the main thing is
just to go!! A bibliophile deserves the utter
joy, every so often, of being able to savor the
beginning, middle, and end of a delicious read
all in one day or weekend. After you 've experienced your first reading weekend, the anticipation of your next one becomes as fun as
the actual event. Suzanne and I have become
so addicted to these twice-yearly escapes
from the real world, that we've begun to plan
the meals, snacks, and the most comfortable
wardrobes needed, as enthusiastically as we
plan the choices of books to bring! Don 't
deny yourself this pleasure!
"Brief spurts of reading between subway stops on our way to work, or
semiconscious moments before falling
asleep, weren't enough to make a dent
in the pile (of books). We were frustrated. It was like being surrounded
by luscious fruit we had no chance to
eat." Barbara Beckwith)

ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON SOME
OF THE BEST FICI'ION BY WOMEN?

THE WOMEN'S
LITERATURE REVIEW*
Is a new publication which reviews books by female authors as well as providing Information
about what book groups are reading, Ideas for improving book group discussions and readers
opinions of popular and less well known books on the market.

EACH ISSUE FEATURES:

*Focus on an Author and Her Work
*Three or Four Book Reviews of Fiction
*One Book Review of Non-Fiction
*Several Book S1 immaries
• information About a Book Group and What They
Have Read
~;::::::::.a *Ways to Improve Book Group Discussions

WHY ONLY BOOKS BY WOMEN?
ONE CAN ONLY DESIRE WHAT ONE KNOWS ABOUT AND BOOKS BY
WOMEN ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE REVIEWED THAN THOSE BY MEN.
CHECK THE WEEKLY BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS OF NATIONAL PAPERS
AND-YOU'LL SEE WHAT I MEAN!

TO SUBSCRIBE:
Write to: Suzanne Shaw
Women's Literature Review
4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Md. 21212
Annual Subscription $15
(Three Issues Plus an Additional Mailing)
For More Information Call:

410-323-5782

"I myselfhave never been_ able tD.find out
precisely whatfeminlsm is:
I only know that people ooJl me afemlnist
wheneuer I express sen.ttments that
dftferent:late me.from a doormat . .. "

Rebecca West



~Women's Literature Review
t\

A Book Should Be Chosen As Carefully As 9ne's Friends
March 1997

Silences
by Tillie Olsen
Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1965
Fiction/Women's Studies 283 pgs., $12.95
"SILENCES draws on the lives, letters,
diaries, and testimonies of many writers,
and on the author's own life, to examine
the needs and work of creation, and those
circumstances that obstruct or silence it.
Circumstances - which include one's sex,
economic class, color, and the times and
generation into which one is born - crucially determine whether creative capacity
is used and developed or impaired and
lost." (from the back cover)
The premise of Silences is that many
writers and potential writers have been "silenced" because they did not have the
luxury of spending long periods of time
without income and/or did not have the
mental and physical space in which to focus. These factors, which contribute to
writers being "silenced" by circumstance,
are exacerbated for women, who, even today, are expected, at the end of a long day
of work, to carry out domestic chores.
Their time is rarely their own.
In her essay A Room of One's Own,
Virginia Woolf speculates that woman will
never be free (to create) until she has a room
of her own in which to work and the financial means to support that work. This conclusion was reached based on her own experience. Tillie Olsen took a different path
- that of research - to reach much the same
conclusion in Silences. Olsen notes that
the number of women authors who produced work, before the 20th century - including George Elliot, Jane Austin, Emily
Bronte, Louisa Mae Alcott - was small indeed. None of them married or had children. All had servants. The circumstances
that allowed the means to concentrate on
that work, either family money or a husband with wealth, were not available to

most women. Even well into this century,
in the 1940s and 1950s, women writers
were far overshadowed by men. Children
were still very much a burden, not only in
the physical requirements of their care, but
also in terms of the mental energy required
by their caretakers. "More than any other
human relationship, overwhelmingly more,
motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children
need one now. The very fact that these are
real needs, that one feels them as one 's own
(love, not duty); that there is no one else
responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that
becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil." (p.19)
As well, there were a number of writers who
were only able to publish once - not necessarily because their books were not popular, but because they could not afford the
luxury in their lives of producing another
work of art.
Another topic which Olsen delves into
is that of inclusion. Until the 1970s, and
the rise of the Second Wave of feminists,
few women authors were included in college literature courses and they were a select few. (George Eliot and Jane Austin,
for example, were included time after time.)
It appears that life, as experienced by
women, was a topic apparently not worth
noting. " ... appearance in twentieth-century literature courses, required reading
lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the
year's best, ... consideration by critics or
in current reviews - one woman writer for
every twelve men (8 percent women, 92 percent men). Why are so many more women
silenced than men? Why, when women do
write (one out of four or five works published is by a woman), is so little of their
writing known, taught, accorded recognition? " (p. 25) Even among women authors chosen for inclusion, (there is) a preponderance of popular, genre, "fluff"

women writers." (footnote,
pg. 188) This very issue - inclusion of
women writers - is
currently a topic of
hot debate at St. Johns
College, a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, and one of the last bastions of Dead
White Men.
(Continued on page 2)

contents:
Silences con't

2

Advisory Group

2

Natasha Saje Column

3

Book Darts

3

Stones From the River

4

Regeneration
Review
5
Book Group Comments 5
Bebe Moore Campbell

6

Children's Literature

8

What It's Like To Live Now 9
Let's Hear it for the Girls

9

Map of the World
Point
Counterpoint

10

Pull of the Moon

11

J. California Cooper

11

More Reading Weekends

12

Written & Published by
Suzanne Shaw
with help from many supporters
4908 Crowson Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21212
(410) 323-5782

What harm then? Literature written by
men has been portrayed as representing the
universal human experience. In fact, it is
"restrictively male," the female characters
are portrayed as one dimensional and the
attitude of the author is often hostile toward women. In short, male writers cannot know the experience of women. A
writer can only know the world they have
experienced first hand and that experience
is very much determined by one's sex.
Encouragement given to the potential
writer is a related consideration. "How
much it takes to become a writer. Bent,
circumstances, time, development of craft
- but beyond that: how much conviction as
to the importance of what one has to say,
one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store ofbelief in oneself to be able
to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's
own life comprehensions. Difficult for any
male not born into a class that breeds such
confidence. Almost impossible for a girl,
a woman." (p. 27) Elaine Showalter writes
in her pioneering study, Women and the
Literary Curriculum: "Female (students)

are estranged from their own experience
and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity, in part because they do not see
it mirrored and given resonance in literature ... They are expected to identify with
masculine experience, which is presented
as the human one, and have no faith in the
validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in
literature, or accepted in criticism . . . (p.
29)

There is much in this book to convince
the reader that what we have experienced
as literature, until the very recent past, has
been far from a representation of life, but
rather the musings of a privileged few who
had the means, access to free uninterrupted
time and, belief in the importance of their
words. Thus, our "literary tradition" resembles the history we learned as children;
a history which included only those in
power. Only through awareness can this
change. Complaints to newspaper book
sections about the lack of inclusion, demands by college students that their experience is not represented in what they, and
others study are two ways in which to pro-

test. Other means of changing the status
quo include a personal decision to read
books by others who speak to our experience and then books which open up to us
the experience of others who have been
"silenced".
"Tillie Olsen helps those of us condemned to silence ... to find our voices."
Maxine Hong-Kingston, author of The
Woman Warrier
"There are few writers who manage
in their work and in the sharing of their
understanding to actually help us to live,
to work, to create, day by day. Tillie Olsen
is one of those writers for me." Alice
Walker

Tillie Olsen was born in Nebraska in
1912 or 1913. She has taught or been
writer-in-residence at Amherst College,
Stanford University, M.I.T. and Kenyon
College. She is the recipient of five honorary degrees and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in
California.

Meet The Advisory Group
Stephanie Shapiro -Feature writer for The Baltimore Sun and Visiting Journalist at Loyola College. She has two children, Ben
age 8 and Henry age 5. Her husband Tom Waldron also writes for The Baltimore Sun.
Charlotte Taggert - is the librarian at Gilman Middle School. She is in two book groups, one with older women and one with
women in their thirties. She has two grown children.
Debbie Helfeld is a prodigious reader who is in two book groups in the Silver Spring area. Debbie thinks that books written
for older children are some of the best literature there is. She was the first director of Baltimore's Sexual Assault Recovery
Center. She has two children, Daniel, age 9, and Anna age 8.
Linda Schwartz is a Branch Manager at the Enoch Pratt Library - Waverly. She is in a book group in the Charles Village area.
The patrons of Linda's branch successfully stopped their library from being closed an additional day by staging a sit-in.
Lauren Dale - also known as Canada Lauren - is on hiatus in the US for five years. She is in two book groups - one at Park
School and the Feed and Read Bookgroup in the general Northeast Baltimore area. Mother of three children, Sebastian, age 14,
Zoe, age 12 and Ariana age 8. She is a former free-lance photographer and has lived in Africa.
Jan Westervelt is the Branch Manager, Enoch Pratt Library - Northwood branch. She is in a book group in Takoma Park. She
is an aspiring fiddler, birdwatcher and gardner.

The purpose of the advisory group is to assist me with newsletter decision making, help with the production, and make suggestions
for layout, design and contents. At our first meeting in January, the conversation flowed with article ideas, books read and their
relative merit and different ways of looking at a book. Each member has agreed to help using her talents - book reviews, proofreading, contacts, resource access etc. Several members of the Advisory Group have contributed to this issue.

2

•~69 k£1 6iii•1#~• ii
=

Plot and Personification in Narrative
Adapted from J. Hillis Miller, Aristotle, Peter Brooks and Freud

Telling stories is a universal human activity. The stories that we tell reveal our particular values or those of our
culture. This is because desire is the motor that drives narrative, as it does life (see Freud on "unquenchable striving").
The writer desires to tell a story, the reader to learn and derive pleasure from it, while the characters' desires fuel the plot.
Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot: Knopf, 1984) calls characters "desiring machines."
The protagonist is (usually) a main character who desires something, and the antagonist is the force or person that
prevents the protagonist from achieving that desire. For example, Isabel Archer is the protagonist of Henry Jame's
Portrait of a Lady, a young woman who wants to do great things with her life, and her antagonists are variously herself,
her suitors and husband, and the 19th century society that confines women to narrow roles.
Every narrative also contains a "witness" who learns. In the most satisfying stories, that witness is the protagonist.
In other stories only the reader learns. Occasionally protagonist, antagonist, and witness are rolled into one character.
Moreover, complex stories can be read flexibly, by inserting different agents for the three slots. For example, in Faulkner's
"A Rose for Emily" one reading makes Emily the protagonist who wants to marry Homer and Homer her antagonist. But
also: the town is the protagonist who wants to understand and thus discipline Emily, and Emily (and her class privilege)
becomes their antagonist.
'
Another way to think about narrative is through plot. Every story begins with an initial situation and involves some change or
reversal of that situation. The change can be subtle. Susan Minot's story "Lust," at first seems merely a catalog of lovers. However,
because the narrator's attitude alters--in the very process of making the inventory--she herself changes, and her tone at the end of the story
is very different from the beginning: the list has made her question her life.
Sometimes characters think they want one thing, but really want another. The change in the story is an increased understanding of
themselves. Characters can be their own worst enemies, by preventing themselves from achieving their desires. Aristotle in the Poetics
(1452 and 1453) argues that the "change in the hero's fortunes must be not from misery to happiness, but from happiness to misery; and the
cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part."
Asking "who is the protagonist and what does he or she want" gets to the core of the narrative. When stories don't satisfy us, there is
either not enough change or not enough desire, and the story feels flat. And although certain human desires--love, power, self acceptance,
etc.--seem universal, examining the particular way they are blocked in stories reveals history. For example, Maggie Tulliver in George
Eliot's The Mill on the Floss wants love and learning, and Zenia in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride wants power. The differences in
antagonists proclaims changes in the condition of women in the last 150 years.
Natasha Saje, Ph.D, is the author of a collection of poetry, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and many essays. She teaches at
Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Book Darts
Since books are my obsession I have
become the recipient of many interesting
accoutrements designed for the book reader
- cushions to lay on one's lap and hold the
book while reading in bed, calendars with
the birth dates and deaths of famous authors, books about books etc .. This Christmas I received a truly revolutionary, but oh
so simple, item - Book Darts. These are
small (one inch) clasps, with an arrow on

one side which can be easily slipped over
the edge of a page to point to a passage or
sentence one wants to go back to. They
eliminate the need to turn down pages and
underline.

cyclable. For a book group reader they are
the perfect way to easily flip to the page
and passage one wants to quote. When the
book group has discussed the book, remove
them and start marking the next book.

A gimmick? Not if one reads the pagelong description written by the designer.
Book Darts were designed for teachers to
help in marking passages to be read to
classes. They are a way to return to a book
time and time again and easily locate what
one is looking for. Best of all they are re-

Book Darts can be ordered from the
makers at a cost of $9.95 per 100 at
3945 Willow Flat Road, Hood River, Oregon 97301. Buy 100 and share them with
friends. They can also be purchased at
some book stores in sheets of 15.

3

•,J•X•Biii1 •3 f d•41

stones Fram The River • Ursula Hegi

Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw with help from
Debbie Helfeld
Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, 525 pgs., $12.00
Stones from the River is a multi-layered
novel which covers topics as diverse as the
ways in which being different affects one's
life, to the meaning of the human condition
and its potential for good and evil. It views
Hitler's rise to power in Germany through
the lens of a small German town, in which
Trudi Montag, a Zwerg - dwarf - is the
spokesperson. Trudi has a duel role as the
narrator. She outlines the catastrophe of
Nazism as it .unfolds, from the first hints of
prejudice to the point at which she becomes
aware (through defectors hiding in her
house) of the atrocities in the KZ's - known,
after the fact, as concentration camps. She
is also the town's storyteller because she
knows the secrets of many of its inhabitants.
From an early age, Trudi Montag is
aware that her physical difference will
greatly affect the rest of her life. In her early
years she believes that she can change physically by hanging onto door frames and
stretching herself out. While still hoping for
normal growth, she discovered that her
differentness held a power because: "Most
grown-ups didn't look right at Trudi: they
acted as ifshe were invisible and said things
they would never say around other children.
She found if she stayed very quiet they often
kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized . . . The feelings
they tried to hide sprang into their voices,
and she could discern fear, joy, impatience,
rage." (p. 72)
As the assistant to her father in the paylibrary she is in a position to hear many of
the stories while staying in the back shelving books. Over the years she learns to ask
the questions that will elicit secrets from
adults they didn't mean to tell. Her talent
gave her a connection to how others were
different as well. Hegi juxtaposes Trudi's
differences with those of Jewish residents
who are being dismissed and punished by
the Nazis. In both cases, the town residents
don't look beyond Trudi's dwarfism or Frau
Abramowitz's Jewishness to see who the
person really is. Because of her astute powers of observation and her role as storyteller
she is in a unique position to observe the
ways in which the town's Jewish residents
are affected. As an outsider herself, Trudi's
connection to the Jewish residents is amplified.

At first the harm of the Nazis was not
clear, except to a very few. "Who really paid
much attention to the frequent speeches that
were delivered? ... So what if their flags
were in every public building?" (p.194) The
fuhrer was ending unemployment and improving the economy. He was helping the
youth to find a new purpose and direction.
"Frau Weiler saw a fresh enthusiasm in her
son Georg, and his friends. How much damage could the Nazis really do, she wondered.
... She stilled her misgivings by saying, 'At
least let's wait and see what happens.'" (pg.
195)
But Trudi, being an observer, had doubts
from the beginning. At a public speech by
Hitler, "She fought the excitement ofhis gaze
and voice because what he wanted from her
was only too familiar - beliefwithout doubts
... She fought him by reminding herselfwhat
her father had said - that they lived in a
country where believing had taken the place
of knowing.'' (p. 167)
The power of the Third Reich unfolds
from the beginnings as Germans and Jews
are separated into different and distinct
groups. Gradually, the ability of the Jews to
live is taken away. Jewish doctors are no
longer reimbursed for the patients they treat;
Jews are not allowed to buy many food
staples like sugar and coffee.
Those who are not Jewish are chastised
for any wrongdoings against the Partei: Frau
Weiler, a Catholic, is admonished when she
helps a Jewish child who is beaten up by a
gang of Nazi youth; Trudi ends up in temporary confinement when she makes disparaging remarks about being forced to sing the
national anthem of the Third Reich. Any indiscretion which indicates less than full support for the Third Reich will be noticed by
the eyes and ears of the supporters who have
been trained to tattle on their fellow countrymen.
There is also, in this book, the courage
of a people under siege. The ordinariness of
their lives and ties to one another are revealed
in ways which give hope. In spite of great
loss the people of Burgdorf recognize that
those who hid Jews and those who collaborated with the Nazis must live together after
the war is over. They choose to turn a blind
eye to the actions of other town residents.
Pointing out the collaborators would not
benefit anyone in the long run.
Ursula Hegi, having grown up in postwar Germany, reveals with great insight the
ways in which ordinary people act under a
4

force greater than their will
to resist. One is left with the
question, "Would I have ·acted
differently than these ordinary
German citizens? Or, would
the fears and uncertainties
they faced have kept me from speaking out,
from acting out of principle in spite of the
consequences.
The question of the German character
comes into play. Did their temperament feed
into this blind following? A careful reading
of the book shows that this is the case. Interestingly it is Trudi's father who is often
the bearer of these truths: "We Germans have
a history of sacrificing everything for one
strong leader . .. It's our fear of chaos." (p.
112) and: "... / worry about the German
attraction for one strong leader, one father
figure who makes you obey, who is strong
enough to make you obey. . . . Who tells
you: This is the right thing to do. I worry
about the belief that our strength is a military strength.'' (p. 166)
In the narrative itself, Hegi asserts her
belief: " ... the long training in obedience
to elders, government and church made it
difficult even for those who considered the
views of the Nazis dishonorable - to give
voice to their misgivings. And so they kept
hushed, yielding to each new indignity while
they waited for the Nazis and their ideas to
go away." (p. 207)" and: "Most practiced
the silence they were familiar with, a silence
nurtured by fear and complicity that would
grow beyond anything they could imagine. .
.. To justify this silence they tried to find the
good in their government . .. They knew how
not to ask questions ; they had been prepared
for it by the government and church. Over
the years they had forgotten that early urge
to question.'' (p. 239)
One member of the book group felt this
was the best book she had read in the year or
so since joining. Unlike some discussions
in which the same points come up over and
over again, each person had something new
to contribute, because there is so much in
this book which one can discuss. Everyone
agreed - "definitely a great read".
Many thanks to the members of the
Sunday Evening Chocolate Society Book
Group for contributing, through discussion
of the book, to this review. They are: Claudia
Leight, Francie Weeks, Mary Skogland,
Martha Benson, Janice York, Ruth Draper,
Mary Jo Kirschman, Anne Walker, Anne
Blumenberg and Jevne Diaz.

Regeneration - Pat Barker
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
with comments and additions from
Mary Jo Kirschman, Claudia Leight and
Patti Carrington
Plume/Penguin Book, 1991
Fiction, 252 pgs., $10.95

This is the first book review, in a series, parts of which will be taken from the
contributions of book group readers. Regeneration was read, almost simultaneously, by three book groups in the Baltimore area - the Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society (SECS) Book Group, the Original
Northwood Book Group, and the RadnorWinston Book Group. The SECS Book
Group has been together for over five years
with many of the original members still in
the group. Original Northwood is a relatively new book group that is focusing on
books which have won the Booker Prize
and/or books by authors who have won the
Booker Prize.
Regeneration, named by the New York
Times as one of the nine best novels of
1992, is the first of a trilogy about World
War I. The other two books are Eye in the
Door. which won the Guardian Fiction
Prize for 1993, and The Ghost Road. which
won the 1995 Booker Prize. This first book
focuses on a psychiatric hospital in the
North of England where soldiers, who have
become "shell-shocked," are sent to recover. It is, as the back cover states, "a war
saga in which not a shot is fired." Many of
the characters in the novel are based on real
people. The therapies practiced by the doctors were actually used at the time.

,.

The story revolves around Dr. William
Rivers, the psychiatrist, whose job it is to
get to the bottom of the emotional problems of his patients in order to make them
mentally stable enough to leave hospital
and, more importantly, return to the
trenches where their mental collapse began.
The atrocities which have brought Rivers'
clients to Craiglockhart are ones not easy
to forget. As the Washington Post review
asks, "ls he making these men 'well' or
taking them from a healthily honest recognition of the horror their situation, into a
sort of repression and madness which is
necessary for army services. So does regeneration come from remembering or forgetting?" The descriptions of the events
which lead these young men to be excused
from the war indicate only too clearly how
World War I was truly a war fought in the
trenches, man to man, body to body.

The most famous of the clients is
Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero
and noted poet, who enters the hospital after having declared that he will no longer
fight in a war which has reduced the troops
to acts of senseless slaughter. Unlike his
fellow patients, Sassoon is in hospital because his superior officers don't know what
else to do with him. He has sent the officers a letter in which he states that his abandonment is "an act of willful defiance . ..
because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the
power to end it." (p. 3) The letter is written
on behalf of his fellow soldiers. He believes that they have been deceived into
fighting not for the cause of liberation but
rather to prove that England can conquer.
Sassoon's sessions with Rivers are
word plays in which Rivers pretends that
he is trying to get to the bottom of the psychosis that has brought Sassoon there.
Based on the experiences of his other pati en ts. Rivers fully understands that
Sassoon's position may be justified. Rivers, the neurologist, undergoes the major
transformation in the book as he thinks
about issues of repression, masculinity, patriotism, and the work he is doing to patch
up war victims only to send them back to
the front.
Aside from the conflict between
Sassoon and his superiors, Barker also
writes of the conflict between patient and
therapist, class conflict and the conflicting
feelings of wives who are relieved to have
unwanted husbands sent to war - at times
expressing the sentiment that they are not
sure they want them to come back. Barker
presents us with the wartime paradox that
leaders in battle become the nurturers and
care givers of their men, while the women
left at home are free to take on the "male"
roles of breadwinner. One of the gender
issues was the comparison between the
breakdowns men suffer in wartime and the
anxiety disorders women suffer in peacetime. Both, the book explains, develop not
from trauma or horror alone but from prolonged stress and powerlessness.
The interplay between the patients, as
they probe one another's emotional
wounds, is worth the read, aside from the
political issues of the justification for war.
The author has a remarkable ability to create what is essentially a male voice about
the experience of war. It is hard to remember that this book, so entirely about men,
5

was written by a woman.
She captures the ambivalence about the horrors of war
versus the thrill and comradeship of the trenches - a comradeship difficult to find in
civilian life.

BOOK GROUP
COMMENTS
Mary Jo - Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society Book Group "Our book group
had a very lively discussion of Regeneration. One of the issues we focused
on was the responsibilities of individuals whose eyes are opened to evils, such
as the war machine, to go along, to
question, or to protest or to remain in
silence. We asked one another who the
heroes were.if any. There was much
disagreement about this issue.
We saw Rivers' evolution from detached practitioner to questioner and
self-doubter as the central development
of the novel. "
Patti - Original Northwood Book
Group - "Our book group found this
book a "rich read." That is, worthy of
discussion on several levels, with complex, well-drawn characters. I have
never been drawn to works of war fiction, though found Barker's exploration
of the many internal conflicts of her
characters gripping. This occurred
most strikingly with Rivers. as the book
progressed, intensified by his increasing discomfort with the work assigned
to him.
There was homosexual tension
throughout the book. hinted at between
Sassoon and Rivers and more explicitly with the Pryor character. This
dovetailed with Barker's ideas of masculinity, femininity and the roles that
war assigns to our gender. All the more
interesting because this was written by
a woman, a fact that surprised several
members of our group. Barker clearly
has some clinical background - her psychiatric knowledge and historical context were sophisticated. to say the
least." (This book group includes both
a psychiatrist and medical doctor.)

Kil i=t11 ii 4•> ii ti= iI
Bebe Moore Campbell
by Suzanne Shaw

BIOGRAPHY
Bebe Moore Campbell grew up primarily in Philadelphia with her mother and
grandmother. During the summers of her
childhood she lived in the North Carolina
with her father - a paraplegic as a result of
a car accident. She graduated from an all
girls' high school in Philadelphia with honors and went on to receive a B.A. in Education from the University of Pittsburgh.
Recently she received the institution's Distinguished Black Alumna award.

Like Mine is a social commentary, on the
relations between whites and blacks in the
South: a portrait of living in a rural Southern town during the early Civil Rights era
in which the ground was shifting - not fast
enough for the blacks and too fast for the
whites. Brothers and Sisters is the story
of a modern black woman trying to make
it in the corporate world - hoping to crack
the glass ceiling, but not really believing
that it is possible. It explores the tensions
that exist between blacks and whites in the
world of work.

SWEET SUMMER, WITH
AND WITHOUT MY DAD
Ballantine Books, New York, 1989
Autobiography, 272 pgs. $12

news - the dogs, the hoses
and nightsticks against black
flesh - and we seethed . .. In
the schoolyard and the
classroom we saw the sea of
white surrounding us and
we drew in closer. We'd been fooling ourselves. It didn't matter how capable we
were: it was their school, their neighborhood, their country, their planet. . .. Our
bitterness exploded like an overdue time
bomb. (pg. 178)
The thing that sets this book apart from
other books written about growing up female and black is Campbell's expression
of love for her father and the importance of
black men in her life. "... as I look back,
I realize that this is what I know: My father took care ofme. Our separation didn't
stunt me or condemn me to a lesser humanity. His absence never made me a fatherless child. " (p. 271)

After college, Ms. Campbell taught
elementary and middle school for five
years, was married and had a daughter.
Sweet Summer is about Bebe Moore
During this period she began writing. She
Campbell's years growing up in Philadelwas unsuccessful at getting her fiction pubphia during the 1950s and 1960s, in a world
lished but, had better luck working as a free
whose scope and rules are ever changing
lance writer. She published non-fiction
for blacks. It is the story of many black
pieces in Essence, Parents and Glamour
and the now defunct SaV1ry. An article
There are, as well, other men in
for Sa"'-Y, "Successful Women, Angry
her life who encourage her. She is
"If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be
Men" generated such response that
perhaps more tuned into them beremembered as the most important African-American
Ms. Campbell decided to temporarily
cause
of her father's absence. There
novelist ofthis century --except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison
abandon her fiction-writing. "I could
is Pete the man who lives upstairs,
and James Baldwin. She's smart enough to see everynot sell fiction, but I got such a reher Uncles who live in Philly and
thing and courageous enough to write it down." Carolyn
sponse from that article that I thought
much
later, Mr. Logan, whom she
See, The Washington Post Book World.
I would concentrate on it," she said.
babysits for. It is he who provides
The outcome was the book Successthe role model of a father in her late teens children, at that time, whose winters were
ful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the
teaching her to cook fried chicken, giving
spent in the North and summers in the
Two Career Marriage. (Random House,
her advice, watching out for her, being as
South with relatives.
1986)
proud as any parent when she graduates.
The absence of a father in her cousin
Her prose is lyrical and enchanting.
After this book was published
Michael's life and the subsequent results,
She writes in the poetry of spoken black
Campbell quit her teaching job to write.
reiterate the importance of her own father's
language. Some examples follow:
Her second book, Sweet Summer: Growrole and the difference it made in hers.
ing Up With and Without My Dad was pub"My mother viewed speaking impeclished in 1989, followed by Your Blues
"Touching . .. With this candid account
cably proper English as a strategy in the
Ain't Like Mine in 1992 and Brothers and
and loving tribute to a special man,
overall battle for civil rights." (p. 15)
Sisters in 1994. She has already started a
Campbell breaks through all the stereotypes
fifth book, but remains mum on the subabout black family /ife and reveals candidly
"When he tired of reading, he'd lean
ject. She is also a regular commentator for
how her parents - although divorced - susback in his chair and sing. Mr.Abe's readNational Public Radio.
tained her." New York Daily News
ing wasn't so hot, but his singing was better than any television show. The music
eased out ofhis half-parted lips effortlessly.
OVERVIEW
YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE
Mr. Abe moaned hymns so old and handed
MINE
down, so syncopated by human rhythms
Each of Bebe Moore Campbell's books
Ballantine Books, New York 1992
that there was a clink of chains in each
is different, not only in the subject matter,
Fiction, 332 pgs. $12
verse." (p. 55)
but in the way it is approached. Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine is essen"The little band of Negroes at Logan felt
Dad, is an autobiography, full of the love
tially the story of a black youth, Armstrong
something more than puberty. Fierce new
and memories of a happy and secure childTodd, from the North, visiting relatives in
rhythms - barn de barn de barn barn barn! hood, punctuated with the longings for a
the South for the summer and the trouble
were welling up inside us. We were figurfather who is not always there, but an everhe gets into not understanding the local cusing things out. . .. We watched the nightly
present part of her life. Your Blues Ain't
toms with regard to black and white rela6

Literary Works of
tions. He makes the mistake of speaking
French to the wife of the white pool hall
owner, Floyd Cox. Within hours the relatives of the white woman - husband, fatherin-law, and brother-in-law, are on the doorstep of the boy's grandmother looking for
him. Shortly thereafter he is found dead
from a horrific beating. For those who remember Emmet Till, the incident is similar, in the spirit of what happened. Despite
the fact that Floyd Cox is not found guilty
of murder, his life and that of his family
are as inextricably changed as that of
Armstong's family.
Because of action by Armstrong's
mother, Doletha, the story is published in
the newspapers - a story that would have
been hushed by the Southern press. As a
result the spotlight shines brightly on the
way the town is run and on its residents,
who see their behavior in new ways. "The
realization that people all over the country
had witnessed their oppression, encouraged
new dreams. In subtle ways the death of
Armstrong Todd began to change them." (p.
122)
As the story unfolds the thinly disguised superiority the Coxs felt, as whites,
begins to show up their own weaknesses.
Both of the brothers soon face financial
crisis. The town has turned its back on them
for bringing disgrace to the white community. Floyd's life falls apart piece by piece
and in the decay, his wife Lily begins to
question some of her assumptions about
men. Each of their children, Floydjunior
and Doreen, is affected - one of them
drowning in bitterness and hate, the other
growing in strength and character.
Armstrong's parents come together and
for a brief time appear to have risen above
the loss of their son. But, the birth of another son reaps its own destruction in an
overprotective mother who can see no
wrong in him, and a father who gives up
because he has been given no role in his
son's life. Doletha reflects: "She remembered the old days when she andArmstrong
waited for Wydell to come and he never
showed up. More and more often these
memories plagued her and why shouldn't
she remember. Wydell had deserted one
son. Does he think she was fool enough to
trust him with another? (p. 271)
In the end, both sides begin to see the
part they have played in their own destruction and that the way out of their circumstances is strength of character and forgive-

Bebe Moore Campbell

ness. Doreen, the Cox's daughter says,"/
was raised around here and even though I
went to school with them, I always felt I
was different from them, like I was better
than they were ... but Momma, you know
one thing, it's getting to where I just can't
afford thinking like that no more. Them
feelings just ain't practical." (p. 290) In
Chicago, the second son of Doletha and
Wydell is in a great deal of trouble. Doletha
says, "All I ever wanted was for W.T. to be
safe, for white people not to kill him like
they done Armstrong." (p. 313) Her
brother-in-law Lionel replies, "The streets
are killing more black boys than white folks
ever could." (pg. 313)
"Wonderfully imagined .. Campbell's
deeply sympathetic, ecumenical, and unsparingly honest book will not comfort racists in their disease, nor victims in their passivity; but it will open up a new kind of
discourse, in fiction at least, where writers
work harder to create understanding for the
characters they, the authors, are most unlike." Raleigh News and Observer

BROTHERS AND
SISTERS
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 1994
Fiction, 476 pgs., $6.99
I remember in social work school when
Dr. Cyprian Rowe told our Racism class,
composed primarily of white students, that
they should assume every black person they
encounter dislikes and/or mistrusts them.
Those students were dismayed that someone who doesn't even know them could
have an opinion about them, never questioning the preconceived notions they had
about blacks. If any of these students are
still in a quandary about the reason behind
the mistrust reading Brothers and Sisters
should give these students, and other
whites, the insights they may be lacking.
Bebe Moore Campbell has more to say
in the first chapter of this book about race
relations - in particular black and white than many authors say in an entire book.
She does not hold back the emotional content of her characters feelings or the
thoughts running through their heads, even
as the words coming out of their mouths
are those used in the corporate world of
banking.
The setting is the aftermath of the
Rodney King trial, in which four white
police officers are acquitted after beating
7

King,andthesubsequent
eruption of violence in
the black community.
Racial tension is at an all time
high in Los Angeles, a city
which truly reflects the diversity of America.
The drama is played out in the corporate world of banking. Esther, the protagonist, is a black woman who has reached
middle management through hard work.
She is hoping to move up the corporate ladder and solicits the help of a white woman,
Mallory, to do so.
The second character of primary importance is Humphrey Boone - an up-andcoming mover, who has all the qualities the
corporate world wants, and, in the aftermath
of the riots, with the public demanding a
more diversified face in the corporate community, he has the added bonus of being
black. The president of the bank, for which
Esther works, sees in Boone his replacement. After being used as a pawn in the
racial game, Humphrey Boone sees for the
first time, a crack in the glass ceiling and
takes the job as manager of the lending
department, with an enthusiasm he thought
impossible.
Boone replaces Kirk, a white male,
who has worked hard to pull together his
department and is completely thrown off
balance when he is demoted and replaced
by a person he feels is only being hired to
appease tensions in the black community.
While everyone gives the appearance of accepting this change, there is a great deal
going on behind closed doors.
The last several chapters of the book
bring the characters into a riveting climax,
as they play out their roles in the corporate
climate of dog- eat-dog. One's sensibilities are thrown hither and yon as the reader
are forced to sympathize on one page with
one character and on the next page with
their opponent. I found the ending as good
as many mysteries I have read - better than
most. I could not put down the book, despite it being the middle of the night.
Captivating. With wit and grace,
Campbell shows how all our stories -white, black, male, female -- ultimately intertwine." Time

_ _ Children's Literature
The following books have been recommended by more than one reader. I will be publishing write-ups of each of these books
in the next issue, as well as reader comments. IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE - EITHER COMMENTS, OR
YOUR OWN VERSION OF WHAT A BOOK IS ABOUT, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. Books which are underlined have won the
Newberry Prize for Children's Fiction. Those which have an* were listed by adults as one of their favorite books.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS OR SEQUELS
JULIE OF THE WOLVES 1973
MANIAC McGEE 1991
JACOB HAVE I LOVED 1981
ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS 1961
MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH 1972
RACSO AND THE RATS OF NIMH
THE CAY & TIMOTHY OF THE CAY
THE DOOR IN THE WALL
THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS.
BASILE. FRANKWEILER 1968
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
& MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
HARRIET THE SPY
MATILDA
THE GIVER
ROLL OF THUNDER HEAR MY CRY 1977
*BRIDGE TO TERABITHA 1978
A WRINKLE IN TIME 1963
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
HATCHET
***THE SECRET GARDEN
GOODNIGHT MR. TOM
WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS
TUCK EVERLASTING
ARE YOU THERE GOD,
ITS ME MARGARET
WISE CHILD
DIAMOND IN THE WINDOW
CRAZY LADY
THE GREAT AMERICAN ELEPHANT
CHASE
*DEAR NAPOLEAN I KNOW YOU'RE
DEAD,BUT ...
OLD YELLER
SERIES
NANCY DREW
*THE DARK IS RISING
*LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS
REDWALL
**WIZARD OF EARTHSEAS
PRYDIAN CHRONICLES

JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
JERRY SPINELLI
KATHERINE PATTERSON
SCOTT O'DELL
ROBERT C. O'BRIEN
JANE LESLIE CONLY
THEODORE TAYLOR
MARGUERITE DE ANGELI
E. L. KONIGSBURG
JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
LOUISE FITZHUGH
ROALDDAHL
LOIS LOWRY
MILDRED D. TAYLOR
KATHERINE PATTERSON
MADELINE L'ENGLE
MARK TWAIN
GARY PAULSON
FRANCES HODGES BURNETT
MICHELLE MAGO RIAN
WILSON RAWLS
NATALIE BABBIT
JUDY BLUME
MONICA FURLOUGH
JANE LANGTON
JANE LESLIE CONLY
JILLIAN CHASE
ELVIRA WOODRUFF
FRED GIBSON

CAROLYN KEENE
SUSAN COOPER
LAURA INGALLS WILDER
BRIAN JACQUES
URSULA LE GUIN
LLOYD ALEXANDER

QfHER FAVORITE CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF ADULTS
****LITTLE WOMEN
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
LYNNE REED BANKS
THE FARTHEST AWAY MOUNTAIN

If you would like to be sent copies of write ups about these books, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope (55c stamp)
and I will send them to you. In the next issue I will include a list of other recommended books.

8

Boak summaries
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO LIVE
NOW
by Meredith Maran
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
Bantam Books, 1995
Women's Studies/ Sociology
352 pgs., $11.95
What can you say about a book that is
recommended by the owner of Ben and
Jerrys, the President of the Ms. Foundation
for Women and the Editor of Mother Jones
magazine? It is obviously politically correct. But, it is much more than that. It is,
as the reviewers, say "chock-full of laughter . . a recipe for life . . . exposes the
naked truth of our existence . . . down to
earth."
Meredith Maran, herself, is, "the most
irresistible force I have ever had the good
fortune to meet ... wise, resilient, loving
and funny . . . charming and confrontational." (quotes from the back cover).
While you the reader may not be bisexual, or live the hip life-style of the Oakland/Berkeley corridor, or have the pleasure
of working in Smith and Hawken 's art department, there are in this book many of
the truths of life for women in their forties
(and maybe fifties and thirties as well).
There is the issue of where to live so that
our children will not be isolated from the
real world, while at the same time worrying about the dangers in that very same real
world. Maran analyzes what it means to
have long-term female friends who mean
more to one than life itself, but also provide much of the angst in our lives. She
explores the difficulties of putting all of
one's eggs in a basket when the world today is so fluid. She discusses the pain of
raising children in two households with
different rules; the sharing of children between two parents.
She agonizes over how to present Judaism to her sons, as well as the subsequent issue of decidi~g where Jewish religion and culture fit into her own life ..
Maran grew up in a family which did everything it could to get away from being
identified as Jewish which complicates her
feelings and decisions. These issues are

presented in chapters titled: What It's Like
To Love ... To Be Family ... To Stay Alive.
.. To Pursue Happiness Now.
Maran has a breezy, self-reflective,
honest approach to her life. She analyzes
each and every aspect and comes out with
self-revelations that make the reader think
of how it applies to their own lives. For me
the book was worth the read just for the
section on friendship. On the one hand,
"is it just too damn scary nowadays to love
a friend enough to last a lifetime?" (p. 94).
On the other hand, "With each birthday I
am more aware ofhow difficult it is to make
the kind of new friends who will someday
be old friends. As my past becomes the
greater portion of my life it becomes increasingly important to me to have friends
who have lived at least some of it with me."
(p. 95)
Try it, I think you'll like it. The issues
she deals with - breast biopsies, friends
dying of AIDS, the breakup of a marriage,
facing the prospect of growing older etc.
are serious ones, yet, her writing is full of
humor and hope.

LET'S HEAR IT ~OR THE
GIRLS
By Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith
Penguin Books, New York 1997
Education/ Children's Literature,
224 pgs., $10.95
Following their highly acclaimed 500
Great Books by Women: A Readers Guide,
Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith address the need to provide children with role
models who are fearless, fair-minded, funny
- and female. Just in time for Women's History Month in March, LET''S HEAR IT
FOR THE GIRLS: 375 Great Books for
Readers 2-14 reaffirms the author's belief
"in the power of books to give children a
vision of what is possible."
As in their previous book, Smith and
Bauermeister recommend a rich and wideranging selection of books that take us
around the globe and across history. They
introduce girls and women, both fictional

9

and real, who are strong
and resourceful, whether
they are outwardly tough or
quietly brave, ordinary or extraordinary. Here are the
best-loved females of literature, from Eliose and Miss Rumphius
to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harriet the Spy;
and accomplished women such as Jane
Goodall, Harriet Tubman, Golda Meir, and
Louisa May Alcott. And there are many
new discoveries as well. These are girls
and women who hunt fossils, swim with
sharks, outwit dragons, learn to read, win
the Nobel Peace Prize, make friends. These
are characters, the authors note, who "teach
us that 'greatness' can be defined in many
ways."

I NEED YOUR HELP
• What are your favorite biographies/
memoirs/autobiographies? Would you
be willing to contribute a short writeup either about the book and/or why
you like it so much?
• Suggestions for bedtime reading to
the older child - those over nine or ten
who can read to themselves. Books
that are longer than they might choose
to read alone and/or a little more difficult than they are ready to tackle.
Books that are a pleasure to read out
loud.
• Do you have comments on the books
that have been presented thusfar? What
books has your book group read that
they really liked and/or lead to a great
discussion? I'd Jove to get feedback
on Book Group Books?

Cortstdeft a Qtbt S;ubscfttpttort
noft a Sisteft. bhiend. motheft to the

WOMEN'S
LITERATURE
REVIEW
u4C8Utthda~. CJ'fteat Oft

CJhan~ <]ou noft a speciaQ nauoft

Map of the world - Jane Hamilton
POJNT
by Suzanne Shaw
Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1994
Fiction, $12.00, 390 pgs.
Map of the World has elicited ~any
responses from its readers. As noted m the
first newsletter (November 1996) it can be
said to be both "deeply depressing" and a
book that some "loved." It is true that the
book begins with tragedy and, through a
tumbleweed of events, it continues down a
path of further disasters. In the first chapter it is Alice Goodwin's tum to watch the
two young _daughters of her friend and
neighbor, Theresa, as well as h~r ow?.
While upstairs looking for her bathmg smt,
Lizzie Theresa's two-year-old, wanders out
the mtlocked screen door to begin her swim
in the pond. Alice realizes as soon as she
gets downstairs that Lizzie is missing. She
finds her face down in the pond, no longer
breathing.
For parents of young children, the
death of Lizzie is more than they can bear too close to home. Some cannot continue
from there. But, for those who stick with
the book, there is much to be gained, as the
reader watches Alice's life and sense of
security disintegrate piece by piece. Aside
from the stigma she now faces, as a result
of Lizzie's drowning, what is at the core of
her problems is her "differentness." She
says from the beginning that she has not
made friends in this small rural, turned suburban, community, in which she, and her
husband Howard, are running the last family farm. It is this lack of commu?ity c?nnection that makes her vulnerable m her JOb
as school nurse. She allows her hostility
toward a difficult child to push her beyond
reasonable behavior. Because of this error
in judgment and restraint, Alice once again
finds herself in trouble - this time with the
law, rather than just her conscience.
Jane Hamilton is a terrific writer. She
is eloquent, poetic and truth telling. The
thoughts that are expressed in Alice's narrative are poetic versions of thoughts the
reader could imagine having themselves.
Alice in vulnerable in many of the same
ways we all could be - subject to the whims
of the majority when her feelings and opinions are very much outside the norm. If
this statement seems far from reality, consider the litigious nature of our society and

the vulnerability of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Behavior which may
seem perfectly natural in a supportive environment, may appear sinister when ones'
observers are hostile. Think of the House
Unamerican Activities Committee; imagine being a pacifist in a gun-toting NRAsupporting small town.
You may very well ask, "Why read a
book which is so clearly painful, when there
is so much else to read?" My answer would
be that Map of the World forces one to look
at their own lives, their own vulnerabilities
and examine how they would act and think
under the circumstances. It is so easy to be
judgmental when someone else appears to
be at fault, but what if the same things happened to us? At its best, it brings out the
compassion and empathy of the read~r. It
is also a pleasure to read Jane Hamilton
once you get beyond the grief of the events
described.

ity, the balances and dances be~ween
spouses, and between parents and children.
There is no shortage of meaningful material in this novel, but the power of the writing makes the repeated calamities, which
sweep away the characters, literally too
much to bear. The reader can either close
the book with a sigh of relief and tum gratefully to some mundane, but safe, task or
deliberately distance and detach from the
characters in order to be able to finish the
story.
Neither approach is very satisfactory.
It is a bizarre conundrum for Ms. Hamilton
to write so well that she becomes unreadable.

I am aware of at least three book groups
which have chosen not to read this book
because of comments in the previous newsletter. BUT, my book group, which includes many women with young children,
overall, felt positively about the book.

"Hamilton's chillingly accurate prose
keeps her fine novel buoyant. She is superb in her observation ofthe natura_l world
and in her examination ofpsychological nuance." Washington Post

COUNTERPOINT

"It takes a writer of rare power and
discipline to carry off an achievement like
Map of the World. Hamilton proves here
that she is one of our best." Newsweek

by Lauren Dale
It is a rare experience to say of a book,
"This is a very well written book, and I
don't want to read another word." Are the
shortcomings within the book or the reader?
In A Map of the World by Jane
Hamilton, Alice and Howard Goodwin and
their young daughters, Emma and Claire,
live on a dairy farm, the last in their part of
the Midwest, a sanctuary of four hundred
cheap acres. The land around them is being devoured by housing tracts and suburban development. The Goodwins are oddities, outsiders,, vulnerable to the forces of
the surrounding community even before a
disastrous accident occurs.
A Map of the World is a grueling book,
the kind of vivid book that swallows you
up and takes over your emotional state: ~e
difficulty with that degree of persuasion 1s
that the events within the story are grim in
the extreme and deteriorate with every
page. The themes tackled are significa~t:
loss, responsibility, friendship, vulnerabll10

Jane Hamilton's first book, The Book
of Ruth won the Pen/Ernest Hemingway
Foundation Award in 1994 . It is currently
on the paperback best seller lists, because
it was a featured book on Oprah.

NEXT ISSUE
Charms For The Easy Life by Kaye
Gibbons
Author Lee Smith ...
In The Time of Butterflies by Julie
Alvarez ...
Balimore Blues, by Laura Lippman ..
The Liars Club by Mary Karr . . .
Memoirs - An Analysis ...
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice
Munro . .

•~t-:,, fi,-1,a ,a" o, 11

The Pull Of The Moon Review & Book Group comments

by Elizabeth Berg
Reviewed by Mary Ann Dunevant
Fiction, $21.00 (hardback), 224 pgs.

I was too smart to do this, that a
chimpanzee could do what I was
doing - better!" (p. 98)

The Pull of the Moon is a novel composed of letters, written by Nan, a 50 year
old woman, to her husband. whom she has
temporarily left in order to take a trip by
herself. Each letter is followed by an entry
into the turquoise journal that was the inspiration for this trip. It is the expression
of Nan's feelings and memories, as articulated through the letters, that so moved me.
On nearly every other page, I had to pause
while I realized that I, too, had felt exactly
the same as she.

On dying: "Let it be this way:
Let me be eighty-eight. Let me
have just returned from the hairdresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn
chair beside my garden, a largeprint book of poetry in my hands.
Let me hear the whistle of a
cardinal and look up to find him
and feel a sudden flutter in my
chest and then - nothing. And, as
long as I'm asking let me rise up
over my own self, say, "Oh. Ay."
(p. 80)

The discussion was very personal and
thought-provoking. We talked about the invisibility of aging women and how loss of
youth and beauty gives women "one less
card to play" in a society that values youth,
wealth and marital status. This book
brought out more people on a cold February night when snow was forecast than any
other book has for years. Read it. Read it
with your group. Maybe even buy it ...

On motherhood: "Of course
there were some bad days. Remember the time Ruthie was napping on a Saturday afternoon and
I sat in the living room literally
tearing my hair out and saying that

Since the book touches on issues of
aging, marriage and classism, it made for a
great, passionate book group discussion.
Like me, several people unabashedly loved
the book while other despised it. Among

I would welcome other reviews of this
sort - a summary, or review of the book and
book group comments. For the next issue I
would need to receive them by May 23rd the Friday before Memorial Day.

those who didn't like
book, Nan was described as
"spineless and vapid," "narcissistic,", "wasteful," and
"unable to take responsibility for her life."

J. California cooper at The Pratt
Contributed by Charlotte Taggart
Five hundred enthusiastic fans greeted
author J. California Cooper at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel on Saturday, February
22nd. While enjoying a buffet breakfast,
her audience laughed, sighed and voiced
approval at her words of wit and wisdom.
Ms. Cooper is one of America's foremost fiction writers who tells moral tales
and parables rich in insight and wisdom.
In her works she writes of simple people
living complex lives and of complex people
whose actions reveal simple tales of life.
Her two novels are Family and In Search
of Satisfaction. In addition, she has created four collections of short stories: the

winner of the 1989 American Book Award,
Homemade Love; Some Soul to Keep; A
Piece of Mind; and The Matter is Life. She
has been honored as Black Playwright of
the Year (1978), received the James
Baldwin Writing Award (1988) and the Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association (1988). J. California
Cooper now lives in Texas.
According to Ms. Cooper, she was a
solitary child who took delight in observing others. "I've always loved wisdom; I
didn't want to make mistakes." When she
wanted to go out to play her mother would
say that any fool could have fun and that
she should stay in the house and learn something.

J. California admonished her listeners
to look at their lives and take control of
them; to build their world and make their
own happiness. Ms. Cooper views the Ten
Commandments as directions for life.
When a young man once remarked that
everything fun was a sin, this author replied
heatedly, "Is lying fun? Is stealing fun? Is
murder f un? Is adultery fun, (pause) after the first few times?"
After a spirited reading of two short stories, Ms. Cooper answered questions from
the audience. In strident tones Ms. Cooper
concluded her presentation by advising her
listeners to do the things they love. This
energetic woman confided that she is currently enjoying both tap dancing and piano
lessons.

Subscription: Three issues annually, plus an additional mailing, for $15
Name _______________ Phone# ________________
Address---------------------------------

Send payment and this farm to: Suzanne Shaw• 4908 Crowson Avenue• Baltimore) MD 21212
11

More Reading weekends:
by April Seitz
(interspersed with
quotes from "The
Bookworm's Weekend
Retreat", by Barbara
Beckwith, US Air
Magazine, March 1994)
In the last issue of this newsletter,
Suzanne introduced the glorious experience
of "reading weekends". I too am a devotee
of this perfect melding of good books, good
food, and good companionship, and it is my
assignment to elaborate on the preferred settings for such a literary escape.
Since the essential focus of the weekend
is to immerse yourself in the worlds of your
favorite books and authors for Jong, uninterrupted blocks of time, comfort is primary.
(The quality of your reading choices are just
as important, but that is a topic for a future
article). Also, as in many fields of endeavor,
remember the importance of: location, location, location! Select a destination that does
not have the typical tourist or activity distractions - you don't want your surroundings
to lure you away from the purpose of your

~

-

The most important consideration for
me, however, is the comfort level of the place
you settle into. Soft, cushy, but supportive
furniture is a must (the more cushiony the
sofa or chair available the better!). Also, make
sure good lighting is present. Movable lamps
with wattage sufficient for reading are a necessity. Bring extra light bulbs with you. Is
the indoor temperature controllable by you?
Lighting, temperature control and comfort are
all things you want to check out before you
commit yourself to staying at a particular
place. If you don't want to bother with cooking, and have the money to eat out all weekend, the proximity of good restaurants conducive to conversation should be considered
as well.
I believe the best times of year for reading weekends are fall and winter. What could
be better than cocooning in front of a fireplace with a juicy novel, your favorite cookies, and a friend interested in hearing all the
good parts?! Spring is a wonderful time,

Women's Literature Review

~
~

retreat. A cabin in Hedgesville, West Virginia, and a bed and breakfast in rural Carroll ,
County, Maryland have both served us well
on past trips.

~

4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21212

though, if you like taking a walk to exercise
your legs and discuss what you've been immersed in.
Whenever, and wherever you go, though,
is really besides the point- the main thing is
just to go!! A bibliophile deserves the utter
joy, every so often, of being able to savor the
beginning, middle, and end of a delicious read
all in one day or weekend. After you 've experienced your first reading weekend, the anticipation of your next one becomes as fun as
the actual event. Suzanne and I have become
so addicted to these twice-yearly escapes
from the real world, that we've begun to plan
the meals, snacks, and the most comfortable
wardrobes needed, as enthusiastically as we
plan the choices of books to bring! Don 't
deny yourself this pleasure!
"Brief spurts of reading between subway stops on our way to work, or
semiconscious moments before falling
asleep, weren't enough to make a dent
in the pile (of books). We were frustrated. It was like being surrounded
by luscious fruit we had no chance to
eat." Barbara Beckwith)

ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON SOME
OF THE BEST FICI'ION BY WOMEN?

THE WOMEN'S
LITERATURE REVIEW*
Is a new publication which reviews books by female authors as well as providing Information
about what book groups are reading, Ideas for improving book group discussions and readers
opinions of popular and less well known books on the market.

EACH ISSUE FEATURES:

*Focus on an Author and Her Work
*Three or Four Book Reviews of Fiction
*One Book Review of Non-Fiction
*Several Book S1 immaries
• information About a Book Group and What They
Have Read
~;::::::::.a *Ways to Improve Book Group Discussions

WHY ONLY BOOKS BY WOMEN?
ONE CAN ONLY DESIRE WHAT ONE KNOWS ABOUT AND BOOKS BY
WOMEN ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE REVIEWED THAN THOSE BY MEN.
CHECK THE WEEKLY BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS OF NATIONAL PAPERS
AND-YOU'LL SEE WHAT I MEAN!

TO SUBSCRIBE:
Write to: Suzanne Shaw
Women's Literature Review
4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Md. 21212
Annual Subscription $15
(Three Issues Plus an Additional Mailing)
For More Information Call:

410-323-5782

"I myselfhave never been_ able tD.find out
precisely whatfeminlsm is:
I only know that people ooJl me afemlnist
wheneuer I express sen.ttments that
dftferent:late me.from a doormat . .. "

Rebecca West



~Women's Literature Review
t\

A Book Should Be Chosen As Carefully As 9ne's Friends
March 1997

Silences
by Tillie Olsen
Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1965
Fiction/Women's Studies 283 pgs., $12.95
"SILENCES draws on the lives, letters,
diaries, and testimonies of many writers,
and on the author's own life, to examine
the needs and work of creation, and those
circumstances that obstruct or silence it.
Circumstances - which include one's sex,
economic class, color, and the times and
generation into which one is born - crucially determine whether creative capacity
is used and developed or impaired and
lost." (from the back cover)
The premise of Silences is that many
writers and potential writers have been "silenced" because they did not have the
luxury of spending long periods of time
without income and/or did not have the
mental and physical space in which to focus. These factors, which contribute to
writers being "silenced" by circumstance,
are exacerbated for women, who, even today, are expected, at the end of a long day
of work, to carry out domestic chores.
Their time is rarely their own.
In her essay A Room of One's Own,
Virginia Woolf speculates that woman will
never be free (to create) until she has a room
of her own in which to work and the financial means to support that work. This conclusion was reached based on her own experience. Tillie Olsen took a different path
- that of research - to reach much the same
conclusion in Silences. Olsen notes that
the number of women authors who produced work, before the 20th century - including George Elliot, Jane Austin, Emily
Bronte, Louisa Mae Alcott - was small indeed. None of them married or had children. All had servants. The circumstances
that allowed the means to concentrate on
that work, either family money or a husband with wealth, were not available to

most women. Even well into this century,
in the 1940s and 1950s, women writers
were far overshadowed by men. Children
were still very much a burden, not only in
the physical requirements of their care, but
also in terms of the mental energy required
by their caretakers. "More than any other
human relationship, overwhelmingly more,
motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children
need one now. The very fact that these are
real needs, that one feels them as one 's own
(love, not duty); that there is no one else
responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that
becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil." (p.19)
As well, there were a number of writers who
were only able to publish once - not necessarily because their books were not popular, but because they could not afford the
luxury in their lives of producing another
work of art.
Another topic which Olsen delves into
is that of inclusion. Until the 1970s, and
the rise of the Second Wave of feminists,
few women authors were included in college literature courses and they were a select few. (George Eliot and Jane Austin,
for example, were included time after time.)
It appears that life, as experienced by
women, was a topic apparently not worth
noting. " ... appearance in twentieth-century literature courses, required reading
lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the
year's best, ... consideration by critics or
in current reviews - one woman writer for
every twelve men (8 percent women, 92 percent men). Why are so many more women
silenced than men? Why, when women do
write (one out of four or five works published is by a woman), is so little of their
writing known, taught, accorded recognition? " (p. 25) Even among women authors chosen for inclusion, (there is) a preponderance of popular, genre, "fluff"

women writers." (footnote,
pg. 188) This very issue - inclusion of
women writers - is
currently a topic of
hot debate at St. Johns
College, a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, and one of the last bastions of Dead
White Men.
(Continued on page 2)

contents:
Silences con't

2

Advisory Group

2

Natasha Saje Column

3

Book Darts

3

Stones From the River

4

Regeneration
Review
5
Book Group Comments 5
Bebe Moore Campbell

6

Children's Literature

8

What It's Like To Live Now 9
Let's Hear it for the Girls

9

Map of the World
Point
Counterpoint

10

Pull of the Moon

11

J. California Cooper

11

More Reading Weekends

12

Written & Published by
Suzanne Shaw
with help from many supporters
4908 Crowson Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21212
(410) 323-5782

What harm then? Literature written by
men has been portrayed as representing the
universal human experience. In fact, it is
"restrictively male," the female characters
are portrayed as one dimensional and the
attitude of the author is often hostile toward women. In short, male writers cannot know the experience of women. A
writer can only know the world they have
experienced first hand and that experience
is very much determined by one's sex.
Encouragement given to the potential
writer is a related consideration. "How
much it takes to become a writer. Bent,
circumstances, time, development of craft
- but beyond that: how much conviction as
to the importance of what one has to say,
one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store ofbelief in oneself to be able
to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's
own life comprehensions. Difficult for any
male not born into a class that breeds such
confidence. Almost impossible for a girl,
a woman." (p. 27) Elaine Showalter writes
in her pioneering study, Women and the
Literary Curriculum: "Female (students)

are estranged from their own experience
and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity, in part because they do not see
it mirrored and given resonance in literature ... They are expected to identify with
masculine experience, which is presented
as the human one, and have no faith in the
validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in
literature, or accepted in criticism . . . (p.
29)

There is much in this book to convince
the reader that what we have experienced
as literature, until the very recent past, has
been far from a representation of life, but
rather the musings of a privileged few who
had the means, access to free uninterrupted
time and, belief in the importance of their
words. Thus, our "literary tradition" resembles the history we learned as children;
a history which included only those in
power. Only through awareness can this
change. Complaints to newspaper book
sections about the lack of inclusion, demands by college students that their experience is not represented in what they, and
others study are two ways in which to pro-

test. Other means of changing the status
quo include a personal decision to read
books by others who speak to our experience and then books which open up to us
the experience of others who have been
"silenced".
"Tillie Olsen helps those of us condemned to silence ... to find our voices."
Maxine Hong-Kingston, author of The
Woman Warrier
"There are few writers who manage
in their work and in the sharing of their
understanding to actually help us to live,
to work, to create, day by day. Tillie Olsen
is one of those writers for me." Alice
Walker

Tillie Olsen was born in Nebraska in
1912 or 1913. She has taught or been
writer-in-residence at Amherst College,
Stanford University, M.I.T. and Kenyon
College. She is the recipient of five honorary degrees and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in
California.

Meet The Advisory Group
Stephanie Shapiro -Feature writer for The Baltimore Sun and Visiting Journalist at Loyola College. She has two children, Ben
age 8 and Henry age 5. Her husband Tom Waldron also writes for The Baltimore Sun.
Charlotte Taggert - is the librarian at Gilman Middle School. She is in two book groups, one with older women and one with
women in their thirties. She has two grown children.
Debbie Helfeld is a prodigious reader who is in two book groups in the Silver Spring area. Debbie thinks that books written
for older children are some of the best literature there is. She was the first director of Baltimore's Sexual Assault Recovery
Center. She has two children, Daniel, age 9, and Anna age 8.
Linda Schwartz is a Branch Manager at the Enoch Pratt Library - Waverly. She is in a book group in the Charles Village area.
The patrons of Linda's branch successfully stopped their library from being closed an additional day by staging a sit-in.
Lauren Dale - also known as Canada Lauren - is on hiatus in the US for five years. She is in two book groups - one at Park
School and the Feed and Read Bookgroup in the general Northeast Baltimore area. Mother of three children, Sebastian, age 14,
Zoe, age 12 and Ariana age 8. She is a former free-lance photographer and has lived in Africa.
Jan Westervelt is the Branch Manager, Enoch Pratt Library - Northwood branch. She is in a book group in Takoma Park. She
is an aspiring fiddler, birdwatcher and gardner.

The purpose of the advisory group is to assist me with newsletter decision making, help with the production, and make suggestions
for layout, design and contents. At our first meeting in January, the conversation flowed with article ideas, books read and their
relative merit and different ways of looking at a book. Each member has agreed to help using her talents - book reviews, proofreading, contacts, resource access etc. Several members of the Advisory Group have contributed to this issue.

2

•~69 k£1 6iii•1#~• ii
=

Plot and Personification in Narrative
Adapted from J. Hillis Miller, Aristotle, Peter Brooks and Freud

Telling stories is a universal human activity. The stories that we tell reveal our particular values or those of our
culture. This is because desire is the motor that drives narrative, as it does life (see Freud on "unquenchable striving").
The writer desires to tell a story, the reader to learn and derive pleasure from it, while the characters' desires fuel the plot.
Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot: Knopf, 1984) calls characters "desiring machines."
The protagonist is (usually) a main character who desires something, and the antagonist is the force or person that
prevents the protagonist from achieving that desire. For example, Isabel Archer is the protagonist of Henry Jame's
Portrait of a Lady, a young woman who wants to do great things with her life, and her antagonists are variously herself,
her suitors and husband, and the 19th century society that confines women to narrow roles.
Every narrative also contains a "witness" who learns. In the most satisfying stories, that witness is the protagonist.
In other stories only the reader learns. Occasionally protagonist, antagonist, and witness are rolled into one character.
Moreover, complex stories can be read flexibly, by inserting different agents for the three slots. For example, in Faulkner's
"A Rose for Emily" one reading makes Emily the protagonist who wants to marry Homer and Homer her antagonist. But
also: the town is the protagonist who wants to understand and thus discipline Emily, and Emily (and her class privilege)
becomes their antagonist.
'
Another way to think about narrative is through plot. Every story begins with an initial situation and involves some change or
reversal of that situation. The change can be subtle. Susan Minot's story "Lust," at first seems merely a catalog of lovers. However,
because the narrator's attitude alters--in the very process of making the inventory--she herself changes, and her tone at the end of the story
is very different from the beginning: the list has made her question her life.
Sometimes characters think they want one thing, but really want another. The change in the story is an increased understanding of
themselves. Characters can be their own worst enemies, by preventing themselves from achieving their desires. Aristotle in the Poetics
(1452 and 1453) argues that the "change in the hero's fortunes must be not from misery to happiness, but from happiness to misery; and the
cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part."
Asking "who is the protagonist and what does he or she want" gets to the core of the narrative. When stories don't satisfy us, there is
either not enough change or not enough desire, and the story feels flat. And although certain human desires--love, power, self acceptance,
etc.--seem universal, examining the particular way they are blocked in stories reveals history. For example, Maggie Tulliver in George
Eliot's The Mill on the Floss wants love and learning, and Zenia in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride wants power. The differences in
antagonists proclaims changes in the condition of women in the last 150 years.
Natasha Saje, Ph.D, is the author of a collection of poetry, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and many essays. She teaches at
Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Book Darts
Since books are my obsession I have
become the recipient of many interesting
accoutrements designed for the book reader
- cushions to lay on one's lap and hold the
book while reading in bed, calendars with
the birth dates and deaths of famous authors, books about books etc .. This Christmas I received a truly revolutionary, but oh
so simple, item - Book Darts. These are
small (one inch) clasps, with an arrow on

one side which can be easily slipped over
the edge of a page to point to a passage or
sentence one wants to go back to. They
eliminate the need to turn down pages and
underline.

cyclable. For a book group reader they are
the perfect way to easily flip to the page
and passage one wants to quote. When the
book group has discussed the book, remove
them and start marking the next book.

A gimmick? Not if one reads the pagelong description written by the designer.
Book Darts were designed for teachers to
help in marking passages to be read to
classes. They are a way to return to a book
time and time again and easily locate what
one is looking for. Best of all they are re-

Book Darts can be ordered from the
makers at a cost of $9.95 per 100 at
3945 Willow Flat Road, Hood River, Oregon 97301. Buy 100 and share them with
friends. They can also be purchased at
some book stores in sheets of 15.

3

•,J•X•Biii1 •3 f d•41

stones Fram The River • Ursula Hegi

Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw with help from
Debbie Helfeld
Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994
Simon and Schuster
Fiction, 525 pgs., $12.00
Stones from the River is a multi-layered
novel which covers topics as diverse as the
ways in which being different affects one's
life, to the meaning of the human condition
and its potential for good and evil. It views
Hitler's rise to power in Germany through
the lens of a small German town, in which
Trudi Montag, a Zwerg - dwarf - is the
spokesperson. Trudi has a duel role as the
narrator. She outlines the catastrophe of
Nazism as it .unfolds, from the first hints of
prejudice to the point at which she becomes
aware (through defectors hiding in her
house) of the atrocities in the KZ's - known,
after the fact, as concentration camps. She
is also the town's storyteller because she
knows the secrets of many of its inhabitants.
From an early age, Trudi Montag is
aware that her physical difference will
greatly affect the rest of her life. In her early
years she believes that she can change physically by hanging onto door frames and
stretching herself out. While still hoping for
normal growth, she discovered that her
differentness held a power because: "Most
grown-ups didn't look right at Trudi: they
acted as ifshe were invisible and said things
they would never say around other children.
She found if she stayed very quiet they often
kept talking, disclosing far more about themselves than they realized . . . The feelings
they tried to hide sprang into their voices,
and she could discern fear, joy, impatience,
rage." (p. 72)
As the assistant to her father in the paylibrary she is in a position to hear many of
the stories while staying in the back shelving books. Over the years she learns to ask
the questions that will elicit secrets from
adults they didn't mean to tell. Her talent
gave her a connection to how others were
different as well. Hegi juxtaposes Trudi's
differences with those of Jewish residents
who are being dismissed and punished by
the Nazis. In both cases, the town residents
don't look beyond Trudi's dwarfism or Frau
Abramowitz's Jewishness to see who the
person really is. Because of her astute powers of observation and her role as storyteller
she is in a unique position to observe the
ways in which the town's Jewish residents
are affected. As an outsider herself, Trudi's
connection to the Jewish residents is amplified.

At first the harm of the Nazis was not
clear, except to a very few. "Who really paid
much attention to the frequent speeches that
were delivered? ... So what if their flags
were in every public building?" (p.194) The
fuhrer was ending unemployment and improving the economy. He was helping the
youth to find a new purpose and direction.
"Frau Weiler saw a fresh enthusiasm in her
son Georg, and his friends. How much damage could the Nazis really do, she wondered.
... She stilled her misgivings by saying, 'At
least let's wait and see what happens.'" (pg.
195)
But Trudi, being an observer, had doubts
from the beginning. At a public speech by
Hitler, "She fought the excitement ofhis gaze
and voice because what he wanted from her
was only too familiar - beliefwithout doubts
... She fought him by reminding herselfwhat
her father had said - that they lived in a
country where believing had taken the place
of knowing.'' (p. 167)
The power of the Third Reich unfolds
from the beginnings as Germans and Jews
are separated into different and distinct
groups. Gradually, the ability of the Jews to
live is taken away. Jewish doctors are no
longer reimbursed for the patients they treat;
Jews are not allowed to buy many food
staples like sugar and coffee.
Those who are not Jewish are chastised
for any wrongdoings against the Partei: Frau
Weiler, a Catholic, is admonished when she
helps a Jewish child who is beaten up by a
gang of Nazi youth; Trudi ends up in temporary confinement when she makes disparaging remarks about being forced to sing the
national anthem of the Third Reich. Any indiscretion which indicates less than full support for the Third Reich will be noticed by
the eyes and ears of the supporters who have
been trained to tattle on their fellow countrymen.
There is also, in this book, the courage
of a people under siege. The ordinariness of
their lives and ties to one another are revealed
in ways which give hope. In spite of great
loss the people of Burgdorf recognize that
those who hid Jews and those who collaborated with the Nazis must live together after
the war is over. They choose to turn a blind
eye to the actions of other town residents.
Pointing out the collaborators would not
benefit anyone in the long run.
Ursula Hegi, having grown up in postwar Germany, reveals with great insight the
ways in which ordinary people act under a
4

force greater than their will
to resist. One is left with the
question, "Would I have ·acted
differently than these ordinary
German citizens? Or, would
the fears and uncertainties
they faced have kept me from speaking out,
from acting out of principle in spite of the
consequences.
The question of the German character
comes into play. Did their temperament feed
into this blind following? A careful reading
of the book shows that this is the case. Interestingly it is Trudi's father who is often
the bearer of these truths: "We Germans have
a history of sacrificing everything for one
strong leader . .. It's our fear of chaos." (p.
112) and: "... / worry about the German
attraction for one strong leader, one father
figure who makes you obey, who is strong
enough to make you obey. . . . Who tells
you: This is the right thing to do. I worry
about the belief that our strength is a military strength.'' (p. 166)
In the narrative itself, Hegi asserts her
belief: " ... the long training in obedience
to elders, government and church made it
difficult even for those who considered the
views of the Nazis dishonorable - to give
voice to their misgivings. And so they kept
hushed, yielding to each new indignity while
they waited for the Nazis and their ideas to
go away." (p. 207)" and: "Most practiced
the silence they were familiar with, a silence
nurtured by fear and complicity that would
grow beyond anything they could imagine. .
.. To justify this silence they tried to find the
good in their government . .. They knew how
not to ask questions ; they had been prepared
for it by the government and church. Over
the years they had forgotten that early urge
to question.'' (p. 239)
One member of the book group felt this
was the best book she had read in the year or
so since joining. Unlike some discussions
in which the same points come up over and
over again, each person had something new
to contribute, because there is so much in
this book which one can discuss. Everyone
agreed - "definitely a great read".
Many thanks to the members of the
Sunday Evening Chocolate Society Book
Group for contributing, through discussion
of the book, to this review. They are: Claudia
Leight, Francie Weeks, Mary Skogland,
Martha Benson, Janice York, Ruth Draper,
Mary Jo Kirschman, Anne Walker, Anne
Blumenberg and Jevne Diaz.

Regeneration - Pat Barker
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
with comments and additions from
Mary Jo Kirschman, Claudia Leight and
Patti Carrington
Plume/Penguin Book, 1991
Fiction, 252 pgs., $10.95

This is the first book review, in a series, parts of which will be taken from the
contributions of book group readers. Regeneration was read, almost simultaneously, by three book groups in the Baltimore area - the Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society (SECS) Book Group, the Original
Northwood Book Group, and the RadnorWinston Book Group. The SECS Book
Group has been together for over five years
with many of the original members still in
the group. Original Northwood is a relatively new book group that is focusing on
books which have won the Booker Prize
and/or books by authors who have won the
Booker Prize.
Regeneration, named by the New York
Times as one of the nine best novels of
1992, is the first of a trilogy about World
War I. The other two books are Eye in the
Door. which won the Guardian Fiction
Prize for 1993, and The Ghost Road. which
won the 1995 Booker Prize. This first book
focuses on a psychiatric hospital in the
North of England where soldiers, who have
become "shell-shocked," are sent to recover. It is, as the back cover states, "a war
saga in which not a shot is fired." Many of
the characters in the novel are based on real
people. The therapies practiced by the doctors were actually used at the time.

,.

The story revolves around Dr. William
Rivers, the psychiatrist, whose job it is to
get to the bottom of the emotional problems of his patients in order to make them
mentally stable enough to leave hospital
and, more importantly, return to the
trenches where their mental collapse began.
The atrocities which have brought Rivers'
clients to Craiglockhart are ones not easy
to forget. As the Washington Post review
asks, "ls he making these men 'well' or
taking them from a healthily honest recognition of the horror their situation, into a
sort of repression and madness which is
necessary for army services. So does regeneration come from remembering or forgetting?" The descriptions of the events
which lead these young men to be excused
from the war indicate only too clearly how
World War I was truly a war fought in the
trenches, man to man, body to body.

The most famous of the clients is
Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero
and noted poet, who enters the hospital after having declared that he will no longer
fight in a war which has reduced the troops
to acts of senseless slaughter. Unlike his
fellow patients, Sassoon is in hospital because his superior officers don't know what
else to do with him. He has sent the officers a letter in which he states that his abandonment is "an act of willful defiance . ..
because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the
power to end it." (p. 3) The letter is written
on behalf of his fellow soldiers. He believes that they have been deceived into
fighting not for the cause of liberation but
rather to prove that England can conquer.
Sassoon's sessions with Rivers are
word plays in which Rivers pretends that
he is trying to get to the bottom of the psychosis that has brought Sassoon there.
Based on the experiences of his other pati en ts. Rivers fully understands that
Sassoon's position may be justified. Rivers, the neurologist, undergoes the major
transformation in the book as he thinks
about issues of repression, masculinity, patriotism, and the work he is doing to patch
up war victims only to send them back to
the front.
Aside from the conflict between
Sassoon and his superiors, Barker also
writes of the conflict between patient and
therapist, class conflict and the conflicting
feelings of wives who are relieved to have
unwanted husbands sent to war - at times
expressing the sentiment that they are not
sure they want them to come back. Barker
presents us with the wartime paradox that
leaders in battle become the nurturers and
care givers of their men, while the women
left at home are free to take on the "male"
roles of breadwinner. One of the gender
issues was the comparison between the
breakdowns men suffer in wartime and the
anxiety disorders women suffer in peacetime. Both, the book explains, develop not
from trauma or horror alone but from prolonged stress and powerlessness.
The interplay between the patients, as
they probe one another's emotional
wounds, is worth the read, aside from the
political issues of the justification for war.
The author has a remarkable ability to create what is essentially a male voice about
the experience of war. It is hard to remember that this book, so entirely about men,
5

was written by a woman.
She captures the ambivalence about the horrors of war
versus the thrill and comradeship of the trenches - a comradeship difficult to find in
civilian life.

BOOK GROUP
COMMENTS
Mary Jo - Sunday Evening Chocolate
Society Book Group "Our book group
had a very lively discussion of Regeneration. One of the issues we focused
on was the responsibilities of individuals whose eyes are opened to evils, such
as the war machine, to go along, to
question, or to protest or to remain in
silence. We asked one another who the
heroes were.if any. There was much
disagreement about this issue.
We saw Rivers' evolution from detached practitioner to questioner and
self-doubter as the central development
of the novel. "
Patti - Original Northwood Book
Group - "Our book group found this
book a "rich read." That is, worthy of
discussion on several levels, with complex, well-drawn characters. I have
never been drawn to works of war fiction, though found Barker's exploration
of the many internal conflicts of her
characters gripping. This occurred
most strikingly with Rivers. as the book
progressed, intensified by his increasing discomfort with the work assigned
to him.
There was homosexual tension
throughout the book. hinted at between
Sassoon and Rivers and more explicitly with the Pryor character. This
dovetailed with Barker's ideas of masculinity, femininity and the roles that
war assigns to our gender. All the more
interesting because this was written by
a woman, a fact that surprised several
members of our group. Barker clearly
has some clinical background - her psychiatric knowledge and historical context were sophisticated. to say the
least." (This book group includes both
a psychiatrist and medical doctor.)

Kil i=t11 ii 4•> ii ti= iI
Bebe Moore Campbell
by Suzanne Shaw

BIOGRAPHY
Bebe Moore Campbell grew up primarily in Philadelphia with her mother and
grandmother. During the summers of her
childhood she lived in the North Carolina
with her father - a paraplegic as a result of
a car accident. She graduated from an all
girls' high school in Philadelphia with honors and went on to receive a B.A. in Education from the University of Pittsburgh.
Recently she received the institution's Distinguished Black Alumna award.

Like Mine is a social commentary, on the
relations between whites and blacks in the
South: a portrait of living in a rural Southern town during the early Civil Rights era
in which the ground was shifting - not fast
enough for the blacks and too fast for the
whites. Brothers and Sisters is the story
of a modern black woman trying to make
it in the corporate world - hoping to crack
the glass ceiling, but not really believing
that it is possible. It explores the tensions
that exist between blacks and whites in the
world of work.

SWEET SUMMER, WITH
AND WITHOUT MY DAD
Ballantine Books, New York, 1989
Autobiography, 272 pgs. $12

news - the dogs, the hoses
and nightsticks against black
flesh - and we seethed . .. In
the schoolyard and the
classroom we saw the sea of
white surrounding us and
we drew in closer. We'd been fooling ourselves. It didn't matter how capable we
were: it was their school, their neighborhood, their country, their planet. . .. Our
bitterness exploded like an overdue time
bomb. (pg. 178)
The thing that sets this book apart from
other books written about growing up female and black is Campbell's expression
of love for her father and the importance of
black men in her life. "... as I look back,
I realize that this is what I know: My father took care ofme. Our separation didn't
stunt me or condemn me to a lesser humanity. His absence never made me a fatherless child. " (p. 271)

After college, Ms. Campbell taught
elementary and middle school for five
years, was married and had a daughter.
Sweet Summer is about Bebe Moore
During this period she began writing. She
Campbell's years growing up in Philadelwas unsuccessful at getting her fiction pubphia during the 1950s and 1960s, in a world
lished but, had better luck working as a free
whose scope and rules are ever changing
lance writer. She published non-fiction
for blacks. It is the story of many black
pieces in Essence, Parents and Glamour
and the now defunct SaV1ry. An article
There are, as well, other men in
for Sa"'-Y, "Successful Women, Angry
her life who encourage her. She is
"If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be
Men" generated such response that
perhaps more tuned into them beremembered as the most important African-American
Ms. Campbell decided to temporarily
cause
of her father's absence. There
novelist ofthis century --except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison
abandon her fiction-writing. "I could
is Pete the man who lives upstairs,
and James Baldwin. She's smart enough to see everynot sell fiction, but I got such a reher Uncles who live in Philly and
thing and courageous enough to write it down." Carolyn
sponse from that article that I thought
much
later, Mr. Logan, whom she
See, The Washington Post Book World.
I would concentrate on it," she said.
babysits for. It is he who provides
The outcome was the book Successthe role model of a father in her late teens children, at that time, whose winters were
ful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the
teaching her to cook fried chicken, giving
spent in the North and summers in the
Two Career Marriage. (Random House,
her advice, watching out for her, being as
South with relatives.
1986)
proud as any parent when she graduates.
The absence of a father in her cousin
Her prose is lyrical and enchanting.
After this book was published
Michael's life and the subsequent results,
She writes in the poetry of spoken black
Campbell quit her teaching job to write.
reiterate the importance of her own father's
language. Some examples follow:
Her second book, Sweet Summer: Growrole and the difference it made in hers.
ing Up With and Without My Dad was pub"My mother viewed speaking impeclished in 1989, followed by Your Blues
"Touching . .. With this candid account
cably proper English as a strategy in the
Ain't Like Mine in 1992 and Brothers and
and loving tribute to a special man,
overall battle for civil rights." (p. 15)
Sisters in 1994. She has already started a
Campbell breaks through all the stereotypes
fifth book, but remains mum on the subabout black family /ife and reveals candidly
"When he tired of reading, he'd lean
ject. She is also a regular commentator for
how her parents - although divorced - susback in his chair and sing. Mr.Abe's readNational Public Radio.
tained her." New York Daily News
ing wasn't so hot, but his singing was better than any television show. The music
eased out ofhis half-parted lips effortlessly.
OVERVIEW
YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE
Mr. Abe moaned hymns so old and handed
MINE
down, so syncopated by human rhythms
Each of Bebe Moore Campbell's books
Ballantine Books, New York 1992
that there was a clink of chains in each
is different, not only in the subject matter,
Fiction, 332 pgs. $12
verse." (p. 55)
but in the way it is approached. Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine is essen"The little band of Negroes at Logan felt
Dad, is an autobiography, full of the love
tially the story of a black youth, Armstrong
something more than puberty. Fierce new
and memories of a happy and secure childTodd, from the North, visiting relatives in
rhythms - barn de barn de barn barn barn! hood, punctuated with the longings for a
the South for the summer and the trouble
were welling up inside us. We were figurfather who is not always there, but an everhe gets into not understanding the local cusing things out. . .. We watched the nightly
present part of her life. Your Blues Ain't
toms with regard to black and white rela6

Literary Works of
tions. He makes the mistake of speaking
French to the wife of the white pool hall
owner, Floyd Cox. Within hours the relatives of the white woman - husband, fatherin-law, and brother-in-law, are on the doorstep of the boy's grandmother looking for
him. Shortly thereafter he is found dead
from a horrific beating. For those who remember Emmet Till, the incident is similar, in the spirit of what happened. Despite
the fact that Floyd Cox is not found guilty
of murder, his life and that of his family
are as inextricably changed as that of
Armstong's family.
Because of action by Armstrong's
mother, Doletha, the story is published in
the newspapers - a story that would have
been hushed by the Southern press. As a
result the spotlight shines brightly on the
way the town is run and on its residents,
who see their behavior in new ways. "The
realization that people all over the country
had witnessed their oppression, encouraged
new dreams. In subtle ways the death of
Armstrong Todd began to change them." (p.
122)
As the story unfolds the thinly disguised superiority the Coxs felt, as whites,
begins to show up their own weaknesses.
Both of the brothers soon face financial
crisis. The town has turned its back on them
for bringing disgrace to the white community. Floyd's life falls apart piece by piece
and in the decay, his wife Lily begins to
question some of her assumptions about
men. Each of their children, Floydjunior
and Doreen, is affected - one of them
drowning in bitterness and hate, the other
growing in strength and character.
Armstrong's parents come together and
for a brief time appear to have risen above
the loss of their son. But, the birth of another son reaps its own destruction in an
overprotective mother who can see no
wrong in him, and a father who gives up
because he has been given no role in his
son's life. Doletha reflects: "She remembered the old days when she andArmstrong
waited for Wydell to come and he never
showed up. More and more often these
memories plagued her and why shouldn't
she remember. Wydell had deserted one
son. Does he think she was fool enough to
trust him with another? (p. 271)
In the end, both sides begin to see the
part they have played in their own destruction and that the way out of their circumstances is strength of character and forgive-

Bebe Moore Campbell

ness. Doreen, the Cox's daughter says,"/
was raised around here and even though I
went to school with them, I always felt I
was different from them, like I was better
than they were ... but Momma, you know
one thing, it's getting to where I just can't
afford thinking like that no more. Them
feelings just ain't practical." (p. 290) In
Chicago, the second son of Doletha and
Wydell is in a great deal of trouble. Doletha
says, "All I ever wanted was for W.T. to be
safe, for white people not to kill him like
they done Armstrong." (p. 313) Her
brother-in-law Lionel replies, "The streets
are killing more black boys than white folks
ever could." (pg. 313)
"Wonderfully imagined .. Campbell's
deeply sympathetic, ecumenical, and unsparingly honest book will not comfort racists in their disease, nor victims in their passivity; but it will open up a new kind of
discourse, in fiction at least, where writers
work harder to create understanding for the
characters they, the authors, are most unlike." Raleigh News and Observer

BROTHERS AND
SISTERS
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York 1994
Fiction, 476 pgs., $6.99
I remember in social work school when
Dr. Cyprian Rowe told our Racism class,
composed primarily of white students, that
they should assume every black person they
encounter dislikes and/or mistrusts them.
Those students were dismayed that someone who doesn't even know them could
have an opinion about them, never questioning the preconceived notions they had
about blacks. If any of these students are
still in a quandary about the reason behind
the mistrust reading Brothers and Sisters
should give these students, and other
whites, the insights they may be lacking.
Bebe Moore Campbell has more to say
in the first chapter of this book about race
relations - in particular black and white than many authors say in an entire book.
She does not hold back the emotional content of her characters feelings or the
thoughts running through their heads, even
as the words coming out of their mouths
are those used in the corporate world of
banking.
The setting is the aftermath of the
Rodney King trial, in which four white
police officers are acquitted after beating
7

King,andthesubsequent
eruption of violence in
the black community.
Racial tension is at an all time
high in Los Angeles, a city
which truly reflects the diversity of America.
The drama is played out in the corporate world of banking. Esther, the protagonist, is a black woman who has reached
middle management through hard work.
She is hoping to move up the corporate ladder and solicits the help of a white woman,
Mallory, to do so.
The second character of primary importance is Humphrey Boone - an up-andcoming mover, who has all the qualities the
corporate world wants, and, in the aftermath
of the riots, with the public demanding a
more diversified face in the corporate community, he has the added bonus of being
black. The president of the bank, for which
Esther works, sees in Boone his replacement. After being used as a pawn in the
racial game, Humphrey Boone sees for the
first time, a crack in the glass ceiling and
takes the job as manager of the lending
department, with an enthusiasm he thought
impossible.
Boone replaces Kirk, a white male,
who has worked hard to pull together his
department and is completely thrown off
balance when he is demoted and replaced
by a person he feels is only being hired to
appease tensions in the black community.
While everyone gives the appearance of accepting this change, there is a great deal
going on behind closed doors.
The last several chapters of the book
bring the characters into a riveting climax,
as they play out their roles in the corporate
climate of dog- eat-dog. One's sensibilities are thrown hither and yon as the reader
are forced to sympathize on one page with
one character and on the next page with
their opponent. I found the ending as good
as many mysteries I have read - better than
most. I could not put down the book, despite it being the middle of the night.
Captivating. With wit and grace,
Campbell shows how all our stories -white, black, male, female -- ultimately intertwine." Time

_ _ Children's Literature
The following books have been recommended by more than one reader. I will be publishing write-ups of each of these books
in the next issue, as well as reader comments. IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE - EITHER COMMENTS, OR
YOUR OWN VERSION OF WHAT A BOOK IS ABOUT, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. Books which are underlined have won the
Newberry Prize for Children's Fiction. Those which have an* were listed by adults as one of their favorite books.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS OR SEQUELS
JULIE OF THE WOLVES 1973
MANIAC McGEE 1991
JACOB HAVE I LOVED 1981
ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS 1961
MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH 1972
RACSO AND THE RATS OF NIMH
THE CAY & TIMOTHY OF THE CAY
THE DOOR IN THE WALL
THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS.
BASILE. FRANKWEILER 1968
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
& MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
HARRIET THE SPY
MATILDA
THE GIVER
ROLL OF THUNDER HEAR MY CRY 1977
*BRIDGE TO TERABITHA 1978
A WRINKLE IN TIME 1963
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
HATCHET
***THE SECRET GARDEN
GOODNIGHT MR. TOM
WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS
TUCK EVERLASTING
ARE YOU THERE GOD,
ITS ME MARGARET
WISE CHILD
DIAMOND IN THE WINDOW
CRAZY LADY
THE GREAT AMERICAN ELEPHANT
CHASE
*DEAR NAPOLEAN I KNOW YOU'RE
DEAD,BUT ...
OLD YELLER
SERIES
NANCY DREW
*THE DARK IS RISING
*LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS
REDWALL
**WIZARD OF EARTHSEAS
PRYDIAN CHRONICLES

JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
JERRY SPINELLI
KATHERINE PATTERSON
SCOTT O'DELL
ROBERT C. O'BRIEN
JANE LESLIE CONLY
THEODORE TAYLOR
MARGUERITE DE ANGELI
E. L. KONIGSBURG
JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE
LOUISE FITZHUGH
ROALDDAHL
LOIS LOWRY
MILDRED D. TAYLOR
KATHERINE PATTERSON
MADELINE L'ENGLE
MARK TWAIN
GARY PAULSON
FRANCES HODGES BURNETT
MICHELLE MAGO RIAN
WILSON RAWLS
NATALIE BABBIT
JUDY BLUME
MONICA FURLOUGH
JANE LANGTON
JANE LESLIE CONLY
JILLIAN CHASE
ELVIRA WOODRUFF
FRED GIBSON

CAROLYN KEENE
SUSAN COOPER
LAURA INGALLS WILDER
BRIAN JACQUES
URSULA LE GUIN
LLOYD ALEXANDER

QfHER FAVORITE CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF ADULTS
****LITTLE WOMEN
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
LYNNE REED BANKS
THE FARTHEST AWAY MOUNTAIN

If you would like to be sent copies of write ups about these books, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope (55c stamp)
and I will send them to you. In the next issue I will include a list of other recommended books.

8

Boak summaries
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO LIVE
NOW
by Meredith Maran
Reviewed by Suzanne Shaw
Bantam Books, 1995
Women's Studies/ Sociology
352 pgs., $11.95
What can you say about a book that is
recommended by the owner of Ben and
Jerrys, the President of the Ms. Foundation
for Women and the Editor of Mother Jones
magazine? It is obviously politically correct. But, it is much more than that. It is,
as the reviewers, say "chock-full of laughter . . a recipe for life . . . exposes the
naked truth of our existence . . . down to
earth."
Meredith Maran, herself, is, "the most
irresistible force I have ever had the good
fortune to meet ... wise, resilient, loving
and funny . . . charming and confrontational." (quotes from the back cover).
While you the reader may not be bisexual, or live the hip life-style of the Oakland/Berkeley corridor, or have the pleasure
of working in Smith and Hawken 's art department, there are in this book many of
the truths of life for women in their forties
(and maybe fifties and thirties as well).
There is the issue of where to live so that
our children will not be isolated from the
real world, while at the same time worrying about the dangers in that very same real
world. Maran analyzes what it means to
have long-term female friends who mean
more to one than life itself, but also provide much of the angst in our lives. She
explores the difficulties of putting all of
one's eggs in a basket when the world today is so fluid. She discusses the pain of
raising children in two households with
different rules; the sharing of children between two parents.
She agonizes over how to present Judaism to her sons, as well as the subsequent issue of decidi~g where Jewish religion and culture fit into her own life ..
Maran grew up in a family which did everything it could to get away from being
identified as Jewish which complicates her
feelings and decisions. These issues are

presented in chapters titled: What It's Like
To Love ... To Be Family ... To Stay Alive.
.. To Pursue Happiness Now.
Maran has a breezy, self-reflective,
honest approach to her life. She analyzes
each and every aspect and comes out with
self-revelations that make the reader think
of how it applies to their own lives. For me
the book was worth the read just for the
section on friendship. On the one hand,
"is it just too damn scary nowadays to love
a friend enough to last a lifetime?" (p. 94).
On the other hand, "With each birthday I
am more aware ofhow difficult it is to make
the kind of new friends who will someday
be old friends. As my past becomes the
greater portion of my life it becomes increasingly important to me to have friends
who have lived at least some of it with me."
(p. 95)
Try it, I think you'll like it. The issues
she deals with - breast biopsies, friends
dying of AIDS, the breakup of a marriage,
facing the prospect of growing older etc.
are serious ones, yet, her writing is full of
humor and hope.

LET'S HEAR IT ~OR THE
GIRLS
By Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith
Penguin Books, New York 1997
Education/ Children's Literature,
224 pgs., $10.95
Following their highly acclaimed 500
Great Books by Women: A Readers Guide,
Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith address the need to provide children with role
models who are fearless, fair-minded, funny
- and female. Just in time for Women's History Month in March, LET''S HEAR IT
FOR THE GIRLS: 375 Great Books for
Readers 2-14 reaffirms the author's belief
"in the power of books to give children a
vision of what is possible."
As in their previous book, Smith and
Bauermeister recommend a rich and wideranging selection of books that take us
around the globe and across history. They
introduce girls and women, both fictional

9

and real, who are strong
and resourceful, whether
they are outwardly tough or
quietly brave, ordinary or extraordinary. Here are the
best-loved females of literature, from Eliose and Miss Rumphius
to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harriet the Spy;
and accomplished women such as Jane
Goodall, Harriet Tubman, Golda Meir, and
Louisa May Alcott. And there are many
new discoveries as well. These are girls
and women who hunt fossils, swim with
sharks, outwit dragons, learn to read, win
the Nobel Peace Prize, make friends. These
are characters, the authors note, who "teach
us that 'greatness' can be defined in many
ways."

I NEED YOUR HELP
• What are your favorite biographies/
memoirs/autobiographies? Would you
be willing to contribute a short writeup either about the book and/or why
you like it so much?
• Suggestions for bedtime reading to
the older child - those over nine or ten
who can read to themselves. Books
that are longer than they might choose
to read alone and/or a little more difficult than they are ready to tackle.
Books that are a pleasure to read out
loud.
• Do you have comments on the books
that have been presented thusfar? What
books has your book group read that
they really liked and/or lead to a great
discussion? I'd Jove to get feedback
on Book Group Books?

Cortstdeft a Qtbt S;ubscfttpttort
noft a Sisteft. bhiend. motheft to the

WOMEN'S
LITERATURE
REVIEW
u4C8Utthda~. CJ'fteat Oft

CJhan~ <]ou noft a speciaQ nauoft

Map of the world - Jane Hamilton
POJNT
by Suzanne Shaw
Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1994
Fiction, $12.00, 390 pgs.
Map of the World has elicited ~any
responses from its readers. As noted m the
first newsletter (November 1996) it can be
said to be both "deeply depressing" and a
book that some "loved." It is true that the
book begins with tragedy and, through a
tumbleweed of events, it continues down a
path of further disasters. In the first chapter it is Alice Goodwin's tum to watch the
two young _daughters of her friend and
neighbor, Theresa, as well as h~r ow?.
While upstairs looking for her bathmg smt,
Lizzie Theresa's two-year-old, wanders out
the mtlocked screen door to begin her swim
in the pond. Alice realizes as soon as she
gets downstairs that Lizzie is missing. She
finds her face down in the pond, no longer
breathing.
For parents of young children, the
death of Lizzie is more than they can bear too close to home. Some cannot continue
from there. But, for those who stick with
the book, there is much to be gained, as the
reader watches Alice's life and sense of
security disintegrate piece by piece. Aside
from the stigma she now faces, as a result
of Lizzie's drowning, what is at the core of
her problems is her "differentness." She
says from the beginning that she has not
made friends in this small rural, turned suburban, community, in which she, and her
husband Howard, are running the last family farm. It is this lack of commu?ity c?nnection that makes her vulnerable m her JOb
as school nurse. She allows her hostility
toward a difficult child to push her beyond
reasonable behavior. Because of this error
in judgment and restraint, Alice once again
finds herself in trouble - this time with the
law, rather than just her conscience.
Jane Hamilton is a terrific writer. She
is eloquent, poetic and truth telling. The
thoughts that are expressed in Alice's narrative are poetic versions of thoughts the
reader could imagine having themselves.
Alice in vulnerable in many of the same
ways we all could be - subject to the whims
of the majority when her feelings and opinions are very much outside the norm. If
this statement seems far from reality, consider the litigious nature of our society and

the vulnerability of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Behavior which may
seem perfectly natural in a supportive environment, may appear sinister when ones'
observers are hostile. Think of the House
Unamerican Activities Committee; imagine being a pacifist in a gun-toting NRAsupporting small town.
You may very well ask, "Why read a
book which is so clearly painful, when there
is so much else to read?" My answer would
be that Map of the World forces one to look
at their own lives, their own vulnerabilities
and examine how they would act and think
under the circumstances. It is so easy to be
judgmental when someone else appears to
be at fault, but what if the same things happened to us? At its best, it brings out the
compassion and empathy of the read~r. It
is also a pleasure to read Jane Hamilton
once you get beyond the grief of the events
described.

ity, the balances and dances be~ween
spouses, and between parents and children.
There is no shortage of meaningful material in this novel, but the power of the writing makes the repeated calamities, which
sweep away the characters, literally too
much to bear. The reader can either close
the book with a sigh of relief and tum gratefully to some mundane, but safe, task or
deliberately distance and detach from the
characters in order to be able to finish the
story.
Neither approach is very satisfactory.
It is a bizarre conundrum for Ms. Hamilton
to write so well that she becomes unreadable.

I am aware of at least three book groups
which have chosen not to read this book
because of comments in the previous newsletter. BUT, my book group, which includes many women with young children,
overall, felt positively about the book.

"Hamilton's chillingly accurate prose
keeps her fine novel buoyant. She is superb in her observation ofthe natura_l world
and in her examination ofpsychological nuance." Washington Post

COUNTERPOINT

"It takes a writer of rare power and
discipline to carry off an achievement like
Map of the World. Hamilton proves here
that she is one of our best." Newsweek

by Lauren Dale
It is a rare experience to say of a book,
"This is a very well written book, and I
don't want to read another word." Are the
shortcomings within the book or the reader?
In A Map of the World by Jane
Hamilton, Alice and Howard Goodwin and
their young daughters, Emma and Claire,
live on a dairy farm, the last in their part of
the Midwest, a sanctuary of four hundred
cheap acres. The land around them is being devoured by housing tracts and suburban development. The Goodwins are oddities, outsiders,, vulnerable to the forces of
the surrounding community even before a
disastrous accident occurs.
A Map of the World is a grueling book,
the kind of vivid book that swallows you
up and takes over your emotional state: ~e
difficulty with that degree of persuasion 1s
that the events within the story are grim in
the extreme and deteriorate with every
page. The themes tackled are significa~t:
loss, responsibility, friendship, vulnerabll10

Jane Hamilton's first book, The Book
of Ruth won the Pen/Ernest Hemingway
Foundation Award in 1994 . It is currently
on the paperback best seller lists, because
it was a featured book on Oprah.

NEXT ISSUE
Charms For The Easy Life by Kaye
Gibbons
Author Lee Smith ...
In The Time of Butterflies by Julie
Alvarez ...
Balimore Blues, by Laura Lippman ..
The Liars Club by Mary Karr . . .
Memoirs - An Analysis ...
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice
Munro . .

•~t-:,, fi,-1,a ,a" o, 11

The Pull Of The Moon Review & Book Group comments

by Elizabeth Berg
Reviewed by Mary Ann Dunevant
Fiction, $21.00 (hardback), 224 pgs.

I was too smart to do this, that a
chimpanzee could do what I was
doing - better!" (p. 98)

The Pull of the Moon is a novel composed of letters, written by Nan, a 50 year
old woman, to her husband. whom she has
temporarily left in order to take a trip by
herself. Each letter is followed by an entry
into the turquoise journal that was the inspiration for this trip. It is the expression
of Nan's feelings and memories, as articulated through the letters, that so moved me.
On nearly every other page, I had to pause
while I realized that I, too, had felt exactly
the same as she.

On dying: "Let it be this way:
Let me be eighty-eight. Let me
have just returned from the hairdresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn
chair beside my garden, a largeprint book of poetry in my hands.
Let me hear the whistle of a
cardinal and look up to find him
and feel a sudden flutter in my
chest and then - nothing. And, as
long as I'm asking let me rise up
over my own self, say, "Oh. Ay."
(p. 80)

The discussion was very personal and
thought-provoking. We talked about the invisibility of aging women and how loss of
youth and beauty gives women "one less
card to play" in a society that values youth,
wealth and marital status. This book
brought out more people on a cold February night when snow was forecast than any
other book has for years. Read it. Read it
with your group. Maybe even buy it ...

On motherhood: "Of course
there were some bad days. Remember the time Ruthie was napping on a Saturday afternoon and
I sat in the living room literally
tearing my hair out and saying that

Since the book touches on issues of
aging, marriage and classism, it made for a
great, passionate book group discussion.
Like me, several people unabashedly loved
the book while other despised it. Among

I would welcome other reviews of this
sort - a summary, or review of the book and
book group comments. For the next issue I
would need to receive them by May 23rd the Friday before Memorial Day.

those who didn't like
book, Nan was described as
"spineless and vapid," "narcissistic,", "wasteful," and
"unable to take responsibility for her life."

J. California cooper at The Pratt
Contributed by Charlotte Taggart
Five hundred enthusiastic fans greeted
author J. California Cooper at the Omni Inner Harbor Hotel on Saturday, February
22nd. While enjoying a buffet breakfast,
her audience laughed, sighed and voiced
approval at her words of wit and wisdom.
Ms. Cooper is one of America's foremost fiction writers who tells moral tales
and parables rich in insight and wisdom.
In her works she writes of simple people
living complex lives and of complex people
whose actions reveal simple tales of life.
Her two novels are Family and In Search
of Satisfaction. In addition, she has created four collections of short stories: the

winner of the 1989 American Book Award,
Homemade Love; Some Soul to Keep; A
Piece of Mind; and The Matter is Life. She
has been honored as Black Playwright of
the Year (1978), received the James
Baldwin Writing Award (1988) and the Literary Lion Award from the American Library Association (1988). J. California
Cooper now lives in Texas.
According to Ms. Cooper, she was a
solitary child who took delight in observing others. "I've always loved wisdom; I
didn't want to make mistakes." When she
wanted to go out to play her mother would
say that any fool could have fun and that
she should stay in the house and learn something.

J. California admonished her listeners
to look at their lives and take control of
them; to build their world and make their
own happiness. Ms. Cooper views the Ten
Commandments as directions for life.
When a young man once remarked that
everything fun was a sin, this author replied
heatedly, "Is lying fun? Is stealing fun? Is
murder f un? Is adultery fun, (pause) after the first few times?"
After a spirited reading of two short stories, Ms. Cooper answered questions from
the audience. In strident tones Ms. Cooper
concluded her presentation by advising her
listeners to do the things they love. This
energetic woman confided that she is currently enjoying both tap dancing and piano
lessons.

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11

More Reading weekends:
by April Seitz
(interspersed with
quotes from "The
Bookworm's Weekend
Retreat", by Barbara
Beckwith, US Air
Magazine, March 1994)
In the last issue of this newsletter,
Suzanne introduced the glorious experience
of "reading weekends". I too am a devotee
of this perfect melding of good books, good
food, and good companionship, and it is my
assignment to elaborate on the preferred settings for such a literary escape.
Since the essential focus of the weekend
is to immerse yourself in the worlds of your
favorite books and authors for Jong, uninterrupted blocks of time, comfort is primary.
(The quality of your reading choices are just
as important, but that is a topic for a future
article). Also, as in many fields of endeavor,
remember the importance of: location, location, location! Select a destination that does
not have the typical tourist or activity distractions - you don't want your surroundings
to lure you away from the purpose of your

~

-

The most important consideration for
me, however, is the comfort level of the place
you settle into. Soft, cushy, but supportive
furniture is a must (the more cushiony the
sofa or chair available the better!). Also, make
sure good lighting is present. Movable lamps
with wattage sufficient for reading are a necessity. Bring extra light bulbs with you. Is
the indoor temperature controllable by you?
Lighting, temperature control and comfort are
all things you want to check out before you
commit yourself to staying at a particular
place. If you don't want to bother with cooking, and have the money to eat out all weekend, the proximity of good restaurants conducive to conversation should be considered
as well.
I believe the best times of year for reading weekends are fall and winter. What could
be better than cocooning in front of a fireplace with a juicy novel, your favorite cookies, and a friend interested in hearing all the
good parts?! Spring is a wonderful time,

Women's Literature Review

~
~

retreat. A cabin in Hedgesville, West Virginia, and a bed and breakfast in rural Carroll ,
County, Maryland have both served us well
on past trips.

~

4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21212

though, if you like taking a walk to exercise
your legs and discuss what you've been immersed in.
Whenever, and wherever you go, though,
is really besides the point- the main thing is
just to go!! A bibliophile deserves the utter
joy, every so often, of being able to savor the
beginning, middle, and end of a delicious read
all in one day or weekend. After you 've experienced your first reading weekend, the anticipation of your next one becomes as fun as
the actual event. Suzanne and I have become
so addicted to these twice-yearly escapes
from the real world, that we've begun to plan
the meals, snacks, and the most comfortable
wardrobes needed, as enthusiastically as we
plan the choices of books to bring! Don 't
deny yourself this pleasure!
"Brief spurts of reading between subway stops on our way to work, or
semiconscious moments before falling
asleep, weren't enough to make a dent
in the pile (of books). We were frustrated. It was like being surrounded
by luscious fruit we had no chance to
eat." Barbara Beckwith)

ARE YOU MISSING OUT ON SOME
OF THE BEST FICI'ION BY WOMEN?

THE WOMEN'S
LITERATURE REVIEW*
Is a new publication which reviews books by female authors as well as providing Information
about what book groups are reading, Ideas for improving book group discussions and readers
opinions of popular and less well known books on the market.

EACH ISSUE FEATURES:

*Focus on an Author and Her Work
*Three or Four Book Reviews of Fiction
*One Book Review of Non-Fiction
*Several Book S1 immaries
• information About a Book Group and What They
Have Read
~;::::::::.a *Ways to Improve Book Group Discussions

WHY ONLY BOOKS BY WOMEN?
ONE CAN ONLY DESIRE WHAT ONE KNOWS ABOUT AND BOOKS BY
WOMEN ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE REVIEWED THAN THOSE BY MEN.
CHECK THE WEEKLY BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS OF NATIONAL PAPERS
AND-YOU'LL SEE WHAT I MEAN!

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Write to: Suzanne Shaw
Women's Literature Review
4908 Crowson Avenue
Baltimore, Md. 21212
Annual Subscription $15
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For More Information Call:

410-323-5782

"I myselfhave never been_ able tD.find out
precisely whatfeminlsm is:
I only know that people ooJl me afemlnist
wheneuer I express sen.ttments that
dftferent:late me.from a doormat . .. "

Rebecca West