Author du Jour: Jonathan White

Tides-Cover=smallTides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean,” by Jonathan White

(Trinity, pp 336, $28.00)

Something unexpected will happen upon reading the chapters of this captivating book. Your nostrils will feel the iodine-laden air as the winds break like waves upon the shores of your assumptions. They will jolt into wakeupness.  If you ever thought that the constant ebb and flow of the sea was something simple, think again. Jonathan White, an expert sailor, thought he did and came close to pay dearly for his naïve belief. Maps and tide charts reveal only the partial story of tides, the mechanical one. All along these pages, White gives another perspective.

Tides” is first a powerful anthem to the sea, a hymn to a misunderstood life-cycle, and a must-read engagement with the world’s most iconoclastic waters. If anything, you will learn that without tides life would miss movement and would be radically different. To learn about tides is to understand the multi-daily symbiosis taking place, all over the world. How milieus rely on each other, not just a toing and froing between sandpipers and mud-shrimps, or blue mussels and crabs, but how the pendulum movement is intimately integrated with migrations of birds and reproductive cycle of species, ours included. The pages will flick through your fingers, as it becomes obvious that our modern understanding has been severely confined to our economic and cultural needs. The worst offender is our view of nature as a place of competition.

White crossed the world and back to bring about his fascinating accounts, visiting the great Canadian North and Okney Island in Scotland, via the Bay of Mont Saint Michel in France, to the Hangzhou Bay in China, and many more, to show that although tides vary depending where they are located, they also demonstrate vital common features. His is to demystify our modern hypothesis. There is no survival of the fittest, but a synchronized moondance leading to the spirit of cooperation. Our paradigms, we know now, have been wrong and wronged us. The consequences have been and are enormous. Time for a new tide to come in wash off past mistakes so that we can re-think everything new again.

Author du Jour: Fabrice Jaumont

Book-Cover-ENGLISH-smallThe Bilingual Revolution,” by Fabrice Jaumont

(TBR Books, pp 210, $19.99)

This book is about education and the teaching of foreign language in the American school system . . . And this book is about community and the use of other languages within a specific social framework . . . This book is also about cultures, ancestries, foreign roots, identities, and above all how they manifest through other languages. You could leave a blank space and fill it with your own input, and chances is that it would be coherent. Because, at heart, this book is a love-letter to the preservation of linguistic diversity.

Its arrival could not be more timely. A disruptive force in this age of nativist revivalism, where pluralistic criteria are perceived as threats to uniformity and stability of a nation. Jaumont, a specialist in these linguistic issues, has crafted a remarkable history of bilingual and dual education, which runs counter to this ideology.  This is what he calls the bilingual revolution. He seeks to debunk the monolingual myth.

But the book’s true revolutionary spirit, which he clearly captures, reveals that like all revolutions, this one started as grassroots movements, scattered around the nation, with little connections with each other. Far from being led by radical and heated spirits, these groups were led by mothers and fathers, with no legal and educational expertise, but with simply the eagerness to transmit their native tongue to their children. The revolution is that over the last 5-7 years, these groups have mushroomed all over big cities and are transforming education in a global way. Jaumont shows how these groups succeeded in establishing dual language programs in their community. He covers a wide range of languages: Chinese, Russian, French, Japanese, Polish, and so on, to show how these parents did it. The real nugget of this book lies precisely on this latest remark. For anyone wishing to give their children a bilingual education, this book is a must-read. It is above all a roadmap to navigate your way through the educational school mazes and their treacherous administrative hurdles. His message is loud and clear, whether you speak Chinese or Serbian, you too can implement new programs, and he has the merit to tell you how to do it. Merci mille fois!

Author du Jour: Kathleen Hill

She-Read-to-Us-cover-smallShe Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels,” by Kathleen Hill

(Delphinium Books, pp 224, $24.00)

Here is a book that could easily be missed out. So delicate in tone and style that it reads like a minuet. It is precisely the finely chiseled and graceful sentences that make this sonorous book all the more moving. Its topic, on the other hand, reads more like a symphony. A multi-layered memoir, which deals with the life of books and their influence on our lives, but without ever becoming cacophonous. Its impact, however, could not be louder, so much the ideas tackled are gigantic. You would have to be tone-deaf to miss the point Hill is driving home.

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons” is about the rendition of a courageous young American idealist taking a teaching job in Nigeria in 1963, and who thinks she is going to remake the world. If her memoir could be a grain of sand, each chapter describes a unique universe of self-questioning, which echoes with so much truism that you will catch yourself nodding as her journey progresses, with universal truth. Big frictions are raised. The validity of a western education, which displace traditional values and cultures, in the name of economic development. It is not just the horror of the ivory trade, as in “Heart of Darkness,” or the indoctrination of charmed African workers laboring merrily in coffee plantations as in “Out of Africa,” but also the disruptive voice of “When Things Fall Apart” which departs from the accepted discourse of obvious legacy of the white man’s burden.  And Hill does not fall in the trap of explaining all the whys.

What makes this memoir so captivating is that the journey is undertaken through fiction novels. Hill excels at navigating through the labyrinth of her trajectory back to the source of the long river of colonialism, starting back at Badagry. What is it like to read “Portrait of a Lady” thousand miles away from home, in the darkest jungle? Can books really teach us anything if they taint our reality with fiction from other worlds? Of course, there is a chapter on “Madame Bovary,” who epitomizes de facto the issue of self-deception. Chances are we have all been infected with Bovarism somewhere in our life. Though a work of non-fiction, “She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons” come in a world increasingly globalized to make us ponder over our decisions and lives. Is anyone immune at all? Are you living your life or the one expected from you? “She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons” will keep you pondering.

Author du Jour: Teresa Messineo

Fire-By-Night-small-HCThe Fire by Night,” by Teresa Messineo

(William Morrow, pp 302, $ 26.99)

Though all wars results in the same atrocious outcome, they are hardly similar in their origins. They often start with an incident, a provocation, appearing to be insignificant, but releasing long-repressed emotions, a process which makes take years to burn out. We celebrate May 8th, officially marking the end of WWII, and though the conflict has been over for more than 70 years, it still continues to consume us on the intellectual and spiritual levels. We still try to comprehend how the magnitude of atrocities was made possible. We remember the main perpetrators, their names synonymous with locations, whereas all the forgotten heroes and sacrificed populations are collectively remember as the casualties. Even in memory wars and history are unjust.

Upon reading “The Fire by Night,” Messineo’s remarkable and powerful debut novel, I could not help thinking about “Hidden Figures,” and how tenacious women made NASA’s spatial odyssey possible, and also “The English Patient” for the resilient tenderness the nurse displays towards her wounded soldiers, no matter the external circumstances. In “The Fire by Night,” we met a pair of unsung heroes, two nurses working on the front lines, one in Europe, Jo, and one in the South Pacific, Kay. Jo struggles to survive in a makeshift medical camp as German troops advance. Kay is kept captive in Manila at the hands of sadistic Japanese soldiers. Both women where friends in Nursing school and only when they come home do they realize that they now must fight a different kind of enemy, not only their own disillusion, trauma and losses, but also a world forever changed. A world they struggle to adjust to. One of the paradoxes of wars is that one can find endless resilience to fight a well-defined enemy. Life in freedom however may not be as extreme in terms of survival, keeping the enemy thinly veiled. Communities and friendships are paramount to heal wounds. The nurses rely on each other to survive. My reference to films was not random. The world of nurses in wars, their sacrifices and resilience in the face of the utmost atrocities, tending to others while striving for their own survival, have been broadly neglected. The novel deserves to find its way to the big screen. Like Messineo wrote for it.

Author du Jour: Deborah Crombie

GardenOfLamentations-small-HCGarden of Lamentations,” by Deborah Crombie

(William Morrow, pp 400, $15.99)

A new shipment from Texas transplant, Deborah Crombie, to the UK brings another powerful thriller featuring the Scotland Yard detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. The most interesting aspect of Crombie’s novels, and this one (her 17th) does not fail to hit the high mark, lies in their characterizations. No two thriller-writers write alike, but two schools stand out. One that accentuates plots and actions, while the other emphasizes characterization and, indirectly, intimacy. We travel through life with the protagonists, outside of the investigation. We meet their families and evolve within their domestic spheres, their marriage, children and personal problems. It goes without say that this latter category makes for a different kind of reading and novel experience. Crombie is neither one nor the other, but a perfect balance between the two that few can achieve without falling into the traps of tediousness and formulas.

Garden of Lamentations,” takes us from the get-go on a double-spiral ride. The Kincaid-James team works separately. First Gemma is involved in the investigation of the murder of a young woman, whose body is discovered in one of Notting Hill’s private gardens. Suspicion does not lag; for this macabre discovery is located in one of London’s most select neighborhoods. When another victim meets the same dark forces, Gemma knows that there is something more at play. Meanwhile, Kincaid, who fears for his life, has moved away from Gemma James, to investigate a case involving members of the forces. Distrust reigns in the ranks, especially after an officer is violently assaulted. As a reader, you anticipate when these two stories are going to cross path. I will not tell you how but partially points you in the direction. While Gemma foresees a potential solution to her crimes, she becomes aware that a child’s life rests in her hands . . . and this makes for a psycho-haunting uninterrupted read, with Kincaid to the rescue.