I really enjoyed this book. In my youth, 1968-1969, I spent 11 months and 29 days in Vietnam courtesy of the U. S. Government. One of the things that I enjoyed most was the fact that most of it was set in Saigon with a few excursions into the Chinese portion of the city, Cholon. I spent time in and around Saigon and Cholon during the Tet Offensive of 1969. This story is very evocative of my experience, and as it turns out the story told is true, even though it is ostensibly a fiction, it is a fiction with a heart of truth.

Many of the descriptions Greene uses give the story an atmosphere of foreigness, of a certain expectation, which is not denied. However the most pervasive atmosphere is one of ennui, all the characters seem to be in a lull waiting for a major event in the civil war raging at that time between Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh and the French. It reminds me of the malaise that one finds in tropic climes mixed with the sense of forboding that comes with the waiting involved in war, long periods of waiting punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror.

The narrator,Thomas Fowler, a British jounalist on the verge of either going native or returning to England once the expectation in feelings of low level dread wears away and he feels he can make a decision. His friend, Pyle, the quiet American of the title, turns out to be an agent provacateur attached to the U. S. Embassy as an assistant to the Economic Attache, but was actually supplying several of the Vietnamese revolutionary groups with weapons. The hope was that if one of these groups won out in the end against the Viet Minh the US would have a good deal of influence over them and guide the winning insurgent to control of South Vietnam with the US as their major supporters. As we know now, all of these plans were all too true.

One of the episodes in the book that points out clearly and firmly the nature of war in Vietnam comes when Fowler and Pyle are returning by auto from a Buddhist ceremony up country. On their way back to Saigon they run out of gas and while hunting for more they find a guard tower and wind up spending an eventful evening in and around this tower. I lived in a village about twenty miles into the Mekong Delta region and these towers were situiated on the road, usually next to a stream or creek where an eye could be kept on both the road and the water. The description of this evening took me back to my time in country.

Both men, Fowler and Pyle are interested in the same woman, a courtesan name Phuong. Fowler loses her to Pyle because Pyle has promised to take her home to America with him when his time in Vietnam comes to an end. However, shortly after a major terrorist bomb explodes in a crowded square, Pyle is murdered. These two events return Phuong to Fowler. This is a subplot that runs throughout the book, partially as a means to drive home the innocent arrogance Pyle exhibits in his quest to find and support the "third way" candidate with a chance at defeating the Viet Minh. The terroist bombing of the public square was a part of that activity.

What I found most interesting and distrubing about the book, other than Greene's obvious familiarity with Saigon and Vietnam in general was the innocence with which the Americans thought they could manipulate the situation without being mired in Vietnam as the French were at the time. The entire course of the Vietnam war can be discerned in this book. If Greene could see this in 1955, why couldn't the US see this in 1965?

The book is brilliant. It does three things very well: it creates a very palpable atmosphere, in fact the atmosphere may be read almost as a character, dragging everything else along, the story deals with the relationship between Phuong and Fowler and Pyle to help fill out life in Vietnam through the eyes of the Vietnamese, as well as the standard sort of romance that was de riguer in novels from this period, but it never gets in the way, and always serves to move the story forward, finally, again, the foolish innocence of Americans in their belief they have something special to bring to a world that often does not want it. George W. Bush may have been served better by reading this book rather than Camus' L'Etranger.

I recommend this book to everyone, especially to those who have an interest in the history of American relations with Vietnam during the French occupation after WWII.

The rural South with it's basic agricultural economy was severly strained by the Great Depression, the setting for this novel. I lived in the south off and on for more years than I care to count, some of the time in the rural South, a part of the country pulling itself up by its bootstraps at the time. I didn't know anyone as "interesting" as the Lesters, but I went to school with children who lived and worked on tobacco farms as sharecroppers. Many did not live that much better than the Lesters, and many of the African Americans living in the county lived in what we would consider squalor, but was actually well kept and pretty well preserved, unlike the Lesters home place. But, as I say these folks were working croppers. My home was on the edge of a tobacco field and separated from the fields by a real "Tobacco Road". The evidence of the depression was all around: tumble down tobacco curing sheds, houses that looked just like the ones on the cover of this book, people walking up and down the county road to get from one town to another, mule carts and so forth. It was a very interesting place. I imagine in the 1930's this area was full of Lesters.

This is the only Erskine Caldwell I've read and I must say I was surprised in places with the subtlety of his message, while delivered with a strong hand, it sent ripples in all directions from the broke down shack and the overgrown fields, to the towns and cities in the area. This is a story of dislocation in time, loss of meaning in life, and the cultural and social upheavals in the South during the change from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy centered in the cities. This is a story of a present that was very different from the past. The older generation lived a life close to the land, but times were hard and, as it does everywhere, cotton had essentially destroyed the land, leaving it unusable for anything but scrub oak and weeds. The Lesters haven't had a crop for years, can't get any money to grow another crop and are reduced to stealing everything they have. Over time the Lester family has sold off their land just to have money to survive on. They are a family living on a road going nowhere, the tobacco road.

Jeeter, the father of the Lester clan and Ada, his wife and mother of his seventeen children live on land that used to belong to the Jeeters, but now is owned by an absentee landlord. Their house is falling down, the things they own are in pitiful shape, they have an automobile that hardly runs and food is always on their minds. Sometimes they are reduced to eating tree bark, other times as in the opening scene the entire family cooperates in stealing food, only to have Jeeter selfishly consume it without sharing among the family. These are people at the edge of existence. Sharecropping is a failure with no prospects for the future.

The new world of manufacturing, cities, and opportunity are disdained by the Lesters. Jeeter is a farmer and will never go to the city to work in a factory, no matter what. It is apparent that the new world in the towns and cities is a very alien place and the things it produces are alien products. The saga of the new automobile provides a metaphorical insight into the changing phases of life on the land contrasted with the permanence of the new and modern. Over a period of less than two weeks, a brand new automobile is almost completely destroyed one fender bender at a time just as the lives of the Lesters have been a series of catastrophes resulting in lost land, collapsing buildings, starvation and worst of all, lost hope.

All but three of the Lester's children have left home and are lost to the opportunities of the mills and the cities. At one point Jeeter asks his eldest son to give him money and is turned down. His son tells him that tobacco road is the past which he has no desire to revisit and he has rejected his rural roots. None of the other children who left are ever heard from again, either.

The children at home, the thirteen year old girl who is scared to death to sleep with her husband, the sixteen year old boy who plows through life looking neither right nor left and, just like his father, with no sense of where he's going. His wife Bessie the lady preacher, the owner of the new car which she allows her husband to drive. Living at home too, is the eighteen year old Ellie May, an unmarriable girl with a massive harelip. Finally, there is the grandmother who is looked upon by the rest of the family as a leech, and as events prove could not be got rid of quickly enough. Her death is a particularly gruesome scene showing the level to which the Lesters have descended. It's just a miracle they didn't eat her.

I don't know that much about Southern Literature, but this is certainly a circus of grotesques. The question in my mind is how well Caldwell captured this world. We start out with what appears to be an instance of incest between brother and sister (I may have misread this), which seems a bit over the top anytime anywhere. The Lester's entire lifestyle seems more like a fantasy than a slice of reality. I know the paperback editions of this book were sold in the fifties as a lurid story of unabashed sleaze. I was very surprised at how tame it seems by todays standards and that the story was much more than a sleazy look at the grotesques of the south. I found it to be an engaging read that was easy to take with solid prose and a purpose beyond the simple story. This is a story of death, death of King Cotton, death of the agricultural south, the death of a way of life, and finally the death of those who will not chose life if it means change.

I found this book entertaining, easy to read, and, surprisingly, with a message deeper than I thought would be found here. Caldwell is no O'Connor or Faulkner, but the children of Jeeter Lester populate both their works in full. I can see several plot lines from this book in both of O'Connor's novels. Hazel Mote could have been one of the Lester children that left the farm. In a way, The Violent Bear it Away is the same story told from a different point of view. I would venture to say that Caldwell had an influence on O'Conner. It makes me want to read God's Little Acre, now. I recommend this book to all who may be interested.

I just don't know what to make of this novel. It's short, a little more than a hundred pages, with fairly large, well spaced print and is a very quick read, more like a novella. I'm just not sure what I'm reading about is even worth the short time it takes to read it. Contemporary adult fiction has always been something of a problem for me in terms of interest and taste. I tend toward the modern in this category, while the only way I can describe this book is an exercise in various forms of post-modernism.

Now, I like Borges for his ability to break down reality and reassemble it in ways not before considered. But Ray gives me the sense of a robot clunking through someone's life, taking a very circuitous route, dropping, from time to time, unimportant pieces of information that don't go anywhere or contribute to the story. There is just an overall clunkiness to it.

I suspect part of this may be the language Hannah uses to tell the story. It is told in very, very plain, functional language, with few if any flourishes, almost as Ray would tell the story under sodium pentathol, as if an unknown questioner, asking unseen questions, gives us the answers, but leaves it to us to decide who is answering and what the questions where. I tend to like my stories a little more straightforward. Another issue, I have seems to run through the book in fits and starts with no real rhyme or reason: the unreliable narrator. Once again, who is narrating this story, and believe me it is mostly narration, Ray, Ray's sometime alter ego, an unseen questioner, a survivor of the battle at Antietam creek? The book jumps from straightforward narration to hearsay and back with no warning, leaving me not disturbed, but certainly scratching my head. Am I not smart enough to "get it"? Could be.

The blurb on the back talks about the "electrics of being alive", but these electrics have not changed since at least Shakespeare. I see the typical modern American novel enchanted with bad boys and girls, loaded with sex, drugs, alcohol and violence, although all of this, being told in very very simple sentences with mostly single syllable words, manages to wash the life out of these experiences. They are dry and flat at best.

The chartacters are mostly charicatures of the people in Ray's life. Once again it is as if the lives of these people were sucked dry by the language from which they are created. Is this Hannah's point: "Electric" lives can be as ordinary and mundane as other lives? Or is this an attempt to wed the over the top actions and events of the story with the plainness of the lives living them. Was the shooting of DeSoto a comment on the need for ever increasing stimulation in lives given over to prostitution, sex, and violence? It seems ironic that the person Ray, an ex-fighter jock in Vietnam, a pilot, a doctor with an insatiable appetite for sex, an educated man with six kids and a gorgeous wife, would be most jealous of a man who is lazy, incompetant, with a shrew for a wife just because he writes, in Ray's estimation, better poetry than Ray can? Ray's problem is he doesn't know any interesting people who are not in someway damaged goods, including himself.

Aside from the clunkiness, in a weird, twisted, very lonely sounding way this is an interesting book whose point may just be that we all live clunky, weird, twisted, lonely lives, "Electric" or not.

If you enjoy contemporary adult fiction, you may find this a good read and time well spent. With that not being my cup of tea, I probably will not add this to my "to be re-read" list, but I would recommend it to anyone, because in this case I can only speak for myself. If you enjoy this type of fiction I would bet you will like this one. The most positive thing I can say about it is there is never a dull spot, and trust me that goes as far as any aspect of the reader-writer-reading experience does in making for a pleasurable read.

Here in Texas and several other states a battle is being fought for the hearts and minds of our youth in regard to the place of religion, specifically Christianity, in the life of our country. Entire curricula teaching the Christian foundation of America and subsequently the United States have been created and are being taught in home-school environments and private church supported schools.

In a manner of speaking this is true, America was founded by disaffected, radical Christians who almost immediately began metastasizing into several hundred sects, each one treating the others as heretics and hurling anathema's at one another, not to mention criminalizing each others beliefs from time to time. the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is an excellent example of this. The Founding Fathers, ranging from Atheist to Christian to Deist to Jewish lived in this era of battling churches and the abuses of state churches and, as a result, excluded any reference to God or Jesus Christ in their founding documents, while recognizing the existence of a religiously amorphous "supreme being" or "nature's god". An unintended result of this was the unofficial creation of a public religion that recognizes this supreme being in the public square. This supreme being is recognized as "providence" and later on as "god" in the sense of "in whom we trust". However, this "god" is never the object of public worship, and fits the requirements of most religious people as a public institution regardless of sect or religion. This is the "god" of all, not the God of any particular sect or religion.

It is the history of this public religion with which this book is concerned. It's growth from a religious atmosphere that was tired of religious repression and state control to today where Americans, with a skewed sense of their own history attempt from time to time to convert this public religion to Christianity. Several attempts have been made to include the Christian God as well as Jesus Christ in the wording of our Constitution, creating an official state religion. We have been fortunate that as these situations arise we always have statesmen willing to beat this back. We are still a nation of religious freedom, and officially do not privilege one religion over any other.

An interesting point that Mr. Meacham makes is we are not likely to be successful in dismantling this public religion and attempts to do so create a dangerous backlash encouraging more people to institute Christianity as the official religion of the United States, which of course defeats the original purpose of the attacks on public religion and can bring us dangerously close to an official religion. When one determines whether a state religion is dangerous or not if must first be separated from this basically harmless public religion.

This book is a good primer on the nature of religion in our government and shows the difference between it and a real, worshiping religion. At present this public religion is under attack in favor of a more strident religiosity and once again, let us pray legislators at all levels will have the wisdom to beat it back again.

The author has written this book in a fluid, almost breezy, style for an historical survey. It requires little background understanding of the subject and can be understood by even the least religious among us. If religion and religious practice are important to you then this book may be a bit light, but if you are just now becoming interested in this subject or are just curious this is a good place to start. The book contains two appendices that present original documents regarding the issue of religion in America, as well as extensive notes on sources. While this is a brief survey, there is enough end matter to turn this into a course of study.

This would have been a fun read if I had been interested in the history of the Civil War, but since I'm not really, I didn't enjoy it much. The fact that it is a fantasy, a genre I don't care for, didn't help, either. But, someone recommended it for a group read, and belonging to the group, and having one of my suggestions for a similar group read accepted, I felt somewhat obliged to join in. I'm not sorry I did, however, I could have spent my time otherwise and felt it better used. I know, these are all personal problems, so what about the book?

This is one of a type of book I call a palette cleanser, the kind of book I enjoy after a hard slog through something on the order of Our Mutual Friend or The Violent Bear it Away. This type of book is the sherbet of the book world. Pleasantly sweet, little substance, no lingering aftertaste and soon forgotten in the red meat of Dostoevsky or the superb taste of a good Graham Greene. Another reviewer of this book called it a Harlequin Romance for men. Not too far from the mark, but just a little harsh considering that it is of a style that encourages reading by those who may otherwise not.

The story itself, as I said, is a fantasy (some call it alternate history, but I'm of the call a spade a spade set). As the title implies, it is set in fantasyland in the year 1862. There is a Civil War raging and the British have been drawn in with hopes of weakening the growing threat of the United States. As the story unfolds armies fight, territory is lost and won, people die, or lose important body parts, allies are duplicitous, the women are bawdy and the men horny. Typical of this genre I suppose. I know it's typical of this kind of four hundred page pot-boiler, of which I have some experience in my youth, before I discovered what a real book could be.

Much to my surprise and delight, I did not find the usual assortment of misspellings, fractured syntax, broken paragraphs and gaping plotholes that bring me up short and slingshot me out of the fantasy and back into my chair. For that I am grateful to the thoroughness of the author and his editors. Good editing can make almost anything go down smoothly, especially an action adventure book. Some books, even if they are edited by God, cannot be saved. This fortunately is not one of them.

The style is modern action with few interruptions for character development, introspection, or emotions that make characters real, and worth caring for. What I find makes a page turner is action, action, action and this has it in spades. The man-action is only interrupted three of four times with gratuitous sex, both hetero and homo. I really don't care much for explicit sex in novels, it all seems to emerge from the same cookie cutter, which is generally dull aound the edges. There were a few subplots that were fun, but petered off into nowhere. In retrospect some of these seem to be there just to fill up the page, not advance the story. A great example is the slave rebellion. If this was to get certain papers into British hands, then it was totally unnecessary and could have saved twenty or so pages that ultimately went nowhere. Oh, well, remember, action, action, action.

I can see this book providing hours of good reading to many people, mostly men, but I don't think I will read anymore of these for a while, I hope. One disadvantage to group reads (which I like a lot, don't get me wrong) is that not everyone has the same taste. Even though the book is four hundred pages, it reminds me of a thin broth or soup. It has a watery texture, with no complexity or depth, just action, action, action.

This is a very interesting book. It's part adventure, part satire, part spoof, part travelogue, and all fun. The central conceit is the telling of the event that was disastrous as it happened, but in hindsight quite funny in its absurdity. I've lived through quite a few moments of this nature, myself, and more than my share seem to have to do with water and cold weather.

Three friends, George, Harris, and J, the unnamed third, accompanied by a somewhat reluctant fox terrier, Montmorency, decide they need a vacation and settle on a row up the Thames to Oxford. As it becomes plain during the course of the story this is a fairly usual vacation for these three. They've all been up the river before, sometimes without a paddle, either together or apart. This slender volume uses the trip as a framing device to tell fourteen or fifteen humorous vignettes about people, places, and adventures on other trips in other days. The tone of all these stories is one of schadenfreude and a charming sense of the absolute absurdity of everyday situations.

Not all stories are filled with bathos, though. One of the best pieces of writing in the book is an imaginary description of the scene at Runnymeade of the signing of the Magna Carta by King John. The pomp and circumstance, the festive atmosphere, the tension, are all captured as if this were a chapter of Scott or Stevenson. Marvelous stuff.

The most intriguing aspect of this book is that among other things, it is an accomplished travelogue. Every town they pass on the way, every lock and weir system are brought to the fore. Descriptions of people and events that make a locale interesting, while often humourous, are quite informative. The book is something of a humorus journey into the Heart of Lightness, A journey from the modern rapidly paced center of London with its foggy, smoggy, rainy days, successively stripping away the centuries as they proceed upriver into the heart of Britain. As they approach the end of their journey they are surrounded by ancient Britannia, Roman earthworks, towns that are at least two thousand years old, the river opens the romance of Britain to the heart of the reader.

Once again, this is an excellent little book. This is a perfect two or three hour read that has plenty of entertainment value, but be careful, you just might learn something along the way.

This book is a slap in the face to the more fundamentalist evangelical Christians, while at the same time acknowledging the luke warm efforts of many mainstream churches. The issue here is the politics of Christ, a kind of "how would Christ vote". Even having to write such a book shows the decline of Christianity in this coun try in favor of a form of Christianism as a national political movement stemming from the fundamentalist evangilical churches. Make no mistake about it, this is a political movement not a religious movement, and Jim Wallis sees the movement as a misguided apostasy from the teachings of Christ.

Don't get me wrong. Wallis is not opposed to informing one's politics with Christian values, just make sure they are Christian values, not some cynics idea of Christian values. Wallis runs through the Beatitudes asking the question, "How does this square with the agenda of the Christian right?" Not surprisingly it seems that they don't square with Christ's teachings at all. In fact he points out that people who attempt to live in the light of Christ always have been, are now, and always will be a small minority of professing Christians. Indeed, there are non-Christians Christ would recognize as brothers before some professing Christians.

Wallis is an equal opportunity critic. He takes groups like the moral majority and Christian Coalition to task for exchanging the humility and rightousness of Christ for political power and how they have been cynically used by politicians while acheiving little or nothing toward helping the poor, bringing justice into the world, and governing with compassion. At the same time he chastises progressive religious leaders for trading their moral fire for a photo op with a Democratic big-wig. No one is looking at the critical issues raised by Jesus two thousand years ago. We are either pharisaic or seperate our religious lives from our secular lives. Wallis believes we should live our lives informed by the teachings of Christ, but be sure they are Christ's teachings, not the teachings of man shoe-horned into religious forms.

There is also a concern in this book for the idea of family values. Is it right for a family to struggle along in the standard patriarchal model rather than organically create a form that works for the requirements for the family to thrive? Wallis talks about the nature of patriarchy and how it can lead to problems, especially if the patriarchy takes precedent over functional family life. Families that rely on the patriarchal model tend more toward violence and divorce more than non-patriarchal families. How does this outcome square, once again, with the teachings of Christ? How are family values strengthened through violence and repression? Once again, Christianism leads away from Christ.

Each chapter deals with another aspect of how conservative Christians have been led to a national Christianism (my tern, not his) that is leading America down the path to hell and how progressive religious leaders allow this to happen by standing on the sidelines wringing their hands and bemoaning their fate.

There is good news according to Wallis. Many educated evangelicals are standing up to the right wing church leaders in areas such as ecological concerns, the poor, racial injustice, family abuse, and foreign policy.

This book will make conservative Christians angry at not having their social agenda questioned by Wallis, while progressives will be angry with the stress on informing daily life with religious precepts. The main lesson here is read your Bible, paying close attention to the Gospels.

I enjoyed most of this book, there were a few things I questioned, but they were mostly in style rather than substance. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the issue of Politics and Christianity.

After receiving this book through the mail the first thing I did, after opening it, was see how many pages there were. Anything over five hundred pages will generally have a hard time maintaining my interest. When I saw eight hundred and one pages I felt a pang of anxiety work its way from the pit of my stomach into the farthest reaches of my patience. Would I, should I, could I open this book with the intention of continuing to the end? Or would I, should I, could I close it right back up and put it in the "thought it was a good idea at the time" stack? I didn't know which way to go, but after deciding on the pages/year rule of determining interest, I decided to give it a try. I was hooked (gaffed?) by the end of the second page. I have never read an eight hundred page book in such a relatively short time as I read this one, including the last three hundred fifty pages in two evenings. It was a real page turner. How did Dickens do it? I haven't a clue.

Dickens wrote for people who had never seen any of the places he mentioned, and as a result can be very descriptive, but he does this in such a way that one generally doesn't notice, nor are his descriptions filled with minutiae, the way some descriptive writers often are. He elicits scenes more than paints them. I suspect this is one reason why young people are bored to death by Dickens, while more mature, or at least those with more life experience take to him more readily. He attacks and stimulates the imagination with just a few words, then moves into that space to present his story for that scene. I beleive this may be responsible for the misunderstanding that Dickens' characters are stereotypical. They are drawn from our own imaginations, elicited by Dickens' descriptions and the illustrations that accompany his books. If these characters seem stereotypical it's because they are so familiar to us. This aspect of Dickens drew me into the quality of the prose, almost without realizing it. Each word is perfectly placed between that which precedes it and the one following. No false moves, no clunkers, nothing out of place. An example of the finest craftsmanship. Another element that seperates the immature reader and the more mature. The quality of the work is not only in the story or action, but in the diction, in the mood, in the characters, in the craft of telling the story, of understanding that a novel operates on several planes at once. Something I never got from Stephan King or Michael Crichton.

However, after heaping all this praise on Dickens' craftsmanship, the ending was a small disappointment. It seemed that one day Dickens looked up from his writing desk, glanced at the calendar, and exclaimed "Oh, My goodness, I'm scheduled to be finished by publication next!" then dedicated himself to stopping things right where they were and wrapping up the story. No smooth glide to the end of plot elements, more like a jet landing, a barely controlled crash, the result of which was a rather abrupt end to the book. Is this a problem? Yes. Is it a fatal flaw? No. If you didn't know by this point how the book was going to end, you had wasted your time on the previous seven hundred pages. It was time to end it, so he ended it. I expect this problem is related to the requirements of serial publication.

Another problem that may arise from serial publication are the extraneous characters and subplots that arise from time to time. As I'm sure all of you who are likely to read this are aware Dickens' works were originally published serially in weekly or monthly magazine installments, some of which were published specifically, but not exclusively to provide a place for the Dickens story. These typically were contractually for a certain number of segments.

In order to fill the contracts the books had to be quite long. One of the results of this style of publication was the surfeit of plot lines and characters, along with what we today refer to as excess wordiness, but when looked at from the standpoint of art ceases to be wordy and becomes beautiful prose. You may find yourself reading along with a smile in your heart from the humorous way Dickens skewers some Victorian silliness when moments later, and without ralizing how it happened you are on the edge of your seat over the dangerous situation one of the characters faces. You just have to take a moment, sit back and marvel at the craft that took you from near out and out laughter to suspense and excitement in just a few well paced moments.

The language is such that you really don't mind reading about a character who only shows up three or four times in a minor subplot which ultimately has no bearing on the main plot and goes nowhere. There are three or four of these subplots some of which are resolved and others are just left hanging, but you know what, when all is said and done and you've finished the last page, it doesn't matter because those subplots and the characters that carry them have provided much enjoyment along the way. Without them the book would have been tighter, but certainly less fun. So if someone pops in for a page or two and drops out again for a hundred, two hundred pages, don't worry, be happy.

The story itself is about Love, jealousy, and greed along the Thames in London. That's all you need to know. Take my advice, read the book, you will be greatly rewarded with a reading experience second to none.

When I was fourteen years old, 1959, my father retired from the Navy, packed us all up and moved us straight up US HWY 17 from Green Cove Springs. Florida to a very small town in Eastern North Carolina, Oriental. Oriental was mostly a water town, but the surrounding area was all tobacco, except for the very enlightened farmer who sold us our house and the acre it sat on. He threw over his tobacco allotment and grew soybeans on it.

I spent the next four years in this town learning about small town life, crewing on a shrimp boat, hanging out, being cool, and spending a lot of time with myself. We lived a mile outside of town down a two lane road, surrounded with fields on one side and a chicken farm and a pecan orchard on the other. At night, during the new moon, it got darker than anyplace I've ever been and when the moon was full, nearly light enough to read by. I walked this road so often I knew it in my sleep.

Imagine my surprise when I find myself in the same part of the country, albeit a few miles away, walking at night down an old road, headed for town with a thirteen year old girl, bursting at the seams with an erotic sensuality, that only the innocent can display. She was the daughter of a retired Marine, living near the Marine Base at Jacksonville, North Carolina, so her family could enjoy the privileges of military retirement. She, too, lived down that road, in a trailer, across from the Hunnycutt family, Mom - Lenore, Dad - Floyd, and the three girls - Cleopatra, Lydia, and Nan and the Bells, Clyde, Clyde (the cement duck), Dee-Dee, and their son Ezekiel. Pearl is the girls name and The Secret of Hurricanes is her story as she tells it to her unborn child thirty years later.

Pearl is left adrift at the worst possible time in her life by her parents. Her father spends his days at Saigon Sal's drinking and bragging about making a Marine out of Steve McQueen, the Steve McQueen, and his nights feeding the purses of the whores who hang out there. Her mother has given up on family, doing just what needs to be done and allowing Pearl to run around like an untamed cat. Pearl becomes attached to the Hunnycutts and the Bells and is more part of their families than her own. She sits in Floyd Hunnycutt's lap while he pets her and she sometimes purrs like a cat. She has a crush on Zeke Bell, but is too young for him to notice. Her development gives her a sense of desiring a satisfaction that seems somehow to be tied up with men, but she only recognizes it in a childish way, thinking of Floyd as her father, of Zeke as a man. Lost, confused moving from a world she understands to new, darker territory and no one to light her way. Those few times she sees her father, he tells her all she is is what's between her legs. This from the man she needs to show her how to be a woman and only thinks of her as a vagina. What is she supposed to make of that?

At the age when most girls are beginning to bloom, Pearl is, as she tells Zeke ". . . old, already old". And indeed, she already is. In the course of trying to connect with the human Pearl rapidly deteriorates into both subject and object. Her humanity is chipped out of her a piece at a time, as if it were skin being pried off by a knife. She dove headlong into her sexuality while the deeper she went the more of her it stripped away, until it finally cost her her freedom, and nearly her life.

As I mentioned before, this story is being told thirty years after her descent into the darkness of emotional suicide and the events of the three years from thirteen to sixteen. Pearl spends the next thirty years in a near emotional vacuum, working day by day, at her loom, weaving a life from what scraps of her life she can find.

Not only can Theresa Williams make a riveting story out of the most ordinary of lives, but she does it with craft and care. At first, I was put off by the short simple sentences, and the use of fragments as punctuation. As I was drawn into Pearl's inner life, I realized it was these simple short sentences that made Pearl real. The words over time took on the quality of plain, simple poetry. The fragments emphasized the thought and brought Pearl to life. The use of details, place names, the student driven school buses, cockelburrs, but especially the road plunged me into the place of this story and left me cozy.

This book is not long, only a couple of hundred short pages, but there is not a word wasted or an item out of place. It's simply Pearl's story. A little girl lost and in need of "superhuman control" and only finding "dark mists across the waters", unfathomable dark mists.

This is the best contemporary literary fiction I've read in a long time. I recommend it to every one, especially thirteen year old girls and their mothers.

This book is a tragedy in the clothing of a visit to a Victorian English Midlands Industrial complex, named by Dickens, Coketown. As Dickens has done with other stories this is about the abuse of humans by one another. The children are abused by the Gradgrind school of Facts. The workers are abused by the owners and by their own workers union organizers. The elderly are abused by their children. The only people who control their own destinies are the circus and its performers.

 One of the major themes here is the attempt to crush the soul through an education that stresses logic and facts and suppresses concepts that can not be represented by hard facts such as love, honor, truth, and compassion.

 Even the great Josiah Bounderby is a set of facts, false facts, but facts nonetheless. He prides himself on his Horatio Alger life story, when in reality he is the product of a very middleclass family. He insists at one point that if he could raise himself up from the gutter everyone could if only they wanted to, and thinking the worse of those who work for him in his Mill and Bank because they haven’t. Of course they haven’t because all they have time to do is work to keep body and soul together, as Stephan Blackpool has been doing for twenty years.

 Stephan Blackpool is the representative of the bulk of the inhabitants of Coketown. Mill workers living on meager earnings, working long hours, six days a week, living in a one room, poorly lit apartment. He is the soul of honesty, courage, and dignity.

 The main story concerns Bounderby, Blackpool, and the Gradgrind family. Money goes missing from the Bounderby Bank at the same time Stephan is fired from his job for not spying on his fellow workers for Bounderby. Bounderby has blackballed Stephan in Coketown so Stephan changes his name and leaves to find work elsewhere. This is brought to Bounderby’s attention by his slacker clerk, young Thomas Gradgrind. Well, after much searching, many accusations and several adventures showing the human impulse  toward altruism and compassion, the entire situation is resolved. As a result, there are epiphanies all around, except for the incorrigible Bounderby.

 This is one of Dickens’ shorter novels, running about one third the usual length. The story is so tight, the characters so sharply drawn, that one hardly misses the other six hundred pages. One of the most interesting themes was the way Dickens portrayed the union organizer not as a person there to help the workers attain better lives, but leeching off of them like everyone else. Stephan Blackpool is the pure soul in this novel, and his refusal to deal with the union, even though it meant being shunned by his former friends, is a key turning point in the story.

 I really think that Dickens, unlike many reformers, labor leaders, and capitalists, believed in the power of doing the right thing. He saw much that others did not. He understood much that others did not, and he said much that was not popular. His genius was in shaping his story and phrasing things in such a way that they made great sense without sounding didactic as in this example:

 “I am almost ashamed,” said Sissy with reluctance. “But to-day, for instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.”
“National, I think it must have been,” observed Louisa.
“Yes, it was – But isn’t it the same?” She timidly asked.

 What a wonderful slap at the notion of natural right, or Manifest Destiny, or any of those things that lull people into a sense of complacency when the reality is rather more grim. What a wonderful insight into what drives empire and hegemony. I feel there are many in this country that could benefit from reading this.

 I would recommend this book to anyone. I have always been intimidated by Dickens, even though I’ve read a lot of his work. I would say that this, being one of his later works, and short, would be an excellent introduction to Dickens for anyone contemplating taking him up.