My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

"But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today."

                                                             -Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World preface

After seeing a TV interview of Sonia Sotomayor and having one member of our book club suggest we should read her recently published memoir, I selected it as our March book.  I am so glad I read it! Justice Sotomayor is a new hero of mine!

I especially loved the first 200 pages or so of the book, the part where she describes her family, her early years and her education. I was so impressed that a young person with a difficult life and many strikes against her could rise to higher and higher levels of success, up to her selection as the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic heritage.

As quite a fan of crime and courtroom television dramas, I found her early career as an attorney interesting, as well, though not as compelling as the part I mentioned previously. Sotomayor was very perceptive and intuitive in her work and apparently she attributes much of her talent in this area to the way she grew up in a far-from-ideal home.

It was striking to me that with all her assertiveness and independence, she never aspired to be a "rabble rouser." At Yale, Sotomayor was a member of Accion Puertorriquena, an activist group who addressed minority problems on campus but also became involved with national issues. She says, "Not that I didn't care passionately about the group's causes; rather, I had my doubts that linking arms, chanting slogans, hanging effigies, and shouting at passersby were always the most effective tactics. I could see that troubling the waters was occasionally necessary to bring attention to the urgency of some problem....Quiet pragmatism, of course, lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge." Personally, I wish we had more people in positions of authority who had those strengths!

I appreciated Justice Sotomayor's writing style also. It was clear, personal, descriptive and at times, poetic, as in this description of her first visit to Puerto Rico as an adult:  "In the rain forest at El Yunque, waterfalls trick the eye, holding movement suspended in lacy veils. Wet stone gleams, fog tumbles from peaks to valleys, mists filter the forest in pale layers receding into mystery. On the beach at Luquillo, when the sun appears under clouds massed offshore and catches the coconut palms at a low angle, the leafy crowns explode like fireworks of silver light." I thought she added just enough humor in her story, as well.

I liked putting my smallish Spanish vocabulary to work through the book and when I got stuck, there were usually context clues, or as a last resort, the glossary in the back of the book.

It was my good luck that I saw another interview of Justice Sotomayor on "Oprah's Next Chapter," which aired on March 24, after reading the book. She was very candid and down-to-earth. She seemed rather in awe of sitting with Oprah, and I believe the feeling was mutual!

Tomorrow the book club meets to discuss the book. Hopefully we will have enough to talk about since I could never find questions on the Internet as I usually do. I hope others liked My Beloved World as much as I did. I have rated it a 5. I will return to finish after the meeting.

*****

The Page Turners met this morning, a smaller-than-normal group due to Easter plans for the weekend, travel and so forth. Refreshments included flan and plantains, relating to the author's heritage.  Everyone liked My Beloved World; no one rated it lower than 4. The average was 4.2. We had a wonderful discussion using some generic biography questions I found online after my extensive search had not located book-specific ones. We all agreed that Sonia Sotomayor is an amazing woman and someone we would like to know!

A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

"Stoneybridge was a paradise for children during the summer, but summer in the west of Ireland was short, and most of the time it was wet and wild and lonely on the Atlantic coast. Still, there were caves to explore, cliffs to climb, birds' nests to discover, and wild sheep with great curly horns to investigate. And then there was Stone House."
                                                             -from the novel, page 3

It is ironic that I finished this novel by an Irish author and set in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day! I enjoyed it very much. I think I have only read one other of Binchy's books but I will look for more. Unfortunately, Maeve Binchy died soon after completing this novel.

The story is told by proceeding from one character to another, starting with Geraldine Ryan Starr, or Chicky as she is called. After some wandering and soul-searching, Chicky returns to her home in Stoneybridge and turns the much-loved Stone House into a bed and breakfast inn. One by one the reader is introduced to a great variety of characters, first some family members who end up working at the inn, and later the guests who would spend the grand-opening week at Stone House. Each character or pair of characters has their own story so there are a number of sub-plots going on.

It was fascinating to me how these 10 guests, if I counted correctly, all end up spending this "week in winter" together. As each individual or couple is brought into the story, the main plot moves forward a bit more. I found this technique effective and it made the novel a "page turner" for me. I would rate it a 4 and if asked to describe it in one word, I'd say "sweet."

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

"I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright...The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel."
                            -Abraham Lincoln to an Ohio regiment returning home in 1864, from Team of Rivals, page 653

I waited a long time to receive this book from our local library but it was most certainly worth waiting for! I am a confessed history buff and have long considered Abraham Lincoln a hero. After seeing the movie "Lincoln" in December, with its wonderful portrayal by Daniel Day Lewis, and hearing that it was based partly on this book by Goodwin, I felt it was a must-read for me. I enjoyed it immensely though at times it seemed as if I would never get to the end of its 757 pages.

The title refers to the men Lincoln chose for his cabinet, men who had been rivals for the presidency. The author provides very thorough background information mainly on William H. Seward, Secretary of State; Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War; Edward Bates, U.S. Attorney General; and Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. I found it quite fascinating how Lincoln made a "team of rivals" into a formidable team to keep the country together during the worst of times. They all became great believers in Lincoln and even friends, with the exception of Chase, who never stopped being a rival.

The sub-title of the book is "The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." He certainly was a political genius, but I couldn't help but notice the amazing number of positive adjectives used to describe him. Here are some that I noted: honest, sympathetic, good-humored, confident, diplomatic, cunning, good-natured, forgiving, unruffled, calm, kind, fair, logical, candid, subtle, progressive, earnest, shrewd, magnamimous, wise, inspiring and gracious. It was said that he kept his promises, he had a felicity of speech and thought, he was "one of the most sagacious men of modern times," and a "great man of the century [who] sees more widely and more clearly than anybody." It was also said that he was "the great guiding intellect of the age" and a cabinet member, Edward Bates, said he "comes very near being a perfect man."

I was delighted to be reminded of a children's picture book called Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco in which people of color are so impressed by "touching the hand that touched the hand" of Lincoln. Goodwin writes that Walt Whitman "fancied that at some commemoration of those earlier days, an 'ancient soldier' would sit surrounded by a group of young men whose eyes and 'eager questions' would betray their sense of wonder. 'What! have you seen Abraham Lincoln---and heard him speak---and touch'd his hand?' Whitman was also quoted as saying "Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century." High praise, indeed!

I was greatly impressed by Lincoln's ability to use figurative language to illustrate his thinking. For example, on page 233 in describing the danger of the expansion of slavery into the territories and new states, he uses a metaphor of putting a snake into a child's bed. Many people of the day, and the author, seemed to think this kind of speech was helpful in convincing the masses of the merit of his ideas. Lincoln was also well-known for his story-telling and sense of humor. Many times during the reading of the book, his witty responses and stories made me laugh out loud.

In a couple of months, I will be visiting Washington, D.C. and I am bound to be more awed by the sight of the Lincoln Memorial than ever before. I am SO glad I read this book! A rating of 5 for sure!

Children and Fire by Ursula Hegi

"As they hunker and observe, they feel the learning seep into their bodies like breath, almost, or like a soul, a shape they can't describe but know is there, just as they know from their teacher that learning lives inside them with all they have learned before, ready to connect to more learning."
                                                    -from the novel, page 187

This book really was not what I expected. I thought it would involve the Holocaust and a Schindler-like character helping Jews to escape the Nazis. The setting is Burgdorf, Germany in 1934, a time soon after Hitler has come to power. Fraulein Thekla Jansen is the young and beloved teacher of a class of 10-year-old boys. Though she seems quite devoted to her students, she is taken in by the political propaganda of the time, even encouraging her boys to join the "Hitler-Jugend," something like a Nazi scout troop. The teacher-student relationship was interesting to me since I am a retired teacher of students almost the same age. (Though thankfully of a different time and place!) Some of Fraulein Jansen's educational philosophy was right on, in my opinion, such as the quote above having to do with making connections and also illustrated by a quote from page 196: "Her exhilaration at his progress is what she believes love is: to bring her students forward and to release them once they're ready."

Though I forced myself to continue reading (I am, after all the facilitator of our discussion group AND the selector of this novel!) I was glad I read it. I found it very wordy in places but quite poetic in others. For example, one sentence that I particularly noticed was 14 lines long, almost 70 words! And to illustrate the poetry, when the students are playing at recess and see their breaths melting ice they are reminded "of something Fraulein has told them: once a hole opens in how you've been looking at the world, everything else pushes through." I found that to be a lovely and profound thought.

It was rather interesting, too, that I was finishing this book a day after Ash Wednesday and there were several references to that religious observance. One of the students relates that the priests burn Palm Sunday branches and save the ashes for the next year's Ash Wednesday tradition of tracing crosses on parishioners' foreheads. If I ever knew that, I had forgotten it.

I look forward to hearing the discussion of this book. Perhaps I will like it more afterward; that has happened before. I will rate the book a 4 and I doubt I will look for others by this author. As I said, it was worthwhile, if only to show how bright people can be taken in by propaganda and fear.

Our group met to discuss Children and Fire on the last day of February. We had an excellent discussion and the group voted a 3.4 rating with all 4's and 3's. Refreshments furnished by two members were delicious: a sweet potato and apple hash and bee-sting cake which was mentioned by a German name in the novel. What a lovely treat!