Book Review: What We've Been Reading

Chelsea and I have been doing a lot of reading lately.  Our book club with the cousins started up again recently, and our first book back was very interesting! 

Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong is about Chinese students sent to work on the Mongolian grasslands in the 1970's.  I had never read anything about Mongolia and little about China, so it was interesting to read about the cultural revolution happening in the 1960's and the effects it had on the people living in Inner Mongolia.  The students come to the grassland with ideas about modernity and what that means in Chinese cities as well as for farming across the country. They are under the impression that farming and increasing the volume of fields and crops is the answer for feeding the increasing demand of the Chinese population.  However, as they begin to live the lives of a grassland herder and learn the "ancient ways" from Papa, an elder in the community, they soon discover a symbiotic relationship between the grasslands, the wolf pack, and the Mongolian herders. They hear mythic stories of wolves and learn to respect and revere the wolf pack.  This book tells the often unheard story of the effects that modernity has on a people when they are told their old way of life is no longer relevant and are forced to assimilate into a new way of thinking and living.  Folklore and storytelling are discussed as a way to teach the students why the herders live the same way their ancestors did, dating back to Genghis Khan, illustrating the importance of respecting nature and preserving the ecosystems to maintain their way of life.  It was really fascinating! 

Another book I read recently about forced cultural revolution (unfortunately again at the hands of the Chinese) is Across Many Mountains: A Tibetan Family's Epic Journey from Oppression to Freedom by Yangzom Brauen.  This is a story about three generations of women in a Tibetan family, told by the granddaughter Yangzom.  She tells the story of the family fleeing Tibet after the Chinese invasion and subsequent occupation in the late 1950's.  Yangzom's grandparents and their two children escape across the Himalayas to India, where only her mother and grandmother survive.  The story begins in Tibet prior to the Chinese arrival, when Yangzom's grandmother is growing up, discussing Tibet prior to the invasion and what happened after the soldiers arrived.  She portrays her mother's and grandmother's difficult lives in India and their longing to return to their homeland.  Her parents meet in India, fall in love and their journey now continues to Switzerland where they move with Yangzom's father.  As a young woman, Yangzom becomes involved in the "Free Tibet" movement, and her story picks up from the threads of her mother's and grandmother's memories and love for their country.  I had also not read nor knew much about the Chinese occupation of Tibet and found this book very informative and interesting.  Another great pick by Chelsea for one of my Christmas presents! 

Chelsea also bought the next book for me that we both recently read: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder.  This book is about the life's work of a Boston doctor, Dr. Paul Farmer, an infectious-disease specialist and anthropologist. He travels to Haiti as a young man and is devastated by the crushing poverty and illness he sees.  The Haitian people he meets don't have even the basic necessities and are suffering and dying of curable diseases.  He vows to help them and creates the organization Partners in Health, which raises money and ultimately builds and runs a hospital in rural Haiti.  After his successes in Haiti, Dr. Farmer expands his organization to help in other developing countries.  He also works diligently on the global scale with the United Nations World Health Organization to bring global attention to the issues of making preventable disease and illness a priority.  He is very inspiring, tirelessly working to help strangers around the world survive and lead a better life.  It opened my eyes to the struggles of others I did not know much about--I went on to read three other books about Haiti and have enjoyed them all.  All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell is a historical fiction novel about the Haitian slave revolution of the 1790's. I had no idea that Haiti was the world's first Black republic! Shouldn't I have learned about that in school?!?  I had to find out more. This book is 500+ pages and very informative, graphically violent and hard to take at times (but what revolution isn't violent?), but overall well done.  Different characters throughout the book narrate the story, from landowners to slaves to soldiers, so you see a multi-faceted view of the events of the revolution.  It lends a background to the roots of problems Haiti faces today, showing how colonialism wrecked havoc on native lands around the world.  All of these books have a similar theme--a more powerful nation coming in to destroy culture and the native people's livelihood in the name of modernizing the country.  What a mistake!

We have more books coming down the pipe, so stay tuned for more suggestions :)