Further (Largely Uncomfortable) Meandering

 

Wednesday morning

 

The national memory of any people is a mixture of truth and myth. 

 

-      Madeline Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

 

Not what I expected, this book, but in retrospect not surprising. The author, after all, was only born in 1937, and it was only in the following year, ten days after Nazis marched into Prague, that her parents were able to secure necessary papers to exit the country. The papers were necessary for leaving, and leaving was also necessary. A bare two weeks after Czechoslovakia’s future existence had been signed away at Munich, a newly formed Czecho-Slovak [note the difference in name] Defense Ministry asked for the dismissal of Madeline’s father, Joseph Körbel, from the diplomatic service. He had become a political undesirable. Besides his views and public positions, the Defense Ministry noted, “Dr. Körbel and his wife are Jews.” In that ten-day interim, the family slept in friends’ apartments and spent their days on the streets and cafes, to avoid the Nazi dragnet.

 

The author was a tiny child in the Prague of that time and spirited to safety in England as quickly as her parents could arrange it. She would, however, grow up to earn a doctorate in history, and a visit years later to the place of her birth (Prague: May 15, 1927) would not be complete for her without seeing it in historical context. Thus “Part I: Before March 15, 1939” of the book is not memoir but the product of research and delivers a blow-by-blow account of the history of Czechoslovakia and Prague leading up to March 25, 1939. 

 

This book is obviously not comfort reading or escape literature. Seeing Germany gobble up more and more of Europe, page by page, is all the more painful since a reader knows what will follow, while at the same time seeing a series of decisions made by leaders and diplomats who did not have a vision of what was to come. 

 

…The war in Europe was still months away. When it did come, it was expected to be over quickly. Nazi prison camps, such as Dachau, housed dissidents regardless of race.

 

It was an anxiety-ridden, confusing, depressing, hostile, and saber-rattling “calm” before the storm of the Second World War, a long, drawn-out horror that appeasement did nothing to prevent.

 

I am also still reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz. About two-thirds of the way through the book, knowing what lies ahead for the principals, I am living vicariously alongside them with a heavy heart.

Wednesday evening

 

What can be said of a bookstore customer who orders books and then brings them back to loan to the bookseller to read? That’s a reading friend! “I’m just glad you’re interested,” she told me. So this afternoon at the bookstore I started reading Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss. After that I’ll read the same author’s Notes from No Man’s Land, but my reading friend recommended that I start with Having and Being Had, “because it won’t break your heart like the other one.” Forewarned. Although history has been breaking my heart over and over for years, as has politics.

 

(Notice that I have set aside Crazy Horse and Madeline Albright for a Eula Biss session. This is typical of my reading life.)

 

Having and Being Had is a book of nonfiction. It is a collection of very short personal essays, often anecdotal in nature, that take us with the author as she explores the role of economics in our everyday lives. You think you know about the game of Monopoly™? Well, I certainly found the story surprising! 

 

When Biss gets into the question of class, I recall my brother-in-law telling us on Monday, as four of us in masks rode in the Artist’s big Chevrolet station wagon to Traverse City, Empire, Glen Arbor, and back home, “This is the way two lower-class couples ride together: men in front, women in the back.” Middle-class couples, he told us, would sit with their spouses, while an upper-class foursome would mix mates for the length of the drive. Really? I have always just thought that (1) most men have longer legs, so (2) when one man is driving, it makes sense for the other man to be the front-seat passenger. Also, (3) that older people divide up riders this way. I’d never thought of it as a class thing. But author Eula Biss says that her husband can identify from a distance people who grew up in his boyhood neighborhood, not because he knows or ever knew the particular people, but because the fact that you grew up on the South Side is “written on your body.”

 

Although the foregoing paragraph contains random thoughts, I am not writing down every thought from every short chapter’s essay, because almost every sentence I read generates associations and ideas and speculations that would run into whole paragraphs. 

Thursday morning

 

Bicycles have the same rights and duties as motor vehicles. But being governed by the same laws doesn’t produce equality.

 

-Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

 

Stop and think about that a moment. Then read on. 

 

A bicycle doesn’t occupy a full lane, is rarely granted the three-foot passing margin required by law, and must use signals not everyone understands. Bicycles belong to a different class and they can’t expect to be treated like cars. And so, bicycles break the rules, riding through stop signs and red lights. Like the people who occupy neighborhoods that are overpoliced and underpoliced, bicycles know that what keeps them safe on the street is not the law, but their own vigilance, quickness, and wit.

 

I admire the way the writer has personified the modes of transportation, having them stand in for the riders and drivers the law actually covers. I think it makes her point more effectively and facilitates the neighborhood analogy she brings at the end.

 

The value of art, the artist’s life, the ‘precariat’ as a class – all this I read this morning in the dark. But then, “The Hug”! What a horrible little story that is! I am so sorry she acquiesced! …And yet, in the scale of the world’s horrors, I realize one this small barely registers at all.

 

Friday morning

 

I picked up Madeline Albright again last night, joining the family in London:

 

…As refugees in London that summer, we had plenty of company. Jews and other antifascists arrived from Germany, Austria, Poland and our own Czechoslovakia. The British had quotas that limited the number of adults, but an exception was made for unaccompanied children under seventeen years of age. 

 

A humanitarian program, the Kindertransport, had begun rescuing Jewish children from Germany and Austria….

 

Is there a word that jumps out at you in that first quoted paragraph? Maybe more than one, but how about antifascists? The word appears again in subsequent pages, and every time I see it I think of a president of the United States who thinks that being antifascist is a bad thing, and I ask myself how this can be possible in my country. Does he imagine we should support fascism? Remain neutral? Would he have American citizens fleeing for their lives to other, safer countries?

 

“So long as grass shall grow and water flow,” the treaties with the Native American tribes read. “All men are created equal,” reads the Declaration of Independence. And yet -- a history of broken promises and cruel exceptions, offset by periods of self-conscious and fumbling attempts to do better and to make amends.

 

Sunday morning

 

I picked up and brought home last night an old novel from 1909, The Making of Bobby Burnit, by George Randolph Chester. It looked to be a Horatio Alger-type story of the period, but riches-to-riches rather than rags-to-riches. That is, the son of a wealthy merchant inherits the retail business and has to prove himself under strange terms set in his father’s will. 

 

The story proceeds slowly in the beginning – nice young man, spoiled by life, keeps proposing to nice young woman who won’t give him an answer, etc. Then gradually begins a cascade of bad business decisions and money lost. But the book only really got interesting to me (and I wasn’t looking so much for interest as for relaxation) when Bobby bought a newspaper and resolved to launch a campaign against corruption in his town. (There is a surprising amount of detail on investments and municipal utilities.) The newspaper, too, was a money-losing proposition at first (advertising revenue plummets), but this is a novel, the young man has more of his inheritance in reserve, and all comes right in the end. 

 

In books from this era, it’s interesting to examine the publisher’s lists of other titles at the end of the story. How many of the listed authors, so popular in 1909, are still read today? Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle stand out from the crowd. Ellen Glasgow’s name, too, I hope rings a bell. Literary fame in general, however, is a fleeting thing for most. We remember many more politicians and fighters, even those who fall into the evil category, than the writers of yesterday. Is there a lesson in that fact?

 

You Wanna “Debate”?

 

What do you want to debate? How much the president paid – or, more to the point, didn’t -- in federal income tax? Whether or not there should be hearings for a Supreme Court nominee not only in an election year but as the election process is already underway? What each candidate proposes as far as the nation’s health care is concerned? 

 

No, I will not be watching – or listening, either. What each man will say is pretty much a foregone conclusion, and my only question is how big a train wreck it will be. Will there be name-calling? Shouting? Will there be onstage stalking? We will find out soon enough, but the morning after will be soon enough for me, so although I know many of you will, I don’t need to follow it “in the moment.” I’d rather be elsewhere.

We are having a lot of rain this week here in northern Michigan, but bright, fast-changing colors gleam in the rain, and this morning we had a shot of bright, bright sunshine, welcome for however long it may last. And yes, I am here in Michigan. But I am also on the Great Plains, and for a few minutes of every morning and evening I am in France before I was born. Mine, you see, is a magical life, and if you are a reader (as I hope you are), your life is magical, too, not limited by time or space. Is that not a rich blessing?

 

The drowsy heat of middle August lay heavy as a furred robe on the upper country of the Shell River, the North Platte of the white man. Almost every noon the thunders built themselves a dark cloud to ride the far crowd of Laramie Peak. But down along the river no rain came to lay the dust of the emigrant road, and no cloud shaded the ‘dobe walls and bastions of Fort Laramie, the soldier town that was only a little island of whites in a great sea of Indian country two thousand miles wide. 

 

-      Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

 

So it begins, this lyrical biography called “one of the great stories of the West” (Atlantic Monthly), a “glorious hero tale” (John C. Neihardt in the New York Times), and “a splendidly done thing” (Washington Star). Mari Sandoz wrote many books set in her native Great Plains country (Old Jules, the story of her father, among them), and thanks to the University of Nebraska Press, with their Bison Books imprint, these titles are available in well-designed modern paperback form for a new generation of readers, as well as those of us still catching up to books missed earlier in our lives. I’m already thinking that Crazy Horse belongs on the American classics list. Maybe Old Jules, too. (I’m sure many people would think so.) The books Sandoz wrote were and probably are still considered “regional,” but every book set in the United States is set in one or more regions of the land; there is no reason, then, to set “regional” in opposition to “American,” in my opinion, that is, the opinion of someone who loves to travel, either by automobile, train, or armchair.

 

If you’re the kind of reader I am, you usually have more than one book going at a time (sometimes as many as four, in my case), and the other one I’m enjoying at an extremely leisurely pace -- only a page or two at a time -- is one I’ve read before, the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I’ve written about Proust before and will not try your patience with a long quote in French, but I’ll tell you that the two pages I read this morning performed a near-miracle, pulling me out of the Slough of Despond and into the light of day. “Life is worth living so we can read Proust,” I exclaimed happily to the Artist over our morning coffee. “He saw and felt and noticed every last detail in his surroundings and then every association those details called up. What a rich life!” The Artist was amused.

 

Once in a while the Artist gets bogged down, as so many of us do, in the relentless stream of what seems like uniformly bad national and world news. “They’re not telling us the good things,” I say, and he asks rhetorically, “What good things? What’s happening that’s good?” In truth, sometimes I’m the one who’s down, and he has to remind me of all our blessings. I’m only reporting our conversation from this one Tuesday morning.

 

There was bad news from the agencies too – more soldiers there, with little soldier chiefs for agents and more treaty men coming to buy the Black Hills, making a strong talk of starving the Indians into going to the Missouri or the south place called Indian Territory.

 

The news! When has it ever been good? One of the hardest things about reading the story of Crazy Horse is that he lived during dreadful times for the Lakota Sioux. “Culture clash” is one way those times are sometimes described, but the phrase completely leaves out the power dynamics of a strong, armed national government and a relentless flood of pioneering homesteaders overwhelming traditions of those who had lived off the land for generations. 

 

The news! Big, bad happenings! Disastrous events and ongoing horror shows! 

 

I think the good things -- some of the best things – never make the news cycle precisely because they are not disasters or horror shows. Not “newsworthy,” in other words. Instead they are background constants, such the regularity of night and day and the annual round of seasons; parts of ordinary life too easily taken for granted because of their ordinariness, like family and friends and health and beauty; and stunning moments encountered in the natural world or in human interaction that surprise us with their grace. A peach tree growing in the compost or an understanding smile where we fearfully anticipated an angry frown.

 

May you experience today moments of grace, as well as the strength, although we cannot literally shake hands these days, to extend a metaphorical hand of friendship to someone rather than yield to the temptation of an angry gesture. Are we to be outdone by bonobos?

 

On the Ground in Apache Pass

Seasonally retired Michigan bookseller at ruins of Tom Jeffords's Indian agency

You’ve been with me to Fort Bowie before, when my first day on the trail with my sister brought many unexpected delights. This year I joined three neighbors, and they doubled the challenge: we would hike in both directions, returning not on the low country trail we would take in but by way of a high ridge. I was assured that the mileage would be no greater — 1-1/2 miles each way, for a total of 3 miles — and that surely I could handle it. After all, I’ve routinely been doing a couple of miles back in the neighborhood once a week or so on dog-walk mornings. 

Shade tree at Butterfield Stage station ruins

Therese at Butterfield stop

Because the trail we took in from the parking lot trailhead to the ruins was, for the most part, a repeat of last year’s story, I won’t go over every detail. A few, however, will serve to introduce my fellow hikers from Dos Cabezas. First is Therese (above), the day’s driver and my regular dog-walking companion back in the ghost town. 

Apache Spring

Ah, but already I need to slow down here (as I did so often on the trial!). About three-quarters or more of our way to the fort, my energy level was dropping. Double-checking, I asked Therese if we would stop for a rest break when we got to the fort, and she assured me that we would but said we didn’t have to wait until then. We were coming at that very moment to Apache Spring, a lovely, shady spot with a trickle of flowing water and some nice, big rocks for seating. The other two hikers (to be introduced shortly) were agreeable, and we slipped out of backpacks and dug out comestibles. The water was low enough that I had a chance to explore back almost to the spring itself and to see much more of that cool grotto than I’d seen before from the trail, and that was as satisfying as the rest and refreshment.

And now you meet Dorothy and Sam. These intrepid hikers and birders own and operate the Dos Cabezas Retreat B&B (sorry, they are booked solid for the next 26 days!), and they still find time and energy to put in plenty of volunteer hours in Cochise County. Last month they volunteered for the second year with the Wings over Willcox festival, and they have put in a total of about 40 hours (spread out over many weeks) right here at Fort Bowie, where willing hands under the supervision of a fifth-generation mason from Mexico are using old methods to stabilize what remains of the fort. 

Sam, Therese, Dorothy at gun shed ruin

Sam and Dorothy have worked on many sections, but this particular little ruin, this old wall section of the old artillery gun shed from 1890, is one for which they feel particular fondness. 

Volunteer ranger standing, Sam seated in rocking chair

Therese rocks!

The inviting porch at the ranger station/visitor center seduced us with its beautiful rocking chairs, and our second short break stretched to a full half-hour, as we caught our breath and rocked and visited with volunteer rangers who live the non-winter months of the year in Bozeman, Montana.

Climbing path

But soon it was time to take up the challenge! The trail up to and along the ridge! Our path up (new to me, remember) climbed and climbed and kept climbing, and the higher we climbed, the more spectacular the views. The layout of the fort ruins, spread out before our eyes so far below, looked tinier and tinier in the immensity of the surrounding mountains as we rose above it. 

Fort Bowie below us

Fort Bowie farther below

Looking San Simon way

View north

To our northeast lay the San Simon Valley, straddling the Arizona/New Mexico border, and to the northwest towered Government Peak, a mountain in our own Dos Cabezas range. In fact, from where we were, Government Peak was hiding the distinctive, more familiar, and, by us, much-beloved twin peaks from which our range takes its name. Apache Pass divides the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua mountain ranges, and it's clear how welcome that mountain opening with its freshwater spring must have been to everyone traveling from East to West.

And oh, the vegetation! We made our way over hard rock and loose stones through a veritable forest of ocotillo wands. “Ocotillo likes limestone,” Sam remarked. And sure enough, on our way down, when we reached the fault line on the path — identified by a sign pointing to the line where sedimentary limestone is left behind and a subregion of igneous granite entered — ocotillo immediately gave way to beargrass, the two different plants keeping each to its own bedrock territory, with areas as distinctly marked off as Midwestern fields of corn and soybeans separated by a fence or hedgerow.

Beargrass region

Dorothy on trail

While I was almost invariably bringing up the rear, sometimes Dorothy lagged behind with me, and that was fun, because Dorothy has an eagle eye for spotting tiny natural wonders, such as an old praying mantis egg case on a branch or a baby cactus hiding under a larger, sheltering plant. 

Dorothy called our attention to this darling little baby cactus

Other times it was Therese who slowed her pace to be companionable. “I just love plants!” she exclaimed once, after the two of us had paused to delight in bright green ferns and patches of fruiting moss in moist cracks of rock shaded from sun, while Dorothy and Sam led the way ahead.

Therese spotted moisture-loving ferns in cool, shady spot

Sometimes, though, I stopped long enough with my camera that the other three grew small in the near distance ahead, and if a mountain lion had been stalking us, I would have been its dinner. But somehow that dire possibility seemed remote, and I enjoyed my quiet moments, too. I smiled gratefully and happily to myself, looking at my hiking companions farther up the trail and knowing with confidence that they were keeping tabs on me, too, and would miss me were I to slip on a loose rock and plunge off the side of the mountain!

The weather forecast for the day had foretold cloudy skies and temperatures in the 50-degree range. The longer we were out, however, the brighter the sun and the more layers of clothing we shed, and by the time we were on the road back to our ghost town the outdoor temperature had reached almost 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So will we have rain tomorrow? Will we have, perhaps, even snow? What will be, will be. Whatever the future, our happy quartet was brimming with contentment, even as we began excitedly planning our next outdoor adventure.

More rocks!

More mountain flora!

More open spaces!

When Therese dropped me off back at the cabin, the front door was wide open to let the sun stream in, and David and Sarah greeted me eagerly. “Did you two go anywhere?” I asked the Artist. No, he and our dog had stayed home, enjoying the day at the cabin. All three of us were happy with the day we had had.

But I do have one final doubt, because I find it hard to believe my friends and I walked only three miles. With all the ups and downs and steep climbs and big steps, it felt like at least five to me.

Whose “Good Old Days” Are You Talking About?

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said the character Stephen Daedalus in the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. True for the Irish, and it should have been true for the English, also, but was it? An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a difficult book to read, because the facts themselves are brutal, but for that very reason it is also an important corrective to U.S. history as generally taught. I’ve made my way through it slowly so as not to skip over any of the unbelievably horrible but horribly real — and horribly repetitive — details. The awful repetition of horrors is important because it shows that, rather than being something that can be brushed aside today as anomalies, all were part of systematic, government-sanctioned and often (though not always) government-led racism and genocide in our country’s history. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz did not grow up on a reservation but “in the midst of,” as she puts it, Native communities in rural Oklahoma, her father a cowboy, her mother “ashamed of being part Indian.” She became involved in political movements in the Sixties — antiwar, civil rights, anti-apartheid, women’s lib — and eventually with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council. She earned her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on land tenure in New Mexico. It’s easier to tell you about the author’s background than about what’s in her book, though, because even white people know, after all, that the history of the frontier was not a happy one for Native Americans. We have all heard and read that the westward movement was made possible by a series of broken treaties and bloody encounters. But what about colonial days? Weren’t we taught in grade school about a peaceful “First Thanksgiving” between Native Americans and English colonists?

One point the author makes repeatedly is that the “Indian Wars” did not begin in the Wild West but right there in the beginning on the Atlantic Coast. From England’s invasion and subjugation of Ireland (that nightmare history) came the practice of scalping, with bounties paid and few if any questions asked about sex or age of the murdered and mutilated. Thus immigrant men without property in the colonies and new United States, organized into volunteer militias, might better themselves financially as scalping and land-taking practices accompanied immigration to the North America.

European justification for seizure of Native lands can be traced back to the 15th century, when the pope promulgated and clarified the Doctrine of Discovery, cited in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson and reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823. According to this doctrine, which came to be enshrined in international law, “discoverers” of a land could claim it as territory for their own country, thus jumping the property rights claims of all other European countries. Prior inhabitants (called “First Nations” in Canada) were not considered to have any property rights in their own homeland. In their religion, land was too sacred to be bought and sold — and so they were sold out by invaders with a different set of values and customs.

Another theme Dunbar-Ortiz presents is the idea that “total war” — i.e., war fought not only between armies but waged against an entire population, with villages and crops burned and game slaughtered so that, facing starvation and “scorched earth,” no choice is left but to take to what was called, in the case of the Cherokees, the “Trail of Tears” — is nothing new to the U.S. military. Used first against Native Americans, it was national and military policy at the highest levels of American government, as the author demonstrates with quotations from governors, generals, and U.S. presidents. Military experience in dealing with Native Americans was subsequently taken overseas to the Philippines and, later, to Vietnam. The first U.S. invasion of Iraq was promised to bring speedy victory of U.S. forces over Iraqi “Indian country.” The phrase “Indian country” came from the Vietnam era but has come to be abbreviated as “In Country,” disguising the origins of the term designating “behind enemy lines,” the change, though at best only cosmetic, perhaps due in part to a protest from the National Congress of American Indians in 1991.

I’m refraining from incorporating very many quoted passages, but here’s one that encapsulates all the rest. The author writes that Dee Brown’s 1970 account of a 19th-century massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, became a “surprise best seller,

so the name Wounded Knee resonated with a broad public by 1973. On the front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by side, each of a pile of bloody, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army massacre of the Lakota in 1890. Had they not been captioned, it would have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.  

- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz, however, does more than bust myths and document genocide. Equally important to her story is Indigenous resistance and survival, from the beginning to modern times, including legal battles ongoing today. Here’s one that may surprise you:

…In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public Law 91-550, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress [my amazed emphasis added]. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done, in which land involved in this bill — 48,000 acres — was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”

Yet today, even as I was working on this expanded version of my review of the Dunbar-Ortiz book (a shorter version was written for another publication), a young man from Leelanau County, Zhaabadiis Biidaasige, whom I knew when he was a little boy as Johnny Petoskey, was standing before the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People, representing the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Kitchiwikwedongsing Anishinaabak, and speaking to the issue of unfulfilled treaty promises made by the State of Michigan to the Anishnabe people. 

Survival. Resistance. Renewal.

A special edition for young people of this book is due for release in late July. How will the story be told there? And what do we want American children of any skin color or ethnic background to know about American history? How do we tell them the truth and still inculcate in them a love of their country? Perhaps that depends not only on how we teach about the past but even more on how we conduct ourselves in the present and into the future. 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), paperback, 296 pages with index, $16

Sometimes it is very hard to come to the end of a book. Or anything else.

In the Chiricahuas

The two men began to ride into the hills daily. They seldom spoke. They rode silently, through the places Cochise had lived in and fought in, through the places he remembered from his childhood. They went to the canyons in the Dragoons and into the depths of the Chiricahuas, to the secret places which later came to be called by the Indians the Spiritland of Cochise. Cochise devoured his country as though it were food. He drank in his memories as though they were strong liquor. He found forgotten camp sites, old hunting grounds, places of terrible beauty and unworldly isolation. He touched trees and stroked huge boulders and when he spoke it was only to say the names of the shrubs and the plants. 

- Elliott Arnold, Blood Brother

In the Dragoons

• 
  

Facts and Stories

Hardly green cheese, eh?

As a reader and as a thinker, I am absolutely not an anti-fact person. Facts are important because truth is important. Living in the real world, as opposed to dreamy, wishful fantasy, demands recognition of reality, in all its complexity and all its myriad forms. And so, while we may have wanted nothing but fairy tales as children, as adult readers most of us mix the leaven of nonfiction into our reading.

If facts are going to appear in sentences, however, rather than in graphs or tables, I want something more than a mind-numbing recital of dates and numbers. I do not want an avalanche of nothing but facts. In fact (ahem!), when I suspect an author of trying to overwhelm rather than appeal to my critical faculties, I get downright annoyed.

Because under the avalanche, lost in the blizzard – what is the writer trying to hide? That’s what I ask myself when the fact storm gets too wild and woolly.

I’ve read a few books where a single unstated premise, when I plugged it in, was sufficient to undermine an argument otherwise well buttressed -- even overly so -- by a snowstorm of facts. (As a philosopher, I have learned to be very careful when reading historians, who are often tempted to tread lightly on argument and depend overmuch on fact storms.) Other authors, as becomes dismayingly apparent after several tedious chapters, try to cover so many bases that they are obviously trying to say everything that can be said on their subject (so as not to be wrong?), which boils down to saying nothing, once the snowdrifts are cleared away. Don’t waste my time!

Instead of a meaningless fact storm, I want at least one of the following: either a clear line of argument, leading to convincing conclusions or a compelling narrative. The nonfiction book that delivers both has knocked it out of the park.

My nonfiction reading these days is taking me far from home – up to Lake Superior, out to Arizona, and over to southern France -- and I've been reading some very good books. The most demanding in terms of argument and evidence is Tony Judt’s Socialism in Provence 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left, but the book is demanding not because the author resorts to blizzard tactics but because, on the contrary, he is very, very careful and clear about the claims he is making, the arguments he opposes, and the evidence for both sides. Painstakingly rigorous. It is exciting to be challenged by such a rigorous thinker, a writer so careful to avoid unsubstantiated generalization!

The temptation is great for me. No, not to leap into generalization but to pick up yet another book when I already have three or four others going. And so I could not resist looking into Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, by Carol S. Dweck. 

Wow! Again, a writer perfectly clear about what has been said before on her subject and what she has discovered, experimentally, that contradicts and disproves long-held beliefs still, unfortunately, quite prevalent. Not to give away the whole show here, but Dweck’s studies show that learners’ self-concepts influence their motivation more than initial success and more than praise. Does the learner hold what Dweck calls an “entity” theory of intelligence or an “incremental” theory? The former is a belief that intelligence is a fixed trait, a belief shoring up "a system that requires a diet of easy successes.” On the other hand are learners who believe that intelligence can be cultivated and increased. These are more eager to learn, not simply to take an easy path where they can succeed and reaffirm to themselves that they are smart. Dweck calls the patterns that emerge in the face of setbacks “the helpless pattern” and “the mastery-oriented pattern.” You can probably guess which pattern connects to which theory of self, can’t you?

Superior Land and the Story of Grand Marais, Michigan, by Karen Brzys, does not strain my brain as much as the Tony Judt book, but like Judt’s and Dweck’s it is clearly written and presents its facts in accessible form, not in a blizzard. U.P. blizzards are best kept in meteorological form, as the author well knows! Very good stories emerge from well-chosen facts in this book.

Then there is A Beautiful, Cruel Country, Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce’s memoir of her life in southern Arizona, near la frontera, when she was a little cowgirl of three to five or six years old. In her book, the facts are not only very local (as are the facts presented by Judt and Brzys) but also quite personal. They are also recollected many years after the events described. Some could no doubt be verified; for others, we must either take the author’s word for her account or remain skeptics.

Curious to learn more about the author, I searched online and found this piece from a Tucson newspaper. Holy cow! “La Pistolera” – what a nickname! It seems the grown woman was every bit as feisty as the little three-year-old self-described in the memoir. Follow the link, read the article, and maybe you’ll want to read the book, too. (I found A Beautiful, Cruel Country still in print and have ordered a couple copies for the bookstore.) But a word of warning: There are some terrible, terrible events reported in the book and in the newspaper article. The book ends with the sad removal of the Indians from Arivaca, leaving the land silent in its sudden isolation, and even in the story of young Eva’s very early years there are many painful episodes – indigenous Indians, then called Papago and now identified as Tohono O'odham near starvation; the little girl whipped by her father, and such. The ensuing feud described in the newspaper, not part of the book, is also nightmare stuff.

What do you know? Whose story do you believe? What do you see as the facts of your world?

Beliefs, although not material objects independent of believers, are as real as microbes, the operation in the world of beliefs and microbes both dependent on so many other factors that we human beings are continually surprising one another. “X had such a healthy lifestyle, I thought she would live forever!” we say, or, “I thought I knew Y,” or, “Z had that election in the bag – how could he have lost?” The beliefs we hold about the economy influence the direction of the economy, as beliefs about the past influence the course the future will take.

Draw your own conclusions. But think carefully. And don't stop thinking when you've reached a conclusion, either.

Can you doubt that fall is coming in?