Figuring Things Out

Morning clouds, October

This could be a short post. We'll see! If I were writing about all the things I have not figured out, it would be long, but I’m taking the easy way out. 

Happy girl!

First (because I know that’s why many of you tune in), Sunny and I are making great strides in our agility sessions with Coach Mike. I’m able to keep more of the course in my head at once, and our race from one station to the next is becoming smoother all the time. If there were an indoor agility course in Leelanau Township, I would be more than willing to continue through the winter. 

Scene of someone's adventure glimpsed on our way to agility --

(Parenthetically, in answer to the often-asked question, “How late in the season will you keep the bookstore open?” the answer is that Dog Ears Books will be open all winter. Come November, weeks will be shorter [Wednesday through Saturday], and days will be shorter, too [11 to 3], but weather and roads permitting, the shop will be open four days a week.)

 

I’m pretty sure I have the answer now to why Albert Murray is not better known as a writer of fiction. By now well into the fourth of his semi-autobiographical novels, more and more I realize that while his characters and settings are vivid, the world large and complex (from Alabama to Hollywood to Paris and back to New York), there is simply no conflict. The narrator makes a single mistake as a boy, is saved from the consequences by one of his boyhood idols (an understanding and sympathetic character with the wonderful name of Luzanna Cholly), and from there on there are no obstacles in Scooter's life path. When he learns a secret about his parentage, he takes in the new knowledge without a moment’s angst, and it never troubles him later, either. He is given a string bass and within months is touring the country and the world with one of America’s top dance bands. All women want him, no men are ever jealous, and the woman he wants to marry waits contentedly for his return. Marked out from the beginning for great things, he is the golden boy from start to finish, with everything falling into place for him. 

 

Just as Murray decried interpretations of the blues as music of suffering, he had little patience for stories of Black victimhood. He heard the blues as celebratory, not moans of misery, and he wrote his hero’s progress through the world as a story of success, and that’s great – except that we don’t see Scooter triumphing over anything, because nothing ever blocks his way. There is no agon to make him a protagonist. 

 

I say all this more as explanation than critique because I am still very much enjoying these books and looking forward to rereading them in years ahead. Any one of so many little vignettes, e.g., a scene in a barbershop, is as delightful as many a short story from a less-skilled writer, and discussions between characters about history, literature, and music are endlessly fascinating. I’m no longer troubled by neglect of Murray as a novelist, though, because I see what’s missing in his books as fiction: there is no tension, conflict, struggle, and so no real drama. 

 

It’s hard to believe that Murray’s own life was as velvet-smooth and free of difficulty as Scooter’s road. Life is never that easy for anyone! But he apparently felt free to leave out the bumps in the road, thoroughly covered as they had been by other Black writers. I’ll be interested to read this author’s nonfiction work and see how it compares to the fiction: Next up on my Murray agenda is The Omni-Americans: Black Experience & American Culture.

An already colorful curve in the road --

We should have peak color here in Leelanau by next weekend, although I almost hate to see it build to a climax, knowing that the gales of November will soon follow. And we still need rain! But who can argue with blue skies and the warm, albeit temporary, palette of our upper Midwest trees in autumn? 

So here it is for today – dog, books, outdoors. Because that’s my life. 

Wait for it...

...to turn blue!

Book Review: WHEN TRUTH MATTERED

When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later

by Robert Giles

Traverse City, MI: Mission Point Press, 2020

Paper, 353pp, $18.95

Kent State seems like such an ordinary place … until you try to reckon with its meaning as a battlefield of the Vietnam War. 

…

The students were defenseless. Still, even against the advancing soldiers, they believed they were safe to speak out on their campus. They were exercising three of the basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: freedom of speech, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. 

- Robert Giles, When Truth Mattered

Passages above are taken from the first chapter of Robert Giles’s book. The subject of his book, however, is not about the shootings per se but about the way the Akron Beacon Herald covered the events at the time. Giles was then managing editor, the paper was part of the Knight chain, and Giles had responsibilities all the greater that spring because the executive editor and publisher was out of the country. 

What does it take to get a story “right”? To cover truth from all important and relevant perspectives? As second-in-command thrust into #1 position by his superior’s temporary absence, Giles felt his responsibility for the newsroom keenly. “The proverbial buck,” he writes, “would stop with me.”

Here and now in the year 2020, with cries of “Fake news!” from many different quarters (including our own White House), with foreign and domestic “bots” masquerading as American individuals at the grass roots and fomenting discord among us, the questions posed and answered in this account of one particular news story half a century ago provide perspective to a contemporary national conversation that could not be more vital to our country’s future.

Campus demonstrations were nothing new in 1970. The year 1968 had brought demonstrators and university administrations into conflict across the U.S., with protestors agitating against the draft and against the Vietnam War and demanding more socially relevant courses. Both Students for a Democratic Society and the Black United Students had demonstrated at Kent State in 1968. Fifty-eight students were arrested in 1969, SDS subsequently banned from campus.

Campus demonstrations were not new to the Beacon Journal, either. Because Kent was an Akron suburb and the campus only 12 miles from the BJ offices, the paper had reported campus unrest carefully and in detail in 1968 and 1969. Moreover, the paper’s president and editor, John S. Knight, had been following developments in Vietnam back as far as the French occupation. (Many believed, Giles tells us, that Knight’s 1968 Pulitzer was “a lifetime award for his perceptive and forceful commentary on Vietnam.”) When President Richard Nixon announced on nationwide television that he had sent combat troops into Cambodia, not only was the “smoldering center of protest” at Kent State primed to erupt, but the Beacon Journal was well situated to cover student reaction.

Wednesday, April 29, 1970. Secret infiltration of Cambodia ordered by President Nixon began.

Thursday, April 30. Nixon announced the Cambodia infiltration and rationale to Americans on national television.

Friday, May 1. Students assembled on campus to protest the invasion of Cambodia. Some went on a destructive rampage through downtown Kent.

Saturday, May 2. Kent mayor announced a state of emergency, with curfew from dusk to dawn, and a batallion of National Guard was ordered to the campus. During the night protestors set fire the ROTC building.

Sunday, May 3. Ohio governor James A. Rhodes arrived and took charge of the university, determined to prevent a student rally scheduled for Monday. The governor’s more inflammatory remarks, calling the students “worse than brownshirts” [Nazi storm troopers], appeared only on page 2 of the Sunday paper.

Monday, May 4. It was unclear whether the student rally scheduled for noon would take place. Kent State journalism student and part-time weekend Beacon Journal reporter Jeff Sallot, on campus by 11 a.m. to report on the situation and thinking daylight would keep things calm, expected a peaceful rally. Events proved otherwise.

When Truth Mattered is about journalists putting together a particular story, but for that very reason it must also be a story about the events. Jeff Sallot, with his dual role of student and reporter, and because he was on campus when events unfolded, with an open line to the newsroom 12 miles away, was crucial to the communication of facts to managing editor Bob Giles. Photographer Paul Tople, another student and part-time Beacon Journal staffer, was also where he needed to be. Giles writes of the “potentially combustible tableau” Sallot witnessed with these short, poignant sentences: 

The Guardsmen were clearly outnumbered. The students were entirely outgunned. 

The bloody tragedy unfolded quickly – within a mere 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired, four students killed, and 11 others wounded – but the newsroom had to get the story straight before going to press. Truth, accuracy, facts. Names and numbers. 

United Press International (UPI) first reported two dead Guardsmen. Associated Press (AP) was reporting four dead students. Which was it? Should the Beacon Journal go with UPI or take the word of their own student staffer who had been on the scene, Jeff Sallot, who believed there were four students killed? They went with Jeff. He was there. Other newspapers and radio stations went with the erroneous UPI report and had to correct their stories later. The Beacon Journal was also first to list names of those killed and injured. 

The technology of newspaper work was different 50 years ago, with reporters admonished never to leave the office without a “pocket full of dimes” for pay phones. Only the telephone company had mobile “car phones.” (Thanks to secretary Margaret Brown, secretary in the KSU School of Journalism, Sallot had the only open telephone line out from the campus during the critical time period.) Back in the newsroom, writers banged away daily on typewriters, not computer keyboards, and a serious city newspaper published several editions in a single day, which offered an opportunity to amplify and correct earlier reports but was a far cry from today’s minute-by-minute online publishing. 

Giles calls the daily newspaper of the Sixties a “ponderous” institution, one he and editor Pat Englehart “were pushing … to be nimble enough to do what we wanted it to do,” i.e., to dig out and put together the complete story of what had happened and how and why. Former reporting on the Vietnam War and Kent State University helped, but it was imperative that Beacon Journal reporters ask questions of anyone who could shed light on the tragedy. Questions, questions, and more questions. Interviewing Guardsmen who were on the firing line was of paramount importance. 

Also crucially important, Giles realized, as the story continued to unfold following the shootings, was acknowledgment of team effort in reporting. He cites one time he authorized a single byline, i.e., one name only given credit for a day’s story, and writes candidly that his decision for the single byline was a poor judgment call. He did not repeat his mistake.

Giles devotes an entire chapter to photographic evidence, images that captured the truth moment by moment. We are more skeptical today, aware of how digital images can be manipulated. Fifty years ago exposed film was processed in a darkroom and provided to the newsroom as quickly as possible, and there was no arguing with what the images showed. “The camera did not lie.” But the best images came from student photographers, and one of the best was taken by the photographer to a newspaper other than the Beacon Journal, as a result of the BJ print lab having lost some of his earlier work. Errors can be costly in journalism in more ways than one.

In the weeks following the tragedy, as theories, speculations, brickbats, and calls for investigations circulated throughout the public, the media, and every level of government, the Beacon Journal worked tirelessly to stay on top of it all. Giles tells us that the newspaper staff put together a multidimensional story -- 

…under the pressure of deadline. They did it in the face of powerful opposition from the military, the Nixon administration, the state of Ohio and the university itself, as well as strong currents of negative public opinion. 

Because that is the job of the Fourth Estate: to tell the truth fearlessly, regardless of whose oxen are gored. It is not the job of journalists to serve as mouthpieces for those in power but as gadflies assuring that what is done by the powerful will be exposed to public scrutiny, especially during times of conflict and uncertainty. 

In 1970, as now, the United States was deeply dis-united.

In many ways, the Kent State story was about a nation at war with itself.

And because the country was so divided, there was no quick final resolution to the tragic events at Kent State. Giles tells how the Beacon Journal continued to follow the story for years through various reports, grand juries, and civil suits, as families sought answers and justice for the deaths of their children. In searching for the meaning to his story, the author also outlines lessons to be learned from it.”The Meaning” is an important chapter in the book.

With every cell phone possessor a potential reporter and anyone who can access the Internet able to disseminate an instant opinion, truth can be harder to ascertain today. Giles cites “urgency” – and also impatience – as “the enemy of accuracy and care.” 

But truth will always matter, because it will, in the realest possible way, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, determine whether “[our] nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

I recommend this book most highly to all readers. 

Conflict! Every Way You Turn!

Timely photo unconnected to text that follows

Imagine (asking readers to imagine seems to be a theme of mine this week) two headstrong individuals in the same organization, each determined to rule alone as autocrat. That’s a recipe for conflict, whether the organization is a nation state or a high school club. If only the two would-be autocrats could join forces and work out ideas together, then go even further and present their ideas to the organization for feedback, what wonders they might achieve! Am I dreaming?

And then there is the national political scene, but I’m not venturing into that minefield today, except to say I am so glad not to have chosen a life in politics!

Idealism, pragmatism, or blind dogmatism; out to win at all costs or hoping to change the world; in it for self or for country – anyone who chooses a life in politics has got to start out with or quickly develop a thick skin, because it’s one thing to realize that no one, even dear self, is universally beloved and quite another, I’m sure, to be ducking slung mud on a daily basis, in public. I have chosen to dedicate my life to a different realm of what Greek philosophers called “the good,” that of literacy and literature and scholarship and art. And yet, even the quietest life presents conflicts, as I’m sure every reader is aware.

Some are small, momentary, and easily resolved.

Whether to linger over coffee and pastry or go for a walk with the dog – that was my first conflict last Wednesday morning, but I resolved it fairly easily by sitting in a park with Sarah for a while, sharing bites with her, and then doing our one-mile walk. No doubt a mere mile was not enough to counteract the effects of the pastry, but that was not a conflict for me, because I don’t have energy to fret about calories in the summer.

Remember those lovely yellow flags not so very long ago? Already Joe-Pye-weed has taken their place as streamside flowers in bloom, and there is loosestrife, too, and also – oh, good heavens! – a few very early goldenrod blossoms rushing the season.

Look closely....

Goldenrod!!!

Loosestrife is an invasive alien we are called upon to despise as an enemy, but I can’t help loving its colorful spires and old-fashioned evocative name. Loosestrife sounds much more poetic than “conflict resolution,” doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine a flower with the latter name! At least in English it seems impossible, but maybe there is a lilting Japanese or Ojibway phrase that would do the job beautifully.

More vexing for the bookseller in a summer tourist town are schedule conflicts that plague efforts to assemble audiences for author events. Impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on! Tuesday evenings are out for much of the summer (township library author series), and Friday evenings in Northport are for Music in the Park, and both the libraries series and Music in the Park are traditional, classic, wonderful public gatherings with which one would not want to conflict, anyway. Every weekend, it seems, has a festival going on somewhere in the area.

So I hit upon Thursday, thinking to land safely on an evening not already crowded with obligations for my target audience of friends and readers and bookstore supporters – but alas! Back to that unfortunately true sentence two paragraphs back: It is impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on.

Kathleen Stocking and I had agreed on Thursday, August 4, at 7 p.m. for a presentation she would give in connection with her new book. Kathleen has traveled all over the world in the past twenty years, always circling back to her Leelanau home when between trips, and she has a lot to share, and it is an honor to have her agree to give a talk in Northport. All good! Imagine, then, my dismay when a local visiting the bookshop looked carefully at our flier for the event and observed that the Leelanau Conservancy’s annual picnic is the same day!

Kathleen and I had already announced the event and put out publicity. We’ve been telling everyone. Too late to change the date now! “What will be, will be,” Kathleen Stocking observes philosophically.

Here are my suggestions:

(1)        It is possible to go online and bid on auction items, rather than waiting for the physical gathering. That’s one idea. Do that.

(2)        Another thought is that the picnic begins at 5:30, and Kathleen Stocking will not be speaking at Dog Ears Books until 7 p.m., so it would be possible to go to the picnic, place a couple of silent auction bids (if you didn’t do it earlier online), and then come on up the last six miles to Northport.

Of course, if you hadn’t planned to attend the Conservancy picnic, you don’t have that particular schedule conflict, and as for others, there may be a way around them, too. (3) Having family or friends visiting? Bring them along! It’s free entertainment, the talk will be lively and stimulating, and you can get ice cream nearby afterwards.

Please think about squashing us onto your calendar for August 4th! You’ll be glad you did. How many people do you know who have taught in a private school (under armed guard) in El Salvador and taught in the Peace Corps in Thailand and Romania? Her experiences gave her plenty of food for thought, and she will share many of her thoughts with us this coming week, as well as signing copies of her book for anyone who cares to purchase.

What Does a Story Need?

Critics and fans alike have struggled for decades over what to call The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, and so I suggested to the Fearless Leader of our Ulysses Reading Circle that when we discussed Pointed Firs we should address the question, “Is it a novel?” He was somewhat shocked, but I raised the question, anyway. We were only seven that evening, and I abstained from answering right away. Only one person immediately answered with a resounding “No!”

“Why not?” others asked.

“Nothing happens!”

Voices were raised around the table, five people eagerly and simultaneously enumerating various events from Jewett’s pages. “They go out to the island!” “She visits the old man!” “They go to the reunion!”

Yes, there are these quietly related events, but what is lacking is conflict, or, to put it more generally, tension.

“I loved it!” “I did, too!” Pointed Firs defenders were staunch and vocal around the table, although one of them admitted the story had “no dramatic arc.”

I said I meant nothing derogatory by saying it wasn’t a novel. Neither was I was saying it should have been different. I loved the book, too. I think the place itself is the main character, and it’s a charming place -- although I couldn’t help thinking the narrator’s impressions of the place might be different if she were a fulltime, year-round resident. It’s easy for annual visitors to see a place through rose-colored glasses. I admitted that Grand Marais is my Dunnet Landing. Perhaps Willcox, Arizona, even if I never return, is another, but I recognize that my feelings for those places don’t take into account the struggles people making Grand Marais or Willcox their homes and needing to make a living there. Vacation, after all, is a very different kettle of fish. But I digress....

Jewett herself, according to Willa Cather, never referred to this work as a novel or even as stories. Her term was sketches. (See “Miss Jewett,” in Cather’s Not Under Forty, published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf.) That intrigues me, as it suggests that there might be a form of fiction besides novels and stories.

Perhaps no tension is required of a sketch? In visual art, we do not expect of something is called a sketch all the qualities of a finished oil painting. And yet sketches have their own charm. Done well, literary sketches, too, can be delightful. And who is to say that a sketch lacks anything if it is everything its author intended?

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock, is in a very different vein from Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Whereas Jewett shows the beauty and dignity of ordinary lives in a remote place, Leacock’s intent is humor. He holds up and exposes his main characters to our ridicule and laughter – and yet, he does so gently, even lovingly. Truly, we must laugh at ourselves when we laugh at the people in Leacock’s little Canadian village, for inflated self-worth and self-importance can be found in towns of all sizes. Doesn’t each one of us imagine ourselves the center of our world? And how silly is that, in all the enormity of the universe?

In Leacock’s book, as in Jewett’s, there is chronology, and there is one major event (the sinking of the picnic boat) to which smaller events lead, as in Pointed Firs (the reunion), but at no time in either book do we fear disaster. Whatever there is of pain in Jewett lies in the past and has been smoothed and mellowed by the passage of time. In Leacock, conflicts arise in the story as it develops, but the reader cannot be terribly concerned, since the author’s tone is saying all along, “Tempest in a teapot, isn’t it silly?”

On Saturday, looking for something else on my store shelf of writers’ helps, my eye stopped on The Essence of Fiction, by Malcolm McConnell. I have a friend who wants to turn a piece of memoir writing into fiction and isn’t sure how to proceed. Maybe she wonders where to start. Anyway, I brought the book home with the thought that it might shed light on my friend’s problem, as well as on my own meditations on what constitutes a story.

Malcolm takes a clear stand: fiction is drama. What the playwright creates for the stage, the novelist or short story writer must bring alive for readers on the printed page, but the very essence of fiction is always a dramatic core. Take Malcolm seriously on this point, and you’ll hardly be surprised to have him tell you next that the scene is the basic building block of all fiction.

Here is the list of scenic elements from Malcolm’s assignment sheet to his students:

o    Believable and Relevant Physical Setting
o    Point of View
o    Problem or Conflict Situation
o    Dialogue (or Monologue or Thought)
o    Relevant Physical Action
o    Relevant, Original Descriptive Metaphor
 From The Essence of Fiction: A Practical handbook for Successful Writing, by Malcolm McConnell (NY: Norton, 1986), p 37

(I have highlighted “problem or conflict situation” in red, since it is my major concern.)

In his discussion of the “problem or conflict situation,” McConnell does not even bother to argue that conflict is necessary. There is no drama without conflict; therefore, if fiction is drama, conflict must be present in all fiction, if it is to be worthy of the name. That’s a given, not something that needs stating except as it must be part of each scene:

Somewhere in any scene there must be dramatically revealed some aspect of the overall conflict of the story.

Malcolm quotes a friend and fellow writing teacher, Will Knott, who wrote in The Craft of Fiction that fiction is always about people in trouble.

...I take this one step further. Fiction is never about people with no problem or conflict in their lives. At first examination, this may seem perverse, that literature, one of the most respected art forms of Western civilization, is entirely devoted to the negative aspects of life. Be that as it may, the fact remains, that all effective drama, on the stage or in the pages of a fictional work, involves characters faced with one kind of problem or another.

Lest his reader turn away from all this gloom, he adds,

This central core of conflict, of course, does not necessarily mean that the writer must accentuate the negative side of life.

Perhaps the central character will rise to a challenging occasion, triumph over adversity, learn valuable lessons for the future. Whether or not there is a happy ending, however, drama and fiction, unlike the chronicle of factual events most of us recognize as history, allow us a special way to share emotionally in the experience of characters onstage and in books. Like us, the writing teachers say, fictional characters face problems, and that is what captures our interest. Without a problem, without a conflict -- no reason for the reader to keep turning pages.

What, then, accounts for the love so many readers feel for The Country of the Pointed Firs?

Nature is never static, and no one season of the year and no single day, not even the solstices, give us time in which “nothing happens.” If we are very fortunate, however, there may be moments or days or even seasons in our lives that seem uneventful, stretches that flow so gently we have the illusion of time standing still. Those peaceful moments will be lost, and time will resume its headlong rush. But recollection of an illusory season of stillness – perhaps that is inspiration for the literary sketch.

What do you think? Can a sketch be called fiction if it has no conflict? Can something that lacks tension be called a story? Or is it dealing in contradictions to say so? 

And finally, in your limited reading time (because reading time is always limited for all of us), are such slight productions, whatever we call them, worth reading?

Very, Very Good for What Ails Us

Old tree at Kehl Lake

I had written a whole long post, replete with quotations, on a book I read last week, but rather than publish that today I’ve decided to go with another book, one I finished Monday out by Kehl Lake while Bruce was at the bookstore helm. The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop, by William Ury, held me spellbound from the beginning. It is exciting reading. For one thing, he leads off with some surprising statements, such as--

“Stopping” [fighting] does not mean ending conflict altogether. Conflict is a natural part of life. It brings about change In the form of business competition, it helps create prosperity. It lies at the heart of the democratic process. The best decisions result not from a superficial consensus, but from surfacing different points of view and searching for creative solutions. Few injustices, moreover, are addressed without serious conflict. We need more conflict, not less.

More conflict and an end to fighting? How’s that going to work? And isn’t aggression simply part of human nature?

Since no one would take the rest seriously if the question of human nature were left unaddressed, the author tackles that one head-first. I am going to spend a disproportionately small space here on his argument, but basically he cites recent archaeological evidence that has overturned the earlier “killer ape” theories. The emerging view is that our ancestors lived for 2,500,000 years without warfare and that only as hunting and gathering gave way to agriculture (in the past 10,000 years) did human beings seek to dominate territory in an attempt to defend fixed resources. (Here I also recommend David R. Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which argues that agriculture’s ability to provide for larger populations led to overpopulation, tillage of marginal land, erosion, flood, and war.) We have a longer history of cooperation, says Ury, than we do of war. For me, the author’s careful and detailed refutation of Hobbes was beautiful.

It is easier, in fact, to imagine cooperation than coercion. If one person tries to coerce another in a simple, nomadic society, the victim can simply pick up his or her few possessions and go join kin elsewhere. Or the victim can recruit allies. A bully may be more powerful than any one person [echo of Hobbes], but not more than a group. The use of force would, moreover, undermine the valuable cooperative ties that sustain the bully along with everyone else [my emphasis added].

Okay, maybe we will agree with Ury that “human nature” is not simply programmed for war, but how does that agreement support his larger claim that peaceful cooperation is possible at this stage of history? It isn’t as if the human race is going to stop growing food and go back to hunting and gathering, is it? And with the global population what it is now, wouldn’t even that lead to a world “red in tooth and claw”?

Next step of the argument: Resources in the primitive hunting/gathering world were, he argues, an “expandable pie.” With the coming of agriculture, the formerly expandable pie of resources became fixed; compulsion rather than cooperation became the means of ordering social groups; human relationships went from complicated horizontal networks to vertical (hierarchical) levels of power, concentrating the most at the top, the least at the bottom. But now that knowledge has become the coin of the global realm, we find ourselves once again with an “expandable pie.” Knowledge grows by being shared. Knowledge is advanced by cooperation. Moreover, as weapons of war have become more dangerous--and knowledge of the dangers spread throughout the world—motivation grows to cooperate rather than to coerce and kill. And so we are once again dependent on getting along with one another, as were our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

World peace is hardly inevitable, the author acknowledges. It would be difficult to say right now, in 2012 (or when the book was first published in 1999), that it is even probable. But William Ury makes a strong case that it is possible—and that we can all help to bring it about.

One of the most wonderful things about The Third Side is that it is not merely theoretical but practical, and the roles we can take on to further peace are available to us in our everyday lives. In fact, it is in the ordinary challenges of family and community life that we can try on the roles of the provider, the teacher, the bridge-builder, the mediator, the arbiter, the equalizer, the healer, the witness, the referee, and the peacekeeper. We can, that is, retrain ourselves and help to retrain others to deal with conflict cooperatively.

Ury’s last chapter, “Next Steps,” answers the question, “How can I start?” with twelve concrete suggestions. Do you have a troubled relationship somewhere in your life, with a family member, friend, or community member? (Who among us does not?) This book shows in practical terms, with specific strategies, how to move from hostility and resentment to healing, and for that alone I would recommend it highly, but the author’s insights apply all the way from the interpersonal level to the international level.

Working for peace is not easy, but don’t human beings love a challenge?

In the sheer magnitude and complexity of the challenge, the struggle for peace, ironically enough, most closely resembles nothing so much as war itself. Think of how much work goes into preparing for and engaging in wars. Consider how many men and women serve in the armed forces. Weigh how much treasure, talent, and blood is poured into this gigantic venture. Reflect on the around-the-clock vigilance required for huge numbers of individuals. No less effort will be required for the sake of peace. Think too about the virtues required for the successful conduct of wars. Courage? Peace demands just as much; facing up to force nonviolently calls for perhaps even more bravery and self-control than fighting. Cooperation and discipline? Solidarity and altruism? All these ingredients are needed to transform treacherous conflicts. Ironically, in the end, war may have served as a great training ground for peace. For peace is harder than war.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. What do you say? I would love to see this book chosen as a "Leelanau Reads" selection (as far as I know, there is no such program--yet) and have everyone in Leelanau County take its lessons to heart.

Bookstore at 106 Waukazoo Street