Book Review - "Dancing to the Precipice"

"Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era" by Caroline Moorehead

My education had a big hole in it....well, many holes. One was that I had no idea what the French Revolution was all about and what happened.  I found “Dancing to the Precipice” recommended on a book list and decided to read it. 

From Publishers Weekly:  “Educated to wait on Marie Antoinette, the marquise Lucie de la Tour du Pin (1770-1853) instead precariously survived a devastating revolution, an emperor, two restorations and a republic. Drawing on Lucie's memoirs and those of her contemporaries, Moorehead (Gellhorn) uses Lucie's descriptions of both personal events and the ever-changing French political atmosphere to portray the nobility's awkward shifts with each new event and the impact they have on Lucie and her diplomat husband, Fréédric. A woman with both court-honed aristocratic manners and rough farm skills (earned in the Revolution's wake during her rural New York exile), Lucie benefited from passing platonic relationships with Napoleon and Wellington, Talleyrand, and countless salon personalities. Lucie's terror during the anarchy of the Revolution remains palpable in her memoirs centuries later. Moorehead obviously admires Lucie, but she gives a convincing and entertaining portrait of an intelligent, shrewd, unpretentious woman and the turbulent times she lived through and testified to in her memoirs.”

Having known nothing about the French Revolution, I have to say, I was shocked by the brutality and the senselessness of much of it. The contrast between the American Revolution and French Revolution is quite striking. Reading the book also gave me some insight into the French people themselves.  The fashion...during the French revolution many of their fashions where political statements.  It was also interesting to see how most of them threw off all religion and embraced the new philosophies of the time.

I found the book fascinating overall.  It was often difficult to keep the names straight and remember who was who.  I felt the author painted Lucie as a woman without fault which  I found annoying at times.  But Lucie was an extraordinary woman who lived through some extremely difficult times.

Now I think I should try to tackle "Reflections on the Revolution in France" by Edmund Burke. Hmmm?  We'll see.

A few quotes from the book:
"'Amid all these pleasures,' [Lucie] wrote, 'we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.'"


"For the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their friends, the salons were the one place where ideas of this kind could be aired in safety, where no questions were deemed too sensitive to debate, no thoughts too perilous to think.  Many severed their links with their religious upbringings."


"Even now, with the revolution turning upside down all ideas about society, the nuances of 18th-century fidelity hung on.  To show such evident love for one's husband was unusual, even a little absurd; but among her contemporaries Lucie was unusual, sometimes disconcertingly so."


"Over the next two years, the securalisation of the Church would go further than anyone had imagined, with churches demolished or turned into warehouses, church bells and plate melted down, religious orders made destitute, and priests turned into public servants.:


"As [Alexander] Hamilton observed, it was hard to go on supporting a revolution that had plainly substituted 'to the mild and beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting and desolating atheism'."


"The revolution, argued the emigre journalists, had turned out to be synonymous not with liberty but with destruction."

Book Review - "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa

I don’t know where I heard about this book but it’s been sitting around on my Kindle for a while so I decided to give it a read.  The story pulled me right in from the start.   The characters are all so interesting and the story intriguing.  This is a quiet story…not a lot of action…it’s about human relationships.

A mathematics professor has been in a car accident and his short term memory only lasts for 80 minutes.  He does remember everything from his past….right up until the accident.  The professor is getting old, so the housekeeper is hired to clean and cook for him.  The Professor pins notes to his jacket to help him remember things.  He clips on a note that reminds him he has a housekeeper.  Every morning she has to re-introduce herself.  The housekeeper has a son that the Professor calls Root…because the housekeeper’s son has a square head and it reminds the professor of the square root sign.  As the days go on the Housekeeper and Root learn how to deal with the Professor’s 80 minute memory.  They treat him with respect and dignity.  The Professor loves numbers.  He was a mathematics professor before the accident and he is always ready to pass on his enthusiasm for numbers.  He is often giving a little lesson to the Housekeeper…and she begins to see beauty in numbers herself.  

Numbers.  I love numbers.  There’s beauty there, regularity, dependability.  Patterns; beautiful patterns.  I think that numbers point us to attributes of God.  This made me especially enjoy this lovely story that had a few little lessons about numbers tucked here and there.  But there is so much more to this beautiful story.  It’s about loyalty, respect, caring, giving of yourself and friendship.   Even if you don’t like numbers and mathematics class filled you with dread, you will appreciate this story very much…and maybe you will also begin to see the beauty in numbers yourself.

Some of my favorite quotes in the book:

“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material thing or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression – in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.”

“Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.”

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers.  For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied, and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world.”

Book Review: Charlotte Collins: A Continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Jennifer Becton

I actually liked this book.  I needed something light to read and since I love Jane Austen I thought I would give this book a try.  I give the author a lot of credit.  It can’t be easy to write a book that is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.  While she is no Jane Austen, I think she did a good job and came up with a fun and interesting plot line. 

The story picks up 7 years after Pride and Prejudice ends.  Mr. Collins is killed in a carriage accident leaving Charlotte a widow.  He leaves behind no children; the only child they had, a girl, died in infancy.  Charlotte now has to make a life for herself.  Her sister Maria is not married so she comes to live with Charlotte so that Charlotte can be her chaperon out in society since their parents are now quite old and confined to their home.  Maria hopes to make a good match.  While Charlotte would prefer to live out her life in peace and quiet, she accompanies Maria to country dances and dinner parties.  Along the way their are many twists and turns in the story making Charlotte question many of her preconceived ideas on love and marriage.  

Book Review: Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

I enjoyed this book; it was like a vicarious vacation to Italy.  Yet, Frances Mayes wasn't vacationing in Italy, she was living there.  It started out as a vacation…several vacations to Italy…eventually she decided that she loved it so much that she bought a house there.  She worked as college professor and was free to live in Italy all summer.  So she took the plunge and bought a dilapidated old stone home in Tuscany.  This book is the story of renovating the house, living in Italy, eating, drinking, gardening, sight-seeing, and life.

I loved the description of the Italian way of life; the food she ate and cooked; and the garden she planted.  She even includes some recipes in the book. 

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Tuscans are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring the past along with them.  If our culture says burn your bridges behind you - and it does – theirs says cross and recross.”

“What we never knewis the tremendous resurgent power in nature.  The land is implausibly regenerative.  My experience with gardening led me to think plants must be coaxed along.  Ivy, fig, sumac, acacia, blackberry can’t be stopped.  A vine we call ‘evil weed’ twines and chokes.  It must be dug out down to its carrot-sized root; so must nettles.  It’s a wonder nettles have not taken over the world.”

Book Review - "Island of the World" by Michael O'Brien

I finished reading Island of the World by Michael O’Brien.  It took a couple of weeks.  I read it on my Kindle and it seemed long…so I looked it up on Amazon….. 850 pages!  Island of the World is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  It’s difficult to put into words how the book touched me.  It’s a book that goes deep down into your soul.  I wanted to read it fast because I wanted to see what happened next…and yet, I wanted to read it slow because it was full of profound thoughts and insights.  It’s like no other book I’ve read before.  It is beautiful and devastating at the same time.  Ultimately it’s about redemption and forgiveness and it’s about finding peace. 

Here is a synopsis of the book from Amazon:

“Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium. The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces that resist them—the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and Communist Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the young and the innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only remaining strength is their religious faith and their families.

For more than a century, the confused and highly inflammatory history of former Yugoslavia has been the subject of numerous books, many of them rife with revisionist history and propaganda. The peoples of the Balkans live on the border of three worlds: the Islamic, the orthodox Slavic East, and Catholic Europe, and as such they stand in the path of major world conflicts that are not only geo-political but fundamentally spiritual. This novel cuts to the core question: how does a person retain his identity, indeed his humanity, in absolutely dehumanizing situations?

In the life of the central character, the author demonstrates that this will demand suffering and sacrifice, heroism and even holiness. When he is twelve years old, his entire world is destroyed, and so begins a lifelong Odyssey to find again the faith which the blows of evil have shattered. The plot takes the reader through Josip's youth, his young manhood, life under the Communist regime, hope and loss and unexpected blessings, the growth of his creative powers as a poet, and the ultimate test of his life. Ultimately this novel is about the crucifixion of a soul—and resurrection.”

A few quotes from the book:

“We are born, we eat, and learn, and die.  We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare.  I was here.”

***

“In this world are many people who do not master their bodies.  Such people say that no one can tell them what to do, not even God, and they think that in this way they have no master.  In the end they become slaves to anything.”

***

“’I’m saying that through genuine culture man can know himself, even in nations where his identity is denied.’

‘But what do you mean by genuine culture?’

‘The beautiful and true!  In music, in poetry, in literature, even in novels without political or historical references, we can apprehend what is not immediately known through rational thought or the accumulation of objective facts.’”

 ***

“’Culture is the last refuge, the sanctuary, the human place in the midst of the surrounding dehumanization.  Through the arts man is able to know himself, even if only on the intuitive level.  He senses his own worth, even when he cannot articulate is.’

‘Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?’

Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect?

‘Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time.  When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it – both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.’”