My grandfather died a month and a half ago, at the end of May 2013, at the age of 95. He was a World War II veteran. It's incredible to think about all the things that happened during the span of his lifetime.

And then I read The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin. Over the decade or so before this book was published in 2013, Rubin managed to find remaining members of my grandfather's parents' generation, all over 100 years old, and interview them about their service in the military and government during World War I. For Americans, the First World War, at the time "The War to End All Wars," is usually overshadowed by the Second World War, since the U.S. was in WWII a longer time and had American territory directly attacked. The Last of the Doughboys does a very good job of bringing focus back to the earlier world war, fought during the earliest years of modern technology (for example, one of the interviewees recalls delivering belts of ammunition to machine gun emplacements -- using a mule-drawn wagon). It's amazing to get personal perspectives on everything from trench warfare to race relations a century ago from people who were there, and were old enough in 1917-8 to fight or work but still lived into the age of cellphones and the Internet. (Rubin notes that he would never have been able to track down as many living veterans as he did without Internet resources, particularly lists from a French government program started in the 1990s to honor Americans who served on French soil).

There's also a fair amount of non-interview historical material which is also very interesting, particularly the sampling of sheet music art and lyrics for patriotic songs of World War I (and some less patriotic ones from immediately before the war). The book also covers stories such as those of the "Yeomanettes," women who were able to serve as members of the Navy (though doing work on land) during the war, and the treatment of war veterans after the end of the war and particularly during the Depression. In short, it covers a lot of ground, but this does a good job of introducing current readers to times that should not be forgotten, and providing a tribute to the individual people who fought or worked behind the lines in this important juncture of history.

Charles Fishman's The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water is a book full of things that will make you say "Wow . . ." or "My God!" or whatever phrase you use as shorthand for "I can't believe that's the way things really are!" Unless you work in water systems, you will probably find out a lot of surprising things -- maybe even if you do. Because here in the USA, and I expect in most developed areas, we just don't think about our water supply. You turn on the water and out it comes. (When Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne knocked out our electricity here in Tampa for two days each, the water was still fine. Despite the warnings when a hurricane is expected that people should stock up on bottled water, it has rarely been needed.)

The Big Thirst shows how quickly, as history goes, we've stopped thinking about water, and how many problems that lack of thought can cause. In 2008, droughts caused Barcelona, Spain, sufficient water shortage that the city arranged to have supertankers full of water delivered to the city regularly. In the same year, the much smaller Orme, Tennessee, had to have fire trucks deliver its drinking (and bathing, and washing) water. Neither city is located in a desert, either. Las Vegas, Nevada, is in a desert, but 60,000 people move there annually anyway, never thinking about where the water they'll use comes from. Much of Australia has similar problems, particularly given the recent years of drought that have nearly shut down the Murray-Darling river system, which both southeastern cities and farmers rely on. On the other hand, most of India's largest cities only manage to pump water through their municipal systems for at most a couple of hours each day. Fishman talks to both the people in charge of some of these urban water systems throughout the world, and those who have to figure out workarounds or cope with not getting the water they need. It's a real wake-up call for people who have always had water available.

I've read some interesting and thought-provoking books recently -- thanks to the new stuff shelves at the St. Petersburg (Florida) main library.

The first is Judith Stacey's Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China. I am not a marriage traditionalist: I think any consenting adults who want to marry should be able to, but on the other hand people who aren't interested in getting married (like myself and my boyfriend of 14 years) are fine without a ceremony or legal registration. However, I've only lived in this one culture, that of the modern U.S.A., and in an accepted-by-all-but-the-sternest-Biblethumpers heterosexual relationship. Stacey's book examines relationships and child-raising in different cultures -- first, that of West Hollywood gay men, but then some even less familiar to most Americans:

• South Africa, at the time of writing the only country in the world where same-sex and polygamous marriages are both legal, though with some limits on the latter, and
  
• the Mosuo, a minority people of southwestern China who may be the only human group not to include couples living together in marriage to raise children in their traditional way of life.

The book's exploration of these ways of life managed to bring new information and arguments to the sometimes repetitive discussion of what marriage and family can be and should be. It's really fascinating to read about how the non-heterosexual-monogamous minority groups interact with the different majorities around them; I was rather amused South African marriage law's attempt to accommodate the original African "customary" plural marriage while still encouraging European-style monogamous marriages, leading to the result (if I understand it correctly) that only a black man can legally have multiple wives, but not a white man or a woman of any race, despite the racial and gender equality legally prescribed in the South African constitution. (Future legal challenges may get interesting.) And then there's the Mosuo, who used to just leave everyone living with their family of origin, so children are raised by their mother, with her own mother, siblings, and extended maternal family, whether or not the father is continuing to see the mother or not (even if he is, he still lives with his mother and family of origin). To some degree this lifestyle has survived intense government pressure in earlier years of China's Communist government, and even become sort of a tourist attraction now under less-repressive regimes. These are cultures that might have something relevant to say in the modern U.S. marriage debates, as well as just being interesting examples of ways people live.

The next is On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (And Ourselves) by Jonnie Hughes. The author is a British man who frames his discussion of how ideas change and grow within his trip with his brother across the U.S. and Canada looking at such things as changes in barn architecture among settlers and differences in structure of Native American tepees between tribes. Parallels between how Darwinian evolution shaped the plants and animals of the Great Plains and how the needs of Westerners shaped the origin of the cowboy hat, or any of the many other examples of cultural changes Hughes cites, become clear when you look at them from this angle (and the author being British means he has a fresh view of some cultural things that North Americans are so used to as to never consider). Whether or not you can believe in the idea of a "meme" as an entity akin to a "gene" that can exist independently of the organisms that contain it, this book is a fascinating look at how things change.

The final book I felt strongly enough about to blog is Taras Grescoe's Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age (originally published with a different subtitle). I am an American rarity: someone without a driver's license. Outside of a few northeastern cities, it's commonly accepted that it is "impossible" to get by without a car in the U.S., and zoning, building, planning and transit work on this assumption. Of course, this screws over the too-young; too-old; people who are blind or otherwise physically unable to drive; and those who are too poor to afford car, insurance, and gas (plus weirdos like me who just never seemed to be able to learn for no obvious reason). Public transportation exists but rarely makes anything remotely convenient; even here in St. Petersburg, some areas of which pre-date cars, my "local" service center for the county Worknet program is an hour and 3 minutes away or an hour and 5 minutes by different bus routes. (Google maps says driving to the same destination would be 16 minutes, or 21 in current traffic conditions.) And my experience is that St. Petersburg has better transit than say, Tampa, which is a lot more spread out.

This is partly due to the cultural status attached to private car ownership. The book's introduction starts by quoting Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." (Bitch.) These attitudes are preventing a lot of places from making it possible to reduce car pollution, urban sprawl that takes animal habitat, and even obesity rates by cutting down on individual car use.

So I like reading about places where non-private-automobile transportation (not necessarily "public transit") works, and Grescoe catalogs a wide variety of them, as well as a few where it's not so successful. Subways, trains, buses, and bicycle commuting work for people all around the world, allowing them to avoid spending on gas and parking even if they do have their own cars, spewing fewer pollutants per passenger-mile than individual cars, and in some cases even letting them get things accomplished during their commute because they don't have to spend that time controlling the car. But there's no one-size-fits-all plan for every area, and some of the functioning systems Grescoe visits were arrived at after trial and error led to urban blight and gridlock. So Straphanger is a very interesting historical-and-current look at how people get where they need to go, and something people should read in places (such as here in Florida) where transit systems like light rail are being suggested as possibilities.

I haven't added to this blog in a long time, but some books have stuck in my head for months after I read them, which seems like true proof that they are worth blogging.

I can only remember three books in my life that made me cry. They are William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Albert Camus' Les Justes, and Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. The last is the only one in twenty years to make me cry, but the story of the life and death of Merle the dog and the depth of his relationship with Ted, hit my emotions in the same way as the life and death and love of Romeo and Juliet (or Yanek and Dora) had done in high school. I've read a lot of memoirs focusing on people-animal relationships, but this one truly stands out. Rather than just reminding me of the best relationships I've had with animals, the book made me feel like I was missing something by never having known this particular dog, and it also made it clear that dogs (at least some of them) have a lot of potential that their human owners don't allow them to live up to -- even though with the best of intentions to protect the dog's own safety. Ted had the good fortune to live in a relatively rural area, where adding a dog door could allow Merle to truly make his own decisions about where and when to be in any one place, what people to go visit, etc., making Merle "a responsible individual rather than a submissive pet," in the words of the Publishers Weekly review. While many dog owners would find this an uncomfortable situation because they have to rely on the dog's desire to come home and ability to avoid accidents, Ted seems to have been able to trust that Merle, who chose Ted as the one he wanted to stay with rather than the other way around, would continue loving him and always want to be with him, despite Merle's deep friendships with nearly every other person in the area.

The book also contains references to a lot of scientific work about dogs and other animals which back up the ideas about their abilities being greater than humans often realize, and at least one Amazon reviewer considered this to be a liability, but I think it's woven into the story very well; it did not seem at all intrusive, even though the real-life events made much a deeper impression on me. Merle was lucky to come across Ted Kerasote (and made a good choice in going home with him), but the rest of us are lucky that the person Merle chose to make his life with was also someone talented enough to tell the story so movingly.

On a very different note is Sandra Kalniete's With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows (translated by Margita Gailitis) -- this book didn't make me cry but it kept me up at night. Kalniete's family were from Latvia, which was at the time of her birth a part of the Soviet Union. However, she was born in Siberia because both her parents' families had been moved there by the Soviet government; the title comes from the lack of supplies available to the deportees in the small towns where they were essentially dumped, far from home with no preparation for the very different conditions they had to live under. I read Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia years ago in elementary school, which tells the story of a similar Soviet deportation (Hautzig's family were Polish Jews sent to Siberia), so the fact that the Soviet Union did this was not new to me. But Kalniete's book seems more aimed at adults, first because she has to rely on her older family's stories of how things happened before her birth and when she was just a baby, and also because we know a little more, just from the book jacket, of Kalniete's adult achievements. Hautzig's story, on the other hand, is often given to younger readers because it's her own memory of her life from ages ten to fourteen, without mention of her adult self. But both books had the same effect on me that one of the Amazon reviewers says that Endless Steppe had on her: pondering how I would cope in that situation, what would I have thrown in a suitcase on short notice, could I have even gotten through what these people survived? These are the sort of questions a lot of people living comfortably in developed nations ought to think about at least once in a while.

The blog has not been forgotten. And these books are about people who should not be forgotten.

Dana Jennings' Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music hit me the most personally. Jennings talks about the role of classic country music in his life and that of his family growing up in rural New Hampshire -- not the location one most associates with country music, but his stories resonate with my North Carolina family. I remember a story about how my great-grandfather was apparently needy enough to trade his gun for liquor. That's the kind of people Jennings talks about, and he was there for some of it in his family; I just heard the parts people were willing to pass down (my great-grandfather and his daughter were both dead before my grandfather told me about his father-in-law's drinking). But these stories make the country records on my grandparents' turntable make sense to me in a way they didn't when I was a 12-year-old listening to Culture Club and Duran Duran. Not that growing up didn't make me realize how deeply the Osbourne Brothers' "Rocky Top" and such bluegrass and country were embedded in my brain from childhood hearings, but this book made me a lot more aware of the emotional purpose these songs served for their contemporary listeners. It's the same emotional purpose Suicidal Tendencies' "How Will I Laugh Tomorrow (When I Can't Even Smile Today)?" served for me when I was a depressed 17-year-old -- an age at which these rural girls were often coping with marriage and/or motherhood instead of my own problem of not being able to pay for college. And so the book made me feel a lot closer to people I only knew as elderly ladies bent over a quilting frame, or as names in genealogy records, and closer even to many, many Americans who didn't get much American dream for themselves in the past and even now.

But at least I always knew something about rural Americans. Despite spending a stretch a couple of years ago reading all kinds of books on Russian history, most of the place names I could name in the Asian part of Russia were learned off a Risk board. The conquest of Siberia, one-twelfth of the world's landmass, by Russians from the European side of the Ural Mountains was lucky to get a couple of paragraphs in those tomes. A partial fix for that is in The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid, who journeyed across Siberia to see the homelands of some of the native peoples and survey what had happened to them under tsarist, Soviet, and now Russian Federation government. A single 200-page book can barely scratch the surface of the subject -- Reid points out that she only visited and interviewed members of nine of the thirty-one "Small-Numbered Peoples" of Siberia, as the Soviets labeled these ethnic groups. (As with Native American Indians, a few centuries of fighting with Europeans and getting exposed to their new diseases took quite a toll on the size of the original population.) Still, the book is a fascinating introduction to groups such as the Buryat, Tuvans, Sakha, and Chukchi, through both Reid's visits and the records from the Russians and other groups who showed up to live on their land. The collapse of Communism seems to have strengthened some of their ethnic identities, and it will be interesting to see if any of these groups show up as the next Chechens fighting for independence from Russia, or if they just quietly keep on trying to survive, with or without the culture and traditions that Reid searched for.

Perhaps the atrocities of Nazi Germany are in less danger of being forgotten or ignored than those perpetrated on indigenous peoples who had less chance to tell their stories. But that's no reason not to pay attention to the life stories of people who lived through World War II, and author Mark Kurzem's father Alex (anglicized from "Uldis Kurzemnieks") has had a fascinating, surprising, and sometimes horrifying life, chronicled in The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood. As far as his wife and children in Australia knew for most of their lives, a five- or six-year-old Alex was found wandering alone in the forests near the Russian border in 1942 by Latvian soldiers. The trauma of surviving alone for an unknown time (the shortest possible time guessed in the book is several weeks; it might have been longer) had made the little boy forget his name and origin. The soldiers named the boy, kept him with them for a while as a sort of mascot, and eventually their commander arranged a foster home for him in Latvia's capital, Riga, with a family who kept Alex through the war, their time in a displaced-persons camp, and their emigration to Australia. It was not until more than sixty years after the war that Alex revealed to his son Mark that he remembers, not his name, but the circumstances that left him alone in the forest -- that he remembers seeing his mother and younger siblings killed by soldiers. Latvia was occupied by the Nazis at the time and its soldiers used as part of German forces invading Russia; it probably wasn't hard to get Latvians to help with that invasion, since the USSR had invaded Latvia barely a year before the Germans did. The Latvian soldier who saved Alex from being executed with other "partisans" when he was found in the forest undressed him to find that he was circumcised and therefore most likely Jewish, but nonetheless kept the boy with his group of soldiers (with a warning not to let anyone see him undressed). The things Alex saw while he accompanied the soldiers haunted him, and even long after the war and on the other side of the planet, pressure continued on Alex to keep quiet about anything he had seen as a child that might incriminate the people who had cared for him in war crimes. But eventually the Kurzems researched and traveled to confirm as much as possible of Alex's memories and find his birth identity, despite the pain involved in revisiting that kind of past. The mix of historical and psychological mystery made this a book that I could not put down and read all in a single morning; I can't agree with reviews on Amazon who found the beginning to be too slow.

A recent book to be surprised that this agnostic was interested in: Jim and Casper Go to Church: Frank Conversation about Faith, Churches, and Well-Meaning Christians by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper. I think all Christians who have the urge to preach to non-Christians should read this book. Jim Henderson is a Christian, former church pastor and co-founder of Off the Map, which "helps Christians learn to communicate better with non-Christians, or as some of my more outspoken 'lost' friends put it, 'Off the Map helps Christians learn how not to be jerks.'" (I've got to support any organization with that aim!) Matt Casper, on the other hand, is a very well-spoken, outspoken atheist. And for this book, the two of them attended various churches and discussed their views of what went on in their services.

"Casper the Friendly Atheist" says a whole lot of the things I always want to say when Christians try to preach to me, and Jim asks for his reasons, leading to some really interesting discussions. Jim is a somewhat unusual Christian in my view (which perhaps is why he's willing to take a nonbeliever to church without trying to convert him) -- he makes a distinction between simply having faith in Christ and actually performing behavior that Christ would approve of, and he seems to believe that faith is not enough, that Christians need to do good on this earth and not just by trying to forcibly save people's souls.

The two visit Saddlebrook, the California "mega-church" of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life; the "Dream Center" and "Mosaic" in urban Los Angeles; another mega-church outside Chicago (Willow Creek); a medium-sized Presbyterian church and the more urban Lawndale in the Chicago area; a sort of casual church in the home of a friend of Casper's; offbeat "emerging churches" in the U.S. Northwest; Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church and T.D. Jakes' "Potter's House" in Texas. This is, as Jim points out, more types of churches than most Christians ever attend. So followers of Jesus might be interested in Jim's feelings on their own in this sampling of how Jesus is worshiped across the United States. (For that matter, non-Christians could find that interesting from an anthropological point of view as well; I certainly did.) But the person who wants to spread the "good news" of Christ -- well, honestly I think that person should let us non-believers alone to run our own lives. But for those who really don't feel they can give up on trying to "save" us supposedly "lost," considering the issues that come up between Jim and Casper will definitely reduce the likelihood of driving away the very people you want to attract. And that goes for attracting believers searching for a church that feels right to them, too.

I've been busy packing, moving, and going on summer family visits for the past few months and have let the blogging lapse, but here I am again, finally. There are lots of things I want to mention.

I pick up pretty much anything written by the incomparably funny Daniel Pinkwater, and have done so for more than 20 years, even though I'm rather older than the intended audience for most of his books. His latest, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization is no exception; I bought it as soon as I saw it. It's set in the late 1940s, which is mostly obvious from the choice of a train for the rich Wentworthstein family's move across the U.S. and the type of movies discussed, but it's just as wacky as other Pinkwater works, with an Indian shaman named Melvin, a ghost who enjoys sniffing people's meals, and a brief appearance of the fat men from outer space who show up in multiple Pinkwater novels. Schoolboy Ned has been given custody of a sacred stone turtle and is being chased across the country by an incompetent villain who wants to take it; luckily he meets new people who are on his side and their adventures are fun and ridiculous without seeming particularly unreal, like all good Pinkwater.

It was a much greater surprise to find so much fun in a history of 20th-century architecture, Tom Wolfe's 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House. Not only the subject, but the author didn't sound like easy reading to me; I had great difficulty managing to get through Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, even though normally reading about 1960s counterculture greatly interests me. But From Bauhaus to Our House was quite short, so I was willing to give it a try, and it turned to be a hilarious look at the people behind "glass box" architecture. Its point of view is obvious from the first sentence: "O BEAUTIFUL, FOR SPACIOUS SKIES, FOR AMBER WAVES OF grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?" I suppose a lot has taken place in architecture in the 26 years since the book came out, so this is no longer completely current, but that doesn't make it any less applicable -- the buildings from the decades described are still looming over us. Wolfe manages to make reading about concrete cubes way more pleasant than looking at them.

Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World by Liza Mundy was very interesting in a completely different way. It doesn't just go through the technology of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, donor eggs and sperm, and other relatively new ways of making it possible for people to become parents; it goes through the personal issues involved. How can a baptism ceremony acknowledge an egg donor? Should medical personnel be able to choose who they will help with fertility technology (single parents, same-sex couples, people they feel are too old?) Or how much help to give -- balancing the risk of in-vitro fertilized embryos not implanting in the uterus with the risk of too many implanting, which makes it harder for any of them to survive to an age to safely leave the uterus? I never thought of most of these risks, but I'm not planning to have children. Since I seem to be in the minority here, these are definitely issues that should be widely thought over, and Mundy makes it interesting to consider.

Stuff I've only Read BzzAgent Excerpts of:

• When I read an excerpt from Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black I found her dot.com-era rich self extremely annoying. However, the excerpt of her new book of personal essays, Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me? wasn't nearly so bad, even with the memory of not having liked the author as I saw her in her previous work. Anyone who is as annoyed by Rachel Ray as I am can't be all bad! Lancaster's living a life I have a lot more experience with -- riding the public bus, putting off medical checkups (though it's the dentist, not the gynecologist, who scares me) and so I find her snarky remarks much funnier now.
• The beginning of Leslie Kagen's Whistling in the Dark is mostly concerned with setting up the situation of ten-year-old Sally: Milwaukee in 1959, jerk of a stepfather, mother entering the hospital for surgery, Sally and younger sister Troo are largely reliant on each other -- and a neighbor girl has recently been found dead. That summary is far too blunt to convey Sally's viewpoint, a realistic 10-year-old who doesn't always understand what adults are telling her and gets just as much of her information from children's gossip. I'm really curious to find out what happens.
• The excerpt from Patrick Rothfuss' fantasy novel The Name of the Wind I read was actually chapters 13-17, but it's mostly a flashback to when the character Kvothe was twelve and so is a sort of beginning. There's only a few sentences in the setup of the flashback to indicate why we should be interested in Kvothe, although obviously the two characters he's telling the story to are very interested in his past. However, the look at Kvothe's growing up and the tragedy that happened when he was twelve make him seem a sympathetic character, and the rest of his life as told in the whole book and the two upcoming ones could certainly be worth reading.