theSheetNews.com

March 19 marked the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War, a date that passed with little fanfare in the small communities of Mono and Inyo counties. Yet the war in Iraq has undoubtedly touched the lives of many Eastside residents, indirectly if not directly. Some of us may merely recall watching the first few weeks of media coverage in 2003; bombs bursting to a victorious soundtrack supplied by Fox News. Others may have interacted with Wounded Warriors during Disabled Sports Eastern Sierra clinics, and heard their stories, told with a mixture of wariness, pride, and detachment. Still others may have faced the hardship of saying goodbye to loved ones before deployment, the joy of welcoming them home, or the heartbreak of never having another chance to.

Some Eastsiders are undoubtedly veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the latter of which celebrated the dubious honor of 12 years this year, and may have experienced first hand the challenges of leaving and returning changed in ways that they or their loved ones may not yet fully understand. While many of us might not have noticed when March 19 came and went, that date represents a long and troubled chapter in American history.

Until now, the experiences of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been channeled largely through nonfiction; we read their stories in newspapers, or hear their stories during the nightly news. But a recently released collection of fiction short stories, Fire and Forget, written by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeks to change that.

Addressing the challenge of telling stories about another generation’s fraught war, Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien wrote, “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis … A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” The 15 stories collected in the recently released Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo Press) do just that. Like O’Brien, these contributors are warriors, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and like O’Brien, each seeks in this superb collection to make sense out of senselessness, truth out of ambiguous truths.

Edited by veterans Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher, with a forward by National Book Award winner Colum McCann, Fire and Forget offers 15 windows into the complex, contradictory experience of war. The writers are military spouses, members of the National Guard, Marine Corps, Army, and Special Forces, and their collected stories are by turns heartbreaking and sidesplitting, ferocious and tender, anguished and hopeful.

Some stories, like Brian Turner’s “The Wave That Takes Them Under,” in which a platoon slowly loses its way in the shifting sands of the desert, delve into the beauty and terror of war. Other stories center on the difficult transition home, like Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” wherein a Marine contemplates his experience shooting dogs during the Battle of Fallujah, then must return to his own, ailing dog in North Carolina. Still others, like Jacob Siegel’s “Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere,” reflect on the act of storytelling itself, and the challenges of speaking about experiences so unreal they elude language.

As Siegel writes, “War stories are almost never about war unless they’re told by someone who was never there. Every now and then maybe you talk about something or listen to someone who needs to get it off their chest, but those aren’t the stories you come back to, not for telling.”

The stories collected in Fire and Forget are not, or not entirely, about war. They are about universal human experiences: terror and adventure, fear and courage, sorrow and hope.

The Sheet spoke recently with contributor Phil Klay and editors and contributors Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher about the genesis of Fire and Forget, the particular strengths of fiction versus nonfiction, and whether writing war stories will always be an inherently political act.

Sheet: When did you conceive of Fire and Forget, and how did it finally make it to print?

MG: Initially it was kind of a bar napkin idea. We [editors and contributors Jacob Siegel, Phil Klay, Perry O’Brien, Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher] met at the New York University Veteran’s Writing Workshop a couple years ago. We all came from different backgrounds and different wars, and the workshop was a very healthy thing for all of us, because we were pushing each other; we didn’t believe one another’s B.S. And we just started thinking, ‘Why not put together an anthology collection?’”

Sheet: Did you have a specific audience in mind when assembling the collection?

RS: Our audience is people who love great stories. Our audience is also people who are curious about these wars, and what happened there, and curious about it not just in a historical way, but in the closer, more descriptive and even emotional sorts of ways that fiction can get at. Our audience, broadly, is just people who read books and like stories, and are interested in what’s been happening in America in the last decade.

MG: We wanted to be appealing to people who consider themselves a literary audience. We wanted to avoid being seen as trauma writers, or anything like that. That certainly has its place, but we were trying to do something different. Really we were focused more on gathering a diverse collection of voices, a diverse collection of writing styles, a diverse collection of experiences, knowing that in 15 stories, a story might not resonate with somebody, but this other one really will.

Sheet: What has been the reception to the collection thus far?

RS: The reception’s been great. We’re really excited to see how excited readers are. There are people who say this is a book they’ve been waiting for, and there are people who have called it necessary, and I’m humbled and honored that they would say that. But the two most important things, it seems to me, and actually most gratifying things about people’s response to the book, is people are really excited about the variety of perspectives. That was a key part of the idea, to get as many different approaches, different kinds of writing, different kinds of wars, into one collection as possible. And people really dig that.

The other thing that people are saying is that it’s intense. It’s a tough collection, and it’s emotionally intense to get through. Which is also so great to hear.

Sheet: Why did you choose to collect fiction rather than nonfiction stories?

RS: There’s two important things, I think, that fiction can do better than nonfiction. One thing is that nonfiction gives you what happened; it gives you the particular events. And fiction deals in what’s possible, and it can pull out from the particularity of this event—this day, this life, this one moment—something bigger, something a little more universal. It can talk about the kinds of things that happen. It can talk about the kinds of things a certain kind of person would do. And in that way, it can get at a deeper human truth.

The other thing that I think is really important that fiction can do, and nonfiction can’t, is play with storytelling itself. Nonfiction can play with storytelling, but what fiction can do is inhabit that space between the stories we make up about what happened, and what might have actually happened, which we might not even remember right in the first place. There’s a funny thing, particularly with war, and really intense events; people misremember them all the time. And fiction allows you to get into that space, where what you remember may not even be true, and then how do you say something true about that?

MG: There’s also been a lot of nonfiction out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it certainly has its place, but fiction is just now starting to emerge with this collection and a couple novels. Historically that’s normal for war fiction. It takes more time than nonfiction. For me personally, and for most of us in the collection, writing short stories and writing fiction allowed us access to deeper emotional truths that were much more difficult to find in nonfiction, I think because we’re all limited by our own experience, by our own eyes, our own background. Fiction frees you up of all those things and allows you to write about something wider and something deeper that nonfiction just really can’t tap into.

Sheet: Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” was one of those stories that I thought got at something deep, and one that I felt deeply. What was the inspiration for that story?

PK: It came from talking to 2 Marines who were at the Battle of Fallujah, who told me about shooting dogs. And that struck me as interesting. I’d heard a lot of first person accounts about the Battle of Fallujah, and I’d also done a lot of research into that conflict, and from the very beginning I think one of the things I was always interested in was not just the experience over in Iraq, but the homecoming. I probably couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but I felt like there was something about that notion of shooting dogs, especially because I’m a dog lover, that felt like it needed to be explored.

When you first write something, you don’t know what you’re actually going to be writing about. You know that there’s a problem; something that troubles you, or something that seems like it may be a key into exploring other things. And that’s basically all that it was.

Sheet: Your story gives a glimpse into the actual process of coming home from Iraq to the States. Without that in the collection, I think there might be a disjunct between the stories that are set abroad and the stories that are set at home.

PK: Yeah, I mean it’s the first war story I ever wrote. Especially being in the Marine Corps, being home, that was on my mind. As I said it took me a couple more years to actually finish the damn thing, and I think part of that was just having the distance, and the time and reflection, but also just the practice writing, to be able to get a better handle on that experience.

Sheet: It seems like a real challenge to process such an intense and complicated experience, and to channel it into fiction.

PK: Well my experience of war is quite different from the Marine’s in my story. And I feel like that distance is actually important, for me anyway, for being able to write. It allows you a certain space to deal with things that you’ve been thinking about, because it’s an experience removed from yours but still a human experience, and you can try and get at the communicable aspects of it, and in that way it serves to clarify your own thinking in a way that maybe you couldn’t if you were just trying to write about yourself.

Sheet: Colum McCann states in his forward to the collection that “writing fiction is necessarily a political act.” How much did you feel Fire and Forget was a political act?

RS: That’s a great question, and it’s one that we’re still arguing about amongst myself and Matt, Phil and the other guys. Because these wars were violent, they were ethically messy, and they were politically charged. And I think Colum’s right in that especially with something about war, there’s no way it can’t be political somehow.

But it’s really important, coming back to the question of having a variety of perspectives and voices, to not skew one way or the other. Some of our contributors are still in the military. Some of our contributors, like Perry O’Brien, who wrote “Poughkeepsie,” he’s a conscientious objector who served in Afghanistan. So there’s a range of views on that issue. I don’t want to say that the collection is not political. It’s important to acknowledge how political these wars were, and continue to be. But we’re not signing up for a party, I’ll put it that way.

MG: Yeah, because it’s so easy, if this is an ‘anti-war book’ or this is a ‘pro-war book,’ to get caught up in those labels, and immediately half of readers aren’t listening anymore. And that’s not doing anyone any good.

PK: And that’s one of the things that I really like about the collection; when people read it, they’ll all like different stories, which I think speaks to the strength of the collection, and also it’s getting at very different aspects of the experience, and ways of thinking about war, and breaking out of a simplistic mindset about these experiences and taking a fuller approach, which is part of the whole point. I’m really pleased to be a part of it. In order to get a fuller sense of what the past 12 years have meant, you need a broad range of voices.

Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War is available at The Booky Joint.

“WILD”
By: Cheryl Strayed, 2012,
Knopf, $25.95, hardcover

There are hiking books and books about hiking, and then there are books about life and how it was irrevocably changed through hiking. Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” is clearly the latter; a personal, intimate, true story of a woman’s descent to the depths of depression and how her entire existence was rebuilt by a happenstance idea to hike 1,100 miles of the 2,663 mile long Pacific Crest Trail.

By the summer of 1995, Strayed was basically about as down and out as one could get, going through an emotionally turbulent divorce and the devastating loss of her mother to cancer. “I was living alone in a studio apartment in Minneapolis, separated from my husband, and working as a waitress, as low and mixed-up as I’d ever been in my life,” she described. Hers was a nomadic existence, roaming from Minnesota to New York to Oregon. For some reason, all that changed one day while standing in line at an outdoor supply store.

“I picked up a book called ‘The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California’ from a nearby shelf and read the back cover,” Strayed wrote. At the bottom of a very “deep well,” as she put it, from that well, “I set about becoming a solo wilderness trekker. And why not? I’d been so many things already. A loving wife and adulteress, a beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone. An ambitious overachiever and aspiring writer, who hopped from one meaningless job to the next while dabbling with drugs [heroin, in particular] and sleeping with too many men.”

Her description of her backpack, which she dubbed “Monster,” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her skills as a novice hiker!

But it’s not the hiking parts that are why Strayed’s story is so engrossing, and such a page-turner. With one novel to her credit as well, this book is the one that shows off her literary abilities and her very original voice. Locals in the Eastern Sierra can relate to a lot of places she describes along her route to and while on the PCT, especially those readers who have done all or part of the trail themselves, including references to Mojave, Ridgecrest, Mt. Whitney and other localities.

What is so compelling about “Wild” is the honesty and frankness, but also how she describes her mindset and emotions, changes that likely began even before the moment she took her first steps on the trail. The PCT becomes her counselor, as do the many travelers she meets along the way.

In one instance, perhaps it was the trail, or at least its affect on her, that causes her to watch one of her boots sail over a cliff side just six weeks into her sojourn, only one of many life lessons that await her, and one meaning of the shot of the lone boot on the book’s cover.

Her story is filled with peril and adventure, and the descriptions of her situations are comical, bittersweet, but always part of an arc that would alter, and in most cases destroy, any preconceived and pessimistic notions of both her life and her own self-worth.

“Wild” is filled with accounts of how Strayed deals with everything from snakes, bears, and snow and ice challenges, not to mention loneliness, and also how she is changed by the PCT’s beauty, its unyielding truths and an amazement at even her own resilience. Strayed knew that in order to rebuild her life, she must first be broken down. Her intellectual reaction might have been to walk away, but deep down an innate desire to see it through propelled her.

If, as the saying goes, life is a journey and not a destination, then Strayed’s account of her own, which has caught on like “Wild” fire with book club readers across the country, is one journey you’ll want to take.

There’s the type of outdoorsy badass who accomplishes a noteworthy feat for the bragging rights. Then there’s the kind of badass who — like John Muir, Mary Austin or Norman Clyde — follows the tug of nature to the source of its extremes because he just can’t help himself, lives to tell the tale, and tells it beautifully.

Daniel Arnold is part of the latter group of badasses. His new book, “Salt to Summit: A Vagabond Journey from Death Valley to Mount Whitney,” combines his passion for adventure with his talents as a wordsmith. Eastside readers might be familiar with his previous work,
“Early Days in the Range of Light” (Counterpoint, $24.95), in which he retraces the footsteps of climbing legends through the Sierra.

In “Salt to Summit,” Arnold recounts his expedition from Badwater Basin in Death Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney. A distance of 80 air miles and an elevation gain of 14,787 feet, the 17-day journey takes him from the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere to the tallest point in the contiguous United States. Arnold recognized this poetic proximity of extremes as a teenager, thinking, “. . . this must be the perfect way to climb a mountain. Start at the very bottom, and end at the very top. What more could a mountaineer want?”

In a fashion familiar to readers of Early Days in the Range of Light, Arnold self-imposes obstacles to make is journey more difficult. Rather than travel the paved route from Badwater to Whitney, he forges his own path, avoiding roads and trails when possible. He leaves in April, a month when Death Valley smolders and Mount Whitney is still snow-capped. He carries little more than what the early travelers would have brought: no GPS device, no tent and a grown-out beard for sun block.

Schlepping 46 pounds of water, Arnold begins his trek from Badwater Basin: “Getting pinched between the salt and the sun here feels like hanging out in a jerking oven. It’s the apocalypse written by a banana slug.” Fighting the tricks of the desert and mountains, Arnold makes his way across salt flats, through slot canyons, and up precipitously steep rock and ice.

Although he travels alone, Arnold encounters a host of ghosts from the Old West … Shoshones, ‘49ers, writers, climbers, entrepreneurs and Paiutes. With his signature gift for storytelling, Arnold’s narrative seamlessly transitions from anecdotes of his own journey to tales of people from the past. He also leads readers through the history of the landscape, from the time when the native population thrived, to the gold rush era, all the way to Owens Valley water wars.

With the observations of a philosopher and the artistry of a poet, Arnold’s impressive writing style propels the story forward. He breathes life into the area’s history and its notable characters. His descriptions of the landscape spring to life on each page, as he notes the changing color palettes, geology, flora, and fauna.

To some, Arnold’s feat itself might not sound entirely “epic” in a world where athletes are constantly breaking records free-soloing, speed-climbing, BASE jumping, and logging obscene mileage on foot or bike. But “epic” aside, this is a story of extremes, of hot and cold, high and low, and of the extremes people have taken to live in such seemingly uninhabitable conditions.

“More than a story of passing through, this is also a story of trying to stay, of people drawn to the harshest landscape in the American West and held here when the desert got into their blood,” Arnold writes.

Copies of “Salt to Summit” can be found at the Booky Joint in Mammoth Lakes, and Spellbinder Books in Bishop.

The cost of eBooks may be rising thanks to publishers, but books, be they digital or paper, are still a great gift to give this holiday season. Whether they’re read on a new Kindle Fire or in hardback, here are some suggestions The Sheet thinks you, your family and friends will enjoy.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stroud ($14 paperback, $9.99 kindle, Random House). Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, this novel of linked stories paints a portrait of a quiet coastal town in Maine where secrets and unfulfilled desires work like currents beneath the surface of each character’s seemingly ordinary life. Olive Kitteridge herself, a complex and fascinating presence in each story, offers a voice at once bracingly honest, painfully funny, and profoundly sad. These simple but wisely told stories will keep you reading from cover to cover.

Just Kids by Patti Smith ($16 paperback, $9.99 kindle, HarperCollins). Poet and musician Patti Smith shouldn’t be this talented, but in her lyrical memoir she proves herself a master of not only poetry and songwriting, but also of prose. Smith’s book brings to life the vanished New York City of the 60s and 70s, capturing all its beauty, seductive charm and danger. Just Kids chronicles a lifelong friendship between Smith and provocative photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 of AIDS. This book will make you believe in the power of art and friendship.

The Gentleman’s Hour by Don Winslow ($25 hardcover, $11.99 kindle, Simon & Schuster). A sequel to The Dawn Patrol, this stand-alone mystery novel follows surfer and former cop turned P.I. Boone Daniels on another misadventure that tangles him up with a Hawaiian gangster, a rich man’s straying wife, and the San Diego surf community itself. Winslow’s style is rhythmic and hypnotic, and perfectly Southern California cool. A must read for mystery fans.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes ($15.95 paperback, $7.57 kindle, Grove Press). Written by a decorated Vietnam veteran over the course of 30 years, Matterhorn offers a powerful depiction of the Vietnam War. Like the best war novels, it captures combat in all its complexity: the boredom, terror, and unexpected beauty, as well as the horrible meaninglessness of men’s lives lost for the sake of politics at home. Marlantes’ book will make you think about Vietnam, and the warriors who fought there, in a whole new light. This raw and devastating novel is a must read.

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin ($35 hardcover, $14.99 kindle, Bantam Books). Fantasy may not be your cup of tea, but then again, this isn’t your typical fantasy. If you haven’t read the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, think about picking up the 4-book boxed set, because these books are addicting. Packed with action and intrigue, the latest in Martin’s epic series picks up reader’s favorite characters and throws them into ever more perilous situations. A Dance with Dragons is a compelling continuation to the dramatic series that’s redefining the fantasy genre.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins ($53.97 hardcover, $17.85 kindle, Scholastic Press). Katniss Everdeen is no Bella Swan, and Collins’ Hunger Games books are not your typical Young Adult novels. In the first book, Collins introduces a heroine who is tough, courageous, and resourceful, then tests her to her limits in a dark dystopian world where children fight to the death as mass entertainment. Collins’ writing is spare and sharp, her future world distressingly believable. This series will haunt readers young and old.

A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead, Illustrated by Erin Stead ($16.99 hardcover). This gently loopy Caldecott Medal winner is perfect for kids, and won’t make parents roll their eyes while they read. The illustrations are delicately rendered using woodblock print techniques, with just a touch of whimsy to match a simple tale of a beloved zookeeper visited on a sick day by all of his animal friends.

Cover Photo: Galen Rowell

By: Matt Johanson
Illustrated by: Christopher Hampson
Dreamcatcher Publishing, 210 pages

After learning more about Bachar and his free solo exploits, I realized what an inspiration he had been to some while serving as the poster child for recklessness to others. The man’s life seemed to have many layers and I had barely skimmed the surface. Naturally, when I received an email asking if I would like to review a new book that was a compilation of short stories penned by Yosemite adventurers including John Bachar, I was intrigued to read words from this sometimes controversial figure’s own pen.

Joining Bachar in “Yosemite Epics, Tales of Adventure from America’s Greatest Playground,” are more than 20 other adventurers sharing their personal accounts of near misses and close calls on the granite slabs, backcountry ski/snowboard trails, and waters in and around Yosemite. As John Moynier points out in his forward, “the list of contributors reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of Yosemite … over the past 50 years.”

The stories are short and to the point, with the longest spanning about 10 pages, and each ends with the adventurer commenting on what he or she learned from the life-threatening experience. More than half of the stories are about near misses while climbing the granite monoliths in the national park. The tales have the feel of stories one would tell around the campfire, each one having the flavor of a mini epic. Their compelling nature leads one to believe that being a great adventurer naturally leads to being a great storyteller.

Helpful to readers like myself who may not rock climb is the glossary of terms as well as the explanation of climbing ratings that help one navigate the terminology used by the experienced climbers throughout the book.

Obviously each person writing the tale survived the ordeal they describe (otherwise how would they be able to tell the story?), but author Matt Johanson warns in his afterword that while all the tales in the book end well, “no one should draw false or rosy conclusions from these hand-chosen episodes.” Reminding readers that the risk that accompanies outdoor adventure should always be taken seriously.

An example of this is Bachar, who may have “got away with one” in the story in the book, but who passed away from another free solo climb just two weeks after meeting with Johanson and relating his tale. Bachar’s piece, “I Got Away with One” briefly discusses the taboo topic of climbing without a rope and describes the first experience he had with the technique many consider dangerous.

“I’m up there without a rope, and I’m thinking, ‘This is just nuts.’ I don’t belong here without a rope.” The sensation, however, passed quickly and he soon realized how freeing climbing without a rope could be, and he began to push himself in the field.

His story of near-tragedy centers around his harrowing on-sight solo of the Moratorium, a 500-foot tall, 5.11 crack. A tricky section left him shaky and disoriented when he finally reached the top.

“I felt like a hollow shell,” he penned. “I felt like I got away with one. I didn’t feel like I conquered it. I felt like it let me slip through.”

No one will ever know if Bachar felt the same distress he felt on the Moratorium on that fateful day at Dike Wall in 2009, but by the end of the story I had gleaned one more tidbit about this intriguing figure. While he would free solo all day and all night, he never recommended it to others, perhaps because of feelings like those described above.

“Yosemite Epics” is full of tantalizing tales just as gripping as Bachar’s with other authors such as Scott Cosgrove, Peter Croft, and Royal Robbins. Pick up your copy locally at The Booky Joint in Mammoth or Spellbinder Books in Bishop.

Summer solstice has come and gone, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to tackle that summer reading list. Most summer reading lists (if you plan on reading anything at all) tend to fall into two categories: the Classics-I’ve-been-meaning-to-read-for-years, and the Trash-I’ll-probably-read instead.

You know which list is yours, whether you’re staring with some trepidation at the 600+ pages of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or if you’re already breezing through the Twilight series for the seven hundredth time.

Each list has its virtues. Sure, I feel a duty to give a shout-out to the Classics—books such as The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Swann’s Way, that remain relevant to our lives 50 to 100 years after they were written.

But as a human being, I’ll admit that more often than not I tend to gravitate toward the Trash side of the spectrum (although not Stephanie Meyers’ brand).

To resolve this tension I’ve decided to embark on a quest for a new kind of summer reading, a melding of Classics and Trash, or Trashics, if you will. Weeks of searching have led me to the first book I think meets the criteria: George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

You may already be a fan of the classic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, to which this first book belongs. Or it could be you’ve watched the new HBO adaptation, which wrapped up its first season this past Sunday. I belong to the latter camp, and I have to say that while the show is fantastic, I’ve discovered that the book is even better.

A quick disclaimer: I’m a former fantasy junkie. I got hooked on fantasy books at an early age, and although I hadn’t read one for years, that passion is still in my blood. Fantasy isn’t for everyone, I know, but A Game of Thrones isn’t your typical fantasy.

A Game of Thrones introduces readers to the country of Westeros, home to seven kingdoms that teeter on the brink of civil war. There’s plenty of intrigue, backstabbing, romance, and heroics; there are swords with names, mystic visions, lords and ladies, bastards and assassins, knights and kings. All of these elements might consign the book to the Trash category. But A Game of Thrones also offers a profound meditation on the effecs of power on individuals rich and poor. It poses age-old questions about whether power always corrupts; whether morality can survive in times of war; and whether good can endure evil.

To carry forth his plot, Martin creates a compelling cast of characters, from the noble Lord Eddard Stark to the boozy, whoring King Robert Baratheon; from the sweet, naïve Sansa Stark to the steely Queen Cersei Lannister.

Martin’s characters are complex human beings who develop in surprising ways over the course of the book.

Martin also isn’t afraid to let bad things happen to good characters. You’ll find by the end of A Game of Thrones that some of your favorite characters have been emotionally abused, physically crippled, or even killed.

This is no Harry Potter; major characters meet sudden, frequently unjust ends. It’s that grittiness that gives the book its edge, and makes it so unpredictable and addictive.

Also unlike Harry Potter, there are no deus-ex-machina spells, no wise wizards or all-powerful forces of evil. There’s hardly any magic, and no dragons — at least not live ones. Instead there’s a richly imagined Dark Ages world devolving into the chaos of war. There are human beings caught in the crossfire, forced to choose between honor, love, and life.

At its heart, A Game of Thrones is a classic portrait of the cost of war, and the enduring need for peace. If that doesn’t qualify it for the Trashics Summer Reading List, I don’t know what will.

Katie Vane recently earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College.

COURTESY PENGUIN PRESS

THE HELP

By: Kathryn Stockett

Penguin, 451 pp.

Race relations between blacks and whites may still have a ways to go, but there certainly has been some progress and promise, especially given the wide acceptance
of an insightful new novel, “The Help,” a fictional tale about African-American housekeepers in white households in Jackson, Miss., during the early 1960s.

Stockett spent five years writing “The Help,” which was turned down by 45 literary agents before being picked up by Penguin. Smart move … it’s since spent more than a year on the L.A. Times Bestseller list, and on May 27 of this year topped that chart.

Based on Stockett’s early life experiences with just such a situation (she was raised in Jackson), her first book is full of revelations. The book is unique in several ways. First, it’s told from the point of view of three major characters:

Aibileen, who has spent her life raising white children and recently lost her only son to very heartbreaking circumstances. The very sassy Minny, whose fiery manner is equaled only by her cooking, bounces from job to job. Her money struggles can be directly attributed to offended employers, but when she lands a position with a family too new to know her reputation, she soon finds they have secrets of their own. And Eugenia Phelan, aka “Skeeter,” a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college only to find her childhood maid, Constantine, has mysteriously “disappeared,” or as her mother put it, “Constantine’s gone, Skeeter. She went to live with her people up in Chicago.” Is that the truth? Skeeter’s not so sure.

Skeeter has a college degree, but her life’s ambitions clash with the Southern culture of 1962, which turns its nose up at professional white women, preferring they be married instead of heading into the workplace or otherwise upsetting the social apple cart.

The stories are all connected, and each is filled with emotional twists and turns; still, I couldn’t help but think that it’s Skeeter who wittingly or not ends up providing the book’s underlying subtext.

Skeeter, it turns out, is so affected by “the help,” particularly what the mystery surrounding what happened to Constantine, that she contacts Elaine Stein, a non-fiction book publisher with Harper & Row, who encourages her fledgling writing efforts. Stein, who tells Skeeter she previously lived in Atlanta, becomes particularly interested in her young protégé when Ms. Phelan pitches her an idea that may lead a rather controversial, though potentially groundbreaking magazine feature article.

“I’d like to write this showing the point of view of the help,” Skeeter tells Stein. “They raise a white child and then 20 years later the child becomes the employer. It’s irony that we love them and they love us, yet … we don’t even allow them to use the toilet in the house.”

And second, as opposed to just being narrated as a white woman writing about black people, Stockett chose to create all three voices as if they were her own. Having grown up in the Deep South, similar to Stockett, I know what the voices should sound like, and trust me her accuracy is uncanny. Far more than just simply changing “are” to “is,” Stockett has a way with capturing inflection, intonation and general conversational parlance of the day (and even today in many areas).

Stockett’s depiction lets the reader hear, see, and practically smell and feel Jackson, Miss., during the Civil Rights movement, the larger world — including references to icons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks — analogized in the lives of “the help.”

One doesn’t have to get to her afterword about the writing of the book to know that her real life experiences left an indelible impression on her, and have been transferred with painstaking care to the cross-threaded storylines that make up “The Help.”

Indeed, there is still more to learn after the story is finished. Rare is it that an afterword renders as much emotion and power as the story that preceded it, but in “The Help,” it’s almost an extension of what you’ve just read. Frankly, you’re just not done with the book until you’ve read her thoughts on how the story came to be.

Is “The Help,” as she posits in her afterword, “too little, too late?” I’m not so sure. She selflessly maintains, “There was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or time to portray.” Proud of her state’s heritage, she nonetheless admits, “I don’t presume to know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don’t think that is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand it is vital to our humanity.”

She recalls with pretty fair certainty that no one in her family ever asked her real life domestic, Demetrie, who cooked and cleaned for Stockett’s family, what it was like to black in Mississippi, working for a white family. “I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question,” Stockett writes. [She died when Stockett was 16.] “I’ve spent years imagining what her answer might be.”

As with any artist too close to their work, perhaps Stockett harbors a few doubts about what she’s accomplished with this book, but if you ask me, the answers she’s waiting for are here, and the world can use all “The Help” it can get.

The Help” is available at The Booky Joint in Mammoth Lakes, and Spellbinder Books in Bishop.

BOOM! VOICES FROM THE SIXTIES

By: Tom Brokaw

Random House, 622 pp.

I am what one might call a “second-half” boomer, someone who just made it to the tail end of the “baby boomer” generation, which encompasses those born between 1946 and 1964. I remember seeing some images of Vietnam on TV in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but don’t ask me where I was on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was only 10 days old at the time.

On the other hand, by way of the music from the ‘60s, as well as movies and documentaries from and about the era, I came to know about President Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley college campus and Vietnam. I can even find parallels between the present and the ‘60s. Was that “tumultuous fault line” in American history the touchstone for what we’ve evolved into as a nation in the four decades that followed?

The answers could well lie in the pages of “Boom!” by veteran NBC newsman and journalist Tom Brokaw. Using an exhaustive compilation of reflections from those who lived through that time, Brokaw looks at the sixties’ successes and failures through an unfiltered lens. Good, bad, right, wrong, no punches are pulled.

Liberalism was idealistic at best, radical and narcissistic at worst. Traditional Goldwater conservatism gave rise to a newer faction that would soon be co-opted by fundamental Christianity. Drugs, war, race, politics, feminism, pop culture, music … at few times in our nation’s history have social, political and individual changes been more profound, he points out.

But the title isn’t really descriptive of the “boomers” so much as it is about the speed and impact of those changes. “Everyone agrees that the Sixties blindsided us with mind-bending swiftness, challenging and changing almost everything that had gone before. Boom! One minute it was Ike [Eisenhower] and the man in the gray flannel suit and the lonely crowd … and the next minute it was time to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” time for “we shall overcome” and “burn, baby, burn.”

And in capturing those “booms,” Brokaw, who evokes coming of age here as eloquently as he did in his landmark “The Greatest Generation,” leaves no meaningful voice unheard.

He may be a self-professed liberal, but his selections are diverse and open-minded, not letting his politics overtake his professional sense of fairness. And the choices are surprising.

Juxtaposed against Senators Gary Hart and George McGovern are Karl Rove and Dick Cheney! You’ll hear from Senator Bob Kerrey and General Colin Powell, Pat Buchanan and then-Senator Hilary Clinton, and you’ll be shocked at the similarities drawn between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton.

Presented in three sections (the last an interesting catchall of various “Reflections”), Part One, “Something’s Happening Here,” looks at the origins of the various general topics. For example, “He Had A Dream,” which establishes Dr. King and the roots of Civil Rights activism. Part Two: “Aftershocks: Consequences, Intended and Otherwise” picks up and carries on where the earlier parts leave off.

Certain topics aren’t given as many pages as others. The time of Camelot and President Kennedy are only briefly touched on. But it makes sense as presented here. In all reality, the Kennedy administration covered a very short period, but its echo has lasted infinitely longer. Far more pages are devoted to Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, the latter perhaps overly so. Then again it’s arguable that no topics are more significant or relevant to the sixties than those two.

The sections on feminism are particularly fascinating, detailing the evolutionary role of women from the “a woman’s place is in the home” of the early ‘60s to the “bra-burning/equal pay for equal work” of the later ‘60s.

Pop culture plays its part, from the protest-fueled folk music of Bob Dylan to the heavier acid-influenced rock of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, the debut of Rolling Stone magazine and Garry Trudeau’s political cartoons, “Laugh In” and even stand up comedy (the section on Dick Gregory is riveting and hilarious at the same time).

Even the space program’s impact is explored via astronaut Jim Lovell and the now famous Apollo 8 Christmas 1968 voyage around the moon. That mission led to one of the most famous photographs of all time: the Earth as seen from the spaceship’s window, which Stewart Brand pasted on the cover of his Whole Earth catalog, along with the inscription: “We can’t put it together. It is together.”

Thought-provoking summaries abound as the book comes to a close, but one that sticks out for me is Brand’s take on what that inscription means 40 years later. “I suppose it is seeing what connects rather than what divides.” It’s a lesson we’re still learning, but all the necessary parts to getting it, and much more, are all here, if you’re willing to listen, and I mean really listen — to the voices.

For many of us, especially younger readers, the sixties are very misunderstood. The decade is as wrongly characterized as a time of hippie peace and the Summer of Love.

Brokaw lets the words of the time travelers that made it through the sixties set you straight on all the triumphs, tragedies, uplifts and unrest that really took place during the decade. It’s a trip (no acid required) through a period that may have set the stage for life as we know it today.

They say if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there. Either way, thanks to Brokaw, if you weren’t there then, you are now.

Pick up a copy of “Boom” at The Booky Joint in Mammoth Lakes and Spellbinder Books in Bishop.

Back to Normal

By: Debbie Boucher

Outskirts Press 406 p., $ 21.95 (soft)

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Set in Pleasant Valley, a fictional Mammoth Lakes-esque town in the Eastern Sierra, “Back to Normal,” the first novel by retired teacher and Mammoth local Debbie Boucher, is the story of Sue Beauchamp, whose world splits open when she must finally deal with a lie from 20 years earlier – the wintry night her daughter Michelle was injured in a car accident.

“It was black ice.” Chris eases his grip on Sue’s arm. Bile burns in her stomach and rises to the back of her throat. Why did she agree to allow Michelle to drive herself home from college in winter?

“Thank God Caltrans noticed tire tracks going over the embankment and radioed CHP.”  Wisps flutter past frosty panes as he flips on the deck light. “Damn. The storm’s here already. The weatherman was wrong — again. We have to go.”

The trip to the hospital is only the beginning of Sue’s heartaches.

Saving Michelle requires a blood transfusion that can only come from John, Michelle’s biological father, who as luck would have it, happens to be a neighbor. Sue knows she’s tempting fate by calling him. And it doesn’t take long for John to figure out what’s going on, and that both Chris, Sue’s husband, and Michelle have never been told he’s her real father.

Once that secret’s out, all hell breaks loose. Her relationship with Chris and “his” two sons is threatened. Michelle takes the revelation badly and runs off. And John presses Sue for a relationship with a daughter he’s never been allowed to know. All this leaves Sue trying to mend strained relationships and restore some semblance of normalcy for herself.

In an age when books about family matters find themselves competing with the latest Robert Langdon adventure by Dan Brown or books about teen angst-ridden vampires, “Back to Normal” is a breath of fresh air. It’s a simple story, and by that I don’t mean that it lacks plot. There’s a nicely-woven pretzel of personal drama here, but its rural setting and characters make it even more intimate and cozy.

Readers with only a passing familiarity for ski town life (or none at all, really) can still relate to Pleasant Valley in winter, but Mammoth locals will also enjoy some subtle nuances (references to kids going to ski team practice, the Forest Service) that are part of a family routine.

Structured essentially in three main parts, Boucher uses the middle of the book to flashback to 1971, which provides more background on Sue, and how she made the choices that would define her life and love for the next two decades.

For her first novel, Boucher’s style is sure-footed and flows well. I particularly liked her use of writing in the present tense and keeping the reader in the moment, making him/her feel as if they’re another character in the book. The chapters are already concise, but the slice-of-life delivery makes for a genuine page-turner. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself pretty immersed in the book.

“Back to Normal” is categorized as “contemporary women” fiction, but it’s more than just a Lifetime movie in print. The characters, both women and men, are identifiable and interesting. Guys, don’t dismiss this one as a “chick” book. Sue Beauchamp is flawed to be sure, aren’t we all, but I care about her, every bit as much I do another literary Beauchamp, Claire in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series. But that’s another story.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” That biblical quote (interestingly enough from another John, the apostle) appears in at least a couple of places in the book. Truth is the overarching theme, but also interesting is Boucher’s exploration of the gray area that exists between truth and lies.

I won’t tell you how it ends, but suffice to say you’ll want to stick around for every last page of this emotional, but ultimately worthwhile journey that takes us from Pleasant Valley “Back to Normal.”

Pick up a copy of “Back to Normal” and get it signed by the author. Boucher will be at two book signings this weekend, at Spellbinder in Bishop on Friday, April 2, from 4:30-6 p.m., and another one at Booky Joint in Mammoth Lakes on Saturday, April 3, from 3-5 p.m.

The staff at Spellbinder Books. Clockwise from top left, Gail Albutt, Genevieve Woods, Jemima Lamb and Lynne Almeida. (Photo:Fredericksen)

Have we reached an age when both physical books and independent bookstores will become obsolete? Amazon.com is the largest grossing book retailer in the world, Borders and Barnes and Noble sales run close behind, and portable electronic reading devices can now replace tangible books with virtual reads. Despite these unfavorable odds, local independent booksellers contend that they will continue to serve a loyal niche market.

In certain ways, Amazon.com and big chain stores, such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, cannot directly compete with independent bookstores, said Dave Leonard, owner of the Booky Joint in Mammoth Lakes. Unlike the online entity of Amazon, independent bookstores often have a friendly and helpful staff, and a place to sit down and browse through books. Compared to corporate stores, they offer a more intimate atmosphere as well, Leonard said.

He said he also doesn’t foresee inventions like Kindle and the iPad replacing books to the point of running bookstores out of business. Lynne Almeida, co-owner of Spellbinder Books in Bishop, said there probably has been a degree of customer decline resulting from these new technologies.

“Once you buy a Kindle, you’re basically committing to not supporting your local bookstores anymore because you can only download books from Amazon.com,” Almeida said.

However, she said, people still seem to have an ingrained inclination towards printed material, which probably won’t change drastically in the next couple of years. Almeida said she took home a Sony E-Reader one night to test it out. She resigned herself to the task of reading it for half an hour to consider its consumer value. It was easy to read, and didn’t cause any eye strain. But has she picked it up again? No, and what’s more, Almeida says she’s not really worried about these new technologies replacing books in the near future.

“It’s definitely an area of technology to keep up with and pay attention to, but nothing to freak out about right now,” Almeida said.

The real threat, she said, comes from Amazon’s potential total control of digital books and print-on-demand publishing. Amazon has already become the only distributor of a new book about President Barack Obama, and is arranging with certain publishers to release books exclusively through Kindle. Amazon can also have the opposite effect on bookselling, in the form of withholding books from the public.

“If Amazon says, ‘We don’t like that book. We’re not going to sell it,’ they can prevent books from being sold or even published,” Almeida said. “The overall right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression is not served by the way Amazon is being run.”

Exclusivity is not the only competitive advantage exercised by Amazon. The company’s unbeatable prices have a tendency to sway book buyers away from independent bookstores which have less wiggle room on discounts, Almeida said. According to a 2009 Verso Advertising survey of book-buying behavior, price is a primary factor in making book-buying decisions.

However, it’s impossible for small businesses to sell books at prices comparable to what a company like Amazon can offer when it has a vast supply of stockholders. Since people continue to buy their stock, Amazon can afford cutthroat prices.

Almeida said Amazon and Wal-Mart control almost half of all book sales, which is most likely a result of their unrivaled discounts. Spellbinder Books gives $35,000-$40,000 a year in book discounts, which is still not enough to compete with big corporations.

“Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com started pricing certain books at $8.99 and $9.99, below the cost to produce them,” Almeida said.  “So then there started to be a lot more noise about what these big corporate entities were doing to devalue books and literature.”

While Amazon and big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target may offer lower prices, buying books from these corporations comes at a cost. When money is spent at Amazon or international chains, these dollars don’t stay within the local economy. By contrast, a local retailer spends a larger portion of its revenue on local payroll, since it doesn’t rely on corporate staff stationed in some other part of the country. Additionally, local businesses often invest in more products and services from within the community.

“The more times a dollar has circulated within a community, the more it serves the local economy,” Almeida said. “I don’t think that K-Mart gets their register tape at Peggy’s Office Supply.”

Local bookstores are also usually more involved in the community in the form of promoting local events, as well as giving discounts and donations to educators and non-profit organizations. The Booky Joint gives a 10 percent discount to book clubs in Mammoth, as well as certain discounts for honors students and frequent buyers. Almeida said she wants to start a frequent-buyer program at Spellbinder that would reward patrons with discounts for their loyalty to the business. And while common sense would tell some people that the local bookstore is the obvious place to buy books in town, Spellbinder is not always first on everyone’s list.

“A lot of people in town come in here and say, ‘I’ve looked everywhere in town for this book,’” Almeida said. “And my first thought is, ‘So your town bookstore is the last place you come?’ I think a lot of people have it ingrained in their minds that K-Mart is the first place to shop for books.”

Studies have consistently found that a greater percentage of money stays within a community when it is spent at local businesses. A study conducted in Chicago by the firm of Civic Economics showed that every $100 spent at a national chain created an average of $43 in additional economic return within the community. In contrast, $100 spent at a local business generated an average of $68 in additional economic activity.

“I think it’s always good to keep money in the local community,” Leonard said. “If you want a community, then you need to support local stores.”

For the most part, supporting local businesses means actually spending money at them. Almeida said there’s a direct relationship between how many books people buy at the bookstore and how wide a selection of books the business can carry. She recalled a time when a customer entered the store and admitted that she hadn’t visited the store in almost three years. The customer then commented on how the number of books in the mystery section had dwindled since the last time she was there.

“I didn’t ask her how she didn’t see the disconnection between only coming here every two or three years and not seeing books on the shelves,” Almeida said.

While Spellbinder and the Booky Joint may not have every book in stock that a customer wants, it’s easy to order most books and have them delivered between two and five business days— a faster shipping period than Amazon offers. Community services are another area where Amazon pales in comparison to local bookstores. Events such as author talks and presentations, book clubs, and programs in schools are hosted by Spellbinder and the Booky Joint. The same can’t be said for Amazon.

“A lot of people in town make a conscious decision to support us,” Leonard said. “Amazon is probably our biggest competitor in town. But I think people are used to going to the Booky Joint since it’s been in business for over 30 years.”

Despite a recession, competition from Amazon.com, advances in technology, and being located in relatively small towns, both the Booky Joint and Spellbinder continue to stay in business. Leonard attributes this success to the loyalty of Mammoth locals and to the tourists who need a good book for their vacations.

Almeida said sales for this past holiday season were up a lot over last year, and she hasn’t been able to say that for many years. She said it was a really validating realization for the business.

“I’ve been told that an independent bookstore can’t survive in a community of less than 25,000. But here we are!” Almeida said. “There’s a certain segment of the population who are staunch in their support and loyalty to us.”