Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell

   2006; 255 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Travelogue; American History; Non-Fiction; Biographies.  Overall Rating: 8½*/10.

 

    Four United States presidents were assassinated during their time in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy.  Each time, America was stunned and went into a state of shock and mourning.

 

    In every case, authorities concluded a lone gunman was responsible.  In two of those assassinations, Lincoln and Kennedy, the killer also perished: John Wilkes Booth during the ensuing manhunt, and Lee Harvey Oswald during his incarceration phase. In the Garfield and McKinley slayings, the shooter was put on trial and subsequently hung.  There was no national mourning for any of them.

 

    But then comes the remembering part.  What should you do to memorialize the slain presidents?  Heroic statues of the presidents come to mind, but what about the bullets, the blood-soaked clothes, and a lock of presidential hair?  For that matter, what about those sorts of things taken from the assassins?

 

    Sarah Vowell decided to find out.

 

What’s To Like...

     Assassination Vacation is first and foremost a travelogue.  Sarah Vowell travels up and down the eastern United States, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends when she can talk them into it.  The book of her experiences is divided into five sections, namely:

    00. Preface (page 1)

    01. Abraham Lincoln (page 19)

    02. James Garfield (page 121)

    03. William McKinley (page 187)

    04. Robert Todd Lincoln (page 239)

 

    As can be seen, the biggest attention is rightfully paid to Abraham Lincoln.  He was the first POTUS killed in office, had just finished presiding over a heart-wrenching Civil War, and his killer came from a nationally-known acting family.  James Garfield and William McKinley were presidents that most people, including me, know very little about.  Robert Todd Lincoln was Lincoln’s son, who, through incredible odds, was in the vicinity of all three of the aforementioned slayings.

 

    I loved the historical aspect of the book.  Sarah Vowell gives the reader lots of interesting details about each president – where he grew up, what his politics were, and where his life came to an end.  I was impressed that the author also took time to investigate the lives of the assassins.  What was their life like, why did they do it, how did they manage to accomplish the assassination, and what rationale did they express during the limited time after they were apprehended.

 

    Sarah Vowell has an “informal” writing style that I thoroughly enjoy.  This is not a dry presentation of American history.  The reader gets to hear her thoughts as she rummages through museums and tourist traps, and searches for hard-to-spot memorial plaques on nondescript walls.  She often shares her tastes in music (which I found eclectic and excellent).  Last but not least, the she taught me the proper pronunciation of one of the assassins’ last names:  Leon Czolgosz.  Yeah, good luck guessing that one; we’ll divulge it at the end of this review.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 1,176 ratings and 446 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.93*/5, based on 47,128 ratings and 4,142 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    In a museum across town there is another object that is the best indication of the esteem for Lincoln I have ever seen—more than the marble tomb, more than even the marble Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., more than any book, statue, lock of hair, bloodstained collar, top hat, or plaque.

    Any old forgettable rich guy might warrant a marble tomb, an obelisk, or elaborate sculptures after death, but you know you are regarded with a ridiculous, religious amount of awe when they put your dug-up drainpipe in a museum.  (pg. 109)

 

    The wounded president was moved onto a mattress, his head held in the hands of a washroom attendant.  But, as Laurie Anderson put it, “It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.”  Garfield might have survived the shooting but for what happened next.  Namely, that various physicians summoned to the scene, especially Dr. D.W. Bliss, searched for the bullet’s location in Garfield’s back by poking their grimy fingers into the wound, rooting around in the presidential innards.  (pg. 160)

 

“You sockdologizing old man-trap.”  (pg. 46, and yes, that’s a real word.)

    There’s just a modicum of cussing in Assassination Vacation.  I counted just ten instances in the entire book, and they were mostly the result of direct quotes from persons Sarah was talking to.

 

    It should be noted that although four presidents have been assassinated while in office, only three are discussed here.  There’s almost nothing about John Kennedy being shot in Dallas.  I was okay with this; I’m old enough to remember where I was when this happened: in 8^th-grade civics class.  But younger readers may be disappointed that his assassination wasn’t investigated for this book.

 

    Also, please keep in mind that Sarah Vowell isn’t shy about voicing her political views in Assassination Vacation.  We won’t say what they are, but right-wingers should probably give this book a pass.

 

    Overall, I enjoyed Assassination Vacation., both for its delightful travelogue aspect and its informative history aspect.  It was easy-reading, witty, and above all, tremendously informative.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  Per the author, the name “Czolgosz” is pronounced “shol gosh”.  Now you know.

Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horwitz

   1998; 390 pages.  Full Title: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Genres : Travelogue; U.S. History; Civil War; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    I’ve always enjoyed studying history.  History classes were my favorites in Junior High and High School, and helped prop up my GPA in college.  The best parts of History studies were the sections about wars.  All sorts of wars, including the American Civil War.

 

    I grew up in Pennsylvania, and the Gettysburg battlefield was about about an hour from our house.  One time I got a chance to walk through the national park there.  I stood behind the cannons of the Union defenses, mentally relived the bloody fighting on Little Round Top, and sensed the desperation that the Confederate soldiers felt as they were cut down during Pickett’s Charge.  I was an avid Civil War enthusiast.

 

    So was Tony Horwitz.  He spent the better part of three summers visiting all sorts of Civil War sites, then wrote a book about his experiences: Confederates in the Attic.  Compared to him, I was a Farb.

 

    I was a what??  Hey, be cool now.  Don’t have a Wargasm.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are fifteen chapters in Confederates in the Attic.  Tony Horwitz’s travels and conversations are presented in chronological order, and for the most part take place in the South, since that’s where almost all of the fighting was done.  My favorite chapters, and yours may vary, were:

    05. Dying for Dixie  (Kentucky)

    06. A Farb of the Heart  (Virginia)

    10. The Civil Wargasm  (Virginia and beyond)

    11. Gone With the Window  (Georgia)

    14. I Had a Dream  (Alabama)

 

    I liked the “balance” in the author’s telling of his interactions with folks in the Deep South.  Tony Horwits is a Yankee (he was born in Washington D.C.), and most of the locals he meets and interviews are staunch Dixie diehards.  Their outlooks on their present situation range from “can’t we all just get along?” to “the war ain’t over yet.”  The “truth” about the Andersonville prison seemed to be an especially contentious issue. 

 

    The author also gets introduced to, and quickly enlists in “Reenactment” squads, which I found fascinating.  I assumed participants in Reenactments were just wannabee actors playing their roles; it turns out that the “Hardliners” in that group go to great lengths to fully experience the miserable life of soldiers in the Civil War.

 

    I loved the attention Tony Horwitz gives to the “myth versus reality” aspect of Civil War history. An example of this is given in the first excerpt below.  There are dozens more.  The Battle of Shiloh seems to have been particularly fictionalized, and the “Minie Ball Pregnancy”, which I was taught as being factual, is apparently pure hokum.

 

    Confederates in the Attic is a trivia lover’s delight.  You’ll learn the etymology of the word “deadline”, and how The Citadel college got its name.  I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite writers, Ambrose Bierce, fought in the Battle of Shiloh, and that you can visit the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 2,043 ratings and 597 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.10/5 based on 25,050 ratings and 2,165 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Sybaritic (adj.) : fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure.

Others: Coffle (n.); Guidon (n.) .

 

Excerpts...

    Fort Sumter wasn’t yet finished when the Confederate commander in Charleston, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, received orders to “proceed to reduce it.”  Beauregard carried out this dietlike instruction at dawn on April 12, 1861, when the rebels unleashed an artillery barrage from batteries ringing the harbor.

    The Union garrison inside Sumter fired back until the fort’s wood barracks caught fire, forcing the men to surrender.  Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse.  But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the struggle that followed.  (pg. 46)

 

    The next morning, I toured what little there was to see of Elba, a town of 4,000 perched beside the Pea River.  I asked a Chamber of Commerce official if Elba had any historic sites I might visit.  “There’s that bug statue over in Enterprise,” she said, handing me a pamphlet about the neighboring town.  In a bizarre act of homage, Enterprise had erected a monument to the crablike pest that ravaged Alabama cotton fields seventy years ago.  “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity,” the inscription read.  The weevil had forced cotton farmers to diversify, and Enterprise was now a leading peanut-growing center.  (pg. 344)

 

I was midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder when I realized my Civil War odyssey had come to an end.  (pg. 379)

    There’s only a small amount of profanity in Confederates in the Attic, 10 instances in the first 20% of the book.  Almost all of the cussing is in direct quotes of the folks that Tony Horwitz is interviewing.  Three of those first ten cusswords were f-bombs and one was a racial epithet.

 

    I only notice one typo in the whole book: hanger/hangar.  Kudos to the beta-readers and editors.

 

    The worst thing I can say about Confederates in the Attic is that after a while, the rationalizations used by diehard Dixie devotees to justify their antipathy for all damn-Yankees get repetitive and tedious.  That’s not Tony Horwitz’s fault; indeed, he mentions this a couple of times in the book.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  In addition to “farb” and “wargasm”, the other new bit of slang I encountered was “knob knowledge”.  Tony Horwitz cites it as a collegiate term used at The Citadel, but we had this at Penn State when I was there.  Pass your knob knowledge test and you can toss your beanie away!

The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson

   1989; 299 pages.  Full Title: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Travel Memoir; Americana; Anecdotal Humor; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8½*/10.

 

    A little bit about the author, Bill Bryson, mostly courtesy of Wikipedia.

 

    He was born in 1957 in Des Moines, Iowa, and grew up there.  In 1973 he visited Britain, then opted to stay there.  He married, moved back to Iowa in 1973 to get his college degree, then moved again to Britain in 1977.

 

    His father, Bill Bryson Sr., died in 1986.  Shortly thereafter, Bill Jr. journeyed back to the US and made two long sightseeing trips, mostly by car, to the less touristy places in America.  The first one was in the fall of 1987; the second in the spring of 1988.

 

    This book chronicles those journeys, blending in a healthy dose of memories about his dad, along with the author’s trademark style of wry humor.

 

    Wikipedia notes that The Lost Continent was Bryson’s first travel book.

 

What’s To Like...

    Bill Bryson divides up the two legs of his odyssey into 28 chapters.  The first trip is to the East, and takes 34 days, 6,842 miles, and 19 chapters.  The second phase covers 7,136 miles (total: 13,978 miles) but only 9 chapters; Bryson discovers that things are farther apart in the West.  By the end, he’s traveled through 38 of the 48 contiguous United States.

 

    For the most part, he adheres to the subtitle’s goal of visiting small towns, but he occasionally hits the large cities as well, including Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Las Vegas, where his slot machine luck was spookily similar to mine the one and only time I played the slots there.

 

    There’s no Table of Contents in my paperback version, but there is a 13-page Index in the back which lists, among other things, all the small towns mentioned in the book.  In addition to the author’s personal impressions of each stop, the text is full of fascinating touristy and historical tidbits concerning those places.

 

    It was fun to compare my experiences with Bryson’s in places we’ve both been to.  He bemoans Boston’s freeway system; I almost had a head-on collision doing that once.  He was wowed by the colonial attire in Williamsburg, Virginia; so was I.  He cringed while driving through the ghetto area of Philadelphia; I did likewise.  He had a blast in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park; so did I.

 

    The book is a trivia lovers delight.  You’ll learn the proper way to pronounce “Cairo”, the city in Illinois, not Egypt.  The Melungeons in Appalachia will mystify you.  You’ll visit Mark Twain’s home in Hannibal, Missouri, and nearly plummet to your death off a “scenic road” in Colorado.  You’ll delight in eating at a genuine Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant, although Bryson doesn’t give its location. (Hey, I was born and raised in that part of the country.)  And that's just a small percentage of Americana highlights you'll read about in The Lost Continent.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Apposite (adj.) : apt in the circumstances, or in relation to something.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.0*/5, based on 5,152 ratings and 879 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.81*/5, based on 63,169 ratings and 3,597 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns.  Everywhere else in America towns are named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave.  But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three.  Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passersby such as me who think it is the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postmark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.  (pg. 135)

 

    People in the West like to shoot things.  When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.  (. . .)

    Many people will tell you that you mustn’t call them buffalo, that they are really bison.  Buffalo, these people will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and are a different breed of animal altogether.  These are the same people who tell you that you must call geraniums pelargoniums.  Ignore them.  (pg. 214)

 

“Hah doo lack Miss Hippy?”  (pg. 58)

    The profanity level in The Lost Continent is higher than what you’d expect in a travelogue, although I wouldn’t call it excessive.  There were eleven instances in the first 20% of the book, including a couple of f-bombs.  I don’t recall any “adult situations”, although some of the author’s comments on female physiques might be viewed as misogynistic by today’s standards.

 

    Some reviewers were turned off by Bill Bryson’s negative and/or snarky opinions of a portion of the little towns he visited.  They have a point, but I imagine it’s difficult not to become a bit jaded if you drive to, and walk through, dozens upon dozens of tourist traps like Bryson does.  After a while, all of the gift shops look the same.

 

    Other reviewers weren’t thrilled with Bryson’s writing style, which is folksy and often goes off on irrelevant tangents.  Again, they have a point, but this is an early Bryson effort.  It's the ninth book of his I’ve read, and I can say that with time, his technique becomes more refined, without losing its edginess we devoted readers all expect and look forward to.

 

    All in all, I enjoyed The Lost Continent, especially since it brought back childhood memories of family vacations where we rode around in station wagons, slept in tents, and cooked our own meals.  We got our cheap thrills by doing things like feeding the black bears on the roads in the Great Smoky Mountains and walking around on the Gettysburg battlefield, two places that Bill Bryson also visited.  Those were good times.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  In walking through the touristy area of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Bryson comes across a shop called the “Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall”.  Now there’s a name that I haven’t heard in a long while.

North To Paradise - Ousman Umar

    2019 (first published), 2022 (translated); 143 pages.  Original Title: Viaje al Pais de los Blancos.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Autobiography; Travel Memoir; Non-Fiction; Africa.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    We call them many things.  Immigrants, foreigners, undocumented aliens.  Some come from Central and South America northward.  Others travel from Eastern Europe westward. 

 

    For what?  What motivates these folks to leave their families, possessions, and homeland behind, and embrace an uncertain future?  How dangerous is their long trek?  What percentage of them reach their destination?  What kind of predators lurk along the way?

 

    If only one of them would write a memoir, telling how harrowing (or not so harrowing) such a migration is.  But that’s unlikely, because even if they are successful in their journey, they rarely sit down to write their story and get somebody to publish it.

 

    But Ousman Umar did, after leaving his small village in tropical Ghana on foot, and with a goal to somehow reach Spain.

 

North to Paradise.

 

What’s To Like...

    It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Ousman Umar did reach his destination, although it took him five years to do so.  There were languages to learn along the way, including both Catalan and Spanish once he arrived.  North to Paradise was originally written in Spanish, and recently translated into English by Kevin Gerry Dunn.

 

    Traversing the Sahara Desert with only what one can carry is daunting enough, to do it on your own, as a youth, verges on suicidal.  Worse yet, the need for water and avoiding the authorities meant a straight-line journey was impossible.  There’s a map at the beginning of the book showing the route he took; he was forced to meander all over northern Africa.

 

    The first chapter describes Ousman’s life as a child in Ghana, and gives the reader a great “feel” for what that’s like.  In some ways, life was very modern – in school they had computer classes, including how to use MS-Excel.  But other aspects were sadly outdated – there were no actual computers in the computer classes (the teachers drew pictures of the screen shots for Excel on the blackboard), and Ousman has a traumatic first meeting with an escalator, something he likens to an “enormous python”.

 

    After leaving Ghana, Ousman’s trek takes him through another ten countries, the last being the Canary Islands region of Spain.  It takes him five years to get there, four of which were spent in Libya, trying to eke out a living and save enough money to be smuggled into Spain. 

 

    Being a memoir, the book is written in the first-person POV.  The writing style is straightforward: “I did this, then that happened”, but in amongst all the events he sprinkles some remarkably adult-like insight about life.

    Don’t stop reading when you reach the end of the tale; there are a number of “extras” tacked on, including some great Photographs of the author and his families (89%-92% Kindle).  Then there are Afterword, Author’s Note, and Acknowledgements sections that tell you what Ousman has been up to since gaining citizenship in Spain.  It'll leave a lump in your throat.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 7,938 ratings and 572 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.27/5 based on 7,706 ratings and 534 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Trotro (n.) : in Ghana, a minibus.  Google-image it.

 

Excerpts...

    The first stage of my journey wasn’t too rough.  My concept of time was entirely different: if you had asked me what I would be doing five years in the future, I wouldn’t have known.  Long-term planning wasn’t a priority; my concern was what I would eat that day and whether I’d have anything to eat the next.  In Ghana, buses depart only when they are full; there’s no hurry, and people wait patiently until all the seats are taken.  You can’t make many plans.  (loc. 305)

 

    Another aspect of life here that I could never wrap my head around was this idea of “vacation.”  I took time off work only when I had exams.  Once, I went on holiday with a girlfriend, and it was really hard because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself.  Why were we wasting time like that?  I need food, I need clothes, but I don’t need vacation.  I didn’t understand that I had the right to take time off work, and to be honest, I still don’t totally get the point of doing nothing on purpose.  (loc. 1421)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, North to Paradise sells for $4.99, although ISTR I got this as a freebie on Amazon’s “World Literature Day” or whatever they called it.  At present, it is Ousman Umar’s only published book, although you can get the Spanish and Catalan versions for $6.99-$7.99.

 

Given all the hardship I’ve experienced, it would be easy to think that the world is full of bad people, but I prefer to think that most people are good.  It’s just that the good people make less noise.  (loc. 1442)

    I don’t really have any quibbles about North to Paradise, but there are a couple things to be aware of.  First and foremost, at 143 pages, it’s a very short book.  The writing may be straightforward, but it’s also powerful, and I would’ve loved for it to be twice as long, particularly since some of the countries Ousman Umar passes through, such as Togo, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia, are barely mentioned.

 

    I don’t recall any cusswords, but as a small, male youth, the author twice has to find off attempted rapes.  Acronyms are sometimes introduced without what they stand for, such as “NGO”, but hey, that's what we have Google for.  Also, there are some brutal scenes – Ousman comes across withered corpses in the Sahara; some of his traveling companions die along the way: of the 46 that start out, only 6 survived the trek across the Sahara; and the plight of the “sinkers”, migrants who are stuck in some woeful place with no means to go forward to their destination or back to their homeland, is utterly heart-wrenching.

 

    Finally, at one point in his Spanish residency, the author mentions that his grades at the university weren’t good enough to get into the school's Pharmacy program, so he had to "settle for" the Chemistry program instead.  As a degreed chemist, I’m just a little miffed.  😊

 

    Despite its brevity, I found North To Paradise to be a fantastic book, providing a rare look at life in the African equatorial subcontinent, as well as stark insight into the challenges faced by undocumented migrants anywhere in the world when they travel through dangerous and foreign lands.  Those who undertake such a venture are not suicidal, just desperate.

 

    9 Stars.  One last thing.  I was impressed by Ousman Umar’s balanced views on humanity.  Yes, as a black migrant he is introduced to racism, but some of the best and kindest people he meets are also white.  Yes, there are some nasty people in Ghana, North Africa, and Europe, but all those places have lots of kind and helpful souls as well.  Some reviewers gave up on North To Paradise as soon as the subject of racism cropped up.  You stopped reading too soon, folks.