Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

Grandma’s Backyard

While reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book detailing her family’s attempt to eat only locally grown food for an entire year, I was reminded of my grandmother’s back yard where she maintained a chicken coop.
 
In the ‘40s and early ‘50s, we lived next door to Gram in Ashland, Kansas, a rural town of about 1,400 persons in southwest Kansas, close to the Oklahoma border. It certainly wasn’t unusual for people there to have chicken coops, where they grew chickens and had a ready supply of fresh eggs. Most everyone also had gardens, butter churns, and kept locally grown meat at the local ‘locker’.
 
To get ready for the evening meal, Gram would head out to the coop, grab the closest chicken, and after taking it out of the coop, would violently wring its neck, breaking the head off. After releasing the chicken, it would literally ‘run around like a chicken with its head cut off’, spewing blood all over the grass.
 
It was always a spectacle lasting several minutes, and eventually the chicken would run out of steam and drop over dead.  Then she would pick it up and drop it into a boiling cauldron of water on the back porch.  After a few minutes then, it would be removed—ready for plucking. I often had the undesirable chore of removing the stinking feathers and bringing the denuded carcass into the kitchen for cooking.

Today, it’s much less exciting – and cleaner.  We go to the HyVee meat counter and pick up a package of pre-cut chicken. — Ken Johnson

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou writes beautifully and from the heart in the autobiography of her sometimes happy but often painful childhood. When their parents divorced, she and her brother, Bailey, were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. She was just 5 years old, Bailey, 4.

Their grandmother was an exceptional woman, kind but strict. The children helped in the general store she owned and ran in the small, tight-knit all-Black community.

Angelou tells of going to visit her mother in St. Louis and being raped by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The 8-year-old child was so traumatized that she refused to speak for several years. She recovered when a teacher, who understood her love of books, encouraged her to read out loud.

Her teenage yeas were difficult. Angelou grew to be six feel tall, had no self-confidence, believed she was ugly, and had been stung more than once by bigotry.  In her late teens, she visited her mother again, this time in California. As a result of a one-time encounter, which she initiated to try and reassure herself that she was “lovable,” she became pregnant.  The result was “her greatest gift,” her son, Guy.

Angelou went on to become a renowned writer of both books and poetry. She wrote and read a poem at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. All of her works are written in a direct, personal, sometimes humorous style. She was a civil rights activist, sometimes working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. She also was an educator, a playwright, a singer, composer and dancer; she earned numerous honorary doctorates. Angelou died in May of 2014.

—Gail Allen

You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, by Heather Sellers

St. Timothy’s Books, Brew and Banter book club has just finished reading a fascinating book by Heather Sellers entitled You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.  The story is a memoir and concentrates on this author’s coming to an understanding of a condition she has known as “face blindness.”  The official term for this condition is prosopagnosia; what it means is that she is unable to put together any memories of people’s faces.  Yes, she sees their eyes, noses, mouths (that’s vision), but cannot put them together in memorable forms (perception).  She recognizes some people by hairstyle, the way they carry themselves or walk, the style of dress they usually wear.  But others – even her own husband – she frequently does not recognize.

What makes the book fascinating is that she does not really understand that she has this condition until she is in her late 30’s, when she is also coming to grips with the fact that her mother is a paranoid schizophrenic.  Her father is an alcoholic who has significant problems of his own.  To say that this woman comes from a dysfunctional background is to understate her childhood.

Written in a style where the author moves back and forth between the present and the past, we see Ms. Sellers’ childhood and adolescence remembered from her perspective at close to 40 years old.  We feel her pain at shuttling back and forth between living with one parent and then another; her disappointment when neither of her parents will complete college scholarship financial information forms; her heartache at her lack of friends because other kids see her as stuck up when she doesn’t recognize them.  And yet, she never stops loving her parents and trying to understand them. The story is ultimately one of the power of love and forgiveness to bring redemption and acceptance to troubled relationships.

We enjoyed this book a great deal and would recommend it highly.  The book is well written and makes reading on and on a pleasure, even, and maybe particularly, in the parts where she is finally able to find medical help that explains prosopagnosia.

—Jeanie Smith