Burn Scars, by Patricia Prijatel

COMMENTS FROM BBB MEMBERS:

As I read this beautifully written memoir, it was like having my own sense of loss affirmed by someone who truly understands. When a landscape we love and are intimate with (whether it’s splendid mountains and valleys or our own backyard), is destroyed by the freakishness of our changing climate, it hurts. It changes us. We stop trusting nature. We feel stress. Maybe we get sick. We need to recover. Patricia Prijatel’s beautifully written account of the burn scars on “her” mountain and on herself is a must read if you care about climate change. It’s well researched and informative, fast paced and vivid. And perhaps surprisingly, in places it’s laugh-out-loud funny.
— Sharelle Moranville

This is a beautiful book. The author has infused the opening chapters with descriptions of this land and its people she so loves. But there is a clear sense of suspenseful foreboding for a catastrophe that you know is coming. Her descriptions of the fire and the response of the human beings who are affected by it gain weight the farther we get from the event itself. Far from going back to normal, she chronicles the work of the people to prevent land erosion, how difficult and sometimes impossible it is, and the emotional toll it takes. What grows in the wake of the fire is not a regeneration of what was there before but in some cases harmful plant life that will change the landscape forever. We watch human emotions as they deny, accept, grieve and try to move on. What we learn in the process of reading this book is how precious our earth is and, in taking it for granted, how much we have endangered it.
— Jeanie Smith

“Burn Scars” tells the true personal story of a Colorado family’s love for the land and the mountains. They enjoyed a wonderful life near the East Spanish Peak. Then fire erupted. They fled for their lives. Courageous firefighters saved most of the homes but the trauma lasts to this day. Prijatel talks about the personal grief. She tells the impact of fire, wind and flood on the plants and animals. She describes the increasing danger. Each year spawns higher temperatures and dryer forests. Each year sees more and bigger fires. Her well researched story flows easily. Read this book.
— Ray Gaebler

The author did an extraordinary job of giving us a personal account of climate grief and educating us. Very readable, relatable and touching.
— Karen Peters

Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven (1994)is a sequel to Kingsolver’s debut 1988 novel The Bean Trees—in which Taylor, a young woman whose driving ambition is to graduate high school without getting pregnant, finds herself traveling alone cross-country in a car with serious needs. She falls into sudden, unexpected, and unwitting possession of a Cherokee toddler who has been badly abused. Taylor names the toddler Turtle and sets about forming a chosen family to raise Turtle and help her heal from the abuse she suffered. This involves getting “legal” adoption papers with the collusion of a young central American couple who are in the U.S. illegally. Readers can’t help but love adorable Turtle and spunky Taylor and the whole supporting cast. And the novel ends happily with Turtle having been saved by a bunch of white people (plus Esperanza and Estevan). 

But. And there needs to be a but.

What happens in The Bean Trees is good, but perhaps needs a second, more nuanced look. Is it in Turtle’s best interest to separate her from her Cherokee roots? Could Turtle endure the second trauma of being taken from the white mother with whom she has bonded?  Pigs in Heaven is a moving and beautifully written “second thought” about The Bean Trees. 

Young, smart attorney Annawake Fourkiller decides early on that a tribal injustice has been done, and she resolves to undo it –which naturally strikes terror in Taylor’s heart. So she goes on the run with Turtle, living on the edge, meeting fascinating characters like Barbie and the goose man and Jax. Taylor’s mother, Alice, with largely unacknowledged—up to this point—Cherokee roots, gets drawn into a quest to find her own happiness and broker a peace for Taylor and Turtle. 

Kingsolver shows the differences between the expansive tribal family structure and the constricted nuclear white family structure brilliantly. And through all the characters, but especially through the character of Alice, who has a foot in both worlds, the reader is given a more thoughtful look at what might be best for Turtle. What might be best for everybody.

I quote the novel’s ending because it is such a perfect example of Kingsolver’s inimitable style. Cash, who is conveniently both Alice’s soul mate and Turtle’s grandpa—andnow Turtle’s legal guardian—as a token of his deep and true love of Alice, leans the TV against a stump and shoots it.

“The woods go unnaturally still. All the birds take note of the round black bullet wound in the TV screen, a little right of center but still fatal. Alice’s heart performs its duties strangely inside her chest, and she understands that her life sentence of household silence has been commuted. The family of women is about to open its doors to men. Men, children, cowboys, and Indians. It’s all over now but the shouting.”

A truly righteous ending of sweet Turtle’s story.

— Sharelle Moranville

Songs of America, by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw

In Songs of America, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Presidents Jon Meacham and Grammy-winning country singer Tim McGraw teamed up to trace America’s history through patriotic songs that shaped and reflected the country’s mood amid wars, social movements, and other times of conflict from before the American Revolutionary War up to the election of President Obama. Anyone who enjoys reading history or listening to music – or better, both – will find it irresistible. 

Meacham writes a celebration of the history and songs of the eras while McGraw reflects, as an artist and performer, on the songs selected in a series of sidebars. The two form an irresistible duo, connecting us to music as a force in our nation’s history. They begin their narrative early on, when tensions first arose between England and the 13 colonies. From there, they recount the next two-and-a-half century journey over our history’s rocky road.   

From the Star Spangled Banner and Yankee Doodle Dandy, to I Wish I was in Dixie, America The Beautiful,This Land is Your Land and He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, in early years, to the more current We Shall Overcome, Blowin’ in the Wind, Okie From Muskogee, and Born in the USA, to name a few, they connect us with music as an unsung (no pun intended) force in our country’s development.   

McGraw’s engaging commentary fits well with Meacham’s artful delivery in writing about each song and how it fits into the era. Rarely do such diverse talents mesh in a way that produces a result of a whole greater than the sum of the parts.  

In summary, they have written a wonderful and moving account of how the sounds of America have inspired us and contribute to our understanding of our past.   Toward the end, Meacham quotes Shakespeare:

The man who has not music in his soul
Or is not touched with Concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils,
The Motions of his mind are dull as Night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such Man be trusted.  

Perhaps this is why the authors halt their story just before the 45th President….  

p.s. A personal note of a segment of my early history and music. While a ninth-grader in 1956, I joined a group of boys who were skipping school to travel to Memphis to hear Elvis Presley at the Cotton Carnival, an event much like the Mardi Gras. Elvis had recently made the scene with his hit “Heartbreak Hotel”, and we were entranced by his sideburns, swiveling hips, ducktail haircut – all of which we quickly tried to emulate. We got back home well into the wee hours of the morning, and of course my parents had been extremely worried and now mad, but glad I was safe.  I think I was grounded forever. Several years later, Elvis and I were both serving in the Army at the same time in Germany.  

— Ken Johnson