House of Spies by Daniel Silva – Book

The book, House of Spies by Daniel Silva contains a classic spy story with a plot as twisted as the highways through the south of France and the narrow ways in the souks of Morocco. Gabriel Allon is the lead spy in House of Spies, and he has been featured in a previous Silva novel, The English Spy. Allon is a genius at putting together successful operations when ordinary security methods have failed.

He calls in a team of very effective, if reluctant, operators who are not full-time spies. They are tied to him for reasons that are personal (he saved them from a previous, possibly life-ending fate.) Allon knows the heads of government spy networks all over Europe – in this case, England, America, and France. He is also unusual because he heads Israeli security operations.

Saladin is a terrorist/drug supplier (an unusual combination for a Muslim if he is one) who has been very successful at hiding any details which might allow authorities to track his location. Engaging in very few face-to-face contacts by conducting most of his business through intermediaries, and changing his appearance if he feels exposed have sufficed to keep him out of the shared national security data banks.

Gabriel calls on Christopher Keller, who has worked with him before and who is a very talented assassin. Keller has found a way to live a private and satisfying life on the island of Corsica which is controlled by a mafia-style “don” who is fond of and loyal to “family” and who considers Keller a family member. Keller is someone who once led an underground operation in Ireland against the IRA where he connected with Gabriel Allon.

Choosing to listen to this book rather than read it was a big mistake for me. The plot is almost byzantine and I am not, apparently, a good listener. I’m not as used to processing words aurally as visually, but I still managed not to miss much (only caught myself napping twice). The careful, but lengthy preparations lead to a messy and almost disastrous end to this operation.

If you are a fan of nonstop action, and I believe I have made this point before, Silva is possibly not your man. Once again he has written a spy tale that is more brainy than adrenaline-filled. However it is memorable.

The Late Show by Michael Connelly – Book

Detective Renée Ballard is a cop on the night shift aka the late show in Michael Connelly’s book, The Late Show. She works in an LA precinct. Ballard was a promising detective on the day shift until the Lieutenant leading her team began to stalk her sexually, refusing to believe that no meant no. When she lost her case against him she became a pariah and the late show, to which she was demoted, gave her some less judgmental space in which to do what she loved, bring bad people to justice.

But the night shift did not run at the same intense pace that animated the precinct in the daytime. She had a brilliant partner on the day side, but he betrayed her and took the side of her lieutenant.

Now, seemingly buried in the minor crimes of a precinct that no longer buzzed with activity, with a partner, Jenkins, who has a wife with cancer and is doing his job as if it is always an eight hour shift, Ballard gets sucked back into a case that is being led by the man who was her harasser. At the same time she is pursuing a serial abuser who likes to tie up, beat up, and torture women; a case that hooks in to all her current demons. There is also a case, more typical of the late show, of a report of theft of credit cards from an upscale home.

This book moves fast and falls squarely in the area of people who like their recreational reading to include a bit of social commentary. It’s The Late Show by Michael Connelly.

Evicted by Matthew Desmond – Book

Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City summarizes the lengthy and intimate researches of this sociologist with a MacArthur Genius Grant who has done his due diligence. His interest is in analyzing and discovering ways for breaking up stubborn, seemingly impossible-to-resolve problems that make life a misery for poor folks, especially black poor folks, and single mothers who are at the absolute bottom of the economic heap.

Mr. Desmond, a young man, still in college, moves into two different poor neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Since he is white he perhaps would have been distrusted in a minority neighborhood so he started out in a trailer park at the edge of the city with a more mixed-race population. This allowed him to make some connections, see some possible housing issues and eventually he was able to enter the predominately black North Side as a resident. He roomed with a black policeman called Officer Woo (a childhood nickname).

Obviously poverty and all of the things attendant on it, such as lack of education or training, being limited to low paying jobs, being hungry and having to spend too much time finding food for your family, not having an appropriate job wardrobe are all factors that contribute to keeping poor people from rising.

But Matthew Desmond decided to focus on the issue of housing and he exposes an angle on urban poverty that we have not yet explored in enough detail. He looks specifically at the part evictions play in squelching opportunity. He looks at a cycle that allows ever higher rents that do not decrease for low value properties. He looks at the gap between incomes and rents. He introduces us to the people he met who let him have access to their personal finances. I will issue a warning to you that they still haunt him even as he moves on to pursue his own life, and they will stay with you also.

Anecdotal studies are difficult because of the fact that the researcher is present and interacting. This can change the data in ways that are quite subtle, and perhaps not so subtle, sort of the way in which a rock bends the current in a stream. Desmond tried to keep his presence somewhat personal even as he also stuck to his position as a writer and a recorder of the lives of the people he met. He calls his report, his book, an ethnography, which seems accurate enough.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has a book club every summer. He chooses a title and everyone who signs up for the book club reads the same book. There is a discussion session at a certain date. This is the book for summer, 2017. You could probably still sign up.

I’m not going to summarize Desmond’s findings or his suggestions for fixing this seeming unresolvable dilemma of inner cities which seem to act like traps, robbing Americans of the comforts we expect life in America to offer. These observations are the entire content of his book. However, I will say, “Good choice, Cory Booker!”

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy – Book

In her most recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy talks about modern India (which is not as modern as you would like it to be). Two women are the focus of her story, Anjum and Tilottama. However, this is really a story of human rights and human intolerance and finding happiness when and where you can.

Anjum is born a boy. However upon closer examination he has the organs of both of the sexes – a hermaphrodite. His mother is able to keep this biological state a secret until puberty. At puberty the boy, Aftab, realizes she is not a boy. Are such things accepted in India? Yes and no. Anjum would never find a life in “normal” India society but one day she follows a transgender shopper from the market and she learns that there is a separate society of transgender Indian people, that the name for some transgender persons, including Anjum, is “hijra,” and in her neighborhood the hijra live in a house called the Khwabgah.

Within this group she is able to have a circumscribed but full social life. She adopts a homeless child and becomes her rather jealous mother. Although she must face a life separate from her parents and siblings, she is protected by superstition and left to her own devices. Fortunately, although feelings about Muslims are running high (as they do periodically in India), and although Hindus are attacking and slaughtering Muslims with little provocation, it is bad luck to kill hijra. This does not prevent Anjum from experiencing something so horrifying that it turns her life upside down.

Tilottama is a young woman with considerable charm despite her dark “café au lait, except very little lait” skin, which is not considered desirable. In fact she is desirable enough to attract three men (and more) who are in school with her. Naga, Musa, and “Garson Hobart” meet Tilo when practicing to stage a play (which never opens). These four are caught up in the off again – on again brutal war for control of Kashmir, a province coveted by India proper, Pakistan and China. Kashmiris want only to be a free and independent nation. Musa becomes a Kashmiri spy and a fighter for the independence movement. Tilo loves Musa who she can connect with only in the moments he snatches away from the movement.

The lives of our two main characters, Anjum and Tilo, become intertwined over, of all things, a homeless child.

Now it may seem as if I am telling the whole novel and that this will make it unnecessary to read this book. But that is not so. Arundhati is a prize-winning author and not by mistake. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a 400+ page book. It is detailed without being dry; it is instructive without being pedantic, and long without seeming long. This book cannot be summarized. It must be experienced.

Arundhati Roy never sugarcoats political flaws of corruption and religious intolerance in India, corruption that possibly tops the corruption we lament in our own government. She also explores the courage of people who lead authentic lives.

If you enjoy travelling to another culture without leaving your comfort zone and you want to avoid the touristy spots and get some in-depth exposure to the true spirit of a nation, Arundhati Roy is your ticket. You will gain exposure to an internal turmoil that inspires people, frightens people, and generates great courage and great grief. Don’t be a chicken. What you learn makes the journey worthwhile.

I’ll end with Roy’s beginning quote, “I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart…” –Nâzim Hikmet

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – Book

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communal Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Anna Summers in 2017 caught my attention because I had read, not long ago, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which was also set in post-revolutionary Russia in the Metropol Hotel, located in the heart of Moscow. While I enjoyed the novel by Towles, I felt that the life Alexander, once a member of the aristocracy, lived in the Metropol Hotel might be a somewhat romanticized version of the fate a person would normally have suffered as an enemy of the people during those early days of the Communist (Bolshevik)Revolution. The new leaders were purging the nation of old bourgeois influences and the privileged classes. Petrushevskaya’s story is quite different from Alexander’s and conforms more nearly to my understanding of the complicated and unpredictable suspicions that often led to the arrests of Russians in the wake of the revolution.

Anna Summers offers a preface which provides some background. She begins by describing a May 9^th parade that took place in every town and village since the end of WWII with rows of ragged and neglected veterans marching proudly, and then she has us picture the day of May 9^th in 2015 (Petrushevskaya originally published her book in Russia in 2006) when there were no WWII vets left to parade through the towns and villages; there were only pictures carried by their grandchildren. She tells us, “Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, buried alive in a tank, like mine or return disfigured or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag…” (Her father and her grandfather were killed in a mass execution in the late 1930’s, even though her relations were prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution, so she had no war stories to tell and this was a problem.) “The shared experiences of their childhoods – evacuation, hunger – were heightened in her case by the unbearable – and unshareable – extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an ‘enemy of the people’”

Ludmilla’s childhood with her aunt and her grandmother was hungrier and dirtier than that of most children because of the classification and execution of her grandfather and her father. The female survivors were ostracized and interned in a prison without walls. Ludmilla’s story may begin when she was born in the Metropol Hotel but her life is lived far from Moscow for the most part. Whatever Russia was like after the Revolution for those who found favor with the Communists, Ludmilla’s memoir of her childhood years shows what life was like for everyone in a family once a progenitor became an enemy of the people, even though the reasons were often obscure, petty, or even imagined.

Soon this famous Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, will join the ranks of those no longer living veterans of WWII. Thankfully she got to publish this memoir of her early hardscrabble existence and outcast state. We should not ever forget that the Russian Revolution was often an ideological quagmire with many victims, both guilty and innocent. Sounds grim, but is very readable.

Flâneuse by Laura Elkin – Book

Laura Elkin’s book Flâneuse is not the first book about women who are the counterparts of the more usual male figure, the flâneur, A few other books with this title predate hers. Her book has a subtitle: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London and reads very much like a doctoral dissertation, although the language is not quite as academic, and the book tends to offer a warmer reading experience than the expected dry fare of the dissertation. The flâneur she tells us is “one who walks aimlessly…A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.

Flâneuse is the feminine form and denotes “an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. But each flâneuse discussed in any detail by Elkin is not truly idle. These women were writers, photographers, artists. Until recently it was difficult for a woman to be a flâneuse. Writer Janet Wolff did not give credence to the flâneuse as “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.” Other writers agree. But Elkin reminds us that the rise of the department store in the 1850’s and 60’s “did much to normalize the appearance of women in public.”

Laura Elkin was born on Long Island where no one walked anywhere. Her father was an architect who designed some of the corporate headquarters as companies left the city and moved into newly designed corporate parks. But Elkin discovered that she belonged in cities when she moved into New York City to attend college. “To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and the taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.”

The book is dense with detailed examples of women writers, artists, journalists, and more who felt most at home in cities and used the intimate details of city life gained through wandering and observation to enlighten us all. Elkin gives us a taste of London, following in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps; a soupçon of Venice, New York, and Tokyo (where wandering alone around the city is basically impossible even in daylight); but mainly of Paris which ended up being her home.

Artists she expands on in some detail, both about their lives and their work include Jean Rhys (allied with Ford Maddox Ford), George Sand (who dressed as a boy/man to roam the city freely), Virginia Woolf, Martha Gellhorn (wife of Ernest Hemingway and war journalist and more), and Agnès Varda, in French films.

Elkin’s sums things up in this way, “You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman. Just walk out your front door.” Reading this tome is a bit like being a literary flâneuse without having to leave your armchair – lots of great little tidbits.

Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato – Book

Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato is a story of mental illness so severe that even love and medication cannot prevail. It is a story of grief that makes a person forget all the rules that humans should heed. And it is story of parenting both neglectful and obsessed; the story of a boy so small and pale he seems to have been born an albino child; a child so dependent on his grandmother, Florence, that when she dies he is too bereft to heed the protective advice routinely offered to children.- “never speak to strangers.”

Lodato’s novel is well-written, but I was torn. The plot itself is not quite as formulaic as it might seem. This kept me reading. And clearly we cannot spend too much time thinking about the issues that arise from mental illness and our less-than-successful treatments and enabling behaviors. The rights of an individual to freedom are set against the chaos that comes with untreated serious mental illness, a set of circumstances which offers the mentally ill both a sort of dignity and the potential to destroy the balance of more than one life. Lodato makes us hope that we come up with better answers in the future. This issue that continues to challenge us all is a frustrating, but is also a rewarding thread in this book.

What I found hardest to take was the bad parenting the reader encounters in this story. Sadly, it is a fact that bad parenting is a common topic in modern literature. What happens to children when parenting is absent or inappropriate is heartbreaking and, although it probably reflects accurately on what is really the case (and not only in these times), I wish I could believe that exposure leads to improvement and that we get parenting right in the majority of families, however unorthodox the family might be. However, I have sincere doubts that such optimism is valid.

There are plot twists in Lodato’s novel that I cannot discuss. The author uses internal cues to make us think that things will come out one way, while the outcomes are actually less predictable. This should be a good thing but ends up being a bit creepy in ways I cannot specify as I don’t want to interfere with letting readers judge this aspect of the novel as they read. It bothered me; it might not bother another reader. I am concluding with a belief that those who read Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato will find in this novel an almost constant stream of personal emotional reactions. While it is a good read; it does not make it onto my list of favorites.

The Baroque Cycle, A Trilogy by Neal Stephenson – Book

I chose the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson because I wanted a long book to read and because this author has written other books that I enjoyed. Perhaps if I knew this trilogy of books ran to 2700+ pages I might have had second thoughts but my Kindle doesn’t deal with page numbers. I like to think that I would have read these novels anyway. It certainly was not a sprint: it was a journey – a journey in time, a mental journey, and involving lots of journeying by the books’ characters. Stephenson takes us to the 17^th and early 18^th century. This time period represents a transitional age in that the way men lived upon the earth was changing, in much the same ways that we are in a transitional age now.

Quicksilver introduces us to the Alchemists, who wished to find a way to turn base metal into gold. Quicksilver is mercury, which fascinated Alchemists with its unusual behaviors as a metal that is liquid at room temperature and a metal that beads and rolls around as if it were solid. It was felt that quicksilver, so often found near gold deposits, was somehow transformed into gold by some kind of mysterious natural process. The Alchemists were almost done with their investigations, having failed so often in their endeavors. But the experimentations they had conducted gave them a great scientific curiosity about everything in the world around them, both nonliving and living. Out of the Alchemists came a group known as Natural Philosophers and we had the very beginning of Physics.

These were the days of Isaac Newton in England and Hooke in England and Huygens, a Dutchman, and Gottfried Leibnitz, a German. These men explored the insides of living things, they looked at everything under lenses that improved in quality as the trilogy progressed. They created “the algebra” and they began to see that all things were made of smaller things (atoms to Newton, monads to Leibnitz). Newton and Leibnitz both claimed to have come up with “the algebra” which made these two great men opponents and caused educated folks to divide into two camps depending on which great man they backed.

Stephenson gives us a fictional character to serve as a go-between for these great gentlemen who did not always agree with each other. Daniel Waterhouse is the character who speaks to all of the principals. He also avoids much of the Catholic – Protestant divide of the times by coming from a family that is neither. His father is persecuted for his beliefs, but Daniel is not. Daniel serves as our man in London and in Massachusetts where he is trying to set up the Massachusetts’ Institute of Technological Arts. (He is not the founder of MIT.)

The other two books in this trilogy – which jumps around in time and place – although not quite as neatly and tidily organized as I am making them sound, are called The Confusion and The System of the World. They take us out of London with a vagabond. On the “Continent”, we follow two very unusual fictional characters. We follow Eliza, the stunning and extremely intelligent ex-Turkish slave, captured by a French aristocrat with her mom and sold into slavery in Turkey. And we have Jack Shaftoe, a poor Englishman, also extremely intelligent, who becomes the King of the Vagabonds. Eliza and Jack fall in love when he rescues her from the Turks but their paths diverge. Eliza becomes wealthy by learning to invest in the Dutch “stock market” of the day. Dutch economics are superior to other nations earlier due to the trade of the Dutch East India Company. Eliza becomes a member of the court of Louis XIV and becomes a familiar figure at Versailles. Jack gets captured and becomes a slave rower on a ship bound for Africa. But he is too brilliant to stay down for long. Jack makes a plan, makes some friends and ends up taking us to visit all the world that was known at that time.

Jack’s plan involves stealing gold as part of a plan of retribution against the Frenchman who enslaved Eliza. He does not realize that this is known as the Solomonic Gold because it is bound to mercury. The nature of this particular gold had everyone chasing Jack and his men all over Christendom and beyond and puts his life in mortal jeopardy more times than you will want to count. The Alchemists and the Natural Philosophers are thrown into a total tizzy over this gold and several of our favorite characters barely escape with their lives and only manage it through the rather extreme machinations of Daniel Waterhouse and those he ropes into assisting him. Thus ends the age of Alchemy.

What follows are the beginnings of the Industrial Age. Here as magical science wraps up and practical science begins, just here when someone invents the “Engine that Uses Fire to Pump Water” and a contest offers a prize to anyone who can come up with a way to determine “the longitude” when on a sea voyage, things are as chaotic as they are here at the end of the Industrial Age in our real world.

The Baroque Cycle is a tale that will either entertain you over many a rainy and sunny day or will cause you to completely lose your patience and perhaps throw it at a wall. (Don’t throw your Kindle). Although I sometimes felt a bit crazed when I read for half a day and only progressed through 2% of the book, I never really wanted to stop reading it and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it’s not an experience I can recommend to anyone. You know if you are a reader who will love this or yawn over this. As for me I will eventually download another Stephenson tome and while away some more idle hours by allowing my mind to be taken somewhere/time else. (It is also a love story of sorts.)

“At some point, says Neal Stephenson by way of Daniel Waterhouse, the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it…Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But – and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away – he has to admit that having some kind of System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.

Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood – Book

“Brush up on your Shakespeare”. Hogarth Press has commissioned modern authors to write novels based on Shakespeare’s plays. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood is the famous Canadian author’s offering in this series. Her novel is based on The Tempest, a Shakespeare play that I have never read. I have no real excuse except that I just never got around to it. Now I’m glad that I didn’t. I think Atwood’s book would provide schools with a great precursor to this rather complicated play, although it is probably just as helpful if read after-the-fact. Felix Phillips is the Artistic Director at the Makeshiweg Festival and he gives new scope to Shakespeare by staging productions that are quite edgy and sometimes a bit over-the-edge. He has an assistant who he has perhaps given too much responsibility for all the nuts and bolts jobs that keep theater festivals afloat. Just as Felix is getting his new cloak (pieced together from stuffed animals) ready so that he can become Prospero, Tony breaks the news that Felix’s contract is not being renewed.

As it turns out the contract now belongs to Tony. Felix has lost so much. He lost his wife of one year when she died in childbirth, then he lost his daughter, Miranda (strange coincidence, Miranda is the main female character in The Tempest) to meningitis when she was three. This second huge loss happened very recently. Now he has lost the career he loves. He is old. He married late. He is fifty and is not likely to find another meaty job in theater especially after being let go. He is mourning and he is angry. He wants revenge and he is willing to wait until his main chance arrives to get it.

He goes to ground in a very bare sort of cottage built into the side of a hill with only an iron stove for heat and no indoor plumbing, but an outhouse. He spends nine years in self-imposed exile with only the ghost of his daughter to keep him company. He uses an alias. He is now known as Mr. Duke. In his new persona he takes a job as a teacher of literature at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute where he teaches, you guessed it, Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, he works with minimum security prisoners and he has them act out the plays, records the productions, and then plays them for the entire prison population on closed-circuit television. His course is in great demand.

Finally he gets to put on the play he never got to direct. He gets to put on The Tempest and if you never understood this play you will by the time the inmates and Mr. Duke are done with you. This is a very enjoyable way to learn about or refresh your memory about a Shakespeare play that has a rather complicated plot and lots of deep things to say about humans and the human condition. And it is the perfect vehicle for Felix’s revenge, as if the universe delivered this moment to him because he deserved it. The parallels make the novel fun for those who enjoy symbolism, metaphor, etc.

Hogarth, as I said, has given very famous authors each a play that mates well with the kind of fiction they write. If you go to Google and type Hogarth Shakespeare Series in the search window it will take you to a list of who has been assigned to which play. Some of the books in the series have been written and some are not out yet. Great idea. I hope to eventually read them all. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood was an excellent place to start.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles – Book

In Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World, Captain Kidd is in Wichita Falls, Texas, five years after the end of the Civil War, and Texas is in the midst of political upheaval. The Indians are still actively raiding travelers and communities whenever they feel that they need threats to help with treaty negotiations. Captain Kidd is a retired soldier and a printer/journalist forced out of business by the economy and then by the war. His great love of news has stayed with him through all the chaos of recent years. He is a lover of geography, literacy, and all human events in this world.

He has decided to earn his way in the world, now that his wife is dead and his two daughters are grown, by traveling to towns and small cities throughout the west, where newspapers are just about as scarce as readers, holding meetings to read out the “news of the world”. He avoids politics in these contentious times. He likes to read about exotic locations and interesting tidbits from lands people have heard of but will probably never travel to. He gives people a chance to escape the verbal battles that rage around them and marvel that other people live such odd lives and are, perhaps, unluckier than they are. People pay a dime to attend this somewhat cerebral entertainment.

In Wichita Falls he runs into an old acquaintance who works as a freighter, moving merchandise by wagon from a buyer to a seller, or vice versa. His friend Britt, it turns out, has been paid 50 dollars in gold to return a white girl, kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe when she was 3 to her Aunt and Uncle near San Antonio. His friend begs him to take this girl off his hands. Texas is a very big state and San Antonio is far out of Britt’s way. He will lose a lot of money if he takes her all the way home. He will give the gold to Captain Kidd.

“She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians’ manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. … She had no more expression than an egg.”

Now Captain Kidd does not in any way want to undertake this task. It is the rainy season and rivers are rising and he would have to cross several to get this child to San Antonio. Texas is relatively lawless and there could be bandits on the road. But he is the father of two daughters. And so we have a journey tale as this good man reluctantly undertakes the responsibility to get this child to all of the family she has left, people she does not even know. What happens on that journey, watching these two bond, is a sweet story and sometimes I do love a sweet story.

The author, Paulette Jiles, became interested in stories of children who were kidnapped by the Indians because they gave up their European heritage so easily and they were never happy to give up their second-hand Indian heritage. What was it about life with the tribes which gave children such a feeling of satisfaction and belonging even though it began as a harrowing and totally foreign experience? Of course we will probably never know the answer to this but there is still a part of us all that thinks that Native Americans or Indigenous People, or whatever the politically correct term is today, had a knack for living lightly on the earth and a natural social order which served most of them very well.