Joint Musings: A Band of Noble Women

I heard about the book A Band of Noble Women:  Racial Politics in the Women's Peace Movement from Eva and was instantly interested in reading it.  We both got to read the book through NetGalley and decided to discuss our thoughts and share them with all of you in a joint review format.


A Band of Noble Women is a non-fiction book about key players in the Women's Peace Movement after WWI- a group of women internationally who wanted to ensure that war would never happen again.  As the group was comprised of women all over the world, there were many politics involved, but the US contingent in particular had to deal with the racial politics of the day and African-American women serving as delegates faced significant setbacks.  The result?  They started fighting for rights at home.  This book highlights some truly wonderful, fascinating women who did so much to fight discrimination in the world, specifically in the United States.  While the book had some severe flaws, I am grateful to have read it solely to have learned more about these strong and passionate women.

Below is Eva's half of our review of this book.  I responded to the same questions, and these are posted over on Eva's blog.  Check it out, if we've piqued your interest at all!

[TSS] Interlude: The Truth About Helen Keller

I remember the first time I read about Helen Keller.  My elementary school principal, Ms. Weber, had a tradition of giving every student in school a book on her birthday.  When it was my turn to go to her office to pick out a book, I gravitated towards the one with a beautiful young girl on the cover:  Helen Keller, by Stewart and Polly Anne Graff.  The book told me about Helen, a willful young girl who was spoiled by her parents because she lived in almost complete isolation.  Before she reached the age of 2, Helen was blind and deaf and she had no way of communicating with anyone.  Until she met her beloved teacher, Annie Sullivan, who taught her sign language.  The book described how Helen went on to become a champion for blind and deaf people, helping to get children admitted to Perkins School for the Blind.  She was the first deafblind person to get her Bachelor of Arts and went on to become a very good author.  She became a national hero.  As her life coincided a great deal with the women's movement, teachers often teach about her around the same time, with some sort of brief accolade:  She was an amazing woman who stretched her boundaries and accomplished so much.  And she had a wonderful teacher that helped her do that.

What people often neglect to mention is that Helen Keller, in addition to being ambitious, intelligent, stubborn and successful, was also very, very active in the political sphere.  She spoke out against war, argued for women's rights and wanted workers to earn a fair wage.  She was, in fact, an extreme leftist and socialist.

Musings: Lionheart

Lionheart is Sharon Kay Penman's new novel about Richard I's time on crusade in the Holy Land.  It is, like all her novels, epic in scope, with an impressive amount of detail and a lot of research.  I have not read the two books that come before it in this series- Time and Chance and Devil's Brood- though I read the first in the series on this fascinating Angevin family, When Christ and His Saints Slept.  This book picks up right around Richard's coronation, after which he promptly left (on a somewhat meandering journey) to the Holy Land to pit his own military prowess against that of Salah-al-din in hopes of regaining Jerusalem for Christians.

The Angevins are one of the most interesting families in western history- they have a sordid history of deceit and distrust and ill will, and while I can't imagine that it was at all fun to be living under their rule, it is a lot of fun to read about them.  I should have read this series in the proper order, but I confess that I found When Christ and His Saints Slept to be very long, repetitive and lacking spark, so I wasn't very motivated to read its sequels.  But Richard the Lionheart is one of those giants of history, still very well known today.  And I loved SKP's book about another Richard, Richard III, in The Sunne in Splendour (in fact, it was the first book I ever blogged about!), and I was confident she would do justice to this one.

[TSS] Interlude: The Freedom Riders

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides in the US, and I thought after last week's very somber 10th anniversary of September 11th, I would devote this week to another important event in American history, one that many know very little about, the Freedom Rides.  I watched an excellent American Experience documentary about the Freedom Riders (linked to at the bottom of this post), and I thought I'd share with you all what I learned.

I think many Americans (myself included) can sum up their knowledge of the Freedom Rides in about two sentences:  People used non-violent means in hopes of integrating the bus system.  They were beaten for their efforts, and then were successful in overturning Jim Crow.

And while these sentences are essentially true, they completely wash out the complexities of one of the Civil Rights' Movement's most amazing success stories.  It is easy now, 50 years later, to be dismissive of racism and the stronghold it had on the United States in the mid-20th century.  I know many people, including some friends, who think that "racism is over," that women have all the rights they'll ever need, and that people are treated generally equally.  In a way, it's amazing that this sort of bliss can even exist, but human memory is very short and it's easy to think that because you yourself have never witnessed discrimination of any sort, that no one else can be experiencing it.  So it's important to remember what came before, the sacrifices that many people made so that some of us today can live in that blissful ignorance that all is well with the world.

Part of the reason I think this is such an important topic is because of the release of the movie The Help, and the highly successful book that inspired the film.  I read and enjoyed The Help, but I am a little worried that many people will read the book or watch the movie, and think, "Wow, that was wonderful!  I completely understand why the Civil Rights movement started now," and then, like my friends, go merrily about their lives without looking deeper into the issue.  I'm not by any means saying that I have done enough research into the topic (or into many other topics), but I thought I'd do my part in trying to provide a balance of information.  So here's the first of a semi-regular series on topics that I feel get glossed over in most people's minds, when they were worth looking into much more deeply.  Hopefully I can pique the interest of a few people to at least click through on my Wikipedia links!

Musings: The Chronicles of Harris Burdick

Almost 30 years ago, Chris Van Allsburg (of Jumanji fame) came out with a book entitled The Chronicles of Harris Burdick.  It was a collection of 14 drawings, each with a tantalizing title and an intriguing caption.  And that's all- no stories attached.  There was an interesting back story told about these stories, about a mysterious man named Harris Burdick who dropped the pictures off, promised more of them and the accompanying stories, and then disappeared, never to be seen again.  And now, fourteen brilliant authors have collaborated to each create a story around the pictures, using their titles and the given captions as additional inspiration.

[TSS] Ten Years Later

 

In memoriam

Musings: The Unfolding of Language

Like many readers, I have a fascination with language itself.  How was it created?  How has it changed?  Why is there so much structure?  Why are some aspects so unstructured?  How are new words added and old words removed?  How were words formed in the first place?  It's so interesting!

Some years ago, I read a blog post (I think it was Carrie's, but I can't find that post now) that mentioned a book by Guy Deutscher with the fantastic title The Unfolding of Language:  An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention, and immediately I went out and got the book for myself.  And then let it sit on my shelf, unread, for quite a while.

But I was recently motivated to pick it up and it does not disappoint!  Really, the formation of language and the way it's evolved over the centuries is so, so interesting.  For example, did you know that even though the word "I" has been spelled the same way for years and years and years and years, the pronunciation has changed drastically?  It used to be pronounced "Itch" (much closer to German).  And then it became "ee," and then "eh," and then FINALLY only in the 18th century did it start being pronounced the way we pronounce it today.  But it has been spelled the same way since the 14th century.