A Walk In The Woods

My mom liked to say that from Kansas, you could get to somewhere fun in a mere 12 hour drive.  The beaches on the Gulf were 12 hours to the south, the mountains 12 hours to the west, and deserts and cacti 12 hours to the southwest.  We spent many summers in Colorado or Santa Fe, and most vacations involved some rustic cabin living and lots of hiking.  We had our favorite trails-- the Alpine Trail near where we stayed in Buena Vista, CO and the ski basin in Santa Fe.  But these trails would represent just a centimeter of the 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia up to Maine.  In the mid-90s Bill Bryson and his friend Steven Katz decided to hike the AT over the course of several months, and A Walk In The Woods is Bryson's record of that adventure.
I started this book as part of the Emergency Holiday Challenge and remembered Steph loving it and was even told by someone in my yoga class how funny it was.  And while it was funny, it was also wistful and kind of sad.  Bryson would intersperse details of the hike (lots of walking, lots of trees) with facts about the AT and the environmental changes.  We've all heard about the demise of the passenger pigeon, and the relatively quick fell of the American Chestnut trees...Bryson lectures us just to the point of depression and then says, "back to the trail!"
Even though this book is just about 10 years old, at times it felt dated.  Bryson writes with disdain about people to bring modems hiking so they can share stories from the trail (um, that would be blogging) and writes with amazement that some people have brought satellite tracking devices (what we now know as GPS!).  Every few days they arrive at a small town where they check in with their families from payphones.  Cell phones were not rampant yet.
2,200 miles is a lot of hiking and without giving anything away, a six-mile day hike on a trail of woods, streams and mountains maybe gives you the same idea as 6 months of the same.  Day hikes let you get back to the relative warmth of a cabin (and maybe access to some soothing hot springs) by 6 pm.  Nevertheless, I feel lucky that we have the luxury of wilderness to hike in, that despite the extinction of species, we generally value unspoiled nature.
4/5 netflix stars

The Help and Strength in What Remains

The Revolutions of 1989 were by and large bloodless; the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions of other Eastern Bloc countries resulted in the end of Communism and peaceful transfer of power. Twenty years before that Dr. Martin Luther King epitomized the non-violent struggle for civil rights.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett describes the stories of three women: one privileged white woman who along with two African American maids work together to tell the stories of behind the scenes lives, and in the process create a non-violent revolution in Jackson, Mississippi.  Each woman makes personal sacrifices for the greater good-- even though at the time they have no idea what that good will be.  Ms. Stockett tells the story of The Help in three viewpoints-- Skeeter's, Aibileen's and Minny's.  Each woman has a personal impetus to enact change, but what's amazing is how the three of them come to work together.
The revolutions of 1989 were not all peaceful. Tianamen Square took place that summer.  Likewise, 1994 brought about revolutions too. The very violent kind.  Extreme poverty for the majority and extreme wealth for the minority set the catalyst for the ethic genocides in Burundi and Rwanda.  Tracy Kidder relays Deo's story in Strength in What Remains.  Similar to What is the What, Deo miraculously flees Burundi and lands in New York with $200, no place to live and barely understanding a word of English.  Within five years he's enrolled at Columbia and soon after that, Dartmouth Medical School.  Mr. Kidder relays Deo's story in a series of viewpoints also.  He writes as a journalist, telling Deo's history as Deo remembers it.  Then he tells the history of the country, so the reader can better understand how events took a turn from the worse, and finally, he tells his story: how he met Deo and his impressions of him and his relationship to him and their return together to Burundi.  Mr. Kidder's document seemed a more complete story than What is the What.
In The Help, Skeeter is amazed that Aibileen is such a voracious reader, and that other maids who work for her friends have gone to college and aspire to send their children to college.  Many of white women Skeeter is friends with cannot see past the color and occupation of their maids.  But what surprised me was that Deo's story in New York was similar.  He'd come from being an intern at a hospital in Burundi to being a grocery delivery boy who made $15 a week in New York.  Just as the family Aibileen works for dehumanizes her by not even allowing her to use a bathroom in the house, Deo's employer literally pokes him with a stick to make him work.
Both books are good reminders that revolutions are, and should be, dynamic and constant.  I give both 5/5 netflix stars.