1906

1906
© 2004 James Dalessandro
368 pages

Turn of the century San Francisco was a notoriously corrupt city, filled with vice from the brothels of the Barbary Coast to the opium dens and sex slaves of Chinatown. 1906 is a political thriller  that brings together two brother-cops and an intrepid lady reporter together as they attempt to throw a spotlight onto the den of scum and villainy that is city hall, exposing a political-criminal cabal controlling the city.   And then...history happens, in the form of an earthquake and a fire that destroy city hall and a lot of the city, pitting the corrupt mayor against a slightly deranged general whose solutions all involve shooting or exploding things.   The novel and title both indicate that this is a novel set amid the chaos of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, but in reality....the quake hits when the book is nearly over,  and it merely serves as a large-scale plot twist.  Because I was reading this solely for the earthquake and fire angle, I wasn't too much interested in the seaside skulduggery -- especially since one of the cops was this irritating college grad who seemed to have majored in precognition, since he keeps telling people all the mistakes they're making, apparently armed with information from the future.  Perhaps he's a time traveler -- he wouldn't be the only one, since another character pines for cars not taking over the street yet, despite their still being rich man's toys in 1906.  devices that couldn't roll a mile without a flat tire.

If the potential reader is interested in the actual disasters, there are a couple of very storied histories -- Dan Kurzman's Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 was the volume that ignited my interest. It bubbles over with anecdotes that really bring the calamity to life.  Less anecdotal, but written by a San Francisco citizen, is Edward F. Dolan's Disaster 1906.

Opera fans may be interested in Enrico Caruso's steady appearances throughout 1906. He no good a-speaka the English, because he's-a Italiano.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
© 1969 Maya Angelou
304 pages

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography in the form of a novel, following a young woman’s coming of age as she journeys from a small town in the South to the big city – and then there and back again.  Functionally abandoned by her parents, and constantly worried about her status as not only an awkward and homely girl from a family full of photogenic frames and faces, but being a racial outcast, Maguerite makes her way by a loving grandmother and brother and books aplenty. I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings largely out of peer pressure, since it is always mentioned in the hallowed company of books like The Scarlet Letter and Tom Sawyer, hailed as essential American and Southern literature.

Racism dominates Caged Bird just as the wilderness fills the reader’s experience in The Last of the Mohicans;  Angelou writes that segregation was so complete in Stamps, Arkansas that she hardly ever saw a white person.  In her younger years , Stamps’ white citizenry were phantoms who she scarcely regarded as human.  They were cold and distant authority figures, or ‘powhitetrash’ wretches who behaved like little barbarians yet expected the blacks of Stamps to defer to them.  On the rare occasions that Marguerite and her family entered the white side of Stamps to buy goods unavailable in their own neighborhoods, they ran the risk of being refused service – as happened with a dentist.

This book remains controversial because of several scenes of sexual violence, which I approached with some trepidation – intending to skim over them, if need be. There are three scenes like this within the same chapter, and Angelou renders them in a way to convey a child’s confusion and detachment – the sort of detachment one adopts while at the dentist, or in preparation for a surgery, a self-defense against panic. Following these scenes, Marguerite enters a mute period in which she reads more devotedly than ever, before finding a positive vision of womanhood in her community to guide her out of the darkness.

In her path to womanhood, Marguerite was provided with several examples, strong in their own way.   Central to her life is her grandmother, “Momma”, who operates a general store that is also the community center for Stamp’s black community.  While the store never makes them wealthy,  the family’s frugality and Momma’ adaptability allow them to weather even the Depression in mild comfort, lending money even to white business owners – including the dentist who considers his obligation merely fiscal, and refuses to budge from his policy of not treating blacks.    Momma and her family provide a safe haven for the main character and her brother, a haven not found when they visit or live with their parents.   Marguerite’s mother is beautiful and independent, but her world is full of violence; when Marguerite is raped, it is at the hand of one of her mother’s beaus. Her father, too, is handsome but not altogether reliable;  when he takes Marguerite to Mexico to buy supplies,  his drunken revelries force Maguerite as a young teenager to attempt driving for the first time in literal terra incognita – a mountainous descent in rural Mexico.   A third example for Marguerite is the mysterious Mrs. Flowers, who has a regal bearing and a full library, both of which inspire Maguerite to better things. For the most part, she takes those lessons to heart -- fighting a protracted campaign to become a streetcar conductor, the first black woman to enter the service. Yet at the end, she decides to have sex with a boy to determine that she is not a lesbian, promptly becomes pregnant, and after the delivery of her boy, the novel ends. It's as if a story of King David ended abruptly with his having Uriah killed so he could cover his petty lust with Bathsheba.  I know the person of Maguerite -- Maya Angelou -- went on to greatness, but as a novel by itself, it's a weird way to end things.

The Chinese in America

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History
© 2003 Iris Chang
558 pages

Like most Americans, my earliest notion of the Chinese in America is an association with the Transcontinental railroad. As it happened, their story begins before that, with the California gold rush. Poor Chinese men, having caught wind of the bonanza in California, made their way to "Gold Moutain" in hopes  of making a fortune and returning to China with it. While many hit the jackpot and returned, still others made another home in America, becoming actors in its story. In The Chinese in America,  Iris Chang superbly runs together three threads:  a history of China, as the decline of the last empire and the resulting civil strife (including war)  created a need for opportunities and safety to be found abroad;   the history of the United States,  lassoing in the West and needing all the railroad men, miners, and farmers it could get;  and the story of the generations who traveled from one nation to the other, attempting to adjust to a new country without losing their heritage.   It is an admirable story of perseverance amid bewilderment and hardship.

 The earliest Chinese visitors to the United States came not to flee wicked oppression in China, but to make money on Gold Mountain and go home rich men.    A few did strike it lucky and retire wealthy, but many more stayed. Although most of the Chinese who settled in the United States remained on the west coast, not all congregated in urban Chinatowns. They searched for opportunity wherever it might be found; working farms and ranches, mines and railroads, and - occasionally -- even finding their way to New England and the South.   There, despite racially-orientated legislation, they found tacit acceptance, safe in their ambiguous status.  That changed in the 1870s,  when a depression set teeth on edge and prompted unemployed laborers to blame the cheap labor flooding in from the East.   The Chinese Exclusion Act followed, barring most immigration from Asia. Strict quotas were imposed, and only certain professions were entirely welcome.    The Exclusion act would hold until the 1940s, when the United States and the Chinese people became allies, both targets of Japanese imperialism.  (Shortly after World War 2, racial limitations on immigration were ended altogether. even as the war and those which followed generated anti-Asian prejudice)  As one generation pushed the frontier by breaching the Rocky Mountains, linking the coasts and allowing agriculture to prosper in the west, another stretched it still further in aviation and software engineering. Chang doesn't limit herself to politics and economics; a strong reliance on oral history imparts a good dose of social history, as well, like the evolution of  "Chinese" food.

The Chinese-American story is not one I have any experience with -- the South's Asian population is predominately Korean and Vietnamese, at least in my neck of the woods. What little I knew came from histories of San Francisco (particularly Good Life in Hard Times, with a section on Chinese gangs).  This  was, then, a welcome introduction to another aspect of America's mosaic.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
© 1968 Phillip K. Dick
210 pages

In a world ruined by nuclear war, most animals are extinct and most humans who can have fled for the cold, distant colonies of Mars.  Technical civilization has survived, creating artificial pets for people to cherish.  It has also created lifelike androids for people to fear-- such constructs are barred from Earth, but still prefer operating on a planet where nuclear fallout is included in weather reports to barren wastelands like Mars.  Androids who escape the colonies to return to Earth are the business of 'bounty hunters' like Rick Deckard, who hunt them down and 'retire' them --  permanently.   In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard takes on the challenge of finding six recent escapees, androids  that so perfectly replicate humans that the conventional diagnostics might not even detect them. The case will, for him, blur the lines between living and dead, between reality and fiction.  It is a thriller which, halfway through, features three characters sitting in a room with trained guns on another,  two convinced of fiction and one knowing the truth. The one isn't Deckard, nor is it the reader, and the sudden plot turn succeeds magnificently.  The world of Dick's imagination is fairly dismal: empty buildings, sparsely populated by lonely people who get their emotional life from plugging into a 'mood organ' that manipulates their brains. This is part of a new religion, Mercerism, which features heavily in the confusing ending, one in which the reader is left wondering what was real and what wasn't.   This was a definite success as a thriller, though one that left me missing the safe optimism of Asimov's robots.

Related:
Asimov's Robots books, including the slightly more grim books not written by him.

Disaster 1906

Disaster 1906: the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
© 1967 Edward F. Dolan Jr.
172 pages

If, as some say, God spanked the town

For being over-frisky

Why did He burn the churches down

And save Hotaling's whisky?

-p. 175

Years ago I read a fantastic book called Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. A few years later I determined I wanted to buy my own copy of that book, but alas! Woe! My home library no longer had the book and I forgot the title of it. I hit Amazon, and this seemed like it might be what I was looking for.  It actually isn't, as I found out while reading the book and noticed that key elements from the masterpiece I remembered were missing -- like Enrico Caruso hearing of the volcano eruption in his hometown and thanking God he was in safe San Francisco, only to wake up to an earthquake and an inferno.

Disaster stories interest me, hence why my home library contains several books on the Titanic and why I've read various books on the San Francisco and Chicago fires, as well as the Galveston Hurricane. Part of this is what Augustine might call gross curiosity -- the appeal of looking at a car wreck -- but I'm also fascinated by the way people react when their world is completely eradicated and the society-as-usual  no longer exists. In Disaster 1906,  the sleeping town of San Francisco is visited by a mighty earthquake, and then ravaged for several days by fires which consume much of the city.  Communications are negligible, the water pipes are dry, and yet -- people survive. People freely gather together to help pick up the ruins, men from all walks of life join the fire brigades,  women empty their pantries cooking food for the newly-homeless, and a corrupt mayor  suddenly begins to fulfill his moral responsibilities as a public official and becomes a hero. And people are clever! They improvise! They fill the bathtubs with water before the cisterns leak completely dry, saving the water for use in fire fighting: they construct stoves of bricks and random metal grates.  Throughout the long night, as the fires burn and destroy homes, businesses, and all the hopes of tomorrow, people gather together and tell jokes: they sing and entertain one another, and when they day breaks they start picking up the pieces.

Disaster 1906 was probably written for younger readers given its length, but it's a fine introduction to the disaster and one written by someone who grew up in San Francisco, and who is so fond of the City by the Bay that his last chapter is devoted to  commenting on the rebirth of the city after the disaster, in which the wild child of the west coast grew into a Queen who astonished all the world at the Exposition in 1916, but who maintained her childish sassiness.

Related:

• Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Dan Kurzman
• The Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, 1906. John Castillo Kennedy. I may have also read this one while trying to find Disaster!  I think my confusion in trying to find the book is warranted given how similar these three titles are. 
• Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco in the 20s and 30s, Jerry Flamm. One of my favorite books.

This is my fifth review in 15 hours, and while two of those were leftovers from last week and the week before last, it's still odd. Why do I go days without being able to progress in collecting my thoughts on a given book, and then have days in which it's easy?