Val Muller

As I’m just wrapping up teaching this book with my juniors, I thought I’d write a review. The Grapes of Wrath is a classic, one of those books you should put on your bucket list. Don’t let its length scare you away, but know that the book is meant to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace rather than whizzed through during commercial breaks and smart phone beeps.

During the Dust Bowl era, Steinbeck traveled with a group of displaced farmers who, like many, were thrown from their land (either because the sharecropping model was no longer working or because they lost the mortgage on their own homes). Like many, they made a goal of traveling to California where, it was rumored, they could find work. This novel is a fictionalized account of Steinbeck’s own experience.

Packing an entire family into a customized car (the family includes Grandma, Grandpa, Ma, Pa, Tom, Rose of Sharon, Connie, Noah, Al, Ruthie, Winfield, and the preacher Jim Casy) as well as all their possessions, the Joads set out from Oklahoma to California. They’ve received a handbill claiming that there are orchards in need of workers to pick the profusely-growing fruits of the West Coast. What the Joads don’t understand is that the owners of these farms printed up many more handbills than they actually needed. When they arrive at California, there are many more workers than work, and the Joads find themselves competing for work, often taking a low-paying job for fear of starving (though with the wages they earn, starving is inevitable anyway).

The book really has two parts: the Joads’ journey to California and their experiences once they arrive. Each chapter of the Joads’ journey is broken up with an “interchapter,” a short essay in which Steinbeck describes an element of the journey experienced by the migrant workers. Chapter One describes (and personifies) the dust and the weather that caused the problems in the first place. Chapter Three, my absolute favorite chapter of any book, ever, describes a turtle crossing a highway. It’s a short chapter, but it’s ripe with symbolism, and as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that the turtle’s stubborn journey is a metaphor for the Joads’ (and the journey of all migrant workers).

My favorite part of the book is Steinbeck’s poetic style. The words roll off the page. But again, read the book when you have time to enjoy them. No sense in rushing such beautiful literature.

You can read the book from numerous perspectives—examining the juxtaposition of the interchapters, for example; examining the politics of the book (numerous times, the book was banned or frowned upon for suspected support of communism, though that’s not what Steinbeck was advocating); examining the metaphor Steinbeck creates between the Joads’ journey to California and Moses’ journey to free his people (they both cross a desert to reach a “promised land.”) But the angle from which I love to examine the book is that of the spirit of man. There’s nothing more inspiring than Jim Casy (yes, the initials are relevant) questioning religion and realizing that our definitions of “right” and “wrong” are often arbitrary, and, as Casy says, there’s just “what people do.” When we’re cut off from each other and not thinking about the consequences of our actions, that’s what’s not holy. When we think about fellow man, that’s holiness.

Tom Joad, the main character, could be considered a disciple of Casy. At the end of the novel, Tom leaves his family (for various reasons, but their safety is his primary concern—I won’t say more so as not to spoil the plot). But he tells his mother, “I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere…I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad…I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they built – I’ll be there, too.” This speech embodies all that Casy has taught him–that we are all human beings, and we are all interconnected. The Transcendentalists would be proud.

Despite any of the various political ways people have read this book over the years, I love it for its celebration of the spirit of man. Tom, Ma, Casy, and Rose of Sharon especially embody this trait. The final scene, which is probably the strangest final scene of any work you will read, embodies this trait especially. I won’t give it away—you can look it up if you really want to. But what it comes down to is that mankind was meant to live, not just survive like animals, and despite oppression and hardship, he will ignite the flames of his spirit and use his life to leave a footprint of his existence and leave the world a little better than he found it.

This is a young adult dystopian novel taking place in an alternate reality in which the discovery of “halves” in the past has drastically altered the present. Each time a child is born, a paired “half” is born on the same day in some location around the globe. Halves are matched with their counterparts on their eighteenth birthdays and are (usually) smitten and, from that day forward, unable to live without each other. When one half is in pain, the other feels it. When one half dies, the other usually does, too.

The protagonist, Aaron, has an abnormal condition: his clairvoyance, the element linking people to their halves, was injured at birth, and doctors fear there will be a problem when he meets his half. In the meantime, Aaron is stubborn and hot-headed. He doesn’t buy the concept of halves, noting that there was a time in human history when people chose their own mates. Just before his eighteenth birthday, he meets Amber, an attractive girl with whom he falls in love. And Amber’s birthday is the same as Aaron’s, so it looks like they might even be halves. But there’s a problem: Clive. Clive is violent, and his father is a sinister doctor doing research that seems to be less than legal. Clive’s birthday, of course, is the same as Aaron’s and Ambers, and Clive insists he is Amber’s half. In fact, Amber and Clive have been identified as halves since they were babies, a practice that is generally frowned upon.

When Amber doesn’t seem to want to submit to Clive, Aaron hopes maybe she will be assigned as his half. But he finds out that Clive (and his father) have an operation planned that will make Amber docile, the perfect wife but no more than an empty, non-resistant shell.

The book builds up to Aaron finding out who his half is. Of course I’m not going to ruin it. This is a great read for a high-school student, especially a male reader. There’s plenty of action and teenage aggression and lust. It’s a page turner from the start. The one thing that bothered me was the absence of Aaron’s parents. At times, things were happening, like kids entering the house at midnight, and the parents didn’t wake up. Also, Aaron got beat up a few times, but his parents didn’t seem too aware of that fact. Other than that, I enjoyed the story and would definitely recommend it to hesitant readers in my high school English class. It’s a compelling read that, I believe, would keep them turning the pages. I’ll admit, I lost some sleep over this book, as the pages compel you to turn… despite the fact that it’s past bedtime!

How do I review what could possibly be my favorite book? This review will be a long one, and it will contain spoilers.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948 after experiencing the horrors of World War II, revolutions, and colonialism. Primarily, the book serves as a warning, showing the worst extension of the evils of man. The book takes place in Air Strip One, a territory of Oceana (which includes the US and the UK, among other places). Air Strip One used to be England, and the novel takes place in what is now London. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is discontent with his life to say the least. He lives in a society with heavily-regulated class systems: the Inner Party (about two percent of the population) follows the will of “Big Brother,” the leader of Oceana; the Outer Party (nearly fifteen percent of the population) follows the will of the Inner Party; and the Proles (at least eighty percent of the population) live their lives in a highly-manipulated world, but they are too focused on bread and circuses to care. Winston works in the Outer Party. His job is to change bits of news from the past to reconcile the Party’s constantly-changing history. The terrifying phrase that the Party clings to is, “who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.”

In this world, enemies of the Party are vaporized, meaning they are abducted, their identities washed away. Even family and friends cannot talk about the vaporized, as it would lead them to become vaporized as well. Winston’s job involves removing references to these “unpersons” from past news articles and changing Big Brother’s past predictions so that they align with actual events as they unfolded.

Integral to the Party’s nefarious workings is their control of language. The Party is working to limit the English language through a dialect known as Newspeak. The goal of this dialect is to remove the connotations from language with the theory that if people do not have words to express ideas, eventually they will simply stop having those ideas. For example, the word “freedom” in new speak would only refer to freedom from a cold, for example. The idea of “freedom” as we know it in a political sense would simply not exist. “Bad” has become obsolete, as words are now simply coined as opposites. “Good” exists as a word in Newspeak, so if something is to be described as “bad,” it would simply be called “ungood.” (Thus, a vaporized person is referred to as an “unperson.”)

So why do people like Winston continue to manipulate past history at their jobs? They are encouraged through a concept called “doublethink.” This is the mind’s way of tricking itself: they obviously know they are changing the past, but they are convincing themselves that Big Brother is actually right, and there are mistakes in history that need to be reconciled. Doublethink is both believing and not believing simultaneously, and ignoring facts when they are inconvenient to present purposes. In this world, there really aren’t any formal rules, but everyone knows that if they cross the Party, they will be vaporized. If the idea seems far-fetched, remember the Holocaust of World War II. Men were convinced to send fellow man to gas chambers, or watch them starve to death. Individuals abandoned their moral compasses to follow a terrible dictator. Something like doublethink had to have been at work there.

There’s more.

The government is terrifying. The Ministry of Love (“Miniluv” in Newspeak) is a building used for torture. Any enemy of the Party is taken there, tortured, and re-educated before being released back into the population, broken and likely marked to be shot at some unknown future date. Every Party member has at least one telescreen in his house. These are wall-sized screens that project propaganda 24/7. Outer Party members can never turn off these screens. Life in the Party requires participation in the Two Minutes Hate. During this time, Party members are shown propaganda, most of it about a man named Goldstein, who is the enemy of the Party. He’s been at large for years, supposedly, and he’s got a Brotherhood of rebels whose job it is to take down the Party and Big Brother. Those in control of the Party use the Two Minutes Hate to control the Inner and Outer Party members.

The Party has all but outlawed sex. It is allowed only for the purpose of procreating, but Party members are being brainwashed to believe it is dirty and disgusting. The point of this is to break all human bonds. Coming home to a loving spouse would be detrimental to the Party. Even children (“spies”) are trained to spy on their parents for any “unorthodox” thoughts against the Party. The Two Minutes Hate allows the Party to direct the pent-up rage and sexual frustrations of the Party members in a way that keeps anger alive.

There’s even more.

There are three global superpowers in this world, and they are always at war. The point of the war is to use up all excess material goods to keep the citizens always just fed, but always needing or wanting more. They’ve become used to the perpetual sacrifices of war and are willing to let the government do terrible things because of the gravity of war and the need for the common good. The Two Minutes Hate helps to justify the sacrifices people make. Still, Winston recalls that he was always almost starving as a boy.

In the novel, Winston decides to rebel against the Party in a small way—by keeping a journal. In it, he writes his thoughts against the Party. My favorite of Winston’s observations is that true freedom is the freedom to say that two and two add up to four. If a Party member is given the right to say that, all other rights necessarily follow. This comes into play later in the novel.

Winston is captured after writing in his journal and having an affair with another Outer Party member named Julia. They are both taken to the Ministry of Love to be tortured. Before their capture, which they both knew was inevitable, they agreed that they could “win” this if only they remain loyal to each other in their minds. They had both heard of the torture that takes place in the Ministry of Love, and they knew they would be forced (through pain) to say anything the torturer wanted them to, but they agreed they would never betray each other in their hearts and minds.

In the Ministry of Truth, Winston learns that a man he thought was a member of the Brotherhood, O’Brien, was actually an Inner Party member who had been “messing” with Winston for seven years. Winston had dreams about O’Brien and almost became obsessed with the intellect he saw on O’Brien’s face. It’s implied that the dreams were probably the result of the telescreens, which are actually two-way communicators. Not only do they display propaganda, but they can be used to spy on Party members and even speak directly to them. Winston is slowly tortured and made to heal again (numerous times). He tells the Party whatever they want to know, and O’Brien is generous in giving Winston information about the Party and their methods. Winston realizes that he understood the “how” of the Party. He just could never comprehend the “why.” Why would a government go to so much trouble just to control fellow man? O’Brien’s answer is, essentially, simply because it can. The Inner Party members don’t desire riches in excess, only power over others. Their goal has never been to better mankind. O’Brien even suggests that the quality of life might be lowered to the point that 30 years old is senility: that wouldn’t matter. What matters is that the Party has power over the people.

Once this is revealed to Winston, the reader realizes that the Party isn’t done with Winston yet. Even though the man has been nearly starved to death, his teeth all falling out, his body emaciated, they are not finished. They want one final act of submission. Winston has been “recovering” from torture in the Ministry of Love, and he tells himself that he will still be able to keep that which makes him human: right before he is shot (because inevitably, all people released from the Ministry will be shot in the back at some unknown date in the future while they are simply going about their business), Winston will be able to hear the click of the trigger, and he will use his last thoughts to think about how much he hates Big Brother. This last act of rebellion will mean that, in his mind, he died a free man. This is his final act of hope, something he can control in a world controlled by a dictator.

But O’Brien knows this. He tells Winston of prisoners of the past. After being tortured and “recovered” in the Miniluv, they begged for a quick death so that they might die while their thoughts were still pure—in other words, while they still loved Big Brother, and before they had a chance to think terrible thoughts against him. This suggests that to be released from Miniluv, one must give total control of one’s mind to the Party.

They finally take Winston to Room 101, in which prisoners must confront their deepest fears. Winston’s is rats. A cage is affixed to his face with two hungry rats inside ready to gouge out his eyes and eat his face. In a moment of panic, Winston calls out that the Party should torture Julia instead of him. It is his final act of betrayal because in his mind, he honestly believes it. He is so afraid of the rats that he betrays the one person he loves. At this point, he is broken. He’s released into the world, given a sinecure, and kept always drunk. The final scene is the most dismal I have ever read. Winston is watching the telescreen while drinking horribly oily Victory Gin. He’s heard that the war might be lost, and he’s watching the news eagerly (never mind the fact that at one time Winston knew the war was all but a farce and used to control the population). In the end, the news from the warfront is good, and Winston cries tears of joy because he realizes that he loves Big Brother with all of his being.

The book is an obvious hyperbole, but some of the connections to modern society are frightening. “Newspeak” is surprisingly similar to the language of text messages or Twitter, in which we are forced to distill language to its most basic. Politicians engage in a form of doublethink all the time, lying to constituents and denying the truth in an effort to increase power. Like the Party in Orwell’s world, our modern politicians seem less interested in actually helping mankind and more interested in doing thing that will afford them more power (i.e., buying votes). Even today’s citizens seem divided along “party” lines. Not that we have a Two Minutes Hate, but anyone who was on Facebook during the last presidential election can see that rather than engaging in intelligent discussions about politics, citizens were more prone to engage in hateful rhetoric aimed at inflaming hatred against those with opposing beliefs (Big Brother vs. Goldstein—neither of whom existed, in all likelihood).

The book never ceases to amaze me, despite the fact that I read it almost every year. I am in awe of Orwell’s ability to see the worst in mankind, and to make predictions about things that are starting to come to pass. I hope that this book will always be simply a warning, and that humanity will always reclaim that which makes it human against a system of government that always seems to be fighting to augments its own power, rather than to make life better for all it should be serving.

It’s Just Lola is the story of Lola, the author’s grandmother, as told to Lola’s daughter, and then from Lola’s daughter to the author. As the author attests, the story is based on truth, but any holes in the plot were filled with fiction. Even more intriguing is the fact that both Lola and her daughter told the tale to their next of kin only when they felt the hand of death compelling them to share their tale.

Born in the late 1800s to a wealthy Peruvian landowner, Lola has a rocky life. She’s seduced and pregnant at age 14, widowed at 15, and the challenges don’t stop there. She’s got a manipulative step-mother, a prideful father, and men in her life with their own strong wills. But Lola prevails, using her skill to sew dresses and uniforms to make money, her arithmetic skills to become a clerk, her business acumen to help her father with his plantation, and her intellect to learn medicine through books. Through each challenge, Lola’s positive attitude prevails, and she uses her intellect and abilities to make the best of each situation, providing the best for herself and her growing family. I enjoyed how Lola was a strong woman in an era when many women relied on men. I won’t give away too many of the plot twists, but you’ll get to experience different cultures (from Peru to America, and even a South-American distrust of Britain—and Lola’s British husband—during the war), the effects of industrialization and life in the cities, and the effects of World War I. Lola’s strength, starting from such a young age, makes her a sympathetic and likeable protagonist and will make you want to keep reading to see how her life turns out.

I enjoyed the author’s writing style. It was easily accessible, adding just the right amount of details to make each episode relevant. As I read, I felt like I was getting to know Lola as a real person, which is a real testament to the author’s writing (as well as her grandmother’s strong personality). While reading the book, I was dealing with plumbing problems in my home, which I felt (at the time) were the end of the world, but reading Lola’s story made me realize that life can throw much more difficult challenges at us, and she inspired me to stay strong–that this, too, shall pass.

Though I think this book would appeal more to women than men, it would also appeal to anyone with a love of experiencing history as a narrative—experiencing the challenges of a different era through the eyes of a likable protagonist. I’m not a fan of non-fiction because I rarely feel I can relate to the characters, but this book was completely different: I  recommend this book with enthusiasm.

This is a middle-grade quick read about a girl named Storee who dreams of being an author. The names are allegorical: the protagonist Storee Wryter, her cat Critique, and even her new dog Addie (who has been “added” to the family). Storee keeps writing ideas in a file in her room and is always thinking about what to write for her next big story. At the beginning of the book, her friend Kyria comes over and asks Storee to adopt a dog.

The book stresses responsibility and service in adopting and training a dog, and part of the discussion Storee has with her parents is whether they can train Storee to become a therapy or service dog. Without going over-the-top with details, the book models ways of properly training a dog as well as traits a dog must possess to be certified as a therapy dog. In the end, Storee’s parents agree to the dog, and story works hard (even Critique helps her out) to train Addie to the point where she can visit a class of struggling readers eager to read to the dog as part of a program.

While reading, I did wish the book was longer. The writing is great, and there were some opportunities for expanding some of the scenes, or perhaps showing us some of what Storee was writing, or showing us more of Storee’s challenges in training her dog.

I enjoyed the positive message of the book, encouraging young writers to keep up with their ideas. The book even ends with prompts and space to write down ideas. It’s clear the author cares about helping young writers. The book also teaches the proper training techniques for dogs and teaches students just how much responsibility is involved in responsibly training one. My own corgis could learn a lot from Addie, as they sometimes tag-team against me to subvert my training efforts!

All in all, it’s a great read for young readers, writers, and animal lovers looking to make something of themselves in the world.