July Key Words: Bee Balm, Italian Art in WWII, Civil War Stories

Garden Notes

This week's star native is Bee Balm (aka Wild Bergamot). This fragrant perennial comes in lots of colors, has spikey flowers, and it blooms for a long time. Right now, my native garden is mostly yellow and purple, with my Bee Balm providing the purple canvas on which the yellow blooms can shine. 

Bee Balm is a perfect native alternative to the ever-popular Butterfly Bush, which is actually an import from Asia, which means it may look stunning, but it isn't helping the local ecosystem and is invasive.

Bee Balm is also an edible plant. John Forti, author of The Heirloom Gardener, says:

All aerial parts of the plant can be used fresh. The tender leaves can be chopped finely and added to salads and summer vegetable dishes or made into teas and balms. However, the flowers (particularly the red ones) are my favorite edible part of the plant; they are full of an Earl Grey–like floral nectar and offer a fun kid candy from the garden. They are beautiful frozen into ice cubes for summer drinks or turned into a simple syrup for refreshing cocktails and confections. 

On to Books...

The Last Masterpiece, by Laura Moretti - Moretti is an art historian and historical novelist who focuses on the Renaissance and Italy, and I have read just about all of her books. This latest is set during WWII, featuring two young women, an Austrian and an American, on opposite sides of the war but both working to preserve the art treasures of the Italian Renaissance from destruction and looting during the war.

I loved it. In fact, I think it might be my favorite of Moretti's novels. The Nazi part of the story begins in Florence, with Eva, the Austrian woman, newly arrived with a job to photograph the paintings and sculptures that the German art historians are cataloging and putting into storage, with the help of the local Italian art historians. Her father is actually heading up the operation to store art from around Europe in the Austrian salt mines, and Eva truly believes that the Nazis are trying to preserve and protect the art for the Italians. Turns out she's wrong about that.

Josie is a WAC from Connecticut who is assigned to provide secretarial support to the Monuments Men. In the course of her duties, she comes to learn about and then love Renaissance art. She also learns to love Italy, particularly Florence.

Now I am all primed to finally read Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel, who also wrote The Monuments Men, the book on which the movie is based.

The March, by E.L. Doctorow - this is much-lauded novel is about General Sherman's 1864-1865 campaign in which his army of 90k+ subdued Georgia and the Carolinas and helped bring the Civil War to its end. 

Definitely a 5-star book, and not just because of my abiding interest in the Civil War, but because of the breadth and scope of character and story, the insight and compassion, realism and historical accuracy, and eloquence.

Doctorow tells the stories of a cross-section of people involved--the generals and other officers, of course, a smattering of soldiers from both sides, both the brave and the not-so brave. He tells the stories of civilians whose towns, farms, and homes were invaded, sometimes burned, almost always violated. He tells the stories of newly freed African Americans as well those who had enslaved them, and those who are on the periphery of the fighting but still a part of it--the British war correspondent, the itinerant photographer. 

My favorite story was that of a German doctor who came to America to find personal liberty and found himself tending the wounded and dying of both sides. I also loved the story of Pearl, an African American girl whose skin was so pale that she could pass but struggled with whether she wanted to live in the white world as a white woman.

Here's my favorite passage, which stopped me cold, near the end, when Sherman is negotiating terms of surrender with his Confederate counterpart, Joe Johnston.

And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across the table. It was contested in sentences. Entrenchment and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs. It is all turned very quiet, Sherman said to Johnson, who not quite understanding, lifted his head to listen.

No cannonball or canister, but has become the language here spoken, the words written down, Sherman thought. Language is war by other means. 

Ragtime is the only other one of the many noteworthy books by Doctorow that I've read, but I mean to remedy that, although some of them seem mighty grim. Any suggestions?

March and Midnight Rising - fictional and non-fictional Civil War Reading

It just so happened that I read March, by Geraldine Brooks, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz back to back in September.  The coincidence is not so much that they are both books about the Civil War--I am on a CW reading binge--but Brooks and Horwitz are married, and in her Afterword Brooks mentions traveling with her husband countless times to Civil War sites. 

March is a novel in which the main character is Mr. March, the father of Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March and husband of Marmee, literature's archetypal mother, in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  In LW, Mr. March is a shadowy character, off stage during half the book and in his study or in the far background during the second half.  He rarely speaks, and while the girls adore him, he withers as a character in the face of the force which is Marmee.

As with A Year of Wonders, the other novel by Brooks that I've read, I had mixed feelings about this book, which is why it's taken me so long to blog about it.  It is well-written and the characters and storyline are interesting, just not believeable.  I'm not sure what it is about Brooks' stories, but she always seems to go a step too far in her plotting, rendering me a disbeliever. 

I also came to this book having recently read Eden's Outcasts, which is about Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  Brooks' portrait of Mr. March draws heavily on Bronson Alcott, just as LMA drew heavily on her own life for the stories and characters of Little Women.  While I am not a fan of Bronson Alcott, I'm even less of a fan of Mr. March.  Brooks took all his worst qualities and magnified them...and yet, the writing is good.

I really think I would've enjoyed March much more if Brooks hadn't leveraged Little Women.  Her main character still could've hailed from Concord, MA, still could've rubbed shoulders with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, still could've been an abolotionist, but needn't have been saddled to Marmee and the girls from Little Women.  There's just too much baggage and it weighs the story down with doubt and assumptions and inevitable dissappointment.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Midnight Rising, a bio of John Brown, he whose "body llies a-mouldering in the grave" while "his soul's marching on."  I have known of Harper's Ferry for years, but never really had a good grounding in what led Brown and his family and followers to attack Harper's Ferry, what they hoped to accomplish, or even really what they did accomplish.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and really loved how Horwitz was able to link so many of the major players in the Civil War together via Brown's story.  Absolutely first rate history and one that will bear rereading down the road.

Here's a great interview with Tony Horwitz about Midnight Rising on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Mailbox Monday...a day late but such tasty morsels

I have been utilizing Paperbackswap.com a lot lately and have a lot of new books on my shelf.



You're on Your Own (But I'm Here if You Need Me): Mentoring Your Child During the College Years, by Marjorie Savage

My oldest child leaves for college in August, and the sheer logistics are keeping me from obsessing on how much I'm going to miss her. I'm a reader and so when I face an issue I often turn to help from books. This one was recommended on the college's web site section for parents. This is now a must-read with everything else taking a backseat.


Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

The same friend who recommended Kathryn Stockett's The Help, also recommended this book in the next breath. Since I loved The Help, I'm going to give this a try. I haven't read about China since the last Amy Tan that I read, which was years ago, so this is definitely outside my normal range.


A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka

I've been hearing good things about this book, so got it and started it right away--it's about a woman who must reconcile with her estranged sister in order to keep their aged father from going off the deep end when he falls for a younger woman in search of a green card.


Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson, by Paula Byrne

I loved Paula Byrne's wonderful book Jane Austen and the Theatre, and found this when I was Googling on that. If Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is outside my usual reading, Perdita is smack dab in the middle of it--regency, biography, theater. It's a hat trick! Here's what Amazon hooked me with: "...darling of the London stage, mistress to the most powerful men in England, feminist thinker, and bestselling author."


March, by Geraldine Brooks

I loved Brooks' Year of Wonders until the ending, which I considered a train wreck of an ending, but since I am finally going to read Little Women this year, I thought I would follow that up with a reading of March, which chronicles the girls' father's adventures during the Civil War.