Cool Chicks from History

The mission of StoryCorps is to collect oral histories from average Americans.  All There Is highlights some of the most touching love stories from this project.  The stories range from high school sweethearts to senior citizens finding a second chance at love.  One couple met through a misdirected email thanks to their shared surname and initials.  Another were plaintiffs in the landmark case that legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts.  They’re not all happy stories, several couples face illness and two interviewees talk about losing their partner on 9/11, but some of the most moving romances are also among the saddest.

All There Is on Amazon

Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.  College student Immaculée Ilibagiza survived by hiding with eight other women in a pastor’s bathroom for 91 days.  The women were literally piled on top of each other in a bathroom smaller than a walk in closet.  With only intermittent access to food, Immaculée’s weight dropped to 65 pounds.  The pastor’s home was repeatedly searched and Immaculée could hear the braying death squads through the walls.  Yet she survived when so many others didn’t.

The book begins by describing her childhood, her middle class family, and how the ongoing conflict between Hutus and Tutsis impacted her early life.  By the end of the book, many of those Immaculée loved have been killed and some of those she thought she could trust have blood on their hands.

At times the book felt a touch simplistic.  Immaculée’s family were described as flawless in the first few chapters and her forgiveness of those who participated in the genocide seems to come without any internal struggle.  However, the pastor who saved Immaculée was not the saintly hero one might expect- the intense propaganda put forth by militant Hutus seemed to effect even her rescuer who began to speak of how he would help them escape when all the Tutsis were dead.  Pull no punches scenes like this make the book well worth reading for those interested in the Rwandan genocide.

Immaculée is a devout Catholic and regularly speaks to Catholic/Christian groups.  She prays throughout her time in hiding and more than once feels God leading her down the right path.  I think the story is strong enough to interest people of all and no religious faiths, but the religious slant may be a deal breaker for some would be readers.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust on Amazon

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures follows a fictional starlet from her childhood in Depression-era Wisconsin through her Hollywood career.  Although it is rich with details about the studio system, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures is not a salacious roman à clef.  Instead, one woman’s life is used to explore identity, career, and family.  

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures on Amazon

In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals.

Written by Dorothy’s granddaughter, Nothing Daunted reconstructs the events that led Dorothy and Rosamond to travel West and explores what they experienced in Colorado.  Educated at Smith but not trained as teachers, this was a step outside of their comfortable lives into an entirely different world.  In their late 20s and still unmarried, they were casting around for a direction in life.  Their time in Colorado would leave a lasting impact on both the women and the community they served.

Nothing Daunted is a glimpse at real life adventures which I think would be of particular interest to teachers and Coloradans.  

Nothing Daunted on Amazon

January 12, 1888 began as such a warm day that many children on the American prairie left for school without their hats, mittens, and sometimes even coats.  That afternoon a massive blizzard bore down on the Midwest without warning.  Many children were still in school and their teachers, often teenagers themselves, had to decide whether to chance losing their way home in the storm or risk freezing to death in a poorly insulated schoolhouses.  

I picked this book up because I’m a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. Although that book focuses on a dreadful winter eight years before the events of The Children’s Blizzard, both explore the challenges of a rough winter on the prairie in the days before reliable weather forecasts and gasoline powered snowplows.  This books fills the reader in on the meteorological causes of blizzards and the history of weather forecasting alongside real life stories of survival.  The Children’s Blizzard is worth picking up for anyone interested in extreme weather or the homesteading of the Great Plains.  

The Children’s Blizzard on Amazon

On April 20, 1999 18 year old Eric Harris and 17 year old Dylan Klebold came to school armed with four guns.  In an hour they killed thirteen people and injured 27 more.  Panicked students trapped in classroom phoned news stations.  An injured boy crawled out a shattered library window as TV cameras rolled.  A murdered teenage girl was named a martyr by some Evangelical Christians.  Goths and Marilyn Manson were blamed as a story spread about a group of loners called the Trench Coat Mafia.     

Written ten years after the events at Columbine, Dave Cullen’s Columbine draws on a range of interviews, police files, and materials left behind by the boys.  It reexamines the accounts that spread in the aftermath of the tragedy, parsing truth from myth.  Almost as much about crime reporting as it is about the killers, Columbine is worth picking up for anyone interested in true crime.  

Columbine on Amazon

The niece of Henry VIII, Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England for nine days.  A teenager at the time, her reign was engineered by members of the Privy Council to prevent Catholic Mary I from ruling England.  Mary eventually prevailed and Jane was jailed in the Tower of London.   Jane might have eventually been released from the Tower if not for Protestant rebellions that threatened Mary’s reign.  Lady Jane Grey was executed on February 12 1554, seven months after her short time as queen.

Ann Rinaldi uses these historical facts to create a novel in which Jane speaks to the reader from beyond the grave:  “I don’t know what they are going to tell you about me.  But be careful what you believe.”  The novel sticks tightly to the known history with limited embellishment.  Knowing the course of Jane’s life doesn’t take away from the book, the first person narrative keeps the story compelling

This book is categorized for younger readers, HarperCollins website says it is for ages 8+ or 12+.  Big Tudor fans who have read through all the recent adult novels about this period might find it a little too light, but I found it to be a quick and satisfying read about a little known woman from history.  

Nine Days a Queen on Amazon

The Americanization of Hawaii began with the arrival New England missionaries in 1820.  Within 80 years the descendents of these missionaries deposed the indigenous Queen of Hawaii and Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes traces these events in her typical chatty, irreverent style.  It is a quick, broad brush introduction to Hawaii’s often overlooked history. 

I’m more of a book-book person, but if you like audio books the voices for the audio book of Unfamiliar Fishes include Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Catherine Keener, Edward Norton, Keanu Reeves, Paul Rudd, Maya Rudolph, and John Slattery.

Unfamiliar Fishes on Amazon

In August of 1850 the Oatman family left Independence, Missouri and joined a Brewsterite wagon train bound for California.  Travelling through Arizona alone after the hardships of the trail broke up the wagon train, the Oatmans were attacked by the Yavapais.  Both parents and seven of the children were killed.  One son was left for dead but survived.  Fourteen year old Olive and seven year old Mary Ann were taken captive.  After a year of rough treatment from the Yavapais, the Oatman girls were traded to the Mohave who adopted them.  While with the Mohave, Olive and Mary Ann were given blue chin and arm tattoos that marked them as members of the tribe.  A drought led to starvation among the Mohave and Mary Ann died in 1855.  Although she was acculturated into the tribe, Olive was returned to white society when word of her existence reached the US Army post at Fort Yuma in 1856.  A bestselling book was published about her experiences and Olive spent several years on the lecture circuit before marrying a Texan banker and retiring from public life.

Margot Mifflin’s The Blue Tattoo investigates Olive’s life, working to separate fact from fiction.  Olive’s story was part of a popular genre of captive narratives, bestselling books about women who had been kidnapped by Native Americans.  Her story was filtered through a Methodist minister who wrote her biography and arranged her lecture tour.  The Blue Tattoo describes Olive as a woman caught between two cultures.  Embraced by the Mohave but eventually forced to leave them, Olive could never fully rejoin white society, her blue tattoo serving a permanent reminder of her time among the Natives.

The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman on Amazon

In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever. 

Recruited for her dance experience as a student of Merce Cunningham, Alma arrives in Cuba during the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest and is assumed to be an internationalist (friend of the revolution) rather than an apolitical dancer teacher.  The National Art Schools are neglected and Alma finds herself teaching her eager students without basic dance equipment.  The book leans more towards how the experience impacted the her own development rather than the lives of the dancers in the program,  but it is an interesting look as a small slice of life in Fidel’s Cuba.  

Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalists who has written about Latin America for American, British, and Latin American newspapers.  She is currently teaching at Princeton.  

PBS is showing a documentary on the design and administration of the Cuban National Arts Schools October 12.

Dancing with Cuba on Amazon

Dominique Moceanu bounded on to the world stage in 1996 as the youngest member of the “Magnificent Seven,” the US’s first Olympic gold medal winning women’s gymnastics team.  Today she is a mother of two and an author. Her memoir, Off Balance, starts with the story of her parent’s marriage and follows her life to the present day.

Previously I read Shawn Johnson’s Winning Balance.  For me, Off Balance is a much more interesting book. Dominique is ten years older than Shawn, which gives her more life experiences to write about and more distance her period as a teenage Olympian.  Dominique also seems to have had a much more challenging life than Shawn, from her tumultuous childhood to her discovery of an unknown sister at age 23.  

Off Balance is worth picking up if you’re a gymnastics fan …or if you want to find out more about that secret sister.

Off Balance on Amazon

The Go For the Gold Gymnasts, Dominique’s children’s books, on Amazon

Dominique’s Tumblr

At 8:46am on September 11, 2001 Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  At 8:55am workers in the South Tower were advised to remain in their offices as only the North Tower was affected.  Eight minutes later Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. Massive evacuation efforts began in both Towers as flights were grounded in New York City, Boston, Cleveland, and Washington.  At 9:37am Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. 

US airspace was closed for the first time in history at 9:45am.  Approximately 500 flights were en route to the US.  Those that were more than halfway to North America were almost all redirected to Canadian airports.  Of the 238 flights redirected to Canada, 39 landed in Gander, Newfoundland.  A town of 10,000 people suddenly had 6,000 visitors. 

The people of Gander and the surrounding towns put their lives on hold to care for the stranded passengers.  Striking bus drivers laid down their picket signs to ferry passengers to temporary accommodations in schools, legion halls, and churches.  Local people donated food and bed linens, opening their homes to strangers so passengers could shower.  Neighborhood stores let stranded passengers take whatever items they needed free of charge.  The Day the World Came to Town profiles the individuals involved and tells a heartwarming story amidst tragic events.

The Day the World Came to Town on Amazon

A Dutch painting of a young girl survives three and a half centuries through loss, flood, anonymity, theft, secrecy, even the Holocaust. This is the story of its owners whose lives are influenced by its beauty and mystery. Despite their unsatisfied longings, their own and others’ flaws, the girl in hyacinth blue has the power to engender love in all its human variety.

Looking through the cheap Kindle books I stumbled on this one which I read several years ago and think is worth checking out.  A series of short stories trace the fictional history of an imaginary painting by Vermeer from 1990s New Hampshire to the artist himself.  Published the same year as Girl with a Pearl Earring, Girl in Hyacinth Blue is about how a painting fits into the lives of its owners rather than the life of the subject of a painting.  I’d recommended it to those interested in art history who enjoy short stories.

I wasn’t sure what “Books into Film” on the Amazon page referred to, but apparently Girl in Hyacinth Blue was adapted into a TV movie called Brush with Fate starring Glenn Close in 2003.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue on Amazon