Q&A Washington Independent Review of Books

The author discusses Correspondence Course: The Bathsua Project, her multi-layered debut novel, with Harriet Dwinell. Washington Independent Review of Books, December 6, 2014.

The Year of Magical Thinking, the title of Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir written in response to her husband's death, well describes Rhoda Trooboff’s complex debut novel. Correspondence Course, The Bathsua Project follows a “magical year” that takes Dee Young, a retired English teacher, from paralyzing grief at the death of her husband, Dan, to acceptance of the past and hope for the future.
Dee does not undertake this journey alone. Clinging to the possibility of reaching Dan in cyberspace, she sends obsessive emails to their joint email account. At the same time, she embarks upon a secret correspondence with Bathsua Makin, a 17th-century schoolteacher and tutor to one of the daughters of King Charles I. This correspondence begins innocently, if supernaturally, enough. Soon, in a niche in the Library of Congress’ Main Reading Room, the two women begin exchanging notes that bring their lives to life.

Bathsua Makin isn’t a household name. How did you discover her?
I first learned about Bathsua in the 1980s, when I was preparing to teach British Literature at National Cathedral School for Girls. Who were the women who deserved to be in the English literary canon before Jane Austen and the Brontës? I wondered. So Correspondence Course started with a question. I soon found myself a 17th-century women’s literary history hobbyist. My first notes about Bathsua were dated 1985, when I read Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Bathsua lived during exciting, stressful times in English history — the Civil War, the regicide of Charles I (1649), the Plague Year of 1665, and the Great Fire of London (1666).
In 2001, I discovered Frances Teague’s excellent Bathsua Makin, Woman of Learning, which carefully documents Bathsua’s accomplishments as a teacher, linguist, and educational theorist. Teague’s book also provides excellent contextual material and points out poignant archival documentation of her personal life. Dry stuff, perhaps, but suggestive of a rich, compelling emotional life. I could hear so many dramatic stories behind every fact I learned.

Given your fascination with 17th-century history, how did the coupling of Bathsua’s 17th-century story with Dee’s modern-day life come about?
Confluence. Fascinated as I was by this obscure historical figure, wondering what lay behind the recorded facts, and fretting about bringing to life an obscure and ordinary woman living in a time of enormous national upheaval, I found myself, like others, unhinged in the year after 9/11, our annus horribilis. Might I explore Bathsua’s life through the lens of a modern DC woman who also lived at a time of enormous national upheaval? Parallels — correspondences — between Bathsua’s life and Dee’s started presenting themselves.

Would you call Correspondence Course an epistolary novel?
Absolutely. The novel begins with emails — our substitute for handwritten letters. But I’m nostalgic about “real” letters — the long, discursive, handwritten kind! So I decided to have Dee exchange old-fashioned letters with Bathsua — and at the same time continue to email Dan. During the 10 years or so that it took me to write Correspondence Course, I observed that email was totally changing the nature of letter writing. So I knew that I had to use both the old epistolary form — letters — and the new one — emails — as well as their enclosures, attachments, and mailboxes. Perhaps Correspondence Course is an elegy to the lost art of letter writing.

When only a few facts are known about Bathsua’s life, how were you able fill your novel with vibrant scenes that bring her alive?
Both research and imagination were crucial — and interdependent. Real-life events helped me create an appropriate timeline and context for Bathsua’s life. I did a lot of library research on many topics — the precarious lives of newborns and their mothers in the 17th century; the way schools functioned; the last days of King Charles and his precocious daughter Elizabeth; the history of Bedlam Hospital, where Bathsua’s brilliant father spent his final days. I spent valuable time in London at the Museum of London and walking in the neighborhood where Bathsua spent her childhood. The office building at No. 30 Saint Mary Axe Street, now the second tallest building in London and known fondly as the Gherkin, rises beside Saint Andrew Undershaft, where Bathsua first taught in her father’s schoolroom. These are only a few examples. All this research led to thrilling imaginings.

When Dee asks Bathsua about her relationship with her sister, Bathsua doesn’t answer directly but invents five amazing fairy tales that hint at it. And when Dee explores her relationship with her own aging father, she doesn’t analyze it, but examines it in the course of teaching “King Lear” to her students. Can you talk about this process?
I learned that the night before King Charles was executed, he was visited by his daughter Princess Elizabeth. She had been Bathsua’s pupil — a precocious, talented teenager under house arrest when Bathsua taught her Greek, probably by having her study and translate classical tragedies like Sophocles’ play “Electra.” Elizabeth was eventually taken off to a damp, drafty castle on the Isle of Wight, where she died several months later. I found myself imagining the last tutoring session, the last time Bathsua and her star pupil saw each other. Those imaginings became “A Play in the Style of a Sophoclean Tragedy.” There was no historical record of that tutoring session, of course, but there is evidence that Princess Elizabeth was familiar with “Electra.” And after Elizabeth’s death, she was compared to that ancient doomed princess.
Similarly, I imagined both Dee’s and Bathsua’s elderly fathers growing more and more problematic — now we call the condition senile dementia — and I decided to tackle their last days fictionally. I don’t know why Bathsua’s father died in an asylum for the insane, but I tried to imagine how that might have come to pass in 1635. In the case of Dee’s father, as you said, I used the device of the literary parallel to Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Dee’s teaching the play as the key to unlock that sad time. In both cases, and throughout the novel, I sought fictional ways to explore huge crises in the personal lives of these two women.

At one point, Dee talks about how easy it is to present real life as fiction. “Rearrange some details, add others, subtract something here and there, assign characters fictitious names, and poof.” Is this what you did? Are you concerned that people might see your novel as memoir? Does it matter?
I’ve been intrigued for years by texts that inhabit the blurry, porous, contested borders between fiction and memoir and between fiction and nonfiction. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried may have sparked this interest. Other novels I love do this, too. Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name and Laurent Binet’s HHhH, both of which I’ve reviewed [for the Independent], are two such novels. So, too, is Zola’s L’Oeuvre, about the early Impressionist painters living and working in Paris.
Writing teachers say, “Write about what you know.” This makes huge sense. And I think creativity is like the workings of recombinant DNA, or like playing with a bag of Legos: Artists, scientists, composers, writers disassemble what they’ve been given in life and recombine that raw material — a little bit of this moment, that gesture, this emotion, that fragment of memory or melody or event or place or person — dislodging bits and pieces from their original situations and transforming and combining them with other bits into a work that is wholly new. So I’m okay with friends noticing bits of my life in Correspondence Course…and perhaps a few bits of their own lives, too.

Ending a book that deals with the supernatural can pose problems for an author. Without needing a spoiler alert, can you talk about the way you wrestled with this issue?
I fussed over this for a long time. As I approached drafting the last chapter, I was considering three possible endings. I then put the manuscript away for about a year. I knew I had to end Correspondence Course somehow, whether it worked or not. (Writing teachers also say, “Don’t get it right; get it written!”) Finally, I chose the ending that seemed easiest to write, perhaps because it’s the most plausible. I’m pretty satisfied with this ending, but I can still imagine ending the novel differently.

What’s next?
Well, I’m a children’s book publisher here in DC (Tenley Circle Press). I’m thinking about a book for young readers about a spunky, smart girl who grows up to be someone like Bathsua Makin!

Harriet Dwinell, a frequent contributor to the Washington Independent Review of Books, has written for a number of local and national publications.

Q&A Washington Independent Review of Books

Review of Correspondence Course

Review by Roger Brunyate (Amazon Top500 reviewer)
of Correspondence Course: The Bathsua Project 

The Year of Magical Communication

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.

Format: Paperback

On June 22, 2002, Dee Young writes an eMail to her husband Dan, the first of a long series of letters and other documents that make up this unusual book. The reader soon ignores the mechanics, and this rhythm of casual communication, short notes dashed off at all hours of the day or night, becomes quite natural, and very much in the moment. In the moment, too, are her references to the outside world -- the legacy of 9/11, the Beltway Sniper, the run-up to war in Iraq -- to anchor the correspondence in reality. Which is necessary, since it soon becomes clear that Dan is dead, and the eMails are Dee's way of conjuring herself through grief.

Dee's magical thinking takes a further turn one day in the Library of Congress. A former English teacher, she is researching the life of Bathsua Makin, a [real] 17th-century Englishwoman who lived through the eventful times of the Civil War, the Plague, and the Great Fire of London. Makin was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and a pioneer of the education of women; for a while, she served as tutor to the King's daughter. Finding a handwritten note from Bathsua tucked into the library copy of her book, Dee replies. And so begins an exchange of letters across the centuries, using a niche in the classics section as a drop box. After a few letters comparing their different eras, written in deliciously contrasting styles, the two women agree to follow the example of Boccaccio's Decameron and exchange longer stories. While reflecting different aspects of their personal lives, these span many genres, including memoir, bedtime tales for children, historical fiction, and even a pastiche of Sophoclean drama.

Dee Young and Bathsua Makin were both extraordinary teachers. So clearly was the author, Rhoda Trooboff. I got this book from one of her former students at the school in Washington where she used to teach. My friend looks back with awe and gratitude at her mentor's example, and I can well see why. She is human, approachable, and caring. As a writer, she has an extraordinary range, but is always lucid and enjoyable. And her knowledge is phenomenal. The quotations that dot the book like raisins in a cake may be in English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, the last two in their original scripts, untransliterated and not always translated. The authors she cites include Homer, Ovid, Cicero, Donne, Dryden, Boswell, Austen, Thoreau, Pound, both Eliot and Elliot, Borges, Marguerite Yourcenar, Margaret Attwood, and dozens more. To read any part of this book is to come into contact with a remarkable mind applying itself to subjects that are personal and very, very real, having to do with marriage, motherhood, illness, grief, and security in an unstable world. It is a book that one might want to keep by one's bedside to dip into at random.

But there's the rub. Dee Young (and Trooboff too, I suspect), is essentially an essayist. This sequence of magical letters does not really read as a two-way correspondence, let alone a novel. There is very little narrative through-line, and the sheer range of the many pieces of writing that it contains detracts from the book's inherent unity.

All the same, Dee Young's year of magical communication succeeds in its endeavor. She shuts down her husband's eMail account. Her correspondence with Bathsua comes to a graceful end. "Dear Self and Reader," she says in her final entry, dated June 23, 2003, "My annus horribilis has become my annus mirabilis." Literature and language have worked their miracle. And so, with a quotation from Chekhov and a poem by May Sarton, she closes, woman and scholar to the end.

Our newest book!

It is summer 2002 in DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and Dee Young is heartsick after her husband Dan’s death. Dee finds herself conducting two secret correspondences: one-way emails to Dan and two-way letters with Bathsua Reginald Makin (1600-1675), a Londoner who — like Dee — was a teacher, writer, wife, and mother. From Dee’s annus horribilis comes a celebration of the endurance of love, the evolution of grief, and the healing power of work.

Available from independent bookshops, big online booksellers, and Tenley Circle Press.

Review: Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch

Washington Independent Review of Books 

My Life in Middlemarch 

By Rebecca Mead

Crown Publishers

294 pages

9780307984760

Review published January 28, 2014

When asked her opinion of George Eliot’s newly published Middlemarch in 1873, Emily Dickinson famously replied, "What do I think of Glory?" Half a century later Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." In 2007 A.S. Byatt called Middlemarch “arguably the greatest English novel ever.”

In My Life in Middlemarch, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead agrees — and goes further, demonstrating how a passionate attachment to a great book helps us understand our own lives. Although this genre-bridging study of the novel, its author, and their lifelong impact on Mead will appeal particularly to Eliot and Middlemarch enthusiasts (including this reviewer), the work may well persuade other readers to join their ranks.

For a clear, elegant précis of My Life in Middlemarch, read Mead’s 2011 New Yorker essay, “Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot Teaches Us”. For the in-depth meditation on the novel, the author, and the power and pleasure of reading a great book again and again at all stages of life, read Mead’s book cover to cover.

Like Middlemarch, the book examines the complexities of love and marriage, of ambition and disappointment, of youthful idealism and mature sufferance. Unlike Middlemarch, however, it is under 300 pages (Middlemarch is more than twice as long); also unlike Eliot’s masterpiece its stream-of-consciousness structure allows Mead to roam freely and intuitively among the genres of memoir, biography, literary history and analysis. When we close My Life in Middlemarch we know a bit about Mead and a great deal about the life and work of Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans), her admirers and her intimate circle.

Mead has taken seriously E.M. Forster’s famous dictum, “Only connect.” My Life in Middlemarch convincingly links the novel’s panoramic plot, fully-drawn characters, and profoundly sympathetic themes on the one hand with events and people in the lives of Eliot and Mead herself on the other. Mead connects Eliot’s early passionate theological inquiries and brief attraction to the philosopher Herbert Spencer to the fictional Dorothea Brooke’s youthful idealism and disastrous first marriage to the icy, much older scholar Edward Casaubon. Mead also acknowledges parallels between the Eliot/Dorothea narratives and her own eager escape to Oxford from the provincial town of her English childhood, as well as her early romance with a senior American academic. Similarly, in her own fulfilling mid-life marriage, Mead sees shadows of Eliot’s long, loving, mid-life quasi-marriage to George Henry Lewes and the mature Dorothea-Ladislaw love story that blooms late in the novel. Mead also notes similarities between her love for her own three stepsons and Eliot’s maternal devotion to Lewes’s three grown sons.

Mead apparently has read and reread everything in and about Middlemarch and by and about Eliot.  As a result, Mead seems to channel the wise, sympathetic, middle-aged Victorian voice that intones sentences such as this, beloved of Eliot-Middlemarch enthusiasts: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

Readers unfamiliar with Middlemarch, seekers of great-books-style plot summaries and Wikipedia-style literary biographies might be disappointed by My Life in Middlemarch. So might be readers eager for yet another tell-all mid-life celebrity memoir. However, this contemplative, restrained work of biography, reporting, literary criticism, and memoir will delight those of us who favor old-school reportage buoyed by old-fashioned research methods: careful primary- and secondary-source reading, persistent archival study, pursuit of unlikely tangents, closely observed site visits, and attentive face-to-face interviews.

Mead’s thoughtful, tenderly erudite love song to a book and author will please those of us who delight in reassurances that great works of fiction, well-read, help us understand our own lives. Probably best appreciated after at least a first reading of Eliot’s classic, My Life in Middlemarch will inspire many of us to read Middlemarch again. And again. And again. It will, I hope, introduce more readers to this novel, this glory, one of the few English novels for grownups, arguably the greatest English novel ever.

Rhoda Trooboff, a longtime literature and writing teacher at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., is a publisher of children's books at Tenley Circle Press, Ltd.

Review: Hannah Kent's Burial Rites

October 4, 2013. Washington Independent Review of Books.www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/burial-rites:

Burial Rites

By Hannah Kent

Little, Brown and Company

320 pp.

978031624319

Published September 10, 2013

Reviewed by Rhoda Trooboff

Iceland is famous for its wild natural beauty: volcanic mountains, glaciers, cascading waterfalls and boiling geysers beneath a surreally massive sky of rushing clouds by day and trembling aurora borealis by night. In her haunting first novel, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent stunningly captures this setting and recreates the life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir (1795-1830), the last woman executed in Iceland for a capital crime.

The historical record is familiar to Icelanders: On a spring night in 1828, house servant Agnes woke neighbors with word that Natan Ketilsson’s Illugastir farmhouse was ablaze with Natan and his friend Pétur Jónsson trapped inside. When the fire was extinguished, it was discovered that the two men had been stabbed to death. Agnes was arrested along with two others, the farmhand Fridrik Sigurdsson and his teenaged girlfriend Sigrídur Godmundsdóttir. Sigrídur was sentenced to life imprisonment. Agnes and Fridrik received death sentences and were assigned to forced labor with local farm households pending their executions. On January 12, 1830, they were beheaded on a small hill in Vatnsdalshólar in the Húnavatn district. Their executioner, appointed by District Commissioner Björn Blöndal, was Natan’s brother, Gudmundur Ketilsson. The National Museum of Iceland preserved the execution block and axe, and a memorial stone marks the execution site.

Close observation and research by Kent, an Australian in her late twenties, are evident throughout the novel. Primary source documents accompany what Kent calls “fictional likelihoods,” which were based on her year spent in Iceland as a high school exchange student, her subsequent visits there and, most important, her rich empathetic imagination.            

Among these “fictional likelihoods” are vivid portrayals of the real participants. In Kent’s hands Agnes, an orphaned servant, becomes a reminder of Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield; Natan, an herbalist/farmer, becomes a shaman and Agnes’s on-again-off-again lover; and Rósa Gudmundsdóttir, one of Iceland’s most famous poets, becomes another of Natan’s lovers. In the novel, District Commissioner Blöndal takes responsibility for all bureaucratic elements of the trial, the forced labor assignment, and the execution; Thorvardur “Tóti” Jónsson, the young clergyman assigned to be Agnes’s confessor, elicits her backstory and moral/psychological musings. The real Fridrik, Sigrídur, and the farm family that housed Agnes until her execution are all brought to life as well.

Besides containing convincing character development, Burial Rites also depicts Iceland’s starkly beautiful, sparsely-peopled landscape. The novel’s treatment of character and setting is structurally significant as well. Against the backdrop of the open natural landscape, Kent situates many of the novel’s scenes in badstofas — traditional communal sleeping rooms — where the ever-present supporting characters establish an atmosphere of oppressive, judgmental social cohesion. Emerging from this stifling communal life are the few individuals — principally Reverend Tóti, the farm wife Margrét and, of course, Agnes herself — who ambiguate societal norms and pit individual moral dilemmas against ethical standards.

Given her large cast, Kent has wisely chosen to simplify some characters and complicate others. Assigned appropriately monochromatic treatments are the greedy, immoral Fridrik; the officiously bureaucratic Blöndal; the enigmatic Rósa; and the scheming Sigrídur. More multidimensional are the manipulative, amoral Natan; the spiritually and sexually anxious Reverend Tóti; the conflicted Margrét; and Margrét’s squabbling daughters Steina and Lauga. These characters help the reader understand and sympathize with Agnes and her decision to kill Natan.

Kent deftly knits the story arc from multiple points of view, interior monologues, dialogue-rich scenes, confessions, flashbacks and official documents. Shifting the narrative focus among various characters ultimately presents a fully rounded portrait of Agnes herself, with the most lyrical writing — prose poems, in fact — coming in her interior monologues. Ultimately the reader emerges from the novel with a powerful sense of Agnes’s full humanity — her capacity for suffering and wisdom, for vulnerability and strength, for violence and love.

Readers may find early 19th-century Iceland’s rugged way of life utterly unfamiliar and its place names and patronymic naming patterns maddeningly mind-boggling. Even though Australia is about as far away from Iceland as it’s possible to be, Kent is fully at home in this world and this novel and invites her reader to be, too. It is no hyperbole to put Burial Rites in the same company as Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Ingmar Bergman’s “Virgin Spring” and Akira Kurasawa’s “Rashomon.”

Poets W.H. Auden and Louis McNeice traveled together in the 1930’s to Iceland. Like many who have visited the island before and since, they were moved deeply by what they saw and wrote about it. I think they would have admired Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites. Perhaps the last lines of Auden’s “Journey to Iceland” are an apt tribute to this brilliant first novel:

Tears fall in all the rivers. Again the driver

Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

Upon his deadly journey; again the writer

Runs howling to his art.

Review: Monica Wesolowska's Holding Silvan: A Brief Life

Holding Silvan: A Brief Life

Monica Wesolowska

Hawthorne Books 

202 pages, paperback

Midway through her breathtaking memoir, Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, Monica Wesolowska recounts an incident from her childhood: On an ordinary weeknight after her mother had left for choir practice her father began serving dessert, “cutting and distributing as equally as he could to four kids. He passed the first piece to me. I watched him cut the next. It was a good-looking piece, too, and as I would relate it to myself later, I thought, I will be polite and pass this down to Katya. Abruptly, my father changed the position of his knife. ‘For holding out for a bigger piece than your sister,’ he said, ‘you get half.’ I howled at the injustice. . . . [M]y father wanted me to accept that, even if the next piece was smaller, my life was fine. He wanted me to be grateful for whatever I got. . . . For being good, for caring about others, for suffering enough myself on behalf of those others, I thought I deserved at least the same as everybody else.” 

In clear and transcendent prose, Wesolowska urges gratitude for life’s gifts even in the direst of circumstances. After a long labor she delivers her firstborn, a beautiful, full-term, seemingly healthy baby boy. Her joy is palpable, even as she admits that he is limp and silent and the neonatologists whisk him off “for observation.” Soon, however, Wesolowska and her husband discover what the medical team fears: during labor and delivery the brain of Baby Boy Wesolowska -- Silvan Jerome Fisher -- has suffered a catastrophic insult -- oxygen deprivation -- that leaves him with irreversible brain damage. 

Holding Silvan begins with an epigraph by Václav Havel: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The doctors at first “keep holding out hope like little bits of candy,” but soon they name Silvan’s condition: severe hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. Wesolowska and her husband must decide what is in Silvan’s best interest. “Where’s the line? When’s enough?” Wesolowska asks. “How long can his life be artificially sustained?” 

The narrative arc of Holding Silvan dips into Wesolowska’s past -- including lessons from her Catholic upbringing and reflections on the deaths of family and friends -- and  moves forward to her current children, but it centers on the weeks of Silvan’s life. Doctors and nurses as well as Wesolowska’s husband, family members, clergy, and friends are honestly and sympathetically drawn. The memoir unflinchingly addresses the profound themes of the “good death” and the moral and ethical choices facing patients, their caregivers, clergy, and medical professionals in the age of modern medicine. Wesolowska’s honest, elegant prose places Holding Silvan firmly in the company of Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. 

Above all else Holding Silvan is a stunning meditation on love. “All [Silvan has] known in life is love,” Wesolowska writes:

“Since he came into the world through love, since he’s been surrounded by it, I’d like him to leave knowing nothing else but love. . . . We love him as a newborn, his loamy-scented head, the soft heft of his thighs, the tiny thump of the heart in his chest -- and we love the dark-haired man with the cleft chin whom we are still in the habit of imagining he will become.”

“I bend forward to kiss his forehead, then his nose, then the space by his ear that is free of medical tape. And then I cannot stop. I kiss the front of his neck below the breathing tube, those warm wrinkles, and the side of his neck, so smooth, so smooth, and his shoulder, and creases at the edge of his armpit and across his naked sternum and down towards his belly button, all the while making smacking noises, eating him up. When I raise my head I am renewed. . . . The mother and grandmother at the next crib stare in surprise. ‘That was quite a kiss,’ the grandmother says. ‘Well, once I started I couldn’t stop,’ I say. My time is limited. This is a mother’s love distilled.”

“A Reasonable Proposal” Editorial 17 January 2013. The Garrett County, Maryland REPUBLICAN Newspaper:

While President Obama's proposed gun legislation is clearly facing an uphill battle with Congress, not to mention the National Rifle Association, the three major components of his package seem reasonable, and do not appear to be a serious challenge to, or outright snubbing of, the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The three pieces of Obama's proposal are: the introduction of criminal background checks on all gun sales, the renewal of the ban on military assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines and armor-piercing ammunition.

So what is the big deal about background checks? These are done routinely for various reasons, such as employment or when applying to work in almost any capacity with children. One of the NRA's claims is that not enough is being done to identify and treat mentally ill persons who end up with weapons, which is probably a fact. Would not such a background check help immensely with that identification, in addition to determining whether or not the individual has a criminal background?

The second piece will likely be the toughest to enact, since it is viewed by pro-gun folks as an attempt to "take away our guns!" But as noted over and over, assault-style weapons are unnecessary in nearly every circumstance – certainly for hunting purposes. And if the Second Amendment affords us the right to own assault weapons, then should it not follow that private citizens should be permitted to own bazookas and mortars?

For similar reasons, the third piece seems reasonable. Having the capability of rapidly firing 100 shots or more with a gun is unnecessary, and there is no question that armor-piercing bullets are "needed" only to kill persons wearing bullet-proof protection – usually law enforcement officials.

The claim by some gun enthusiasts is that they feel they must be armed in the event of an attempted government take over. [Chuckle.] If the government would ever make that decision, no private arsenal of any kind or size would be enough to stop tanks, flame throwers, drone missiles, etc.

Using the most recent figures available, among 75 nations the United States ranks 10th in the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 population. Among those ranked ahead of us are the highly unstable, Third World nations of Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, and Swaziland.

For the purposes of comparison, it is striking that the number of murders by firearms (not counting suicides) in the U.S. in 2009 was 9,146, while the number for Great Britain, where there is fairly rigid gun control, was 648. Since Britain's population is 1/5 that of U.S., this is equivalent to 48 times fewer murders than in the U.S.

It is only fair to point out that the rate of gun murder in the U.S. is at its lowest point since at least 1981. The high point was in 1993. However, non-fatal gun injuries from assaults increased last year for the third straight year, and that rate is the highest since 2008.

Regardless of the falling rate of gun murders, when innocent children are among those being slaughtered, the president and Congress absolutely must act to change things.