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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 4, 2003)
Winter Reading 2003-2004 orful anecdotes, nicely captures how the first denizens of a hot and acrid pile of rock transformed it into Eden. — Valerie Brown A Sign of Respect Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. OSU Press, 2003. Paperback, $17.95. D on’t skip the short preface. Here the author describes her first childhood view of a snowflake through a hand lens. It taught her to see something many of us never see: another level of complexity to natural beauty that lies, as she puts it, “just at the limits of or- dinary perception.” And because it is essential to her world view and her approach to knowledge, Kimmerer lets us know right at the start about her Potawatomi heritage. Three decades later, she tells us, she almost always has a lens around her neck: “Its cord tangles with the leather thong of my medicine bag, in metaphor and in reality.” Both scientific and indigenous ways of knowing inform this book. The science is real, and the pages are littered with botanical names. It would be hard to avoid. You can’t do science with- out naming things and, because few peo- ple pay attention to mosses, few have common names. Besides, as the author reminds us, in the Native American tradi- tion all beings are recognized as persons, and all have their own names. It is a sign of respect to call a thing by its name. “Words and names are the ways we humans build relationships,” she says, “not only with each other but with animals and plants.” Thus Gathering Moss is much more than a uniquely readable and entertaining natural history of mosses. “I want to tell the mosses’ story,” Kimmerer says, “since their voices are little heard.” I checked the library, and sure enough there are very few books about mosses intended for a general reader. But as the action switches from the Adirondacks to the Willamette Valley and back again, as well as from the botanical to the personal, this book is also about fami- ly, community, human rapaciousness and the power of plants to heal a damaged world. — Rachel Foster Border Tales Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family by Charles Bowden. Simon and Schuster, 2002. Hardcover, $27. I f you’ve read James Ellroy’s hard- crime novels, you may be practiced at following multiple strands of myriad plots. I had to learn how to read this densely packed book with its many facts, characters, conflicts and complicated inter- relationships. Nonfiction writer Charles Bowden has written about the American Southwest, the environment and Mexico for the last 25 years. He lives in Tuscon, has written for Tuscon Weekly, has pub- lished 11 books and won the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Like Ellroy, Bowden’s style is exactly the right way, the only way, perhaps, to tell the many-layered stories that make up the true tale of the 1995 murder of Bruno Jordan, brother of the DEA intelligence chief in El Paso. A story about family, drugs and society, the book begins in the border town but leads inexorably into the ubiquitous Mexican drug business, impli- cating many characters and destroying others. The book profiles one of the least- known (in this country) but most ruthless and successful of Mexico’s drug kingpins, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who died in a hospital following surgery in 1997. Some say he outlived his usefulness to the politi- cians, including Vicente Fox and others in high places. It’s clear his death didn’t stop drug trafficking across the border. Bowden details the decline of Bruno Jordan’s drug agent brother, Phil, who becomes so embroiled in his investigation that he ignores orders to stop working the case from both his own and the Mexican government. Why was Bruno killed, if not to send a message to him? Phil asks. He had no known connections to Carrillo Fuentes’ Gulf cartel. The answer drags most of Phil’s large Mexican family into the bottomless cesspool of drug politics, along with politicians and law enforcers on both sides of the border. Bowden’s impassioned search for the truth requires not only great courage but also dogged perseverance. Bowden respects language as a poet might, and he uses word power to shape his vision of the big picture with both literary precision and soulful emotion. He wants readers to share his understanding of what happens down by the river, where “the unwritten history” of two nations joined together through mutual corruption is “erased as soon as it happens to hit the page.” Read this book, and you’ll have a notion of the futility this justice-seeking journalist lives with every day. — Lois Wadsworth Eugene Middle East Peace Group 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 invites the community to its Fourth Annual Festival of Light & Renewal An all family event celebrating Channukah & Eid el Fitr Saturday, Dec. 13 • 5-9pm LCC Main Campus Cafeteria Hafla (feast) 5 Children’s Activities Music by Eugene Peace Choir, Jonathan Seidel & Maha Hamide Music & Traditional Dancing by Troupe Amerikanistan & L’Chaim Dancers A benefit for the Eugene Middle East Peace Group • $5-25 sliding scale donation Raffle Benefit for Physicians for Human Rights - Israel F OR MORE INFORMATION CALL 345-2682 The Festival of Light & Renewal is co-sponsored by the LCC Multi-Cultural Center, Temple Beth Israel, UO Muslim Student Association, Eugene Islamic Cultural Center, LCC Jewish Student Union, Jewish Community Relations Council and the LCC Culinary Institue DECEMBER 4, 2003 21
