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
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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