Spirit And Conscience
January 2002

Fighting-the-evil-of-ignorance reading list

photo/Howard Zehr (c. 2001, Good Books)

by Elaine Klaassen
It’s a new year and it feels like the same old same old. No one can explain the stupidity of wars and violence. At the same time, no one can explain the people whose lives and work undermine the stupidity of wars and violence. Unbelievably, there are still people in the world who trudge along with hope in their hearts doing beautiful work in spite of everything.
In a strange convergence of energy, books produced by three people I know and love have come out in the past year. (A fourth is finished but has yet to find a publisher.) All are non-fiction and have to do with subjects and themes that are really important to me. All demonstrate compassion for their subjects, the greatest spiritual gift a writer can give. In all of them, readers are introduced to people whose personal viewpoints and descriptions of their own particular experience whittle away at our stereotypes and preconceived notions. Reading will always change you, even if you can’t recount what you read.
I am proud and blessed to know these creators and want to share their excellent work with Southside Pride readers. (It’s kind of funny to drop names of people no one has ever heard of.)

What a Guy
David Reher and co-editor/translator Maria del Carmen Ferreyra have produced a riveting book excerpted from the extensive diaries of Ferreyra’s Argentinean great-grandfather, “The Gold Rush Diary of Ramón Gil Navarro” (University of Nebraska, 2000). I couldn’t put the book down. At first I was going to plow through it as a favor to David but then I got so engrossed I dropped everything and read it straight through. For all the voyeurism involved in reading someone’s personal diary, it’s the best chance you’ll ever have to see the world through someone else’s eyes—which is, of course, the foundation for compassion. And it’s the best perspective to steer you away from seeing things in black and white.
Having just turned 22 in 1849, Ramón Gil Navarro, from a prominent Argentinean family exiled in Chile, sailed for California to make his fortune in the gold mines. Three years later he returned to Chile and from there eventually returned to Argentina where he became a journalist and politician. The book contains entries written during the time Navarro was in California, all before he turned 25.
The diary reflects his boundless energy. He studied history and languages and practiced his guitar daily. (He called his guitar his “wife.”) At one point he set up a store and another time bought a ship, scrupulously taking care to provide double provisions to ensure passenger safety. He loved beautiful women as he loved the beauty of the land and fell into a number of romantic intrigues. The most fascinating thing to me about these California years was his chipper, aristocratic outlook in the face of physical hardship, disease, fires, floods and mud, as well as the brutality, “justice” (people were tried and hanged the same day), death, danger and violence at every turn—reading this diary makes it clear that American violence didn’t begin with Hollywood.
I didn’t think of him as good or bad, but rather as intense, alert, warm and decent—a man of action and a man of letters. Anyway, the point in reading someone’s most intimate thoughts is not to judge them. Instead of judging, you might call what you do, very naturally, an investigation of your own values. As far as Ramón Gil Navarro was concerned, his diary was between himself and God; he wrote passionately about how private his diary was and how confident he was that no one would ever read it.
In my opinion, his love for art and for the Catholic church was frighteningly sentimental, and his belief that he was especially protected by God seemed somewhat possessive and maybe arrogant. His attitude toward women lay somewhere between purely hormonal and patronizingly chivalrous. His willingness to grab his guns and muster an impromptu army to protect someone in trouble was inspiring even to my pacifist heart. I resonated with his love for American inventiveness and his hatred for its greed and ruthlessness.
It isn’t every day that the public gets to read primary sources! The translation shows off what a good writer Navarro was. Extensive and well-researched explanatory notes about the time period, a chronology of his life and the sweeping introduction are fascinating. This is a book that kids in high school and college history classes should read. It would be nice if some publisher would put it out as a cheap paperback.

“The Gold Rush Diary of Ramon Gil Navarro” can be ordered from the University of Nebraska Press at 1-800-755-1105 or from www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. It’s also in the University of Minnesota library.

The Romance of French Bread
With her odd, mystical, warm and anthropological outlook, Sara Mansfield Taber roamed the French countryside to see how local a loaf of French bread really is. And to find out why it tastes so good. And to meet the people who make it. And to find out in what way it is important to the French way of life. The result was “Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf,” (Beacon Press, 2001).
She found out a number of things: French bread is still pretty French, but not as local as it used to be; the French have passionate attitudes about bread; a loaf of delicious French bread no longer represents, to her, a leisurely lifestyle; and, good French bread is a work of art. At an enormously tranquil pace, Sara breaks the investigation into four parts, the ingredients in a loaf of French bread: salt, wheat, water and yeast. Sara describes a kind of holy sensuality in all the elements. The technical complexity of their production unfolds poetically over 239 pages and I felt as though I had shaken hands with the paludiers (salt harvesters), the miller, the organic wheat farmer, the guys who run the water works, the yeast manufacturer, and the baker himself. Sara’s journey begins with the most manual, labor-intensive salt gathering process in Guérande and ends at the least labor intensive, the gigantic yeast factory in Lille where the fanatically spotless plant is run by computers and a handful of employees.
Sara’s interviews demonstrate that even in our post industrial, impersonal world it is still possible to have a sense of necessary and meaningful work. The baker and the producers of each ingredient see themselves within a larger community, as contributors to culture and creators of something beautiful. They love the work on a sensory level, don’t take short cuts and practice a serious perfectionism. Bread production nourishes the workers—body and soul, it seems.
I thoroughly enjoyed the lyrical images and strong personalities juxtaposed with detailed information in this beautiful and unusual book. Did you know, for example, that the salt from Guérande, which some bakers swear by, contains trace minerals and helpful bacteria, sort of like yogurt? That the paludiers have been gathering salt by the same method for over a thousand years. That the water in France has higher allowable levels of nitrates than in the United States and lower allowable levels of chlorine? That the Lesaffre yeast company’s largest customer is China? That yeast is made from molasses? That in France there are six types of wheat flour—as opposed to our white and whole wheat—defined by the proportion of bran and wheat germ that remains at the conclusion of the milling process?
If you love people, food, poetry, commerce, environmental issues and sociology, you’ll like this book.

“Bread of Three Rivers” is available at Ruminator Books in St. Paul and Barnes and Noble in Edina. It’s also in the Hennepin County library system.

Victims’ Voices
Howard Zehr began his work in the field of criminal justice as an advocate for people accused of crimes who had no access to adequate representation. He went on to become a co-founder of the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP). His book of photo portraits and interviews, “Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims” (Good Books, 2001) comes out of his work in the restorative justice movement. It follows his similarly formatted work by the same publisher, “Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences” (1996).
For a long time, as an offender advocate, Howard felt that it was conflictive to know too much about the victims’ side of the story. He wrote in the afterword that “empathizing with victims would only confuse the issue emotionally, making it harder for me to advocate for offenders. These feelings are a natural consequence of the adversarial framework of our justice system.” Now he believes that concern for the needs of victims is a key element in restorative justice.
Throughout the interviews in “Transcending,” victims talk about what justice means to them. Punishment and revenge are not at the top of their list. More important is being heard and taken into account by the justice system. And even more important is having the perpetrator truly realize and feel the pain he or she caused.
Many of the people interviewed in “Transcending” had met, through victim-offender mediation, the person who had murdered their loved one or who had violently assaulted them. It is moving, to say the least, to hear them describe the sensation of forgiving that person. The stories are all different, of course; not every offender repents, not every victim forgives.
In both “Transcending” and “Doing Time” there is much insight into human strength and weakness. These are all people who have experienced an unusual amount of pain. And they’ve all reached a spiritual place that allows them to go on living. Both offenders and victims talk about reaching a level of growth in which they cease to define themselves by their crimes or their victimization.
Zehr, as we used to call him when he was a college history major, has taken the time to know these people, to hear their stories and serve as a mirror for them to see themselves as valuable and respected. I appreciate it that someone in the world is bringing these overlooked voices into the public arena.

“Transcending” and “Doing Time” can be ordered from Good Books at 1-800-762-7171 or from www.goodbks.com. Or order through your favorite bookstore. “Doing Time” is in the Minneapolis Public Library.

Blood, Sweat and Cotton
Karin Haag’s manuscript, “Blood, Sweat and Cotton: Two Hundred Years on a Georgia Plantation,” is about her neighborhood’s history—when she and her husband, both historians, found out that a plantation had preceded the subdivision where they have lived for 30 years, they started to trace its history in courthouse records. The book is about daily life on the Cedar Creek plantation—stories of people involved in cotton production. Karin said she learned that “the large amount of wealth produced for this country by African Americans is still not recognized. And that “we cannot understand our racial history until we understand cotton and the cruel system used to produce it.”
I hope she starts looking for a publisher soon.