Archive

Tag Archives: Reviews Of Books In My Collection

Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel – A Book Review

September 9, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
Leave a comment
This is a great read, not only about Galileo & his daughters, but also about the rigid, religious era they lived in.

><

Galileo’s Daughter; A Drama of Science, Faith & Love

 

><

Galileo Galilei, that illustrious 17th Century  scientist, and devout Catholic, confined his eldest daughter from the age of thirteen (1616)  to San Matteo convent in Arcetri.  His daughter, Virginia was deemed unmarriageable because her father had never married her mother, the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice.
Virginia (Sister Maria Celeste) lived out her life in poverty and seclusion in the convent (Order of St Clare) , as did her younger sister, Livia. Unlike Virginia, very little is heard from, or about, the “silent and strange” Livia.   Virginia  lost all her teeth by age 27  because of her lack of a nutritious diet.  It is worth reading  ‘Galileo’s Daughter’ by Dava Sobel, a gifted author, for more on these remarkable lives.  We know so much about Galileo and Virginia because of the correspondence between the two. 
Ms Sobel also covers the horror of Galileo’s life and his banishment to house arrest in Ravenna, at the hands of the Holy Inquisition headed by Pope Paul V.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 9 September 2011

><

Previous post:  Nuns: An Endangered Species?

‘Banished Babies’ by Mike Milotte – A Book Review

July 25, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
2 Comments

The book ‘Banished Babies’ by Mike Milotte, is about babies born in Ireland to unmarried mothers.   But we now know, banished babies were also born to illegitimate mothers in  New Zealand, Australia, America and England. More countries where this practise took place may yet come to light.  Australian Banished Babies want an apology. You might say “But this happened last Century”.  The thing is, the wounds left in these heartbreaking cases, never heal.

><

See Adoption: The Open Wound That Never Heals

><

‘Banished Babies’ were those babies taken from their unmarried mothers at birth.  I believe that the word ‘taken’ in this instance is a misnomer. It should read ‘ripped’, because that’s how it felt to the young mothers. I know this personally from my own mother’s case. This ‘baby snatching’ as others call it, was not for altruistic purposes; rather it was following Catholic dogma issued by the Vatican’s Office of the Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition).   It was certainly not for the welfare of the infants, or their mothers.  No.  It was to remove these babies from their mothers who were seen by the Catholic Church as sinners who had to be punished. In the nuns’ minds, indoctrinated by the Church, the babies themselves were being saved from the clutches of satan and were ‘sold’, mostly to wealthy American couples, who, it was stipulated, had to be of the Catholic Faith.  It was strictly enforced by the Church, that neither mother or infant would ever be able to trace each other, and this caused even more heartbreak decades later.   (See my post about Philomena Lee). Large sums of money were exchanged for the privilege of ‘buying a newborn’, donation being the euphemism used. Ironic, isn’t it?  So much of that wealth the Church received, is now being paid out to even more victims of the Catholic Church; in the form of compensation  to  thousands of families whose children were sexually abused by paedophile priests.

><

For all the mothers and babies who never found each other

><

Between the end of WWII and 1965 more than 2,200 Irish infants were adopted out of the country, mostly by hopeful parents in the U.S. All the adoptive parents were, by mandate of the church in Ireland, Catholic. Until the late 1990’s and the work of Irish journalist Michael Milotte this was a fact known to few in Ireland and fewer in the U.S. In Ireland Milotte’s work, emphasising both the emotional and physical brutalisation of the birth mothers and the country’s loss of vital human capital, led to a great furor.

><

In 2001, the Washington Post reported:

Milotte, a senior reporter for the Irish television network RTE, says life was particularly hard for the mothers in these convents, which were largely self-sustaining thanks to the women’s labour but also received public funding. In some cases, he says, the priests and nuns received money from the adoptive parents, who paid “confinement and medical costs” associated with their child’s birth.

“Where did the money go?” he wonders. “It sustained the people who ran the institutions in a manner they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.”  But money likely wasn’t the primary motivator, he says. Rather, there was a demand for children, and many of the nuns believed they were doing God’s work by sending some of Ireland‘s social outcasts to a better life in the land of opportunity.

“They thought they were doing good,” says Milotte in a phone interview from Dublin. “The fact that people might have rights didn’t enter into their thinking. They thought they knew best. If, in doing the best thing, there was an opportunity to make money, that was all the better.”  In those postwar days, it was not uncommon for Irish children to be adopted by U.S. military and government employees living abroad, Milotte says.

The birth mothers of these children spent their pregnancies and post-natal, pre-adoption lives in varioushomes, often convents, for girls and women who were seen by the conservative Catholic culture as shame-worthy moral degenerates. The horrific conditions that these women underwent was recently dramatized in the movie the Magdelene Sisters.

><

 

Milotte spoke with NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling upon release of his book Banished Babies in May of 1998:

Many of these women were seen as the next thing to prostitutes, and were very often told that when their identities became known. Even when girls got pregnant, very often they didn’t get married even if — because there was the stigma attached to having had sex before marriage. So even where a relationship endured, the child would be given up for adoption. And it was all done in secret.

I am one of those kids given up for adoption. It was in that interview in May of 1998, two days after I returned to Chicago following my mother’s funeral, that I learned of the controversy. I have always known that I was adopted, that I was a ‘true Irishman’, and I had always been proud and honored by the distinction. In the days immediately following my mom’s death I told my Dad that I had never for a second doubted who my ‘real’ parents were, that he and my mom were the only ones who can lay claim to me. I feel no different today.

None-the-less, as the NPR story continued I found myself getting information that I’m sure even they didn’t have.

ZWERDLING:  Here’s one of the most curious aspects of this story.It’s hard enough for most women to give up a baby for adoption during the first few hours or weeks of its life. But church officials forced the young mothers to stay in their convents and raise their own infants for at least one year or more before adoptive families could come and get them.Reporter Mike Milotte says he’s turned up cases where young women changed their minds after their babies were born and tried to leave the convents. (This also happened to my mother in New Zealand). But the nuns sent guards to capture the women and bring them back.For her part, Mary O’Connor says, she knew she’d have to give her baby away. She felt she literally had no choice. But by the time the nuns came to take her son, she’d been raising him for 17 months. Then one evening, O’Connor says, a nun told her, “Get him ready. We’re giving him away in the morning.”

O’CONNOR: So she just carried it over to the convent. There was two parts, like there was a hospital part where the children were kept and then there was the convent part. And the child was brought over to the convent part. And there was three steps up. You went in the side door and there were three steps up. And they went to the top of the steps and they said, “Just say goodbye now. That’s it.”

<

-Anne Frandi-Coory 25 July 2011

For more about my mother’s lost children & the heartlessness of the Catholic Church:

  ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers’.

Anton Chekhov & Katherine Mansfield

July 18, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
2 Comments

Updated 2 March 2018

 

Anton Chekhov (Russia 1860-1904) and Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand 1888-1923), two of my favourite authors.  Tuberculosis killed them both. Chekhov had a tremendous influence on Mansfield, both on her life and in her writing.  Mansfield translated most of Chekhov’s letters and works into English.

><

*****

Anton Chekhov from ‘KATERINA’ by Joanna Woods

img20180314_09223807

If you are interested in the Russian phase of Mansfield’s life, Katerina; The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield, by Joanna Woods, is a must read.  Woods sets out this period of Mansfield’s life so meticulously that it serves as ready reference material for any questions which might come up regarding this phase of her life, and the other writers who featured in it.

‘”I would like to speak Russian with you” were among the last words written By Katherine Mansfield. She never travelled to Russia. However, her lifelong passion for everything Russian runs through her letters and notebooks in an unwritten thread.

Katya, Katoushka, Kissienka and Katerina were just some of the names that Katherine used at the height of her Russian pose, when she wore Russian dress, smoked Russian cigarettes, attended Russian concerts and embarked on a literary love affair with Chekhov that changed her writing – and her life.’

*************************

If Only We Could Know  by Vladimir Kataev – published 2002.

It is fascinating read and reveals what a great judge of character Anton Chekhov was.

I can understand why Katherine Mansfield was so passionate about his work. It is a double tragedy that they both died so young.  

Andrew R Durkin writes: Kataev’s work has been of fundamental importance in understanding Chekhov’s fiction and drama. Harvey Pitcher’s selection and careful translation of the core of Kataev’s studies make some of the best Russian Chekhov criticism available at last in English and should mark the beginning of a new level of understanding of Chekhov in the English-speaking world.

**********************************************

 

Katherine Mansfield

*****

The photo of Katherine Mansfield above is taken from the cover of  An Appraisal by Nariman Hormasji which gives another important aspect to Mansfield’s  writing including the influence of Chekhov and other Russian writers and authors.

*****

The Illustrated edition of THE GARDEN PARTY– Katherine Mansfield Short Stories first published in 1987, is a beautiful, colourful bound book I treasure.

 

Katherine Mansfield 001

 

Visit Anne Frandi-Coory’s Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/myhomelibrary/

‘The Arab Mind’ by Raphael Patai – A Book Review

June 30, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
4 Comments

Updated 19 July 2017

The price you pay for a book bears no relation at all to the value of the stories and lessons held within!  I found The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, [a prolific cultural anthropologist] marked down at a sale in a favourite NZ book shop.  I believe that, like cats, books find you, you don’t find them.  In all my travels I have never seen this book anywhere else.  And I found it while writing the final manuscript for ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’

********

Fayez A. Sayegh comments in The Arab Mind: ‘…yet even more devastating… was the drying up of the creative and adventurous spirit within Arab society itself. The keen intellectual curiosity which characterised the preceding period, the passionate and untiring search for knowledge, and the joy of adventure were smothered under a hard crust of dogma and fundamentalism. Free thought was banished, traditionalism reigned in its place…’

><

One of the most enlightening books (for me) I have ever bought

><

I grew up without knowing my Italian mother as a person.  She suffered from severe bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes. So, at ten months old, I was placed in a Catholic  Orphanage for the poor, and was visited only by my devoted Lebanese father.  His extended family could not find any room in their hearts to love me.

My father often took me to visit his extended family, in the futile hope that  their frozen hearts might thaw, but the quiet, prayerful ways of a nun-studded convent does not prepare a young girl well for the noisy and multi-generational home of  Middle Eastern immigrants.  In their view I was “of another breed”.  I escaped Catholicism and “Little Lebanon” as a teenager and never returned.  However, you can take the girl out of her Lebanese extended family but you can’t take the Lebanese influence out of the girl, as the familiar cliché goes.  I picked up the Aramaic language they spoke and many positive aspects of their lives; great cooks, devotion to family (if you didn’t have a foreign mother that is) but those positives  were buried deep in my soul for many years, under all the negatives.

From The Arab Mind by Albert H. Hourani: To be a  Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it. It is no longer to have a standard of values of one’s own, not to be able to create but only able to imitate; and not even to imitate correctly, since that also needs a certain originality. It is to belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals itself in lostness, pretentiousness, cynicism and despair.

The Arab Mind was such a help in the final stages of writing   Whatever Happened To Ishtar? A Passionate Quest to Find Answers for Generations of Defeated Mothers.  Many of my Lebanese family’s ethnocentric behaviours suddenly took on new meaning; the hatred they exhibited toward my Italian mother and by association, to me, was the result of thousands of years of cultural prejudice.  Necessary in desert and mountain life in sectarian communities where brutal invasion and massacre were a common way of life.

To the Arab, saving face and honour are everything and when your beloved eldest son marries a sharmuta (Aramaic for prostitute-every woman who did not live up to the family’s cultural values was labelled sharmuta) then what can you do but exile from the family the issue of that union!  Being the only girl child made it easy for them to make me the scapegoat of all the family’s ills in a foreign country.

Historian Oswald Spengler: The Arab culture is a discovery . . . Its unity had been suspected by the late Arabs, but it escaped the Western historians so completely that one cannot find even a good designation for it. On the basis of the dominant language one could term the pre-culture and the early period Aramaic, the late period, Arabic . . . The Arab spirit however, mostly under a late-antique mask, cast its spell over the emerging culture of the West, and Arab civilization, which in the folk psyche of Southern Spain, Provence, and Sicily is superimposed that of antiquity…

In this current era of the ‘Arab Spring’, I recommend you find a copy and read The Arab Mind to gain an understanding of how differently we westerners from such very young countries, like Australia and New Zealand, view everyday life.  I think the half of my book that dealt with my father’s family was a much kinder book in the end because I read The Arab Mind before I sent my re-written manuscript off to the publishers.  So many of the events that played out in my childhood took on very different meanings, while suppressed memories re-surfaced.  I understood better, what it must have been like for my naive, fifteen year old Syrian/Lebanese grandmother, from the hills of Bcharre in Lebanon, to marry and follow my grandfather to the other side of the world. She was one tough, superstitious old woman when I met her.

How relevant to the lives of my Maronite Lebanese extended family, and by the same token, to the current Arab Spring,  are the following quotes in the book:

Nabih Amin  Faris and Mohammed Tawfik Husayn  write in The Arab Mind: ‘In some respects Arab absorption [particularly Arab Muslims] in their bygone days tends to be a chronic disease. It stems naturally from the general misery of the majority of the people and the wretched social and political conditions since the fall of the Abbasid empire and the Arab states in Spain and North Africa. They live in a splendid past as an escape from the miserable present…Until the closing years of the eighteenth century, the Arab world was in a state of near stagnation, ingrown, content with its prevailing conditions, resigned to its fate, and blissfully ignorant of the events unfolding around it. Then the West descended upon the Arab world as a conqueror, bringing its culture, civilisation, and science, its missionaries, its mercantile goods and commodities, and political, economic and military domination.’

I found chapter 15, The Question of Arab Stagnation particularly interesting. e.g. the Arab admiration for Israel; its excellence in scientific research, and its brilliant scholars and universities. Its global achievements in weaponry, commerce and banking, not to mention its organisational abilities in all walks of life. ‘The Jews, their rich people and their financial institutions…donate millions for their researches in Israel; but our rich people and our financial institutions,  our leaders, our rulers …do not contribute a single gursh [penny], but ask: Why donate to science?’  This chapter has several publications written by Arabs who are very critical of Arab stagnation since the early 14th century and why they believe Israel won the 1967 war. It may surprise readers to know that upwards of 200,000 Arabs a year regularly visit Israel because they love the place, and everything that it has to offer them, and which they cannot easily access in their own country.

Faris and Husayn further recognise that ‘the cultural famine which ravages Arab life is indeed not novel, nor is it the handiwork of colonial rule, feudal rapacity and local oppression alone…its roots go far back into the history of the Arab people.‘ …the low position in which Arab society keeps its women is an important contributing factor to this sorry state of affairs.  ‘No wonder,’ they exclaim, ‘that the Arab world remains backward, tradition-fettered, and limping behind the procession of human achievement, when women’s status is so low.’ [my emphasis]

It is not enough for Arabs to continue to blame the West for their stagnation…dam butlab dam feuds were so intense among the Arab tribes [blood demands blood or an eye for an eye] in pre-Islamic times, and were such a permanent feature of life…’that an important contributing factor to Muhammad’s success in rallying the people of the Arabian Peninsula around the banner of the new religion he preached was the fact that widespread feuding had weakened the Arab tribes and made it impossible for them to unite against him.’

From author Hisham Sharabi in The Arab Mind: …There is no turning away from Europe. This generation’s psychological duality, its bilingual, bicultural character are clear manifestations of this fact. It has to judge itself, to choose, and to act in terms of concepts and values rooted not in its own tradition but in a tradition that it has still not fully appropriated.

From Author Halim Barakėt in The Arab Mind:…We are a people who have lost their identity and their sense of  manhood. Each of us is suffering from a split personality, especially in Lebanon. We are Arab and yet our education is in some cases French [my grandfather, Jacob Coory’s second language was French], in some cases Anglo-Saxon and in others Eastern Mystic. A very strange mixture. We need to go back and search out our roots. We’re all schizophrenic…

The Arab Mind is a great read, very well written, and draws on accomplished writers and authors who know their topic well.   I urge anyone interested in Arab culture and history, to read this book.

I have lived a life in two halves, so I know what Barakėt means about being schizophrenic. Writing Ishtar? helped me to become one person and to discover the wonderful Italian and Lebanese genetic talents buried within me. The young Arabs of today have so many tools to use in their search for who they are; Facebook, Google, Twitter, blogging, mobile phones, formal education, etc etc.  Let’s hope their search for an identity won’t take as long as it did my generation.

 Follow Anne Frandi-Coory here on her blog:  frandi.blog

Also Here on Anne Frandi-Coory’s Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/myhomelibrary/

 

‘Bosnia; A Short History’ by Noel Malcolm – A Book Review

March 21, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
Leave a comment

Hell holes. Man Made by Religion,Politics, or both?

I often contemplate whether there would still be wars if religion didn’t exist.  I guess there would be; the fight for power over people, land, and resources, human nature being what it is. Perhaps these days religion is just an excuse to fight.  But I too dislike the hypocrisy of religious beliefs and the divisions these beliefs cause. Most of all I resent those people who leave their own countries  to live a better life in ours, and then reject the way we live. They seem to believe that they are somehow superior beings, and history has shown us that this is a very dangerous mind-set.  Australia  is not the only country experiencing these problems.

A courageous man, a Muslim himself – Mahfooz Kanwar, Professor Emeritus of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, commented angrily on the complaints made by Muslim families  to the school board  that music is un-Islamic and that physical education (coed) classes should be segregated by gender even in primary schools.  About a dozen immigrant Muslim families were demanding that the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg should not teach their children music for religious reasons.   Professor Kanwar stated “I’d tell them, this is Canada, and in Canada, we teach music and physical education in our schools. If you don’t like it, leave. If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hell hole country you came from or go to another hell hole country that lives under sharia law.”  The Professor went on to say that as always,  the school authorities were trying to figure out a way to fit the demands of the Muslims into the curriculum rather than the other way around.  Is this just another form of segregation?

Perhaps religion is too narrow a focus, and Western Powers and their media are a large part of the problem.  A good place to try to understand the world dilemma is to read a recent history, that of Bosnia.  Bosnia – A Short History by Noel Malcolm “rigorously clarifies the various myths of racial, religious and political history which have so clouded the modern understanding of Bosnia’s past”.   Many recent wars in actual fact, may not have causes as simple as  the inevitable consequences of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds.  And why do so many of these wars result in burning books and destroying the cultural heritage of enemies? Much food for thought.  ><><><

– Anne Frandi-Coory 21 March 2011

*****

Also here on Anne Frandi-Coory’s Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/myhomelibrary/

 

See post Burning Books Leads To More…

‘The Reformation’ by Owen Chadwick – A Book Review

February 10, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
3 Comments

Updated 15 November 2013

…

Pope Benedict preaches forgiveness again, albeit centuries too late! Has anything really changed in the Catholic Church?

In the last year or so the Pope has forgiven Joan of Arc (possibly mistaken identity) Galileo, and Martin Luther, their alleged heresy against The Church.

See previous posts: Joan of Arc; &  Galileo’s Daughter

…

The Reformation

The Reformation

…

THE REFORMATION by Owen Chadwick

– A Book Review

Martin Luther, a former Catholic priest, the Pope now says, did not intend to split the Catholic Church. Luther (1483-1546)  wanted to purge The Church of corruption.  The poor were forced to contribute to the Church’s coffers at Sunday Mass,  and starved, while the clergy grew fat on that income and the wealth given to them by the privileged in order that those who sinned (like paedophile priests) may take a short cut around penances for their mortal sins, and still get to heaven.  Luther preached that whether we go to either heaven or hell,  is preordained when we are born.  We cannot bribe our way into heaven.  This was Luther’s way of stopping the corruption of indulgences within the Catholic Church. Luther believed the Bible to be the sole source of religious authority and made the Bible accessible to the masses by translating it into the vernacular and arranging hundreds of copies to be printed; made possible by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

See previous post: Justification of Johann Gutenberg

The whole thing is rather sickening and hypocritical really. The move by the Pope is believed to be the Vatican PR Machine’s way of softening Pope Benedict’s image as arch conservative hardliner, ex-head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and pro nazi sympathiser during World War ll.  It is no secret that the Catholic Church supported Nazism.  The Pope is also erecting a statue in the Vatican gardens, to Galileo, another  “heretic” excommunicated by the Church, and who lived out his last years in poverty under house arrest.  His crime was his belief in heliocentrism: the planets and the earth revolve around a relatively stationary sun at the centre of the solar system.  I think the only reason Galileo wasn’t tortured to death by the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition was that he was much loved by the people and a brilliant scientist. Nevertheless Galileo was forever alienated from his church, the pope, and the Jesuits in particular.

Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.  Many thousands of the poor were tortured and killed in the purges that followed.  A brutal war erupted which divided Christendom; but it was not about religion, it was about POWER!  Nothing has changed in the 21st Century.

St Bartholomew's Day twitter

MERCY

MERCY: St Bartholomew’s Day, Paris, 1572. ‘Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant’. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

……………………………

-Anne Frandi-Coory  15 November 2013

‘Egypt, Greece and Rome’ by Charles Freeman – A Book Review

February 1, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
Leave a comment

Charles Freeman’s book about civilisations of the Ancient Mediterranean

I have just been reading Egypt, Greece and Rome; Civilisations of the Ancient Mediterranean by Charles Freeman , published 1999.  What an amazing book of 638 pages.

Not as much of a chore to read as you might think. The author breaks the book into easy to follow chapters and titled paragraphs.  He uses date charts, date lists, events and maps to great effect and to which I referred constantly during the reading of the book.

The book has given me a better insight into the pre-history of these amazing civilisations, and to their relevance today. Mr Freeman takes the reader on an epic journey from Egypt in 4,500 BC to Eastern and Western Empires up to 1000 AD.  He brings together the most interesting and salient stories. In one sense, not much has changed.  Constant wars, plagues, atheism, religious diversity,polemics, politics, the fight for democracy, all played a part.

Carthage (now Tunisia) , for instance, was a prosperous and thriving Phoenician city in the 5th Century BC, and Greece was pioneering philosophy and   theatre.   Greek philosophers travelled the Mediterranean teaching students to “look” at both sides of an argument.  Trading goods between the various states was the chief activity that brought so many disparate groups together.  What I also loved about this book, are the references to legend and myth, and how they intertwined everyday life across the Mediterranean world. I especially enjoyed the sections on Classical Greece, a favourite era of mine, and the references to its literature.

In Chapter 14, Mr Freeman expands on the 5th Century origins of drama (one of the greatest of Athenian Inventions, by no means a universal human experience),  poetry, tragedy, theatre with such names as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and Aristophanes, that satirical playwright extraordinaire.

During these times, beliefs in various gods were tied in with natural events,  human frailty and excesses.  Travel was relatively easy throughout Greece and the Mediterranean, and even non-citizens could find skilled work. Differing versions of the genealogy of gods wasn’t a hindrance, and most visitors ‘slotted in’ with local lore.

It was interesting to read the section on Sophists. The original meaning of the word ‘Sophist’ was anyone with exceptional talent.  However, members of this group were attacked  by both Plato and Aristophanes (satirically) for daring to present arguments  for and against any motion. Sophists can be credited with pioneering the study of religion as a social and anthropological phenomenon according to Mr Freeman. They disagreed strongly with the belief that there was some divine principle at work in the Universe. (Modern atheists, take note!) The Sophist, Protagoras, spent most of his life as a travelling teacher. He wrote: “Concerning the gods, I am unable to discover whether they exist or not, or what they are like in form; for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”  He proclaimed: “Man is the measure of all things.”   Athens was implementing democratic governance at this time and Protagoras’ proclamation could be taken as the slogan of democratic Athens.  Other Sophists suggested that gods originated in man’s experience of nature. The various gods had been created as personifications of natural phenomena such as the sun, moon, rivers, water and fire. To the Sophists men of shrewd and subtle minds invented for man the fear of the gods, to “frighten the wicked even if they acted, spoke or thought in secret.”  By the end of the century free thinking on religious matters was less tolerated.  Pestilence, war, tyrants and destruction killed optimistic fervour.

I wonder, is this what is happening in our world now?

 

-Anne Frandi-Coory  1 February 2011

 

 

*****

Also here on Anne Frandi-Coory’s Facebook page: 

https://www.facebook.com/myhomelibrary/

Mary & Jesus? No, actually Ancient Greek statue Tyche or Fortuna, the centre figure of a flourishing cult

‘Jean Rhys; The Complete Novels’ A Book Review

August 9, 2010
BOOKS In My Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
Leave a comment

Updated 28 January 2016

<><><

I loved every one of Jean Rhys novels listed on the book cover below.  I have read this book several times and each time find something new in each novel.

Rhys’ books are semi-autobiographical,  intensely personal and  often she utilises streams of consciousness to convey to the reader, her subject’s deep sense of rejection caused by the callousness with which she is treated by men. The women she writes about suffer from depression, although they don’t seem to be aware of this, which manifests itself in their lack of energy, and self esteem.  With no hope of a steady income, the women in her stories drift in and out of relationships with men who have no real love for them but who none the less finance the women’s accommodation, meals and clothes. The men obviously expect a sexual relationship in return, for only as long as it suits their own needs.

Complete Novels Jean Rhys_0001

Lovers, Place d’Italie – photograph by Brassai 1932

Jean Rhys The Complete Novels (including the classic ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’) are superbly written with an intense pathos, revealing the hardships single women experienced in Europe in the early Twentieth Century; loneliness, reliance on brief sexual relationships with various men for their living, difficult landladies, illegal abortions. Men had all the money, all the power and of course, all the best careers. Women were used and abused, by single and married men. Choices for women to earn their living were severely limited, and often young women resorted to prostitution and if they were lucky and attractive, the stage. Rhys, under several guises, daydreams and longs for her birthplace, and childhood, in the Caribbean. The Complete Novels is enhanced throughout with magnificent and scene-setting photography by Brassai.  Rhys also gives us a vivid picture of life in the London and Paris of the times.

Leaving Mr McKenzie

Streetwalker, Rue Quincampoix – photograph  Brassai 1932

Quartet

Two Girls Looking For Tricks, Boulevard Montparnasse – photograph Brassai 1931

 

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I don’t really care.” – Jean Rhys

portrait Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys, who was born in the Carribean island of Dominica on 24 August 1890, wrote her early novels between 1927 and 1939. Her friend and editor Diana Athill, who believes the five novels listed above to be her best, continues: “Then Jean Rhys disappeared and was almost forgotten. The second part of her career begins in 1966 with the publication in London of Wide Sargasso Sea.  The success of this novel led to the publication of her earlier books.”

older jean-rhys

Jean Rhys died 14 May 1979 aged 88 in Devon, England

<>><><>><><><><

-Anne Frandi-Coory 28 January 2016

><><><><><><><><><><><><><

My review of…  Wide Sargasso Sea

‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys – A Book Review

June 8, 2010
BOOKS In My Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
Leave a comment

Wide Sargasso Sea

Updated 30 January 2016

*****

Years ago my daughter Gina gave me this second hand book which  I have now read at least three times.

The author Jean Rhys is acknowledged as a technically brilliant writer.   As you read the book, which is set in the Caribbean,  you can almost feel the muggy heat intertwined with the intensity of suspicion and mistrust between the whites, creoles, and blacks.  It tells the story of the early years of the heroine Antoinette Cosway’s tragic life before she marries Mr Rochester  as depicted in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  The story, which exists in  its own right,  ends as she and her new husband set off for England where Antoinette becomes the mad woman in the attic.  I recently read the history of the Caribbean which is fascinating and brutal at the same time, and it inspired me to re-read Wide Sargasso Sea,  the history of the Caribbean adding yet another dimension to that story.

My present copy of  Sargasso Sea is now falling to pieces with pages constantly falling out so I  decided to buy a new copy through Amazon.com as I couldn’t find a copy  in any of the second- hand book shops  that I regularly haunt.  Jean Rhys  has written other novels that I’ve also included in the purchase from Amazon.  Can’t wait to read them.

From Jean Rhys’s personal knowledge of the West Indies, and perhaps her reading of their history, she would have known about the mad creole heiresses living in the early nineteenth century, whose dowries were only an additional burden to them. These unfortunate heiresses were products of an inbred, decadent, expatriate society, resented by the recently freed slaves whose superstitions they inevitably shared.

*****

Jean Rhys quote

*****

In her introduction of the book  Jean Rhys – The Complete Novels   Diana Athill, editor and friend of Rhys for the last fifteen years of her life, writes:

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre had always disturbed Jean. She may not be the only reader of that novel to dislike its heroine, but is probably the only one to identify with Mr Rochester’s mad wife from the West Indies. Ever since Jean had come to school in England she had felt that the English had misunderstood and despised West Indians, and here was a West Indian woman so totally misunderstood and despised that she was presented as a monster. Impoverished English gentlemen had, in fact, married West Indian heiresses from time to time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Jean thought it likely that Charlotte Bronte had known of one such marriage and had based her novel on it. What had really happened to that unhappy bride onto whom Bronte had projected such a cruel – such (in Jean’s eyes) a typically English version of that story? 

From that question grew Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel created over so many years, against such heavy odds, with which [Jean Rhys] made her comeback in 1966.

portrait Jean Rhys

To wring out of herself things so painful, in circumstances so cruel [in her earlier novels] and finally to hand us a novel [Wide Sargasso Sea] so lovely and haunting, which seems to alight on the page as easily as a bird on a branch: if she had nothing else but this, Jean Rhys would still be one of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 30 January 2016

><><><><><><

For more information on Jean Rhys novels  Visit Amazon Here

See my review of other Rhys novels … Complete novels by Jean Rhys

><