Truth stranger than fiction?

Last week I read three books, all worthy, depending on what you look for in a book.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed (2012)

Reading Wild, I separated the protagonist from the experience.  One I found mundane, the other exhilarating.  But of course, we could not have one without the other.

A young women loses her mother, throws away her marriage and decides it's time to do something drastic.  Meaning, more drastic than hard drugs and throwing away your marriage.  A chance meeting with a book about the Pacific Crest Trail, no hiking experience and no other prospects naturally developed into a plan.  Soon, Cheryl, who took the manufactured name 'Strayed' after her divorce, was packing to spend months hiking alone, having never embarked on such a trip.  Ill-prepared but motivated, she set out with a backpack she could barely lift to walk from the Mojave desert up California through Oregon to the border of Washington State.

Along the way, her ill-fitting boots ruin her most-needed asset, her feet.  She encounters snakes and bears.  She meets and befriends hikers, most of whom are kind, a couple who are borderline criminal.

This is no vapid, self-absorbed life-journey.  Cheryl could have bailed soon after she realized she overpacked, that snow conditions sent seasoned hikers to Appalachia, when her feet were first damaged, when the money ran out, at any number of points when most of us would have called it a month.  She did not.  She persevered.  Just a few weeks into this adventure, Cheryl was not the same Cheryl who was messing up her life.

As a person, I was not impressed with her antics pre-hike and even throughout, I thought, has she learned?  Has she changed?  Was she supposed to?  The idea of doing something so grand and potentially dangerous without proper preparation, so impulsively, was in and of itself immature.  Ridiculous.

The writing was engaging.  I never even cared about hiking.  And certainly not about women 'Strayed' who 'find themselves.'  But this was a good, solid adventure both philosophically and physically.


Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment by Craig R. Whitney (2012)

Regardless of your feelings about guns in America, they aren't going anywhere fast.  This book gives a solid history of guns in America back to the colonies, the treatment of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court over the years and while the author is clearly a liberal, he reconciles how we can live with guns with how to attempt to do it safely.  In his opinion, where the NRA dropped the ball is the civic duty angle on gun ownership, turning it into a bastion of individual, self-defense rights issues.

The National Rifle Association does not walk away unscathed.  Whitney attempted to reach the NRA for discussion but they lacked interest in doing so.  They are guilty of promoting individual gun rights to the detriment of individuals overall.  They are against education standards for gun owners and any kind of registration or even inventory on gun shops where it's the business norm everywhere else.  Why did they move away from education and training?  Why are they against promoting responsible gun ownership?

In this well-researched book, even the 'stand your ground' laws are explored and how they are being staunchly defended by the NRA and gun-rights activists when they are not grounded in any Constitutional right.

Published post-Aurora, pre-Sandy Hook, Whitney doesn't have all the answers.  But he does a fair stab at examining laws we have, ones we need, loopholes that should be closed, how the NRA fights all of the above and what can and should be done to make sure that both the Second Amendment, which the author believes does give individuals gun-packing rights (whether or not you agree) and safety of the populace are adequately protected.


Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick (2011)

Sometimes a picture can be worth much more than 1000 words.  If the picture in question is an iconic photo of two teenagers, in the foreground, one black and on her way to her first day at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the other white, angry, scowling at the black girl in opposition of desegregation, then books can be written and movements can grow from it.

Elizabeth Eckford was the black teen, one of nine who broke through and began the desegregation process at Central that September 1957.  In retrospect, we think, this was the beginning!  It's wonderful, it's amazing!  But the story of Elizabeth's days at Central and the life that followed for her was quite different than the fairy tale.  She was ostracized and taunted by a white community that did not want her or the other African-American students poisoning their white school.    She was stoic and her education was important to her.  There were white students who did befriend her.  But the bad far outweighed the good and the photo was definitely a harbinger of things to come at Central.

Hazel Bryan Massery, the angry white girl, had no idea that she'd gain notoriety for screaming racial epithets in a crowd that morning, caught on film by not one but three reporters.  But that she did.  It haunted her throughout her life.  Soon after these events, she left Central and married young.  But these opinions did not stay with her.  Caught on film, though, she was forever branded a racist.

Margolick follows the lives of the two women in the picture through high school, after and how they fared.  Their lives surprisingly intersected, they grew and changed.  Sad, surprising, sobering, we think of icons frozen in time but the truth is often very different from the story we're told.

I read, therefore I am,
the lowercase b