Charlotte Mason Highschool: Year 11

This is our Year 11 Australian/personalised adaption of Ambleside Online. We've finished Term 1 and are a couple of weeks into Term 2 so I'll update this post as we continue through the year. 

Bible/Devotions

*  **  * *** In The Steps of the Master by H.V. Morton - Bible History & Geography

* Knowing God by J.I. Packer - continued from last year

Family line of Herod the Great

History

*  **  *** A History of the Twentieth Century  by Martin Gilbert

* A Short History of Australia by Ernest Scott (1953 Edition) We've used this in Year 9 up to the end of the first term of Year 11. We're using this one for Term 2 and 3 this year:

**  *** A Short History of Australia by Manning Clark - starting at Ch 9: Radicals and Nationalists - 1883 - 1901

* World War I and World War II by Richard Maybury

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain - this is scheduled in Term 1 but it's been slow going so Miss 16 will be reading it this term as well.

Biographies

*  Stalin by Albert Marrin 

** Hitler by Albert Marrin 

Speeches

Speeches That Shaped the Modern World by Alan J. Whiticker is our primary resource for Year 11 as well as some from the AO list that aren't too focussed on the USA. This book includes a couple of speeches made by Australian Prime Ministers.

Australian Literature

* We of the Never-Never by Mrs Aeneas Gunn

** A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

*** Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara

Literature

* Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (see here for some details) - we used this instead of The Great Gatsby.

I'll be substituting another book in place of Brideshead Revisited but will include all the others.

* Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing

Short Stories & Essays

I've been cherry-picking titles from the AO list.

Current Affairs

Conversations - John Anderson (former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia) via Podcast or YouTube. 

The Plight and Polarisation of Mainstream Media 

Authoritarianism 

Archaeology

* Digging For Richard III, How Archaeology Found the King by Mike Pitts - a great book to read after Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time.

** Come, Tell me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan

Geography

* Endurance by Alfred Lansing

** *** Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall - a combination of geography, history, current events and politics.

Science

*  **  ***  Novare General Biology by Heather Ayala and Katie Rogstad - this is a really in-depth biology book so we're not rushing through it. Lab work is included.

* The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif

* Six Easy Pieces by Feynman - Miss 16 read four out of the six chapters and then I changed to this book:

** Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski - only 13 pages in but so far my daughter likes its conversational style. Thanks to Joy H on the AO Forum for mentioning this book. 

Plutarch

* Aristides

Art 

Reading a section of this each week - two to three pages on a wide range of artists; well illustrated, short biographies.

Free Reading

Pastoral by Nevil Shute

The Far Country by Nevil Shute (set in Australia)

The Black Orchids by Rex Stout

The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

Shane by Jack Schaefer

The Lonesome Gods by Louis L'Amour

The Yellow Poppy by D.K. Broster

The Jacobite Trilogy by D. K. Broster

Son by Lois Lowry

Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie 

Books by Jackie French:

The Girl From Snowy River

Pharaoh

Pennies for Hitler

Tom Appleby, Convict Boy

Stay tuned for updates...

Charlotte Mason Highschool Update (May 2021)

 I tend to only do a year end exam but we're using this week as an exam week as we've finished Term 1 of Ambleside Online Year 11. Being Year 11 and covering the 20th century, there are a lot of things happening over short periods of time so having a break to reflect and look back over what we've covered so far seemed like a wise thing to do.

I've made a few changes to the AO schedule like I always do but we're following the general outline, adding in some Australian content, dropping some of the American focused titles, as well as using some books we already had in place of books that were scheduled and we didn't have. I generally post what we've used at the end of the year's work but I'll also highlight bits and pieces as the year progresses.

Nature and Science Notebooks

A simple experiment for illustrating osmosis that only uses a potato, salt and water.

Experiment with a homemade Calorimeter

We used the instructions here to make the calorimeter and do the experiment.

 

Enjoying the sunshine while drawing & listening to me read James Herriot and Charlotte Mason's 'Ourselves'

Current Events/Culture

I like to listen to John Anderson's Conversation Podcasts from time to time. This conversation with Matt Taibbi was very good so I played it on YouTube and we watched it today. I'd never heard of Taibbi before but he has a fascinating background - a journalist who has lived in Soviet Russia, played basketball in Mongolia and who is very articulate. I like John Anderson's style of interviewing - respectful and thoughtful. He interviews people with a wide range of views and is a good listener who asks intelligent questions. In this interview they discuss the state of journalism in the West & Taibbi gives some good advice to young people who want to pursue journalism. 

*Update: I shared this interview with one of my sons who's into politics etc. and he commented that Taibbi's had an odd journey to where he is now & he wouldn't exactly call him a role model. As I said I didn't know a thing about him and just took the interview at face value. I did a little searching and it looks like his former views have changed somewhat. Anyhow, I thought this interview was well done and very topical.

Some favourite free read books so far this year

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout

The Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters

The Holy Thief by Ellis Peters

Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge

Feed Them on Things Worth Caring For

If you are familiar at all with the writings of the 19th Century educator, Charlotte Mason, you will know that one of her signature ways of illustrating a liberal education is to compare it to that of a feast that is spread before the child.

As educators we are responsible for choosing the food for the feast. If we provide a variety of excellent food and allow the child liberty to choose what appeals to their taste, nourishment will take care of itself.

I think the feast metaphor is very apt. A child’s food preference can change over time and they can acquire a taste for things they rejected in the past. One of my sons would have lived on bread alone if I’d let him, but it wouldn’t have been a healthy diet. His tastes in food developed much more diversity as he grew, as did his intellectual tastes and appetite, because he was served nourishing food – literally and metaphorically.

The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton was published in 1922 a year before Charlotte Mason died. I read it recently and was impressed by a couple of passages that touched on education as they shared a close similarity to Mason's educational ideas.

Wharton was American but she spent much of her time in Europe (The Glimpses of the Moon was set mostly in France). During WWI she remained in Europe and established schools for children escaping from Belgium after the German occupation. She had a 'gift for languages and a deep appreciation for beauty - in art, architecture and literature': Edith Wharton | The Mount | Edith Wharton's Home

Merry Family by Jan Steen, 1688

'Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowed her.'

The Fulmers were an artistic couple living in a cramped cottage and both Susy and her husband to be, Nick Lansing, had spent time with them and their noisy family before they had considered marriage. They couldn’t understand how the Fulmer’s lived as they did - bad food and general crazy discomfort -  but they had more amusement in their company than they had with any of their rich friends and their opulent house parties.

The Lansings married some time afterwards after hatching a scheme whereby they’d live off their wedding gifts of money and accommodation but with the understanding that if either of them found a way to climb the social ladder, the other would not stand in the way but agree to a divorce. Barely a year later their plans had unravelled and out of desperation Susy agreed to look after this ‘uproarious tribe’ while their parents were in Italy.

'But in these rough young Fulmers she took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer’s bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and spoke with the voice of wisdom.

That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty. From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.'

Charlotte Mason believed that children should be given the best going on the subject - really good books; that we should try, however imperfectly, to make education a science of relationships. These thoughts from Edith Wharton on education - feed children only on things worth caring for - were an unexpected surprise to me and echoed the ideas that I've been reading in Charlotte Mason's writings.  

The tentacles of the science of relationships are far reaching.

We're using The Glimpses of the Moon instead of The Great Gatsby for Literature in AO Year 11.

In The Steps of the Master by H.V. Morton (1934)

H.V. Morton’s In the Steps of the Master is a wonderful mix of travelogue, history, archaeology, and adventure. He wrote the book in an attempt to express the thoughts and the encounters that a traveller through Palestine ‘with the New Testament in his hands’ would have experienced.

At the time the book was written in 1934, Palestine and the neighbouring territory of Trans-Jordan was administered by Great Britain after they had been taken from the Turks in WWI. The country was divided into provinces headed by Commissioners and under them were the village headmen. A British Inspector General of Police commanded a highly respected police force that was made up of British, Jews and Arabs. 

The country and its way of life had remained remarkably unchanged over the centuries and even the law of the land was a modified form of Ottoman Law. In the time of Christ three official languages were recognised - Latin, Greek and Hebrew. In 1934 the Mandate for Palestine stated that the official languages of Palestine were English, Arabic and Hebrew.

The book begins with the author boarding a boat on the Suez Canal in Egypt. From there he crossed to El Kantara where the railway that was constructed by Allenby’s troops during the War followed an ancient route through Gaza, Lydda, Jaffa, and into the mountains of Judea. 

‘As the train climbs and winds into the hills towards the mountain capital of Jerusalem, you are aware of something fierce and cruel in the air. You have the same feeling in Spain when the train crosses the Sierra de Guadarrama towards the mountain capital of Madrid. But Judea is fiercer than anything in Europe. It us a striped, tigerish country, crouched in the sun, tense with a terrific vitality and sullen and dispassionate with age.’

Morton visited many different places mentioned in the New Testament such as Galilee, the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, Samaria, Bethany, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem:

‘My first thought was amazement that Jerusalem should ever have been built. A more unlikely place for a famous city cannot be imagined...There is a splendid defiance about the situation of Jerusalem, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that no people who did not believe themselves to be in the special care of God would have dared to have built a city in defiance of all the laws of prudence.’

Everywhere he went he saw around him people unconsciously illustrating the Bible and he often delved into aspects of the Bible that a person who had never been to Palestine would overlook. From his travelling experiences he was able to make interesting connections and comparisons. For example, having seen the ruins of Ypres after WWI he likened them to what the Christians would have faced upon their return to Jerusalem after the siege of Titus in 70 A.D. 

Herod the Great, Saladin, the Emperor Julian, Pontius Pilate, Tiberias, and the Crusades, besides many other lesser known people and events, were vividly described. Lady Hester Stanhope was one of these. She makes an appearance in Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen and Morton gives us a sympathetic cameo of her life and her tragic end.

The artist William Holman Hunt also gets a mention. He painted one of his best known paintings, The Scapegoat, while living in Palestine.

These cultural insights and the exploration of history and archaeology are extremely helpful in understanding the background of the New Testament.

‘The Gospel accounts...are always meticulously accurate.’

‘The hideous instability of mind which the Passover mob shared with all mobs in history is clearly seen in the Gospels when the people one say cried, “Hosanna!” And the next “Crucify Him!”

We are using In the Steps of the Master this year for Geography (Ambleside Online Year 11) but it covers so much more than geography. It is beautifully written and captures Palestine very much like it would have been when at the time of Christ.

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall (2015) Non-Fiction

Tim Marshall is a British journalist and author who has been on the front line in the Balkans, Syria and Afghanistan. He witnessed close hand how international conflicts and civil wars have arisen out of past decisions. He has seen how history has shaped the future events of a country and the role geography has had in that shaping.

In Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics, Marshall gives some very interesting insights into the major factors that determine world history. He examines the international affairs of ten regions of the world to show that geographical factors - the physical landscape, climate, demographics, culture and the availability of natural resources -  have an important impact on civilisations. He considers that these geopolitical factors are often overlooked.

‘Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than man, and that we can only go so far in determining our own fate.’

Marshall discusses the following areas in this book:

Russia, China, USA, Western Europe, Africa, The Middle East, India & Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America, and The Arctic.

I borrowed this book from my eldest son who recommended it. He reads mostly nonfiction, especially politics and current affairs. I don’t read much of this genre and expected it would be a little dry and heavy going. It definitely isn’t like that at all. I found it hard to put it aside at times - unlike a lot of nonfiction titles that I have had to read in small doses. 

If you enjoy history, I expect that you would enjoy this book. 

I liked it enough to include it in our  Australian version of Ambleside Online Year 11 which  covers the 20th Century. It would fit well into not only geography and history but also current affairs especially for those implementing a Charlotte Mason High School. Most of the issues the author discusses are still being worked out.  

Here are some extracts from the book that I found interesting and helpful:

Russia - the Arctic and the fact that Russia has never had a warm-water port, limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. Its most powerful weapon is gas and oil, where it is only second to the USA. Russia has a hold on Europe’s energy needs and the better a country’s relationship with Russia , the cheaper its energy costs. The closer a country is to Moscow, the more dependent it is on Russia. This plays into foreign policy - for example, Russia supplies about half of Germany’s gas needs so German politicians are slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour. 

China - although it has always been a land power, in wasn't until the 1980’s that China began to be major trading power. Until recently the country has been limited due to its lack of a global navy. With its huge population, lack of arable land and the affects of pollution, it is looking to expand. The author believes that the Chinese are not looking for conflict or seeking to spread Communism (not sure I agree with this??) but are concerned with keeping ocean access open as they depend upon imported resources. Recent maps published in China show almost the whole of the South China Sea as theirs and they have been building deep sea ports around the world as they seek to establish a ‘blue water’ (ocean going) navy.

USA - due to the shrewd decisions it made in the past to expand its territory in key regions, the USA became a two ocean superpower and is now close to being self sufficient in energy. This will change its policies in the Middle East as it will no longer need to rely on their oil.

Europe -  flat land and rivers that can be navigated have been key factors for Europe’s place on the global scene. The UK has been advantaged by its location with access to the North Sea and the North Atlantic. Its relative isolation has provided protection from European wars and unrest. 65 years of relative peace due to Europe’s unity may be threatened due to the financial crises they have been going through.

Africa - this continent is an example of the effects of isolation. Maps are deceptive and don’t allow for the hugeness of Africa. It is three times bigger than the USA!

‘Africa’s coastline? Great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.’

In the 15th and 16th centuries, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, thousands of Africans, mostly from Sudan were taken cross the Arab world as slaves. The Europeans did the same to a greater degree later on. 

In European cities artificial borders were drawn with new countries created on maps. The same was done for the Middle East, and India/Pakistan (Partition!) - artificial borders on paper, drawing lines on maps & disregarding cultural distinctions & topography. This led inevitably to ethnic conflicts.

Japan and Korea - although they don’t have the ethnic problems of some other countries there are other problems. Japan is an island with basically no natural resources. Korea's division into North and South was a decision made in the USA by two clueless junior officers in the White House. It left Seoul, South Korea's capital, very vulnerable and only 35 miles south of their unstable Communist neighbours. 

Latin America begins at the Mexican border and stretches all the way down to Cape Horn. None of its coastal area has many deep harbours so trading is limited. South America is cut off geographically from just about everywhere else with mountains and the Amazon jungle. Bitter relations between countries such as Bolivia and Chile and border disputes add to their problems.

Arctic - as the ice in this region melts, new energy deposits have been found, but it’s a dark and dangerous place: ‘It’s not a good place to be without friends. They know that for anyone to succeed in the region they may need to cooperate...’

Modern technology and air power is helping to break down geographical barriers; ‘bending the iron rules of geography,' as the author puts it, but it is still a major factor for many countries.

Marshall has written a follow up book that looks at other countries, such as Australia, that I’d be interested in reading. I appreciated the author’s very readable, conversational style, and his knowledge of history and international affairs, and highly recommend this book.

The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge (1941)

 

Many of Elizabeth Goudge’s books have historical settings. The White Witch takes place during the English Civil War, Green Dolphin Country and The Dean’s Watch are set in the 19th Century. I expected The Castle on the Hill to be set at some remote period of time and was surprised when I started reading it that it was written at the beginning of WWII when England was being hammered by the Germans during the Blitz.

The outlook was grim and many people were feeling quite hopeless. It is into this insecure and desolate setting that Elizabeth Goudge weaves her story of loss and despair, love and hope, duty and sacrifice. There’s a good deal of sadness, as you would expect. No one quite gets what they were hoping for and have to settle for circumstances that weren’t their first choice. But, in typical Elizabeth Goudge fashion, sacrifice and duty are redemptive decisions that grow people’s souls. As one of her characters decided after surviving a bomb blast that crippled him, 

‘The other way would have been too easy a death for a man who had too easy a life. Now he would have time to make his soul.’ 

One of this book’s most likeable characters is Miss Brown, a nondescript woman of forty-two years who had nothing about her that stood out, ‘nothing to catch hold of.’ She had a gift for protective covering and managed to blend into the background wherever she was. She was a woman who loved more than she was loved. 

She had had to give up her home for military use and had just learnt that it was obliterated in a bombing raid and the news caused her to lose hope.

‘Her loss of everything she had hitherto known was making her feel as solitary as though she were the only human creature alive in the world. And what a world! It was June nineteen forty. Yesterday was gone, burnt up in the blazing inferno of its suffering. There was today, a tiny patch of foothold, but there was no to-morrow...Memory of the past and hope for the future are companionable things.’

Sitting outside the Free Library in London, feeling herself to be on the edge of a great abyss, a small thing lightened her despair. A violin played by a street musician began to reach her,

‘And she knew it was the truth she was listening to. She heard no words, she saw no vision, but she was slowly made aware that she was one of a multitude that went upon pilgrimage to something or other. She had no idea what the something was, or how they were to get there, all she knew was that the way was stony and painful, dreadful, terrifying; yet worth daring all the same.’

The music was Delius’ Song of Summer and hearing it played helped her transcend her circumstances. When one of Dostoevsky’s characters said that 'beauty will save the world,’ I think he was referring to this ability of beauty to reflect truth, inspire us with a sense of awe, and point to something beyond ourselves. 

Some favourite passages:

'Orderliness of life and thought must be maintained as far as possible. When these chaotic days were passed what was left of it would form the scaffolding upon which the new order could be built. “Order.” A good word. How passionately sane men longed for it, and how incapable they seemed of achieving it with any permanence. How passionately the insane hated it and how easily they could destroy it. Hitler’s contemptuous sneer at “the bourgeois virtues of peace and order” was typical of all the anarchists through the ages.'

'England, from the days of Ethelred the Unready onwards had never been ready for anything, and never would be, had not been ready with proper shelters when the Blitz came.'

'I wish I could live that afternoon over again and do it better...one ought to be given the chance to live certain scenes in ones life over and over again until one gets it perfect.'

As with every book I've read by this author, I found her characters very well described. Her writing progresses slowly because she spends so much time exploring personality and setting, which I enjoy. Her work is perceptive and reflects a deep understanding of human nature, much of it shown through the conversations and reflections of the characters in her books. 

She was living in Devon when World War II broke out and you get the sense that her own personal experience of vulnerability permeates the book.

Linking to Reading Europe: United Kingdom and British Isles Friday

2021 European Reading Challenge (Belgium): William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (1919)

 

This book is a gem!

Cicely Hamilton worked in administration in France during World War I and served at the Front as the Germans were advancing and the area was being bombed. Incredibly, she wrote this novel during that time, probably in a tent, and in between evacuations and mopping up efforts. The book was first published in 1919 and reprinted by Persephone Books in 1999.

I don’t want to give too much detail about the storyline except to say that its ending is very different from its beginning.

William- An Englishman tells the story of William Tully, a very nondescript young man of twenty-three living under the strict rule of his mother. According to his office colleagues William was ‘a negligible quantity’ and he remained so until a crisis occurred in his life and changed the direction of his life.

William’s crisis led him to unburden himself to one of his work associates, a young man by the name of Faraday, who tended to keep to himself. Unbeknown to William, Faraday was a passionate Socialist and before long William, hitherto clueless about social issues, wholeheartedly embraced the same cause and devoted himself to it. Within a year he was in demand as a speaker and campaigner. He also became involved in the suffragette movement and it was in one of their meetings that he found his perfect match in Griselda. Like William, Griselda ‘had found peace of mind and perennial interest in the hearty  denunciation of those who did not agree with her.’

William and Griselda held to identical idealistic creeds. They were Pacifists when it suited them but knew next to nothing of history, science, literature or art.

They believed in, ‘a large, vague and beautifully undefined identity, called by William the People, and by Griselda, Woman; who in the time to come was to accomplish much beautiful and undefined Good; and in whose service they were prepared meanwhile to suffer any amount of obloquy and talk any amount of nonsense.’

William and Griselda believed their own intentions were pure and therefore the intentions of those who did not agree with them must be evil and impure. No dissent was permitted. The author played on this belief and the pernicious idea of isolating ourselves from those who hold opposing views. (There is nothing new under the sun, it seems.)

‘They were, in short, very honest and devout sectarians - cocksure, contemptuous, intolerant, self-sacrificing after the manner of their kind.’

William and Griselda were married and travelled to the Belgian Ardennes for their honeymoon where a fellow revolutionary had made her cottage in the forest available to them. There, in a foreign country, where neither of them knew the language and had no knowledge of or interest in world affairs, their narrow and idealistic thinking was shattered. For, the day before they had planned to return home to England, World War I was declared and the young couple were oblivious that the world had changed overnight.

Cicely Hamilton wrote with a brilliant combination of irony, sarcasm and humour about those on the sidelines of the war effort. William, Griselda and their associates were combatants in their own War; waging battle in scuffles at Cabinet meetings, suffragette protests, stirring up revolt and distributing pamphlets. Caught up in their own view of international affairs, armchair critics of everything military, they were completely unprepared for what awaited them.

I mentioned earlier that the book’s ending is very different from its beginning. As the story progresses there is a gathering intensity. The author keeps the sardonic tone but as their slightly ridiculous behaviour becomes pathetic rather than laughable, I felt a growing sympathy for the two of them.

‘So they trotted down the valley, humiliated, dishevelled, indignant, but still incredulous - while their world crumbled about them and Europe thundered and bled.’

‘...it is one thing to brave ridicule with an approving audience in the background, another to face it unapplauded, uncrowned with the halo of the martyr...’

I’ll leave my thoughts at that. I think William - An Englishman is a neglected classic that deserves to be noticed. I’ll be adding it to my daughter’s free reading for this year’s study of the 20th Century as I appreciate the way the author looked at the folly of dogmatically cutting oneself off from the views of others. The book is unusual in that it views World War I through the eyes of noncombatants. Another book I enjoyed in this vein was ‘Pied Piper’ by Nevil Shute, set in World War II.

 

Linking to Reading Europe 2021 Challenge at Rose City Reader: Belgium

 

An Australian Classic: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a 943 page classic and an Australian one at that. It is also a tragedy. The author relentlessly follows the ‘fortunes’ of both Richard Mahony and his wife, Polly (known as Mary later in the book), the ups and downs of their rollercoaster-like lives, the inevitable sadness of their circumstances.

Mahony is an Irish immigrant whose restless nature will never allow him to settle anywhere for very long. Although he is proud and exceptionally thin-skinned, he is at heart a kind man. Mary is originally from England and puts down roots easily. She is loyal, tends to see the best in people and makes the most of circumstances. They are as different as chalk and cheese in many ways but they care for each other and life goes on reasonably well it becomes clear that Mahony will never settle anywhere. 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony was written between 1917 and 1929 as a trilogy: Australia Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule, but was re-published as one book in 1930. Henry Handel Richardson is the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson (1870-1946).

The book begins during the mid 1800’s gold rush in Ballarat where Mahony works in his store selling supplies to the miners. He had originally qualified as a medical doctor before emigrating to Australia but set that aside for the lure of the goldfields. He meets Mary on a trip to Melbourne when he is in his late twenties and she is only sixteen. They marry soon after meeting and she comes to live in Ballarat.

With his wife’s encouragement, Mahony takes up medical practice again and does very well but his restlessness makes him miserable.  He insists that life in England would be much more suitable for them, culturally and socially. So off they go only for Mahony to find that the grass is not as green as he had thought. Doctors were still not much higher in the social scale than barbers in this 'slow-thinking, slow moving country.' 

‘Long residence in a land where every honest man was the equal of his neighbour had unfitted him for the genuflexions of the English middle-classes before the footstools of the great.’

Although his pride was hurt by the attitude of the people to his profession, he was furious when he learnt that Mary was snubbed by some of the ladies of the town. Studying her objectively, he realised that she was different. Her manner was natural and spontaneous which contrasted to their restraint and it seemed to him that,

'...into all Mary did or said there had crept something large and free - a dash of the spaciousness belonging to the country that had become her true home.'

There are some interesting backdrops to this book: the Victorian goldfields and the Eureka Stockade, the Crimean War, Lister’s experiments in Glasgow, the English class system, and the fear of the Kelly Gang in country Victoria. It touches, too, on the treatment of the mentally ill - asylums were basically prisons and visits by relatives were discouraged. Mahony becomes intensely interested in Spiritualism for a time, attending seances and the like - apparently Ballarat had a small group of very devout believers in the 1800’s. 

There are also many philosophical tangents in the book as Mahony thinks about faith, science and eternity.

It’s interesting reading this in 2020 where the average lifespan is significantly longer than it was in the 1800’s. I kept reading jarring comments about someone being past their prime at 39 years of age ?! and a person was described as ‘very old’ when they were 61 or 62 years old.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a very compassionate and in-depth exploration of a marriage. At different times the author allows the couple to share their individual thoughts. I thought this was very well done and helped me to understand both parties. Mahony's personality is so thoroughly explored that even though at times he appears to be a real jerk, one cannot help but feel some empathy. He tended to have flashes of inspiration that came too late:

'For such a touchy nature I'm certainly extraordinarily obtuse where the feelings of others are concerned.'

'To be perpetually in the company of other people irked him beyond belief. A certain amount of privacy was as vital to him as sleep.'

'His first impressions of people - he had had the occasion to deplore the fact before now - were apt to be either dead white or black as ink; the web of his mind took no half tints.'

As time passed, Mahony grew increasingly withdrawn. His work left no time for friendships, so he said, and although his wife was dear to him, he missed the companionship an old friendship provided. The 'solid base of joint experience' was gone but his life had become too set to allow him to start building another.

'...the one person he had been intimate with passed out of his life. There was nobody to take the vacant place...He had no talent for friendship.'

Richardson was a gifted woman and an excellent writer. Obviously well-educated, her writing is peppered with allusions to mythology and Latin words. From what I've read of her life, this book has strong undercurrents of her own experiences.

Linking up with Brona for the 2020 AusReading Month.

Charlotte Mason Highschool: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (1967)

The Outsiders is a coming of age sort of story which works really well, probably because the author wrote the book when she was just seventeen years old. It is told very simply and directly from the viewpoint of Ponyboy, a fourteen year old ‘Greaser.’ The author captures the main character’s  personality and concerns so well and so naturally.

Ponyboy lives with his two older brothers, Darry and Sodapop. Their parents were killed in a car accident and twenty year old Darry has taken on the role of keeping the family together. He is bent on avoiding any situation that would give an opportunity for the authorities to send the younger boys off to boys’ homes. He has had to grow up fast and work hard and Ponyboy, not understanding his older brother’s situation, believes he doesn't care and sees everything he does as unnecessary interference in his life.

Something that really struck me about this book was the value placed on the role of parents. This isn’t something you’d normally encounter in a book dealing with the struggles of adolescence and it was quite refreshing.

‘Darry and Sodapop were my brothers and I loved both of them, even if Darry did scare me; but not even Soda could take Mom and Dad’s place.’

Johnny was the Greaser gang’s pet, everyone’s kid brother. His father was always beating him and his mother ignored him unless she was angry and then she just yelled.

He could stay out all night and nobody would notice. When Ponyboy complained about his older brother, Johnny said, ‘I ain’t got nobody,’ 

Ponyboy was startled out of his misery:

‘Shoot...you got the whole gang. Dally didn’t slug you tonight ‘cause you’re the pet. I mean, golly, Johnny, you got the whole gang.’

‘It ain’t the same as having your own folks care about you,’ Johnny said simply. ‘It just ain’t the same.’

The Greasers were from the poorer side of town while their rival gang, the 'Socs,' were well-heeled and drove around in cars looking for Greasers to fight with. The two gangs were continually warring with each other but one night one of them was killed and everything changed for Ponyboy. Two gang members ended up on the run and suddenly it was no longer 'us' and 'them.' Ponyboy's former enemies are just like him - human.  

'Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn’t think of any real good reason. There isn’t any real good reason for fighting except self-defence.’

The Outsiders is a quick but memorable read suitable for around the age of 15 yrs and up. 

I first heard about the book when I hosted a ‘Mum Culture’ evening where a group of us discussed some of our most memorable reads. The gist of The Outsiders was mentioned, although the title had been forgotten and immediately someone else jumped in and said, “I loved that book!” and told everyone the title. So of course, I had to it check it out.

The ultimate test came when I gave it to my 15 year old daughter to read and she gave it her tick of approval also.

(I happened to notice that Ambleside Online has it as a free read in Year 11. I missed that in previous years so I don’t know if its been added lately or I just didn’t see it.)

Come, Tell me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946)

Come, Tell me How You Live, which Christie describes as 'a meandering chronicle' of life on an archaeological dig, is just delightful! I came across this book accidentally when I was looking for some of her crime novels with an archaeological setting.

Agatha Christie met the distinguished young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, in 1930 when she visited Leonard and Katherine Woolley in Baghdad. Her first marriage had come to an end a few years previously and she and Mallowan were married about six months after they met and enjoyed forty-six years together until her death in 1976. During the pre-war years, Agatha accompanied Mallowan on all his digs and took an active part in the photography, recording and preservation of the finds. Come, Tell me How You Live was written to answer a question that was asked of her very often:

'So you dig in Syria, do you? Do tell me all about it. How do you live? In a tent?...'

The book was begun before the war but was put aside for four years while she was engaged in volunteer work in war-time London and Max was serving overseas. In 1944 she picked it up again and said that it was a joy and refreshment to her to live those days again.

'Writing this simple record has been not a task, but a labour of love. Not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the had work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has.'

Come, Tell Me How You Live revealed a side of Agatha Christie that I would never have guessed existed. Her warmth, humour and honesty shone through the writing and I felt I got to know her as a person and not a detached narrator. It was such a pleasure to read about her relationship with Mallowan. They obviously were very secure and comfortable with each other. I had to laugh when she describes an 'archaeological packing,' which consists mainly of books. (I can relate to that!) Mallowan asks if she has room in her suitcases and promptly rams two immense tomes on top of her smugly packed clothes and forces down the lid. The next morning...

'At nine a.m. I am, called in as the heavy-weight to sit on Max's bulging suitcases.

'If you can't make them shut,' Max says ungallantly, 'nobody can!'

Max saw everything through an archaeological lens. Seeing a folded printed linen dress in one of Agatha's suitcases he asked what it was and when told commented that it had 'fertility motifs all down the front.' Another time he suggested she wear 'the greenish buff with the Tell Halaf running lozenge pattern.' He described everything in pottery terms - 'pinkish buff,' and was obsessed with Tells.

Agatha continued her crime writing while on the field and found much inspiration for her books in her Middle Eastern travels. One day, one of the expedition team who had newly arrived and was very sociable, interrupted her while she was getting down to the gory details of a murder. He asked if he could join her in the office while he labelled some objects, but she had to be firm:

'I explain clearly that it is quite impossible for me to get on with my dead body if a live body is moving, breathing, and in all probability talking, in the near vicinity.'

Mice, fleas, mechanical breakdowns, fighting workers, eccentric personalities, post office dramas, conniving sheiks, are all a part of life and are described vividly.

'Anointing beds with carbolic merely stimulates the fleas to even greater displays of athletics. It is not, I explain to Mac (a young archaeological assistant), so much the bites of the fleas. It is their tireless energy, their never ending hopping races round and round one's middle that wears one out. Impossible to drop off to sleep when fleas are holding the nightly sports round and round the waist.'

I've shared in a previous post the Archaeological Studies I'd put together for my daughter in which I included some fiction as an added interest and also because she's always hunting for books to read. After reading Christie's memories of her and Mallowan's archaeological expeditions in the Middle East and enjoying it so much, I decided I'd add this to her reading in Year 11.

252 pages.

Linking to the 2020 NonFiction Reading Challenge at Book'd Out: Memoir

Back to the Classics: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1873-1877)

 One of the problems with classic literature is that we may think we know what the book is about before we even read it. I can think of many classic books that I’ve never read but could tell you their basic plot.

*SPOILER ALERT*

This was the problem I had with Anna Karenina because my ‘knowledge’ of it was basically:  Woman commits adultery and ends up throwing herself under a train. It was written by a Russian, so of course, it would have a mass of various names, patronyms, and diminutives to confuse the reader. I’d also never read anything by Tolstoy before so had no idea he was such a brilliant writer and that I could trust to his expert skill.

But, oh my! What a book this turned out to be. And what a shame to believe you know the crux of the story and to put off reading it because of this. I’m just very thankful I finally decided to read it.
I’m not going to attempt a ‘review’ but will share some thoughts, impressions, and quotations, and hopefully, if you’ve put off reading A.K. for whatever reason, you might just be persuaded to give it a go.

‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Tolstoy jumps into his narrative with the observation above.
Family, community, and society are central to the story as are country life and city life. Tolstoy was a master when it came to characterisation and getting into people’s heads. There are seven main characters in Anna Karenina and he succeeds in allowing the reader a certain intimacy and empathy with each of them.
Prince and Princess Shcherbatsky have three daughters. One is happily married, another unhappily, and the youngest has just refused Levin’s offer of marriage and has had her head turned by the dashing Vronsky. The Prince thought highly of Levin but his wife disliked him in ‘his sharp judgements, his awkwardness in society (caused, as she supposed, by his pride), and his, in her opinion, wild sort of life in the country.’ 
She thought that Vronsky was far superior but the Prince was furious with his wife for her attempts at matchmaking:

‘It’s loathsome, loathsome to look at, and you’ve succeeded, you’ve turned the silly girl’s head. Levin’s a thousand times the better man. And this little fop from Petersburg - they’re made by machine, they’re all the same sort, and all trash...I see a man who has serious intentions, that’s Levin; and I see a popinjay like this whippersnapper, who is only amusing himself.’

Vronsky had never know family life, barely remembered his father, and had no respect for his mother:

‘In his soul he did not respect her and, without being aware of it, he did not love her, though...he could not imagine to himself any other relation to his mother than one obedient and deferential in the highest degree, and the more outwardly obedient and deferential he was, the less he respected and loved her in his soul.’

‘Vronsky...despite the full realisation of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realisation of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happpiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realisation of desires.’

Levin was an interesting person, full of self-doubt, idealistic ideas, and awkwardness. Tolstoy opens the window into his mind and his inner struggles and it was quite comical at times.

‘I need physical movement, otherwise my character definitely deteriorates.’

In Part Seven, Chapter XIV, Levin’s wife is having her first baby and Levin was convinced she was dying. He doesn’t understand how the doctor can sit in another room smoking and chatting...

‘Suddenly there was a scream unlike anything he had ever heard. The scream was so terrible that Levin did not even jump up, but, holding his breath, gave the doctor a frightened, questioning look. The doctor cocked his head to one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.’

When he went into the room his wife seized his hands and said, ‘Don’t leave, don’t leave!’ and then pushed him away.

‘No it’s terrible! I’ll die, I’ll die! Go, go!’ she cried, and again came that scream that was unlike anything in the world.’
‘Doctor! What is it? What is it? My God! he said, seizing the doctor by the arm as he came in.
‘It’s nearly over,’ said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so serious as he said it that Levin understood this ‘nearly over’ to mean she was dying.

Around the time I was reading this part of the book, our eldest son and his wife had their first baby. My daughter-in-law had a long labour and then delivered a whopping 11 pound boy. When our son rang us he said he had no idea that childbirth was going to be like what they experienced.
‘It was brutal!’ were his words. I immediately thought of Levin.

Levin had rejected his childhood beliefs and tried to reason his way through life. He undergoes some dramatic changes, struggling with his idealistic ideas that fall flat in real life.

...while his wife was giving birth an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying he had believed.

Dolly, married to Anna Karenina's philandering brother, Stepan, felt that she had lost herself in the process of being a mother. Alone in a carriage on her way to visit Anna she has time to reflect on her fifteen years of marriage,

'pregnancy, nausea, dullness of mind, indifference to everything,,and, above all, ugliness...Labour, suffering, that last moment...then nursing, the sleepless nights, the terrible pains...'

Released from her everyday cares, she falls into a reverie where she questions the point of it all and considers that she should have left her husband and found happiness somewhere else. 
As she spends time with Anna and her crowd, she has a feeling of unhappiness and that she is poorly playing a part in the theatre with actors better than her.
She decides to go home earlier than intended:

Those painful cares of motherhood that she had hated so on her way there, now, after a day spent without them, presented themselves to her in a different light and drew her to them.


Tolstoy describes Anna Karenina as she follows a course that rapidly changes everything in her life and her exclusion from the society she desperately needed to belong to.

Anna said whatever came to her tongue, and was surprised, listening to herself, at her ability to lie. How simple, how natural her words were...She felt herself clothed in an impenetrable armour of lies. She felt that some invisible force was helping her and supporting her.

Towards the latter part of the book the stream of consciousness narrative that Tolstoy uses with regards to Anna is superb and reminded me of Dostoevsky’s character, Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment - psychotic and paranoid.

Death is a theme throughout and interestingly, only one chapter has an actual title and that is Ch XX - ‘Death.’
I could fill this blog with excerpts from this outstanding novel but so much needs to be read in context. It is multilayered, thought-worthy and deeply spiritual. I don’t know how Tolstoy managed to intersperse so much humour amid the pathos and tragedy, but he did. And to my surprise, I was able to keep up with the Russian names quite well, referring to the 'List of Principal Characters' at the front to the book - Crime & Punishment confused me no end with that side of things.
An impressive book in all respects!

Book Depository has 53% off the lovely Penguin HB pictured above at the time of writing. This edition was translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and it flowed beautifully.
The free Kindle version here is translated by Constance Garnett, which I haven't read so can't comment on, but she is highly regarded as a translator.


Updated to add some articles on translations of Anna Karenina:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/new-translations-of-tolstoys-anna-karenina.html

https://mirabiledictu.org/2016/06/05/translations-of-anna-karenina-constance-garnett-maude-or-pevear-volokhonsky/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/anna-karenina-tolstoy-translation



Linking to Back to the Classics 2018 - Classic That Scares You

Mr. Standfast - How do I Love Thee? Let me Count the Ways...

This is the third time I’ve read Mr. Standfast by John Buchan. It’s one of my favourite books by this author and the third time around hasn’t diminished my ardour.
Mr. Standfast is the third book of five in Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels that began with The Thirty-Nine Steps, and was followed by Greenmantle. The book was published in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution and as World War I was coming to a close. Buchan’s story opens in 1917 when Hannay was serving as a Brigadier in France. He is recalled by British Intelligence to pose as a pacifist in order to infiltrate a spy ring that threatens to bring about an Allied defeat on the Western Front.
Hannay, an upfront man of action, is disgusted with the idea of being a fake pacifist, but he sees his duty, does what is required of him, and by the second half of the book he’s well and truly in on all the action, and nearly gets annihilated a couple of times.
There is a romantic element in this story as Hannay falls in love with the charming Mary Lamington, who is also working for British Intelligence. There are some tense moments for him when the sinister Graft von Schwabing, the German master of disguise, succeeds in tricking Mary. She walks into his trap and finds herself on the 'Underground Railway' heading into Germany with him.

What I loved About Mr. Standfast

•    Buchan uses the theme of Pilgrim’s Progress throughout the book. When Hannay is given his assignment via Mary, she tells him to buy a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress and ‘get it by heart.’ When he receives letters and messages about his assignment, they are written in a style reminiscent of John Bunyan. Some of the chapter headings are taken directly from Pilgrim’s Progress: The Village Named Morality; The Valley of Humiliation; The Summons Comes for Mr. Standfast.

•    Buchan has a very literary style and perceptive insights into human nature. Add those qualities to his grasp of the historical setting and his ability to tell a thrilling political/spy adventure story and the result is a winner.

•    Buchan was a fellow Scot and I love his descriptions of the Scottish Highlands and its people. He also had a very full and interesting life, living in South Africa and later in Canada where he held the position of Governor General. This wide experience of life is reflected in his writing.

•    Buchan’s characters: Mr. Blenkiron, who starred in Greenmantle makes his appearance again in Mr. Standfast, this time as a healthy man cured of his chronic dyspepsia; Sir Archie Roylance, the light-hearted youth who previously served with Hannay and now is in the flying Corps, and Mary Lamington, the courageous and patriotic eighteen year old girl who wins Hannay‘s heart.

•    My favourite character in this book would have to be the wiry and wise, Peter Pienaar, an old associate of Hannay’s from South Africa who participated in some previous adventures. He had found his niche in the Flying Corps and gained a reputation for skill amongst his fellow flyers, but also from Lensch, the German aviation hero. Peter had been downed by Lensch in a air fight and at the beginning of this story he is a crippled prisoner of war. The Pilgrim’s Progress was his constant companion and he had singled out Mr. Standfast as his counterpart because he did not think he could emulate Mr. Valiant-for-Truth. How wrong he was!

Among the unopened letters was one from Peter, a very bulky one which I sat down to read at leisure. It was a curious epistle, far the longest he had ever written me, and its size made me understand his loneliness. He was still at his German prison-camp, but expecting every day to go to Switzerland...
Peter's letter was made up chiefly of reflection. He had always been a bit of a philosopher, and now, in his isolation, he had taken to thinking hard, and poured out the results to me on pages of thin paper in his clumsy handwriting. I could read between the lines that he was having a stiff fight with himself. He was trying to keep his courage going in face of the bitterest trial he could be called on to face - a crippled old age. He had always known a good deal about the Bible, and that and the Pilgrim's Progress were his chief aids in reflection. Both he took quite literally, as if they were newspaper reports of actual recent events.
Peter preferred Valiant-for-Truth to Mr Greatheart, I think, because of his superior truculence, for, being very gentle himself, he loved a bold speaker...He thought that he might with luck resemble Mr Standfast, for like him he had not much trouble in keeping wakeful, and was also as 'poor as a howler', and didn't care for women. He only hoped that he could imitate him in making a good end.

But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind, and he called it 'Fortitude'. I reckon fortitude's the biggest thing a man can have—just to go on enduring when there's no guts or heart left in you.

Peter was writing for his own comfort, for fortitude was all that was left to him now. But his words came pretty straight to me, and I read them again and again, for I needed the lesson. Here was I losing heart just because I had failed in the first round and my pride had taken a knock. I felt honestly ashamed of myself, and that made me a far happier man.


Mr. Standfast by John Buchan is my choice for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018: Re-read a favorite classic

John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels are scheduled as free reads in the AmblesideOnline Year 11 curriculum, but they are also great reading for around age 12 to 13 years and up. My kids loved them.

Living books for the 20th Century: Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng (1986)

'On the evening of 30 August when the Red Guards came to loot my house...

I was sitting alone in my study reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...'

What an incredible story this is! Nien Cheng's memoir, Life and Death in Shangai is saturated with spiritual and soul stretching lessons from her exceptional life. I've read a few books set during Mao's Cultural Revolution but this account stands out for the sheer courage, audacity, and fortitude displayed by the author.
In some respects, Nien Cheng reminds me of Kostoglotov in Solzhenitsyn's book Cancer Ward - two individuals pushing against a totalitarian system.

Nien Cheng was born in Peking in 1915 and studied Economics in London in the mid-1930's. She met her husband during this time and upon their return to China in 1939, he became a diplomatic officer in the Kuomintang Government.
When the Communist Party entered Shanghai in 1949 he was asked to remain in office for the transitional period, after which he was allowed to leave and take on the position of general manager of the Shell International Petroleum Company based in Shanghai.
In 1957 Nien Cheng's husband died of cancer and she was asked to fill the position of assistant to the new general manager, becoming the only woman in Shanghai to occupy a senior role in a company that was acclaimed worldwide, a role she enjoyed until 1966.
Up until the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party didn't decree how people should live, but from time to time political campaigns rocked the country, and when people fell victim to these their incomes were drastically reduced or they and their families were relocated. For seventeen years Nien Chen had made an effort to make her home a haven for her daughter, Meiping, and herself, and managed to maintain their standard of living, 'so that we could continue to enjoy good taste while the rest of the city was being taken over by proletarian realism.'
Meiping, a young actress in the Shanghai Film Studio, was an attractive and intelligent young woman who had learned from an early age that 'the classless society of Communism had a more rigid class system than the despised capitalist society.'
When the Communists gained control of China a new system of discrimination developed against the children of the educated and affluent, who found themselves handicapped because of their family background.

Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a British spy in 1966 and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six and a half years. She steadfastly maintained her innocence throughout that time, defying her brutal interrogators with quotes from Mao's red book and her quick wits.
There was a mysterious element behind her arrest that she wasn't able to identify until much later, but it added a background of suspense to her story.
Although there were many sad and intense moments in Nien Cheng's account, at times she made me feel like laughing and giving a cheer...such as when she was being outrageously denounced by former employees of the company she worked for:

...I must put a stop to this farce. I jerked my head up and laughed uproariously.
My reaction was not what anyone had expected. There was a moment of stunned silence.

She disciplined herself to stay calm and maintain a cool politeness while her interrogators ranted and yelled at her. Her logical responses and her refusal to be bullied into a false confession were a source of frustration to those who were unaccustomed to this type of response. Throughout her imprisonment she had no contact with her daughter but her overwhelming concern was for her safety and she was careful not to do or say anything that would jeopordise her child's future.
When she was facing the extreme cold of her cell and the lack of food, she forced herself to keep her mind active by recalling poetry she had memorised and worked out ways to give her body some exercise without the guards noticing.

There were so many quotable passages in this book but here are a few that especially stood out  to me:

'I'm not a spy for anybody. I have nothing to confess,' I said firmly to the wall from where Mao's portrait looked down on me. As I gazed at Mao's face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but what was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate.

When a man was denounced, he was depicted as totally bad, and any errant behaviour was attributed to the influence of capitalism. 

A Party officer entered her home and spat on the carpet - the first time that the author saw a declaration of power made in a gesture of rudeness:

...I had come to realize that the junior officers of the Party often used the exaggerated gesture of rudeness to cover up their feelings of inferiority.

The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the 'Four Olds' - old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of 'old'; it was left to the Red Guards to decide...

Political correctness had them changing the names of streets...the Bund was renamed Revolutionary Boulevard.

The Red Guards debated whether to reverse the system of traffic lights, as they thought Red should mean Go and not Stop. In the meantime, traffic lights stopped operating.

They seemed to be blissfully happy in their work of destruction because they were sure they were doing something to satisfy their God, Mao Tze-tung. Their behaviour was the result of their upbringing from childhood in Communist China. The propaganda they had absorbed precluded their having a free will of their own.


Nien Cheng developed bronchitis and a 'doctor' was sent to her cell. After explaining to the young man that she had a fever and had been coughing for nearly two months he declared that she probably had hepatitis! She realized he was not a trained doctor at all, but had been given the job because although unskilled, he was politically reliable:

The young man was simply carrying out Mao's order to 'learn to be a doctor by being one.'

'...It's not the purpose if the proletarian class to destroy your body. We want to save your soul by reforming your way of thinking.' Although Mao Tze-tung and his followers were atheists, they were fond of talking about the 'soul.' In his writing, Mao often referred to the saving of a man's soul. During the Cultural Revolution, 'soul' was mentioned frequently...
While no one could ask Mao Tze-tung or Lin Piao what exactly they meant when they talked about a man's 'soul', it greatly taxed the ingenuity of the Marxist writers of newspaper articles who had to explain their leader's words to the people.

On the objective of the Proletarian Revolution to form a classless society, which at first seemed an attractive and idealistic picture when Nien Cheng was a student:

...after living in Communist China for the past seventeen years, I knew that such a society was only a dream because those who seized power would invariably become the new ruling class....
In Communist China, details of the private lives of the leaders were guarded as State secrets. But every Chinese knew that the Party leaders lived in spacious mansions with many servants, obtained their provisions from special shops where luxury goods were made available to their households at nominal prices and sent their children in chauffeur-driven cars to exclusive schools to be taught by specially selected teachers...

Nien Chen was finally told she could leave prison, that the proletarian had magnanimously decided to refrain against pressing charges against her, but she wanted a full apology and refused to leave without one. The interrogators had never had a prisoner refuse to leave detention and were nonplussed. Meanwhile two guards arrived and dragged her outside. She was to endure further years of harrasment before she was eventually able to leave China.

This is such an excellent book and there are so many parallels to our present age with the push to be politically correct and the Marxist influence in many university courses. It's scheduled as a possible biography in Ambleside Online Year 11. I've used Mao Tse-Tung & His China by Albert Marrin in the past, which is a good book also, but not a personal account like Nien Cheng's, and a couple of other books we already had, but I found a copy of Life & Death in Shanghai recently and it's a book that I'd highly recommend.


Some information about the author:

Nien Cheng (1915-2009) established a Chinese embassy in Australia with her husband before communism Photo: Getty

"There were many Chinese who fought back and many who suffered much more. Some of them have never recovered," she said. "But my privilege has been to write about it, and that's only been possible because I could leave."


"It was not until later that Cheng learned that her interrogators were trying to get her to confess to being a spy so that Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife) and other radicals could oust Premier Zhou Enlai, a moderate who favored allowing foreign firms like Shell to operate in China."