Curl up with a Good Book

"How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor." March, Geraldine Brooks, p 65. Hmmm that is how I felt about the Marriage and Family Relations class that I took - things that seems so clear and easy in the classroom, when once encountered with emotional wrappings and trappings of personality are not quite so easy or clear in the battlefield of life.

The first book I read by Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonder, I really did not enjoy, but Jesse told me how much she had enjoyed, People of the Book, also by Brooks, so I went to the library looking for that book. It was out, so I checked out March, Brooks' Pulitzer Prize winning novel. I did enjoy this thought provoking novel. It is a fictional account of the experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Little Women. I think anyone who has gone to war or has had a loved one go to war would find the insights in this book valuable.

Brooks begins one chapter with "Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man’s character, the other its nadir. And yet, to me, the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. Who is the brave man - he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads . . ." March, Geraldine Brooks p .168
Even though it has been eons since I read it, I couldn't help but think of the book Red Badge of Courage as I read this novel. Brooks gives interesting historical insight about the Civil War and the battle over slavery. I felt I learned so much from this book and enjoyed seeing the famous March family from a different point of view.