Book Reviews
by
Estella Blevins
Peck, Richard. The Teacher's Funeral: A comedy in Three Parts. Dial Books (Penguin Group) (c) 2004, 190 pages.
Richard Peck, a widely acclaimed wrier for teenagers, and winner of the Newbery Award for A Year Down Under, has written about a back woodsy Indiana school in the early 1900's. Although The Teacher's Funeral will delight non-academic readers, it will not generate any respect for schools. Students of today tend to take a negative attitude toward school whether or not they actually feel that way. This book will certainly substantiate "the jailhouse of school" concept.
With the softening effect of a subtitle, "A comedy in Three Parts", Peck has wrapped a total year of a rural school in seventeen readable chapters that concentrate on the entertaining episodes in one-room school environments of 1912.
Miss Myrt Arbuckle had been the teacher of The Hominy Ridge (one-room) School in Parke County, Indiana, for so many years that she was an "institution." Then, as Peck writes, "she hauled off and died." Russell Culver, age 15, the main character, hoped that with the teacher's death, he would be able to escape, with his friend Charlie Parr, to join a wheat-threshing crew in the Dakotas. Residents could not imaging having school with Miss Arbuckle.
Russell had a younger brother, Lloyd Culver; a dog, J. W.; older sister Tansy; an Aunt Maud who replaced his late mother in the kitchen, and an omniscient father. Other kids in school included Flopears; Little Britches; Pearl; Lester Kriegbaum (future president of Indiana University?); the mailman Mr. George Keating; the Tarboes, especially Glenn; and Eugene Hammond from Terre Haute. Other Hoosier localities in the book include Montezuma, Rockville, Weed Patch Hill, Indianapolis, and Butler University.
Pranks that did not always materialize included muffling the school bell, putting a puff adder in the desk drawer, smoking behind the privy, and cleaning soot from stovepipe. Certain mores existed that included picking garden flowers for the teacher's funeral; a law barring married teachers from contracts; packing lunches in Karo buckets with bails; using maps from back of Montgomery Ward catalogs for geography study; and procedures for butchering pigs.
The surprise choice of the new teacher and the display of her effectiveness when the commissioners came to examine will delight every reader.
Goldberg, Natalie. The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth. Harper Collins (c)2004 192pp
Regardless of the precept that one who does not understand the subject should not attempt to write a review, I chose to review Natalie Goldberg�s The Great Failure because she is an eminent personality in writing techniques. Admittedly I do not know much about Zen Buddhism, but I do have an interest in an author who has written ten books and teaches seminars in writing. Goldberg lives in Northern New Mexico.
The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth is Goldberg�s memoir that embraces two important men who dominated her emotional outlook, her father and her Zen teacher Roshi.
Divided into three parts, Part I discusses Natalie�s youth when her Jewish bartender father failed her expectation and her Mother was only a backdrop in the picture. She reports worthless college counseling and the long break in the relationship between Natalie and her parents.
Part II treats the shock that Natalie experienced when Zen master Dainin Katagiri Roshi died. She had studied with Roshi for twelve years and had written a book about him, Long Quiet Highway, in 1993. Goldberg felt she had lost both fathers although Benjamin Goldberg was still alive.
Six years after Roshi�s death, information about his indiscreet relations with one of his female students surfaced. In Roshi�s lectures, he had inverted Rene Descartes� �I think; therefore I am� into Katagiri Roshi�s �nothing� existence, �I don�t think; therefore I�m not.� In Zen, �dumb� is a compliment meaning one is open to receive the world as it is. Gradually Natalie accepted the �chasm between the Zen master and the lonely. insecure man.� (p.115)
In Part III, the author tenderly reports the details of her father�s death and then jests about which person he should lie beside in the Hebrew Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, and the voluntary comments at the graveside.
Goldberg�s search for a deep trust in herself was thwarted by an uncomfortable, early father-daughter relationship and by the indiscretion of her revered Zen teacher Roshi. In a literary technique, Goldberg uses a parallel insertion of a Chinese tale about Te-shan who also was seeking the truth. In her introduction, Goldberg writes, �I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole.� That was the great failure. Goldberg hopes that after her ashes are sprinkled, someone will say, �she was lonely; she suffered a lot. She was mixed up. She made some big mistakes---but she was important to me.� Surely many writers will utter these words.
