The first three

I couldn't wait anymore. I drew the first three book names from the box. The winners are:
1. Eleanor Roosevelt volume 1
2. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present
3. Best American Essays: Fifth college edition

I started this post but never published it. I read 2 and 3 already, and I drew another 3 because I couldn't wait; it was so much fun!

4. 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl
5. Henry VIII
6. Mexico and Peru Myths and Legends

So now 1, 4, 5, 6 are sitting on my bedside table along with Gabaldon's Breath of Snow in Ashes, Lonely Planet's How to Write Travel Writing, Tales to Tremble by, The 3am Epiphany, Reading Like a Writer, and a whole stack of books for my capstone research and class.

#3, Best American Essays: Fifth college edition, was an excellent book. I could have excerpted every other page. It was such an interesting mix of great writing on all different subjects. I highly recommend the Best American Series. This one is the best of the best intended for use in college classes as a good collection of writing in many styles for their students.

#2,  A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present, sat on my shelves for years - and what a treasure. It is a colection of excerpts from diaries of common American women. Some of the writing and stories were amazing! I ordered two of the books from Amazon so I can read the whole thing. Here are a few of the highlights:
 One woman, writing in 1788 in New Hampshire, describes a change in her husband toward their daughter - how he begins to sexually molest her and the mother can do nothing about it since women had absolutely no rights back then.

Several women give first hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, the Oregon Trail and the Civil War. I was continually surprised that some women were allowed to speak their minds so freely at these times.


Elizabeth ashe went to France at the end of WWI to work in a hospital. She writes of French woman named Mlle. L'Hotellier who worked in a hospital, hid French troops from the Germans and helped their escape, was finally caught, arrested, tortured and starved. Later she escaped and made her way back to the hospital. Mlle. says of her experience: "No one knows what freedom is that has not been deprived of it; that she is now free from everything; that she realizes that before she was a slave to certain habits, slave to her clothes and to her possessions, but that now that she is free she realizes how little all of these are worth if we are deprived of the freedom of body or soul."


One excerpt was by a Juanita Harrison - a Mississippi born black woman (b. 1891) who worked her way around the world finding jobs as ladies' maids to support her travels. She finally retired on the island of Hawaii in a tent. I am currently waiting for this book in the mail. I really need to read the whole thing.


The next diarist is Eslanda Goode Robeson. She is another black woman (b. 1896) who went to Columbia University. Her book is called African Journey and is currently in the mail on its way to me. It was such an amazing story I just had to get the book. Here are a few bits of her writing:
She and her 8 y o son are traveling through Africa in 1936. This was an era of rampant and unhidden racism. The colonial era is still in full swing and modern conveniences are not common.
In Kenya she remarks in regards to the public segregation: "It always strikes me as amusing, pathetic and a bit silly when I see Europeans taking so much trouble to segregate themselves in public places, when i know these same Europeans fill their homes with all kinds of native servants, who come into the most intimate contact with their food, clothing, and especially their children."
"This morning we drove through a locust storm. Pauli said it was like the movies. (It is strange when one comes to think of it, that natural phenomena should seem like fiction or films, and not vice versa, to city-bred or highly civilized people.)"
As she worked with some native women one day, "They wanted to know what kind of work women did 'outside,' how they brought up their children, how their men treated them,how they dressed, whether they went to school with the men. They wanted to know if I thought our black children will have a place in the world, a real place, or will 'they only be told what to do?' "We are tired of being told what to do. Our children will be more tired of it.'"
Crossing the Mediterranean on a boat, she conversed with an older white "colonial" man. The man said her son was intelligent, "pity he's got that handicap, he's black, pity, he could go far." The author responded, "He'll go far because he's black. His color, his background, his rich history are part of his wealth. We consider it an asset, not a handicap." Later she contemplated, "This poor man doesn't know what it's all about. He has no important or useful knowledge about more than a billion of his fellow men - Negroes, Africans, Indians, Chinese, probably Jews, and probably Russians. Most likely he has simply dismissed them contemptuously as "primitive," "oriental," or "red." He has built himself into a very small, very limited world of his own, behind a towering formidable wall of ignorance, prejudice and "superiority."