From My Fantasy Writing Desk
Today I’m sharing an especially important review with you. I’ve watched this book come into being and grow. Memoir, done right, is a complex and tricky project. Diane Benitez got it right. I hope you’ll read her story of an American in Franco’s Madrid. Here’s my review:
Benitez writes in a style that is in turns dryly humorous, breathtakingly heart-wrenching, and simply beautiful. This is a rare memoir that brilliantly takes you on two simultaneous, spell-binding journeys.
Benitez will give you the full savor of Spain’s extraordinary culture, its regional foods, unsurpassed art and churches, even a forgotten one tucked against an isolated coastline.
While she vividly draws you into life in Spain in the final years of Franco’s rule, she also tells the page-turning story of a young American woman who falls in love with this foreign world but discovers a soul-harrowing crisis hiding at the core of that beloved life. It is a crisis both personal and particular, while also reflecting the unresolved, silent shadow left by the Civil War. What a luxury to find in one book both an immersive travelogue and an utterly engrossing tale, told in such masterful prose. I highly recommend Without a Second Thought.
You can purchase Without a Second Thought on Amazon (affiliate link)
Find Diane Benitez on her website and on Facebook.
Archaeology I Enjoyed
Settling Down to Shellfish Creates Cooperation and Conflict
Here’s food for thought next time you’re eating some shellfish. 100,000 years ago modern humans along coastal southern Africa began to shift from hunter-gatherers to settled groups. They did so, researchers believe, by concentrating on shellfish as a food source.
Study and isotope analysis dating of deposits of shells leads to this conclusion. What’s especially interesting to me, are the two behaviors that these researchers conclude came along with the focus on this high-protein food source. The two C’s: conflict and cooperation.
Because the area where the shellfish could be harvested had to be protected from others, territorial conflict arose and with it the development of projectile weapons. However, the better diet also led to increase in population and cognitive capacity. Combined with the density of communities and the increasing tool sets, these physical aspects, in turn, led to cooperation as a social mode. However, that’s reading a lot into scanty remains and precision dating, but fascinating nonetheless.
Click here for Archaeology Magazine “Our Coastal Origins”
Reflections in the Past and Present
Smithsonian magazine has an article about selfies and their historic equivalents in the form of mirrors.
Intriguingly, they hand my Hittites (or given this date pre-Hittites) the honor of the first mirror. While I have not seen this particular polished obsidian mirror excavated from the ancient capital of Hattusa, but it is pretty impressive. In contrast, the obsidian mirrors in the photo are from Çatalhöyük, the grandfather of archaeological sites in Turkey for the early periods of Anatolia.
“Judging by the archaeological record, we’ve been fascinated by our reflections for a long time. Some of the earliest human-made mirrors, fashioned from polished obsidian, date to 6200 B.C. in Turkey. Egyptians later made mirrors of polished copper, and Chinese inventors from reflective jade. Mirrors were sometimes involved in religious observance, regarded as a portal to a spiritual world.”
The Hittite mirror I have included in my fiction is created by blackening a circle of silver or bronze, creating a lip, and filling it with water to reflect. That kind of mirror is in the Anatolian museum in Ankara and dates to the later period of my Hittites. The human desire to study one’s reflection is an interesting idea to reflect on.
Click here for Smithsonian Magazine “The Original Selfie Craze Was the Mirror”