Russell Banks (1940–2023)

"{He} did not mention blinding clouds of mosquitos. He said nothing of the long, torrential rainy season. He did not say that every few years a frost kills all the crops overnight....He did not tell us about the hurricanes. He neglected to describe the brutal intensity of the heat in summer, and the suffocating humidity from May to September, {the droughts, the wildfires}."

You would be forgiven if you thought this novel of historical fiction set in Florida was about Disney World. It is not, or at least only peripherally so, in that the land on which the novel is set supposedly was acquired in the mid-20th century by the Disney conglomerate. Instead it is about life in a small Shaker Community in early 20th century Florida. While fictional, the story itself has some basis in fact.
The story is purportedly told by Harley Mann, as set forth on some audio tapes Harley made in the 1970's when he was in his 80's. Harley came to the fictional Shaker community of New Bethany with his mother and siblings when he was a young boy. He grew up there, but as a young man fell in love with a young woman residing in a nearby tuberculosis sanatorium and decided that the celibate life of Shaker adults was not for him. The gist of the novel relates to a scandal involving the Shaker community elders and Sadie Pratt, the young woman Harley fell in love with.
I enjoyed this story of what life was like in a Shaker community. I also enjoyed getting a feel for what life was like in early 20th century Florida before the developers and conglomerates took over. This was not a particularly fast-moving story, but it was always engaging.
Of course after reading the novel I had to do some googling to try to see what was real and what was made up. There was an actual Shaker community back then in Central Florida called Olive Branch, not New Bethany, and there was a TB sanatorium located in nearby Narcoosee. A patient named Sadie (with the different last name of Marchant) resided at the sanatorium, and there was a similar scandal involving that Sadie and some of the elders from the Shaker community. So to that extent the story is fact based.
In addition, a note in the novel states that the burial ground for the Shaker community is still in existence on the grounds of Disney World. Supposedly it's located in the Animal Kingdom at the edge of a marsh "several hundred yards southwest of the Rainforest Cafe, where no one but Disney security guards patrols the area." Not sure if this part is fact based, but maybe something to be checked out.
3 1/2 stars… (lisätietoja)

The final word we will have from writer Russell Banks is a sobering look at his old stomping grounds, the lackluster fictional rural village of Sam Dent, NY. Three novellas are presented, and one of the three is a familiar story from a different setting. The first is a gun tragedy, featuring a war between a local resident and the wealthy security expert who buys his family land and sets up a training camp for right wing gun nuts. The second is a suicidal tragedy, with two white moms killing themselves and their four adopted Black children by driving into the Ausable River, a prominent tourist attraction that feeds into the Ausable Chasm. The last is a drug tragedy, featuring loving grandparents who are blind to the mental illness of their adopted grandson, whose contact with the birth mother who abandoned him after the death of her husband in Iraq proves disastrous for all. There's a great deal of morbidity and sorrow here, but there's also such vivid writing, especially on local history and on the surrounding forests, that it ends up being a sympathetic narrative that penetrates the layers of this difficult environment.… (lisätietoja)

Continental Drift is a powerful book dealing that shows how some of the worst and most exploitive experiences that humans have are born from the trivial failures of imperfect people. Many of the people in this book are hugely flawed and only partly evil. Yet their actions and desperation when magnified by the relentless drive for profit on all things that is capitalism generate absolute horrors and destroy lives and spirits. A book like this should is so important especially now when so many advocates of social justice imagine that people can just "envision the good they want to be" and that that will be enough.… (lisätietoja)