Thoughts on Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club

I was standing in the New Releases section of my local Barnes & Noble Booksellers looking for a new book to send to my mother for her birthday. I had read a favorable review of The End of Your Life Book Club, the reviewer summarizing the book as a memoir about a man and his mother and the books they read together near the end of her life. My own mother is an avid reader and ingrained within me from an early age a similar appreciation of books. The End of Your Life Book Club sounded like it might be a good gift. However, after reading the jacket flap and learning that the man's mother was also dying of pancreatic cancer, I closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. This wasn't just the end of the woman's life. It was the end too soon. It sounded too sad for me and certainly too sad to give as a birthday gift. I bought something else instead and shipped it to my mom.

I called her a few days later after I had received confirmation that the package had been delivered. Mom and I engaged in the usual mother-son chatter and then I admitted my original intent; that I had meant to send The End of Your Life Book Club to her and we would each read it together, a mother and son reading a book about a mother and son reading books. I suggested that while I hadn't sent the book that inspired the idea, maybe I could get a copy of the book I did send and we'd read it together. Mom liked the idea but wanted to read The End of Your Life Book Club instead. I warned her of the subject matter but she insisted that we read the book that inspired the idea. So, I ordered two copies and had one shipped to her and other to me.

The book is simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming. Mary Anne Schwalbe was a tremendously accomplished woman. In addition to being the mother of three children, she was an educator and traveled to impoverished and war-torn countries to volunteer in refugee camps, caring for women and children. She was, like my own mother, always reading something and inspired her kids to read. This love of books and reading gives her and her son something to discuss other than cancer treatments. Through the books they read, the two of them find strength, peace, and inspiration. They follow others through their struggles, fictional or non-fictional, and through discussion of these stories, the two find a way to manage their own challenges.

Somehow, through all of the chemotherapy, awful side effects, and bad news from her oncologist, Mary Anne Schwalbe stayed strong. She had a matter-of-fact outlook on the whole situation. She was determined to do what she could do and didn't worry about what she could not control. She seemed almost peaceful about it, or at least that was she appeared to her family. If she was scared, she did not show it and that impressed me. It would be so easy for some people to curl up and hide, but she continued to live her life, travel, attend charity events and work toward her goal of getting a library funded and built in Kabul, Afghanistan. She wasn't dead yet and she didn't want anyone fretting over her or eulogizing her before it was time. I find that inspirational.

I am not really sure I can say I "enjoyed" the book though I am grateful for the experience and grateful to Will Schwalbe for sharing such a deeply personal story. I recently had friend die of colon cancer and his family exhibited a similar strength and togetherness shown by the author and his family. I hope my friend felt as much peace in his final days as the author's mother did in hers.

Thoughts on Tim Butcher's Blood River

I suppose my imagination wrote the adventure I thought I was going to read as I stood in line at my bookstore with Blood River tucked under my arm. When I had read the description printed on the leaf of the front cover, I imagined the author battling his way through the African landscape with a rucksack on his back, a machete in his hand and a mixture of excitement and fear in his heart.

While Blood River, being a story of a man largely using modern transportation methods instead of hoofing it the way the explorer Stanley did, was not what I was expecting, it was still an interesting tale of a man's journey across a country in decline juxtaposed with historical excerpts either discovered through the author's own research or gleaned from the stories told by the locals he met along the way.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the ruined cities he passed through as once-thriving boom towns of a promising time. I was disappointed, as was the author, to discover that towns that had once been the home of many thousands of people, with paved roads, running water, electricity and the rule of law had degraded into derelict ruins of miserable poverty and hardship. Butcher does a nice job of painting a mental picture of former modern buildings reclaimed by the Congolese wilderness, of a nation with great potential regressing to despotic ways and largely rejected the influences of the modern world.

What struck me as I read through the book was how provisionally unprepared the author seemed to be for his adventure. Surely, he did not expect it to be easy, as his years of pre-journey preparations revealed to him a country at war with itself, with lawless armies of rebels ravaging the countryside, murdering the Congolese and corrupt politicians extorting money from everyone they could intimidate. Even as he set out on the first leg of his trip from the town of Kalemie on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, he had only a few bottles of water and no food save for a handful of energy sweets. I found it staggering that someone intending to cross a country lacking in modern comforts and amenities would decide not to bring any food at all. By his own admission, he intended to rely on the villages he passed along the way for his meals. These are villages whose people are already starving, "skeletal" victims of murderous rampages of the rebels who sweep through an area to kill, rape and plunder and the author thought it would be a good idea to just take his meals from them? One of the frustrations he shares when discussing the history of the explorer Stanley's initial journey in the 1870s was that it jump-started a European policy of white men taking complete advantage of the Congolese people, the Congolese land and all the raw resources it had to offer. For someone who regretted the fact that the white man profited from and savagely mistreated the people of the Congo, it is ridiculous and thoughtless of him to decide he was going to leech his own travel resources from the impoverished people unlucky enough to be in his way. He also seemed mentally unprepared for what lay before him. Only a day and a half into his journey and already "I no longer had the wits to deal with anything".

Those criticisms aside, Tim Butcher was massively appreciative of the people who helped him along his way. The pygmy Georges Mbuyu, Care International operatives Benoit and Odimba and several others all received their due appreciation and respect from the author.

By the end of the book, I was left feeling sad for the people of the Congo. During the Belgian colonial period, the Congo showed promise. It is a country rich in economic potential with large quantities of diamonds, cobalt, tin and rubber available, if only someone would get organized and responsibly harvest them. Instead, as one UN officer told the author, "[T]he Congo people. They don't want to make money for themselves. They just wait to take money from others." The author's own concern was similarly grim: "The world seems to view the Congo as a lost cause without hope of ever being put right."

While offering a good look at the situation the country is in now, Blood River did not leave me optimistic about its future. I knew little about the Congo before I read this book and while I know I can't take one author's word as law, I at least feel I have a better understanding of a country that I knew only by name a few days ago.