by William Golding
Believe it or not, I never read this book until now, and the only reason I did finally read it is that my son is currently in his high school’s production of Lord of the Flies.
Set during some fictional wartime in the mid-twentieth century, this classic novel is about a group of British school boys who end up on an uninhabited, remote island when the plane that is evacuating them from home crashes. That a plane happened to crash so conveniently close to an island, that no adults survived the crash but a significant number of boys did, and that none of those surviving boys seem to have suffered any injuries from the crash all require a degree of suspension of disbelief, but this passes quickly as the novel unfolds.
The story opens after the plane crash has already happened, and the surviving boys have made it safely onto the island. As they converge on the beach, they quickly choose a boy to be in charge, or “chief,” by a show of hands. A sensible, fun loving boy named Ralph, who is prone to spontaneous handstands is chosen. However, another boy, Jack, sees himself as chief, and his resentment at not being chosen manifests in a bitter rivalry with Ralph soon after. As a consolation, Ralph appoints Jack and the rest of the school choir to which Jack belongs hunters; it will be their job to hunt the wild pigs on the island to feed the crash survivors until they are rescued. Ralph also determines very quickly that their only hope of rescue is to start a fire and keep it going night and day so that any passing ship or plane might see the smoke.
Everything starts out pretty orderly and cooperative. The boys agree to certain rules to maintain civility. One of the central rules is that meetings are called by Ralph by blowing into a conch shell found on the beach. The conch has a significant role in the story; it represents a certain amount of power, for not only is it used to call meetings, it’s also agreed that whoever holds the conch gets to speak while everyone else listens.
Gradually, civility disintegrates and the rivalry between Jack and his gang and Ralph and his more underdog group, which includes an asthmatic, obese outcast of a boy cruelly called Piggy grows until the two groups are basically at war with one another.
It’s a pretty grim, and even gruesome story, and a fascinating exploration of human nature as these young boys descend into savagery.
A good read.
by Howard Zimmerman with them (an excellent book), and detouring to other books when we want to delve more deeply into certain aspects of the history we’re reading about. Slavery in America is one of those aspects. I want to somehow convey to my kids the depth of horror of slavery, and to really try to imagine what it must have been like to be owned as a piece of property, like a table or a dog or an iPad, by another human being, to have no rights, and to spend one’s entire life doing the bidding of another person or people. It’s hard even for me to imagine, obviously, being a white woman.
, which was a compilation of interviews with the last living former slaves undertaken by the Federal Writer’s Project of the Depression. The book angered Lester, who says, “The slaves depicted there were too reminiscent of the stereotyped blacks of the movies of the forties and fifties – happy, laughing, filled with love for while people.” Believing that the interviews with former slaves were cherry-picked in order to produce a record of slavery that (white) people could feel good about, Lester went to the Library of Congress and spend weeks pouring through all of the interviews undertaken by the Federal Writer’s Project himself, gleaning from them exactly what he had gone there to find: true, emotional, harrowing, courageous, horrifying, heart wrenching firsthand accounts of slavery from those who were slaves themselves and lived to tell about it. To Be a Slave is Lester’s compilation of those interviews, along with his notes.
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