A colorful portrait of the rhythms and textures of Zonian life, with little investigation of the underlying politics.
An evocative account of growing up in the Panama Canal Zone during the last years of U.S. control over the key waterway.
Deep in the Panamanian jungle, the Panama Canal Zone was a small slice of America, where U.S. workers employed in operating and maintaining the key isthmian waterway lived with their families. In 1970, about 45,000 “Zonians” lived amid a total Panamanian population of 1.5 million. Judy Haisten’s poignant memoir describes her experience growing up a Zonian between 1964 and 1977—the year President Jimmy Carter signed the treaty ending U.S. control over the canal. For Haisten, the Zone was a tropical paradise in which “[l]ife patterns...were planned, organized, and structured, while the jungle promised chaos, confusion, spontaneity.” With wry humor and vivid detail, she presents a series of Zonian-life vignettes, from dodging bats in the only movie theater in her town to chasing a stray parrot, staring down a crocodile and running away from a boa constrictor. Her prose is as steamy as the humid Panama climate: “Mealy water bugs” skim the surface of a pond where alligators breed, and “[f]oamy masses of frog eggs [float] close to the bank.” There are also visits to the primitive settlements of two indigenous tribes, including the half-naked Choco Indians. “I felt as if I had stepped into the pages of the National Geographic magazines we received at home in the mail,” Haisten recalls. The idyll ends abruptly with the canal treaty, under which the Zone, as a political entity, ceased to exist on Oct. 1, 1979. “America had lost a piece of herself,” Haisten laments, her dreams of raising her own children in the Zone dashed. But like the water bugs, the author skims the surface: Her focus on Zonian life is so tight that she doesn’t explore the palpable tension of the U.S. presence in Panama, which was established under a 1903 treaty that many Panamanians viewed as imperialistic. The host country is just “a welcome part of our lives,” while her encounters with Panamanians are limited to her family’s housekeeper, bus drivers and salesmen at an auto dealership she visits with her mother. She chastises President Carter for going back on his word to protect Zonians, but she fails to acknowledge that they always lived in Panama on borrowed time.
A colorful portrait of the rhythms and textures of Zonian life, with little investigation of the underlying politics.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1614930853
Page Count: 290
Publisher: The Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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