Lives

For April’s Love Blippin’ Books prompt (#LBB16) we’ve been asked to choose biography/autobiography/memoir.

I’ve cheated a little by including one that I’d just finished last month, but I’ve also read two new ones from my shelves.

I’ve had this volume of Gandhi’s Autobiography for many years without getting round to reading it. I was surprised to find it was a US first edition, but it had certainly been around the block a bit before I picked it up. The volume was originally written between 1925 and 1929 in the form of weekly newspaper articles, which means it’s in easily digestible chunks. It covers more or less the first 50-60 years of his life, back to boyhood, although leaving out quite a lot of his South African years as he’d already covered those in another book. I found his experiences of being a law student in 1880s London, including the trials of being a vegetarian in the city at that time, very engaging. It’s also fascinating to see how his philosophical and practical ideas developed through time, and also to get more insight into the movements for civil rights in South Africa and independence in India of which he played a leading part. 

Naoki Higoshida’s ‘The Reason I Jump’  (2007), a memoir of kinds, is also made up of digestible sections, but this time just a page or two at a time, so perhaps morsels more than chunks. Naoki, at time of writing, was a mainly non-verbal autistic teen, and the book is mainly an attempt to offer insight into how he experiences the world. Reading it as a verbal autistic adult I did find bits of his experience that I recognised, but also much that I didn’t. That wasn’t a surprise, as autism is realised in unique ways for each of us (while showing commonalities for for clinical diagnostic criteria). I found some of the language used to describe autism and autistic people dated, and wondered how heavy a hand the translator, David Mitchell, had in particular forms of expression. I’d have been much more comfortable if ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ had been used throughout. However, millions of readers have learned more about an autistic life experiences through reading this book, so that can’t be a bad thing.

[Which reminds me that when reading Gandhi’s book, I did see recognise a lot of autism in him, and there has certainly been plenty written about the likelihood that he was autistic.]

Finally, a biography of Crazy Horse (1999) by one of the best writers of the American West (e.g. the Lonesome Dove books), Larry McMurtry. As an example of a biography it’s fascinating, as there are very few tangible facts about Crazy Horse’s life. McMurtry picks his way carefully around the myths, and gives helpful information about what we do know about the events that culminated in the Great Sioux War of 1876, and Crazy Horse’s assassination the following year. McMurtry also situates these events within broader colonialism.  It’s a short book, but a rewarding historical sketch.

[For what it’s worth, Crazy Horse was also inclined to take himself off alone for long periods and was seen as an aloof individual, but with a strong moral sense and generosity to others, but as yet there doesn’t seem to be a raft of online claims for him as part of the autistic tribe. Let that start here… :-) ]

Three very different books, and three very different lives, but some interesting threads of convergence. 

An enjoyable reading challenge. Many thanks to @EuniceM for this month’s prompt and to @squatbetty for creating and curating LBB.