Mary E. Trimble

My Own Words by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933 – 2020) with authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams is a compilation of talks and published papers written by one of the most influential voices of our time.

In this fascinating book, Ruth Bader Ginsburg discusses her life as a judge, gender equality, how the highest law in the land works, and the value of looking at other countries when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. RBG began her law practice at the beginning of the seventies when the subject of women’s human rights was nowhere to be found in law casebooks.

We often think of gender equality from a woman’s point of view, but RGB fought for men’s equality as well. In one case, a single man who took care of his widowed mother fought for a tax deduction, the same as a woman caretaker would receive.

Ginsburg had a brilliantly analytical mind along with a delightful entertaining wry streak. She was deeply involved with her family. She taught law and fought for equalization in women’s opportunities in colleges regarding admissions policies, financial aid, and placement of graduates.

In her talks she sites examples of state laws of inequality, as in a 1975 Iowa court case that declared a parent could stop supporting a daughter when she reached 18 years of age, but required parental support for a son until he turned 21.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s energy and work ethics demonstrated what matters most is equality for everyone regardless of race, sex, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religion, and other group characteristics. She was totally dedicated to her job and devoted her life toward the betterment of our nation’s attitude toward equality for all.

My Own Words is a delightful compilation of RBG’s attitudes and beliefs. Her biographers have presented some of RBG’s most important achievements through her talks and published papers. The book was published in 2018, two years before RBG’s death. At 400 pages, It’s a good-sized volume, and loaded with the esteemed Supreme Court Justice’s wisdom and sharp wit.

Book Review: Strength in What Remains

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Mary

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness, by Tracy Kidder is a biography of an African, Deo, and his remarkable journey, both in miles and achievements.

The story begins in Bujumbura, Burundi during the terrifying 1994 military coup d’ etat. Deo has been six months on the run, sick, and horrified by the inhumane treatment by the Hutu, an ethnic group primarily found in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. A Tutsi, Deo is of a smaller tribe and fears for his life, and that of his family. When the extreme violence and chaos began, he had been a medical student, but had to escape from the college with no provisions, no food nor adequate clothing. On the run, it seems the whole country is on fire. He sees groups of dead people stacked in fields, witnesses horrifying acts of cruelty. He travels on foot 70 kilometers, manages to board an airplane, and finally arrives in New York.

Deo is fluent in French as well as some tribal languages. In his home country, French was thought to be an international language. When Deo arrives in New York, he has two hundred dollars, speaks no English, and has no contacts. He manages to get a poor-paying job delivering groceries. He briefly sleeps in an abandoned building in New York slums, but soon realizes he is happier sleeping in the open at Central Park. He learns English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Deo eventually meets people who will change his life. A dream comes true for him when he is accepted at Columbia University, learns English, becomes a doctor, and begins a life of healing.

Author Tracy Kidder and Deo later travel to Burundi and journey together through Deo’s previous turbulent life. Kidder witnesses the agony Deo still feels with the memory of the genocide he witnessed, but Kidder also sees Deo’s strength and determination to bring healing to his home country.

My husband and I served with the Peace Corps in The Gambia, West Africa, 1979 – 1981. Toward the end of our service, we experienced a coup d’etat attempt carried out by members of the Gambia Socialist Revolutionary Party. We sought shelter in the American Ambassador’s home, together with 116 other people from several different countries. The house often shook from close-sounding explosions. We managed to survive on short rations, including water, until we were liberated by Senegalese military intervention. It was estimated that 1,000 people died in the coup attempt. What we endured in ten days was mild compared to Deo’s journey, but when I read this account of the suffering in Burundi, it brought back memories of the terror we experienced.

Strength in What Remains is a remarkable and memorable account of one man’s determination to help his countrymen. It isn’t a pretty story; in fact it is quite gruesome in places. But it is a true story of courage and goodness of not only one man’s journey, but of the many people who helped him along the way.

Book Review: James Patterson by James Patterson

Posted on December 30, 2024 by Mary

James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life is a fascinating memoir written by a world-renowned best-selling author. I love Patterson’s informal and conversational writing style, and the many anecdotes, often amusing, he shares about his personal life.

In short chapters Patterson gives readers glimpses of a life that captures the essence of greatness, though he hadn’t a clue of that during his early years.

Patterson was raised in a Catholic blue-collar family in Newburgh, New York. He was an altar boy, and attended Catholic schools. After graduating from university he worked for a time in a psych ward, but for the majority of his “working” (that is, not writing) years he was employed by the big-time ad agency, J. Walter Thompson. For several years he started his day at 5:00 and wrote a couple of hours before going to work, but seriously doubted his ability to write fiction. After about 30 rejections, his first novel was accepted by a literary agency. Once his fiction writing was published, there was no stopping him–he had an immediate audience and the fuel he needed to continue writing one best-seller after another. He began collaborating with well-known personalities such as former President Bill Clinton (The President is Missing) and singer/actress Dolly Parton (Run Rose Run). He has written several popular mystery series as well as romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.

In his memoir, Patterson shares many of his writing habits, such as always writing an extensive outline before writing the book itself. Interestingly, Patterson writes his first draft with pencil. His memoir is written as though he’s talking to the reader. The narrative isn’t in chronological order, but is generally grouped into themes. James Patterson by James Patterson is a fun, lively read. And, no surprise, he tells a good story.

Book Review: Dreaming of Flight

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Mary

Dreaming of Flight, an endearing novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, is a thought-provoking, contemporary story of love and loss.

Stewie Little, eleven, never knew his parents. They died when he was just a baby. But he did know his grandmother and loved her very much. When she died, he was devastated. Stewie and his older brother have been raised by their older sister on the farm where their grandmother lived.

After his grandmother died, Stewie took over the care of her chickens. He takes his job seriously, calls each hen by name, and gathers their eggs lovingly. He sells eggs to his neighbors and has steady customers who count on him.

On his egg route one day, he went to a house that was farther than he had been before. An older, grouchy woman came to the door. Actually, she reminded him of his grandmother. They became friends, each giving the other the “something missing” in their lives. For instance, Stewie had trouble reading and his new friend took the time to sit down with him for reading lessons.

A serious boy, Stewie doesn’t understand sarcasm, is painfully honest, and often confused by others’ behavior. When his new friend gets into serious trouble, Stewie steps in to help, with surprising results.

I appreciated how Stewie and his new friend filled each others’ needs. By the time I was eight years old, my family had moved several times due to my father’s work. We had just moved, again, from Michigan to what would become our permanent home in Seattle, Washington, and my new teacher noticed I wasn’t reading at third-grade level. She sent a note home with me and the next day the teacher, my mother and I had a little conference. The teacher gently explained that I needed to catch up on my reading skills, and sent books home with me. I was to read aloud for 30 minutes a day. So began my catching up, then passing up my grade level. I will always be thankful this teacher took the time and effort to recognize the problem, and then follow through. She opened up a life of reading–and writing–that I otherwise may not have had.

Stewie’s new friend reminded me how important it is to step in when you see a need. In Dreaming of Flight, needs of both Stewie and his new friend are met, but in unexpected ways. This is yet another heart-felt novel by one of my favorite authors, Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Book Review: Salmon Moon

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Mary

Salmon Moon: River of No Return, a novel by Julie Weston, is the sixth in the “A Nellie Burns and Moonshine Mystery” series. The story takes place in the 1920s along Idaho’s wild Salmon River, known as The River of No Return.

Nellie Burns hires a scow to rescue her husband of only a few weeks, Sheriff Charlie Azgo. They find him in an old abandon house near the shore of Salmon River. A shootout renders one man killed and Charlie injured. The small gang of criminals escape with stolen money and gold, one in a dory on the river, and another on horseback. There is a third thief, but where he or she has gone is a mystery.

Nellie, Charlie, Janie, a nurse, and Ace, the scow’s sweepman, pursue the criminals along the raging river. With them is Nellie’s faithful Black Lab, Moonshine. Although the scow, a large flatbottom wooden boat with square ends, is the best way to travel the river, it’s rough going and at one point Nellie and Moonshine are swept off in a rush of water. They make it to shore, but surviving in the wilds of Idaho can be daunting. You can’t simply stop a boat in that wild river, and the rest of the party is swept downriver in a rush of water.

Thus begins a frantic search for Nellie, and hot pursuit of the thieves who got away. It’s tricky, traveling by river while pursuing thieves. The Salmon dictates when and where they can go ashore. There are fish in the river and wild game on shore, but do they have the equipment to catch enough to sustain them? The river is cold and it’s tough to stay dry while going through churning waters, navigating rapids, and trying to stay clear of large rocks.

Author Julie Weston is a native of Idaho and has family history of Idahoans dating back to the 1870s. Weston and her husband have rafted many northwest rivers, and can speak with authority about the subject.

Salmon Moon: River of No Return, is the last of the “A Nellie Burns and Moonshine Mystery” series. Each book stands alone, but it’s fun to read them in order: Moonshadows, Basque Moon, Moonscape, Miners’ Moon, Moon Bones, and this latest, Salmon Moon. It’s an exciting series, written with personal knowledge about Idaho, a state known for its scenic landscapes and outdoor recreational opportunities, including its wild rivers.

Book Review: Cutting for Stone

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Mary

Cutting for Stone, a novel by Abraham Verghese is a sweeping family saga that takes place in Ethiopia and the United States beginning in the mid-fifties. The story originates in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at a mission hospital.

Marion, who tells the story, and his twin brother Shiva are born of a secret union between a Carmelite nun and a British surgeon. Seeing the babies’ mother in distress as she labors to give birth, Thomas Stone, father of the twins, steps in, but it’s too late to save the mother.

Hema, a no-nonsense Indian-trained OB-GYN specialist, just arriving from a visit with her parents in India, takes over the birth of the conjoined babies, performing a cesarean section on the deceased mother. The babies are easily separated after birth and are strong, healthy boys.

The father, overwrought with the death of the woman he loved, rushes from the operating room and disappears, not to be heard from for thirty years.

Hema takes over the caring for the twins and considers them her own sons. She marries a fellow Indian, Ghosh, an Internist who also works at the hospital. Ghosh is a wonderful husband and father, full of wisdom and good humor.

Identical twins, Marion and Shiva are inseparable as little children, but as they enter puberty they become quite different. They have a bitter falling-out, and go their separate ways. They are both brilliant and seek professions in the medical field.

The novel is full of medical phrases, techniques, and references, which I found fascinating. Not that I understood most of it, but I appreciate the knowledge and experience behind it. The author, Abraham Verghese, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is a physician and teaches at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Cutting for Stone is a long family saga, but engaging and memorable with deeply-felt characters. I loved hearing about life in Ethiopia, especially regarding health care. When my husband and I served in West Africa with the Peace Corps in The Gambia, I worked at a 22-bed bush hospital as a records keeper/advisor, so providing medical care with very limited resources was familiar to me.

Reading this novel is a commitment, much like his later novel The Covenant of Water. Though long—the paperback is 677 pages—it was definitely worth my time and effort.

Book Review: Connie

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Mary

Connie: A Memoir by Connie Chung is an interesting and inspirational read about the first woman to break into the overwhelmingly white, male-dominated television news industry.

In China, Connie’s mother was twelve and her father fourteen when they were engaged. They didn’t know one another and in fact, didn’t meet until five years later on their wedding day. The family eventually moved to Washington D.C. where her father worked at the Chinese Embassy. Connie, their tenth child, was born in America in 1946, the only child in the family born in the United States.

In her early school years, Connie was a quiet, shy girl. In college she morphed from shy and quiet to fearless, ambitious, even driven. At the time, most working women’s occupations were as teachers, nurses, or secretaries. If they did work in media, it was behind the scenes, or in fashion or culinary arts. Connie insisted on working with real news, but had to fight the attitude or belief that there are certain things a woman cannot do or understand. Connie proved that to be untrue. She quickly became a household name when she co-anchored the CBS Evening News. In the following years she also worked at ABC and CNN. right up there with Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings. In all her various roles as journalist she worked hard, earned respect, but also at times received harsh criticism, mostly, it seems, criticism that would not have occurred had she been a man.

Connie conducted many interesting interviews, traveled extensively, and was tenacious in pursuit of stories, always demanding excellence of herself. She learned to eat a big breakfast, knowing that it might be the only meal she’d have that day. She talked to some big names, political personalities, and covered scandals such as Watergate.

Connie, a ground-breaker in many respects, has fought to be seriously judged on her work as a journalist, not as a woman. She was often given assignments that a male reporter would not be asked to do, jobs that irked her, but that she fulfilled to the best of her ability. Connie fought the “good ole boy” syndrome—men often flirted, even made inappropriate remarks—things they would never do to a man reporter.

In 1984 Connie married a Caucasian, Maury Povich, a popular talk-show host, and later they adopted a baby boy, Matthew.

Connie, A Memoir is well written, witty, and touching. She often ends a chapter with air-time comments such as, “More to come,” or “Don’t go away,” or “That’s next.” I enjoyed this memoir. The book is witty, personable, and loaded with plenty of sharp insights into the world of TV News.

Book Review: Crow Mary

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Mary

Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom is a deeply moving novel inspired by the real life of Crow Mary, an Indigenous woman in 19th-century North America, with a forward by Nedra Farwell Brown, Crow Mary’s great-granddaughter.

The story begins in 1872 Montana when a sixteen year-old Crow Native woman marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. Abe is a well respected man and there is mutual attraction between Abe and Crow Mary. Mary’s Indian name is actually Goes First, but when the Christian minister performs the ceremony, he calls her Mary, as was the practice at the time when a white man married an Indian woman. The new bride goes along with this, but adds “Crow” to her name, thus Crow Mary.

After the marriage ceremony, they set off on the long trip to Farwell’s trading post in Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way Crow Mary meets Jeannie, and they become close friends. Jeannie, a Métis woman, teaches Mary how to read and write, and many ways of the whites. (A Métis is a person who is part Indian and French or English.) Crow Mary also meets Sam Stiller, a cruel wolf hunter who becomes her lifelong enemy.

The winter trading season is peaceful and Crow Mary and Abe Farwell enjoy their mutual love. Abe confesses to Mary that he can’t tolerate liquor, that once he starts drinking he can’t stop. Crow Mary admires his vow to avoid liquor, and falls deeply in love with her husband, whom she calls Farwell.

At the end of a successful trading season, they plan to return to Montana. On the eve of their impending trip, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughter forty Nakota people despite Farwell’s efforts to stop them. Crow Mary witnesses the murderers, including Stiller’s part in the slaughter and his involvement in taking five Nakota women back to their fort. She creeps into their fort and saves the women, thus creating bitterness and false accusations among colliding cultures. The results of this event cause lasting repercussions, and ultimately cause Abe Farwell to lapse in his vow to avoid liquor, creating a strain in their relationship.

Crow Mary is a richly detailed story of love, clashing cultures, and historical events that profoundly changed lives. Author Kathleen Grissom shows the plight of Indigenous peoples, and the deplorable methods taken to reeducate them. She also gives credit to those who helped make peace between the cultures. This is a rich read, one that I enjoyed from beginning to end.

Book Review: The Moonshiner’s Daughter

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Mary

The Moonshiner’s Daughter: A Southern Coming-of-Age Saga of Family and Loyalty by Donna Everhart is a novel loaded with authenticity and grit, set in North Carolina, 1960.

Moonshining in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina had been a popular occupation for generations, even though it was against the law. The law wasn’t based on dangers to health, it was based on taxes, originally put in place right after the American Revolution to pay off its war debt. Even though illegal, it was common practice. Well-hidden stills dotted the heavily forested hills, and it became a lucrative but dangerous business, dodging revenuers while making their runs on the hilly mountain roads. It was common practice to bury ill-gained money rather than betray their occupation by depositing large amounts of cash in banks.

Jessie Sasser’s family had made moonshine for generations. But she wants no part of it. When she was four and her little brother Merritt two, Jessie had the horrible experience of watching her mother die when her clothes caught fire while she and Jessie’s father made sour mash. Jessie’s father refuses to talk about her mother or what they were doing at the time of her death.

Even though Jessie, now sixteen, and her brother are expected to help in the family business, she deeply resents it. She doesn’t want to be known as a moonshiner’s daughter. She attempts to seek comfort in food and develops an eating disorder, constantly binging, then purging, harboring a distorted vision of her body with feelings of shame and worthlessness. A school nurse tries to help Jessie see what she’s doing to her body and health, but Jessie is in denial. She feels unpopular at school, is a loner, rarely speaks to the other students, and doesn’t care about her appearance.

When an unexpected revelation occurs, Jessie sees her family and her own strengths in a different light, an insight that changes her life.

I found The Moonshiner’s Daughter fascinating. I was soon accustomed to the local dialect: “I reckon I might could do that.” Although the story is believable, I found it hard to relate to Jessie. My school days were filled with friends and total involvement with my school’s extensive music program. But I was vaguely aware of girls who obviously viewed themselves as misfits. After reading this book I wish I had reached out to those girls, shown friendship. I would highly recommend this book to women and teenage girls, not to learn how to make moonshine (though interesting), but to become more aware of how mental attitude affects our health and feelings of well-being. Plus, it’s a riveting, entertaining story.

Book Review: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Mary

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of five volumes of autobiography by Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014), with a Foreword by Oprah Winfrey, is a joyous but painful memoir about the early life of a Black woman who was raised in the bigoted South.

Although both her parents were still living (but separated), Maya and her brother Bailey, one year older, were sent to live with their father’s mother in Stamps, Arkansas. The family—grandmother, a crippled uncle, and the two children lived in the back of their grandmother’s small grocery store. Though strict, their grandmother was a powerful influence on Maya, lessons that provided the strength and determination she would need in life.

As a young child Maya was aware of the unfairness Blacks suffered, especially in the South. People who worked in the cotton fields never made decent wages and were always in debt, but many didn’t have the money to relocate. The schools children attended were geared for Black children with the idea that when they graduated their “careers” would be as carpenters, farmers, handymen, masons, maids, cooks and babysitters. Maya was an exceptional student and far ahead of other children in her classes.

For a brief time she stayed with her mother in St. Louis, but that visit ended in tragedy. At a later time, she visited her father in California, but he had no sense of responsibility and Maya narrowly missed catastrophe while with him. Later, she again lived with her mother in St. Louis, attended school, and at the age of 16 had an unwanted pregnancy that changed her life forever.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captured my heart. Things white people take for granted—freedom of where they will live, be educated, get medical care, etc. were denied to Blacks, especially in the South. Many of these issues have improved in recent years, but many prejudices still linger.

Angelou says it best: “The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.” I think every American should read this memoir. It is an honest representation of life in the South even in our lifetime.