Volume 3, Issue 14
July 5 - July 18, 2001

Book Reviews

KISSING THE VIRGIN'S MOUTH

How many times have you apologized for something that wasn't your fault, just because it was easier? How far have you gone to avoid conflict? Duck a fight? Keep the peace? How often have you said you were sorry for something when you knew without a doubt you were in the right?

Magdalena, the heroine of Donna M. Gersheten's Kissing the Virgin's Mouth must apologize for committing an unthinkable crime working to keep her family from starvation. And the worst part is, it is her family who makes her apologize. In the small Mexican town of Teatlan, it is a disgrace for a young girl of 14 to go parading in the streets, but since Magdalena's drunken father spends all his time chasing women and her mother is going blind, Magdalena has no other choice but to go outside and figure out how to make some money. At night she brews homemade alcohol and by day she sells it from a cart.

To attract business, she does what would occur to any pretty girl in a desperate situation she puts on short shorts and a crop top. She shows off her body, and it pays off. In one day she earns more money selling drinks than her father ever earned in a year.

For her long hours of work, the only thanks she receives from her family (after they take her money and spend it on food to fill their stomachs) is a demand for an apology. She has shamed them.

And after Magdalena apologizes, she starts to see she really has shamed her family before the eyes of the town. The League of Decency (a secret society of judgmental women) harasses Magdalena by writing "whore" on the outside of her house and destroying her vending cart. It is wrong for a girl to show her body, and it is even worse for a girl to show independence and guile.

With no other recourse left to her, Magdalena takes what little money she has and heads for Tijuana, where she narrowly avoids prostitution, violence, and bodily harm. It is through her wits that Magdalena outsmarts drug dealers, rich landowners (and their mothers), and American tourists.

Through it all she is cursed and adored, loved and despised for one thing: her beauty. If she allows her body and face to show, she is called "puta" (whore). But at the same time, if her body can be seen she has the power and ability to get what she wants money, food, security, and love.

It is a hard lesson for Magdalena to learn, that one of her greatest gifts, her beauty, is also something that she must apologize for. It is the same lesson her family taught her as a child work for us, earn money for us, be pretty for us, but only if you say you're sorry. A- Cecilia Johnson

HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION

Despite the fact that my father is 50 percent Irish at best, and my siblings and I have to earn our 25 percent, Dad brought us up to believe we are full-blown, raging, proud, doomed, alcoholic-by-definition Irishmen. We ignore the German, French, and English ancestry on my mother's side (especially the English) and swear strict allegiance to Ireland, a place none of us has ever seen. I proudly boast of my Irish ancestors and their flight by sea from that little rocky island howevermany years ago; I tell how our surname McMarrow yielded to Moore at Ellis Island, though I suspect the story is actually little more than family myth. I can drink everyone I know under the table, especially if we're drinking whiskey, and I even wash with Irish Spring.

So when Christmas shopping last year for my family, I naturally froze in my tracks when I spotted Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization. A perfect gift for my father an appropriately boastful and challenging title that inspired just the right amount of incredulity: only the Irish would not be surprised by the scope of that statement. "Saved civilization, huh? During what happy hour?" the world begs to know. I bought the book, proud of my find, and wrapped it up for Daddy. Silly lass. Daddy already read it. Daddy's way ahead of me. I am such an eejit.

Predictably, my father promptly gave the book back to me, insisting I read it and "learn a little something" about my "history." How the Irish Saved Civilization is indeed filed under 'history', so I expected it to be an ideal blend of interesting information and grueling torture. Guess what? I was wrong about the torture.

This book is like an exciting find on "Antique Road Show," completely unexpected and entirely priceless. Within its 218 pages, I learned more about the Sack of Rome and the ensuing few hundred years than I had ever hoped to understand in school. It lends the light of the Irish people to the Dark Ages, pinpointing a moment in history in which we may focus on the tenacity and hope exemplified by a few hundred people, instead of remembering only the overwhelming whirlpool of illiteracy and regression marked by the Barbarians.

And he's funny! Thomas Cahill is a clever and poignant author, seemingly rereading his own book over every reader's shoulder, as if for the first time. His enthusiasm is evident in every phrase; his love for his work shines in the prose like poetry. Mr. Cahill deftly portrays just how close the world came to closing in upon itself culturally: when Alaric the Goth sacked Rome in A. D. 410, he surely did not consider literature, art, music, architecture, and culture his victims. The Romans surely did not expect a rowdy band of illiterate, unrefined, uneducated, dirty barbarians to crush an empire eleven centuries old. But above all, in contemporary society, we do not expect to hear that the holy men and women of Ireland are the reason we can read and write. We have never given a thought to why we have access to the works of Socrates, Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Terrence, Plautus, Augustine, and hundreds of others. When Latin died with Rome, it lay dormant for hundreds of years before sweeping the educated circles of Europe again ... but how? It certainly didn't teach itself.

Thomas Cahill explains the entire thing, from start to finish, with passion, grace, and an awesome intelligence. On his coattails we coast through a transitional period in history, meeting the likes of Medb, an ancient and saucy Irish queen, Brigid of Kildare, a missionary and abbess of an enormous monastery, and the famous St. Patrick. Do yourself a favor and read this book. Dare to learn why Ireland's geography was more a blessing than a curse, why the only thing capable of combating barbaric indifference was Irish pride, and why Ireland's scribes are more powerful and memorable than even her drunks. A Andrea Moore