CULTURE NOTES
Over its three-week run, the Sarasota Music Festival brings rising young musicians to town and pairs them with faculty from the orchestra and various conservatories for a series of chamber and full orchestra concerts. Friday night’s concert included an exquisite performance of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. This is a piece we know very well, and both the Chief Penguin and I thought it was the best rendition we’d heard. Thank you, festival director and pianist, Jeffrey Kahane, and thank you, musicians!
HISTORIC BETHLEHEM MUSEUMS & SITES
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was founded in 1741 by Moravian settlers and was a very successful community with the first industrial quarter anywhere in America and its own farm called Burnside Plantation. Visitors to Bethlehem can tour the historic buildings and explore the exhibits in the Kemerer Museum of Decorative Arts and the Moravian Museum. In 2014, Bethlehem’s 18th century colonial Germanic architecture was formally recognized as a National Historic Landmark District and designated as Historic Moravian Bethlehem. But the story doesn’t end there.
While in Bethlehem recently, I met with friends and former board colleagues, Charlene Donchez-Mowers, president, and LoriAnn Wukitsch, vice president and managing director, of Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites. Through their diligence and persistence, Historic Moravian Bethlehem is now on the U.S. Tentative List for eventual nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List. This can be a long process as the U.S. Secretary of State and Secretary of Interior can recommend only one site at a time to UNESCO.
Currently, there are four other U.S. sites on the list. Bethlehem’s chances, however, are likely strengthened by the naming in 2015 of Christiansfeld, Denmark, an historic Moravian community, to the World Heritage List. Moravian sites in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and South Africa are either on pending lists or waiting for nominations to those lists to re-open. Exciting times for Bethlehem as Moravian heritage gets greater recognition!
RECENT READING
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Grann’s detailed and thoroughly researched account of the systematic murder of various members of the Osage Indian tribe in the 1920’s is a chilling story of judicial corruption and indifference. When rich deposits of oil were discovered on the Osage land in Oklahoma, white men quickly developed a great interest in purchasing or acquiring by devious or other means the headrights owned by tribe members. The deaths of Mollie Burkright and her relatives from illness were later discovered to be the result of poisoning. Others connected to her were shot or died in an explosion. Little was done in the way of investigation until J. Edgar Hoover, head of the newly formed FBI, sent agent Tom White there to organize a team and find the criminals. It’s grim history, but a fascinating and impressive piece of nonfiction. Thanks to my sister Sal and to the Wall St Journal and other publications for recommending this! (~JWFarrington) 
SUMMER READING—TRACKING TWENTY
As you may recall, I’m trying to emulate another blogger in reading twenty books between June 1st and September 1st. Here are my first 4 books. What are you reading this summer? I’d like to know.
We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter. This novel is a quasi-documentary about the experiences of the Kurc family, both parents and their five adult children, Jews who lived in small Radom, Poland beginning in 1939. The chapters alternate between the various family members at different locales from Radom, both before and after it was taken over by the Nazis and then when the country was divided between the Germans and the Russians, to Paris, Italy, and Rio de Janeiro. It covers the years from 1939 to 1947. What is incredible is the risks these individuals took, the ghettos, prison and dangers they individually surmounted, and the fact that they all survived the war.
Hunter is the granddaughter of Addy, one of the chief characters, and she undertook extensive research and numerous interviews to uncover and delve into this amazing family’s history. Unlike many novels about the war, this one has an uplifting ending. (~JWFarrington)
The Wife by Meg Wolitzer. Published in 2007 and told from the perspective of Joan Castleman, wife of very successful husband/author Joe, now a big prize winner, this novel is angry and biting in tone. On the plane to Oslo for the award ceremony, Joan reflects on their marriage, Joe’s affairs with other women, his early praise for her own writing, and her now firm decision to divorce him. I didn’t love the book and felt that the twist at the end was a long time coming. I look forward, though, to the movie treatment coming out this summer starring Glenn Close. (~JWFarrington)
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. This is a book of linked stories including protagonist Lucy Barton from Strout’s earlier novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. The prose is spare and direct and appears to be just that, but as you contemplate it, it packs a punch. For the most part, the characters in these stories are not happy, fulfilled individuals. Rather they harbor secrets and hurts and have had damaged or abusive childhoods. Their circumstances are reduced, many live in poverty, and acts of kindness and tenderness are the exception not the norm. God is often invoked, but seldom with piety.
I think my favorite chapter is “Sister,” in which Lucy returns after seventeen years and visits both her brother Pete, mostly a hermit, and her sister Vicky, to whom she sends money. There are long silences, good and painful reminiscences about their upbringing, recriminations, and then the brother and sister are left behind when Lucy departs. (~JWFarrington)
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. This is an extraordinary book. Westover’s life story from childhood to late 20’s is amazing, appalling, wrenching, and powerful. That she, coming out of such a deprived poverty-stricken, dysfunctional Mormon family, could achieve the success she has is astonishing. Her survivalist bipolar father distrusts the medical establishment and any form of government including schools. His children stay at home and work for him in his scrap yard and they have no birth certificates. It is only at seventeen that Tara first goes to school at Brigham Young University. One of her brothers regularly physically abuses and taunts her, but her parents both then and later refuse to acknowledge it.
She loves their mountain setting below Buck’s Peak, Idaho, and that peak is a character in its own right. So strong is the pull of family and the tug of that familiar landscape, that escaping is a long drawn out process as she acquires bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and eventually a PhD. Her courage and candor and fine writing make this one of the best memoirs I’ve read. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Peony header photo ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).
