Tag Archives: Book Reviews

A Homesteader’s Portfolio by Alice Day Pratt

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Originally published in 1922, A Homesteader’s Portfolio by Alice Day Pratt is an account of Pratt’s experience as a solo female homesteader in Eastern Oregon over 100 years ago. The book reads almost like a series of journal entries, with several engaging stories and also some content that was difficult for me, as a modern reader, to get through. I simply do not usually love the cadence and style of older writing. This book was part entertainment, but mostly about research for me.

I think I first heard about this book from by Susan Butruille, who wrote Women’s Voices from the Oregon Trail. From this experience, I was very intrigued to learn that there were so many single female homesteaders! Experts think about 15% of homesteaders were single females. In some areas, it was more like 20%. The predominant narrative is that homesteaders were families or solo men seeking gold, so this new-to-me statistic really changes my understanding of that migration and feels very empowering too!

So, I was particularly interested to read Alice Day Pratt’s account of homesteading in Oregon. She kept her day job as a school teacher, while purchasing an “unimproved” plot of land that she named Broadview. There she started various agricultural endeavors, including dairy cows (a rarity in the area) and chickens for eggs and some meat. She had a cat and dogs and horses and dealt with the challenges of being viewed as different by the neighbors, some who were happy to help her in kind and others who seemed to disregard her, or try to take advantage of her, or who actually fostered some form of ill will.

As a many generation Oregonian, who is also deeply involved in agriculture, I found her story intriguing. As an ag insider, I could see the ways she was messing up and causing more work for herself and her neighbors, and I could see the ways she seemed more interested in the narrative and the poetry and the story than in the actual agricultural process. But, I could also see her genuine interest, her genuine struggles, and the genuine value in her endeavor. I could identity with the passion, the sense of difference, and so much more. She did have some great success in ag too, and that’s saying something in a field that can be so precarious that even experts can continually fail.

While not revealed in the book, Alice Day Pratt’s life ends in an apartment in New York City, where presumably in her final decades she continues to read, write, and share her passion for teaching. She does not keep her farmstead, and according to accounts, she is not able to keep it–she loses it somehow. The story does not end in victory. Except that it does in that the world gains a new kind of story, one of a woman who is able to live life on her own terms–smartly, passionately–and is able to share it through her writing.

Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty by Diane Keaton

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I read Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty by Diane Keaton because I remembered liking her Then Again awhile back. Also, more importantly, Diane Keaton has done things a little differently, and I’m always looking to read about women who are doing things a little differently because I do things a little differently too.

image from amazon.com

image from amazon.com

It’s an odd book, and much more stream of consciousness than I remember of Then Again. And, so I was glad to read something entirely different. It was insightful to be privy to Diane Keaton’s mind, which was, just like her, brilliant, annoying, confusing, legendary.

I mean, you can tell that a frenzied editor tried to assemble her bedside journal scribblings, but that’s okay. It never needed to be a perfect to begin with.

She writes about beauty. It’s mostly about beauty. The introduction is so promising, and there are only glimpses (though worth it!) of this promise throughout. She writes about the process of discovering beauty as a young girl, and hearing the opinions of others, she and writes “Don’t tell me what beauty is before I know if for myself.” I think that line is so important. The most honest, provocative moments are when we fall in love with something beautiful before we realize or understand if it meets a shared social standard of beauty: our mothers, the fabric on grandmother’s old chair, a tiny glass figurine weighted just right. Of course, soon enough, we are told what beauty is, and all is lost, and we can never again really know how much we’ve mixed up our own sense of beauty with society’s standards. C’est la vie.

Later, of Picasso’s depiction of Marie- Thérèse, Keaton writes that Picasso paints her, “through loving her, living with her, and seeing her as both ugly and magnificent. Because of his sculptures, Marie- Thérèse emerged as a symbol of unsightly, frightening, even hideous but also, I have to say, complete beauty” (xix). I can think of nothing more romantic than the thought of two people loving each other and timelessly fascinated with the ugly and the magnificent in the other—the unsightly, the frightening, the hideous, and the beauty.

Keaton is a romantic and appears to be unlucky in love, but has also had some luck in love. Her questions of love and beauty were really nice to think through with her, even if just for a couple hundred pages.

The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan Into the Future by Fawzia Koofi

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I just finished reading The Favored Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan Into the Future by Fawzia Koofi. It was a fascinating glimpse into the life of a Middle Eastern woman and a reminder of how quickly a dictatorship can destroy people’s lives, especially women.

The Favored Daughter

image from NPR

Several years ago, I also read Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia by Carmen Bin Laden, and it was also spellbinding. The books are both from the perspective of educated women from the Middle East. I love getting their perspective because that experience is so vastly different than my own and also because it is represented so infrequently in literature. On one hand, these women are very similar to me in that we are all highly educated. On the other hand, I have much more relative freedom here in the US than many women in the Middle East. A highly educated woman living in an incredibly conservative patriarchal society is fascinating.

What I loved most was Koofi’s description of her childhood, growing up in the remote mountains of Afghanistan to a politician father in a polygamous family. It illustrated the bygone days when rampant spousal abuse and deadly sexism prevailed. The book provides a lens to a culture that is very different from my own. The passages about her childhood and early womanhood are lovely and interesting. It seemed that the love and unusual attention her mother gave her, even though she was “only” a girl, inspired her to a different life than one lived by most women in Afghanistan.

It is no spoiler than Koofi goes on to have a political career and that is where the book falters a bit. The last few chapters become a bit repetitive and have a distinctly political. The book ends in a tone that is political and not always in a good way. Not at that her points aren’t valid. They are! And, she is incredibly inspiring and her work as one of the few female politicians is no doubt incredibly important. All of that is gripping and exciting—but it’s not as exciting as the personal view she takes of her life in the first two-thirds of the book. By the end, she sounds like a politician who is on the campaign trail—a politician who might one day become the president of Afghanistan.