Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Children in Pakistan and Cuba
Reading maketh a full man.
-Francis Bacon

Here are some nonfiction books residents of San Miguel have read lately.

Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, 2006, first published in the US by Viking Penguin; trade paperback issued by Penguin in 2007.

Excerpt: Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything—even die. 

This quote from an illiterate village chief in the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan is the heart of Greg Mortenson’s challenge to build schools for Muslim children, especially girls, in some of the most remote villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson’s heart-tugging story begins in 1993 after he has failed to reach the summit of K2, but he finds a larger calling and demonstrates with quiet persistence that one person can change the world one school at a time.

Review by Maxine Stone. 

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire. Part confession, part catharsis, part history lesson, part glorious memoir, this book is unforgettable. The narrative, centered on the Cuban revolution’s impact on a young boy, glows with memories, snapshots, grainy video-like sequences and the vivid sounds, sights, smells, terrors and elations of boyhood. I was entertained by the humor, taken by the parallels between Cuban boyhood pranks and the behaviors we see here every day in San Miguel, informed by a previously unseen perspective on the Cuban revolution and deeply moved by the human misery and suffering laid bare. The brief but poignant mention of the Bay of Pigs fiasco underscores that bad decisions and poor follow-up in international affairs are not restricted to one political party or another. I am a better person for having had this opportunity to look into Eire’s soul.

Excerpt: I shouldn’t have been surprised that New Year’s morning. There had been plenty of signs of trouble brewing, of changes to come. Even a sheltered child should have known something was about to snap. Later in life I would think back to that morning and try to link it to earlier events, just to make sense of what had gone wrong with all our lives.

Quite often, my wondering would come back to the day we almost died.

Review by Roger Hind.

Next week: “Books about Books.” Coming in December: the fiction I’ve read recently that I loved. In January, Book Fever will look at classic British mysteries.

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

fomentar (vb) To stir up, to foment, yes. And you will not likely be misunderstood if you use fomentar where to foment is your intended meaning. The problem comes from the other direction, because the most common usage of fomentar in Spanish is to promote, or to foster, particularly where educational matters are concerned. To translate fomentar by foment in this context sounds utterly ridiculous, but you will hear it a lot (see entry under capacitación)

guan (adj) Sooner or later you will run across this odd-looking specimen that is not listed in too many dictionaries, because it is usually written by less than literate people, and you should be relieved to hear that it is none other than the Hispanic phonetic version of our word one. If English is your mother tongue, it is easy to forget just how weird one looks to most foreigners. Not only does the pronunciation bear no relation to the spelling, but there is another version, won, that is pronounced exactly the same way. Little wonder that Mexicans have given up and invented their own version to confound us. What would you make of guan-tu-tri? No, it is not a lost tribe of Paraguay, simply a Mexican phonetic shot at 1, 2, 3.

Bill Gallacher is compiling a dictionary of Spanish words and phrases potentially confusing to English speakers. Selections will appear as a weekly column in Atención.