Downton Abbey

By now, you may have heard of the PBS (yes, you heard me right) show that's been attracting an impressive following: "Downton Abbey," a British import that chronicles the lives of an aristocratic family and their servants in the years leading up to World War I and during it. Here's a quick trailer for Season 1:

Season 2 just finished airing on PBS last month. In case you missed the show, the library has both seasons on DVD. You can find them on the DVD shelves that house our TV shows under DVD TV DOWNTON. We've also got the book on the show, The World of Downton Abbey.

I recently started watching "Downton" out of curiosity. Now I'm hooked. You come to care greatly for all the characters and the few villainous characters there are, you love to hate. Even then, you can grudgingly see where their bad attitudes come from. Upstairs, benevolent patriarch Lord Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) oversees his brood, which includes his mother, wife and three daughters. Downstairs, the dignified Mr. Carson does the same with his small army of staff.

In Season 1, the ill-fated Titanic has taken with it the heir to Downton Abbey. The rules of inheritance shift Downton's fate into the hands of a unknown third cousin, Matthew Crawley, a lawyer working in Manchester. The fact that he is unlanded and employed (gasp!) is cause for great consternation.

The show examines, among other things, issues of class and gender at the time. Be prepared; the first episode starts out slow and it takes a while to warm up to the show but by the end of Episode 1, you'll be flipping over to Episode 2 and pushing "Play." It may be a period piece, but it's written in a way that feels thoroughly modern and relevant. No stodgy, boring portrayals here; just well-written, absorbing fun. There is drama, romance, and humor — all PG-rated, of course (this is PBS) — but engrossing nevertheless.

Little princes: One man’s promise to bring home the lost children of Nepal -by Conor Grennan

This book looks like a package put together by the publisher, crafted to make you feel awed and touched and humbled, all at the same time. To let you know that these kids in need who are halfway around the world from us are being helped by someone and you can read all about it.

Well, that is actually what kind of book it is. An important characteristic of the book that sets it off from a lot of others in the same vein is that the writer has written it himself, and he tells his story well. He tells us about the situation in Nepal – how a civil war was waged for ten years between the monarchy and the Maoists, and how the Maoists were demanding that the villagers in the areas they controlled give one child per family to the Maoist rebel army. Children as young as five were taken. If they weren’t old enough to fight, they could run errands and be used as a servant. So, when strangers showed up in these remote villages and proposed to take children for money and raise them elsewhere, safe from the rebels, this sounded too good to be true. Many parents sold everything they had just to send a child, two children, away. But the traffickers – for that’s what these strangers were – simply took the children to Kathmandu, the capital, and dumped them, or sold them to be slaves for a family or a business.

The author, Conor Grennan, is 29 when he volunteers for a three-month stint of working at an “orphanage” for these kinds of children, six miles south of Kathmandu. He had been working for a think tank in Prague and in Brussels for eight years and was ready for a change. So, in the fall of 2004, he arrives in Nepal. He doesn’t exactly style himself as a bleeding-heart liberal out to change the world, instead explaining that volunteering in Nepal helped to justify his plan to immediately afterward spend all his savings on a world-wide trip to sixteen different countries. In other words, it was just a bit of philanthropic window-dressing for a self-seeking venture.

There are 16 boys and 2 girls at the orphanage. In spite of Grennan not having any particular bent for children, they immediately gravitate to him and literally start climbing all over him. He paints a funny picture of trying to continue to walk forward to enter the orphanage and greet the other workers while encumbered with children literally hanging from his neck. The children go to school, after a fashion, but school is frequently cancelled because of the civil war, and Grennan and the other workers have to supplement their lessons. The children eat lentils and rice, bundle up in layers of clothes (no central heating), do chores, and of course play. Grennan shares how a particular boy’s being difficult to settle down at night reminds him of himself as a child, and how strangely healing it was to tend to this child, finding the patience to give him the right combination of affection and strictness.

Suddenly it’s time to leave and Grennan is hit with overwhelming sadness. It doesn’t matter that he tells himself: you are cold here, you never go out, you have no dates, and you are dirty most of the time. He connects his emotion with the kind of sadness his mom exuded whenever he would leave her to go back to work in Europe; and he realizes the kind of happiness that the children’s acceptance and caring brings to him.

Much more…he comes back, he finds out about most of the children actually having families up in the mountains – how to go about reuniting them? Working with other child advocates, foreign and Nepalese, the story of his quest is both exciting and sobering. Although the civil war is now over, the Nepalese government is still at a stalemate. The Maoists and other elected parties can’t cooperate in writing a constitution for their new republic, so are unable to give Nepal any measure of stability. And as Grennan reminds us, there are still “tens of thousands” of missing children in the country.

The Cellist of Saravejo by Steven Galloway

Steven Galloway is a Canadian writer whose third book, "The Cellist of Saravejo", has become an international best seller, not without some controversy. While the setting of the book is clearly portrayed as being Saravejo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the author assures us in a preface, that “this is above all else a work of fiction.” Galloway, however, does want to connect readers with the historic siege of Sarajevo, which took place from 1992 to 1996. During the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was targeted by the Serbian army, who feared encroachment and domination by Croats, the other primary nationality living in that region. The Serbian forces rained down death and destruction on Sarajevo, effectively blocking the city and exposing inhabitants to starvation and disease, as well as inflicting rape and torture.

There have been atrocities on all sides in the Balkan conflict, but the Serbian nationalist profile is one that emerges as the most horrendous, as witness their leaders now being tried in The Hague for war crimes. Galloway describes the lives of four city residents in prose that is precise and meant to be impersonal, giving us a birds-eye view of each person’s reflections and how they adapt to survive. Galloway takes pains to show how each person struggles with living in a war. His characters find themselves losing compassion, direction, and hope. Then an act of bravery, charity, or love revives them, and they remember who they are and why they should care about other people. The main action that inspires them in this book is a cellist who plays in the street, mourning the victims.

What is interesting is that the cellist of Sarajevo was a real person, Vedran Smailovic, who is now living in Ireland. He is outraged by Galloway’s use of his character as the symbol for hope in his book. The cellist in the book plays every day for 22 days (at the same time) as a tribute to 22 people killed while standing in line for bread. Smailovic says that he played for two years, not just 22 days, and was not so stupid not to vary his times playing, to make a harder target for the snipers.

Galloway does not explore the racial hatred in Bosnia and Herzegovina, preferring to emphasize our common humanity. But this idealizing of life without war wears somewhat thin as the novel goes on. War is never simple, yet Galloway tries to make it so, by stripping characters of their racial identity and assuming that to kill anyone is just a mistake that people fall into. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" uses historical events as the impetus behind its story, but, in my view, fails to illuminate them.