“Renaissance” is a fine name for that period in Europe’s history (roughly the 15th and 16thcenturies, give or take a week or two). But it’s too often used as an adjective for someone who’s adept in several categories of creativity—just as “genius” is the operative term in Hollywood for just about everyone who can string together a sentence, splice together some film and amass enough investors to churn out a hit movie.
I’ve always wondered why “Go fly a kite!” was considered a putdown, either in childhood or thereafter. To me, it sounded more like someone suggesting you do something whimsical, energetic and out in the fresh air. To recap, where some heard “Scram” I heard “Have a nice day.”
First, it’s very easy for me to tell you my opinion of Maeley Tom’s new book, “I’m Not Who You Think I Am—An Asian-American Woman’s Journey,” because it’s right there in the book’s opening pages of rave reviews.
After reading and making a few suggestions on the manuscript months before the book was published, I called it “a clear-eyed but touching memoir, a guide book on how the inner workings of government in the country’s most progressive state grind along” and “an awesome, very human achievement.”
If we can accept a Midwest archaeologist named Henry “Indiana” Jones as an action hero, then we can certainly do the same for a former California librarian named Elizabeth “Betsy” Austin.
Austin has just written “Grand Canyon to Hearst Ranch: One Woman’s Fight to Save Land in the American West,” an incident-filled biography of Harriett Hunt Burgess, who spent 40 years attempting, with great success, to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres. Without Burgess’s efforts, it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the Lake Tahoe region and huge swaths of California’s coastline might have been paved over to make room for office campuses, housing communities and industry.
