Wednesdays with Words: No Glory in It

I have really been enjoying participating in the Read the World Summer Book Club with my kids these past several weeks. We are getting to know, at least in a small way, different countries and cultures; and seeing that people are people wherever they are from. We have also been reading Squanto (and no, I didn’t pay that much – yikes!) more often during our Morning Times, as we’ve completed some of our other books and studies, and I want to finish it up by the end of the term. Ziner makes Squanto a real person with feelings and struggles we can all relate to, and an example is this description of the degrading work he was forced to do on an English fishing boat off Newfoundland:

Squanto had worked hard in his life. He recalled the whaling in Maine. No hunt could have been more dangerous, more taxing, more thrilling. But this was different. There was no glory in it. This work reduced a man to something less than human. Split and push, split and push. An ugliness unrelieved by song or ceremony. No thanks were offered to the God of the Sea who provided man with his prodigious harvest. If an eye, or an arm, or a life were sacrificed, the loss was casual, without sorrow or significance, incidental to the day’s work. A dead fisherman would simply cease to live, like the fish he pulled up out of the sea. It would take a hundred thousand fish to fill that great, yawning hole in the belly of the ship. The men fished for their very lives.

Also read or listened to in the past week:

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