Am re-going through the various books. having quit Fb for good have a lot more time to enjoy. So just finished "Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, for those who haven't read it, it's the story of a family who gets kicked out from their farm by Corporations, and end up on the street, moving to California, where they found such horrible human behaviour that beggars belief.

The very last page though gives hope for humanity, when a woman who lost her baby gives her milk to a starving man so as to save him.

Am now on "The Log fro the Sea of Cortez" also Steinbeck, true story of a friend and himself plus the whole town at times, very entertaining and mostly positive. As I haven't 're-finished', will report later.

#books #reading #Steinbeck

“There would come a time in our poverty when we needed a party.” — John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
#JohnSteinbeck #Steinbeck #QOTD #Quotation #Quote #Poverty #Party

https://yahooeysblog.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/quote-of-the-day-5504/

No trimming today as I can't be bothered, met some plotters, had a very interesting conversation about the community plot and who stole the material after that management left.

Yesterday I was told its was the previous group, today was told it was the present group...

At my plot was chuffed and surprised to find tiny yellow flowers on the olive tree! And on the thyme, a bumblebee!! (*)

Been plucking horse tail. Am now reading a book sitting under the blackthorn.

#allotment #olives #bumblebee #reading #Steinbeck #photography

A quotation from Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer
East of Eden, ch. 34 (1952)

More about this quote: wist.info/steinbeck-john/83944…

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Today in Labor History May 26, 1895: American photojournalist Dorothea Lange was born. Here are a few of her photos.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #GreatDepression #poverty #journalism #photography #DorotheaLange #steinbeck #journalism #writer

Today in Labor History May 26, 1895: American photojournalist Dorothea Lange was born. She is best-known for her empathetic photographs of people during the Great Depression. However, she is also one of the first to document the suffering of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War II.

Lange grew up poor, in New York’s Lower East Side. She was one of the only gentiles in her school, which was predominantly Jewish. As a young adult, she moved to San Francisco, where she began her career doing portraits for the wealthy. But as the depression began, she turned her camera to the streets, hobo camps, refugees from Oklahoma, farmers, breadlines, the homeless, portraying the misery and desperation of the period, becoming one of the first photodocumentarians. 22 of her photographs were used in John Steinbeck’s 1936 journalistic series for the San Francisco news, The Harvest of Gypsies, and they served as an inspiration for the film version of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #GreatDepression #poverty #ww2 #japanese #prison #ConcentrationCamp #journalism #photography #DorotheaLange #steinbeck #journalism #writer

A little patch of land.
Bread on the table.
A dear friend you can talk to.
A small house you can call Home.
Rabbits…

Such a modest dream. And yet so impossibly out of reach.

Which character from this story stayed with you the most?

#Steinbeck #books #fiction #shortstory #OfMiceandMen #story #JohnSteinbeck #book #bookstodon @bookstodon #tragedy #loneliness #literature #discussion #classic #booksky #BookDiscussion #BookTok #bookstagram #bookstadon #bookstack #friends

T.A.E.’s Book Review – Viva Zapata! by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck’s Viva Zapata! is less a conventional biographical screenplay than a tragic meditation on power, integrity, and the corruption that attends victory. Though it dramatizes the life of Emiliano Zapata, the author is not chiefly interested in historical pageantry. He is interested in the moral problem of revolution: what happens when a righteous uprising succeeds, and the men who were born to resist become the men who must govern.

What gives the work its force is Steinbeck’s characteristic ability to turn political history into elemental drama. Zapata is introduced not as a polished statesman but as a peasant leader whose authority comes from ethical clarity rather than institutional power. He speaks, acts, and chooses as a man rooted in the land. In that sense, the screenplay treats land not merely as property but as identity, memory, and justice. The struggle for the fields becomes a struggle for human dignity itself. The story’s revolution is therefore deeply physical: boots in dust, horses, rifles, farms, hunger, soil. Its prose-driven screenwriting style gives the events a spare, almost biblical weight.

One of the work’s most compelling tensions lies in its refusal to romanticize leadership. Zapata begins as a liberator, but the screenplay steadily exposes the loneliness and burden of public power. The line between justice and authority grows increasingly thin. This is where Steinbeck’s tragic imagination comes into full view: the revolution does not fail because its ideals are false, but because institutions and ambition deform even noble causes. A brief phrase like “the land” carries enormous moral pressure in the screenplay, becoming almost sacred in its repetition. Likewise, “the people” is never an abstract slogan; it names actual bodies, actual losses, actual histories.

Steinbeck’s Zapata is especially moving because he is not written as a flawless hero. He is stubborn, morally serious, and at times isolated by the very purity that makes him admirable. The screenplay understands that integrity can be a kind of doom in a world that rewards compromise. Zapata’s tragedy is that he remains more loyal to justice than to expediency, and Steinbeck frames this not as weakness but as greatness. In this sense, the work aligns Zapata with the writer’s broader fascination with the outsider who sees more clearly than the crowd, even when that clarity exacts a terrible cost.

The language of the screenplay is restrained, but its restraint is part of its power. Steinbeck avoids decorative excess because he wants the political and moral stakes to emerge cleanly. The dialogue often feels carved down to essentials, which gives moments of idealism or betrayal a sharp edge. When the screenplay invokes ideas such as “freedom” or “revolution,” it does so with an awareness that such words are easily corrupted. That suspicion is one of Steinbeck’s great themes: language can inspire liberation, but it can also become propaganda.

As a literary work, Viva Zapata! is strongest when read as a tragedy of moral consequence. It does not simply celebrate rebellion; it asks what rebellion costs, and who survives to inherit its victories. The book shows that the end of oppression does not automatically produce justice, because human desire, vanity, and fear remain. The result is a screenplay of unusual seriousness, one that transforms historical revolution into a parable about the fragility of goodness under the pressure of power.

In the end, Viva Zapata! stands as a compact but resonant Steinbeck work: humane, severe, and unsentimental. Its hero is memorable not because he conquers, but because he refuses to betray the principles that gave his struggle meaning. That refusal gives the screenplay its tragic grandeur. It reminds us that the most difficult revolution is not the overthrow of tyranny, but the preservation of justice after victory.

T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent is a late, bitter, and deeply searching novel, one that turns the tools of the social novel inward and asks what becomes of integrity when decency itself is treated as a liability. Set in the fictional Long Island town of New Bayport, the book follows Ethan Hawley, a once-prosperous man now reduced to working in a grocery store that his family once owned. On the surface, Ethan is a figure of mild disappointment: educated, courteous, observant, and chronically underemployed. But Steinbeck uses him to stage a drama far larger than personal failure. Ethan becomes a test case for American morality under pressure, a man who begins the novel with a desire to remain good and ends by discovering how easily “goodness” can be compromised by aspiration, shame, and social hunger.

The novel’s title signals this tension immediately. The author draws on Shakespeare’s Richard III—“Now is the winter of our discontent”—yet he reverses the phrase’s mood. In Shakespeare, the line moves toward triumph; in Steinbeck, it becomes a condition of spiritual coldness, a season of erosion rather than transformation. Ethan’s discontent is not flamboyant or revolutionary. It is quiet, intimate, and corrosive. He is surrounded by the language of respectability, but respectability in this novel is nearly always a mask. The bank, the grocery store, the church, and even the family home are all places where status is negotiated, performed, and defended rather than simply lived.

One of Steinbeck’s great strengths here is his handling of Ethan’s inward life. Ethan is not a hero in the conventional sense; he is a man who knows the vocabulary of conscience but cannot always sustain its authority. His reflections often reveal the novel’s central ethical problem: he sees through the hypocrisies around him, yet he is also vulnerable to the same temptations he condemns. Early on, Ethan insists on the ideal of self-command and inherited honour, but those ideals are unstable in a world where everyone else seems to be trading character for advancement. Steinbeck makes this instability vivid through Ethan’s interactions with his wife Mary, his children, and the town’s social climbers. The novel repeatedly suggests that goodness without power is treated as weakness, and weakness is treated as an invitation.

This is where Steinbeck becomes especially sharp as a social critic. New Bayport is not merely a setting; it is a moral ecosystem. Everyone is implicated in forms of aspiration, opportunism, or vanity. Ethan’s wife, Mary, exemplifies a kind of anxious domestic ambition: she wants security, status, and the visible signs of success that she believes have been unjustly denied. Their children reflect the pressures of modern America in different ways, with one seeking military escape and the other drifting into a world of improvisation and self-invention. Around Ethan, the town speaks the language of improvement, but improvement here often means compromise. Steinbeck suggests that the American dream has narrowed into a contest of acquisition, in which ethical distinction is not rewarded but exploited.

The novel’s most unsettling feature is that Ethan’s moral descent does not feel melodramatic; it feels logical. That is what makes it so disturbing. Steinbeck does not present corruption as a single catastrophic fall, but as a series of small permissions. Ethan tells himself stories, rationalizes choices, and learns to enjoy his own cleverness. His internal conflict is captured in the novel’s repeated opposition between performance and sincerity. He is a man who can still recognize fraud in others even as he begins to become fluent in it himself. That double vision gives the book much of its tragic force. Ethan’s tragedy is not that he is uniquely evil, but that he is ordinary enough to be persuaded.

The novelist also deepens the novel through biblical and symbolic undercurrents. Ethan’s very name invites reflection: “Hawley” suggests the hardy, thorny natural world of old New England, while the family’s history recalls the decline of older moral and economic orders. The novel is full of images of seasonal decay, enclosed spaces, and inheritance under pressure. Winter, in particular, is not just a metaphor for hardship but for spiritual suspension, a time in which things do not grow, only endure. Yet Steinbeck resists simple despair. Ethan’s awareness remains a form of grace, even when his conduct fails to match it. The novel’s sadness comes partly from the fact that he knows better.

Stylistically, the book is leaner and more compressed than the author’s great epic novels. The prose is controlled, almost severe, but it carries a faintly ironic edge. Steinbeck is less expansive here than in East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath, and that compression suits the novel’s moral claustrophobia. The dialogue is especially effective because it is often double-layered: characters say one thing while meaning another, or use politeness as a weapon. The town’s surface civility hides a great deal of predation. His tonal balance—between satire, sadness, and moral inquiry—keeps the novel from becoming a simple sermon. He does not merely accuse; he observes, and his observation is merciless.

What ultimately makes The Winter of Our Discontent enduring is that it refuses comforting resolutions. It is a novel about the price of adaptation, but also about the humiliations that make adaptation tempting. We come to understand that moral failure rarely begins with evil intentions; it begins with fatigue, embarrassment, resentment, and the desire to belong. Ethan Hawley is memorable precisely because he is so human in that regard. He wants dignity, but he is drawn toward advantage. He wants to remain clean, but he is standing in the mud. That contradiction is the novel’s central insight, and Steinbeck renders it with unsparing clarity.

In the end, the book is not only about discontent but about the modern condition of self-division. The deepest winter in the novel is not outside Ethan Hawley. It is the cold that settles within a conscience when it begins to negotiate with the world. Steinbeck’s achievement is to make that inner season feel at once personal, historical, and national.