Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 230

November 14, 2023

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             Top row, Chandra Prasad, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Henry Adams
Second row, British ceramics kiln; Martha Wells' Raksura Queen.

 

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BOOK REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.

 

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Your Brother: Historical Fiction by Angela Terasa Baldree
Reviewed by  Mary Lucille DeBerry

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III
Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell

Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's by Don. E. Fehrenbacher

Shoot Like a Girl by Mary Jennings Hegar

Brooklyn Crime Novel By Jonathan Lethem Ecco reviewed by John P. Loonam

The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

Mercury Boys and Damselfly: Two by Chandra Prasad

Plena Vita – The Full Life: The Collected Poems of Timothy Russell
Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis 

Guilt by Carter Taylor Seaton

Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of
Antisemitism and Racism by Magda Teter
 Reviewed by Joseph Chuman

Final Three Raksura novels by Martha Wells: The Siren Depths;  
The Edge of Worlds; and The Harbors of the Sun

 

 

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams 

The Education of Henry Adams appears on a list of the 100 best books in English chosen by Modern Library. It was published privately in 1907, then, after Adams's death, commercially in 1918. It then won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. I have been hearing about the book for much of my life, and, when I first tried to read it thirty years ago, I assumed it was going to be the memoir of someone with an interesting life. But the book so put me off that I remember getting an actual queasy stomach. That has never happened to me before or since with a book

I laid it aside, and read a sample of his fiction, which didn't make me sick, but didn't hold a candle to other nineteenth century novels. So I decided to try again this past summer of 2023. Reading Gore Vidal's excellent Lincoln and a couple of other books about civil war and Reconstruction era, I have a better handle on Adam's life-and-times (he was a friend of John Hay, for example, one of Lincoln's secretaries and multitudes of other public figures). Also, I'm now much closer to his age than I used to be.

Then I made a rather weird discovery: I found notes and even an entry in a 2011 Books for Readers that claim I did indeed read it again, finish it, and even wrote about it. I say "claim" because I didn't remember much of it at all. Did I run my eyes over the pages so I could say I read it? This was more than ten years ago, but I remember other books that I read far longer ago than that.  I have to think that while the book didn't make me sick that second time, I still just didn't get it, which hurt my pride.

In most ways I still don't get it, but this reading I think I understood enough to remember it. It isn't that it is an esoteric book, although Adams had some pretty complex if nutty ideas as he tried to explicate the meaning of life and his own life to himself. It also has perhaps ten places, none more than a page long, where there is a flash of brilliant insight and/or stunning writing.

Adams was the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. presidents. He was born in 1838, educated (very badly according to him) at Harvard, then during the Civil War private secretary to his father, who was the Ambassador to England. Adams wrote many books, did lots of journalism, and apparently knew everyone in the ruling class of the United States and a lot of the ruling class of England as well. He was beloved as a loyal and stimulating friend.

His wife killed herself.

He leaves all deep feelings largely absent from The Education, including his marriage. The book, he insists, is about trying to understand the modern, changing world and his place in it. In a review linked below, Michael Lindren says. " Whatever the truth, it takes a special kind of man to write a 500-page autobiography without mentioning the suicide of his wife, and here again we find ourselves looking at Adams as from a great distance....It's a little frightening; the intensity of Adams's world-historical skepticism approaches nihilism." I would add that he also makes nihilism unusually dull.

And then there are all of Adams's cultural and class prejudices: he is much more than casually anti-semitic, at least in this memoir. For example, referring to himself in the third person, he writes: "His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he — American of Americans...." It goes on, and the butt of his remark is himself and his class, but it's the anti-Semitism you hear.

He seems to lack sufficient imagination to grasp that people of other religions and classes and enslaved status have complex lives or even world views. He says of the Civil War that in his work for the Union in England, he had "just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it..." (Kindle Location: 3,340). Nothing about slavery, except in the most abstract way. He was, of course, a Northerner and Unionist and opposed slavery, but he seems to make no connection to the lives of enslaved people.

He sees that the world is out of joint, but still believes that Anglo Saxon Harvard educated men should run it. He has a self-deprecating charm, insisting that he has spent seventy years or so getting even a modicum of education. He says of a period when he was infatuated with Darwinism as an explanation for everything, that "Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun. " (Kindle location: 3,430). He continues, however, to try to make a systematic world view that unifies everything. This makes for long passages of abstract writing while he tries, like a very smart but terminally prolix undergraduate, to work out the meaning of life. He plays with social Darwinism and a theory of dynamism and machines and Force. He is interested in the Cathedral building of the Middle Ages, and in the meaning of the Virgin Mary.

He also skips those twenty years of his marriage. One of the best little gems of his writing is about a woman's death, but not his wife's. It's about his older sister who is living in Italy when she contracts Tetanus. He suddenly breaks into beautiful language and real emotion. It's a stunning three-quarters of a page or so, and I begin to wonder if the whole education trope is about how he wasn't prepared for suffering or death. Here's some of the passage: "Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women." ( Kindle Location: 4,215)

Now that's writing, friends, rich with imagery and startling ideas (that Nature enjoys death and torture!)--marred by the usual signs of Adams' narrow class and gender views.

But is the passage worth the price of admission?

Do I have any readers who might comment who actually like/admire The Education of Henry Adams.

 

For perhaps more balanced views of this book, take a look at Michael Lindgren's 2012 revaluation in The Millions: and also John Patrick Diggins in The Claremont Review of Books.

 

Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's by Don. E. Fehrenbacher

This was short and readable and happily not a hagiography. Saint Abe was of course  the legendary stuff I was raised on: the kind, gentle, long-suffering hero who was generally confused in my childhood with Gentle Jesus. Later, in college and after, I started reading that he had been a racist like all the other white people, even if he did oppose slavery. Which is why he got elected president probably–that he was a middle-of-the-roader: anti-slavery, pro-union, but no more accepting of black equality that the white people around him.

Anyhow, this book covers the Douglas debates and some on Lincoln's move from the Whig party to the new Republican party, and his deep interest in politics for a couple of decades. He had to pull back from politics periodically to make money from his law practice, and then he would return to making speeches and running for office.

Fehrenbacher is more interested in historian's debates about Lincoln than I ever will be, but I forgive him that for a clearly written, even-handed look at a real man, and at political issues of the eighteen-fifties, including the status of the state of Illinois, and the Dred Scott decision and a lot more.

 

 

 

In Plena Vita – The Full Life: The Collected Poems of Timothy Russell Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis 

In Honorem

 

Larry Smith, of Bottom Dog Press, has outdone himself with the 2023 publication of In Plena Vita – The Full Life: The Collected Poems of Timothy Russell.  For almost forty years, Smith has sought and published manuscripts that combine outstanding literary skill with a focus on experiences of people whose livelihood depends on their own labor, skilled or unskilled. Bottom Dog’s publications include works by too many prominent writers to name here; but Valerie Nieman, Jim Daniels, Richard Hague, Silas House, Crystal Wilkinson, Thomas Rain Crowe, Ron Rash, Philip St. Clair, and Laura Treacy Bentley are among the many authors who have contributed to its forty-year history of high quality literature; honest depictions of working class lives; and deep attachment to Appalachia. This posthumous collection of most of the poetry Tim Russell wrote, or published anyway, is a perfect match with Bottom Dog’s mission, writers, and readers.

Russell’s northern Appalachia, working-class roots are reflected in the book editors’ background. Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia since 2012, was born to a couple with a small farm in Randolph County, Indiana, lives in Wheeling; and Larry Smith, born in Mingo Junction, Ohio, has lived in Huron for many years. Russell, who was born in Steubenville, Ohio, grew up in Follansbee and Weirton, in northern West Virginia. As an adult, he lived in Toronto, Ohio, raising a family there while working at Weirton Steel. As editorial assistant for In Plena Vita, Ivan Russell, Tim’s son, contributed an intimate knowledge of the man.

Harshman’s introduction ranks Russell alongside such respected poets of working-class life as Philip Levine and Marge Piercy. I’d add Thomas McGrath to the list, though McGrath’s work is less well-known.  Harshman describes Russell as possessing “an unwavering devotion to truth, both uplifting and sobering.” He sees the poet as a “faithful witness to the oppressive and sometimes brutal realities of this region” who, nevertheless, “seems possessed, always, of a fierce desire to illumine the light within the dark.” The poems in this collection document with skillful artistry the life and loves of a hard-pressed but often joyful man of a certain time—the late 20th and early 21st century—and place—a small town in Appalachia’s “rust belt.”  They offer a poignant amalgam of the man-made world and the natural world, each affecting the other in their small daily enterprises. To me, Russell’s poetry is a much-needed antidote to the toxic, reactionary politics currently reflecting our nation’s unprecedented imbalance of wealth (and hence power).

I first heard Russell read at the James Wright poetry festival at Martin’s Ferry, West Virginia. At that point, Russell’s work  had been published by Bottom Dog Press in Red Shadows of the Steel Mill, which included short collections by three other poets as well—David Adams, Kip Knott, and Richard Hague. A couple of years later, Russell’s poetry collection, Adversaria, won the Terrence Des Pres prize, a prestigious award named in honor of a writer dedicated to literature as witness, author of The Survivor: A History of Life in the Death Camps and Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century, and co-editor of Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem.  Russell traveled far beyond Martin’s Ferry to give readings and, often, to accept awards. Among those trips was a 1999 visit to Japan, when he won the 4th Shiki International Haiku Award.

His poetry, whether narrative or haiku—seldom refers to the serious health problems he suffered most of his life, problems a lot of us have never heard of, such as cerebral vasculitis (a life-threatening inflammation of the brain’s blood vessels that is sometimes associated with Lupus), as well as problems with which many are all too familiar, such as Type II diabetes and osteoporosis. He died of leukemia on September 16, 2021.

Reading his poems, I’m struck by the grace that infuses his poetry, especially given the hard work and health problems he coped with for years. Multi-faceted as his poetic forms and subjects are, there is a steady center that is benevolent, proportional, and knowing. In so many ways, he was—like all of us—in a fight (his an exceptionally hard one), yet there’s no flailing of arms, no wasted motion, just a clear-eyed, often wry, observation of the human condition as subject to forces beyond individual control and hence requiring powerful personal resources to appreciate and celebrate the good and recognize and defend against the destructive.

I’m reluctant to quote from Tim Russell’s poetry because whatever I quote will fail to do him justice. Even so, I’ll end with the last line of the second poem in Adversaria. Assuring readers that he will show them his world, he says, “I give you my word.” He couldn’t have left a better gift.

 

 

 

Guilt by Carter Taylor Seaton

This is a novel built around a boy's regret for not helping to save a friend's life. It begins with a suspenseful trial in a small town near Atlanta in the very late 1950's and early 60's and follows with scenes of the Civil Rights movement in Georgia--from student demonstrations for SNCC through Blood Sunday in Selma, Alabama, and then on to service in-country in Vietnam as well as the Covid crisis of the 2020's.

The question the story raises is whether an intelligent, observant poor boy can be blamed for not telling what he knows about a murder. Both his mother and a beloved teacher encourage him to keep silent in order to protect him from a racist society and make sure he survives till adulthood. He follows their lead, losing a friend along the way, but eventually becoming a respected attorney and  judge.

Is a minor responsible for a sin of omission? Will the adult man's commitments and actions redeem the boy's error?

Covering large swathes of American history, this is a novel of suspense, history, and the complexities of love. Carter Seaton'ss brilliant story telling keeps everything in motion with a potent mix of character and cultural context.

 

 

 

Your Brother: Historical Fiction by Angela Terasa Baldree Reviewed by  Mary Lucille DeBerry

Trillium Publishing, under new ownership, presents its first new publication: Your Brother:Historical Fiction.

Your Brother by Angela Terasa Baldree, granddaughter of Lauri, a sister in the Kingmont, West Virginia, Julian family, has three themes, First: set apart in tinted blocks are the letters written between four Julian brothers in the armed services during World War II and their oldest brother, Rocco, who lived in Clarksburg with his wife and two children and who shared the letters with the large family back home. Second: the author, through interviews and family stories, describes civilian life and the stress of having four family members overseas. Third: she supplies factual information about the war itself and specific units where the brothers are serving as well as military action not included in their letters.

Much insight is given into an Italian-American family settled in Appalachia, drawn there by coal mines. The chapters are organized chronologically by the war years followed by a poignant Epilogue and are accompanied by two charts of family members, per-war and post-war. The author has created an insightful family history within the context of happenings within a specific family, state, and nation.

West Virginia readers will be intrigued by the interest and love shown by the uncles of “little” Norman Julian who grew up to become a columnist for the Morgantown Dominion Post and who has published three collections of essays: Mountains and Valleys, Trillium Acres and Snake Hill; an adventure novel Cheat, as well as Legends, profiles of WVU Basketball. Norman graduated from the West Virginia University School of Journalism and founded Trillium Publishing which he recently transferred to his second cousin, Angela Terasa Baldree who is now the purveyor of his books along with two books of poetry by Russell Marano of Clarksburg and her own Your Brother.

Learn more at www.trilpub.com.

 

 

 

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I loved this 1988 novel about a young woman coming of age in what was then still Rhodesia. It's another from the list of books suggestion for starting to read about Africa, by Tinashe Chiura. The story is told in the first person by Tambudzai, Tambu for short, who is a village girl whose brother has been tapped to get an education because he is oldest and a boy. We know he dies in the stunning first sentence "I was not sorry when my brother died," and what we learn soon is that he had been distancing himself from the village and bullying his sister for a long time.

Tambu, even though she is consciously a good girl giving the enormous formal respect demanded of a young woman in the family, is also very determined. She tries to earn her own school fees, and when her brother dies, is picked up by her uncle, the headmaster of the missionary school in the larger town, and takes her brother's place as the scholar and hope of the family.

The book is not simply about Tambu's experience and determination, it is also about her thought process--how she analyzes her situation at various points. Novelists, especially those writing coming-of-age novels, often stick to the emotional and experiential side of things, but Dangarembga wants us to see her character figuring out her ethical dilemmas, and her practical problems for continuing to improve her educational opportunities. She thinks about her feisty but unhappy Anglicized cousin, about her educated aunt, and about her uneducated mother back in the village.

It is a marvelous cast of characters, including Tambu's ne'er do well father who is constantly figuring out how to get more resources from the affluent educated older brother who has taken Tambu to live with him and his family at the mission school.

Dangarembga does not explain a lot for those of us who don't know Zimbabwe as it is now or as it was then as Rhodesia, but she gives us what we need to know, concentrating on Tambu's struggles, but including the people and the relationships in the village. She presents a world in which relationships are everything, and responsibilities go in many directions. But the communal life, the responsibility of an educated person to take care of the rest of the family, for example, does not in anyway hamper the flowering of individual quirks and colorful personalities.

I have to say I'm tempted just to tell you about the people in this book: Tambu's aunt Lucia scandalizes the community by refusing to get married; the cousin who grew up in England is Tambu's closest confidante, anti-colonialist and proto-feminist, but also struggling with how to have friends and how to deal with her father and her eating disorders. It goes on and on, boys and girls and men and women, traditionalists and those breaking with tradition. Without losing the power of the coming-of-age novel, she also creates a group portrait, and a moment in time when religions and classes are clashing.

It really is one we should all read.

 

 

 

 

Brooklyn Crime Novel By Jonathan Lethem Reviewed by John P. Loonam

Years ago, when Manhattan colleagues learned that I lived in Brooklyn, they would ask what neighborhood and immediately guess Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope. When, as years went by, I answered Carroll Gardens or Midwood or Bay Ridge, they would stare at me blankly, then ask the question already in their eyes, “Why?”

Jonathan Lethem, of course, has done as much as anyone to change that dynamic, and Brooklyn is now the cool borough. His novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude chronicle life in neighborhoods that were once destitute but are now desirable. In Brooklyn Crime Novel, he illustrates what that transition cost the children of those neighborhoods.

The neighborhood in question, where Lethem grew up, is the main character in Brooklyn Crime Novel — the development around two blocks of Dean Street. And it gets a name, albeit one invented by real-estate interests: Boerum Hill (although there is no hill and little connection to the 18th-century Boerum family farm). The human characters in this complex and stunningly creative novel simply get descriptors like “the Dean Street boys” or “the younger brother.” Some get nicknames, like the Wheeze or Little Man, while one important figure gets an initial, C.

Lethem is not concerned with real estate but rather with gentrification and how it has steered the lives of the children living through it. Brooklyn Crime Novel follows the adventures of the (mostly) boys of the neighborhood — kids who didn’t choose to take part in this urban reclamation, who were not concerned with brownstone authenticity, original detail, or working fireplaces but with going to school, making friends, growing up, and surviving the violence and humiliation of this world their parents chose for them.

The story is told in brief anecdotes, jumping through time between 1976 and 2019 — a period Lethem describes as after the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement. The move to Boerum Hill was supposed to be an affirmation of integration, a rejection of the white flight decimating American cities. But the newcomers refer to themselves as “pioneers” and are deaf to the racism and classism inherent in that word. They think their children will be “ennobled” by having Black friends. Of course, children are neither ennoblers nor forces of social change — they are children, and they act out of the same impulses of fear and power and pride and humiliation that motivate adults. Very little ennobling goes on in these pages.

While the crimes of the title include questionable parenting, real-estate speculation, and lousy decorating, Lethem centers most of the action around a social ritual he calls “the dance.” In “the dance,” boys (and some girls) in their mid-teens intimidate and humiliate boys (and some girls) in their preteens into handing over money or property. These are not exactly muggings — the perpetrators do not demand money; they simply ask for it. The older boys only imply violence by their presence, their age, their size. And their race.

The older children are mostly Black and Latino, many coming over from the nearby housing projects, while their victims are mostly white. The children live out the changing ownership and future of the blocks as the dance reverses the power dynamic taking over the neighborhood — those older kids are part of the problem that the white newcomers are there to solve. The not-quite-robbing practice is widespread and well-known enough that parents send their children out with “mugging money,” a dollar in the pocket to hand over, real cash hidden in the shoes. These kids live an aspect of gentrification that doesn’t make the real-estate ads.

As the neighborhood grows more prosperous, the characters age and develop. They outgrow the dance. They leave the neighborhood for high school. Many of the white boys find their way to New York City’s elite schools — both private and public — and the center of their lives moves from Dean Street to Manhattan and beyond. The dancers become computer geeks, graffiti artists, booksellers, and, yes, novelists. One even becomes the Wheeze. Aging itself is indicted, made criminal as characters carry the scars of their predatory childhood. They fall victim to nostalgia in their search for redemption.

Having gone back to the old neighborhood in his more conventional novels, Lethem offers anything but convention here. He discusses his themes and lays out his ideas more directly than authors generally do. Brooklyn Crime Novel will strike some as speculative sociology or meditative history more than fiction. And while the incidents and anecdotes are compelling and funny, the book sometimes feels too long — the jumble of chronology and humiliation goes on long after the reader has gotten the point. In many cases, that’s fine — a good anecdote can be self-justifying — but endurance becomes another demand Lethem makes of the reader, and the didactic and spontaneous tone of the book are already demanding.

However, there is joy in being in masterful hands, and the way Lethem’s chronology balances chaos and forward movement, not to mention the deftness of his detail, brought me great joy. Not everyone will relate to Boerum Hill as fervently as Lethem does, but gentrification and race, childhood and memory, redemption and nostalgia are not unique to Brooklynites. We just think they are.

 

(Also published in the Washington Independent Review of Books )

 

 

Shoot Like a Girl by Mary Jennings Hegar

...was recommended to me by a woman who came to a book discussion of one of my books. She said she was ex-military and couldn't really finish my book because what she likes to read is books about women in the military. And she named as one of her favorites Mary Jennings Hegar's book. I liked the directness and honesty of the speaker, and decided to see what I thought of her choice.  I'm happy to say I liked it too.

Shoot Like a Girl is a solid read which I expect does well at capturing a voice. As best I can tell, Hegar wrote it herself, although she acknowledges an editor. She seems to be the kind of straight shooter who would be honest if it was actually an as-told-to book.

She presents herself as, above all, a woman warrior--excellent shot (apparently women have more natural talent for sharp-shooting than men), talented pilot, appreciator of her team. She likes men as co-workers and companions and lovers. She is someone who wants to move, who wants to protect. There hints of abuse in her childhood and a growing feminist perspective as she matures. She goes through ROTC, and is determined to be a pilot, and ends up the National Guard in order to do this. She begins with fighting forest fires, doing military and civilian rescues, and eradicating marijuana fields. Then her unit is called up, and she does battlefield work during three tours in Afghanistan.

As the climax of her memoir, she escapes a terrifying battle in Afghanistan in which her helicopter is destroyed. She rides out on the landing skid of another craft.

There is plenty of excitement and conflict both military and personal-- and horror, including a brutal military gynecologist who gives exams that are rapes--and is protected by the military brass.

Hegar's path is not smooth. She is repeatedly passed over for flight training, often because she's a woman. But she tries another way each time--takes flying lessons privately, signs up for the National Guard, which turns into a military career.

Reading this, we are reminded that we need warriors--the people who love physical risk and protecting and rescuing. Often these people are men, but there are plenty of women too. We could do without the ones who are addicted to violence and killing, but we will never do without the much-needed adrenaline junkies we call on when we are lost at sea or facing a wildfire.

After her military career, MJ goes on to have a family and to work for marginalized groups. She is a well known speaker and media personality. She also ran for the Senate in her home state of Texas, as a Democrat, and lost to longtime Republican John Cornyn .

Her relentless determination and optimism lift the book, and I liked it and her.

 

 

 

Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

This is late Victorian (actually Edwardian), and Bennett is supposedly not of much interest to readers today, but I really liked this one. He wrote tremendous amounts, and has been sneered at for his open espousal of middle class life. Anna of the Five Towns is set in an industrial small town dominated by Wesleyan Christianity. Anna is the teen-aged woman-of-the-house since the early death of her mother, and her brutal and miserly father treats her and her sister as servants and spends as little as possible.

Anna toes the line, apparently, but is having a spiritual crisis over not experiencing an expected conversion. A friend lifts Anna's spirits by suggesting that people who have lived Christian lives sometimes have quieter experiences of their religious convictions, to Anna's great relief. Meanwhile, she has an admirer, the owner of a small pottery factory that is doing very well.

When she turns 21, her father, brutal but at least marginally honest, tells her that she has inherited a lot of money from her late mother. The rest of the novel is about Anna's gradual gathering up of her power and becoming a strong, if not happy woman. She suffers over not helping a family of factory who owes her money, and the father kills himself, leaving the son, who also loves Anna, to decide his only option is to emigrate to Australia.

Anna's more affluent lover proposes, and she has to face fighting with her father for enough money to buy clothes for herself and linens for her new home. She also realizes that she doesn't really love her fiancé, but like her father, she believes a commitment is to be taken seriously.

The ending is anything but an H.E.A. We have a sense of what her marriage is going to be like, and learn what happens to the ruined young man who loved Anna. And yet, Anna's life is not desperate. She makes decisions and she lives with them. The novel is like Thomas Hardy without the high tragedy. Lives are narrow and drab, but they have depth and dignity.

 

For more information on Anna, click here.

 

 

The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

I read the trilogy some years back, and this reread of the first book was stimulated by my occasional dips into Kenneth C. Davis' book A Year of Reading–Briefly: Great Short Books.

The Country Girls takes place in a small Irish community full of interesting figures. The narrator and her family are genteel but poor, and there is a constant awareness of poverty plus a drunken father and a tragic mother who wants love. Cait and her best friend want some kind of love too, but they want adventure more. Central to the story is Cait's not-quite-affair with an older man. It's somewhere between icky and funny and so sad,

At the time it was published the sexual detail got it banned in her home region. Now, of course, it doesn't seem explicit at all, just honest in its delineating of the different desires of the young women.

Probably best is the relationship between Cait and Baba, her bolder and sometimes quite mean best friend. They are 14 when the book starts, spend 3 years in a convent boarding school, from which Baba maneuvers to get them expelled. They then go together, still teen-agers, to jobs and the thrilling life in Dublin. This too is its own way narrow and cheap. Baba wants a high class champagne kind of life. Cait wants her strange old secret lover.

Throughout is a deeply wry humor: the least of it being their choice of black lingerie so they won't have to wash it so often! It's very much worth reading. I admire O'Brien's work more than I love it, but reading it in this small, perfect dose was just right.

 

 

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Here's another recommendation from A Year of Reading–Briefly--also a reread for me. I last read Death in Venice probably 40 years ago, maybe more. My memory is that at the time I felt it was important to read it, that it was short, and that you were supposed to find a lot of symbolic meanings about hidden homosexuality. Also there was an image of a boy seen across some water that has always stuck with me.

Most of which, except for the image of the boy and the wateer, seems pretty wrongheaded now. The homosexual love, for example, isn't secret at all--the main character Aschenbach and even the women with Tadzio all see it, and the women make an effort to keep Aschenbach away from Tadzio. There are allusions in Aschenbach's internal monologues to Greeks and Eros and boy-love.

In my first read, I also didn't identify at all with Aschenbach: he was too old, too close to death. Even now, I have to make an effort to imagine being such a person at his stage of his career.

The first couple of chapters are dense with discussions of art and the life of a (highly successful) artist. Then, once Aschenbach gets to Venice and begins to observe and follow the beautiful young boy, it is all perfectly paced and visualized. There is a touch of Henry James in here, even some tropical imagery of a beast in the jungle (Mann's is a tiger), and that finely tuned observation and communication through silence.

I may want to read a better translation now, but in any translation, it is a moving story of a lonely man mutely in love for perhaps the first time, and facing the inevitability of loss, which is at the endgame for all of us.

 

 

 

Mercury Boys & Damselfly by Chandra Prasad

Mercury Boys, a young adult novel, I think, has an elaborate premise that involves using the element mercury and nineteenth century daguerreotypes to go back in time via extremely vivid dreams that are probably actually time travel. Details of how it all works are sketchy, but a group of high school girls, stimulated by our narrator Saskia Brown, master the technique.

The visits to the past are interesting but fragmentary. The real story is Saskia's tribulations. She is new in town and part of a newly broken up family, She is thrilled to make one good friend, and then some of the top dog girls begin to be friendly with her. They create The Mercury Boys Club, that meets mostly at the home of a a pair of rich and beautiful sisters whose "'rents" are never home, and who have an endless supply of alcohol and manipulative strategies that include complex rules for the club and brutal punishments if you do things like, say, break up with your nineteenth century boyfriend without the group's permission.

It gets worse and worse as Saskia and her friend Lila are attracted by the glamour of the sisters and their desire to be part of a group. The daguerreotype world scenes have walk-ons by various nineteenth century figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglas, and one of the club members becomes a nurse at a Civil War hospital camp (Union side) where she saves some lives by insisting on clean water, some fresh air, and relatively clean wound dressings.

But the fun really is in the classic story of making mistakes by yearning to fit it. There is a near-horror story quality to the bullying and attempted revenge of the beautiful mean queens.

 

 

I also read Prasad's Damselfly, a response in many ways to Lord of the Flies with a mixed gender group of boarding school kids-- the fencing team--whose plane crashes on a remote island in the South Pacific. The main players, unlike in Lord of the Flies, are girls, although boys are along but mostly followers of the rival leaders, the rich and gorgeous Rirtika and Mel, who knows the natural world.  Mel, who was named after the American pilot Amelia Earhart whose plane disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific. I kept expecting them to find hints of Earhart's presence on their island, but instead there is a mysterious someone who leaves messages threatening to kill them if they don't get off the island.

It's a good story, although it felt to me like it stopped too soon-- an interesting character is killed, the main characters have an open-ended finish. A lot happens in a short few pages, and one wonders if Prasad's energy ran out, or if it was getting too long for y. a. fiction, or if I was just asking for old-fashioned closure and answers to questions she didn't choose to give. The first two thirds was very good, though.

 

 

Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism   Reviewed by Joseph Chuman

The Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 to protest anti-Black racism, especially the killing of Blacks at the hands of the police, was arguably the largest protest movement in the history of the United States. It created a tectonic shift in the understanding of the systemic character of racism in American society and has generated chasms in the political landscape, shaping the politics of segments on the left and reactions by the right. It is a major fault line exacerbated by Donald Trump that is consuming the contemporary political moment.

It is against this background that historian Magda Teter has written Christian Supremacy, subtitled Reckoning With the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism. It is a monumental treatise, rigorously researched and annotated, that illuminates our current condition by placing its origins in the broadest possible historical context.

Magda Teter is an unusual scholar. Born and raised in Poland, she is an expert on Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations. She is not  Jewish herself, but taught at Wesleyan for more than a decade and is currently the chair in Judaic studies at Fordham University. Her written corpus reveals an extraordinary number of scholarly articles and half a dozen texts. The current volume, published this year by Princeton University Press, well exemplifies her prodigious scholarship. This is a relevant and important book, and though replete with detailed information and citations supporting her thesis, remains eminently readable.

Teter’s thesis is compelling and persuasively argued. Anti-Black prejudice and discrimination, as well as the recrudescence of white supremacy, did not originate with the American experience. Its roots run very deep. Its beginnings can be found in Christian antisemitism, traced back to St. Augustine and even further to the writing of St. Paul. In briefest terms, her premise is as follows:

“…the ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy. These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and in respect to people of color in European colonies and the US, before returning transformed back into Europe. That vision of social hierarchy is built on the foundations of early Christian supersessionist theology that negated Judaism as it claimed to ‘replace’ it and sometimes called replacement theology or replacement theory. Ancient and medieval Christians developed a sense of superiority over Jews, whom they saw as carnal and inferior, and rejected by God…For Christians, Jews became necessary ‘contrast figures’ created and used to validate Christian’ claims of theological replacement and superiority.”

“…Christian supremacy predated white supremacy and has left its mark on the legal and mental structures that continue to reverberate in what is now commonly called white supremacy.”

“…the modern rejection of equality of both Jews and Black people in the West is the legacy of Christian supersessionism.”

It is a mainstay of Teter’s thesis to highlight what she claims is frequently omitted by historians, namely how norms of Christian superiority at the expense of the subordination and humiliation of Jews were strengthened by their reification and codification into law.

Teter notes that the biblical phrase cited in Genesis, repeated in the book of Romans, “an elder shall serve a younger,” and augmented by the authority of St. Augustine, became the paradigm for Christian dominance and the entrenched subjugation of Jews. It is well known that Augustine spoke about the needed survival of the Jews in order for them to bear witness to the superiority of Christianity. Teter’s takeaway from Augustine’s views lies in his persistent emphasis on Jewish inferiority and the establishment of an ideal Christian-Jewish hierarchy. She notes that this Augustinian hierarchy was not merely theological. It was embedded in the social and political reality of the times and became an influential basis for enduring Christian supremacy that, in the early modern period, was transferred to white Europeans in their relations to Blacks.

Inclusive in the transition from Christian structural antisemitism throughout the Middle Ages to the emergence of Black enslavement by Europeans in the era of colonization was the linkage fostered by Islam. Slavery was absent in Europe, except under Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula and was greatly predated by Islam. “Iberian history,” she notes, “is…key to understanding the legal cultural, economic foundations that would help establish slavery in the Americas.” Quoting the historian Timothy Lockley, there is “a clear lineage of negative racial imagery from Arabic (Iberian) to English thought.” Teter further states, “The connection between slavery and Black Africans was first made in Islamic thought, when Muslims conquered parts of Africa and amassed dark-skinned captives, by reinterpreting the curse of Ham as both the curse of slavery and Blackness.” The British went on to imitate the systems of enslavement in their colonies that had earlier been put in place by the Spanish and Portuguese.

As Europeans began their colonial expansion across the Atlantic, they firmly developed their sense of religious and political superiority, a superiority which had long been established through their convictions regarding the inferiority of Jews. What emerged was the slow evolution of the identification of Christianity with whiteness. That evolution was at first hampered because Catholicism held to the doctrine of universal conversion. One could become Christian through baptism regardless of color. By contrast, in Protestant colonies, English, Dutch, and Danish, slave owners prevented Black conversion or allowed free Blacks to convert. But in time, as Teter notes, “Christianity, freedom and whiteness came together.”

In recent decades, the Enlightenment has become a subject for critics who view it as responsible for the evils of colonization, slavery, and genocide. In my view, despite the personal racist sentiments held by Enlightenment luminaries, the critique is generally misplaced. To her credit, Teter treads lightly in taking the Enlightenment to task, though she notes that it was eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, with its interest in taxonomy, that developed a scientific classification of the races that aided in solidifying racial hierarchy.

The modern period saw the emergence of democracies, and with it came the ideas of equality and citizenship. The question of who counts as a citizen, therefore, became a contentious, long-lasting issue both in Europe and in the United States. In Europe, the status of Jews, the “Jewish question,” was front and center. In the United States, the subjugated status of Blacks was enduring and not legally settled until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The French Revolution created The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen. But the two were not the same; which rights accrued to “man,” and which to “citizen” was contested, and analogous arguments persisted in the United States pertaining to Blacks through much of the nineteenth century.

bbe´ Sieyes, a major theoretician of the French Revolution, maintained that all persons have passive, natural rights, such as protection of their person and property. But not all should have an active right to participate in governmental affairs, and those, including women, children, and foreigners, should be excluded from citizenship. Jews, who throughout the Middle Ages were construed to be an alien nation within Christian lands, were the consummate foreigners. The French Declaration banned discrimination on grounds of religious belief, and so Huguenots and other Christians were admitted as citizens. Jews remained banned as a foreign national group. Christians of every denomination could assimilate, but Jews presented a unique problem. After much debate, Jews were eventually granted active citizenship in France, but the question of their rights and citizenship spread to other parts of Europe.

These debates continued in Holland, Germany, and Great Britain. Often at stake was the notion that if Jews were granted equality, such would endow them  with excessive power, leading to Jewish hegemony over Christians. Such reasoning reflected the depth of the theologically grounded notion that Judaism, by rejecting Christ, was an eternally inferior religion and needed to be confined to a subordinated status. This false identity of equality with mastery also found its analog in white supremacist initiatives to deny Blacks equal rights in America later in the century.

It was not until 1869, and the unification of Germany, that Jews attained full German citizenship. But this achievement was quickly followed, as such advances often are, by an immediate backlash, in this case with the emergence of political antisemitism.

Teter elaborates a pivotal discussion on the contested legal status of free Blacks in the United States. Neither enslaved nor white, their presence placed in high relief the issue of color in a way in which slavery itself did not. In principle, one could oppose slavery on the grounds of justice  or economic pragmatism without referencing skin color. Nothing raised this issue to a higher pitch than when the people of Haiti, in 1804, overthrew their French colonial masters. In a historic irony, we may conclude that the Haitian struggle for freedom was inspired in great measure by the principles of the French Declaration. The Western Hemisphere now contained two newly independent nations, one sustained in great measure by slavery, the other without slavery under Black sovereignty.

As Jill Lepore noted in her history of America, These Truths, slave rebellions in the colonies were frequent, but nothing placed fear in the hearts of slave owners as did the Haitian revolution. When America was founded, the concept of citizenship was new, and, as noted, not clearly defined until a century later. Full citizenship was tied to being white, and,as a result, free Blacks were subjected to humiliating distinctions, as Teter notes, with regard to the ownership of property and guns, and to giving testimonies in court.

Teter explicates in great detail the debates and ensuing laws relating to race, religion, and citizenship as those presented to deny Blacks equality in nineteenth-century America. She notes,

“The 1820 debate over the admission of Missouri into the Union put on display clashing visions of what the United States is and who belongs, while regional court cases and religious debates, in a slow-moving backlash against the ideals enshrined in the US Constitution against established religion, began to clarify a sense of dominant religious identity. Both Jews and people of color challenged, in different ways, American white Protestant hegemony in what was beginning to shape as a white Christian republic.” Teter concludes that the issue regarding the admission of Missouri as a slave state was not pivotal in that the admission of Maine provided a compromise. It was rather the heated debate that resulted from an article of the Missouri constitution that would ban the residency of free blacks in the state, a provision that ostensibly violated the US Constitution. It also suggested that Blacks who could freely reside in some states could not in others.

The inequality of Blacks can be readily illustrated by the reasoning employed in major Supreme Court decisions, one prior to the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and those that were argued in the backlash of the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution.

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Missouri and was taken to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, both free jurisdictions, and then brought back to Missouri, where he was again enslaved. Dred Scott sued to assert his status as a free citizen under the Constitution. By a 7-2 majority, the Supreme Court denied his appeal, in what was arguably the worst ruling in the history of the Court. Teter provides an extensive elaboration of the case, quoting at length from the prevailing decision of Justice Roger Taney. Taney invoked what today would be deemed an originalist argument, claiming that at the time of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and passage of the Constitution, Black people were not considered to be citizens. Taney’s unabashed racism would, by today’s standards be cringe-worthy. With regard to Blacks, he wrote:

“…(they are) beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

“…they (i.e.Blacks) at that time considered as a subordinate, and inferior class of beings who had been subjected by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” “…this opinion was at the time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the ‘the white race.’” “…a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery, and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power and which they looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings.”

The reference to a “perpetual and impassible barrier” speaks to the depth of Taney’s racism. It may strike us as astounding, but it was validated by the science of the times and, we may conclude, was the prevailing view of Americans in that era.

There were those who argued that the United States was founded as a white republic and such was the meaning of “We the people.” Questions emerged as to whether the United States was an Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization struggling to preserve its purity against the incursion of Blacks and foreign hordes. Or, was America meant to be diverse with regard to race, religion, and ethnicity? As Teter observes, the former reflected “a kind of Protestant nativism grounded in a package of Christianity and whiteness that began to crystallize in the early decades of the nineteenth century. And though in the earliest iterations Christianity may not have been explicit, it became increasingly so from the 1820s onward.”

The arguments in America concerning the place of Blacks paralleled arguments in Europe in regard to Jews. Many arguments when related to matters of principle (conceptual and legal) appear hairsplitting. Yet, as Teter points out, they reflected the prevailing attitudes of the time. Many who argued for a status less than equal for Blacks and Jews explicitly made reference to feelings of belonging with their own, degrees of discomfort with others, and conclusions that people who are different, as Blacks and Jews are from whites, and Christians simply could not live together as equals. Many validated this inequality in religious terms. Opposition to slavery was increasingly cast by proslavery Christians as anti-Christian. The backlash against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was enormous. And, as Teter concludes, borrowing from the historian Luke Harlow, “The racist religion of the antebellum period became ‘racial unity’ that paved the way for the emergence of a white Democratic political bloc.”

Intimidation, violence, terror, and the gradual disenfranchisement of Black voting rights established by Reconstruction, became the hallmarks of the Jim Crow era. As we painfully know, those phenomena, at times relatively latent and at others painfully manifest, have not disappeared, rather they have dramatically reemerged in our current political moment.

The 1870s saw several civil rights cases that promoted the unqualified equality of Blacks and intended to put substance behind the post-Civil War amendments. These cases were declared unconstitutional on the dubious distinction that segregation in private, but not state, settings, was legal. A major milestone was the Plessy V. Ferguson case of 1896. Homer Plessey, a one-eighth African-American, was denied a first-class railroad ticket. His defense rested on the argument that such segregation violated the equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Thirteenth in that it perpetuated the “essential features of slavery.” The court’s majority held that while the Amendments may have abolished political inequality, they did not intend to abolish distinctions based on color or to enforce social equality. Legal equality, in short, did not mean social acceptance.

There was pushback. Teter elaborates in detail the arguments of the sole dissenting justice in Plessey, John Marshall Harlan. He noted that the Thirteenth Amendment did not merely strike down slavery but “…prevents any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude.” He noted that “there is in this country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates among classes of citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.” Harlan’s was an expression of American ideals that, with minimal reflection, should be understood as self-evident. Harlan grasped how structural racism was factored into law. He was ahead of his time in that it was not until Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 that the law began to align with Harlan’s dissent.

The 1870s marked the decade in which political antisemitism emerged with a renewed force both in Europe and the United States. As mentioned, Jews had attained citizenship in France in the aftermath of the Revolution and were accepted as citizens in Germany in 1869. By then, the number of Jews in Germany exceeded half a million, but in France, the population was less than one percent. Yet when the lid of legal antisemitism was removed, Jews moved rapidly into positions of prominence in the professions, commerce, finance, and the press, and held positions in government. Though many German Jews were highly assimilated, and intermarriage was common (they frequently identified themselves as “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion”), their status as ostensible outsiders deepened feelings of contempt. Their stepping out of their theologically sanctioned position as subjugated people in the Christian society, revived stereotypes. Their social climbing and success were seen as marks of insolence and ill-gained power. Jews were condemned as being “carnal” and “materialist.” The attainment of equality was felt as usurpation and, as Teter notes “encroachment on the rights of others.” German nationalism, which later was transmogrified by the Nazis into the ideology of “blood and soil,” stood in opposition to the ideals of liberalism, pluralism and cosmopolitanism, which the prominence of Jews represented. In France, antisemitism culminated in the infamous Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Jewish officer was falsely accused and convicted of treason. The affair extended for twelve years and was indicative of antisemitism’s wide acceptance.

The situation in Eastern Europe, especially tsarist Russia, was much different and far more severe. Jews were not citizens, and salient expressions of anti-Jewish hatred were not political; they were fiercely violent and deadly. The years 1881-1882 saw over a hundred pogroms in the Russian empire, with violent outbreaks repeated in the early decades of the twentieth century. These attacks on Jewish villages, often by the army with the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, bear on my own life story in that my father, as a child, was a witness to a pogrom in his native Ukraine. It caused him to flee to the West, as it did countless other Jews during that dark period. The effects of Russian antisemitism were ongoing. One of its lasting contributions to perennial antisemitism was the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictitious tract that alleged Jewish aspirations toward power and conspiracies aimed at world domination. It became a deep-seated trope that was aggressively appropriated by the Nazis and has been a mainstay of anti-Jewish bigotry employed to the current day.

The fate of the Jews in America, as Teter states, was in some ways more complex. Jews were full citizens and never enslaved. Yet, beginning in the 1870s there was an upsurge of antisemitic discrimination. The 1870s just preceded the waves of millions of European Jews, many impoverished, that extended from 1881 until 1924 when the doors of immigration were closed.

Teter describes at great length and in detail an incident in 1877 in which Joseph Seligman, the head of an elite banking family, was denied access to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he had vacationed many times before. Seligman was a noted public figure. He was president of Temple Emmanuel in New York, and President Ulysses Grant had previously invited him to serve as the Secretary of the Treasury. The cause was blatant anti-Jewish bigotry and was accompanied by derogatory depictions of Jews as gluttonous, loud, and smelly. In short, Seligman did not reflect the class that the patrons of the hotel allegedly chose to associate with. It is clear that Seligman was not rejected for who he was personally but as a construct of the white Protestant imagination.

The Seligman incident was followed by a succession of other hotels and resorts prohibiting Jewish entry – in Coney Island, Lake Placid Club, and at the Mohonk Peace Conference, somewhat ironically organized by Quakers.

The discriminatory exclusion of Jews extended beyond exclusive hotels and resorts. Though there is passing mention of restrictive covenants, it was a form of antisemitic discrimination that, in my view, deserves more extensive description. Neighborhoods where Jews were barred from residence were a common feature of American society, especially in the decades prior to World War II. Such exclusion tangentially touches upon my own life. I grew up in the Forest Hills section of New York City. Before the War, the older section of Forest Hills, festooned with tidy Tudor homes and private streets, barred Jews from living there. Teaneck New Jersey, where I worked for almost half a century and now harbors a large population of Orthodox Jews, in the 1940s excluded Jews from residence.

Also significant, but omitted in Teter’s narrative, was the restrictive quotas placed on Jews attending American universities, especially the elite schools. The first such restriction was imposed in 1919 at Columbia University, enacted by its famed president, Nicolas Murray Butler. Here too, the history becomes personal. I received my three graduate degrees from Columbia. This discrimination has long been a source of resentment for many Jews and has caused some, who have traditionally been at the forefront of progressive causes, to balk at the adoption of affirmative action initiatives even as they have otherwise supported programs to leverage equality and greater opportunities for Blacks. The exclusion from clubs and universities was also paralleled by the rejection of Jews from selective law firms, which caused them to create their own.

Of historical significance is that antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe, anti-Jewish discrimination in America, as well as anti-immigrant nativism and the violent suppression of Blacks all occurred more or less simultaneously, and all emerged as backlashes against movements toward greater equality, liberalism, and democratic pluralism. Within the American context, this convergence, as Teter, concludes “…helped bolster that ‘true’ Americans were white Protestant, while others were undeserving of citizenship and equality.”

But, of course, the Black experience was different from that of Jews. Discrimination against Blacks was structural, not exclusively cultural. It was baked into the law and the justice system. Though difficult to contemplate, American race laws served as a model for restrictions on citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws that went beyond our borders. The Nazis sent their legal scholars to the United States to learn from us how they could justify the legal disenfranchisement of Jews.

After the Second World War, the enormity of the Holocaust led, for a while, to the mitigation of antisemitic outbursts. But Blacks who fought Fascism in Europe in defense of freedom found themselves, upon returning home, still confronting discrimination, bigotry, and violence. It is well known that the much-vaunted G.I bill excluded Black home buyers, whose political deprivations have long been augmented by structural economic inequality and plunder. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that the experiences of the War, as well as decolonization transpiring in Africa and Asia, helped to inspire the Civil Rights movement, and put an end not to racism but to legal segregation and disenfranchisement.

Beyond Magda Teter’s primary thesis that the Christian degradation and subordination of Jews, extending back to biblical times, was transferred to the enslavement of Blacks at the hands of Europeans in the early modern period, a secondary narrative describes how each advance by Jews and Blacks has precipitated a backlash, pointing to the reality that these prejudices remain deeply entrenched in American society. Sitting atop this historical dialectic and providing its justification has been the phenomenon of white Christian supremacy.

Teter ends her book with the insurrectionary assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. In line with her thesis, White Christian supremacy was clearly in evidence; some rioters were donning antisemitic slogans, while others carried crosses and Christian symbols.

It’s a powerful narrative, rich in detail, and rigorously argued. But there are also notable omissions. Christian nationalism is ominously present on the Trumpist and extremist agenda. It is the American component of what is a more expansive religiously based nationalism that is making inroads internationally. Arguably inaugurated by the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, we see variants of religious nationalism in Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s Hindutva in India, in Israel under Netanyahu, and elsewhere. Magda Teter’s study points to the emergence of a Christian nationalist movement in the United States. Its conclusions would be enhanced if she provided elaboration, perforce speculative, as to what precisely Christian nationalists in this country want. How is their movement organized? What would a Christian nationalist America look like?

Acknowledging white Christian hegemony, I found it surprising that she has little to say about the role of evangelical Christians specifically. Claiming tens of millions of Americans, the evangelical movement since the late 1970s has moved the political landscape far to the right. During the George W. Bush administration, they had hundreds of members of Congress in their pockets. Arguably, evangelicalism is no longer a religious movement, but a political one spewing extremist positions riddled with misogyny, anti-gay rhetoric, and a contempt for Democrats, liberalism, and pluralism. Donald Trump would not have been elected without their support. Their putative love for Israel is based on the theological presumption that Jews need to be regrouped in the Holy Land in order to jump-start the Second Coming of Christ. At that time, Jews will either convert to Christianity or die. Their ostensible philo-semitism is anything but. It is a blatant expression of Christian supersessionism played out on the contemporary political stage, and as such is a prime expression of Teter’s thesis.

The author might have given more attention to the role of the Ku Klux Klan, and such noted antisemites as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Charles Coughlin. But perhaps she concluded that these subjects have been amply explicated in other texts dealing explicitly with antisemitism, and it better to unearth lesser-known figures.

In closing, Christian Supremacy has done a masterful job of explaining how deeply rooted racism and antisemitism have been baked into American history and endures. It goes far in clarifying the extremism of white supremacy and explains how what has in recent decades been confined to the lunatic fringe, is more mainstream than we would otherwise wish to countenance.

We need history to understand the present. But in this critic’s view, Magda Teter’s prodigious work requires a response that looks to the future. As a progressive, I believe in the possibility of moral and social progress. As a humanist, I believe in an open future, and while our future may be shaped by the past, it is not determined by it.

It’s important to note that renewed expressions of white Christian supremacy, as  Magda Teter so amply documents, have been responses to advances in the status of Jews and Blacks, both in Europe and the United States. Those advances have been as real as the endurance of racism and anti-Semitism, and provide the foundations on which to build a more benign future marked by greater equality and justice.

Antisemitic incidents are at an all-time high in recent decades, and we have just seen the conclusion of the trial of the assailant in the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the most devastating antisemitic incident in American history. But this time, the government is on the side of the Jews and not their persecutors as was true in ages past.

Anti-Black racism is still very much with us. We have far to go. But there has been real progress. The Great Society programs of the 1960s helped to leverage more than half the Black population into the middle class. And while the election of Barack Obama has been met by backlash that has unearthed the extremism that so ominously confronts us, electing an African-American to our highest office speaks to a reality that stands against the perdurance of racism.

We are at a precarious moment and our democracy and freedom stand at a precipice. We need history to help guide us to an unknown future, and Magda Teter’s far-reaching explanation of where we have arrived is essential reading. It is a book for our time, and I strongly recommend it.

When it comes to our choices in this difficult moment, we  must remain as inspired by the future as we are enlightened by the past.

 

(Also published in Logos Journal 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

 THE REST OF MARTHA WELLS' RAKSURA NOVELS

I finished the Raksura novels and generally found them delightful. I love fantasy/science fiction that tries out social structures to see what comes of them, and Wells does this very well. She usually goes off into adventure and struggle,but there's enough to keep me coming back.

The Siren Depths by Martha Wells

This was the best of these so far– not every-expanding worlds that don't get developed, which I felt The Serpent Seasuffered from.  Important characters here are Moon's newly discovered relatives, especially his mother, Malachite, who is the biggest and baddest queen we've met yet. The Fell are back, with Greater Kethels and Rulers and Progenitors, Some mysteries are solved, and the adolescent dialogue exchanges are funny and sometimes a little surprising, work nicely. Altogether the best yet. Here's some blog-praise about the novels that is a good introduction to them at Cover to Cover.

 

 

The Edge of Worlds by Martha Wells

I continue to like these Raksura novels for their world building and people, and the plethora of races and species and culture clashes.  I have one more to go after this and will certainly read it with much gusto. I don't love every moment in every one of them. There are books (Victorian novels, probably the Bosch police procedurals) that I can just open at random and get satisfaction from reading a while. This series can get soft in the middle while Wells finds her story (I wonder if she plots ahead of time or as she writes).  In other words, especially in this book, I could feel her sloshing around finding her way.  As a writing teacher, I say, fine, the best way to proceed is always to slosh away.  But as a reader, I say, Can't you tighten up the darn thing??

    Anyhow, this starts brilliantly with a court-wide dream of horror about a Fell attack--the Fell being the mindless eating machine hive creatures (organized into "flights"). They and the Raksura share a common ancestor. Like the Raksura they are shapeshifters and predators, but the Raksura are caring of each other and sometimes of other species, and talk endlessly in their decision making.

Then a group of groundling scientist explorers arrive with a flying ship and a friend of the Raksura, and some of our favorites go on a quest to find a lost city. Once they get to the city , the story sharpens up and is in fact, what I read Wells for: the funny differences between individuals and between classes of Raksura (queens, consorts of the queens, warriors, and the non-flying arbora, who are very smart, some with healing and visionary powers and all kinds of other talents)--and between species.  They all talk like bright high school students-- witty, snippy, endlessly wrangling. This modern tone becomes a kind of bottom line, how all the languages are translated. The plot and action are as usual good enough, and the best part of this one–which ends with not everything solved (one more novel in the series)–is that there is a half Raksura-Half Fell young queen who may not be absolutely evil. We presume she and her flight will be back in the last book.

    Meanwhile, our primary point of view guide, Moon, a consort who was raised on his own not knowing who/what he was, and his queen Jade, have had their first clutch of babies, and Moon, who is an excellent fighter-explorer-guide, is eager to get back to his job of overseeing their education. The queens are terrific in this, strong and beautiful and natural leaders and as ready to fight each other as evil Fell. Moon's mother, who we met in the last book, is the biggest and baddest queen of all, and in the end quite a nuanced character.

    Not that Moon and the other consorts are weaklings or uninteresting. The oldest, largest, and probably the strongest of all the Raksura is Stone, a so-called line-grandfather who is gruff and vastly powerful.

    When Wells is good, it's just what I like.  When Wells hasn't quite revised and cut enough, I get moderately bored until she brings us back, and so far, she always has.

 

 

 

 The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells

Last book, more's the pity!

Here's the summary of the plot from the Wells-approved web page: "A former friend has betrayed the Raksura and their groundling companions, and now the survivors must race across the Three Worlds to rescue their kidnapped family members. When Moon and Stone are sent ahead to scout, they quickly encounter an unexpected and potentially deadly ally, and decide to disobey the queens and continue the search alone. Following in a wind-ship, Jade and Malachite make an unlikely alliance of their own, until word reaches them that the Fell are massing for an attack on the Reaches, and that forces of the powerful Empire of Kish are turning against the Raksura and their groundling comrades,"

I enjoyed this one a lot, especially the further exploration of the half-Raksura half-evil Fell characters who you can smell a mile away (the word stench is somewhat over-used in reference to the Fell). There's a satisfying hopefulness about this rejoining of the two predatory species, the good one (our Raksura!) and the bad, smelly Fell.  The Queens make common cause to fight the Fell, and Moon pretty much sacrifices his body, at least temporarily, as you expect of him, to stop a world-ending or at least Raksura-ending explosion. Lots of characters, some interesting betrayals, Stone gets a girl friend.

I was sorry to have to leave.

 

 

SHORT TAKES & RESPONSES

 

Belinda Anderson writes to say, "Here's a nonfiction book about the very young Winston Churchill that provides insight into the man who became a World War II leader: Hero of the Emprie: The Boer War, A Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill. The author is Candice Millard, an excellent researcher and writer."

She adds in reference to remarks in Issue 229 about William Makepeace Thackery, "Your writing of Thackery's female protagonists reminded me of Thomas Hardy's flawed heroine Eustacia in The Return of the Native. I recommend the audiobook presentation by actor Alan Rickman, whose voice gives such meaning to the prose. Here's what audiofilemagazine.com said of his reading: 'Rickman's voice is masculine and seductive; yet ... he becomes Hardy's women and children, utterly compelling as he projects all ranges of emotion.'"'

 

 

Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell

Such Kindness, Andre Dubus III’s latest novel, is wonderful.  I’ve seldom read a novel that strived so hard to show transformation from within, and how that expands gratitude and compassion and consideration for other people. The main character, Tom, a master carpenter, fell off a roof before the novel begins, became addicted to pain-killers, weaned himself from them, and now is divorced from his wife, rather estranged from his son, and living on the edge.  I won’t tell more, except to say it starts off with a crime he’s about to make, and by the end, I found myself consciously spreading more love and kindness than before I read it.  No one writes about class better than Andre Dubus III.

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

 Look for Laura Tillman's new nonfiction book, The Migrant Chef: the Life and Times of Lala Garcia.

 

Rachel Kin's Bratwurst Haven won a 2023 Colorado Book Award.

 

Just Published! John Michael Cummings new fiction
The Spirit in My Shoes has a November publication date.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published in Persian!

My novel for children Billie of Fish House Lane. See announcement here. The Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) has just announced that "Juvenile fiction book Billie of Fish House Lane by American author Meredith Sue Willis has been published in Persian and is available to Iranian Children."

 

 

 

 

 GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF

 

Reviews of Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem and Ravage and Son: A Novel by Jerome Charyn by John Loonam.

 

 

Joe Chuman, the Ethical Culture leader and professor of philosophy (and frequent reviewer here), has a good substack blog on the "relative" value of human lives and other issues related to the war in Israel and Gaza.

 

Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read!

 

Take a listen to West Virginia Writers at https://www.wvstories.com/ -- audio recordings, materials for teachers and much more! Produced and hosted by Kate Long.

 

 

Dreama Frisk suggests this audio interview with Ann Pancake about her novel As Strange as This Weather Has Been.

 

 

How novel writers make a living,--and it's not by writing novels.

 

 

Persimmon Tree is always a good read, and there is a special section in the Fall 2023 issue on the late Wendy Barker with a selection of her poems. One I particularly liked is called "I Hate Telling People I Teach English."

 

 

 

 

 ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More

Commercial selling of fiction in late 2023 from Therese Anne Fowler.

Chat GPT and writers: research by George Lies:

• Wired article on using Chat GPT to improve your writing

•  Training Chat GPT to imitate your voice/style: from Forte labs

•  A Youtube on training Chat GPT

A piece about writing strong emotions.

Do you lack confidence on punctuating dialogue in your fiction or memoir? Check out Reedsy's six "unbreakable" rules for dialogue punctuation.

September 2023 article by Emily Harstone that distinguishes three forms of publishing: tradtional, self, and vanity. It also has some good links. 

  

 

 

BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER

If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left.

 

A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool for brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.

 

I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184,  as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.

 

The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.

 

Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores.

 

Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage-only way to trade books with other readers.

 

Ingrid Hughes suggests "a great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."

 

If you are using an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927), and free, free, free!

 

Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.

 

More and more public libraries are now offering electronic books for borrowing as well.

Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers # 231 Jan 15, 2024 Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact Read this newsletter in its permanent location Spring 2024--MSW is teaching Novel Writing at NYU-SPS By Zoom: NYU  WRIT1-CE9357001 Wednesday Evenings 2/21/24 - 4/24/24 CHECK OUT THESE ANNOUNCEMENTS!!    Terrific new and upcoming publications:  Translations by Marc Kaminsky; Poems by Ernie Brill; New Issue of Review Tales; and Alison Louise Hubbard's new novel The Kelsey Outrage plus book launchI! Also take a look at Shepherd.com for a new source of ideas for what to read next.    I have a list of the Best Great American Novels from Appalachia. Back Issues Announcements Book Reviews Especially for Writers Good Stuff Online & Elsewhere   BOOK REVIEWS This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer). They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Razorblade Tears by S.A.Cosby Long Way Home by Eva Dolan The Jailing of Cecilia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly Star Wars: Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly Following the Silence by Marc Harshman The Private Patient by P.D. James The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret) The Clay Urn: A Novella  by Paul Rabinowitz Birthright by Nora Roberts To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith  Reviewed by Dreama Frisk Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle   You can tell I haven't been teaching for several weeks because I've been reading everything that comes my way. I have reactions here to a Barbara Hambly silver screen mystery  (Bride of the Rat God) and her early spin-off of Star Wars as well as to a book by contemporary crime writer S.A. Cosby.  I read a romance novel by Nora Roberts and Marc Harshman's latest book of poetry, one of Elizabeth Strout's tender stories about the varieties of love, and an excellent popular history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911. I also read my first work by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and reread my old professor Anthony Burgess's big success A Clockwork Orange. Continuing in a British mood, I read a P.D. James and discovered a new (to me) Victorian author, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant. These books came from recommendations in this newsletter or were gifts or, e-books borrowed from the public library, or books suggested by students in my classes and members of my writer groups. I also found a new book-list website called Shepherd.com.  As always--I'm looking for more.  Please send reviews and/or short takes on what you've been reading! The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Let me begin by saying that Michael Lewis is really good at what he does, which is explaining things and telling a story that shows the things he explains in human terms. My son is a fan of Lewis's work and recommended The Blind Side to me. I never saw the movie, but the book is very good.  I even watched bits of a football game on t.v. last night with better understanding after reading it. However little you care about football, it is hard not be engrossed in what Lewis has to say about the revaluing of offensive linemen, particularly the left tackle whose job is to protect his quarterback from the thundering herd of defenders coming to smash him to bits while he looks for a place to throw the ball.     The left tackle, says Lewis, needs a particular physique: very tall and broad, but also extremely fast and quick on his feet. This becomes necessary background for the second thread of the book, which is about recruiting college students who are perfect specimens of what the NFL needs, which often means finding the right high school students and getting them into the right colleges. The system thus turns a certain subset of children into a kind of meat market that results in a recruiting feeding frenzy that really, really made me hate American football.  I understand that all sports is big business, and that all big business is about making big money. The athletes certainly deserve a cut of the pot-- but I am appalled by how young boys are funneled into a system that is so extremely destructive to knees and hips and brains of those who play the game.     The third thread of the book is about what the athletes get out of this, and how that is related to race and poverty, and in particular about Michael Oher, the young black man from one of the poorest zip codes in the nation who was famously taken up by a white family, the Tuohys. I won't  try to summarize Michael’s story or for that matter the Tuohys’s story: I recommend the book, highly, and the complexities of who the people are and who they are to each other is the best reason to read it. Sean Tuohy’s wealth, for one thing, is not old money but his own wealth built on his own sports career.  And he is apparently often on the verge of losing it. Leigh Anne Tuohy is an ex-cheerleader who just loves poor Michael and really teaches him a tremendous amount about surviving the white, affluent, Evangelical Christian world of East Memphis, Tennessee.  A final fascinating thread here is this world of evangelical private schools that were created to a large extent to avoid integration of the schools.  Throughout you get whiffs of what led Michael, after his retirement from the NFL to write memoir-self help books, and in 2023, to sue his white “family” for misleading him and not sharing proceeds from the movie version of The Blind Side with him. Part of what he speaks against is the portrayal of his character in the movie as not intelligent.  In fact he appears to be a very clear-eyed and shrewd operator himself.  It’s never totally clear who is hustling whom in this book. So the story is about the Tuohys and Michael Oher and the NFL and football strategy and college recruiters, and the story is ongoing, problematic, and depressing. This kid who was never taught to read but who has perfect body type for a particular football position becomes the center of wild recruiting from the colleges down south. There is a whole other part of the background that deserves its own book, about the separatist school system for wealthy white Christians and the religious fervor for college football teams  Of course, we're in the twenty-first century now and southern racism is soft: the Ole Miss Rebels just love their big ol' black  athletes. Boy do I hate American football. Here are a couple of reviews of Michael Oher's two memoirs. Long Way Home by Eva Dolan  This is a Crime novel starring Detectives Zigic and Ferreira of the Hate Crimes Group in Peterborough, U.K., a city famous (and toured as) the set for the BBC series based on Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels, now home to many emigrants and many exploiters of this work force: women are brought over from Eastern Europe to be waitresses and pushed into sex slavery, men are given laboring jobs at locations where they are treated as prisoners, and sometimes, when they don't follow the ruled, brutally beaten–or disposed of more simply and fatally. In this novel, a man is burnt alive horribly in a shed, and there are apparently plenty of suspects, including his own family, who don't like him very much. It's grittier than it is gory, and Zigic and Ferreira, both immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, are somewhat depressed personalities, but determined to find the killer. Nicely written, a new background for me, prejudice and violence in Britain against Eastern European and Portuguese immigrants.     The Jailing of Cecilia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale I don't know who recommended this to me, but it turns out Hale is my age mate and died of Covid two years ago. I'm so sorry, because this stolid and deeply moving story made me feel close to her. She wrote a number of y.a. and other books, not as many as you might expect by her age, so I kept wondering what challenges she had in her life. But this book is lovely enough all alone. It's the story of a young woman whose father insisted that learning and lawyering would save indigenous Americans, and she internalizes this, lives with his alcoholism and her mother's arthritis and nastiness and general unhappiness. Cecilia has a child as a teenager, then a bad marriage and a second child, and is full of rage at her parents and her husband and white America.  Still, she scrambles her way to a college degree and then on to law school where she gets arrested for drunk driving and is caught up in a ten year old arrest warrant for welfare cheating at a desperate time in her life. The structure of the novel is simply Cecilia in jail waiting over a long few days including a week-end to be arraigned and disposed of, and as she sobers up remembering her whole life, her father and children, her bitter mother, her love affairs and her marriage. Then, after a somewhat self-dramatizing effort to kill herself, which Hale knows this vital woman would have been highly unlikely to do, she moves on with her life.  We don't know the outcome, but we have deep insight into what she had experienced that brought her here. The Clay Urn: A Novella  by Paul Rabinowitz  This small book focuses on scenes from the lives of two young Israeli lovers during the first intifada, when there were frequent suicide bombings and other suicide attacks by Palestinians on civilian Israelis.  Both of the main characters have had deep losses, and both are shown during their time in the army and how it changes them. The young man has flashbacks to his time doing private archaeological digs in the hills with his father.  This is the source of the ancient clay urn his family owns. The woman, who is a visual artist, has a section when she tries a different life in New York City.  There is a gathering sense that something terrible is going to happen, both from the tone of the story and, appropriately, from the historical background.  A Palestinian man is stopped and humiliated by Israeli soldiers; there is a failed night raid that involves this same Palestinian man's family.There is a horrific multiplying of hate and revenge at the end, which, as we know, continues.     The story feels horribly timely. It is alight with conviction and empathy.  The viewpoint is almost entirely Israeli, but the changes wrought on the people and their efforts to remain human in the face of war rend your heart. Following the Silence by Marc Harshman   This new collection of poems by Marc Harshman, the poet laureate of West Virginia, is, like all his work, important, strong, and engrossing. He begins with ghosts– “the dead, whom we know would return/if only we quit trying so hard” in “August Ghosts”  (p. 3) and a tumble down old farm in “How the Ending Begins” in which it is “Hard to imagine the extravagance or order/when the simplicity of ruin/is everywhere evident.” (p 7).   The volume has a lot of endings but also a lot of staying put and cultivating patience. Many poems begin with powerful concreteness that proves to be far less simple than it appears.  “Lines” opens with short lines of observation--a falcon that “draws a line/directly across the high clouds” and a “a door opening outwards/like a handshake”(p. 56). The journey to that welcoming door proves to be difficult. The narrator can see the house, but walks miles before asking directions and studying the lines of his own palms. In the end, he reaches the house, and there is a painting that leads “back through time into/this almost familiar present.”  These are dream insights, and many of the poems have a great deal of dream and spiritual mystery that burgeons out of the simplest observations. “A Man” starts with sunlight on a brick church and coffee steaming in a white cup. Which leads to this stunning passage: The coffee grows cold, the prayers go     unanswered but the fields are important,     their old earth hungry     with an urgent longing to be worked     even as the songs slip unnoticed      through the singing wires.                               (p. 63) Honestly, I don’t know precisely what this means in any linear, logical sense, but you feel that you have been there with Harshman, and seen the vision. There are more quotidian, sunnier poems, especially toward the end: a wonderful true-to-life  narrative “Poet in the Schools” that captures what it’s like to bring poetry to a crowd of not fully receptive students, and one called “Mathematics” that is about the poet’s relationship with that discipline. Harshman also explores a pervasive spirituality, as in “Not All That Much” in which he prays “without thinking God or prayer,/pray by simply staying put, letting/time fall away....”   (p. 72) It’s a thick, deep, and uplifting collection. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess     So much funnier than I remember from when I read it fifty years ago or so. Then I pretended the violence didn’t bother me, but I was pretending. I did a lot of pretending back then, as I held onto ideological ropes to keep myself oriented.  Now, though, old and crotchety, I find it a total hoot, in spite of its didactic core, which carries the simple message People Need Choice. But the pleasure of the novel isn't about messages. Burgess cleverly makes you end up complicit with the violence perpetrated by “little” Alex. Everything is distanced nicely by the language, which is the overwhelming point. I read the book as part of my continuation of the short novel guide  (Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly). I didn't get it the first time, which I think was when Burgess was my workshop leader.The speculative fiction part still isn’t terrific, but it’s not all that important either (I did like the idea of Milk Plus Bars, which are milk plus drugs.) It is thoroughly a sound book. Burgess was famously nearsighted, so the world of the novel is built on the sound of music and language. The fake Russian slang is never really explained, and the people in power are pretty straight near-future British.  So how was the slang brought to the young droogies?  Not clear, and he offers some kind of explanation in a throwaway line of dialogue, but I don't think he really cared. And it doesn't matter:  it sounds totally horrorshow!  And  Alex ends up sympathetic, of course, in spite of everything. This (1986?) edition has the final chapter that Burgess’s American publisher cut.  The witty introduction by Burgess theorizes about why--that is was some kind of macho American fetish for toughness that precludes a violent boy from changing by choice, as opposed to brainwashing. The final chapter, then, has  Alex rather sadly outgrowing his brutal hooliganism.  It’s not nearly as much fun as the rest of the book, and also a far greater punishment for little Alex (Oh my brothers!) than imprisonment or pain. A lot of my pleasure related to remember a time in my life when I was in Burgess's seminar. I was angry a lot of the time, especially at his disdain for beginning writers, above all female beginning writers. I also remember a nasty joke he passed on from Ringo Starr about a man with a girlfriend who had a hunchback. I don't think I knew back then that his real life first wife was the victim of a rape by AWOL American soldiers. She miscarried shortly after that, and years later died of alcoholism.   Which doesn't prove anything, except that Burgess knew something about violence. Razorblade Tears by S.A.Cosby This is a best selling crime novel by a relatively new writer. It came out in summer 2021. Cosby is often compared to Elmore Leonard. It is indeed like the crime master in its clarity of style and strong dialogue. Two not-quite-elderly but getting there ex-cons are brought together over the dual murder of their two sons, who were married and the fathers of a three year old girl. Ike, who used his natural rage to turn himself into a stone-cold killer in prison, is Black. He has created a large landscaping business and is a considerable success, albeit suffering over the loss of his son–a loss that goes back to homophobia and anger long before the murder. The other man,white, is Buddy Lee, also regretting his frequent estrangements from his son. He is a sort of Appalachian-foothills piece of hard drinking trailer trash who drags Ike into a search for the killers of their sons. Cosby does a great job with both of these men, and with a host of other minor and major characters including a vicious but bumbling white supremacist motorcycle club. I liked this, in spite of a certain uneasiness about the way it gets us hooting and hollering in support of Ike and Buddy Lee slaughtering a few dozen of the guilty. This is also Elmore Leonardish, in that everything is ready for the movie or Netflix series. The book has long since been optioned, of course. Part of the fun is figuring out who's going to play Ike and Buddy Lee. It's just that there is a disconnect for me: I like these guys so much, and appreciate the honesty of Cosby's treatment of their cultural homophobia and also their deep love of their sons.  And then they turn out to be over-the-top killers. I understand that this is a lot of what sells this particular genre, especially to the movies, but I'd like to see what Cosby does with a little more realism, because he is a really good writer.   For other reviews, check out Carole V. Bell on NPR ( https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1012647702/two-fathers-risk-it-all-to-avenge-their-murdered-sons-in-this-new-thriller) and Adam Sternbergh in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/books/review/razorblade-tears-s-a-cosby.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/books/s-a-cosby-razorblade-tears-crime-novelist.html   Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk Tokarczuk is a best-selling Polish Nobel Prize winner. This first of her books I've read is often described as mythological or like a fable, but that doesn't capture it for me. There are, yes, touches of magic or the supernatural, but they seem to have more to do with the traditional and idyosyncratic attempts by the villagers of Primeval to understand the world. The book is made up of short (a page to maybe four page) sections called “The Time of...,” usually followed by the name of a character.  Primeval is their village.  There are a lot of clever stories about the dominance of mushroom spawn and the non-conscious consciousness of trees and a perhaps magical barrier that stops certain people from leaving the village–oh, and a grouchy not-very-successful Creator known as God whose passages come mostly during descriptions of a board game played obsessively by one of the characters. This all sounds a little whimsical, but it floats lightly on a firm ground of very real and painful twentieth century history and how it played out on the people of Primeval.  We go essentially from the First World War through the Polish Solidarity movement of the nineteen eighties. During the Second World War the villagers camp in the forest and are occasionally killed and raped by alternating waves of Nazi and Soviet soldiers. There are a lot of good characters like Izydora with his drooling and physical limitations even as his mind makes theories and plans and falls in love. He discovers that he can earn money by appealing to the post office of Poland and other countries for lost letters. He also becomes the target of police for possible spying, and later creates a meaning-system based on the recurrence of things in fours. One character disappears early on and is referred to mostly for not coming home ever, and at the very end we find out why she didn’t come back, and the reason is at once mundane and deeply true. None of these bits and references capture the greater whole of this book which is brilliantly accomplished and also unexpectedly reassuring about how we are all part of creation. Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs. Oliphant In reading Miss Marjoribanks  (1865-66 by Margaret Oliphant, I was struck by its interesting oddity. Mrs. O. was very popular in her time, but her reputation faded compared to, say, Trollope or even Bennett. I have to wonder how much this has to do with the fact that she says things about women extremely directly.  For example, the narrator says the main character Lucilla Marjoribanks, is of an age when she could have run for parliament had she been an man. She is charming and bossy and plans her campaigns far ahead, and gets made fun for her extreme efforts to create a little society, but the insight is there: what if this energy had been turned to public affairs? And indeed, Lucilla takes on and runs a campaign for Parliament with a brilliantly vacuous  P.R. slogan: “The man for Carlingford!”  The novel has an HEA, but immediately after her wedding,  Lucilla is back in the driver’s seat, running everyone’s life in her benign way.  She uses the rules of her culture magisterially. An interesting side plot is the physical and moral decline of one of Lucilla's early suitors, especially compared to how Lucilla thrives through adversity. The second half is less humorous, and shows Lucilla with genuine discouragements. There is also a hint–never even close to explicit, that her father, when he finds he is ruined, creates his own quiet exit from this world. A suicide would clearly not be acceptable in the world of upbeat domestic fiction, but the hints at darkness and momentary despair make the ever resilient Lucilla a far more interesting character–not just a self-satisfied young woman. Always pleased to find a new Victorian! Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle I read this out of an abiding interest in what happened at a still-existing building in the Washington Square area of New York City that I often walk by, but I was also interested in the book as light research for a novel I may be writing. I did a lot of folding page corners and marking passages (sorry, printed book lovers!). I started reading it on my Kindle, realized there is no efficient  (or at least familiar) way of note-taking on e-books, so I ordered a used hard copy and finished it on that. It is a wonderful, horrifying book.  It reads easily, sometimes extremely vividly as in the actual fire chapter. Even if you never read the whole book, you ought to skim over the chapter on the fire, which took place over just about fifteen minutes total.  I had no idea it went so fast--there were oceans of thin fabric scraps in boxes under the work tables where the young immigrant women (mostly Jewish and Italian) sewed. Essentially two floors of the factory just went poof. Also amazing to me was that the “fireproof” building actually was, in fact, fireproof. Only those two floors were seriously damaged, and  many of the deaths came because of the speed of the fire so that if chose to exit by the famous  locked door, you didn't have time for a second exit elsewhere.Also, there was a weak fire escape in an air shaft.  The air shaft worsened the conflagration, and the fire escape buckled and collapsed with more people on it. The before and after parts of the book are equally good, if less shocking.  Von Drehle tells about the great strike by the shirtwaist women workers a year or two before the Triangle fire, and then the years following up through the final passage of laws governing safety and work hours in the NY garment industry.  Threading through it all are the story of Tammany Hall and a couple of  reformers associated with Tammany Hall, the lawmakers Robert Wagner and Al Smith.  There are also links to FDR and the New Deal, especially through labor activist Frances Perkins, who became the first woman in a presidential cabinet. As so often in my reading, my own ignorance just blows me away. The final chapter is about the trial of the Triangle factory owners, with a neat focus on their lawyer Steuer, an immigrant Jewish kid who made it very good. Finally, Von Drehle also makes a point of using the best list he can find of the deceased from the fire and gives character sketches of some of them, and captures their hard lives that mix with a lot of joy and energy. Birthright by Nora Roberts Another experiment in tasting romance novels.  Roberts is a mega best seller who has published dozens if not hundreds. This one was recommended. in a Shepherd.com  list of five best romance novels.  The fact is that it is well-written.  The story hums along.  The set-up is anthropologists and archaeologists on a dig in Maryland.  One of them, the main character discovers a secret about her past, and there are murders and attacks.  It all moves very well and is occasionally quite funny. There are periodic breaks for good sex with two sets of lovers.  The men are dreams of good looking and attentive lovers, the women highly orgasmic and also professionally accomplished, an archaeologist and a lawyer.  Nothing stops their careers, even if they fall in love and Big Problems happen in the world.  Of course there's an HEA. (I'm such a neophyte I didn't even know this major romance requirement, the Happy Ever After). There is also the point of view issue: Roberts and most of the genre writers I've been reading lately, switches POV among the main characters, primarily the lovers, in a way I would criticize student writers. It seems to work for her, even though she sometimes flips a couple of times in one scene. Thus, Callie is in a scene with Jake, with her mixed feelings, hot temper, etc. and about halfway through it goes over to Jake, who is making a manful effort to be supportive of Callie. Since the points of view seem to be rather lightly held, and among a limited number of characters (never the bad guys, for example) it works for her, but if you compare it to Elizabeth Strout's single world view of Lucy Barton, there is a loss of intensity, which may be part of why romance readers find the stories dependable and reassuring. A so-called literary novel (or a thriller) might have, for example, made one of the lovers the killer, but that doesn't seem to happen in romance. Now someone is going to send me an example of a book where it does! Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout   This was the lovely third of Strout's Lucy Barton books, and as usual moving and admirable, with the odd stylistic quirk-- which works of course when she does it-- of including the narrator’s wrong words and phrases as she fumbles for her meaning. That part is about how we talk and think, which is good, and perhaps Strout's way of demonstrating that her Lucy is a writer. There's a fair amount about Lucy’s dysfunctional birth family, and like her, I wonder how we learn to love. I’m struck by the powerful advantage of spreading it out: of having a village to raise the child, or at least extended family, or large family, seeing my own grandchildren in that situation. Oh William! is the  study of a relationship, the continued entwinement of a divorced couple. Strout is  good on Lucy and William’s adult daughters, and the portrait of William with his limitations and suffering is so well done. For whatever reason, though, I am moved but never wholly give myself over to her, in spite of being caught up, of admiring them a lot, of feeling with them.  I don't have an explanation for this, but certainly recommend the Lucy Barton novels. The Private Patient by P.D. James I need someone to explain to me why they like her books. Yes, the writing is good in that  twentieth century British manner that comes out of a certain education in composition. It always reads a little too smoothly to me, as if once you get the formula, you can pour it out forever-- the descriptions, the dialogue-- but without a lot of passion. It's also a kind of writing that assumes a certain level of shared class and education.  I suppose we all write that way, but James seems to me to be working a narrow slice of experience. The Private Patient concerns a plastic surgeon’s practice that he splits between a London hospital and a lovely estate in Dorset (southern England, on the coast) where they do the surgeries for the wealthy in great privacy. There is a long section in the beginning about the victim, an interesting woman who is a journalist with a terrible scar given to her as a child by her drunken father.  She decides in her forties finally to have it fixed. James gives her and her point of view a good chunk of space, and  all the while we know she is going to die.  It does a good job of pointing up that victims are not just lumps of pitiful flesh. Most of the novel takes place at the estate/surgery. There is a murder, and later another one.  There are ancient prehistoric rocks where a witch was burnt in the 1600's. There’s a cast of suspects that includes medical people, a member of the original family that had to give up the house, a woman who killed her sister some years past. Then there’s James’s New Scotland Yard hero Adam Dagliesh and his squad, and social sub-themes like the one that the surgeon needs a successful practice to support his ownership of the estate--and the problems of keeping large estates together in England at all. I don’t really approach mysteries as a game, keeping count of what we know and when we know it leading up to who did it.  For me, it’s always the atmosphere/place and the fun of the suspecting and sleuthing that holds me.  So the bouncing about among points of view threw me a little:  Were we occasionally in the actual killer’s head?  Is that fair?  I’m perhaps too absolute in my distrust of omniscience.  James makes it work by the relative shortness of her forays into various heads, and also by a reticence about what her people reveal even in their thoughts.   I wasn’t emotionally hooked, but I was always interested.    To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith  Reviewed by Dreama Frisk Tracy K. Smith had already been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and appointed to a second term as Poet Laureate of the United States when she did a reading at my local library (Arlington, Va.) Although I had read her warm and inviting poetry, I was not prepared for the way she pulled me into a conversation in the few minutes after she signed her book. Her attention was warm and generous in spirit. She gave it without measure. I have noticed that same quality as I watched her do interviews on TV for To Free the Captives.      The subtitle, A Plea for the American Soul, caused me to catch my breath. Yet, that is the fearless message. In beautiful sentences that sing to us, she tells us, “we can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to the America’s oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of the present.”        As I read To Free the Captives, I found a new hope for our American souls. I think you might also. Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly     Everything Barbara Hambly does is a good story. Sometimes she wanders a little sloppily, sometimes I just don't like one thing she's doing as well as another thing, but she always has energy and seems sincerely to enjoy what she's doing, so we do too. Her work includes historical mystery and vampire horror and both fantasy and science fiction. This one is labelled fantasy, and it's part of something called the "Silver Screen" series set in the 1920's movie industry in Los Angeles. This one  has a satisfyingly monstrous Rat God, but the payoff for me is her well built world of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and Venice in 1923.  The big Hollywood sign is already up, but it says Hollywoodland, the name of a housing development. There are also scenes out in the desert  at a favorite movie location.   The main characters include a grieving British widow and her movie star sister-in-law. The movie star hires her dead brother's widow to be a companion and dog walker for her three Pekinese dogs.  She's a real piece of work who makes up various stories about her life and does a lot of gin and cocaine. She can't act, but is a real trouper through long days of filming under uncombortable circumstances. There is a camera man who becomes a love interest for our hero, who herself becomes a script writer. There are also lots of minor characters, including a self-consciously stereotyped old Chinese wizard. The Pekes are quite wonderful, and at a crucial moment morph into lion-dogs. You know all along you’re in a silent-film melodrama of a novel, but it is terrific fun, and the characters manage sufficient humor and roundness to make the reader not feel manipulated. Good work, Hambly. When she's good, she is my present favorite genre writer right now.  Along with Michael Connelly–more Angeles settings. Star Wars: Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly I’m not sure why I decided to read Barbara Hambly’s foray into the Star Wars world–I guess I was testing out my instinct that everything she does is worth reading, and I wanted to see some of her earliest work.  Here I especially liked the insouciance of the original Princess Leia (now head of state of not-the-Empire) and her faithful but still adventurous husband Han Solo. Cee pee three-o etc. make appearances, as do other life forms from the original movies. One half of the plot, the Luke Skywalker Jedi Knight part, has a lot of people and species being pulled onto a big star ship.  They wander around pretending in some cases to be storm troopers, and in others just bumping into things having lost their brains.  One hilarious big bunch of humanoid dum-dums refer to their males and females as boars and sows.  Their specialty is constant physical fights for a quasi feminist reason: they’re all vying for the alpha-sow’s favors. So funny. There's too much description for me here and  there, and I did get bored by so many  references to Star Wars lore--I assume real fans would eat that up, though.  This was published back in 1995 as part of a trilogy, not all written by Hambly.     GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF Barbara Crooker's Poem of the Month. Hannah Brown's book for children  All Grownups Were Babies won an honor prize in the Astra Interrnational Children's Book Writing Contest! Harvey Robins assesses Mayor Eric Adams' administration in New York City, and it doesn't look good.   Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read! West Virginia Writers at https://www.wvstories.com/ -- audio recordings, materials for teachers and much more! Produced and hosted by Kate Long.    ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More Peggy Backman writes:  "Years ago I wrote a column for a small town newspaper on classic cars. I had heard that the newspaper was really bad in terms of delaying payment, so I refused to write anything until I was paid  As it turned out, at some point they changed editors. I had written three articles (that I had been paid for upfront), but the new editor decided to discontinue the column—and I even had a little following!  So at least I had my money, but I felt so bad for the people I had interviewed for the articles, as they were looking forward to reading about themselves and their cars. Congrats to those who got this new law passed." https://authorsguild.org/news/agcelebrates-passage-of-new-york-state-freelance-isnt-free-act/ Jane Friedman's "Hot Sheet" of new agents & presses from 2023  Free lectures from Authors Publish  A free publication from AuthorsPublish about how to publish in literary journals. Check out WriterBeware.com, which keeps us uptodate on scams and bad publishing options:  it comes from a genre organization, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association,  but has information that is useful for all writers.  A list of literary journals and 'zines that accept previously published work. Hilton Obenzinger wrote on Facebook, "Have you ever wondered what blurbs you could get from dead writers for your book of poems? After a lot of hallucinations I was able to conjure a few of them. This for my book Treyf Psach but they could apply to any number of my books. What are your dead readers writing about you?" Walt Whitman: "I salute you on a modest career now done. Allons!" Marianne Moore: "Your hat is splendid. Put it on top of all your words." Allen Ginsberg: "Mountains of Treyf! Happy Pig to fuel Jeremiah! Blessed Blasphemy! Holy Unholy!" Langston Hughes: "He knows rivers—Hudson, Klamath, Jordan, Pearl. He can speak their language. Even how they curse." Edna St Vincent Millay: "We shared the same ferry, although he arrived at a very different port. At least he stays drunk." Emily Dickinson: "To hear Bird song—Long gone—Now flung—Alone—So You and I can return—Outside Time Herman Melville: "He battled with Clarel and won. That pleases me and is praise enough. Call him Hilton? Why?" Emma Lazarus: "Reader, breath free—it's your turn to hold the lantern." Woody Guthrie: "You went to a Passover meal, but you still kept running, singing and running, and I sure know what that's like." Leonie Adams: "I was your teacher, and I accept your apology." Francesca Rosa: "Your poem was read to me on my deathbed. I ascended into words. Thank you." Kenneth Koch: "These poems are so good that I want to pour them into a bathtub and rub them all over my body." William Carlos Williams: "Whose birth have you delivered if not America's?" Bertolt Brecht: "You must have courage to be sly in such times. Be careful." Ezra Pound: "Take that damned hat off." Amiri Baraka: "Dialectical Magic does its job like a dog lifting his leg. Up against the wall, Motherfucker! I'm just kidding. This time." Bill Berkson: "You still get high with joy and dread. Like that time we ate mushrooms on the Mesa in Bolinas and then went to talk with Bob Creeley about Vietnam." Walter Lowenfels: "I encouraged you many years ago. Now I'm sharing a jail cell with Nazim Hikmet, but we can always make a bit more room for you." Chidiock Tichborne: "Honor Passover and watch the story run. And now you write, and now the poem, your life, is done." Do you lack confidence on punctuating dialogue in your fiction or memoir? Check out Reedsy's six "unbreakable" rules for dialogue punctuation. September 2023 article by Emily Harstone that distinguishes three forms of publishing: tradtional, self, and vanity. It also has some good links.      ANNOUNCEMENTS New Poetry book by Ernie Brill:  Journeys of Voices and Choices Leslie Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become those journeys to another way of seeing every place and time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when the going gets kind of rough.  Unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine any time. Don’t miss this ride.” Alison Hubbard, lyricist and author, has a new historical novel just about to be published: The Kelsey Outrage.  We'll be reviewing it soon, but for those of you on Long Island, consider meeting her at  her book launch party at the Next Chapter in Huntington on Thursday January 25! Ms. Hubbard's short story "Wildflowers" was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 2022; "Belladonna" won the Slippery Elm Literary Journal Prize for Prose and was published in the 2021 print edition. A new issue of Review Tales! Founded in 2016, Review Tales informs, inspires, and provides knowledge of the craft of writing and supports indie authors by providing a platform to demonstrate their well-deserved work. The quarterly magazine is dedicated to readers, writers, self-publishers and includes literature discussions. It is an essential collection of author confessions, exclusive interviews, words of wisdom, book reviews, and literary works.  Founder & Editor in Chief: S. Jeyran Main Marc Kaminsky's latest translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan Review (vol.21. No. 1).  The issue is available as hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan Review . The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother," "Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit."   Look for Laura Tillman's new nonfiction book, The Migrant Chef: the Life and Times of Lala Garcia. Rachel Kin's Bratwurst Haven won a 2023 Colorado Book Award.     Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers # 232 March 16, 2024 Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact Read this newsletter in its permanent location  My favorite reads for 2023 at Shepherd.com.  Check out Shepherd.com for lots of writers' (and others'!) favorite reads: they have lots of interesting lists by  genre and other categories. Back Issues Announcements Book Reviews Especially for Writers Good Stuff Online & Elsewhere Short Takes Lists   BOOK REVIEWS This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer). They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted. Porch Poems by Cheryl Denise, Susanna  Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal  Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly The Late Show by Michael Connelly The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector Trilby by George du Maurier Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg Fever Season by Barbara Hambly The Kelsey Outrage by Alison Louise Hubbard Safe by Imogen Keeper The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson reviewed by Diane Simmons Rearranged by Kathleen Watt Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell Educated: a Memoir  by Tara Westover Reviewed by Christine Willis Love Palace by Meredith Sue Willis reviewed by  Hilton Obenzinger This issue has reviews by several friends of mine, including one of an older book of my own by Hilton Obenzinger.  I don't usually run reviews of my own books, but this review is fun to read, and it is about a book (Love Palace) that didn't get a lot of notice when it first came out, so I especially appreciate Hilton's review. We are in a time when books need readers and reviewers badly: there are wonderful books coming out from Knopf and Random House and the other biggies, but a lot of great stuff is overlooked by the conglomerates. Reach further when you can--look at small presses like Dos Madres and University Presses like Ohio University Press and WVU Press.  And once you've read something-- particularly something from a smaller press that you like--make time to write a review. If you have somewhere to place it, great, but also (or only) post the review on Amazon. Whatever you think about Amazon, its short reviews matter, and you can help writers by them. I continue to make some of my reading choices via the short novel guide Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly by Kenneth C. Davis.This issue I comment on  Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, Natalia Ginzburg's The Dry Heart, and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. These short books have been especially useful for me as a way to read something by writers I've been hearing about for years and never quite getting to. I went ahead and read another Ginzburg book, Family Lexicon, and expect to read more Lispector soon. I also reread a couple of Michael Connelly's books instead of watching Netflix or HBO. Connelly is a very dependable writer with a clean style, serious and entertaining, and when I'm too tired to challenge myself, I often turn to Harry Bosch or the Lincoln Lawyer.  Again, please share your reviews: I'm happy to have submissions here, including ones  you're publishing on Amazon).                                                                                                                                     The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick     Perhaps more than the spoons, I love the birds in this book.  They, along with a multitude of images brought to mind by the uses of and phrases using spoons, light up Minick’s collection of poems with what Doug Van Gundy calls “a near-boundless affection for the overlooked and quotidian.”     The poems are suffused with delight and love even as they look grimly at the loss and future loss of lifestyles and species. “Diminished,” for example (p.23), is about the passing of ovenbirds.  This poem, like several others, is addressed to a specific poet, in this case Robert Frost. Minick speaks directly to climate change again in “When You Realize the Future” (p. 84).     But I kept anticipating the birds: the lost ones, but also the living ones. They give the book its cohesion (along with the spoons!), and sometimes, like “Spoon Bill,” you get both. “Why Birds” (53), celebrates love of birds and love of a woman. “Blink” (p. 79) is about a hands-on close encounter with a stunned cardinal, but there are also jays and sparrows and many others: the precise color of their feathers, the vicissitudes of their precarious small, striving lives, and Minick’s swell of gratitude to be in the world with them. Birds fly me away from me, but also back–                          (53)     There are other animals too: in “Coyote Grace” (3) where the coyote puppies have a yodeling school and get the "nightly hairy news.”   “Earth Diving” (66) is the fanciful title for a dog’s funny hobby of rolling with “odoriferous joy” in whatever is rotten. There are also several excellent narrative poems, especially the stunning voice piece “Tim Slack the Fix it Man” (57) with its calmly mentioned double murder. This one is too compact, humorous, and shocking to quote in part–just get a copy and read it!     And finally, there are the spoons. The book begins and ends with spoon poems: the opening “To Spoon” (1) explores the metaphors and the actual metal cutlery.  To spoon is not to fork-- that’s what we do to steaks and roads and manure. And the final poem, the “Intimacy of Spoons” (81) takes us to a lovely ending, in bed with a lover--spouse--partner: “knees cupped,/thighs touching."   Spooning.   Porch Poems by Cheryl Denise, Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal  Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis   Porch Poems, a chapbook anthology of 24 poems by four authors, offers new work in keeping with some of the most characteristic themes of Appalachian poetry—connectedness to family and community; connectedness to place and nature; and respect for work and the everyday. Cheryl Denise, Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal, all well-known and highly respected in Appalachia and beyond, formed a kind of writing collaborative that resulted in the collection. The foreword to the chapbook notes that the four friends began meeting in May, 2016, in Pocahontas County, “one of the most beautiful and peaceful spots in West Virginia.” That spring and at least one week-end a year for the next few years, they stayed at an old house built for a section foreman of the Greenbrier Railroad in the early 1900s. During their stays at what they deemed “Poet Camp,” they wrote, critiqued each other’s work, and exchanged ideas. In keeping with the spirit of the book, I refrain from identifying the author of any of quoted passages below, as the collection refrains from doing so until the end of the book. Readers familiar with the poets might guess who wrote what. “Audience Blessing,” the first poem in the collection, addresses an imagined community of readers directly. It lists things the narrator hopes those who read the book will take away from it: : Blessings to each of you. May you find something familiar in the words we share. May you find  kindness. May you find solace. May you remember one moment you had forgotten. May you find a gentle way  to listen to the morning gossip of crows.   Even when expressing awe at the mystery of nature the diction and rhythms of these poems are natural-sounding. The tone is conversational, as in “Almost Hidden,” in which the narrator talks to someone dear, describing a trek the two made together on a narrow trail along the Mississippi River in winter. The poem ends with these lines, which honor both the beloved and what the couple sought:   I saw your eyes and knew why we had come here now to see the cranes standing thousands still and patient breathing quiet almost hidden in the morning snow    “DNA” uses a scientific acronym as the title to a kind of tall tale about origins, crediting family with passing traits to a descendant. Written in the third-person, the poet opens with— “His father was firewood./His mother an ax./ He knows how to burn,” and goes on to claim, “His father was a moon./ His mother a hawk./ He hunts at night.” Other family members lend traits, too: “His grandfather was a trail./ His grandmother a boot./ He travels light and fast./  His uncle is a hemlock./ Another a spade./ He is green and planted.”  The author uses exaggeration to make a serious point. Several poems assume the serio-comic manner that runs through Appalachian poetry and prose. “Rules for the Open Mic Poetry Reading” offers friendly advice for the community that populates open mic readings. The advice for the poet includes the following: “Don’t explain the whole poem before you begin./ Don’t stumble or slouch,/ or pick the scab at your elbow.” Advice for the listener includes “Gaze out the window of your mind/ and change what you see according to what you hear./Allow yourself to be surprised.” Missing home and family is the theme of “Borders,” a poem that surprised me because the place the narrator misses is far away from Appalachia. The narrator, writing in the second person, describes crossing the Canadian border into this country and a new life then tells how it feels years later:   But even though you unfurled and became bold, reading poems on the radio, still some days, roaming these hills, you wish for a family crisis, an unexpected surgery,   anything to pull you north for a month, maybe  two, pretending you could stay.               References to labor appear often in the collection. “Reprieve” follows a woman living in the country as she goes out to gather eggs. Ready to kill one of her hens for what I imagine to be Sunday dinner, she notices the hen is on the nest: “So you’re laying again, old girl.”/ ‘The clouds move on./ This will be a good day,’ she says.” The poet  takes away the sense of complacency,  however, with the next lines of this last stanza of the poem: “Sunlight gleams/ on the sharp edge of the blade/ hanging just inside the henhouse door.”   “Blue Watering Can” connects work and life with the presence of death, too, in the things the narrator holds up for us to see—a peach tree heavy with fruit, tomatoes growing, a blue watering can:   When the watering is done she sits in a wooden rocker on the porch built on to the trailer, finishes her smoke with long, slow drags, making it last, making it last. . . . . Over the hill coonhounds shift sadly on long chains. One jumps to the roof of his doghouse, as if to better see the road, the trailer, the man inside who wheezes with the steady beat of the oxygen tank, watches hunting shows on TV, as if maybe one night he will unchain the dogs, grab his gun, walk the midnight hills again.   The porch, in “Blue Watering Can: serves, among other things, as a metaphor for a borderland between life and death. In “Fermata” (a music symbol that looks like an eyebrow over an eye and signifies lengthening of a note), it signifies the time between day and night:   Night approaches. Hermit Thrush rushes into song. Doe and fawn rise in meadows. Snakes slide home. Dusk pulls near.   Patient on the porch             I wait alone for that succinct moment   My body relaxes,             skin marries the air.   Here the porch acknowledges the border, but—in this last poem of the collection—emphasizes the sense of connection that runs through the book.  The motif of a borderland, both connecting and separating, is an especially poignant motif for the people of the Appalachian Mountains, as. Appalachia itself has long been regarded as a borderland—between east and west in the settling of this nation during the 18th and early 19th centuries; between the north and south in the Civil War years; and between poverty and wealth in the mid-to late 20th century. This collection, published in 2023 by Sheila-Na-Gig, bodes well for the region’s place as a borderland between past and future, connecting the past, “what brung us,” with a sense of the importance of a communal future with the natural world.                                     The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector     This was my first work by Lispector, of whom I've been hearing for a long time in places like (I think) The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. There was always a sense that she was highly experimental, maybe something of a literary show-off, but if this small novel is a good example, she is on the contrary extremely easy to read and pretty powerful. Brazilian, although born a Ukrainan Jew, Lispector published this book in 1977, not long before her death.She fascinated the Brazilian public, and her books sold well. The Hour or the Star has a complex story within a story and is told by a male writer character who spends a lot of time sharing his travails with writing before getting to his story, which is a simple life and death of a very poor young woman. It has some of the tone of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, but with more devastating poverty and no parrot. The striking thing to me is that the remarkable, small novel does not feel like an experiment, but how she had to write it. Educated: a Memoir  by Tara Westover Reviewed by Christine Willis Tara Westover, Dr. Westover, entered my life via her memoir Educated, too late.  Had I read her resistant-to-being-put-down book before I retired from high school teaching, I would have made the book required reading for my students in an Expository Reading and Writing course. Not a few of my many students disdained education and would have opted out had the option been open to them.  Dr. Westover, however, was denied an education by her fundamentalist (my description) Mormon parents.  Her father, driven to a degree by the Ruby Ridge events, took the extreme route of keeping some of his children from attending any school but home school.  (The education she received at home had extremely little to do with academics; learning how to work with “scrap” was her alternate learning environment filled with sexism, violence, and hard labor.) She reveals how she agonizingly gained an education (initially by hiding who she was and where she had come from), and how she was able to finally fashion a family. Family relationships are described in painful detail, and Westover admits to memory differences among people involved in important family events.  It would have been frightening to have lived the life she lived as a child of her parents.  The world view she was given was unique to her family, and it appears to have influenced her choices and actions well into her adulthood.  Trilby by George du Maurier This 1894 novel by George du Maurier, the Franco-American caricaturist and writer (and grandfather of Daphne du Maurier), came to me first as a Classics Illustrated comic when I was about seven. At the time, I was was thrilled by the melodrama, the mystery of hypnotism, the hints of sexuality, and the the evil of Svengali, the impresario who trains Trilby to become a great singer. What I didn’t remember (and probably wasn’t in the comic book version) was the gross anti-Semitism toward the clownish but villainous Svengali, who is hook-nosed, averse to bathing but brilliantly musical. Those passages are offensive reading now. Even so, the novel is entertaining. It spends most of its time on the story of three young British artists living and painting and carousing in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Apparently the details of that life and the great friendship of the artists and their working class friend Trilby are based on Du Maurier’s own life and observations. This part is lots of fun, with drinking parties, Svengali on the scene--the anti-Semitism off-handed and cultural at this point.  Then things get serious when Little Billee’s mother and sister show up to take him back to England and stop his marriage to Trilby.  There’s lots of nervous prostration, and Trilby runs away so she won’t ruin Billee’s life, and he almost dies, and loses his ability to love even his great friends Taffy and the Laird.     You can deprecate the story for coincidences and melodrama and sections that go off on the wonders of the Latin Quarter, but the story moves forward. Little Billee is presented as a real artist, unlike his friends who like the life style more than the art.  He has an interesting crisis in which he pretends to be affectionate with friends and family, but his heart is closed.  His  frozen emotions aren’t released until he hears the famous mysterious La Svengali, a singer who comes from apparently nowhere but has a voice that breaks and heals hearts and has never been heard before or since.  Can she be the young men’s Trilby who had a magnificent speaking voice, but couldn’t carry a tune? In the final section, the mystery is solved, Svengali’s hold over his ward is broken, there is much satisfactory sorrow with plenty of time for memories and long farewells. Whether you would want to read this would depend, I think, on your tolerance for some over-long passages of nineteenth century tangents and melodrama--and anti-Semitism that turns a figure of unpleasant fun into a devilish villain.   Love Palace by Meredith Sue Willis reviewed by  Hilton Obenzinger In Martha, Meredith Sue Willis has created a great hard-boiled narrator. She’s been hurt and pissed off, mainly by her two “rotters,” her father and her ex-husband, and the world that’s dealt her a tough hand, and she finds relief through sex and constant instability, confiding in her therapist, when she can afford her. She’s ready for change, and stumbles into the Love Palace, a church, a social center, and an organizing HQ for its elusive charismatic spiritual leader, and by happenstance she becomes its administrator. The Love Palace is among the last low-income housing buildings in the riverside New Jersey neighborhood being overrun by gentrification, and it becomes the focal point for a fight to save what’s left. The Love Palace is a catalyst, pulling together multiple lives and stories into a pulsating community. Martha ends up cajoled to marry a much younger man, scion of the rich couple who owns the Love Palace as a project of their church – or at least we think they own it. The Love Palace community fights eviction and demolition, and knowing who owns the building is crucial – and knowing the truth about the spiritual leader as well. The novel is filled with surprises and revelations as the mysteries peel away, and Martha grows increasingly capable of handling the madness of seduction, deceit, and betrayal. Love Palace, the novel, is a delight to read, and Martha is a tough character worth meeting again and again." Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Offill’s second novel (and she does not produce many) of 2014 was highly praised.  Many people seem to like its brief sections in block format, not paragraphs, with some space between them. It’s the story of a writer who has, she thinks, a wonderful marriage, focuses on her work and her neuroses in a very New York City milieu. Then she has a baby, falls in love with it, suffers for it, fears all the possible evils that might befall the child.  She seems to think her child and her experience of motherhood are unique-- and trouble ensues in the marriage. The writing is witty and beautifully accomplished, although I could use just a little more self-awareness of how the narrator’s life is at once ordinary and at the same time, not the kind of life most people are privileged to lead.   I recommend balancing this rather tepid praise with Roxane Gay’s review of it in the The New York Times at  https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html The Kelsey Outrage by Alison Louise Hubbard          Alison Hubbard's novel The Kelsey Outrage takes place shortly after the Civil War in a fishing and farming village on Long Island where a disappearance turns into a murder, and Cathleen Kelsey turns herself into a successful sleuth as she tries to find out what happened to her brother. She knows he has been tarred and feathered after an accusation of rape, but Cathleen is sure he’s innocent, and that the alleged victim’s wealthy fiancé and his powerful local friends are responsible.          One of the things being explored here is the conflict between the affluent original inhabitants of the town and the immigrant Irish, as well as the age-old propensity of the wealthy to get away with murder.  What powers the novel is Hubbard’s excellent. layered storytelling. It’s a crime novel, but also the portrait of Cathleen as she faces off against far more powerful people who see themselves as the masters of their little universe. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson reviewed by Diane Simmons Somewhere in the Far West, the town of Fingerbone perches on the bank of a lake that is cold and deep, and haunted by those who have died in its waters.   The deaths are legendary—the town’s own version of the Titanic—as one night, passengers enjoying a train journey in warm, bright coaches, plunge off a trestle bridge, the lights and the lives, instantly extinguished in the black depths. Afterward, the lake is still here, as is the little mountain town. But Fingerbone is built upon land reclaimed from the lake, and the smell of the water that comes through the tap is that of dank, freezing death, the ferocity of the wilderness invading through the house.  One family raised in the odd, little town struggles to locate “normal” life. One of the sisters, Helen, who went off for a time to Seattle, brings her two daughters — Ruthie and Lucille— home to Fingerbone to stay with their grandmother.  Then Helen gives her handbag to a boy and drives her car into the lake. Helen’s death prompts another of the sisters, Sylvie, to leave off her life as a hobo and come home. The grandmother has died, and someone must keep house for the two pre-teen girls.  For Sylvie, though, the idea of living a settled life has become alien, and she continues some of her drifter habits. But for the sake of the girls, she tries to do the things that proper housekeeping seems to require.  Houses need to be furnished, for example, so Sylvie dutifully goes about collecting furnishings. She does not, however, acquire the things usual to houses, but rather the materials she knows from her life on the road, especially newspapers and tin cans. She piles and bundles the paper neatly, washes and stacks the cans. Sylvie is cheerful and kind, and the girls, Lucille and Ruthie, are all right.  They go to school most of the time. Sometimes, though, they take off to ramble through the forests and along the lake.  On one such adventure, they become disoriented and don’t make it home until the next day; a crumbling old cabin suggests the fate of lost children.  After this adventure, Lucille— recognizing both the charm and the gentle insanity of the wandering life—makes a sudden, irrevocable decision to go straight. She learns to sew herself proper clothes, and studies fashionable hair styles in magazines.  She gets herself adopted by a teacher and is eventually accepted by normal girls. But Ruthie remains with Sylvie, and—as if they were only trying for Lucille’s sake—they now wordlessly agree to drop their efforts to observe expected conventions.  Ruthie gives up school and Sylvie stops trying to puzzle out what a proper home might be.   Now they are free, too free for Fingerbone. Later, as the lake is searched in vain for their bodies—Can they really have crossed the mile-long railroad trestle in the dark? Can they live forever as drifters? —we see that the story isn’t about houses at all, but the beauty, immensity, and sometimes fatal allure of the still untamed West. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg I read The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg in more or less in one sitting. It’s a gripping little book that spins out from a crime and turns out to be about a bad marriage, entered into for bad reasons that don’t stop any of the parties from obsessing and suffering.  There is also a sad portrait of mothering.  Just about all of it is sad and grim and gray–and I couldn’t put it down.  Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg Natalia Ginzburg deserves her fame, but I don’t find this particular work as sympathetic  (to me) as I'd hoped. It is about a large, eccentric family in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century.  They  have a vast acquaintance of equally eccentric and brilliant friends–many of them important in the arts and politics, especially in the anti-Mussolini world.  Mixed with discussions are actual partisan activities.  Many of the people in this book, in fact,  end up jailed or killed under Mussolini or later under the Nazis, but the book--called a novel but using real events and real people and striving for a true account.  It is told from the matter-of-face perspective of the youngest child in the family, first as a child and then as a young woman. I loved a lot of the individual people.  They change realistically over time without a lot of back story on how and why.  It has a brilliant, moving ending in the form of  several pages of faintly nostalgic dialogue between the parents of the family. I also value its firm focus on what the Second World War and Mussolini’s fascism meant on the ground in Italy to a family of the professorial class with a bombastic Jewish father and a cheerful self-described lazy Catholic mother. As a group, the people are realistic about the horrors being experienced and their own losses (Ginzburg’s young husband is one). The translation is smooth and easy, but the conceit of the work is the Levi family’s idiosyncratic slang-words, and they are translated into English equivalents that don’t have the resonance I expect they do in Italian. It took me a while to get into this world, it’s an important world, well worth the visit. Rearranged by Kathleen Watt Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell Kathleen Watt’s memoir Rearranged is riveting.  With the marvelous ear of the opera singer she once was turned now into nearly pitch-perfect prose, she recounts her harrowing ten-year odyssey of dealing with facial cancer and innumerable reconstructive surgeries.  On the way, she informs the reader of the intricate architecture of the face and the equally delicate medical procedures required to restore that architecture.  Sustaining infections, dislodged protheses, medical psychosis, and the emotional roller coaster of triumphs beset with setback after setback, she records the journey she and her partner traverse with authenticity, wit, and sobering bravery. The reader is left with awe over the heroism required to sustain optimism.  When hers finally fails, she refuses to gloss over despair. When restored, it feels earned by the sheer grit of enduring that darkness.  This is an inspiring, wise, astonishing book.      I attended the launch reading of Rearranged. Kathleen Watt looks terrific.  She read with humor and drama, even singing.  Like the performer she once was and still is.                        Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh Here's another book I've been hearing of for fifty years, but never read.  It was recommended to me by a children's writer  (I’m working on a novel with a child narrator). This starts fairly slowly with a clever eleven year old heroine who writes in a notebook about everyone and all her perceptions, and makes a frequent circuit of interesting East Side New York neighbors whose activities she follows. The beginning didn’t seem especially special to me, but one needs to keep in mind that Harriet (published in 1964) was a game changer in how the characters, including Harriet herself and her friends, are not just cutely mischievous but occasionally nearly vicious.  It's an affluent world of nannies and cooks and enormous freedom for a kid like Harriet who runs pretty free after days at her loosey-goosey-artsy private school.  For example, Harriet has to choreograph a dance for herself as an onion.     The books gets better and better as it goes along, and a little over halfway in, there is a crisis when the wrong people find and read Harriet’s notebook and she gets involved in a pretty terrible battle with the other students that includes pouring ink over people and tripping them and isolating them and a lot of things terrible to children.     The getting better as it goes is always one of my major criterion for success. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride My favorite part of the novel are the scenes centering on a deaf boy who gets sent to the asylum. I'm a sucker for people-in-institutions-stories, and McBride does it really, really well. This part of the novel deserves all the accolades the book has been getting, in my opinion. For me, though, the legendary story-telling quality of much of the rest is not as much to my taste.  I confess, then, that both what I love and what I don't love so much is about taste.  I have a lot of respect for McBride and what he’s trying to do, but my whole life has been about trying to figure out what’s really real, and while I certainly enjoy tales and fantasy, I tend to like best even in those genres the characters more than the pyrotechnics.  And I do like the characters here, but the half-humorous tall tale quality always sounds better to me told in person than on the page. Legends and myths make me wary.  There are some chapters and scenes in The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store that are as good as anything contemporary I’ve ever read: the deaf boy Dodo communicating with his friend who has cerebral palsy, for example, and some terrific dialogues with precise dialect on all kinds of topics.  On the other hand, I don't like the POV section of the evil racist doctor who is, compared to all the other characters, quite clichéd.   For a solid recommendation of the book, read what Maureen Corrigan has to say on NPR. SHORT TAKES Safe by Imogen Keeper I just finished Safe, the fourth of five Imogen Keeper novels in the After the Plague series.  She does the details of post apocalyptic life well, keeping it all pretty quotidian.  In her world, it was a pandemic that killed half the population, and every survivor has lost a couple of loved ones.  There's lots of predatory violence and some dictatorships and armies forming up, but the novel is, in fact, a romance (so is post-apocalyptic romance a thing?) Keeper makes her love story a teaser, Frankie and Yorke are four (very short) books in, and have done just about everything sexual except intercourse.  And doing just-about-everything-sexual very vividly, too. But Yorke, a big powerful warrior-type, is saving the final intimacy for when Frankie is finally ready--namely ready to let go of her dead husband.  It's really pretty funny, how close they come and then, Oh wait, let's not.  I assume Keeper knows it's funny.  And old-fashioned, to have that particular sex act given such importance. On the other hand, I'm quite engaged in their story, especially how she creates group dynamics.  It's not a loner story.  It's about their group, that has taken over a big resort based on the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia.  They garden, they search out gas for their vehicles, and they have a difficult relationship with a big group in the nearest town who are not exactly evil but rather bullies.  They force our survivors to give them half their seedlings and share one guy who's an engineer. Keeper also quietly has all the groups, including the big bad ones in D.C. let by women. I wonder if Keeper would have preferred to write more post-apocalypse and less romance, or if  this Big Tease plot line is what she really likes.Easy to keep reading. Good on dogs, children, friendship. Fever Season by Barbara Hambly    Another Benjamin January historical mystery set in 1830's New Orleans with terrific background of class and race distinctions and the devastation of Yellow Fever and cholera.  January is working in a hospital where most medicine is by today’s standards malpractice.  He also teaches piano to the daughters of a high class creole lady of interesting contradictions. The characters alone would carry the story: there’s January’s extremely cool (in several senses) mother and his sisters, as well as his opium addicted white violinist friend.  I particularly enjoyed a “Kaintuck” policeman with a penchant for missing the spittoon with his tobacco spit. Murder, torture, surprises, and the constant danger of bad actors kidnaping free blacks and selling them into (or in some cases back into) slavery.  I like almost everything about this novel, except that it probably needed one final run-through of tightening. As Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare when told that the Bard always wrote straight ahead without blotting (i.e. correcting) a line,"Would he had blotted a thousand." More Connelly   I’m reading Connelly again. I started reading his books seven  years ago when we were simultaneously selling and buying a house.  It was hot and we didn't have a.c.,  and I always seemed to be stuck in one of the houses waiting anxiously for a call about money or repairs.  I couldn't concentrate on anything intellectually challenging.  I fell hard for Michael Connelly's Bosch, that perfectly serious and sincere urban cowboy loner with big gaps in his psychological make-up, whose true and only love is tracking murderers. He has a daughter eventually, but she mostly just distracts him from his calling.He's a native of Los Angeles, the child of a murdered prostitute, survivor of various institutions, and a veteran of the Vietnam War.  His personality and Connelly's scrupulously believable police procedures (his plots are somewhat less believable, but I don't care so much about plot) work together extremely well.  It's fast moving stories set on a bedrock of the inner suffering and narrow vision of a warrior.  There are also a lot of fun minor characters and great L.A. scenery.  None of Connelly's other protagonists come close.  Mickey Haller the Lincoln Lawyer (and Bosch's half brother) is fun, but he's a first person narrator, a trickster, whose brash, optimistic voice carries the entertainment fact. Harry's the man, though. I reread these instead of watching t.v. The Late Show by Michael Connelly Nice to be back in his meticulous police procedures, but Renée Ballard isn’t Harry Bosch.  I think the problem is that MC just doesn’t feel her the way he feels Bosch. He tries hard, and he’s so good at what he does that I was totally into it, but she’s a skeleton crew going through the story–a damaged person, but without the historical/generational reverberations of Bosch.  In her case, her dad died more or less in front of her in a surfing accident. She is semi-homeless, has a nice grandmother, a dog, a surf board.  Basically lives out of a van. The detection was fun: at least three cases underway, lots of personal betrayal in Ballard’s life, so she has ended up on the “Late Show,” the overnight shift.  There's a nasty evil murderer; a semi-sympathetic portrayal of an ex porn star who now directs porn; bondage;  life-threatening danger at 60% of the way through–typical of Connelly–with most of the violence and ugliness off-stage or in a crime scene till then. There's a daring escape, some sleazy cops and dedicated cops. Satisfying fast read.  Desert Star (2022) by Michael Connelly This one is  Bosch and Ballard together, and Bosch is sick at the end.  He gets called “old man” a few too many times.  I read this one in a used hard copy instead of as an e-book, and I kept feeling how many pages were left between my fingers, hoping it would last a long time.  It didn’t, even though it was between 350 and 400 pages long.  Two serial killers, a reset of the Cold Cases group, Renee running it now, Bosch back as a volunteer.  Lots of taking the 101 to 405 then the 10 to Santa Monica. I go to L.A. a couple of times a year now, so I love that. Ballard is still just okay–she just doesn’t have the depth that Connelly feels for Bosch. Daughter Madison is in and out of this one toward the end–written after the t.v. series got going. Two Kinds Of Truth (2017) This is the one with the stone cold Russian killers and the plane rides over the Salton Sea. It is also the one with a sneering serial killer Bosch put behind bars who is suddenly about to be freed by new evidence that Bosch is sure has somehow been planted. The two plots, the dead pharmacists/drug plot and the serial killer seem like totally separate stories, but Connelly seems to do that a lot, at least in his later books, and my rereads blend it all into one long epic.  Not complaining. For a fuller review, check out Kirkus.  The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly  The big question here is whether the person Mickey Haller is defending is the real perp or not, and of course Haller is determined NOT to answer the question, only to defend the person.I enjoy his energetic generally optimistic voice– Connelly’s male characters have a nice tendency toward faithfulness, wanting to get back to the One They Love even after divorce etc.  In Mickey Haller’s case, that’s part of his charming optimism. There’s also a good informal series of exchanges on guilt and innocence and how a Defense lawyer is better off not knowing about the client’s status.  And all the turns of the case and the courtroom antics are a lot of fun. LISTS Phyllis Moore recommends Wiley Cash’s best books of 2023: Evil Eye by Etaf Rum The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash Yellow Face by R.F,  Kuang I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins To Anyone Who Ever Asks:The Life Times and Music of Connie Converse by  Howard Fishman   After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher American Caliph by Shahan Mufti  ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More  Danny Williams' March Adventures in Editing Peggy Backman writes:  "Years ago I wrote a column for a small town newspaper on classic cars. I had heard that the newspaper was really bad in terms of delaying payment, so I refused to write anything until I was paid  As it turned out, at some point they changed editors. I had written three articles (that I had been paid for upfront), but the new editor decided to discontinue the column—and I even had a little following!  So at least I had my money, but I felt so bad for the people I had interviewed for the articles, as they were looking forward to reading about themselves and their cars. Congrats to those who got this new law passed." https://authorsguild.org/news/agcelebrates-passage-of-new-york-state-freelance-isnt-free-act/ See Ben Shepherd's suggestions for online marketing.  He sells services, but has lots of free ideas too. Jane Friedman's "Hot Sheet" of new agents & presses from 2023  Free lectures from Authors Publish  A free publication from AuthorsPublish about how to publish in literary journals. Check out WriterBeware.com, which keeps us up-to-date on scams and bad publishing options:  it comes from a genre organization, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association,  but has information that is useful for all writers.  A list of literary journals and 'zines that accept previously published work.  GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF Two pieces from Scott Oglesby's memoir online at Red Dirt Press.   Red Dirt Press is  a publication focused on "New South" writers, and the two pieces from Telling Dixie Good-bye are "Waiting For Mama" and "Rednecks and Sofabeds." Rachel King interviews  Austin Ross and recommends his novel Gloria Patri. Check out Malarkey Books  (thanks to Rachel King). Joe Chuman's latest substack entry on his recent trip to Israel: always stimulating and worthwhile. Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read! An interesting New Yorker story by Sheila Heti that she wrote by interrogating and manipulating a chatbot and then cutting out her own lines.  "According to Alice" starts out charming, then gets pretty  weird and a little tedious.  Definitely the best thing I've read with Chatbot collaboration, though:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/according-to-alice-fiction-sheila-heti Daniela Gioseffi "It Might as Well Be Spring" youtube singing and art! ANNOUNCEMENTS   Just published--New Poetry by Jane Hicks! The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration. Marc Kaminsky's latest translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan Review (vol.21. No. 1).  The issue is available as hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan Review . The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother," "Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit."  New Poetry book by Ernie Brill:  Journeys of Voices and Choices Leslie Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become those journeys to another way of seeing every place and time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when the going gets kind of rough.  Unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine any time. Don’t miss this ride.” James Crews says of Barbara Crooker's new collection Slow Wreckage, “Opening a book of poetry by Barbara Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need: the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.” Coming April 16, 2024 Deborah Clearman's The Angels of Sinkhole County  Review Tales Founded in 2016, Review Tales informs, inspires, and provides knowledge of the craft of writing and supports indie authors by providing a platform to demonstrate their well-deserved work. The quarterly magazine is dedicated to readers, writers, self-publishers and includes literature discussions. It is an essential collection of author confessions, exclusive interviews, words of wisdom, book reviews, and literary works.  Founder & Editor in Chief: S. Jeyran Main. Look for Laura Tillman's new nonfiction book, The Migrant Chef: the Life and Times of Lala Garcia. Rachel Kin's Bratwurst Haven won a 2023 Colorado Book Award.    Published in Persian! My novel for children Billie of Fish House Lane. See announcement here. The Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) has just announced that "Juvenile fiction book Billie of Fish House Lane by American author Meredith Sue Willis has been published in Persian and is available to Iranian Children."             Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers # 233 April 29, 2024   Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact Read this newsletter in its permanent location       Lisa Scottline, Mary Roberts Rineheart, Susan Abulhawa, Ursula LeGuin     Back Issues Announcements Book Reviews Especially for Writers Good Stuff Online & Elsewhere Responses to Previous Issues   BOOK REVIEWS This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer). They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted. Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie The Angels of Sinkhole County by Deborah Clearman The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford Warnings:  The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy by Leondard Grob and John K. Roth Reviewed by Joe Chuman Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Valediction, poems and prose by Linda Parsons reviewed by Felicia Mitchell The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth Three by Lisa Scottoline:  Lady Killer Everywhere that Mary Went Legal Tender Tally-Ho by Oscar Silver   New and Interesting Links: Los Angeles Review of Books The Washington Review of Books Are you looking for an agent?  Try  Query Track!     This issue has a couple of rediscovered books  (see announcements) plus two pieces under Especially for Writers  about the very individual process of getting published.  As my mother used to say, "It's a long row to hoe." I've also been in one of my crime and mystery periods.  This is largely becuase I've been traveling and doing a lot of papers for a class. Along with the speed of movement and dependability of the genres, there's a great deal to be learned about story telling, pace, and structure, especially from the late, great Elmore Leonard.Dennis Lehane says this of Elmore Leonard's plots:  Where other novels zig, Leonard’s zag. Plot is not a series of bricks built upon bricks to erect a formidable edifice, but a loose collection of steps one or two primary characters take down a path that crosses another path that leads to a building with a room where more people are gathered. When one of those characters goes out the back door and down a fire escape, the original character follows and enters an alley which leads to another path which winds further away from that first path, which nobody remembers anyway because it’s, like, 10 paths back. In other words, Elmore Leonard’s plots feel less like plots and more like life. Lehane's piece on Leonard ("Get Shorty" at 30 in The Guardian) also speaks admiringly of Leonard's dialogue and how his crime stories are character driven rather than plot driven. REVIEWS Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa This novel by the writer-activist Abulhawa covers the history of Palestinians in Israel from 1948 to the early 2000's with richly drawn characters and various historical events--mostly political catastrophes for the Palestinian people.  There is a strong nostalgia for the life in small olive farming communities before the foundation of Israel, and for Palestinian folkways and foods and religion and family ties.  The main character Amit has a loving literary father who wakes her at dawn in the refugee camp Jenin to read to her, usually from the work of Khalil Gibran.  There are friends who are European and Jewish.  There is a hint of what was and might have been, from the Palestinian perspective. And then there are the catastrophes for the land-tied traditional people in Amit’s family: the clearing of the Palestinians from their home, the conditions in the small refugee camp where Amit grows up and has the kind of fun children do, wherever they are.  The family, however, has terrible wounds: the oldest children, twin boys, are divided as babies when a Jewish solider kidnaps one of the boys to give to his deeply disturbed but nuturing wife, a survivor of the death camps in Europe.  Amit and her older brothers’ mother goes into depression and psychosis, and, much later, dementia.  Amit's beloved father disappears; Amit herself is badly wounded by an Israeli sniper. She ends up going to an orphanage-school in Jerusalem to honor her father’s devotion to education.     The middle third of the novel covers families in Lebanon, including the horrific massacres in the PLO refugee camps Sabra and Shantila in 1982 Lebanon by right wing Christian Lebanese, overseen by the Israeli army.     Then come the intifadas.  Amit’s lover dies after she goes to the U.S. to make a place for him and their coming child.  She spends much of her life-- skipped over rather cursorily in the novel-- living in the U.S., and finally, when her daughter is college age, goes back with her to Jenin after a visit from her Jewish brother who has found out about his past and is looking for his family.     The final section, back in Jenin and Jerusalem, is also harrowing, but deeply satisfying at the same time.  There is no end to blood-shed, but Abulhawa explores the possibilities for good even in the middle of great evil and violence.     To be honest, I had trouble finishing the book. I have friends in Israel and friends and family who are deeply commited to the State of Israel.  As I write this, we are in the middle of the Gaza War after the murders and rapes and kidnapings in Southern Israel by the anti-semitic Hamas terrorists. We are in the middle of the Gaza War in which Israel has already purportedly killed 20 or 30 times the number of Palestinans as Hamas killed Israelis.  I kept wincing and putting the book down.  I saw Abulhawa herself on a youtube report from Gaza for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.  She is highly partisan, a founder of a group that builds playgrounsds for Palestinain children–and an important member of the BDS gorup (Boycott Divest Sanctions). A lot of people do and will view this novel as propaganda.     But even if Abulhawa, who lives in Pennsylvania, made up half ot it, it is still a powerful record of suffering and violence.         Valediction by Linda Parsons reviewed by Felicia Mitchell Sometimes I pick up a particular book I like by Pema Chödrön, as if it will transport me to a psychic space that comforts me. But as much solace as Chödrön’s words bring, sometimes I will put the book aside and walk outdoors, into my yard or a forest, more at home with the natural world that helps me to make sense of my own life. With my feet on the ground and my head in the air, I breathe and feel less adrift in a life that can elude me. Other times, I read poems that I have accumulated over the years by writers whose experiences make mine make more sense. A poem can tether together so many of the threads that bind us to the myriad experiences of a life. Sometimes they make us feel less alone. The sort of connection that can emanate from a good poem or book of poems is perhaps more helpful than any self-help book I have read. I like poets who weave words into patterns to bring others closer into that psychic space that explains exactly what it is like to be human, to be mortal, to live with not only death but the weight—and light—of what a lifetime can give. As poets, our dare is that others might hear us. Our hope is that our words will be as indelible as, Linda Parsons writes in “Dust to Dust,” the “small label / on the brass letterbox / I gave my grandmother / forty years ago, memento . . .” (14). This is why I love Valediction, a new collection of poems and short prose pieces from Parsons (Madville Press, 2023). Her voice resonates from her indelible words. Valediction is thus meditative for both author and reader. Reading it is like being inside a mind where a deep wisdom resides, where there is the possibility of redemption, where life and death circle alongside loss and light, where family—as complicated as it can be, as contrary as it can be with the good and the bad—makes sense, if you wait long enough or look through the prism of a sage adulthood. The poems, in order to effect this reaction, are perfectly crafted, diction palpable as the imagery invoked from garden to travels to memory. Every poem is finely wrought. For example, “Believe” weaves imagery of past and present to assert “I do believe we can shape our grief / solid as brick—or torch it like straw” (74). So many poems weave sense out of history and mind, as also in “Recipe for Troubled Times,” about a father’s death, which begins, “Throw it all in the pot—the war and hunger / years, the Depression’s hoboes, pandemic pandemonium . . .” (48). Consider, too, “Overtaken,” where “my DNA / commingles columbine and verbena, / sweat of my sweat” (24). The motif of commingling deepens the reading experience, where one finds meditation embodied in “October’s thinning veil” (“Visitation: October,” 11), a game of checkers (“Checkers with My Granddaughter,” 54), a mother’s nail polish on her toes or the absence thereof (“My Mother’s Feet,” 62). It occurs in far-flung places the poet has travelled, in her yard, and in rooms for Thai massage. Sometimes it is like breath, other times a reaching out in order to reach in, as in “The Motherhouse Road,” a poem that encompasses the travel that is solace alongside an assertion of the need for holy retreats. This poem shows how turning towards the self includes finding a place for others, in life and in memory, including a former husband and a complicated mother “who remembers nothing bad / or fractured, beatific in her nursing home bed” (55). Healing, this poem and others show, is possible, so much of this healing a reaching outwards into travel, the natural world, domestic rituals. “Plaintive ocarina, / call me to bear all the light coming,” the poet writes in “Valediction,” a riff on John Donne’s poem inspired by the loss of a dog but transcendentally more than about the loss of the dog (8). Such light counters darkness, which is what we find in the poems and prose pieces in this collection where the poet is both the healer and the healed. In “Roy G Biv,” Parsons writes, “My assignment in sixth grade / was to harness light” (46). She has been doing that in one way or the other ever since. Consider the pandemic-inspired “Everywhere and Nowhere at Once,” which shows with its weaving of Deepak Chopra’s words that both still the poet and draw her into her own “sodden earth,” with cicadas, oak, and trumpet vine grounding literally and figuratively. The poet’s discipline with her own life, her own karma, informs a healing grace that shows a human being healed who can then better heal. But there is no heavy-handedness in the way the wisdom is shared, with the voice of the poet inviting us into a safe space rather than preaching. “I’m not a healer,” the poet writes in “Garden Medicine,” “though maybe / I am—my ordinary hands laid on the scathing past // to cool its sear . . .” (22). The paradoxical, sometimes koan-like, makes the poems even more meditative. I should mention that along with the exquisite poems the prose pieces, each a “Visitation,” are woven so gracefully through the book, with their topics echoing topics addressed in poems, offering a prismatic effect to their role in the collection. “Prose pieces,” inspired by the Covid Garden Project workshop, are termed “essayettes” rather than prose poems, but their inclusion draws us to consider the distinction when some might have called them prose poems. Bridging the best of her poetry and prose, these prose pieces embody the elements of the essay or “essai” in its truest essence: an attempt to make sense of something in contemplative prose that sketches the thought processes reflecting more than it tidily concludes. Questioning, implicit or explicit, is at the heart of a good essay, as with this question in “Visitation: White”: “How will we fare in the next inch toward light, a new year I infuse with starlike hope?” (70). “Visitation: Conjunction,” also more narrative than a poem from Parsons might be, begins, “This winter solstice, our national psyche and our homebound selves hung in the balance. I took a breath, a break from doomscrolling, and sat on my porch steps” (47). A reflection on “my own dire conjunctions up close and personal” (47) leads the poet back to the light that sustains: Time orbits as it will, worldly upheaval or no, and the light in its sure return urges us to rebuild, repair, yes rebirth ourselves from whatever ash we’ve become in our hard trying and doing. In the end, luck has nothing to do with it. (47) I could not find better advice almost anywhere. I am thus thankful for the gift of resilience and wisdom Parsons shares, as well as a gift of being able to find the right path through life and her words. In “Airing Out,” she says, “I take myself to the sun” (4). This book takes us there too, where we are allowed to bask in the possibilities that reside in everything, from “Varadero’s opal waters” (“Elegant Decay,” 68) to a “gazebo feathered with tall phlox, begonia, / spent lunaria” (“Garden Medicine,” 22).             The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin      This was so good!  I readsome LeGuin years ago--Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, part of the Earthsea books. At the time I praised her work for its feminism and because I was glad there was some grown up science fiction. I missed this one, and I reallly liked it. The main character is Orr, a man who dreams “effectively”–predictive dreams which he can’s control. The setting is a mildly dystopian future (I think it was imagined as taking place in the nineteen-nineties, but it's easy enough simply to see it as an alternative world).  Orr is sent for psychiatric evaluation and treatment to Dr. Haber–ambitious, skillful, brilliant, and generally wanting the best for the world in an abstract way. He develops a way to control Orr’s dreams, and indeed, some things improve a little, but more are disastrous. For example, Dr. Haber tells Orr to dream of a world with no differences among races/ethnic groups and no war. The world he dreams has everyone with exactly the same color gray skin–and war has ended on earth because threatening aliens have landed on the moon. Of course, since it’s LeGuin, the aliens turn out to be different from what people like Haber expect. The story telling never falters, the bits and pieces of the future world are interesting (although none of the versions of the futre include the digital revolution). The people are complex, and the changes surprising and satisfying. The good news for me is that I missed of LeGuin'w work, so have a lot to read! Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay This was highly entertaining, the first of the novels about Dexter, a somewhat controlled sociopath/serial killer who only kills other serial killers who are really bad (child molesters, woman-choppers). This was the source of the popular t.v. show I never watched. Dexter has a powerful Dark Passenger who periodically takes the wheel as it were, and Dexter goes hunting. Dexter also, however, has a deceased adoptive father who gave him permission to kill, but only bad people.  He is hilarious in his observations about humans (of which he doesn’t consider himself one) and very insightful about who he is himself.  He has a sister, genetic child of his adoptive parents, for whom he prefers that things go well. His job is in the police department of Miami as an expert on spatter patterns–that would be blood spatters.  He can have sex, but really doesn’t get the point.  He is most fascinated by a true artist serial killer who seems to be trying to attract him, I was highly amused and entertained up until the final quarter or so when the plot seems to get more attentiion than the characters.  It tries, IMHO, to be too explosive, too complete, too melodramatic. Otherwise, it's quite a t rip to get sucked into Dexter’s world view.       The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart     Briefly, this was more fun than it should have been.  Mary Roberts Rinehart was famous in her time (early 1900's) as an American mystery writer. It feels like it’s emulating if not imitating the British. I had always wondered about her because I once got a grant with her name on it, (1976: Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation Fellowship–I just looked it up, and I don’t remember how much money or how I got it or anything about it). The plot is boringly complicated, and I didn’t even try to follow it, but I did like the self-described spinster narrator and her relationship with her maid.  She never wants to admit she cares about anyone, and turns out to care a lot about the maid and her her niece and nephew. And she likes adventure. It’s an oddity to read in the twenty-first century, but not awful.     Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie I just can't seem to get up a head of steam about Agatha Christie, the mystery writer who has reputedly sold more books than anyone but Shakespeare and God  (if you believe God wrote the Bible.)   This one began with a pleasant lightness as various vacationers--British, American and Belgian (well, that's just Hercule Poirot)-- are sitting on the beach at an island resort chatting and exposing their quirks of character. There's a henpecked husband and a femme fatale who appears to be fascinating a young man while his wife suffers.  There's an unhappy teenage girl, there's a retiree who tells long boring stories, there's Poirot etc.etc.       Before long, of course, there's a murder too. I was mildly curious about whodunit, but more curious about how Christie would go about resolving the mystery.  I didn't really care a lot, though--it's much more like a puzzle or a game than any portrayal of human behavior. I just don't get the appeal. Not to mention that she was a notorious casual-cultural anti-Semite.   Take a look at this article from The Forward called "What Did Agatha Chrisite Really Think of Jews?". The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth As usual, I am blown away by Roth’s excellent structure: 200 pages, one night in the present time of the novel, with a couple of powerful flashbacks that act as a meditation on family dynamics and what it means to be Jewish.  And, also as usual, in spite of the brilliance and tightness and some hilarious moments, I get impatient with Roth’s–what?  Misogyny? He gives the 23 year old protagonist, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, a hard time too. He is unbearably randy, always trying to get the nearest woman down on the rug in with him. And somehow, that Roth is making fun of him isn't enough: I'm still impatient. He is visiting in the rural Berkshire Hills home of his beloved maybe-mentor Lonoff who is probably diddling the mysterious lovely European Amy Bellette.  Lonoff’s wife Helen, an aging shiksa, repeatedly collapses in jealousy and insists she’s leaving.  Nathan eats it all up, while reading Henry James and imagining (I think) that Amy Bellette is writing about how she is really Anne Frank but intends to keep her survival hidden. The best part is, as usual, Newark: it's all about Nathan’s love of his father and mother and his fury at them for not loving a story he has written that exposes (they think) family dirty laundry to the Goys that makes the Zuckermans and the Jews look bad. There’s a lot of humor in this, and the whole Anne Frank is Alive theme is (probably) a fantasy of Nathan’s so he can marry her and please his parents (“and this is Nathan’s fiancée Anne Frank, yes, that Anne Frank...”).   For an excellent wayback review, see the  1979 Kirkus review here.            The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford I have to think Hillary Mantel read this older book and perhaps was even answering it in some way with her Thomas Cromwell novels. Ford Madox Ford's Cromwell isn't nearly as interesting--intelligent and unscrupulous, but more coarse.  Ford does some nice scene setting with his details of the late days of Henry VIII, and a lot of the minor characters are good--including King Harry himself, but Katharine Howard the fifth queen is pretty a much a cipher.  That is, she runs around a lot and has plenty of lines, some witty, but she doesn’t hold together as a character for me.  Ford Madox Ford was a major player in his time, writer, publisher, and friend of everybody who was anybody in the early 20th c. literary world in Britain. But aside from the setting and a few set pieces, The Fifth Queen seemed pretty clunky and melodramatic to me. People just keep popping into Katharine’s rooms and having long, theatrical dialogues. It does capture the youthful impetuosity of the Tudor era: nobody seemed to have gotten very old. King Henry is seen as decrepit, but he's in his late forties and early fifties here.         Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins I was inspired to reread this biography already on my shelves after my lukewarm response to Ford Madox Ford's novel The Fifth Queen. I first read this when I was fifteen, thanks to a frankly intellectual World History teacher, Mrs. Anna Lee Townsend at Shinnston High School. She recommended the Time Life Reading series to her class. I think I was the only one who asked for a subscription for my birthday or Christmas or something, and I was very proud of my sophistication. The books were good too, many still read. They opened big windows wide for me: Mistress to an Age about Mme de Staël, The Worldly Philosophers about great economists, and a slew of other. I probably liked this one best, though. Elizabeth the Great was published in 1958 (see Kirkus here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/elizabeth-jenkins/elizabeth-the-great/), and it has really aged well. It isn't a work of original scholarship, but it is well-documented and includes many aspects of its subject, including some psychological speculation. It emphasizes Elizabeth's great strengths as a ruler: her sense of a relationship with the people of England and her determination to save money for them (even as she herself, as required and as she loved, wearing vastly expensive jewels and clothing and living a fantastically luxurious life style). She was also determined to stay out of war, frequently through endless negotiations over marriage proposals. She was always pretty neurotic (Daddy has Mommy beheaded, anyone?) She apparently had a pretty ample sex life but it was always sans penetration. She was sometimes pettily nasty to subordinates, but kind to young people and very loyal to old friends. The book is a perfect mix for me: how a woman in a past time made her way, respectrably scholarly style, but also lively and willing to speculate. It's an even better now that I'm an old lady myself: a lot made sense to me now that didn't before: the whole threat of the vast power of Spain darkens much of her reign, and her final execution of Mary Queen of Scots was timed in relation to thata. She did lead an awful repressiion of Catholics, but generally preferred religious toleration. I'll probably read it again one day, but I'll have to get a new copy because this sixty plus year old volume crumbled in my lap.   Jenkins herself lived to be 104! See her obituary for more reading ideas: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/books/09jenkins.html. The Angels of Sinkhole County by Deborah Clearman   Deborah Clearman's new novel The Angels of Sinkhole County is set in a mythical West Virginia with strange place names and charmingly realistic denizens who include a family of affluent come-heres and several working class families who serve as their caregivers (the "angels" of the title). The caregivers adore the old Major, and when he dies, come up with a ramshackle plan to keep their jobs and help each other and an aphasic hermit. The adult son and daughter of the deceased Major–he a local veterinarian and she an artist from New York City–perhaps unrealistically but absolutely hilariously, join the plot. All the characters, in spite of what could have been stereotype and slapstick, are fully human, with detailed back stories and plenty of their own problems. Before it's over, it appears that at least half the people in town are in on the secret. The novel is a charming mix of angst, poverty, drugs, struggle, and love. They fumble forward like Shakespearean lovers wandering in an enchanted woods.  Clearman's ability to mix real life with high comedy and bring people together in a common if perhaps off-kilter purpose is brilliant and enjoyable.       Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard It's been a while since I read an Elmore Leonard crime novel.  His other big category is Westerns, but of course his westerns are about crime too. Cat Chaser, is early nineteen eighties, and one of the most noticeable things to me is that there are fewer guns in hands than usual.  Guns are used and discussed, but there just aren't that many. The highest ranking bad guy, a former torture boss for Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, has made good in real estate in Florida, and he hires a set of bungling Cuban refugee brothers to cut off our hero's private parts.  With big shears.  That's the kind of story it is. The main character, George Moran, a former soldier who was wounded in one of our little wars, in the D.R., runs a motel now, and is in love with the Trujillo torture general's wife. Apparently because they're both from Detroit. Once it gets rolling, it's vintage Leonard. There's a nice running theme about a girl rebel that George sort of casually goes looking for in the Dominican Republic (she shot at him and captured him in his days as a soldier, but his actual wound was by friendly fire). Instead of finding her, however, he finds big trouble with Mary the general's wife. There are several other really nice minor characters-Leonard always gives even flunkies and supernumeraries a little bit of attention, which I appreciate.  He likes his slightly aimless but basically good white guy protagonists best, but makes a space for everyone.  If you have any interest in Leonard, be sure and read Dennis LeHane's appreciation of him in The Guardian.     Three by Lisa Scottoline:  Lady Killer;  Everywhere that Mary Went;  Legal Tender Well, I thought I had a new fast-food read here:  Lisa Scottoline is a best seller and highly praised by big names  in the Crime writing world  (Including Michael Connelly), so I borrowed Lady Killer as an e-book from the library.  It was witty and light, but I liked the narrator's voice. Next I bought the first book in the series (not available for borrowing).  That one, notes below, Everywhere That Mary Went, I liked less.  It has the same narrator, Mary DiNunzio, but it didn't feel as sharp--maybe Scottoline hadn't quite mastered her form?  I tried another from the library, which I stopped reading after two pages, not likimg it without a first person narrator. I gave her one more try, book two of the series Legal Tender, with a narrator who is Mary DiNunzio's boss in Lady Killer. This one I liked well enough to read, rapidly, but I think I've had it with Scottoline for now.  They go down like marshmallow Peeps, and leave me with a grit of sugar in my teeth.  Lady Killer.  With a Philadelphia setting and a lawyer sleuth from South Philly, it is wonderfully full of cannoli and quotations from The Godfather and a great group of “mean girls” protagonist Mary DiNunzio’s went to parochial school with. They are victims, suspects and helper sleuths.  Mary is smart and very determined and devoted to helping out her community, but also sloppy and mourning her husband, prim in sexual behavior and torn over religion (abortion comes up). Throughout she is witty and touching. Nothing is especially subtle–Mary seems to be falling for a good looking man whose South Philly mother thinks is gay, and this causes lots of funny but not light-handed situations and jokes.  So there’s a romance component. Best are Mary’s very humanly grounded skills and above all her mama’s spicy red gravy for the pasta and other details from real life.   Everywhere That Mary Went is again (or rather, the first) young lawyer Mary from South Philly with her parents and an identical twin sister who is a nun!  (and doesn't appear in the more accomplished Lady Killer).  Mary is being followed, maybe stalked  (Everywhere that Mary Went, get it?) and she falls for one of her employees and has to solve the murder than no one else seems capable of. She spends most of the book being terrified.   Legal Tender starts a new character, Bennie Rosato who will meet up later in the series with Mary.  Bennie has a single mother who is possibly schizophrenic.  She is six feet tall (Mary is petite) and works out with long runs and rowing.  Her voice, though, has a lot of the same wise cracking, which is what I like.  Lots of suspects laid out for us before we have a murder, and when the murder finally happens, everything points to Bennie herself who is just a little too able at running and hiding and finding supplies and whatever she needs. One good part is her sneaking into a big fancy law firm where she used to work and breaking into the computers and arranging ID for herself and a work space and computer. She orders a load of appropriate clothing from a personal shopper and passes as a visiting lawyer from the New York office. It's clever and suspenseful, but then she keeps going, doing three or four other clever moves, including setting a good friend on the right track to recover from a heroin addiction.  It's all a little too much, but I like Bennie, and it moves.      Tally-Ho by Oscar Silver     This is a first person paranormal PI novel (first book of a trilogy), and it has that light tone, an old school sleuth who drinks rather a tremendous amount of what he always refers to as single-malt.  The Scotch is smoky and peaty and made me want to have one, but he (and people he likes) do seem to drink all day long.     Anyhow, our PI Hobbs is an ex-cop with a gambling habit and a pleasant knee-breaker bookie who shows up occasionally. Hobbs' gambling losses, though, are out of loyalty: he always bets on the New York Mets).  Hobbs gets called in to work for a wealthy Duchess around whom people are dying rather viciously and vividly.  Our boy Hobbs (Thomas Hobbs--is there meaning in his sharing a name with the philosopher famous for insisting human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without a strong government?)  Just as Hobbs is setting out on his new job, he begins to hear a voice that he is flexible and strong in his ego to accept as something strange but not insane. I particularly appreciate his willingness to accept this, after some questions and arguments, of course. There’s some police work, often with his friend who is still a detective with the NYPD. There's a little mostly-off stage sex, more single-malts, plenty of action and snappy comebacks.   Many things are worked out at the end, but Silver leaves a few things open for the next books.    Warnings:  The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy by Leondard Grob and John K. Roth Reviewed by Joe Chuman Two eminent scholars of the Holocaust have written a passionate and engaging book on the dangers our democracy faces and what we must do to save it. It is essential reading. American democracy is standing on a precipice. With the unthinkable, namely a Trump victory looming, the last several years have spawned a glut of volumes sounding the alarm: The 2024 presidential election may mark the end of the American experiment. Warnings, co-authored by Leonard Grob and John K Roth, is a most valued addition to this timely genre. Its approach, organizational structure, and voice reflect the distinctive backgrounds of the writers. Roth and Grob are both Holocaust scholars with decades of scholarship to their credit. John Roth has authored, co-authored, and edited over 35 volumes on the Holocaust. Grob had founded a Holocaust Center at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he had long taught, as well as a program bringing scholars from various religious traditions together for biennial conferences spanning decades, dedicated to applying Holocaust studies to contemporary political and social problems. Both writers, who have previously collaborated, are in their eighties and are retired professors of philosophy. Despite the academic backgrounds of its authors, Warnings is highly accessible to the general public, written in a voice that is passionate, heartfelt, and personal. The reader cannot fail to be moved by the humanity of the writers, whose teaching and activism have reflected democracy in practice. Our democracy is in grave danger, and the book resonates a sense of urgency while veering away from stridency and avoiding despair. As implied, the thesis funnels into the upcoming presidential election and how we have reached this point. As the books subtitle – The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy- implies, it mines the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany to provide usable lessons for the roads we must avoid if democracy is to be rescued from the dark forces of authoritarianism. Its historical interest is focused more on the conditions that created the groundwork for the Holocaust than on the details of the genocide itself. The narrative also includes Russia's assault on Ukraine as exemplary of an additional example of the encroachment of authoritarianism on freedom and democracy, and the emergence of fascistic tendencies resembling the rise of Nazism, while not drawing false equivalences. But the American situation remains the book's primary concern. The rise of Donald Trump, his minions, and the MAGA culture are laid out in explicit detail while not mincing words. The danger we confront is starkly presented to the reader at the beginning:  “...American democracy remains at risk. It could be trumped by conspiratorial, vengeance-driven, violence-prone, antidemocratic authoritarianism, as an American version of fascism.” Most valuable is the authors' rigorous explication of the substance of democracy on multiple levels and beyond the mere exercise of periodically casting votes. The book's richness is vested not solely in the threat to democratic institutions but in the public and personal values that sustain those institutions. As they make clear, democracy is not a static framework of institutions. It is a living process. A prevailing theme is that democracy is not self-executing or self-sustaining. Also emphasized is the paradox that lies at the heart of democracy. In the authors' words, “democracy's existence invites its demise.” It is a product of the will, values, and virtues of the people below who will determine whether our democracy survives or will give way to authoritarianism. Referencing Elie Wiesel, arguably the foremost writer on the Holocaust, “the opposite of the epitome of evil is not hate, but indifference.” Democracy will die unless the people reverse the slide into indifference, unless they care sufficiently to sustain it. That reversal is the writers' primary task. The writers inform us in the opening chapters that dialogue is essential to democracy, and the format of the book structurally reflects that central dynamic. The book's organization serves as a meta-example of the centrality of dialogue to democratic process. The volume's eight chapters are subdivided into the reflections of one author and then a response by the other. The views of each are not challenged so much as augmented and enriched by the responses of the coauthor. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction and ends with a postscript that serves as a summation. Woven throughout the substantive content are autobiographical references that further humanize the ideas presented and evoke an engaged and caring response. The initial chapter on the role of philosophy in preserving democracy clearly emerges out of the life-long professional vocations of both Roth and Grob as academic philosophers. At first glance, the presumption that philosophy can play a role in significantly influencing political life appears counter-intuitive. As Grob notes, “The relative silence of academic philosophers in the face of the Holocaust is deafening.” As one who has taught in the academy this fails to surprise. Philosophy is an arcane discipline, and with the exception of a small number of public intellectuals, is notably removed from the practical realities which thickly comprise everyday political realities. This is probably more the case in contemporary America than it was in Europe in the 1930s. Yet this is not philosophy, despite their academic pedigree, as Lenny and John and understand it. They return us to philosophy's Socratic roots. Philosophy so applied is arguably the possession of any and all thoughtful persons whether academically trained or not. The foundational premise that ties the volume together is that of values, values which all people in a democratic polity can possess and realize. In the current moment more so than ever. The heart of philosophy is openness to varying and opposing viewpoints, which is realized through discussion and dialogue. It is the disposition of curious people who are actively engaged in their world. The essence of Hitlerian thought was one of closed absolutes. Jews were responsible for all of Germany's problems; Aryans comprised the superior race. No questions asked. We witness a similar approach in Trump's Big Lie, conspiracy theories, and gratuitously proffered misinformation. To question such assertions is to be treated as the enemy. The tone for fascism is set. With decades of teaching behind them, it is not surprising that education and the relation of education to democracy should be of central concern. That relation has been a major dynamic of progressive thought for decades. It has long been asserted by social theorists that improving education is the primary driver for the improvement of society overall. Since the 1960s, major critiques have been written and innumerable reports commissioned on ways to improve American schools. Yet Germany of the Nazi era throws into contention a positive relationship between education and the flourishing of a civilized and humane society. Mid-twentieth century Germany produced the most highly educated society on the planet. Here was the land of Goethe and Beethoven in which the Enlightenment flourished. Yet, it was Germany, the pinnacle of rationality, science, and technology, that applied those superior capabilities in constructing killing factories that enabled the murder of millions of human beings with the greatest efficiency in the quickest period of time at the cheapest cost. Education did not save the victims of the Holocaust. It was perversely employed to perpetrate history's greatest evil. That ostensible contradiction was starkly illustrated by a fact that Lenny tersely recounts:  “On January 20, 1942, fifteen members of the Nazi Party and the German government met at a villa at Wannsee near Berlin. The agenda: to coordinate the destruction of the European Jews, the 'Final Solution' of 'the Jewish question,' Eight of them held doctoral degrees from German universities. Their academic accomplishments did nothing to keep them from committing genocide. So, Americans need to be warned that if education is crucial for democracy, its quality and its commitments are a matter of life and death.” The final clause is the determining clarifier. Clearly having an educated public per se is no guarantee that authoritarianism will not emerge. It is rather the quality, method, and content of education that are determinative. Nazi education provided the counter-example. As Lenny notes, “Nazi education glorified functional means-ends reasoning. It lacked concern for the ethical dimension of the end toward which such reasoning was employed. The classrooms of the Weimar period embraced voraussetzunslos Wissenschaft, science lacking moral concerns. The result during the years of the Holocaust itself: the loud silence of the German railroad worker who never inquired, let alone protested, where the cattle cars were going: the silence of the Zyklon B factory worker who never inquired about, let alone protested, the lethal use of the product to gas Jews to death.” The lack of ethically based teaching has long been absent in American schools. Questions arise: which ethical values? Whose ethics? Morality is broadly understood to be grounded in religion. Consequently, the separation of church and state would make the explicit teaching of ethics difficult as it is contentious in public schools. The problems that concern us at this strident moment are not so much the absence of moral issues, but the imposition of policies that reflect a morality that is politically driven and increasingly extremist. The authors cite the initiatives fueled by the MAGA cohort, including rampant book banning, attacks on teaching about racial and gender justice, and the whitewashing of American history that speaks to its dark underside. In its stead, a balanced view is replaced by an uncritical interpretation of the history that aligns with the views of Donald Trump's base, namely that America is an exceptionally great and just nation. It's a view that invokes romanticized versions of 1950s society when white, male dominance went significantly unchallenged. Also cited are the long-lasting issues of the undervaluing of the teaching profession, overcrowded classrooms, and a nod to the inequities that are created when schools are sustained by property-tax revenues. Not surprisingly, the authors see necessary value in educating about the Holocaust and its contextual antecedents. Yet when one witnesses the extraordinary outbreak of antisemitism, including on college campuses, in light of the Israeli assault on Gaza in response to the Hamas massacre of October 7th (which is often cited as the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust), I asked myself how aware are today's students of the evil of the Holocaust? And if they are aware, what difference does it make? For today's college students born after 2000, the Holocaust may feel like a very distant event, no longer relevant to the contemporary political world. More captivating, one learns, are contemporary ideologies of post-colonialism,which for some student activists exclusively maligns Israel, the Jewish state, as a perpetrator. Ideological reductionism, not nuance, details, or complexity is arguably a product of contemporary college education. Education plays a formative role, but not the kind that one who sees the dangers of anti-democracy lurking would not want to encourage. As educators, Lenny and John are, nevertheless, realists who affirm the limitation of education in sustaining the values and practices we need at this moment. They end their chapter on education with the sober conclusion that “...the cliché 'education is the solution' is naive and banal in the current American context. Education-for-democracy is under siege in the United States.” Yet, without providing evidence, they remain hopeful that the majority of Americans stand with them in affirming democratic values. Political theorists have long had difficulty with religion. Progressive mid-twentieth century thinkers conventionally assumed that religion would fade as education expanded, the prestige of science would grow stronger as the populace ascended the economic ladder. Religion was not construed as a significant political actor. Ensuing events on the international stage and domestically have shown that these prophesies were ominously mistaken. In the Muslim world, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1970 was a game changer. In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pushing the country that is officially a secular democracy toward becoming a Hindu state. The American analog was marked by the movement of evangelical Christians back into the political arena. With the emergence of The Moral Majority, the reentry into the public square, in the late 1970s, of tens of millions of evangelicals has moved the entire political landscape far to the right. The breeding ground for current extremism was then set in place. The effects of this tectonic change are discussed in Warnings' chapter on religion. John Roth notes,  “...no threat to democracy in the United States is greater than White Christian nationalism. It is the American 'cousin' of both the German Christian nationalism that supported Hitler and his genocide against European Jews and the Russian Orthodox Christian nationalism that has backed Vladimir Putin and his grisly war in Ukraine. In the United States White Christian nationalism, whose allies include some Roman Catholics, 'mainstream' Protestants, and even secular fellow travelers, is not synonymous with White evangelical Christianity. But the overlap with the American evangelical tradition is significant, striking, and sinister. The difference and the overlap pivot on the degree to which White Christian nationalism and White evangelical Christianity privilege White power to define and control American identity and the future of the United States – legitimating violence, if necessary, to do so. If Christians abandon Christianity at its best and fail to resist White Christian nationalism, then God help us.” It needs to be noted that Donald Trump would not have become president without the support of White evangelicals. They comprise the centerpiece of his electoral base. He received upward of eighty percent of the evangelical vote and he is poised to do so again. For John, the powerful role that religion is currently playing is personal. He is the son of a Presbyterian minister and remains a church-going Christian. His identity is rooted in the best of the Christian tradition. His reflections include the work of the German resistance theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who forfeited his life in the struggle against Hitler. As a scholar of the Holocaust, John notes that had it not been for the churches' support for Hitler's antisemitic Nazism, Jews would not have been murdered during the Holocaust. Despite articulated hope, the authors concede that the mainline traditions have not done enough to oppose the onslaught of White Christian nationalism and its authoritarian initiatives. In this reviewer's opinion, such realism is warranted. Mainline Protestant churches are greatly diminished, with some very greatly hemorrhaging members. Younger generations, especially, see no value in traditional religion and have greatly remained unaffiliated. Whatever commitment to the prophetic voice of Jesus evangelicalism once espoused is now gone. Evangelical Christianity has primarily become an extremist political movement, which perversely sees Donald Trump as sent by God. It has lost its soul. The book's chapter on death and the dead is the most poignant. Here recalling the Holocaust plays a specific and powerful role. For Lenny such appreciation is deeply personal in that close family members were killed in the Holocaust. The dead convey an essential message to us, or “through us” as the authors remind us. Lenny Grob's reflections are especially moving. Seldom has the continuity between past lives and our present obligations been so compellingly stated:  “If respecting the dead includes the possibility of hearing their call, what might the dead be saying? In particular, what are they saying to, or through me? As the grandson of grandparents murdered in Eastern Poland (today western Ukraine) and as a scholar of the Holocaust, I have heard a summons. I feel commanded by the murdered ones to remember – literally to help 'remember' – a world dismembered eighty years ago. The Holocaust was an attempt to destroy the realm of human solidarity. I hear the silent screams of Holocaust victims telling me to insist that it is unacceptable to engage in acts that murder the victim a second time. The Holocaust's dead implore me not to see them merely as victims, but as living persons who had names, took part in family events, and energized the communities they inhabited. I am asked to see their deaths not as objective facts but as subjective blows that strike me. I am summoned to my best to gather together pieces of the dismembered world of the Holocaust. For me, that means working toward healing our democracy's torn egalitarian fabric.” In short, our active work now to save our democracy not only safeguards the present and sets the stage for future generations, but retrospectively honors the lives of those who perished before us. Saving our democracy does not, therefore, solely consist in preserving needed institutions. It is a spiritual engagement that speaks to the living connection of human lives across generations. A chapter devoted to pandemics is well-named in that it goes beyond the extent of death caused by the Covid-19 virus and the divisive politics it spawned. As the authors note, “Accompanying its virulence, lethal plagues of moral, and spiritual infection are at pandemic levels in our body politic.” What follows are analyses of ethnocentric racism that accompanied the plague, including the proliferation of lies and lying that emanate from Donald Trump and poison the political and social environment. As the writers assert, pervasive lying rots out the foundational ground from which democracy grows and endures. There is discussion of judicial tyranny and cruelty, focusing primarily on the Supreme Court; the attack on women with rescission of Roe, the diminution of voting rights, and an upsurge in rule by minorities. Gun violence, environmental degradation, and other entrenched ills are manifestations of contemporary plagues tearing away at our democracy. A concluding chapter highlights means of resistance and grows out of the analyses of the threats to democracy the text previously documents and describes. There is a listing of concrete political initiatives, among them supporting, through action and financial donations, candidates who promote democracy, support of progressive NGOs, and funding for Ukraine's defense, which is a battle line in a war to save freedom and democracy from Putin's onslaught. They include standing for progressive immigration reform, supporting science, and aligning with the Justice Department in its prosecution of Donald Trump for the January 6th insurrection and other crimes. Warnings employs the past, specifically the Holocaust, to better understand the dangers of the present with a view toward sustaining democracy now and into the future. It oscillates between immediate concrete measures and abstract and long-lasting values. Most appealing was the authors' emphasis on the cultivation of ethics and personal virtues in the public at large to ensure democracy's survival and flourishing. They begin and end their treatise with the assertion that democracy is not self-executing, but ultimately rests on the will and commitment of an informed citizenry. When it comes to the cultivation of virtues and ethics that form the character of individuals, perhaps a chapter on family and the socialization of children would be a relevant addition to the comprehensive analyses presented by two knowledgeable scholars and activists. Warnings is an important book, written, as noted, with urgency and passion. Its purpose could not be more relevant to the greatest issue of our time. Many books have been written about the looming threat to democracy and the consequent rise of authoritarianism. What makes Warnings different – and eminently compelling – is the deep personalism conveyed by John Roth and Leonard Grob. It is an enriching element that underscores the humanism and sincerity of these two wise thinkers. Democracy, as stated several times throughout, is a process. Warnings is part of that process, and as such, is an exemplification of the very ideals it describes and promotes. It is a book that merits a wide readership.   RESPONSES TO PREVIOUS ISSUES Eddy Pendarvis says, "I'm so glad you reviewed The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. I loved McBride's The Good Lord Bird and haven't read anything else by him for fear I'll just be disappointed. He won the National Book Award for that novel, I believe.  Anyway, I'm with you on caring more about character than about 'pyrotechnics.' It's the main reason I just can't read Samuel Beckett's work. Maybe it's my being dense, but I never can care about his characters. I'm fascinated by the character of John Brown, and I thought McBride's young boy, whom Brown insisted on believing was a girl, just offered a wonderful take on Brown." Nikolas Kosloff, who identifies himself as a fan of the short story, likes Daphne DuMaurier's short story "The Doll."  He says, "Oddly, I find this short story which was lost to be better than a lot of her published work." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/30/the-doll-daphne-du-maurier        GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF   Joe Chuman, whose book reviews sometimes appear here (see Warnings above) , was in Israel recently.  He expresses a lot of what I have been feeling and thinking about the war in Gaza in his substack piece. John Loonam has an essay and review in The Washington Independent Review of Books: The essay:  TemmaE@gmail.com /features/the-voices-of-reason .    The review:  https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-vanishing-of-carolyn-wells-investigations-into-a-forgotten-mystery-author Latest Barbara Crooker poems Two pieces from Scott Oglesby's memoir online at Red Dirt Press.   Red Dirt Press is  a publication focused on "New South" writers, and the two pieces from Telling Dixie Good-bye are "Waiting For Mama" and "Rednecks and Sofabeds."        ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS Notes on Self-Publishing by Oscar Silver  Self Publishing. My experience is you won’t get rich doing this. I have an editor who has worked on all three of my books. I can recommend her services. Her web site is “Edits by Stacey” (https://editsbystacey.com/). She isn’t terribly inexpensive but very helpful. My books are printed etc. by IngramSpark. Again not terribly expensive but cheap isn’t how I would describe them. Also on the cost side is how much can you afford for cover art. In a nut shell self publishing isn’t inexpensive. I turned to self publishing after collecting over a hundred agent rejections. This may be sour grapes but I felt almost none had read any of my submissions, all less than a chapter long. I can summarize the responses:“You’re not Dan Brown.”  And I am not. Self publishing will get your hard work in print. Mine started and still is a vanity project. I like the work and what I have created.  Luckily I don’t need my book proceeds for lunch money. Good luck! Oscar Silver's trilogy is Tally Ho; Low Hanging Fruit; and A Family Business.     How I Got My Book Published by Alison Louise Hubbard   My Historical Fiction, True Crime novel, The Kelsey Outrage, the  “Crime of the Century” was published by Black Rose Writing in January, 2024. My journey from writing to publication began in Meredith Sue Willis’s Novel class at NYU. I wasn’t sure exactly when I had taken that first class, but on picking up my copy of Meredith’s book, OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, I read her inscription: “To Alison, with best luck on your novel! 10-24-11.” Oh, no! I thought. Did it really take me that long? For anyone attempting to write or publish a book, fear not. It probably will not take you that long. But if it does, take comfort in one of the things I learned along the way: each book in its own time....  Full Article at A Journal of Practical Writing See Alison's novel at Amazon.com. Are you looking for an agent?  Try  Query Track! The wonderful  Persimmon Tree   offers some thoughts about beginnings in fiction.  Here are a couple of resources for writing short stories.  One from writers.com offers several possible structures, including Freitag’s pyramid:https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline . A couple of books that are old but useful are  Master Class in Fiction Writing by Adam Sexton and How Fiction Works by James Wood.   I often get older books at bookfinder.com. The best sources for where to submit are the classifed section at NewPages.com.  There are others online.  I have a somewhat out-dated list on my website. April 2024  Adventures in Editing with Danny Williams This is witty and wonderful: One hundred tips to improve your novel (or not) Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read!     ANNOUNCEMENTS Rediscovered! Temma Ehrenfeld's Morgan: The Wizard of Kew Gardens Imagine George Constanza turned into Harry Potter.... A sardonic pot-smoking New Yorker, develops magic powers.           Patricia Park's new novel WHAT'S EATING JACKIE OH?, comes out on 4/30. JACKIE OH.  She is inviting everyone to a book signing at the Strand on Tuesday, 4-30-24 at 7:00 p.m. She sayds, "JACKIE OH is appropriate for ages 12 and up, 12 (grade 6) and up, so it'd mean the world if you can share the book with teachers, students, and kids in your life...as well as adults."             The 10th edition of  Review Tales Magazine is now available for purchase, in suppot of Indie Authors.  It has a curated selection of book reviews, interviews with authors, inspiring words of wisdom, and the much-loved segment of author confessions.  The magazine is available in print and digital format. Amazon: https://shorturl.at/jmRZ8 B & N: https://shorturl.at/DE013     Suzanne McConnell recommends Neighbors by Diane Oliver.   Suzanne says, "Miracles. Resurrection. Here are reviews of Neighbors and Other Stories, published nearly 60 years after the death of my classmate, Diane Oliver, during that tragic week at Black's Gaslight Village in Iowa City, and here's her sister Cheryl and me at the Center for Fiction launch event. We were thrilled to meet! We knew her! I'm going to visit Cheryl in North Carolina! She has just accepted an award for Diane in Austin! It's Eastertime!" For some reviews of Neighbors see The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, and The Guardian   Suzanne McConnell and Diane Oliver's sister Cheryl; Diane Oliver     Jane Hicks' new book of poetry The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.       Marc Kaminsky's latest translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan Review (vol.21. No. 1).  The issue is available as hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan Review . The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother," "Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit."  Ernie Brill has a new book of poetry, Journeys of Voices and ChoicesLeslie Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become those journeys to another way of seeing every place and time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when the going gets kind of rough.  Unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine any time. Don’t miss this ride.”     James Crews says of Barbara Crooker's new collection Slow Wreckage, “Opening a book of poetry by Barbara Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need: the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.”                       BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER   A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.   If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left.  Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.   The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184,  as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here. Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Paperback Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical books with other readers.   Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."   If you use an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927).  Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned books from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere--easier to read and more attractive.     RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.   LICENSE Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis.  Some individual contributors may have other licenses. Meredith Sue Willis Home    For a free e-mail subscription, please fill in your e-mail address here: E-mail address: Subscribe Unsubscribe      Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.     BACK ISSUES   #234 James Welch, Robert Graves, Kathy Manley, Soman Chainani, Marie Tyler McGraw, Elmore Leonard, Jennifer Browne, Dennis Lehane, Primo Levi, Elmore Leonard, James McBride. Reviews by Dreama Frisk, Martha Casey, and Diane Simmons--and a poem by Dreama Frisk! #233 Ursula LeGuin, Ford Madox Ford, Elmore Leonard, Deborah Clearman, Susan Abulhawa, Agatha Christie, Oscar Silver, Jeff Lindsay, Linda Parsons, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Philip Roth, Lisa Scottoline. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Felicia Mitchell. #232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill.   Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis. #231 Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk.  Review by Dreama Frisk. #230 Henry Adams, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis. #229 John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons. #228 Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.          #227 Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and more. #226 Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker, Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more. #225 Demon Copperhead, Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more. #224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more. #223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White. #222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more. #221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly #220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury #219  Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams. #218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien.  Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman. #217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover. #216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more #214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, and more. #213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more. #212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama #211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger. #210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more. #209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more. #208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more. #207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more. #206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more. #205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman. #204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more. #203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall. #202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others. #201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more. #200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more. #199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers. #198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc. #197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis. #196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates #195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more. #194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books. #193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more. #192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia. #191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more. #190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more. #189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews. #188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann #187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more #186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more #185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson #184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker #183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe #182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens #181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens #180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more #179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more #178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more. #177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman #176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger #175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman #174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary #173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls #172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout #171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd #170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski #169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more #168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more! #167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld #166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding #165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw! #164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard #163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more #162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more #161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret #160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris #159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho #158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro #157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow. #156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation #155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf #154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton #153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse #152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig #151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more! #150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. #149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife. #148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family #147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.  #146 Henry Adams AGAIN!  Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic #145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë #144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu #143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial #142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc. #141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy #140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow #139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian #138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton #137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River #136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz #135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang. #134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia #133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco #132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again. #131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon. #130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism #129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books. #128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement #127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates #126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist #125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow #124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University #123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing #122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?" #121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?" #120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list #119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer #118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family! #117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity #116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown #115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom #114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck #113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia #112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers #111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick #110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs #109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers #108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords #107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy #106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more #105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher #104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007 #103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007 #102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski #101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go #100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P. #99   Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel #98   Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate #97   Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more #96   Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults #95   Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng #94   Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday #93   Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta #92   Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs #91   Richard Powers discussion #90   William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare #89   William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more #88   Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo #87   Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers) #86   Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more #85   Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia #84   Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor #83   3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code #82   The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls #81   Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso #80   Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy #79   Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway #78   The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford #77   On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick #76   Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy #75   The Makioka Sisters #74    In Our Hearts We Were Giants #73    Joyce Dyer #72    Bill Robinson WWII story #71    Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald #70    On Reading #69    Nella Larsen, Romola #68    P.D. James #67    The Medici #66    Curious Incident,Temple Grandin #65    Ingrid Hughes on Memoir #64    Boyle, Worlds of Fiction #63    The Namesame #62    Honorary Consul; The Idiot #61    Lauren's Line #60    Prince of Providence #59    The Mutual Friend, Red Water #58    AkÉ, Season of Delight #57    Screaming with Cannibals #56    Benita Eisler's Byron #55    Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake #54    Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule #53    Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin #52    Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard #51    Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton #50    Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography #49    Caucasia #48    Richard Price, Phillip Pullman #47    Mid- East Islamic World Reader #46    Invitation to a Beheading #45    The Princess of Cleves #44    Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books #43    Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door #42    John Sanford #41    Isabelle Allende #40    Ed Myers on John Williams #39    Faulkner #38    Steven Bloom No New Jokes #37    James Webb's Fields of Fire #36    Middlemarch #35    Conrad, Furbee, Silas House #34    Emshwiller #33    Pullman, Daughter of the Elm #32    More Lesbian lit; Nostromo #31    Lesbian fiction #30    Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead #29    More William Styron #28    William Styron #27    Daniel Gioseffi #26    Phyllis Moore #25    On Libraries.... #24    Tales of the City #23    Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction #22    More on Why This Newsletter #21    Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin #20    Jane Lazarre #19    Artemisia Gentileschi #18    Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey #17    Arthur Kinoy #16    Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions #15    George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot #14    Small Presses #13    Gap Creek, Crum #12    Reading after 9-11 #11    Political Novels #10    Summer Reading ideas #9      Shelley Ettinger picks #8      Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn #7      About this newsletter #6      Maria Edgeworth #5      Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger #4      Homer Hickam and The Chosen #3      J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji #2      Chick Lit #1      About this newsletter                                                  BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER   A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.   If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book. You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left.  Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.   The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184,  as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here. Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Paperback Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical books with other readers.   Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."   If you use an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927).  Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned books from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere--easier to read and more attractive.     RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.   LICENSE Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis.  Some individual contributors may have other licenses. Meredith Sue Willis Home    For a free e-mail subscription, please fill in your e-mail address here: E-mail address: Subscribe Unsubscribe      Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.     BACK ISSUES   #233 Ursula LeGuin, Ford Madox Ford, Elmore Leonard, Deborah Clearman, Susan Abulhawa, Agatha Christie, Oscar Silver, Jeff Lindsay, Linda Parsons, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Philip Roth, Lisa Scottoline. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Felicia Mitchell. #232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill.   Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis. #231 Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk.  Review by Dreama Frisk. #230 Henry Adams, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis. #229 John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons. #228 Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.          #227 Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and more. #226 Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker, Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more. #225 Demon Copperhead, Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more. #224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more. #223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White. #222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more. #221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly #220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury #219  Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams. #218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien.  Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman. #217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover. #216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more #214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, and more. #213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more. #212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama #211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger. #210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more. #209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more. #208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more. #207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more. #206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more. #205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman. #204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more. #203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall. #202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others. #201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more. #200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more. #199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers. #198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc. #197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis. #196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates #195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more. #194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books. #193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more. #192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia. #191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more. #190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more. #189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews. #188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann #187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more #186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more #185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson #184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker #183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe #182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens #181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens #180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more #179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more #178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more. #177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman #176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger #175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman #174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary #173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls #172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout #171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd #170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski #169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more #168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more! #167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld #166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding #165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw! #164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard #163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more #162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more #161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret #160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris #159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho #158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro #157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow. #156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation #155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf #154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton #153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse #152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig #151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more! #150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. #149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife. #148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family #147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.  #146 Henry Adams AGAIN!  Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic #145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë #144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu #143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial #142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc. #141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy #140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow #139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian #138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton #137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River #136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz #135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang. #134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia #133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco #132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again. #131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon. #130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism #129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books. #128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement #127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates #126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist #125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow #124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University #123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing #122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?" #121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?" #120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list #119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer #118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family! #117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity #116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown #115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom #114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck #113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia #112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers #111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick #110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs #109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers #108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords #107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy #106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more #105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher #104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007 #103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007 #102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski #101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go #100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P. #99   Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel #98   Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate #97   Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more #96   Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults #95   Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng #94   Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday #93   Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta #92   Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs #91   Richard Powers discussion #90   William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare #89   William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more #88   Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo #87   Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers) #86   Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more #85   Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia #84   Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor #83   3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code #82   The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls #81   Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso #80   Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy #79   Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway #78   The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford #77   On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick #76   Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy #75   The Makioka Sisters #74    In Our Hearts We Were Giants #73    Joyce Dyer #72    Bill Robinson WWII story #71    Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald #70    On Reading #69    Nella Larsen, Romola #68    P.D. James #67    The Medici #66    Curious Incident,Temple Grandin #65    Ingrid Hughes on Memoir #64    Boyle, Worlds of Fiction #63    The Namesame #62    Honorary Consul; The Idiot #61    Lauren's Line #60    Prince of Providence #59    The Mutual Friend, Red Water #58    AkÉ, Season of Delight #57    Screaming with Cannibals #56    Benita Eisler's Byron #55    Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake #54    Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule #53    Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin #52    Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard #51    Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton #50    Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography #49    Caucasia #48    Richard Price, Phillip Pullman #47    Mid- East Islamic World Reader #46    Invitation to a Beheading #45    The Princess of Cleves #44    Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books #43    Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door #42    John Sanford #41    Isabelle Allende #40    Ed Myers on John Williams #39    Faulkner #38    Steven Bloom No New Jokes #37    James Webb's Fields of Fire #36    Middlemarch #35    Conrad, Furbee, Silas House #34    Emshwiller #33    Pullman, Daughter of the Elm #32    More Lesbian lit; Nostromo #31    Lesbian fiction #30    Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead #29    More William Styron #28    William Styron #27    Daniel Gioseffi #26    Phyllis Moore #25    On Libraries.... #24    Tales of the City #23    Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction #22    More on Why This Newsletter #21    Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin #20    Jane Lazarre #19    Artemisia Gentileschi #18    Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey #17    Arthur Kinoy #16    Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions #15    George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot #14    Small Presses #13    Gap Creek, Crum #12    Reading after 9-11 #11    Political Novels #10    Summer Reading ideas #9      Shelley Ettinger picks #8      Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn #7      About this newsletter #6      Maria Edgeworth #5      Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger #4      Homer Hickam and The Chosen #3      J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji #2      Chick Lit #1      About this newsletter