Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 234
June 15, 2024
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
MSW To Teach Novel Writing Online at NYU Fall 2024.
Fatima Shaik's Economy Hall Recommended by The New York Times
Danny Williams Adventures in Editing June 2024 Issue--
How Danny got a client's book accepted for publication and more.
A poem for early summer by Dreama Frisk
MSW was in "This Week in West Virginia History!"
New Commentary on MSW's novel about student sit-ins
at Columbia University in 1968!
CONTENTS
Back Issues
More Announcements
Book Reviews
In Memoriam: Recent Literary Deaths
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.
The Salt of the Geologic World by Jennifer Browne
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
Bandits by Elmore Leonard
Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard
Split Screen by Elmore Leonard
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Don't Tell 'Em You're Cold by Kathy Manley Reviewed by Martha Casey
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.
Some Kin by Marie Tyler McGraw Reviewed by Dreama Frisk
Fools Crow by James Welch Reviewed by Diane Simmons
NOTES ON THIS ISSUE #234
Diane Simmons and Dreama Frisk and Martha Casey review some fine books in this issue, and my own reading included more Elmore Leonard (chewy chocolate chip cookies! crunchy potato chips!--so sweet and salty and they go down so fast). I also review Robert Graves's I, Claudius books and the wonderful James McBride's The Good Lord Bird--my favorite so far of his novels. And there's more.
A happy thought: as I write this, summer's only a few days away, and I look around and say to myself, "Sixty or seventy years of reading, and I've hardly begun!"
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.
This one was recommended by Eddy Pendarvis after I reviewed McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store in issue 232. I think The Good Lord Bird is better than the grocery store novel. It's consistently strong, organized around the real history of John Brown's anti-slavery struggle, which can be viewed as heroic or as terrorism.
McBride is a genius of voice and language, and some of his work, brilliant as it is, tends to wander. No one is better at short bursts of vivid story telling, but in this novel, the outlines of history give his tales and voices and observations a perfect armature.
McBride''s narrator is a boy called Onion who is one of Brown's companions at Harpers Ferry
who makes it out alive. Onion, enslaved at the beginning, runs away with John Brown disguised as a girl, and pretty much stays in a dress for the whole novel. He is a delightfully practical survivor with no particular ideology except staying alive. His sort-of benefactor, Old John Brown, is crazy as a bedbug, but also oddly lovable and carelessly loving.
Onion doesn't quite get the concept of slavery--what he does get is how black and white treat each other. He spends three years with John Brown and his crew and learns from the inside about hiding the most important parts of oneself for safety.
He also learns a lot about killing: it's all around him, people getting "deadened," and he definitely doesn't want to be one of the smelly bodies littering Kansas and Virginia. He has a lukewarm, unformed plan to run away, even though he becomesfond of John Brown and his zealot sons. "The Old Man," according to Onion, is clearly a lunatic, and a fearsomely boring preacher, but at the same time he allows people to make their own decisions, and he never gives up on his mission.
It's a spectacularly engaging story, and a good analysis of the murderous old abolitionist from the point of view of the black people he wanted to free. My only complaint is that my hero Frederick Douglass doesn't come off very well.
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
This strange and lovely tall tale follows the life of Håkan, a Swedish immigrant boy who only wants to find his beloved older brother and ends up in Gold Rush California where he is held as a sex slave prisoner in a raw mining town. He escapes finally, grows to an unusual height and strength. He has adventures, is exploited by many more people, meets a few who help him, eventually kills a large group while trying to save a family that has been kind to him. Hunted for the killings, he is captured by an evil lawman who displays the prisoner on his way to be hung. One of the Sheriff's men finally helps him, and the two young men run away and live together for a happy while in the wilderness.
Diaz's American West has some of the vastness, human violence, and mythological quality of Cormac McCarthy's West in Blood Meridian, but Diaz is a much kinder novelist. He makes us yearn for some kind of happiness or at least relief for Håkan–and in the end, what Håkan gets is an opportunity to tell his tale at length to others.
This, perhaps, is as great a gift as a novelist can give a character.
Fools Crow by James Welch Reviewed by Diane Simmons
Fools Crow is an insecure but earnest young warrior of the Lone Eaters band, Blackfeet nation. The place is what we now call Montana, close to the Canadian border. The year is around 1870. To the east, the Civil War has ended, and, no longer preoccupied, white soldiers and settlers are flooding West. Even before we start, we know, pretty much, how the story will end. The wise older men of the band know that the napikwan, the whites, will, ultimately, be impossible to defeat or drive away. The napikwan are not necessarily strong fighters. One-on-one they are no match for the Blackfeet warriors, who've been trained since childhood to raid and steal from other bands, to fight and kill those they consider enemies, to "make them cry."
A string of scalps worn at the waist shows the fighting prowess of a warrior. Such deeds win him the trust of the leaders, respect of contemporaries, admiration of women. But despite the ferocity of this warrior culture, it is clear that the napikwan can't be stopped. There are too many of them, they are better armed, and they'll keep coming. As the older men understand: the only way to preserve their way of life- -at least for their children and grandchildren—is to treat with the whites, even though agreements are often broken. But the young warriors see that their elders are ultimately powerless, and no longer listen to their council.
And the mad violence perpetrated by young braves like Owl Child means that the chiefs' cautious negotiations are worthless. A massacre against white settlers gives the army the excuse to indiscriminately destroy as many Indians* as they can. As the book concludes, we see the U.S. Calvary ride into a camp of sleeping women and children, killing indiscriminately. The event is based on the 1870 Marias Massacre, which Welch, who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures, learned of from his grandmother, who was a witness that day. We know this story; it's how the West was won. But what we generally don't know, I think, is how it felt to be Fools Crow just before his world ended.
The young man—his name was White Man's Dog before brave actions in battle with the Crow band earned him a new name—needs to prove himself in hunting and in war. Only in this way will he become respected by the others, grow rich, own many horses, attain a fine lodge and many wives. At first, as I read—and I hope I can be forgiven this —I thought: "just like Succession." Well, the fighting, the killing, the pursuit of wealth is certainly there in this male-dominated culture.
But if Fools Crow is no stranger to violence and ambition, that is far from the sum of his existence. For a great deal of his experience is supported, informed, even dictated by a rich access of dreams, omens and visions, all of which are thought to impart to humans the knowledge and wishes of the spirit world. Fools Crow would never dream of disregarding these messages, though often they send him on dangerous quests. He is, it seems to me, rather unlike the whites, whose undoubted Christian beliefs appear not to inform their actions. The spirit world is, in addition, brought to Fools Crow by his intimacy with nature, where animals, birds and even insects are as sentient as humans when they wish to be, and sometimes step out of their expected role to beg for help, offer wisdom or mockingly criticize. Too, companionship, stories and teachings are offered by heavenly bodies.
Though Fools Crow—who is always on horseback— might appear to be travelling alone, the spirit world is always present. Finally, Fools Crow is fully intertwined with tribe and family. We see him safe and warm in his father's fine lodge, where, as the elders talk, the pipe is passed to the right and then the left; never passing the doorway. We see him stepping up to hunt for another family, when their man is lost to war. We see his astonishment at the power of sexual passion when he takes a wife, Red Paint, and his tender amazement when she is with child, carrying a little creature that its parents-to-be call "butterfly."
The world that Fools Crow is losing has been, in many ways, brutal, dangerous and precarious, with much fighting and killing, sometimes darkened by superstition. James Welch does not care to pretend otherwise. To do so would be an insult to memory.
But it is also a world so steeped in spirituality, so immersed in nature, so beyond anything the napikwan can imagine, that—as Fool's Crow sees in a dream—with their ascendency, the life of his people can only be a shadow of its former self.
*I adopt Welch's usage.
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
First of all, don't miss the interesting afterword interview with Philip Roth and the discussion about the original title versus the American title.
Second, Levi says up front that he won't in this book be emphasizing the horrors of the death camps (the
vast majority of the people arrested with him were immediately gassed and cremated), but rather the quotidian suffering of the work camps. This turns out to be horrible enough: some more or less healthy men put to strangely brutal and often irrationally useless work. They are not fed enough to live on, and face frequent "selections" when numbers of them are pulled out to be gassed.
Weirdly, there is an infirmary where some people actually recover as they rest and eat relatively well. Levi is in the infirmary with scarlet fever when the Nazis start retreating from the Russians. They take the healthy prisoners with them, and most of them did not survive. The people in the infirmary are simply left to their own devices. For ten days they find food and organize their own lives, and then the Russians arrive, and a goodly number of them eventually get home.
It's a story about infinitely receding personal agency: the lack of camaraderie, the brutality of other prisoners. The insanity of the Nazis. Everything is chance: where you are at a given moment, whether you have some useful skill, are you hard enough to push in front of the weaker ones.
It's an essential text, and the mystery to me is that it is, in the end, it is not depressing--it's one possibility, one extreme, one experience.
Don't Tell 'Em You're Cold by Kathy Manley reviewed by Martha Casey: A Review and a Coincidence
On the cover of a memoir, I read recently, Don't Tell 'Em You're Cold, by Katherine Manley, is the intriguing picture of a
sweet-looking little girl with a shy smile and wearing a very dirty dress. I decided to read it, and I could hardly put it down.
Kathy's father is crippled, having lost part of a leg in a train accident and fingers in another accident. This meant that he needed Kathy to help him. They would go to the tipple where coal cars were loaded. When the cars moved, a few lumps of coal would drop to the ground. Kathy would run to pick them up and her father would load them into The Purple Goose, their old car. Later, during the winter, her father would sell the coal. He received a relief check of about ninety dollars a month, but he was cut off from relief because one could not earn money if on relief. As a result, hoping to qualify again in a different place, the family moved from their two-room shack on Paint Creek to a coal camp in Holden. Relief was restored, but it was not enough. In order for the family to survive, her father begged in front of G.C. Murphy's store in Logan while selling pencils. Kathy would stay with him.
This story began to sound familiar. In my homeroom in Logan High School, I once had a student named Kathy whose father had a peg leg, and who was responsible for getting her two younger siblings off to school each morning. She also was our cheery, popular homeroom president. Could it be the same Kathy?
I looked the book up on the computer and read about the author. I found her “bio” in the back of the book and some pictures.
Yes, Katherine Manley is Kathy Evans. Her father was John Evans.
Having read this book, I am asking myself, “Why wasn't I more sensitive?” Kathy was proud and never indicated that she needed help, but I never discussed her home situation with her. I hope after reading this book, I will try harder to show love and kindness to all and to be aware how much we all need to be caring and moved to lend a helping hand.
Don't Tell 'Em You're Cold was a finalist in the 2024 American Legacy Book Wards in two categories, nonfiction narrative and autobiography/memoir. Also see another review in Issue #205.
Bandits by Elmore Leonard
New Orleans during the Nicaraguan Contra/Sandinista days. The story includes a letter from Ronald Reagan
complimenting a brutal, sometime Contra colonel as a freedom fighter.
The main character, Jack Delaney, is another of Leonard's charming ne'er-do-wells: a retired (by virtue of a prison sentence) cat burglar, presently driving a hearse for his brother-in-law and living in a small apartment at the funeral parlor. A fair amount of the story takes place at the funeral parlor, in the embalming room and the viewing rooms.
The plot revolves around a caper by the brutal Contra and some associates to raise a lot of money from rich Americans for the Contras and then steal it. Among the colonel's many crimes was slaughtering a lot of people in a leper colony, witnessed by a nun, now an ex-nun, who wants to punish him and take the money to rebuild the leper colony.
Jack is pretty much ignorant of current affairs let alone history. He has to be schooled by the gorgeous ex-nun, whose father is one of the right wing rich men being asked for donations. There's also an old girlfriend of Jack's who got him put in prison not really on purposes, and a couple of ex-con friends of Jack. Other assorted characters include a Miskito Indian assassin who has no idea what's going on. There are a lot of issues of trust, and who is going to help whom, and shoot whom.
And a good time was had by all.
Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard
This 1998 novel one is part western, one part crime, and one part historical novel--Spanish American war: the sinking of the Maine, smuggling guns to Cuban guerrillas, evil Spanish "dons," bad leadership and frequent racism from the North Americans. There's a fair amount of torture and execution revenge, a leprosy hospital (an ongoing theme of Elmore's? See Bandits above). The Girl is a kept woman, which came about as a sort of lark, but she and the cowboy hero fall hard in apparently true love for each other. She's a Leonard girl, at least post-second wave Feminism Leonard girl: beautiful of course, falls for the main character, clever and ready for anything-- riding, shooting, stealing. Leonard goes into everyone's head and always manages to make his thugs and assassins interesting or at least amusing. There's a lot of history slipped in, frequently by a journalist trying to cover it all. He makes amusing asides about how to put what he's seeing in just the right words.
Split Screen by Elmore Leonard
It's not my fault... I was definitely finished reading Elmore Leonard for a while. I had put a hold on the e-book version of this some time ago, and it suddenly became available and I just sort of lost control and the next thing I knew, I was on my screened porch with a glass of iced tea and my Kindle and I was halfway through--
Split Screen is set half in Detroit and half in Florida and has a typical Elmore Leonard love affair with a pleasant lean cowboy-style Detroit homicide detective and a bright good sport of a woman, plus a wonderfully amoral and crude right-wing ex-cop named Walter and a sociopathic rich guy who has just discovered a hobby that actually doesn't bore him--killing people.
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
This 2023 best seller was my husband's birthday gift to me. I started reading and went wham through it, very engaged, very entertained. It moves fast, as Lehane's work usually does, and this one has just enough socio-historic context to give it some resonance.
This context is the busing/integration crisis in Boston in 1974-76. Most of it takes place among poor project families, Irish American, in South Boston. They are frankly racist, violent, and deeply clannish, but not entirely wrong that they are being used to achieve something (school integration) that will not require any discomfort for affluent people in the Boston suburbs. The black people in segregated Roxbury aren't thrilled with the situation either, and the death of a young black man in the subway sets off the plot.
The main characters are Bobby, an Irish-American cop from Dorchester, not South Boston, and Mary Pat, a woman who is the product of a public housing project and an enormous violent Southie family. She works in a nursing home, but street-fights better than anyone else who shows up in the novel.
There are two murders early on, both young people, one black and one white. Clearly, but never too heavy-handedly, Lehane is setting up who are the real victims here. There are a lot of other missing young people too: soldiers from Vietnam, drug over-doses, etc. There are also some fraught cross-race relationships. Then,about two thirds in, Mary Pat goes rogue. She feeds evidence to the cop and takes justice into her own hands.
My reservations aren't so much about this book as about its genre: all of what interests me most begins to fall away around the revenge story: Death Wish Charles Bronson in drag--no, that isn't fair. Lehane makes Mary Pat feel real. And I was definitely excited at the end: my reading speed increased: How would Mary Pat's private war turn out? But in the end, too much for me is about what certain types of bullets do to the human body.
There's a nice epilog in which Bobby's beloved young son has a bicycle accident that breaks his leg in several places and lands him in the hospital. He's going to recover, but Bobby realizes how vulnerable even a well-guarded kid is--that all of us and our beloveds are in constant danger from human evil, but also from everyday accidents.
The Salt of the Geologic World by Jennifer Browne
This chapbook from Bottlecap Press has 16 lovely poems built of natural observations and powered by the human body striving for its place in the universe:
Maybe to love you is
to love this landscape,
or to love this landscape
is to love you.... (13)
That fragment touches some of how the poems embed the human in the natural, but Browne is every more precise in what she sees: the "chubby,/dust-fluffed" house sparrow under the café table (3), the moth banging the window. snakes mating, as the poet attempts to join herself physically to the world she is a part of. She is often fierce, almost savage, as in the wonderful image
I don't know what to do with all my wanting,
but rub myself along the surfaces of things... (7)
The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani
My 8 year old granddaughter went crazy for this book--reading the whole thing in a day or two. So I decided, as a responsible grandma who wants to have a topic of conversation with her granddaughter, to read it too. Wikipedia says of it, among other things (this is the first volume, published in 2013 and labelled as children's fantasy) that it is about best friends who are pulled away from home to attend the "School for Good and Evil, an enchanted institution where children are trained to become fairy tale heroes or villains."
The premise is that the friends, witchy Agatha and tooth-ache sweet Sophie, are placed in the wrong schools. This is a great premise, and pretty obvious from the beginning to an adult reader anyhow. that Agatha, in spite of black dresses and bad skin and a home in the graveyard cares very much for Sophie and will do anything for her, while Sophie is pretty clearly a classic user.
Anyhow, it's lively and clever, but for my taste, events and invention tumble by so fast that there's no time to savor anything let alone do real character building. Does that only mean I don't fully appreciate it because I'm old? Maybe, but other y.a. and kidlit have pleased me a lot--I'm thinking of Harry Potter and Hunger Games. The latter is even more vicious and has all the usual love dilemmas, but it worked as science fiction for me. This one feels thin, frantic, no time to catch your breath, and terribly dependent on fractured fairy tale style and parody.
Yes, it's funny that the princesses are obsessed with grooming and catching a prince, and the princes are musclebound dunderheads, but Chainani seems to love the accoutrements of his cleverness more than his world or his characters. In the end, writers like Suzanne Collins and J.K. Rowling take their worlds deeply seriously, and I think that makes the difference.
Well, the good news is that Shira didn't like the second book in the series, so I'm released from the necessity of going on.
I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
I don't hear these excellent 1930's British novels mentioned often--there was the t.v. series fifty years ago, but I never watched it. Except for the orgies, is the Roman
empire perhaps cconsidered old-fashioned? Graves, of course, grew up at a time when British boys' education was centered on the Latin language and Roman history. When I was growing up, Roman history was mostly skipped over unless it was being spoken of as a kind of foil to the flowering of Christianity.
The odd to me is that Claudius's voice feels timeless. I can't speak to the world building (most of the history is fairly accurate, I believe), except to say that it feels modern, but without anachronisms.
For me, then, these two, really one book, are perfect historical fiction: a faint whiff of the archaic, but also a window in, an interpretation. I ended up thinking I knew something about Roman history, which may or may not be true, but Claudius is a wonderful guide to his life and times.
And his family. Mercy upon us, what a crew--especially Claudius's nephew Caligula, of course, but also his cold mother who doesn't like having a partially disabled son, and his grandmother Livia, who, according to Claudius/Robert Graves, really ran Augustus's empire.
This was written during the rise of the Nazis, also the early days of Stalin, so the study of what it's like to be in the presence of an absolute and probably insane dictator is fascinating and terrifying.
I liked the women characters too, not just powerful ones like Grandma Livia and Claudius's super slut wife, but also the prostitute he hires, Calpurnia when he's between wives, who helps him through bad times and saves his life.
The second book, Claudius the God, is in large part about aging. Claudius gets tired. He has less interest in good government, and slips into some dictatorial executions of his own as well as silly public entertainments. He keeps his ideal of a Roman republic to the end though, even when everyone else has given up on it, and names nasty Nero as his heir in hopes of shocking the empire back into being a republic. He marries Nero's mother because she can run the empire while he rests.
He stays an attractive character, and his final skepticism and disappointment are sad.
Anyhow, highly recommended, and not quite like anything else you're likely to read.
Some Kin by Marie Tyler McGraw Reviewed by Dreama Frisk
In Some Kin, Marie Tyler McGraw uses all her experience as an academic historian teaching in colleges – two of which were historically African American – to write an engrossing and splendidly written family history concentrated on four families over four centuries played out against a background of time and change. In
addition, each of the chapters follows intimately members of one of the families and their world. Eventually every piece fits together like a puzzle. You will feel close to these families as they share their stories of struggle, joy, revelation, tragedy, and triumph. The title, "Some Kin," comes from an inscription written by Marie's grandfather on the bottom of a photograph taken in 1911 by an early Brownie camera. He could not keep track of all his wife's cousins. As Marie warns, the families come dragging their own mysteries and dramas with them. This includes her sister, Crissy, and her sister-in-law Alicia. It certainly includes Marie as she begins in the first chapter, Wheeling Island. "Johnny Hunter drowned in the Ohio River. I heard someone screaming outside our house. Johnny's mother was walking up and down South Huron Street, and Derry Smith's mother was holding her up. Johnny was the youngest Hunter boy and was in my first-grade class." Then, there is are comments about Johnny's father made by her mother and her aunt about a neighbor, still in Germany after World War II, "He'd rather live with the Nazis than those Hunter kids," her mother said. "Maybe he's got a fraulein over there," Aunt Marion said. Marie is teaching her readers all the time: "I am not interested in the genealogy that results in long strings of "begats" or hundreds or thousands of distant cousins." Instead, she uses every possible device known to writers: a preface, an introduction, chapter titles, chapters notes, notes on sources, and an appendix. They are full and even elaborate. In addition there are, snapshots, and scribbled cake recipe. Notes on Sources for all ten chapters especially connects the reader to the main text. I frequently used the chapter notes as a reader and a reviewer. It is not like anything anyone has written before. She has created a genre unto itself. It reads like fiction. This would come as no surprise to Marie who planned it all. Always there the clarity of a remarkable purpose. From her background as an historian, she creates the freedom to connect as she moves through the history of four families. Marie is like that herself. Over a life- time of friendship, we come together easily after long absences.
2 All chapters have titles, like Inventing Tylers. In particular, one chapter not only has a title, but sets up the chapter with a note: ". . .according to a statement of Elisha Tyler's, "that during the early settlement, of New England three brothers named Nathaniel, Abraham, and Job coming from England landed at Plymouth and after a little delay seated themselves on a log, partook of their refreshments, arose, embraced and kissed each other, then each went his own way, and it saith not that they ever again met." signed Jessica Tyler Austin. As she follow her plan, Marie uses two chapters to move through the worlds of Inventing the Tylers and Beezaleels. It is possible to follow one member and his world. I followed Roger Tyler who died in 1796 and his grandchildren, Bezaleel 11, and Bezaleel III. Bezaleel II died on June 29, 1796 from drinking potash. As if she knew him first hand, Marie tells us, "he may have confused the liquid with water. . . and decided he had seen enough of the world." Describing a boundary line on a map, she writes about how the southwest corner of Pennsylvania presses into West Virginia like a sharp elbow into a pillow. Frequent travelers in this area will instantly remember it. This is a place I fondly remember. Marie and I with our spouses met for dinner at a restaurant there. Some Kin not a culmination of Marie's career as an historian but an addition. It is a daring book you can give yourself to.
GOD and the Catbird
That gray catbird,
Rufous under the tail of the male,
Knows where to find me.
The "meow" call has no bearing
Upon my hesitant soul;
Catbird just flutters down
From his summer haunt
Between the fence and the redbud tree,
The perky bend of the head
With a centered black stripe;
The snappy eyes,
So inquisitive.
Look at me and waits
Knows and knows that to standby
Is simply enough.At hint of autumn,
Catbird and covey leave,
Having born out their summer stay.
They never promised
To be with me in winter.Next spring, one lovely day in late May,
When I am in despair
In the garden at weeds and such,
Catbird or a cousin,
Return to find me
Pondering this earthly adventure.
Dreama Wyant Frisk
GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Another wonderful piece by Hannah Brown in The Jerusalem Post: "Dies Irae."
Suzanne McConnell interviews Jason Baum on Bellevue Literary Review Youtube.
Fatima Shaik's nonfiction Economy Hall is recommended by The New York Times!
Sign up for Kelly Watt's weekly log of books recommended. Go to her web page (and learn about her books) then scroll to the bottom.
Adventures in Editing with Danny Williams Editor and Writer Danny Williams tells amusing tales of editing--and passes on some serious hints for writers at the same time!
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Six Writers on Writers' Block
Alice McDermott in Literary Hub on what to say when the future of your writing career looks bleak. Thanks to Suzanne McConnell.
For marketing your books and for all indie-publishers, take a look at some free (and paid) tools at Kindlepreneur. Free QR codes among other things.
From Jane Friedman-- a chart for writers of historical fiction and the merely curious: who was alive and how old at a given date in history: Parallel Lives.
IN MEMORIAM
George Lies
George was one of the great gentlemen of West Virginia Letters. Learn more about him here.
Alice Munro, Nobel Prize Winning
Master of the Short Story Dies
See the New York Times obituary here.
Literary Hub has links to 25 Alice Munro
stories to read online for free.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
MSW Teaching Novel Writing Online at NYU Fall 2024.
Fatima Shaik's Economy Hall Recommended by The New York Times!
Danny Williams Adventures in Editing June Issue
MSW was in "This Week in West Virginia History!"
New Commentary on Trespassers!
Jayne Anne Phillips wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction!
Read Jonathan Corcoran at Literary Hub on what he learned from her books and from classes with her. Also, read my essay about her work in Appalachian Heritage "Seduced into Consciousness" here.
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.
Jane Hicks' new book of poetry The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from arevealingperspective. Images of stark examination rooms, theravages 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.
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 235
July 30, 2024
Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
Read this newsletter in its permanent location
Ilyon Woo; Ellen and William Craft; Jamaica Kinkaid; Nadine Gordimer; and James Lee Burke
MSW Teaching Novel Writing Online at NYU Fall 2024
BOOKS ABOUT APPALACHIA:
I'm a fan of Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow about the destruction of a subsistence life style in Appalachia--which was not the same as poverty.
One place to start learning about Appalachia is Barbara Kingsolver's article from August 2023 in the The New York TImes, "Read Your Way Through Appalachia." (She even tells you how to pronounce it).
Some recommended nonfiction includes:
Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudill
Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers by Ron Eller
Uneven Ground by Ron Eller
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. (Read an excerpt here: “Hillbillies Need No Elegy.”
At Home in the Heart of Appalachia by John O'Brien.There is also a huge amount of wonderful poetry and fiction by people like Silas House, Mary Lee Settle, Denton Loving, Crystal Wilkinson, Harriet Arnow, James Still, Denise Giardina (don't miss her novel of the mine wars Storming Heaven)-- I really can't start in naming specific books and writers, though, or I'll never finish. Just let me say this is a powerful literature that says much more and much more richly about my home region than Mr. Vance's tendentious memoir.
Phyllis Wilson Moore has an excellent list of Young Adult Appalachian books here.
Also, check out Moore's syllabus for a course in Appalachian literature. Moore is notable in her lists for including the many ethnic groups other than Scots-Irish who live in the region.
Here's one list people are using, and here is another.
A few more to recommend: Vic Depta's Brother and Sister: a Memoir; Deborah Clearman's recent novel is The Angels of Sinkhole County. And oh yes everal of my books set in West Virginia (Oradell at Sea, Their Houses, Higher Ground, In the Mountains of America and Out of the Mountains).
CONTENTS
Back Issues
Announcements
Book Reviews
Reviews of Four More from Great Short Books
by Kenneth C. DavisShort Takes
Books About Appalachia
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.Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke
The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds
Hijacked American Conservatism by Joe Conason reviewed by Joe ChumanBecause of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
The Searcher by Tana French
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Margaret, The Rose of Goodwood by Donna Meredith Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
My Life in Water by Cat Pleska
The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's
Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times by Ilyon WooMaster Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
NOTES FOR ISSUE #235
As I write this, President Biden has announced he will not run for a second term and has endorsed Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, the Republicans have nominated J.D. Vance for vice-president. This latter circumstance has set off a lot of my Appalachian writer friends discussing again on social media what to read about Appalachia instead of Mr. Vance's book.
Most of these Appalachian writers and teachers have been highly critical for years of Mr. Vance's stereotyping of regional poverty and even of his claim to be Appalachian. They have also been offering a ton of wonderful suggestions for better choices in reading for a deeper and more balanced presentation of our region. Take a look at some suggestions here.
I mentioned online, tangentially to this discussion, that when current events weigh too heavily on me, I tend to read some straight history or well-researched historical novels to remind me that, no, this is probably NOT the worst moment in human history.
My friend Eddy Pendarvis (professor emerita, poet, and writer) talked about what she reads when she's feeling self-pity. I hadn't thought of these feelings and complaints as self-pity, but it's true that many of us often wail, Oh poor me! Oh poor nation! Oh, poor world going to hell in a handcart! Which it may well be doing, but at the same time, we need to clear away the cobwebs and try to see where we are. Historical perspective helps, but so do models of individual struggle.
One book I would suggest about a really bad time and place is Timothy Snyder's The Bloodlands, which concerns 14 million murders in central Europe (Poland, Ukraine, and more) between 1932 and 1945. This book surely reminds us that it could be worse, and indeed has been. To narrow the focus to the United States alone, consider what it would have been like to live in post-Reconstruction times in the South, in the late 1870's and after, when the American troops were withdrawn and the so-called "redeemers" took back power and terrorized the formerly enslaved people with night riders and voter suppression, lynching and the Ku Klux Klan.
Eddy then suggested an antidote to self-pity. She wrote, "Endurance: Shackleon's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing is about Shackleton and his crew. [It] details the horrible conditions they ALL lived through in Antarctica before Shackleton and two other men from the crew made it (across ice and up and down cliffs) to a whaling station and were able to get a ship to rescue the rest of the crew who had waited for three or four months while the three trekked to semi-civilization. It cured my self-pity for sure, so I can understand why reading and learning about the suffering of other times and places makes you feel less depressed about how things are here and now."
Being informed, going deeper, going broader--isn't that what reading is all about?
BOOK REVIEWS
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The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother's Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times by Ilyon Woo
Well, that subtitle certainly obviates the need for a summary of the footnoteless but highly researched book. The book began as a chapter in Woo's Ph.D. thesis, but it is highly entertaining, written with just enough speculation about motives and feelings to keep you emotionally involved. A lot of the book, to my surprise, turned out to be about how Eunice Chapman learned to master early nineteenth century lobbying and publicity in her long battle to get her children back.
The setting is the first half of the nineteenth century around Albany, New York, and a few other places where the Shaker sect
had villages. The Shakers have always fascinated me with their female founders and balanced male-female leadership, their celibacy and dancing to rid their bodies of carnality; their beautiful farms and handicrafts; and, in this book, their strange and fanatical dogmas.
Eunice's husband takes his and Eunice's children (who essentially belong to the father in the law of the time) and joins the Shakers. Eunice first tries living with them, but leaves, and then spends five years writing attacks on the Shakers, getting law makers to support her and eventually to pass a law granting her a divorce. In the end, she participates in organizing a near-mob to put pressure on a community of New Hampshire Shakers to turn her children over to her. She finally more or less steals one child and negotiates for the others.
Among many turns and struggles is that, after five years, the teenage boy and two younger girls don't want to leave the Shakers. This is amazing and crucial, and of course naturally what would happen to kids–told their mother deserted them, treated well by the Shakers, unaware of the controversy around them. One of the best parts of the narrative for me is how Eunice manages to convince them gradually to come back into the World. She was, needless to say, a force of nature, and then, once she had the kids, she pretty much left the public eye.
The practical ramifications of patriarchy as it was lived in the early nineteenth century United States was that a woman becomes "dead to the law" as an individual (as Woo likes to repeat) when she marries. New York state politics and the politics of the Shaker sect are also well-described. This was refreshing and shocking, and also a reminder that there have indeed been changes for the better in history.
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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
Another, new Ilyon Woo book--also terrific! For me, it wasn't quite as amazing as Great Divorce, possibly because the latter was brand new to me, whereas I'd heard of Ellen and William Craft, who are part of the well-documented run-up to the Civil War: there's lots about slavery, the Great Compromise, Webster, Calhoun, Clay, the Underground Railroad, the Dred Scott decision, etc.
Still, Woo does an amazing job pulling together the story of the Crafts, and including their their later life as well as a detailed time line of their escape from slavery. I was especially interested in the Black communities in Boston and other parts of the North and how they protected the escaped people. Also, there is a new figure to me, the Crafts' friend and co-worker William Wells Brown, also escaped from slavery and a prolific showman and writer. The story of how hard the Crafts worked to get an education is inspiring, as is how they returned to the South after the war with their several children, and tried to make a farm/school for freed children. This was burnt out once by "night riders" and attacked with lawsuits.
Woo seems disappointed to have to share that the final years of the Crafts were a mix of successes and loss including William's time in Africa and how he was tricked when a king's debt to him was paid in slaves who he felt obligated to free, leaving him destitute. On the other hand, Ellen managed to reunite with her mother, and one of the Craft descendents eventually sat-in at a lunch counter in the 1960's.
Woo is especially good on intelligent, informed speculation about why Ellen Craft acted as she did–when she was willing to speak in public and when not, for example. The story is worth a Netflix series--and I'm sure negotiations are underway.
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My Life in Water by Cat Pleska
Cat Pleska's second memoir is sharp, compact, and organized around encounters with water. We range widely, in rough chronological order, from how her young aunt saves her as an infant from drowning in a bath to why she never learned to swim. She visits a fortune teller who explains the meaning, sort of, of being
a water sign. There is a beloved grandmother also saves her from drowning, this time from fluid in her lungs. The grandmother reappears throughout, as does her aunt. The aunt is always close to Pleska's mother, both in location and in emotion. Her mother is a woman of uncertain stability who marries a man who is extremely handsome, but alcoholic.
The incidents move forward in a way that is natural and emotionally touching but without any sentimentality or self-pity. It gives us one writer's origins–her family, her education, her development as a writer.
One of the fascinating threads through the memoir is how Pleska always feels loved, in spite of her mother's unhappiness and her father's lapses. In some ways, this is the most remarkable thing about the book: how a clearly troubled family life is neither unusual nor the deciding factor in a child's life.
Pleska's resilience doesn't make her a hero, but it is part of what makes her increasingly strong and self-possessed. This is a remarkable and uplifting story: there is no whining, no highlighting of victimhood. The little girl who becomes a writer doesn't ever seem to think she was dealt a bad hand. She sees her hand as rich and real and thoroughly worth playing.
And meanwhile, there is the flow of life and water: a near-disastrous white water rafting excursion; a bad choice of starter home for her and her husband that they struggle to repair and make livable. In this section, about the young marrieds, she refers to them as the "fools" rather than by name. It gives a nice folkloric tone to the story.
There's no magic, of course--this is emphatically the real world-- but there are powerful, vivid night dreams that give an ambiance to what is in the foreground, which is Pleska's ambition and determination. She writes, she teaches, she travels. Each short section moves us farther along a life-in-process.
May Cat Pleska's continue long and with many more books!
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Margaret, The Rose of Goodwood by Donna Meredith reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
The story of Margaret, the Rose of Goodwood is a Cinderella tale with serious complications. It opens, as such tales do, with a scene in the life from which a poor girl is rescued. Margaret Wilson—the “rose” referred to
in the title—is working in a department store when William Cabot Hodges, a well-to-do, older man, happens into the store and is smitten with her beauty and kindness. He immediately sets about courting her and wins her consent to marriage, despite her misgivings about this prince’s age—he was almost a quarter of a century older than the eighteen-year old girl.
At first, Margaret and William enjoy life as a married couple. Hodges sees himself as a worldly wise, benevolent mentor and lover sharing his knowledge and experience with an inexperienced, voluptuous young naïf. For her part, Margaret enjoyed acquiring social graces (becoming a “rose”), having expensive new clothes, being part of Tallahassee’s high society, and treating her family to gifts and experiences she couldn’t have offered had she said “no” and followed the life path open to most working-class women. She benefitted from the marriage in many ways; but, as Meredith’s novel makes clear, she paid dearly for the benefits.
Hodges—a popular political figure who would serve as a state senator from the early 1920s until his death—was known for his devotion to Tallahassee and its betterment; but he was also known as a womanizer, a trait that carried into his marriage and brought sadness and embarrassment to his wife, especially after their early happiness wore off and new realities set in. Among those realities was the couple’s disappointment that Margaret couldn't get pregnant. She had anticipated with excitement the time when she and Will would be “a family complete,” and she “could rock our precious baby in my arms.” Their marriage suffered, and they consoled themselves in their own ways—if he hadn’t done so earlier in the marriage, Hodges now turned to other women, while Margaret lavished love on her nieces and nephews. She also turned to food for comfort and pleasure, a habit her husband deplored and mocked.
Margaret, The Rose of Goodwood isn’t just a fictionalized portrait of a real woman with an interesting life. It’s a portrait of a marriage—two marriages, in fact. Despite their disappointment in each other, Margaret and Will stayed together until his death in 1940 at age 64. Like many couples of the time, they appear to have lived out a kind of truce as a better option than divorce. Just entering her forties, she stayed on at Goodwood, and, eight years later, remarried—this time to someone several years younger than she was.
Thomas Hood, an army captain stationed at nearby Dale Mabry airfield, was one of several officers who rented cottages on the Goodwood estate. A talented artist and cook, Hood courted Margaret through more conventional means than had his predecessor, and at a much slower pace. When he became her second husband, the power relations were reversed from those of Margaret and her first husband. Before she would agree to marry him, Margaret lay down a condition—she would hold the purse strings to the inheritance from Hodges—a proviso indicating her self-confidence and perhaps a distrust of men, inspired by her first husband’s often caddish behavior. Tom agreed to her condition, but came to resent her reluctance to spend money in ways he thought she should, including on the upkeep of Goodwood.
Mostly told in the first-person voice by Margaret herself, the story is a kind of self-portrait. However, brief perspectives on Margaret and her marriages as told through other first-person accounts—those of her two husbands, as well as friends and family—highlight different dimensions of Margaret and those close to her. Writing about their honeymoon, William Cabot Hodges says Margaret was “peach pretty and deliciously ripe,” “fresh and unaffected.” His narrative about their first weeks of marriage ends, “Honestly, she is just so damn cute, she leaves me breathless.” Tom Hood, only a year into his and Margaret’s marriage, speaks unflatteringly of her as stiff and defensive, like “a marionette whose strings have been jerked upright” whenever he urges her to spend money on repairs to Goodwood. Nevertheless, he concludes that they have a good marriage—“not perfect. But whose is?”
The author also offers a compelling portrait of Goodwood—one of Tallahassee’s oldest and finest estates, It invites readers onto the estate and into its antebellum buildings and elegant gardens—now open to the public, thanks in part to Tom Hood’s dedication to the place and his vision of its value to the Tallahassee community. Addenda to the story include photographs, notes on the historical accuracy of the novel, and a thumbnail history of Goodwood, as well as a brief explanation of Meredith’s interest in writing the novel, an interest that includes the fact that Tom Hood, who lived at Goodwood for nearly half a century, was from Clarksburg, West Virginia, where Meredith grew up.
Herself a transplant from West Virginia to Florida, Donna Meredith has given readers a story about the complexities that gender, money, and power can bring to marriage and how those complexities played out in a historic setting. The title of her book, Margaret, Rose of Goodwood, could be the title of a fairy tale. Instead, in lovely irony, it offers real-life drama that educates and entertains.
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FOUR MORE FROM GREAT SHORT BOOKS: A YEAR OF READING--BRIEFLY
I am with great enthusiasm continuing to read books suggested by Kenneth C. Davis in his study of short books Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly. The books are mostly but not all fiction. Often I am already familiar with the authors and/or have read the books in the past, but many others I somehow missed. They are all worthwhile--a great resource.
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
This Kincaid book is a real knockout. The blurbs and reviews I took a look at made it sound at once more tragic and more conventional that I
found it. Yes, it is a coming of age story, but it's about sex more than romance. The real love of Lucy's life is her mother. Lucy insists that in her culture everyone knows men have no morals, and that's why they need laws, which they change when it suits them.
The book was published in 1990 after Kincaid was well into her career as a New Yorker writer and staffer. It's supposedly highly autobiographical, but what I care about is the 19 year old Lucy's learning curve as she comes to an unnamed city that is pretty definitely New York from an arid 12 mile by 8 mile Caribbean island which is pretty definitely Antigua. She is working as an au pair who is supposed to be studying nursing at night, and preparing to support her family back home.
Her observations about cultural and economic differences are brilliant, and her character has a lot of moxie. She observes herself as well as her employers and makes judgements and decisions about the people around her and her own future. Her most intimate relationships in the present of the novel are her employer, Mariah, and a young woman who eventually becomes her roommate, Peggy. She's often annoyed with them and annoying to them, but carries an interesting conviction that any break between her and her woman friends is always going to be temporary.
She is a wonderful character to ride--not smooth or easy or even always admirable except in courage and honesty. She is often angry and bitter with youthful disappointment. Toward the end, she claims her name comes from Lucifer. She refuses to open her mother's letters and at the end reveals why she is so angry with her mother. It makes a strong closure to the story.
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Here are a couple of other views of the book from Thulani Davis at the The New York Times and from Kirkus.
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The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
This small novel scooped me up and engulfed me almost like Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, only not for quite as long. It is an interior story that takes us into the consciousness of Leda, a professor of English, whose young adult daughters have recently left Italy to live in Canada with their father, her ex-husband. Leda is alone on vacation at the beach, preparing classes for the coming term.
But of course, she isn't really alone: she observes people in town and on the beach, particularly a mother daughter pair and their large Neapolitan family that reminds her of her own rejected roots. By the week-end, the men of the Neapolitan family show up, and Leda is repelled and attracted even more. The little girl gets lost, and Leda returns her to the family. The little girl loses her grungy doll, and that becomes a heavily laden plot element for the rest of the book.
We are constantly learning more about Leda, of course, as she observes the others, particularly how at one point in her life, feeling smothered by motherhood, she left her daughters. She returned to them, and is deeply entwined with them, but also at some level still estranged.
An impulsive action of Leda's centers the rest of the story, although I realized as I write this that neither plot nor even psychological insight is the real point.
Ferrante offers a kind of book, one that is a practice. You get inside it and let it do its work on you, which you feel profoundly, but may never make complete sense of.
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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Short and stunning: a disastrous wedding night in 1962 or so with excursions back into the main
characters' pasts, a slight hint of what might have gone wrong, never made explicit, and just so awful and beautifully told. I haven't read a lot of McEwan (who was apparently called "Ian Macabre" for his early psychological thriller/horror work), but I really admired Atonement and should probably reread it. This one painfully reminds us of our failures to reach out or accept others reaching out.
The largest part of it goes back and forth between the two principals, Florence and Edward, very even-handedly. McEwan does an excellent job of treating Florence's sexual repulsion, giving a probable but only hinted at reason for it.
It ends with a summary of the rest of Edward's life, which puts the whole story in sad perspective.
McEwan makes good on the use of his alternating close third person to get at what's going on inside the characters, but also where there are forks in their roads, and how they make their choices.
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July's People by Nadine Gordimer
July's People is a work of dense and sensual speculation in which a white South African family experiences the shock of losing their home and all their comfort, cleanliness, and privileges. Nadine Gordimer's 1981 novel is an alternative history, published almost ten years before Nelson Mandela got out of prison. In her novel,
there is a shooting revolution going on in South Africa, and the white Smales family, in danger of their lives, is taken to the home village of their long-time black employee, July.
Nobody is happy, least of all July's wife and mother and the other people in his home village. The white people are superficially liberal, but the adults, especially the husband, fall apart with the loss of control of his car and then his gun. The children, on the other hand, do just fine, playing with the local children. The little white girl falls in love with a peer and they run around holding hands and giggling and enjoying life.
It is a small book, but incredibly dense with the smells and itches of living in the mud sided thatch houses. The woman, Maureen, has to figure out how to use and wash rags for her period, and what to eat and where to excrete. One of the things it captures, I think, is how refugees spend their days trying to get through the most mundane and basic tasks. This sense detail is one of several great strengths of this book.
Other great strengths are the in-depth explorations of Maureen's relationship with her husband, and with July. I kept trying to figure how Gordimer would end it. At first I assumed it would end in a blood bath or the white family being simply taken away by black revolutionaries. The end is, in fact, ambiguous, but not hopeless at least partly because the Africans are hardly monolithic in their purposes. The people in the village are grumpy and not eager to have whites around, but they disagree about what to do and which side they are on.
July generally makes sure the Smales are treated well, even, we learn later on, giving them the use of his mother's house. The end is ambiguous, as it would have to be honestly. The novel is perhaps really about imagining what it is to be a refugee. And that is absolutely up-to-the-moment contemporary.
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This would be great for a class or book group to read in conjunction with the two I read last summer from the point of view of African women: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga and Zensele: A Letter for My Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire. In Gordimer's book July's "women," seem totally focused on him--his wife and his mother's relationship is touched on, but compared to the two I mentioned, the relationships among the women feel silent or missing.
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Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
This was considered a break-through in kid lit when it was published in 2000, and I liked it a lot. Opal is a new girl in a town in Northern Florida, where her dad is a preacher. He is loving but distracted. Her mother deserted the family, and Opal always wants to know more about her.
Opal and her father take in a large smelly dog that Opal meets at the local Winn-Dixie grocery store. The dog makes friends with everyone and seems like a real hero dog except for his blind terror of thunderstorms. All the neighbors are quirky, with stories to tell, even the unpleasant squash-faced girl Opal rejects as impossible for a friend. Everyone has sadness and a history. One of Opal's older friends drank too much like Opal's mom. An ex-convict is also a musician whose music speaks to animals.
This one really deserved its awards. Thanks Fatima Shaik for the recommendation!
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The Searcher by Tana French
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I'm a fan of Tana French in general--her books are always readable with a few nice plotty twists that are satisfying if not always believable. I especially like her Ireland.
This one is the close third person story of not an Irishman, but a retired Chicago detective who feels he messed up his marriage and family and has chosen somewhat randomly to make a life in an extremely isolated Irish village where he found a property by searching the Internet. Furthermore, boy Cal is not even a native Chicagoan but was raised partly in North Carolina. The accents and world views are pretty good but not perfect, and I do wonder why she decided to go American here.
Cal works hard on fixing up his house and finding a way to be friendly with the neighboring farmers, several of them older bachelors, especially Mart, who limps and teases and pretends to be less astute than he really is. There are women around too, including a match making general store owner with an available sister. Cal thinks he just wants to fish and fix and have pleasant conversations, knowing he'll never be fully accepted. He's okay with that, and deeply appreciates the landscape and people, even if he can't quite get a grip on the seemingly infinite web of cousins and feuds and delicately delineated social statuses.
A young teenager named Trey from one of the families that would be classified as trailer trash back home in North Carolina (says Cal), begins hanging out with him, ostensibly to learn a little carpentry and how to fish ad shoot. But everything has deeper levels and secrets in a Tana French novel, so it turns out Trey's older brother has gone missing, and we're off on a search for a missing young man, an exploration of a failing family or two, drug dealers from Dublin, local vigilantes--lots of lovely characters for Cal to interrogate.
I found the pace a little leisurely for the first two thirds--I never considered dropping it, but I was impatient for the action--and then everything breaks loose. There's a sheep murderer on the loose, some gender bending, hints of foul play--and all my little guesses, or at least moments that needed explanation were amply satisfied.
Except for one. There were some hints about Cal's daughter back home that suggested a path French decided not to take--a very subtle red herring, and maybe my fault for looking too hard. Or her setting up for another book?
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Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard
Well, it went fast and made me laugh multiple times, especially the dumb Hoosier hit man. It's about another lazy but honest con-man, Terry Dunn, sometimes Father Terry Dunn, who witnesses one of the Hutu-on-Tutsi massacres in Rwanda in the mid nineteen-nineties. Terry has a beautiful but one-armed Rwandan housekeeper-lover, but decides to go home to the U.S. after meting out some rough and violent justice.
Then it's back to Detroit and a scam to collect money through his touching photos of Rwandan orphans eating garbage. Or that's what we're supposed to think.
Terry gets involved with Deb an ex-con stand-up comedian who wants to help him make his scam work (and split the money, of course). There is also Terry's straight arrow lawyer brother and Deb's wonderfully sleazy ex-husband (she did time for assaulting him with a vehicle), and there are various members of a low-key Detroit mafia–anyhow, it's amusing and busy, and we're always basking in the warmth of Leonard's affection for his slackers and confidence people and sleaze bags and thugs.
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Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke
This was an early book by Burke. I generally like his work, especially the later Louisiana murder mysteries. This one is from 1971 (his first published novel was 1965, and he was born in 1936). The style here is that over-cooked Baroque operatic suffering of the good-hearted-but disappointed Southern man--William Styron with a touch of William Faulkner.
The main character Hack is a hard drinking Texas congressional candidate. He gets drawn into a labor dispute by a hippy-style
union-organizing woman with big breasts who, after he opens his soul to her with his suffering and goes on a picket line with her, and --and oh yes gives her some real man sex--becomes all supportive and sorrowful when he has to go off and do what a man's gotta do. And by the end she's raising his twin boys and watching his thoroughbreds race. Blecch. I'd rather just have a good hearted whore who does it for affection as well as money and has only one little unshed tear when he goes off. And does what a man's gotta do. Because this one is, above all a cowboy story, and I used to watch a lot of cowboy movies and t.v. shows.
Hack himself, of course, is much improved by the suffering and realization that there is injustice in the world. He faces his demons, resets his goals, drinks less, marries the good woman, embraces fatherhood, etc.
The best part of the book by far is Hack's chapter length story of being a prisoner of war in Korea. It's about torture and snitching in prison camp in Korea. It's better than the rest of the book. I guess it is supposed to show why Hack is an alcoholic, but it is just powerful on its own. Also, after that chapter, the writing improves. Everything felt more taut. There was more action, less heavy-handed repartee. Almost as if he finished the book at a later stage in his development as a writer.
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The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism by Joe Conason Reviewed by Joe Chuman
Also see this on Joe Chuman's substack blog.
American democracy is severely imperiled. The rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism has poisoned the political environment and has stood moral norms on their head. The foundations on which we stand have become wobbly and unstable. The reality we live in is gut-wrenching and mind-bending. Tens of millions of Americans have seemingly lost their minds as conspiracy theories abound and people believe what is easiest for them to believe while throwing to the wind facts, the rules of evidence, and even the claims of reason.
When we assess Donald Trump we can ask, how can one man do so much damage? But Trump is by no
means alone. He has become the head of a cult which is the Republican Party and legions of acolytes. Even a tyrant needs the cooperation of followers, and Republican officeholders now follow him in the quest for petty power while jettisoning conscience, adherence to constitutional governance, and truth itself. The GOP is no longer a political party. Yet Trumpism in the broader sense is hardly new, as Joe Conason in his latest book, The Longest Con, amply documents.
How did we get to this point? Recent volumes abound on how democracies fail. Many sound the warning of fascism and tyranny, elucidating apt analogies to the rise of Hitler and the 1930s. Most look at ideologies and policy changes in the Republican Party, and decisions rendered by major actors. In the recent past, Republican politics was centered on a cluster of conservative ideas - economic and political - expanding individual freedom while cutting taxes and limiting the role of government. It was pro-business and anti-social welfare. It was skeptical of government regulation. It was hard on crime, and in foreign policy, it heralded American military power. The Republican Party saw itself as the vanguard of patriotic virtues and as the defender of liberty.
It is this conservatism that serves as the foil for Joe Conason's The Longest Con. Conason comes to analyze the erosion of conservatism with an impressive legacy of journalistic accomplishments. He is editor-in-chief of The National Memo, a daily political newsletter. His articles have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, The American Prospect, and others. Two of his previous books on contemporary political issues were New York Times bestsellers.
While most treatises, as noted, provide manifestly political analyses, Conason looks at the transformation and erosion of conservatism through a different and original lens. His analysis describes what we may arguably call a tradition for which the scheming, manipulative, and thoroughly immoral attorney, Roy Cohn, serves as the role model. Conason's treatise leads to, and ends with, Donald Trump. It's a tradition comprised of a huge cavalcade of grifters, swindlers, and frauds. They were con artists who made huge fortunes by arousing fear and hate in their gullible constituencies. These fraudsters were able to hitch their schemes and machinations to larger movements of the day, be it anti-communism during the Cold War or evangelical Christianity, especially since the late 1970s. The flip side of their capacity to make quick bucks in huge tranches was their ability to coral hordes of vulnerable Americans willing to open their wallets to underwrite their false causes.
The Longest Con features a steady stream of very bad actors and their fraudulent schemes. Despite being packed with information, the text is written in clear and engaging prose. It is a highly informative but brisk read. Its style is the mark of a highly skilled journalist, and its message could not be more relevant to our current moment.
Among multitudes of scammers several of the figures are more prominent than others. The book starts with Roy Cohn, who served as a young counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, who made his career in the search to find and expose communists hiding behind every tree, was a lesson in hollow fraudulence which Cohn learned well. An important fact, unknown to this reviewer, is that Cohn helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, through meetings with the sentencing judge with whom he was able to gain access. It was a grisly achievement in which Cohn prided himself, but no less an index of his abject immorality.
In a way that sets the tone for the book, Conason says the following with regard to what Cohn had learned from McCarthy:
"From his experience with McCarthy, Cohn developed the philosophy of impunity that he lived and taught his acolytes, who would shape right-wing politics in the decades to come, even beyond his death. It was not only possible but admirable to lie, cheat, swindle, fabricate, and then deny, deny, deny- and get away with everything. He remained consistent in purveying untruth and contesting the incontestable. Rather than acknowledge what he had cost McCarthy – or that McCarthy had lost the confidence of the Senate – he would insist throughout his life not only that he and McCarthy had acted righteously but they were always the victims of a liberal conspiracy."
If this sounds like the Donald Trump we have come to know, the similarity is no coincidence in that Trump became Cohn's favorite client.
Conason makes the linkage and the learning of reprobate lessons clear:
"In a city where real estate is a dominant industry and too often a corrupt racket that thrives on abusive practices, tax chicanery, and political favoritism, Cohn also represented several of the leading landlords. By far, his favorite was a flashy and ambitious developer from Queens named Donald J. Trump, for whom Cohn was not just counsel and friend but also the single most influential mentor. What the awestruck younger Trump saw in Cohn was an all-powerful public figure, who had lived, until then at least, a life of lying, bribing, cheating, stealing, swindling, - and never apologizing – without any lasting consequences. The lesson Trump learned was that he could get away with anything."
Cohn's influence on Trump was pervasive and went beyond sole mastery of fraudulent behavior. It seemingly molded Trump's political persona more broadly. As Conason illustrates:
"Although he cultivated the image of a swashbuckling right-winger, Cohn was less an ideological partisan than an influence peddler, a fixer in pursuit of graft and grift. His politics revolved around money and power more than policy or philosophy. Of course, he never abandoned the 'conservative' posturing that had lifted him into the limelight during the fifties. Baiting liberals and flapping the flag were intrinsic to the bullying persona that undergirded his business."
McCarthy's anti-communism found fertile ground among a roster of grifters who combined fear and foreboding within a dubious Christian framework to rake in formidable profits. Conason first recounts the success of an Australian physician named Frederick C. Schwarz, who founded the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Starting from humble beginnings, Schwarz's venture brought together rosters of speakers and drew larger audiences. Listeners would learn that many of the nation's teachers were communist operatives who were taking over the minds of little children and that the Boy Scouts had been completely taken over. Communists were training 900 Asiatics to be the executioners of boys and girls in America. The way to combat this menace, needless to say, was to contribute generously to the Crusade. Through seminars and lectures, as Conason notes, the Anti-Communism Crusade was the largest single-issue right-wing organization of its day. Seven years after its founding in 1953, it was amassing $1.1 million in annual gross income. While trucking in fringe ideas, Schwarz's audiences were primarily middle class, and certainly not composed of marginalized individuals. As an example, Conason notes,
"With the Crusade's increasing visibility, Schwarz was able to put together a spectacular rally in October 1961 at the Hollywood Bowl, presented in prime time on West Coast television stations, boasting sponsorship by Schick and Technicolor. The three-hour program featured major stars like John Wayne, Dale Evans, Pat Boone, and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, as well as a B-list actor named Ronald Reagan."
Arguably better known was the radio preacher Billy James Hargis from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Armed with dubious advanced degrees, he preached the imminent communist takeovers to tens of thousands over the airwaves. An admirer of Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater, Hargis, as Conason notes, enjoyed hating liberals as he hated labor unions, Ivy League Universities, The United Nations, the NAACP, and mainstream media, which he accused of aiding the Kremlin.
For those of us who are bewildered by the malicious nuttiness of contemporary conspiratorialists, Conason reminds us of the incredible conspiracies fostered by the wealthy candy manufacturer Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. Today's blather of MAGA cohorts that rant about elitists and globalists has merely mimicked the name-calling of the Birch Society. And if we find Trump's condemnation of Democrats and liberals as "communists" outrageous, we need to recall that the John Birch Society went so far as condemning Dwight Eisenhower of being a communist. Welch supported the campaigns of Hargis and Schwarz as part of his own mission, as he was financed by top corporate executives. It's an ironic historic turn that J. Edgar Hoover, known for aggressively hunting down communists, despised these non-governmental hucksters whom he derided as "professional anti-communists." Despite his own sins, Hoover correctly recognized the destructive nature of the grift of Schwarz, Hargis, and many others of their ilk. But they were path-breakers. As Conason concludes "... profiteering from smears and fables became a career path on the right, (and) those unwholesome tactics were certain to proliferate – and they did."
A name retrieved from the past is Richard Viguerie. Borrowing from, and categorically expanding, the promotional work of Hargis, Richard Viguerie mastered the art of direct mail to reach mass cohorts of right-wingers while making a fortune in the process. Viguerie discovered that the failed Goldwater candidacy generated lists of millions of conservatives. Conason points out that Viguerie's primary tools were not technological but emotional. By 1971 he employed 250 people to promote fear, anger, and resentment, encouraging donors to open their wallets. Viguerie enraged his contributors by invoking the menace of the liberal "enemy." The menace included "union bosses," "federal bureaucrats," "radical feminists," or "homosexual activists." Viguerie's approach was aggressive, strident, and devoted to gaining power at the expense of any nuance. His mailings raked in millions of dollars for the outfit bearing his name, little of which was spent on programming. It was a slash-and-burn style that led to the poisoning of our political culture.
Viguerie paved the way for the crowd that billed itself as The New Right. It included such characters as Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, who was also a Cohn acolyte, and others who found new ways to sucker the credulous while building on the base that Viguerie had forged. These figures of the New Right were aligned with the sleaze that the Nixon administration had attracted. Much of its activities centered around the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) which brought in more than any other right-wing PAC, though only 16% percent of its revenue was spent on candidates. Through rampant populism and appeals to fear and hatred, the NCPAC inserted themselves into the political fray at the expense of mainline conservatives. The Roe decision became the basis of the attack on liberals as "baby killers," the "homosexual agenda," and the alleged grooming of children by gay teachers. Such was the basis of appeals devoid of any decency. But it served as a method to rake in big bucks in which emotion replaced policy and legislation.
After the NCPAC faded in 1984, its kingpins, Charlie Black, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and a Democrat by the name of Peter Kelly, founded a consulting and lobby group with the initials BMSK. As Conason notes, its clients included "Republican politicians of all stripes, corporate clients, and even tin-pot foreign dictators." Donald Trump, who owned casinos in Atlantic City, became an early client. The firm drew in $70,000 in today's dollars in monthly retainers, and each partner cleared more than $1.5 million annually. In the assessment of this reviewer, who has long worked in the human rights field, BMSK's most ethically heinous clients were the tyrants who headed authoritarian regimes. As noted,
"Soon millions poured into the firm's accounts from a different sort of clientele. Numerous authoritarian regimes overseas hired BMSK to lobby both the State Department and Congress to increase their shares of American taxpayer largesse. Indeed, the worse their human rights records, the more those foreign dictatorships required the kind of persuasion that lobbyists could exercise. The roster of murderous despots whose remittances enriched Stone, Manafort and company ranged from Asia and Africa to South America, which eventually resulted in BMSK gaining a reputation as 'the torturer's lobby.'" The firm's foreign clients included repressive and corrupt governments like those that ruled Kenya and Nigeria, which spent millions on BMSK lobbying and reaped tens of millions in US foreign assistance."
Needless to say, beyond schemes that led to the enrichment of immoral operatives through the employment of dupery, the chieftains of BMSK, two of whom have served as Trump's closest enablers, have a great deal of blood on their hands.
The most powerful engine of grift has been the lure of right-wing religion, Christian swindlers and right-wing demagogues have long and often shared common purposes. George W. Bush set the tone for the empowerment of Christian operatives who mastered the art of earning massive fortunes. Having declared himself a born-again Christian, Bush proclaimed that he was chosen by the grace of God to lead in the moment. It was Bush who was the first president to promote and bring around him so-called prosperity gospel ministers who preached that material wealth was a sign of God's grace. It was an appeal to greed that had no use for charity, and it attracted a sleaze factor that paved the way for such figures as Jim Bakker, John Hagee, and Rod Parsley. As such, it opened the door which attracted Donald Trump.
While Conason cites the political influence of Jerry Falwell and the exploitation of the faith-based initiative engineered by the preacher-business tycoon, Pat Robertson, it is Jerry Falwell Jr. whom he credits with the most far-reaching swindles. Falwell Jr. inherited Liberty University from his father. The institution, which Falwell Sr. envisioned as a "Protestant Notre Dame," by admission was more of a business than an institution of higher learning. Liberty made a fortune through online courses while procuring a huge amount of federal funding. Only five universities nationwide received more.
Falwell's downfall came in a widely publicized sex scandal. But his entire lifestyle was a maelstrom of corruption. As Conason notes,
"Just as Jerry Jr. had built an 'educational' enterprise that vacuumed up billions in student loans and grants while delivering little academic value, he had continually siphoned off university funds to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies. The preacher's son became a master grifter, creatively abusing his executive power in ways that would never be tolerated in any honest business, let alone a supposed non-profit devoted to Christian education."
"Once the Falwell grifts began to unravel, they seemed almost endless. The founder's son had run the university as a hub of crony capitalism, much like the Philippines under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos."
Falwell's annual salary reached $1.25 million, with perks such as the use of the university's aircraft for frequent personal travel as well as cushy jobs for family members.
Falwell's corruption was politically emblematic and highly consequential in that he gave his endorsement to Donald Trump. As such, it revealed the unholy nexus between evangelicalism and Trump. Many have been puzzled by the support by evangelicals of a man who is totally irreligious, biblically illiterate, and flagrantly immoral. Conason explains how:
"To put it bluntly, the religious leaders most inclined toward grift and greed (not unlike Trump himself) were also the most eager to join his campaign – and to invent a variety of excuses for an irreligious, profane, and brazenly immoral politician."
"What drew the prosperity preachers and their congregations to Trump, eventually joined by millions of white evangelicals, was how much he resembled the televangelists who were the most successful among them."
Conason's final chapters explicate the rise of Trump through the swamp of grift and sleaze in details too numerous to cite. Speaking of Trump's victory in 2016, the author notes that "...hate drove politics on the right, not morality or even ideology." "Before Election Day, nearly every conservative who had denounced him as a narcissistic fraudster would crawl like 'servile puppies,' as Cruz put it, acknowledging him as their master. His political triumph completed the transmogrification of the American right into a shameless hustle devoid of principle and fully devoted to exploitation."
And so American political culture had been corrupted and rendered ominous, strange, dark, and unrecognizable not so much because of failed policy or losing ideological battles, but because of the triumph of greed, fear, hate, and credulity. It is a sad and tragic story after almost 250 years of the American experiment. We can thank Joe Conason's insightful and detailed analysis for illuminating a powerful dynamic that has brought us to this point.
As I complete this review, I read that at a recent Trump rally in Detroit, the warm-up act from the event's sponsor was an Alexander Spellane. Spellane was pitching the audience to invest in gold and silver they could purchase from his company Fisher Capital. For the past fourteen months, the government has been attempting to shut down Fisher Capital for selling its wares at deceptive and exorbitant prices that ensure that customers would suffer dramatic and immediate losses.
After reading Joe Conason's The Longest Con we have no reason to be surprised.
SHORT TAKES
Two of these books are about people who for various reasons left Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities-- and one is an engaging study of teenage girls from the Lubavitcher community (I reviewed that one in a past issue.
Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman by Abby Stein
Holy Days: The World Of The Hasidic Family by Lis Harris
Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers by Stephanie Wellen Levine
BOOKS TO READ ABOUT APPALACHIA INSTEAD OF J.D. VANCE
I'm a fan of Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow about the destruction of a subsistence life style in Appalachia which was not the same as poverty.
One place to start is Barbara Kingsolver's article from August 2023 in the The New York TImes, "Read Your Way Through Appalachia."
Some recommended nonfiction includes:
Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudill
Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers by Ron Eller
Uneven Ground by Ron Eller
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. (Read an excerpt here: “Hillbillies Need No Elegy.”
At Home in the Heart of Appalachia by John O'Brien.There are also tons of wonderful poetry and fiction by people like Silas House, Mary Lee Settle, Denton Loving, Crystal Wilkinson, Harriet Arnow, James Still, Denise Giardina (don't miss her novel of the mine wars Storming Heaven)-- I really can't start in naming specific books and writers, though, or I'll never finish. Just let me say this is a powerful literature that says much more and much more richly about my home region than Mr. Vance's tendentious memoir.
Phyllis Wilson Moore has an excellent list of Young Adult Appalachian books here.
Also, check out Moore's syllabus for a course in Appalachian literature. Moore is notable in her lists for including the many ethnic groups other than Scots-Irish who populate the region.
Here's a list people are using, and here is another.
A few more to recommend: Vic Depta's Brother and Sister: a Memoir; Deborah Clearman's recent novel is The Angels of Sinkhole County. And oh yes everal of my books set in West Virginia (Oradell at Sea, Their Houses, Higher Ground, In the Mountains of America and Out of the Mountains).
GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Thanks to Nikolas Kosoff for drawing our attention to this interesting article in Psychology Today that discusses some fiction writing techniques in light of neurology. It's a refreshingly different way of looking at things. Author Laura Otis says, "Deciding which confrontations readers should experience in real time and which should be quickly summarized goes to the heart of the writing process.
NancyKay Shapiro recommends an article in Granta called "Literature Without Literature" by Christian Lorentzen.
Backlisted is a podcast out of the UK that features books from the near and far past--Anita Brookner to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight! Give them a listen,
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Take a look at this article from Literary Hub by Ayeşgül Savaş on creating a clock for your story. She recommends these books for their use of time: The Human Zoo by Sabina Murray; Intimacies by Katie Kitamura; and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
Don't miss the latest installment of Danny Williams's Adventures in Editing--July 2024. Editor and Writer Danny Williams tells amusing tales of editing--and passes on some serious hints for writers at the same time!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
MSW Is Teaching Novel Writing Online at NYU Fall 2024.
Kelly Watt's The Weeping Degree is coming 8-21-24!Kelly Watt's The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me From Suicide – is a raw and forbidding new collection of poetry and prose by award-winning author Kelly Watt.
Kelly’s gritty collection of poetry and flash prose reveals the biography of a trauma, following the ripple effect of childhood abandonment and sexual abuse as it echoes throughout the author’s life, slowly transforming through time from a wound to a gift. Inspired by the author's own challenging astrological signatures, in these poems Watt turns to astrology and Buddhism to make sense of her encounters with the dark side of the soul. Divided into three distinct sections: The Home for Little Girls, The Buddha and The Pink Futon, and Hands Across the World, this book travels the globe; beginning in the silent shadows of foster care in a bleak Scarborough suburb, and emerging to the light and sound of Sanskrit chanting in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal.
Written for poetry lovers, spiritual seekers, and astrology aficionados alike, this collection will take you on a wild ride, where poetry is a sacred alchemical art; a destination where our deepest sorrows are transmuted through imagination and creativity to wonder and joy.
Praise for The Weeping Degree:
What do dead girls need in the afterlife? They need the poems of Kelly Watt so that the daffodils will return to run rampant over the ground with their crazy yellow hope.
--Paul Lisson, poet and editor of HA&L, Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine.
Kelly Watt has taken the darkest, most horrifying moments of her young life and made them into a groundbreaking work of beautiful words. The Weeping Degree is more than a triumph of poetic virtuosity; it is a testament to Watt’s moral courage, her tenacity, and to her faith in the ability to heal.
–Ruth Edgett, author, blogger, reviewer.
Latest issue of the Jewish Literary Journal is now out.
Ed Davis Literary News
Review Tales: A Book Magazine for Indie Authors, 11th Edition Summer 2024
Launched in 2016, Review Tales Magazine is a distinguished publication that enriches, enlightens, and champions the art of writing. Dedicated to empowering indie authors by showcasing their exceptional talents, our quarterly magazine serves as a vibrant hub for readers, writers, and self-publishers alike. Each issue is a curated compilation encompassing insightful author confessions, exclusive interviews, sage advice, comprehensive book reviews, and compelling literary pieces. Review Tales Magazine is not just a magazine; it's an essential resource and a gathering place for the creative and the curious, making it an indispensable addition to the collection of anyone passionate about the written word.
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers # 236
October 14, 2024
Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
Read this newsletter in its permanent location
Some of the writers featured this issue: Brandon Taylor; Carter Sickels,
Abby Chava Stein; Jane Austen, Robin Hobb, and Stephen King
October issue of Adventures in the Written Word
Check out Kelly Watt's newsletter-- and her new book of poems,
just out, Weeping Degree .Cynthia Swanson on going from best-selling commercial author to self-publishing.
Do you have a library card for a public library in West Virginia? You can borrow many of MSW's books--and books by many other people-- for Kindle and other ebook readers.
Go to this Overdrive site.Some of my favorite books of 2024 at Shepherd.com -- a site
that offers reading ideas and the opportunity to share yours.FREE: Danny Williams is offering free samples of his editing services. See more here.
CONTENTS
Back Issues
Announcements
Book Reviews
Short Takes
Especially for Writers
BOOK REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Cape May by Chip Cheek reviewed by Elaine Durbach
Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelley
A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton reviewed by Danny Williams
Writers and Lovers by Lily King reviewed by Elaine Durbach
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
Ava Gardner and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg reviewed by Joel Weinberger
Holy Days: World of a Hasidic Family by Lis Harris
Will There Also Be Singing?—Poems by Pauletta Hansel reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri reviewed by Diane Simmons
Tablets Shattered: The End of An American Jewish Century and the
Future of American Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer Reviewed by Joe ChumanAkmaral by Judith Lindbergh reviewed by Diane Simmons
Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb)
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother’s Story of Reunion and Reckoning
by Julia MacDonnell reviewed by Diane SimmonsLonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry reviewed by Diane Simmons
Black Sun and Fevered Star By Rebecca Roanhorse
The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels
Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein
The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart
An Ember in the Ashes; A Torch against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates,
A Sky Beyond the Storm by Sabaa TahirReal Life by Brandon Taylor
1876 by Gore Vidal
Lincoln by Gore Vidal reviewed by Diane Simmons
I'm excited to say that several people have responded to my request for sharing short reviews: see the reviews below and listed above as well. You're invited to send yours. Contributor/recommenders this month include Diane Simmons, Elaine Durbach, Joel Weinberger, Danny Williams, and Nikolas Kozloff. Eddy Pendarvis contributed a full length review of Pauletta Hansel's poems Will There Also Be Singing? There's also a Joe Chuman review of Joshua Leifer's book on the future of American Jewish life.
The reviews that don't say "reviewed by" are my me. I have some new fantasy writers to recommend along with several books new and old like Carter Sickels' excellent The Evening Hour and Real Life by Brandon Taylor. I also enjoyed more short novels from Kenneth C. Davis's book Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly.
Invited by Shepherd.com to contribute my favorite 2024 books, I chose rapidly, because I had a lot more "favorites" than three. Shepherd.com welcomes your reviews too.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels
This beautiful book was suggested to me by Eddy Pendarvis. It covers a lot of what Kingsolver does in Demon Copperhead but in a less spectacular but equally powerful way. It focuses on one guy, one tiny town, one family, and one toxic water dam break because of mountaintop removal.
Cole, the very close third person protagonist, loves working with older people, loves his community, and is pretty much apolitical. He was raised by his grandmother and a thundering snake-handling preacher grandfather, His mind is full of pyrotechnic Biblical quotations, even though he doesn't really believe them in any literal way. He works in a nursing home and wishes vaguely to be a nurse instead of an aide, but takes no action. And oh, yes, he steals prescription medications and other items and sells them to people around the county. He is a lovely, loving damaged young man.
The way Sickels handles this is amazing, and also the way he handles the coal company destroying the land. It's another good entry for someone who wants to get some understanding of the bad stuff in West Virginia and the rest of Appalachia, but without stereotypes.
Holy Days: World of a Hasidic Family by Lis Harris.
This came out back in 1985. I remember reviews of it, and wanting to read it, but I was just starting out with having a baby in my life and not reaching out very far in my reading. Its chapters alternate Harris's experiences with a pseudonymous Lubavitcher family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and some Hasidic history. She organizes the book by holidays and other events that structure the life of the Konigsberg family.
I was fascinated. Harris, who chaired the nonfiction department at the Writing Division of the Columbia School of the Arts, hasn't written all that many books, but she works thoroughly and painstakingly. At the time she did the research for this book, she had young sons and a husband in Manhattan and would take the the train over to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to the Konigsbergs and the famous "770" building that is the center of the Lubavitcher movement. She finds herself attracted by the rich group life and is inspired by many of the rituals. She is especially moved by the experience of the mikvah, the ritual cleansing bath.
Above all, though, she learns from the family that welcomes her. Moshe Konigsberg, the father, wanted to be a teacher but was told almost casually by the Lubavitchers' revered Rebbe that he should be an engraver instead, so he did. His second wife is Sheina, a Midwesterner who turned to Hasidism after being widowed herself. She is an excellent interpreter of Hasidic life for a secular Jew like Harris (and thus for readers). One sees the attraction of the women's very communal lives, and while Harris gives a brief chapter about a couple of people who left the Lubavitchers, her main take is affectionate, with some of the envy I myself always feel for anyone in a closed system: the Hasidim, the Amish (there's a funny story in Holy Days about a secular Jew who is fine with the Amish,except for their black hats).
All the rigmarole about sex and separation and women's responsibility for the huge families is off-putting to me, but it is clear that so many thrive on being part of something very large, and in their belief, very important.
It's really an excellent book, and I'm left with my sadness about how these interesting people aren't interested in me, or much of the rest of the world. The Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died thirty years ago, but some of the Lubavitchers still think he might be the Messiah. Since his death, Chabad houses for teaching and converting other Jews have spread around the world.
Here's the original New York Times review of Holy Days: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/10/books/for-torah-community-and-rebbe.html.
The Rebbe and followers
Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein
More Jewish orthodoxy. This one is short, fast, upbeat memoir about gender dysphoria in a Hasidic ultra orthodox context. It is the memoir of Abby Chava Stein from her birth.
She was raised as an oldest son in a family descended from the founder of Hasidism, a sort of rabbinical prince who always felt like a girl. She was brilliant, rebellious, finally married and fathered a son--and then broke all the rules to search the Internet and discover she wasn't the only girl in a boy's body.
She leaves home, masters English (she grew up speaking Yiddish), goes to college, and finds organizations and people who help her. She begins gender therapy, comes out to her family and is shunned by them. The story is fast moving and rich--Stein is only in her early thirties--but she, and the details of Hasidic life are fascinating. Abby Chava Stein herself is so positive, even with her memories of suffering, that you are swept along happily.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Once more, with different feelings. I last read it in 2015, and in my notes then, I wrote a little abo
ut how I rooted for the Crawfords, and to some extent I still do, but in this 2024 reading I can see much more clearly that while they are, as Fanny and Edmund say, morally spoiled by a bad upbringing. It is also clearer to me that Edmund is a prig and a patriarch-in-training, and Fanny herself is severely limited by her early years in a home that was disorganized and also short on moral instruction.
I always remember her visit back to Portsmouth as happening much earlier in the novel, but it is in the final quarter. Fanny, as a child, was swept from that shabby, crowded place to great Mansfield Park. Terrified if not terrorized, she slowly makes a tiny corner for herself, mostly by serving her languorous Aunt Bertram.
Cousin Edmund instructs her in everything moral, and she learns it rigidly, and also, of course, falls in love with him. Her strong moral center is a surprise later in the novel when she refuses to marry Henry Crawford, who genuinely loves her, we are to believe, and probably could have won her had he not decided to dabble in one last flirtation. I would have liked to read that novel, the nonexistent one where Fanny, in spite of her secret passion for Edmund, takes on Henry Crawford. But the ever clear-eyed Austen sees it as far more likely that Henry can be patient only so long. His flirtation turns into an affair that is disastrous for all parties, especially the proud Bertrams.
In fact, for all of Fanny's limitations, she is the only person in the novel who steadily improves in strength and social position. The Bertrams are devastated by oldest daughter Maria's sins, and even Edmund acts against his own beliefs over the in-house theatricals. Everyone is chastened. Austen's chapter long summary at the end in the voice of her implied author is impressively successful: she gives us the "whatever-happened-to's," but it is done so neatly, and so fulfills our desire to know, that it is an essential structural part of the novel.
I think it is no longer my favorite Austen novel–I just can't love Fanny and Edmund- although I find it broader and stronger and more intelligent than ever. Also its analysis of women's roles is brilliant, broad and deep, whether or not Austen herself ever imagined a word other than the one she knew. I think my favorite of hers these days is Persuasion.
One thing Austen never does is romanticize poverty-- or the wealthy, for that matter.
My sister just read the book in an edition called The Annotated Mansfield Park by David M. Shapard. My sister says she likes the annotations and background material better than the story.
A few more comments: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10987048/Mansfield-Park-shows-the-dark-side-of-Jane-Austen.html
My 2015 notes: https://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive176-180.html#austenagain
Will There Also Be Singing?—Poems by Pauletta Hansel Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Just about everybody I know is mad or scared (or both) because of the political and economic times we’re going through. Vehement disagreement on what’s wrong and what the solutions are makes things even worse. Pauletta Hansel’s Will There Also Be Singing? offers wonderfully bold and intriguing combinations of her own and others’ observations of and feelings about hard times—some past, most present. The book’s three sections include voices from the coal fields; a “conversation” between Hansel herself and Black sociologist, James Hathaway Robinson (born in Kentucky, 1887; died. in Ohio, 1963); and voices of others poets, creating a virtual community. That community includes, through the book’s title and epigram, the great playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, who faced the hard times of post-World War I Germany, with its hyperinflation and the growth of the Nazi party that eventually brought Hitler to power.
The first section opens with “You Could Draw a Circle Around Where I Live,” a poem that begins with the words of UMW President, Cecil Roberts, and moves to those of a coal miner, who bids us to listen: “while I have air enough to speak / what you don’t want to hear.” This poem and others, such as “Aerial View of Catastrophic Flooding in Eastern Kentucky,” make clear that not only miners suffer damage, but whole communities and the places they call home, Among the poems about the importance of place is “A Word like Home: A Cento.” Composed of lines by other poets, it builds a haunting narrative of what home can mean. Notes at the end of the book tell who the other poets are in this and other cento poems in the collection.
The second section contains one poem, “James Hathaway Robinson: A conversation in prose and poetry, 1919-2022.” It opens with an excerpt from the Notable Kentucky African American Data Base, briefly describing Robinson, who moved from Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio, to teach and who wrote, among other things, The Negro in Cincinnati, published in 1919. A second excerpt, from the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition Website, says Cincinnati neighborhoods that Appalachians moved into didn’t always welcome them, but saw them as examples of the “Southern Appalachian migrant problem.” The body of the poem alternates observations made by Robinson with lines of poetry by Hansel, his observations referring to Blacks in Cincinnati, hers reflecting her misunderstanding of relations between the races, as the following lines from the poem show:
My people, his people
“The Negro lives by himself, works by himself”
suffers sick “by himself in the colored ward... \
Unlike me, Robinson had no illusions
“[And] when he dies, ‘he is buried by himself whether
in a colored cemetery or the colored section of the
Potter’s Field.”
That our people were one and the same.
“The presumption is invariable against the Negro and
he is often arrested and sentenced where others . . .
I am the other.
would be excused. [And the press gives] undue
publicity to [black] weaknesses, foibles, and crimes
while seldom mentioning black accomplishments
and virtues . . .
We want to believe things are different now.
The final section begins with “Presidents Day 2021” and the lines, “Friend, I can’t stop thinking about race, today / and by race, I mean whiteness.” The poet acknowledges white privilege and the presence of racial bias even among those with the best intentions, including in her. The poem ends with these lines:
I wear my whiteness lightly,
like a down-filled coat. I hardly know
it’s there, unless I’m called out to the cold
without it. And, friend, how often am I
called to that?
In “On Grief: November 2016,” the poet is listening to a speaker talking about the six stages of grief. As the poem progress, we learn that the poet is grieving because of “this unnatural/disaster of a president-elect” (Trump admirers will probably have stopped reading earlier in this collection). Despite the desirability of reaching meaning through completing the stages, she concludes, “. . . I’m going to / stick with anger, / stage two.” Her conclusion jibes with the poem, “I Confess,” in which, the poet says that despite their storied history, she doesn’t believe in assassination of evil rulers, “regardless of whether the target / will ever see the inside of a detention center, / and be faced with deciding, like thousands / of seven-year-olds, should the assigned Mylar blanket / go over or under on the mud-caked concrete floor” (a comment on the Trump administration’s immigration policies).
One of my favorite poems in the whole collection is “America.” It reminds me of Allen Ginsberg’s funny, sad, and powerful poem of the same title. Lamenting ills of the mid-1950s, he concludes with his intention to help: “I’d better get right down to the job. / . . . America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Hansel’s poem begins, “America, I am not singing you / beautiful. I do not hear the melody beneath the toiling / clang and clatter of your / discord. . . .” The poem ends in grief: “I am/ exiled, America, even as I walk / your streets singing / Zion, we lay down and wept, and wept, and wept for thee,” but “Diptych,” the last lines of the last poem in the book open the door to hope:
There is a hinge. Close
the two sides together
and you have a book. It is
an old story. How it’s told
depends on how
you open it again.
Will There Also Be Singing? is a gift to readers who value the bond of humanity that goes deeper than race, ethnicity, gender, or class. She weaves the personal and the political together beautifully, moving from the past to the present. The argument she unscrolls implies that change for the better requires understanding of injustice and our role in it; anger at the results of injustice; and hope reflected in action.
1876 by Gore Vidal
This was not nearly as good as Lincoln, or even as Burr, to which it's a kind of follow-up,as the main charactere in 1876 is Charley Schuyler who also narrated Burr. Again, the subject is politics and people in politics, but the cynicism and open corruption of the Grant administration has no redeeming charm the way Aaron Burr did. All the candidates for the presidency in 1876 are corrupt, and the general picture is disheartening at best.
Vidal didn't make it up: this was, according to most accounts, a real low point in American history. The Democratic candidate almost certainly won (definitely won the popular
vote), but after a commission was formed by Congress to clarify the outcome in the electoral college, a lot of behind-the-scenes sculduggery led to Rutherford B. Hayes's victory.
Oh, and there were promises made, especially by Hayes's side. to remove the last Federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction and any protection for the formerly enslaved people. It was the beginning of forty brutal years of anti-black terrorism.
Those things don't seem to be of much interest to Vidal–or at least not to his Frenchified narrator and his daughter who is in the U.S. to get a wealthy husband. Actually, both of them come west because they are broke–and it is the hunt for money that underlies their lives as well as the rest of the book. Parts of it are a lot of fun, but the names got me confused: all B's, it seems, Blaine and Bigelow and maybe a Barstow? Even Hayes is Rutherford B.
Mainly, it was just too depressing, except for Vidal's irrepressible wit. If could make the endless details of that endless election bearable, it's him. Here's some further reading on the book: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-1876.html
Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg Reviewed by Joel Weinberger
The core thesis—that America and the West are losing their central ideal of liberty—is compelling, and I am sold on the case that both the right and left are abandoning it. Goldberg starts with a strong examination of the point of the Constitution, America's place in Western ideology, and the core case for liberal values. One of his strongest chapters is an active, compelling case for the value of Locke to Western society and the profound damage of Rousseau. This is all compelling material, and I almost would recommend it for this part alone.
As someone who enjoys reading and listening to Jonah Goldberg, despite some profound disagreements with him, I cannot help but be disappointed in where this book goes, however. It feels like a missed opportunity to match his normal rhetoric on The Dispatch and podcasts, where he generally focuses on core issues. Yes, regularly laments the changes in the Republican party (as you'd expect of someone previously so deeply connected to it), and yes he has bones to pick with specific progressives, but he rarely feels—to me—as if he's picking on groups of Americans per se. He feels like he is fighting ideologies, and that's lacking in Suicide of the West.
Instead, after a good background and case for core liberal principles, he resorts to picking fights with politicians and groups he disagrees with. Some of this is historically and contextually important. For example, explaining how the Republican party became the party of Trump is central to understanding the deliberalization of the right. Similarly, even if I disagree with it, making his core case for Obama as a populist is important. However, over time, these morph into attacks bordering on ad hominem, and the book suffers for it.
Moreover, he has a habit of quoting thinkers and politicians and interpreting it as he sees fit in the way he already views them, without room for reading it any other way. One example is in his quoting of Obama on income inequality as, the "defining challenge of our time." Goldberg immediately reads this as Obama saying we need to directly even out income, but there's a perfectly fine reading that says Obama was just commenting on that as a symptom of underlying problems in preventing upward mobility, which, ironically, Goldberg then later says is the actual problem (and I think Obama would agree!).
All in all, I think Goldberg was well on his way to making the case he wanted, but he got in his own way. It's a shame because there's great value in his thesis, and Goldberg certainly has much to offer.
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
I was looking for something with a strong narrative for week-end reading and came across John Grisham's first (1989) novel that was, according to some random lists and a quotation from the man himself, Grisham's and others' favorite. It was made into a movie with Matthew McConaughy and Samuel L. Jackson, and there have been a couple of book sequels with the same characters.
It definitely feels like a first novel in a few ways. For one thing, you often have trouble telling the author's world view from his main character's. Jake Brigance is a young Mississippi lawyer with generally good values, a lot of ambition, and also a self-conscious mask of good-ol'-boy. He says he fell in love with his wife because she was an old fashioned Southern girl who wanted to stay home and support her man. He uses the N word all the time, like almost all the white people in the book. He refuses to be called a liberal, and loves publicity, especially if he can get publicity and defy the journalists as he does it. He believes (again like most of the white but also the black people in the novel) that his client was justified in planning and carrying out the courthouse slaughter of two two white boys who raped his ten year old daughter. The trick is that local racism dictates says that Carl Lee should fry because he is a black man who killed white men.
Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughy in movie version of A Time to KillThe novel starts with the rape, which is harrowing at best. The murder of the rapists is well told, and the vicissitudes of the case and trial are gripping and well done. I have a little trouble believing how the KKK operates with almost complete impunity, but I'm not from Mississippi. They beat an old white man who dies, they almost dynamite Jake's house, they kill one of their own for squealing, burn crosses on potential jurors' lawns, shoot at Jake, but miss him and paralyze a national guardsman. Oh, and they finally do manage to burn down Jake's house.
So that may be believable, but it's a lot to take in.
There are a lot of things, however, to quibble about that also strike me as things a beginner couldn't quite integrate into his story. One is a good looking brilliant northern 3rd year law student who shows up to volunteer to help Jake. She does a great job, tries to seduce Jake, but he turns her down. Then she gets kidnapped by the very busy Klan who strip her naked but don't rape or kill her. She is hurt fairly badly, but the weird thing is that she's largely out of the story from then on. Jake and his friends go to see her in the hospital, but she's asleep, and her dad has flown down from Boston to speak for her. That is to say, the guys take over, pretty completely.
There's a woman juror who helps make a compromise that allows the other jurors to come to a verdict, but she's a one-off.
Then there are the local black pastors who are presented as mildly clownish and completely venal and manipulative. Really,there isn't much of anyone to admire, black or white, except maybe, just maybe, the black sheriff.
Jake's mentor Lucien is a Southern lib lawyer who was disbarred for drunkenness. He's maybe my favorite character. There is a lot of drinking in this book and a lot of affection if not support for white Southern folkways and prejudices.
But for all that, it's a readable, energetic story that I never really wanted to give up on.
Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb)
This has a lot of the sad-sack male protagonist that is my least-favorite quality of Robin Hobb's writing, but I liked it anyhow. Not as much as the Assassin series, probably because the protagonist Fitz in those novelsstarts out as a kid, and kids always have that resilient biological optimism. The only series I really didn't like was the Soldier Son books.
This one is interestingly different, an urban fantasy that starts with the sad sack, Wizard, in the streets of Seattle. It is so much closer to the real world, especially as part of Wizard's sadness is what happened to him as a solider in Vietnam. This is part of his struggle, which is also against a dark force called the Mir, a gray, pervasive, evil dull thing.
Each of the magic characters has definite limits to what can be done with magic. Then it turns out that Wizard has actually, in fact, given himself more rules than he had to. It was a nicely thick world, and to my pleasure got thicker too as I read.
Ava Gardner and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
This is another suggestion from Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books. Everyone knows the 1994 movie with Morgan Freeman, but I may like this better. The story is told in King's original novella in the voice of an admitted murderer, Red, a white Mainer. I don't remember in the movie how they explained a black lifer in a Maine prison in the 1930's–were Maine's
prisons integrated? Freeman's work is always worth watching, but I think this probably feels more realistic.
So the novella's voice is an old white lifer talking about prison, talking about the main character, Andy Dufresne. It is pieced together (no doubt an illusion, but one that makes for very good reading) of the stories that float in slow time around a prison. It about how Dufresne survives and prevails and inspires the men around him.
Probably my favorite character is the Warden who is a terrifically mean and unsavory hypocrite Baptist Sunday school superintendent. The scenes (overheard and pieced together, of course) between him and Dufresne are super, as is the scene when Dufresne gets beer for the roof tarring crew.
Honestly, it's a lovable book on so many counts. Wish fulfillment at the end?
Fine by me.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
This 2011 book has a great beginning, and a complex but interesting ending. It was my first book by Julian Barnes, and in the end, I couldn't really feel much identity for the narrator, Tony Webster. He just keeps whining about after all his youthful hopes he's become an "average" bloke. For me, it was a little silly: didn't we all imagine as boys and girls heroism in adulthood? He complains that he isn't brave enough for suicide like his friend. It's a real lack of growing up. My adolescence is still vivid in my mind, but I'm really glad is isn't the high point of my life.
So Tony has an interesting story to tell, especially the At School stuff, and the book is cleverly put together, but I just didn't care that much about Tony. This may have been a bad book to read on Kindle. Should one read contemporary British novels in hard copy?
I'll offer some balance with reviews from the Wikipedia article on the book and from
Krkus which calls it a "knockout. What at first seems like a polite meditation on childhood and memory leaves the reader asking difficult questions about how often we strive to paint ourselves in the best possible light."
And finally, the New York Times review.
Since Barnes seems to have a terrific reputation, I thought I'd give him another chance and read.......
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
And this one, in spite of requiring some effort, is a lot of fun. It's extremely quirky, and this one I definitely should have read in a hard copy. but well worth your time if you like literature.
The set up is that a retired (or is he just vacationing?) English physician amuses himself by doing research in France on Gustave Flaubert, the author of, probably most famously, Madame Bovary, the scandalous adulteress.
In particular, the doctor wants to see if he can figure out which stuffed parrot on display in France is the one that inspired/oversaw Flaubert's novella Un Coeur Simple, in which a serving woman has a beloved parrot that is probably even more important in her life dead and stuffed than alive.
As he does his research, he picks up lots of bits and pieces about Flaubert's life and travels and friendship circle, and particularly his lover, a poet named Louise Colet. Somewhere about a third of the way in, you realize there's another story being revealed, or hidden, about the doctor and his late wife. Slowly we discover, along with which stuffed parrot might be the model for the famous Loulou, that there is a mystery about his wife, about their relationship, and that the doctor is resistant to telling it.
It's a small, brilliant, and highly literary book. Flaubert comes across as far more interesting than I ever thought he was. We explore adultery. It isn't a book I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't read Bovary or at least Un Coeur Simple. That is to say, it is all about writing and writers and of course also about real life and love, but you get to real life through literature.
I really never read anything like it, though. And this was Barnes' first novel.
So now I have to read at least one more of his books to see if I like his work or not.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
This novel has been highly praised and is probably more than a little autobiographical. It is extremely intense, to the point
I kept having to put it down and come back just to catch my breath. The main character, Wallace, is an unhappy graduate student whose nematode experiments have been devastatingly contaminated to the point of colony death. Taylor describes this wonderfully, and it helps bring him to the realization he really isn't happy in graduate school.
His excellence in science has always been a way for him to escape a poor and abusive home in Alabama. He is also gay. And Black. He has a friendship group at the Midwestern university where the story takes place over a few days, but he feels too different, estranged from them, even the one who is his lover.
The racial divide and the bland niceness of his friends is part of his suffering. Everyone speaks in a sort of therapeutic jargon, and even his advisor, who is ready to throw him out of the program, says "Are you all right?"
The "Are you all rights?" certainly grated on me. It's quite a wonderful book with its laxer focus on if and how Wallace is going to escape again. It has huggy female friends, rough sex, memories of brutal sex, and those marvelously described nematode experiments.
Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelley
This is the fifth Lincoln Lawyer book, published in 2013, and it strikes me that in the end, Connelly may love his procedures best: police procedure, court procedure. Very satisfying to read,
though.
Micky Haller is a little thinner as a character than Harry Bosch–less tethered in history and a traumatic personal past, but he's also funnier, a kind of Huck Finn in how he thinks he's doing wrong but somehow in his heart he knows it's right–that is, the scum and the guilty also deserve legal representation, and sometimes the scum and apparently guilty aren't guilty at all.
Theres a clichéed angelic daughter in play–Haller is estranged from his teen daughter who thinks he's a bad guy for defending the bad guys. Very Hollywood: the sacred wisdom of children. I believe kids aren't particularly wise, but are always our hope. The wisdom thing tires me out.
There is one sad death of a good guy, no melodramatic twists, only unreeling complications. Quite good.
Black Sun and Fevered Star By Rebecca Roanhorse
I've been on a late-summer vacation tear with epic fantasy. This series is probably the best of the three (see below). Roanhorse is way better-than-competent as a writer, but Fevered Star is another middle book of a trilogy with longeurs.
Still, I've bought the final one and I'm ready, when I've refreshed myself from the over-sugar and fried donut addiction that fantasy gives me.
An especial Roanhorse strength is her hero-anti-hero, a boy who becomes the Crow God. He is like a beloved nation or warrior son: so bloody and death-seeking and yet also human and complex and attractive, even lovable. She seems to be going for a recognition that we can't get rid of human violence, but that there is hope for a kind of control long term.
We'll see if she follows through on that in the final book.
Image by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125547165
The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart
I was looking for a fantasy series, and this one is so-far-so-good. It's newish, 2021, and I had to get a cheap used paperback, huge, even though I'd like it better on Kindle just plunging forward into the dark night with the narrative. (Dark night meaning I can read at night on the Kindle.
Instead of the vaguely European Medieval-Renaissance backgrounds of, say, George R.R. and Robin Hobb, this one has a vaguely Chinese setting–foods have a lot of noodles and ginger, there is an emperor. The world seems to consist of floating islands that migrate in season, changing the weather. The emperor is doing weird things, harvesting shards of bone from the skulls of the citizens, all in the name of protecting the empire from a mysterious previous race
Whose statues and murals that always in the past had closed eyes, and the eyes have begun to open...
The shards are taken from children, who sometimes don't survive, and used to create and control "constructs," robots made of animal parts with more and less complex instructions via the bone shards. Meanwhile, the people whose shards they are using die spent and soon.
This is what the emperor does, and now his heir Lin and an adopted boy are being taught and teaching themselves to do what the emperor does. Of course, things get complicated as discoveries are made.
Two characters get first person points of view, Lin and a smuggler named Jovis who is on a quest to find his seven years lost wife. There are a couple of other third person points of view, all getting their own chapters when it's their turn.
Women and men in this world are equally heirs, soldiers, and marriage partners–this is, you can marry any sex you like. But sex itself comes mostly as big feelings and kisses and sinking into the wonderful warmth of the lover. That is, all pre-teen girlish (or is it anime love?)--I suppose it's officially Y.A. My favorite thing so far is is a newly discovered cross among an otter, a primate, and maybe a cat–with horns. They grow fast and bond deeply with their person (one for Jovis and one, at the end, for Lin.
Lots of fun in the series so far.
Ember in the Ashes
A Torch against the Night
A Reaper at the Gates
A Sky Beyond the Storm by Sabaa TahirI finished the Sabaa Tahir Ember series (2015 through 2020). I found them on a list of Best Recent Fantasy somewhere, and obviously I was into them enough to read on, but I also had mixed feelings.
First of all, I read the four big books in three weeks, probably too many too fast. I read three as ebooks borrowed from the library and the last one I just bought because I didn't want to wait.
Tahir starts with a group of young people struggling through a special school to become part of an elite corps of highly trained fighter/assassins called Masks. This is, of course, a fantasy world, with various ethnic or caste groups and some magic. There's only one female student, one of the point of view characters, but the evil commandant of the school is female.
It has plenty of action writing, probably too much for me, but then I'm an old lady who still considers herself a literary novelist and reader of literary novels. Everything moves, and Tahir does an excellent job in world creation–too eclectic for my taste maybe: she mixes vaguely Roman empire material with a sort of Bedouin semi-nomadic world of tribes people, mostly female led. There are some cities run by a semi-free nation of Mariners. And in the empire itself there are strict castes, Martials are at the top, Scholars the slaves, lots of plebeians too. Oh, and also, as the books continue, more and more jinn, efrits, and wights (little buzzy message-carriers not George R.R.'s white walkers).
Looking back over the four books, I think she handles all that well, but for me the constant danger and battles and impossible situations from which the characters almost always escape. There are often about to die horribly at the end of a chapter, Perils of Pauline style. This gets tedious, but a couple of books in, I realized I was reading something called a y.a. romance/fantasy. At least that explained why budding sexual relationship kept being frustrated. She does these hot scenes where the partners have tremors when their lips touch and all sorts of waves through their bodies, and his hand lands on her waist or hip–and then one of them pulls away (no, no this is wrong) or else they are interrupted. Over and over.
And yet--I couldn't stop reading. I'd also say that Tahir gets better at the end of each book and offers an extremely satisfying ending. People finally do have sex, and there is the complexity of the victims having done evil in the past. The evil world-ender himself is mostly sad inside. A few die and return from death, others stay dead, but it has hope at the end.
SOME SHORT REVIEWS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Elaine Durbach suggests:
Cape May by Chip Cheek
A delicately unfolded, surprisingly sexy tale of a honeymoon that brings two very young, very naive Southerners to Cape May for their honeymoon, and encounters that change them for life.Writers and Lovers by Lily King
This writer just keeps getting better and better. In this story of a would-be author, barely keeping herself afloat with a job as a waitress, she depicts romantic, familial and professional struggles that might all have been overly familiar, but in her hands, become startlingly fresh. I seldom reread any books; this one I dip into over and over, for the sheer pleasure of her word choices.
Danny Williams says: "Emptying boxes of books in the attic today, I saw A Map of the World, and though it's far from Their Houses, both contain a child's creation of a world they understand. Jane Hamilton is a favorite, especially The Short History of a Prince (I could see where it was going, but that's okay) and The Book of Ruth, inventing a consistent voice of a specific person with a specific history and situation. Disobedience not so much for me, but a B- amid a dozen As is a pretty good GPA."
Nikolas Kozloff recommends The Romantic by William Boyd. (Review in The New York Times here.)
Diane Simmons suggests:
A new novel Akmaral (Regal House, 2024) imagines the life of ancient women warriors—they really existed; ask Herodotus-- on the steppes of Central Asia. Using classical texts, along with evidence from recently opened burial mounds, Judith Lindbergh “conjures,” as she writes, the complex story of Akmaral and other women warriors of the Sauromatae, who lived in armor and on horseback, and who were not allowed to mate until they had killed a man in battle. The details of this life--the yurts, the fermented goat milk, the leather armor--are fascinating. But there is much more here than the daily life of fighting and survival. We see too a world haunted by the supernatural, tied to visions, ancient rites and tribal loyalty. Akmaral is a strong fighter—she will become a warrior leader--but she is also a woman which, even in the fifth century B.C.E. can complicate your life. As she shuns one of her own warriors, she falls for a Scythian slave, bears a child, then finds herself in position of impossibly conflicting alliances and betrayals.
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother’s Story of Reunion and Reckoning by Julia MacDonnell, a memoir, is hard to read and hard to put down. The author, daughter of a well-to-do and image-conscious Catholic family, is the bright, creative one among eight children. Looking for love, a commodity in short supply at home, she becomes pregnant. (It is the late mid-Sixties and neither female contraception nor birth control nor female birth control are available to her.) Immediately, she enters a nightmare of blame, shame and degradation from which, she writes, she has “never fully recovered.” She is sent to a grim home for unwed mothers where her newborn—already beloved-- is immediately taken from her and put up for adoption. Meanwhile everyone—case workers and family alike—make clear that her disgusting secret must never be told. Here, though, some fifty years later Julia MacDonnell tells, taking us on a road trip of the closed adoption system, where unmarried pregnant girls are treated with astonishingly self-righteous cruelty, so that “worthy” families may be provided with healthy newborns. Birth certificates are amended, and courts seal the records; it all becomes, McDonnell writes, a profitable business. Only recently, records have been opened and DNA tests allow adoptees and mothers to find each other. But this too is a painful process, both mother and child struggling to understand the “staggering degree of the original loss.”
Lonesome Dove, 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Larry McMurtry. From my Western Literature obsession: a novel about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the late 19th century. Sounds like 50s TV. But cattle drives were very real, especially after the Civil War when the North lifted its blockade on Southern herds, and before the railroads put the cowboys out of business. In Lonesome Dove, Texan Larry McMurtry goes for a non-stereotypical version of this classic western story. Two ex-Texas Rangers –one silent, one garrulous—try to manage the herd and the crew of complicated young men on a long and dangerous trip. (Full disclosure: my great-grandfather once drove horses, purchased from the Nez Perce, from Oregon to Omaha. Or so it was said.) I read the book and then listened on Audible. Lee Horsley’s delivery reminded me so much of the men I grew up with in Eastern Oregon that I kind of choked up when it ended.
(See our review of Lonesome Dove from 2015)
Lincoln by Gore Vidal . It’s a novel and obviously can’t be compared to the essential studies of Eric Foner or Doris Kearns Goodwin. But my smart friend put it on her best-of-2023 list, so I had to read it, even though I’ve never much liked Vidal. And initially—self-fulfilling prophecy?-- I was not in love with the book, bored and irritated by the gossipy account of the politicians surrounding the new president. Then I calmed down and allowed myself to be won over by the portrait of the canny country boy who didn’t like to eat anything but apples and was addicted to corny stories: “As the preacher said to the widow. . . .” Is his humor a “tic?” little smart alecks asked. But maybe the humor was his way of insisting on being himself in the snake pit of DC; meanwhile---in this telling-- he quietly and unassumingly defied all expectations. In the end—and I have to love this part-- he wouldn’t quit on America, even when the cause seemed hopeless.
(See our review of Lincoln)
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. Deceptively subtle first-person vignettes: at first. they seem to be no more than depressed diary entries, depicting a woman in her forties who lives alone in an Italian city. But soon we find the theme: the desire for solitude versus the fear of loneliness a solitary life may bring. It is a dichotomy that must be constantly managed.
The narrator loves the public pool, for example, but skirts the intimacy of the women’s dressing room. She accepts invitations to large gatherings -a festive dinner occasion of a christening—but after 40 minutes can't take the kids, slipping away to walk alone on the beach. She has a lover, but he is married and lives in another city. She doesn't ask which one. And in the quiet of August, with everyone away on vacation, she forms a connection of sorts, buying beloved knickknacks that her neighbor--closing up his late parents’ house-- must part with. She brings the items home and puts them on a shelf where they comfort her. They are not be precious to HER family, but they were precious to A family. In the tense standoff between the desire for solitude and the need for other people, they seem to offer an acceptable compromise.
Tablets Shattered: The End of An American Jewish Century and the Future of American Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer Reviewed by Joe Chuman
The war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the expansion of hostilities into Lebanon and the missile assault on Israel by Iran have thrust the Jewish state foremost into the headlines. It has also sown new divisions in the American social and politic fabric, further exacerbating tensions and hatred in what is already a deeply divided nation. America's military support of Israel and the accompanying loss of civilian life in Gaza, now exceeding 42,000 dead, the majority innocent women and children, has occasioned fervent demonstrations in support of the Palestinians on college campuses and in the streets. Passions have been aroused on many sides. Those supporting Israel have also been on the barricades.
Zionism, which has long evoked opprobrium, not only among Arab and Muslim populations, but among developing nations, has become a dirty word, equatable with unqualified evil. Zionism was the political movement that brought Israel into existence and created the Jewish state. Those who support Israel will interpret Zionism as the expression of the national self-determination of the Jewish people, long a fundamental precept of universal human rights. For many on the Left, in line with a post-colonial ideology that has become academically fashionable, Israel is excoriated as a “settler colonialist” entity whose very existence is construed as illegitimate.
The rise of pro-Palestinian fervor has spilled over into a resurgence of antisemitism which is unprecedented in the United States at least since the Second World War. Jews have long felt secure and have prospered in America. Current events have shaken that security and have raised the question among many Jews as to whether beneath the veneers of safety and extraordinary accomplishment, Jews in America will re-experience their historical status as the perpetual outsider. Though latent and for the most part muted for decades, antisemitism has become manifest again. Jews now feel vulnerable.
I began this essay on October 7th, the anniversary of the unprecedented and vicious slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas terrorists, often cited as the greatest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel is experiencing collective trauma, and many American Jews share in the agony of ongoing hostilities.
These events, taking place far away, have raised many painful questions as to the place of Jews with regard to the larger society. It has also raised questions within the American Jewish community as to the place of Israel as a major component of Jewish identity. These questions are by no means new, but they have taken on much greater urgency given the volatility of current events, painful as they are.
It is also a factor, among many others, that figures into current dynamics of what it means to be a Jew in America, and raises concerns and apprehensions about the future of American Judaism. These questions, though brought into stark relief in the moment, bear a long and extremely complex history.
The future of Judaism in America is the subject of recently published Tablets Shattered by journalist Joshua Leifer. This timely book, thoroughly researched and nuanced, is written in a polished, high-minded, and sophisticated style. This is not merely an academic study of American Jewry. Woven through his narrative is a deeply personal and honest exposition of Leifer's identity as a Jew and the evolution of the American Jewish community in the 20th century.
Leifer identifies himself as a “mainline affiliated” Jew, an identity to which he is inextricably attached. But Leifer's Jewish commitments are by no means without their vicissitudes. He is admirably honest and realistic about his changing viewpoints, his angst, and his ambivalences which feed into his conclusions as to where Judaism is heading in America. Tablets Shattered provides an assessment of the rising success of the Jewish community, and leads to the conclusion that it is “cracking and crumbling.” His approach is historical, sociological and political, but it is also a memoir, a personal cri de coeur. Leifer is clearly pessimistic about the American Jewish future, a conclusion for which he provides exhaustive evidence.
I was gripped by Leifer's study. Though he is less than half my age, his struggles with Jewish identity are parallel to my own. While I was educated in an Orthodox synagogue and had an Orthodox bar-mitzvah, and mine was a Jewish home, Jewish practice was minimal. Leifer's commitment to Judaism has run much deeper and his been continuous. Leifer spent his early education in a Jewish day school and as a youth there were multiple stays in Israel. Mine was not a Zionist home. I didn't develop an interest in Israel, or view it as a component of my identity until after the 1967 war, as Leifer notes, many Jews did. After my bar-mitzvah, I moved away from Judaic belief and found meaning in a humanistic world view and a career in the Ethical Culture movement. Though Ethical Culture was excoriated in some Jewish circles as an escape for Jews from their Jewish identity and a fast track toward assimilation, my motives for joining Ethical Culture emerged as a fulfillment of my Jewish values and not in defiance of them. From childhood I always valued my ethics as emerging from my Judaism. My being Jewish comprises my interiority at its deepest levels. There is an adage in Yiddish, “Az ihr hot nicht kein rachmones, vos macht ihr a Yid?” “If you don't have compassion, what makes you a Jew?” Such insight has been a source of personal meaning and pride.
It is that identification that also generates searing personal conflict in light of where Israel has moved politically and ethically, namely solidly to the right. The wanton destruction of innocent life in Gaza brings that conflict into stark relief. In an earlier essay I noted that on a trip to Israel last February, despite the national trauma caused by the unprecedented assault of October 7th, I encountered not a single Israeli, many with whom I ostensibly shared common values, who expressed a word of compassion for the disproportionate killing of innocent lives in Gaza. It is an ethical absence expressed by too many American Jews as well, and I have found it painful in light of what I have always considered central to being Jewish in any justifiable sense.
Both Joshua Leifer and I are leftists, which generates further conflict and distress as pro-Palestinian demonstrations have too readily morphed into a yen for Israel's very destruction, and even beyond, have been an outlet for antisemitism.
But Zionism comprises just one aspect of a much broader thesis. Leifer traces the trajectory of Judaism in America with reference to the evolution of his family through generations. The years from 1881 to 1924 saw the emigration to America of more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe. They were fleeing not only czarist pogroms, but also, in many cases, rabbinic establishments in the search of freedom and new opportunities. In the move across the Atlantic, the new arrivals, who were born into folk Orthodoxy, quickly shed their religion as they sought to assimilate to America and its values. Such was the case with Leifer's family and my own. In my case, my maternal grandparents arrived from Eastern Poland around 1900 and lived in the Lower East Side before moving to the Bronx. Though they lived in the United States for 70 years, they never learned English. Their seven children related to their Old-World parents with muted disdain and became radically secular, one becoming a Stalinist and younger brother a radical Trotskyist. There was an annual Passover Seder, which was formally correct, but devoid of underlying belief or reverence. The only exception was my mother, who was the youngest and who retained some vestige of religious practice within the context of upwardly mobile middle-class aspirations.
As such, sustaining Jewish identity, as Leifer makes clear, involved deliberate effort in light of the blandishments of consumerism and the opportunity for social climbing that America provided. Leifer identifies three pillars around which Jewish identity has been centered that began at the turn of the century and solidified after World War II.
The first was Americanism. America provided promise and the promise was fulfilled. American freedom and opportunity provided a powerful counterweight to the Jewish history of persecution. Jews, as never before, flourished in the new land. But, as Leifer notes, success came at a very severe cost:
“...while Americanism gave much to American Jews, it also exacted a significant and ultimately devastating cost. The theorist of cultural pluralism might have hoped otherwise, but, in practice, fully joining the American project entailed the suppression and surrender of what had been the dominant forms of Eastern European Jewishness: traditionalist Orthodoxy and left-wing radicalism. These were the roots of eastern European Jewry; making it in America required that they be severed.”
In short, in the move to a new and open society, Jews had to create Judaism anew with new institutions fitted to the American environment. It is these institutions and Jewish affiliation that are shredding and now fading away.
The second pillar was Zionism, especially after Israel's founding in 1948 and then again after Israel's dramatic victory in the 1967 war. Israel, as a locus of Jewish identity, as Leifer notes, emerged at mid- century at a time of “embourgeoisement and suburban anomie, when a cultural and religious crisis appeared imminent.” But making Israel and Zionism central to Jewish identity was problematic in that it too was attained as a substitute for religious practice. As Leifer asserts:
“If meaning could not be found in liturgy or in synagogue, it could now be found in fundraising for the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). American Jews imagined Israel as a moral beacon and Zionism as the secular fulfillment of the religious faith in which they could no longer really believe.”
While Israel, born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, could inspire great pride in American Jews, it has not come without intrinsic problems for American Jewish identity. As implied, while support for Israel became a centerpiece of Jewish identity, nationalism is not a religion. Moreover, Zionist ideology promoted the notion that the authentic Jewish life could only be lived within the Jewish state. Hence many American Zionists found themselves fervently supporting Israel with their passion and their financial generosity while Israel collectively has construed those in the diaspora to be second class Jews.
But with Israel's victory in the 1967 war, and the occupation and settlement of the West Bank and control of Gaza, the politics of supporting Israel dramatically and painfully changed. American military support for Israel grew tremendously and Israeli society and its government moved steadily to the right. American organizations such as AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and the Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, along with their self-appointed leaders, staunchly supported Israeli nationalism and maintained the position, with few exceptions, that Israel could do no wrong. Sustained by, and catering to super-wealthy donors, they postured themselves as speaking for a constituency they did not and do not represent, given that the overriding majority of American Jews remain liberal. Such groups actively have worked to shut down any criticism of Israel, and have actively destroyed those Jewish movements that have lodged dissent, particularly regarding Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.
Indeed liberalism is the third pillar of Leifer's framewoek defining the basis of American Jewish life. It was natural for Jews to support liberal causes. Identification with the oppressed came readily, and Jews were actively supportive of the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement, and in the 1960s found themselves in the forefront of the New Left and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Jews supported progressive education and the labor movement. Jewish attorneys championed civil liberties and the separation of church and state, among other progressive initiatives. And Jews have reliable supported the Democratic Party, even, as often noted, when Democratic policy has run against their economic interests. The American Jewish population has been reflexively liberal.
But the embrace of liberalism, as Leifer makes clear, has led to the undoing of American Judaism and points to the central dynamic that has been its cause, often unnoticed or underappreciated. It is a conclusion he often repeats:
“But it soon turned out that what worked for liberal America could not work for Judaism. The idea of obligation-the meaning of mitzvah, the core of Jewish life-fell out of fashion in liberal capitalist culture that sacralizes individual self-expression and self-gratification. The logic of the market reduced all aspects of life to fungible value, and religious practice became, like Pilates or yoga, just another consumer good. In a world of limitless choice and limitless growth, the kind of commitment and restraint required to sustain community increasingly appeared as an unjustifiable and palatable anachronism. By the late twentieth century, American Jews have become such good liberals that they could no longer give themselves compelling reasons for why they should live Jewish lives in terms other than those American liberalism furnished for them.”
A fourth pillar I would add and that Leifer discusses, but I consider weightier, is the significance of the Holocaust. The salience of the Holocaust in Jewish discourse did not emerge until several decades after the War, perhaps owing to its enormity and associative trauma. But once it did, Holocaust memory and its significance for Jewish identity became central to Jewish world consciousness and worked its way into Jewish culture at large. Holocaust museums, memorial events, school curricula and the portrayal of the Holocaust in popular culture became widespread and commonplace.
Yet as Leifer maintains, these pillars have run their course and are unraveling. American ism and liberalism have winnowed away at the religious core that has defined Judaism as Leifer understands it. Religious obligation and practice, and the communal bonds that reinforce them, have been subsumed by the dynamics comprising modern American life. Zionism, which was a benevolent cause for older generations that fostered pride and was a source of identity, for many younger progressive Jews signifies support for an ethno-nationalist militarized state, committed to the oppression and humiliation of seven million Palestinians seemingly without end. It's been noted by some that memorializing the Holocaust sacralizes victimization and bears no relation to active religious practice. And in a few years, with the passing of the last survivors, the Holocaust will move from lived history to memory, and with this shift, its significance and centrality to Jewish identity will most likely grow weaker.
The thinning of the Jewish community is most evident in the increased pace of intermarriage. I was taught early on that marrying out was strictly forbidden and Orthodoxy requires that one's child who weds a Gentile be disowned if not declared dead by one's family. In the 1950s perhaps no more than eight percent of Jews outmarried. Today, if we bracket the Orthodox sector, more than 70 percent of Jews marry someone of a different faith. The shift has been a source of high anxiety in the organized Jewish community, occasioning flurries of studies seeking to pin down with precision the population of Jewish Americans. In earlier decades, Conservative Judaism had been the largest of the three major denominations, followed by Reform. Despite greater visibility, Orthodoxy compromises no more than ten percent of the organized Jewish community. Both Conservative and Reform have greatly declined, though Conservative, which I have long construed as a way station for the immigrant population, more so.
Despite large endowments, libraries, archives and synagogues, the decline is shocking. Leifer cites the following:
“Disaffiliation is a top-down as well as bottom up phenomenon. Enrollment at the existing Reform and Conservative seminaries has dropped in tandem with synagogue membership. The numbers can appear shocking. Across its Los Angeles and New York campuses, the 2022-2023 Hebrew Union College rabbinical student class had only fourteen students. At the Conservative JTS (Jewish Theological Seminary) in New York, the same year's first-year rabbinical class had only seven.”
“At mid-century, the Reform and Conservative movements were mammoth organizations and, like the mammoths seem headed toward extinction- not tomorrow, but inevitably...The once vast suburban architecture of liberal Jewish life is becoming a mausoleum to a religious civilization that has now passed.”
What has been the cause of this decline and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it?
American society has dramatically changed in the past half century and with this change has come the advance of pluralism, women's equality and the movement of gays into mainstream society. It was inevitable that the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, as has been the case with mainline Protestant churches, would be compelled to adjust to these changes. The effects of postmodernism on society at-large have given rise to post-denominational- and post-God- movements within Judaism and new forms of Jewish expressions to keep pace with cultural changes. The ordination of women as rabbis was a long-standing issue of debate and contention within the Reform movement and then in Conservative Judaism. What of gay marriage? Gay and lesbian rabbis? With the explosive reality of intermarriage, Reform especially has wrestled with the issue of placing the non-Jewish spouse in the synagogue. Can he or she be a member of the temple? Hold office? Participate in religious rituals? Traditional Judaism is matrilineal. If a child's mother is Jewish, so is the child and the father is irrelevant in this regard. Reform elected to alter this millennial doctrine so that a child of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could be construed as a Jew as long as there was a stated pledge to raise the child as such.
In general, the pressures of society have resulted in liberal Judaism opting for greater inclusion, and as a result, liberalizing still further. But have such efforts to be relevant to the times been propitious for Judaism's future, or have they been a cause of the decline? I recall a conversation with an older friend, a retired Reform rabbi, who stated his discomfort when walking through the corridors of the temple where he had long served hearing the sound of Christmas carols sung by the congregation's choir. At what point does Judaism lose its defining character? Leifer notes that there are those who conclude that the decline of Jewish commitment and affiliation can be attributed to the very accommodations social changes have wrought.
But these changes have also brought new and creative expressions of Judaism, as Leifer states, along the periphery. There are experimental forms, many brought by gay and lesbian Jews, that involve the reinvention of ritual and liturgy inclusive of music, storytelling, theater and more, much reflective of current political and social sensibilities. There is borrowing from avant-garde trends, even the syncretistic inclusion of practices from other traditions.
Clearly Leifer is admiring of the creativity. Yet even here, in an effort to transform Judaism in tune with current values and political movements, he remains uncertain and discomforted, and his misgivings go to the heart of his thesis.
The problem with contemporary Judaism is not its appropriation of new forms. The dynamics run much deeper and reach far beyond internal Jewish issues. The problem is the primacy of individualism that defines American life. It is a reality that Leifer often repeats:
“...for most of Judaism's existence, being Jewish meant recognizing Judaism's binding framework, even if one struggles with, bristled at, or neglected, whether with guilt or relish, its stipulations. Contemporary Jewish life, by contrast, appears to rest on a roughly opposite axiom. While most American Jews describe themselves as proud to be Jewish, they also seem to believe that such a declaration exists independent of any set of obligations-that it requires no adherence, let alone knowledge, of Jewish law. Jewishness today has become more of an identity to be possessed than a coherent set of practices. Self -gratification and individual preference have supplanted commandedness and commitment to community.”
“It is the liberal-individualist mentality-not queer inclusion or gender egalitarianism-that is responsible for mainline affiliated Judaism's demise.”Leifer has gotten it exactly right. It is as if Robert Putnam and his thesis proffered in Bowling Alone is looking over Leifer' shoulder. In my view, American society is characterized by hyper-individualism that has led to the breakdown of organizational and institutional affiliation of all types, including religious ones. Leifer does reference the meteoric decline of Protestant churches, noting that some scholars estimate that 6,000 to 10,000 churches close down every year. Sociologically, synagogues are subject to precisely the same forces.
While Leifer is clearly intrigued with the creativity of new expressions of Judaism he has his doubts in a way that reveals the internal nature of his own Jewish commitments and what he believes Judaism needs to be. He closes his book with a sentiment which I understand and with which, in a broader sense, I completely concur. In a manner that is admirably revealing, Leifer notes as follows:
“Most of all, I have become convinced of the radical potential of traditional Judaism...I believe that a life centered on the commandments, on mitzvot, is a good life in and of itself. In our current moment, it is also a profoundly and radically countercultural one...Judaism is a religion of limits and obligation- two concepts utterly opposed to the dominant currents of contemporary life. Our liberal capitalist culture celebrates boundless growth, infinite choice, and instant gratification. Traditional Judaism, by contrast, teaches the merits of long term commit, patience and restraint, and commitment with one's lot.
Whereas liberal capitalism glorifies the individual while condemning him to an atomized and isolated existence, traditional Judaism requires that life be lived with and for others-in obligated community.”
“Especially in times like ours, I understand that these may seem like conservative values. In a sense, they are. But I have arrived to them through my left-wing convictions, not despite them.”
“To be clear, I don't think embracing tradition means relinquishing important progressive commitments such as feminism, anti-racism, or opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It simply means realizing these commitments differently.”
Here I completely agree. There can be no freedom without restraint. There can be no freedom for oneself without obligation and responsibility to others and to higher, more enduring, values. There can be no individual without community. It is such commitments that deepen life's meaning. And so, Joshua Leifer has not headed for the exit. He has chosen to recommit himself to his Judaism, its practices and obligations,and to Israel, and fight whatever battles that need to be fought from the inside. Whether he will find others like him in sufficient numbers to ensure the Jewish future, he has left us with many reasons to doubt.
Leifer's treatment of Orthodox Judaism is relegated to a single chapter. It deals primarily with the Haredi community in Lakewood, New Jersey, from which his wife comes. He is admiring of the Haredi devotion to transcendent values, to community and family. But clearly he refutes the parochialism and conservatism that are constitutive of what he finds in Lakewood. Oddly a major omission in Leifer's study is a discussion of modern Orthodoxy, which in many places is vibrant and thriving. My childhood synagogue was the Queens Jewish Center in Forest Hills. It was the first of what is now a row of a dozen Orthodox synagogues and yeshivas that line 108th street in my old neighborhood. The suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey, where I worked for 50 years, is home to perhaps 15 Orthodox shuls. It is one of several communities in the New York area where modern Orthodoxy is growing.
As noted, Leifer views American Judaism through a sociological and historical lens. He does not deal with the philosophical and metaphysical underpinning of Jewish belief. Conventionally, Judaism is seen primarily as dealing with behavior, the living out of the mitzvot. But belief cannot be fully discounted. At a minimum, Judaic commitment requires at least a belief that something not of this world occurred on Sinai. Jewish liturgy is inextricably theocentric, and metaphorical reinterpretation can only be applied so far. For me, belief in God, or rather the absence of it, has raised radical questions as to how I construe and construct my Jewish identity. Leifer does not engage issues of belief and, in my view, his work would be more complete if he had.
Despite these omissions, Tablets Shattered will generate extensive discussion within the Jewish community. It is worthy of much attention. And rightly so. It could not be more relevant to the contemporary Jewish experience in America. It is written with sophistication and in a powerful style. It is erudite but personal and admirably honest. Leifer is committed to speaking the truth as he sees it and without reservation. And given our fraught times and the volatility of the moment, Leifer's thesis also partakes of courage.
GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Diane Simmons talking about The Courtship of Eva Eldridge, now an audio book! See our review here.
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Check out Cynthia Swanson on going from best-selling commercial author to self-publishing.
Take a look at this article from Literary Hub by Ayeşgül Savaş on creating a clock for your story. She recommends these books for their use of time: The Human Zoo by Sabina Murray; Intimacies by Katie Kitamura; and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
Don't miss the latest installment of Danny Williams's Adventures in Editing--July 2024. Editor and Writer Danny Williams tells amusing tales of editing--and passes on some serious hints for writers at the same time!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Check out Estelle Erasmus's book on getting nonfiction writing noticed:
More on Estelle Erasmus: www.estelleserasmus.com (sign up for her newsletter);WIRED: How toResist the Temptation of AI When Writing ; Writer's Digest: What to Do to Pre-Launch to Get Your Book Noticed ; Shondaland: I'm Learning to Listen in New Ways
Kelly Watt's The Weeping Degree is Now Available!Kelly Watt's The Weeping Degree: How Astrology Saved Me From Suicide – is a raw and forbidding new collection of poetry and prose by award-winning author Kelly Watt.
Kelly’s gritty collection of poetry and flash prose reveals the biography of a trauma, following the ripple effect of childhood abandonment and sexual abuse as it echoes throughout the author’s life, slowly transforming through time from a wound to a gift. Inspired by the author's own challenging astrological signatures, in these poems Watt turns to astrology and Buddhism to make sense of her encounters with the dark side of the soul. Divided into three distinct sections: The Home for Little Girls, The Buddha and The Pink Futon, and Hands Across the World, this book travels the globe; beginning in the silent shadows of foster care in a bleak Scarborough suburb, and emerging to the light and sound of Sanskrit chanting in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal.
Written for poetry lovers, spiritual seekers, and astrology aficionados alike, this collection will take you on a wild ride, where poetry is a sacred alchemical art; a destination where our deepest sorrows are transmuted through imagination and creativity to wonder and joy.
Praise for The Weeping Degree:
What do dead girls need in the afterlife? They need the poems of Kelly Watt so that the daffodils will return to run rampant over the ground with their crazy yellow hope.
--Paul Lisson, poet and editor of HA&L, Hamilton Arts & Letters Magazine.
Kelly Watt has taken the darkest, most horrifying moments of her young life and made them into a groundbreaking work of beautiful words. The Weeping Degree is more than a triumph of poetic virtuosity; it is a testament to Watt’s moral courage, her tenacity, and to her faith in the ability to heal.
–Ruth Edgett, author, blogger, reviewer.
Lewis Brett Smiler has a new story, "The Sculptor," at Anotherealm.com, a journal of speculative fiction. It's pretty scary: a lawyer starts seeing frightening links between a movie and his own life. And the main characters in the movie don't make it out alive. Here is the link: The Sculptor by Lewis Brett Smiler (anotherealm.com)
Paul Rabinowitz has had several poems and more published recently (see his webpage here). He will also be appearing at readings in NYC: Saturday, Sept 21 at Fort Tryon Park, 3-4PM Saturday, Oct. 19 at Chakra's Restaurant 7PM (Fundraiser for Uptown Dance Collective) Sunday, Oct. 27 at P&T Knitwear Bookstore 5-7PM @wordshednyc with Margaret R. Sáraco Friday, March 21 Adverse Absraction 6PM at Otto's Shrunken Head (East Village). Upcoming in 2025 is his first book of short stories called The Ending and Other Short Works.
Ernie Brill writes with his latest news: "I’m immersed in sending out work and finishing a novel about the historic San Francisco State student strike but I wanted to let you know about my recently published book of poetry, Journeys of Voices and Choices (Human Error Press, Wendell, MA, January2024). 115 poems, blurbs by Leslie Simon, Ousmane Power Greene, Michael Krasny, Truing Tran, and Michael Krasny. The book is selling on Amazon!"
Danny Williams is still offering free samples of his editing services! He says, "Editing services for which I've actually been paid money for over the past 35 or so years. (If you want details on the kind of work I've done, contact me and I'll tell you what I can remember. The list stretches back to mimeograph days in the mid-1960s.) Send me some words, and I'll spend about two hours reading them and responding in some way which I believe might be useful. I've been averaging about two writers a year taking me up on this. That comes out to about 40 seconds of my time per day, so I believe I can take on some more. Maybe I'll think of a way I might be able to help you, or maybe not. Whatever. I love doing this stuff, everything from sitting on the virtual front porch with a writer and chatting about an idea they have, to getting a manuscript finalized and finding the right publisher. Write Danny Williams at editorwv@hotmail.com
Latest issue of the Jewish Literary Journal is now out.
Ed Davis Literary News
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.
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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.
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#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.
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#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
