Rocketjk's 50-Book Feet Up, Read Up in 22

Greetings, all! Here's my 2022 hullabaloo of a reading challenge. Last year (2021) I read 67 books, which was a good effort but didn't come close to 2020's crazy 82-book rampage. We'll see where this year takes me. 2019 found me reading 63 books. My previous five totals, when I still owned my used bookstore, had been 41, 41, 46, 44, 46 and, in the first year of the store, only 40. I doubt I'll ever hit 82 again, but who knows?

In case you're interested:
2021 50-Book Challenge thread.
2020 50-Book Challenge thread
2019 50-Book Challenge thread
2018 50-Book Challenge thread
2017 50-Book Challenge thread
2016 50-Book Challenge thread
2015 50-Book Challenge thread
2014 50-Book Challenge thread
2013 50-Book Challenge thread
2012 50-Book Challenge thread
2011 50-Book Challenge thread
2010 50-Book Challenge thread
2009 50-Book Challenge thread
2008 50-Book Challenge thread

In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list.

Master List (Touchstones included with individual listings below):
1: Darker Than Amber by John D. McDonald
2: Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer
3: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
4: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor
5: Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
6: The Handle by Richard Stark
7: The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
8: First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner
9: Flats Fixed - Among Other Things by Don Tracy
10: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
11: The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
12: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen
13: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
14: Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
15: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
16: Turning Angel by Greg Iles
17: Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts
18: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
19: Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
20: The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in the Korea by Andrew Geer
21: Conjure Women by Asia Atakora
22: Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by Colin Escott with Martin Hawkins
23: The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
24: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove
25: Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
26: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei
27: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
28: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
29: The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
30: Show - The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962 edited by Robert M. Wool
31: Boy in Blue by Royce Brier
32: Dead Dead Girls by Neksa Afia
33: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
34: The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde
35: Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund
36: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
37: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
38: Homecomings by C.P. Snow
39: Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White
40: Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley
41: The Background of Our War by The U.S. War Department Bureau of Public Relations
42: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
43: A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr
44: Liberal Porto: A Guide to the Architecture, Sites and History of Porto edited by Manuela Rebelo
45: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
46: Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother by Sarah Hermanson Meister
47: Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
48: John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland
49: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs
50: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
51: Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen
52: Snow Country by I.J. Parker
53: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James
54: Rough Translations by Molly Giles
55: Watch Czechoslovakia! by Richard Freund

I've dropped off a star to follow along this year.

>2 RBeffa: Ditto!

I'm here, you're starred.

Book 1: Darker Than Amber by John D. McDonald



Here's my first completed book of the year, a relatively quick one. Darker Than Amber is the seventh book in John D. MacDonald's famous Travis McGee series of crime novels, first published in the 1960s. McGee is a footloose, cynical but ultimately heart of gold private eye who lives down in the Florida Keys on his boat, the Busted Flush and only takes work when he's out of money. His specialty is helping people who have been cheated or conned get back what is rightfully theirs and taking down the bad guys in the process. In the big picture, McGee insists on staying on the right side of the law, and his own sense of honor. When it comes to the details, however, he doesn't mind fudging on the rules. As Darker Than Amber begins, McGee and his buddy, Meyer, are doing some nighttime fishing under a road bridge when down from the bridge comes a woman being dropped into the water, tied to a weight. Something about this body tells the men that the woman is still alive, so McGee dives down and is able to rescue her. Dangerous adventure, of course, ensues. These books are fun, fast-paced and well plotted. Good, snappy, cynical dialogue but without the noir cliche patter that quickly becomes tiresome. There is sexism galore, however, and that definitely diminishes the series' luster.

>5 rocketjk: Well, yes, p.i. fiction from the 1960s being sexist isn't surprising, but it sure as heck was easy to read MacDonald's prose.

Happy 2022! Let's hope the 80+ club is an even-years phenomenon.

>6 richardderus: Hey, Richard! Thanks for dropping in here, my friend. Hope you're well and that you have lots of great reading, and everything else, this year. Cheers!

>7 rocketjk: Happy to report that 2022 is off to a rip-snortin' start, though not all on the upside; still, better than blah any day.

Blah = death.

Book 2: Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer



Having completed my one-novel-per-year reading (or, mostly, rereading) of all of Joseph Conrad’s novels last year, I’ve decided to begin a new tradition of beginning each calendar year with a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, in this way how many I can read, given my starting point: I’m now 66.

At any rate, Satan in Goray is Singer’s first novel, originally published in Poland (in Yiddish) in serial form in 1933, and then in novel form in 1935. The novel wasn’t published in English until 1955. Satan in Goray is an historical novel, taking place in 17th Century Poland, and based on two historical facts. One is the uprising of Cossack armies in 1648. They were revolting against Polish rule, but they found their easiest targets among the Jewish towns across the country, and the result was a series of furious attacks and massacres. The other is the rise several years later of Sabbatai Zevi, a charismatic figure who claimed to be the Messiah that Jews had been waiting and praying for since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews were to be finally redeemed, their suffering on Earth at an end! Zevi gathered a huge following of Jews desperate to believe in the end of their travails.

And so we come to Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world,” and practically obliterated by the pogroms. The action of the story begins 20 years later. The scattered survivors of the town have gradually drifted back to their homes. The town’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi, it’s attempting to restore a sense of normalcy through the age old religious teachings of the Torah that have been followed for centuries. But first one and then another messenger arrive in the town heralding the rise of the new Messiah. Soon, the agony of the Jews will be over. Why follow old laws and old rules of morality? And so the battle is on. Singer tells the story in a folktale style, laced with Jewish mysticism. Imps, demons and devils are simply assumed to be real. Singer creates a sense of his characters and their actions and reactions by piling up details, painting vivid pictures of internal terrors and delights. Although the narrative style is otherwise straightforward, the narrative begins to resemble a fever dream.

Harvard scholar Ruth R. Wisse, in her fascinating introduction to my 1996 Farrah, Straus and Giroux edition, lays out some of the historical context of Singer’s writing, here. The mid-30s in Poland were a time of fierce anti-Semitism in the country. Despite the fact that the Treaty of Versailles had called for a democratic Poland, the country had been ruled since 1926 by a strongman, Jozef Pilsudski, whose nationalistic program called for a repression of “the strangers within.” This meant, especially, Poland’s Jews. Anti-Jewish boycotts of all sorts led to a Jewish intellectual life that was forced to turn in on itself. Wisse points out that by showing the weaknesses of both the old ways that Rabbi Benish tries to save and the false hopes of saviors, Singer is spurning movements in general. In this, Wisse says, Singer would have been outside the mainstream of Yiddish intellectual culture in the Poland of that day, wherein enthusiasm for Marxism by then was strong and growing stronger.

American immigration policies in the 1930s had tightened considerably, so European Jews in that day did not have the option of pulling up stakes and heading to the New World that their parents’ generation had had. Even, for the Communists among them, the Soviet border was closed. But Singer, whose older brother had preceded him to the U.S. some years before, was able to get one of the cherished visas, and emigrated to New York in 1935, just before Satan in Goray was published in novel form in Warsaw.

I waited until after reading the novel to go back and read the introduction, as I usually do, and I’m glad I did, for there are a lot of plot spoilers in that text. Still, I would have liked to have had some of the historical/cultural context in mind during my reading. I wish there were some way for such writers to split up their strict cultural/historical information into their introductions and their more specific discussions of the text itself into afterwords. C’est la vie!

>9 rocketjk:
You got me with a Book Bullitt on that one. I have read several of Singer's books of children's stories but not one of his adult novels. Time to remedy that as I will be turning 66 this year. :-)

>10 benitastrnad: Just a note that many people like Singer’s short stories better than his novels. I’ve read many of his story collections and they are marvelous.

I enjoy Singer's short stories, but have never tried a novel. I think the sort of introduction your edition came with can be very very helpful in grasping the context of translated works from another time and place. I always try to save them until I've finished the book too, but if I'm having trouble with parts of the story, I have been known to sneak a peak for enlightenment.

Book 3: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong



After starting a new tradition with my January reading of an Isaac Singer novel, with my next book I continued a tradition that my wife and I began several years back. Each year, we give each other to read a favorite book from our own reading of the previous year. Obviously, we each choose a book we think the other will enjoy. This year my wife handed me On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to read, and, wow, what a terrific book it is.

The story of this beautiful book is told through a letter that our narrator, a young Vietnamese-American man, writes his mother. His narrative weaves in and out through time, in beautiful language telling of his own life as a child and then as a young man in the rough, decaying streets of Hartford, Connecticut, where violence and opioid addiction both are constants, his upbringing by his grandmother and mother in a loving yet problematic home, their ever-present otherness as Vietnamese in this city. Both of the women suffer from PTSD, his grandmother from her harrowing experiences in her native country during the Vietnamese War, and both of them from abusive marriages. The narrator, known only to us as Little Dog, describes his mother’s occasional use of her fists on him, but also of her endless, debilitating work at a nail salon that leaves her exhausted and bent, and of his grandmother’s protective love and heartfelt life lessons. Little Dog gradually gains awareness of his homosexuality, and we read of his first, heartbreaking love affair. We see Little Dog’s grandmother’s experiences during the war, including one harrowing scene in which she faces down a young American soldier who who stands with rifle pointed at her in suspicion as she holds her infant daughter, Little Dog’s mother, to her shoulder. It is Vuong’s strong, poetic, flowing language that makes this work so well and made this a profoundly memorable book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

It served, in fact, as an interesting counterpoint to Gilead which I read this month and also loved, written in the form of a father’s letter to his son.

And in case anyone's interested, the book from my 2021 reading that I gave my wife to read was The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak.

Book 4: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor



This is a very readable and detailed account of the growth of the U.S. and, to a lesser extent Canada and Mexico, from just after the American Revolution to just before the American Civil War. I've read a lot of U.S. history over the years, but I derived a lot of new information, or at least new perspectives in Taylor's book.

The first, and one of Taylor's central themes, is that the idea of Manifest Destiny that all Americans learn in school--that is, the concept that Americans always believed (or at least said aloud as a rationalization for their actions) that it was America's God given "destiny" to eventually control the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is a vast simplification of the attitudes, desires and fears of the country as it evolved after the Revolution. As Taylor describes it, the government's main motivations for encouraging the settling of (at first) the territories between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River were a) to push the English and Spanish Empires and the Indians further away from the populated regions of the U.S., and also for the revenue to be gained by the government in selling off the land. But at the same time, there was a major distrust of what those settlers would do when push came to shove. If they didn't like the policies of the U.S. government toward them, or if they thought they could get their goods to market more easily by, say, sending them down the Spanish controlled Mississippi River and through Spanish-held New Orleans, or if they thought the English could help keep the Indians off their backs better than the U.S. could, they might throw their lot in with those empires, as indeed many did along the way. The idea that the settlers saw themselves as Americans who owed allegiance to that country was far less assured than we think it was from the remove of centuries. Many of the settlers hadn't even been born in the U.S., and anyway, the country, for decades after the Revolution, was seen to be in danger of imploding into two countries or even into shards of bickering states, certainly not necessarily the wagon you'd want to hitch your fortune to.

The second is the importance of the War of 1812, not in and of itself, but as part of a series of conflicts within that decade, what Taylor calls the "War of the 1810s," that included Andrew Jackson's ruthless but successful incursions
into Spanish held Florida, and that "shifted the geopolitics of North America."

Taylor writes:

"Embattled and imperiled at the start of that decade, Americans secured continental predominance by 1819, as the Spanish forsook Florida while the British retreated behind the Canadian border. Both empires abandoned Indian allies, who lost their crucial suppliers of modern weaponry. Thereafter, Indians could slow but not stop American domination . . . . But it also mattered that the Americans settled for hardening their northern border while expanding southwestward across the continent. . . . That shift irritated Yankees who wondered why federal leaders compromised boundary issues with Canada while expanding the nation to the south and west. As that tilt obtained vast new lands suitable for plantation slavery, Americans bitterly debated the future of their Union."

Taylor goes into great detail showing the cruelty of slavery, but also the importance of the Southern belief that expanding slavery was crucial to its continued viability. The perceived Southern need to protect slavery winds through every political development and conflict throughout the country's history. Additionally, Taylor is clear that White supremacy was far from a Southern only concept. In fact many Northern politicians attacked slavery only on the basis that it existed at the debilitating expense of the White working class. Being anti-slavery in no way meant being for equal rights for Blacks. There were many states and territories that were firmly anti-slavery while at the same time harshly discriminating against, and in some cases actually expelling, free Blacks. The cruelty to and treachery against Native Americans is described in detail as well.

Taylor does a good job, also, of detailing the differences in the country's early decades between the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government with the ability to make internal improvements such as roads, bridges and canals to strengthen the country's commerce and help tie the disparate regions together economically, and the Republicans, who saw the country more as a loose confederation of states with a central government responsible primarily for defending the nation from foreign attack. He also shows the ways in which both sides were willing to compromise those core philosophies for their own self interest. Jefferson certainly comes off as a conniver!

One criticism I've seen of this book is that Taylor overemphasizes systemic racism in his accounts. My own thought is that it is crucial that histories written now and going forward make it clear the degree to which racism has, indeed, played a major roll in every development in America's history. We cannot sustain an accurate idea of ourselves by treating slavery, racism and Indian genocide as an "oh, by the way" or "well, everybody knows that was bad so we don't have to go into it" aspect of our story. And yet, in a way I can see the point: by so frequently going back to, emphasizing and detailing those points, Taylor was faced with the choice of leaving other developments out or writing a much longer book. I'm going to take a wild guess that his publishers gave Taylor a 400-page limit (the book comes in at a very manageable 382 pages). So, for example, the cultural and artistic life of the country is almost entirely absent here. I consider this, relatively speaking, a quibble rather than a major drawback in the book's content.

Incidentally, Taylor, in his preface, describes this book as a sequel to two previous books of his: American Colonies: The Settling of North America and American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, neither of which I have read. I only read this one because it was a birthday present from my wonderful wife back in July and has been awaiting my attention since then. Taylor won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.

Book 5: Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet



I found Our Lady of the Flowers to be a profoundly rewarding reading experience. There's quite a bit about the narrative that I need to think through more thoroughly, a process I'll be engaging in over the coming weeks, but my initial impressions are as follows:

The narrator, "Jean Genet," a habitué of French prisons, tells this tale from inside a prison cell, telling us that he is doing so and also telling us that he is spinning his tales and creating his characters out of his imagination. These characters, most predominantly Divine, Darling and Our Lady of the Flowers, are members of a Paris shadow world of homosexual grifters, thieves, prostitutes and pimps. The membrane of the narrative is porous, however, for though most often we read about these figures in the third person, frequently we get the idea that Divine is Genet (or Genet is Divine). The narrator's imagination takes us back and forth in time, as we get, especially, Divine's origin story and see the ways in which his (her) sense of difference and isolation as a child push him (her) to the fringes of society as time goes on. We see how the characters simultaneously depend upon and prey upon each other. And sometimes this shadow world collapses entirely and we land back with "Genet" in his jail cell, back to the source of this whirlpool of storytelling. All of this comes to us through what I found to be a powerful lens of poetic language and surrealist imaginings. And it all works because, as fractured as it is, as often distasteful as the characters' actions make them, Genet renders them entirely human, people we end up feeling for despite their crimes and betrayals. At heart, what they desperately need out of life is what we need.

I'm very happy I finally read this novel, considered a classic, certainly, and rightfully. Genet wrote the book from his own jail cell in 1941 and 1942. I should say that only occasionally does Genet make oblique reference to the German invasion and occupation of Paris during this time. Somewhere I've read that Genet wrote the book clandestinely, had the manuscript confiscated by a prison guard, and then simply (perhaps "simply" is not the correct word) wrote the book again, this time successfully. I've also read that the beat writers like Burroughs and Kerouac considered this novel a major inspiration for their own work.

My copy of Our Lady of the Flowers is a beautiful Modern Library edition. The translation is by Bernard Frechtman. The brief biography of Genet on the back inside flyleaf reads thusly:

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Assistance Publique. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. After ten convictions for theft in France, he was condemned to life imprisonment, but was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of the concerted effort of France's leading artist and writers.

Book 6: The Handle by Richard Stark



This is the eighth book in Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) guiltily entertaining "Parker" series. Parker is a psychopathic thief and all-round criminal who doesn't have any particular desire to kill you but will without compunction if you represent the slightest bit of trouble for him, the job he's in the midst of, or the security of his alias. In this short novel, Parker is brought in as part of a scheme to knock over a casino complex on an island sitting in the Gulf of Mexico several miles offshore near Galveston. It seems that everybody has a grudge against the casino's owner, from organized crime to the feds. The planning for the heist is meticulous, as it is for every job that Parker agrees to take part in. But there are always unknowns, you know? The writing in this series is very sharp and the plotting swift and enjoyable, but the protagonist puts the "ugh" in anti-hero, though this particular entry in the series goes lighter on the standard misogyny of the era than some of the others. I have to say, though, that I found The Handle to be the least enjoyable of the series so far. Nevertheless, I'll be continuing on in anticipation of a bounce back.

FYI: I found some Jasper Fforde books at the used bookstore today, and brought home The Eyre Affair. I had it on my "Recommended to Me" list, with you as the recommender. 😉

>17 fuzzi: Oh, I do so hope you enjoy that book at least somewhere close to how much I did. My wife and I are both huge fans, as you know. I'll look forward to seeing your reactions to it. Cheers!

Book 7: The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power



Samantha Power has led a very interesting life, to put it mildly, and her memoir is well worth reading, although at 554 pages it presents something of a time commitment. Power was on the spot as a war correspondent during the siege of Sarajevo and at other tragic hot spots. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, in which she was strongly critical of what she saw as the U.S. government's lack of response to genocidal campaigns around the world. She went to work as an advisor to Barack Obama during his time in the U.S. Senate and worked in his presidential campaign until she had to resign following an unfortunate incident in which she allowed a reporter who was interviewing her overhear her referring to Hillary Clinton as "a monster." (For what it's worth, Power says she was only repeating back words spoken to her over the phone by another frustrated Obama campaign staffer. Power points out that she had previously been quite vocal about her admiration for Clinton despite that fact that Clinton and Obama were at that point competing for the Democratic nomination.) Once Obama was elected President, however, he wasted little time bringing Power into the administration. At first Power was a middle-level official in the National Security Counsel, but eventually she was appointed to the much higher-visibility position of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.

Power is a clear, straightforward writer, and in this memoir she combines the professional/historical aspects of her life with the personal. So we read of her childhood, her relationship with her alcoholic (though, to be clear, never abusive) father, her parents' split and her mother taking her and her brother to America when Power was seven (and her lifelong guilt over leaving her father behind). During the course of her government career and her by necessity workaholic schedule, Power finds time to fall in love, get married, and begin to raise (with a "villageful" of help) two children. But, of course, the memoir really takes off when Power is describing her time as a war correspondent and then her entry into government. Her portrayals of her experiences in Bosnia are harrowing, indeed, and they serve as a foundation for the passion she subsequently brings to her government work, where she tries to push the government to take concrete action to protect vulnerable ethnic groups, the lack of which she had criticized so strongly in her first book. Also very interesting for me were her insider's descriptions of life as a middle-level government official. In particular, it was enlightening to read about the multifaceted degrees of cross-agency buy-in she had to attain before issuing any sort of official statement or taking any action. As someone who had always been a free agent as a foreign correspondent, Power reports how frustrating she found this at first. In time, though, she comes to see the necessity of team work within the context of the multi-headed creature that is the giant American foreign policy apparatus. Or at least we can say that she makes her peace with it all. Power describes with increasing detail her U.N. work, relating campaign after campaign that she engages in to try to help at-risk groups, free political prisoners, enhance women's rights and provide support and protection for LGBT communities. It's all fascinating, although often Power's (and her allies') efforts fall short.

The story of Power's friendship with Obama, as well as their professional relationship, especially once he becomes president, is an interesting part of the narrative. While, as president, Obama continually seeks her council, he must keep her at arms' length personally and sometimes becomes irritated with her for trying to push him in directions that he considers strategically or politically impossible. In one high level meeting, in which she is urging Obama to take more forceful measures to protect victims of Assad's military violence in Syria, Obama snaps, "Yes, Samantha, we've all read your book." The Syrian conflict, in fact, is the single area that Power expresses strong criticism for Obama, wishing in particular that he had not backed away from his proclamation that Assad's use of chemical weapons was a "line in the sand" that would bring a military response from the U.S. But overall, Power describes Obama as a man of principle and compassion who is often forced by international or domestic realities to act in half-measures when he'd prefer to be more forceful. And she has high praise for his quick reaction, and the U.S.' effective actions, in working to contain the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa.

Power tries to maintain a self-critical focus, as well. For example, she speaks of her own self-absorbtion during her early journalism career as "unrelenting." We don't get the sense that she has fully shaken off this quality, but then, that would, almost by definition, be a difficult hurdle to clear while writing a 554-page memoir. At any rate, Power does chronicle her snafus, failures, bouts of depression, and self doubt throughout the book. Also, throughout the sections on her U.N. work, in particular, Power does a good job of highlighting those within the government, including her own assistants, or from other countries, who are instrumental in whatever successes she feels she's taken part in, giving credit to others rather than claiming credit for herself. Ultimately, whatever a reader might conclude about Power's ego, I found The Education of an Idealist to be very much worth reading.

Book 8: First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner



This is one of those rare cases, at least for me, where a discussion of a book's author, before discussing the book itself, is necessary to put the book in context. The author of this novel about the German occupation of a small French Channel Coast village is not Vladimir Pozner, the contemporary journalist, but Vladimir Pozner, the French/Russian Jewish writer and intellectual. He was born in France in 1905, where his Russian/Jewish parents had fled after publicly supporting the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. In 1909, the family returned to Russia after a general amnesty was declared. Pozner studied in Leningrad, and in the meantime his parents gathered a literary community around themselves. Pozner returned to Paris in 1921 to study at the Sorbonne. He remained a Communist and socialized with the prominent Russian expatriate writers (and continued writing himself) who had gathered in in France. With the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, Pozner became a vocal anti-Fascist. Oddly, the Wikipedia page on Pozner (whence comes almost all the information presented here, as I couldn't find any other info in English online) and the book's flyleaf diverge regarding Pozner's experiences during World War 2. The flyleaf says that "in the summer of 1939, {Pozner} was ordered to report to his artillery depot for active duty. For one solid year he vegetated in the army, then in six weeks he saw a lifetime of warfare, and then France fell." (The mention of "vegetated" we can assume refers to the "Phony War" during which time the French and English Armies did very little, indeed.) The flyleaf goes on to tell us about the circuitous route by which he reached New York in 1941. Oddly, the Wikipedia page makes no mention of Pozner's military service at all, saying instead:

"As Nazi panzers rolled into Paris, June 1940, he left Paris behind to join his family in Correze. He stayed with Arlette and Renaud de Jouvenel, his best friends. There they met Aragon, the Prevert brothers, Marcel Duhamel, and many other refugees, particularly Spanish republicans.

Thus the Gestapo found his Paris apartment empty. As a public anti-fascist, and militant Jewish communist, Pozner sought asylum in the United States, and was able to get this. (Quite possibly, the State Department, notoriously stingy with visas for Europeans fleeing Nazi occupation, already had their eye on him for future war work.) Leaving for New York, where his wife and family were waiting, they soon found themselves moving to California, he stayed at first in Berkeley with Barbara and Haakon Chevalier. Charpentier, the Hollywood director shot "Liberty Ships" at Richmond in the bay of San Francisco. He worked on several films with Berthold Brecht, Jons Ivens, George Sklar, Saika Viertel (starring Greta Garbo), with whom he remained friends. He was nominated for Oscars, most original screenplay, in The Dark Mirror, won by Robert Siodmak."

So, a fascinating life, which I've learned about only because somewhere along the line I purchased this beautiful first edition copy and somewhat randomly decided to pull it down off my shelf and read it last week. So, now maybe, finally, I should actually talk about the novel itself!

The novel takes place, as mentioned above, in a small, Channel Coast French village under occupation by the German Army. For the bored occupiers, there is very little going on except cold, rainy weather. For the villagers, what's going on is malnutrition, as their cattle and crops are requisitioned by the Germans. A plan is underway among the villagers to hide their wheat crop, but where? This malevolently placid setting is interrupted when a German enlisted soldier turns up missing and the occupiers look to the occupied for answers. There is a mist of unreality throughout the proceedings, particularly in the novel's first half. The characters are not fully drawn. The Germans in particular seem almost cartoon like in their foolishness. There is a degree of fable telling in the narrative, perhaps. At the beginning, I thought once or twice of the book, The Good Soldier Schweik, although here the comedic element is much more subdued. During the book's second half, however, as the tension and sense of menace mounts, any comedic sense still maintaining serves only to underscore the cruelty of the situation. This novel, one could say, is about the banality of evil. This is not a great novel. Although we do come to know and care about several of the villagers, the relative shallowness of the characterizations drains some impact from the proceedings. But the power of the situation itself has rendered this novel a very memorable one for me. I should mention that the book was published in 1943, so it was very much a novel of its moment.

Book 9: Flats Fixed - Among Other Things by Don Tracy



This is the 6th entry in the Giff Speer series, an obscure but enjoyable crime series from the late 60s into the early 70s by Don Tracy. Speer begins the series as an operative in a super secret U.S. agency that handles cases that the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies cannot take care of. But somewhere around the series' 4th book, Speer has been cashiered from the agency for fudging the rules in order to hide the crimes of an old friend (though of course solving the case and busting the real bad guys). He spends a couple of books as more or less a private investigator. But in Flats Fixed, our pal Giff is brought back into the agency for, supposedly, a one-off. So off he heads down to a remote Florida county to try to break up a Mafia ring that has set up shop and in the process rescue the two teenage girls the mob has taken hostage, all the while keeping from public view the fact that the girls' grandfather, the head of a Federal drug enforcement agency, has been corrupted by . . . well, you get the picture by now. The whole thing adds up to being extremely far fetched, even more so than the series' earlier books. And yet, somehow, this is the series' most enjoyable entry, or at least it was for me. There are three more books in this series, and I'll be reading them all.

Book note: I am the only LT member with this book listed in his/her/their library.

Book 10: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander



I have finally read this excellent, essential, infuriating, heartbreaking book, twelve years after its initial publication. The New Jim Crow is an examination of the harms done to the black community, and by extension to America as a whole, by the War on Drugs. I would think that by now most people who have an interest in the topic of racial justice and injustice already have an idea of the general themes of Alexander’s study, so I will simply provide a quick overview of her main thesis.

1) The War on Drugs was expressly created as a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement (in a very similar way to which Jim Crow was a backlash to Reconstruction) and in order to help Reagan and the Republicans gain the support of poor white Americans by renewing whites’ racial resentments and driving a wedge between lower class whites and blacks who would have done better for themselves by aligning together against powerful elites.

2) This was accomplished in large part by demonizing ghetto blacks, lying about crime rates within the black community and pretending that blacks use drugs at a higher rate than whites, and pretending that crack cocaine (mostly used by blacks) was more dangerous than powder cocaine (mostly used by whites at about the same rate) and therefore justified more arrests, higher incidents of imprisonment and longer prison sentences.

3) The Supreme Court in particular has consistently given police departments and prosecutors free rein when it comes to racial profiling and “loading up” defendants with excess charges: that is, charging people with so many crimes that innocent people end up pleading guilty in order to avoid excessive sentences.

4) All this has added up to incarceration numbers in America, and predominantly within the black community, of ballooning from somewhere around 700,000 at the end of the 1970s to approximately 3.5 million at the time the book was published in 2010.

5) Bill Clinton, in his desire to steal a march on Republicans and not appear “soft on crime,” made matters worse rather than helping to solve this problem.

6) The harms of incarceration last far beyond actual prison time, throughout the process of state control (parole and probation periods) and often throughout a person’s life, as a felony conviction makes finding work extremely difficult (in some fields requiring certification actually impossible) and may disqualify a person from programs like food stamps, and from public housing, for life.

7) This system is perhaps even more pernicious than Jim Crow was because it is “colorblind.” Jim Crow laws were expressly designed to oppress blacks. But the current system, although it is clearly administered to an overwhelming degree against minorities, particularly blacks, is able to hide in plain sight because it has been supposedly crafted to apply to everyone equally. So there is plausible deniability to anyone wishing not to admit, or perhaps just not to see and know, the degree to which our current legal system has been designed to create a pernicious caste system. “I don’t see color” is one of most maddening phrases extant in our culture today, and “Why does everything have to be about race?” one of the most maddening questions.

Well, so much for my “short overview,” I guess, though it's important to say that I've far from exhausted here the important points that Alexander makes. This is an extremely eye-opening and regret-inducing book. As LT member dchaikin (Dan) has said (to paraphrase), it’s particularly hard to read because this all happened right in front of me. Although I always understood how racist Reagan and his crew were, along with their political prodigy, with their dog whistles and hateful policies, I never realized (or turned a blind eye to) the degree to which they were following through with it all and the effect it was having. It’s impossible for me to give myself a pass on that. The question, of course, is one of what to do going forward. I should also say that Alexander's writing is clear and direct, and her points well supported. It is only the subject matter that makes this book difficult to read.

Book 11: The Tenth Man by Graham Greene



This short novel by a very sharp storyteller provides a very interesting and readable morality play. During the Nazi occupation of France, group of 30 Frenchmen are being held by the occupiers in a large jail cell as hostages. The day after two German soldiers in the town are killed by resistance fighters, a German officer enters the cell to announce that three of the hostages are to be shot the next morning, and it is up to them to decide which three it will be. They decide to draw lots, and the results of the drawing have consequences that echo dramatically into the years after the war. I don't want to give away any more of the plot than that, other than to say that in the set-up, the characterizations and the book's final act, Greene's debt to Conrad is apparent (in theme and narrative construction, though not in writing style, of course).

Also interesting is the book's backstory, which I will simply quote from my copy's back cover: . . . "A short novel that {Greene} wrote in the 1940s for MGM as the dry run for a screenplay, and that remained untouched in a studio file until its discover in 1983." Greene writes in his introduction that he had no memory of writing the story. Because he had been under contract to MGM when he wrote the manuscript, the person who bought the rights to it upon its discovery owed writer's royalties to MGM rather than to Greene. However, Greene says, a) upon reading the manuscript so many decades after writing it, he found that he liked it enough that he couldn't object to its publication and b) the person who owned the rights generously agreed to co-publish the book with Greene's own publisher, meaning that Greene did see some money out of it after all.

On a personal reading note, this calendar year I have now read three books taking place in France: The Tenth Man, Our Lady of the Flowers and First Harvest. The first two have to do with French townspeople held hostage by the Nazis during World War Two, and all three of them take place entirely or partly within prisons! It's not a theme I envisioned for myself beforehand.

Book 12: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen



In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen has delivered a well-written and researched, but relatively short, biography of Charles Darwin that also provides clear explanation of his work and famous theory. Quammen also makes clear the revolutionary nature of Darwin's findings, particularly within the context of Victorian England, where all scientific belief was firmly rooted in Anglican creationist theory to greater or lesser degree. Quammen tells his tale in an engaging, sometimes even breezy, style, upon occasion inserting himself into the narrative to mention his decisions about what to include or leave out, about his research, and about what he knows from his close readings of Darwin's diaries and other works and what, instead, he feels "we can conjecture." (I should point out that these "conjectures" are on minor matters only, such as what Darwin might have been thinking of when he made particular notations in those diaries.) I suppose some readers would find this style annoying, but on the whole, I appreciated this manner of telling the story (although were were isolated spots where I felt Quammen did cross the line from "breezy" to "glib").

At any rate, I feel like I was right in the cross-hairs of this book's target audience: someone who, like almost everybody, has some idea of what Darwin's theory of evolution is, but is lacking in the details of what the theory actually entails scientifically, and has only the slightest knowledge of the timeline and other details of how Darwin did his work and who he was as a person. Quammen did a great job, I thought, of assembling a narrative history of all these factors. Wanting to limit the book's length, Quammen explains, he made the decision to omit describing in any detail Darwins voyages on the Beagle, and starting with the research that came after. Quammen describes Darwin as a mostly honorable (well, he was English, so I should say "honorable") individual, though not short of quirks of personality, and a meticulous scientist. Darwin was a strong family man in a lifelong devoted marriage despite the fact that he and his wife differed diametrically on the question of religious faith. After he'd pretty much nailed down his theory, Darwin refrained from publishing for eight years while he continued his research (mostly by studying barnacles!) because he wanted to be sure, and because he felt that he'd be creating a furor, and opening himself up to attack, by asserting a theory of evolution that dispensed with the need for a diety in the process. Quammen also does a good job of providing the historic/scientific/cultural context for the theory of evolution, in terms of the major theories that had been put forth before Darwin, and the ways in which his ideas were either supported or disagreed with after he'd published.

This book was a selection by one of my reading group mates. We had our discussion of the book yesterday, and we were pretty much unanimous in our enjoyment of the work.

Book 13: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen



In all my long years of reading, the only Jane Austen novel I'd ever read was Emma, which I'd loved, so I felt it was finally time to get to another, and brought my long-owned nice old hardcover copy of Sense and Sensibility down off the shelf. And I did, indeed, enjoy the reading of this novel, though not quite as much as I'd remember enjoying Emma. Sense and Sensibility is, of course, a satire of manners about the landed gentry of late 18th-Century England. The real joy for me in reading the story was in soaking up Austen's use of language, and especially her sly wit in taking down the mostly idle men and women of this essentially obsolete class. They seem to my 21st Century eyes a holdover from an earlier version of the English economic system, no longer serving any discernible function, and it seems clear that Austen thought so, too. (I must admit that I've read very little about Jane Austen and have never studied her works in an academic setting.) The descriptions of the fools and knaves among the characters, and their actions, take a while, sometimes, to fully unfold, but once you see where Austen has been going all along in a paragraph, you end up with a delightfully humorous stiletto job. The problem with the book, or at least with my experience with it, is that mostly the story is static. We wait with our heroines, the Misses Dashwood (Elinor and Marianne) and their widowed mother, for the men in their lives to either get their acts together or reveal themselves as irredeemable rascals. Elinor in particular is the sensible and discerning rock upon with the family fortunes depend. And while I have no doubt that the situation of women in Austen's time was very much as described here, the two main characters' condition of relative stasis did take some of the air out of the plotting. In some ways, the dastardly schemer Lucy, Elinor's main foil throughout the book, is the most interesting character in the lot. She has no scruples and more than her share of malevolence, but she is certainly capable of taking action in her own selfish service. At any rate, I did enjoy the reading. Austen's sense of humor and turn of phrase make up for the slow points I experienced in the narrative.

Book note: I've owned this copy of Sense and Sensibility for quite a long time. The book's LT entry date is January 2008, which is the very start of my cataloging my library here. This copy is from the A.L. Burt Publishers Cornell Series, which seems, from the article I found online, to date back to the early 20th Century. As you can see from the image I've posted, my copy was at one time owned by a collection called the Discipleship Library. Also, the blank page immediately inside the front cover bears the inscription, written in fountain pen ink,

Gwendolyn Smith
Brayton, Iowa
April 21 -- 1923

Perhaps Ms. Smith bought the book upon its becoming a Discipleship Library discard. Whatever that story might be, we can see that she inscribed the book pretty close to exactly 99 years ago!

I ran a quick online search and I think this "Find a Grave" entry might be her:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70848591/gwendolyn-leona-gliem

>25 rocketjk: that is cool!

Book 14: Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes



This is a somewhat flawed but mostly well-written and interesting bit of reportage about how Joe Biden managed to navigate the turbulent currents of a wild Democratic Party primary season and batten down the hatches during the general election to prevail as the Democratic nominee and defeat Donald Trump to become President of the United States. This is a mostly "inside baseball" report. That is, a lot of time is spent on describing the political machinations and the processes from inside the various campaigns, and those sections are often quite fascinating, though we learn a lot more about, for example, the rivalries and personal conflicts within the Biden, Sanders and Trump campaigns than we do about the candidates themselves. Nevertheless, it's interesting to learn that sort of history, the undercurrents of the election season that were mostly not on view to the general public. According to this narrative, Biden believed that his name recognition, the body of work he'd turned in over his decades-long political career, his association with Barak Obama via his two terms of Obama's vice president would serve to make his case to the country that he was experienced enough, well meaning enough and calm enough to serve as the antidote to Donald Trump and get him elected president. What America wanted, went Biden's theory, as a compassionate, non-controversial figure. Especially during the primary season, the attraction would be to nominate someone capable of projecting the kind of calm needed to defeat Trump. Also, and very importantly, Biden was help in high regard by many in the African American community and was thought of as the candidate who could attract high vote totals from people of color in general. In other words, he was at the same time the Anti-Trump and the Anti-Sanders. This book is, basically, the narrative of how this theory in the event played out successfully, though, as the title tells us, not without huge dollops of good luck at just the right times. Some examples of that luck:

* As the primary season opened, Biden, who had entered the race relatively late in the going, knew he was going to have serious troubles in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, because they were mostly white states and would be leaning toward more progressive candidates. The goal was to somehow make just enough of a showing to remain viable until the South Carolina primary, when Biden's natural constituency would come into play. Biden, in fact, got buried in Iowa in a showing so disastrous that it might have torpedoed his campaign right away, except for the fact that the App that state primary officials were using didn't work, and the vote results were delayed so long that by the time they finally came out they were yesterday's news.

* During the debates prior to the New Hampshire primary, Amy Klobuchar did some of Biden's work for him by skewering Pete Buttigieg, who was more or less presenting himself as a younger, more energetic version of Biden, so effectively that he never really recovered. Klobuchar wasn't trying to help Biden. Her goal was to take out Buttigieg, who was polling higher than her, but she'd helped clear a path for Biden's subsequent rise, nevertheless.

* During the primary debate, just as Michael Bloomberg was beginning to gather strength as a Biden replacement with lots of his own money to spend and a better chance to beat Trump than Biden represented, Elizabeth Warren came to the rescue with a withering attack on Bloomberg for which he had no response and which more or less ended his candidacy on the spot. Again, Warren was trying to help Biden. She just despised Bloomberg and his belief that he could swoop in and buy the nomination. But, again, clearing the field of Bloomberg at that point served Biden enormously.

* Everybody in the in the Democratic field, with the exception of Warren, feared a Sanders candidacy above all else, thinking that Trump and his campaign strategists would wipe the floor with him. So, as Biden did indeed win in South Carolina, and then cleaned up in several states on Super Tuesday, many of Biden's moderate Democratic rivals made haste to drop out of the race and endorse Biden.

Well, there are other "luck" factors described, but those are some of the key moments from the primary campaign. Again, the story here is almost exclusively one of campaign offices, strategies and personalities. We spend precious little time with the candidates as the campaign. (The infamous incident in which Biden, objecting to comment made by a voter at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, called that person a "lying dogfaced pony soldier" is related as a throwaway example of Biden's inadequate skills as an in-person campaigner.) And the authors either never tried to (or tried and failed to) interview and of the candidates themselves. It clearly never occurred to them to talk to voters to find out why people made the voting decisions they did. Also, the authors' mostly effective breezy style sometimes spills over into glibness, as when we're told, "By nature, {Biden} came to decisions at a pace that only a badly wounded slug would envy." Finally, the authors interject made up thought bubbles, presented in italics to set them apart, as they conjecture about what the candidates or their aides and strategists were thinking at any given time. These are almost uniformly annoying, and I learned to skip over them as I read.

Overall, I'm happy to have read this contemporary history. I will say that the book's first half, about the primary season, was more interesting for me than the second half about the Biden/Trump general election. But as an insight into how presidential electoral politics work, especially in an election that played out within very particular circumstances--the desperation of Democrats to unseat Trump and, of course, the onset and fury of the Covid 19 pandemic--this book serves a very useful purpose. For me, its strengths overcome its flaws, sort of like Joe Biden, come to think of it. (For the record, I was a Warren supporter, myself.) And Lucky's 413-page length notwithstanding, it was a fairly quick read for me.

Book 15: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson



The Ministry for the Future is Robinson's massive science fiction novel about global warming set in the relatively near future. Climate change has progressed. Those blinded to anything but their own near-term pleasure and profits have become even more entrenched, while the rest of the world is becoming more desperate. When a massive heat wave kills millions of people in India, a significant portion of the world begins finally to wake up. The global organization put in place by the Paris Accords creates a new sub-organization tasked with finding and driving scientific and economic solutions to the problem, an organization that is quickly dubbed the Ministry for the Future. The novel takes us through the efforts of the ministry's leader, an Irish woman named Mary, and her many officers and assistants, in their efforts to bring corporations and world banks to pivot their attention to keeping the world alive in the face of massive intransigence. We also helicopter around to visit many of the scientific efforts to address the issues directly, such as a massive attempt to pump prematurely melted water up from under the antarctic glaciers in order to settle the glaciers back down onto the rock below them and thus slow their progress to the sea. Sometimes Robinson just stops the action entirely to deliver two or three-page long explanations of particular scientific issues or economic theories. Sometimes we get chapters told in the voice of climate refugees or terrorists. Because as things grow more dire, some people get angrier and more desperate and begin taking matters into their own hands in the form of targeted murders and sabotage of polluters and polluting industries.

The whole novel adds up to a plausible look at how climate matters may well progress, and of individual components of the problem that many of us may not be specifically aware of, followed by a speculative and mostly hopeful view of how things might get turned around. Not all of the latter elements felt particularly likely to me, sad to say. The characters themselves are mostly razor thin. Robinson does make some attempt to deepen the characterization of Mary somewhat, giving her a personal side issue that at first is interesting but which eventually becomes (or at least became for me) mostly extraneous. A lot of this novel is quite good, although Robinson's scattershot approach can become wearing, and I got the feeling eventually that Robinson was simply determined to tell us everything he knew and crowbar in every piece of research he'd done. Of course, the problems are global and massive, so in Robinson's defense we might agree that they needed a massive novel to do them justice. My paperback edition checked in at 563 pages. After page 400 or so, I was ready to be finished. But, as this was a selection of a member of my monthly reading group, I was obliged to carry on. Mostly I'm glad I read this novel, though I doubt I ever would have selected it on my own (which I guess is one chief value of book groups). I did learn a lot, assuming of course that Robinson knows what he's talking about.

Book 16: Turning Angel by Greg Iles



This is the second book in Iles' Penn Cage mystery series. Cage is a former prosecutor turned author who, in the series' first book, The Quiet Game, returned from Houston to his native Natchez, Mississippi, to help his father, a beloved local physician, and along the way solve a decades old cold case of the murder of an African American man by a white supremacist. I remembered that first book, which I read several years ago, as being quite good. In Turning Angel, Cage, who has stayed in Natchez, gets involved in helping a longtime friend out of a tough legal jam. It turns out his pal, also a beloved local physician, has been having an affair with a high school senior, the town's golden girl, who turns up murdered on page 1. The problem with the story, of course, is that Iles has to go through all sorts of logical and emotional gyrations to make his friend's actions, and his friends, anything but reprehensible to Cage and to the reader. The way does that strains the willing suspension of disbelief. Of course, once Cage starts delving into matters on his friend's behalf, all sorts of other sordid details about the town surface, including some very nasty drug dealers. Well, is there any other kind? There are other implausible plot elements, as well. Giving Iles the benefit of the doubt due to what I remembered as the quality of The Quiet Game, I still found Turning Angel enjoyable. Iles writes pretty well, his dialogue is OK, his pacing is good, and the Penn Cage character is one I can abide with. He's often the smartest person in the room, but not always. Also, Iles makes a decent effort to include the town's history of inherent racism into the narrative. So, I don't know . . . I'm eventually going to continue on with the series, hoping we get back on more plausible ground going forward. I couldn't recommend this book as a stand-alone, but I'll let you know when I move on with the series whether I think this book is the rule or the exception for the series, plausibility-wise.

Book 17: Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts



Sometimes I'm just in the mood for a good, long, old fashioned historical novel, and Northwest Passage certainly filled this bill for me. Young Langdon Towne just growing into adulthood in 1750s Maine, wants to be an artist. He wants to go west and paint Indians. This ambition runs him afoul of his straight-laced father and, especially, of his beloved Elizabeth's father, a hell and brimstone, status seeking minister. When Towne further gains the enmity of the town's petty tyrant, he hightails it out of town with a friend with an aim to join the army, thinking it fairly safe, as the major battles of the English and their American colonists against the French and their Indian allies (i.e., the French and Indian War) seem to be mostly over. Running into the charismatic figure of Sergeant McNott in a nearby pub, however, Towne and his friend soon find themselves joining the famed Rogers Rangers, led by the larger than life Major Robert Rogers. Adventure ensues, you'll not be surprised to learn, 709 pages of adventure, to be precise, along with romance and political intrigue. Towne's superior abilities as an artist stand him in good stead throughout. This novel is a lot of fun, and even, in some places thought-provoking. The descriptions of the hardships endured by the Rangers, and the countryside they travel through, are vivid (descriptions of nature and weather are a strength throughout), as is the violence of the massacre they perpetrate an Indian village, a retaliation, we are told, for the outrages these Indians themselves have perpetrated on nearby English homesteaders. Our hero at first tells us of his opinions that Indians are, when push comes to shove, basically "savages." But as the book moves along and Towne matures, and he learns more about the Indians and about the villainy that Europeans perpetrate on the natives, so do his perspectives and his sympathies. Which is not to say this is an even-handed treatment, narratively. The book is a product of its time, for sure. Jews don't come off too well, either. That said, the plotting and characterizations in this novel turned out to be more nuanced and complex that I was expecting. Heroes turn out to be flawed, sometimes gravely so, expectations regarding stereotypical romantic historical fiction plotting are often subverted, as well. So while there are parts of this long novel that move along less briskly than we would wish, overall I found this to be a very entertaining reading experience.

This book was first published in 1937, and we find it listed in the post for that year in the old, mostly deserted but still interesting to peruse Bestsellers Over the Years group. In fact, according to the book's "Bibliographical Note," including the book's first appearance on June 25, 1937 and the printing of the copy I own on August 30, 1938, there had been 26 printings!

Book note: On the title page of my copy I find the following inscribed in ink:

Ralph S. Stirling
Montreal
Sept 1938

On the inside cover, however, I find this small sticker, probably a return address sticker:

Miss Della Ann Stirling
498 Main Street
Burbank, California

I found nothing in my online search for Ralph Stirling Montreal.
I found one "Find a Grave" listing for a Della Stirling in a town close to Burbank, but with a dating that would make one assume Della was Ralph's widow (I'd been assuming daughter, as a widow wouldn't be going by "Miss . . . " Perhaps Della was Ralph's unmarried sister. At any rate, it seems this book was given or passed down from one to the other. I haven't a clue when/where I purchased the book. I included it in my LT library on January 28, 2008, which is the very beginning of my listings, here. So there's no telling how long I owned it before then.

>30 rocketjk: I read the first half of Northwest Passage and thoroughly enjoyed it, but my interest petered out after his return and I never finished it.

>31 fuzzi: There is a slow spot right in the middle, there, I agree. But I found that the story and the narrative picked up again after a while and the last couple hundred pages were almost as entertaining as the first half. Anyway, that was my experience.

>32 rocketjk: I'll probably give the second half another try, then.

Book 18: The Sellout by Paul Beatty



This terrific novel was first published in 2015 and won the Man Booker Prize. I see that it already has 116 LT reviews, so no need for a long explication from the likes of me at this point, but if you've missed this book so far, as I had, I will offer my hearty endorsement. In extremely acute, morel than a little absurdist and mostly affectionate prose and intent, Beatty presents his take on African American life and attitudes in early 21st century America, and particularly inside of life in lower middle-class Los Angeles. Beatty gets at the intractability of racism in America, the myths of "post-racial" American society, and the tension within the African American community between trying to tilt at the windmill of racism and instinct to just deal with the realities of those indignities and turn to the business of just getting on with life within those confines. Police violence, poor schooling, the impossibilities of true integration, and the attempts of greater America to erase African American identity via the post-racism fiction are among the themes dealt with in this hilarious send-up of modern life. Beatty's wry, on-point observations and the machine gun-like pace of his observations are often breath. The story revolves around the narrator's attempt to restore the decommissioned municipality of Dickens, a Black working class township that suddenly loses its off-ramp signs and identification on local maps, in order to help keep the community from disintegrating in the face of the inevitable gentrification that the see on the horizon. In so doing, he turns the notion of segregation and freedom on its head. The whole book, including memorable, slightly larger than life characters and the tweaking of history and societal norms for humorous and thought-provoking effect, often reminded me in the reading of more or less a 21st century, Southern California Catch 22, so I was not surprised to see Beatty call out that exact book in passing toward the end of the novel. Which is not to say that I found The Sellout to be derivative in any way. This is an extremely inventive novel. I will say that the book's final third was somewhat less inventive on a sentence or paragraph level, but the pace set at the beginning would have been extremely difficult to maintain for an entire novel, I think. At any rate, my interest never waned, and that very small quibble only lowered my rating rating from 5 stars down to 4 1/2. Highly recommended.

Book 19: Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach



Another entertaining and informative book by Mary Roach, blending globetrotting research and attention to detail with Roach's light-hearted sense of humor, acute powers of observation and unostentatious but extremely engaging writing style. I will observe that the second part of the title, "When Nature Breaks the Law," is a bit misleading. "When Animals Run Afoul of Humans" would be more accurate, but of course not as catchy. That's an extremely minor quibble. What gets reported in Roach's latest book are things like the ways in which monkeys are overrunning many cities in India, the Navy's futile attempts to deal with the large, troublesome albatross population at the airfield on Guam, the poisonous elements to be found within legumes and the uses those toxins have been put to, bear break-ins in rural North American communities, and the history of farmers' battles against crows and other supposed crop destroying birds. I found the chapter on mountain lions particularly interesting because I live in mountain lion country. (I've only gotten one quick glimpse of a mountain lion in the wild.) I've seen others on LT mentioning that this book lacks, somewhat, the level of humor and absurd observations of most of Roach's earlier books. I would concur, but point out an obvious (to me) reason for this: Roach's earlier books were about some aspect of human society and human nature. This book is, for the most part, about animals and animal behavior.* Simply put, animals are just not as absurd and do not lend themselves as well to absurdist humor, as we humans are. Any attempt by Roach to reproduce fully the tone of those earlier books would have, I'm guessing, ultimately seemed forced in ways that might have sabotaged the effort overall. At any rate, in the end, Roach comes down on the side of the animals in pretty much every case.

*As well, to be sure, and about human reactions to that behavior.

Here is my usual Mary Roach book, full disclosure caveat: Mary Roach is my wife's close friend and frequent traveling companion since the days that they were college roommates one or two moons ago. In fact, she is Mary's "pal Steph," mentioned once in the body of the text (She is the accomplice in the "monkey stealing the bananas" incident in India) and once in a final-chapter footnote. (The dead mouse in the drinking bottle incident, though I will state for the record here that the person who actually found the offending mouse carcass on the road, searched for after the fact at Mary's urging so that its head could be measured, was me.)

Book 20: The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in the Korea by Andrew Geer



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This book was not what I was expecting. It was written while the Korean War was still going on. On the book's front cover flap, we're told that the author, a WW2 Marine veteran who'd returned to duty for the Korean conflict, serving in 1950-51, "had access to the complete file of Marine combat reports and was able to gather material at firsthand as an active Marine field officer during the dreadful spring and summer of 1950-51 in Korea. He interviewed 697 Marines individually in preparing this history." It was those 697 interviews that gave me the impression that the book was going to be a series of oral histories about frontline life and combat during the war. What Geer did instead was lean more on those official combat reports to create detailed narratives of the troop movements, battles, down to individual skirmishes, throughout the Marines' first years of combat in Korea. Geer's accounts get very, very detailed, down to orders given and followed by individual rifle companies on a day-to-day basis. Battle scenes are often detailed by the acts--frequently the heroics--of individual enlisted men, non-coms and officers during battle, including the specifics about what individual Marines were doing, or attempting to do, when they were killed, and what they said just before their deaths. I assume that these details come from those 697 interviews. The time period related here spans from the Marines' first entry into Korea shortly after the beginning of hostilities, their fight to liberate Seoul, their march northward to the Chosin Reservoir, where they became surrounded, and their fight to break through this containment and make their way to the sea and evacuation. The enervating and deadly cold and the effects of frostbite and malnutrition, as well as the horrifying attrition as Marines are wounded or killed, are described in detail effectively enough to give the reader a feel, even from the remove of decades, of what the men experienced.

I originally intended to read this book straight through, but I soon realized that the book was more or less a series of extremely detailed battle scenes, not chronically those battles on a broad scale, but instead focusing in on the experiences of small groups of Marines as they worked their way up hills, dug in to repel attacks and counter-attacks, awaiting relief or fought from trench to tree to boulder, with machine gun fire and mortar rounds coming in. I was afraid that, as extremely well created as these scenes were, they would begin to run together in my mind if I just kept reading. So I made the decision to break the book up and read it a chapter at a time as a "between book." You won't find much if anything here about the politics or larger command strategies of the Korean War. Instead, this is a report of the day to day experiences of soldiers within a hellish cauldron of war. It should be noted that as realistic and well written as the book is, it's also essentially a work of propaganda. No matter how poorly a particular battle goes, for example, it is never described as having been the result of a strategic mistake. And while there are occasional references to "slackers" or "stragglers" among the Marines, for the most part, everyone is a hero. There is, I am grateful to be able to say, no description of the war as a noble cause. The war is simply taken for granted as an assignment. So while the Korean War is not glorified, life in combat, it seems to me, is, albeit tacitly.

My copy of this book is a beautiful hardcover first edition, published in 1952. One of my motivations for reading it is the fact that a longtime neighbor of mine, one of the finest people I've ever met, in fact, who passed away a few years back, was not only a Marine and a Korean War veteran, but was actually a member of the First Marine Division and lived through the experienced described here. His widow, also a wonderful friend of my wife's and mine, has told us since his death that he had nightmares for years. I never felt right quizzing him about his experiences, and so never did. He spoke of it but sparingly, though he did tell us once that he never expected to survive.

Book 21: Conjure Women by Afia Atakora



This is a lovely if somewhat flawed novel about a Black community on a Southern plantation before and during the Civil War and then in the years just after, and the story, within that community, of a mother and a daughter: two generations of conjure women--community healers, midwives and, when need be, spell casters. The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time periods and the two women. The mother, Miss May Belle, tries to keep the plantation's slaves healthy and to soothe them as best she can. She is given extra privileges by the plantation's owner because of her ability to keep his workforce working and help the women bear their children, which of course then immediately owns. Her daughter is Miss Rue, a child during slavery days, and her mother's protégée, and then the heir to May's practice and position in the community. It's Rue's job to tend to the community after Emancipation. We're told that the plantation is large enough, and in a spot so remote, that once the owner and his family are gone, the freed slaves are left to fend for themselves. This is the first of the not-quite-believable elements to the story. At any rate, modern readers will know, although this is only hinted at in the narrative, that Reconstruction is not going to last forever, or for very long, and that soon enough the White world will come calling, bringing terror and death. Rue's doomed attempts to forestall this calamity provides some of the novel's best, and skillfully understated, tension. The descriptions of the worlds of slavery and the times just after are handled well, with close in portraits of living conditions and the social aspects of those world's as well. In particular, I appreciated the Atakora's avoidance of cliche in this respect. However, that's not to say that the book is wholly free of cliche. The arrival of a charismatic traveling preacher of questionable morals and intent, for example, and the resulting tension between the old ways of Rue's natural learning and the preacher's wielding of Christianity as a weapon, as well as their battle for the loyalty of the community. It's not that these elements, and a few others I'll refrain from detailing here, aren't handled well, it's just that they represent very familiar tropes that I'd hoped perhaps could have been steered around.

The narrative moves slowly at times. That's OK, as I mostly found it fine to luxuriate in some of the descriptions of character and place, but still I thought the book could have been trimmed about about a quarter. The two timelines come together skillfully at the end, though some of the most dramatic situations of what had seemed at times to be the heart of the story seemed by them to be mostly have been dispensed with. Additionally, at times the characters' motivations for actions that, again, are at the heart of the story, are a bit obscure.

I feel, as can happen with these reviews, that I've over-emphasized the faults I found to the extent perhaps of overshadowing this novel's many virtues. There's a lot here to like, a lot of terrific writing, and this is a first novel. I will absolutely be tracking Atakor's career and look forward to seeing what she does next.

Book 22: Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by Colin Escott with Martin Hawkins



This is a fun, briskly written history of one of the seminal record labels in American popular music and it's founder and driving force, Sam Phillips. Phillips, in his relatively primitive Memphis recording studio, had an ear for unique, forceful--even raw--singers and musicians. His genius was that what he wanted to do was not to make these musicians fit popular molds, but instead to highlight each musicians raw qualities, to enhance the elements that made them stand out. Rather than smooth over the rough edges, Phillips wanted to make that roughness stand out in sharp relief, and he was skilled at getting the best of these musicians in the studio. He would listen to anybody, always hoping to find a diamond in the rough. In this manner, Phillips, through his famed record label, Sun, first brought to national prominence such stars as Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and, most famously, Elvis Presley. None of them stayed very long with Phillips and Sun--his inability to promote more than one or two musicians at a time saw to that, as did the larger contracts that national record labels could offer once a musician's initial contract with Sun had run its course. But many of these musicians made their best and most enduring music in their early recordings with Phillips.

In the course of relating the rise and fall of Sun (though not Phillips, who went on to do just fine for himself in a slew of endeavors after his recording and promoting days were over), the authors also give us a revealing snapshot of the inner working of the popular music industry in America during the mid-1950s through mid-60s. In addition, there are fascinating thumbnail biographies of many of the most famous (and also the lesser known) musicians who came recorded for Sun to lesser or greater ultimate success. Also, the curtain is lifted on the creative recording process of these musicians, as Phillips and his musicians moved from blues and R&B, through country music, into the earliest days of rock and roll, and pop music as well. The book was published in 1990, and many of the musicians, technicians, promoters and producers who worked with Phillips were still around to be interviewed, as was Phillips himself. (He passed away in 2003 at the age of 80.) The authors seem to have done plenty of interviewing, in fact, and they also quote from the work of other music writers to round out their accounts. This is not the most in depth account one might read, I guess, though on the other hand, I don't know if there are any others. At any rate, it is a fun book for anyone interested in the topic. It's been sitting on my music shelf for at least as long as I've been on LT, as its entry date into my LT library is 2008. Goodness knows how long I've actually owned it, but I'm very glad to have finally read it.

Book 23: The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is an amusing but slight entertainment from Thurber. Although I spread it out and read it through little by little, it could really be read through in an afternoon's sitting or two. The book has three parts: "Mr. and Mrs. Malone," "The Pet Department," and "Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage."

"Mr. and Mrs. Malone" is a series of vignettes about the couple of the title, middle class and, as far as I can remember, childless. He is bumbling and dim, she is loving but long-suffering and perpetually bemused, even by his attempted infidelities. Every once in a while, Mr. Monroe turns out to have been correct about something. The problem is that, in many of the stories, at least a third, Mr. Malone is actually too dim for the tales to be humorous. Those fall stories fall flat.

"The Pet Department" is a series of tongue in cheek responses for an imaginary advice column on pets. Each of these come with a Thurber cartoon drawing. They're mostly fun in a whimsical sort of way.

"Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage" is the most amusing section of the three. Here we have Thurber's tongue-in-cheek descriptions--full of amusing digressions--of syntax and parts of speech such as "Whether," "Who and Whom," and "The Split Infinitive." These also come with fun Thurber drawings. Anyone who's grabbled with these syntactical elements as a teacher or a writer or both will enjoy these. Sadly, "The Split Infinitive," which would otherwise be the best section of the lot, includes a brief but dismaying suggestion of the violence against women that is wince inducing, to put it mildly.

I wouldn't go out of my way to find this collection, but if you ever run into it at a thrift store or garage sale, it might be worth picking up, as a curiosity if nothing else.

Book 24: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove



I first learned of this novel through an article in the New York Times describing relatively recent efforts to find, translate and publish works written in Yiddish, both in America and in Europe, by women writers. This book was essentially the article's centerpiece. While many male Yiddish writers' works have been well known over the years, the work of female writers fell into obscurity, essentially due to sexism, the women not being taken as seriously by the male-run publishing and academic worlds. Here's the Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/books/yiddish-women-novels-fiction.html

Miriam Karpilove, it turns out, was an extremely prolific writer. She was born in Minsk, in what was then Belorussia (part of the Russian Empire) and is now Belarus. She came to America at the age of 18, in 1905, living first in Harlem, then Brooklyn, and eventually in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She wrote novels, essays, short stories and criticism over her long career, publishing primarily, I believe in the then thriving world of Yiddish press in New York. Diary of a Lonely Girl was published first in installment form in a Yiddish newspaper over the period 1916-1918, and then in novel form in 1919. OK, so what is this novel about?

As made clear by the title, the book is written in fictionalized diary form. The writer is a single young Jewish woman in New York City. She is a working woman, though her work is never specified or really discussed, so she is not destitute. But she is alone, living in rented rooms in which she must always be careful of following the norms of propriety, lest she be turned out, as happens more than once during the course of the novel. But most dramatically for Karpilove's heroine, the stream she swims in is that of the leftist political climate of the young, non-religious Jews of New York City at this time. A mostly male-dominated society, a major tenet of this world is the idea that bourgeois principles must be done away with. That includes the constrictions of traditional marriage and therefore, so say the men, "free love" must be the rule of the day. As our never-named heroine describes for us in her furious, sarcastic and desperately heartbroken voice, this means fun for the men, who expect women to be essentially compliant, to "live life!" Affairs are to be enjoyed but definitely to be finite in duration. Commitment? Phooey! Children? Why bother, but if it does come up, that's the woman's problem. You can't expect a man to be tied down!

Our heroine is, in fact, in love, with the first of her suitors that we're introduced to, A. A is attracted to her, as well, but is only interested in a short-term affair, and not even a monogamous one. As heartbroken as this makes her, our heroine refuses the terms. And so it goes through one suitor after another, as our protagonist still pines for A. and refuses the advances of a series of others, though agrees to spend time with them as a futile antidote to her loneliness. Men tell her things. Mostly they tell her that she is wasting her life by refusing to "live," meaning to have sex with them. The lectures are long and rendered absurd by Karpilove's fierce sense of humor. One of these men tells her:

"Someone once said, I forget who it was, 'If even one person understood my work, it will not have been for naught.' Let me tell you, if someone--especially if you were that someone--should acknowledge the truth of my words, then I will have reached my goal."

When he said "my goal" I felt very uncomfortable. I didn't stop feeling that way for a long time. I asked myself why I didn't protest and tell him not to talk like that. I was firmly opposed to his reaching his goal. I pretended not to understand so that he would take more time to explain to me, and I could think of other things while he talked.

As is alluded to only once or twice during the narrative, other than just not wishing to partake in the "free love" as designed by the men around her, holding out instead for a committed relationship, she is also imperiled by these unwanted attentions which often take place in her own rooms, often essentially against her will. Readers of the original installments would have been aware of the laws that had been passed in New York City aimed at improving life in the city's tenements but also including provisions that punished prostitution in those tenements more harshly than in brothels or on the street. In the event, women could be informed upon as prostitutes without proof, sometimes by landlords hoping to rent out their rooms for higher rates, and wind up at the mercy of often unsympathetic and uncaring policemen and judges. The fact that the men in this novel are not above coming into her room unbidden and trying to force themselves on the narrator physically, assuming she will eventually submit if they keep it up, puts her even more at risk.

This and other aspects of the societal context that the novel's original readers in its installment form would have been aware of (the ongoing slaughter of World War One in Europe, and particularly the very real dangers that the war was exposing the Jews of Europe to, are well described in translator Jessica Kirzane's excellent Introduction, which I saved to read until after I'd read the novel.

So this novel represents a fascinating historical artifact. It presents a strong woman's voice coming to us from a long-ago world but expressing concepts that are extremely familiar to us today. It can feel claustrophobic. The long lectures from the men become repetitive. I understand the purpose for that, to show us the relentless and depressing nature of the onslaught of such efforts, and in that sense the storytelling is very effective. But it does get repetitious in the reading, no matter how much sympathy we might have for the narrative strategy. I suppose reading the work in weekly installments would have mitigated that factor somewhat for the work's original audience. At any rate, this is an extremely valuable book, I think, opening up one more revealing look at this particular era, at the price women have always paid for the blockheaded egotistical insistence of men for their own primacy and the value of their own pleasures, often in the name of "enlightenment," and at the ways that women have continually had to find to try to confound that behavior.

Book 25: Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin



The last four stories of this eight-story collection are among the most powerful short stories I can ever recall reading. Those stories are "Sonny's Blues," "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," "Come Out the Wilderness," and "Going to Meet the Man." The first three stories of that quartet embed us* into experiences and perspectives of Black Americans in 1950s/60s American as they navigate both implicit and explicit prejudice and try to manage the constant psychological and external pressure these constants create for them. The last of the four puts us inside the head of a Southern sheriff during the days of the Civil Rights movement, as well see how his experience of a lynching in his childhood has helped fuel the rage that explodes behind the blows of his baton as he goes after Blacks lined up to register to vote. The beauty and power of Baldwin's writing, I think, has always been greatly enhanced by the compassion built into his world view, even for that sheriff as he stands in a jail cell over the man he has just beaten bloody. My emphasis of the final four stories isn't meant to imply that the first four tales aren't excellent. They focus on childhood, and are all quite good in many ways, especially as they describe the only partially controlled rage with which many of the adult male characters seethe. They just weren't quite as powerful for me. I don't think it's a stretch, or at all original, to say that Baldwin was one of the very greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Book 26: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei



This is the memoir of Ai Weiwei, a famous Chinese conceptual artist, architect and activist. Although Ai Weiwei has struggled determinately and consistency against the censorship and other oppressions of the current Communist Chinese regime, and has presented his conceptual art in major exhibitions and museums around the world, this is the rare memoir in which the portrayal of the author's childhood is actually more interesting (or at least that was my reaction) than the portrayal of his or her adulthood. That's because Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was also famous, a world renowned lyric poet, who was targeted and harshly oppressed by the forces of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In approximately the first half of his memoir, Ai Weiwei relates his time as a child, moving with his father and his half-brother from one remote and desolate punishment outpost to another, with only intermittent contact with his mother. From his father's early comradeship with Mao, through the descriptions of these horrible work settlements and Ai Qing's day to day degrading humiliations as a "Big Rightist" who is made an example of on an hourly basis, Ai Weiwei walks us through the events and repercussions of the Cultural Revolution and describes the profound loss of history and Chinese cultural identity that resulted.

Oddly, though, once Ai Weiwei grows to adulthood and, especially, once he becomes a noted artist and activist, the narrative flattened out for me. Perhaps some of this has to do with the translation from Chinese to English. Ai Weiwei certainly has led a fascinating and, it seems, a quite admirable life. His conceptual art installations have been aimed at promoting ideas of freedom and individuality, of protesting against the harshness and absurdity of the repression of the Communist regime, and of pointing out the regime's corruption and ineptitude as they steer the country toward capitalism under the guise of communism. One of the issues for me, as I think back on the reading experience, is that Ai Weiwei often presents his own activities in isolation, as if he were the only activist in China. Occasionally other names are mentioned, but I found it off-putting that so much of Ai Weiwei's narrative consisted of statements along the lines of "I created this work in order to say that." Well, it's a memoir, so of course he'd be talking about his own accomplishments, but he seemed to me to be entirely self-focused. With a few exceptions, the entirely of Chinese history during the time under discussion seemed to me to be focused through the lens of his own perspective.

An example of this is Ai Weiwei's description of his discovery of the Internet, and of the beginnings of his life as a blogger with many thousands of followers. There are overstatements like "Every character that I tapped on my keyboard was emblematic of a new kind of freedom." (Again, maybe this is a translation issue.) The next sentence, I'm sure, rang true at the time, though seems less assuredly true by this point: "Buy enabling alternative voices, the internet weakened the power of autocracy, dispelling the obstacles it tried to put in the individual's way." That second sentence and another that follows soon after ("On the internet, social coercion is nullified and the individual acquires a kind of weightlessness, no longer subordinate to the power structure.") made me nostalgic for the early days of the online world, when we still thought such things were unmistakably true. And was Ai Weiwei the only activist blogger at this time? I don't know, but from this memoir, you'd think so.

One more example of this sort of thing: In his role as an architect, Ai Weiwei had an active role in the designing of the stadium (referred to by Ai Weiwei as "the Bird's Nest") to be used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The description of the teamwork and creative process in this work was very interesting. But Ai's final comments on the endeavor had me scratching my head:

"The design of the Bird's Nest aimed to convey the message that freedom was possible: the integration of its external appearance whites exposed structure encapsulated something essential about democracy transparency, and equity. In defense of those principles, I now resolved to put a distance between myself and the Olympics, which were simply serving as nationalistic, self-congratulatory propaganda. Freedom is the precondition for fairness, and without freedom, competition is a sham."

I found Ai Weiwei's assumption that any more than a slight handful of observers would notice a message of freedom in the design of a stadium to be unfortunately self-absorbed, and his shock that the Chinese government was using the Olympics as a propaganda tool, despite the artistic splendor of the stadium design, to be more than a little disengenuous.

Ai Weiwei's personal relationships get more or less short shrift. I understand that his focus here was on his artistic and political accomplishments and on exposing conditions in China, but no matter how reasonable the intent, the result for me was a memoir somewhat drained of dimension and empathy.

I have waited much too long to say that Ai Weiwei is clearly a man of courage who has inspired a great many of his internet followers, and admirers of his art, to maintain a resistant attitude toward the oppression of the Chinese regime. He has done so despite the constant threat to his own freedom, even to his life. In this, we has clearly been inspired by his father's example. Also, I have a lot of respect for conceptual artists, those who attempt to challenge our preconceived notions of reality, life and politics through their work. Ai Weiwei's output, and the degree to which he is clearly admired and respected by other artists and curators, speaks volumes about the value of his accomplishments. Many of the installations and exhibits Ai Weiwei describes sound like works I would love to see and experience. And as a tour through Chinese history from the end of World War 2 through the present day, and as a close-in look at the threats, oppressions and dangers experienced by artists fighting to stay relevant within oppressive regimes, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows is an extremely valuable narrative and testimony.

Book 27: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass



I've waited far too long to finally read this classic and powerful testimony of the evils of chattel slavery in America. Douglass tells in straightforward fashion his story of the frequency of whippings, the demeaning and demoralizing nature of living life enslaved and the daily pains and degradations endured by the enslaved men, women and children he knows as a youth. Enslaved from birth, Douglass, once he became old enough to understand the full ramifications of his situation, acquired and retained a determination to find freedom. His first step was to surreptitiously learn to read. As such, this is also a testament to the enduring possibilities of the human spirit. Anyone with a doubt as to the absolute evil of American slavery will be disabused of such doubts after reading these searing 126 pages.

Book 28: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison



Nobody needs a lengthy review of Song of Solomon at this late date from the likes of me. I fully enjoyed my reread of this modern classic, decades removed from my initial exposure to it. My memory of my first read was very light on specifics. (I remembered a particular scene very close to the end, but entirely misremembered how that scene resolved!) I only recalled how moved I was by the experience. This led me to select the book when it was my turn to make a pick for my monthly reading group. (Our rule is that you must choose a book you've already read, so that you know for sure that you think it's a book worthy of the group's time, rather than taking a flyer on some book off the bestseller list.)

On this second reading, I did have a little bit of trouble settling completely into the narrative at the outset. Initially, none of the characters are particularly likable, including the book's protagonist, Milkman. But as we begin to see more of these characters' lives, often as they explain themselves to Milkman or, in the case of Milkman himself, though his own experiences, they begin to gain dimension, and we begin to attain perspective. At this point, I became wholly invested in the story. The skillfully drawn themes of Morrison's narrative begin to emerge: the dangers of personal isolation, the holding of grudges and the assumption that there isn't more to be learned about the people around you; the prices paid of living a life in Diaspora; the power of mythology and legend; the slow-dripping, corrosive poison of hatred and revenge seeking; the redemptive powers of forgiveness and the liberating nature of learning one's own family history. All this is framed within the rewarding, perhaps somewhat larger-than-life, portrayal of African American culture, both in the rustbelt north, where Milkman's story begins, and in the isolated mountains of Virginia, where Milkman goes searching for treasure. I'm very glad to have reread this now.

>44 rocketjk: That was a powerful read for me, and surely worthy of a second time around.

>45 laytonwoman3rd: " . . . and surely worthy of a second time around."

Absolutely, and especially so many years later.

Book 29: The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer



A note that this review is different from my normal reviews, as it is long (not that unusual for me these days, now that I think about it) and relies much more heavily than is common for me on quotations. There was so much in this book that I made note of during the reading that I had a hard time coming up with a better way of introducing the book here than to just let Singer speak for himself.

The Family Moskat is Isaac Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.

The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a boot to the small of the back. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.

The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.

As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.

Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. For example, a crucial aspect of the story is the romance carried out between Asa Hesel and Hadassah, a Moskat granddaughter, Abram’s niece, who has actually been promised by her family to Fishel, a successful businessman. Says Abram to Asa Heshel:

She doesn’t want him, that Fishel, with the whole business of the mikvah, and wearing a matron’s wig, and his grandfather, and his lousy oil business, and the whole stinking mess. The damn fools. First they send their daughters to decent, modern schools and then they expect them to forget everything they’ve learned and suddenly become old-fashioned, orthodox, meek Jewish housewives. From the twentieth century straight back to the Middle Ages. Tell me about yourself. Is your health all right?”

At the same time, Singer is clearly looking back with affection. Thinks Abram at one point, as he reflects on his own life as a schemer and carouser:

“There was only one thing that wasn’t worth a plague: death. Why should he, Abram, have angina pectoris? What would he be doing through the long winter nights over there in the Gensha cemetery? And even admitting that there as such a thing as paradise, what good would it be to him? He’d rather have the Warsaw streets than all the wisdom of a Jewish paradise.”

And there is gentle humor running throughout, mostly put by Singer into the mouths of his characters. At one point, a rich man’s shiva (wake) is overrun by curious strangers. “Look at that mob,” Naomi complained. “A person would imagine someone sent for them.”

An ever-present theme, of course, is the endless current of tragedy that has stalked the community for centuries and shows signs, now of accelerating rather than abating. In the period just after the First World War, a new mother looks at aunt and observes:

“A sort of pious melancholy flowed from her, the generations-old dolor of the Jewish mother, the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives. And was she any different? What would happen to her child? Who could say that in another twenty years there wouldn’t be another war?”

In addition to the schisms developed by the tensions and changes in Jewish life as the years and generations proceed comes the ever-tightening vise of rising anti-Semitism in post-World War One Poland, described here in a relatively early passage:

The saloonkeeper rubbed his forehead. That’s the way it always was. Let one Jew into the place and they’d draw a thousand others, like flies, and the place gets to be a madhouse. The plate of soup was standing untouched. The cat was gnawing at the sausages. A pack of devils, these Jews, with their stylish clothes. The newspapers were right; that gang would eat up Poland like a flock of locusts, worse than the Muscovites and the Swabians.

As time goes by, things get worse, and as the 30s progress boycotts against Jewish businesses commence and Polish ruffians begin aping their German Nazi neighbors in beating up Jews on the street. Toward the end of the book another Moskat family member, Yanovar, after being falsely accused of being a Communist and arrested, has an ominous conversation with the police officer who, while releasing him, warns about the ubiquity of Jews within the Polish Communist movement.

Yanovar replies, “That, sir, is the unfortunate situation the Jew finds himself in. We are not permitted in the civil service, nor are we permitted to take posts in factories. Anti-Semitism creates Communism.”

“Well, assuming that this is so, do the Jewish leaders realize the Communism among the Jewish masses evokes an anti-Semitism tenfold, a hundred-fold, more intense?”

“We know that, too. It’s a vicious circle.”

“Mr. Yanovar, I don’t want to frighten you, but the situation is unbearable. Today the Jews are the spreaders of Bolshevism throughout the face of the earth. I’m not exaggerating. This puts the very existence of the Jewish race in danger.”

After the policeman dismisses the idea of a Jewish homeland, suggesting that Zionism is another source of anti-Semitism within Poland, the conversation ends on an ominous note. The policeman recommends that Yanovar acquaint himself with a book called The Twilight of Israel,* and concludes the conversation with the chilling pronouncement, “Time solves all problems. One way or another. Adieu.”

* (A note that while I could not find any reference to this book online, my guess is that it was never published in English and, more importantly, that it is an anti-Semitic tract and probably a vicious one.)

Elsewhere, Asa Heshel looks out of a tram window and sees this: “Along Marshalkovska Street women loitered. Their shadowed eyes shone with the gloomy lust of those who have lost all fear of peering into the abyss.”

The book represents a time commitment. As with many multi-generational family novels, The Family Moskat is relatively lengthy, checking in at just over 600 pages. Not every segment flows along exceptionally well, but most do. Also, I felt that the ending was rushed, the final 20 pages or so not as satisfying as the rest of the novel. But those flaws didn’t seriously detract from the overall power of this book for me.

So I guess since this has become a review of quotes, I’ll finish up with one more lengthy one that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:

After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off along through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.

He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.

Book 30: Show - The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962 edited by Robert M. Wool



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another entry from the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my closet that I'm trying to gradually read through. I tried running an online search to learn the history and duration of this publication, but couldn't find anything. I must admit I didn't spend a lot of time on it. At any rate, this July 1962 edition of Show provided a very rich selection of reading, indeed. The central theme of the edition was the Japanese film industry. Among the articles on this topic were an interesting profile of Akira Kurosawa and his movies and a humorous piece on the many openings in Japan for Americans and Europeans (no acting experience necessary!) to play movie villains. But there were many fascinating pieces above and beyond that central theme. For example, we have a long entry from Somerset Maugham's memoirs describing his unfortunate marriage but also his activities working for the British government during World War One. Also, an evocative and absorbing memory essay from Joseph Heller describing the Coney Island of his youth. Another was a fascinating essay by dancer/actor/writer Geoffrey Holder about his participation in an American government sponsored cultural expedition to Lagos. And Leonard Feather writes about the health of the jazz festival. These are some of the most interesting pieces, and also on hand are reviews of movies, plays, music, books visual art and more, all providing a snapshot of the American world of the arts in 1962. I love these old magazines for the pictures and knowledge they provide of the eras in which they were published.

Book 31: Boy in Blue by Royce Brier



Here is an obscure but highly readable novel about the American Civil War. Boy in Blue was published in 1937. Doing the math, this means that it was published 85 years ago, but "only" 72 years after the end of that war. The author, Royce Brier, was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who three years before this book's publishing had won the Pulitzer Prize in Reporting "For his account of the lynching of the kidnappers, John M. Holmes and Thomas H. Thurmond in San Jose, Calif., on Nov. 26, 1933 after they had been jailed for abducting Brooke Hart, a merchant's son."
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/royce-brier

In a way the novel is standard fare. Robert Thane, a young naive but good-hearted boy is growing up on a farm in Indiana. The Civil War has just begun. His father is a staunch Unionist and abolitionist, but his uncle's sentiments are with the Confederacy. Robert has an older brother who is soon to enlist with the Federals. In the meantime, Robert is in love with the pretty girl living on a nearby farm. She returns his affections, but he is too shy to do much about it. Soon, of course, events send Robert off to the war as well. Well, it seems that every Civil War novel, and many another historical novel in general, begin more or less in this way. A reader must simply determine to plow through the opening to get to the real action of the story. However, Brier was a pretty good writer, and he does a good job of using this opening act to set the stage of Robert's attitudes about the war. And while we see him as naive at the beginning, he comes to see his father's passion for the principles that have set the conflict in motion as being the real naïveté. We may or may not agree with that, but we can understand the soldier in the midst of the conflict thinking so.

Robert's early army days entail a lot of training, and then months of marching hither and yon, up and down Tennessee, without seeing much action. As readers, we know, of course, that there must be a climactic battle coming at the end of all this. Still, the descriptions of those dreary months of marching and discomforting struggle are rendered quite well and we do feel that we're getting a believable close feel for the experience of an army in the midst of its perplexing (to the foot soldiers) wanderings. Brier was very good with the sights and sounds and physical toils of the marching, rain soaked or sun beaten days and weeks going by, with just enough characterizations of Robert's marching comrades to fill in the spaces around him. The flyleaf tells us that Brier spend a long time walking the Cumberland Valley trails that the Federal army traversed during the weeks leading up to the battles fought there, and we can certainly believe it.

The battle, when we finally get to it, takes up around the final 60 or so pages of the book. We do not know whether Robert will survive. It is a testament to Brier's skill, I think, that the ending, whether it's to be happy or tragic, is not telegraphed. So, all in all, I am happy to have read this novel, though it doesn't surprise me too much that it's become forgotten and obscure. My copy, a first edition, is one of only four copies listed here on LT. I've had it on my shelf since before my LT "Big Bang," which is to say before I first began posting my personal collection here in 2008.

Book 32: Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia



I was very much looking forward to reading this book, a murder mystery taking place in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance with a gay African American female protagonist, written by an African Canadian woman. The book was a selection for my monthly reading group. But I was sorely disappointed. I found the writing amateurish and cliche-ridden and the plot barely credible. And while the book ostensibly takes place in Harlem during the 1920s, there is essentially no sense of place, other than the fact that most of the characters, other than the policemen, are black and an occasional reference to Prohibition.

So I would warn folks away. On the other hand, there are LT reviews giving this book 3, 3.5, and in one case even 4 stars, so your mileage may vary.

Book 33: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe



This is a fascinating, disturbing and eminently readable history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It begins with the seizing in 1972 of a seemingly harmless widow, Jean McConville, by an armed, masked posse right out of her own apartment and in front of her 10 children. Historian Patrick Radden Keefe uses this crime, and its repercussions, as the central event in his in-depth account of the events of the Troubles and the aftermath of the tragedy, as well. Keefe soon backs his lens away from the kidnapping itself to describe the bloody years and events in Belfast primarily. He takes for granted to a certain extent a knowledge of the sectarian/religious animus between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast, and the hard line in the rubble between Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Catholics who want the counties of the North to join the Republic of Ireland. But one of the huge strengths of the book is Keefe's practice of focusing in on some of the important individuals on the Catholic (IRA) side, showing us who they were and how they became radicalized to the extent that they were will to go to "war" (most would say terrorism) to try to drive the English out of Ireland once and for all. Of particular interest are the Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, who turned to violence after a peace march they were taking part in was viciously attacked by Protestant thugs. Both end up not only in prison, but taking part in the hunger strikes that nearly cost both of them their lives. Occasionally, Keefe revisits the McConville children, their attempts to learn of their mother's fate, to stay together as a family, and then their individual often brutal journeys through the Northern Irish youth homes and orphanages. Back to the conflict, and Keefe takes inside the IRA, mostly following the Price sisters and another very high-ranking member, Brandon Hughes, another prison/hunger strike survivor, as individual acts of terrorism are planned and committed, almost never coming off entirely as conceived. And, of course, we see the IRA's leader (or was he?), Gerry Adams, the man who eventually turned away from terrorism to create the movement's political wing, Sinn Fein.

Keefe illuminates the sense of betrayal felt by Adams' former brothers and sisters in arms by this development, and in particular Adams' insistence that he was never really an IRA member, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement between the IRA, the Loyalist Protestant forces and the British government. "What was it all for?" the surviving terrorists want to know bitterly in the face of the agreement that allows the British to remain on the island. As the violence fades, the accounting begins, including the search for answers about the IRA victims who have been "disappeared." The IRA's most commonly followed custom was to dump the bodies of those they'd executed, normally for being informants for the British (or even just for being suspected as such) or for disobeying IRA orders, on the streets as a warning to others. But there had been a small number, only 10 or 11 all told, who had been "disappeared," surreptitiously executed and buried in remote locations, never to be spoken of again. Even asking about these people's fates could get you killed. Had Jean McConville been one of these? And if so, why, and by whom? It turns out that the story of the post-Troubles accounting and unburdening is almost as fascinating, as presented by Keefe, as the story of the bloody years of the Troubles. Keefe also takes us, to a lesser extent, inside the British Army hierarchy in Northern Ireland, and shows us the British attempts to infiltrate the IRA organization, and the counter-espionage steps taken by both sides.

If there is anything lacking in the comprehensive picture Keefe provides, it stems from the fact that, as he describes the most violent years of the Troubles, he spends most of his time with the higher echelons of the IRA, with those who plan and carry out high-level operations and create the policies and strategies that were followed. To get at the horrifying claustrophobic and terror-laden daily life in Belfast during these years, I think one need to turn to fiction, or perhaps to other memoirs/histories that I haven't learned of. So, for example, a novel like Milkman or even the thriller, The Ghosts of Belfast, give us a stronger view of what life was like on the streets and in the neighborhoods than Keefe has provided here. That's not meant as a criticism of Keefe's accomplishment, here, which I consider to be enormous and extremely valuable. Also, as I mentioned at the start and want to reiterate here, Keefe is a clear and sympathetic writer, and his prose pulls the reader along, as horrific as his subject matter often becomes.

Book 34: The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde



Goodness, I do love Jasper Fforde's writing and imagination, and while probably nothing will replicate for me the delight of reading the early Thursday Next books for the first time, The Constant Rabbit, after a bit of a slow start, turned out to be great fun. It has been fifty-five years since the entirely unexplained Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event (a.k.a. the Event) has turned most rabbits, along, unfortunately, with quite a few foxes and a weasel or two, in England into sentient beings, weird hybrids between rabbits and humans. Humans have become ever more wary of the rabbit neighbors and suspicious of the consequences of their breeding power. As a result, laws proscribing the rights, movements of rabbits, and even where they are allowed to live, have multiplied, and a great "rehoming" to Wales is in the offing. The action of the novel centers around the antics in the town of Much Hemlock (Fforde has great fun with English town names, here) and our hero is the human Peter Knox. Peter works for the evil rabbit control agency (he only works there because he needs the money) though he is sympathetic to the rabbits and their plight and even has a crush on Connie, a rabbit he's known since college days.

The constant rabbit is a satire about anti-immigrant fear:

The rabbit issue used to be friendly chat over tea and hobnobs in the old days, but the argument had, like many others in recent years, became polarised: if you weren't rabidly against rabbits, you were clearly only in favorer of timidly bowing down to acquiesce to the Rabbit Way, then accepting Lago as your god and eating nothing but carrots and lettuce for the fest of your life.

But Fforde also takes on the issues of the complicity of inaction. As one rabbit, Finkle, puts the case (and as Fforde eventually pokes fun at himself) in this exchange, which I have edited for length:

"Shame is right. Shame works. Shame is the gateway emotion to increased self-criticism, which leads to realization, an apology, outrage and eventually meaningful action. We're not holding our breaths that any appreciable numbers can be arsed to make the journey along that difficult chain of emotional honesty -- many good people get past realization, only to then get horribly stuck at apology -- but we live in hope."

"It's further evidence of satire being the engine of the Event," said Connie, "although if that's true, we're not sure for whose benefit."

"Maybe it's the default position of humans when they feel threatened," I ventured, "although if I'm honest, I know a lot of people who claim to have 'nothing against rabbits' but tacitly do nothing against the over leporiphobia that surrounds them."

Or maybe it's just satire for comedy's sake and nothing else," added Connie, "or even more useless, satire that provokes a few guffaws but only low to middling outrage -- but is coupled with more talk and not action. A sort of empty cleverness."

As always, Fforde is extremely clever with his world building (which I've only scratched the surface of here) and language. His satire is cutting but compassionate. And after that slow start I mentioned, the storyline moves along quite nicely building to a tense and believable (Did I just write that a novel about talking rabbits and foxes has a believable ending?) ending. So overall, the Constant Rabbit is fun and funny and has a message worth noting.

Book 35: Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund



Sometimes you just need one from the pulp paperback shelf, especially when there are a couple of long plane rides in the offing, and so it was with my decision to take this fun science fiction novel along on my recent vacation. Falling Toward Forever was published in 1975. Two soldiers are fighting on the same side in an anti-colonial war in an unnamed African country. One, Ahmad, is a black man fighting to free his own country. Waller is a white mercenary, a former Vietnam War prisoner of war and torture victim. Embittered by the experience and the hypocrisy of the U.S. government, he has turned soldier for hire, willing, so he says, to fight for any insurgency against any established government. Although Ahmad is suspicious of Waller's motives and what he believes to be Waller's death wish, the two have respect for each other as fighters. In the heat of a battle, Waller comes upon a woman who is trying to hide from the fighting. But she has a gun that she fires at Waller, hitting his arm. Just as he is about to return fire, Ahmad runs up from behind and yells at Waller not to shoot. Suddenly, all three of them are snatched from the spot by an unseen force and dropped down in a wholly alien environment. Where are they and what has happened to them? The rest of the novel, of course, brings the trio trying to sort out their circumstances and deal with the people whose time and place they have suddenly entered.

Eklund seemed to be attempting to add at least a touch of social awareness to his story. It's hard to miss the fact that our trio of heroes include a white man, a black man and a woman. The leadership and planning, and the best ideas and plans, ebb and flow between all three characters throughout the story. On the other hand, the leadership often does default to Waller, and we are expected, it seems, to see this as natural. Well, I don't want to make too much of all that. This is, after all, a pulp novel, and it appears Eklund was at least aware of these issues in his storytelling. At any rate, Eklund's writing is pretty good, here. The plot itself gets more implausible as things go along, and the ending is rushed, but what the heck, I had fun reading the tale, which was just right for vacation reading.

>53 rocketjk: I have not seen a Laser paperback in a great many years.

>54 RBeffa: I found it on the bargain table of The Book Juggler, a great used bookstore in Willits, CA, more or less in the middle of Mendocino County. (Come to think of it, living in Vallejo as you do, you probably know where Willits is.) I have several shelves of old pulp paperbacks, but I don't attend to them very often, I'm afraid.

>55 rocketjk: Stopped in Willits many times on the way to the redwoods. The retro styled Burger King on the main road made a good lunch break for the kids and us. I have heard of the Book Juggler!

Book 36: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn



When my friend selected this book last month for our reading group, I was surprised to realize I'd never read it. The Boys of Summer is a classic of the genre of sports memoirs, at least in the U.S., not counting memoirs written by the athletes themselves. A day or two after my friend announced the selection, I ran into him in town and asked him, "Are all the guys in the group baseball fans?" I was pretty sure at least a couple of us weren't. He replied that the book is well enough written, and deals with enough issues other than baseball itself, that even the non-baseball fans in the group would enjoy it. As I began reading, I realized how right he was.

Roger Kahn grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, intellectuals who were frustrated in not being able to make use of their love of learning and literature professionally, but made sure there was a strong intellectual atmosphere in the household. (Even in adulthood, Kahn attends weekly sessions with his parents during which they all take turns reading aloud from Ulysses.) Kahn describes his childhood lovingly, but without sparing the families frustrations or the tragedy of his sister's polio. Kahn then takes us into his early days as a journalist, including apprenticeship as a copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune and his first tentative writing assignments and the tough mentorship he receives from some of the experienced writers and editors. Soon enough, Kahn, at only 24, manages to land the prized assignment as daily beat writer covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. As Kahn describes his years cover the Dodgers, he concentrates on writing about the personalities and inter-team relationships of the most memorable players. Most fascinating, of course, is Kahn's relating of the drama of Jackie Robinson's entry into the Dodger clubhouse and the trials he had to go through as Major League Baseball's first black player. Some of the players, such as Pee Wee Reese, the shortstop and team captain, and pitcher Carl Erskine, supported Robinson from the beginning, especially as Robinson was such a talented and fearsome player. Other were resistant. But the Robinson story is not the only player's tale that Kahn weaves into the narrative, and we get a close-up view of the multi-faceted relationships within a 25-man team as well as the pressures of competition, of the daily failures and success, and how they are handled differently by the diverse personalities of the ballclub.

Kahn admits in the book that he never had much objectivity when it came to the team and their fortunes. He'd grown up a Dodger fan and remained one as a writer. But still he was able to write negative stories when he needed to, stories about on-field failures and less than admirable remarks. It was a different era in sportswriting, however, in which writers would more or less respect the players' privacy and to a certain extent protect their reputations as well. Kahn was able to walk those lines, and earned the respect and in many cases the friendship of quite a few of the famous Dodger players of those teams of the early to mid-1950s. Significantly, Kahn does a good job of describing the often vicious prejudice experienced by Robinson and the other black players the Dodgers soon added, both from other players and from fans, and this theme is a more or less constant theme throughout the book.

Eventually Kahn tired and/or grew out of the daily grind of the baseball beat writer and turned to freelance magazine writing and other outlets. Around 15 years later, Kahn developed the idea of visiting as many of the key members of those by then legendary Dodger teams to see how life had treated them after their playing days. This section takes up, more or less, the book's second half. You don't need to care about any of these men as baseball stars to find these post-career portraits compelling. Kahn renders them with sensitivity and, yes, love. Many of the players have gone back to their childhood towns in the midwest or the Ozarks, removed from public life. Some remember their baseball years as the highlight of their lives and relish the memory of the relationships and fun of the clubhouse and the splendor of playing ball for a living. Others remember more the intense pressure they felt of trying to survive as major leaguers and perform well on the field. Some think of their baseball years as, more or less, part of their training for adulthood. One or two are bitter about how they were treated by the businessmen atop the Dodger corporate ladder. All in all we get a series vivid portraits of these men whose fame as athletes entailed the built-in obsolescence of youth. And it's important to remember that this as all before the era when a 5-year baseball career could set a person up financially for life. These men, in one way or another, simply went back to work in some other fashion, from bartenders to business executive in companies like Greyhound. Luckily, Kahn's relationship with Robinson was a good one of mutual respect. Robinson was already ailing from diabetes and other problems when Kahn went to interview him, and the story of that visit is largely taken up with a description of the man through the lens of his sorrows over the problems his oldest son was having with substance abuse. Over the years between ballpark and interviews, the 50s had become the 60s. Robinson himself died not very long after Kahn visited him.

So, as you can see, Kahn crammed a lot into these 456 pages, but he did it with grace and style and substance. As far as the quality of the writing is concerned, I'll finish up here by quoting this final paragraph from Kahn's chapter on Gil Hodges, the Dodger first baseman known of his quiet strength as a player. Hodges went on to manage in the major leagues, most famously leading the 1969 Miracle Mets to the teams first World Series championship, but died from a heart attack only three years later at the age of 47.

" . . . We parted, and in the large empty ball park I tried to imagine how this job and night and life felt to a man with mine deaths in his past and a heart condition in his present and I missed a sense of joy. He has been close to the peaks of baseball for a quarter century and, though he has gained things he wanted, Hodges has paid. He had seemed more tranquil as a player struggling to hit Maglie than as a pennant-winning manager. In the empty ball park, where my footfalls on cement made the only sound, I wondered whether Gil Hodges truly was better off with the satisfactions and fierce strains of his success or whether sometimes he envied his older brother Bob, who always talked a better game, but disappeared into the chasm of corporate life during the 1940s when all his talk and scheming ended with a dead arm on a Class D ball club playing in West Central Georgia. And here it was, only May."

Book 37: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson



In this clearly written, crucial and devastating* book, Isabel Wilkerson lays out the concept of caste as it pertains to American society. The book more or less begins with the fact that racism grew out of a stronger group's desire to use "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits" (Ashley Montagu as quoted by Wilkerson) to create an underclass. Wilkerson quoting Montagu again: "The idea of race was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste." In other words, European colonizers needed an excuse to subjugate, plunder and murder the people they came in contact with.

These divisions and classifications hardened, with pseudo-science, religion, greed, hatred and ignorance acting as the cement among the brickwork. Now, white America is brought up with a wide array of assumptions about people who don't look like them. This holds true for working class whites who are taught to eschew social programs that could help them and their families if those programs will also help blacks. It also holds true for liberals (like me) who think they are past all that and who are well-meaning and think of themselves (ourselves) as "not seeing color," would never hesitate to shake hands with or even hire a Black person but who still embody a roster of unconscious suppositions about people of other races.

As Wilkerson puts it, "Color is a fact. Race is a social construct."

The crux of Wilkerson's explanation, and here, I'm afraid, comes a rather long quote, can be found on page 71 of my hardcover edition:

"In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positions and restricting those positions, vis-a-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste . . .

. . .

In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random black or brown person who is also shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a black or brown person who is also a guest to fetch them a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It's the automatic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences."

The rest of the book is more or less a detailed explication of this phenomenon. But I don't want to give the impression that Caste becomes repetitive or didactic. Far from it. The detail and the layering on of the different aspects and results of the social construct Wilkerson is examining helps immensely. The deeper she goes into those layers, the more she illuminates the history, complexity and fixity of the problem.

As a way of underscoring the concept of caste, Wilkerson also spends significant time looking at the caste system in India, its history and superstructure and, especially, its harms. In comparing U.S. society with the Indian system, Wilkerson strengthens her points about American caste culture.

The explanations of and comparisons with India work well, but where the book becomes flawed, in my view, is when Wilkerson talks about her third example, the Holocaust. For one thing, these segments seem jammed in somehow, and artificial. Primarily, to me, this is because she frequently refers to the 12 years of the Nazi regime, seeming to marvel at how fast the Nazis were able to turn Jews into a lower caste. But, of course, there was nothing new about Europeans treating Jews as a lower and reviled caste. It was a construct of more than a thousand years standing, a fact that the Nazis relied upon in their murderous anti-Semitic campaigns across the continent, but that Wilkerson never mentions.

That reservation, however, is not a major one for me. As many others have said here on LT and elsewhere, this is an essential book that should be assigned reading for every white (at the very least) American and European. I was a bit concerned that Caste would seem at least somewhat redundant after my relatively recent reading of The New Jim Crow. I needn't have worried, as the problem of race and caste in America is vast enough for more than one book, to put it mildly. The two books are complimentary, and in fact I would recommend a trio of works that each get at the issue from a different direction:Caste, The New Jim Crow and The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Us and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee. Together, I think, these three books help create a good starting place for understanding the issues and people involved.

* That is, devastating for American white people like me. My supposition is that blacks and other ethnic groups have known all about the information contained in this book all their lives.

>58 rocketjk: I'm not making quick progress on this read. It is, as you observe, a devastating blow to smug ignorance and quite painfully miserable an experience.

>59 richardderus: Amen. But on the other hand, we don't have to live the experience of lower caste status. I don't want to moan, therefore, nor do I feel particularly proud of myself just for reading a book.

>60 rocketjk: It's always the case that, no matter the effort expended, the reward must be sought internally. No one anywhere ever will praise you for doing tough stuff like growing and changing...nor, I suppose, should they since that makes it about your image.

>61 richardderus: That's very well said, Richard. Great to see you here. Hope you're well.

Book 38: Homecomings by C.P. Snow



This is the seventh book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series that takes a reader through several layers of middle- and upper-class English society from the 1920s through the 1950s. All of the novels feature a man named Lewis Eliot, who over the series fights his way from a lower middle-class upbringing into the halls of administrative power, first in industry and then, during World War 2, in British Civil Service. Hindered socially, and therefore professionally, by a profoundly depressed wife, Sheila, who cannot help him make friendships and connections through the never-ending round of dinners and parties Eliot is expected to attend, Eliot is, early in the series, thwarted in his attempts to make his mark in the legal profession. Snow's frustrations with a social environment that prevents the rise of capable people in this manner is mostly unstated but clear throughout the series. As this novel begins, Eliot is an adviser to a powerful industrialist. He is seen by his peers as a successful man, but one who has never fulfilled his real promise. Eliot sees himself this way, as well, but has mostly made his peace with it.

As this novel progresses, the war begins and Eliot makes his way into the wartime government. He has a job that is stressful with responsibility, but he is still attending to more powerful men. From his spot near but not at the top, Eliot is able to make sharply drawn observations about the nature of the bureaucracy--and the qualities of the people--both above and below him on the organization chart. At the same time, Eliot's private life, as Sheila's condition deteriorates further, becomes complex and sorrowful. The book is filled with small but powerful observations about the nature of love and responsibility, and the handicaps inherent in a life pointed too much inward. This is not just a flaw of Sheila's as Eliot describes things for us, but also of Eliot himself. There is a varied and entertaining cast of characters attendant, as well, and Snow is adept at describing their personalities and actions, for good or ill. Several figures from the early books are brought back into the scene here.

It's not an uncommon theme that the end of major wars bring on unexpected changes--ends of eras--in countries and cultures, but Snow's observations regarding this phenomenon in England just after World War Two has ended are, I think, particularly good. Eliot, who has come of age in relatively Bohemian company during the 1920s, looks around during a party at a couple of friends he's known since those days and reflects:

" . . . I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.

So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of skepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: thy would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except of catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by civil service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese court. . . . Just as the men of affairs had fractioned themselves into a group with its own rules . . . just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks . . . {I}t was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors."

I find Snow's writing style understated and enjoyable, and his observations and characterizations satisfying. The plotting of these novels is often slow, but I'm OK with that. Snow's talent for detail is very good, as well. I know that this is the sort of book that many of my LT friends are more or less avoiding these days: a book by a white, straight, male featuring a white, straight male protagonist living in a white world of power and relative privilege. Yet for me, these books, which are about in the end about human nature, the joys, pitfalls and dangers of all sorts of relationships, be they private or public, provide rewarding reading experiences nevertheless. There are four more books in the series, and I expect to be attending to them gradually over the next couple of years.

A quick note on the title. As you'll see in the cover image I've posted, my American edition from the 1960s called the book Homecoming (no "s"), but almost every other cover image on LT shows the title with that "s."

Book 39: Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White



Professor Deborah Gray White's study of the particular aspects of the experience of female slaves in the American south was considered a groundbreaking book when it was first published in 1985. Most of the previous studies of the slave experience had either focused especially on the male experience or had more or less failed to differentiate significantly between the lives of male and female slaves. The book is still held in very high esteem these 37 years later.

White begins by describing the twin stereotypes of Black women through which became part of the white justification of the slave system and endured well past emancipation. One was the stereotype of the wanton, highly sexualized Jezebel, which was used to help justify the common sexual abuse of female slaves by their white enslavers. And the other was Mammy, the benign, all-knowing raiser of the white children, who ruled the kitchen with a firm hand and identified, so went the stereotype, more with her white masters than with her own black enslaved community. In contrast to Jezebel, Mammy was generally portrayed as essentially asexual, and therefore non-threatening. Here as the personification of the benign aspects of slavery, the supposed strong ties between enslavers and enslaved. This stereotype remained on America's syrup bottles and pancake mix boxes until very shortly ago.

White delves in as detailed manner as possible into the life of the female slave. Important factors were the value females had within the system for their ability to give birth to babies that had high monetary value to their enslavers, and the resulting pressure to continue reproducing. In the meantime, they were still expected to get their plantation work in, as well. Women were much less likely than male slaves to have the sort of plantation jobs and/or privileges that allowed them to travel between plantations. In addition, because of their value as baby producers, women were much less likely than men to be sold away. Because of this, female slaves' strongest bonds were often to be found within the community of enslaved women. It was to this community that women most often turned for support in times of troubles and for tending in times of illness. Most women's strongest identities were through their roles as mothers rather than as wives.

I've only touched on two of the many important main themes of this book. I will say that the writing style is a bit dry at times, academic in nature, but never to the extent that I was hindered in the reading. Also, when I ordered my copy of the book online, I didn't realize that there was a newer edition which features an additional chapter. So I would recommend anyone thinking of picking this book would want to pick that later edition.

Book 40: Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley



Bob Motley certainly led a fascinating life. Motley was a Black man born in the early 1920 in Jim Crow polluted Alabama. His dream was to be a ballplayer, but his talents couldn't keep up with those dreams. When World War II broke out, Motley became one of the first African Americans accepted into the Marines and saw combat, and a lot of it, in the Pacific theater. After the war, Motley decided to stick with his dream of making a living in baseball, but now as an umpire, for which he felt that his combination of Marine toughness and natural flamboyance made him suited. In fact, after many years of umpiring sandlot and semi-pro games, Motley made it to the top of the profession, at least as it existed for African Americans in the 1950s, a job umpiring in the Negro Leagues. By the 1950s, Major League Baseball had been somewhat integrated, as more and more Black players had joined the Major League ranks after Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and several others had first integrated the game in 1947. Umpiring, however, was another story. I guess the difference was MLB's willingness to have Black players, in positions, despite their obvious talents, of relative subservience to management, but not, as umpires, in positions of relative authority. In other words, it was one thing for a Black man to be able to strike out a white player with fastballs and curves, another for a Black man to call a white man out on a borderline pitch or a close play at first base. And not only were the Major League umpiring ranks still segregated, but even the minor leagues as well. Motley kept pushing, however, and eventually was hired as the second African American to umpire in the Pacific Coast League, a very high minor league. Motley, all these years, had also had a full-time job at the General Motors plant. He gives the company high grades, in fact, for allowing him lots of leeway in terms of taking time off to go on the road to umpire during baseball season. By the late 50s, Motley had been promoted into GM's management ranks, and finally decided to give up umpiring in order to concentrate on enjoying life with his wife and two growing children. So he finished short of his dream of managing in the big leagues.

So the story that Motley has to tell is, obviously, fascinating. A constant thread throughout the memoir is the pervasiveness of Jim Crow, from his childhood days of having to duck down out of sight when the Klan came roaring through his family's poor Alabama small-town neighborhood to the dangers and humiliations the Black players experienced during their barnstorming journeys through the South, right into the 1950s. The memoir does have some flaws, though. For one thing, Motley was already in his 80s when he finally sat down and told all these stories to his son, Byron, who then produced this "as-told-to" narrative. As Motley says himself near the book's conclusion, many of the specifics of time and place had faded for him by then. So in the reading, there are times when recollections that you wish would be more detailed and specific remain general, and the narrative is often somewhat flat, with cliches relatively common. People are often "thrilled," and they "marvel" and so on. In addition, Motley umpired in the Negro Leagues at a time, post MLB integration, when the Negro Leagues were beginning to implode, with teams folding and investment waning for lack of interest. So I'm a bit dubious of Motley's claims that there was no diminishing of the quality of play over the seasons that the Negro Leagues gradually shrank from three full leagues to one four-team league. Nevertheless, many of the tales Motley does tell are fascinating. He doesn't add much to my knowledge in describing his impressions of Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Willie Mays, who as young players came through the late Negro Leagues, but his stories of umpiring behind the plate when the great Satchel Page was pitching are priceless. And many others of his recollections of events both on the field and off make this memoir well worth reading, particularly, though not necessarily exclusively, for baseball fans. This is, overall, an American story.

Book 41: The Background of Our War by The U.S. War Department Bureau of Public Relations



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). The U.S. War Department (now known rather euphemistically as the Department of Defense) put this book together immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally brought the U.S. into World War 2. The War Department evidently assumed that cadets at the U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point) needed to be brought up to speed about what had been going on in the world over the past 10 years or so. The book contains a chapter apiece about the war up until that time. The Japanese invasion of China and other pre-Pearl Harbor activities in the Pacific get a couple of chapters, and there's a chapter each for the Nazi invasions of Norway, Poland and France, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic, among others. There will be very little that's new here for folks who are up to speed on their WW2 military history, although the book might serve as a good primer for those who haven't read much on the topic. The writing and explanations are generally clear and straightforward. There's more than a bit of a propaganda element going on here, you won't be surprised to learn. The snafus that were part of the English Army's attempts to help the Norwegians fight off the German invasion and the inept defense of France are both pretty much whitewashed, for example. At any rate, copies of this book were evidently handed out to West Point cadets. It's unclear to me whether there was any further distribution of the book, although if not, the volume does represent a pretty impressive effort all told for such a small (in numbers, anyway) an audience.

Book note: This volume has been on my Military History shelf since 2010. So, a while. I have no memory of purchasing it, but most likely in some thrift shop or antique store somewhere. According to the penciled in price on the inside cover, I paid a dollar for it. According to the inscription written in ink, the book originally belonged to

Cpt. A.W. Brooks
Co. F-1, U.S.M.A

>66 rocketjk: sounds like it was an interesting read, even if it had some whitewashing included.

>67 fuzzi: Yes, it was interesting. I learned some things and was reminded of some others, so all in all it was definitely worth the time.

Book 42: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown



Well, nobody needs another long review of The Boys in the Boat at this late date. Everybody with an affinity for this sort of book was reading it when it first was published several years ago. I still owned my used bookstore in those days and I couldn't keep the book on my shelves. And I can understand why that was, now that one my reading group buddies assigned the book for last month's reading. It's a rags-to-glory tale of the group of mostly working class young men who endured personal hardships galore as well as a grueling training regimen of several years' duration to bring honors to themselves and to the University of Washington while rowing crew in an 8-man boat. Not only did they manage to defeat the upper class teams who rowed at Cal Berkeley and the elite Eastern Seaboard schools, but they went to Nazi Germany in 1936 and embarrassed Hitler by winning an Olympic Gold Medal.

The central focus of the book is one of the rowers, Joe Rantz, whom the author met very late in Rantz's life and was able to interview at length. Rantz's personal story, especially his early years, would have made a good book even if he'd never touched an oar. He grew up in Depression-era rural Washington and, at age 15, was abandoned by his family and left to fend for himself. (His stepmother couldn't abide having him in the house, and went the family moved, Joe's father acquiesced to leaving Joe behind in order to ensure that Joe's three half-siblings would have a father while growing up.) Years of difficult, hardscrabble existence ensue.

Brown does a good job of describing Rantz's youthful experiences, and also a very good job of describing the gathering of the crew team, and the harrowing winnowing out phase of the boys who turn out to audition for the freshman crews. Other figures who come into play are the team's coaches and George Pocock, the boat builder, part-time coach and philosopher who comes to have a great influence on the team as a whole and on Rantz in particular. The details of rowing, and what it takes to turn nine young men (eight rowers and a coxswain) into a smoothly running boat with "swing" are also handled extremely well. Also, Brown takes pains to show us the ways in which, simultaneously to all this training and effort and pain, Hitler is working feverishly to turn the 1936 Olympics into a showcase for the new Nazi regime. Finally, the minute-by-minute excitement of each individual race the boys row is presented in very engaging fashion.

So, as I said, I can certainly understand the book's success. The flaws, such as they are, come for me in Brown's breathless style and, in particular in his overuse of cliche. People are "thrilled to the core," they decided to do things "here and now," they "marvel" at events and observations. These sort of glitches pop up several times per page. I should note that, of the seven guys in my reading group, I was the only one who cared about this factor. There's also a "too good to be true" element to some of the storytelling, and a feeling that Brown had become quite enamored with the "sound" of his own voice. Finally, while the description of the buildup to the Olympics and the frantic efforts on the part of the Nazis to turn the events into a propaganda bonanza for themselves, is well done, there is basically no attempt made to describe and connection between all that and the Washington rowing team. If they had any idea of what was going on there, and what they were getting into, or of what their impressions of it were once they arrived in Germany, we get no hint of it. As readers we understand the context in which they won their medal, but the boys' knowledge and/or experience of it is entirely missing. Certainly, at least the coaches, whose perspective we are giving throughout the book, were at least somewhat aware of it all. And again, at least the coaches had to know about the large movement within the U.S. to boycott the Olympics due to the Nazi's anti-Semitic policies and actions. That movement is described, but as readers we'd think that nobody in the state of Washington had ever heard of it. Again, I was the only one in my reading group for whom all this was a concern.

So, anyway, I'd call this a very good book all in all. Brown's success here was deserved. The reservations I've described above knock it down to 3 1/2 stars for me.

I rated that one a bit higher than you did, most probably because I listened to Edward Hermann read the audio book version. He may have sublimated the cliches and hyperbole into something more palatable with his incomparable delivery.

>70 laytonwoman3rd: An interesting hypothesis regarding the audio book and potential sublimation of cliches. Anyway, none of my reading group mates had any of the reservations I did, so I know I'm in an outlier cohort, here. Thanks for checking in. Cheers!

Book 43: A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr



This is the 9th book in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther noir crime series. The beginning of this series found Bernie Gunther as a Berlin homicide detective in 1935, as the Nazi's were quickly taking over all aspects of life in Germany, much to Gunther's dismay and disgust. Gunther has both a solid moral compass and a backbone, and was not loath to let his strong anti-Nazi sentiment be known. On the other hand, his excellence as a detective condemns him to be constantly brought into situations where he is often working on behalf of, and often at the behest of, some of most prominent--and evil--figures in the Nazi hierarchy. By this ninth book, Gunther's disgust with himself over the moral compromises he's had to make in order to survive is strong indeed. Kerr (who died of cancer in 2018) was not shy about bringing real life figures like Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler and Goebbels alive as characters. In addition, as we move along in the series, Kerr jumps us back and forth in time. Although A Man Without Breath takes place in 1943, we already know much about Gunther's wartime combat activities as well as several years' worth of his post-war experiences.

In A Man Without Breath, as mentioned, it is 1943. Gunther, due to his long career as an investigator, finds himself, to his own disgust, officially a member of the SD, the intelligence wing of the SS. He is sent to Smolensk in German occupied Russia. The war's great turning point, the German defeat at Stalingrad, has just occurred. But just outside Smolensk, a giant unmarked graveyard has just been discovered in a place called Katyn Woods. The bodies seem to be those of thousands Polish officers murdered by Stalin's forces back at the beginning of the war when the German-Russian nonaggression pact was still in force. Sensing an anti-Russian public relations coup, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels sends Gunther to lead an investigation. Gunther sets about doing this job, surrounded by a cast of German officers and Russian locals who motives vary. With the defeat at Stalingrad, the more clear-eyed among the Germans, Gunther as much as anyone, realize that the German Army's days in the region are numbered. And then murders begin occurring, as murders will in murder mysteries. Gunther has his mission, and yet, of course, his homicide detective instincts come to the fore. As always, Gunther is swimming in a stream of shifting motives, violence, compromise and downright evil. He manages to keep his own sense of right and wrong afloat, but his soul becomes more battered and scarred with each book.

As are all of these Gunther novels, A Man Without Breath is well written and very sharply plotted. There are a lot of characters to keep track of in this one, but the up side is that Kerr by this time had dropped the over-cute reliance on noir novel patter than had marred a few of the earlier books. I highly recommend this series to anyone who finds my synopsis here of interest. There are, all told, 14 of these books. Since there aren't to be any more, I've been allowing myself only an occasional foray into Bernie Gunther world.

Book 44: Liberal Porto: A Guide to the Architecture, Sites and History of Porto edited by Manuela Rebelo



A quick hitter, here, a memento from my recent vacation in Portugal. This is a small (4.5 by 6 inches or 11.5 by 16.5 cm) book meant to be carried about with you while you walk the streets of Porto, Portugal. There are several distinct walks presented in the book, with, of course, historical information about the sights to be seen on each. A very large portion of the history provided centers around events that took place in the city from 1820, when a revolt against the absolutist reign of Don Miguel was harshly put down, to 1832, when Don Miguel's brother, Don Pedro IV, landed troops and occupied the city in support of his daughter, Queen Maria. Maria was a fierce supporter of a Charter that had been developed to create a constitutional monarchy rather than absolute rule. Hence the "liberal" tag of the book's title and text, although the writers also make the claim that the city had always had a reputation for learning and internationalism that leant themselves to liberal leanings, at least relative to the times. Don Miguel showed up and laid siege to the city for over a year, but Don Pedro's forces were ultimately successful in breaking both the siege and Don Miguel's claim to power. Anyway, that's the story told in this book, and, as I mentioned above, most of the buildings and parks and history are described within the context of the roles they played in the events of 1832-33. I didn't find this book until one of our final days in the city, and anyway my wife has an aversion to "walking tours," historical or otherwise. I'd say that on our own we found our way to about half of the locales described in this guidebook, though the full history of the Portuguese Civil War, as described here, didn't take real shape for me until I read over the short book this week. At any rate, we had a lot of fun in Porto and still learned a lot about the city and its people while we were there. Also, I'm aware that there's a lot more to learn about the events of the conflict and siege than is set forth here. Still, this is a fun reading trip around a very fun, interesting and beautiful city.

Book 45: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein



The Color of Law is another frustrating, infuriating and absolutely crucial study of racism in America. Richard Rothstein's central thesis is that most Americans (or at least most white Americans) believe that the widespread segregation of American cities and suburbs happened relatively naturally, the result of racism, yes, and of the economic forces that that racism produced, but not due to any overt official program of separation and exclusion, at least in the Northern states. Rothstein calls this the theory of de facto segregation. But as Rothstein proves convincingly and forcefully in his book's 240 information-packed pages, what we have had in America is and has been, in fact, de jure segregation, a condition created and maintained by over a century of overt governmental policies. These policies range from the widespread creation of public suburban housing developments like Levitown purposefully designed with strict "whites only" rules, the allowance and encouragement of redlining policies that kept white and African Americans apart and destroyed neighborhoods in the process, the refusal to offer government loans and mortgages to African Americans, the staunch refusal of law enforcement agencies to protect African American families trying to move into white suburbs from violence, the purposefully designing of urban spurs of the Interstate Highway System to destroy middle class African American neighborhoods and push black Americans further away from white suburbs. And that's a very short list of the occurrences and policies that Rothstein covers.

It was all done on purpose, not by accident. So the idea, says Rothstein, that these conditions can be gradually done away with as public policy and peoples' attitudes become more compassionate over time is false. The harms that have been done are deeper, more solidly cemented into our jurisprudence and governmental behaviors since Reconstruction and are countrywide, than can allow for gradual evolutionary changes. Many of the policies that Rothstein proposes in the book's final chapter to begin to address the profound societal harms that have been done over the decades would take enormous political and cultural will, conditions that Rothstein acknowledges are not likely to arise any time soon in America. He also sets forth a few less comprehensive and more doable that might be put into play, but not, he says, until Americans come to jettison the belief in de facto segregation that serve the purpose of letting so many of us off the hook on an individual basis.

I add The Color of Law to what now becomes a quartet of relatively recent books on the subject of systemic cultural racism in America that I consider essential reading for every American. The other three are The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee.

Book 46: Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother by Sarah Hermanson Meister



This is another "quick hitter," a la the book about Porto, above. I spent a few days in New York City with some buddies in September, including one happy afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. I picked up this book in the museum gift shop as a gift for my wife. She read it and enjoyed it and then handed it over to me to read when I got the chance. It was published within MOMA's One on One series. Each book in the series is a "sustained meditation" on a single work in the MOMA collection. In this case, we have 42 pages of text and images describing one of the most iconic photographs in American history, one which came to represent in many ways to most Americans the hardships and inequalities of Dust Bowl life. Meister provides a thumbnail biography of Lange, who led a fascinating life, and then a history of how Lange came to take her famous photo and the life the image took on, the many adaptations and uses to which it was put over the years.

Among the most compelling facets of the story is the fact that Lange almost never took the picture. She was driving alone through California agricultural country, photographing Dust Bowl migrant life for the Resettlement Administration (an FDR New Deal organization), but she was finished for the day, exhausted, and already on the long drive home. She passed a sign for a Pea Harvesters camp but kept on driving. Twenty miles later, she turned her car around and headed back. After pulling into the camp, she took only a single series of seven photos of Florence Owens Thompson and her children, sitting exhausted in a lean-to, and then left. It turned out that the roughly 2,000 people in this camp were essentially slowly starving. A freeze had destroyed the pea harvest, so there was no work. None of the local aid agencies would help, claiming the migrants did not fit into their specific mandates. But when the administrator of Lange's agency heard the story from Lange that there were desperate people in the camp, he alerted the appropriate federal agency, who sent in food and other supplies to tide the workers over.

Decades later, it was revealed that by Thompson's family that Thompson had, over the years, come to resent the ways in which her image had been used so often and in so many ways while she had received nothing at all by way of compensation. However, when Thompson later became ill, an international effort raised a substantial amount of money for her health care. Also, only at around this same time did it become known that Thompson was Native American, a fact that brought about still another reappraisal of the photograph and its meaning and context.

All because Dorothea Lange was compelled to turn her car around and drive back the 20 miles to a migrant pea harvesters' camp.

Book 47: Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller



This famous book, which appears both on many a "Banned Books" list and also on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, is in turns exhilarating, hilarious, thought-provoking, tedious, irritating and, for its misogyny, deeply disturbing. Miller was, as I understand the situation, intent on breaking away from standard forms of narrative and plot, and so his books are considered relatively significant in the timeline of the evolution of prose writing. The book is at its best when Miller is describing his disgust with the dog-eat-dog, hurly-burly, money-driven, industry-riven, heartless, dirty tumult of American life as experienced in New York City during the 1920s and 30s. We are meant to see the desperation of the Depression flattened individuals he encounters in his job hiring and firing delivery staff for a telegraph company as poignant despite the relentlessly comic/satiric nature of Miller's description of it all. But Miller has also created his first-person narrator, also named Henry Miller, to be not just a commentator on, but also a product of, the society he is intent on exposing. As such, we are made to see him as almost entirely amoral, a determined ne'er-do-well. Even his frequent generosity is executed with an eye toward subverting the despised dominant paradigm. And that amorality definitely extends to Miller's sexual adventures, which are relentlessly frequent and basically heartless. Women are mostly to be conquered and used, then walked away from. There is a rape scene near about the 1/3 mark of the book that is the nadir of this element of the book. I read this book essentially "blind," meaning I have read essentially no literary criticism, either contemporary with the book's publishing or in the intervening years, and have very little knowledge of Henry Miller the person and his attitudes about all this, and/or his purposes for sprinkling the book with these scenes. I assume he was attempting to present the narrator's gleeful depravity as a characteristic of the bankruptcy of American society. Even the narrator who sets himself up as critic is wrent through and through with the same poison. Even if this were true, it's still really hard for a modern reader, and I'm sure for women since the day the book first saw print.

The writing comes down to earth only when Miller, the narrator, is describing his childhood in the fondest of terms, and later bemoaning the inevitable changes in the neighborhood streets where that childhood took place. Miller also leaves earth quite frequently, and for long stretches at a time, with pages-long passages that essentially turn into language poems. I essentially began to just skim these sections. The language was fun, the imagery was clearly (well, to me, anyway) describing a desire to break free and fly above the mundane, to rise above the ordinary and expected experiences and duties of culture and even of artistic endeavors. But in terms of being able to make sense of the individual images and metaphors, I mostly skipped off them. Or maybe that was the point. At any rate, I'm glad I read this book, more or less for the experience, for the filling of another hole in my reading arsenal. I did skim a few of the LT reviews of this book, and many of them commented that its predecessor, Tropic of Cancer, is actually the better book. I very strongly doubt I'll be reading it, though. I've got the idea, and I think one is enough for me.

Book note: I bought this book quite recently at an annual used book sale held to raise money for a local volunteer fire department. My decision to select this book was informed mostly be this edition's vintage and place of origin. It is an edition printed in 1958 (a later printing of a 1957 edition) by the famed Obelisk Press in Paris.

Book 48: John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland



Helmut Herzfeld was an artist and graphic designer who came of age as an artist during the fraught and chaotic days of 1920s Weimar Republic Germany. He changed his name to John Heartfield as a political protest against what he saw as the disastrous rise in toxic German nationalism that had already led to the insane, meaningless carnage of World War I. Heartfield was a founding member of the short-lived but extremely influential Dadaist movement and, along with artist George Grosz, is credited with more or less inventing the art of photomontage. It was obvious to Heartfield that German industrialists were manipulating the politics and economics of the day and criminally exploiting German workers. He became a lifelong Communist, a very early member of the German Communist Party. Heartfield turned his artistic talent, plus his anger, determination and sharp wit, to message-bearing graphic design, most notably designing dozens of classic covers for the weekly German Communist Journal, AIZ, or Arbiter Illustrierte Zeitung: in English, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper. His profoundly affecting and often savage designs took on the monied interests and, increasingly, the rising fascist movement, personified of course by the Nazi's. Heartfield portrayed Hitler as being not only hateful but corrupt, funded, as can be seen in the book's cover image, by the industrialists themselves as a way to keep the workers in line. When the Nazi's finally took power in 1933, Heartfield had to flee Germany, literally escaping out a window and hiding in a trash bin for seven hours when the Gestapo raided his studio. The AIZ set up shop in exile in Prague until the Munich Agreement in 1939. Soon Heartfield was in England, where his determined anti-Fascist bona fides didn't mean much to the British authorities, who interned him for being a German national and a Communist. Released after six months due to poor health, Heartfield remained spied upon and, to a certain extent. He moved back Germany, specifically, to the DDR, in 1950, where he was once again viewed with suspicion due to his 11 years in England, not being formally admitted to the DDR's Academy of the Arts until 1956.

I've only touched on some main points of Heartfield's astounding and fascinating life story. This book is mostly filled with large and colorful prints of Heartfield's most famous posters and book jacket arts. In many cases, we see the original montages flanked by the finished products including the use of shading and text that appeared in AIZ and elsewhere. I would be remiss if I failed to point out that his art was not only anti-capitalism/fascist, but also in many cases pro-Communism, in which he stongly and determinedly believed. But here are two examples of the former work. Thanks to lolawalser for her review of this book in 2021, which inspired me to purchase it online and, at long last, to read it.

*

Finally, I should note that the two above images were not taken from the book, but were recreated from this website: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/collections/john-heartfield-periodical-illust...

>75 rocketjk: wow, fascinating story!

>78 fuzzi: Amen!

Book 49: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs



This is an extremely well written and harrowing autobiography of a woman who, born in 1813, grew up a slave in North Carolina. Due to a protective mother and a kind "mistress" who even taught her to read and write, Jacobs as a girl was not even aware that she was a slave. But her mother and mistress died in short order, and in her mistress in her will, "left" Jacobs to her 5-year-old niece. This put Jacobs in the power of the girl's father, who proceeded to sexually harass Jacobs relentlessly. Jacobs refused to submit, and due to highly unusual community status of Jacobs' grandmother (who had long since bought her own freedom), Jacob's tormenter a prominent doctor, had to refrain from force or physical punishment. However, the psychological torment he subjected Jacobs to was horrible enough and remains a constant theme throughout most of Jacob's narrative. In the meantime, a relationship with another white man brings Jacobs two children. And while the father reneges on his promise to free both Jacobs and their children, Jacob's fight to protect her young son and daughter, along with her determination to evade the clutches of her tormentor, create the dominant, determined themes of her story, leading her into desperate sacrifices and risks. Through all this, Jacobs provides a detailed, horrific picture of chattel slavery.

Jacobs' book, published after her eventual escape to the North, became an important document in the abolitionist fight against slavery. Although not the first slave testimony, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first widely distributed slave account written by a woman. According to the excellent Introduction in my edition written by Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, doubts remained in historical circles about the veracity of Jacobs' account, and even about whether there ever was a Harriet Jacobs, up through the 1980s, when researchers uncovered letters and other documents that proved the existence of Jacobs, and the details of her story, beyond a doubt.

Book 50: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel



Nobody needs a lengthy review of Wolf Hall from the likes of me at this late date. I knew I was going to get around to reading this extremely popular historical novel eventually. My wife has read the whole series and liked them all. I read the book now, though, because it was selected for my monthly reading group. I'm not going to be able to go the the group meeting this weekend, however, because, dammit, I have to go to the funeral of a longtime friend who was killed in an accident recently. I decided to carry on with the reading regardless in solidarity with the group and, as mentioned above, I had plans to read the book, anyway.

At any rate, Wolf Hall is an excellent novel about the early to middle reign of Henry VIII, focusing on and seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell began as an aide to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and moved on to become a very highly placed figure in Henry's court (a rarity for a commoner) after Wolsey's fall from power and death. Several years back, I read an excellent biography of Wolsey called Naked to Mine Enemies, by Charles Ferguson, so I knew going in what Wolsey's trajectory would be. Mantel is extremely detailed in her descriptions of the many machinations of government and power during Cromwell's/Henry's days. Mostly, this world circles around Henry's obsession about producing a male heir, and his efforts (and consequently the efforts of everyone around him who wanted to stay in power) of figuring out how to get the Pope to grant Henry a divorce from his longtime wife, Katherine, whose many pregnancies have ended in still births, every early deaths, and one daughter. The court and the country are split. Katherine is popular with the people. Their sympathies lie with her. Henry's desired replacement wife, the young Anne Boleyn, is seen as grasping and unworthy. Nevertheless, first Wolsey and then Cromwell attempt to maneuver the Pope into accepting the idea. Well, most of us know the history. The genius of this book is Mantel's focus on the details of Cromwell's life: his personal relationships and tragedies, political maneuverings and skillful use of power, which he is always accumulating more of. Who knows how absolutely accurate all Mantel's day-to-day details are about the figures in Cromwell's household and his minute-by-minute political strategies. Mantel herself in her acknowledgements speaks of her own "fumbling speculations." I don't really care much about that. This is fiction after all, and Mantel provides an aura of authority about, at the very least, the principal political/religious players and their opinions and actions. I will say, though, that after a while (about halfway through) the tone and narrative voice began to seem repetitive to me. I had to push through that somewhat in order to get re-involved with the storytelling. That, plus Cromwell did seem a little too good to be true. Always acting from a place of honorable intentions, always the smartest one in the room. Sort of a better written, somewhat less violent Jack Reacher. (OK, the Reacher comment's a low blow. Let's call it an exaggeration for effect.)

Anyway, those reservations are relatively minor. Mantel's navigations through the pitch and yaw of the political scene of 16th century England, which, as we read, not incidentally provides plenty of insight into the use and abuse of power more generally, and the frequent vanity and crassness of the powerful, adds up all in all to a very rich and enjoyable artistic experience.

>81 rocketjk: Congratulations on hitting that 50-book target. I was given a beautiful Folio Society edition of Wolf Hall for my birthday recently. I will be enjoying my (second) re-read soon of what has become one of my favorite historical novels of all time.

>82 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks! Hope you enjoy that beautiful Wolf Hall and your second re-read. Cheers!

Book 51: Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen



I often buy old books that are in good condition and that I've never heard of if the cover descriptions make them sound interesting. You take a chance on quality, of course. There's a reason you've never heard of the book, right? But they can be fun to read. Such was the case with my latest book read, one that had been sitting on my shelf since before my LT "Big Bang" (the year I first started entering my collection here) in 2008. Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen is not to be confused with the relatively well-known novel of the same name by A. Manette Ansay. Coen's book was published in 1950. It is the story of a conflict in an unnamed Southern town (in an unnamed Southern state) between a group of small farmers, most of whom are WW2 veterans, and the entrenched monied interests in the town who are trying to pull off a lucrative land grab. The issue is where the new highway is going to go through the area, who is going to make money off the land rights, and who is going to be served (or not served) by the new road. The powers that be, of course, have the sheriff and his deputies in their pockets. In the very opening pages, one of the leaders of the "troublemakers" is murdered. The storyline revolves around what is going to be done about that, and by whom. The storyline is interesting enough, and the book is a relatively quick read. There are many points of view presented, and Jim Crow is not left out of the equation, either. There's even some sections of very nice writing. Things never really come together coherently, however, and the ending is mostly a hash. So I can see why this novel sank into obscurity, to the extent that there are only five LT members, including me, who have this book listed on LT. I will say, though, that the book was entertaining enough in the reading.

I did a little research about Frankin Coen and discovered that he was actually a well-known screenplay writer. Here is his credits page on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0168759/

I went looking for a review of the book and couldn't find anything via a simple online search. So, as I'm a NYTimes subscriber, I decided to use the Times website search engine. I found, there a very short review to the effect that while the writing was good, the characters were essentially set pieces. I actually though the characterizations were a little better than that. However, I also found a link to a short article about a lawsuit Coen had filed having to do with Vinegar Hill.

Warners is Sued by Franklin Coen
Warner Brothers Pictures has been named defendant in a $250,000 plagiarism suit filed in Superior Court on behalf of Franklin Coen. The complaint alleges that "Storm Warning," the wild starring Ginger Rogers and released early this year, infringes on a story of the same title submitted in screen treatment form by Mr. Coen to the studio about five years ago. The company rejected the story, according to the author's attorney . . . and then Mr. Coen rewrote it into a novel called "Vinegar Hill," published in 1950.

I couldn't find any online reference to how the lawsuit came out. The Wikipedia page for the movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Warning_(1951_film) doesn't mention the suit at all. The description of the movie here makes it sound like the movie was quite a wretched affair. It also featured, by the way, Ronald Reagan and Doris Day!

But all that does make sense in terms of the book itself. It's easily seen as a novel produced by someone more adept at screenplay writing.

>84 rocketjk: interesting post, thank you.

I picked up a book at a discard sale, written by William Ellis, and called Jonathan Blair: Bounty Lands Lawyer. The cover and title intrigued me. It turned out to be an above average read, a 4 star for me!

>85 fuzzi: I love that sort of thing! So nice when that happens. Thanks for sharing that story.

>84 rocketjk: A similar thing happened to me with Robert Shaw's The Hiding Place. The concept was interesting--two British airmen held captive by a German soldier for years, never told that WWII had ended. Even after they accidentally escaped, they did not realize the war was over, and apparently turned the tables on their captor. But in fact, I couldn't get through it because it felt like I was reading a story treatment, rather than a novel. I may give it another try one day. This is the description that made me hunt the book down in the first place. Apparently it was staged and filmed (with some pretty hefty talent each time) but not well received in that form either.

>87 laytonwoman3rd: Cool story. I'll have to go exploring on that website you linked to, although it will be hard to keep from buying every book I read about there.

Book 52: Snow Country by I.J. Parker



Snow Country is the third entry in I.J. Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series. Akitada is a low-level nobleman in 11th-century Japan who's become known, in the series' first two books, for his ability to solve murders and annoy his superiors. Now he's been sent to be the governor of a far northern province where the emperor's authority is but barely acknowledged and a powerful warlord holds sway instead. Akitada's job is to get this situation in hand. He is accompanied by his wife and by his two loyal lieutenants, Tora and Hitomara. Soon, as will happen in murder mysteries, there is a murder. Then the bodies begin accumulating. Plus there is the problem for Akitada of asserting his imperial authority. These books have been fun all along, and I will say that in this third book the quality of the writing has gone up a notch, both in terms of the sentence-level work (many fewer cliches, for one thing) and the the plotting. There are, in fact, 21 books in this series! Well, I have the fourth one on hand and will definitely be reading that one somewhere along the line, though I doubt I'll make a point of going any further. I should add that the historical context adds to these books' enjoyability.

Book 53: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James



The Black Jacobins is a fascinating study of the Haitian Revolution and the ascent, leadership and eventual downfall of its most powerful character, Toussaint L'Ouverture. Haiti, or San Domingo as it was known until its independence, was the most lucrative colony among France's possessions and the most lucrative colony of any in the West Indies. As such it was endlessly coveted by England. The money came from the sugar plantations, and the sugar plantations were run on the backs of African slaves. James opens the book with a long section describing this slavery, by his account more cruel even than what was experienced by the enslaved on American plantations. Then came the French Revolution, with its eventual claims of Liberty and Equality for all. But even in its most radical days, the Revolution, as described by James, was never free of the influence of the powerful merchant classes and landowners, not just the plantation owners, but the shipbuilders, import/export merchants and slavers, all of whom relied in one way or another on the sugar coming out of San Domingo for their fortunes.

In San Domingo itself, the society was fractured along class/racial lines. There were the rich white enslavers/plantation owners, plus the merchant class. Also there was a large group of mulattos, children of mixed parentage between enslavers and enslaved. The mulattos were free, some even being plantation owners and enslavers themselves and always, regardless looking down on the Blacks, the enslaved. Many of the slaves in San Domingo had come over on the Middle Passage themselves. They had more of African heritage than any sort of the European heritage that might have rubbed off on them over several generations. Arose from this boiling cauldron of resentment and distrust an ex-slave, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a born leader and military strategist who was able to inspire unquestioned loyalty from fellow officers and foot soldiers. A much shortened and simplified account of all that went on: the Blacks took up arms to throw off slavery; the mulattos took up arms to defend their property and social rights from the whites and, especially, the colonial forces of the French and, for a time, the English who landed when they thought the colony was ripe for the picking, not understanding how well the local Blacks and mulattos, lead by Toussaint, would fight them off in defense of what they saw as the principles of the Revolution that would eventually lead to their emancipation by the French, but never by the English.

In the end, the fighting came down to Toussaint and the Haitians against the forces of Napoleon, who sent a large army to subdue the Haitaians once his war against England had been (temporarily) concluded. Toussaint saw Haitian independence as a mistake. He wanted the island to have the benefit of European learning and civil institutions. And he never could come to the conclusion that Napoleon had left the ideals of the Revolution behind him and, dependent on the money and power of the French merchants, had come with the purpose of reinstitution slavery, which the Revolutionary councils had abolished throughout the French empire less than a decade before. So Toussaint vacillated in his campaign against these French forces, still hoping to make Napoleon understand that he was not aiming at separation from France but merely freedom for his people. It took a more clear-sighted leader, Dessalines, to understand that Toussaint's equivocation was causing confusion among the Haitian masses, and that he would have to supplant his leader. In a way we can see Toussaint as sort of a Moses figure, ascending the mountaintop but not reaching the promised land himself (though James never makes this reference). Eventually, the repeatedly defeated French, with their armies decimated by battle losses and by yellow fever, gave up and left, and Haiti became an independent country. James ends his narrative, abruptly, here.

James outlines the cruelties and massacres perpetrated by all sides in this conflict. He also gives vivid illustration of the bravery of the slave forces who sometimes charges guns and cannons with nothing more than rocks and metal-tipped pikes. He also described Toussaint's growing autocratic side. For example, during lulls in the fighting he insisted that the slaves return to their former plantations and continue working under their former masters, though with strict rules on treatment and with the workers now receiving one fourth of the plantations' profits. The idea was to keep the island's economy and revenue production from grinding to a halt. This was not a vision embraced by all, but Toussaint had the power to ensure the policy would be carried out. Similarly, Toussaint tried to keep mulattos and slaves from carrying out reprisals against their former enslavers, thinking that their expertise would be needed after the wars were over. But, says James, Toussaint, in his growing autocratic ways, never felt compelled to explain his motivations, assuming that his orders would simply be carried out whether understood or not. But the workers who made up his army became confused. One minute Toussaint was protecting white landowners and praising France, the next he was calling for them to take up arms to fight against the French. Which was it?

James was a lifelong and eminent Marxist, and we receive this extremely readable history through that strong Marxist lens. For example, at one point we read:

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilization as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of humanlike and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

I have absolutely no argument with the statement (other than the fact that there did seem to be times that Toussaint held out hopes that the French would, indeed, stick to the oaths of their own Revolutions) and no beef with James' including these sorts of observations throughout his history. In fact, I found James' straightforward inclusion of his own perspectives a refreshing change from the normal historical "objectivity" that so many historians strive for. I also enjoy the fact that James places the history within the context of the times in which he was writing. The book was originally published in 1938. My copy is a second printing of the book's republishing in 1971. In a new introduction, James says that he's only made a few small changes in the text to excise short passages that further research had shown to be inaccurate. But often in the original text (occasionally with footnotes adde to remind us that the ideas had been written in 1938), James makes reference to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of anti-semitic laws in Nazi Germany. More frequent, and more to the point, are James' references to what he sees as the coming (in 1938) anti-imperialist revolutions in Africa.

I flew through this history's 400 pages. It is a compelling and detailed narrative about a section of history I knew very little about, extremely well told and clearly written, with additional insights that put the events in a valuable historical context.

Book 54: Rough Translations by Molly Giles



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is Molly Giles' first short story collection, originally published in 1985. The stories are all well written, though overall the collection is not as satisfying as a later collection of her I read some time ago, Creek Walk and Other Stories. Well, that's what I get for reading the later collection first. The stories in Rough Translations all have female protagonists. For the most part, they are in, or relatively recently out of, unhappy marriages. Their husbands, care more about their jobs than their marriages, spend their weekend afternoons watching football to the exclusion of all else, undervalue them, condescend to and/or despise their wives and so forth. The women lack in confidence, though they'd once expected much more of themselves. In other words, despite the stories' individual effectiveness, resonating as they do with real life, there is a sameness to them that drains the collection as a whole of effectiveness. There are two or three that rise above these factors, and the final story, the title story, in fact, is a tour de force.

Perhaps we can see these tales as stylistic period pieces of mid-80s short fiction. At any rate, I found the stories in Creek Walk to be much more diverse and imaginative. I should say that Giles was an instructor at San Francisco State University when I was a grad student in the Creative Writing Department, there. I never had a seminar with her there, but she did sit in as instructor when one of my teachers had to take sick leave. She was an extremely popular and effective teacher, by all accounts.

Book 55: Watch Czechoslovakia! by Richard Freund



This is a very short book, written in 1937, just months before the infamous Munich Agreement that allowed the German Army to occupy Czechoslovakia without a shot fired. The book is, at its heart, an examination of the conflicts within the country between the Czechoslovak majority and the German minority, the use that Nazi Germany might be likely to make of these conflicts, and the very important reasons why they would care. I could find very little information about the book's author. I did find a couple of contemporary book reviews online. Freund is referred to in one as an "Anglicized Austrian journalist" and in another as an "Anglo-Austrian journalist." At any rate, he seems to have known his business. He describes at one point an interview he had with Edvard Beneš, who had been the country's president since 1935 and would serve in that capacity again after the war. In between, Beneš led the Czech government in exile during the Nazi occupation.

Freund give a thumbnail sketch of Czechoslovak history and describes the geographic and economic factors that have made the country of such strategic importance in Central Europe throughout the centuries. As Freund wrote:

"Four points should be remembered: (1) the Western mountain arch, pointing towards the heart of Germany; (2) the 50 miles' gap in the northern range which, as the "Gateway of Moravia," has played an important part in the migrations of the European races for thousands of years; (3) the long sweep of the Carpathians pointing towards Rumania and Russia; (4) the Danube in the south.

The Bohemian basin with its mountain walls has been coveted by ambitious nations from the dawn of history, because its possession gives to a strong military power a strategic basis for operations over vast tracts of the European Continent."

The German minority in the country actually made up around 22% of Czechoslovakia's overall population. As Freund describes things, quite a few of their grievances were legitimate. But by time of his writing in 1937, he says that rather than working towards solving these problems, a nationalist German party, under the leadership of a Nazi sympathizer named Konrad Henlein, was much more interested in kicking up dissension and creating an excuse for the Nazi Army to take action. Freund describes the separate mutual defense agreements the Czechoslovakians had with both France and Russia, and talks about what these allies were likely to do in the face of a German incursion. Freund seems to have been able to imagine every eventuality other than what actually occurred, the Allies ignoring their own strategic interests by handing over the country to the Nazi's. Given the strategic military use Hitler and his generals were obviously likely to make of occupying the country, it's astonishing in retrospect that Neville Chamberlin could have ever supposed that the result of the Munich Agreement would be a significant period of peace.

I've read elsewhere that Beneš threatened the Allies with resisting the Germans despite the Munich Agreement (for what it's worth, Freund, in describing their likely strategy could hold out for around six months), telling Chamberlin that, agreement or no, if the Czechs fought, the Allies would be forced by public opinion to come to their aid militarily. Supposedly, Chamberlin replied that Beneš was correct, that the English and French would have to fight, but that if that happened they would make sure that the country was punished in any post-war treaties.

It's all fascinating information, especially given the fact that it was written at the moment, and as educated conjecture rather than as history. It took me only a single rainy afternoon to race through the book's 112 pages. I have no idea when and where I found this volume. It's been sitting on my history shelf since before I first started posting my library here on LT in 2008, as its entry date in my LT collection is March 1, 2008. It's in perfect condition with dust jacket intact. Finally, there are exactly three LT "members" listed as having this book. Me, something called Czech Center Museum (which provides no information on its LT profile page as to where or what it actually is*) and Ernest Hemingway!

* Possibly this place in Houston: https://www.czechcenter.org/

And with that, I wrap up my 2022 reading. I'll have a 2023 thread up here soon. All the best, and Happy New Year!

>87 laytonwoman3rd: oops! Sorry I forgot to congratulate you on achieving your goal.

The description of the book mentioned here sounded familiar, and sure enough, I'd seen parts of the film Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious. I wouldn't recommend it.