rocketjk's 2024 reading rollercoaster

Greetings! I've greatly enjoyed five year's participation in Club Read and especially all the reading friends I've made here. To review: I live in Mendocino County, northern California, USA, but my wife and I came to New York City in June 2023 to spend a year here and see what we think. We're both New Jersey natives, with family (my wife) and old friends (both of us) in the NY/NJ area, so really this is like coming home. The longterm future is still in flux, though. (Well, isn't it always?). I'm retired, with a checkered past including, in no particular order, public radio producer, teacher, freelance writer and used bookstore owner, busman, waiter, dishwasher and publications coordinator at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on the resume. My reading is an eclectic mix of fiction, history, memoirs, bios and more. 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. Cheers and happy reading one and all!

Keeping Track of Who/What/How/Where I Read

For the past several years I've been posting a personal thread in the Reading Globally group to keep track of where my reading takes me. However, whereas when I started that tradition it seemed like there were a few folks doing the same thing, I'm now the only one still posting in that way there, so I've decided to move my personal map pinning to my own CR thread. Here is my standard introduction to my Reading Globally thread:

I've had fun charting my travels the last fourteen years. 2023's reading brought me to 14 countries, including the U.S., and 8 states within the U.S. As always, there were also many "U.S. non-state specific" and "Non-country specific" books on the list.

I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" in any particular way. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me!

Who
Female: 4.5
Male: 13.5

What
Novels: 8
Histories: 5
Contemporary (when published) Events: 1
Biographies: 2
Memoir: 2

How (Original Language)
English: 16.5 *
German: 0.5
Yiddish: 1

* The captions for Death in the Making were written in German by Robert Capa and translated into English. The original (1938) forward and the afterward for the 2020 edition were written in English.

Where
ASIA
China
Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang

EUROPE
England
Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe
The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson

Norway
The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch

Poland
The Manor by Isaac Balshevis Singer

Spain
Death in the Making by Robert Capa et. al.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

NORTH AMERICA
The United States
Non-State Specific
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy
Lady in Armor by Octavus Roy Cohen

California
Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts

Massachusetts
This is Murder, Mr. Jones

Minnesota
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Mississippi
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

Montana
The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan

New York
The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto
The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan

Welcome to Club Read 2024, Jerry! I was wondering if you have seen the Global Challenge group? It's where I track all my global reading. I cross-post relevant reviews to the Reading Globally regional threads. Just another option!

>3 labfs39: Yes, I have a thread in that group. I use the two for different things, though. In my old Reading Globally thread (you can see the 2023 version here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/347485), I included every book I read and start a new thread every year. I've moved that all here this year. In my Global Challenge thread, I have one long thread in which a) I have a running list since my first joining LT in 2008 and b) I only include group-appropriate reading (i.e. books that are written by authors from the appropriate countries or at least take place in those countries). Hope that all makes sense. Cheers!

>4 rocketjk: That's right. I remember you joining the Global Challenge earlier this year. Sorry about that! I have actually toyed with starting a new thread in the GC this year to change from listing countries alphabetically, to listing by continent like Liz is doing. Her organization is impressive.

>5 labfs39: Australia often missses out when the world is divided up into areas. It’s not part of Asia but is near it. It’s more Eurropean in population ethnicity but it’s nowhere near Europe. Did you have Australia in your challenge? Did people participate?

>5 labfs39: I, too, divide my reading up by continent and then subdivide by country.

>6 kjuliff: I count Australia as Oceana. Does that not seem right to you?

>7 rocketjk: Yes that’s the most correct categorization. Australia is a continent so it is some places just has its own category. Or Australasia. Many non-Australians would not think Australia when seeing Oceana.

Jerry, I look forward to hearing about your reading and further New York adventures in the new year.

>8 kjuliff: I think of Oceana as Australia and New Zealand, mostly. Is that not correct?

>9 markon: Thanks!

>10 rocketjk: Yes I think it’s correct, but I’ve noticed others in this group - can’t remember which have listed the Pacific. Islands such as Fiji and Vanuatu. In doing so it gives the impression that Oceana doesn’t contain. Australia. It’s a hard one. Oceana is correct but perhaps just needs to be defined somewhere for clarity. And where would we putting Hawaii? If it’s geographic then Hawaii would have to be there. If it’s ethnic, no or geo-political, no. There’s also Melanesia which deserves a place.

Happy New Year, Jerry. Look forward to your great reviews in 2024.

happy new year! looking forward to stealing i mean reading some of your finds

>12 AlisonY: & >13 cindydavid4: Thanks! I'm looking forward to following everybody's 2024 threads for the book suggestions and conversations, as well! Cheers!

Hi Jerry! Good to see you here, and hope to really see you in NYC one of these days soon!

>15 lisapeet: Thanks! I was justing thinking about trying to arrange a get-together with you soon after New Year's Day.

I sincerely wish you health, happiness, contentment and many exciting books.

Just like last year, I will be following your thread (and hopefully saying more than I did last year).

Happy New Year, Jerry. I like the sentiment in your opening post. What Singer will you start the year with?

>19 dchaikin: Thanks! Happy New Year to you too, Dan. I've started The Manor, which takes place in Poland during the final quarter of the 19th century.

Hello again to all! My reading for 2024 began as usual with a ramble though one of my Between Book stacks, in this case Stack 1. Here's what I read therein:

* “The Flagmakers,” excerpted from The American Spirit by Franklin K. Lane from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Salt Lake City Lefty Earned Win on Lone Pitch” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Daughter of Lebonon” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* Two poems by Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Day 4, Story 7 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Americans, Stop Being Afraid!” by Wendell L. Wilkie from Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

As mention in response to Dan's question, above, I have been working on a project whereby I'm reading all of Isaac B. Singer's novels in publication order, two books per year. The first book I begin in each calendar year and in each July comes off of the Singer list. So I'm beginning calendar year 2024 with The Manor, which takes place in Poland during the latter part of the 19th century. The rebellion of the Polish nobility against Russian occupation has just failed, and the Poles have more or less decided to shrug off the fact that they are under Russian rule and simply get down to business. Serfs have recently been emancipated and it is a liberal time for the country's Jews, who find themselves having to deal with many fewer restrictions in terms of where they can live and what pursuits they can legally follow. It is a good time for our hero, entrepreneur Calman and his family. Though as readers we know that liberal winds changed and chilled quickly for the Jews of Eastern Europe during this era. At the same time, strong currents of modernism are beginning to run through the communities of traditionally observant Jews of the area. I'm about 44 pages into this 442-page novel.

Will you combine reading The Manor with The Estate? I have the two in a single book, and I loved them both. I read them long enough ago that I can't remember whether the same characters carry over between the books, but I did think of them as one book. It's long been on my "Must Reread" list.

>23 rocketjk: No, I'll be reading them separately, as that's how they were originally published. The first copy of The Manor that I was able to find when I went bookstore searching was a near first-edition hardcopy. It contains an author's note in which we read Singer's comment, "This volume, although it stands as an independent story, constitutes Part One of the complete saga of The Manor. Part Two is now in the process of being prepared for the English-speaking reader."

At 442 pages, The Manor is long enough on its own as a first book for the year. As per recent custom, I'll read Singer's next book, in this case The Estate as my first book started in July.

>16 rocketjk: Yeah, let's do it!

>21 rocketjk: I am curious about that book, report back pls

>25 cindydavid4: Well, you know me. I report back on everything! :)

My first review of the year is a long one, indeed. Sorry about that, Chief!

The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer



At the beginning of 2022, having completed my once-a-year Joseph Conrad read-through, I began a similar tradition with the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, although I changed the process to two novels per year, one at the beginning January and one at the beginning of July. So, now I'm up to Singer's fifth novel, The Manor.

Once again we are in Poland, this time in the later decades of the 19th century. The novel begins just after an 1863 uprising by the Polish nobility against what had become ongoing Russian rule has ended in humiliating disaster. With this nationalist movement quashed, Poland instead turns to business, and the modern world begins seeping into Poland: mines, factories, railroads begin appearing. For Poland's Jews, the period is one of liberalism. In the town of Jampol, one of the insurrectionists, Count Wladislaw Jampolski, has been banished to Siberia, and a Jew, Calman Jacoby, has managed to win the right to lease the count's large landholding and manor house. He judiciously allows the count's family to continue living in the manor house, in order to avoid offending the local Poles, and he begins making money growing and selling crops on the land and, in particular, selling timber to be used as railroad ties. So begins our tale, with Calman at the center of what becomes a whirlwind of cultural and religious change and the personal crises and moral choices, both good and bad, of an expanding group of characters.

Calman himself is an observant Jew. He expects his children to stay within that community and some do. But the Jewish community as a whole does not stand apart from the modernism taking hold in Poland, and Calman, to his woe, has lived to see a growing divide among Poland's Jews: those who demand adherence to the old ways, and those who look westward with approval at the assimilation of the Jews of France, Germany and elsewhere. To them, the exotic, "Asiatic" dress, the standing apart from Polish society as a whole, is a self-defeating lifestyle of superstition, destined to bring down further antisemitism on all of their heads. To the traditionalists, antisemitism is a constant, sure to come in future waves however they're dressed and however they worship. Faith in God and loyalty to the commandments is the only path. Calman's children, as they grow to adulthood, more or less split down the middle of this divide. One of his daughters goes so far as to run off with the count's son. But the world of the Polish nobility is on no more solid ground than the world of the Hassids. In the meantime, socialism, Zionism, nihilism, anarchism and more are debated and sometimes adopted. The roles of women in this world are changing as well. Although this topic is not made specific, the limitations faced by The Manor's female characters, and the extremely unsatisfactory choices they're forced into, become an undeniable theme of the novel.

I don't want to give the idea that Singer's presentation here is devoid of sympathy and even love for the ways and tribulations of the observant Jews. Indeed, his portrayal is laced strongly with affection and understanding. The storyline is a tapestry, or perhaps labyrinth is a better description, of interrelationships between members of the old world and the new, the Jewish society and the Polish Christians, interwoven amongst and strengthened by family, marriage, business and religion. The old world's concerns are offered with as much detail as those more modern leaning. This is a vivid picture of a complex society at a tipping point, full of memorable characters. And of course Singer was writing, and we are reading, within the context of hindsight. In the end, modernization did not save the Jews of Europe.

Here is a good example of the issues Singer is dealing with. Ezriel, Calman's son-in-law, has mostly left the old ways and is studying at university to become a doctor:

Ezriel had had great hopes that progress could be achieved through education. Yet knowledge itself turned out to be extremely precarious. The entities which were said to constitute matter seemed to have almost magical properties. Moreover, the various materialistic theories, and Darwinism in particular, had put almost all values in jeopardy: the soul, ethics, the family. Might was right everywhere. Man's ancient beliefs had been bartered for the telegraph. But what could Ezriel do about it? For him the old traditions were already destroyed. He was left with nothing but examinations and dread. He had forsaken God but he was dependent upon all kinds of bureaucrats. He had made a mistake, Ezriel felt. But what exactly had been his error? How could it be rectified? As he lay in the darkness, it occurred to him that the young man who had been found hanging in an attic room in the Old City and whose dissection Ezriel had witnessed must have had much the same thoughts as he was having now.

Here's one more quote I like a lot, one that shows more accurately the range of human emotion and reverence for the natural world that Singer displays through the novel, as Calman, about a third of the way through the story, contemplates his situation:

Calman sighed. He heard his grandson, Shaindel's Uri-Joseph-Yosele, awake and crying. Burek, the dog, barked. The cows in the stall rubbed their horns against the door. The spring was a warm one, and after two years of drought there were signs that the coming harvest would be fruitful. The winter crops had sprouted early, rain and sunshine had been plentiful: the life of the soil was as unpredictable as the life of man. Scarcity followed plenty. When the earth seemed to have grown barren, the juices of life flowed through her again and she blossomed once more. Who could tell? Perhaps God would still grant Calman some comfort.

When I first began reading The Manor, I wasn't particularly enamored. But the more I read, and the more the branches of Singer's story reached outward, the more absorbed I became, and in the end I can say it's a book I recommend highly. My copy is a near first-edition hardcover, published in 1967. Singer, in his Author's Note at the beginning, says in part, "This volume, although it stands as an independent story, constitutes Part One of the complete sage of The Manor. Part Two is now in the process of being prepared for the English-speaking reader. That Part Two was published in English in 1969 as The Estate. The two are often published together now in a single volume. My general procedure would call for me to read The Estate as my first book in July, but I may well decide to push that up some and read that novel while the details of The Manor are still fresh in mind.

Book note: I found my copy of The Manor sitting way atop a rather haphazard stack of hardcovers in the S section of the wonderful Westsider Books at Broadway and West 80th Street in New York. As I began reading, I found that many top right page corners had been turned down in increments of every 8 to 15 pages or so. There were too many such creases for me to imagine that some previous reader was making note of particular passages, so I assume that the creasing was this reader's way of noting progress, in lieu of using a bookmark. As I read, of course, I unbent them. Each time I did so, I couldn't help wondering just who that reader might have been, and imagining that my own progress through the book, and my gradual straightening out of those creases, in some way connected me to that person across time. I am happy to report that the creases continued to the end. My fellow reader had, like me, finished the book! Also, sometime during the early stages of my reading, I happened to slop some red wine out of my wineglass, such that a small wine stain now appears on the edges of a few pages. So now, perhaps several years hence, another reader will wonder who caused the stain, and who made the creases which, although now unbent, are still visible. Was it the same person or was it two different readers? No, I am not going to leave a note in the book. Let the next person have their own mystery.

Fantastic review and I was also impressed by your personal thoughts.

>28 Ameise1: Thanks!

>27 rocketjk: terrific. Again, you leave me anxious to read more Singer. The quotes are enjoyable and I’m really glad you ended up taking to the book.

Happy new year--that's a beautiful start with Singer.

Every six months I get a reminder that I want to read more Singer. Thanks for keeping the Singer love alive!

>30 dchaikin: & >32 labfs39: Yes, would you kids please follow through and read a Singer novel or two? I would love to read your reactions.

>31 LolaWalser: Thanks! And a happy new year to you as well, my friend.

>33 rocketjk: LOL, right? To be fair, I did read Love and Exile and two books of children's stories, but no adult novels, 'tis true. I own The Penitent and two collections of short stories for adults. The Family Moskat is the one I want to read first though, as it has been on my wishlist for eons.

>33 rocketjk: 🙂 you’re messing with my plans

>35 dchaikin: "🙂 you’re messing with my plans"

Mwaaa ha ha! It seems my work here is done for the day.

My post-The Manor "between book" reading took my back to Stack 1, like so:

* “Blackbeard,” excerpted from Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts by Frank R. Stockton in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “El Paso’s Dees Walloped Four Homers in a Row” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Dreaming” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* "Pride and Fury" by Mahmud Darwish from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Day 4, Story 8 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Determined Lady: Carole Landis” by Kyle Crichton from Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

I've now started The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff.

Ohhhh I’ll get on board that “read more Singer” train with you folks. That was a great review, Jerry.

>27 rocketjk: I'm so glad you liked The Manor. I think I told you that I read The Manor and The Estate as one book, and loved them. In fact I think they may have been my introduction to Singer, or at least one of the first things I read by him. For several years I've contemplated rereading the books, and your review has instigated that wish again. (A few years ago I reread The Family Moskat in lieu of rereading thus one). Oh how I wish there was more reading time!

Jerry, your review of The Manor is enticing. Singer is already on my list - I don't think I've read any of his novels, but did read several short stories long ago.

I've enjoyed listening to jazz, but have never taught myself much about its history. I've decided to remedy that, and am curious about any information you might recommend. This will probably be an ongoing project - I want to combine reading with listening, which will likely require some purchases as well.

I am starting with a children's book, A child's introduction to jazz by Jabari Asim with links to song samples. Also on deck is the PBS series (via DVDs from the library) and a book published in 1982 called American women in jazz: 1900 to the present by Sally Placksin (published 1982.)

Appreciate any direction you can give to help me focus.

>40 markon: Ooh, A Child's Introduction to Jazz sounds great for me to use with my nieces. Following...

>40 markon: Yes, that Child's Introduction does look great.

A couple of survey histories, both fairly detailed, that I've read and really liked are:
Visions of Jazz: The First Century by Gary Giddins and
The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia

If you're interested in the very early history, a good book to try to run down is
Pops Foster: the Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman - When I lived in New Orleans, this slim paperback was available in all the museum bookshops and such. I don't know if it's still in print but it shouldn't be too hard to find online. I remember reading an essay by Winton Marsalis in which he talked about how influential this book was on him.

A fun and valuable autobiography is Music is My Mistress by Duke Ellington (I haven't read it yet, but have heard it's excellent, but also not to take every story Ellington tells as gospel.)

Also entertaining is At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene - A collection of columns by deservedly famous jazz writer Nat Hentoff.

Hope that helps!

Jerry, I haven't read anything by Singer yet and my library has very few books by him. Yesterday I picked up Golem. Have you read this?

I feel like a philistine - Singer is not an author I'm at all familiar with, nor have I ever seen his work in the 2nd hand bookshops I go to. Great review - I'm intrigued about him now.

I enjoyed your review of The Manor. I am now thinking about curious ways of marking the books that I take to the book swop - perhaps a series of numbers that look like some sort of code. Perhaps pencil notes in nearly discernible language. Messages to characters in the book.

>43 Ameise1: No, I haven't read Singer's Golem. That is a rendering of an old Jewish folktale and I have read a couple of literary versions, most prominently The Golem by Czech writer Gustav Meyrink. fwiw, Singer's version is listed as juvenile fiction. I'm sure it's good, and perhaps as good an introduction to the folk tale as any other, although the original tale is quite dark, and Singer's kids' version is probably less so. (At least I hope it is!)

>44 AlisonY: I hope you find something good of Singer's to read. The Family Moskat is a great place to start, although it's a bit long.

>45 baswood: My own opinion is that purposefully leaving false clues is cheating, but surely this is a "to each his/her/their own" question. Have at it!

>42 rocketjk: Thanks Jerry. I have access to an audio version of Ted Gioia's book, so will probably start with that.

>47 markon: I hope you like it. Gioia now has a substack page I like, mostly about the music and recording industry but not exclusively, and I get notices for new entries in my email.

>40 markon: >42 rocketjk: I've noted a few of these and hope to get to them some time this year. Thanks!

Great review of The Manor! I’ve never read anything by Singer and, like others, I feel I should remedy that.

I did not have the oppotunity to stop by and wave hello earlier in the year, as I wanted to devote enough time to your thread, which is difficult in this busy beginning of year. But at last, here I am.

>27 rocketjk: I think I have read one book by Isaac Bashevis Singer (can't remember which one) and I own one or two minor works from him. This is not an author I intend to read in a near future, but I enjoy reading your review, learning, and seeing that maybe I should revise my plan and give him a chance!

Happy 2024 reading year!

>51 raton-liseur: Thanks for stopping by. I understand that we all have (many) authors that we know to be of quality who nevertheless just don't make it onto our reading lists, planned or otherwise. If you do decided to give Singer a chance, the two books (of those I've read so far) that I'd most highly recommend are The Family Moskat and The Manor, which I've just reviewed as you know. Both are more or less family sagas that tell many stories within the framework of specific historical periods. The Family Moskat tells of Poland in early/mid-20th century, ending with German bombs falling on Warsaw. The Manor, as indicated in my review, takes us back to late 19th century Poland. I found both to be compelling, with perhaps a slight edge to The Family Moskat. A note that The Manor is represented as Part 1 of a story that continues in Singer's next novel, The Estate, which I have yet to read.

Happy 2024 reading to you as well. Cheers!

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff



Year-opening tradition #1 was my reading of an I.B. Singer novel. Year-opening tradition #2 is one that my wife and I share. At the beginning of each calendar year, we give each other to read the book that we each enjoyed most from the previous year (and that we think the other will enjoy). So this year my wife gave me The Vaster Wilds to read. (I gave her Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas.)

A young indentured servant with the regrettable name of Lamentations (more commonly known as Zed) has been brought against her will to early-days colonial Massachusetts. Filled with grief over the death of the young, mentally challenged daughter of "her" family who has been Zed's main charge, and wanting to leave behind her the famine and disease that is afflicting the colony and the cruelty that is her daily lot, one night she slips through a hole in the colony's stockade walls and escapes into the forrest. Her goal is to walk north for as long as she must until she reaches the territory where she will find the French, who she hopes will be kinder than the English.

The novel proceeds from there as an adventure of survival and a reverie on nature and God and memory, as well as innocence and guilt. As we are taken through Zed's daily and hourly struggle for survival, and her awe at the natural world she finds around her, for a long time we sail along (or at least I did) with admiration for Groff's imagination and powers of natural description. The details of Zed's quest: finding shelter and food, building a fire, evading the indigenous people who she assumes would do her harm as just one more treacherous white person are very believably and entertainingly rendered. Groff is very good at making us feel Zed's hunger and her growing physical pains and weakness, and Zed's philosophical musings, as well as the gradual filling in of her backstory, flow nicely. This includes the horrors of vulnerability and abuse that a young servant girl without a defender was highly likely to experience.

I found that things began to drag about midway through, but the book's final, say, 20% picked up again and the ending I thought fit perfectly.

I must admit that I was distracted more and more as the narrative went along with Groff's attempts to render the language in ways that she clearly imagined would put us more in mind of the era, but for me became irritants. I'm talking about things like leaving the "ly" off of adjectives (such as "The bear was terrific large") or using "did" for past tense rather than an "ed" ending (such as "The rapids did surge" rather than "The rapids surged") Eventually this artifice got on my nerves, especially because I didn't think it necessary. Also, as far as I'm concerned, the use (and certainly the overuse) of the verb "to marvel" (She sat and marveled at the night sky) and the adjective "wondrous" can be retired from English-language fiction writing henceforth and forever more. But those are all just my own peeves. I know there are many who are not distracted by such things.

So, in the end, I do recommend the book for folks who enjoy these sorts of fictional accounts of struggles through, and immersion, in nature. There is a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief needed in terms of Zed's nature skills. Where did she get them? But I didn't really mind that element and it didn't take away from my enjoyment of Groff's accomplishment here.

>53 rocketjk: so, I shouldn’t say I marveled at your wondrous review? I enjoyed your review and found it helpful. I can’t tell if i want to read this or not.

>54 dchaikin: Or better yet, I did marvel at your wondrous review. I'll pass, as I think I would find both the language and the miraculous outdoor skills irritating.

>54 dchaikin: You may indeed tell me how much you marveled at my wondrous review! Just don't use those words in the novel you write about it. :) Or, I should say, don't use them more than once each.

>53 rocketjk: Also enjoyed your review. What a lovely marriage tradition to have!

Wonderful reviews of both book, and I loved your little personal note about the previous reader. I buy a lot of secondhand books, and I always wonder about whose hands and whose eyes have encountered them before I did.

>52 rocketjk: Thanks for those recs, I'll keep them in mind. The Family Moskat seems interesting indeed and a book I could like!

>59 raton-liseur: fwiw, my (long, but what else is new?) review of The Family Moskat is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/342766#7898508

Here is my post-Vaster Wilds "Between Book" wander, once again through Stack 1"

* “The Story of Captain Kidd,” excerpted from The Book of Pirates by Henry Gilbert from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Young Alou Colared Just Once in 49-Game Span” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* Two poems by Buland Al-Haidarifrom New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Day 4, Story 9 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Chips in the Stars” by Richard English from Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

I'm now reading (finally!) and very much enjoying The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.

I hope that you enjoy The Sentence as much as I did, Jerry.

Ditto! I read it in November I think, and it was one of my favourite books for 2023!

Edited for typos.

>62 kidzdoc: & >63 raton-liseur: Yes, I am enjoying it immensely.

Darryl, you might be amused to learn that I bought a signed hardcover copy for my wife as a birthday present back during our month in Jersey City at the lovely Word Bookstore on Newark Street (now closed to traffic as a pedestrian mall, and very nicely done at that). When my wife and I visited the neighborhood again a month or so back, we were unhappy to see that the store was gone! However, a bit of research online reveals that they're still in business but moved to Hamilton Park (29 McWilliams Place).
https://jerseycityupfront.com/word-bookstore-jersey-city/

>64 rocketjk: Nice, Jerry! I haven't visited my home town in quite a few years, so I'll have to look at Google Maps to see exactly where the pedestrian mall on Newark Avenue is.

Here's a picture of Rosie, our German shepherd, in the snow. My wife snapped the photo this morning during "off leash time" at the Great Hill in Central Park.

>66 rocketjk: she’s beautiful!

>66 rocketjk: Very elegant!

>66 rocketjk: Love it! Her attitude makes me remember Penny in the snow in Michigan, she could hear little mice-type things running under the deep snow. She would stop and listen and then pounce (in her mind probably with the grace of a fox, but in reality not so much) and dig. She didn't manage to get anything but we did see one run off from the hole she made!

oh lovely! looks like fun!

I love your dog photo. Thanks so much for sharing it!

>66 rocketjk: I'm glad you made it to the off-leash park before your snow melted. She looks very alert.

>69 ursula: Ace does that pounce and dig thing too. In fact, sometimes he channels his inner kangaroo and bounces stiff-legged. Quite amusing

Thanks to all for the kind words. As she grew up in Lake and Mendocino Counties in northern California and we just moved here a few months ago, this is her first real snow experience. She's about a quarter husky, though, and seems to recognize the cold white stuff instinctually.

>69 ursula: Rosie used to do that in our front yard in California, though without the snow. We had a pretty sizable fenced in area for her to roam around in. She would stop, listen, pounce and dig, trying to catch gophers. She never did catch one as far as we know, but our front field was generally full of holes. The gophers were real pests, and they necessitated the use of raised beds with wire mesh beneath if you wanted to grow tomatoes or any other gopher-attracting vegetables. They are capable of pulling whole tomato plants straight down into the ground. My wife was the gardener and the tomatoes she grew were delicious. I helped with the construction of the raised beds out of cinder blocks and the placement of the wire mesh, though.

>72 labfs39: It's been in the low 30s down to the low 20s around here over the past few days. The snow's not melting any time soon, evidently.

>64 rocketjk: When my oldest son lived in Jersey City his condo was on Hamilton Park, and since it was a Silverman development, I suspect that the bookstore is in my son's building. Unfortunately, my son is now in Florida (and we followed him here), so we have no reason to visit JC any more (the other kids are in Brooklyn and Astoria).

>66 rocketjk: Rosie looks so regal!

>74 arubabookwoman: "Rosie looks so regal!"

Ha! Yeah, maybe, until you realize that that intense stare was probably her glaring at a squirrel. :)

Rosie is beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

>66 rocketjk: love the picture! She looks like she’s in her element.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich



Until now I have been one of those stupid idiots who had never read any of Louise Erdrich's novels. Finally I rectified that by reading her much acclaimed 2021 novel, The Sentence. Given this book's 91 reviews on LT so far, I'd say that nobody needs a long review of this book at this late date from the likes of me. But here's what I will say: all the acclaim is warranted. This is a good-hearted book about community, friendship, love and identity. It is a book about a bookstore, and so brought me back quite vividly--and in a good way--to my own days of bookstore ownership. The story centers around a group of Native American women living in Minneapolis who together run the aforementioned bookstore including Tookie, our narrator, and Tookie's husband, Pollax. There is also Flora, a regular customer. Flora is a white woman who, sometimes to the amusement but also often to the annoyance of the store's employees, identifies strongly with Native American culture. Well, but this identification often takes the form of acts of kindness and positive action, so how annoyed can they be with her? But early in the novel, Flora dies and soon thereafter begins haunting the store, in particular targeting Tookie for her increasingly unwelcomed attention.

Then Covid hits, and everything is turned upside down. And then George Floyd is murdered and, since we are in Minneapolis, the world, already standing on its head, explodes. Erdrich does an astoundingly good job of recreating the feelings of uncertainty, fear, isolation and dread of those early Covid days, events which already, only a few short years later, have faded from my memory, or have at least lost their vivid, horrifying intensity. And then stir in the turbulence, anger and regret of the George Floyd protest and the violent, repressive response of the police.

But ultimately The Sentence is, as I said at the beginning, a book about community and reconciliation. The strength of friendships and the vital role that we can play in others' lives through straightforward acts of support, and by listening to each other. The revelations about Flora and her purpose, and about a strange, very old, book that enters the story along the way, come in due course. The ending is spot on and the whole enterprise was for me an entirely uplifting (in a non-maudlin way) and satisfying experience.

>78 rocketjk: Great review, Jerry. I'm putting it on my library list.
Six years ago I've listened to The Gathering and enjoyed it very much.

Great review of The Sentence, Jerry. I also loved it, and I do need to read more of Louise Erdrich's work. I also enjoyed her novel The Plague of Doves.

>78 rocketjk: I still belong to that club of idiots you just left 😉 Evidently I need to rectify this! Thanks for the great review.

>81 FlorenceArt: "I still belong to that club of idiots you just left 😉 "

Yes, I might have put that a little strongly. :) It was meant as a joke. It's just that almost everything I've heard about Erdrich's work, and for so long, has been positive, and after reading The Sentence I was slapping my head for having waited so long to try her work.

>78 rocketjk: Love your review, and love this book. This was my first adult novel by Louise Erdrich (I had previously read a child book and then some of her short stories), and it's one of my best read from last year.
I like how you described the theme of the book, ultimately about community and reconciliation. Such a nice way to put it.

Terrific review. I have no problem being characterized as one of those idiots. It’s my own fault. 🙂 (there is a long list of other idiots-that-haven’t-read-(fill in author) clubs that I’m also a member of.) But seriously, this is encouraging, partially because I trust your sense of critique and your approval is encouraging specifically for this book.

I havent read her in awhile but did read love medicine,The Master Butchers Singing Club which I really loved the beet queen, and I vaguely remember The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse this one looks like its up my alley, thanks for the review

Erdrich's The Round House is excellent and won the National Book Award. I also really liked her children's trilogy, beginning with The Birchbark House.

>78 rocketjk: I'm glad you've discovered Erdrich and you have so many great books ahead of you.

For some reason I landed several times in a row to Stack 1 during my "Between Book" reading. Post-The Sentence, I finally returned to Stack 2:

* “Penalty of the Siren” by F. Anstey from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “Mrs. Smiff” by Collin Brooks from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Pros and Cons” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “Errors, Homers and a Buttock Play (World Series Game V)” by Si Burick (Dayton Daily News) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 4, Story 10 & Conclusion from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* "Knights with Wings" by Harold Lamb in Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

Now I'm on to The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto. This is a history that had been recommended to my wife and me several times by different friends. So my wife took it out of the library, read it and loved it. Then she went out and bought a new copy to give to me as a Hanukkah present. The introduction has me hooked.

oh I loved that book! it led me to a historic fictional account of the same city of dreams which i highly recommend

>89 rocketjk: Oh dear, another one for Mount TBR. (Island at the center for the world)

I haven't read Erdrich but every time I see her name I recall she was Edmund White's student (at a postgrad level). Probably not two names one would think of in the same breath, but he mentions her with admiration. Always meant to check her out based on that.

Just starting to catch up after a couple of weeks away—we're a group of prolific posters! Love the photo of Rosie in the snow. Jasper enjoyed what little we got too. And he does the stop-listen-and-pounce thing, but what he catches are... rocks. He loves rocks. Because our yard sits on top of a giant block of Fordham gneiss/Manhattan schist, there's nothing else burrowing underneath, none of the rabbits or chipmunks you'll find 10 blocks north in Van Cortlandt Park. So it's a good thing he likes those rocks so much.

>78 rocketjk: I always liked Erdrich's earlier works, but haven't kept up with her more recent stuff. I do have a copy of The Sentence, though, and hope to get to it one of these days.

The Vaster Wilds is also up toward the top of my pile. I've heard very similar things about the pacing from other folks who've read it, but I was taken enough with Matrix that I want to see where she goes with this one.

>93 lisapeet: I'll be very interested to read how well you enjoy The Vaster Wilds. Steph loved it, as I've noted above. Hope you're able to stay dry on this rainy Sunday.

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto



This is a fascinating, very well-written and deeply researched history of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, the town on Manhattan Island that was eventually taken over by the English and became New York City. Dutch holdings at the time ranged as far north as the settlement that eventually became Syracuse, NY, and as far south as the Delaware River. In grammar school in New Jersey in the 1960s, we were barely taught about the importance of New Amsterdam. Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant became vaguely familiar names, but essentially no details about them were taught. We knew about the Dutch presence mostly through place names and through old storybooks like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But Shorto's narrative shines a bright light on the history of the Dutch in 17th century North America, and on the the degree to which Dutch influence molded the spirit of the multi-cultural, exuberant, dynamic city that New York City grew into.

Some important points:
The English colonies to the north and south of the Dutch were set up as religiously repressive Puritan outposts. "Heresy" was punished harshly. But the Netherlands during this time was the most liberal country in Europe, and freedom of religion and overall inclusionary policies were the word of the day. So people came to settle the incredibly fertile land in and around Manhattan, or to live and do business within the young city, from all over.

It soon became apparent that Manhattan Island, sitting as it did at the mouth of the massive Hudson River and having the best harbor for maritime activity on the east coast of North America, was the spot around which trade with Europe and exploration into the continent itself would revolve.

While the English chartered land in the New World for their citizens to take over and settle, the Dutch, as their global trade networks expanded, left the work to private companies, namely the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India company. Generally speaking, then, the Dutch set up trading centers to be run for the profit of these companies, rather than for the country itself. New Amsterdam, then, was an anomaly in that a true colony grew up. The way these trading posts were administered was that the company would send a director, who would run his post autocratically. Authority derived from the company. In the case of New Amsterdam, that director was Peter Stuyvesant, who ran the place with an iron fist and fought tooth and nail against the citizens who began agitating for a role in the decision-making process of the town and for their own rights as Dutch citizens.

It's this last point that provides the heart of Shorto's story. Most of the history of New Amsterdam was presumed lost, but in the early 1970s, a treasure trove of documents from the colony, handwritten, of course, and in 17th century Dutch, was discovered in the archives of the New York State Library in Albany. Shortly thereafter, a scholar named Charles Gehring, a specialist in the Dutch language of that time, was given the job of translating the 12,000 pages in the collection. As of the original 2005 publication of The Island at the Center of the World, Gehring, while still at work on the task, had made huge strides. What had emerged were day-to-day administrative records of the settlement, court minutes, and official letters. All sorts of historical details that help create a nuanced, multi-dimensional look at New Amsterdam written in the hand of its leading citizens.

One important figure, previously almost entirely unknown, who came to light was one Adriaen van der Donck, who came to the colony to work with Stuyvesant as his secretary, but soon turned against him and became the ringleader of those trying to wrest significant amounts of authority away his former boss. van der Donck made it all the way back to The Hague, where he argued before the Dutch governing body that New Amsterdam should be taken away from the Dutch West India Company (and Stuyvesant) and instead become a province of the Netherlands proper, with all attendant rights for its citizens. He came very close to succeeding. The fact that he didn't eventually meant the end of Dutch Manhattan. As trade wars between the English and the Dutch intensified, the Dutch West India company ignored Stuyvesant's pleas for soldiers and weapons to defend his wildly valuable island. When the English appeared in the harbor with gunboats and soldiers, reinforced by English settlers from the North who showed up armed on the colony's border, Styuvesant had no choice but to hand the place over.

Shorto does a great job of describing the Dutch culture and politics off the era, as well as their on again-off again conflicts with the English, and the ways that all this affected New Amsterdam's development. He also shows the many ways that the Dutch culture and mindset of New Amsterdam has influenced American attitudes over the centuries since and the ways in which American culture is different than it would have been had "original" 13 colonies in truth been entirely English in nature, as what became the prevailing American myth would have it.

Book note: My wife and I were told about this extremely interesting and entertaining history by friends of ours who are lifelong New Yorkers. Once we got to New York ourselves last June, my wife borrowed the book from our local NY Public Library branch and loved it. To ensure that I'd read it, too, she went out and bought a new copy which she then gave me as a Hanukkah present.

Great review 😀

>95 rocketjk: Sounds fascinating!

>95 rocketjk: Sounds like really good background.

Have you read World's End by T Coraghessan Boyle? Lots of fun.

>95 rocketjk: i’ve thought about this one, but I’ve never read such an enthusiastic review. I’m making a note. I learned a lot from your review.

Reading Edith Wharton and all those Dutch old family names who set the cultural trend in Old New York in the 1800’s through at least wwi, increases my curiosity.

>96 Ameise1: Thanks!

>97 labfs39: I think you'd really like it.

>98 SassyLassy: You know, I've haven't read any of Boyle's books, though I've always thought his work would be up my alley. My wife speaks highly of his novels, though I don't think she's read one for quite a while.

>99 dchaikin: I hope you decide to check out Island at the Center of the World. I'd be very interested to learn your take on it.

>95 rocketjk: fascinating

>95 rocketjk: Great review, this sounds fascinating.

>98 SassyLassy: Ive read many of his back in the day world's end was one, and the women which I read when i was reading loving frank There are a few titles that look famililar like talk talk and a friend to earth but not sure. he sorta vanished from my radar around 2010

My post-The Island at the Center of the World "Between Book" reading, a wander through Stack 2, proceeded thusly:

* “Masked Ball,” anonymous,* from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “Somebody Calls” by James Laver from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “The God of Wind” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Annual Fall Anthem Sing Ends (World Series Game VII)” by Furman Bisher (The Atlanta Journal) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5 Introduction & Story 1 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* "Our New Army" by Gurney Williams in Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

* Listed in the table of contents as “Berlin Memoirs.”

This evening I'll be starting The Ploughmen, a crime novel set in Montana, written by Kim Zupan.

>104 rocketjk: This book The Ploughmen interests me. It’s not the sort of book I’d normally read, but for some reason I think I will like it.

>105 kjuliff: Well, I'm only 20 pages in, but so far so good.

>104 rocketjk: re the Decameron: your back on story 1?

>107 dchaikin: Day 5 Introduction and Day 5 Story 1.

>108 rocketjk: 😁 sorry. Missed that. Since I’ve prompted you, how’s it coming along?

>100 rocketjk: Somewhat surprised you haven't read any Boyle as yet, as I think he would be right up your alley. World's End would be a great companion/antidote to The Island at the Centre of the World. I think Boyle is one of the few writers who is read fairly equally by both men and women.

>103 cindydavid4: Time to pick him up again.

>109 dchaikin: I'm enjoying the Decameron stories, but I'm not really being moved by them in any way. Once you get past their ribald quality, which is fun, they're just sort of light-hearted tales. I suppose they're one kind of window into the world of their time and place, but really, for me, one at a time, as I've been reading them, is just about right. I don't see how folks would sit down and read all 100 stories in one gulp. I'd be bored. Even if I read them as you did, one "Day's" worth of 10 stories at a time, by about the third story each time I'd just be pressing to get through them. But, certainly, to each his/her/their own. And I am happy to be slowly moving through them.

>110 SassyLassy: "Somewhat surprised you haven't read any Boyle as yet . . . "

I know. Me, too. Every time I see his books in a store, I think, "Why haven't I read any of those yet?" And then I go buy something else. Not sure why, really. One of these days! And thanks for your specific recommendation.

>111 rocketjk: enjoying but particularly moved sounds about right. They’re amusing. I’m not sure where i might have said i read roughly one day at a time. I misspoke. I read roughly one story a day (ten days to complete one Boccaccio day).

>112 dchaikin: "I’m not sure where i might have said i read roughly one day at a time. I misspoke."

Nah, I probably remembered your comment incorrectly.

The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan



The Ploughmen is a very effective but dark dual-character study about the springing trapdoor of loneliness and the sly banality of evil. The novel begins with a heartless murder in rural Montana. Soon it becomes apparent that we are going to spending a lot of time in this novel with the murderer. He is John Gload, orphaned in his early teens, who has learned soon thereafter that he is able to kill without remorse or revulsion. Very quickly, Gload has been captured and is sitting in a jail cell in Copper County. There he encounters Deputy Sheriff Valentine Millimaki, the book's main protagonist. The police have Gload dead to rights on this murder; they're certain of a conviction. But at the same time they are fairly sure that Gload, already in his 70s, has killed before, and often. He seems to respect Millimaki, however, so Millimaki's boss asks him to remain on night shift weeks past his regular rotation for that duty should be up, to see if he can get Gload talking about past crimes.

Millimaki has two additional problems. The first is that he is now barely seeing his wife, an ICU nurse who works days. The second is that he is the county's chief search and rescue officer. Working with his German shepherd, Tom, Millimaki has prided himself on finding wandering hikers and others lost in the Montana wilderness in time to save them. But now he is on a depressing run of finding people too late. With that on his mind, he has also to sit up all night listening to Gload, who gradually begins spinning stories of his life and his crimes. It turns out, as well, that the two men have elements of their past in common.

And so we watch the two men interact and develop, not a friendship, but an eery closeness. Gload is a man devoid of decency yet still beholden to his own sense of propriety. Millimaki is a decent man trying to maintain balance, alone in his cabin while his wife works by day and walking the hallway between jail cells at night.

So, as I mentioned above, this novel is pretty dark. But it is also beautifully written, especially when Zupan goes about describing the Montana countryside. Sometimes these descriptions enhance our sense of foreboding, but often they serve as a palliative and as a ray of hope. Millimaki's sense of decency adds another dimension of light to the dark spaces. At any rate, here's one of many such passages I liked which we read as Millimaki and his dog are out on a search and rescue mission:

After they set out the shepherd was immediately drawn to a streamed entering from the south and the going in that direction was slow: deep troughs and cutbacks and a twisted wrack of weathered plank and post and deadfall from some headland flood of the previous spring. Queer rocks lay atop the dirt as smooth and round as Jurassic eggs, and pinecones tumbled and abraded by the torrent lay all about like spined sea creatures of a past age. Grasshoppers wheeled up before them and rattled off into the weeds and sage.

While this is a novel about crime, it is not a whodunnit. That doesn't mean it's devoid of suspense, however, as we watch the relationship between Millimaki and Gload and read to find how each will be affected, even changed, by the other. You do come to care about Millimaki, the dialogue throughout is generally excellent, and both characters are memorable. This is not an easy read, as we spend a lot of time in very gloomy places. But my personal opinion is that overall this is quite a good psychological study and therefore a fine book.

Point of information: We are told that Millimaki is a Finnish name.

Book note: The Ploughmen was published in 2014. According the LT (and the rest of the internet) it is Zupan's only novel. I've had it on my shelves since May 2019. I have no memory of where I bought it, however.

Also up late! I just downloaded an ebook sample of that - and it’s free on kindle unlimited. Definitely up my street.

>114 rocketjk: Interesting review. I tried this novel a few weeks ago after seeing it was on your list. After about 30 pages in I got a little bored and also wasn’t feeling well at the time. Think maybe I should give it another go.

>116 kjuliff: Well, the style doesn't change much and there isn't really a whole lot of action, just interactions between several characters and quite a bit of lovely natural description. I would say maybe try another 30 or 40 pages or so, and if it's still not working for you, c'est la vie!

>114 rocketjk: His bio says he worked as a carpenter for 25 years and he has an mfa. My guess is he got the mfa later in his life. This sentence screamed mfa to me: He was vain of his lank black hair combed back slick, and so eschewed the addition of a hat to his costumery.

ROTFLAHO

>117 rocketjk: More la mort for me then. I’m afraid I’m in a negative mood atm, and am reading an appropriate novel for my mood. It’s The Discomfort of Evening a debut novel brilliantly executed by a young write born in the 90s. Set on a backward farm in Holland 21C.

>118 dianeham: Yes, there are some, shall we say, over-enthusiastic sentences of that kind, but not too many all in all. Mostly I found the writing to be evocative and effective. And I am very hard on over-writing and bad metaphors and such, so you may be sure that if the sort of sentence you quoted (which I agree is off-putting) were prevalent, I would be warning folks away. The passage I quoted is much more typical. That said, everyone's tolerance is different.

>121 rocketjk: I trust you!

ETA: if you’re wrong then I want to watch you (es)chew your hat.

>120 kjuliff: You should probably pass then, at least for now. The book, as I mentioned above is dark in tone. If you're in a negative mood, this book won't help.

>122 dianeham: "I trust you!"

Thanks!

"ETA: if you’re wrong then I want to watch you (es)chew your hat."

Wouldn't be the first time. :)

Here's another passage I really liked. See what you think. This is during the same search and rescue mission described above:

Shadows like viscous ink slid down the coulee sides and gave sinister shape to the sandstone totems and crags accoutered with high-water jetsam and there were shapes enough among them to populate any dream or nightmare, even in a sound mind. Box elder trees with their eveningtime shadows came to resemble groping mandrake creatures, and raptors planing high overhead gave voice to them, and the roots of the dark pines lay atop the rutted ground like vipers.

The day was far advance when Millimaki and the dog stood among the bones of the ill-starred Hereford.* He stared at the bleached jumble about his feet as if it might be an augury he was meant to decipher but in his diminished state he could hardly unriddle the mystery of his own compass.

It's kinda sorta overwritten, I guess, but between the pictures the paragraphs draw and the mood they create, I found them ultimately effective nevertheless. More important, though, is Zupan's deft touch with character, more gradually built and much less easily shown via sampled quotes.

To be clear, I'm not urging anyone to read this book. I thought it was good, though.

* A long dead calf that the pair have come upon, described more fully in an earlier paragraph.

I’m looking forward to their long nights together.

>114 rocketjk: terrific review. Was it the game that kept you up?

>123 rocketjk: I did a pass , and for someone in a negative mood chose an odd book - The Discomfort of Evening by a brilliant young Dutch writer Lucas Rijneveld. It’s disturbing but not grueling. Remarkable by a debut novelist.

>125 dchaikin: Thanks! But, no, my late night reviewing session was the previous night. Just couldn't sleep . . . on thing and another. They say when it's the middle of the night and you're not sleeping you should get out of bed. On the other hand, they also say you should stay away from screens, so I was off the mark, there. I just decided to get the review finished regardless. It was a great game, though.

>126 kjuliff: Thanks for the heads up re Rijneveld.

>127 rocketjk: I’ve told that you should get up and do something really boring. 🙂 But sometimes it’s nice to write late at night.

>114 rocketjk: Such an interesting review, and I liked the bits you excerpted. I'm also wary of overwriting, but you're making a good case for this book, I'll try it.

>129 rv1988: Thanks for your positive comment on my review. I feel like I might be out on thin ice with people trying the book based on my say-so, but I'll be very interested to see what y'all think. Anyway, it's only 256 pages, so not a great investment in time if it doesn't work for anyone.

My post-The Ploughmen "Between Book" reading provided a nice interlude, including one new addition:

* “A Second Espousal,” by Anton Grazzini from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “Harry” by Rosemary Timperley from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Mango Season” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “Beanball Homicide” by Tim Cohane (Look Magazine) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* “Kahramana” by Anoud from Iraq + 100 edited by Hassan Blasim – Newly added!
* Day 5, Story 2 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* "Too Mad to Fight" by Walter Davenportin Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

Last night I began Inheritance, Lan Samantha Chang's first novel. So far it's very enjoyable.

>131 rocketjk: Iraq +100 looks really interesting. I'll look forward to your impressions.

>132 labfs39: That first story is quite good as is the author's own tale. Anoud is a woman who has left Iraq and writes under a pseudonym because she has fallen afoul of the Iraqi government. She lives in New York City now. The idea behind the whole collection is interesting, too. But I will talk about that more when I write my review. ("Between Book" with 10 stories, so it will take me around 15 books read to finish the collection.)

Interesting about Iraq + 100, I read Palestine + 100 last year. Also interesting to me to see the title of that story - I see that it means "heroine" in Arabic. Turkish uses the word kahraman for hero/heroine.

Now I’m dying to know where you are getting an apartment. Extending your stay in ny? I figured you were up to something since I haven’t seen you. Sorry, I’m very nosy - or as we say in some parts of Philly "newsy."

>135 dianeham: "Extending our stay" is (I hope!) an understatement. We are going to sell our house in California and move here. The lure of family (for my wife) and friends (for both of us, as we both grew up in New Jersey) plus NYC culture has been enough for us to decide to settle in here. We're looking for an apartment on the Upper West Side. Steph wants to be close to her sister, who lives a short subway ride uptown from there. Plus with luck we'll be close to both Central Park and Riverside Park. That's a priority for all sorts of reasons but mostly to keep Rosie the German shepherd happy.

Oh how exciting! If I lived there Id want to be on the upper west side. I bet its very expensive tho. Hope you can find something that wont break the bank!

>137 cindydavid4: The Upper East is where I am I prefer the East Side north or south. I would prefer the Lower East Side but am sort of entrenched here.

>136 rocketjk: Well that's exciting news! I love house hunting (other people's, that is - far too stressful when it's my own) - keep us updated with all the details!

>136 rocketjk: How exciting! Hope you find the perfect place. Will you be moving lots of stuff from the west coast to the east?

Hooray! I look forward to seeing more of you and Stephanie at LT gatherings. Good luck with the house hunting. I'm really happy with the one I bought after moving East from Seattle.

>138 kjuliff: Yes, the East Side is very cool and I can easily see why you'd prefer that area, but we are committed to the West Side due to Steph's desire to be only a quick subway ride from her sister.

More generally, thanks, everyone, for the kind words about out search. We just found out yesterday that we were outbid for a place we'd put an offer in on. C'est la vie. The hunt continues!

>141 labfs39: Thanks! I am looking forward to being able to spend time with all my LT/CR pals who live or visit here once the dust settles. There is going to be a logistical nightmare coming down the pike in relatively short order.

Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang



Inheritance is a novel that takes us through three generations of a Chinese family, from the beginning of the 20th century up through the late-1980s. The narrative moves from the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the gathering threat of Japanese imperialism, the Japanese invasion and occupation, the Chinese Civil War and the calamity (from the point of view of our protagonists) of the Communist victory and the family's exile to Taiwan. The focus is primarily on the women of the family, told often through the point of view of Hong, the daughter of novel's central figure, Junan. Although the storytelling is often in the third person, we understand that the perspective is Hong's and that she is relating the family history as it has been told to her or as she has pieced it together. This somewhat shifting narrative strategy I found to be largely effective. And as important, or perhaps even more important, as the historical events the family lives through, and are often drastically effected by, the novel takes us through a near-century of shifting attitudes and expectations of the roles and duties of women in Chinese society, from Hong's grandmother, who had spent 6 years with her feet bound before "the practice went out of fashion," to Hong's adulthood as a professional woman in the United States.

As noted above, the novel's central figure is Junan, the narrator's mother, who we follow from girlhood. Junan is beautiful and iron-willed, determined to pull her family through the national disasters whirling around them, even as her husband, Li Ang, is off rising through the ranks of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army. The complicated relationships between Junan and her husband, but also between Junan and her beloved sister, Yinan, are at the heart of the story. Personal and emotional sacrifices, as well as unfortunate levels of pride and standards of propriety course through the storytelling.

This is a first novel. Chang has since gone on to write several more novels and story collections, none of which I have read. I found Inheritance to be quite enjoyable and often absorbing, though I did find it inexplicably slow going in some parts. The writing is straightforward and clear, and for me very effective on almost all levels. The characters are well drawn and complex, and their lives and relationships are much more fully drawn than I have perhaps indicated above.

There are a couple of flaws in the procedure for me, however. One is what I call the "shayna punim" (Yiddish for "pretty face") factor. Junan is strong-willed and physically beautiful, married to a man rising in power and prestige and able to a large extent to bend conditions to her will. I do sometimes weary of novels in which the protagonists have the advantages of physical beauty and strength to help propel them over obstacles that might hinder the rest of us mere mortals. The other is the fact that the characters occasionally make crucial decisions that seemed inexplicable to me, and that the quick paragraphs meant to explain these decisions, either presented at the time or later in retrospect, were opaque to me. Two or three times, I couldn't make out what Chang, through her characters, was getting at. At least twice, paragraphs that seemed to be meant to be explanatory were so cryptic as to leave me scratching my head. I can't decide whether the problem was that Chang was simply so sure of what she was getting at that she didn't realize she hadn't described things comprehensibly or that I'm simply a blockhead. I figure the chances at 50-50. Or, of course, perhaps Chang purposefully left things vague at those crucial points, though I'm not sure what the point would be.

At any rate, I found Inheritance very much worth reading, offering an interesting (if necessarily limited in focus) picture of Chinese society during extremely turbulent times, with memorable characters throughout. As a first novel, I'd say it's admirable indeed, and I will be keeping an eye out for Chang's subsequent works.

Great rewiev 😃. Unfortunately my library hasn't got a copy of it.
Good luck with your house hunt. 🤞

My post-Inheritance "Between Book" reading consisted of more time spent with Stack 2:

* “Anne Gillespie’s Character,” by James Hogg from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “The Shades of Sleepe” by Ursula Codrington from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Life Spring” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “That Perfect Game” by Allen Lewis (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5, Story 3 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* "The Promise" by Felicia Gizycka in Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

Next it's on to Death in the Making, a book of photos of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa and two other photographers. The book also includes two explanatory essays.

>143 rocketjk: Wonderful review. I have loved everything by Lan Samantha Chang, especially her short stories and the novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, which I picked up solely because of the title. The Family Chao is also brilliant.

And how fun to be translating your sabbatical into a permanent residency! Good luck on the apartment hunt.

Death in the Making by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim



This photobook of powerful images from the Spanish Civil War is mostly comprised of images by famed war photographer Robert Capa but also contains several by Capa's collaborator and sometime romantic partner Gerda Taro and by a photographer known as Chim (born Dawid Szymin). (There are 111 images by Capa, 24 by Taro and 11 by Chim.) Capa was a Hungarian Jew, and Taro a German Jew. Both had fled to Paris to escape the rise in antisemitism. Chim was Polish. All three were fierce supporters of the Loyalist side, fighting against Franco's fascist armies (plus the Italian and German air forces).

The photos are remarkable, bringing to vivid life the faces of Loyalist soldiers and civilians alike. We see the smiling groups of soldiers in the war's early days when hope and camaraderie lit up these civilian solders' faces with the joy of the righteous cause. But we also see soldiers dying or freshly dead, killed in battle or in air raids. Fear and fatigue. The panic of civilian crowds running for bomb shelters. The shattered, exhausted faces of refugees. The horror of war, and the cruel, relentless crushing of dreams. The refusal to surrender. The book's forward was written by Jay Allen, a journalist who had been in Spain since 1930. The captions to the photos are by Capa himself, though they often provide more of a narrative of the overall experience than direct descriptions of the individual photos.

This book was originally published in 1938. The war was still going, but things were already looking very bleak for the Loyalists. Capa had already left Spain, heading off to China to photograph the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion, and Taro was already dead, killed after a year spent at the front when the jeep she was riding in was struck by an out-of control tank. Capa left the publishing of the book to others, and the result was a book of powerful photos but less than stellar production values: grainy photo reproductions and subpar paper stock. The book sold poorly. In 2020, however, the International Center for Photography in New York City teamed with the Italian publisher Damiani to produce a new edition, with greatly enhanced reproductions and much better paper stock. (I bought my copy at the ICP Museum.) The new edition contains an extremely helpful and interesting afterward by contemporary photography curator Cynthia Young, who has done a lot of work with Capa's photos.

The book's cover photo, now known as The Falling Soldier, is one of the most famous photos in combat photography history. It depicts an advancing Loyalist soldier an instant after being struck by a bullet. Capa claimed that he stuck his camera up over the lip of the trench he was in and snapped the photo of the advance without looking. In the 1970s, claims arose that the photo had actually been staged. Young, in her essay, makes no mention of this issue and instead takes the photo at face value. She does wonder why the photo was only used for the dust jacket and not included in the book itself. (I read about the "staging" issue on wikipedia and haven't looked into it further.)

Original editions of the book are rare and extremely pricy. This new edition isn't cheap either, but I can say for sure that the New York Public Library as at least one copy, and other libraries may have copies as well.

Here are a couple of online images of Capa's photos. The first is contained in the book. The second is not but gives a good idea of others depicting refugees that are there:

>147 rocketjk: Some years ago I read Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. I wonder if the photos in your book were included in this one. I don't own the book unfortunately, so I can't check.

>147 rocketjk: Fascinating.

>147 rocketjk: I've always loved Capa's photos. What a great project by the International Centre. Do you know if any other photographers are on their radar?

>150 SassyLassy: I don't know what their current projects are, but here's their website:
https://www.icp.org

Sounds like two quite interesting books (Inheritance and the Capa photographs.) My library has The family Chao, so maybe I'll get to that one of these days.

Good luck apartment hunting!

Well the post-Death in the Making "Between Books" coin flip came up Stack 2 again, and here's what I read:

* “A Spanish Kiss,” by Lafcadio Hearn from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “The Woman in Black” by Daniel George from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Time and Opportunity” from Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt
* “Hutch” by Dick Young (The New York Daily News) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5, Story 4 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* "Old Bones" by Bob Considine in Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941

Next up will be a baseball history, The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about four members of the great Boston Red Sox teams of the late-1930s through early-1950s. The book is by historian David Halberstam. Seems appropriate as spring training games get underway.

I’m also happy we have spring training again. Terrific review of the Capa photos.

>143 rocketjk: Great review, and the book goes on the looming TBR!
>147 rocketjk: Fascinating and such moving photographs posted by you.

Jerry, I sent you a message about "questions for the avid reader" last week. I know you’re really busy right now. If you want me to make up a fun/no essay set of questions, I'd be glad to do that.

Sure, fire away. Always happy to have suggestions. I'm most interested in questions that engender discussion.

>157 rocketjk: i’ll send another message then?

>147 rocketjk: Very interesting review. There are various collections of Capra's photos around. I have sort of grown up with them ever since I got interested in Black and White photography.

>151 rocketjk: Thanks for the link. That's a whole 'nother rabbit hole (and wallet hole)!

The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam



This one's really for baseball fans only. As the title lets on, The Teammates is a book about the friendship between Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio, four members of the famed Boston Red Sox teams of the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s (with time out for World War 2). In 2001, Ted Williams was dying. Pesky and DiMaggio, although in their 80s, decided to drive down from Massachusetts, joined by their friend Dick Flavin, a well-known Boston-area TV personality and humorist, to see Williams one last time. Younger than the other two men, Flavin has volunteered to do most of the driving. Doerr is absent, remaining in his Oregon home to care for his ailing wife. This trip is the occasion for Halberstam's slim book about the friendship and careers of the four famous ballplayers. Halberstam was already friends with these men himself, having interviewed them all for a previous book, Summer of '49, about the epic pennant race of that year between the Red Sox and Yankees, won by the New Yorkers on the last day of the season.

The Teammates contains pocket biographies of each of the four former players, as well as the history of the close friendship that grew up between them all during their playing days. Williams, the biggest star by far, was the leader. He referred to the others as "my guys." As portrayed here, Williams was also the only one of the four with a strong dark side. He could be generous and charming, but more frequently he was "cantankerous" (Halberstam's word) and pushy, never admitting he might be wrong, always insisting on having the last word and getting his own way. Although Halberstam never uses the word, Williams was clearly a bully. Halberstam spends about four pages detailing the miserable childhood and the irritations provided by his constantly ne'er-do-well brother that certainly contributed to Williams' distrust and bluster. The other three friends are presented as extremely skillful and intelligent ballplayers and all-round nice guys. If the narrative slips over the line into hagiography territory for these three, we're willing to forgive that. The stories of their careers and playing days are certainly interesting and fun: worth reading indeed for anyone with an interest in the topic.

The drive to Florida and the final meeting with Williams really provide only the thinnest of framings for the book. Halberstam was not in the car, of course, and there are only a few brief anecdotes from those days on the road. The meeting with Williams is described affectingly but briefly. Nevertheless, I can certainly recommend this slim volume for any baseball fan in the mood for an affectionate, well-written look at this friendship, as well as a trip back in time to a long-gone era of baseball history. And if the name Halberstam is familiar, yes, this is the same historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the early days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Book note: A few weeks ago I took the train from New York City into New Jersey to meet up with one of my oldest friends, a buddy from high school days who lives out in western Jersey. We drove to Montclair, where we spent a happy afternoon together at the Yogi Berra Museum. In the gift shop was a bargain book rack, from which I purchased three baseball books. Since my friends birthday was coming up, I told him to pick whichever of the three books he wanted as part of his birthday present. He picked The Teammates. Reading the book soon thereafter, he told me that he liked it so well that he insisted I read it too, and lent it to me the next time we saw each other.


That's me on the right (post-book purchases!) with my buddy Dan at the Yogi Berra Museum. My sweatshirt bears the logo of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a low level minor league ball club that plays in Coney Island.

>161 rocketjk: I love the the anecdote. How fun!

My post-The Teammates "Between Book" reading finally brought me back to Stack 1, with the following result:

* “Table Rock” by Frederick L. Coe from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Dawson Struck Out 20 for California Mark” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Vision of Life” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Lessons in Parsing" by Rashid Husain from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “The Garden of Babylon” by Hassan Blasim from Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim
* Day 5, Story 5 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* “Blues in Swingtime” by William and Milarde Brent from Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941 - Finished!

I've now started The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr., which was shortlisted for the American Book Award in 2021.

>161 rocketjk: Lovely review.

>161 rocketjk: terrific review. It’s seems somehow that it’s tricky to write a good baseball book without bashing everyone.

Great review of The Teammates, Jerry!

>166 kidzdoc: Thanks! If you'd like my copy, I'm happy to turn it over to you when I see you in NYC. It's a slim volume so not too difficult for slipping into a suitcase or backpack.

>167 rocketjk: Yes, please! TYIA.

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.



This beautiful, painful, heartbreaking novel about the spiritual and physical lives of the members of an enslaved community on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the 1830s was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2021. The story revolves around the love between Samuel and Isaiah, enslaved men who have grown together from boyhood and who have long worked together, mostly isolated from the rest of the community, in the plantation's barn, taking care of the animals and doing the many attendant chores and growing physically strong in the process. Mostly, the other enslaved folks consider Samuel and Isiah's relationship to be benign, referring to them as Those Two and either leaving them be or considering them friends. In a flashback to their ancestors' lives in Africa, we see that such relationships were not considered in the least remarkable. But the two men, and particularly Samuel, have stubborn streaks, and quietly refuse to follow the plantation owner's directive to help him breed more slaves.

The beauty of the novel for me stems from the skillful way that Jones shifts his attention around the plantation, showing us the inner lives of many of the enslaved people, particularly Maggie, the leader of the circle of female healers in the community and the one in closest, though mostly vague, contact with the ancestor spirits, the Prophets of the novel's title. Violence, of course, is ever present, or at least the threat of it is, as is the cruelly capricious manner in which the enslavers wield their power and display their hatred and fear. But while this threat of violence is always there, Jones describes the enslaved's true despair as their powerlessness, the stunted nature of their lives, devoid of outlet, individual potential bleeding, often literally, into the ground. That and the cruel crushing nature and impossibly long hours of the work demanded of them. But they are, as noted above, a community, taking care of each other to the extent they're able within the confines of their oppression. And always shining through is the love between Samuel and Isaiah, as well as the links between the lives of the enslaved and the memory, often not even conscious, of the lives their ancestors led in their home countries. Jones also brings us inside the lives and minds of the plantation owner, his wife and grown son, and the plantation's overseer, all of them woven into the pattern of this world, all warped by the evil nature of the power they wield.

I found the writing on a sentence and paragraph level to be excellent. I was not fully sold by the ending, but still I absolutely highly recommend The Prophets. Here is a longish passage that I thought was wonderful:

Isaiah's breath smelled like milk and his body curled snugly into Samuel's. Moonlight did all the talking. It just happened. Neither of them chased the other and yet each was surrounded by the other. Samuel liked Isaiah's company, which had its own space and form. Samuel knew for sure because he had touched its face and smiled, licked every bit of calm from its fingers and giggled. Then, without either of them realizing what had happened, it snuck up on them--the pain. They could be broken at any time. They had seen it happen so often. A woman carted off. Tied to a wagon screaming at the top of her lungs and her One risking the whip to chase after her, knowing damn well she couldn't save him, but if she could just stay near him for a few more seconds, his image wouldn't fade as quickly as it would have had she not challenged death.

No one was the same after the Snap. Some sat in corners smiling at voices. Others pulled out their eyelashes one by one, making their eyes seem to open wider. The rest worked until they collapsed, not just collapsed in the field, but collapsed in on themselves until there was nothing left but a pile of dust waiting to be blown away by the wind.

Wow, amazing review. Love that passage Wasnt interested in reading it, but i just m ight now

>169 rocketjk: I used to avoid debut novels and realise now that I probably missed out on some good experiences. There’s a freshness such novels can bring to us that sophomore novels especially just don’t have.

I couldn’t read The Prophets though. I can’t bear to read books about slaves. I did read Beloved and I can’t return to how I felt upon reading that excellent novel.

>169 rocketjk: I'm with Cindy, you might have sold me on this one.

>169 rocketjk: Wonderful review. This sounds like an incredibly moving book.

>69 ursula: Fabulous review of The Prophets, Jerry. I hope to get to it this summer.

>171 kjuliff: I know what you mean about debut novels. I have a tendency to shy away as well, but I try not to be doctrinaire about it. Sometimes they have a "first timer's" flaws baked into them, and these can be disconcerting, to put it mildly, even if you can see the potential in the talent. But, of course, a first-time novelist doesn't necessarily mean an inexperienced writer if there's been enough short-story and essay writing beforehand. At any rate, in this case the strengths absolutely obliterate any "first novel" flaws. In fact, I didn't notice any until the ending, which was good in and of itself, but, as I said above, not entirely satisfying for me. Another first novel I've read this year is Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang. (Reviewed here: >143 rocketjk:) There I found a few elements that I thought a more experienced novelist might have honed somewhat, though overall it's another book I recommend.

Otherwise, thanks, all for the kind words. :)

Post-The Prophets, it was time for another "Between Book" ramble, bouncing to Stack 2:

* “Zaida, Pearl-Of-East,” by A. Sadlier from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “A Laugh on the Professor” by Shane Leslie from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Separation Notice” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Cheating in Baseball Today” by Maury Allen (Sport Magazine) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5, Story 6 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
* Editorials: "The Battle of the Atlantic," “Three Voices” and “Wartime Prohibition Again?” from Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941 - Finished!

I've now started George Orwell's classic memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.

Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is another publication from the stack of old magazines I've accumulated on the floor of my home office closet. This one is fascinating in that it was published just 7 months before the Pearl Harbor attack finally pulled the U.S. into World War 2. But the debate between FDR, who wanted to support the Allies as strongly as possible, and the isolationists was going full throttle. Colliers, as per this edition, had a very strong pro-Allies editorial stance. There are several short pieces and photography essays about the U.S. military and its drive toward preparedness. The centerpiece of this editorial policy is the long essay by Republican Wendell Wilkie. Interestingly, Wilkie had recently lost the 1940 presidential election to Roosevelt. He ran against Roosevelt's New Deal policies, but he refused to break with Roosevelt on his European policies, much to the chagrin of the isolationists, who dubbed him, iirc, "Me Too" Wilkie. At any rate, Wilkie's essay in this Colliers is titled, "Americans, Stop Being Afraid: The Dangers of Isolationism." There are also three or four fun short stories (by authors I've never heard of), and one very interesting feature on the famed race horse Exterminator by Bob Considine. All in all, a very interesting time capsule.

A note that this is the last of the magazines that I brought with me from California for our year in NYC, so my old magazine reading will be on hiatus from the "Between Book" lists until we get back to the west coast. At that point, we'll be packing up to move here permanently, and I guess most of the remaining magazines will get bundled up for the move.

The mailing label on my copy of the magazine tells us that it was mailed to Esther H. White who loved at 925 Jones Street, Apt. 204, in San Francisco. I couldn't find any reference to Ms. White online, but she lived on the 2nd floor of this building, constructed in 1922, in San Francisco's Lower Nob Hill neighborhood:

I hope White enjoyed her lovely location. Great reviews of The Prophets.

>178 dchaikin: Me, too. That's a great neighborhood, and it must have really been something in the 30s and 40s.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

*

I read this book as part of a memorial for Julia ("rosalita") that some folks in the ROOTS ("read your own tomes) group are taking part in. Basically, we are reading books from Julia's LT list of her TBR books and counting them as "off the shelf" books for her: (https://www.librarything.com/topic/357293)

Book note: The cover on the left is the cover of the edition of Homage to Catalonia that's been on my bookshelves since my LT "Big Bang" in 2008. However, I'm currently 3,000 miles away from those bookshelves. The cover on the right is cover of the edition I borrowed from the Harry Belafonte Branch of the New York Public Library to read this past week. More on this later.

As most here will know, Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's memoir of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell came to Spain to fight against Franco's ultimately (and tragically) successful Fascist takeover attack against the Republican government of Spain. Orwell's own political sympathies were Socialist, and he quickly joined the POUM militia, POUM being an acronym for what translates to English as the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Orwell describes his time in the trenches in the Catalonian mountains, where in the event, cold, hunger, lice and rats were as big a drawback as Franco's forces. The POUM troops were also very short on weapons and ammunition.

In addition, Orwell was in Barcelona in what he though was going to be a couple of weeks of R&R when street fighting broke out between the forces of the Communist Party, POUM and the Anarchist party. Orwell describes this bloodshed as part of the Communist Party's effort to consolidate control over the anti-Fascist armies, to create a single central government authority and do away with the independent party militias that had been fighting the war in many places, but also to suppress the popular anti-capitalist uprising staged by the working and peasant classes in that part of Spain with the advent of the war. Eventually, POUM was "suppressed," (declared illegal) and the police began arresting POUM members and throwing them in jail. This caused Orwell and his wife to have to escape from Spain. Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia six months after leaving Spain, while the war was still ongoing. And while he was able to do a bit of research before writing, he acknowledges that, as someone who was in the middle of these events, he does not have the perspective to understand in depth the causes and complexities of all the Barcelona events. (To paraphrase, he writes, "Beware my prejudices and beware of my inaccuracies.")

I very much enjoyed and was interested in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell writes with clarity, a terrific eye for detail and description, and humor. You very much get the feel for what it was like to be in those mountain trenches, despite (or maybe because of) Orwell's understated, wry writing style. He describes the mood of optimism, togetherness and idealism of Barcelona when he first gets there, and observes with regret that when he returned from the front lines just a few months later, the whole mood of the revolution had dampened, and class divisions were already reasserting themselves. Orwell also tells us of his bewilderment and eventual irritation at Spanish politics, but his great and abiding affection for the Spanish people.

Book note, part 2: The reason I differentiated between the edition I own and the one I actually read is that the newer edition, published in 2015 includes not only Lionel Trilling's original 1952 introduction, but also a new forward by the excellent historian Adam Hochschild. Hochschile relates the fact that later in life Orwell decided that the book included two much emphasis on the events he'd taken part in in Barcelona, feeling that they didn't really constitute that much of an effect on the ultimate conducting or outcome of the war. Orwell asked later publishers to move the two chapters he'd written about those events out of the main body of the work and into a pair of appendices. Mostly, editors had ignored Orwell's request. Although a couple of translated editions had finally made the changes, the 2015 Mariner edition was the first English language edition to finally do so. The second of the appendices in particular is a deep dive into the motivations and actions of the various parties, along with the propaganda efforts each side took part in to justify their actions and vilify their opponents.

At any rate, all that minutia aside, I found Homage to Catalonia to be a fascinating, well-written account of Orwell's time in Spain during the war.

Ive read it, but after reading Wifedom the glow is wearing off a bit. His wife Eileen Orwell followed him there and was involved in much of the parts he played in. Just sayin :)

>181 cindydavid4: She is mentioned frequently throughout Homage to Catalonia, though Orwell rarely specifies what she is actually doing in Barcelona while he's at the front. I did wonder about that, particularly in light of the reviews I've read here on LT of the book you refer to. For me, the glow of this book, the value of the reading experience, does not necessarily shine on Orwell, the individual, but on the quality of his writing and his powers of observation. I more or less assume that any male author whose books I read and whom I don't know personally stands a fair chance of being a cad in his personal life. Even women sometimes have faults. :)

"For me, the glow of this book, the value of the reading experience, does not necessarily shine on Orwell, the individual, but on the quality of his writing and his powers of observation. " I can go with that. And glad she is at least mentioned I obviously didn't notice when I was reading, so shouldnt complain

"Even women sometimes have faults. :)" what? pistols at dawn sir!

>183 cindydavid4: " . . . pistols at dawn sir!"

Well, I did say "sometimes." :)

Cheers!

>180 rocketjk: Enjoyed your excellent review of Homage to Catalonia a book I have not read.

Good stuff on Orwell, Jerry.

>183 cindydavid4: “what? pistols at dawn sir!” 🙂

>184 rocketjk: yes, i know :)

I've been noticing a bit of disquiet in the Force recently. I realized it was because I had not come on here to post my post-Homage to Catalonia "between book" reading. Let's handle that:

* “Crown of Navarre,” by Ortensio Lando from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “Poor Girl” by Elizabeth Taylor (1) from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Neeru’s New World” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Yankees: Healthy, Wealthy, Unwise” by Leonard Koppett (New York Times) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5, Story 7 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

Since then I've read a brief biography of the early 19th-Century English reformer, Robert Owen. Review coming within the next day or two.

Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe



This is a short, clear biography of visionary English social reformer, Robert Owen, written by Joseph McCabe, who was himself, 70 years later, a prominent Rationalist writer and lecturer. (McCabe's wikepedia bio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCabe)

Robert Owen was a British industrialist in the early 19th century who spent his life and a major bulk of his money attempting to improve the lot of the British working class in a multitude of ways, including promoting shorter work days (the standard at the time was 14 hours per day), raising the minimum age of factory employees from 7 years old to 10 or 12, creating schools for children and even day care at company and/or public expense and full equality for women. Once he had amassed enough money of his own (he came from relatively humble roots in Wales), he purchased a factory and lands (including workers’ housing) in Scotland and proceeded to create what he considered a model industrial community in Lancashire, Scotland, called New Lanark into which he poured his own money and that of several investors to put his ideas to work, improving housing, building and running schools and day care (called “infant schools”), among the many efforts to improve the lives of the workers and the quality of the productiveness. In time, he was able to turn a profit. However, Owen also was vocal in his idea that, while belief in God was fine, organized religion was a source only of discord and misery in society as a whole. This brought him into conflict with his partners, and he eventually had to bow out of the administration of New Lanark, which, without his leadership, soon failed.

Owen, however, did not give up, and spent the rest of his long life agitating for his ideas, first in the English Parliament and then, giving up on the politicians, among British society as a whole. He never gave up on trying to replicate his success in Scotland, and in trying to point out the ultimate justice and economic advantages of improving the lot of factory workers, including champion and financially supporting the early English labor union movement. Not surprisingly, his pleas fell on deaf ears among British industrialists and politicians. The Church of England was particularly hostile. Owen also spent time in the U.S., starting an industrial community in New Harmony, Indiana.

While Owen never succeeded, he never gave up, either. McCabe asserts that Owen’s ideas and efforts paved the way both for the increasing strong British reform movement that followed. McCabe also posits that many of Owen’s ideas foreshadowed the work of Karl Marx several decades later. Owen never went as far as Marx, certainly. For example, Owen never suggested worker ownership of the factories, only that capitalist ownership had a duty to raise the quality of life of the workers. But Owen did suggest that goods should be valued based on the amount of labor that went into making them, that that labor should be fairly valuated, and that the workers deserved a just share of the profits that thereby accrued.

This brief biography (120 pages of a 6” by 8” volume) is clearly a hagiography, just, really, an outline of Owens’ life, ideas and works. McCabe was an Owen enthusiast, to put it mildly. The book is simply but well written and includes some occasional humor. This volume was published in 1920 in England, evidently part of a series called “Life-Stories of Famous Men,” about which I’ve been unable to learn a single thing online. The book was given to me by my wife’s uncle, a recently retired minister of the Ethical Culture Society in New Jersey. He has been trying to downsize his personal library and asked us to pick out a few volumes each to take away on our last visit. This is one of the two books I took away. However, as I am currently 3,000 miles away from my library, when I decided to read this book I had to go online to find an alternative copy. In the event, I had to order all the way from Wales. This second copy does not come with a dust jacket, but it does include this interesting inscription on the first page:



I take it that the first line is the owner's name, maybe D. Lannock or Hancock. After that, we read, "Ministry of Labor
Employment Ex." (Would Ex. be short for something that equates to Department?)
The final line, given that it seems to start with two L's and that the book came to me from a store in Wales, I thought might be the name of the Welsh town where this person worked and lived. The inscription was written in this book very close to 103 years ago.

Finally, I am the only LT member with this book listed in his/her/their library.

>189 rocketjk: A hero according to many

I'm reading the signature a D Connock, not seeing an "L" as in the place name lower down.
Wondering if Ex. is Exchange or possibly even Exchequer.

It's always great to discover yourself the sole member with a given book!

>189 rocketjk: Robert Owen was somebody that featured in our history lessons in school, but only his work during the industrial revolution. I did not know anything about his hostility to organised religion or his political views - fascinating to read your review.

llanelli is probably the Welsh town that features in your inscription. My wife's nieces and nephews live near there I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanelli

OOPs no! they live in North Wales Llanelli is South Wales

>191 baswood: "Robert Owen was somebody that featured in our history lessons in school . . . "

I'm not surprised, and I did mean to mention in my review that I was guessing that my ignorance about him was probably due to my U.S. upbringing, and that folks from the U.K., at the very least, were probably much more knowledgeable about him.

>190 SassyLassy: "It's always great to discover yourself the sole member with a given book!"

Yes! In fact, I have a tag for it, "ultb," which stands for "unique Librarything book." I used to post about them on a now dormant group called "Unique Library Thing Book Group" (https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/4918/Unique-Library-Thing-Book-Group). I need to go back and check that all of my ultb books are still unique to LT, come to think of it. At the moment I have 149 books so tagged, but as soon as somebody else posts a given ultb book on their library, the book of course ceases to be unique.

>95 rocketjk: I've had The Island at the Center of the World on my bookshelf for many years, sent to me by a long-ago online reading friend who's now deceased. I love New York history, and need to get to that sooner than later—thanks for the reminder.

>114 rocketjk: You had me at "the springing trapdoor of loneliness and the sly banality of evil." On the wishlist it goes... looks like NYPL has it in print but not e, so I'll hold off until I know I can go pick it up.

As I was scrolling through your thread I was thinking that, when we were first talking about getting together again, May seemed so far away. And now... it's not. So I'm really pleased to hear you're planning on staying. The UWS is a great neighborhood—hope you can find something there that suits your purposes. And, of course, hope to meet up again one of these days.

>193 lisapeet: "hope you can find something there that suits your purposes."

Ah, I forgot to mention it here, but Steph and I are approved for a coop apartment, just waiting for the lawyers to do their thing so we can complete closing, sometime from 1 to 2 weeks hence. We'll be at Broadway and 107th.

"As I was scrolling through your thread I was thinking that, when we were first talking about getting together again, May seemed so far away. And now... it's not. So I'm really pleased to hear you're planning on staying."

I know what you mean about time and dates and all that. Anyway, I still haven't entirely given up on seeing you before the end of May, if you still think it's possible. Our current lease will be up then, and we'll drive back to California to pack up the house and put it on the market, then drive back and commence the next chapter of our lives. We have to drive rather than fly because we both hate the idea of sending our German shepherd cross country in an airliner cargo hold. But we have an all-electric vehicle, so at least we won't be burning petrol.

>194 rocketjk: Oh neat! Fingers crossed for all to go smoothly with the apartment.

And yes, I'd still like to get together before the end of May too. I'm away for a few days the first week of April (Columbus), again for during the first week of May (Spokane), but otherwise mostly languishing in NoBro. Let's see if we can figure something out.

You're fortunate that Rosie is good in the car, so you have that option. I don't know what we'd do with Jasper if we had to go cross-country—I'm sure air travel would be completely traumatic for him, but car rides of any length make him miserable. I felt terrible bringing him up to Syracuse and back a couple of weekends ago, even though having him along for the ride was the only way we were going to get up there.

mazel tov! hope it all goes through!

My post-Robert Owen "between book" reading was a jaunt along Stack 1:

* “Mississippi River Pilot,” excerpted from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Oliva Wore Out Pitchers—Fouled up Records” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Savannah-La-Mar” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “In the Deserts of Exile” by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “The Corporal” by Ali Bader from Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim
* Day 5, Story 8 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

I'm now already three-quarters through This is Murder, Mr. Jones, the fourth book in a 5-book murder mystery series featuring wise-guy literature professor/amateur detective Jupiter Jones. The series was written in the early 1940s.

>194 rocketjk: How wonderful! Of course, you've got another move ahead of you, but it's good to get a chance to go back and make final good-byes to a place you loved.

>198 RidgewayGirl: Thanks! Those good-byes are definitely going to be bittersweet.

This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller



This is the fourth of the 5-book Jupiter Jones mystery series written in the late 1930s through early 1940s by Timothy Fuller. When we meet Jupiter Jones in the series' first book, Harvard Has a Homicide, he is still a Harvard student who stumbles onto the murder of one of his professors. By this fourth novel, Jones is a Harvard English professor. The year is 1943 and our hero is about join the Navy to fight in the war. Since there have been three previous books, you'll not be surprised to learn that Jones has already solved three baffling murder mysteries. So we're not surprised to learn that Jones, along with his wife, Betty, has been invited to be a guest at a radio broadcast from an old, deserted mansion in the Massachusetts countryside where, 100 years ago, a still-unsolved murder had taken place. Furthermore, you will not be astonished when I tell you that, once cast, crew and assorted guests are gathered at the house, a brand new murder takes place forthwith. Luckily, our man Jones is on the scene, as usual a step or two ahead of the local police. These mysteries are far from classics, but they are fun, with enough gentle, self-deprecating humor to keep things light, and an interesting time-piece of their era.

I've had this fourth entry in the series on my shelves since my LT "big bang" in 2008. I took it down from the shelf to read a few years back, only to realize it was part of a series. So, given my predilections, I had to go back and read the first three Jupiter Jones books in order before attending to this one. There's one more in the series, which I'll be attending to sooner or later.

>192 rocketjk: You have just solved a mystery for me. Years and years ago, I must have come across something you wrote about ultb's. I've been cataloging my books that way ever since, but I couldn't remember what ultb stood for or where I originally got the idea. Thank you!

According to my tag list, I have 220 ultbs. Occasionally I go through and clean them up, so that number may not be completely accurate, since I haven't cleaned up the list in awhile.

I just checked my Vous et nul autre LT page, and I have a whopping 8 unique holdings!

>202 labfs39: Oh, right! I forgot about that page. I will have to give it a look.

Good luck with your permanent move to NYC. Sounds like you're going to be very busy making that happen.

Is the US well set up for electric charging now? It's bitty in the UK still. That's a long old journey - I'm guessing quite a few refuelling stops.

>204 AlisonY: Much better on the coasts than in the middle, but the infrastructure is being built up. rocketjk, is yours a Tesla or something with a CCS charger? There's more Tesla chargers than anything else, and that's not going to change since nearly all the manufacturers have switched to that plug (which doesn't help older cars...though they do seem to be working on adapters as well). There are very few Chademo cars with any range, so I assume that's not what you have. My Chevy Bolt is CCS.

>205 jjmcgaffey: We have a VW ID.4 SUV. A while ago, VW lost a lawsuit due to it being found that they'd lied about the mileage on some of their diesel vehicles. As part of the settlement, they agreed to spend a gazillion dollars setting up an EV charging station network. We leased our VW, and the lease came with free use of the VW charging networks. We can also use other charging networks, but we have to pay for those. Anyway, it's quite possible to get across the U.S. in our EV. We've done it three times, now. You just don't have the freedom of the back roads, etc., that you would in a gas-powered car. And there's the inconvenience of two or three 20 to 30-minute stops per day. But my wife and I both feel that the insistence on convenience over everything else in countries like the U.S. is one of the reasons we're in this climate mess, so experiencing a bit of inconvenience is the least we can do at this point. We have a mid-level charger installed in our garage in our California home. When it comes to just driving around at home, the EV is ideal. You just plug in at night.

Yep. We take a Bolt up to Tahoe (about a 4-5 hour drive) two or three times a year - it's lovely for that distance, stop for 45 minutes for lunch someplace where there's a charger. I use the Electrify America (VW's) chargers in my town - there's a set next to the local Target, convenient. I live in a condo and can't (or at least, it would be difficult and expensive) to have a charger in my parking space, but there are enough chargers around town that I don't have any problem.

My post-This is Murder, Mr. Jones "between book" reading was a wander through Stack 2:

* “A Fight With a Whale,” excerpted from The Cruise of the Cachalot by Frank T. Bullen in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Haas’ ‘Grand Slam’ Only a Single—Passed Mate” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* Four poems by Nizar Qabbani from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “The Worker” by Diaa Jubaili from Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim
* Day 5, Story 9 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

As noted elsewhere, I'm now indulging my love of old histories about relatively obscure subjects. I'm about to start reading The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson. The book, published in 1964, is about an (from the flyleaf) "incident at the height of the Irish Home Rule crisis of early 1914 when 58 cavalry officers, stationed at the Curragh and in Dublin, chose dismissal from the army rather than the possibility of 'active operations in Ulster.'"

>78 rocketjk: I read one or two Erdriches several years ago and for some unknown reason did not continue. Thanks for the reminder!

>202 labfs39: I had never known about that page. My list is amusing.

>202 labfs39:, >209 Jim53: I have 879 ultbs - admittedly many of them are issues of a fanzine (Xenofilkia) and other filk songbooks. But that's a heck of a lot! I should probably go through and check combinations, but it'd be quite a task.

>210 jjmcgaffey: I have 197 unique entries--though a significant portion are literary periodicals of one sort or another--and 70 that I share with only one LT member or Legacy Library.

Great review of The Prophets, Jerry. My copy is literally staring at me near the door of my bedroom, so I'll have to read it soon.

I also enjoyed Homage to Catalonia, a book I would like to reread, as I think I finished it before my first vacation in Barcelona.

The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson (a.k.a. 8th Baronet of Kilkerran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_James_Fergusson,_8th_Baronet)



Obscure history warning!

In early 1914, with a Liberal government in power in England, it had more or less been decided that Ireland would be granted Home Rule. Ireland would not be independent, but there would be an Irish Parliament that would administer the country, while still being subservient to the English Crown and Parliament. The problem was what to do about the northern counties, whose Protestant majority considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown and wanted no part of being ruled, even nominally, by Catholic Ireland. In Ulster, the locals had put together a disciplined and quite strong Protestant militia and all and sundry feared partisan violence if the English Parliament tried to mandate Irish Home rule throughout the island. Cue the action of The Curragh Incident.

It had come to the attention of the English government, and in particular the Secretary of State for War, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, that the English army had stores of ammunition in several locations around northern Ireland that were only loosely guarded and might be vulnerable to being seized by the Ulstermen should any hostilities arise. So the order went out to Lt. General Sir Arthur Paget, commander of the British forces in Ireland, to see to securing those stores. Unfortunately, Paget did not get these orders in writing, and what the orders actually were, as opposed to how Paget actually interpreted them, became a source of controversy and contention. Most of the British forces in Ireland at the time were quartered and trained at a very large open field in County Kildare known as the Curragh. Installed there were several regiments, including infantry, artillery and calvary. It was well known that a large majority of the officers there were sympathetic to the Ulstermen, whom they saw as loyalists to the British Crown. So, despite the fact that the only orders Paget ostensively had was to secure those stores of ammunition, he sent word to the commanders of the regiments at the Curragh that every officer had to be asked whether he would be willing to obey orders to take action "against the Ulstermen." Any officer answering "no" would be cashiered from the service, with no pension to be forthcoming regardless of length of service. And they were given in many cases but a half hour to decide. At first, many of these officers chose to quit, as much over the insult they saw in the ultimatum itself as for the import of the actual question.

In the meantime, plans were, it seems (Fergusson lays out the evidence but does not make the claim that this evidence is conclusive), actually being laid out for the large-scale movement of troops into Ulster, and several naval vessels were dispatched in support. The plans were created by Seely and the First Lord of the Admiralty. Guess who? Yup, none other than Winston Churchill. Nobody told the Prime Minister, however, Henry Asquith, who was caught quite flat-footed when news of the "Curragh Incident" broke, or the King, George V, in whose name the orders were presumably given. The idea was, supposedly, to provoke the Ulster Militia to take action against the Army, so that armed resistance to universal Irish Home Rule could be crushed.

In the end, cooler heads among the officers prevailed, nobody quit, and the ammunition was protected. Paget, who does not come off well in this narrative at all, inadvertently threw a monkey wrench into the plot, if such there was, by evidently overstepping his orders (which, again, were never put in writing) and demanding that the loyalty ultimatum be put to the officers. Interestingly, other than an officer's loyalty to king and crown, one of the key arguments against even hypothetically refusing orders to take action "against Ulster" was some officers' logic that if the officers were going to refuse such orders, how could they expect the enlisted men, who were mostly from working class families, obey orders given during "strike duty," when the army was used to quell violence by striking factory and mine workers? (A wild guess would be that the army seldom took action to protect strikers, but I don't know the actual history.)

In the end, the question of Irish Home Rule was put on the back burner by the outbreak of World War I. I don't know whether the "Curragh Incident" is still even remembered in England these days. Certainly, as an American, I'd never heard of it. I picked up this book recently off a bookstore dollar rack on a whim. I seem to be on a roll of reading obscure bios/histories/mysteries from bygone eras!

I will say that, writing some 50 years after the event (the book was published in 1963), Fergusson does a very good job of recreating these events in day-by-day and even hour-by-hour detail. As I got deeper into the narrative, I became very interested, despite the by-now obscure nature of the history itself. The personality of the individual officers and politicians are recreated quite vividly (though of course I have no idea how accurately).

>213 rocketjk: Interesting sidebar to history.

>213 rocketjk: Well I had heard of the Curragh Incident, but did not know what it was until now - thanks Jerry

>214 labfs39: & >215 baswood: Thanks, kids. I was absolutely positive that I was going to be able to keep my review of The Curragh Incident to one or two paragraphs at the most. But then I started thinking, well, it won't make sense at all if I don't explain this. And that won't make any sense unless I give some background. And etc and so forth. And then I looked at how long the review was and sighed, "Nobody's going to read that." It's just that once I'd read the book, despite how obscure the events seem now, the more I found the details interesting, especially if Fergusson's suspicions are true that the blunders that occurred at the same time prevented and covered up a relatively high-up plot to provoke a violent confrontation between the English army and the Ulster militia in 1914.

Anyway, thanks for reading (or at least skimming :) ) the review.

>216 rocketjk: I don't care for long reviews of plot-driven novels, too much is given away. But I love long reviews of books like this: nonfiction on an interesting topic, but a book I'm unlikely to read. Now I know something about the Curragh Incident and didn't even have to run to Wikipedia!

Great review of The Curragh Incident, Jerry!

>213 rocketjk: I love it when you write longer reviews about books I probably will never read. I get a thoughtful synopsis and intelligent consideration without having to do any of the work myself.

My post-The Curragh Incident "between book" reading consisted of a ramble through Stack 2:

* “Pricess Bob” by Brett Harte from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “The House in the Glen” by John Connell from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “The Prize” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Dodgers’ Troubled Giant” by William Leggett (Sports Illustrated) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 5, Story 10 & Conclusion from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

I've now started The Mountains Wait, a memoir by Theodor Brach of his life in a far northern Norwegian town before during and just after the Nazi invasion of Norway. The book was published in 1943 so, yes, still another obscure older book. This will be my fourth in a row. In order, it's been a biography, a mystery, a history and now a memoir.

Well, now i know something about The Curragh Incident. Terrific review. I enjoyed the whole thing.

>220 rocketjk: What are the other three? Since We Die Alone I’ve become obsessed with wartime Norway.

>222 kjuliff: "What are the other three?"

The last three books I've read have been:

Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe
This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller
The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson

I'm just past the halfway point of The Mountains Wait now. It's quite interesting. It was first published while the war was still ongoing, in 1942.

It's terrible that I didn't know what the Curragh Incident was, considering that (a) I live in Ulster and (b) I studied Irish history at A Level (or at least I attended the lessons - perhaps had I done more of the studying part I'd have known what this was).

Great review - I learned more from you than I did in 2 years of lessons.

>244 RidgewayGirl: Thanks!

I guess it's not too surprising that you didn't learn about the Curragh Incident in school when you think about it. It really turned out to be a non-event in Ulster. As things actually played out, most of the dust-up was within the British Army and in the British Parliament once the politicians started playing party politics and attacking each other over it. I guess if the supposed plot to incite sectarian violence were established historical fact (Fergusson presents it more as a theory with some backing evidence), more might be made of the whole thing in Ulster history classes now. The book I read was published in the 1960s. I don't know what the more recent scholarship (if any) on the topic has to say about it.

I didn't know about the Curragh Incident either—thanks for that background. Do requirements of loyalty oaths ever not end badly?

>213 rocketjk: This is such a great and informative review: I knew very little about this, and enjoyed reading it. I recently read a novel about Soviet Russia and there was a very similar scene: a senior officer asks cavalry members if they will help destroy Cossack houses, and attack families, and the cavalry members refuse, and are promptly cashiered.

The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch



This is the memoir of Theodor Broch, who was the mayor of the far northern Norwegian town of Narvik when the Nazis invaded in 1940. The book begins with Broch getting away over the mountains into neutral Sweden, having escaped arrest for his resistance activities several months after the Nazi's arrival. But then, quickly, we go 10 years back in time to Broch's arrival in the town with his wife. He is a young lawyer intent on starting a practice away from the bustle (and competition) of Oslo. His wife will run the law office. This first third of the book is a charming description of the town, its lifestyle and citizens, many of whom are charmingly eccentric. Imagine All Things Bright and Beautiful, but in an Arctic fishing and mining town on the inner coast of a Norwegian fjord, as told be a lawyer rather than a veterinarian. Broch's law practice is slow going at first, but eventually the couple gains traction. Then, pretty soon, Broch finds himself on the city council, and then the town's mayor. In the meantime, war clouds are gathering over Europe, though the folks of this sleepy town somehow assume they'll be spared.

But, of course, they aren't. In April 1940, German destroyers show up in the fjord. The Norwegian Navy ships on hand refuse to surrender, but are almost immediately sunk. The defeatist (and/or Nazi sympathizing) commander of the local Norwegian Army forces does surrender. The British, during their rather inept and soon to be aborted attempt to help the Norwegians resist invasion, send their own destroyers to the scene and actually win the ensuing naval battle, though the occupation of the town is not lifted. Weeks later, however, Polish, Norwegian, English and French Foreign Legion forces actually do run the Germans out, but only for a short time. Soon, the British decide to abandon the effort to defend Norway, withdrawing their forces to go defend their own island. Out go the British, and back into town come the Nazis, but not until after a vicious bombing of the town. Broch describes all of this quite well, naturally emphasizing the daily lives of the people of Narvik and their experiences under Nazi rule, including his own negotiations with the Germans in his role as mayor as he attempts to placate the occupiers, keep the daily lives of his constituents as normal as possible despite disappearing food supplies and jobs, and keep the morale of the town as high as he can so that defeatism doesn't set in. Things go a little bit easier for the Norwegians than for other occupied nationalities, as the Nazis considered the Norwegians to be Aryans, people to be won over to the New Order rather than to be crushed, humiliated and exploited.

But, finally, Broch's activities in getting information out to the British and other minor acts of resistance are discovered, and he has to flee. Broch eventually made his way to the U.S., where he became active in trying to raise money for the training and supplying of the Norwegian military and government in exile. He travels the country, especially the midwest, where Norwegian immigrants have been settling for decades. when Broch talks to American college students, he is frequently asked how Norway could have let itself be caught by surprise. That's until the Pearl Harbor attack, when those questions naturally cease. Finally we visit an airfield in Canada where Norwegian airmen are being trained. The Mountains Wait was published in 1943, while the war, obviously, was still ongoing. Broch couldn't know that Norway would still be in German hands right up until the end of the war.

Given the book's publication date, I think it's clear that it was meant as a propaganda effort. The early sections are over-romanticized, I think, and the noble, stalwart Norwegian population certainly seems to be too good to be true. Nevertheless, it is well written* and moves along really well. As a WW2 propaganda work, it is an interesting example of its genre. And while we may assume the descriptions, both pre-war and during, to be offered under a hazy inspirational illumination, I would conjecture that the events described are essentially truthful.

This book has been on my shelves since before my LT "Big Bang" in 2008.

* The writing, and particularly the wonderful natural descriptions of the Norwegian fjords and mountain countryside, is so good that it made me wonder whether there might be some ghost writing going on, especially considering the fact that the book was written directly in English, rather than being translated from Norwegian. I have no trouble assuming that Broch was fully fluent in English, as, I think, are most urban raised Scandinavians. (If you want to hear people who speak English really well, go visit Helsinki sometime!) I wouldn't, however, be surprised to learn that a native English-speaking writer had a go at this text. Not that I care either way. Just a bit of conjecture.

>228 rocketjk: I may have to read this just for the history, had no idea of this side of the war, the brits attempt to help, the other countries banding togther to push back.or this "Things go a little bit easier for the Norwegians than for other occupied nationalities, as the Nazis considered the Norwegians to be Aryans, people to be won over to the New Order rather than to be crushed, humiliated and exploited."

>228 rocketjk: An interesting review. I will try to get this. I recently read We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance set. In Norway in WWIi based on actual events. I highly recommended it on my thread. The descriptions of arctic Norway were amazing.

The coin flip for my post-The Mountains Wait "between book" reading came up once again on Stack 2:

* “Abbe Dumont’s Mystery” by Alphonse de Lamartine from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “The King of Spades” by Nancy Spain from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “12 Short Tales of Women at Work” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Grocery Store Man” by Stan Isaacs (Newsday) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 6, Introduction & Story 1 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

I'm by now already more than halfway through Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin.

>228 rocketjk: Great review! I think it's interesting that I also happen to be reading a book set in Norway, though quite a different type. It's a Dick Francis novel published in 1973, which somehow has managed to sit unread on my shelves for many, many years. I thought I had read all of Dick Francis!

>232 janoorani24: I've only read, I think, two of those Dick Francis mysteries, but I know I enjoyed them both. Cheers!

Slayride is actually my least favorite Dick Francis. I don't know why, but it didn't work for me - that's the only Dick Francis I've only read once.

>232 janoorani24: I thought I had read all of Dick Francis, but I don't remember this one. I will have to look it up!

>234 jjmcgaffey: Yes, so far I can't say it will be one of my favorites.

>233 rocketjk: I fall back on either Dick Francis (41 books) or Georgette Heyer (25 books) when I need a quick and comforting read

>235 rv1988: Same here! I couldn't believe I actually had one I hadn't read.

Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts



From the 1930s through the late-1960s, the Fillmore district of San Francisco was an ethnically-mixed working class neighborhood, alive with minority-owned businesses, a with a bustling neighborhood feel where different groups got along as a matter of course. Starting in the early '40s, the Fillmore became a hotbed of blues, R&B and jazz clubs where local musicians flocked and famous musicians came to jam after their paid downtown gigs, blowing until dawn in bars and cellar sessions alike.

The Fillmore was relatively undamaged by the 1906 earthquake, and many beautiful Victorian homes were built in the area to sell to people who had been displaced by the quake and the fire that followed. In Harlem of the West's introduction, we read this:

"Within a few years after the earthquake, the neighborhood became a melting pot. Japanese Americans living in Chinatown before the earthquake moved to the Fillmore, settling around the few Japanese-owned businesses already in the neighborhood . . . . Pilipnos, Mexicans, African Americans and Russians joined the Japanese Americans and the Jewish population. With its integrated schools and some integrated businesses, Fillmore soon had a reputation as one of the most diverse neighborhoods west of the Mississippi."

The World War 2 years brought a great influx of African American families, both looking for work in the Bay Area's war plants and navy yards, and fleeing the Jim Crow oppression of the South. And while they certainly found plenty of prejudice and rejection based on race in San Francisco, the Fillmore neighborhood was in many respects an oasis of community and inclusion. The exception was the Japanese population, who were yanked out of their businesses and homes during the war and sent to internment camps. Some were able to return and reclaim their businesses after the war, but most never came back.

Soon, as mentioned above, the neighborhood exploded with music clubs. Harlem of the West is a beautiful collection of photographs from the area's heyday, along with dozens of short oral histories from many of the musicians and other local residents who were still available to be interviewed when the authors were first doing their research in the early 2000s. We are lucky that most of the clubs had photographers who took photos of the patrons and musicians. The middle section of the book goes through the neighborhood, club by club, telling the stories of how each was established, and the colorful characters who ran them and performed in them. A reading of this book is a visit back in time to a wonderful era of jazz and inclusiveness in San Francisco history.

Of course, Golden Eras come to an end, and the Fillmore was done in by the usual culprits, prejudice and greed. Even while Fillmore residents were enjoying what many described in retrospect as great times in their lives, the City of San Francisco's Redevelopment Commission was taking pictures of the buildings and labeling them decrepit and liable for demolition. The buildings were, indeed, old and in need of repair, but the people who lived in the neighborhood loved them. From the mid-60s through the late-70s, whole blocks of the neighborhood were summarily knocked down. Geary Street which runs through the neighborhood was widened into a 6-lane highway as it goes through the Fillmore in order to allow drivers to essentially bypass the neighborhood on their way from the western urban suburbs to their jobs downtown. More houses and businesses were destroyed so that an ugly mall, intended to be a Japanese community center and known citywide as Japantown, could be built. When I lived in San Francisco from 1986 through 2008, Japantown was a dingy affair full of cheesy gift shops and mediocre restaurants. Certainly not worth eviscerating a vibrant neighborhood for. Well, developers gonna develop, I guess.

The Fillmore neighborhood still exists, of course, but it is a relative shell. Attempts at reclaiming some of the area's history can be seen here and there, for example in the fact that there is now a stone inlaid in the sidewalk in front of each spot where a jazz club once thrived.

The club that gets the most space in the book is Jimbo's Bop City, which operated from 1949 through 1965. It became, I think it's fair to say, the Fillmore's preeminent spot for musicians and jazz lovers, as players from all over would come to join the local musicians and go until sunup. I have a tiny little personal sliver of connection with that place, despite that fact that it closed 20 years before I arrived in town. During my San Francisco jazz writing days, I came to know a sax player named Vince Wallace, a white saxophonist who as a young musician had made his mark jamming with the famous players in Bop City, originally wearing a fake mustache in order to hide how young he was. I got to interview Vince in 2003 for a website called JazzTimes. It's long (there's a shock!) but Vince was a very articulate fellow about the creative process, about jazz, and about his time at Bop City in the Fillmore. For anyone interested, the interview is here:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/vince-wallace-a-jazz-legend-stands-tall-in-oakland-...


Here's a picture of Vince in his younger days at Bop City which I found here:
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Jimbo%27s_Bop_City

I should note that this is basically a reread for me. The book was originally published in 2007, and I bought and read it then. Over the intervening years, many folks who had lived the history and/or had photographs to share approached the authors, who decided to use these new stories and photos and expand and republish the book. The original publishers ChronicleBooks, had taken the book out of print, so the authors launched an Indiegogo campaign and republished the expanded version themselves. This new version suffers from some copy editing problems, but those are not enough to lessen the book's overall value, which is substantial.

>237 rocketjk: Thanks for the great review. It looks like an interesting book. I know you are interested in books about baseball, and your story about the Fillmore district in San Francisco reminded me of the chapter in the biography of Willie Mays by James S. Hirsch about Mays' problems purchasing a home in San Francisco when he moved there as part of the Giants move from New York in 1958. It was a long, drawn out struggle to get a seller in the Miraloma neighborhood to sell him the home he wanted. It took an international news scandal and humiliation for the city of San Francisco to convince the seller to sell to Willie and his wife.

>238 janoorani24: Yes, I remember that nasty bit of San Francisco history, too. I couple of years ago I read a history of the 1966 pennant races, won by the Baltimore Orioles in the AL and the LA Dodgers in the NL. The book recounts the fact that Frank Robinson, when he was traded to Baltimore from Cincinnati, had a similar problem finding someone to sell him a house. Well, Maryland is the South. San Francisco is mythologized as a city of liberality and inclusiveness, but the truth sadly quite different from the myth. Thanks for the kind words about the review.

In my post-Harlem of the West "between book" reading I took a stroll through Stack 1:

* “A Physician in the Arctic,” excerpted from Down to the Sea by Wilfred T. Grenfell in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Wild Pitch Wound Up Being Game-Ending Out” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Who is this Woman that Beckoneth and Warneth Me from the Place Where She Is, and in Whose Eyes Is Woeful Remembrance? I Guess Who She Is” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* Two poems by Salah Abd Al-Sabur from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “The Day by Day Mosque” by Mortada Gzar from Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim
* Day 6, Story 2 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

Speaking of baseball, I'm now reading and very much enjoying the baseball history Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy, about the pennant races of 1908.

Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy



This one's for baseball fans--and more precisely for those interested in baseball history--only. It's a history of the dual pennant races of the 1908 season, a year that saw both the decades-old National League and the essentially brand new American League enjoy seasons in which three teams in each league were still in contention right up through the final week. Author Cait Murphy, though, focuses mostly on the National League race between the Pittsburgh Pirate, the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.

Not only were the pennant races exciting, but this particular season offers an excellent view of the game as it was evolving away from its earlier, extremely rowdy days, when professional baseball was often essentially a barroom brawl on grass, into something somewhat approximating the game we know today. Although, to be sure, subtle and not-so-subtle cheating, like elbowing a baserunner to slow his progress, or even tugging on his belt loop, vicious umpire baiting, fistfights and other forms of mayhem had certainly not disappeared. Some of the most famous players of early baseball history took part in the action that season, including Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Joe McCarthy, Mordecai "Three Fingers" Brown, and the Cubs' famous double-play combination, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance. And then of course there was poor New York Giant Fred Merkle, whose base running gaff late in the season proved extremely costly to the Giants, so much so that the incident has lived in baseball lore for these 116 years as "Merkle's Boner."

The books seems extremely well researched, and Murphy's writing style is clear and appealingly breezy, even if she does occasionally slip into the over-indulgent metaphor. If you are at all interested in baseball history, this is a very fun book. And I will wrap up this review offering up this baseball-themed takeoff on Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" by much admired sportswriter of yore, Grantland Rice:

Last night while I pondered dreary, grouchy, sore and limp--
O'er the dope in my apartments, far upon the thirteenth floor,
As I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door,
"Tis some bill collector," thought I, "rapping at my chamber,
Only that and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember, I was thinking of September,
And the finish of the league race--what the future had in store--'
And I started prophesying where the pennant would be flying,
Tell at last I gave up trying, feeling very sad and sore,
Grumbling, slowly: "Nevermore."

As I sat there, nearly bug-house, longing for the nearby jug-house,
Once again I heard the tapping, tapping at my chamber door;
So I opened it, shining craven, wishing for somme happy haven--
When, behold--there flaps a Raven, stalking in across the floor--
Stalking Edgar Allan Poe-ish, right across my rugless floor
Ach du Lieber! I was sore.

"Raven," cried I: "Why the devil have you come here? On the lines
I thought Mr. Poe had written you would ever Nevermore,
What has brought you--you intriguer--with that look so keen and sore--
Speak up there, you old bush leaguer--why have you returned, you--
State your trouble and then skip, sir--leave me quickly, I implore."
Quoth the Raven: "What's the score?"

First of all, some of you may recall that my wife and I have been in the midst of an intra-New York City move from our rental apartment in Harlem to the coop apartment we bought on the Upper West Side. I just want to mention that while we are still not entirely finished with unpacking, the mover came last Tuesday and hauled our stuff from the old spot to the new, and we are very happy about our decision to take this place (and feeling very lucky to be able to). At the end of May we get on the road back to California to close up the house there, sift through our stuff (including books and LPs) to see what makes the cut for moving east, put the house on the market, turning over the sale itself to our realtor friend there, and head back here. Then will come the real unpacking and settling in. So there is still lots of work to be done, but things are proceeding apace!

Now then: the post-Crazy '08 "Between Book" reading, a rummaging around in Stack 2:

* “Lady Champer’s Prince” by Henry James from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “The Uninvited Face” by Michael Asquith from The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
* “Journey to a Stepwell” by Jenny Bhatt from Each of Us Killers
* “The Greatest Center Fielder Ever”* by Joe Reichler (Sport Magazine) from Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* Day 6, Introduction & Story 3 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

* A great quote: "He made the rest of them look like plumbers." (Casey Stengel talking about Joe Dimaggio)

I've now started Lady in Armor, a 1940s mystery by Octavus Roy Cohen.

wow things sound like they are coming along! so does that mean you were able to close? good luck on this last phase of the move!

>242 rocketjk: Good to hear all is going as well as can be hoped. Will you be kenneling your dog or bringing her with you for a final sniff around her old territory?

>243 cindydavid4: Thanks! Yes, we finally closed about two weeks ago. It was an interesting experience. We had about 8 people sitting around a long table. I felt like I was in a deposition scene in Suits or The Good Wife (a couple of cheesy U.S. lawyer-based guilty pleasure TV shows). There were my wife and me, the couple we were buying the apartment from, our realtor and theirs, our realty lawyer and theirs, and the rep from the building's management agency acting as emcee. It was all very pro-forma and pleasant, but it seemed a bit surreal. There was nothing even vaguely like it when we bought our house in California. New York City, though, is evidently a whole other animal! We really liked the sellers (we hadn't met them before) and they really liked us, which made things a lot nicer, as they felt good about who would be moving into the apartment in which they'd lived for 30 years and raised their kids.

>244 RidgewayGirl: The process of taking care of things in California will be much too long, time-wise, for us to even consider kenneling Rosie for that stretch, so she'll be squeezing one more time into the back of the SUV for the drive cross-country. We're going to try to figure out the best way for her to fly back to NY with us when we return, though. We want to be in the California house when the movers scrunch our stuff into the moving van, but also be present when they deliver everything to the new place, so flying back seems a necessary part of that plan.

>245 rocketjk: Yes closing in NYC is an experience. In Australia it was a noting thing. I’m not sure I was even present. But here in Manhattan it was like a board meeting. Truly amazing. I had been warned but thought the realtor was exaggerating. Glad you are now a seasoned New Yorker!

Crazy '08 sounds so good, I added it to my TBR pile on Scribd.

Congratulations on your new home, Jerry!

Great reviews of The Mountains Wait and Harlem of the West, Jerry. I agree, the Fillmore is essentially no more, based on what I read that it was before I began visiting San Francisco regularly in the early 2000s. The African American community seems to have largely shifted to the East Bay, and the city has been taken over by techies who have taken away from much of the core fibre that I associated it with. Thank goodness for City Lights, though!

Congratulations on your new home from me as well.

Closing in NYC is just a misery. Glad you made it through, and that you got what you wanted. Looking forward to getting together one of these days!

Feels weird to me to read about the different closing procedures. In France there is only one way to close a real estate deal, and that’s before a notary, so it’s always a rather solemn event. The whole process takes about 2-3 months after the parties have signed the (binding) preliminary contract.

ETA: congratulations from me too!

>251 FlorenceArt: That’s v similar to the Australian process but it’s less solemn there. For a big sale you’d crack open a bottle of champers with your agent after the signing.

>241 rocketjk: I don't know much about baseball at all but I do enjoy reading your reviews. I liked this Raven parody very much. Congratulations on the new house!

>249 kidzdoc: " . . . and the city has been taken over by techies who have taken away from much of the core fibre that I associated it with."

One of the main reasons Steph and I decamped for rural Mendocino County back in 2008, and also the reason that when we decided that we wanted to return to city life, we didn't even consider San Francisco (though Oakland slipped into the conversation once or twice) but instead headed straight for NYC.

There is still a significant African American community in the Fillmore, or at least there was when we left San Francisco in 2008, but it is definitely a far cry from the vibrant, cohesive community that thrived in the neighborhood's heyday.

" Thank goodness for City Lights, though!"

Amen!

>252 kjuliff: "For a big sale you’d crack open a bottle of champers with your agent after the signing."

I would have loved to bring along a bottle of champagne and a stack of plastic glasses to see if anyone in our closing gathering would want to raise a quick glass to the completion of the procedure, but most of the folks were in the middle of their work days. More importantly, the folks we were buying the apartment from had lived in it for around 30 years and raised their kids there. I wasn't sure whether the whole affair might be a bit emotional, such that a celebration might not be entirely in order. It turned out that the four of us hit it off (it was the first time we'd met them) quite well, so I felt comfortable after a while asking them whether the sale was a bitter-sweet event for them. They said, no, that once they saw the place with their own furniture removed and the stager's furniture in place, it stopped feeling like home to them. They are off to their own post-kids adventure with a new apartment of their own in Brooklyn. So we could have brought champaign after all!

>254 rocketjk: My partner actually dragged our stunned realtor into a nearby bar after we left our NYC closing, insisting it was our custom. The agent obliged bu I could see he was itching to get back to work. Later on reflecting upon the day, I could hear him recounting the crazy Aussies back in his Manhattan office.

Ah, wow, that all sounds very time-consuming. Congratulations on your flat purchase and good luck with the move from California to NY. You still have a lot ahead of you.

Lady in Armor by Octavus Roy Cohen



Back in March I finished up reading the May 10, 1941, edition of Collier’s Magazine. The magazine was an interesting mix of fiction and journalism. Two of the fiction entries, however, were not complete short stories but instead excerpts from novels the magazine was serializing. I never read those, but instead put the novels on my "short" TBR list. Lady in Armor was one of those. With all the activity around our recent apartment purchase and move, I've been sticking with relatively light reading, and so I decided it was time for this book, which turned out to be a mostly entertaining, more or less standard pot-boiler about a southern U.S. small town being run by a corrupt band of ruthless ne'er-do-wells and the crusading underdog reformer who takes them all on at risk of life and limb.

Octavus Roy Cohen was an extremely prolific writer. Wikipedia credits him with 56 novels, mostly of the detective/crime genre, I think. He published several mystery series, each with its own private detective hero. One of those series featured the character Florian Shippey, one of the first black private eyes in American literature. However, also as per Wikipedia, those books are remembered now mostly for their unflattering portrayal of blacks. Think "Amos and Andy" and you'll get the idea. Even at the time they were published, Cohen's black characters were derided as, in the words of one reviewer, "a travesty and a caricature." There is a side plot in this book featuring black characters who do, indeed, speak in an insulting dialect. On the other hand, one of those characters is revealed as both cool and courageous in a deadly crisis and ends up saving everyone's bacon, so at least there's that.

The action takes place in the fictional town of Karnak* (in a state unspecified). When the Democratic primaries for the local county elections draw near, the women of Karnak decide to run a slate of candidates. They don't expect to win any nominations, but they want to register their displeasure at the crooked, graft-laden way the county is being run. They hope some of their candidates will gather 10% of the vote. But the townspeople of Karnak get somehow tickled by the idea of having a female sheriff, and since they know and like the candidate running, more or less as a joke they vote our hero, Dale Meredith, into the post. As readers, we are not at all surprised to learn that Meredith has not only the strong sense of duty, but also the smarts and the backbone to stand up to the town's most powerful (though charming) crook, Neil Berkeley. Twists and turns, some of them deadly, ensue.

Cohen is mostly forgotten now as an author, and for good reason, though he was quite popular in his day. This novel of his is particularly obscure. For example, I am the only LT member with the book listed in his/her/their library. My conjecture is that the novel format was simply cobbled together from the serialized sections. I suppose it's a curiosity piece. And while, as I said, I found the storyline fairly entertaining, there are plenty of other authors of this time period/genre who don't feature the specific racist elements that Cohen's writing suffered from.

If by any chance anyone is interested in learning more about Cohen, this seems a pretty good short bio:
https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/octavus-roy-cohen/

* The only town named Karnak that my quick online search turned up is in southern Illinois, but the book is fairly clear that the action takes place deeper into the South than that.

My post-Lady in Armor "between book" reading was a bounce around Stack 1:

* “Gold,” excerpted from America by George Philip Krapp in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Billings’ Wild Whiffed 21 for Pioneer Record” from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Dark Interpreter” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “The Sermon on the Mount" by Tawfiq Sayigh from New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* “Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby from Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim
* Day 6, Story 4 from The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)

I've now begun another baseball history, The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan, about the famous 1951 pennant race between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.

Great review of Lady in Armor, Jerry. I'll pass on it, for obvious reasons.

Spoiler alert: The Giants win the pennant!! The Giants win the pennant!!

>257 rocketjk: How interesting this is. I'm always interested by authors who were prolific in their time, but have since faded into obscurity (in this case, apparently well-deserved).

The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan



This fine baseball history tells the story of the National League pennant race of 1951, when the New York Giants came from 13 1/2 games back with just 6 weeks to go to overtake the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the pennant. The regular season ended in a tie, resulting in a best-of-three playoff series to decide the victor. In the third and deciding game of that series, the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the 9th inning trailing by three runs, but won the game thanks to a home run by third baseman Bobby Thomson, one of the most famous and dramatic home runs in baseball history, known alternately as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" and "The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff." (The stadium the Giants played in, the Polo Grounds, was built below a rocky cliff in Harlem known as Coogan's Bluff.)

Thomas Kiernan, a life-long New York Giants fan who was just entering college in 1951, provides the story of that season through the eyes of the Giants. He gives effective pocket biographies of the team's important players and their manager, Leo Durocher. Happily, rather than giving a blow-by-blow account of every day of the season, he picks out important points in the campaign to focus in on and provides overall themes that he allows us to follow along with. Just often enough, he picks out particular games to describe in detail, with an eye toward understanding how a season that ended in a tie could have a multiplicity of key moments: a double play not turned, an easy grounder bobbled, a light-hitting backup player's unexpected home run. Also, he shows us the personalities of many of the players and explores the dynamic that allowed the team to coalesce into one that could pull off such an unlikely comeback.

That's the first half of the book. Kiernan was writing in the early 1970s (the book was published in 1975) or only about 22 years after the event. That meant he was able to track down many of the most important Giant players from the team and interview them at length. The second half of the book is a collection of those interviews, providing a Roshoman-type picture of the season, the final game, and even the famous final rally that culminated in Thompson's blast. For example, in that final inning, Giants infielder Alvin Dark, having led off with a single, was on first. Given that the Dodgers led by three, his run didn't mean anything. Yet the Dodgers' excellent first baseman, Gil Hodges, played close to first base to keep Dark from getting a good lead, leaving a hole the Giant Don Mueller hit a grounder through for another hit that might otherwise have been a double play. Was that a positioning blunder by Hodges? One or two Giants said yes. One said that Hodges should have made the play anyway, but that his view of the ball had been blocked momentarily by Dark cutting in front of him. Mueller himself said that he hit the ball there because he saw the hole, and would have gotten a hit in some other direction had Hodges been playing off the back. And so on.

In addition, a few of the players providde fascinating insights into the nature of baseball from a player's perspective. Giants first baseman Whitey Lockman, for example, explained his theory that both hitting and pitching come down to half-inch zones within the strike zone. The pitchers have their half inches that they're trying to put the ball in, and the hitters have their own half-inch zones in which they can make solid contact. Lockman says that if a ball is just a bit outside of one of his zones, muscle memory can take over and still allow him to be successful, but the further away the ball is from the zone, the less muscle memory can help him.

Kiernan had an unfortunate fixation on sussing out the underlying causation of the comeback and final Giants win. Was it divine providence? Luck? Destiny? The players seemed mostly amused by the question. Other than the religious Dark, who was sure he saw God's hand in the events,* most of the players said something like, "The Dodgers had the better players, but we were the more tight-knit team. They squabbled, we pulled together." Kiernan also had a penchant for the occasional cliched overwriting. Fast outfielders "lope gazellelike," for example. But mostly this is kept to a dull roar. Overall, especially due to the excellent set of player interviews, as noted above I found The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff a very good entry in the genre of baseball histories.

* As for my agnostic self, if there indeed is a God, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he/she/they were a baseball fan. But I certainly hope that God isn't fixing ballgames.

>261 rocketjk: Great review of The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, Jerry. Does the author mention whether he or anyone else thinks that Don Newcombe, the starting pitcher for the Dodgers, should have been lifted for a reliever when the wheels started to come off in the bottom of the 9th inning?

>262 kidzdoc: Well, Newcombe eventually was lifted, as, famously, Thompson hit his homer off of Ralph Branca, who'd been brought in to face him. But what Kiernan does relate is that Newcombe had been telling his catcher, Rube Walker, that he was out of gas the entire inning, and told his manager, Chuck Dressen, the same thing during an earlier mound visit. But Walker and Dressen both thought Newcombe was the man to finish off the inning.

And here's what I meant to mention but forgot to in my review: All of Kiernan's questioning about the deeper meaning and/or cause of the comeback and final rally are rendered even more absurd (well, at least to me) by the fact that a Wall Street Journal article in 2001 revealed the fact that the Giants had actually been cheating. Beginning in July, the Giants began positioning someone in the centerfield scoreboard during their home games, armed with binoculars that enabled him to steal the signs the opposing catcher was flashing to his pitcher.

An article on the SABR (Society of American Baseball Research) website tells the story pretty well:
https://sabr.org/journal/article/focus-on-the-giants-cheating-scandal-of-1951/

However, from that article, we get this:
The logical questions, in retrospect, of course are, “Did the Giants truly benefit from their system? Did the Giants in fact ‘steal’ the pennant?” The answer, according to baseball researchers, is a resounding maybe. There is no question that the Giants played much better baseball after July 20 but was that better play the result of the Giants’ plotting? . . .

There is no question that the Giants began playing at a torrid pace once all the elements of their plan were in place. Before July 20, the Giants stood at just 47-41, a good but not spectacular .534. After July 20 the Gothams went 24-6 (.800) at home and 27-12 (.693) on the road. Without those road wins the Giants would never have won the pennant. If the Giants’ cheating were a determining factor in their season, one would think it should be obvious. However, the picture is not so clear

The first surprise was the team batting average. “On the morning of July 20, the Giants were batting .266 at home and .252 on the road. For the rest of the season, New York hit .256 in the Polo Grounds and .269 away. So much for the advantage of knowing what pitch was coming.”3

Interestingly, the one Giant whose batting markedly improved after the cheating began was Bobby Thomson himself; he batted .241 before the scheme began and .346 after.

The real revelation is the Giants’ pitching. Before July 20, the Giants’ pitching staff had a 3.47 ERA at home and 4.49 on the road. From July 20 to the end of the season, their ERA was 2.90 at home and 2.93 away. The improvement was both dramatic and consistent. The only signs that turned around this Giants team apparently were the ones their own catchers were flashing to their pitchers.”4

A logical question, which unfortunately cannot be answered scientifically, is, “Did the Giants’ pitching staff suddenly improve because of psychological factors?” In other words, did the Giants’ hurlers pitch more effectively because they all believed that their offense was going to spot them more runs? It is certainly worth considering. In the final analysis, the Giants needed to win only one more game to force the playoff. If the Giants’ system won the team even a single game in the tight pennant race, then it has to be considered a success. In a long season, one game can make all the difference. For the 1951 Giants it just may have.

The day after the WSJ article about the sign stealing, The NY Times ran a story including an interview with Branca revealing that he'd known since 1954 that the Giants had been stealing pitches. I'm not sure if this is paywalled, but anyway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/01/sports/sports-of-the-times-branca-knew-51-gia...

The original WSJ article is here, but I can't read it because it is, indeed, behind a paywall:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB980896446829227925

But all of the Giants players kept the secret during their interviews with Kiernan.