rocketjk's 50-Book need to read - 2023

Greetings, all! Here's my 2023 hullabaloo of a reading challenge. Last year (2022) brought about a bit of a dip: I read 53 books, which was a good effort but didn't come close to 2021's 67 or 2020's crazy 82-book rampage. We'll see where this year takes me. 2019 found me reading 63 books. My previous five totals, when I still owned my used bookstore, had been 41, 41, 46, 44, 46 and, in the first year of the store, only 40. I doubt I'll ever hit 82 again, but who knows?

In case you're interested:
2022 50-Book Challenge thread
2021 50-Book Challenge thread
2020 50-Book Challenge thread
2019 50-Book Challenge thread
2018 50-Book Challenge thread
2017 50-Book Challenge thread
2016 50-Book Challenge thread
2015 50-Book Challenge thread
2014 50-Book Challenge thread
2013 50-Book Challenge thread
2012 50-Book Challenge thread
2011 50-Book Challenge thread
2010 50-Book Challenge thread
2009 50-Book Challenge thread
2008 50-Book Challenge thread

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

Master List (Touchstones included with individual listings below):
1: The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
2: Show - The Magazine of the Performing Arts, January 1962 edited by Robert M. Wool
3: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
4: The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
5: How Sleeps the Beast by Don Tracy
6: Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson
7: The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
8: Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
9: American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hoshschild
10: Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography by William E. Gienapp
11: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
12: The Devil's Punchbowl by Greg Iles
13: Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott
14: An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young
15: The River of Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker
16: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
17: The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr
18: Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad
19: No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
20: Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys by Steven Gaines
21: Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones
22: Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman
23: Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
24: Natchez Burning by Greg Iles
25: On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
26: Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
27: Mission to Moscow by Joseph E. Davies
28: Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life by Bill Madden
29: The Trackers by Charles Frazier
30: The Slave by Isaac B. Singer
31: Out of the Red by Red Smith
32: Enigmas of Spring by João Almino
33: The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
34: Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns
35: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara
36: Three Thirds of a Ghost by Timothy Fuller
37: Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas
38: Life Magazine - October 24, 1969 edited by Ralph Graves
39: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defore
40: The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr
41: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
42: Call for the Dead by John le Carre
43: Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery
44: Now We're Getting Somewhere by Kim Addonizio
45: The Good Fight by Shirley Chisholm
46: Sappers in the Wire: The Life and Death of Firebase Mary Ann by Keith William Nolan
47: Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
48: Intrigue in Paris by Sterling Noel
49: Mapp & Lucia by E.F. Benson
50: Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz
51: Those Other People by Mary King O'Donnell
52: Voroshilovgrad by Serhij Zhadan
53: Life Magazine - October 24, 1969 edited by George P. Hunt
54: The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner
55: Great Sports Stories edited by Herman L. Masin
56: The Missouri Review - Volume 21 Number 2: Men edited by Morgan Speer
57: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey
58: An Old Guy Who Feels Good by Worden McDonald

Book 1: The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer



At the beginning of last year, 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 third novel, The Magician of Lublin.

We are in Poland in the early 20th century. Poland is still part of the Russian Empire rather than independent, and the Czar is still on his throne in Moscow. Occasional revolutions against the occupiers rock Poland, but for the most part the Poles live life resigned to dealing with their Russian occupiers, who seem to intrude on their lives on a daily basis very little. Yasha Mazur lives in the Eastern Polish city of Lublin. In fact, he is known as the Magician of Lublin. He is a master of slight of hand, hypnotism and acrobatics. Cards, both marked and unmarked, fly from his fingers. Never a lock has he been confronted with that he could not spring open in a few seconds. He is known, in fact as The Magician of Lublin, and his name is known around the countryside and as far as the great city of Warsaw. Tasha things himself an honest man. Although he is pals with the members of the thieves brotherhood in Lublin, who clamor at him to join their ranks ("With your skills, you could skim the cream right off the top!"), Yasha refuses to use his talents for crime. Monogamy, however, is another issue. Yasha has a loving wife, Esther, who waits patiently at home for him during his long performing road trips, even knowing that he has mistresses along his route. Yasha has a mistress in Lublin and has been having a longterm affair with his young performance assistant. Most alluring of all is the beautiful widow in Warsaw, Emilia. Professionally, Yasha should be at the top of the world. He is held back only by the fact that he is a Jew in Poland. Though he is well known, the very best theaters are closed to him, and the fees his manager is able to obtain for him are well below what his status should be bringing. Emelia is the well-meaning temptress. In Western Europe, or even in America, she tells Yasha, such antisemitism is no longer paramount, especially if he were to convert. Yasha must forsake Esther once and for all, run off to France or England with Emelia and her teenage daughter, where, once he has converted, they will be married. The problem is that it will all take money that neither of them have. Yasha believes in God, and identifies as a Jew, but has very little use for the trappings of Orthodox Judaism. Until, that is, he wanders into a synagogue a couple of times during the story and finds himself moved by the fervent belief of the worshippers, whose prayers remind him of his childhood in his father's house, where religion was all encompassing.

So here are the questions of practice and morality that Singer sets up for us in the early pages of this exhilarating blast of a novel, utilizing his standard whirlwind style of prose that crams details into each setting that serves to drop his readers straight into the maelstrom of daily life on the streets of urban Poland and in the minds of his characters.

Here are my favorite two lines in the book (especially the second):

"He stood staring at a spot on the door latch, feeling hemmed in on all sides by uncanny forces. Behind him the silence rustled and snorted."

Singer skillfully sets up these choices for Yasha, the choices that must be made between fame and love and pleasure on the one side and loyalty, self-respect and morality on the other. Can Yasha really abandon Esther, repay her for her years of love, forbearance, understanding and emotional support in this cruel manner? Can he turn from his people and from the religion of his father, all he's ever known and the way he's defined himself for a lifetime and join the persecuting others in order to get ahead? Can he cross the firm line he's drawn for himself and use his talents to steal the money he needs to gain his goals of riches and fame in a foreign country? It is Skinner's great skill that all of these choices are seen as human choices, the moral questions that each of us, in some manner or other, are more than likely to confront. Skinner, in the telling, does not moralize, but instead shows us Yasha wrestling with these issues, as Jacob wrestled with the angel. And we do not get the idea that, no matter which decisions Yasha makes, Singer is going to cast judgement. As readers we feel confident that Tasha, the Magician of Lublin, is alive enough, and self-aware enough, to steadfastly judge himself, should the need arise.

Book 2: Show - The Magazine of the Performing Arts, January 1962 edited by Robert M. Wool



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). I have a stack of old magazines in the closet of my home office that I've picked up along the way at thrift stores and used bookshops and such. I have been gradually reading through them with an eye toward the recycling bin, except for rare occasions when I find them worth keeping. Several on that stack are different editions of Show Magazine. Last year I read the July 1962 edition. And while this January 1962 edition was interesting, it didn't quite match its July cousin in quality.

There were a series of interesting reviews and columns, most notably Virgil Thompson's reviews of the recent operas adapted from the novels The Crucible and Wings of the Dove, John Simon's lament about the ennui of the theater of that day entitled "How to be Bored in Three Acts" and Leonard Feather's unfortunate (as seen from my own tastes) savaging of the avant garde jazz of his day, which he refers to as "anti-jazz." Of the feature stories, the most interesting are theater critic Harold Hobson's interview with John Gielgud, a complaint about the "current" condition of New York's 42nd Street area by Henry Hope Reed, Jr. and Gay Talese, and a feature about Otto Preminger's encampment in Washington, D.C. for the filming of the movie version of Advise and Consent.

When I posted the review of the 7/62 edition last year, my LT friend lisapeet was compelled to do some research and reported the following about the history of Show Magazine and reported thusly:

" . . . there isn't a lot out there on Show. It ran from 1961–65, originally founded by zillionaire Huntington Hartford and then, when it went into debt, sold to American Theater Press, which publishes Playbill theater programs. I love those old deluxe mid-century periodicals too—there was a lot wrong with that era but I have to admit to nostalgia for that slavish devotion to the arts as a thing that would make you a better person."

Thanks again, Lisa! The next magazine added to the rotation will be still another edition of Show, this one from March 1963.

Book 3: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery



After my "first book of the year will be an Isaac Singer novel" tradition comes another annual tradition. Each year my wife and I give each other to read the book that we enjoyed the most from the previous year. This year my wife gave me If I Survive You to read. This is a very fine first novel about the Jamaican immigrant experience in Miami, but also about the overall experience of a relatively light-skinned Black person trying to forge a personal/ethnic identity. "What are we," young Trelawny, the American born child of Jamaican immigrants, asks his mother early on. Are we Black, he wants to know? Do we just say we're Jamaican? And what if the person asking us doesn't know what that means? This question resurfaces throughout Trelawny's childhood. In the meantime, his family is disfunctional. And when his parents split, Trelawny and his older brother, Delano, get split up, one to each parent.

There is a lot going on in this novel, a lot of good writing, a lot of good delving into the questions of race, ethnicity and class, and about what it's like to be among the working poor in the midst of a recession. So the book is well worth reading. Although, I also feel, it's disjointed, Escoffery not entirely in control of his narrative. At first the book more or less skims over the surface of Trelawny's childhood, the years flowing by over just a few short pages. Eventually the book evolves into a family drama, mostly revolving around the competition between the two brothers as they enter adulthood. But also there are chapters about Trelawny's attempt to get ahead as a highly educated, underemployed teacher. Other points of view are entered, other stories are told. Each is engaging and well done, but it didn't always seem to me that there was a coherent whole. I can conjecture that Escoffery was going for a textured tapestry approach with each part overlaid with the others to create a multi-faceted whole. That style can certainly work well. Here, though, I thought the book was just off the mark. Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning, I do think this novel well worth reading. The characters and situations are memorable, and the prose well done, though I must say I did eventually tire of Escoffery's use of the second person style of narration. I could easily see how a person could love this book. I am very much looking forward to more work from this writer.

Book 4: The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is a fun old paperback, published in 1956. As Bradbury makes clear in his introduction, he has put together a collection of stories that are much more appropriately thought of as fantasy rather than science fiction. It's an entertaining set of stories, although somewhat hit or miss. The famous title story, really a novella, is a tour de force of surrealist storytelling. I'd never read it before and was absolutely entranced throughout. That story sets up a standard, however, that none of the other, shorter, entries never come close to matching, except maybe perhaps Shirley Jackson's well-known "The Summer People." Of the rest, Oliver La Farge's "The Resting Place," with it's elements of Native American legends, and Loren Eiseley's subtle "Buzby's Pertified Woman" were my favorites. Also intriguing was "Earth's Holocaust" by none other than Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Book 5: How Sleeps the Beast by Don Tracy



How Sleeps the Beast is a very obscure novel, published in 1937, about a lynching in Maryland. This, I'm afraid, requires a bit of background. One of the mystery/crime series I'm in the midst of now is the equally obscure Giff Speer series from the late 60s/early 70s, written by this same author, Don Tracy. I got curious about who Mr. Tracy might be (or could it be a pseudonym?) and did a little online research. I discovered that Don Tracy was indeed the fellow's real name, that he had been publishing novels since the 30s, and that one of those novels had been this one, a book about a lynching deemed too controversial by U.S. publishers and only offered up to readers in England and, in particular, France. It was only 1950 that the book was finally published in the U.S. as a luridly covered paperback by Lion Publishing. So naturally, I had to go online and order this book, sending all the way to England for a first edition hardcover published by Constable Publishers, London. It took me a while, but now I've finally read the novel.

How Sleeps the Beast is a mixed bag, to put it mildly. It's the story of an ugly, ugly lynching in a rural Maryland town, taken part in by a very large, rabid, hate-filled mob, with the lynching itself, far from a "simple" hanging, and exceedingly cruel and brutal affair. All this is true to the actual events of many, many lynchings, in which Blacks were not just hung, but disemboweled and sometimes burned alive. So as far as that goes, while the book is hard to read, it's a valuable historical testimony. However, three major flaws are also evident. The first is that the Blacks of this town are often (not always) portrayed as the simplistic, child-like folk of the worst racist tropes. Second, and even worse, is that the victim, in the event, is actually guilty of the crime he's accused of, and again via an even more vile racist stereotype, having gotten drunk and in his inebriated haze decided to go off in search of a white woman. Any white woman. When in reality, people in the Jim Crow South got lynched for protesting about being cheated out of payment for the crops they'd grown, or making their houses look too attractive, or having money in the bank: anything that made them appear to be rising "above their station." So suggesting that a Black person had to be guilty of an actual crime in order to be lynched in fact borders on doing more harm than good in terms of the message taken away by the reader, no matter how deprived the perpetrators of the lynching are portrayed as being. The third, and least objectionable in the long run, flaw is that the characters are essentially all cardboard cutouts, put in place to espouse this point of view or that one, whether evil or well intentioned, strong or weak, cynical or idealistic.

So, despite the book being intriguing at the outset, and a good fictional portrayal of the horrors of racial hatred and the depravity of lynch mobs, in the end it falls short for me of being anything ultimately but an historical curiosity.

Book 6: Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson



Kate Clifford Larson has delivered a stirring and extremely readable biography of an extremely important and inspirational--though I expect not well enough known at this point--figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Fannie Lou Hamer was the children of tenant farmers, and became one herself, in Jim Crow Mississippi. With very little education but with a burning drive to learn and an iron-willed dignity that would not allow her to sit still for the horrific realities of 1950s and 60s Mississippi, Hamer gradually became involved in the grass roots efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help rural Blacks attain voting rights in the face of furious, violent and often deadly resistance by segregationist whites. The book begins with the story of Hamer's childhood and family life, of necessity intertwined with an in-depth description of the depravities and horror of Jim Crow oppression, which was brutal and ubiquitous. When, as an adult, Hamer went into town to attempt to register to vote, she came home to find that her white landlord was promising to evict Hamer, along with her husband and children, unless she promised to go back to town the next day to rescind her registration. Hamer replied, "I registered to vote for me, not for you," and her landlord followed up on his threat. Later, in a Winona, Mississippi, jail cell, Hamer and four of her companions received vicious beatings, and Hamer was raped, for the crime of trying to integrate a bus stop diner. The beating left Hamer's health compromised for the rest of her life. But Hamer, due to her articulate, passionate speeches, her inspirational singing and her drive and inclusiveness, nevertheless became a powerful figure in the movement, to the extent that she was the keynote speaker before the Democratic National Committee when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a Black party organized to fight the seating of the fiercely segregationist Mississippi Democratic contingent at the Democratic Presidential Convention in Atlantic City in 1964.

In addition to being a wholly compelling biography of a fascinating figure, Larson's book also provides an important "from the inside" history of SNCC that compliments and in many ways expands upon the more global history of that organization, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson, which I read a year or two back. The biography also provides an effective description of the full deadly fury of Jim Crow. So in some ways the book is hard to get through, especially over the first 50 pages or so, as many of its details are horrific and depressing. Once Hamer moves into adulthood and begins her freedom-building activities, the book becomes a page-turner. This is one of the best, most fascinating, if sometimes depressing, biographies I've read over the past 10 years.

Book 7: The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). Going by what's found in this collection, the late 1950s was certainly a fertile time for American fiction. This excellent volume includes stories by Nelson Algren, Gina Berriault, Evan S. Connell, Jr., William Eastlake, Flannery O'Connor ("Greenleaf"), and Tillie Olson, to name the more famous authors.

Of the writers who were new to me, the highlights were "Man's Courage" about a Black officer at an Army training camp in the South, by Wyatt Blasingame, "Run, Run Away, Brother," about a man thinking back ruefully about his boyhood treatment of his brother, who has died in World War 2, by John Campbell Smith, "Saturday is a Poor Man's Sport," a story about sadness and loneliness (but still somehow beautiful) in a boarding house, by Henrietta Wiegel, and a quiet lovely story, again about brothers, called "Escape to the City," by Gordon Woodward.

Book 8: Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). Dean Acheson was a high-ranking U.S. diplomat throughout the WW2 war years and into the years immediately afterwards. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations and International Conferences from December 1944 through August 1945, then Under Secretary of State until June 1947 and finally returned to government service to become Secretary of State in the Truman administration from 1949 through 1953. Acheson was Secretary of State between George Marshall and John Foster Dulles.

This book contains a series of reminiscences/portraits of the diplomats and politicians he worked with (or, in some cases, against) and/or under during his time in the diplomatic corps. The book opens with chapters about Ernest Bevin and Robert Shuman, Acheson's opposite numbers for England and France, respectively, during the years at the end of, and immediately after, the war, when the large Western democracies were figuring out how they wanted to administer Western Europe and how to negotiate with Soviet Russia and create a united front against what they saw as Soviet plans for further expansion. There is a chapter, also, on Acheson's dealing with several Russian diplomats and their negotiating tactics. The chapters cover negotiations around the establishment of the United Nations, the administration of the post-war occupation of Germany and the establishment of the western alliance that became NATO. Of particular interest to me were the deliberations that led to the decision to bring West Germany into the alliance (i.e., to rearm them, a development that was viewed with some alarm, as I've learned from other reading, in many parts of Europe). While there was serious reluctance to take this step in some quarters, in the end the West Germans were seen by the U.S. and the Western European powers as a pivotal member of any alliance that would be able to stand up to Stalin and his successors.

Other politicians Acheson profiles here include Winston Churchill, Arthur Vandeberg (a Republican leader in the Senate whom Acheson describes as a tough opponent of the policies of the Truman administration who could nevertheless come around to support individual initiatives if he saw that the administration was, in fact, on the right track), George Marshall and Conrad Adenauer.

Nowadays, the first thing you notice in the title of this book, of course, is the word "men." Wives are described as, essentially, diplomatic accessories and Acheson mentions nary a highly position woman in his writings. This he certainly takes for granted. And is more or less goes without saying that in 1961, when this book was published, "men" means "white men." That said, Acheson was quite a good writer, and his profiles are also laced with humorous anecdotes that keep the book somewhat light. So, if one is willing to ascribe any sort of positive (or benign) qualities to American foreign policy in the first place, or give Acheson the benefit of the doubt regarding his own motivations, these portraits and Acheson's descriptions of the issues involved and the negotiations surrounding them, as well as the picture provided of the life of the high level diplomats of the era, make for interesting and even entertaining reading.

Book note: Goodness knows how long I've owned this book. It's entry date into my LT library dates back to my LibraryThing Big Bang, my initial explosion of LT entries in 2008. (Actually, the very beginning, as the book's entry date is January 22, 2008. The book has a stamp inside telling us that it was "Withdrawn from the Los Angeles Country Public Library System."

Book 9: American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hoshschild



This is an excellent but horrifying (again!) history about an extremely violent and repressive, but mostly (as per the title) forgotten 4-year period in American history, from 1917, when the U.S. entered WW I, to 1920. Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 as a liberal reformer, and many like-minded politicians and other figures joined his administration to help with the project of making life better for laborers and helping to reduce the large wealth gap that had formed between the working class and the owners of industry. (Sound familiar?) In many important ways, however, Wilson was no bargain. Although he'd served as governor of New Jersey, Wilson was a Georgia native and a firm proponent of Jim Crow. For example, he went about resegregating the areas of the federal government that had made progress in that area. At first he was opposed to U.S. involvement in WW I, running for reelection under the slogan, "He kept us out of war." But as the war progressed, and the allies became hard pressed, they turned to the U.S. for armaments and other supplies, going into huge debt to the U.S government and munitions companies, among others, to the extent that an Allied defeat in the war would have occasioned massive defaults and extensive losses to U.S. creditors. Well, that couldn't be allowed. That's not the only cause that Hochschild provides for the U.S. entry into the war, but it is an extremely significant one, and something I'd never realized.

Once the U.S. was involved, Wilson's Attorney General and other high-ranking figures went to town, using the war effort as an excuse for furious and violent repression. The so-called Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime punishable by long prison terms to criticize the war effort or the government, or to complain about war profiteering. A nationwide civilian vigilante organization called the American Protective League was organized and given carte blanche for violent and even often deadly activities. People got lynched for refusing to buy War Bonds. Massive, coordinated, roundups of draft-aged men took place, and woe betide anyone who couldn't show a draft card. This was all a cover for nativist, rightwing politicians who wanted to hound immigrants, the labor movement, conscientious objectors, socialists, Jews, Catholics and, it goes without saying, Blacks. Good old J. Edgar Hoover got his start during these days. And Wilson, still supposedly a reformer, either condoned or turned a blind eye to all of it. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Espionage Act (very little espionage was ever uncovered), and did so in a unanimous ruling despite the presence of Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes on the court (Holmes, in particular, later did an about face on this subject). The whole period was a horror show from beginning to end. It wasn't until the end of the war and, in particular, the advent of the Warren Harding administration, that some of the main perpetrators of the offenses began to be discredited (in events reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy's toppling) and the American body politic finally lost their appetite for the repression. And although Harding is generally remember with derision nowadays, Hoschshild makes the point that he immediately began commuting the sentences of and releasing from jail the many political prisoners still being held under the Espionage Act long after the war, and the dangers of espionage, had ended. Or, has Harding put it to a journalist off the record even before assuming the presidency, "Why should we kid each other? Debs* was right, we never should have been in that war."

* Leading, and extremely popular, Socialist politician Eugene Debs, who had previously garnered massive amounts of votes while running for president, and running again for president in 1920 from his prison cell (jailed under the Espionage Act), still garnered 900,000 votes nationwide. Harding let him out. Debs, Emma Goldman, and other socialist and anti-war leaders get excellent pocket biographies in this book.

This is a very well-written history, though towards the end it becomes progressively (you should pardon the expression) harder to read, as it is largely a recitation of objectionable people and events. Hochschild does spend a bit of time at the very end drawing parallels between that time and this one in American history. How could he not? Unpleasantness aside, the book is fascinating and provides, I believe, essential information for all Americans (at the very least) wanting to understand the antecedents of today's massive strains of nativist, repressive movements that currently flourish here.

Book 10: Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography by William E. Gienapp



This is a very enjoyable, well written and relatively brief (200 pages) biography of Abraham Lincoln. The title infers that the book describes only Lincoln's term as president, but in fact it is neatly divided, pretty much in half. The first 100 pages provide a description of Lincoln's childhood and then his career in law and politics leading up to his Civil War administration, from his farm-bound childhood through his early adulthood working any odd job to keep afloat, to his apprenticeship in the legal field, his coming into his own as a lawyer and his career in Illinois state politics. It was interesting to learn that the upshot of the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates was that Lincoln lost the subsequent election to Douglas. This was all great, as far as I was concerned, because while I had read several accounts of Lincoln's presidency and handling of the war, my knowledge of Lincoln's pre-White House life was essentially made up of legend and shadow.

It was nice to learn that many of the legends surrounding Lincoln were essentially true. He did spend his early childhood living with his family in a log cabin. He did quickly become physically strong, able to wield an axe and cut wheat for hours, though he essentially disliked this sort of labor. He did become an almost unbeatable wrestler, and he was self-taught, taking any moment between farm labors to open a book. Also, he did, indeed, earn himself (and keep throughout his life), a reputation for honest dealings and personal integrity. And finally, he retained throughout his life a genuine humane touch and a desire to speak with and learn from farmers, laborers and merchants, men and women. Also, he was, indeed, afflicted with melancholy and depression throughout his life.

The second half of the book covers Lincoln's presidency and the war years. I already mostly knew the details of the progression of the war and Lincoln's struggles to get the commanders of the Army of the Potomac (from McClellan onward) to go on the offensive against the Confederate armies in the east, but Gienapp also did a fine job of filling in the political details of Lincoln's presidency, as he strove just as hard to hold together the coalition of extreme and moderate Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans wanted to press the war and were in favor of emancipation (gradually in the case of the moderates, immediately and fully in the case of the extremists). The other difference between the two were the degrees to which they believed the Southern states should be punished after the war's end. The Democrats believed in pressing the war only to keep the Southern state from seceding, but wanted to leave slavery in place. The extreme Democrats, who came to be known as Copperheads, were actually opposed to the war and wanted to begin negotiations to end it, allowing the Confederacy to remain in place. Though Lincoln, a mostly moderate Republican, had no patience for the Copperheads, he was skillful in keeping a mix of the rest in his cabinet and even in insisting on political appointments of generals of all political camps in order to ensure that all parties felt they had a stake in the outcome of the war. This ability to give his political rivals some ground, and the thick skin that enabled him to shrug off personal attacks and avoid grudge holding, Gienapp describes as among Lincoln's greatest strengths as a politician.

Book 11: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry



This is a beautiful reverie of a novel about life in the small, rural Kentucky river town of Port William, the people who live and, especially, farm there and the changes that gradually drain the life out of the town's way of life over the years, from the 1910s through the 1980s. The story is told via a sort of fictional talking memoir by the title character. Born near the town in the 1914, Jonah Crow is orphaned not once, but twice. His parents are killed by the Spanish flu when he is a small boy, and Jonah is taken in by an aunt and uncle. But when they die, too, Jonah lands in an orphanage at age 10, finally returning to Port William as a young man and quickly becoming the town barber. Jonah, whose name gradually evolves until he is known by one and all as Jayber, is an outsider many times over. As an orphan, he is separated from the general flow of life of Port William, which flows via family life from generation to generation. As the proprietor of a business that will barely support one person, he has sentenced himself, knowingly, to a life of bachelorhood in a community that, again, values family. All this is an effective strategy by Berry to create in his character the ultimate observer of and commentator about the life of the town and the gradual death of its way of life.

The wonderful strengths of this book are Berry's powers of observation and description, his obvious love of his fictional town, its people and rhythms and its natural setting. Berry is also a poet, and as one of the blurbs on the back of my edition of this book points out, that poetic facility is readily evident in the ebb and flow of Berry's sentences and paragraphs. There is love and sadness in this book, but also much gladness and humor. Here are some examples:

Humor
She was the heroine of a famous story. One time before the war, before her losses, she and Maxie Settle and Dora Cotman were sitting on her back porch hulling peas when Thig Cotman came up in one of his fits. He cursed and ranted, damning them and everybody he knew and himself into the bargain, and demanded to know what Miss Dora had done with his razor, for he wanted to cut his throat with it. And poor Miss Dora, who had hidden the razor for fear that he would cut his throat with it, just sat with her head down until Miss Gladdie said, "Thig, Forrest Senior's got a razor. He would never let you shave with it, but if you wanted to cut your throat with it I'm sure that would be all right." You could see, still, that she was the woman who had said that.

Sadness
I thought a good deal about Forrest Junior and wondered where he was buried and if anybody even knew where. I imagined that soldiers who are killed in war just disappear from the places where they are killed. Their deaths may be remembered by the comrades who saw them die, if the comrades live to remember. Their deaths will not be remembered where they happened. They will not be remembered in the halls of the government. Where do dead soldiers die who are killed in battle? They die at home--in Port William and thousands of other little darkened places, in thousands upon thousands of houses like Miss Gladdie's where The News comes, and everything on the tables and shelves is all of a sudden a relic and a reminder forever.

Human nature, and, by the way, a pretty much exact description of my own father's world view
He also was a son of the Depression. He was born in 1932, right in the bottom of it, and before it ended he had grown into knowledge of it. He got what he thought was the point: national prosperity, and especially the prosperity of the nation's farmers, was not permanent; it was not to be depended on; the predictions and promises of politicians and their experts were not to be depended on; it all had come to nothing once, it all could come to nothing again. As much as any of the old-timers, he regarded the Depression as not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley's Comet. He suspected that the world of the Depression was in fact the real world. . . . He had perceived, with the help of some instruction from his elders, that there were people in the world who proposed that he should work hard for his money, and that they would then take it from him easily. He did not consent to this.

The passage of time and the passing away of a way of life
Now the conversation in my shop was burdened with the knowledge that their {the town's farmers'}work might come to an end. A good many of them already knew to a certainty that they did not know who would be next to farm their farms, or if their farms would be farmed at all. All of them knew that neither farming nor the place would continue long as they were. The dignity of continuity had been taken away. Both past and future were disappearing from them, the past because nobody would remember it, the future because nobody could imagine it. What they knew was passing from the world. Before long it would not be known. They were the last of their kind.

Faith and prayer
I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is liked lying awake at hight, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

That's a lot of quotes, sorry, but I had marked them all as I read and couldn't forbid myself the indulgence of including them all here.

Book 12: The Devil's Punchbowl by Greg Iles



This is the third entry in Greg Iles' Penn Cage mystery/thriller series. Cage is an ex-Houston Assistant District Attorney who, at series start, has moved back to his hometown, Natchez, Mississippi. By now he is the mayor, two years into his 4-year term. As the book begins, an old friend brings Cage evidence that their is evil afoot emanating from the riverboat casino whose presence Cage, as mayor, has arranged for in order to bring jobs and tax revenue. Before long, naturally, mayhem has ensued. The evildoers running the casino are, in fact, evil indeed. Very evil. Super evil. Cage, though, calls in the cavalry, in the person of a super-competent mercenary with a heart of gold who comes to Natchez after taking a leave of absence from his job, whatever it might be, in Afghanistan. Soon a team is assembled and the gloves are off! Except the bad guys are threatening Cage's family and nobody knows who in town, from the local DA to the chief of police on down, is in the bad guys' pocket. It might sound like I'm making fun, and I kind of am, a bit. But if one is in the mood for some willing suspension of disbelief, this book is fun, though with a caveat. The writing is good, and the storyline pulls you along enjoyably. The cliches, though present (people sometimes just don't stand motionless, for example, they stand "utterly motionless") are kept down to a dull roar (as my father would have put it). The real caveat are some graphic descriptions of violence, both a rape scene and a dogfight scene. I understood the need for the graphic dogfight, as Iles was trying, I think, to make sure the reader understood how horrific dogfighting is. As such, it is pretty effective. The two rapes scenes, I found gratuitous. All told, though, we're talking about around 10 pages worth of a 707-page book. Some of the descriptive writing, about the nature and architecture of the Mississippi River area, where the river flows between Mississippi and Louisiana, was quite good. Also, Cage has, as mayor, been trying to end the de facto segregation of the town's public schools, so he is aware of and involved in actual social issues to a certain extent. He's a conflicted good guy's conflicted good guy. If my caveats are not deal killers for you, and if you are in the mood from some escapist good vs. evil thriller reading, this series is OK.

Wow! You've been doing this a long time. That's incredible.

>14 handshakes: Thanks! I was 53 when I started chronicling my reading here on LT. Oh, how I would love to have similar lists from all the years before that, say back to my 13th birthday. Thanks for dropping in. Cheers.

Book 13: Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott



Thistlefoot is a whimsical, though sometimes dark, novel based on Eastern European mythology with magical realism the rule of the day. Isaac and Ballatine Yaga are brother and sister, Jewish young adults living in more or less modern day U.S. and the grandchildren of a refugee from anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. They have been raised on the road, working with their parents in an itinerant traveling puppet show. At 17, Isaac has run off to discover himself via a life on the road. Seven years later, the siblings learn that their grandmother has died and left them an inheritance that is being delivered from Eastern Europe. The sibling reunite on the New York City pier where their inheritance is being delivered. This inheritance turns out to be an entire house. But this house is alive, if not sentient, and it is mobile, for it has legs and can both walk and run. And it can understand commands, as long as they are delivered in Yiddish. Soon they also learn that a being with evil powers is hunting the house and so, now, them. The story is based on the Slavic folklore of Baba Yaga, a woodland witch who is sometimes evil but sometimes a helper.

So there’s plenty of willing suspension of disbelieve needed to enjoy this tale. That would be fine with me, if it weren’t for the fact that I found the writing, on a sentence and paragraph level, sadly lacking. This is a first novel for Nethercott, and she doesn’t seem to be in control of her prose at all. Most damaging, for me, at any rate, is the fact that the pages are full of cliches and lazy language. People glower. Their eyes become daggers. Pain scurries up people’s spines. Opening the book to a random page, one can find this: “Tom’s knuckles paled as they tightened on the wheel. His foot sank into the gas pedal, grave as a pocket filled with stones. . . .”

At one point we read, “The street was Dickensian, as if recreated from some Victorian era slum.” Well, but either you think I know what “Dickensian” means or you don’t. If you think I do, you don’t need the second part of the sentence. If you think I don’t, leave out the reference. And so forth. It’s unfortunate, because the storytelling and the imaginative thinking behind it are pretty good, especially in the book’s second half. The horrors of the pogroms and of lives cut short. The value of bearing witness and the illusory qualities of time and place. These and other elements make for a nice, thought-provoking narrative, as the story of the house and its pursuer are unfolded. Or they would have for me, if only I didn’t feel like I was getting poked in the eye with cliches and empty metaphors every paragraph. Well, I know that readers respond to these sorts of issues differently, and some folks just don’t care about them. Those lucky readers will enjoy this book much more than I did. Still, 3 ½ stars from me for the storytelling moxie.

Book 14:An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young



Andrew Young's memoir of his life and, most importantly, his experiences working alongside Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is extremely detailed and, at 531 pages, takes a while to get through. However, the journey is very much worthwhile for anyone interested in reading a comprehensive history of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Young's description of his childhood as the son of a middle-class African American family in New Orleans, I found slow going, but it lays the groundwork for understanding the adult Young became. Young's father assumed, and greatly desired, that young Andrew would follow him into the family profession: dentistry. But Young found himself with a calling for the religious life and eventually took control of his own life and became a Congregationalist minister. Young was also strongly drawn to working for social change, and within a few years finds himself involved in voter registration and anti-segregation campaigns in the Deep South. His skill for organizing, his deep commitment to the Ghandian philosophy of non-violence and his ability to communicate with college- and high school-aged would-be marchers afford him some early organizational successes. Attached to SCLC to work on a specific project, Young is soon being given more and more responsibility within the organization, eventually rising to the position of Executive Director.

All of that is interesting, but what is truly fascinating is Young's blow by blow account of Martin Luther King's growing prominence and the SCLC's growing importance on the national stage. Young recounts in detail each individual campaign organized and carried out by the SCLC, either on their own or (most frequently) in tandem with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The campaigns for integration of public spaces and voting rights in towns like Albany, Georgia, Montgomery, Alabama and Selma, Alabama are described fully. Young emphasizes the huge amount of planning and preparation that went into each effort. Clear and attainable goals were mapped out for each, and prospective marchers and picketers were given weeks-long training on nonviolent strategies. I found these day-by-day and often hour-by-hour descriptions of the events and personalities involved in these momentous events to be very compelling. In addition, as Young was on the scene for these campaigns, he is able to convey extremely well the sense of fear, frustration and exhilaration he experienced, and we almost feel the blows during the protest at which Young took several billy club blows to the head.

Young also describes to great effect

* The wrangling among the strong personalities and egos at the upper echelons of the SCLC.

* The fraying of the relationship between the SCLC and SNCC as the latter turned from its nonviolent, direction-action beginnings in the Deep South to the more polarized and angry rhetoric of the newer, more politicized leaders. To the end, and even as the SNCC leaders began criticizing SCLC leaders as out of touch and accommodationists, King was admonishing Young to remember that even if the two groups' rhetoric and strategies was diverging, their goals were the same, and the the energy and fire of the radicalized SNCC leaders was still needed. Young, though, in retrospect describes the "Black Power" philosophy as in the end futile, because, he says, the group's goal were never adequately defined or articulated and so the likelihood of their accomplishing anything concrete was very slim.

* The slow, hard-fought legislative victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, victories that Young describes as important but incomplete because the Johnson Administration, as hard as they'd worked for the bills' passage, refused to send federal marshals south to ensure compliance.

* The frustrations the group experienced when they tried to create direct action programs in northern inner cities, starting with Chicago, because the goals at that point shifted from relatively straightforward ideas like ending segregation and attaining the right to vote to working to eradicate the more deep seated problems of poverty itself and the federal policies that had created the inner city ghettoes:

"In the Chicago campaign, we learned that slums existed in part because they were profitable. Efforts to help poor blacks came into direct conflict with the financial interests of many politacally connected whites. This was in contrast to our experience with demonstrations against segregation in the South, where the local economic power structure usually eventually came around to our side. . . . The {Southern} private sector supported us because we made them realize through our boycotts that they couldn't afford to sacrifice the patronage of the black community and because they quickly realized, to their surprise, that integration brought them even more business. The integration of public facilities in the South didn't cost the economic power structure anything; in fact, integration was a boon to businesses through the South.

However, once we moved North and began to target the deeper, more entrenched problems of poor urban blacks, the private sector turned against us. Now their interest was in favor of maintaining the status quo. Cosmetic or token changes were fine, but not fundamental changes that in the long run would provide a more suitable and healthy society. The nature of the changes we were now seeking would have required a major redetribution of wealth. This, of course, was a very threatening situation. Now we were the problem."

* The outrage when, recognizing the interconnectivity of racism, poverty and war, King "stepped out of his lane" to forcefully condemn the Vietnam War. This included Lyndon Johnson turning against King and the SCLC in a major way.

* The grief and rage of the King assassination, as Young takes us through the preceding days and hours and then the harrowing, sorrow filled aftermath. Young also describes the assassination of Robert Kennedy as more or less the final nail in the coffin of the Civil Rights Movement as America had come to know it. The depression and cynicism the two killings created within the black community made it impossible to launch an effective get out the vote campaign in support of Hubert Humphrey (as they'd been able to do to help LBJ defeat Barry Goldwater in 1964). As a senator, Humphrey had been a courageous advocate for Civil Rights as far back as the 1950s. But as Johnson's Vice President, he was tainted by Johnson's war policies, and at any rate the black populace was exhausted. The result was Nixon's victory, and the backlash was on.

Well, I've gone on at length as usual, and yet only provided a short list of the issues described in An Easy Burden. But it's hard to do justice to this deep well of a memoir without descriptions of the many important themes that Young illuminates. Young was in many ways the ultimate insider, though he was in some ways a constant outsider within SCLC. Most of the leaders were fiery Baptists preachers, used to top-down leadership, and, as Young points out, extremely patriarchal in experience and temperament. Even Coretta Scott King had to push herself into a leadership role after her husband's death. As a Congregationalist, Young says, his training was to take a more rational, thoughtful approach, and to be more holistic in his organizational approach. This sometime caused the others in SCLC leadership to refer to him as their "conservative" member, something Young admits to resenting. This book stands as an excellent counterpart to the histories I read earlier of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Of course there are more "objective" historical overviews of the Civil Rights Movement and of the SCLC. They might provide different (or additional) facts and perspectives, but right now I'm finding it hard to imagine a more personal, immersive accounting of those times than this one.

**At one point we read, “The street was Dickensian, as if recreated from some Victorian era slum.” Well, but either you think I know what “Dickensian” means or you don’t. If you think I do, you don’t need the second part of the sentence. If you think I don’t, leave out the reference.**

But if the author leaves out the reference, I'll never learn the term Dickensian! Haha.

>18 handshakes: "But if the author leaves out the reference, I'll never learn the term Dickensian! Haha."

Sure. I guess the sentence was educational, as if teaching us something. :)

>19 rocketjk: Gotta take what we can get when it comes to oddball stuff like that, lol. I read a run on sentence the other day and was like what... how did this get published??? It was like "Okay," said the very large, obese man with the freckles that matched his red hair and a smile that matched his demeanor. Haha.

Book 15: The River of Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker



Wanting something a little lighter to read after An Easy Burden, I decided to visit our pulp fiction shelves. The River of Dancing Gods is the first book in Jack L. Chalker's 5-book Dancing Gods fantasy series, vintage 1980s. Joe is a cross country trucker, divorced and cut off from seeing his child, barreling across a lonely nighttime highway. Marge is a woman in her 30s, on her own after leaving an abusive marriage and out on that same highway going she knows not where. Jumping out of the car of a would-be molester, Marge is hitchhiking through the night when Joe picks her up. Soon, however, the road becomes hazy and seems to split in two. They take what seems to be the correct fork but in moments are confronted by a strange character standing in the middle of the road, which has, in fact, now disappeared. Long story short, Joe and Marge are recruited to come with this fellow to an alternate world where they will be able to help the good guys in a battle between good and evil in a world that's pre-technology. Well, of course they will. And of course they go. (Joe's alternative, so says the stranger, is to go back to the main road and die in a truck crash within minutes.)

Anyway, after a bit of training, Joe is super strong and has a magic sword. Marge has become a witch (that's a good thing) with ever heightening knowledge of magic spells. Off they are sent, with a few others, on a quest. Well, of course they are! All in all, I'd say there are some very clever bits, and even some humor. (Joe is instructed to give this magic sword a name, and is pleased to settle on calling it Irving, for example.) But there are a lot of holes left where the reader is left to fill in the blanks, world-building wise. Well there are plusses and minuses to fantasy series where each entry is only 263 pages rather than what seems to be the requisite 600 nowadays. There are lots of lazy use of empty-calorie adverbs like "incredibly" and "unbelievable" but otherwise the sentence-level cliches are kept down to a dull roar. We also get a fair helping of 80s-era sexism. Other than that, I found the whole thing to rather genial, but not particularly satisfying, and I won't be reading any more in the series.

Book note: I purchased this paperback from the "used-books for sale" shelf on the second floor of a pub somewhere in the middle of Ireland during a vacation there my wife and I took seven or so years back, so I do have a bit of sentimental attachment to my copy.

Book 16: A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin



This is a reread, picked up again because it was my turn to make a selection, this month, for my reading group, and this is what I picked. I originally finished the collection in 2021, and I'm just going to repost my review from that first reading:

This is a wonderful collection of short stories, full of writing that manages to be heartbreaking and life affirming at the same time. The tales are loosely interconnected and reflective of Berlin's own life. Teaching, single parenthood, childhood time spent in South America, dealing with the grim lifestyle of the alcoholic and the relative peace of recovery, odd jobs, teaching, lovers and marriages, loneliness, spending time in Mexico City with her sister who is dying of cancer . . . the stories in this collection circle back around to these themes, inspecting them from a variety of perspectives. The observations are acute and Berlin's sentence-and paragraph-level writing often made me stop and reread. The title story is a tour de force, the building of a life on the page, minute detail by detail.

From the next to last story in the collection, "Wait a Minute:"

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.

When someone has a terminal disease, the soothing churn of time is shattered. Too fast, no time, I love you, have to finish this, tell him that. Wait a minute! I want to explain. Where is Toby, anyway? Or time turns sadistically slow. Death just hangs around while you wait for it to be night and then wait for it to be morning. Every day you've said good-bye a little. . . . The camote man whistles in the street below and then you help your sister into the sala to watch Mexico City news and then U.S. news with Peter Jennings. Her cats sit on her lap. She has oxygen but still their fur makes it hard to breathe. "No! Don't take them away. Wait a minute."

Book 17: The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr



The Lady from Zagreb is the 10th novel in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther noir series. Gunther is our morally compromised detective with a heart of extremely tarnished gold who has been trying to navigate the vicious shoals of Nazi Germany since the series' origin found him as a homicide detective in Berlin, 1935, as the Berlin police department becomes ever more quickly overrun with Nazi thugs. The intervening books have taken us through the war years and into the post-war era, but not in chronological order. So while we already know where Gunter is going to end up after the war is over, this book puts us right back into the middle of the conflict. Throughout those war years, Gunther's competence as a detective, and even the independence springing from his disdain for the Nazis and their programs has made him valuable to the party's highest leaders. Figures like Reinhard Heydrich and, in this book, Joseph Goebbels, have used Gunther to run errands and investigations that they don't want to run through party channels. Gunther hates working for these men, but retains a strong enough instinct for self-preservation to not turn them down. In the series' previous book, A Man Without Breath, Gunther has been given the job of investigating the Katyn Forrest massacre, in which the occupying Russians had murdered dozens of Polish Army officers (an actual event). Gunther, by this time, is painfully aware of the Nazis' many atrocities and of the irony of the German military's investigation of somebody else's war crime.

The Lady from Zagreb is a bit tamer, all in all. Goebbels is trying to convince a beautiful actress to star in his latest movie, but before she will agree to that, she demands that somebody travel to Croatia to try to find her long lost father, last known to be living a monk's life in a remote monastery. Assigned to that search would be our man, Bernie Gunther, of course. The journey gives Kerr an opportunity to describe the Croatia of the wars years as a nightmare of sectarian, nationalistic violence that seems to have very little to do with anybody else's greater war aims. Complications arise, or course, and Gunther's adventures, as always, are full of moral dilemmas and political landmines. The book is fun, and Gunther remains an entertaining character to ride along with. This novel, though, isn't quite as strong as most of its predecessors in the series. It takes a while to get going, for one thing, the stakes don't seem quite as high, and the complexities of Gunther's past, present and future, as we know them to be by this point in the series, are less compellingly portrayed than in previous Gunther novels. So, while I enjoyed this book nevertheless, I rate this one a 3 1/2 stars rather than the series' normal 4 or 4 1/2. In the acknowledgment section at the end of the book, Kerr even mentions that his publisher had to convince him that the world needed another Bernie Gunther adventure. Well, in fact, there are still four more to go in the series! Anyway, while The Lady from Zagreb is only so-so Bernie Gunther, so-so Gunther is still pretty darn good. So I will be continuing on.

Book 18: Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post) Laila El-Haddad is a very influential Palestinian blogger and journalist from Gaza (although I can't find much about her that's recent and even her own blog hasn't been updated since 2016). Gaza Mom is a compilation of her blog posts and other writing from Gaza and elsewhere throughout the 2000s. She chronicles the oppressive tactics of the Israeli government and, especially, military to keep the Gazan people bottled up and subjugated. She describes everything from indiscriminate deadly gunfire, frequent flyovers by fighter jets to create havoc- and depression-inducing sonic booms, closing of border gates for weeks at a time to prevent people from getting in or out of Gaza, trade and import embargoes to create artificial shortages in goods and services . . . the list goes on and on. El-Haddid also describes the disfunction of the Gazan government and the inter-party violence that occasionally fills the streets of the city. She notes with mounting frustration the worldwide public inattention to all this and the information vacuum, courtesy of the international press, that prevents even well-meaning people around the world from understanding the real plight of the Palestinian people. This is all described within the context of El-Haddid's own family frustrations, including life as experienced by her own parents and her own young child, as well as the fact that her husband is prevented from joining them in Gaza because the Israeli government refuses to supply him the proper visa. The book is very detailed and, quite properly, depressing to read, which is the reason I decided early on to go through the volume one chapter at a time as one of my "between books." El-Haddid makes no attempt to create a "balanced" or "objective" journalistic account. This is the story of her own experiences and that of her family, as well as her observations of the maddening cruelty imposed by Israel. It's a tough read. You have to take El-Haddid's account at face value, and whether or not she's leaving any "balancing" information out, what she does provide is vivid enough to be convincing. Even if things were, let's say, not quite as bad as she was portraying them because she was leaving out this or that bit of information, it's all bad enough to be a demoralizing education, especially for those of us who grew up being taught to think of Israel as a country with a strong moral compass. Well, I was disabused of that myth long ago, but the details here are still difficult, and extremely important, to read. I can't imagine things have gotten any better over the 14 years or so since this book was published.

Book 19: No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman



Another "Between Book" finished (see first post). The full title of this collection, as you might be able to see in the cover image, is No Cheering in the Press Box: Recollections--Personal & Professional--by Eighteen Veteran American Sportswriters. And that pretty much sums up this marvelous book, first published in 1974. The interviewer and editor of the book, Jerome Holtzman, was himself a very well known sportswriter at the time, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Sporting News and other national sports publications. Holtzman set out to record interviews with, as noted, 18 famous veteran sportswriters. One thing I appreciated about Holtzman's approach was that, in the presentation of these interviews, Holtzman took himself out of the narrative entirely. These aren't, then, question and answer type interviews. We have only the interview subjects speaking, so what we get are much more akin to oral histories.

Cumulatively, these oral histories present a picture of American sportswriting, and very much the American newspaper world, in general from the 1920s through the 1960s. For one thing, there were no journalism schools in those days. Most of these writers became newspapermen by showing up in newsrooms and wrangling a position whereby they made coffee and emptied wastepaper baskets. Maybe, eventually, they'd be sent out to cover a high school basketball game when whoever was originally assigned called in sick. If you did a good job, you might get another assignment. The book's final interview is with the legendary Jimmy Cannon, who tells this story:

I was about fourteen when I started as an office boy on the Daily News. I worked the lobster trick--from midnight to eight in the morning. One night, after I'd been there for about two years, there was a shortage of rewrite men. The whiskey must have been flowing pretty well, and for some reason a guy on the desk gave me a short story to write, about three hundred words. It was on Decoration Day, about a kid who ran away from a summer resort and came to Manhattan.

Harvey Duell, who was one of the great newspapermen, was the city editor of the Daily News. He read the story, and the next day there was a note in my box: "See Mr. Duell." Well, us boys didn't see the city editor unless we were in trouble. I thought I was in trouble. When I went to see him, he was very kind and said, "I understand you wrote this, young man."

He asked me where I learned to write. I said, "I don't know if I can write at all."

Then he told me, "This is the second thing you've done that's impressed me."

"What's the first?"

"I sent you out for coffee one night and you refused a tip."

I said, "I don't remember. I must have been crazy that night."

That's how I became a city-side reporter.

Another part of that world described by many of the interviewees is the different relationship the reporters built with the players and managers (I should have noted earlier that the interviews deal mainly with baseball writing) in the earlier decades of the 20th century. The writers rode in the same trains during road trips, played in the same poker games, and often went on the same hunting and fishing trips. The writers describe the difficulty of still having to criticize a player's performance or a manager's decision making when it was someone you were friends with otherwise. On the other hand, they were much less likely to write about a player's personal flaws or misadventures off the field than sportswriters today are. Many of the writers offer their memories and impressions of particular players, people like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams, and even earlier players and managers. All in all, these writers were fine storytellers, which makes their oral histories fun to read. They paint a mostly romantic picture of that bygone era of American sports, though the difficulties of spending so much time on the road and in hotels are noted, as are the pressures of writing on deadline.

Of the eighteen journalists interviewed, I had only heard of seven: Paul Gallico, Shirley Povich, Abe Kemp, Ford Frick, Red Smith, John R. Tunis and Jimmy Cannon. Tunis who also wrote many (what we would now call) YA sports novels, wrote my favorite baseball novels as a boy, the Roy Tucker series starting with The Kid From Tompkinsville. Tunis had a surprising (to me at least) observation to make about American culture of the 60s and 70s, saying that he disapproved of the growing trend to make sports, and especially youth sports, all about winning, as if the games didn't mean anything if you didn't win them. He says (and I'm paraphrasing, now) "I'm much more interested in writing about characters who don't win, about what they go through and what they learn." I found that of interest in particular because of the derision some people want to heap on parents and educators nowadays who have tried deemphasize the "win at all costs" mentality, making fun of, for example, participation trophies as hippy, woke b.s. Given that Tunis represents that emphasis on only valuing winners as a new trend at that time, it made me wonder whether such attitudes ebb and flow within American culture more than I'd previously realized. Or maybe Tunis was just one observer with an ax to grind. Anyway, I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in baseball and baseball history, or even maybe just in the history of American journalism in general, as seen through the lens of the sports section.

Book 20: Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys by Steven Gaines



Steven Gaines shows his hand at the outset of his detailed group biography of The Beach Boys when he opens his narrative with a blow-by-blow account of the drowning death of Dennis Wilson, the middle brother, the group's drummer, dissipated by years of drug and alcohol abuse, diving time and again beneath his friend's boat in an LA marina, looking for an imaginary box of old coins, while his friends call to him from on deck to stop diving and come back aboard. This biography, we learn, is going to emphasize greatly the band's (and individual band members') troubles and disputes. And, in fact, that's what we get, with consideration of The Beach Boys' iconic music mostly relegated to brief mentions. It's all telling instead of showing when it comes to the creation, recording and onstage performances of the group, but we get shown and shown again the squabbles, alliances, dalliances, lawsuits and individual troubles of the band members, as they fight to hold the group together and continue to create in the face of a myriad of problems.

The Beach Boys were three Wilson brothers, Brian, Dennis and Carl, their cousin, Mike Love, and childhood friend, Al Jardine. The Wilson boys began life solidly behind the 8-ball, psychologically, despite their enormous musical talent, thanks to their domineering, demanding and abusive (both psychologically and physically) father, Murray. Brian, the oldest, came in particularly for the abuse, and was the brother who could never be good enough in Murray's judgement. And he certainly developed the most acute psychological problems. Carl, the youngest, was his mother's favorite, thereby receiving her protection from Murray, and, whether coincidentally or not, maintained the most emotional equilibrium throughout his career and life.

It's a sad tale, and the fact that these men were able to create so much fabulous and iconic music over, more or less, a 15-year recording career, is an amazing testament. Sadly, in this book, that creative process is mostly glossed over. I was a young boy with a transistor radio when The Beach Boys were at their early peak with songs like "I Get Around" and "Help Me, Rhonda" on the charts. Later, in my early and middle teens, I loved their more progressive albums like "Surf's Up" (still a favorite of mine) and "Holland." And then there's the tour de force that is "Pet Sounds," which I did not come to really appreciate until much later.

Gaines does describe well, in particular, Brian Wilson's struggles. His schizophrenia was, for a long time, hidden under his heavy drug use (considered more or less normal for rock stars at the time), his abnormal and reclusive behavior put down as the understandable eccentricity of the artistic genius. Even that "genius" appellation, settled on Brian after the release of "Pet Sounds" (and enhanced by the Beatles' avowed admiration for that album), became a heavy element in Brian Wilson's emotional burdens. And while Brian did have people trying to look out for him and keep him on an even keel (especially his wife, Marilyn), he was also surrounded by "drainers," sycophants always happy to gain acceptance into Brian's orbit by sneaking him drugs and booze.

And so on. All the members of the band, individually and collectively, come in for this sort of examination (with the exception of Jardine, the quite, calm one). Bad business decisions, money-wasting, fly-by-night schemes, Dennis Wilson's extended dalliance with Charles Manson and crew, we read about them all. But we spend precious little time with the musicians in the studio or onstage. It's amazing to realize that The Beach Boys (sans Brian, whose mental troubles early on caused him to stop performing live) remained one of the world's most popular and largest grossing live acts well into the 1980s. This is even though, by the end, the band was broken into two factions who, for the most part, hated each other. So we get told, of some important individual concert, that the band gave a great performance that brought down the house, but there was evidently no attempt to find somebody who could describe what it was like to be at a Beach Boys concert at that time (let alone what it was like to be onstage during one).

A funny thing, though. By the end of the book, I actually did feel like I had a strong perception of what these people where like, and who they were. I'd even gained an affection for them. Who knows how accurate a perception that is, but still, I do feel like this book provides an effective description of a dysfunctional musical family, trying desperately to overcome that dysfunction and to emphasize the "love" element of their love-hate relationship with their father, their talent, their fame, and each other. There are dark sides to their behavior, to put it mildly. None of them were equipped emotionality for committed romantic relationships. Dennis, in particular, the good-looking one, reveled in his "playboy" behavior, even during his three or four (I lost count) marriages. Racism peeks through the narrative a few times, one of their business managers is fired when it's discovered that he's gay, and none of them thought twice about leveling anti-Semitic slurs when riled for one reason or another. So it's the old question of whether one is willing/able and/or desirous of separating the artists from the art. This isn't the book to go to for a proper examination of The Beach Boys' music and creative process. But it's a pretty strong portrait of their lives (as far as I know), warts and all.

Book 21: Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones



I bought this novel on a whim during my recent visit to City Lights Books in San Francisco. It is the story about a family of werewolves trying to stay alive as they move from place to place in more or less modern day Southern America. As the story begins, our never-named protagonist is nine years old. His mother died in childbirth, his father is unknown, and he lives with his aunt, uncle and grandfather, werewolves all. Or rather, sort of half-werewolf, half human. Mongrels, as the book's title would have it. Mostly, they're able to change back and forth at will, but at a cost of pain and energy. Sometimes, though sudden anger or danger will bring upon a change into werewolf unbidden. So uncle Darren's long haul truck driving job is dangerous. If something makes him mad while he's on the highway, he will find himself suddenly with four legs and no hands. Not good when you're driving down the road at 80 mph. As the years go by, our young narrator has yet to "turn," to become a werewolf. Although it is certain he has werewolf blood, it's possible he never will "turn," but will instead remain human his entire life.

Jones does a very good job of creating the werewolf world, the details of this family's, and by extension the werewolf community's, experience of life. Much of it is unsavory and violent. Once they turn werewolf, for example, they become ravenous. Nothing and no-one is safe around them. The first part of the book, though, I found a bit repetitive. It was full of explanations of what is good for werewolves ad what is dangerous for them, one example after another. As the book moves along, however, maybe about a third of the way in, I found that I became more invested in the characters, in the sadness and fraught nature of their existence. Every time there is an "incident," for example, they have to pull up stakes and move again. Our narrator is forever in and out of one school after another. Relationships with outsiders, obviously, are hazardous.

I'm sure there are greater themes going on here of the alienation and violence of American society. This was vacation reading for me, so I'll admit I was not expending any energy delving beneath the surface of the narrative. But still, assuming the unsavory elements of the story do not turn you off too much (there is only a minimum of graphic violence, though there is some), I found that, in the end, Mongrels was for me a fairly compelling reading experience.

A funny (to me at least) story: I was riding on a San Francisco Muni train with the book open. A young fellow whom I'd seen on the platform sat next to me, also with book in hand. We had a brief laugh over the odds these days of two people reading actual books sitting side by side on Muni. I asked him what he was reading and he showed me his book, which was a non-fiction volume about the turning of agriculture in America into big agribusiness. He said it was fascinating reading. Very impressive. So then he asked, of course, what book I had. A bit embarrassed at this point after seeing his weighty volume, I said sheepishly, "Well, it's a novel about a family of werewolves." To which he replied. "Wow! That's cool! That's really cool!" I supposed he'd never guessed that an old graybeard like me would be hip enough to be reading about werewolves. Or something. Anyway, I though that was amusing.

Book 22: Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman



This is the 14th book in Hillerman's famous Leaphorn/Chee mystery series, which seems an odd place to start (I have a vague memory of reading one of Hillerman's books decades ago, but no specific memory), but it was the selection for my reading group this month. I guess the 14th book in a series is an odd selection for a reading group, but mine is not to reason why. Anyway, I enjoyed the reading experience, and though I won't be going out of my way to go back and start the series from the beginning right away, I could see how the series might otherwise be in my future once I get through some of the other series I'm currently navigating. Here, the recently retired Joe Leaphorn and Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee are both, independently, working to figure out who perpetrated a violent, and deadly, large-scale robbery of a casino on tribal land. Eventually their paths bring them together once more. Within the flow of the story we learn about tribal history and mythology, all told in a flowing, entertaining manner. This was a fairly quick read for me, and very enjoyable.

Book 23: Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). The short story collection was published in 1926 by Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty. The stories are almost all "naturalist" (I don't know if that's a real term) in style. Some of the stories depict small town/rural Irish life of the era, and some actually see the world through the eyes of animals: a cow in a fever over the loss of her calf, a young seagull learning to fly, a rabbit being chased by a young boy and his hunting dog. The human-centric stories show us events like a humorous hoax perpetrated by one villager over his neighbors over a so-called treasure, group of villagers waiting anxiously on shore, hoping against hope that their friends, sons, husbands will return from the days' fishing expedition despite a fierce, unexpected storm that has suddenly blown their way, snipers on opposite roofs--and opposite sides--during the 1916 Easter Uprising. The two best stories are the collection's first and last. The opening title story shows us the first day of married life of a young farming couple. Clearly in love and exulting on their strength and energy for the day's tasks, the day passes wonderfully. And yet we are clued into the lifetime's worth of repetition and labor awaiting the two. The final story, "Going Into Exile," brings us the moving tale of a loving farming family whose two oldest children are about to depart, probably forever, for America. For the most part beautifully and simply written, in this collection O'Flaherty has provided us a vivid, humorous and affection (if occasionally melancholy) picture of life in rural Ireland during the early 20th century.

Book note: My copy of Spring Sowing dates for me back to my LT "Big Bang" of 2008 (when I first began posting my library here), so I don't know exactly how long it's been on my shelves, but anyway more than 15 years. This is a beautiful first edition, published in 1926 by Alfred Knopf in New York, but printed in Great Britain. My volume doesn't have a dust jacket, and the cover sports a beautiful is somewhat incongruous Art Deco design. The figure $1.95 is written in ink inside the front cover, which may or may not be what I paid for the book. Finally, penciled in script just below that price is the inscription, M. L. Taylor.

>28 rocketjk: I've read a few of the first Leaphorn/Chee books. I find them a nice combination of entertainment and enlightenment. Hillerman did a pretty good job of teaching without preaching.

Book 24: Natchez Burning by Greg Iles



This is the fourth book in Greg Iles' Penn Cage series, and also the first of a trilogy with the series. Penn Cage, is a former District Attorney in Houston and mystery book writer who, in the series' first book, returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to help his father, Tom, a beloved doctor, out of a jam. By this fourth book, Cage is the mayor of Natchez. Once again, it's his father in trouble, this time accused of murder for, supposedly, aiding in the suicide of Viola, his nurse from decades ago. Pulling on the thread of Tom Cage's action and his possible relationship with this woman decades earlier, Penn Cage finds himself in the midst of several Civil Rights Era murders, cold cases perpetrated by a local group of racists who called themselves the Double Eagles then and who are still alive and still vicious as Cage begins to try to figure out what is going on with his father, who will not come clean about his actions, either in the room with Viola just nights ago, or in their time working together in the '60s. While working all this, Iles also presents an illumination of the viciousness and ignorance of the Jim Crow Era and the persistence of racism into the present. The power was drained from the attempt a bit by the fact that Iles' villains are somewhat over the top bad guys, sadistic, cold blooded evildoers. Otherwise, this book, I thought, was quite good. I recall the first book of the series, as being strong, and also about an old Civil Rights Era murder. The second book was about Cage trying to save the reputation (and freedom) of a friend I couldn't possibly drum up any empathy for, and the third was over the top violent with a barely believable plot. Natchez Burning is much stronger than those second and third books. You could read it as the first book of the Natchez Burning trilogy rather than the fourth Penn Cage book. However, this one is 800 pages long, and the next two are of the same length. That's much too much reading time, for me at least, to commit to any single thriller, no matter how good. So I won't be continuing with the series. It's not that I don't like long books, but for me it's just too much for a crime novel. If that length factor doesn't bother you, though, I do recommend this book, at least.

>31 rocketjk: That was the first Iles book I ever read, and I won't be reading any more. I found the violence and sadism way too much of a distraction and DEtraction from an otherwise engaging story line. The length was totally unnecessary.

>32 laytonwoman3rd: Subtlety is definitely not Iles' forte. :)

Book 25: On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin



Chatwin's novel tells the story of Lewis and Benjamin Jones, twin brothers farming the Vision, a farm in Wales, near to the border with England. The novel begins roughly in 1899 with the meeting between the brothers' parents, Amos and Mary. Amos has been farming this land all his life. Mary, from a higher class, has spent time traveling in India, but comes to this Welch border area with her uncle and falling in love with Amos' strength and knowledge of the land, marries him "beneath her station." We read the story of their lives within the farming community, and then read about the twins' childhood and strange (even for twins) psychological and emotional interdependency. The novel proceeds through the brothers' old age. The outside world intrudes only in seemingly minor ways. Chatwin's powers of description and observation are acute, certainly. His descriptions of the natural world around the Jones family and their farm, and the nature of Welsh farming live through the 20th century, are impressive and enjoyable. And yet there is always something insular and claustrophobic, to the point of oppressiveness, in the storyline. I don't say that as a criticism, though. For me a big part of the point of the story is the gentle exploration of the dangers of too isolated a life, even one lived within an active community. I found this to be an often pleasurable and absorbing novel, but not often a relaxing one.

Book 26: Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). Back in the days when publishers and columnists could be celebrities, Bennett Cerf lived the life. He was an observational humor columnist, frequent story-telling raconteur guest on the Johnny Carson and Merv Griffith shows and the like, and also a serious publisher. If you've ever seen the documentary made about John and Yoko's "Bed-In For Peace," you might recall Cerf as the smug, condescending "establishment" interviewer trying to trick John into admitting that the whole thing was a gag. On the other hand, in 1925, at the age of 27, Cerf, a vice-president at Modern Library, bought the company, and soon founded Random House, as well. Part of Cerf's public reputation was as a jokester and punster. Good for a Laugh is a 220-page collection of puns and humorous anecdotes, gathered roughly into topics like "D is for Doctors" and "I is for Intoxicants." Not all of them are knee slappers. In fact, relatively few of them are. Given that the book was published in 1952, you'll not be surprised to learn that there is plenty of sexism disguised as yuks. Somehow or other, I found browsing gradually through these chapters amusing, but I think it was more a case of happily imagining my father enjoying these jokes than of enjoying them myself.

>35 rocketjk: I remember Cerf from "What's My Line", and later in life knew of him as the man who published Faulkner at Random House. I have a copy of his "reminiscences", At Random, which was published posthumously. One of those "someday I'll get to it" books.

>36 laytonwoman3rd: Oh, right! I forgot to mention his 17 years on What's My Line! Yeah, that "someday I'll get to it" stack is a rather high one at my house.

Book 27: Mission to Moscow by Joseph E. Davies



It took me forever (about a month) to read this book. I started it in late May, nibbled away at it during the drive cross-country my wife and I took as we moved from California to New York City for a year, and finally finished it yesterday. It is interesting, but not particularly compelling in the reading. So what is it?

Mission to Moscow is Joseph E. Davies' memoir, sort of, of his two years (1936 through 1938) as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. I say "sort of" because the book is not a narrative but a series of journal and diary entries as well as many of Davies' official reports and correspondences with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, President Roosevelt, and other government officials. There is quite a bit of repetition, as sometimes, for example, a report to Hull is immediately followed by a very similar report to Roosevelt. That said, the accumulation of information and insights that Davies provides ends up being pretty interesting for someone (like me) with an interest in the events of this era. Davies was in Moscow, and part of the inner diplomatic circle, during the purge trials and the run-up to World War Two. Interestingly, this book was published in October 1941, just 6 weeks or so before Pearl Harbor.

Davies was not a career diplomat, but a lawyer and businessman. He'd met Roosevelt when they were both in the Wilson administration, where Davies was first Commissioner of Corporations and then the first Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Because of his interest in industry, and because he thought it was his job, Davies spent a lot of time touring Soviet Union examining the progress the country had made in the realm of factories, mining and agriculture. He was surprised and extremely impressed with how far they'd come so fast since the Revolution. Davies reports on this are interesting at first, but they become extremely detailed and repetitive, sad to say, long past the time that the point has been made.

Regarding the Purge Trials: The first round of army officers and government officials who were caught up in the Stalin-Era treason trials were accused of collaborating with Germany and Japan to weaken the Soviet Union from within in preparation for possible invasion. Given that Lenin had actually had help from Germany leading up to the Russian Revolution, it seems logical that Stalin and his advisors would be suspicious of similar activities taking place in the 30s. Davies attended several sessions of these trials. He was dismayed by the fact that the accused were not allowed representation and made suspicious by the fact that, in trial after trial, the defendants uniformly confessed. Davies suspected that these confessions had in many cases been obtained either by physical torture or threat of reprisals against family. As the trials progressed, Davies wondered whether the execution of so many high ranking officers would cause the Red Army to turn against Stalin, but concluded in the end that the Stalin administration had instead cemented its power quite effectively. Davies also tells us that many in the Diplomatic Corps (in other words, other countries' ambassadors to Russia) concluded that many of the defendants were probably actually guilty. Davies describes a period of "terror" in which the arrests and executions numbered into the tens of thousands, and reached from the highest levels of military and government down onto the factory floor. In hindsight, in an addendum added in 1941, Davies also observed that Russia had been the only country invaded by Germany that hadn't had a significant problem of fifth columnists creating trouble from within. He concluded that the Purge trials had served to eliminate any potential fifth columnists. I haven't read any more contemporary histories of these trials and their actual purposes and results, so I don't know how accurate Davies observations are now considered.

Davies reports on the Soviet government's increasing frustration with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement politics towards Germany and their eventual outrage when they are left out of the negotiations that led to the infamous Munich Agreement. In fact, according to Davies, the Russians had been prepared to come to the aid of the Czechs militarily (as per the mutual defense treaty the had with Czechoslovakia and France). From the Munich Agreement, says Davies, the Soviets concluded that England and France were willing to give away Eastern Europe to Hitler in order to keep from being attacked themselves, and were probably willing to let Russia have to take on Hitler by themselves. This led them to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that would allow them to at least forestall a German attack.

In the book's opening sections, there is much talk of an American loan to Russia that hadn't been paid back, and had become a diplomatic sticking point. As I understood the issue, the U.S. Government didn't officially recognized the Soviet Government as the legitimate government of Russia until 1933. At that point, the Russians began to be attacked by Japan. Wishing to be able to purchase arms from the U.S., the Soviets had concluded a deal with the U.S. that included the proviso that, in exchange for official recognition, they would agree to pay back a loan that the U.S. had given to the Kerensky government. By 1936, the Russians had followed through with actual payment, and it was getting to be a problem between the two countries. During Davies time this matter was finally settled, with Stalin's direct intervention. The whole thing was evidently a big deal at the time but has been pretty much forgotten now, I mention it here only because it takes up so much of Davies' descriptions. I was surprised to learn that it wasn't until 1933 that the U.S. recognized the Soviet government, but in retrospect I shouldn't have been.

Davies prediction that a post-war Soviet Union would have little interest in trying to expand Communism further into Europe turned out to be short-sighted.

Well, that turned into a long review! But then again, the book is 513 pages plus another hundred or so pages of appendices. It is always of interest to me to read books about this era written before the war has played itself out. In 1936 and 1937, Davies was writing about trying to figure out ways to keep the peace in Europe. By 1938, he was writing about the importance of being prepared for war. The book can be very dry at times, but I did learn a lot about what the perspective of an ambassador in the Soviet Union would have been like during these years.

Book notes: My copy of Mission to Moscow is a sixth printing of the 1941 first edition. It's been on my shelf since before my 2008 LT "Big Bang."

Book 28: Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life by Bill Madden



Personal essay: This baseball biography was a gift from a buddy of mine who passed it along after he'd read it. Although Tom Seaver was clearly one of the best pitchers of his time, or of any time, really, I grew up hating him. That's because I was a Yankees fan, which wasn't as terrible as it now might sound. When I was a little boy, the Yankees were the great team of Mantle, Maris, etc. But in 1965, when I was 10, they became mediocre, then bad, then oscillating between the two until 1976, when they finally returned to the World Series. When I was a kid, you picked one team and hated the other, that was the rule, and I picked the Yankees because I liked their main announcer, Phil Rizzuto, better than the Mets' main announcers. But once I settled on that, my loyalty to the one and antipathy to the other solidified. By 1969, when the Mets suddenly rose to prominence and pulled one of the most unforeseen World Series Championships in baseball history, the Yankees were indeed mired in mediocrity, though there were many players on the team who were worth of admiration and loyalty. When the Mets were suddenly good, (an abrupt change from their "lovable losers" personae) led in no small part by the fiercely competitive and excellent Seaver, all of the lukewarm, don't-really-care about baseball, seemingly all from the wealthier areas of town, were suddenly Mets fans. The Yankees (it seem very strange to say this now, but it's true) were the team of the working class kids. That 1969 Mets World Championship was a torment from beginning to end for us. It took me years for my white hot hatred for the Mets to die down into a more or less friendly indifference. Along the way, I gained an appropriate admiration for the players on that '69 team and their accomplishment that year. Also, there are Mets fans in the family. Waddaya gonna do? (My wife, whose father grew up in The Bronx, is firmly a Yankees fan, thank goodness.)

Actual book review: So, at any rate, when my friend handed over this biography about a year ago, I put it on my "short list" TBR, as I normally do with books I receive as gifts. The author is a sportswriter who had become particularly close to Seaver over the years. He had conducted several lengthy interviews with Seaver after the pitcher's retirement. I wouldn't say there's a whole lot of depth to this biography. It's essentially an (adoring) survey of Seaver's life and, especially, baseball career. Well, when a 70-year life is covered in only 285 pages, you are not going to get much in-depth probing. As such, though, I mostly enjoyed it. It's not the most sharply written book on the bookshelf, and there are some spots where an editor's hand might have been useful, but the recounting of Seaver's life was interesting enough for a baseball fan.

I did learn a few things that I either didn't know or had forgotten. One is that Seaver openly criticized the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The other was that Seaver signed first by the Atlanta Braves, and he was looking forward to being teammates with the great Hank Aaron. But due to an entirely accidental breaking of the rule against signing college players while the collegiate season was in progress (two games that everybody thought had been pre-season exhibitions had turned out to be on the official season schedules of the team involved), Seaver ended up the prize in a lottery among any team that was willing to match the Braves' offer, and in that way ended up on the Mets. It was nice to learn that throughout his life, and even at the height of his fame and success, Seaver remained close friends with many of the guys he'd played Little League, high school and junior college baseball with in his home town of Fresno, CA. Seaver's battles with Mets general manager M. Donald Grant are well chronicled, here, as is his up-and-down relationship with his own fame, and certain individual games are highlighted in depth to good effect. Madden is, after all, a sportswriter first and foremost. All in all I'd say this is a good if not great biography, but absolutely for baseball fans only.

Book 29: The Trackers by Charles Frazier



I knew of Charles Frazier as the author of the best-selling novel Cold Mountain as well as a book I liked even better, Thirteen Moons. Those aren't his only two, but they were the two I knew of. The Trackers is another work of historical fiction, this time taking place in the later stages of the Great Depression. Valentine Welch is a young artist, recently graduated from college, who, through the auspices of his college professor and mentor, gets a job painting a WPA mural on the wall of a post office in remote Dawes, Wyoming. In addition, he has been offered lodging on the nearby Long Shot Ranch, owned by a wealthy landowner, John Long. Long, who has political ambitions, has a younger wife, Eve, with a past that includes years spent on the road, picking fruit, surviving in hobo camps, and eventually singing in traveling country bands. To Val they seem an unlikely couple and during the course of story, no one who has ever read a novel will be surprised to learn, their relationship begins to fray in dramatic fashion.

I found the beginning stages of The Trackers to be its most satisfying section. Frazier's writing style is very engaging, and Val's long musings and observations about the nature of the Depression and the damage it has done to millions of lives in the name of greed and irresponsibility I found very well done. Val's description of the Wyoming landscape and Eve's description of the horrors (and satisfactions) of her earlier life are all quite good. Another memorable character is Faro, the Long Shot's foreman who has a colorful and dangerous past of his own.

Once the plot line gets going, however, as Eve takes off with a small Renoir of her husband's to parts unknown and for reasons obscure, and Long hires Val to go find her, things begin to get a bit more pedestrian. The storyline stays engaging, and Frazier's writing overall remains strong, but I began to wonder what it was all for. Also the common trope of the innocent abroad, much less worldly than he believes himself to be and constantly in error, began to wear on me a bit. Time and again I would say to myself, "You know nothing, Jon Snow."*

However, I don't want to overemphasize the novel's faults. All and all I found it entertaining and fun, with some stretches of really lovely writing and a good if not particularly believable plot.

My wife and I began this book as a shared audiobook experience during our recent drive from California to New York. When we got to NYC, we both agreed to take the book out of the library here and finish the book up that way in turns. To be honest, I was happy to get out from under the influence of the audiobook's reader, actor Will Patton. Patton does a fine job, but in a very mannered way that strongly colors one's experience with the story. I prefer the voices in my own head! My wife reported feeling the same.

* Game of Thrones reference

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer



My twice yearly read through project of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels brought me to The Slave, first published in 1962. The opening setting is the remote rural mountains of southern Poland in the late 17th Century in the years immediately following the Chmielnicki (often spelled Khmelnytsky) Uprising, an invasion by Cossack forces in rebellion against Polish domination. In Jewish history, these events are known as the Chmielnicki Massacres, as the Cossack forces, aided often by the Poles themselves, perpetrated widespread and massive pogroms. Whole villages were essentially obliterated. Our protagonist, Jacob, is a survivor of one such attack on his native village, Josefov. His wife and three children, he believes, have been murdered, but instead of being killed himself, Jacob is captured and sold into slavery to Jan Bzik, a farmer in remote mountain town. Escape into the mountains, whose ways are unknown to him, means certain death, and the villages have sworn to kill Jacob on sight if he is spotted on the wrong side of the river that borders Bzik's land. Bzik himself, it should be noted, is not portrayed as a cruel man.

For five years Jacob spends his winters in a high mountain cabin tending to Bzik's cattle. His only source of food and water is what is brought up the mountain to him daily by Bzik's daughter, Wanda. Far from Jewish community and the holy books he loves, Jacob strives to maintain a pious Jewish life as best he can, and that include resisting the strong physical attraction that Jacob and Wanda feel for each other. Jacob would surely be excommunicated by the rabbis for cohabitating with a Gentile, and either or both of the two could be burned alive by the Church. Marriage is out of the question. Well, but as we know, such temptation cannot be resisted forever, and certainly not in fiction.

Well, I don't want to give away any plot developments.The storyline drew me in and made The Slave an active, enjoyable reading experience for me. As is often the case with Singer, although not as strongly as in others of his novels, there is a touch of magical realism, at least as seen though the characters' eyes, and there is also a bit of a fable like quality. Wanda and Jacob's love, and the peril it brings them, provides the momentum. The Jewish community rebounds from the massacres, but goes quickly back to its former, all too human ways, scrupulously following the slightest rabbinical dicta regarding dress, prayer and diet while ignoring biblical commandments about how to treat one's neighbors. Singer, examines this phenomenon in depth through Jacob and Wanda, who experience it all first hand. And though Singer's (and Jacob's) observations are often scathing (Singer himself turned from religious Judaism to a much more secular philosophy and lifestyle in early adulthood), nevertheless he retains an underlying compassionate perspective on both the frailties of humanity and the value of faith.

As The Slave was published in 1962, the resonance of the Holocaust and its aftermath within the narrative is unmistakable. Singer weaves together themes of identity, isolation, faith, religion, superstition, love, cruelty and compassion, separation and renewal into a rich and memorable novel.

Here is a quote I like:

"Ceaselessly he had prayed for death; he had even contemplated self-destruction. But now that mood had passed, and he had become inured to living among strangers, distant from his home, doing hard labor. As he drowsed, he heard pine cones falling and the coo of a cuckoo in the distance. He opened his eyes. The web of branches and pine needles strained the sunlight like a sieve, and the reflected light became a rainbow-colored mesh. A last drop of dew flamed, glistened, exploded into thin moten fibers. There was not a cloud to sully the perfect blue of the sky. It was difficult to believe in God’s mercy when murderers buried children alive. But God’s wisdom was evident everywhere."

Book notes: I bought my copy of The Slave at a wonderful Judaica store on NYC's Upper West Side called, appropriately enough, West Side Judaica. I had left the apartment on a mission to find a copy of The Slave, as the NYC Library didn't seem to have one on offer, I was strolling down upper Broadway with a thought of eventually getting on the subway and heading to The Strand Bookstore when I came upon this place. The store is full of prayer stalls, menorahs, sabbath candle holders, jewelry . . . you name it. There are also books aplenty, though mostly they are books of history, philosophy and religious commentary, in English and, I assume, Yiddish and Hebrew. I asked if they had any fiction. One man called to another across the store. "Is there any fiction?" "Fiction?" "Do you have any Isaac Singer?" I asked. "Singer? Well, we have just one. We have a few copies of The Slave." And so, indeed, I had my copy. A few blocks later I came upon this:



Annoyingly, two days ago I left my copy somewhere or other while on a mission of another sort (picking up some alteration I'd had done), so I finished up the final 40 pages or so via Internet Archive. Maybe I'll go back and get another copy from the Judaica store, though.

Book 31: Out of the Red by Red Smith



Published in 1950, Out of the Red is a collection of columns written from 1946 through 1949 by one of America's pre-eminent sportswriters of that, or any, era. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on Smith:

"After 18 years {writing for the St. Louis Star}, Smith joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1945. He cemented his reputation with the Herald Tribune, as his column, “Views of Sports”, was widely read and often syndicated. Smith wrote three or four columns a week that were printed by 275 newspapers in the United States and 225 in about 30 foreign nations. When the Herald Tribune folded in 1966, Smith became a freelance writer. In 1971, at the age of 66, he was hired by The New York Times and wrote four columns a week for the next decade, sometimes devoting 18 hours a day to them."

Rather than being arranged in chronological order, the columns are grouped here by subject matter: predominantly baseball, boxing, college football, horse racing, fly fishing and basketball (which Smith famously abhorred). These columns, being published immediately post-WW2, very much reflect mainstream American attitudes of the era, which do not always wear well. For one thing, what we see reflected is very much a scotch and soda, back-slapping, mutuel window, locker room "man's world." Women are barely there, unless they're hosting cocktail parties for charitable organizations. And although Smith is scornful of Major League Baseball's pre-Jackie Robinson Jim Crow paradigm, in later columns Smith's own racism comes to the surface several times.

Smith, though, could indeed turn a phrase. For example:
"In the eighth Hermanski smashed a drive to the scoreboard. Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging it its locker. When he came down he had the ball."

Smith 1946 pre-Kentucky Derby column began like this:

"A consignment of apprentice horse lovers who have been touring the bourbon quarries and oats disposal plants of the bluegrass country pulled in here a trifle lame today and the bellhop rooming one of them clutched the newcomer's lapels before he grabbed his luggage.

'Look,' this one-man reception committee whispered huskily, 'Get down on Golden Man in the fifth today. And I'll see you afterward. Don't forget my number.'

You knew then you were in Louisville, which may be the only town in America where the tips go from bellhop to tourist instead of vice versa"

Another horse race column, from 1948, begins thusly:

Casual water stood among the corn stubble along the right-of-way and on the dirt roads leading to the bucolic gambling hell of the Harford Agriculture and Breeders Association. When the race special pulled into Baltimore from Washington, the train platform was a heaving, squirming tangle and the train announcer had to keep pleading, 'Stand back from the tracks, please.' Men started climbing aboard before the train stopped and the crowd behind them used elbows and heavy heels, rehearsing for the push on the mutuel windows when the Citation race should come around."

Sorry, but here's one more, and the longest, a description of the scene on the infield of the 1948 Indianapolis 500.

The earth is a vast litter of crushed lunch boxes and tattered paper and beer cans and whisky bottles and banana skins and orange peels and the heels of used sandwiches and blankets and raiment and people. Over everything is the reek of burning castor oil, the incessant, nerve-shattering roar of racing motors.

This is the Indianapolis 500, a gigantic, grimy lawn party, a monstrous holiday compounded of dust and danger and noise, the world's biggest carnival midway and the closest sporting approach permitted by the Humane Society to the pastimes which once made the Roman Coliseum known as the Yankee Stadium of its day (cars are used in this entertainment because the S.P.C.A. frowns on lions). . . .

It is said there are a hundred and seventy-five thousand people here, although gates started to close half-an-hour before race time. At that morning hour the Purdue University band was on the track giving brassy evidence of the advantages of higher education. At length these embryo Sammy Kayes tied into the national anthem and followed with "Taps" just in case. Bombs went off. Rockets burst in air, making a heavy flak pattern below cruising planes. James Melton sang 'Back Home in Indiana' slowly, a full four seconds off the track record."

One imagines the scene at the Indy 500 has been tidied up some in the intervening years.

The writing is not uniformly excellent, however. Smith is much better at describing events and scenes and people he enjoys and/or approves of, even when poking fun of them (and of himself) than events he doesn't care for. In those cases, he can quickly go from entertainingly humorous to unentertainingly snide.

So this is a time capsule, really, into a certain segment of American life in the immediate post-WW2 era, in sports and in overall attitudes. It's a look back to the time when the Harvard-Yale football game was still a major sporting event, and when boxing matches proliferated, boxers, trainers and managers had colorful tales to tell, and gamblers' activities often brought suspicion to individual fight results. But it was also still the time when men would naturally assume that they were speaking to, and about, other men--other white men--essentially exclusively. A slap on the back and pass the flask. Who ya got in the sixth?

So this collection ends up being a look at that era, faults and all, with a lot of very good, often humorous, writing baked in. In that way, this collection provides a history lesson of sorts. The ability to be entertained despite the sometimes unappealing paradigms of the day will of course vary by reader.

Book note: This is the sort of collection I'd normally add to one of my "Between Book" stacks. I made an exception here because I was very much looking forward to gorging on Smith's writing, and because the book was an anniversary present from my wonderful wife.

Book 32: Enigmas of Spring by João Almino (translated from the Portuguese by Rhett McNeil)



Enigmas of Spring was first published in 2015. Majnun, a young man (early 20s) lives with (and is supported by) his grandparents in the Brazilian federal capital, Brasília. He has no job and has failed university entrance exams. He greatly respects and is somewhat envious of this grandparents, who have led lives of accomplishment and action, but Majnun himself is a dreamer, and the greater part of his human interactions are anonymous, taking place online. He is obsessed with an older, married woman, Laila. Of the young women in his life, he lusts after the sexy Suzana, but wants only to be friends with the straightforward, caring Carmen. Majnun's other great obsession is Moorish Spain, an era he idolizes as one of Moslem tolerance towards Christians and Jews, though a professor he meets through his grandfather insists on clueing him in to the fact that the truth was much more complicated and nowhere as rosy as he supposes. The bottom line to all this is that Majnun is mostly living in his own head. He has intellectual promise, but stupefied by all the possible options open to him, seems incapable of spurring himself to action. Instead, he spins self-referential fantasies about the things he might do, the causes he might fight for. He is endlessly chewing away at writing a novella about the Spain of his fantasies. All of this we get in the very early stages of the story.

Almino skillfully portrays Majnun as an example of that cohort of his generation that has been pulled down--or jumped--into the whirlpool we now call social media (I don't recall Almino using that term). Causes and plans emphasized one day disintegrate and swirl out of sight to be replaced by something else the next. The possibilities seem endless, but Majnun cannot rouse himself to pursue any. In short, he is waiting for life to happen to him.

Of Majnun's time and the people he meets down that rabbit hole, the omniscient narrator tells us:

"More than what was around him, he was interested in the vast world to be discovered; the territories of absence, infinitely larger than the territory of the present, richer and more complex, a space suitable to his imagination. Perhaps for this reason he preferred strangers, whom he met on his computer. And how did these strangers behave? What did they think and say? They lived in a flexible, malleable universe, and assumed characteristics adequate to whatever their mood might be. He didn't need to feel any responsibility to them or even remember their names. . . . They were like passersby spotted from afar or someone you've only heard about. He didn't need to be moved by their dramas, attenuated as they were by a hygienic distance. If he mourned their deaths or suffered with their suffering, it was because he had compassion for humanity, rather than the people as individuals. . . .

He fears were their fears. His joys were their joys, for he was aligned with them, created them in hs image. In front of the computer, he therefore invented the world according to his judgment, controlled it. . . ."

And:

"{He} couldn't resign himself to the world in which he lived. . . . If he could, he would make reality less dense, lighter, wiping it down, simplifying it, as in the story he intended to tell. But he had a fundamental problem: he didn't now where he was, nor where to go. . . .

In truth, he wasn't at a crossroad. At a crossroad there are possible directions and destinations. He had entered a highway with no traffic laws, where everyone was on their own, unsure of both direction and destination."

Slowly, Majnun's obsessions, and his mental state in general, spin out of control, and our understanding of events often becomes hazy as well. Are we in reality or in Majnun's head? Sometimes it's hard to tell.

The writing in this book I found quite good, and as a cautionary tale about the intellectual dangers of the age, I found it very effective. Majnun is a character that we believe, but it is often unpleasant to be in his head, and it frequently became frustrating for me to listen to his endless imaginings about the various futures that may or may not open up for him, at the same time understanding that this is Almino's point. There is a particularly unpleasant (though brief) scene about two-thirds of the way through that it is not possible to forgive Majnun for. But again, I don't think that Almino means us to. The novel is thoughtful and Almino's treatment is nuanced and deft most of the time. And because at only 194 pages, one need stay in Majnun's reality too long, I recommend the book to anyone interested in the themes it explores.

Book 33: The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is a fun kid's book, published in 1915, of twenty-four fairytales (hence the title of the book: one story for each hour of the day). When there are two rich and acquisitive brothers and one poor yet honest brother, you already know for sure who is going to end up married to the princess or sitting on top of the pile of jewels. Evil ogres, yes, but plenty of magic, wish-granting swans, rabbits and other wildlife to go around. Kindness to humble strangers is always rewarded, and so forth. The writing is fun and frequently chuckle-inducing, even for the so-called adult reader. The only problematic story was number XXI, "How the Princess's Pride Was Broken." This story is troubling because it takes for the granted the fact that a princess has no business having pride, and it's for the best for everybody when that pride is broken. And also, it contains this sentence: "But the lad did nothing but grumble and growl, and seemed as sore over his bargain as though he had been trying to trick a Jew." Oy, Howard. Did you have to? Anyway, it was just the one tale that bugged me and the rest were entirely benign as far as that sort of thing was concerned. My enjoyment was otherwise enhanced by the wonderful line drawings by Pyle that were included liberally throughout. Here's one example (as photographed by me somewhat imperfectly:



Book notes:
1) This book was a present to my wife and I from a former student of hers (she was a high school counselor for many years). He made a point of saying that the present was for both of us, though neither of us can remember the details these four years later.
2) The book is stamped inside as "Withdrawn" and stamped on the edges as having been in the collection of the C. Burr Artz Public Library of Frederick, Maryland.

Book 34: Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives by Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, and Rachel L. Swarns



This is a beautiful coffee table book full of great photographs and fascinating back stories. In 2016, New York Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh tumbled onto the fact that there were tens of thousands of photographs and negatives languishing, usually unseen for decades, in the Times photo archives. In many cases, Times photographers or freelancers would have shot several rolls of film (remember film?) while on assignment, and either only one of the photos would have been chosen for printing in the paper, or the editors would have ended up running the story without any photos, or the stories might never have been run at all. Because of the prejudices of the day (impossible to confirm of course but highly likely) or for other journalistic reasons, many of the most expressive photographs were of black New Yorkers. Eveleigh and the three colleagues listed as authors here began a months-long process of deep diving into the archives to assemble a collection that could then be published. They began with an online project whereby they would post photos they wanted more information about (the names of the people in the photos when the subjects were not famous, primarily), asking folks who could help identify any of the portrayed people to contact them They also did their research into the photographs they'd chosen, in many cases interviewing the figures still alive to find out what those people remembered about the day and the circumstances of the photographs there were in. But the authors also gleaned a lot of information, and valuable starting points, from the notes included in the archives written by the editors of the day and/or the photographers themselves.

In many cases the photographs provided scenes of triumph and accomplishment, such as a photograph taken backstage at Carnegie Hall in 1982 depicting opera singers Shirley Verrett and Grace Bumbry embracing Marian Anderson after an evening of music celebrating Anderson's art and career. That 1982 photo is in fact one of the most recent. Most are from the 1950s through the 1970s. Many portray moments from the Civil Rights Movement and the uprisings of the 1960s. There are several searing photographs depicting the fierce Detroit riots of 1968 and the aftermath of destruction and anger.

Sometimes the juxtapositions the editors have chosen are interesting. A series of "you are there" photos showing the daily life of Resurrection City, the settlement that arose on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign is followed immediately by a photograph of Arthur Mitchell, "the legendary African-American dancer, choreographer and co-founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem" in a posed setting during a rehearsal for the Dance Theater's upcoming production of Creole Giselle.

Sometimes the reasons for particular photographs remaining unpublished are essentially prosaic, reinforcing the Times' reputation as the staid "Gray Lady." Expressive, movement filled photos set aside in favor of more static photos: headshots or posed portraits and the like. Other times, prejudice seems certainly to have played a part. For example, there's a photograph of President Truman shaking hands with William H. Lastie, who had just been named the first black governor of the Virgin Islands. In the photograph in the book, they are standing next to each other shaking hands. The photo that the paper actually ran was identical, but with no handshake ongoing.

There are heartbreaking and horrifying historical photographs: Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral, inside Malcolm X's house in Queens just after it was firebombed. No one was injured, but soon we see the photograph of Malcolm X's funeral after he was assassinated by rifle fire just eight days later. There is a photograph of Fred Hampton's bullet-ridden apartment immediately after his murder by Chicago policemen, and a series of photos of black soldiers in Vietnam.

Given that many of these photographs are of black people in New York City during the 60s and 70s, it's not surprising that most of the street scenes depict areas of Harlem, where my wife and I are staying for a year, through May 2024. In fact, I bought the book in a gift shop on Lennox Avenue (a.k.a. Malcolm X Boulevard) just a few blocks from our apartment on W. 117th.

Each of the photographs/photo series is accompanied by a short essay describing the photograph, the circumstances behind its creation and information about what photo was chosen to run in its place (or whether a photo was used at all or whether a story about the incident or scene was ever run). When possible, followup information and/or relatively contemporary interviews with the subjects are included, and a few times those essays are even written by the original photographer. This is simply a wonderful book that you'll want to take your time paging through and studying.

Book 35: Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara



This slim volume is from Pocket Poets. I was living in California when I bought this book, though I bought it in the gift shop of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Many of the poems are about New York City, where O'Hara lived when he wrote them and where I live now. The poems were written over the period of 1953 through 1964.

I first started reading these poems about a month ago but didn't like the first few. I couldn't engage with the imagery, somehow, which sometimes seemed more or less random. Then last week I decided to try the poems again. Starting where I'd left off, I found the first few I read to be, in fact, wonderful. So I went back to the beginning and reread the poems I hadn't liked the first time, and, lo and behold! I got those, too! The poems are often very personal, direct observations of life and relationships. There were still some few images that didn't work for me, but I could see better what O'Hara seemed to be getting at: flash portrayals of individual gems of experience, not always necessarily profound in the greater scheme of things but so often worth paying close attention to in the moment. Quite a few of the poems are about the elusive nature of love, or at least that's how I took them. A significant number are veined with eroticism, the joys and pains of desire and physical contact.

Then, when I was about two-thirds through, I got curious and took a look at the Wikipedia page on O'Hara to learn more (my knowledge of poetry and poets being mostly woefully lacking). I found this:

In 1959, he wrote a mock manifesto (originally published in the magazine Yūgen in 1961) called Personism: A Manifesto, in which he explains his position on formal structure: "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" He says, in response to academic overemphasis on form, "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it." He claims that on August 27, 1959, while talking to LeRoi Jones, he founded a movement called Personism which may be "the death of literature as we know it."

He says,

"It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person."

Well, so then I had to go back and read the whole collection from the beginning again (we are only talking about 82 very small pages). And, obviously now, this is me finally learning about an extremely important poet that most people with an iota of interest in American poetry already knew of. C'est la vie.

Here's one of my favorites in the collection, written in 1959, simply entitled "Poem" (Note that this reproduction doesn't do justice to O'Hara's line breaks/indentations. You can see how the lines are supposed to be laid out if you follow the link provided below.)

Krushchev is coming on the right day!
the cool graced light
is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind
and everything is tossing, hurrying on up
this country
has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver says
and five different girls I see
look like Piedie Gimbel
with her blonde hair tossing too,
as she looked when I pushed
her little daughter on the swing on the lawn it was also windy

last night we went to a movie and came out,
Ionesco is greater
than Beckett, Vincent said, that's what I think, blueberry blintzes
and Khrushcev was probably being carped at
in Washington, no
politesse
Vincent tells me about his mother's trip to Sweden
Hans tells us
about his father's life in Sweden, it sounds like Grace Hartigan's
painting Sweden
so I go home to bed and names drift through my
head
Purgatorio Merchado, Gerhard Schwartz and Gaspar Gonzales,
all unknown figures of the early morning as I go to work

where does the evil of the year go
when September takes New York
and turns it into ozone stalagmites
deposits of light
so I get back up
make coffee, and read François Villon, his life, so dark
New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street
I wish it would blow off
though it is cold and somewhat warms
my neck
as the train bears Krushchev on to Pennsylvania Station
and the light seems to be eternal
and joy seems to be inexorable
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57553/poem-khrushchev-is-coming-on-the-ri...

Book 36: Three Thirds of a Ghost by Timothy Fuller



This is the third book in Timothy Fuller's Jupiter Jones mystery series, a now obscure set that was evidently relatively popular when the books were first published in the early 1940s. In the series' first book, Jupiter Jones, a wise-cracking, over-confident know-it-all, had just graduated from Harvard and got involved in a Thin Man sort of way in helping the police (who of course didn't want his help) solve the murder of a Harvard professor. Jones' saving grace is his ability to laugh at himself and his pretensions. In this third book, Jones by by now is himself teaching literature at his alma mater. So, the plot:

At the 150th anniversary celebration of a revered Boston bookstore, author George Newbury is the featured speaker. Newbury has gained fame as a mystery writer but whose last book and, evidently his soon-to-be-published next book, are satires lampooning Boston's elite class, with portrayals close enough to real life figures that it's easy to figure out who he's talking about. While speaking in front of the crowded room, Newbury is shot. Everyone agrees that the gunshot came from the back of the room but, puzzlingly, nobody can say that they saw the shooter. In the room are Newbury's agent, publisher, secretary and four members of the wealthy Still family, whom Newbury had been known to be lampooning in his upcoming novel, plus a celebrated medium who is also thought to be in that book. And, of course, Jupiter Jones.

This mystery is fun, but not quite as fun as the first two in the series. There is a bit less wise-cracking humor, and some moralizing that I could have done without as well. Still, the book was enjoyable all in all, well paced and with a good plot and a good denouement. And it's fun to read once popular, now obscure literature. There are five books in the series. I'm definitely going to read the fourth book sometime soon to see if there's a bounce back, but if that book's not any better than his one, I might not bother with the series finale.

Book note: The paperback edition of the book portrayed in the image above is the copy I have at home in California. Being in New York, now, I had to find another copy. The one I found (online) is a hardcover from 1941. While I bought it from a store called Mycroft's Books in upstate New York, a stamp on the book's inside front cover says it was originally purchased at Finch's, 139 Washington Street, Marblehead, Mass. Clearly Finch's is long gone. There seems to be a flooring business at the address now, and a search for "Finch's Marblehead" came up blank.

Book 37: Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas



This is a very good first novel by Fatin Abbas, a writer who was born in Sudan and grew up in the U.S. The novel is about Saraaya, a small town in the middle of Sudan, more or less on the front line between the two sides of the country's intermittent but long lasting civil war. Stated briefly, the conflict as described here was between the dominant Muslim peoples of the north and the rebels of the country's south, demanding an equal part of, among other things, the benefits accrued from the Sudanese oil industry. (In the event, the country ended up being split, as the southern half broke away to become the independent country of South Sudan in 2011. This development is not mentioned in Ghost Season, which takes place beforehand.)

As the novel begins, the war has receded for a long stretch of time, but rumors of its imminent return are growing with reports of rebel forces now camped out in the countryside and the subsequent arrival of government backed and armed militias. In the town live the South Sudanese Nilots and the Moslem nomads, many of whom have been forced from the old ways by global warming, which has dried up water supplies and caused the death of the essential nomad cattle herds. Generally, the two groups live in peace, but whenever the civil war returns, relations become strained and often violent. Nobody wants a return to these conditions, but the fear of them becomes more real with the discover of a corpse, burnt beyond recognition. Is this a sign of troubles to come?

Alex, a young American NGO employee has come to the village with the assignment to create updated maps of the area, which haven't been revised since before the English colonizers left the area. The job is almost impossible, however, as the topography of the region changes with the seasons--rainy and dry--and global warming has wrecked havoc with even these haphazard patterns. Living with him in his small compound are Dana, a young Sudanese-American filmmaker trying to document the lives of the villagers while she simultaneously perfects her craft, William, a Nilot who is hired as Alex's translator, Layla, a young nomad woman who works as cook, and Mustafa, a 12-year-old dynamo who is William's gofer and all-round helper who dreams of escape to the national capital, Khartoum. We see the impending peril through the eyes of these five characters, with their varied perspectives, hopes and troubles.

As mentioned above, this is a first novel, and there are issues with pacing in particular. The first half of the book is pretty static, as Abbas moves her perspective around to describe each character and how the relationships between them all. There's a lot of "telling," in other words. In the book's second half, though, the action picks up considerably. There are also examples of some scenes being drawn out too long (for my taste) and some coming and going in a flash. However, although Abbas here is a first time novelist, she is a very accomplished writer. The list of awards she has won for her short story writing is extensive. So while there are issues with plotting and pacing--novel construction, in other words--there are no problems with Abbas' powers of observation and description. Her sentence- and paragraph-level writing are gorgeous. Her characters are believable, as are their interactions with each other. So even while the plotting is somewhat slow in the first half, the book was still enjoyable for me. In the meantime, the descriptions of the village, the lifestyle and concerns of its people, the historical and environmental forces that have shaped it all are nothing short of admirable. So I very much recommend the book.

Book 38: Life Magazine - October 24, 1969 edited by Ralph Graves



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). Another old magazine off the stack on the floor of my home office. The edition of Life was particularly intriguing for me due to my memories of so many of the events written about here, as I turned 14 in July 1969. Of most interest was the relatively long article, with photos, about the Vietnam War Moratorium that had just taken place in Washington, DC, hundreds of thousands strong, as well as side pieces about the Nixon Administration's response. Also interesting was the piece on the community that had developed among heart-transplant recipients, very much still a new technology at that time, and on a more humorous note, the dynamic between the Washington Redskins' fun-loving quarterback, Sonny Jurgensen, and disciplinarian Vince Lombardi at the start of the latter's short, post-Packers tenure as head coach in Washington. Finally, there was a nostalgia-inducing piece about the early days of rock "supergroup" Blind Faith. I can still recall what a big deal it was for my high school friends and I when Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker from Cream and Steve Windwood from Traffic got together to form that band.

Book 39: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe


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I read Moll Flanders as part of my custom of intermittently and more or less randomly selecting a "classic" I've never read, just to fill in another hole in my reading. I think it was considered rather daring, or at least unusual, of Defoe to create a first person female protagonist at the time he was writing (the novel was first published in 1722). Defoe's intention, evidently, was to create character that he could send down into serious moral degradation and then bring up again to show that even the most incorrigible individual could be redeemed in the end. (This is giving nothing away. The book's subtitle ends with the phrase, "died a penitent.") As well, he obviously wanted to write an interesting, readable tale. During the telling, Defoe provides the reader with details about the lowest levels of London society. If you ever wanted details about the habits and procedures of the pickpockets and shop thieves of late 17th, early 18th century London, this is your book. Whether Defoe meant to titillate his readers with these accounts or he took their foreknowledge of these thing for granted I'm unsure.

When Moll (not her real name, we're told) first comes to early adulthood, she is an honest, naive servant girl who wants nothing more than the opportunity to eventually make a living for herself through her sewing. But, through sexual harassment, she is soon put in an impossible situation by first one of the grown brothers in the family she's working for, and then the other. And although the second brother actually marries her out of love, Moll takes the lesson that men will press their advantages over women in all sorts of ways, and that, to survive, a women must look to her own interests and do what she can to survive. Luckily for Moll, she is physically beautiful. So through a series of marriages and dalliances, she is never short of suitors. However, those suitors are often after nothing other than the money she has set by. Through a series of often rather improbable happenstances, Moll is in and out of such relationships. Sometimes they are strictly mercenary, and sometimes they are happier, but ill-fated. At last, Moll finds herself in London, past the age when men will search her out for her beauty or for marriage. At this point she turns to a life of crime: a pickpocket and a thief.

At first Moll Flanders is clearly a victim of misogyny and the English class system. Later we find her hardened by these experiences in an immoral lifestyle checked only by the fear of being caught an imprisoned. Along the way we learn something that is horrifying to our modern standards but would have been taken for granted, I guess, by Defoe's contemporaries: petty thievery in those days was a hanging crime in England.

There were times when the reading of Moll Flanders was a bit of a slog for me, as some of the incidents do go on and/or are repetitive. And there is nothing subtle about Defoe's portrayal. Even the name Moll Flanders, we're told in the introduction, would have denoted low living and prostitution to Defoe's contomporaries. Whatever it was that Defore meant to portray, he does give us a novel with a forceful female protagonist who lives by her wits and on her own terms. She is sometimes victimized by men, and is set on her path by one man's injustice in particular, but more becomes the agent of her own actions, and has disdain for those men she encounters who are psychologically undone by setbacks. Defoe's frankness about sex (nothing graphic, but then nothing coy, either) is reminiscent of The Decameron, which I am also currently reading. I guess I found Moll Flanders to be more an interesting time piece than an enjoyable reading experience per se, but all in all I'm glad to have read it, and the character will certainly remain memorable to me.

Book note: The cover shown here is that of the Modern Library edition of the book that is sitting on my Modern Library collection shelf in California. The edition I actually read is the Penguin Classics version, edited with an introduction by David Blewett, that I took out of the Harry Belafonte Branch of the New York Public Library.

Book 40: The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr



This is the 11th entry in Philip Kerr's wonderful Bernie Gunther historical noir series. Gunther started out the series as a homicide detective in Nazi-era (but pre-war) Berlin. Being a Nazi-hater in 1935 Berlin was bound to bring our pal Bernie some problems, and of course it did by the fistful. The Other Side of Silence finds Gunther out the other end of the war with even more cynicism to go along with his battered conscience. Now it is the mid-50s and he is working as a concierge in a decent but not great hotel on the French Riviera. Kerr was never shy about mixing well-known real life figures into Gunther's adventures and travails. This time we meet Somerset Maugham, who is living in the same town and is being blackmailed. It's not long before the British Secret Service are in town, too, and what we have is a Cold War conundrum. This isn't among the very best books in this series, but even good-not-great Bernie Gunther is still a lot of fun in the reading. Sadly, Kerr died a few years back, but I still have three Bernie Gunther books to go.

Book 41: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood



No one needs a lengthy review of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, The Handmaids's Tale, from the likes of me at this late date. I'll just say that I found this dystopian tale entirely believable and disturbing. The ways in which Atwood builds her world and the ways in which the United States gradually, by steps, morphs into the totalitarian state of Gilead, in which most men and all women are forcibly subservient to the powerful few, all male, Commanders, and the horrors of life that ensure, especially for women, seems all too--with just a bit of suspension of disbelief--plausible. In fact, it all probably seems more believable today than it did back when the book was originally published in the 1980s, and what does that say? Also, the first person protagonist's voice is real and alive. I only regret that it took me so long to finally read this novel.

Book 42: Call for the Dead by John le Carré



I decided to read Call for the Dead, John le Carré's first published novel and the first book of his famous George Smiley series, because, you know, I needed another series to be in the middle of. :). It's a short book, fewer than 200 pages, and although the story is about spies and espionage, it's essentially a murder mystery. It's a good first novel, I think, though nowhere near the quality of le Carré's (and Smiley's) subsequent novels, though already the writing style, I thought, was quite enjoyable. Foreign Office employee Samuel Fennan, whom Smiley has recently interviewed about a letter the office has received questioning Fennan's loyalty. And although Smiley assures Fennan at the end of the interview that he hasn't anything to worry about, Fennan commits suicide the next day. And when Smiley goes to Fennan's house the next day to talk to his widow, he feels that things are not adding up. Well, they wouldn't, would they? I thought it was good fun and a nice brisk read. I'm now interested in continuing on in the series.

Book note: The cover image above is of the Bantam Books mass market (pocket book) edition from 1979. this book is sitting on my bookshelf in California. The copy I actually read is a Penguin Books edition from 2021 that includes a short retrospective introduction by le Carré. This copy came from the Harry Belafonte Branch of the NYC Public Library on West 115th Street.

Book 43: Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (translated from the French by Thomas W. Cushing)



The pocket biography of Albert Cossery on the front page of my NYRB edition of Proud Beggars tells us, "Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life." Proud Beggars, first published in 1955, brings us the tale of three men living in an impoverished section of Cairo. To a great or lesser degree, they have all chosen their lifestyle. Gohar, in particular, is a former university professor who, in disgust at what he's come to see as the meaningless and hypocritical world of academia, has renounced participation in the world of professional and material values to live instead in poverty, in a tiny apartment, sleeping on a pile of old newspapers, his love for hashish his only real anchor. Gohar's friend and hashish source is Yeghen, also a poet. El Kordi is a low-level civil servant who is proud of his refusal to do any actual work and fancies himself a revolutionary. As Alyson Waters, points out in her introduction to this edition, "None of them is an actual beggar--they all have ways of making money, if only a pittance--but they are certainly free of ambition and otherwise indifferent to social convention." In particular, Gohar's world is framed by optimism, by his love of the people around him and the joy he sees in their existence. Small details of humans and their folly fill him with delight. As a counterweight to this optimism about the human condition in the poor quarter, the three friends share in common their conviction that the world is run by oppressors, scoundrels and thieves.

Near the beginning of the narrative, a young prostitute is murdered in nearby brothel in what appears to be a motiveless crime. Into the picture comes police inspector Nour El Dine who feels in the solving of such crimes and punishment of their perpetrators not any compassion for the victims but instead a maintenance of order, a defense of the status quo. Our three heroes take him on gleefully as a worthy if not particularly threatening adversary. And Nour El Dine has his own dissatisfactions and doubts.

The language and tone of the novel I found entertaining throughout. The characters' caustic takedowns of society's power structures I found often hilarious, and Cossery's powers of description and observation are rewarding, as well. His descriptions of the street life of this poor Cairo neighborhood reminded me sometimes of Isaac B. Singers' descriptions of the Jewish quarters of pre-war Warsaw.

Proud Beggars is in a way a comedy of manners, a sly attack on the mores of middle class society and the ruling class and a celebration of the daily joys of life. On the other hand, it's easy to see the flaws in the worldview, at least as presented here by Cossery. As noted above, all three of the protagonists have chosen their status, and none of them have families to support, adding to their freedom. They are all men, of course, and the murder of the young girl--her very humanity and the tragedy of her death--is for the most part shrugged off by all concerned. She is disposable, not just by the characters but, if Waters' introduction is accurate, by Cossery himself. Especially this last factor made Proud Beggars less enjoyable for me overall. Or perhaps through this factor, Cossery has in fact added a level of unfortunate and unintentional realism to his story.

Book note: During a trip to Strand Books a while back, I purchased a 1978 anthology called New Writing from the Middle East, which I quickly added to my "between book" reading. Fast forward several weeks. One day, during my explorations of Manhattan, I stumbled upon the wonderful store, Albertine Books, housed in a former mansion on Central Park East that offers books in French and French books in English translation. There I found Proud Beggars, which I bought because I recognized Cossery as the author of one of the stories I'd read in the Middle East anthology.

Book 44: Now We're Getting Somewhere by Kim Addonizio



Poet Kim Addonizio was a very good friend of mine during grad school days in San Francisco and immediately thereafter. We have not stayed in close touch over the intervening years, but I still think of her as a friend. Most importantly for our current purposes, Kim is an extremely accomplished and highly regarded poet. The other day I wandered into one of the Strand Books satellite stores and it occurred to me to wonder whether they had a copy of her most recent collection, Now We're Getting Somewhere, which I hadn't read yet. Sure enough!

This is a slim volume, somewhere around 35 poems of varying lengths, with widely spaced layouts. When I got the book home I sat down to read, I thought, the first two or three poems before getting back to Shirley Chisholm's campaign memoir. Next thing I knew, I read through the entire collection and then gone back to the beginning and read through them again. Kim's poems have always been vivid with imagery of the street and of the heart: love, regret, light, bad marriages, new love, the joys of writing, the misery of writing, dancing, cracked plaster, hope.

Here's the first poem in the collection:

"Night in the Castle"

I'm not sure what to do about that scorpion twitching on the wall
Maybe I should slam it with this book of terrible poetry

or just read aloud to it until it dies of a histrionic metaphor
bleeding out on the ancient stones in a five-octave aria

If I get a little drunker I might try to murder it with my sandal
I gave up on mercy a while ago

That's what happens when you live in a castle on an artist's grant
You look at the late-afternoon Umbiran light smearing itself over the tomato vines

& feel entitled--like an underage duchess whose husband has finally died of gout
leaving her free for more secret liaisons with the court musician

She might even have poisoned the duke, the lecherous shit
It's hard to remember what life was like before this

& I don't want to, I want to stay here & poison the king next
I want to be a feared & beloved queen ordering up fresh linens & beheadings

locking up bad poets in their artisanal hair shirts
torturing academics with pornographic marionette performances

Meanwhile the scorpion is still there twitching slightly
reciting something about violence & the prison of ego

& I can hear clashing armies on the wide lawn outside
sinking down into history & then standing up again

And here's the final poem in the collection:

"Stay"

So your device has a low battery & seems to drain faster each day.
Maybe you should double your medication.

You might feel queasy, but also as if the spatula flattening you to the fry pan
has lifted a little.

So your breath comes out scorched, so what.

Inside, trust me on this,
there's a ribbon of beach by a lake,

in the sand, fragments of a fossilized creature resembling a tulip.

Back in the Paleozoic, online wasn't invented yet
so everyone had to wander alone & miserable through the volcanic wastes

or just glue themselves to a rock hoping someone would pass by.

Now you can sob to an image of your friend a continent away
& be consoled.

Please wait for the transmissions, however faint.
Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you,

they're meant for you.

Book 45: The Good Fight by Shirley Chisholm



Only U.S. denizens of a certain age and/or students of American presidential politics or African American history are likely to have heard of Shirley Chisholm. She was the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (from her district in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn) and, in 1972, the first to run for president, as she took on George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Muskie and others for the Democratic Party nomination. The Good Fight is her memoir of that presidential campaign, written very soon after the election and republished last year on the occasion of the campaign's 50th anniversary.

Chisholm was (she died in 2005) a very clear and effective writer, and this memoir makes very interesting reading. She provides a survey of the important issues of the day, the Vietnam War, race relations, women's rights and Nixon's dismantling of the social programs put in place by Lyndon Johnson foremost among them. She describes her decision to run, essentially, as she tells it. due to calls from calls among the constituencies she represented who wanted a relevant alternative to the many white men, conservative and liberal both, to work and to vote for. She writes of the resentment and resistance she encountered by male black political leaders, very few of whom actually endorsed her campaign, although some who didn't actually endorse her gave tacit support. And she writes of her frustration with white liberal politicians who talked a good game but were not often to be found when action (or important congressional votes) were needed.

Her campaign was mostly a cash-starved effort, and she only entered a handful of Democratic primaries. The idea was to garner enough delegate votes to keep any of the "major" candidates from being able to win the nomination on the first vote at the convention, enabling her to be able to bargain for important concessions in the official party platform before releasing her delegates to the candidate who stood to win the nomination. In some states, supporters who wanted to campaign for her begged Chisholm to allow them to enter her in a primary she wouldn't otherwise have signed up for. This happened in the California primary. Chisholm explained to these supporters that she wouldn't be able to campaign in the state or even provide financial help due to lack of funds. The California volunteers would be entirely on their own. Those supporters pushed on, anyway.

Another important sign of those times was the fact that Chisholm's most prominent supporters came from the ranks of young African Americans and mostly middle class white women's rights activists, who often couldn't communicate well with each other and in many states developed fairly acute enmity for each other. The women were often arrogant, unable to identify with the problems of African Americans and looking down at working class people in general, and the African American men brought their gender bias to the office. But as Chisholm writes in her conclusion, "it is important that I never made the rights of women or of blacks a primary theme of my campaign but insisted on making my role that of a potential voice for all the out-groups, those included. . . . Long unmet needs for housing, health care, pensions on which the aged can live decently, effective schools everywhere, including the poorest neighborhoods--all these and more cannot be neglected any longer, I kept saying." In the end, she gained support for her candidacy from across the gender/race spectrum. But she did not come close to picking up enough delegate votes to force more robust policies into the Democratic Party platform.

Chisholm has a lot to say about the rather arrogant, paternalistic campaigns run by McGovern and Humphrey, in which blacks and women were represented only by token figures, but in which effective black and female voices were very much excluded. And yet, post-election, she also says, "Men like George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey are going to be badly needed in the U.S. Senate in the coming years. Our public life would be greatly enhanced if we had dozens more George McGoverns, men who, to quote George Orwell, are 'generously angry--a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.'"

The memoir's only drawback, if such it is, is that it provides Chisholm's global perspective of events. There's very little detail about personality and life experience, either Chisholm's or any of the other players. Her husband barely gets a mention, for example, other than that we're told he fully supports her efforts. None of the other figures become people; they're just names attached to actions and attitudes. That makes for a brisk and readable political memoir--obviously what Chisholm was shooting for, but we never really get the idea we're seeing Shirley Chisholm the person rather than the politician and activist. Fifty years on, though, as far as posterity's concerned, maybe that's the most important thing, anyway.

At any rate, I found The Good Fight to be a fascinating memoir about a fascinating watershed time in U.S. history. Chisholm was clear-eyed about the damage Nixon had already done and what further damage would be done during his next term (aborted though it turned out to be). In terms of civil rights, the Nixon-era backlash was bad enough. The Regan-era backlash "war on crime" was many degrees worse, and the potential that Chisholm saw for the future at that pivotal moment seems tragically to have foundered on the rocks.

Book 46: Sappers in the Wire: The Life and Death of Firebase Mary Ann by Keith William Nolan



Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I became fascinated with the Vietnam War, and specifically what it was like to be an American combat soldier in that war. Part of it was just the surreal and horrifying nature of the experience, and another part was, I think, an identification in some way with an experience I'd only just missed having to go through (or having to make a serious decision about, like moving to Canada or going to jail). I turned 18 in 1973, the final year of the draft lottery, although I think by then they had stopped actually drafting anybody. Still, the Vietnam draft had been a major part of every American's consciousness during the war years, and especially American males who of draft age or who had draft age looming. That feeling stuck with me even after the danger was over, and I read, specifically, memoirs and fiction, rather than straight histories. It's been a long time since I revisited that time and mindset, but for some reason when I noticed this book a couple of years ago in a Las Vegas bookstore, I decided to pick it up. Last week I finally gave it a read.

Sappers in the Wire is a detailed historical account of an American military debacle. It was late in the war, the spring of 1971, and the U.S. was gradually disengaging. The moral of the soldiers still on the ground was understandably low. Belief that there was any real purpose to what they were doing was scarce, and nobody wanted to die in a purposeless war. Drug use had grown, resentment of officers was often strong, and racial divisions affected the soldiers, as well. Firebase Mary Ann was a fortified encampment on the top of a hill in the jungle in the northern part of South Vietnam, put there to allow the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to try to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines into the country. The solders were still going on dangerous patrols in the surrounding jungle, inflicting and receiving casualties. But up on their firebase refuge, they felt safe, and between this feeling of safety and the enlisted soldiers' low morale, it became very difficult for the officers to impose security protocol standards. One night, after a confusion-inducing mortar attack, Viet Cong soldiers snuck past the camp's guards and ran through the camp tossing grenades into bunkers and shooting soldiers who tried to escape the explosions. Thirty U.S. soldiers were killed and 82 were seriously wounded.

Keith William Nolan, a military historian, does an excellent job setting the scene for the American disaster. He starts with a brief description of the event itself, and then goes back several weeks to describe individual patrols that the solders of this division had undertaken in the leadup to the battle. Often the soldiers performed admirably, but it was not unusual for soldiers to refuse orders they thought were inordinately foolhardy. Usually, threats of court martial would get them moving.

The battle, especially when word of the lax security came out, became a scandal within and without of the Army. The Army conducted a thorough investigation of the battle (which Nolan describes in the book's final chapters) and the failings that led up to it, interviewing every surviving soldier in depth, and Nolan was able to access these testimonies. He also conducted phone interviews with dozens of soldiers will to talk to him. The book was written in the 1990s, and Nolan reports that many of the soldiers told him a version of, "We've been waiting 20 years for somebody to tell this story." Between the official testimonies and these interviews, Nolan was able to construct a minute-by-minute account of the terrifying action, and he does so. It is, not surprisingly, very hard reading.

I read this book now, I guess, to remind myself how horrible and tragic this war was, and all war is. Sappers in the Wire certainly accomplishes that. The only flaws in the writing are 1) the fact that he seems to me to identify too closely with and/or wishes to glorify the soldiers themselves. He commonly uses their own slang, referring to the soldiers as "grunts" and speaking of shooting someone as "firing them up" (but only when a U.S. soldier shoots a Vietnamese soldier); and 2) for some reason, Nolan insists on specifying when soldiers he's referring to are black. Having described the racial tensions running through the Army at this point, especially in the rear, perhaps Nolan was trying to stress the fact that these tensions more or less evaporated when it was time for everybody to go into action. I hope there was some such logic, anyway.

At any rate, this is mostly a very good book, for anyone interested in revisiting, or learning about, the daily crazy hell of the Vietnam War. By now, I would assume that's a very small subset of my LT friends.

Book 47: Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Coronet Magazine was a digest-sized monthly publication founded in 1936 and lasting into the early 1970s. By 1938, Arnold Gingrich had taken over as editor. This edition of Coronet is fascinating, indeed. It includes four short stories, including the strongly anti-Jim Crow "Runaway" by Erskine Caldwell. A chilling column on atrocities by journalist Edward Hunter, enumerating those perpetrated by both sides in the Spanish Civil War, in the Japanese invasion of China and by the Italians then invading Ethiopia, all places Hunter had been. There is a fascinating report by Meyer Levin entitled "Epic of Palestine," about life (and violent death) in early Jewish farming settlements during the 1920s and 30s, complete an incredible series of photographs. And speaking of photographs, there is a long photo essay (accompanied by a short bio) of Hungarian photographer Ernö Vadas, followed by an equally long collection of photos by several more contemporary Europeans photographers. There is an essay on the young stage/production wunderkind Orson Wells and his Mercury Theater, a series of silhouettes by artist Paul Swartz. A biography of Verdi. Well, that's just a short selection of the wonderful, fascinating and illumination entries in this terrific, 85-year old magazine. Super cool. I love old publications.

Book 48: Intrigue in Paris by Sterling Noel



Sometimes I just need to hit the pulp fiction shelf, and this enjoyable thriller filled the bill just fine. A couple of years after World War 2, American merchant marine Wright Hughey is sitting in an outdoor cafe in Marseilles, waiting out a tugboat strike, when he is mistaken for a local criminal by some other criminals. intrigue ensues! Although the plot of this romp becomes steadily less plausible as it goes along, nevertheless it is a good time for readers who go in for this sort of thing. Noel was a pretty writer, the action scenes themselves are believable and never get out of hand, and overall the action is understated rather than lurid. I looked up Noel, and it turns out he wrote several of these thrillers and a couple of science fiction works as well.

Book notes: My Avon mass market paperback edition was published in 1955, meaning that it was printed the year I was born. I entered it into my LT library way back in April 2008, my Librarything "big bang." The book was originally published with the title "Storm over Paris." There is even a 1956 English movie based on the book, called "House of Secrets:" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Secrets_(1956_film) (Warning: if you look at this web page, don't read the plot synopsis, as it contains spoilers for the book. That's if you think you will ever read the book, of course.)

Book 49: Mapp and Lucia by E.F. Benson



This is the 4th book in E.F. Benson's famous series about a couple of upper-middle class, small town, English busybodies that takes place in the period between the World Wars. The series is also called Mapp and Lucia, and this entry has also been published as Make Way for Lucia. Got it? Anyway, the series brings us the adventures of Elizabeth Mapp and Emmiline Lucas (a.k.a. Lucia). In these comedies of manners, both women strive to rule their own social sets, run all events in their respective towns and serve as the arbiters of all disputes. The previous books have brought us the characters each in her own small circle, Lucia in the village of Riseholme and Miss Mapp in the town of Tilling. In this fourth book, the two come together for a summer in Tilling, and the sparks of competition and animosity fly almost immediately. These books, I would think would be completely silly and uninteresting to me, but in fact, due to Benson's great skill they are drily hilarious and immensely entertaining. This series, which were reportedly much in demand by the literary cognoscenti in the post-WW2 period when they were out of print, is well written, harmless and eminently diverting fun, and a thorough tweaking of the evidently useless English monied class of the period. This 4th novel was first published in 1931.

Book 50: Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz



Well, lo and behold, my 50th book of the year is a textbook, the major part of the reading for the course I audited at Columbia University this semester, Latin American Civilization I: (Early Latin America, 16th-18th centuries), taught by an excellent lecturer, Catarina Pizzigoni. The book was first published in the 1980s, and is what we think of as a traditional history textbook: very dense and more than a little dry. But when considered with the course lectures and the supplemental readings we were assigned, Early Latin America provides a fairly comprehensive and, for me at least, quite illuminating look at the more than 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule in Mexico and Central and South America.

I took this particular course because this history was a huge blank spot for me. Like many (most, probably) U.S. denizens, my knowledge ran something along the lines of: There were indigenous empires like the Aztecs and Incas, and then the conquistadors came from Spain in the late 15th/early 16 centuries, and then there were independence movements and revolutions in the late 1800s. But what actually occurred during the conquests, how the Spanish (and later the Portuguese in Brazil) both subjugated and then interacted with the indigenous people, how the economies of the areas grew and the various groups--Spanish, indigenous and African slaves (and later free blacks)--gradually began to interact and intermarry, and how and why the local populations were eventually able to establish independence, that was all information that I did not have and, to be frank, had never considered. It was fascinating to get such a fascinating depth of field on it all.

For example, many of us have a picture of the conquistadors showing up and sweeping through the indigenous populations due to the fact that they had guns and horses. What we learned in the class was that a) the guns the Spanish had were extremely ineffective and b) they generally got down from their horses to fight, anyway. What they had, though, was steel. Steel swords and, even more importantly, steel armor that largely protected them from arrows. Furthermore, at most of the major battles that were fought, the Spanish were aided by relatively large contingents of indigenous warriors who belonged to peoples with a grudge against the Aztecs (in the case of Mexico). Also, the Spanish were most effective at creating and maintaining control of areas where the civilizations they found took forms that were relatively familiar. In Mexico, this meant a people who were already organized into large settlements, who mostly stayed put throughout the year, who practiced agriculture on a large scale, and who were used to idea of paying tribute in the form of agricultural good and/or labor to a dominant group and/or class. We learned lots more, of course, but I'll just add one additional fact about those earliest days, which is that a huge percentage of the mortality rate of the indigenous people in those first decades came not from warfare but from the diseases that the Europeans brought with them. Up to 80% of the people living in what is now Mexico when Cortes arrived died in this way.

A quick note about the Columbia University auditing program. One has to live within a certain geographical proximity to the university campus and be over 60 to be eligible to audit courses. Not every course is available for auditing and space in those that are available is limited. I'll spare you further details. My professor liked having auditors participate, though, as she said she like allowing the undergrads a chance to get our perspective on things. Anyway, as auditors are not getting credits or grades, how much of the reading they do is up to them. I did all the reading, but you can be sure I didn't write any term papers! Finally because we had about a dozen auditors in our class, I took the initiative to get an auditors' coffee group together. About six of us met after every class (Tuesday and Thursdays around noon) at a nearby coffeeshop to talk about the class and swap life stories. I met some very interesting people thereby.

Anyway, the book. I wouldn't recommend it for leisure reading, but as a textbook for an interesting course with a terrific professor, it filled the bill just fine.

Book 51: Those Other People by Mary King O'Donnell



First published in 1946, Those Other People is a wonderful and unjustly forgotten novel about people living in close proximity on a block of St. Philips Street, at the back end of New Orleans' French Quarter. The story takes place during the days between the beginning of World War 2 and the U.S. entry into the war. Occasionally we get references to headlines featuring Hitler and Mussolini, and we're also told of Nazi troops shooting down students in the streets of Prague. Those references provide chronological and cultural cues, but they're not what the story is about. Instead, O'Donnell gives us a day in the life of an ethnically mixed but eternally interacting cast of characters. Although she was writing about the French Quarter she knew, for us it's a trip back in time to the days when the French Quarter, and especially towards its back end (closer to Esplanade and further from Canal Street and the Quarter's tourist center) was still an ethnically mixed working class neighborhood. One character builds skiffs in his workshop; another has a small auto body shop. Rubbing elbows with each other daily are an immigrant Italian couple, a Filipino family, a black couple, and a white Protestant family, including realtor Merlin Webster (who owns most the this property) and his wife, as well as Merlin's unmarried sister Leah and their younger sister, Maudie. Maudie is married to Victor Peralta, employed as a writer by the WPA. His elderly mother lives with them, as well. Other strangers are brought into the narrative along the way, as O'Donnell's lens moves gracefully if somewhat fitfully around the city.

If the story has a moral center, it is Leah. Leah wakes up as on the day of our story deciding to go in search of Joe, a merchant marine she met in a bar two nights prior and with whom she spent all that night talking. Upon the sunrise, Joe had simply said goodbye and walked off down the street. Leah knows that finding him, somewhere in the city within the two days before he's due to ship out, is highly improbable, but she decides that the search alone will somehow revitalize her, and so she begins her odyssey, though this is just one of the many strands of O'Donnell's story.

An important strength of O'Donnell's writing his her ability to capture the physical details of the Quarter: buildings, flowers, people, weather, and the play of sunlight as the day progresses. The musings of the characters, their aspirations, frustrations and resignations, whether fretful or at peace, bring this novel its real depth. O'Donnell is also clear about the effects of the many class distinctions between the characters, and gives particular attention to the difficulties and injustices visited upon her black characters, from their economic problems to the cavalier attitude of policeman who, in search of a store thief they know to be a young black man, are content to, essentially, arrest the first black youth they see when they come around the corner.

Here is an example of that last element, and of the quality of the writing in general. The black couple, Dan and Iris, and their friend Orena, are at home. Trouble has come to the Clarks in a way that both threatens their immediate future and stirs up memory of tragedy past:

"Dan and Iris Clark sat at the table in the Clark kitchen with Orena Robideaux. Dan was finishing his interrupted meal, but Iris could not eat. She picked at a thread on the checkered tablecloth. Orena stood up to make a fresh pot of core.

Rain pounded the courtyard bricks; water hissed on the bottom of the kettle Orena had filled and set on the stove; Dan's knife clattered against his plate. Nobody spoke, but the room spoke for them. It was as clean as Iris could keep it; but soap and scouring powder could not erase memories of black sweat and weatherbeaten walls and greasy meals scooped up in haste; beds sought in haste, anywhere, to ease the ache of limbs and heart and loins; beds left in haste to begin the endless work of endless mornings they were made to love and so could not help but love in spite of knowing that the day's work would lead them nowhere except to bed again in a land which was theirs and not theirs, in a house they did not own. And yet, Iris thought, this was her kitchen."

Overall, though, this is a very good-hearted book. The positive energy of life thrums through O'Donnell's writing, and the familiarity between the myriad people jammed up against each other on our block of St. Philips Street breeds friendship and forbearance rather than contempt. The book's flaw, such as it is, is an over-romanticized view. So I wouldn't call this a gritty novel by any stretch, but I did very much enjoy it.

On a personal note, I lived in New Orleans from 1979 through 1986, basically throughout my 20s. That's about midway between the time O'Donnell writes about and the present day. There were still vestiges of O'Donnell's world to be found when I was there, and I still have a very clear mental picture of many of the places O'Donnells characters visit, both in the Quarter and throughout the city. So the reading stirred up a lot of memories for me.

I went looking for biographical information about O'Donnell. The book jacket provides very little, other than the fact that she'd previously published a novel, Quincie Bolliver, under her pre-marriage name, Mary King. After poking around the interwebs for a while, I finally found the following bio, originally published in a 1954 short story anthology called Twenty-One Texas Short Stories:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7560/734166-014/html

Book 52: Voroshilovgrad by Serhij Zhadan



Voroshilovgrad, an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian Serhij Zhadan novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan, was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence. The "business" turns out to be a small but profitable gas station on the outskirts of the town, located on Ukraine's eastern steppes, now known as Luhansk but formerly known, during the Soviet Era, as Voroshilovgrad. The station is under seige from mysterious forces who want to force Herman to sell it, perhaps (although exact reasons remain obscure) because there is natural gas to be found in the area. There is barely a character in the story who is not mysterious and rough around the edges. Stories of the past are always blurred by secrets and mythology. The representatives from the federal government who make periodic appearances are more likely to be gangsters than legitimate government officials. Or else they're both. Travels across the empty stretches of this country are always hazardous. The people Herman runs into could be from anywhere, and the sights that pass before his eyes, especially at sundown and after dark, swirl into hallucinations and dreams.

Gradually, though, Herman begins to find a sense of purpose as he gains a sense of comradeship with the old friends he reconnects with, and through the stories they tell him. What he'd thought would be a quick in and out to "take care of business" before returning to his old life becomes a commitment to this off-kilter community. At one point, an old soccer team, on which Herman had been a young player on a team of old veterans, reassembles for a rowdy game against a local rival. Later, Herman comes upon the graves of some of these teammates in the local cemetery. Had he been playing soccer with ghosts? It is central to the essence of the novel that this question is never taken up again. Herman seems to simply shrug the discovery off as irrelevant.

The writing is often laced with multiple metaphors that don't quite work. A metal rod brought down on the hood of a car makes a sound like to tolling of Easter Bells. Spider webs described as floating in the air, as if anchoring a metal fence to the ground. The come, at times, so fast and furious that eventually I could only decide that the effect was purposeful, as if telling us that no impressions can be trusted. Although the metaphors can also be precise: "He was giving me an angry, prickly look, but it was somehow detached from his personality, as though he was wearing anger-tinted contact lenses."

The overall theme of the book to me seemed clearly to be the struggles of these far flung areas of Ukraine to make sense of their post-Soviet existence, already several decades in the past but still casting a difficult shadow over everything. It's obviously no coincidence that the book's title harkens back to the town's Soviet name. And then there is this seeming (from our current remove and perspective) foreshadowing of events to come:

It was obvious what Ernst was thinking. Ernst was thinking, "Something bad is going to happen, something real bad is definitely going to happen. For now, nobody can really tell--they all think that the worst is behind us and that the storm has passed. But that's not true at all." Ernst was very fam9lliar with the feeling, with the sense of impending danger. It was coming, all right, and there was no0 way to avoid it. They'd have to run this gauntlet one way or another. There would be no way to sped the process up of avoid it altogether. All you could do was look the ominous beast in the eye and wait. Its terrible snout would sniff you for a while, then it'd just walk away, leaving fear an stench behind. Ernst almost immediately had a flashback to when he once felt the rotten breath of brewing trouble. He recalled that trapped feeling that filled his lungs, he recalled that seep-seated fear that encroaches upon new territory like swollen rivers in March. . . .

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended.

Book 53: Life Magazine - July 2, 1965 edited by George P. Hunt



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is one more off the stack of old magazines that have been residing on a closet floor of my home office for years, and which I've been gradually reading through for some time. As you can see from the cover, this issue's main focus was the growing American involvement in the Vietnam War. The cover photo is part of a searing photo-essay (titled "New Fury in Vietnam War") by photographer Horst Faas, who that year won a Pulitzer Prize for his combat photography. In addition, Japanese journalist Akihito Okamura, writes of his weeks spent as a prisoner of the Viet Cong, and another photo essay by unnamed "French journalists" provides a picture of the life of anti-government forces on duty in the jungle. There is also an essay by influential policymaker Eugene Rostow: "The Realities of Power Demand that We Fight On." (I clearly remember my 9th grade history teacher in 1969 or 70 speaking of Rostow with scorn.) Tragically, we read this all today fascinated and horrified at the knowledge that in 1965 the U.S. might still have reversed course, but did not.

In addition to the Vietnam War coverage, we get a piece about Degas' time with his family in New Orleans, accompanied by large color prints of the work Degas did there; a column by Shana Alexander about a Louisiana group called the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed black organization organized to protect black communities from the Klan; and a very interesting excerpt from Theodore H. White's book, The Making of the President - 1964, describing Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process in choosing a running mate, first deciding against Robert Kennedy and eventually selecting Hubert Humphrey.

All in all, this edition of Life is a fascinating time piece. I love these old magazines! They provide so much information about the issues of their day, often including forgotten or unknown (by me, anyway) gems. On a personal note, the magazine was published two days before my 10th birthday. The next magazine on the stack is the May 10, 1941 edition of Collier's Magazine.

Book 54: The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner



In December 1981, during the fierce civil war in El Salvador, members of an elite strike force of the Salvadoran Army arrived at the village of El Mazote in a mountainous section of the country mostly controlled by leftist rebel forces and proceeded to murder somewhere around 800 villagers: men, women and children in the most horrible ways imaginable. The point was to demonstrate to the surrounding areas that the consequences of supporting for the rebels could be dire, even though even the most cursory investigation of El Mazote would have shown the army leaders that these villagers were doing their best to have nothing to do with either the rebels or the government's armed forces. Cruelty and viciousness was the point.

New Yorker reporter Mark Danner does an excellent job of setting up the background of the atrocity, geopolitically and internally. And then, using survivor testimony as well as the testimony of those few soldiers who were willing to talk to Danner anonymously, he walks readers step by step and atrocity by atrocity through that horrible afternoon. Then comes the aftermath, as the Reagan Administration, desperate to secure new funding for the Salvadoran army's fight against "Communist forces," did their best to obfuscate and to discredit as "biased" the first-hand (a couple of weeks after the fact) reporting by journalists from both the New York Times (including photographs) and the Washington Post.

Danner's subtitle for his book is "A Parable of the Cold War," and he does a very good job of setting up the pressure put on Congressmen, including Democrats who should have known better, not to cut funding and thus be responsible to "losing" El Salvador to Communism, especially coming so soon after the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Although the term is never used in the book, "plausible deniability" was the dominant paradigm as far as the U.S. administration was concerned. Reports of the massacre, or of the horrifying number killed "could not be confirmed."

Danner's writing is clear and concise, and his reporting (the book is an expanded version of his writing for the New Yorker) is excellent. He has clearly spoken with everybody who would speak to him, including members of the U.S. Embassy in the country who know something bad had happened but had to couch their reports in very careful language to be sure they didn't run afoul of U.S. policy. The book proper is only around 150 pages long, but Danner then includes every document he was able to lay his hands on (the book was first published in 1994) including Embassy cables, State Department and Diplomatic Corps testimony before Congress, and pages-long reports by the Argentinian forensic team that finally exhumed the remains of the victims over a decade after the events. It's not really necessary to pour through all that (I mostly skimmed), as Danner does a very good job of describing those documents' contents throughout his narrative.

This is not particularly apt holiday reading, but it's a very good book about an event that should not be allowed to recede from memory.

Book 55: Great Sports Stories by Herman L. Masin



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is a collection of short stories on sports themes published in 1957. The publisher is Scholastic Magazines, and the anthology is aimed at what we'd now call the YA market. I guess I'd agree that most of the stories are most appropriate for adolescent readers, but I also found that the tales were universally well written and, even at my own advanced age (68) I enjoyed every story here. Maybe part of that enjoyment had to do with all the reading I did of these types of stories back in childhood days. Many of the stories deliver morals, of course. There's the young shortstop who learns a lesson in humility and forgiveness from an older player on a barnstorming team that comes through town, a basketball player with a secret past that he hopes won't be discovered in each new town he moves to, and an immigrant father learns new things about being an American from his son, the high school football star. The most interesting, and most sophisticated story, has to do with an American fencing star who is so good he has been accepted on a fencing team in pre-WW2 Italy. But in the lead-up to the big match against their longtime rivals, our hero gets a first-hand look at Mussolini's Black Shirt thugs and life under fascism. Of the thirteen stories here, the only authors who were familiar to me were Frank O'Rourke and William Saroyan. Since so many of the stories pertain to baseball and American football, I think this book would be best enjoyed by U.S. readers.

Book 56: The Missouri Review - Volume 21 Number 2: Men edited by Morgan Speer



Another "between book" completed (see first post). I don't know why or where I bought this 1998 edition of The Missouri Review, but I've had it on my shelves at least since my LT "Big Bang" in 2008. The stories, essays and poems featured here all seem to be by authors who were just starting out on writing careers. Some of these folks published one or more books later, and some barely register in online search engines. And, as noted in the issue's title, all of the stories had to do with men and their experiences. At any rate, I found the entries of very high quality all in all. William Gay's story, "Those Deep Elm Brown's Ferry Blues," about a young man dealing with his father's advancing dementia; Peter Walpole's "Distant Lights in the Foothills Beyond Owari-Eki," about a Japanese train engineer contemplating life after retirement; Ron Nyron's "Ordinary Apples," a subtle fictional coming-of-age reminiscence; and Otis Haschemeyer's "The Storekeeper," about a war correspondent's final assignment were particularly good. There was an interesting series of letters between Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Penn Warren, and a very interesting interview with poet Harvey Shapiro, whose work I will now have to investigate.

Book 57: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey



A bit of explanation: I've been gradually reading through my 1000-page Modern Library Giant edition of Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern as a "between book," and I had made my way to Confessions . . . . In the ML edition, the entry is over 200 pages. If you've ever read any of these Modern Library volumes (I adore them and in fact have a modest collection of them) you'll know that the print is often very small. So I decided that I wasn't going to try to fight my way through 220 pages of this mini-font, but instead would give my 68-year-old eyes a break and find a stand-alone copy of the book. I found one quickly in the wonderful store, Book Culture, which is pretty close to where my wife and I live in NYC. It was the Penguin Classics edition pictured above. Oddly, though, in this volume, the Confessions were only 88 pages. What gives? It turned out that the Penguin edition featured the original version of the work, published in two parts in The London Magazine in 1821. In 1856, however, De Quincey revised and greatly expanded Confessions so that it might appear as a self-contained book-length volume in what was to be a multi-volume set of his complete works. Says Van Doren Stern in his "Notes on the Text" in the ML volume, "It has often been said that the first short version is the better one as an integrated work of art. There is a great deal of truth in this, and De Quincey himself was not unaware of it. Nevertheless, it has seemed advisable to furnish the reader with the longer form which contains much valuable autobiographical information." While taking Van Doren Stern's word for the latter point, reading "the . . . short version is the better one" was all I needed to read to give myself permission to stick with the Penguin edition.

Having already become acquainted with De Quincey's writing style via the couple of dozen entries in the Selected Writings, I knew I would enjoy Confessions. De Quincey gives some biographical information about his "down and out" days in London in his late teens when he was frequently very hungry. His theory was that this long period of hunger did damage to his stomach that brought on the discomfort years later that led him to seek relief in opium. He goes on to describe the pleasures of regular opium use, and then the dangers and disadvantages, which mainly took the form for him of vivid, hallucinatory dreams which then haunted his waking hours as well, plus a torpor that made even the slightest activities and accomplishments seem beyond his power to undertake. These latter symptoms seem very much like what we now (I say as a complete medical layperson) describe as the symptoms of depression.

De Quincey had a chatty, rambling style, and his writing frequently took side-trips into digressions that were often, but not always, entertaining on their own merits. Although he had published scores of essays in a variety of English periodicals beforehand, Confessions made him suddenly quite popular and was for a long time held to be an extremely influential work. For a time, even medical professionals referred to the work as authoritative. And they are considered to be influential as literature, as well, with William Burroughs in particular thought to have been strongly affected by De Quincey's example. I found Confessions to be, as I said, enjoyable, but not really in a major way. The work is much more subtle, much less explicit than I was expecting. I guess for some modern readers, Confessions of an English Opum-Eater will serve as an enjoyable and interesting historical artifact and for others as a short and unique piece of memoir writing that stands on its own merits. Others will be bored, and I can understand that, too. All in all, I'm glad to have read this, and I'll be continuing on through the 14 entries in the Selected Writings that I still have to go.

Book 58: An Old Guy Who Feels Good by Worden McDonald



One more book under the wire for 2024. An Old Guy Who Feels Good, originally published in 1978, is the memoir of Worden McDonald, who had led a very interesting and event-packed life. McDonald was born in 1907 in a small Oklahoma town, the fifth of five siblings (and his father's 10th child, counting McDonald's five older step-siblings from his father's first marriage). His father was a Presbyterian minister. When McDonald was 6, the family moved from town onto a farm his father had purchased. And although McDonald loved farm life when he was a boy (and describes it here glowingly), he left home while still in his teens, riding freight trains and otherwise making his way around the country, working at a wide variety of jobs for greater or lesser periods of time, including, among other pursuits, ranching, mining and factory work. It wasn't until later in life that McDonald married, settled down to raise a family, and went to work, for over a decade, for the phone company in California, and began to develop a left-week political sensibility.

McDonald wrote with an off-the-cuff humorous voice. He seems to have been more or less setting down events and anecdotes as they came to him, and those stories are very entertaining in the telling. We normally think of people "riding the rails" during the Depression, and I found it interesting to read that McDonald was doing so in the mid-20s, years before the Depression began. He has a fun sense of humor, as in these examples:

"We lived in town, if you want to call Sallisaw a town, tunnel I was six. Tom and Dick {a pair of horses} pulled the fire truck. When the bell rang they charged in place and waited for their suspended harness to fall on their backs. They took off in a big gallop--once so fast that they overturned the fire truck and broke the driver's leg. But usually they arrived in time to watch the house burn down."

and

"Sometime later I worked on a railroad in the Feather River Canyon, in Northern California. It wasn't the love of railroad life that made me take the job--I was hungry. They gave us a pick and shovel, and for ten hours we didn't straighten up. When quitting time came, we couldn't. We even slept that way. When we got up in the morning, we were in perfect position for putting on our socks."

and finally, when describing how he lost his job (and his pension) after 17 years with the phone company for not cooperating with the California state version of the McCarthy hearings:

"Some of my buddies, when they were interviewed, answered 'all the questions with refreshing candor and frankness' and were congratulated by the senators, but my testimony was considered so poor that they felt obliged to write a letter to the company suggesting that I be fired. The company was prepared for this since they had given my name to the committee in the first place, but still it was unusual. Telephone men had been fired in the past for refusing to work, stealing equipment and once for making an operator pregnant on company time. But I was the first man in the Bell system to be fired for being unfriendly on his day off."

Folks of a "certain age" who grew up in America in the 60s may be amused to learn that Worden McDonald was the father of Country Joe McDonald of "Country Joe and the Fish" fame. This is a fun, obscure bit of Americana.

This book has been on my shelves since before I first posted my books on LT back in 2008.