rocketjk's 2024 50-book rambles

Greetings, all! I'm back for a 2024 reading challenge. Last year (2023) I did pretty well, stacking up 58 books read, and almost all of them enjoyed. That was a bit of a bump up from 2022's 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:
2023 50-Book Challenge thread * 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 Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
2: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
3: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
4: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto
5: The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan
6: Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
7: Death in the Making by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim
8: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam
9: The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
10: Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941
11: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
12: Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe
13: This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller
14: The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson
15: The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch
16: Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts

Book 1: The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 2: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff



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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 3: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich



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

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

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

Book 4: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 5: The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book note: The Ploughmen was published in 2014. I've had it on my shelves since May 2019. I have no memory of where I bought it, however.

Book 6: Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang



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

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

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

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

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

Book 7: Death in the Making by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim



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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 8: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam



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

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

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

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


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

Book 9: The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.



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

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

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

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

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

Book 10: Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941



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

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

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

Book 11: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

*

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

No one needs a long review of Homage to Catalonia from the likes of me at this late date. The book is George Orwell's memoir of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell came to Spain to fight against Franco's ultimately (and tragically) successful Fascist takeover attack against the Republican government of Spain. Orwell's own political sympathies were Socialist, and he quickly joined the POUM militia, POUM being an acronym for what translates to English as the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Orwell describes his time in the trenches in the Catalonian mountains, where in the event, cold, hunger, lice and rats were as big a drawback as Franco's forces. The POUM troops were also very short on weapons and ammunition.

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

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

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

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

Book 12: Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe



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

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

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

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

This brief biography (120 pages of a 6” by 8” volume) is clearly a hagiography, just, really, an outline of Owens’ life, ideas and works. McCabe was an Owen enthusiast, to put it mildly. The book is simply but well written and includes some occasional humor. This volume was published in 1920 in England, evidently part of a series called “Life-Stories of Famous Men,” about which I’ve been unable to learn a single thing online. The book was given to me by my wife’s uncle, a recently retired minister of the Ethical Culture Society in New Jersey. He has been trying to downsize his personal library and asked us to pick out a few volumes each to take away on our last visit. This is one of the two books I took away.

You've been doing some very interesting reading so far this year, Jerry. I'm just catching up, but I find your reviews so useful...you say all the things I'd like to know about a book to decide if it's something I want to read. I hope you'll read a lot more of Louise Erdrich, who owns a bookstore herself, as you probably know. She's a favorite of mine. I've also had Homage to Catalonia on my TBR list for a long time, and you've probably assured that I will move it up the stack and maybe even get to it this year!

>14 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks, Linda! I'm glad you find my ramblings useful. Homage to Catalonia is indeed interesting and to me even moreso because you know as you're reading that Orwell's impressions about events and politics may or may not even be accurate. They're just one person's acutely described observations about his own experiences. And I do look forward to reading my of Louise Erdrich's works.

Book 13: This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 15: The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch



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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 16: Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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