rocketjk's 2021 reading hoopla

Greetings! I've greatly enjoyed my year and a half's participation in Club Read and especially all the reading friends I've made here. To review: I live in Mendocino County, northern California, USA. I'm retired, a former teacher, freelance writer and used bookstore owner. Blissfully married. My reading is an eclectic mix of fiction, history, memoirs, bios and more. In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list. I'll be back in a day or so when I've finished my first book of the new year. Cheers!

Happy New Year, Jerry! I look forward to following your reading output in the new year.

Looking forward to your reading again this year, Jerry.

Happy 2021 Jerry!

>Thanks, Dan. Right back atcha!

The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr



Here's my first completed book of 2021 (I began this book during the afternoon of the last day of 2020!). I wouldn't call this humorous novel, first published in 1963, a "deep" book, but it is a very thoughtful one. David Cohen is a newly ordained rabbi who is told by the head of his rabbinical seminary that unless he spends two years in the military as a chaplain first, he'll never get a congregation of his own. (Again, this is 1963, during the days of the Cold War. I'm sure such things do not go on today.) Duly coerced, Cohen finally succumbs and tries to enlist as an Army chaplain. But our hero is an early 60s anti-hero, and so a smartass, and manages to irritate someone at his physical exam to the extent that he is blacklisted. Sighing deeply, Cohen's superior pulls strings and gets Cohen into the Air Force. Once he begins his Air Force Chaplaincy training, he is plunged into several strange new worlds at once.

His parents having been killed in a car crash when he was very young, Cohen has been raised by his loving, aunt and uncle, immigrants both, in a very Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Although comfortable in the diverse cultures and classes of New York City, Cohen's sudden status as one of only two Jews in a 50-chaplain training course, though expected, still comes as a shock, especially as many of his classmates have never met a Jew before. His roommate, with whom he becomes good friends, has been under the misconception, for example, that rabbis, like Catholic priests, are celibate.

And so, in many ways, this is a novel about alienation and loneliness, and the ways in which we can make our peace with those conditions, or not. Cohen is a Jew in a Gentile world and very much a civilian dropped suddenly into military life. Soon he is a northern liberal in the segregated south. Also a city dweller dealing with the cultural isolation of life on an Air Force base. And he is an Air Force chaplain with a fear of flying! Tarr handles these themes well. They are implicit rather than explicit; we are not hit over the head with them (except maybe the fear of flying part). Surprisingly effective are Cohen's conversations (not debates, thank goodness) about religion and philosophy with his roommate, a Lutheran minister.

The novel is mostly episodic, as Cohen settles into his two-year chaplain stint and begins to figure out his role, and deal with his own loneliness, his outspokenness occasionally getting him into trouble. Some of these episodes work better than others, but overall I found this novel quietly effective. As a Jew myself, I found the portrayal of Judaism and Jewish philosophy to be well done and rarely heavy handed. The book is a timepiece, certainly, as the patriotic descriptions of the crucial nature of the Strategic Air Command as a temporary bulwark of world peace (until the politicians can get their acts together) make clear. I found that that added to the interest for me. It reflected, for example, the sort of thinking my own father would have been doing.

Book note--stamped on the title page I found this:

Library
Congregation Beth El
222 Irvington Ave.
South Orange, New Jersey

That's the synagogue my parents became members of after my sister and I left home for college, as it was closer to their house than the congregation we'd been members of during our childhoods. The inside back cover shows glue marks, a sign that the pocket for the library stamp card had been removed. All this tells me that one of my parents had purchased this book as a discard from the synagogue library. The entry date into my LT collection is 2008, so the first wave of my LT library entries. So this book came from my parents' bookshelves somewhere along the line and had been sitting on my own shelves for decades.

What is the titular conversion, or is that a spoiler?

Hi! :)

>7 LolaWalser: "or is that a spoiler?"

Yeah, kinda sorta. I'll just say that he's still Jewish and still a rabbi at book's end.

Fun review and cool find.

yes very intersting review. The bit about smart asses made me wonder if this is why smart assery is so impossible now, though even then i guess it blocked his way.

Great review of The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen, Jerry. FWIW I checked Google Maps and saw that Congregation Beth El is quite close to the campus of Seton Hall University, my younger brother's alma mater.

>10 tonikat: Yes, being a smartass blocked his way from time to time, but also helped him cope and make friends as well, so that part is well balanced. His being Jewish blocked his way only at the very beginning, for as I failed to note in my review, his choice was between the Army and the Air Force only because the Navy had already "filled their quota" for Jewish chaplains and the Marines got their chaplains from the Navy.

I was remiss in not mentioning in my review another, negative, element of the "time piece" aspect of the book, and that is the occasional (maybe three or four times all told, just a sentence here and there) offhand references to (and dismissals of as an important issue), domestic violence.

>11 kidzdoc: Yes, I had friends in my neighborhood who went to the high school, Seton Hall Prep, instead of to the public high school the rest of us attended. Just two doors down from us lived Mr. Ciccone, who taught at that high school, and I was good friends with his two sons. Even better was the Catholic grammar school that some of these kids had gone to. It was an adjunct of the beautiful Our Lady of Sorrows Church. The public elementary school in the neighborhood was Clinton School, so the kids in the neighborhood were divided into the Clinton Gang and (and I have always loved this name) the Sorrows Gang. Nothing should be made of the words "divided" and "gang," however. We all got along and played basketball and touch football and softball together. Basically, we were Jews, Italians and Irish, with just a few Black kids at that time.

I still root for Seton Hall as one of my two favorite college basketball teams (I went to Boston University, and our only major sport, really, was hockey. Go BU!). My other favorite college squads (basketball and baseball) are, of course, the University of New Orleans.

>13 rocketjk: Nice. I went to several Tulane-UNO baseball and basketball games when I was a student at Tulane in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Neither basketball team were very good back then, but the baseball teams were both nationally ranked, along with LSU.

>14 kidzdoc: Cool! I was going to UNO games from about 1981 through 1986, when I left town. There was the one year that the UNO basketball team actually made it to the NIT, though they lost in the (I think) second round. Those UNO/Tulane baseball games were great. When I was there they used to play a 3-game series called the Pelican Cup. One game at each home stadium and then the third game in the Super Dome. As you know, of course, there was no minor league baseball team in town, so college ball was all we had. I remember one year when the Super Dome was packed for that game.

>15 rocketjk: I attended Tulane from August 1978 to December 1981. We played UNO and LSU in baseball and basketball twice a year, and Tulane's football team was very good from 1979-81, as we beat LSU in the Superdome twice in that stretch. The basketball team was a member of the old Metro Conference (the Metro 7) during those years, and regularly got their butts whipped by national powers Louisville (who won one national championship during that time IIRC), Memphis State and Cincinnati.

What are the odds--at least three people with a connection to Tulane in this thread! I was in grad school Sep 1992-Sep 1997 but attended only one sporty event, AFAICR, a Saints game in the Superdome... sadly they lost to some people with sponge wedges of cheese on their heads. Fun experience but let's just say the Jazz Fest was more my thing. It's actually a little odd I'd miss out on basketball so much but around the time I arrived people were still bitter about "Jazz"--the team--being spirited to Utah. (Never could quite wrap my head about the whole buying selling sports teams thing...)

>17 LolaWalser: "What are the odds--at least three people with a connection to Tulane in this thread!"

Ha! To be clear, my only connection to Tulane was that I and most of my friends loved to hate them. Tulane, to us, was the rich kids private school, while UNO, originally the New Orleans campus of LSU, was mostly a commuter school for locals. The studios of the public radio station I worked at was on the UNO campus and I lived in Gentilly for most of my years in New Orleans. Anyway, most of the folks I know who went to Tulane loved it, so I'll assume my perspective was somewhat skewed in those days.

Back in the 1980s, when I was there, the Tulane student radio station, WTUL, was excellent, so there was that. It was a good era for public radio, there. We had great classical and, especially, jazz programming at WWNO, the NPR affiliate where I worked, 'TUL had very good well-rounded programming, and the now justly famous WWOZ was just getting started.

Glory days, oh they pass you by . . .

>18 rocketjk:

Ah well, I was just the grad school foreign-born riff raff so not of the rich kids set by any means (although I had to teach the snots for two semesters in three courses...) It was a friend from LSU who took me to the ball game--a woman actually, but crazy about (American, obligatory spec) football! And I knew two people at the UNO...

I still listen to WWOZ online, mornings and Sundays especially.

Happy New Year, Jerry! Just checking in.

Waving hello and dropping a star.

>19 LolaWalser: we’re Tulane heavy in CR. I was there 1991-1994 getting my BS. Iirc arubabookwoman has a connection too.

(My freshman and sophomore years were two great non-major conference basketball teams with the “posse” mentality of harass, create turnovers and convert. They were tournament teams that created 1st round upsets both those years. UNO and LSU were softer programs at the time. But then the Tulane program slowly went comatose.)

>22 dchaikin:

Ahh!--I think I remember about you, but not that we actually overlapped! Wonder how many times we nearly met! I presume you were uptown, and I was mostly stuck in the medical school, but I did have courses and errands and stuff on the campus... Mind you, nothing remotely geological.

Wow, so five people at least. Sorry about the drift, Jerry--laissez les bons temps rouler... :)

>23 LolaWalser: "Sorry about the drift, Jerry--laissez les bons temps rouler... :)"

No problem. All New Orleans chatter welcome, as long as you understand how vulnerable that makes you to one of my many "good old days" stories.

Eh, la bas! And even though we don't get a Mardi Gras this year, it's still somehow festive to know that with King's Day behind us, it's now carnival season.

Here's Al "Carnival Time" Johnson to make it official!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QTqagUSPJM

The Rover by Joseph Conrad



For over a decade, I have had a personal tradition of beginning each calendar year with the reading (or, in most cases, rereading) of a Joseph Conrad novel, and in this way reading through all of the Conrad novels in the chronological order of their publishing. The Rover is the last of the novels published by Conrad while he was alive, and so, perhaps,* concludes this tradition.

The novel takes place in France during the Napoleonic Era. Jean Peyrol is a French seaman, old though still hearty, who has spent his life roving the seas, often as a privateer, sometimes as a gunner in the French Navy. He has had more than his share of violence, blood and adventure. Being so far from home, the French Revolution had left him essentially untouched, other than having formed a contempt for the revolutionary extremists who have crossed his path. Finally ready to retire, Peyrol returns to the place of his birth, a remote farming area close on to Toulon, a maritime city on the Mediterranean coast of France. He has brought with him a huge secret stash of old coins, a windfall discovery on a English merchant ship he has captured for France, enough to maintain him quiet comfort for life. Peyrol brings the ship in to Toulon, duly turns it over to the French authorities, and then, once he's sure all is in order, slips out of town for his remote destination. On the farm he picks out as a lodging locale, Peyrol finds three survivors of the Terror. Scevola has been a viscious perpetrator of horrific violence, the beautiful young Arlette has seen her parents murdered, and her tacitern aunt, Catherine, who has devoted her life to caring for her emotionally crippled niece. Peyrol wants only rest, but the war with England is still in progress, the English fleet is lying off the coast in blockade, and a young French navel officer, Real, soon turns up "on assignment." He, too, has been traumatized by the Revolution.

This novel delves less deeply into the mysteries of human psychology than Conrad's earlier novels. Peyrol is a more traditional protagonist than earlier Conrad figures like Marlow, Lord Jim or Verlock, and this is a more straightforward story, though still adorned with the Conrad observations about human nature that I so enjoy. For example, Peyrol stands out from most of the men around him by the fact that he is clean shaven. This is explained by his possession of a fine set of English razor blades that he enjoys using. Toward the end of the novel, Peyrol's use of these blades brings about this reverie:

"Cleaning the razor-blade (one of a set of twelve in a case) he had a vision of a brilliantly hazy ocean and an English Indiaman with her yards braced all ways, her canvas blowing loose above her bloodstained decks overrun by a lot of privateersmen and with the island of Ceylon swelling like a thin blue cloud on the far horizon. He had always wished to own a set of English blades and there he had got it, fell over it as it were, lying on the floor of a cabin which had been already ransacked. 'For good steel--it was good steel.' he thought looking at the blade fixedly. And there it was, nearly worn out.The others too. That steel! And here he was holding the case in his hand as though he had just picked it up from the floor. Same case. Same man. And the steel worn out.

He shut the case brusquely, flung it into his sea-chest which was standing open, and slammed the lid down. The feeling which was in his breast and had been known to more articulate men than himself, was that life was a dream less substantial than the vision of Ceylon lying like a cloud on the sea. Dream left astern. Dream straight ahead. This disenchanted philosophy took the shape of fierce swearing. 'Sacre nom de nom de nom . . . Tonnerre do bon Dieu!'

While tying his neckcloth he handled it with fury as though he meant to strangle himself with it."

All in all, a gripping novel, more straightforward than what we're used to with Conrad, but with a wistful quality, as the author, perhaps, was contemplating his own mortality as well.

* When I began this tradition I left out the first two novels, Almeyer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, because I remembered enjoying them less than I did the later books. Perhaps I'll go back and read those two (likely), or perhaps next year I'll read Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel, which was unfinished when Conrad died and was published posthumously (not too likely), or maybe I'll read the three novels wrote together with Ford Maddox Ford, which I've never heard anyone else speak of reading (a might-could, or maybe just one of the three, just for curiosity's sake), or simply start over with The Narcissus (a relatively high probability), or pick a new author (Philip Roth is the most likely, or maybe Isaac Singer).

Nice way to start the new calendar year. Nice to refresh my reading of The Rover through your review.

>26 baswood: Thanks! If you're a fan of The Rover, you might well enjoy this essay about it, which gets to a lot of elements I didn't see at all. You just have to scroll down a bit to get to the English language version. It's quite interesting, but it is only for folks who have already read the book or who don't mind spoilers.

https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4260

Jerry, I've never been able to make a relationship with Conrad. My oldest son likes his work a lot, but I've never been able to connect. What, in general, is his approach? Is there any way to say, or is that a meaningless question? I don't want to make you "work" for me, I just wondered if there was something that you could point to. I like most decent books--why not Conrad?

>17 LolaWalser: When I lived in New Orleans both the Saints and the Jazz were awful, although each team had one star player from a local university, Saints' quarterback Archie Manning from Ole Miss, and Jazz guard Pete Maravich, who starred at LSU. Hardly anyone was going to either teams' games in the Superdome, and you could buy heavily discounted tickets from Popeye's if you purchased a three piece chicken dinner. Unfortunately the Jazz relocated to Salt Lake City before the 1979-80 season, taking the beloved Maravich with them, which was bitterly mourned by the locals who loved to see his flamboyant play and often prolific scoring. I never understood why they kept their nickname, as Utah is literally the last place I would associate with jazz.

I loved going to the Jazz & Heritage Festival in City Park. What's not to like about great music and food, mediocre beer, and tons of mud?

>18 rocketjk: Tulane, to us, was the rich kids private school, while UNO, originally the New Orleans campus of LSU, was mostly a commuter school for locals.

That's a good distinction between the two universities. Tulane was mostly a school for rich kids, although it was trying to increase its African American student population and did accept students of color from more modest backgrounds with good grades and SAT scores, especially in its School of Engineering. It had only been 15 years since Tulane's first Black students matriculated in 1963, and we were a small but very tight knit community, both then and now (there is a very active group of former African American students from Tulane that I'm a member of, even though I didn't graduate from the university).

I met my girlfriend on day 1 of classes, as she was also an engineering student at Tulane, who lived in Gentilly just off from St Bernard Avenue. She was unfortunately expelled due to bad grades after our freshman year, and the following year enrolled at UNO, which was originally known as LSUNO, Louisiana State University at New Orleans, as you said.

We listened to WTUL quite a bit, and, for some reason, I got hooked into listening to an all night country music station that WWL AM played, mainly for truckers, which I think was called "The Road Gang", that could be heard across much of the United States; I listened to it on my shortwave radio when I moved back in with my parents in suburban Philadelphia. I was especially hooked by singer Patsy Cline ("I Fall to Pieces", "Walkin' After Midnight", "Crazy"), who tragically died in a small airplane crash in 1963 at the age of 30, at the peak of her career.

Yes, that WWL show was called "The Road Gang", according to this obituary of its host, Charlie Douglas:

WWL "Road Gang" radio show creator Charlie Douglas dies at 78

>22 dchaikin: There is quite a substantial Tulane presence on Club Read, with at least four of us attending the university at different times. I suppose we could make Jerry an honorary Tulanian, although he might reject that title.

>24 rocketjk: It is Carnival Time! I think I'll make another batch of crawfish étouffée to celebrate. Oh...I will be going to a dinner party on the 30th hosted by one of my friends who is a physician in our Emergency Department, and she asked me to make something Cajun, so I'll cook another batch of alligator sauce piquante. One of our mutual close friends who will also be there is another ED physician, who also went to Tulane. I'll ask Abby and Sarah if one of us should purchase a King Cake, and make it a Carnival party!

>25 rocketjk: Great review of The Rover, Jerry.

>28 sallypursell: "I like most decent books--why not Conrad?"

Well, obviously I can't tell you why don't like Conrad. I can only tell you why I do.

I like Conrad because of his insights into human nature, of his belief in the futility of most ideologies but in the primacy of the human struggle to overcome our innate flaws. I like him for his distrust of groupthink but his insistence on the potential for honor in our interpersonal relations.

I like Conrad for his use of language, sometimes flawed as it is. (He was writing in his third language, after all!) I find, frequently in his fiction, sentences and paragraphs that seem at first opaque but then suddenly reveal insights--ways of looking at situations or emotions--that make you realize that he's delved down to the heart of an issue, put his finger on a situation, an emotion or a relationship, in a unique and wholly satisfying manner.

I appreciate Conrad because, having read a fine biography and also many of his letters, I'm aware of what a struggle writing was for him. I also appreciate the writing because he clearly was struggling with his own flaws.

His writing isn't for everyone. The writing style, the way he often writes around a situation instead of simply laying out its conditions plainly, offering hints rather than declarations, takes some willingness to accustom yourself to if that's not your preferred narrative style. Conrad's female characters, especially during the first half of his career or even more, are generally on hand only to serve as the objects of his protagonists' passions and fixations, which are frequently of the doomed variety. (One notable exception is Winnie Verlock in the superb novel, The Secret Agent.) National prejudices are evident. Conrad was the son of Polish nobles at a time when Poland had been occupied by Russia. His parents sent him away to an uncle in England because of the danger caused by their agitation against the Russian authorities. (To be clear, they were agitating for the rights of Polish nobility, not for the rights of Polish peasants, or at least that's my recollection.) At any rate, Conrad soon confounded family expectations by going off to sea. (In the novella, Typhoon, we get the backstory of the running off to sea of the captain of the ship we're sailing on. Upon finding his letter of explanation for his sudden leaving, his mother bewails the loss of her son in this manner. His father's only comment is, "Tom's an ass.")

Perhaps due to this history, Germans, in Conrad's novels, are just about always villains. Russians don't fare much better. Jews are generally suspect but can "surprise" with unforeseen backbone. Conrad's contempt for Socialists and anarchists was so complete that it caused him to turn his anarchist characters into mere cartoons in the otherwise brilliant The Secret Agent and the not quite as powerful but still fine novel Under Western Eyes.

The code of the English merchant marine sailor is basically, for Conrad, the pinnacle of human achievement, but even here, in Lord Jim, Conrad holds up for us the absurdity of adhering to this code slavishly in the face of common sense. And anyone who sticks to his post, does his duty, in the face of hazard, is by definition a hero. Any leader who shows compassion for his people, the same. Europeans act with privilege and power in their associations with Asians and all other non-whites. Conrad, however, is often (certainly not always) disdainful of the legitimacy and consequences of this privilege. I fully disagree, for example, with Chinua Achebe's famous screed against Heart of Darkness as a racist text. Perhaps you will not, though.

I had read Conrad a time or two as an undergrad, but it was in grad school (MA in English Lit and Creative Writing at San Francisco State) that I took a Conrad seminar with an excellent professor and really attained my enthusiasm. To complete my degree, I had to take oral exams on three major authors, answering questions on their major texts and their lives for 20 minutes each. My three were Conrad, Philip Roth and the plays of Chekhov. (This was in 1989. If I had it to do over, much as I loved the Chekhov, I probably would have substituted someone else so that I wasn't reading three white men.) I tell you this only so that you'll know where I come by my knowledge. Though, again, this was 30 years ago, and memory gets more porous with passing time.

>29 kidzdoc: I actually went to at least one Jazz game in the Superdome to see Maravich play. If I remember correctly, they had only about a third of the building curtained off for the game, so that it wouldn't be as apparent how empty the giant building was. And, yeah, I don't get why they kept the Jazz name in Utah, either. I suppose that was still the tradition, as per the Minneapolis Lakers keeping their name when they moved to LA in 1960. I saw one or two Saints games in the 'Dome, as well. I actually had a job as a gofer during the final game of the terrible Baghead season, which was broadcast on Monday Night Football. At one point I had to deliver something to the team owner's office. There was head coach Dick Nolan sitting with his head in his hands. After the game his firing was announced. He must have just been told. Next, I believe, came the hiring of Bum Phillips, who had been a successful coach with the Houston Oilers. Soon came the bumper stickers: "Faith, Hope and Bum." Saints fans were ever a hopeful bunch.

You are right that I will, with thanks, decline your offer for honorary Tulanian status. When it comes to New Orleans, I am a proud Privateer.

"I loved going to the Jazz & Heritage Festival in City Park. What's not to like about great music and food, mediocre beer, and tons of mud?"

Jazz Fest in the early-to-mid 80s, which is when I was there, was heaven. Not only at the Fairgrounds, but also in the night time concerts that were put on around the city. In those days, as you probably remember, when they had concerts on the riverboat, the boat would actually push off and sail around in the river during the music. One night I saw the triple bill of Fats Domino, Albert Collins and Muddy Waters. Sadly, the festival became a hipster destination (well, so did the whole city) and they started bringing in rock superstars. The last time I was in New Orleans, though, about four years ago, I got to go to the French Quarter Festival, a free outdoor event around the Quarter in which only local New Orleans and Louisiana musicians are featured. In fact, one of my great memories of my time living in New Orleans was the time, because I was a jazz producer at WWNO, that I was invited to emcee at one of the stages for an early version of the French Quarter Festival. What an honor!

>29 kidzdoc:

Heh--it was great to actually hear "When the Saints go marching in" as the team got on the field, though. Peak "local" experience for a newbie.

"Utah Jazz" is weird! good for a chuckle I guess... Ah, the Jazz Fest memories! One of these days I have to start scanning my photos and have conversations about all the unspoken--and unknown--stuff from back then.

P.S. You've given me a yen for Popeye's! Today's too late but tomorrow I'm getting the spicy for sure...

>25 rocketjk:, >30 rocketjk:

I've often heard that Conrad's "maritime" writings are where his talent shines the most (or most originally). Would you agree? I haven't read any of his "sea" novels so far. Frankly, some aspects make me slow to pick him up (as they might any crusty old "classic", again) but as a sea-lover far away from sea, I note stuff supposedly evocative of it.

ETA:

>31 rocketjk:

One night I saw the triple bill of Fats Domino, Albert Collins and Muddy Waters.

And now I have no choice but to envy you forever.

>32 LolaWalser: "I've often heard that Conrad's "maritime" writings are where his talent shines the most (or most originally). Would you agree?"

Conrad's descriptions of life at sea, and particularly of the experience of being aboard ship during a hurricane (in the aforementioned novella, "Typoon," and in "The Narcissus" {I can no longer write the full title of that book} are particularly engrossing. So yes, as a sea lover far away from sea, those are two in particular that you might enjoy. "Youth," also, maybe. That novella is more about an older man looking back with longing to his earlier adventures, but those adventures take place at sea. Some of the other "maritime" novels are less about life aboard ship and more about the clashing of cultures and the dangers inherent therein for both the weak-willed and the strong.

My own opinion is that Conrad's talent shines the most in his examinations of human nature, of, as he puts it in Under Western Eyes, "the exact shade of mere mortal man, with his many passions and his miserable ingenuity in error, always dazzled by the base glitter of mixed motives, everlastingly betrayed by a short-sighted wisdom." I highly recommend The Secret Agent, for example.

>33 rocketjk:

Thanks. I've read The secret agent, among (very few) other; but not Typhoon. Which, luckily, I have somewhere.

>30 rocketjk: Very interesting thoughts on Conrad. I keep meaning to read more Conrad and you may have given me the push I needed. I studied Heart of Darkness for my English Literature degree a few years ago and found it a very powerful novel. Incidentally, my son also chose Heart of Darkness to do his A level course work on last year, leading to a major argument with his English teacher who complained that it was far too ‘male’. (She’d been following a very overtly feminist track throughout his studies. I can be as feminist as the next woman, more so at times, and even I thought the approach was a bit much!)

>30 rocketjk: I meant that "I like most decent...? as a rhetorical question. The answer you gave me was exactly what I'd hoped for, although much more thorough than I expected. Thanks for your time and thought.

From your answer, further, I think I see why I don't wake to him. I already knew about his struggles with writing and with his position in his family, and also something of the social placement of his family. I think I got that from a preface to Heart of Darkness which, I confess, did seem racist to me. But since I didn't feel I understood that novel at all, I discounted that view. I have tried it at least three or four times, and I think it may be time to give up on it. Maybe I should try The Secret Agent instead. Or would you care to suggest one? I did finish Heart of Darkness at least twice, by the way, so I don't think the problem was the lack of reading the resolution of it.

I don't think I know much about the code of the English Merchant Marine sailor. I don't believe I even knew there was such a thing as that code, though it does make sense that there should be one. Sailing, other than for pleasure, is off-putting to me. Maybe that is my problem with it. The authoritarianism which seems to go along with it is bothersome to me, and the harshness of the life seems to be artificially enhanced by this leadership.

I also take a dim view of the scholarship of literature, such as your MA, but I know it is wrong-headed of me. For me, there are some obvious (to me) symbols and threads in books. The little that I have seen of literary critique seems to treat with those symbols and threads far too much, so as to leave untouched their ineffable wholeness. Then again, once those obvious things are dealt with, it seems to me that going any further takes one into cloud cuckoo-land, where connections are strained, and say more about the audience than the communicator, the writer. I see no enhancement in most of the criticism I have encountered. Of course, it may simply be that I ran across the wrong facilitators for me.

As important as reading is to me, and in many ways it is the main thread of my life, I would have expected to like literary criticism. Against this expectation, I think I have avoided it as much as possible since my adult self emerged.

Optional paragraph follows, in which I muse about reading:

In my first memory I am reading. My parents used to punish me by forbidding me to read. I have depression, and reading is the best treatment for me. My husband says I do way more reading than anyone else he has ever seen. I think I consider reading as something of a sacred rite that consecrates me and my life. Is it the same for you? I have always assumed that this is true for most people who read for pleasure at all. This brings me back to Conrad. Reading him has been more painful than pleasurable to me, and I have felt that I miss some essential thought or connection which would make it work. Learning about him and his family have not helped me make that connection.

I expect this is no longer interesting. I will leave it, because you can elect not to read it, and it may be of interest to some Club Read-ers.

>35 SandDune:

Obviously one can't comment on specific cases without knowing the details, but in general, I think young people today owe it to themselves and the world they'll be living in to learn about the biases of the past. I only wish I could "redo" my own education by applying a feminist lens!

>36 sallypursell:

I recall having had a lively discussion about Heart of Darkness with Jerry in the years past, so it won't surprise him to hear again that I share Achebe's outlook and agree that the book is racist. It's not the only text in which Conrad gave vent to his racism, there are crude direct expressions in his diaries, for instance.

Basically, Sally, you are not alone in this--I'd go out on a limb (don't I practically live on the limb :)) and suggest, albeit about a field a good light year from my own, that this view is now pretty standard, or at least common.

I have made this recommendation before and I'll repeat it for general reference, I found this Oxford U.'s volume of criticism most illuminating: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: a casebook. It contains Achebe's famous first article on the subject and various responses to it.

Also, by no means is there any sort of obligation for anyone to read something that aggravates their mental state, let alone a condition like depression--I'd hope it went without saying.

>37 LolaWalser: I think the problem with his class was that everything was only looked at from a feminist perspective which seemed to be simplistic in the extreme and pretty much equated to ‘women good, men bad’ point of view. Didn’t help that he was one of only two boys in the class. It would have been absolutely fine if that was one of a number of different approaches that was being used. Unfortunately it was the only one. She wasn’t a very good teacher to be honest.

>37 LolaWalser: I also don't know this case, but having had my own over-feminist teachers - there's a distinction between "we must read more books by women", even "we must read more books by women than by men to offset previous teaching focus" and "Only books by women are worth reading, everything written by a man must be ignored (because that's what they did to us)." Balance is important, not winning.

>36 sallypursell: "I also take a dim view of the scholarship of literature, such as your MA, but I know it is wrong-headed of me. For me, there are some obvious (to me) symbols and threads in books. . . . I see no enhancement in most of the criticism I have encountered. Of course, it may simply be that I ran across the wrong facilitators for me."

Well, but here you are asking me my opinions of Conrad, which are based on a combination of my own reading and of the Conrad scholarship I've availed myself of. :)

More seriously, I wouldn't agree that "scholarship" and "criticism" are as congruent as you've put it here. To me, the scholarship of literature encompasses understanding the views and knowledge that others bring to a subject and/or an author. I find this helpful because sometimes the insights that other people have had helps to enhance my own. ("Hmmm, I never thought of it that way" moments are valuable to me.) My own reading experiences would have been much less rich over the years if I'd relied only on my own perceptions and not sought the insights of others. That's not to say I always agree with those other ideas and opinions.

Criticism, to me, is more along the lines of qualifying works and their value or lack thereof, and the reasons why. I have less interest in that, although it can be instructive on multiple levels if one trusts the critic and his/her motivations for the criticism.

Such studies can be valuable even when one detests the author in question. For example, I have never been able to stand reading Henry James' novels. However, I hold the course I took on his writing in grad school to be extremely helpful, because even though I didn't like the books, I'm very happy to understand the elements in his writing that other people value and that are considered important in the evolution of Western (or at least English language) narrative styles and storytelling.

Put briefly, there are elements in Conrad's (and other authors') novels that I wouldn't be aware of without my studies but which enrich my appreciate of those novels. But if you prefer to stay with the themes and other elements that are apparent to you, I would not be the one to tell you otherwise. Clearly, your lifelong reading experiences have enriched your life greatly, so obviously you're doing things right for you. But then, you don't need me to tell you that.

I wouldn't say I consider reading to be a "sacred rite that consecrates {my} life," although I do consider it an essential and joyful element in my life. I certainly could never have married a non-reader, that's for sure. Maybe I'm just juggling semantics, though.

Back to Conrad. He's simply not to everybody's tastes. To me his insights into human nature, his frequent fascinating and astonishing turns of phrase and his compassionate feel for the foibles of humanity create a frequently wonderful reading experience. If reading him doesn't have that effect on you, c'est la vie. If you scan, say, the wikipedia page on Conrad, you can see what others have found admirable about his work, though since you don't care for literary scholarship, perhaps that exercise won't appeal to you. But if you're interested in understanding "some essential thought or connection which would make {Conrad's writing} work" for you, I don't know what else to suggest. With my own paltry talents along those lines, I can't give you a "here's something that will make you understand Conrad better" key to that door.

Hey, maybe you like Henry James! :) Or the novels of D.H. Lawrence (ugh, sez I!).

At any rate, yes, I would recommend The Secret Agent to you, and I'd be very interested to know how you liked it.

>37 LolaWalser: "Also, by no means is there any sort of obligation for anyone to read something that aggravates their mental state, let alone a condition like depression--I'd hope it went without saying."

Amen.

>39 jjmcgaffey:

I had zero feminist teachers.

I'm not recognising what either you or >38 SandDune: are describing as feminism. Feminism isn't against men, but against oppression of women. It's impossible to be "too feminist" for the same reasons that it's impossible to be, say, "too anti-racist", and there is no "balance" to be struck between being feminist and some other "approaches" because feminism isn't an "approach", but a very basic statement about women's humanity.

"Only books by women are worth reading, everything written by a man must be ignored (because that's what they did to us)."

If someone told you this in exactly those terms, I wholeheartedly agree to disagree with them.

>39 jjmcgaffey: Only books by women are worth reading, everything written by a man must be ignored (because that's what they did to us)." I think that was pretty much the opinion of my son’s teacher, to be honest.

>42 LolaWalser: I'm not recognising what either you or >38 SandDune: SandDune: are describing as feminism It isn’t what I regard as feminism, rather what my son’s teacher seemed to regard as feminism, which as I said seemed to be very much ‘women good, men bad’. I understand what you’re saying as it’s impossible to be too feminist, but whether something is feminist or not is not the only way to approach the study of literature. I’m not meaning that they should have been looking at things from an anti-feminist perspective.

>37 LolaWalser: "It's not the only text in which Conrad gave vent to his racism, there are crude direct expressions in his diaries, for instance."

The idea that Conrad was "{giving} vent to his racism" in Heart of Darkness is, of course, an opinion, rather than a fact. As I said before, c'est la vie. I think you're missing a lot of important factors and nuance in the writing. That's my opinion.

>44 rocketjk:

The idea that Conrad was "{giving} vent to his racism" in Heart of Darkness is, of course, an opinion, rather than a fact.

Jerry, lots of people, including, most relevantly, black African readers and scholars like Achebe have called this book racist. You are right, I think, that one can refuse to accept what they are saying as "opinion and not fact", but the problem is that one could say the same about the opposite.

I would retract the clumsy phrase "giving vent" with "expressing racism"--I know this won't seem much better to you but "venting" creates wrong associations which I didn't mean to introduce--I'm not saying Conrad's raving, "shouting" or some such etc. It's just that--in my opinion but (obviously) not only my opinion--the book expresses a racist outlook on Africa and black Africans. Of course, this is a brief statement about something that could be discussed at enormous length--not that I want to, or could!--but it's not a simple, casual dismissal. As I hinted above, for one thing there's been a lot of scholarship on this.

I think you're missing a lot of important factors and nuance in the writing.

If I thought racism is all there is to be known about him, you'd be right. But I never thought so or said so (or I wouldn't have any reason to read him again, would I.) It's just that I can't see this as a small flaw to ignore, let alone deny completely. You seem to feel that acknowledging racism would somehow destroy the value of the novel, or Conrad's stature or something, but I'd say it actually creates complications and novel meanings that for white people in particular (and as far as I know only white people tend to be diehard fans of writers like Conrad) would be super-important to understand.

Just clarifying my stance, which is hard to do without seeming I'm putting pressure on you to accept an opinion you refuse--really not trying to do that. In any case, we've agreed to disagree on this once so I'm sure we can do it again! :)

>40 rocketjk: I can see that perhaps "scholarship" and "criticism" could be the two circles in a Venn diagram, which overlap for most of their area, but are not, as you say, congruent. And you are right that I was asking for the results of these, in a way. When I re-read this I realized that came across in a more negative way towards you than I meant it to. What information you find valuable and which approaches you find helpful are your own, and I have no right to denigrate those.

I wouldn't agree with your definition of criticism as all, though. I have always found that background and influences are very much involved in criticism. Just as you said that you have found enriching some of the thoughts you have encountered about Henry James' novels and the place they hold in the evolution of Western narrative styles, so there must be something I like about commentary on written works. It must be, or I wouldn't be here.

I will read that Wikipedia page. I don't know why I haven't already done so, since I am a great admirer of that kind of digested knowledge when I need it. I didn't expect you to excuse Conrad to me; how presumptuous that would be!

I'm not a great fan of Henry James, although I like him better than Conrad, and better than D. H. Lawrence, too. I know of a number of writers who are not really to my taste, but I can read and get something out of them. I knocked myself into Moby Dick and Vanity Fair until I found that I did like them after all, and I expected my maturity and the repetition to do something similar to me with Heart of Darkness. I am a highly skilled reader, as are most of us here, and I know I can get him eventually. I don't think it is an obligation, but I want him to make better sense to me. Maybe I will give it five years and try again!

("Sacred Rite" might have been hyperbole, but I'd bet it was homage to my mother. My mother was a fascinating and glamorous creature who unfortunately had a Histrionic personality disorder, I believe. She saw life in Technicolor. She was grandiose and a fabulist, so everything became a Story, and everything was grand or awful. Her life was very colorful, of course, and after my husband joined the family, he and my oldest brother imposed a 20% exaggeration cap on all speech.)

Thank you again for taking the time to consider this and write to me about it. I never meant to decry your own scholarship or knowledge and ability. I saw myself lacking, not you.

>45 LolaWalser: "Jerry, lots of people, including, most relevantly, black African readers and scholars like Achebe have called this book racist. You are right, I think, that one can refuse to accept what they are saying as "opinion and not fact", but the problem is that one could say the same about the opposite."

Well, of course one can say the same about the opposite. That's not the problem, that's my point. We each have opinions about that element of the book which should be expressed as opinions rather than as facts. But I don't "refuse to accept what they are saying," I have considered the question, I accept what they're saying and don't agree with their conclusions.

And of course I already know that "lot's of people" think the book is racist and who they are and why. Didn't I just finish explaining that I took a deep dive into Conrad and Conrad criticism in grad school? Also, lot's of people don't think the book is racist. In my initial (I was hoping only) comment to Sally on this issue, I said, "I fully disagree, for example, with Chinua Achebe's famous screed against Heart of Darkness as a racist text. Perhaps you will not, though." Pretty much an acknowledgment, I would think, that I saw the legitimacy of both trains of thought. Perhaps "screed" was my version of "rant," however.

I think you're missing a lot of important factors and nuance in the writing.

If I thought racism is all there is to be known about him, you'd be right. But I never thought so or said so (or I wouldn't have any reason to read him again, would I.) It's just that I can't see this as a small flaw to ignore, let alone deny completely. You seem to feel that acknowledging racism would somehow destroy the value of the novel, or Conrad's stature or something, but I'd say it actually creates complications and novel meanings that for white people in particular (and as far as I know only white people tend to be diehard fans of writers like Conrad) would be super-important to understand.

Obviously, racism in Conrad is not something I "ignore completely." I don't know where you got that. Perhaps, again, you would reread my original comments in response to Sally's inquiry. Of course there is racism in Conrad, and there is racism reflected in Heart of Darkness. The "nuance of the writing" I was referring to are the elements in the storytelling that make me disagree with the idea that the key takeaway is that the book is a racist story at its core. You think the book is racist. I think the book is about racism and the futility and resulting tragedies of one culture trying to stamp itself upon another.

"putting pressure on you to accept an opinion you refuse"

Again, it's not an opinion I "refuse," which you make sound as if it's something I've simply rejected out of hand; it's an opinion I've considered and don't agree with. Certainly we can agree to disagree about it all, and let's do so now, if you don't mind. Cheers!

>46 sallypursell:. No worries! I didn't feel denigrated, and as for my definitions of criticism and scholarship, I am far from the expert in the definitions of those fraught concepts, or on any of the rest of these subjects. They are fun to chew on, though!

"I knocked myself into Moby Dick and Vanity Fair until I found that I did like them after all . . . "

Wow! You're a better person than I am! I don't think I've ever had the stick-to-it-ive-ness to "knock myself into" a book I didn't like through rereading like that! If you ever want to have an off-line conversation about Heart of Darkness, let me know. Perhaps you should also have one with LolaWalser for balance. If you want to try a different Conrad, then, again, The Secret Agent is a favorite of mine and quite different in subject matter from Heart of Darkness, so maybe it would be more up your alley.

"My mother was a fascinating and glamorous creature who unfortunately had a Histrionic personality disorder, I believe. She saw life in Technicolor. She was grandiose and a fabulist, so everything became a Story, and everything was grand or awful. Her life was very colorful, of course, and after my husband joined the family, he and my oldest brother imposed a 20% exaggeration cap on all speech.)"

What a great description! She must have been terrific to know. By the way, are you by any chance a fan of Jasper Fforde and his Thursday Next novels? The idea of "a 20% exaggeration cap on all speech" is something right out of one of Fforde's stories!

Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This was a fun collection of western stories, ranging all the way in length from "novels" (really novellas), longish short stories and a couple of very short tales. Of the authors represented, I'd heard of only two of them from my used bookstore-owning days (I had a pretty large Westerns section): Norman A. Fox and Eli Colter. Most of the stories were engaging enough. There is a distinct pattern to them. Someone, usually a stranger in these here parts, has been wrongly accused of a crime and has to figure out a way to clear himself. Often in doing so, our hero gets the girl into the bargain. One of the most entertaining of the entries, the "novel" by Norman A. Fox called "Land Beyond the Law," is described thusly in its teaser on the table of contents: "Matt Larkey discovered too late that his bargain with the law had sent him into Hell's Vest Pocket with his gun fangs pulled."

The magazine was published by Street & Smith Publications. When I first started my reading here, I did a little fishing online and found a pulp crime and westerns blog that described Western Adventures as Street & Smith's third-string periodical. That may explain the relative sameness to the stories. Regardless, as I mentioned, these stories were entertaining if loved just for themselves by readers who like their lead flying and their bad guys tumbling grimly to their just desserts.

As always with old magazines, the advertisements provide plenty of interest, too. For example, we learn "How a Free Lesson started Bill on the way to a Good Radio Job." Also, you may be amused to learn, we have a full-page ad selling Listerine as a dandruff treatment. Frequent reference to the war is made in these ads. Another full-page spot for International Correspondence Schools features a pen & ink drawing of a GI with rifle pointed as we are advised to "Increase Your 'Fire Power' on the Production Front and increase your chances for prosperity in tomorrow's victory world by enrolling in a low-cost, short-term War Course." The half-page ad for Gillette Razor Blades toward the back of the publication makes a promise that I don't believe it could keep, to put it mildly.

Pulp from the 1940's. some of those magazines of genre fiction are appearing on kindle - not the same thing I know, but I will read a couple from my favourite year 1951. You seem to have enjoyed those westerns - I don't think I have ever read any.

>50 baswood: For the ones not on Kindle/reprints yet, check Archive.org as well - a LOT of the SF ones are uploaded there :)

>49 rocketjk: Now you make me want to go and pull some old magazines out from a box... :)

>50 baswood: & >51 AnnieMod: Absolutely, I enjoyed these stories, but, I have to admit, in a rather low-bar kind of way. The prose was clean and snappy, though the plots were certainly predictable. Certainly nothing "deep" about the characterizations, which were pretty much all stereotypical. But, fun though. Sometimes this sort of thing just fills the bill.

>52 rocketjk: Not every book/story needs to be a "new and never seen before" thing... I like the pulps :)

>48 rocketjk:

What a great description! She must have been terrific to know!

Oh, my mother was glorious. Everyone was charmed, all her life.



The first is age 16, the next posing for a calendar for servicemen, the last is at age 75 with my three oldest children.

>53 AnnieMod: Right! I like them too. Sometimes you just want something fun, and they're often like a fun time-travel trip to a different era.

>54 sallypursell: Wonderful photos! Sincere thanks for sharing those here.

>55 rocketjk: Oh, it was my pleasure entirely. And I thank you for the opportunity.

Oh, I meant to say that I like pulps, too. Zorro came from them, and lots of great stuff.

Enjoyed your Conrad review...loved reading the follow up posts. It would have been hard for Conrad not to have a racist view in his era, since not only was it culturally pervasive, but acceptance of it was too. I find HoD lacks an African viewpoint, which, for an African novel, implies a racist tone.

I came across this in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl. I read it admiring Cather’s nuanced take on slavery. Then someone pointed me to Toni Morrison’s criticism (which I had read a few years ago, but forgot the essence of her argument). I would love to debate with Morrison as I didn’t wholly agree, but she makes one clear point - it’s a white narrative of slavery. That is racist, even if not sinister in intent (it’s clear to me anyway). It’s certainly a crime Conrad commits in HoD, even if not sinister in intent. I haven’t read all the other stuff you and Lola have read, and I appreciate your opinions in that light and i’m open to correction and/or redirection.

>18 rocketjk: >22 dchaikin: >29 kidzdoc: Another NO/Tulane connection—Sorry to digress. My time at Tulane there was 1968-74. The first 3 years at the women’s college, Newcomb (no longer in existence) and 3 years at the law school. I came there via Aruba, New Jersey, and London, England. I chose it because I had a full scholarship, and because my mother had family in Louisiana, and my parents and sibs lived overseas. My first year at Newcomb, there was one Black student. I think there were slightly more Black students in Tulane proper. My law school class had 5 (out of about 185) female students. About 5 or 6 years after I graduated, when I went back to recruit, the law school was closer to 40% women.
I avoided sports like the plague while I was there, but our apartment on Calhoun Street was a block away from the old Tulane Stadium where the Sugar Bowl was played and the Saints played before the Superdome was built, so we made a bit of extra money renting out the driveway on game days. And Pete Maravich was a hotshot player at LSU during my freshman year that a number of girls I was acquainted with were trying to finagle a date with.
We ended up staying in NO basically by inertia for about 12 years after we graduated. Our last few years there we lived in Lake Vista, and our next door neighbor was a UNO English professor. We finally moved to Seattle in 1986.
I met my husband at Tulane the first week of our freshman year (he’s from NY, and a grad of the Architecture School). In May we will celebrate our 50th anniversary.

>57 dchaikin: Hi, Dan. Just want you to know that I'm not planning to ignore your comments, which I welcome, but I'm having a busy few days. It may be the weekend before I can give a thoughtful enough response.

>58 arubabookwoman: Wow, quite a timeline! Living close to Tulane Stadium must have been quite an adventure. My first two or three years in NOLA I was a bus boy and then a waiter, first at the Hyatt at Poydras Plaza but then at a couple of fine restaurants in the French Quarter. It was always a big deal to find out who was going to be in the Sugar Bowl (although by then they were playing the game in the Super Dome, I'm pretty sure). The game in those days was the winner of the SEC Conference vs. some independent team of the selection committee's choosing. We always hoped that the SEC winner would be Tennessee and their opponent would be from the north somewhere. Notre Dame was good. Why? Because those would be the better tippers, by far. When the Arkansas fans filled up the Quarter with their Soooooweeeee yells, well, that wasn't particularly pleasant for us locals.

And it says something about my own level of worldliness and sophistication that when I see the sentence, "I came there via Aruba, New Jersey, and London, England," my immediate question is, "Where in Jersey?"

>59 rocketjk: At least you didn't ask, "Which exit?"

>60 lisapeet: Ha! Nobody from New Jersey would ask that! :)

Oh New Jersey! We lived in Morristown for a year. I came from a school in Aruba with about 7 people in my class to a high school with thousands (just a slight exaggeration). After a year there, I was very happy to move to London, which at that time (1967) was the center of the universe for a teenager.
My grandfather went to Aruba in 1928, and my mother grew up there. My dad came to Aruba in 1948 after he graduated from college. My parents married there, and I (and my 6 younger siblings) were born in Aruba and always lived there. It was a shock to move to New Jersey at age 16.
More recently I have spent a bit of time in Jersey. My oldest son, who moved to Tampa about 3 years ago, worked for about 10 years in NYC. He and his wife lived for about 2-3 years in South Orange, and most of the rest of the time in Jersey City. We visited frequently.
Interesting that you were a waiter in New Orleans. I really miss the food there. During my work years there (1974-86) I worked in the Federal Building on Poydras. I don’t remember eating at the Hyatt, but occasionally ate at The Rain Forest in the Hilton. Most Fridays a group from the office went to the French Quarter for sandwiches at Maspero’s. And of course Mother’s was right there. Was the New Orleans World’s Fair there while you were there? (Getting my times mixed up).

>62 arubabookwoman: Well, I find it very hard to believe that as a teenager you preferred London to Morristown. Ha! I crack myself up. I do know Morristown, though. A nice place but quiet.

"Interesting that you were a waiter in New Orleans. I really miss the food there. During my work years there (1974-86) I worked in the Federal Building on Poydras."

I was in New Orleans from 1979-86, so we were there at the same time! Are you a jazz fan at all? You might have heard me on the radio if you ever listened to WWNO, the NPR affiliate.

"My oldest son, who moved to Tampa about 3 years ago, worked for about 10 years in NYC. He and his wife lived for about 2-3 years in South Orange, and most of the rest of the time in Jersey City. We visited frequently."

That's funny, too. I was born in Newark and lived there until I was 11, when we moved to Maplewood, which you may or may not know is not only right next to South Orange but actually shares a school district. Also, Darryl is from Jersey City. So we all share not only that New Orleans connection but also lots of New Jersey tie-ins!

Another Jersey girl here, twice—once as a kid between 6-14 (Princeton), another time voluntarily as an adult for seven years (Hoboken). Never lived in New Orleans, though, much to my chagrin.

>64 lisapeet: "Never lived in New Orleans, though, much to my chagrin."

Not yet, you mean. :)

>65 rocketjk: Hope does spring eternal.

>57 dchaikin: OK, this got really long. Sorry about that, chief.

"Enjoyed your Conrad review...loved reading the follow up posts. It would have been hard for Conrad not to have a racist view in his era, since not only was it culturally pervasive, but acceptance of it was too. I find HoD lacks an African viewpoint, which, for an African novel, implies a racist tone.

I came across this in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl. I read it admiring Cather’s nuanced take on slavery. Then someone pointed me to Toni Morrison’s criticism (which I had read a few years ago, but forgot the essence of her argument). I would love to debate with Morrison as I didn’t wholly agree, but she makes one clear point - it’s a white narrative of slavery. That is racist, even if not sinister in intent (it’s clear to me anyway). It’s certainly a crime Conrad commits in HoD, even if not sinister in intent. I haven’t read all the other stuff you and Lola have read, and I appreciate your opinions in that light and i’m open to correction and/or redirection."

Hi, Dan. OK, finally I have some time to respond to your post, here. First of all, I want to say that, although I’ll use some of your comments directly, it’s only to use them as a jumping off point. I have no inkling at all of providing “correction.” First of all, what I’m about to provide are opinions, and, second of all, I’m far from an expert on any of this. I can provide my own insights, only. I’m not about to tell anybody that he or she is incorrect. Only that I might disagree.

Next, this topic is, of course, fraught, and rightly so. I am not in the habit of telling Black people what they should or shouldn’t think of as racist, or women what they should or shouldn’t think of as sexist (and even less so since I’ve learned even more about these things over the past couple of years, regrettably late in life (I’m 65)), in much the same way that I do not appreciate having non-Jews tell me what is or isn’t anti-Semitic.

I haven’t read the Cather book, and I love Morrison’s writing and greatly respect her. If her point is that white people shouldn’t write fiction about slavery, that seems off. I certainly don’t see it as a crime. But if her point is that Cather’s description of slavery soft-pedaled the reality in a way that might lead her white readers to come away with an insufficiently horrified idea of what slavery was like, I certainly see the harms. Or else I am entirely or partially missing her point, which wouldn't be a first.

“It would have been hard for Conrad not to have a racist view in his era, since not only was it culturally pervasive, but acceptance of it was too.”

Agreed. An interesting comparison/contrast is his attitude and writing about Jews. Recall that Conrad was the son of Polish nobility. He would have grown up, then, with essentially no contact with Blacks or even, most likely, with people who had virulent opinions about Blacks. But he would have grown up in an environment where anti-Semitism, of an often murderous variety, was basically taken for granted. It would have been the one thing that the Poles and the Russians who were at that time ruling Poland would have agreed on. And yet in Conrad’s writing, as I noted in my original summation of my takes on him up-thread, while Jews are certainly portrayed as “others” and not always in a positive light, they are also capable of noble deeds, such as the character in Nostromo who stands up to torture and, instead of spilling the information that others are desperately counting on him not to divulge, purposefully goads his torturer into killing him. Based on his upbringing, we would expect Conrad to portray Jews basically as devil people, but he doesn’t.

Also note that when Conrad was sent to an uncle in England by his parents in order to get him out from under the danger from Russian authorities, instead of enjoying entry into the English upper classes that one would think his family’s status of nobility would have allowed for him, he instead eventually went off to sea in merchant ships, where his nobility would have counted pretty much for nothing. And by the time he began writing in earnest, he had spent many years in the environment, all around the world.

But, of course, this is far from cut and dry. As I alluded to, again, in my initial post on this subject, Conrad often (mostly) approached other races in his writing from a position of power and privilege. So, yes, racist. And yet, his view of this privilege was often laced with irony, and non-white characters are frequently strong, smart, powerful and honorable. But clear demarcations are, in fact, constantly made between whites and all others. True, certainly.

“I find HoD lacks an African viewpoint, which, for an African novel, implies a racist tone. “

I see what you mean, sort of, but to me HoD to me is, in addition to being "an African novel," a novel about psychology, alienation, the follies of imperialism and of the attempt of one civilization trying to impose itself upon another. It is a story of a stranger in a strange land, trying to make sense of a vast unknown and having his own preconceptions challenged. If Conrad had given Marlow, let’s say, an articulate African guide to provide an African perspective over all Marlow was seeing and experiencing, most of that sense of isolation and confusion would have been drained from the story, for the character and for the reader. If the point is that it was inherently racist for a white man to write a novel in which a white character goes to Africa during the colonial era and finds himself wholly out of his element and confused by what he finds, I can’t really agree.

What follows now is filled to the brim with a) my own opinions only and b) plot spoilers. Beware of both!

Marlow spends much of his narrative reflecting on, as I said, the folly and impossibility of European empire in Africa. Let’s recall, first, that HoD is a story within a story. Marlow is sitting on a yacht on the Thames of an evening with a group of business men. Fat cats, basically. And not only that but the actual narrator of the story is one of that group, telling us what Marlow told him. So, again, we are getting Marlow telling us of something that he lived through long ago, but filtered by the perceptions and memory of the tale by somebody who wasn’t there. These sort of varying shades and levels of narrative, memory and experience are common in Conrad. It makes us have to sift through what we’re seeing and hearing, and keeps the ground shifting beneath us.

At any rate, they all sit on the yacht in stillness as night falls, and then the first words out of Marlow’s mouth as he begins his tale is, “This, too, was one of the dark places of the earth.” Immediately he is setting up a connection, even a kinship, between the supposedly (for the reader and for all those he’s sitting with on that yacht) superior English culture and the Africa we’re about to visit. Or at least that’s my experience of the detail. Marlow then goes on to describe what he’s talking about, taking us back to the early days when England was but a far flung, dangerous, “backwards” outpost of the Roman Empire, very much to be avoided at all costs if one were a Roman soldier or bureaucrat.

One of the first, rather bizarre sights we’re given as the young Marlow of the tale arrives in Africa is that of a man-of-war anchored off the coast, lobbing shells into the jungle, a murderous but certainly, I think it’s fair to assume, most likely futile attempt to assert control over an African insurrection against European rule. The hallucinatory element of the story has begun.

Marlow’s assignment is to take a small steam-powered riverboat up the Congo in order to fetch home an ivory agent named Kurtz. Kurtz, a previous wunderkind sent into uncharted (by Europeans) territory to set up an ivory hunting and export post, heads off on his assignments full of, as I remember the story, presumptuous do-gooder plans for helping the “natives” as well as enriching his employers. He is a success at the latter, but, eventually, a failure at the former. In the cultural isolation and strangeness of the environment, Kurtz eventually uses his charisma to become instead a murderous warlord. At first his bosses don’t care, as the ivory continues flowing. Then the ivory stops, and Marlow is hired to retrieve him before he "ruins the territory" for the ivory trade. Marlow is joined on his boat by a Black crew and several white travelers (“pilgrims”) as well.

Kurtz has been defeated by the environment and collapsed into his own inner weknesses, losing not only his health and his mind, but his soul, succumbing to both greed and blood lust. This has never seemed to me a picture of European superiority.

Marlow certainly does often speak in clearly racist vocabulary. Africans are “savages” and “brutes” and more. Certainly there would be Englishmen who in that era would not speak thusly, though probably not very many, but, nevertheless, we must take note of the racism in the narrative. And yet often, it seems to me, this terminology is wed in important ways to Marlow’s learning something unexpected that changes his opinion, or at least changes ours, about the portent of this usage.

An example is the incident on the boat when Marlow realizes that his African crew members are not only cannibals, but are hungry due to the “pilgrims’” high-handed action of throwing the crew’s hippo meat over the side due to its horrible smell as it rotted. In the meantime, the boat has become befogged and so must sit still, while upon the shore on both sides local tribesman, unseeable in the fog, have arrived and begun a clamorous calling out.

“I would no doubt have been properly horrified, (Marlow says of his new knowledge of his helmsman’s cannibalism) had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been engaged for six months . . . , and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn’t enter anybody’s head to trouble how they would live.”

There is next a description of the worthless brass wire the crew members have been paid in (supposedly to be used as currency during the trip up river. “You can see how that worked. There were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or the director . . . didn’t want to stop the steamer for some more or less recondite reason.”). Marlow says this:

“Why in the name of the knawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big, powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength . . . and I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there. I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest. . . . Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear,--or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, there are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. . . . And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me—the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the seas, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater than the curious inexplicable note of desperate grief in this savage clamour that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.“

So, yes, Marlow in his original racism is shocked to learn that his crew members can act with the same sort of honorable, desperately difficult restraint in the face of hunger that any “civilized” man would be capable of. But he does learn it, and he does express it to his listeners, duly passed on to us by the narrator. Plus, in Marlow’s discerning the sorrow, rather than the ferocity that the rest of the whites on board assume, in the shouts from shore, Marlow is once again alluding to the humanity of the people they're encountering, and of his kinship with them (though they are “savages”), again to the alarm of his fellow whites.

“{T}he cries . . . had not the fierce character boding immediate hostile intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been, they had given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose. . . . You should have seen the pilgrims stare! They had no heart to grin, or even to revile me: but I believe they thought me gone mad—with fright, maybe.“

But to go back a few pages in the book, one of the most commonly cited examples of racism in HoD is the first moment that Marlow and the rest of the travelers encounter the Africans on the river bank making loud demonstrations of anger or grief and are at first wholly uncomprehending. “We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.” It is not the Blacks who were “too far,” but the whites. And now the famous passage:

“We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of their being a meaning it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. Any why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore.”

Here, to me, is Marlow reporting what he had at first assumed, that Africans were a shackled conquered “monster,” and yet having the ability to realize as he watched and experienced that he’d been wrong, and then reporting there on the yacht so many years later how he’d come to view the experience and what he’d learned from it. “He must at least be as much of a man as these on shore.” The salient point to me is not the initial response, then, but what Marlow takes from it all. He is chided by one of his listeners (men whom Marlow continually derides during the narrative for their lack of comprehension and their mindless, civilized comforts and securities) and he shrugs it off with scorn. Certainly, the point is not clear-cut. The racism is intermixed with the illumination. You are not going to get much black and white (you should pardon the expression) with Conrad, which is one of the elements I find intriguing about his writing.

Earlier, while still at base camp waiting for the boat to made river-worthy, Marlow had come upon a group of Africans chained together and waiting. Clearly they are prisoners and/or slaves. The horrors of the European colonization of the Congo would already have been known to Conrad’s readers, and would be fresher to their minds even than to ours. Conrad is criticized for referring to these men as (I am paraphrasing) “a bundle of acute angles,” as if that’s all they were to him. For me it is instead that he is describing men who are being worked and starved to death, who are having the humanity beaten out of them. We are supposed to look at this sight not with the offhanded dismissal of seeing a bunch of “acute angles” but of seeing horribly and criminally abused people. Conrad could have used better wording here, I’ll grant you, to accomplish the effect. For me, though, that’s not a sign of racism. A racist writer, it seems to me, would not have bothered to provide the scene at all, or would not have included the detail that clearly demonstrates a criminal level of abuse.

Marlow, of course, tracks Kurtz down and gets him onboard ship to bring him back to his bosses. But soon after the return journey toward Europe commences, Kurtz, after raving to Marlow for some time, dies of his fever. Famously, Kurtz’s final words are, “The horror! The horror!”

In the falling action, Marlow goes to Brussels (which he refers to constantly throughout the novel as “the Sepulcher City,” not exactly a glowing endorsement of white civilization) to settle accounts. While there, he calls upon Kurtz’s grieving fiancé (his “intended”). Pressed by her to relate Kurtz’s final words, Marlow hesitates and then says, “The last thing he said was . . . your name.” Perhaps this is just meant as a throwaway line, as Marlow being kind to the “intended” and nothing more, with no discernible connection to be found between this little white lie and Kurtz’s actual final words. But if so, it would be very atypical Conrad, certainly at this most fertile stage of his career. More likely, to me, this is Conrad, or at least Marlow, making a final, negative assessment of the supposed glories of European civilization.

So there you have my rather overlong description of my various takes and opinions about Heart of Darkness. I am not attempting to convince anyone to agree with me, or to tell others that they are wrong to think and/or feel differently. This is my own set of perspectives on the text. C'est tout.

Goodness, Jerry, what have I done? : )

First, that was a beautiful analysis and post, an intimate loving look at Conrad. Thank you for that. Second, to defuse, i’m personally not using racism as name calling. I’m not calling you racist, you’re not. And I’m not condemning Conrad in this light. I don’t know if he was a good person or not. Nabokov was from high end antisemitic Russia, but he was well educated and liberal minded and his wife, Vera, was Jewish. Conrad may have been similar. Nabokov was not necessarily a good or bad person. So I’ll leave Conrad there. I’m not condemning, just analyzing.

I see HoD as a variation on Dante’s Inferno. Africa is hell, the ruler, Satan, is Belgium. The “hero” is a humble Dante who goes into hell to roughly rescue Kurtz, who is a caught, surrounded by and infected by this hell. I think that shows the racist problem. Hells guardian demons may be Belgian, but the monsters are the mysterious unknown Africans. (Kurtz is a strange Virgil. Like Virgil, he can’t leave.)

If Conrad writes an African perspective in, this whole impact collapses. The Africans cannot (!!) be human, or not normally so. The narrator, like Conrad presumably liberally educated, sees more than the blind soldier/employee, and his observation of the chain gang is the least-racist, most sympathetic part of the book - and completely authentic. But his story has a racist foundation, it uses racism to make its point. I say this hopefully with some sensitivity that I’m oversimplifying. It’s just of its Colonialist era. Anyway, that’s my view of the moment. Blame Kendi and Morrison. : )

Cather’s problems are a little different, but parallel in this one sense. Her slave onwer is the most well developed character is the book. She’s criticized harshly and neither you nor I would feel comfortable around her ,but she’s complex and human and Cather shows some admiration. No slave gets that treatment, even as one is a main character. That’s a one-sided take and why it easily fails a contemporary racism test.

All of this analysis, if valid, is valid generations after the writers were writing. I still like HoD and still see it as a masterpiece, and your comments actually bring back the texture and nuances. You’re post is terrific. And it’s a fantastic little book, imo.

>67 rocketjk: Jerry, that was wonderful. That told me what I wanted to know.

>69 sallypursell: Thanks! But don't take it as definitive in any way. One person's opinion, only.

>68 dchaikin: >69 sallypursell: I’ve always taken the view that the novel is called Heart of Darkness in a slightly ironical sense. Yes, at the time of writing Africa was known as the ‘dark continent’ (dark as in unknown, rather than in any other more judgmental sense). But I have always felt that Conrad is contrasting this traditional nomenclature with a consideration of where the source of the evil engulfing Africa actually comes from. I always come away from reading this with the impression that the ‘heart of darkness’ of the title can equally be viewed as Brussels and the Belgian exploitation.

>70 rocketjk: hope I didn’t overstep

>71 SandDune: I have no argument with that.

>67 rocketjk: Sorry, I missed you out on your own thread - apologies. I meant to reference the long (and very interesting) post you made about your thoughts on Heart of Darkness but got my post numbers wrong

>68 dchaikin: "If Conrad writes an African perspective in, this whole impact collapses."

Certainly! I, too, made this point: "If Conrad had given Marlow, let’s say, an articulate African guide to provide an African perspective over all Marlow was seeing and experiencing, most of that sense of isolation and confusion would have been drained from the story, for the character and for the reader."

But I think we're drawing different conclusions from the idea. C'est la vie!

"The Africans cannot (!!) be human, or not normally so."

I think where we differ in view is that your reading finds this a static condition. To me, Marlow goes into the trip assuming this about the Africans he expects to encounter, but comes away with a different perspective, or at least maybe has developed a different perspective in the time between the voyage itself and his relating the story on the yacht years later. Hence: "What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore."

Just trying to point out what I see as our key differences. And, yes, certainly the novel is of its Imperialist era. Anyway, it's great to get all these other perspectives.

My inclination is to say that I'd be wary of drawing too close a parallel between Dante and Conrad, but the truth is that I know so relatively little about The Inferno, other than, basically, the Golden Classics version, that such a statement would be almost entirely devoid of utility.

Oh, and before I forget, it never occurred to me for a second that you, or LolaWalser either, were calling me a racist. It's all good, my friends.

Cheers!

>71 SandDune: & >72 dchaikin: Yep, this is mostly my view, as well.

>74 rocketjk: “ My inclination is to say that I'd be wary of drawing too close a parallel between Dante and Conrad”

Good point. Hopefully my post works without Dante too.

>76 dchaikin: Well, on the other hand, I got curious and ran a google search for "joseph conrad dante" and got about a zillion hits of literary criticism making comparisons between the two, some explicitly about Heart of Darkness. I haven't read any of them (other things to do today!) but clearly the parallel has gained more than a little traction!

>77 rocketjk: ❤️ !! Something to follow up on.

Looks like Conrad flags it early on, right after the chain gang:

“Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off. I've had to resist and to attack sometimes—that's only one way of resisting—without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.
“I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible

>79 dchaikin: Aha!

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar



Well, at age 65 I have finally taken the plunge and joined a book club. The book club reading was Homeland Elegies, and I want to get this posted before this afternoon's zoom meeting to discuss the book.

Our protagonist in Akhtar's narrative is a fictional version of himself (of how much fidelity I don't know) right down to the Pulitzer Prize for play writing. The narrator is an American-born Muslim, whose parents emmigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan. His father is a leading cardiologist with a high-visibility specialty. His mother is forceful and loving, but her longing for Pakistan seems to drop a veil around her emotions. The narrator (I'll just call him Ayad for our purposes) has gained the sort of status that gains him access, sometimes, to the rich and powerful and affords him a perspective on modern American society: politics, economics and cultural aspects, as well. So this novel is a tour through those elements and through Ayad's family life. Also, we get a very revealing and effective look at what it's like to be born Muslim in the U.S., particularly in the post-911 world. (There is, in fact, a harrowing depiction of what it was like to be recognized by strangers as Muslim on the streets of Manhattan on the day of the attack.) So the novel is a tapestry, more or less, of all these factors. We move fluidly back and forth from the personal to the societal, as the narrator tells us about the former and tries to make sense of the latter. Most forcefully, the narrator describes for us the depressing and encompassing effects of globalization (though I don't recall him ever using the word), and of the changes in the corporate structure that have resulted in the devolution of the average American from customer to commodity.

If this all seems somewhat fractious and confusing, it isn't, as we are in the hands of a very, very good novelist. It's the great strength of the book that these disparate elements seem as a whole. The people, especially the narrator's parents, seem alive. Issues of cultural and national identity in America, both of immigrants and the children of recent immigrants, are deftly handled.

The book does suffer somewhat for me from what I call famous-itis. I generally prefer books about the struggles and insights of more . . . well, I'm not sure what word to use . . . mainstream(?) characters than about those whose fame and/or wealth have given them a relatively unusual access to the events/issues being described. Obviously, the narrator worked and struggled before becoming famous (this process is described, as is his arduous writing schedule), but the perspective at the time of the narrative is still one of unusual access. At any rate, I offer this observation as a personal aside only. It's not a flaw in the novel, but instead a quirk of my own.

Anyway, this novel has been highly praised, and it's praise I agree with.

>81 rocketjk: enjoyed your review. Did the book club meeting change your perspective any?

>72 dchaikin: >74 rocketjk: Oh, the Imperialist thread is quite plain, as is Conrad's noting the ability of the African man to be self-controlled and hard-working, and the overseers and entrepreneurs as a sometimes lesser type of mortal. I don't really understand the connection with Africa, I guess. One can observe similar things at the harbor of any moderate to large shipping city, and the artificial stratification of humanity according to wealth or exposure to learning. Asians were considered bestial, and Irishmen and Scotsmen only a little less so. Why the black man? Why not, I guess. After all, it is a whole continent.

I can't help contrasting the number of white Europeans and Americans with the number of brown people and black people. I am of wholly European extraction, and I feel a little outnumbered, unless I think of us all as equal--which I do, of course. I like to think that the longer we are integrated the more this will be self-evident, and that each generation will be more mixed than the one before.

>82 dchaikin: I want to know this also.

>82 dchaikin: & >84 sallypursell: "Did the book club meeting change your perspective any?"

Yes. Some of the other members didn't like the book as well as I did. In particular, they found the narrative voice annoying and the first person narrator more than a little self-serving in places. It wasn't something I'd picked up on much, but now that I've heard that perspective, I can see what they mean, though I have different ideas than they did about what the author was up to. It's a question of how much narrative control one ascribes to Akhtar.

Was wondering if your group might get sidetracked on Islamophobia. That comment about 9/11 struck me.

>86 dchaikin: There isn't anyone in our book group, at least among the seven guys who "showed up" for this first meeting, who is likely to be Islamphobic (we are a bunch of old hippy liberals -- at 65 I am the youngest in the group, I'm pretty sure). And also nobody would be likely to doubt Akhtar's accounts of same, for the same reasons. We have one member, someone I never really knew before, who told us that his father's father was Syrian and mother was Lebanese, and it all rang true to what he'd heard about from them (his grandparents) growing up. Have I touched on what you were getting at?

>81 rocketjk: Very nice review. I have both his novels on my list of things to get to - I love his plays...

>87 rocketjk: yes, and interesting. Thanks

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton



This concise and well-written book was first published in 1967 as the Black Power movement and many other historical waves in world and U.S. history were coalescing. I do remember those days, although as young observer, as I turned 12 during the summer of 1967. "Black Power" was a term that made white conservatives angry and white liberals, and some Blacks, nervous. It seemed to speak of separatism, anger and violence. But as Ture and Hamilton described the philosophy, at least from this far historical remove, it seems more common sense than anything else, especially if one allows some--to me--clear fact of the pervasiveness in America of systemic racism, a term the authors here were using in 1967. (I don't know when that term was coined. Maybe it was new then, or maybe it was centuries old. Certainly the condition was centuries old.)

The authors here specifically reject separatism. They are basically calling for African Americans to coalesce into a group that can exercise civic and political power for their own self-interest. They point out that every other ethnic and national group in America had to do, and did do, just that before gaining justice for themselves and traction in the overall body politic.

History had clearly showed the authors that Blacks could not count on whites of supposed good will to help in substantive ways in the grand scheme of things, because the white middle class was more or less designed to be exclusive, and even people who wanted to help would fall away when they felt their own privilege or status being challenged. Basically, the idea being put forward is that whites will really help Blacks only when Blacks as a community or group have gathered enough power, could give or withhold enough things that white power brokers wanted, that whites would find it within their own self-interest to begin to move the dial in substantive ways. But the writers were explicit that alliances with whites who wanted to help were both possible and would ultimately most likely be necessary. But, they imply, allies have to be selected carefully.

Ture and Hamilton also provide several concrete examples of the national Democratic Party turning its back its promised to help African Americans gain justice and political participation. Voting, said the authors, wouldn't be enough, as white liberal politicians would never follow through on promises in substantive ways, and a smattering of Black office holders wouldn't suffice, either, if they were not people who were willing to speak up for their people rather than "going along" with the system on behalf of gradual changes in the face of glaring problems of poverty, poor education, injustice and more.

In my Vintage edition, published in 1992, both authors included "contemporary" afterwords. Hamilton, in his, points out that it had turned out that African Americans had for the most part retained their desire to take part in liberal Democratic Party politics, and had made moderately more strides thereby than they'd expected was possible in 1967.

But there was nothing "radical" about the positions articulated here, nothing that should have been threatening to any but racists determined to continue to exclude Blacks from power and prosperity. Of course, there were a lot of such people, and the term "Black Power," I guess, was easily distorted and used as a cudgel against its originators (as is being done now to those who are call for "defunding the police").

I found this book to be greatly instructive, even these many years later, as a concise explication of what was encompassed in the philosophy of "Black Power" (or at least what these authors meant). To be clear, I have not touched upon in any comprehensive way the totality of the issues covered here.

This was another of the books from the list of important books about African American history and racism in America sent around last year by my friend Kim Nalley, a wonderful jazz/blues singer and an American History PhD candidate at Cal-Berkeley. I'm reading these about every third book. There are 19 all told. The books from that list that I read last year were:

Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon Litwack
Trouble in Mind: Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon Litwack *
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis

The next book I'll be reading from this list will be Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins

* Not on Kim's list, but a crucial follow-up, I thought to the first Litwack book.

Hi! Just a NJ comment. I am from Philadelphia and now live at the southernmost tip of NJ in Cape May County.

>91 dianeham: Hi, back! Cape May is beautiful. Cheers!

>81 rocketjk: Glad you liked Homeland Elegies. I just bought it for Kindle, but that does not necessarily mean I will be reading it soon. I will try though.

>63 rocketjk: Unfortunately, during the years 1979-86 I was juggling a full time law career and 3 young kids, so I didn’t get to listen to the radio much, though I was very familiar with Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. I basically feel like a jazz illiterate. Although I have tried a few times to educate myself, I’ve never been able to get into jazz. Maybe I’ve been starting in the wrong place. I do have a music background—I was a music major in undergraduate school before going to law school. I studied classical guitar, as well as music history, theory and composition. One of my regrets as I enter old(er) age is that I did not keep that up.

>93 arubabookwoman: "I’ve never been able to get into jazz. Maybe I’ve been starting in the wrong place."

If you've an interest in trying again, perhaps start with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (either separately or via some of the wonderful albums they made together).

Great review of Black Power, Jerry. As you rightly said, its basic tenets are anything but radical, and you would think that the message of self responsibility and independence would be welcomed and appreciated by conservatives. I had that book at one time, many years ago, but I didn't read it.

According to Wikipedia, "The term institutional racism was first coined in 1967 by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Carmichael and Hamilton wrote that while individual racism is often identifiable because of its overt nature, institutional racism is less perceptible because of its "less overt, far more subtle" nature. Institutional racism "originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than individual racism"."

>95 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. So the term was first introduced in Black Power. Or at least according to Wikipedia. At any rate, it rings so true to me. I look back over my own life and see the times I was an inadvertent engine for institutional racism myself and it's discouraging. When I see/hear people denying that such a thing exists, it's infuriating.

Look Down on Her Dying by Don Tracy



From the "They Can't All Be Classics" Department. This is the 4th book in Don Tracy's Giff Speer series, an obscure pulp series from the 1960s featuring, obviously, Giff Speer, a member of a secret crime solving unit inside the U.S. Army that handles the jobs the CIA or FBI won't or can't. As usual, the book starts with the murder of a young woman (an unfortunate characteristic that has now become apparent to me), in this case near a Louisiana university with an ROTC component as a prominent feature. Around the same time, for cases of hand grenades go missing from the ROTC. The first undercover investigator sent in by Speer's boss is then murdered, as well (all this on the first 3 or 4 pages). Next in is our man, Giff.

The book was published in 1968. Speer has to cull through the ROTC brass, the campus hippies who are vociferous in their demands to get the ROTC off campus, and the reactionary elements in the Southwestern Louisiana town who would like to deal personally with the hippies.

As usual, Tracy has a clear style and a good, flowing eye for plot development and detail and for the planting of clues for the observant reader to pick up on. Not a classic series of the genre, by any means. The trap door is the misogyny, as per the times for this sort of writing. My plan is to gradually read through this series, but if the next book continues this trend, I'll have to bail. Otherwise, these books are lots of fun, but I'm hoping that "otherwise" won't be carried forward.

>91 dianeham: I'm a little amused to see so many NJ folks around here, although maybe I shouldn't be. It is the most densely populated state in the US, I believe.

I grew up in South Jersey, myself: Merchantville, Pennsauken, and Cherry Hill. We used to spend long weekends down at Cape May sometimes when I was a kid. I wonder what ever happened to all those Cape May diamonds I collected on the beach...

>90 rocketjk: you’re my introduction to Carmichael (who I only know by name, and only that name) and Black Power. Enjoyed your review and interesting that the term “institutional racism” was coined here ... and so late. 1967. (>93 arubabookwoman: )

>97 rocketjk: I’ll try to enjoy Tracy as much as I can through your reviews. I don’t suspect I’ll read it (although who knows). The 1960’s cultural divisions are intriguing.

>99 dchaikin: Re Tracy: The interesting thing about Tracy, and something I only discovered when I ran an online search to try to find out more about the Giff Speer series, is that in 1937 he published a book called How Sleeps the Beast about a Jim Crow lynching in the American south. It was only published in England and France, however, as it was deemed too controversial for American readers, and didn't get a U.S. publishing until Lion gave it the pulp treatment, complete with lurid cover, in the 1950s. So when he puts these stories in the South and makes mention of racism, we can know where his own (and Speer's) sympathies lie.

Of course I had to order a copy of How Sleeps the Beast, and shelled out for a British hard cover edition, and it is now on my "short list" TBR stack.

>100 rocketjk: Oh, that *is* a lurid cover.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell



A couple of years back, my wife and I instituted a new routine whereby at the beginning of each calendar year, we each give the other our favorite book from the previous year to read (taking into account in our selections, what we know of the other's reading preferences, of course). This year, my wife handed over Hamnet for me to read, a big best seller from 2020, of course, and one which, based on all the reviews I'd seen here on LT, I was happy to dive into.

The book is admirably written, with a stunning sense of time and place (Stratford, England, during Shakespeare's time) and a wonderfully effective sense of invention (Shakespeare's family life, essentially, through the two perspectives of Shakespeare himself and, more emphatically, his wife, Agnes). All of this orbits around the pull of the short life of their son, Hamnet.

For all the writing skill and acute observation, however, I have to admit that I frequently became impatient during the book's first half. The characters and situations struck me too often as too familiar set pieces, and more than once I thought to myself, "Can we move along?"

The second half of the book, however, I found very effective, indeed, as the characters came much more alive to me as individuals, and their situations, experiences, relationships and emotions moved for me from the general to the unique. By the end (which I found terrific), I was wholly invested. So, yes, all in all, I found Hamnet to be a very, very good book.

>102 rocketjk: I love the idea of your reading ritual. Sadly my husband prefers to bury his head in the newspaper than in books, but I live in hope of him seeing the light.

After a plethora of glowing reviews for Hamnet, I think the last few I've read in CR have all been a little more critical. However, despite your occasional frustrations it sounds like you really rate it, so it's staying on the to-be-bought list.

>103 AlisonY: I'll be interested to see what you think when you eventually get to Hamnet. I do, indeed, recommend it.

Ways of Escape by Graham Greene



This book is listed as an autobiography, but I really consider it more a memoir, as Greene here provides us memories and insights into his writing career and his fascinating travel experiences, but leaves out pretty much everything about his personal life. We don't really, then, get a full picture of Greene's life. But that's OK, because what is here is extremely interesting and--not surprising considering the author--sharply written. Greene picks his story up here at about age 27, having already chronicled his earlier life in his book, A Sort of Life. This is perfect for me, as I generally find the early, childhood, part of memoirs/autobiographies tedious to a great or lesser degree.

But, for example, after some early references to his wife and two children (he writes gratefully of his wife's "courage and patience" when Greene's early writing career flounders, bringing along the monetary troubles one would expect), his mention of the breakup of this marriage takes up only one parenthetical remark, in which he blames some short-term but intensive Benzedrine use that made him querulous, his depression and his infidelities for the marriage's demise. In addition, he alludes to his manic-depressive condition, and the swings that either helped or hindered the writing of specific books, as one would mention the irritations occasioned by, say, an inefficient travel agent, but with only infrequent references to the real pain brought on by the condition.

Greene walks us through the writing of his novels, telling us how much he still liked them (or disliked them) as he was writing this memoir at age 75. More usefully, he tells us about the inspirations and real life events/memories that went into each, which characters are based on real life figures, and how he felt about the critical reception to the works. Greene converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in early adulthood and took his faith seriously. But he was bemused and somewhat dismayed to find that, after he wrote a pair of novels in which Catholicism (The Power and the Glory is the one that comes to mind for me right this second.) and issues of the Church featured prominently, critics began to refer to him as a "Catholic writer," as if that were the key theme of his work or his motivation. His account of the writing of the screenplay for "The Third Man" is almost worth the price of admission in and of itself.

The details about the various novels will be of real interest to fans of Greene's books. I've only read a few, and those quite some time ago, but now I'm thinking I need to read a few more. The book sings when Greene is discussing the creative process, and also when he is reminiscing about some of the fascinating places he took himself to, basically in an effort to get away from himself, usually after arranging a writing assignment. He tells of being in Dien Bien Phu shortly before the battle that drove the French out of Vietnam for good, with descriptions of how incompetently placed the French forces were, and how inevitable their destruction. He was in Havana during the final months of the Batista regime and in Haiti during the darkest days of Duvalier.

He provides short sketches of friends and acquaintances (his longtime friend Evelyn Waugh gets a particularly loving treatment), as well as some enjoyable chance encounters with memorable (for all sorts of reasons) characters. For example, after discussing the fact that the character Davis, the arms dealer in This Gun for Hire was entirely made up, Greene continues thusly (sorry for the long quote, but it definitely gives a taste of the book's character):

" . . . after the book was written I did, for the only time in my life, encounter a former traveler in armaments. No one could have been less like Mr. Davis.

I was one of two passengers on a small plane flying from Riga to Tallinn. . . . (I was there for no reason except to escape to somewhere new.) I happened to be reading a novel of Henry James and when I glanced at my fellow passenger I saw that he too was absorbing James in the same small Macmillan edition. In the thirties it was more rare than it is today to find a fellow devotee of James. Our eyes went to each other's books and we immediately struck up an acquaintance.

He was a man considerably older than myself and he was serving as British Consul at Tallinn. Since he was not very busy and a bachelor, . . . we spent a good deal of time together {while Greene was in Tallinn}. . . .

My new friend had traveled in armaments . . . after the First World War. He was surely unique among armaments salesmen, for I doubt if any of his colleagues could have claimed to be a former Anglican clergyman. When the Great War started he became an army chaplain. Before it ended he was converted to Catholicism and was about to be received into the Roman Church by the archbishop of Zagreb when an Austrian air raid interrupted things and the Archbishop fled to the cellar. When the war was over his conversion was consummated, and he was left without a job. For want of anything better he became an armaments salesman. He was a very gentle, very solitary man, in whom James might well have discovered a character, in spite of his bizarre past (James would have wrapped it in folds of ambiguity)--someone a little like Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady, the novel I was reading in the plane from Riga.. . . For a fortnight, thanks to Henry James, we were close friends. Afterwards? I never knew what happened. He must have lost his home when the Russians moved in. It seemed hardly a danger in those days--our eyes were on Germany."

The title of this book comes from Greene's notion that the artistic process is often employed by the artist as means of escaping the dark or drab elements of life. Greene speaks of his writing and of his traveling as concurrent means to this end. He speaks of his novel writing as an escape from his own self, and his short story writing as an escape from having to live continually for with the characters of his novels as he was writing them. Very late in the book, Greene wonders how people who do not have some artistic creative process to turn to manage to get themselves through life.

There are certainly unattractive aspects to Greene's character that he makes no effort to hide here, whether from honesty or from a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, it's hard to tell. Either way, he's very matter of fact about them. He speaks often of visiting brothels, mentions (without naming) various mistresses, and describes his foray into opium use in Malaya. His politics were liberal. For instance, after having taken the measure of Batista in Cuba, he gets in trouble with the dictator of Paraguay while on a visit there for speaking highly of Cuba's new revolutionary lead, Fidel Castro.

All in all I found this book a very interesting and valuable reading experience.

Have you read his essays? Not a fan of Greene's, even less of the man than the writer, but he's quite interesting on popular fiction. And I love the fannishness and seriousness with which he wrote about Beatrix Potter (she wasn't flattered, alas). Argh, can't remember the title of the collection it was in... a small Penguin, why on earth don't I list it...

ETA: found it--The Lost Childhood and Other Essays

>106 LolaWalser: I haven't read the essays, but I will check them out. Thanks a lot for mentioning those. I can definitely understand not being a fan of either the writer or, especially, the man.

This came up when I was searching for the selection I read--the entire Collected essays are up on Archive.org? at least one edition--anyway, the Table of Contents is very interesting (scroll just a smidgen, past the "Other books by Graham Greene" listing):

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.225494/2015.225494.Graham-Greene_dj...

ETA: Ha! This is good:

Author's Note

In selecting what essays to reprint over a period of more
than thirty years I have made it a principle to include
nothing of which I can say that, if I were writing today,
I would write in a different sense. The principle applies
as much to my hatreds as to my loves. Some of these
attacks, reprinted after so many years, are directed at
what might seem now rather diminished objects, but I
would feel a serious lack in the book if they were omitted.
A man should be judged by his enmities as well as by his
friendships.

Indeed...

>105 rocketjk: Thats interesting - I have read nearly all Graham Greenes novels (but none of the essays) - worth a detour perhaps.

>105 rocketjk: I've got Ways of escape on my shelves, but I don't remember much about it — maybe time for a re-read. Or the essays, as Lola suggests. I've also found that when I've reread Greene's novels in recent times I've been disappointed.

>110 thorold: "I've also found that when I've reread Greene's novels in recent times I've been disappointed."

Based on what he wrote of his own works in Ways of Escape, Greene would agree with you on quite a few of his novels, but that might have just been his attempt at an artist's humility. I really haven't read that much Greene. I read The Ministry of Fear a long time ago and thought it was good but not great. Perhaps by now Greene has been surpassed by a lot of writers in terms of his "entertainments" (the espionage novels). I just saw on another LT thread someone giving a brief, basically positive, review of The Power and the Glory, about the suppression of the church in Mexico during the 1930s. Anyway, I might give one or two of his books a go this year just for curiosity's sake. They're generally not too long, I don't think, so not too much of a detour.

The Union Reader edited by Richard B. Harwell



Read as a “between book” (see first post). This is a very interesting anthology for those who care about American Civil War history. It’s a collection of letters, newspaper columns and journal entries from people of all sorts who took part in the war or witnessed it the war from the Union side. (Harwell also published a companion collection, The Confederate Reader.)

We get journal entries from Union soldiers in far flung theaters of war like New Mexico, but we are also taken inside Fort Sumter at the very beginning of the war, a diary entry of a woman watching the soldiers of both sides rush back and forth through the streets of her hometown, Gettysburg, first-hand accounts of major engagements like the Battle of Shiloh, letters and telegrams back and forth from an increasingly exasperated Lincoln to his generals during the early years of the conflict. There are accounts of life inside prisoner of war camps and a description of life in New Orleans during the Federal occupation.

Editor Richard B. Harwell (1915-1988) was a prominent enough Civil War historian (especially regarding the Confederacy) that the Atlanta Civil War Round Table now confers the Harwell Book Award for the best book on a Civil War subject published in the preceding year: http://www.civilwarroundtableofatlanta.org/Harwell-Bio.htm

The Union Reader was published in 1958. My copy is a first edition hardback.

>111 rocketjk: I've only read Greene's The End of the Affair, but I quite enjoyed it. It was dark and melancholy, but it suited the plot. Is this his usual style of writing?

I've never read Greene's essays either—I read a few of his novels, but none of them in the last 15 years at least. I'll have to check the essays out, see what the man has to say.

>113 AlisonY: "Is this his usual style of writing?"

It has been a while since I've read any of his novels. According to what Greene wrote in Ways of Escape, Greene distinguished between his serious novels and what he called his "entertainments." Sometimes he would interrupt the writing of one of the former by writing one of the latter if he was finding the subject matter of the serious novel too depressing. One or two of the novels (Our Man in Havana comes to mind) he referred to as satire. So basically, he had more than one style of writing.

An interesting side note about Our Man in Havana. It is about Cuba during the final days of the Batista regime, meant to ridicule the incompetence and futility of the British diplomatic corps in Cuba at the time. Greene noted ruefully in Ways of Escape that, when the Castro revolutionaries took over, they didn't look very kindly at the book, as they resented the fact that when Greene looked at the horrors of Batista, what he saw fit to write about was a comedy about the bumbling of British diplomats. In retrospect, Greene seemed to agree with the Castro regime about that.

He was prouder of The Comedians, a novel which takes a more serious look at the Duvalier regime in Haiti.

Catching up. Terrific stuff on Greene (no, haven’t read him).

>102 rocketjk: I would call this tepid on Hamnet, something like a good second half recovery. Interesting. I’ve been thinking about getting to it. Also like your spousal sharing system.

>112 rocketjk: The Union Reader - what a cool oddball book.

>116 dchaikin: I would say a little stronger than "tepid" re Hamnet, which to me denotes "take it or leave it." By the end, I was very happy to have read the book. Maybe just a semantics detail.

Thanks for checking in and catching up.

>116 dchaikin: I agree, dchaikin! This is, indeed, great stuff in your thread, rocketjk.

>115 rocketjk: The Comedians - one of my favourite Greene books.

>118 sallypursell: Thanks!

>119 baswood: Yes, I read The Comedians about 25 years ago and I remember enjoying it. I still have my copy, so that's one I might decide to reread.

>105 rocketjk: & >106 LolaWalser: Hmm. I read a little bit of Greene in my 20s and haven't looked at him since. Didn't make a strong impression at the time. These essays look, er, sound interesting.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen



A couple of things to know about the title of this book, and how the title relates to historian Valerie Hansen's actual premise and execution here. First, and most importantly, when Hansen says "Globilization," she's not talking about the concept that we think of today, that of, for example, a company setting up organizational shop in one country but building factories in another to take advantage of lower wages. She is really talking about a growing interconnectedness between ever wider areas of the world for the purposes of trade, yes, but also the sharing of ideas and innovations. Second, the year 1000 is really used as a sort of central point in time, one that Hansen frequently circles back to, but not one that she slavishly adheres to. She talks, really, about developments over a range of times within a 2- or 3-century time period, from around 900 to around 1200. Finally, the use of the word "explorers" is misleading, because, at least for a Western reader, it puts to mind people in ships or on expeditions intentionally setting out to explore places they'd never been before to see what they could find out. Only a few of the major players in this narrative fit that mold. More often, Hansen is talking about conquerors, merchants and even historians. So all this makes me wonder whether the book title was Hansen's own idea fully or one that her publisher came up with. Well, at any rate, I say all that not by way of a criticism of the book, but more as a way of aligning the expectations any prospective readers.

Basically, what Hansen does in this book is give us a tour around the world, circa 1000, to describe what an observant traveler then might have found, and both going back in time to illuminate how things got that way and then moving forward. What she wants to emphasize is that the world then was much more interconnected, that trade routes, for example, were much more far flung and markets more sophisticated, than we might imagine via a Western view through which we think of parts of the world as being "discovered" in the 15th and 16th centuries. (To Hansen's credit, in my view, she spends very little time making this last point, choosing instead to concentrate on her topic and let the reader come to his or her own conclusions on that score. It is only at the very end of the book that Hansen mentions the European explorers at all.)

Unfortunately, at least for my own experience here, Hansen begins with, perhaps, the least convincing chapter of her "globalization" thesis, that of the Vikings' travels to North America. It's not that there's anything to be doubted about the idea of the Vikings having been there. (I have actually been to the excavated remains of their settlement at the very northern tip of Newfoundland! It's very cool, and they even have a nearby recreation of the small buildings with folks showing how the forge would have worked, etc.) It's more the fact that the Vikings didn't stay very long, and didn't have much successful interaction with the indigenous inhabitants. So, OK, the Vikings figured out how to get to North America, but they weren't adaptable enough, never, for example figuring out how to catch seals and other marine life through the ice, as the locals could. Also, evidence shows that they returned from time to time to harvest lumber. But still, how is a brief, non-lasting, interaction really evidence of globalization?

Things get more convincing, however, when Hansen begins discussing the Mayans' far reaching trade routes from their Yucatan Peninsula base north as far as Arizona and south into South America. The Vikings also come back into the picture when Hansen describes the forays of Scandinavian bands into northeastern Europe. They came to trade with the inhabitants, but because they were fiercer and had better weapons, they were soon forcing tribute from the people they interacted with, essentially demanding protection money. The people were known as the Rus, "a word derived from the Finnish name for Sweden, which means 'to row' or 'the men who row.'"

As Hansen explains it, one of the most important elements of the globalization she writes of is the consolidation of much of Eurasia from fragmented localized religions into large blocks of people (or at least rulers and upper class) into the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Hansen says that this occurred not because the missionaries of those religions were so persuasive, but more for political and economic reasons. Alliances and even trade agreements were more easily made between coreligionists, and internal power could be consolidated more effectively as well if religion was eliminated as an excuse for the questioning of legitimacy and authority.

Well, I've already gone on for too long here. I'll just add that Hansen does a good job of illuminating her overall thesis, showing how trade was common and markets widespread, particularly between China, Southeast Asia, Africa (The chapter on the wide ranging trade throughout the continent and then outward is short but quite interesting.), the Middle East and India. She describes quite a few technical innovations, such as improvements in shipbuilding, around 1000 that enhanced these factors. (A trading journey known to have been made by Chinese sailors all the way to Madagascar was twice as long in miles as Columbus' first trip.) Sadly, we see that the international slave trade was a major driver of many of these developments. There are times when Hansen seems to be trying too hard to jam events into her globalization premise, saying that things happened "because of Globalization" that might more convincingly be described as signsof globalization. And some of the individual chapters I found more interesting than others. All in all, though, I'm glad that my reading group chose this book for this month. While I would imagine that among historians there is room for debate about some of Hansen's conclusions, I feel that I certainly learned enough and was engaged enough for most of the time, to find this a valuable reading experience.

Very nice review of The Year 1000, Jerry.

I'm off from work today, so I'll tune in to The Jazz Odyssey this afternoon.

>122 rocketjk: I think I want to read that. I love thinking about what it must have been like to be such a small population on such a big globe. Have you read Evan S. Connell's The Aztec Treasure House? It's more oriented toward exploration, but it gives a great overall sense of "little men (and a few women) on foot, in boats and on horseback, beating against the currents of ignorance and treachery and very, very bad weather" (to quote my own review).

>122 rocketjk: now I’m really interested on reading this (although I’m re-titling in my head “an overview of long distance trade circa 1000”). I did not realize “Russian” was a reference to vikings (despite having read the entertaining classic novel The Long Ships)

>124 lisapeet: No, I haven't read that book. It looks very interesting, though, from your description.

>125 dchaikin: " I did not realize “Russian” was a reference to vikings . . . "

Me either. It was one of the most interesting nuggets in the book. Another, at least for me, was information about why so many groups decided to convert to the larger religions. I always wondered how it was the missionaries were able to convince so many diverse people to change religions. Interesting to learn that mostly the inducement was political, and top down, rather than spiritual. Maybe everybody else already knew that, though. The book certainly has its flaws, and I was not always convinced by Hansen's conclusions, but overall it was an interesting tour of the world of that time.

>126 rocketjk: if you had asked me whether religious conversion was top down or bottom up, I would have guessed top down, maybe even made a coherent argument why ... but I wouldn't have thought of the question on my own.

>122 rocketjk: That review is very timely, as on Jennifer's thread we got to talking about Native Americans and I was mentioning about being interested in reading about the colonisation of the Americas long before Columbus every went anywhere near it. This sounds even more interesting, as it's 400 years earlier and looking at the global picture of exploration and colonisation.

Noting that for another time when I have a little more head space.

>122 rocketjk: Nice review and sounds like a good book (And my copy just made it here so I will be getting to it - soonish...). I don't like it when authors make up a thesis and then try to fit all the facts into it regardless if they match or not (but then there are worse things - some authors simply ignore the facts that do not fit whatever they are trying to prove). But then a book on commerce won't sell as well as one of globalization (well... I am cynical) :)

>128 AlisonY: To be clear, there's not much in the book about pre-Columbian colonization by Europeans in North America. The Vikings don't seem to have made a serious attempt to colonize where they landed, if by "colonize" we mean to set up control over the land and the inhabitants in some form or other. Or if they did try it, they didn't get very far. They set up some settlements, did some hunting, some trading and evidently quite a bit of logging. But, as mentioned in my review, they don't seem to have been able to adjust to the environment very well, and they evidently never picked up on the cold-weather hunting practices that allowed the locals to thrive. Also, the Vikings, though they had metal weapons, did not have weaponry superior enough to the natives' weapons to allow them to dominate the locals. If things got heated, the locals' superior numbers were the most important factor, according to Hansen.

So to me, this Vikings chapter is the weakest in the book in terms of Hansen's thesis. The Vikings proved (not that very many people other than themselves seemed to learn about it) that you could get to North America (as we call it now), but that tenuous and relatively short-lived connection doesn't strike me as an example of globalization. The more relevant discussion of the Americas concerns the spread of trading routes within North, Central and South America, centering around the Mayans' expanding (at the time) empire.

>129 AnnieMod: "But then a book on commerce won't sell as well as one of globalization (well... I am cynical) :)"

I, too, strongly suspect that the decision to emphasize the concept of globalization (and the use of the word) had to do to a greater or lesser extent with marketing. I have this picture of Hansen getting a call from her agent, who has just talked to the publishers, and the agent is saying, "They want to know if you can call it 'globalization.' Maybe get it into the title. They like Globalization 1000."

And Hansen says, "How about Globalization for 1000, Alex?"

The agent says, "Hey, that's a good one. Seriously, though . . . "

So Hansen says, "Well, look. Tell them I'll put it in the subtitle, but that's as far as I can go."

And the agents says, "OK. I think I can sell that. I'll let you know what they say."

>130 rocketjk: That made me chuckle. :) In some cases I am not even sure that the author had anything to do with the subtitle their book came out with... :)

>131 AnnieMod: In this case, the appearance of the word "Explorers" in the subtitle is a strong clue that you are correct. This book is not about "exploring," it's about commerce. But though I had fun kidding around above, I do not want to suggest that the term "globalization" is wholly, or even largely, inappropriate to the book.

>132 rocketjk: I didn't think that you are implying that it is inappropriate to be there (or really thought so - if anything, it made me pause and think why I find it to be too early as a first reaction) - these are the first steps towards globalization, there is no argument there. I just do not like it paired with "began" and "how" that early on. That's like saying that a marathon runner's preparation for a marathon started the day they needed to run to catch a bus :) I will still give a chance to Hansen to convince me -- weirder things had happened. But your review kinda aligns with my expectations. And yes - explorers seems to be more obviously out of place than globalization, doesn't it? :)

On the other hand, I've learned to just ignore subtitles and anyone that had ever been in a Higher Algebra class and had managed to redefine the operations in a ring so that 2+2=3 is a correct statement has no issue with fuzzy definitions of terms. So Hanson's globalization and my understanding of the term can be a bit different. :)

>133 AnnieMod: Agree with what you're saying here. Hansen's point isn't that there was no long-distant commerce before 1000, but that that time period was one in which things expanded in a significant and discernible way. But "began" is certainly a hard sell, and, I agree, the wrong word (unless one is in the Marketing Department).

The bottom line for me is that the book was, mostly, an interesting history and a nice tour of the state of the world, as it had developed and was developing, circa 1000. Even leaving the term "globalization" out of the discussion, I'll guess there are some points in the book that other historians are finding worth disputing. But I had a bottom-line confidence that the overall picture was an accurate one.

>134 rocketjk: That argument I would buy :) And the moment a historian writes a book and noone has anything to disagree with in it will be a very sad day....

I need an overview of the (known) world and its connections at the start of the 11th century (because I found myself in the middle of a cluster of books about it and my knowledge there is about 25 years old and probably can fit on 10 pages...) so that fits right in from the sound of it. Now to figure out where to fit it on my schedule... :)

>135 AnnieMod: Another one that might interest you is Farley Mowat's The Farfarers. His thesis is that people who were forced out of the British Isles headed west and north, and colonized, in turn, Iceland, Greenland, and northern North America. He's got some interesting concepts, and data that seem to support them - not highly solid, but interesting. And in the process, he discusses what was going on in Europe and Britain at the time, which I think is at least partly the same period you're interested in.

And it also covers some of what was going on in North America (northern Canada, mostly) - some about how the locals lived, more about various voyages (some documented, some less so) of Europeans to the area. So >128 AlisonY:, you might be interested too.

Hmm. I reviewed it as too dense and too scattered for an enjoyable read, though the ideas were interesting. But almost a year later, I remember it as worth reading.

>136 jjmcgaffey: I will note it down, thanks! I am not that interested in North America that early (not for this specific cluster of books but there is another one on my table and this book will fit there) but it sounds interesting. And dense does not scare me. :)

Well, I am certainly late to the party, Jerry, but have totally enjoyed the conversations. I’ve never read Conrad, but enjoyed reading about him in your thread. I’ve only read The End of the Affair by Greene. Colin Firth was the narrator on the audiobook, and I think that made it for me.

I’m another Jersey girl. I was born in Ireland, but grew up in Kinnelon, NJ. After I was married we lived in West Milford, and later on I moved to Sparta. We moved to Massachusetts at the end of June last year.

I’ll be following along now that I’m caught up.

>138 NanaCC: Thanks! Great to have you here. Always happy to meet another Garden Stater.

And this Jersey girl put the book on her wish list on the strength of this conversation—it sounds like a few threads I'm interested in, so.

Lucia in London by E.F. Benson



This is the third book in E.F. Benson's humorous Mapp and Lucia series. Miss Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (a.k.a. Lucia) are two strong-willed, busybody women living parallel lives in England between the World Wars. (There are six books in the series all told, published from 1927 through 1939, and the two characters don't meet up until the series' fourth book, Mapp and Lucia). Both are members of the upper-middle class, live in small towns, and are mostly preoccupied with getting their friends to do their bidding and acknowledge their own preeminence within their social settings.

In Lucia in London, dear Lucia's husband, Philip (a.k.a. Pepino), has inherited a house in London from his aunt. Will the couple stay loyal to their own Riselholme or will they decamp to the more glamorous world of the capitol? The answer becomes clear early on, as off to London they go. Lucia soon begins trying to push her way up the social ladder. At first, the London society members Lucia encounters are put off by her, but soon many of them become amused and delighted by the clumsy transparency of her ambition, and start encouraging her just to see what she will do next. In the meantime, the friends left at home have issues of their own. It's a gentle comedy, all played for laughs, and Lucia is never allowed to become a villain.

There are times when the goings-on in this novel become repetitive, but overall this was for me enjoyable light reading. You have to have a tolerance for reading about the idle well-off, but Benson is making gentle fun of them, and we're not meant to take their problems, or even their existence, too seriously.

These books were evidently quite the thing among the literati of their day. People like Gertrude Stein and Noel Coward sang their praises, and when they went out of print they were considered quite a prize to find "in the wild.". They now have been back in print for quite some time. In many iterations, Lucia in London is considered the second book in the series rather than the third, but I've been reading them in the order presented here on LT. (Just a note that the image above is of the cover of the Omnibus edition of all the novels that I read this from.)

>141 rocketjk:

Those were so enjoyable (must note I haven't read them in twenty years) and yet I'm hard put to say exactly where the charm lies. How it's "done". A little like Wodehouse in that respect?- (without being LIKE Wodehouse).

Somebody's bound to ask you, so I'll get there first :)--have you seen the TV series with Geraldine McEwan, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Prunella Scales? Very highly recommended! I think it's one of the not-so-frequent cases where the filmed version doesn't interfere with the book and vice versa.

I've heard of the Mapp & Lucia books before. My library has two in ebook format, so I'm adding them to a list of gentle reads for when I need a break from some of the more intense stuff.

>142 LolaWalser: "Those were so enjoyable (must note I haven't read them in twenty years) and yet I'm hard put to say exactly where the charm lies."

For me the charm lies in the fact that it's all endearing nonsense, and that it's supposed to be endearing nonsense, and sometimes I'm just in the mood for endearing nonsense. I don't know if there's supposed to be some satiric commentary on the idle anachronistic gentry upper class of the time. My guess is not, but instead that that that class was mostly already understood to be ridiculous by everyone else, making pointed satire redundant. I feel, as I read these, that I'm safe in Benson's hands, and that Lucia and Mapp are always going to be revealed as absurd, yes, but not villainous. In Lucia in London, for example, when Lucia's husband takes sick (not particularly a spoiler, that), her concern is clearly genuine, and she changes her plans therefore without a trace of resentment.

Given that the books were written before WW2 began, we can't even say that Benson would have been writing with a sense of the impending doom of the lifestyle he was describing. But if there's a touch of poignancy for the modern reader, it's that as we read, we know what's coming.

Oh, and no, I haven't seen the TV series. I'll have a look for it. Thanks for the tip!

>143 markon: Be sure to read Queen Lucia first if you can.

I have friends who adore the Mapp & Lucia books—I think for a combination of quaintness and campiness, maybe? Anyway I downloaded the omnibus collection a while back but haven't dipped a toe in yet. Even with your very astute comments I'm still not 100% sure where the charm will lie for me, but I know, I know, there's only one way to find out...

>141 rocketjk: I have listened to Queen Lucia and Miss Mapp on Audible, and loved those, and then stopped as the next books in the series were only available in an abridged format.

>141 rocketjk: I loved the Mapp and Lucia books. I read them when I first joined LT in 2013. My daughter had snagged the complete set at a library sale. I’ve never watched the tv series, but my daughter gave me the series on DVD a while ago. I should dip into those.

Wow! Who knew we were such a group of Luciaphiles!

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Colliins



Here is my next reading from my friend Kim's list of recommended books about African American history and racism in America. Collins outlines her views here on the development of gender roles and identification within the Black community in America. In particular, she focuses on the ways in which these roles have been shaped, one might say warped as well, by the histories of slavery and subsequent oppression, and how they have evolved through the lens of popular culture, movies and television in particular. Published in 2004, the book is somewhat dated in that social media is barely mentioned and that constructive Black representation, it seems to me, has improved in our culture over the intervening years. That's not to say that this isn't still an extremely valuable book. I certainly learned a lot about how post-Civil Rights Movement racism (referred to by Collins as "color-blind racism") has continued to affect millions of Americans. This is racism that, for many White Americans, has been hiding in plain sight. Believing that the Voting Rights Act and other 1960s Civil Rights legislation had set the country on the correct path, and that now it was just a case of waiting, watching and occasionally pushing for things to gradually get to where we wanted them, the ways in which, in particular, economic opportunities for minorities were in fact shrinking rather than expanding went right by the majority of White Americans. This is, I think, another area in which the book's age shows somewhat. Not that this condition has ended, or even changed appreciably, but I think that recent public conversations about these issues have brought them into better clarity for a lot of White Americans. We'll see how well that all translates into better results, of course.

At any rate, as Collins explains things, the ways in which these factors unfolded also affected the ways in which Black men and women, both heterosexual and LGBT, interacted with each other. Those gender interactions, particularly in regards to the LGBT community, seem to me to have progressed in positive ways (I'm not saying "solved," but "progressed") since this book was published, but I am a straight White guy living in a rural community with a very small Black population (albeit with about a 50-50 apportionment between Anglo and Latinx folks) so I am very much open to correction about that.

The book is not always an easy read, as Collins is an academic and her writing style reflects that. My eyes and brain occasionally bounced off individual sentences and paragraphs several times before I could finally apply myself to unfolding the jargon Collins was using. Nevertheless, her explication of stereotyped gender roles, both as seen from without and within the Black community, are cogent overall. While not all of the information was new to me, having a well constructed and explained overall look at these phenomena was extremely valuable for me. My friend Kim, the provider of the list I'm working from, and who is a History PhD candidate at Cal-Berkeley as well as a great blues/jazz singer, says, "I cannot say how important this book is."

>150 rocketjk:

Thanks, I will look for this.

>151 LolaWalser: I'd be very interested to see your take on this book.

>152 rocketjk:

Don't get your hopes up! :) I have a read a little on the topic and I find it is possibly the most delicate and difficult for white people to discuss--at least, without appearing racist toward black men and/or misogynist toward black women. Also, having read but a little, I don't have anything interesting to say, just a lot to learn. It would take someone well-versed in intersectional thought to discuss this with.

>153 LolaWalser: I agree. Of all the books on my friend's list, I'm sure this will be the hardest for me to comment on. That is why I tried my best to simply report on what I thought the main points were rather than making other than a bare minimum of any reaction to Collins' ideas I might have (and qualifying the observation I did make, which, at any rate, had only to do with what might or might have changed since the book's appearance). Basically, for many reasons, for me this is a topic to read/listen about pretty much exclusively.

Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan



In 1961, Jim Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, who surprised the baseball world by winning the National League pennant. This book is his diary of that season. In fact, this was Brosnan's second book. His first, The Long Season, was a first person account of the 1959 season, during which Brosnan was traded mid-year from the Cardinals to the Reds. That book was considered ground breaking, in that it was the first candid (sort of) look at life on a major league team. Oddly, I haven't read The Long Season, yet.

Anyway, Pennant Race is entertaining fare for baseball fans. This book was published several years before Jim Bouton's Ball Four, about the 1969 season, which was really the first baseball memoir to reveal baseball life warts and all. In Pennant Race, Brosnan depicts life in the bullpen, and on the team in general, as a series of wise cracks under which lie the players' real desire to win and to perform well, along with their not always successful attempts to shrug off their day to day failures. Racial issues are dealt with, but not too deeply or often. Personal animosities among teammates seem non-existent. Again, Brosnan's books were a step forward in terms of real life portrayals of the baseball life, but he doesn't bring us all the way there. The descriptions of some players' personalities are perfunctory. For others, even some relatively famous ones, those portrayals are non-existent. We get almost nothing, for example, about Frank Robinson, then a young star (now in the Hall of Fame). Still there is a feel for what the life was like. Brosnan was a good writer with a breezy, self-deprecating style. It helps that the 1961 season was one of Brosnan's best as a professional ballplayer.

For baseball fans interested in the game's history (or for those with long memories), this book is fun and worth reading, as long as you don't expect too much of it.

American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country by Kay Bailey Hutchison



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Kay Bailey Hutchison was a sitting U.S. Senator from Texas and the Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference when this book was published in 2004. The book is a collection of short biographies (from around 8 to 20 pages in length) of influential women in many different fields and many different time periods throughout American history. The bios are presented by category, with one or two of the bios per section followed by one or two short Q&A conversations with category-appropriate contemporary (as per 2004) women.

All in all, the biographies are well written and interesting. There are a decent number of African American, Latina and Native American women represented, as well. Some of the biographies served as good refresher courses for me, but quite a few were women whose stories and accomplishments were entirely new to me. In the acknowledgements, Howard Cohn is acknowledged as researcher and draft writer. I don't know how much of the actual writing is his and how much is hers. I say that not because I doubt Hutchison's abilities as a writer--why should I?--but only because she was a sitting senator at the time, so I'm wondering where she would have found the time. At any rate, as I said, the book is clearly and informatively written.

So I think this is in fact a valuable and interesting volume. I could see it used in a high school or even a college syllabus.

Book note: I purchased this book at the Goodwill Store in Willitts, CA, in Mendocino County, where I live (the county, not the town). It must have been originally bought at a book signing, as it is signed by Hutchinson under the inscription, "To Margie, A great Republican!"

A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin



Read as a "between book" (see first post). 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."

Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald



This is the 6th book in MacDonald's classic Travis McGee series. Once again, McGee is a Paladin, off to right wrongs amid the squalor of the those willing and anxious to prey on the unwitting and vulnerable. When a friend is defrauded of close to a half million dollars by a consortium of clever and brutal ne'er-do-wells, McGee is pried off of his Florida houseboat and into the fray. This entry seemed a bit darker to me than any of the previous five, especially toward the end. MacDonald was a very good writer, and his descriptions of the nature of the Everglades and his observations of American consumer culture, circa 1965 when the book was originally published are all very good.

>157 rocketjk: I thought this was a terrific collection, and really kind of regret reading a library copy, which meant that I had to plow straight through. This seems like one that would benefit from taking it slowly, if you had that luxury, a story or two at a time.

>159 lisapeet: I can see it both ways. I did read it gradually, as my "between book" nomenclature indicates, and that was good. I like to read collections that way so that the stories/entries don't begin to blend together. But I can also see where aspects of this collection might have been enhanced by a straight-through reading. Maybe some of the recurring themes would have been more apparent and the consistency in tone and subject matter more affecting.

Sort of like the difference between going down to the seashore once a week, wading up to your knees, letting one wave come in and then leaving; and stepping into the ocean and letting the waves and the tide push you back and forth for an hour or more.

But either way, I wouldn't have wanted to rush, and I'm sorry that was your experience. I bet you, though, that these stories would not suffer at all from a rereading. Maybe someday you'll get to go through them at a more leisurely pace. Here's hoping!

>160 rocketjk: Oh, good point—and there were reverberations among the stories, for sure. But in the same way you need silences in between sounds to hear the echoes, I still would like to go back and take more time to read and sit with the stories a few at a time. I agree, also, that they'd be good rereading. They seem like the kinds of stories that would take on different meanings at different times in a reader's life.

>161 lisapeet: "They seem like the kinds of stories that would take on different meanings at different times in a reader's life."

Yes, excellent point.

"Wait a minute" rings with so many associations... Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! (Faust) Linger a while--you are so fair... (the moment in time)

Otello (Verdi's) to Desdemona, "un bacio ancora"--one more kiss.

But I'm reading a book of philosopher Galen Strawson's essays and he has one where he explains why there is no future to lose--or why that is no bad, sad thing.

>163 LolaWalser: "'Wait a minute' rings with so many associations... "

Don't forget the Marvelettes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=425GpjTSlS4

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers



This interesting and extremely valuable history, recently published, explores the role of women in the slave system and economy of the southern U.S. during the centuries before the Civil War. Jones-Rogers uses extensive research in contemporary newspaper accounts, WPA History Project testimony of formerly enslaved people and court records as well to show that many women in the South owned slaves of their own and were not simply subservient to their husbands when it came to slave owning and economic considerations of all sorts. Women were often "left" slaves in their parents' wills and were also given slaves as "gifts" by their parents when they married. Furthermore, many couples signed what we'd now called pre-nuptual agreements stipulating that wives would retain complete control of their own slaves and all other financial interests. Jones-Rogers tours the multi-faceted world of slave owning and shows that women were often mens' equals when it came to wheeling and dealing for profit, and also for savagery in their treatment of their enslaved workers. The work is important particularly, I think, in that it is an detailed treatment of the pervasive nature of the slave system in the American south: all whites took part, not just men, in all facets of the system.

I found it interesting and enlightening that Jones-Rogers refers most often to "enslaved persons" rather than to "slaves." I've never seen this before, but I found it an effective way of making an important point. "Enslaved person" clearly expresses the point that we are referring to people who have been enslaved by someone else. There is action, violent, horrible action, involved. Perhaps this locution is more widespread than I realize, but it seems like it's the first time I've come across it.

There are times in the book where the examples Jones-Rogers uses become more than a little repetitive to read. It's not something I would fault her for at all. It crucial that she establish that the research behind her thesis is extensive, to ensure that we are convinced. So there were times when I was ready for the narrative to move along, but I understood the reasons for the structure Jones-Rogers employed. I think this history all in all is a crucial building block for a serious modern-day understanding of American slavery.

This is fantastic, I think it may interest you, everything is relevant to what you were reading:

The Black Woman! (1970)

Black poetess Nikki Giovanni interviews singer Lena Horne in this special Black Journal program focusing on the Black woman.In another segment, a panel of six prominent Black women discuss the role of the Black woman in today's society. Participating in the panel are Verta Mae Grosvenor, author of "Vibrations Cooking"; Jean Fairfax, NAACP Legal Defense lawyer; Martha Davis of the Harlem Drug Fighters Union; Marion-Etoile Watson, producer for Metromedia Television (Channel 5, New York City); Bibi Amina Baraka (Mrs. LeRoi Jones); and Joan Harris, hostess of NBS's "Positively Black."

>166 LolaWalser: Wow, thanks for that. I will watch that interview tomorrow if time permits, or Tuesday at the latest.

The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak



The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. As the younger generation grows to maturity, they less interested in the old ways and more interested in being good Bolsheviks. Even the older Zelmenyaners are pushed to end their independent lives as tradesmen (tailors, tanners, carpenters) and go to work in the factories, like good Soviet workers.

The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners, although the outside world has been though town within recent memory, in the form of the German Army, who stormed through during World War One. One of the brothers, in fact, has been made a widower during an artillery barrage. Two of the men, one from each adult generation fought in the Russian Army during that war, with the younger going on to fight with the Reds in the Russian Revolution.

Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

I found this book moving for many reasons. For one thing, it describes the place my grandparents came from, the place where they would have lived, and most likely would have died within a decade of the action of this novel, had they not left for America in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Kulbak was also a poet, and his descriptions, especially his uses of natural settings to set mood, are often wonderful. The winter snow and freezing cold becomes almost a character, a member of the family. But here is a description of the end of one summer:

"The first thin, slanting autumn rains began to fall. Beneath them the silent summer, its myriad colors squelched and soiled, was snuffed out in the gardens. Disconsolate beet leaves with hard, purplish veins lay cast between the vegetable beds. Dirty yellows, oranges, and browns were trodden silently underfoot. On days like that you didn't need an antenna to hear distant cries."

Oh, to be able to read this in the original Yiddish. Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one."

Just read through your entire thread in one go - loving the discussions - so much here to think about.

>168 rocketjk: This is sounding somewhat like The Family Mashber. Is it comparable?
Oh, to be able to read this in the original Yiddish. Maybe there is a Yiddish sound recording of it somewhere.

I am a fan of Greene, as well as Beatrix Potter, so will have to find the collection in >106 LolaWalser:.
I like your idea of starting each year with the same author, in your case Conrad, but it occurred to me that Greene would work for me.

Every reader needs those "between books". Collections of newspaper columns also fit well into the category.

>163 LolaWalser: No future to lose I'll have to think about that.

>168 rocketjk: That looks like a really worthwhile read, Jerry. I also have grandparents from that area who emigrated at the beginning of the 20th century, so I've always got an abiding interest in the region and what it was like there. Thanksfor the good review—now it's on my radar.

>169 SassyLassy: "This is sounding somewhat like The Family Mashber. Is it comparable?"

I don't know, sorry. Haven't read that book yet.

Greene would surely work for a "start each year with . . . " project. I'm trying to decide what to do next. Philip Roth is a might-could for me. Isaac Singer's novels is also a possibility for me. The former would be rereads, most of the latter would be first-time enjoyments. But I'll have to see if any other authors bubble up to the surface for me between now and January.

>170 lisapeet: Glad your interest was engaged. Yale University Press republished the novel in 2013 as part of a Yiddish Literature series, so it shouldn't be hard to find. I bought it new in some local bookstore or other as recently as 2019, initially intrigued by the title (I would guess; I literally have no memory of the event) and then, upon looking at the back cover, the subject matter.

I will be very interested to see both of your reactions to this novel.

Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams



This is the second novel (there was also a novella slid in between Books 1 and 2) in Williams' fun Hardwired science fiction/cyberpunk series. We're 100 years on from the action of the opening novel. Humans are spread out around the solar system and beyond, though now in the company of an alien race known as the Power. Corporations have nation-state status and private armies that they use to wage war on each other. People with money can buy "life insurance" that enables them to be cloned, complete with consciousness and memory, in new bodies when they die. Our hero, a mercenary soldier named Steward, is such, known as a Beta. The hitch is that his Alpha neglected to "update" his memories into the data base for the 15-year period before his death, leaving Steward now with a memory gap for those years.

The book is basically a political thriller, as Steward goes in search of those memories and also plots revenge against a series of evildoers. However, added on to that is some very good writing and clever science fiction world building. So this is not very deep reading, but it is fun if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

Interestingly, at least to me, the series was originally published quite some time ago. This book first came out in 1987. Given that so much of the world here is based on computer technology, it is fun to see what Williams imaged correctly, or close to correctly, and what he missed. There is a lot of sophisticated technology described, all sorts of interfaces between the computer and the human mind, and all kinds of gene manipulation. And yet, although it's not specified, I got the feeling that, when it comes to the computer systems, Williams' imagination never really got him past DOS. Well, that's not meant as a criticism. Just an observation. I'd say Voice of the Whirlwind was not as good as its predecessor, Hardwired, but it is still good reading. There's one more book to go in the series, which I'll be getting to probably sooner rather than later.

The Comedians by Graham Greene



This was a reread, picked, by me, for my monthly book group. Our club's rule is that you have to pick, when it's your turn, a book that you've already read and therefore know to be good. This was perfect for me, in that I originally read this so long ago that I hardly remembered any of the plot, but clearly remembered enjoying it thoroughly.

At any rate, The Comedians is Greene's novel of Haiti during the dark days of the Papa Doc regime. Brown has been a rolling stone over the course of his lifetime, British by culture but born in Monte Carlo to father, to Brown, unknown and a mother who soon leaves him in a Catholic boarding school. But Brown's mother eventually summons him to Port Au Prince, where she owns a hotel, to announce that the hotel will be left to him in her will. Brown soon must decide whether to take possession, and his decision to do so brings him into immediate contact with the troubles--and dangers--of the country and the Haitians he soon befriends.

Greene's storytelling here is superb, and there are intertwining themes of the value of loyalty and compassion, bravery and absurdity, and the quicksand of despair that self-loathing, jealousy and mistrust may throw in one's path. The plot moves quickly and the characters are, mostly, believable. The constant sense of horror and dread help the reader understand what life in that time and place was about. Greene actually did spend time in Haiti during this era in its history. Naturally, there is a difference between reading an account, fictional or otherwise of these times written by a Haitian and reading one written by an Englishman, by definition here an outsider. Within those limitations, I felt that Greene did an admirable job, here.

I recently read Greene's memoir, Ways of Escape, and it seemed that this was one of the novels Greene was proudest of.

Just caught up with a lot of this thread. Really interesting discussions. I heard the author of The Year 1000 on a podcast and noted that the book sounded interesting. Will definitely get it now.

>173 rocketjk: In my opinion one of Greene's best novels. I never understood why he called it The Comedians. There is nothing funny about it. A very dark political thriller where everyone seems to be fighting for their lives, even the world weary Mr Brown (surely Mr Greene in another colour). It has a great foreboding atmosphere.

>175 baswood: "I never understood why he called it The Comedians."

That's referenced several times within the novel. The last thing Brown's mother says to him is, "I wonder what role you're playing, now," and the narrator refers to several of the characters, including himself, as comedians, especially towards the end. I don't think he means "comedians" in terms of, say, stand-up comedians making jokes. I think he is making a more classical reference, comedians as opposed to tragedians. (Have a look at the masks adorning the cover of my 1966 Book Club edition posted above.) The comedians, I believe, are the white characters, including the protagonist/narrator, who are in Haiti for purposes of their own and who have all invented their own personae which have only tangentially to do with Haiti and its torments. Funny? No, I agree not. Absurd is more like it. The tragedy is left to the Haitians themselves.

"even the world weary Mr Brown (surely Mr Greene in another colour)."

For what it's worth, Greene, in the book's introduction, says this:

"A word about the characters in The Comedians. I am unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume--I know it from experience--that an 'I' is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant's wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. . . . "

Harper's Magazine - June 1959 edited by John Fischer



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another from the stack of old magazines sitting in my office closet that I've been gradually reading through. I find these old periodicals to be fascinating time pieces, looks at the society and its concerns that would be otherwise hard to find so many years later. The June 1959 Harper's begins with an hilarious take down of the novel, The Ugly American.

The edition also includes one of Leo Rosten's fun and funny H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N stories (The title character was an adult European Jewish emigre to the U.S. and the setting was always the night time English/citizenship adult school class that Kaplan shared with other recent immigrants from all over the world. These stories were quite famous in their day. My parents loved them. Rosten was, perhaps, best known for his book The Joys of Yiddish.)

There is a somewhat horrifying piece called "Germs and Gas: The Weapons Nobody Dares Talk About," by Brigadier General J. H. Rothschild, in which the good general makes the case for biological and chemical weaponry and criticizes the U.S. government for going along with the international ban on them.

"Reading, Writing, and Television" by David C. Stewart is not, as one would first imagine, another complaint about the ways that television is dumbing down the country, but instead an enlightening early look at the ways that public television was being used creatively to help fight illiteracy.

The two most interesting pieces, for me at least, are by George Steiner and Nat Hentoff. Steiner's piece, "Notes from Eastern Europe," really is a fascinating picture of a moment in time. Although of course the Russians were sitting everywhere in the region, one of the major concerns of the people in countries like Czechoslovakia, according to Steiner, was to wonder what American and Western European leaders thought they were playing at by rearming Germany. Hadn't we learned anything? Reading Steiner's piece is a useful reminder to the typical ignorant modern reader (i.e., me) that these were individual countries and not simply a bunch of chunks frozen together into a single "Eastern Bloc." For example:

"Czechoslovakia and Poland are more cut off from each other than from the West. The Czechs are simply afraid of letting Poles across the frontier. They have achieved an extraordinary material prosperity at the price of total political subjection. Poland, on the contrary, is desperately poor; but the winds of freedom blow there in wild gusts. For the lone rail traveler (the fleas and I were the only passenegers in the car that night) the contrast is startling. The Czech frontier guards roused me from my bench in some black and frozen corner of nowhere at four in the morning to ask acrimoniously why I had not flown. It was so much quicker and more comfortable. It must be that I wanted to see something. I pointed to the grime-laden windows and the blackness beyond. But they did not seem convinced. A few minutes later, the Poles entered . . . The Poles were cheery and corrupt, in a fine liberal style. Was I an academic? What did I teach? Had I any dollars to sell? Hints that I liked to sleep at four in the morning struck them as absurd. In Prague one could sleep. There was nothing else to do. But surely not in Poland. There was so much to talk about. Soon dawn was coming up over mud-soaked, gray southern Poland."

Steiner's description of Warsaw, still devastated by the war and in ruins, is vivid and sobering. Interestingly the book review section of the magazine includes a review of Steiner's book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, which the reviewer calls "a book to read and learn from many times over."

The Hentoff essay is called "Race Prejudice in Jazz: It Works Both Ways." I approached this piece with some trepidation, I must admit, although I have certainly come to admire Hentoff's insights into the music and also to trust his political and cultural leanings. At any rate, I needn't have worried. While the piece does begin by pointing out the examples of black musicians' sometimes only grudging acceptance of white jazz musicians, Hentoff spends much, much more time explaining the hardships of being a black musician in America and the reasons why they might feel that way. It made me wonder whether the title was Hentoff's own creation or whether some editor had come up with it to make the piece seem "balanced." Alternatively, I wondered whether the title had indeed been created by Hentoff as sort of a enticement to lure the less savvy readers into his descriptions of racial conditions that such readers might not otherwise voluntarily enter into.

Those are the highlights. My next such periodical will be the January 1959 edition of The Atlantic.

I had a long overdue but enjoyable catch up here. Intrigued by learning you’re in or near Willits. Also many fascinating books. Loved the quotes in A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin ( >157 rocketjk: ). Fascinated by The Zelmenyaners. The Greene review is terrific and maybe that’s the first Greene I should read. And I really like following your trace through racism. The old magazines are entertaining to read about too. Cheers jk.

>178 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. Appreciate your stopping by and catching up. I always enjoy keeping current on your thread, as well.

I'm making catch-up visits to a lot of threads this week, and I have to echo most of what Dan said.

In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson



Here's another work from the list of books on African American history and racism in America I've been reading, provided by my friend Kim Nalley. This extremely interesting volume traces the development, achievements and ultimate demise of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the eminent organizations in the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South in the early- to mid-1960s. By the late 60s, the group had evolved to enter the forefront of the Black Nationalist movement.

SNCC was developed as a group working to encourage the original anti-segregation protests in the south. As Carson describes the organization, they were unique in that they eschewed top-down organization as much as they could. Although they had a Central Committee, project leaders were mostly encouraged to run their projects as they saw fit. Also, rather than coming into a community and attempting to lead protest programs, they would instead encourage and support local leaders, feeling that that would lead to more long-lasting progress. Eventually, a schism developed within SNCC between those who wanted to continue the anti-segregation work and those who thought more political activity, particularly voter registration work, was more valuable. Either way, they were working in the face of still-virulent and often violent Jim Crow opposition. The group decided there was room for both. For several years, SNCC workers waiting for the JFK and then LBJ administrations to back up their pro-Civil Rights rhetoric with actual federal protection from local and state oppression. That wait was long, frustrating and, in some cases, ultimately demoralizing. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of working with white volunteers became a point of increasingly sharp debate.

Eventually, SNCC took their battles north into urban Black areas. As they did, they became more a source of political ideas and less an important source of local programs. The organization evolved from the non-violent, religion based philosophy of people like John Lewis to the more controversial, nationalistic style of figures like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. SNCC was among the first groups to adopt the rallying cry "Black Power." Carson does a good job of describing the personal and philosophical internal friction that became debilitating to the organization's effectiveness and the damaging harassment campaign by the FBI that went a long way toward crippling the group, as well as SNCC's often problematic relationship with Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the one hand, and the Black Panthers on the other.

In Struggle is written in a clear, straight-forward style that avoids that sort of academic prose I sometimes have trouble plowing through. The book was originally published in 1981, which puts it relatively close to the action, time-wise. For example, Carson was able to attend a 1979 reunion of SNCC activists and volunteers and conduct several interviews there. I don't know whether a more recent study would present additional or substantianally different information, but I certainly feel that this is an exceptionally valuable history of the time and of these crucial events. I was 13 in 1968 and I certainly remember many of the important names. I think that, together, this book and Black Against Empire, the terrific history of the Black Panthers that I read last year, go a long way toward providing a good picture of the events of those days.

I thought I may have read The comedians but now I don't think so - but the title has been in my mind in our current situation with our current cast of characters, hereabouts. Your comment about made up characters for theatre also seems to fit.

>181 rocketjk: I'm glad you added that the book was published in 1981, as reading a later book of his, Martin's Dream, it seemed to me that he covered the SNCC era well, but fell down dramatically with the MLK project, becoming more absorbed in what was happening to him instead of his subject. I would like to read a good history of the SNCC days, so maybe this and your previously mentioned Black Against Empire would do it.

Great review of In Struggle, Jerry. I received Black Against Empire as a Christmas gift last year after I added it to my Amazon wish list based on your review of it, and this book will go on this year's wish list.

>183 SassyLassy: & >184 kidzdoc: Greetings to you both. I'm just back home after a week's camping trip down to Kern County, near Sequoia National Forest. My wife and I rented a van that came with bed, stove, refrigerator and such so that we could stay safe (we've both had both shots), and to see if we enjoyed that mode of travel. We went on some very fun and beautiful hikes. Even took our German shepherd along.

At any rate, I think that reading In Struggle first and then Black Against Empire problem makes a bit more sense than the other way around (which is how I did it). Either way, together they work well. Black Against Empire is a little more lively in the reading, but both are fascinating.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson



Isaacson's latest biography is a long an fascinating account of the development of the science of gene editing, as filtered through the life, experience and accomplishments of Jennifer Doudna, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Isaacson, a clear and straightforward writer, does an excellent job of weaving his narrative between Doudna's life story, the concepts of genetics, the progress of the science as discoveries are made, the many scientists that mentored Doudna and with whom she has collaborated and/or competed.

The story of how, over a period of several decades, Doudna and her colleagues discovered the features of DNA and, especially, RNA that allowed them to understand how these enzymes work, and especially the way that RNA is effective in actually cutting to pieces the DNA of invaders like viruses, is fascinating indeed, and Isaacson tells the story very well. He's adept at providing just enough of the technical description of the processes involved to give a lay reader enough of a general idea of what's going on without getting bogged down in too much detail. I actually experienced an element of "willing suspension of disbelief" during the proceedings that I found wholly appropriate. It was fascinating for me to learn, for example, that the genetic techniques being studied and applied by humans now are essentially the same ones that bacteria have been using to fight off viruses for billions of years.

Isaacson stops about 65% of the way through the book to provide an overview of the ethical questions being wrestled with by the scientific world over the issues that our increasingly effective ability to edit our genetic makeup has brought forward. Do we want "designer humans?" What might the unintended consequences be of altering our genetic makeup? How drastically will the ability to genetically enhance or protect our children exacerbate financial and class inequality, as parents with money begin accessing techniques that poorer parents cannot? On the other hand, shall we stop short of curing genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia, or protecting our children from AIDS by altering their DNA? The line in the sand, if you will, is between the ability to provide genetic treatments to individuals to treat or cure genetic conditions from which they're suffering, versus editing a person's overall genetic makeup in a way that will be passed down to their offspring, and thereby affect the species as a whole.

Isaacson describes the question thusly:

"The primary concern is germline editing, those changes that are done in the DNA of human eggs or sperm or early-stage embryos so that every cell in the resulting children--and also of their descendants--will carry the edited trait. There has already been, and rightly so, general acceptance of what is known as somatic editing, the changes that are made in targeted cells of a living patient and do not affect reproductiive cells. If something goes wrong in one of these therapies, it can be disastrous for the patient but not for the species."

And then, as Isaacson was doing his obviously years-long research for this biography, the Covid pandemic hit. The final section of the book describes the ways in which the academic scientific community quickly swung into action, cooperating in areas that would have been sources of competition previously, to create the new sort of vaccines--utilizing RNA manipulation for the first time in vaccine technology--that we are now using to combat Covid.

Isaacson does not skip over the fact that, when Doudna was a young woman deciding upon a career, the idea that "women can be scientists" was one that met stiff resistance within the world of science and in the culture in general. Her role as a pioneer, not among the very first women scientists, of course, but in the vanguard of the generation that battered down many (certainly not all) of the roadblocks taken for granted by previous generations, is stressed, as is her role as a mentor.

There is a lot more in this rich and fertile book, which is at once a biography of a fascinating woman, a primer for how science and private industry inter-relate in our society, a history of the science of genetics, a look inside the war against Covid, and an outline of the ethical/philosophical questions that we are going to be grappling with over these new capabilities.

Fabulous review of The Code Breaker, Jerry! That's right up my alley, so I'll be on the lookout for it.

It was fascinating for me to learn, for example, that the genetic techniques being studied and applied by humans now are essentially the same ones that bacteria have been using to fight off viruses for billions of years.

Yep. This is further proof that bacteria and viruses are smarter than we are, and will outlive our flawed species.

>186 rocketjk: terrific review. I enjoyed Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, but haven’t read other of his books.

>181 rocketjk: another wonderful review. Thanks for this.

>187 kidzdoc: & >188 dchaikin: Thanks, both.

Darryl, yes, I like to think of myself as being smarter than a box of rocks, though evidently not as smart as bacteria. :)

Dan, this was my first book of Isaacson's. I'm interested particularly in seeing his take on Franklin sometime soon.

Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael J. McKeogh and Richard Lockridge



This is a short memoir by Michael McKeogh about his time spent as General Dwight Eisenhower's enlisted aide, orderly and driver before and during World War 2. Originally published in 1946, the book is essentially a hagiography. McKeogh quickly begins referring to Eishenhower as "the Boss," and essentially, other than an occasional bout of temper, the Boss can do no wrong throughout McKeogh's narrative. Well, maybe it is McKeogh's narrative. Harry C. Butcher, who was Eisenhower's Naval Aide during the war, says in his 2-page introduction, "Former Naval Lieutenant Richard Lockridge* has caught the spirit of Mickey's story with uncanny perception. When I read some of the manuscript I could hear Mickey talking." So I assume this is an "as told to" situation, and I'd further guess that Lockridge was tasked not just with putting McKeogh's story into clean prose, but also with smoothing out any rough (or interesting) edges portrayed in Eisenhower's character.

So while this memoir provides a mildly interesting picture of the duties of an aide to a commanding general during wartime there are otherwise few particularly interesting historical notes on offer. Don't get me wrong, it certainly looks like McKeogh had a hard job (although mostly a physically safe one, as he freely admits). Mostly the issues were logistical. McKeogh was responsible for, among other things, ensuring that Eisenhower didn't have to worry about day-to-day issues like laundry, lodging or sustenance. That makes sense, as the general would have had plenty of more important items to concentrate on 20 hours a day. But they kept moving command posts, of course, and McKeogh tells about each new search for lodging as they moved. (Item: The more spacious and luxurious the lodging, the less "The Boss" liked it.) There were some interesting aspects of Eisenhower's command style portrayed, mostly to do with his attitudes about the GIs under his command. For example, he refused to use any supplies that he felt had been taken from his soldiers, and he made frequent inspections of the kitchens serving enlisted men and would be critical of any officers who weren't feeding the soldiers adequately. Well, that's assuming these things were true and this isn't more a case of legend building.

But as to the war itself, McKeogh (or Lockridge) reports very little. Toward the end there are some general descriptions of the death and destruction that the members of the command post saw as they moved forward, but by design a command post is in the rear of the action. Also, McKeogh (or Lockridge) tells us that he made a point never to eavesdrop on Eisenhower's conversations with other officers about the progress, plans or execution of the war, thinking that what he didn't know, he couldn't inadvertently let drop in the mess hall. That makes sense, though it doesn't make for particularly interesting reading. And who knows if that is McKeogh talking or Lockridge's explanation for why he's taken most of the intriguing conversations out of the book?

All in all, I'd say this book is mostly interesting as an historical artifact about the public's appetite for narratives about World War 2 and its heroes in the months and years immediately after the conflict. Books of this sort continued coming out into the mid-60s, I think. Perhaps Americans, alarmed by the dropping of the atomic bomb and by the growing threat of Stalinist Russia, were already looking back with nostalgia to a more understandable time and therefore embracing the mythology quickly coalescing around WW2 and those who fought it. Or maybe that's overthinking things.

* It is unclear to me whether this is the same Richard Lockridge who went on to co-write a slew of popular detective novels with his wife, Francis Lockridge. The LT touchstone takes us to that page, but I couldn't find anything about how that Richard Lockridge spent the war years. I suppose it's likely enough that this is the same fellow.

Book Note: My copy is a first edition hardcover. On the inside I find an Ex-Libris sticker with the name May Galway written below in ink. And at the top I find May Galway's name inked in again under the date (presumably of purchase) May 29, 1946.

Well, I won’t read this one, but I’m entertained by your commentary on it.

>191 dchaikin: Well, then my job is done on both counts. :)

You’re saving us from books we’ve never heard of. :) But seriously, I’m fascinated by this. It’s essentially propaganda.

>193 dchaikin: "It’s essentially propaganda."

I'd say that's accurate. The degree to which it is I suppose you could say depends on whether what it does tell us about Eisenhower is accurate, regardless of how incomplete it is. In other words, if Eisenhower really was the great guy he's portrayed as here, I suppose it's not all that bad. But in portraying only the positive, even if that positive is accurate, it becomes at a minimum PR fluff. But, yeah, all in all I agree this is intended as propaganda, whether or not its creators would have used that word.

But your comment finally motivated me to run a google search on McKeogh to see what I could find. It turns out he later went to work for the Voice of America. However, as per his obituary, he seems to have been sincere about, or at least maintained publicly, his hero worship of Eisenhower:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1993/03/21/mj-mckeogh-voa-official-...

Thanks for that link. Sounds like McKeogh was a good guy.

Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker



Rashomon Gate is the second novel in Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series, set in 11th Century Japan. Our man Akitada is a relatively low-level nobleman who holds down a boring government administrative job but who in the series' first book acquired a reputation for being able to solve mysteries. So these are mysteries of the "talented amateur is smarter than the police" variety. In this novel, Akitada has been asked by his former mentor to return to the royal university to help unravel a blackmailing scheme. Also, there as been a disappearance of a high-ranking nobleman from within a Buddhist shrine which is being put down by everyone from the emperor on down as a miracle: the nobleman has achieved Nirvana and been taken in by the gods. Murders ensue and complications arise, as we knew they would.

These books are fun. The plotting is good and the historical information, assuming it's anywhere near accurate, is interesting. The writing itself, on a sentence level, I give a B or B-. People to often "preen" and "mince" and "comment drily." But this sort of thing does not turn up in the writing often enough to ruin the entertainment value of the story for me. I have the first four books of this 18-book series on hand. I'll probably read books 3 & 4 over the next little while, though I doubt I'll go much further.

>186 rocketjk: That's one's going on my wishlist, I think. I really liked Isaacson's book about Einstein, so I know he can write scientific biographies interestingly.

>197 bragan: I would love to know your reaction to the Isaacson book. I didn't mention in my review that this was a reading group selection. We just had our group discussion about the book this past Sunday. It was selected by the lead doctor at our local health clinic, and one of the fellows in our group is on the medical staff at UC San Francisco, which is essentially a large hospital and a medical school. The latter in particular had some very interesting insights into the nature of the academic research labs described in the book. A lot of our other group members were more concerned with the ethical/societal questions raised by genetic science. But we were all in agreed admiration for Isaacson's accomplishment in researching and writing the book.

>198 rocketjk: Well, I don't guarantee I'll get around to it anytime soon, especially as I am trying, however unsuccessfully, to purchase fewer books than I'm reading these days. Come to think of it, I also still have Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography to read, as well. But I really would like to get to it eventually! And I've been very impressed with the research, too, in the books of his I have read so far.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee



I took a slight diversion from my friend Kim's reading list about African American history and the history of racism in America to read the recently published The Sum of Us after my wife and I saw McGhee interviewed about the book by Trevor Noah. My wife put the book on order from the library and I ordered it on Biblio without telling each other! At any rate, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. It is often depressing, as you would expect, although McGhee also presents reasons for hope.

McGhee runs down the racist, anti-Black roots of many of the major societal problems in America today, examining at the same time the ways in which these policies have also greatly harmed whites along the way. Her thesis, as per the title, is that working and middle class whites have been sold a "Zero Sum" philosophy: if Blacks "win," whites, by definition, "lose." So, for one easy example, welfare programs that would help many more whites than Blacks must be bad nevertheless, because Blacks are "takers" who don't deserve taxpayer help. Never mind the number of poor whites who would be lifted as well.

McGhee uses as her operating metaphor (as per the book's cover art) the history of public swimming pools. During the middle part of the 20th century, communities across the country, including across the South, had built public swimming pools. They were symbols in many cases of civic pride, gathering places for often thousands of people. However, when the law mandated that these pools be integrated, community after community closed the facilities, often filling the pools in and covering them over, rather than comply with that new law. So not only were Blacks kept out, but tens of thousands of white people lost their public swimming pools as well.

The Sum of Us examines the housing/mortgage crisis, environmental racism, redlining, voting rights, disengenuous "color blindness" and several more issues, which all come under McGhee's microscope to convincing effect. There is also a chapter on the psychic toll that racism takes on whites called "The Hidden Wound," the title taken from Wendell Berry's 1968 book of the same name.

The book's final chapter is titled "The Solidarity Dividend" and outlines several successful multi-ethnic efforts currently underway at the grass roots level both in individual communities and across the country. McGhee spent a lot of time crossing the country and investigating her thesis and she has a career's worth of experience in policy advocating and organizing to draw on, as well.

Finally, the book is clearly and engagingly written, and does not come across as a polemic. McGhee seems to me to be writing out of sorrow and, often, frustration, but also out of love and hope for the future. She lays out the problems and conditions of our times exceedingly well, and suggests what could be a doable roadmap for the future.

Pot of Trouble by Don Tracy



Back to Don Tracy's Giff Speer mystery series from the late 60s/early 70s. This 5th entry finds our pal Giff having been booted from the super secret Army outfit he'd been solving crimes for because he'd cut some corners to keep a friend of his, a general who'd been a patsy for some counterfeiters in Saigon out of trouble when he'd busted the bad guys. Now this same friend, Lew Lokey, is in a bunch of trouble on his super glitzy spread in the Arizona desert and calls on Giff to come help him again, strictly as a private citizen now. Well, as will happen, crime and mayhem ensure. There is a super rare dug up artifact being contested and somebody is shooting out Lew's windows. Is it the hippies in the hills? The Native Americans from their nearby reservation? The mafia? Or someone closer to home? Did Lokey's first wife really die in a car accident, or was she murdered?

This is, unfortunately, the least satisfying novel of the series so far. To much is static in the storytelling, and I never really cared much about anybody or their problems. Well, there are four more books in the series and I guess I'll read them all sooner or later. They're all only around 180 pages of old fashion pulp pocketbook size, and they're kind of fun intermissions. Here's hoping old Giff bounces back in the last four books!

>200 rocketjk: a lot of crossover themes between what you cover in your review and Caste, which I recently finished. James Baldwin (and others) highlighted that racism was a white problem, and these books show how self-destructive things come out of that. Noting the title.

>201 rocketjk: good luck with the next one.

>202 dchaikin: I think a lot of the recent books on this general topic have overlying themes and facts, which of course makes perfect sense. I still think it's worth reading several of them, though (I'm sure you'd agree), because doing so, I think, adds depth to understanding. I'm not sure how soon I'll get to Caste, but I've got The Color of the Law and The New Jim Crow on my list to read relatively soon.

>203 rocketjk: The New Jim Crown caused a major change in how I, personally, view the US.

>204 dchaikin: If you want to go back even further, I highly recommend Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon Litwack. It covers, in great, horrifying and sorrowful detail, the period from the end of Reconstruction through the first world war.

>205 rocketjk: I know I should. I’m listing everything you read on this theme. What’s important to me about The New Jim Crow is that it happened in my lifetime, right in front of me, and I didn’t know. It’s so obvious now...!!

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende



This, Isabel Allende's most recent novel, was a selection by a member of my reading group. I expected to like it better than I did, alas. It is the story of two families, and in particular one member of each (one man and one woman who end up together; no shock, there), living through the Spanish Civil War. The protagonists end up in Chile (again not a spoiler, as the book's title refers to that country). The story takes the two through their entire lives.

The storyline, the times described and the characters are certainly interesting, so why was the book ultimately unsatisfying to me? One element was the flat nature of the narrative. We are in third person omniscient. And while we often touch down inside the mind of one or another character, particularly our two main players, I felt that too much of the book was spent in above-the-fray exposition and explanation, and way too much time in historical overview mode. Everything from the history of the Spanish Civil War through the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power, with long lessons on Chilean history in between, are doled out paragraphs, sometimes pages, at a time before we finally get back to our characters and their stories.

Also, the book suffers (in my view) from what I call "exceptional-itits." That is, both protagonists are exceptional enough in their fields as to open doors for them and create the kind of freedom and in some cases safety that a more "common" individual wouldn't experience. So our man, Victor, has learned medicine and surgery on the Spanish Civil War battlefields and is exceptionally good at it, as well as being exceptionally dedicated and selfless and hence beloved and respected by one and all. Roser is an exceptionally level-headed and practical woman who is also a self-taught but of course wonderful pianist who is eventually able to create a career that allows her to travel South America. Of course, famous pianists have their professional struggles and frustrations, but Roser's are never made evident.

Finally the books suffers from a casual sprinkling of cliches and even grammatical errors that made me wonder about the attention paid by the translators (two are listed). Certainly the English language editors were asleep at the switch. On the grammar side, from time to time we get sentences like this one:

"They traveled to Scotland, where Isidro had secured a deal for his Patagonian wool, and to Wales, where he was hoping to do the same, but which fell through."

On the cliche side, here's one example:

"Aitor's visit left Victor speechless for several days."

It's all too bad, because there is so much here that could have been great. In particular, the descriptions, toward the beginning, of life on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and of the final retreat/mass exodus/mad deadly dash to the French border away from Franco's murderous forces are very well done and harrowing. And I was certainly interested in the story of the Spanish refugees who managed to set up new lives in Chile. But it goes by too fast, and, for me, from a perspective too far removed from the characters. Overall, I felt that the attempted scope in time was too ambitious. I rarely ask for books to be longer than they are, but for 60 years of tumultuous history and multiple character storylines, I think we needed more than this novel's 314 pages. Better still in my view would have been a sharper focus on maybe two or three particular points in time. Look at me, telling Isabel Allende how to write a novel, right? But anyway, that's how I experienced this one.

>207 rocketjk: terrific review. I think we feel a need to sometimes pick apart books we didn’t like, trying to explain it to ourselves. That extra analysis makes for thought-provoking reading. I haven’t read Allende. I might try House of Spirits some time.

Harvard Has a Homicide by Timothy Fuller



Well, the last thing I needed was another mystery series to be in the middle of, but, alas, when I went to my fiction shelves and decided to pull down an old mystery hardcover, This is Murder, Mr. Jones, I found that it was the fourth book in a series, and, well, off to the Biblio website I went.

So, here we are at the beginning of Fuller's Jupiter Jones series, this first entry published in 1936. Our man Edmund "Jupiter" Jones is a smart-aleck Harvard grad student, with, evidently, plenty of money and, you'll not be surprised to learn, generally the smartest person in the room. Or so he thinks. At any rate, when Jones is the first to discover the corpse of the recently stabbed to death Professor Singer, he can't resist butting in and "helping" the Cambridge police department's Inspector Rankin solve the case. Or, as Jones' girlfriend comments drily to another character, "He thinks he's the Thin Man." Fuller plays this situation nicely for laughs. When Jones early on steps over the line in his comments to Rankin and gets slapped down, we are told that Jones thinks to himself, "The situation was now perfect. The policeman was irritated at the amateur sleuth." Happily, Fuller plays this against type somewhat, as the policeman is portrayed at very good at his job, rather than the genial bumbler we've come to expect in these situations.

Anyway, as you'll have noticed by now, I found this mystery to be rather fun, although Jones does get a bit tiresome in his smugness, especially towards the end. But the plotting and the mystery itself are pretty good, so I am, in fact, going to read on in the series, which is five books long, all told. Unfortunately, there is some of the racism we'd expect of this time and place, as Jones' Black servant Sylvester is portrayed cringingly condescendingly, although he is at times smart as anyone else in the room, and is clearly a better craps player than most. However, there are two minor characters whose obviously Jewish names are presented as simply normal rather than as occasion for antisemetic commentary, not something we'd take for granted at Harvard circa 1936, so at least there's that.

Book notes:
Fuller was, in fact, just 23 years old and a recent Harvard graduate when this first book was published in 1936. Here is a run reproduction of a Harvard Crimson article about Fuller published the next year:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/3/23/timothy-fuller-author-of-recent-har...

My copy of the book, as you can see by the image here, is an Armed Services Edition copy. There were books that were selected by the Council on Books in Wartime, a government sponsored group of writings and editors, for republishing and free dispersal to American soldiers fighting overseas in World War 2. I found the story of these books interesting in and of itself. Here's the wikipedia page explaining the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions

>187 kidzdoc: I'm ready for that one, too!

>189 rocketjk: Rosalind? I think she got a poor shake. Reading The Double Helix when it came out, I conceived of a dislike of Watson and Crick, instead of admiration. It was Rosalind Franklin I admired.

I'm so glad I came along to catch up today. I hae trouble getting this far into the alphabet when I read posts. Wonderful reading, wonderful comments.

>211 sallypursell: fyi, Isaacson had more or less the same take as you do on that score.

>212 sallypursell: Thanks!

>209 rocketjk: I enjoy your forays into the world of pulp.

>214 baswood: Thanks. I find them fun, and I also see them as a way to visit the era they were written in.

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington



Back to my friend Kim's list of books about African American history and the history of racism in America for this classic that I should have read long ago. Oh, well. Good to get another "reading gap" filled in. Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's memoir.

On the national stage, Washington was one of the most famous African Americans of his time. As the title tells us, he was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation in 1858 or 1859 (he wasn't sure of the exact date or even year). Through force of will and an impressive work ethic, Washington earned his way into the Hammond Institute, a progressive school of both basic and higher learning for freedmen and their descendants. At age 25, he was recommended for and accepted the post of leader/principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University). When he got to Alabama to take over the school, it turned out there was no school and he had to build it from scratch. The story of this process constituted, for me, the most compelling section of the narrative. Afterwards, Washington's success building the Tuskegee Institute, and his impressive abilities as an orator, brought him an ever growing fame, both nationally and, eventually, internationally.

Washington's opinions about race relations are somewhat controversial now, as per the more modern histories that I've read on the topic of the Civil Rights Movement and, particularly, the Jim Crow era that Washington was working in attest. Appearing as the principle speaker at the opening of an Agricultural Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 (a remarkable feat for a Black man at the time in and of itself), Washington made a hit with the mixed-race audience when he stated "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." His ideas were that the Black race (I use the word "race" here because Washington used it.) needed to build itself up economically and educationally before worrying about things like integration and even voting rights (not to mention political power),* and he saw in schools like the Tuskegee Institute, which emphasized the benefits of physical labor and the learning of essential trades like brick making along with academic learning, an important means to this end. What he seemed to be ignoring, at least when looked at from a later perspective, was the ferocity and pervasiveness of Jim Crow/White supremist actions to prevent the average Southern Black from advancing in this manner. According to the excellent history Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, any sort of learning or financial success (a successful crop or even a few dollars in the bank) could be enough to get a Black person lynched.

It's for me hard to imagine that Washington could have been so isolated by his own success as to not know this. I wonder whether he felt that presenting a more hopeful, even if less than realistic, message would help whites accept his school's success (which had always depending for funding to a significant degree from donations by sympathetic whites) and allow for more institutions of the same kind and further advances. Or maybe he didn't realize the ways in which the exceptional nature of his own success could be used by racists as a shield for their own attitudes, as in, "Well look how we applaud Booker T. Washington when he speaks, and how we give him money for his school. Obviously we're not racist." Again, it's hard for me to imagine him really being blind to this, but I would need to read a biography of Washington to have an idea of what the answer to these questions might be.

In the reading, I'm afraid Up from Slavery bogged down for me toward the end, as Washington begins relating the places he went to, the audiences he spoke to and the accolades he received. I can understand why these would have been important to him to include, perhaps to exemplify the ways in which it was possible for a Black man to attain such status and success, but it all became repetitive and impersonal for me. Nevertheless, this is an important book to read for anyone wishing to gain an overall understanding of Black history in America. Certainly, Washington is a person to admire.

* It occurred to me that this attitude found a strange mirroring in the ideas of the Black Panthers, whose platform including the belief that Blacks in America needed to unite before they could make real progress in America, because they needed to present to the American political and social establishment a single, powerful negotiating block. (See: Black Against Empire: the History and Politics of the Black Panther Party) The positions are obviously far from identical, but both contained the concept of, "We need to get ourselves together first, and create a position of strength, before we can hope to deal successfully with White America. (There may well be obvious holes to poke in this comparison that I'm missing. That would be far from a first.)

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe



Goodness knows how long ago I bought this paperback copy of The Right Stuff, probably at a thrift store or maybe a garage sale, thinking, "Well, I really ought to read this one of these days." My copy's LT entry date is in 2008, which means it was already on my shelf when I first began entering my library on this site. It's the sort of, "I'll get to it someday" book that is easy to pass over until that mythical "someday" or more whimsical "maybe next time." This time, when I came upon it while perusing my shelves, I found I had crossed into "Oh, what the heck," territory. Every once in a while it's fun to cross a book off the "Have I really not read that yet?" list.

And, holy cats, I enjoyed the stuffing out of The Right Stuff! As most here probably already know, this is Tom Wolfe's account of the Mercury Space Program, the initial series of one-man flights that led eventually to the Apollo moon-landing flights. Wolfe gets very in-depth about the ethos of the original seven astronauts and how that grew out of the tough "Right Stuff" derring do, laugh at danger attitudes of the early fighter jet test pilots. Wolfe describes the politics of the program, the personalities of those test pilots and, of course, of the astronauts. He delves into the situations their wives found themselves in, as well. Finally, he takes us on a minute-by-minute trip within the Mercury capsules of several of those now legendary flights.

Wolfe describes compellingly the ways in which the sudden rush to get a man into space came as a reaction to the Russian launch of Sputnik, the first successful orbital satellite, and the panic that set off in the press, in the public and, correspondingly, in Congress. Then, the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin in orbit around the earth several times, and the panic was on good and proper. Could America let the Commies rule space?

All that much I already knew, but something I found fascinating and that I'd never known was that when John Glenn was assigned to be only the third American into space, he deemed that a failure. The first to flights, made by Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom, were sub-orbital flights. Basically, they went up and came down in a parabola like a mortar shell, launched by smaller rockets than would be needed for earth orbit. Glenn's flight was supposed to be the third such flight, as that larger rocket, the Atlas, was not ready yet for prime time. But when the Russians sent another cosmonaut into space, this time to orbit the earth seven times, it was determined that the time for fooling around with sub-orbital flights was over. The Atlas rocket was rushed to completion and John Glenn, slated to be "merely" the third man to go up and come down, was suddenly rescheduled to be the first American to orbit the earth! Thus, it was the Russian space program that handed Glenn his ticket to everlasting fame.

As to how many of Wolfe's details and descriptions are accurate, well, one does not really know. I don't ever recall any serious push-back against the book when it was at its highest fame (which was considerable) or when the movie version came out, but I would not have been seriously tracking that in 1980, when the book came out and I was 25 and had more immediate "concerns." The end of my copy features about a page and a half of testimonials to the book's accuracy and "got it right" qualities by folks in a position to know, including a couple of astronauts. But the publishers would not have included blurbs by folks who read the book in horror or fury, so I take a lot of the details here with a certain grain of salt.

Nevertheless, despite my final caveat that the book is overwritten in places (well, this is the writer who would go on to author Bonfire of the Vanities, after all), I found The Right Stuff to be, overall, very well written, quite compelling, and a book that has also aged well.

The Seventh by Richard Stark



This is, in fact, the seventh book in Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) guiltily entertaining "Parker" series. Parker is a psychopathic thief and all-round criminal who doesn't have any particular desire to kill you but will without compunction if you represent the slightest bit of trouble for him, the job he's in the midst of, or the security of his alias. In this short novel, Parker, as part of a 7-man team, has just pulled off a beautiful, profitable heist. The team holes up in separate locations to wait for the heat to die down, with Parker holding on to the loot. He goes out for 10 minutes to pick up some cigarettes and beer, which turns out to be quite enough time for extremely deadly bedlam to kick in (not a spoiler: this occurs on page 1). As I said above, these books are definitely guilty pleasures. The writing is very sharp and the plotting swift and enjoyable, but the protagonist puts the "ugh" in anti-hero and books include the standard misogyny of the era. (This book was originally published in 1966.) Looking back, I see that it had been two years since I last visited Parker world. I can't guarantee I'll wait that long to read the next book.

>216 rocketjk: Maybe time for Kendi. ?? In Stamped from the Beginning, he goes through all these historical figures and colors their perspectives in light of his ideas. It’s interesting who he feels holds up (including James Baldwin and Huey Newton) and who he feels doesn’t (including Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, who he calls a assimilationist.). I’m trying to remember his take on Washington. I think I recall he is a little forgiving based on Washington’s life context...but i might be confusing him with W. E. B. Du Bois.

>217 rocketjk: cool. I have the idea of reading The Right Stuff some day, at least in order to clarify the movie. But, i lack the temptation of an owned a copy.

>219 dchaikin: Re: Kendi . . . probably not for a while, but most likely someday. Right now I'm still working my way through my friend Kim's list on the topic, and Stamped from the Beginning's not on that list, though I have deviated somewhat to add both Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow and The Sum of Us. (The New Jim Crow is on the list, so I'll be reading that relatively soon.)

I've gained some interesting perspective on King via the readings on that list about the Black Panthers (Black Against Empire) and SNCC (In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s), which both describe how King's more radical contemporaries thought about him, which is not to say that I wouldn't profit from learning what Kendi has to say. King's strategies seem to me at this point to have been flawed, but were probably not as obviously so at the time as they might in retrospect. The Black Panther philosophy appears to me today to be essentially a common sense approach, and barely even a radical one (they were avowedly not separatists, for example).

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois



"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

This classic set of essays, first published in 1903 during the full savagery of Jim Crow America, is W.E.B Du Bois' heartfelt and detailed description of race relations, particularly in the South, and the plight of African Americans trying to attain some level of dignity and prosperity in the face of harsh and determined resistance from white America. Du Bois refers to racism as the Veil behind which African Americans must live, a veil which serves to hide the true nature of Black culture and aspirations from the racist white America. The essays cover history and cultural, religious and economic conditions and the nature and source of racism itself. Du Bois also provides two essays that sketch the lives of individuals whose talents and potential are crushed under the weight of mindless Jim Crow hatred. Du Bois was a wonderful writer, and although my previous reading had already revealed to me most of the conditions and history he describes, reading Du Bois' heartfelt explanations and accounts, written from the heart from the midst of those particular dark days (which is not to say that the dark days have relented even today) was a moving experience for me.

Professor Donald B. Gibson, in his introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of the book, says that these essays were Du Bois' attempt to reach white America through logic and emotion, to lay out the case that Blacks were individuals in the same way whites were, people with souls, with longings and emotions, capable of nobility and degradation and everything in between, in the same way that whites were. If only the Veil could come down, how much better for everyone. Says Gibson at the conclusion of his introduction:

"Du Bois believes that black and white may interact in a humane way if whites recognize that blacks have souls (which probably means, at base, human feeling) just as they do. The Souls of Black Folk is an apoeal for that recognition, an appeal that, if we may judge from Du Bois' subsequent approach to racial issues, fell on deaf ears. Du Bois never abandoned reason, but after this book he never felt again that the matter was an issue for understanding and goodwill alone. . . ."

I will admit that I was brought up a bit short by the antisemitism Du Bois displays in a couple of the essays. At any rate, I recommend this book very, very strongly, indeed to (at the very least) all Americans. It is crucial reading, I think.

>207 rocketjk: I find Allende's memoirs much more interesting than her novels. I'm not sure why - they somehow feel more alive to me than her fiction.

>216 rocketjk: & >220 rocketjk: These are both books I've attempted to read and not gotten through ( though it's probably been 15 years since I've tried them.) Your characterization of Souls of black folk as an initial attempt to reason with white Americans is helpful in light of what I know of his life.

I suspect reading with a group or as part of a class that sets these works in historical context would help me. I'm reading The Color of law by Richard Rothstein with a group right now, and am finding myself spending a fair amount of time researching the history he describes in addition to reading.

>222 markon: I'm sure reading these books in a group would, indeed, help me. As you may know, I'm reading from a list of books about racism in America and African American history in general that a highly respected friend of mine posted last year on Facebook. I normally don't read a book's introduction until after I've read the book (I never read the Introduction first for a novel; too many spoilers!) but in the case of The Souls of Black Folk, I'm glad I read the introduction first. I've read about the Jim Crow Era from my friend's list, but having Du Bois' particular context was very helpful as I read his essays.

I have been following your posts about The Color of Law with great interest.

Great review of The Souls of Black Folk, Jerry. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read it yet, and I'm also long overdue in reading the two part biography of Du Bois by former Rutgers professor David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963; each book won a Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

>224 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. The idea of reading a biography or two of Du Bois is extremely attractive to me at this point.

>221 rocketjk: really terrific and inspirational review. Left me wanting to read De Bois to experience his moment.

>224 kidzdoc: thanks for posting these titles.

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan



Kay Ryan, who was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008 through 2010, published this collection of "greatest hits" along with a section of new poems in 2010. It on the members of my reading group selected it for last month's group read. Mostly the poems here are bite sized or at least relatively short. I started out enjoying them very much, but my interest began to wane somewhat as I went along. First of all, here's a poem I like a lot:

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
Apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

Too many of the poems, though, concluded with what seemed to be to be heavy-handed pay-offs: the moral of the story. These are poems I thought would be much better without their final lines. Here's a short example of what I mean:

Reverse Drama

Lightning, but not bright.
Thunder, but not loud.
Sometimes something
in the sky connects
to something int he ground
in ways we don't expect
and more or less miss except
through reverse drama:
things were heightened
and now they're calmer.

How much better that poem would be (for me) if it ended at "through reverse drama." There were too many that left me with that impression. Obviously, Ryan has been at this a long time, is much admired and knows exactly what she's trying to accomplish, so mine is of course a minority opinion. I was certainly the only member of my reading group who had this reaction. Anyway, I'll leave you with another poem I greatly enjoyed:

Felix Crow

Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule--
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
and every time
I like him
when we meet.

We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman



In the late 1950s, Edwin Guthman was a Seattle journalist who had already won a Pulitzer Prize. When Robert Kennedy came to town as a federal prosecutor to investigate corrupt labor leaders, Guthman, who had been writing about those same issues, decided to cooperate with the investigation, knowing that Kennedy would have subpoena power that would enable him to get at financial records that a journalist could never uncover. The friendship that grew between the two men led to Kennedy, upon becoming Attorney General, inviting Guthman to Washington as special assistant for public information in the Department of Justice. Essentially, he was RFK's chief press representative, as well as a trusted advisor, and as such was present for many important deliberations during Kennedy's time as AG. This book is Guthman's fascinating memoir of those times.

Guthman takes us through those initial investigations and his growing admiration for RFK's intelligence, tenacity and integrity, and then through the JFK presidency, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, most compellingly, the Justice Department's involvement, such as it was, in the Civil Rights movement during the JFK years. Most harrowing is Guthman's description of the hour-by-hour negotiations and decisions during James Meredith's attempts to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi. This revealing paragraph from the beginning of this section, written in 1971, when this book was published, is worth reproducing, I think:

"{RFK's} views at the time: that strong positive leadership by the President, persistent federal action to protect federally guaranteed rights, and continuing dialogue with Southern officials and civil rights leaders would isolate violence and gradually but steadily lift the burden of discrimination from the backs of Negroes with civility and justice. The men around Bob shared this view, although {Burke} Marshall {head of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice}, perhaps, saw the inflexibility of white supremacy in its true perspective sooner than the rest.

The trouble, as the passage of a few years would show, was that temporary solutions and the heady atmosphere of the New Frontier obscured our view of the depth of the problem. Despite the enlightened Southerners among us, we lacked a sense of Southern history. Particularly lacking, I can see now, was full understanding of the destructive effect of the federal government's long record after Reconstruction of vacillation and finally abandonment of the Negro to the wiles of white supremacy. There, we did not reckon fully with the ingrained stubbornness of Southern leaders and their adeptness at forestalling federal action to help Negroes. Nor did we fully confront what all must have known instinctively; that the beliefs, fears and customs of discrimination were embedded into the nation's mind and soul much more deeply against Negroes that against any other minority."

Again, this book was published in 1971. Later, Guthman offers this assessment of RFK's original naivete on this subject, and the gradual evolution of his views:

"The difference between his rather hard-nosed replies to Dr. King in 1961 and his sensitive remarks in Fort Wayne in 1968 accurately measures how greatly his attitude toward the black struggle for equal rights changed in seven years.

In 1961 he recognized that the country had been too slow and too intractable in redressing the Negroes' historic grievances, and he had acted within the government to accelerate the pace. But, like most whites in the North and West, he thought in the cliches of the times. He did not then regard the incipient black rebellion as the gravest threat to American society. There still seemed to be time for steady, rational progress that would satisfy the Negroes' demands and peacefully accommodate with the democratic process their hardening insistence on freedom "now." Bob was confident that resolute leadership by the federal government and the good sense of the American people would overcome the centuries of prejudice and white insensitivity to the human aspirations of those who were not white. He thought about the problem then in terms of leadership, tactics and the law. He urged Dr. King and other Negro leaders to concentrate on registering black voters instead of demonstrating. The surest way to improve conditions in the South was to get the vote and exercise it, he thought in 1961 . . .

His road to full recognition of what was behind the black rebellion and its crucial implications for the future of the nation, however, lay not only in discharging his official duties but in frequent walks through ghetto neighborhoods, in many visits to ghetto schools, particularly in Washington, and in countless conversations--some of them acrimonious confrontations--with black leaders."

Guthman also provides a brief but moving picture of Robert Kennedy's intense grief over his brother's death, and goes into some detail about his clashes and eventual enmity with Lyndon Johnson. Guthman stayed on Kennedy's staff through his successful Senatorial campaign in New York, and gives an interesting description of those days, but then went back to his journalism career, and so offers only a few insights into Kennedy's time as a senator. He leaves the details of RFK's death to others to describe.

This is not a "warts and all" biography. Guthman was an unabashed RFK admirer. Given that this admiration comes from a hard-nosed journalist after years of close contact, we might give it some strong credence. But Guthman does not claim to be offering a comprehensive study of Kennedy, and I would guess that he had knowledge of skeletons in RFK's closet that he chose not to reveal.

I grabbed this from the 60s section of my U.S. History shelf in my own collection more or less at random. I have no idea when I bought it, but I'm very glad I ended up reading it. I was 13 when RFK was shot and remember the event, and the times, clearly, though obviously through the prism of youth.

Great review of We Band of Brothers, Jerry. I had just turned seven years of age after MLK was assassinated, and I vaguely remember my teachers crying in school afterward, but I don't know if it was after his assassination, RFK's assassination, or both. I do remember watching Nixon's inauguration on television — for some reason I was home from school that day, which may have been a snow day — and my mother kept the composition book I used to practice writing "Richard Milhous Nixon" over and over. I sometimes wonder how different the United States would have been during and after 1969 if RFK had not been assassinated.

>228 rocketjk: Interesting review of a book that would make a good companion to Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa which I am currently reading. Guthman certainly figures there.

>229 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. In fact, according to Guthman, RFK was particularly alarmed about the possibility of a Nixon presidency, and often figured Democratic Party politics in light of keeping Nixon out of the White House. I remember RFK's assassination pretty well. It seemed then to me, as a 13-year-old, as another in a long line of assassinations. On a selfish and juvenile note, my junior high had just won the WABC top-40 radio station's Principal of the Year contest (students had to send signed index cards to the station voting for their principal). We were to have an assembly which the DJ Bruce Morrow (a.k.a Cousin Brucie) was to emcee and the Rascals were going to perform for. But the RFK assassination had just occurred, so the music was deemed (correctly, I think) inappropriate and we only got Morrow. Funny the things you recall. It's only being brought back to me from reading the Guthman book what a tragedy it was for the country that RFK's career was cut short, whether he would ever have become president or not.

>230 SassyLassy: Oh, wow, that certainly looks like a fascinating book. Are you finding it so? And then on my shelf is also Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade by Jeff Shesol. Between us we've got a trilogy boxed set designed!

>231 rocketjk: That's interesting to know about Guthman, Jerry. Nixon was a horrible and extremely corrupt president, but I would argue that Trump was far worse, and has done more long lasting damage to the fabric of this country than Nixon or any other POTUS has. I'm not convinced that we will ever recover from the distrust, division and resurgence of White nationalism that resulted from Trump's term in office, and it almost certainly won't occur during my lifetime.

I remember Cousin Brucie! I used to listen to WABC when we lived in Jersey City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with WBLS FM, which featured Frankie Crocker, the "Chief Rocker", who always ended his broadcast with King Pleasure's 1954 version of "Moody's Mood for Love", which also featured Blossom Dearie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QziwjSGLaVw

>232 kidzdoc: "Nixon was a horrible and extremely corrupt president, but I would argue that Trump was far worse, and has done more long lasting damage to the fabric of this country than Nixon or any other POTUS has. I'm not convinced that we will ever recover from the distrust, division and resurgence of White nationalism that resulted from Trump's term in office, and it almost certainly won't occur during my lifetime."

I agree entirely, with the caveat that I think it is a continuum, that Nixon, and the cynicism about government and American institutions he engendered, eventually led to Regan, and Regan led to Trump.

"I remember Cousin Brucie!"

I thought you would, given your Jersey roots!

Glimpses by Lewis Shiner



The spine of my copy of Glimpses tells us that this novel is science fiction, but it isn't. The blurb at the top of the front cover tells us that the novel was "Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel!" but the book isn't really a fantasy novel, either. What this is is a very good adult "coming of age" novel (the protagonist is pushing 40) with strong currents of magical realism.

Genre quibbles aside, I enjoyed this novel quite a lot. Ray Shackleford is, as mentioned, in his late 30s, and the story is set in the late 1980s. (It was first published in 1993.) Shackleford, who works for himself fixing stereo equipment for a living, is in a decaying marriage. His emotionally abusive father has just died in a diving accident that might or might not have been suicide, a fact that doesn't diminish Ray's fury at the man one bit. His mother is emotionally frozen. One day, he sits alone in his study thinking about the Beatles. He meditates on the song, "The Long and Winding Road," which was recorded by Paul McCartney alone at the piano and released later on the Let It Be album with kitschy string arrangements added by famed producer Phil Spector, arrangements that McCartney has always strongly disliked. Ray begins dreaming of another version of the song, one without the strings, but with all the Beatles taking part instead. To his shock, Ray realizes that his imagined version is coming out of his speakers. Still disbelieving, he goes back to the beginning and does it again, this time hitting the record button on his cassette player. Sure enough, he gets the version on tape.

This is the jumping off point for a strong novel about self-discovery, disappointment and redemption. The fragile, illusory nature of the promise of the counter culture 60s, the inevitable implosion of that promise and the sense of mourning felt afterwards by those who lived their youths during those years are strong themes, here, deftly woven through the protagonist's own coming to grips with those feelings and with his own life changes. The magical realism episodes deal essentially with things that didn't happen, potential subsumed by tragedy or strife. There are times when Shiner lays Ray's issues on a little thick, but mostly I found this a surprisingly effective and thought-provoking novel. The details built into the magical realism trips back to the late 60s are impressive and capture the era extremely well, the lows as well as the highs.

I turned 13 in 1968, and had a 13-year-old's naivete about it all. I couldn't wait to get to college and dive in, but by the time that happened, it was 1973, and the retreat was in full force. Some of us fought a rearguard action, but in our hearts we knew we were too late. My disappointment was profound, though I've unapologetically retained some of the spirit of those times in my heart through the years. So that's one reason I found this novel's themes particularly affecting, I suppose.

Book note: So how did I come to read this novel? When I owned my used bookstore, this book was on the shelves in the Science Fiction section, because of the label on its spine. One day, somebody bought it. As is true for most used bookstores, I generally gave store credit for books people brought me, and my rule was that I would always take back for credit books that had been purchased in the store (regardless of whether I really needed another copy of the book or not), assuming the book had been kept in sellable condition. One day, the fellow who had purchased the book brought it back to the store. I didn't really know this person, he wasn't that regular a customer, but he knew that I had a weekly radio show on the local public station. He said, "I'm bringing this book back, but not for store credit. I'm giving it to you personally as a gift, because you're a music lover and I think you'd really like it." So I thanked him and duly brought it home and put it on my "short" TBR list, which somehow turned into a 7-year wait, but now I've finally read it and enjoyed it. So I offer sincere thanks to that thoughtful fellow, from a distance in time that fits well into the theme of the book.

>231 rocketjk: It is an interesting book, not deep, but adds a fair amount of detail to this aspect and time of RFK's life. One of the best parts about it is how it shows the struggles RFK had to learn how things worked behind the scenes in Washington, and how to fit into the Washington world of committees. It's a difficult lesson that just because you're young, smart and connected, there are others out there who are as well, and who may have had far more experience than you.

That Shesol book looks familiar. I'm wondering if it's on my TBR, which I don't usually enter into LT. If not, I will have to look for it.

>234 rocketjk: Great story about how the book came to you.

>235 SassyLassy: "One of the best parts about it is how it shows the struggles RFK had to learn how things worked behind the scenes in Washington, and how to fit into the Washington world of committees. It's a difficult lesson that just because you're young, smart and connected, there are others out there who are as well, and who may have had far more experience than you."

These sorts of details are what make good history books really interesting!

>233 rocketjk: “ the cynicism about government and American institutions he engendered,”

I would add prioritizing white privilege as a key component underneath American conservatism and therefore to the Nixon (white privilege = silent majority), Reagan (more so), W, Trump (blatantly) trend.

>237 dchaikin: Certainly. I agree with that entirely. It seems to me that before the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act, white privilege/supremacy didn't need to be prioritized. It was simply understood. After the gains of the 60s, limited as they might have been, I think it became necessary for conservative power-brokers to make their racism more explicit, to signal to their bases that they were not going along with any of that equality nonsense.

Though I would say that Nixon's "silent majority" claim was not only about racism, but about liberal government policies in general and also about the counter culture. I am old enough to remember the days when it was the hippies vs. the hard hats, when blue collar working class folks were encouraged to act out against the longhairs. It was his way, among other things, of trying to put anti-war protesters in a bad light with that blue collar base.

I remember listening to a speech on my Boston U campus in 1975 or so. The speaker made the comment that Watergate showed that the American system worked. The crowd booed. "But he had to resign!" the speaker said. But that didn't matter to the booers. The fact that Nixon had gotten away with his malfeasance for so long got people thinking that the whole system was rotten, and Nixon just got caught because he was sloppy. That's the sort of thing I was thinking of in terms of cynicism. That led to Regan's "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." And then to whatizzname. Anyway, that's how I've always looked at the issue.

But of course, to your point, the cynicism and the racism are true simultaneously, and are intertwined fundamentally.

Agree.

Also, love your story in >134 rocketjk:. I didn’t know that about The Long and Winding Road.

I’m also just catching your reviews of Guthman on RFK and Kay Ryan’s poetry. Enjoyed both.

>239 dchaikin: Thanks! Re: the Beatles, the story is actually from the novel, but I can recall a McCartney quote from some article I read once where he spoke of his displeasure with those strings, though he tried to be diplomatic and soft-pedal the issue somewhat. I also had a memory of the story Shiner tells in that early part of the book: that the Beatles went into the studio to record a new album and decided to video the process, but for several reasons the sessions didn't come off and they abandoned the effort. Later, they went into Abbey Road studios and recorded the brilliant Abbey Road album. The tracks from the first session were sent to Spector to punch up and those tracks became the Let It Be album. All of which is why you'll often read that Abbey Road is the last record the Beatles recorded despite the fact that Let It Be is the last one to be released.

>234 rocketjk: That sounds really interesting—I'll have to keep an eye out for it in my travels, since NYPL only has the audiobook to lend (a print copy is available to read in-library, which doesn't appeal) and I'm not an audiobook person. But I think I'd like to read that someday... very cool story about it, too.

>240 rocketjk: that’s cool. I didn’t know that.

>241 lisapeet: If it sounds appealing, I will send you my copy. It was a gift from, essentially, a stranger, so I'm happy to "play it forward," as it were. Shoot me a PM with your address and I'll send it on to you.

>243 rocketjk: Thanks, Jerry—what a nice offer. I'd hate to take a gift from someone off of you, but if you do feel like paying it forward I'll gladly be a way station on the book's path. Up to you what you want to do, but I'll PM you my deets.

>234 rocketjk: a terrific way for this book to come to you - and I love the fact that you are also passing it on!

>245 wandering_star: Thanks. It's fun to be a link in the chain, sometimes.

And, finally, here are a few photos from our recent camping trip in Jedediah Smith State Park in northern California. These are from a glorious hike among the redwoods. Where my wife and I live in Mendocino County, CA, we are only a 10-minute drive from a redwood forest of our own. But this forest up in Del Norte County was so much deeper than what we have here that it seemed like an entirely different experience.

I will be posting a few more photos over the next couple of days, but it's a bit of a laborious process, as the photos keep uploading upside down, and I've had to learn how to manipulate each one to get them right side up!

Great pictures, Jerry.

Love your forest pictures!

So beautiful. I find forests immensely calming.

I'm glad you had a good camping trip and got to be out in nature. How many Sasquatches did you encounter?

>250 RidgewayGirl: I didn't encounter any, but in the early evening I did hear them singing each to each. Or maybe those were blue jays.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama



I found Barack Obama's memoir of his early political career and, especially, the first term of his presidency to be interesting indeed, and quite well written. In particular, I found the memoir to be a useful trip back through the events and issues of those years (2009-2013). The details of the financial crisis and the TARP program Obama's administration came up with to deal with that situation were enlightening in particular, for me. Throughout the book's 700 pages, we get the background stories on the issues that Obama took on (both those on his planned agenda, like healthcare, and those that got thrown at him, like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico), including all the planning, research, discussion and agonizing over what should be done and what could be done politically. Obama often offers, as well, the perspectives of the people who thought he was acting in error, such as those who thought the TARP bank bailouts were mistakes. Understandably, I think, he gives his own reasons for the actions he did take much more emphasis. If there were times when Obama's explanations seemed not quite convincing in hindsight, I was willing to give him a bit of latitude in terms of the memoir itself. This was meant as Obama's memoir, after all, and not a comprehensive history of the era. His attitude seemed to be, "Here's what I did and here's why I did it. History will have to work out how right or wrong I was." All in all that seems a fair perspective to me.

Obama came across to me as very clear-eyed about the systemic faults and racism in U.S. culture and system of government. He writes often, and with great frustration, about the obstructionist policies of the Republican Party, and especially Republican leadership, during his tenure. But he still retains his optimism, at least in public/print, about the promises that America and America's founding mythology represent (hence, the memoir's title). One's overall respect (or lack thereof) for Obama's worldview might depend to a significant extent upon whether one shares any part of, or is instead cynical about, that optimism.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston



I'm sorry it took me so long to finally read this beautiful, sad, poetic novel. Janie Crawford is a young Black woman coming of age in Jim Crow Florida. As the novel progresses, Janie gains assuredness, learning about herself and the world and about love. Throughout the story, Hurston weaves the poetry of dialect and mythology, and the power of the natural world: a power of beauty and inspiration as well as the power for disruption and death. Also, in this novel, Hurston epitomizes the writer's rule for "showing" rather than "telling." We mostly see Hurston's Black characters living in essentially all-Black communities. Whites are mostly an unseen menace, appearing only occasionally to assert dominance. Also, only a few times in the novel does Hurston use the word "poverty." But the conditions the characters are living in are shown in the paper-thin walls of their homes and the circumscribed limits of their aspirations. A good day picking beans is a great day of work, with no loftier goals seemingly to be imagined. This Jim Crow clamp down on their world is simply understood. The one character who does evince such drive raises himself only within his own community, and in succeeding creates for himself mostly a fresh corner of loneliness. This is, for me, an inspirational story of a woman who retains her faith in herself and grows into her own power despite disappointment and hardship. One might see Janie, perhaps, as also representing the power and soul of the Black community that has fostered her in the face of poverty and repression.

>253 rocketjk: Great to read your review, Jerry. What did you make of blurbs that say this is a fantastic love story? I didn't get that - I thought Teacake was a bit of a letdown. I agree that Janie was ultimately a great character with a steely power, however.

The era the novel was set in really spoke to me. Beloved by Toni Morrison is perhaps the only other novel I've read that's set in the immediate post-slavery era, but this novel probably touched me more in terms of the difficulties of the first free black communities and the skills they lacked in organising their towns as they'd never been given the opportunity to hold those positions before. Interesting that Janie's grandmother (think it was grandmother? I've a terrible memory) was very attuned to their poverty and was so driven about seeing Janie marry 'well' rather than for love. As you say, in the communities that Janie later settled in this drive to escape poverty seemed to be the exception rather than the norm.

>254 AlisonY: Great questions and points! Let me look at them individually. (Beware, ya'll. There are some plot spoilers coming up, I guess.)

"What did you make of blurbs that say this is a fantastic love story? I didn't get that - I thought Teacake was a bit of a letdown."

Luckily, my copy does not feature such blurbs. :) In general though, I'd say that while Tea Cake might not have been a great match, per se, (her grandmother would not have approved!) what with all his faults and indiscretions, he did turn out to be a great love for Janie. It seemed that he loved her for herself, truly did love her and didn't try to change her. So for example, in the times that he tried to keep her from dangerous or hardship situations, when she said, "No, I'm going with you," he never tried to forbid her from following her inclinations or force her in some way to do other than she wanted. In the context of that society, especially in light of her first two husbands' behaviors along those lines, I think Tea Cake was very much the kind of lover that Janie wanted and needed. That's my take on it, anyway.

Beloved by Toni Morrison is perhaps the only other novel I've read that's set in the immediate post-slavery era,"

As an fyi, according to Wikipedia, the novel is set not in the immediate post-slavery era but in the early 20th century, with the hurricane portrayed based on "the great 1928 Okeechobee hurricane." So we're decades past slavery, past Reconstruction, and fully into the teeth of Jim Crow. But maybe this is just me fussing about semantics, in which case, apologies.

"Interesting that Janie's grandmother (think it was grandmother? I've a terrible memory) was very attuned to their poverty and was so driven about seeing Janie marry 'well' rather than for love."

Yes. I think that (yes) her grandmother (Nanny) was not just attuned to their poverty, but to a Black woman's powerlessness (as she saw it) to control her own fate. To me, this was rooted in Nanny's having grown up as a slave and her perception that things had not really changed all that much for Black women since emancipation. While Janie yearned to look forward, Nanny was still, to a large extent, looking back. It's not that Nanny was so wrong in her perceptions about their life and prospects, but I think what Janie later claimed to hate about Nanny in retrospect was her surrendering to (and I guess tacit acceptance of) those factors.

"As you say, in the communities that Janie later settled in this drive to escape poverty seemed to be the exception rather than the norm."

Yes, though I think what's unspoken in the book but would have been apparent to contemporary readers, at least in the South, was the degree to which that drive had been consciously and often violently suppressed by the White society around them. I highly recommend the long and detailed but extremely illuminating book Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon Litvak. According to that work, a Black man or woman could get lynched for having money in the bank, for bringing in a crop that would allow him or her to attain some profit above and beyond their rent, or any other achievement that showed you to be threatening to rise "above your station" as a powerless working person. A drive to escape poverty could get you killed, and there would be no help coming from any state or federal authority to protect you. Maybe by the 1920s things were not quite as bad as that, I'm not sure. But the the awareness of that sort of peril would still have been hard-wired into that community, perhaps. As such, Jody's ability to attain the wealth and power he does within the specific all Black town they'd set up would have been the exception of that particular circumstance. If he had tried it anywhere else, it wouldn't have been stood for, I'm pretty sure.

But . . . and this is a big "but," I clearly need to read and learn a lot more about Hurston before I go around making claims about the points she was trying to make, here. She clearly had some reason for setting so much of the story in an all-Black town that gave inhabitants the ability to live mostly as they wished as long as they mostly stayed within their own bit of territory other than to come make their livings by growing and picking the White landowners' crops, and for making the boundaries of their lives so understated. My immediate take was/is that she was trying to focus on the characters themselves and their community, and not write a book about Jim Crow. I was reminded to a certain extent of W.E.B Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk, and what I read about DuBois trying to get whites to look at Blacks as people just like them, with souls just the same. As Hurston wrote in 1955 (in a letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel criticizing the Supreme Court's decision on Brown vs. Board of Education that struck down the "separate but equal" concept in public schools!), "It is well known that I have no sympathy nor respect for the `tragedy of color’ school of thought among us."

So everything I've written above comes from my own initial reading, with admitted blank spots in my comprehension of the context in terms of Hurston's perspectives on these issues.

As an aside about that letter (see link below if you're interested), it was, again, written in 1955, or 22 years after Their Eyes Were Watching God was published. Hurston was 64 (not that that's so old; I'm 66 myself!). But growing up and into adulthood throughout the first half of the 20th century, I'd guess she had developed a very well-earned suspicion of anything the Federal Government might be about, and also seems to have come to believe much more in the strength of Black self sufficiency than in the value of integration for its own sake, and distaste for the concept of Black efforts to bang down the barriers of white society as an end in and of itself. But, again, I don't know whether any of this represents a change of perspective from how she saw things when she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Here's a link I found to that letter, by the way:
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-the-orlando-senti...

Well, sorry for the long discurssion. Once I got started, I got interested! I am more than open to being corrected about any misconceptions folks think I've developed about Hurston, or any other points of view on the matter.

Cheers and all the best!

The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek



This is a lovely and interesting small coffee table book about the amazing late 9th Century illustrated Book of Gospels believed to created in an Irish monastery, most likely on the Island of Iona. The brief text tells of the conjectured history of the book and its supposed purpose (probably for display in a monastery and rather than for study or proselytizing), describes with much use of detail and example the artistic styles to be found and what their antecedents were likely to have been, and finally describes the materials probable methodology employed.

Below is one very poorly reproduced (just used my cel phone) page that will at least give you an idea of the sort of art on display, here.



I bought this book at Trinity College in Dublin, where the Book of Kells has been on display for many years, back in the late 1990s. They turn one page of the book every day, and what you get to see is just whatever page the book happens to be open to on the day you're there, but only for a few seconds, maybe half a minute at the most, as on most days there is a long viewing line that is understandably kept moving. It's still worth the visit.

This book is fun and interesting, though there are some funny misplacements in the layout: half sentences repeated and sometimes parts of sentences left out. The funniest one is found on page 26, which ends thusly:

"The curious articulation of the creature's hip joing has strong affinities with the beasts that are found on Pictish stone-carvings. This has fuelled the theories of"

The next page begins a new chapter, so we never get to learn about those theories! Oh, well, a minor snafu in the grand scheme of things. I assume they got these issues ironed out in later editions. While the text in this book is relatively brief, there's more than enough info, and the full color reproductions are very enjoyable.

Whoops, double post!

>255 rocketjk: Fascinating commentary, Jerry - I enjoyed reading that. And thanks for putting me right on my timelines - I hadn't given it too much attention and presumed this was quite close to the end of slavery, but now that I think about it there are several places in the book that made it obvious that wasn't the case.

I have a lot of catching up to do on my Jim Crow era reading, and appreciate the book recommendations. We never studied this part of American history in school in the UK, and although I've ready quite widely about slavery and the American civil rights movement my knowledge of the interim period is definitely bitty at best.

Interesting, though, as you point out as well that in the town Hurston created they did seem to have greater autonomy than perhaps in other places. And having read that letter you pasted the link to (thanks for that) it makes me wonder even more about that. There's definitely frustration in the letter over 'following the white mare' prevailing attitudes amongst her fellow black men and women, and as you say she clearly strongly believe in the capability for self-sufficiency in black communities. Perhaps, therefore, she pointedly wanted to not make the narrative one that focused on the imposed restrictions of a community, but rather one that focused on a self-sufficient one. It would be interesting to know more about that, given the 22 gap you point out between the letter and her writing the book. Maybe we're over thinking it!

Much to think about from that letter - it's distracted me from the work I should be doing! She articulates her point so well.

>256 rocketjk: Isn't it dreadful that the Book of Kells is only a 2 hour drive away from me and yet I've never gone to see it? Mind you, Titanic Belfast was named the world's best tourist attraction in 2016 and I've still not gone to see it, and that's only 4 miles away from me. That's quite poor, isn't it? I have been in the Titanic centre a few times for other events, but I suppose I've been waiting for my kids to get to an age where they'd be interested in it. Still wondering when that stage is!

I can't see your image that you took - maybe if you save it to your photos on LT and past the link from there it will show up. I'd like to see it.

>258 AlisonY: "We never studied this part of American history in school in the UK, and although I've ready quite widely about slavery and the American civil rights movement my knowledge of the interim period is definitely bitty at best."

Well, to be sure, this is also the case for 99% of Americans, too, or certainly for white Americans. Black children, if they have an appreciation for this history, I'd conjecture most likely get it from their parents or other community members rather than in school. White children, for the most part, are hardly given a clue about it. We learned that Slavery was bad, Emancipation was good, Southern whites stayed prejudiced (I grew up in the northeast, in New Jersey, graduating high school in 1973) and Martin Luther King was a hero. And that was pretty much all. My relatively in-depth knowledge on the topic has come only within the last year and a half or so, based on my reading in that list of books about African American history and racism in America, supplied by a friend of mine, that I've mentioned several times here and elsewhere. The gaps in my knowledge were enormous and I have been appalled at what I have learned in that recent reading, both in the depth of the harms I was ignorant of and in my ability to live into my 60s with that ignorance intact. I strongly wish I'd been more pro-active about learning about all this at a younger age. Better late than never, I guess.

"Perhaps, therefore, she pointedly wanted to not make the narrative one that focused on the imposed restrictions of a community, but rather one that focused on a self-sufficient one. It would be interesting to know more about that, given the 22-year gap you point out between the letter and her writing the book. Maybe we're over thinking it!"

I think you're spot on, in fact. Over thinking? Us? Surely not! :) Other than that, thanks for the kind words about my post.

Re: the Book of Kells, et. al.: Isn't it funny the way we ignore the interesting tourist attractions and such that are right around us but seek out those sorts of things when we travel? When I lived in San Francisco, for example, it was years before I finally took the ferry out to Alcatraz, and then only because my sister came for a visit with her young children, who wanted to see it. (Quite a while ago, that was. My niece is now a dentist with twin boys of her own and my nephew a lawyer with a newborn son!) So, for whatever it might be worth to you, you get a pass from me for not having visited the Book of Kells yet!

Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman



Scoundrel Time is Lillian Hellman's memoir of her dealings with the Red-baiting McCarthy Era version of the House Un-American Activities Committee. As many (or most) folks here will know, McCarthy and his cronies (including, prominently, a young Richard Nixon), particularly went after writers and movie-makers during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Lots of intellectuals had attended Communist Party meetings, usually small groups that met in somebody's house, during the 20s and 30s, but virtually none of these meetings resulted in anything even vaguely akin to revolutionary activity.

By the 50s, cynical, opportunistic politicians like McCarthy and Nixon went mining for headlines and power by tormenting anyone who was suspected of having attended such a meeting, or knowing anybody who had, or committing such horrible sins as expressing support for the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War (whence came the mind-blowing phrase, "Premature Anti-Facist"). Lives were ruined and friendships dissolved, as people had to decide between being a "friendly witness" (naming the names of others one had seen at such a meeting, say) or refusing to cooperate and risking jail time. But even the taint of having been called and having invoking the Fifth Amendment was enough to get people blacklisted or bring the IRS down on them. By the time Hellman was called to testify, her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett, had already been in and out of jail, blacklisted, and attacked by the IRS with the result that any further income he might accrue in his lifetime would be going directly to them. When Hellman was called, in 1952, she refused, essentially, to cooperate. She offered, in a letter to the committee, to answer all questions about herself fully but said she would not answer questions about anyone else. This offer was refused, and so Hellman was forced to take the Fifth. But the committee made the mistake of making this letter public, and the immediate support for her position in the press basically shielded her from further prosecution, meaning no jail time. But she knew her living as an author of plays and screenplays was over, and that her income would be drying up immediately. She instantly put the farm she'd lived on most of her life in Westchester, NY, up for sale. Her life was changed irrevocably, just by the fact of having been called and refusing to throw anybody else under the bus.

At any rate, Hellman was a wonderful writer, and this short memoir (around 115 pages all told), provides an extremely vivid account of the tension, sadness, anger and frustration of those times for her. She waited until 1975 to finally publish an account of the episode, saying early in the book that she'd tried twice before to write about it all but hadn't liked what she came up with. The fear of being called, the dread when the subpoena finally came, the tense weeks when she tried to figure out what to do about it, the fury Hammett expressed* at the strategy she came up with, at the encouragement of her lawyers, the actual experience of testifying and the impact of it all on her subsequent life are all vividly rendered, including not a small amount of dry humor in the telling.

* Hammett thought Hellman's strategy (the offer to testify about herself but no others) was mad and sure to land her in jail, which he didn't think she was cut out for.

Here is a relevant early quote, in which Hellman talks about the origins and nature of McCarthyism. She marks the real start with the Marxist Revolution in China:

"The fear of Communism did not begin that year, but the new China, allied in those days with Russia, had a more substantial base and there were many host men and women who were, understandably, frightened that their pleasant way of life could end in a day.

It was not the first time in history that the confusions of honest people were picked up in space by cheap baddies who, hearing a few bars of popular notes, made them into an opera of public disorder, staged and sung, as much of the congressional testimony shows, in the wards of an insane asylum

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant. The anti-Red theme was easily chosen from the grab bag, not alone because we were frightened of socialism, but chiefly, I think, to destroy the remains of Rooosevelt and his sometimes advanced work. . . . It is impossible to remember the drunken face of McCarthy, merry often with a kind of worldly malice, as if he were mocking those who took him seriously, and believe that he himself could take seriously anything but his boozed-up nightmares."

I highly recommend this short, vivid memoir, written by an exceptional writer, that provides an incisive look at the folly of those days and the personal price paid by the people that came under the glare of these cynical, incompetent, opportunistic politicians and the great public, including the press for the most part, who acquiesced for so long.

>259 rocketjk: Interesting. Do kids get a different view of history in US schools these days?

>261 AlisonY: I couldn't say. In states with with conservative leanings, there is a lot of harrumphing about teaching students about the history of systemic racism in America, with some state legislatures even passing laws to ban it. I would imagine that curricula in states with Democratic majorities, and especially with relatively large Black constituencies, have made much more progress, or at least are in the process of doing so. I hope so, but I'm not really sure.

ETA: Having just reread your comments in >258 AlisonY:, specifically regarding . . .

"Perhaps, therefore, she pointedly wanted to not make the narrative one that focused on the imposed restrictions of a community, but rather one that focused on a self-sufficient one."

Yes, I have the exact same conjecture.

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford



The is a recent (2020) collection of longish short stories by Ford, best known, perhaps, as the author of The Sportswriter (and three other novels about that book's protagonist, Frank Bascombe). These stories are mostly about relatively successful people who are at or post middle age. In one way or another, the characters here are all navigating the dimming of expectations that that time of life can engender. Marriages are either over or have become everyday and humdrum. Ford, as I think is usual for him, spends a lot of time describing his characters' histories and states of mind. This might all sound tedious, and in some of the stories (the book's final tale, "Second Language," in particular) it is. But in the book's better entries, Ford still displays an ability to put his characters into relatable situations, and give them enough self-awareness of their own foibles to create sympathy in the reader. He also generally avoids marching the storylines to predictable endings. I guess Ford's writing style is not necessarily for everyone. I found most of these tales enjoyable and gave the whole schmear 3 1/2 stars.

>263 rocketjk: I've really liked Ford's short stories in the past (I do like stories about vaguely dissatisfied white dudes, for reasons unknown to me) but ever since reading about his shameful behavior towards Colson Whitehead, I've been unable to pick up anything by him.

I wasn't aware of that story. Pretty awful.

>264 RidgewayGirl: I just read an article about Richard Ford, who spat in the face of Colson Whitehead after the younger author wrote a negative review about one of his books. Ford, a Mississippian, refused to apologize to Whitehead for that shameful act, which reminds me of white segregationists in the Deep South spitting in the faces of blacks who dared to insist on their civil rights. That's more than enough to keep me from ever reading anything by Ford.

>263 rocketjk: I've only read The Sportswriter by Ford, but it left me pretty cold so I've not reached for anything further by him. I hated the character Bascombe. Although a similar kind of plot to books from Richard Yates or John Updike, I found real heart in their characters despite repeating themes of selfish adulterers. Ford's character was just impossible to find any redeeming features in.

>267 AlisonY: I read The Sportswriter a long time ago, but I remember liking it, due in particular to Ford's writing style, and to the fact that I felt sympathy for Bascombe for (as I remember it) his continued sorrow over his wife having left him. But I don't recall her reasons for leaving him (iow, I didn't recall that he was an adulterer). Perhaps what I remember seeing as sorrowful introspection, you and others are seeing as self-absorption. A reread at this point (which is highly unlikely to be forthcoming) might very well change my perspective. As I said, it was a long time ago that I read the book, and I haven't read any of the three subsequent Bascombe books.

>268 rocketjk: Ahh - you're right: I just checked my review and he wasn't an adulterer. However, I seemed to find him a total cold fish in terms of how he treated the women in his life after his marriage broke up which is what must have been nagging in my mind. Ah well - we all get different experiences out of what we read.

>269 AlisonY: "Ah well - we all get different experiences out of what we read."

Amen to that!

Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Captain David Grief is a South Seas adventurer, a self-made millionaire, tycoon merchant during the days of the sailing ships, with engines just beginning to come on the scene. I kept thinking of Grief as sort of a South Seas Bruce Wayne. At any rate, London, of course, was a great writer of adventure stories. In these seven tales, Grief is always the hero, almost always the smartest one on the ship or in the village. There's not much going on below the surface in these stories. Sometimes the villains and/or fools are other Europeans, sometimes they're the island inhabitants. This collection was originally published in 1911 under the title "A Son of the Sun." The assumptions about European cultural superiority one would expect from fiction of that time are here, but, are less overt than I was fearing they would be when I took this slim volume down off my pulp paperback shelves. I did have fun reading these.

Book note: My copy is a beautiful second printing Paperback Library edition from 1957.

The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie by Ira Berkow



This is a fascinating, well-written book biography. Lou Brissie's story is quite something. A teenage pitching phenom in his native South Carolina in the late 1930s, Brissie interrupted his promising baseball career to enlist in the Army after Pearl Harbor. When he went off to war, he already had a commitment from Connie Mack, the longtime owner/manager of the Philadelphia A's. Mack was going to sign Brissie and then pay for him to go to college for three years, an arrangement that provides an idea of how much potential Brissie was seen to have.

But Brissie's leg was shattered during an artillery attack in Italy in 1944 and he had to beg the doctors not to amputate. Luckily for Brissie, he found one Army doctor willing to try to save the leg. Brissie went through multiple operations--his leg bone was essentially fused together from the fragments the exploding artillery shell had left behind--and he had to wear a cumbersome brace to walk, let along pitch in the major leagues. And yet pitch in the major leagues, he did, and quite effectively, despite that leg brace and the essentially constant pain he endured. In fact, Brissie was extremely well known during the post-war years as an inspiration for wounded veterans and kids with handicaps. It's surprising and more than a bit sad that his story has been largely forgotten.

Brissie was comfortable around blacks and happy to be teammates with black ballplayers, not something to be taken for granted in those early days of the integration of Major League Baseball, especially given Brissie's Southern upbringing. During the Depression, Brissie's father, a former daredevil motorcycle rider, had had a cycle repair shop in their small South Carolina town and had a black friend as a full business partner. For this sin, one night the Klan pulled Brissie's father out of their home and beat him severely in their front yard in front of the family, breaking two ribs, then lit a cross ablaze in front of the house. The lessons Brissie took from this was admiration for his father's courage and a hatred of racism.

Brissie was still alive when Berkow was working on the book (the book was published in 2009 and Brissie died in 2013) and sat for extensive interviewing. He comes across as an extremely thoughtful fellow. Berkow, a Pulitzer Prize winning jouralist, is a fine writer who clearly had a strong connection to his subject for this biography. I highly recommend this book for readers with an interest in American history and with even a passing interest in baseball.

Great review of The Corporal Was a Pitcher, Jerry. I'm quite surprised that I had never heard of Lou Brissie, given that he played for the Philadelphia Athletics and died in Augusta, Georgia. I've added it to my wish list, and I'll see if the Atlanta library system has a copy of it.

>273 kidzdoc: Yes, Darryl, it's really surprising to me, too, that Brissie's story isn't much better known. The book's quite nicely written. I think you'd enjoy it very much.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer



This is an intriguing and memorable book that effectively melds memoir, Native American history and philosophy, ecology and plant science, with a reverie about nature and a sad, frustrated, pained warning about the destructive nature of Western civilization's highly commodified* nature. Kimmerer is herself a Native American who has melded her people's ancient philosophies of human's integral role and caretaker's responsibilities with Nature to the scientific establishment's perspective as scientist as observer rather than participant via her own academic studies as a botanist and ecologist. Kimmerer takes us through several personal memories, such as making maple syrup with her two daughters from the trees that stand on their own property, and shares a lot of fascinating information about the ways that diverse species of plants and animals cooperate in nature to the benefit of all. Her book is in many ways a plea that humans return to a role of participation in that cooperation rather and discard industrial society's determination to obstruct and destroy these cycles in the service of profit and material comfort for those with the wherewithal to buy it.

Kimmerer is a very good writer, an element that is particularly crucial to an ambitious endeavor like this one. I would think the book would be extremely thought provoking to anyone already inclined to read it. Our own lifestyle choices and even our daily decisions have meaning and consequence, and this book is a very good reminder of those truths. Some of Kimmerer's examples of the destructive nature of industrialized society's policies are heartbreaking, and it's not hard to feel chagrin (to put it mildly) at the degree to which it is all too easy to turn a blind eye to things that are in plain sight before us.

There are numerous examples of all of these factors, the good and the bad and the wondrous, provided here. It was entirely understandable to me why Kimmerer felt it necessary to provide so many. Each is a little different, of course, and together they form a stronger whole than any would provide on it's own. And yet, at a certain point in the reading, things did bog down somewhat for me. Even though, as I mentioned, I understood the need for length, I did feel at some point that I'd gotten the point, particularly when it came to Kimmerer's presentation of Native American mythology, practice and philosophy. (It's not like the book's a doorstop. My paperback edition comes in at 384 pages.) Well, anyway, that's just me. All in all, this is a beautiful if often heartbreaking book, an invaluable eye-opener and reminder, entirely and emphatically (for me, anyway) worth reading.

* What is meant by "commodified" is, for example, the idea of a forest as some company's property to be exploited for profit rather than employed mindfully and, mostly, protected for the benefit of all. And by "all," Kimmerer means all beings, not just humans.

>275 rocketjk: Braiding Sweetgrass has turned up in conversations over and over in the past month or so, so I put a library hold on it. Hopefully it'll come in after the next month of work reading.

>275 rocketjk: I loved Braiding Sweetgrass for all the reasons you mention. I will also admit to getting a bit bogged down in the middle. I still walked away with a very favorable impression though, and have highly recommended it to people. Because the book had an essay-style feel to me, I think it's reasonable to not connect to every single chapter the same way.

The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker



This is one of the most disturbing, depressing books I've read in a long time, which is going a ways since I've been gradually reading through my friend Kim's list of important books about African American history and, especially, racism in America. This book is exactly what the title suggests, a history of the process of bringing slaves to the Americas from Africa. Rediker has created a comprehensive and very well written narrative. He tells of the cultures and kingdoms of Western Africa who took part in kidnapping members of other groups, marching them sometimes hundreds of miles to the coast and selling them to European slave traders. He uses first person accounts to describe what it was like to be one of those captured in that way. He finishes up by talking about the abolitionist movement and how the practice was finally brought to an end. But mostly Rediker describes the horror and despair the kidnapped experienced aboard the slave ships themselves. And, in addition, the violence, cruelty and high mortality rates experienced not just by the enslaved, but by crew members as well. For common sailors had an aversion to the trade and the danger, and most often had to be coerced in one way or another to man the slave ships. The power of the captains of the slave trade was absolute, and their cruelty, often wanton, toward both crew and "cargo" was notorious. But, to be sure, the main horror was experienced by the enslaved, stuffed into cramped quarters below deck for most of the day and night, chained together, with barely space to breath, and whipped at the slightest provocation. Rediker also makes clear that the enslaved resisted however they could, through uprisings when possible, refusing to eat and often committing suicide when the chance presented itself. And, of course, the people making the real money were sitting in offices in America and England. The book, very well written, as I said above, is a detailed horror show from beginning to end. If you can put yourself through it, though, it is important reading, a crucial, fundamental part of the American and European story.

Excellent review of The Slave Ship: A Human History, Jerry. I'll certainly add it to my wish list.

I could never understand why slaves were transported in such inhumane conditions with a high mortality rate. It seems as the ship owners would have earned far more money if more of the slaves survived the Middle Passage, and they would have been in better condition for sale at slave markets in North and South America if they had been treated better. (Needless to say this is a very dispassionate view I'm taking, especially since several of my ancestors made that horrific journey across the Atlantic.)

>279 kidzdoc: Thanks Darryl.

Rediker provides a couple of factors that address your point. One important factor was that the crews of the slaving ships were in constant fear of uprisings, which occurred much more frequently than I had understood before reading this book. The ships were outfitted with several specific defenses against slave insurrections, including swivel guns that covered the deck and could be manned when necessary, and metal fencing between the slave quarters and the bridge area behind which the crew could retreat and through which they could add gunfire at uprising slaves. Nevertheless, the enslaved, who were often willing, even determined, to die rather than to continue living the painful and degrading existence they'd been kidnapped into, rose up whenever they could work themselves out of their chains. At any rate, that was one reason to keep the slaves terrorized and weak as much as possible.

Another was that, especially given that a mortality rate was expected among both "cargo" and crew on these voyages, the more enslaved people who could be crammed into the holds of those ships, the higher the potential profit both for the ship captains (and sometimes the officers) and the ships' owners, as well.

One more factor is that the sailors on these ships were generally forced into service in one way or another. On the British ships in particular, the sailors had often been tricked into running up tavern debts they couldn't pay, and then given a choice between serving aboard a slave ship or rotting in debtors' prison. Many would normally have chosen prison terms, in fact, but they knew that when they came out, captains of any merchant ships, slavers or otherwise, had a prejudice against hiring "jail birds," meaning that by choosing prison, sailors were losing their means of livelihood entirely. So, knowing that the sailors were aboard ship unwillingly, captains kept control harshly. Whippings and other corporal punishment of crew members was frequent. All that to say that in a typical "divide and conquer" strategy, crew members were allowed, even encouraged to a certain degree, to pass along their own ill treatment to the only outlet available to them, the enslaved. (Though, as your question implies, this had to be balanced with the need to keep the "cargo" in saleable condition.) Rape of the female slaves was an all too constant occurance.

Finally, there was an idea that the slave ships played a part in conditioning these kidnapped but recently free and independent people for their future lives in slavery.

Thanks for your detailed and very informative replies to my questions, Jerry.

You're welcome, Darryl. I hope you understood that I was answering in a relatively dispassionate manner (as you put it) in order to give you a comprehensive answer. Be assured that my actual reaction to the book was one of horror rather than academic interest (although, of course, that, too). I had trouble sleeping while I was reading this and more than once, because of it, since.

Yes, I certainly understood your relatively dispassionate, and perfectly appropriate, reply, Jerry. Thank you for taking the time to do so!

Mucho thanks for that trailer, I loved seeing it! "Don't fall down... DON'T FALL DOWN...!!!" *thunk* :D

Catching up on your thread. Such interesting books you read. As a former Beatlemaniac I had to check >234 rocketjk: Glimpses out on Amazon (and what a lovely story about how you acquired it). Lo and behold it was only $4.99 on Kindle, so I purchased it, and hope to someday read it.
I currently have Obama's memoir out of the library, but not sure I'm motivated to read it fast enough to complete before the due date. Seems like it might have to be one I own and read at my leisure.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is one I read with my book club probably 25 years ago now, and I don't remember it well, other than that I didn't really connect with it. I want to reread it now, though.

>284 LolaWalser: I thought you would like that! Really glad you did. Thanks for letting me know.

By the way, I can't remember if I told you this or not (I probably did), but I was fascinated by your review of John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon and ordered it. It's on my "short list" TBR. I will be sure to let you know when I have a review up, though given the height/length of my "short list," it still might be a while!

Cheers!

>285 arubabookwoman: Sincere thanks for the kind words. I will be very interesting to read how you enjoy Glimpses if/when you get to it.

>285 arubabookwoman: I was going to offer to pass along the copy Jerry sent me, if it survives another reading, but I'm glad you got your own copy. I have a bunch of work reading and a book club book over the next month, but I think it's up in the queue after that.

>285 arubabookwoman: I was going to offer to pass along the copy of Glimpses that Jerry sent me, if it survives another reading, but I'm glad you got your own copy. I have a bunch of work reading and a book club book over the next month, but I think it's up in the queue after that.

Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight



Time for something fun! Death Blew Out the Match is a "Golden Age" mystery, first published in 1935 and the first entry in Knight's "Elisha Macomber" series, set on Martha's Vineyard. When copywriter Anne Waldron loses her job (it's the Depression, after all), she falls back to her cabin in the island town of Penberthy Village. Her friend, Hazel Kershaw (Kerch), a nurse also newly jobless, joins her there. In a nearby cabin, a famous playwright, Marya Van Wyck, is suddenly murdered. Anne and Kerch find the body . . . and off we go! There are lots of plot twists and strange goings on, here, that make the reading fun. The writing is crisp and there is a pleasing amount of sly humor, self-deprecating often, as Anne, our first person narrator, has plenty of opportunity to doubt her own credentials as a sleuth. So this was a good time.

As noted above, this is the first book in a series that has 16 entries! Elisha Macomber is the town's only policeman, with a down-to-earth sense of humor of his own and plenty of smarts, as well. I wonder whether Anne continues to narrate the series, or whether Knight provided different perspectives in the rest of the novels. I might someday read further in the set, but I'm in the midst of so many series already at the moment that I'm not planning on forging ahead here right away.

I looked up Knight just to see what I could find out about her. It turns out that she published upwards of 40 mysteries, all published by Doubleday Doran's "Crime Club" imprint. I found one fun interview with her, originally published in the Boston Daily Globe in 1946 with the headline, "Kathleen Moore Knight Pictured Corpses All Over Martha’s Vineyard - Then Wrote." And does that remind us of anything? Here's a quote:

“One day I happened to be looking out of the window and wondering what it would be like if the island homes around me housed murderers; in my own imagination I scattered the landscape with corpses and before I knew it, a detective story was born,” Miss Knight recalled.

Full interview here: https://readinggoldenagemysteries.blogspot.com/2021/02/kathleen-moore-knight-194...

Book note: My copy is a first edition hardback, sans jacket, that I found at some used bookstore or thrift store or other somewhere along the line. I chose it more or less at random off my shelves because, as I said, I was looking for something light. On the inside front cover of my copy I find the ex libris sticker, "From the Library of Vesta Harvey" It looks like this as a library book, also, as there are a series of handwritten dates, with the earliest being April 1973 and the latest August 1997.

The Atlantic Monthly - January 1959, Volume 203, Number 1



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This was another off the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my home office closet that I'm gradually reading through. This issue wasn't as consistently interesting as some of the others I've read recently, though there were some noteworthy entries. The cover article, "Admiral Rickover's Gamble: the Landlocked Submarine" by Commander E.E. Kintner, describes Rickover's campaign to sell the idea of an atomic submarine to the U.S. government and joint chiefs, and his insistence that a full scale prototype be built and tested on dry land before anything got put in the water. The details of this process, including the various tests and the unknowns successfully overcome, made very interesting reading, whatever one's thoughts atomic power, and atomic submarines in particular, might be.

George Kennan's essay about the American military expeditions in Russia immediately after World War I provides an excellent overview of that now mostly forgotten chapter.

Ralph Samuelson's short story, "A Beautiful Game," about racism in the country club tennis world, was well written and engaging.

The issue also included the final installment of the Atlantic serialization of a novel called "Sigh for a Strange Land" by Monica Stirling. Well, I was not about to read the final section of a novel, not having read the first parts, was I? So I went online and ordered the full novel. It looks very good, and Stirling's story is interesting, as well. I am going to be reading that book soon, so details will have to wait until then!

Those are the highlights.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt



The Righteous Mind is psychologist/ethicist Jonathan Haidt's attempt to understand and explain why humans can come to see things so differently from each other and, most importantly, to become so set in our ways that we see people who disagree with us on important matters as enemies and/or fools.

The book, for me, works best in its first half, as Haidt lays out his research and his theories about human perceptions, how we form opinions, and what drives our responses. Essentially, his theory, based on his research, comes down to his belief that our subconscious really provides the bulk of our opinions, which are generally pre-conceived rather than based on new information, and that our conscious mind is mostly responsible for coming up with rationalizations to fit those preconceptions. If you have ever read an essay or article by someone with an opinion that's the opposite of yours, for example, and found yourself actively looking for the faults in the logic rather than trying to learn from the author's experience or perceptions, you'll understand Heidt's basic idea. He calls the subconscious the "elephant," because it's so big and powerful, and the conscious mind the "rider," because it is only nominally able to steer the beast. All this makes for interesting, and somewhat convincing, information, although Haidt's habit of turning the narrative into a semi-memoir by relating his own progression through various theories ("First I thought this, and then I saw different research, so then I thought that.") was distracting to me.

As Haidt describes it (and again, he also details his research), most humans' perceptions of the world are based on five factors, what he calls "foundational concepts," but in different proportions for different people. He identifies these as "Care/Harm," "Fairness/Cheating," "Loyalty/Betrayal," "Authority/Subversion," "Sanctity/Degradation." He says that a major difference between how liberals and conservatives view the world is that Conservatives react strongly to all five of these foundations, but that liberals are driven chiefly by only two: Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating.

All that's all fine, and there are other interesting points made, as well, especially Haidt's description of the idea that group/societal evolution has gone hand in hand with individual human evolution. His ideas about the benefits of religion seem much more forced, however. And in the book's second half, he seems more to be trying to force all of the foregoing information over his own ideas of politics and culture. He begins doing things like describing another researcher's theory and then proceeding to further conclusions based on that theory as if we had reason to accept the theory as fact. Towards the end, I must admit, I began skimming. So I give the first half of this book 3.5 stars, and the second half 2 stars. I do give Haidt credit for clear writing, relatively free of doze-inducing scientific jargon.

I generally don't read these sorts of books, but a group of my friends organized a group read and periodic discussion group, which my wife and I decided to join. Unfortunately, my need to finish Barak Obama's 900-page memoir on schedule for my regular monthly reading group pushed me behind in my reading of Righteous Mind, so I had to drop out of the discussion. Being already around 2/3 of the way through, though, I decided to push through and finish Haidt's book nevertheless.

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson



The subtitle for Larson's latest is "A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz," which is a pretty good description. This is a history of the first year of Churchill's time as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. I was mostly already familiar with the circumstances of the Battle of Britain, but Larson, in focusing in on this one year and in the Churchill family's experience of the event, adds a lot of detail that was new, and interesting, to me. The details about Churchill's key advisors, what they accomplished and how they supported Churchill, for example, worked very well for me, as did the descriptions of Churchill's desperate attempts to encourage Roosevelt to do as much as he could, in the face of very stubborn American politics and isolationism, to support England's war effort. The horrifying narratives about individual nights of the Blitz, where the bombs fell on particular nights, what damage was done during each raid, and how diarists described the events, helped to transform the Blitz for me from a general impression of calamity, fear and death to a succession of individual desperately fearful human disasters. In other words, I had come to think of "the Blitz" as an event rather than a years-long series of individual nights of terror. Another strength of the book is its depiction of Churchill as an individual during these times, as seen through the eyes of the people who worked with and for him, and also the depictions of the ways in which the English people rallied around him.

The parts that didn't work quite as well for me were the sections describing the lives and experiences of Churchill's family, in particular his daughters and his son. They were essentially grown during the period being written about, and Churchill was by necessity--due to his crushing workload--largely cut off from their daily lives, though he saw his daughters (in particular) frequently. The book doesn't provide a real sense that their experiences were intruding into his own daily tasks and troubles (although his son was a horrid piece of work in particular). I understand Larson's impulse to include the children's romantic travails and experiences of the war. A person running a country in wartime is also a person with a family, and the descriptions were well done, but somehow there didn't seem to me to be a strong organic connection between the family segments and the wartime leadership chapters, the latter making up the bulk, and the central theme, of the endeavor.

Also, I didn't feel that there was enough explanation for the Blitz's end. Suddenly, it seemed to just stop without any clear reasoning from Larson, other than the fact that Hitler had launched his invasion of Russia and meant to get back to finish off England once the Russians had been dealt with. We know how that all worked out, but still I felt something missing there at the end.

All in all, though, these are a relatively minor quibbles. I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in World War Two history in general, and the Battle of Britain and Churchill in particular. I read this for my monthly book group. Strangely, given how highly Larson's previous books have been regarded, this is the first of his I've read. I'm likely to circle back and read a few of his others some time.

i have this sitting on my tbr shelf glaring at me. Perhaps your review will keep other shiny new covers (like the Matrix I just picked up) and Ill finally read this. Loved his other works, this sounds just as good

Larson’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, have been page turners. My mother was in London during the Blitz, and some of the stories she told were riveting. I think I will add this to my wishlist as it’s a time period I enjoy reading about.

>293 cindydavid4: & >294 NanaCC: I think you'll both enjoy The Splendid and the Vile. "Page turner" is a pretty good description for most of it, although there are a few more technical section about arms production and the like that flow a little less quickly.

I've not read anything by Larson either - your review intrigues me.

Ive read Isaacs Storm about a weather man who doesn't believe any storm could harm Galveston. Well....The Devil in the White City about the Chicago Worlds fair and the serial killer stalking it. Havent read Dead Wake about the Lusitania or in the garden of the beasts about the american ambassador to germany during the lead up to the Holocast

My mom read The Splendid and the Vile and loved it - it's on my TBR, I'll get to it sometime. As far as I know I haven't read any other Larson.

Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts are both excellent, I think. I have Dead Wake on the wishlist. Just so many books I really want to read.

The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell



This is a mostly fun book that traces the history of the San Francisco Giants, and the history of the city itself, during the era when the team was owned by real estate tycoon Bob Lurie. Mitchell's account is book-ended nicely, as it begins in 1976 with Lurie stepping in the buy the Giants in a last-minute act that kept the team from purchased by folks in Toronto who were going to move the team there, and ends in 1992 with Lurie's almost consummated sale of the team to moneyed interests in Tampa, before grocery store magnate Peter Magowan stepped forward at, once again basically at the last second, to save the team once again for San Francisco.

In addition to the team's ups and (all too frequently) downs on the playing field from season to season, Mitchell does a good job weaving the team's fortunes around events in the city, while also describing Lurie's frustrated attempts to get a new stadium built to replace the remote and extremely uncomfortable Candlestick Park. It was the newly elected progressive mayor, George Moscone, who was to a great extent responsible for finding Lurie and bringing him into the Giants picture. Not long after Lurie's purchase of the team, however, Moscone was assassinated, along with SF City Counsel member and famed LGBT activist Harvey Milk, by disgruntled former counselman Dan White. These events, the AIDS epidemic that affected San Francisco so dramatically, the city and country's economic difficulties and San Francisco's mostly progressive political climate all created an environment in which voters were understandably skeptical of the idea of voting municipal dollars to allow millionaires to build sports facilities. Four voter referendums for creating new stadiums failed: two in San Francisco, one in Santa Clara, and one in San Jose.

At the same time, Mitchell aptly describes the team management's mostly fumbling attempts to improve the team on the field during Lurie's early tenure. Only, according to Mitchell, with the hiring of Al Rosen as general manager, and Rosen's subsequent hiring of Roger Craig as field manager, did the team's roster and play begin to improve. Mitchell takes us through those horrid seasons of the late 70s, the slight rise and quick fall of the early 80s, and then the comparative glory years when a young Will Clark led a team resurgence that brought a short but memorable glory period that was sadly short-circuited by the 1989 earthquake that hit the Bay Area just as Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and the A's was about to be played at Candlestick.

There are times when Mitchell's writing seems a bit less than fully professional. Events are sometimes described twice more or less in the same passage. There are occasional grammatical errors and typos, too, that seem to speak to a lack of proper editing. And Mitchell seems to not have fully decided whether he's writing for a baseball-knowledgeable audience or for an audience that is less sophisticated in that manner. So, for example, individual statistics, like OPS+, are often used without explanation to help define players' seasons, but other, more basic baseball ideas are explained in full. But while these sorts of quibbles did detract from the reading experience, overall I think Mitchell did a fine job with his history.

On a personal note, I moved to San Francisco in 1986, so a little short of halfway through the period the book covers. I enjoyed reliving some of my own experiences following the team and attending games at the basically horrid (certainly horrid for night games) Candlestick Park. One thing that Mitchell does get right, I think, is the complicated relationship between the team and the city's citizens, and the ways in which team management recognized the particular aspects of the San Francisco mindset and used that understanding to create whimsical marketing campaigns that, even in the team's most dismal periods, kept them in the city's imagination and affection.

For baseball fans only, no doubt. This book was a birthday present from my darling wife.

Candlestick - I made a game in late June (1995) and swear I nearly froze to death in my shorts, trying to withstand the unexpected mid-50 temp and crazy wind. Otherwise, unfortunately, I don't remember much of the stadium.

Catching up here, and enjoyed reading about all these books. Glad you go so much out of There Eyes Were Watching God. I love that Hurston hunted down and interviewed '28 storm survivors and get a more accurate sense of it. (The flooding was made catastrophic because of levees built on the south side of the lake, which were breached. And the impact was actually hushed by Florida officials from fear of bad PR...and likely because most of the dead where impoverished black farmers. So, she scoped out a somewhat hidden story.)

>301 dchaikin: "I love that Hurston hunted down and interviewed '28 storm survivors and get a more accurate sense of it. . . . "

I never knew any of that. Thanks! Clearly I need to read more about Hurston.

San Francisco Life Magazine - Volume VI, No. 5 - April, 1938 edited by E. I. Campbell



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another of the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my office closet that I've been gradually reading through. This one is so slight that I would have skipped listing it here were it not for a couple of items that caught my attention, one historical and one personal.

The publication was clearly one meant specifically for members of San Francisco high society, or for those with an interest in following their exploits. There are two or three "Who's Been Seen Where?"-type columns, with all of the names and events of the upper crust variety. I scanned through these, wondering, as I lived in San Francisco for 22 years, beginning, however, 48 years after the publication of this magazine, whether I'd recognize any of the names, or at least the family names. I was surprised that I did not, but maybe I shouldn't have been.

The one particularly interesting column was a lament about the tearing down of the Columbia (nee Orpheum) Theater, opened in 1887, destroyed in the fire following the earthquake of 1906, and then rebuilt, and about to be finally taken down in 1938. The unnamed writer chronicles the theater's highlights, including dramatic and comedic plays and the venue's long run as a vaudeville house.

The ads are fun, of course. If I still lived in San Francisco it might be a fun project to go around to all the addresses of the businesses advertised here, taking pictures of what exists at those locations, now. My guess is that I wouldn't find a single of those businesses still operating. Could be a cool blog, though.

One advertisement really caught my attention, however, and this is the "historic" item mentioned above. The entire back cover of the magazine is taken up by an advertisement for a newspaper called The San Francisco News. More specifically, the advertisers are letting us know about an upcoming series ("An Article a Day -- for 30 Days!") called "Roosevelt's Own Story." "An entirely new, dramatic account of the New Deal--by the man who made it!" First, I was sort of surprised that the paper would think it useful to advertise a series about the creation of the New Deal on the back cover of this clearly upper class, and thereby presumably Republican, magazine. But what really grabbed my attention was the newspaper's slogan: "San Francisco's complete, white, Home Newspaper." Wait . . . white? Don't worry: I'm well aware that there is, was, and has always been racism of all sorts in San Francisco, as everywhere in the U.S. But that seemed pretty blatant to me. I wondered whether the term meant what I thought it meant, or whether maybe they were differentiating themselves from the "yellow journalism" of the Hearst newspapers.

I did my best to run an online search and came up with a brief wikipedia entry that says, in part, "The Daily News, later titled The San Francisco News, was a newspaper published in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1903 by E. W. Scripps as a four-page penny paper. In its early years, it was the smallest of the several newspapers in San Francisco. It advertised itself as the "friend of the working man." It was distributed only in working class districts: Mission District, Skid Row, South of the Slot. It specialized in short, easy-to-read stories one to two paragraphs long. After the 1906 earthquake, it operated out of a former 720 sq ft 'relief house.' It changed its name to The San Francisco News in 1927, and in August 1959 merged with Hearst's The Call Bulletin to form the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin."

Well, I have learned in quite a bit of reading about San Francisco history that all the way up to World War 2 (when China became our allies in the war), "friend of the working man" in San Francisco usually meant something along the lines of "friend of the white working man" to the exclusion, specifically and often emphatically, of Asian immigrant workers. But, wow, again, pretty blatant! According to that wikipedia entry, copies and clippings of the newspaper are on file for public view in San Francisco, so, again, if I still lived in town . . .

I was also somewhat pleasantly surprised, given the general hum of antisemitism that ran through American upper classes in those days, the following letter (excerpted) to the editor in the front of the magazine from the president of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center:

"Please accept our sincere thanks for your splendid cooperation in according space to the Jewish Community Center in the columns of your paper. We feel that this valuable publicity has helped in bringing to the attention of the public the recreational-educational program offered by the center."

In the April 1938 edition of San Francisco Life, that "cooperation" consisted basically of listing the center's events in the listings of Arts and Lecture events at the back of the magazine. In any event, I scanned the lectures column interested mainly in seeing if I'd recognize any names. I recognized one: "Dr. Joachim Prinz, Jewish Center, Topic: The Future of World Jewry." The reason this jumped to my attention was that almost exactly 30 years after this magazine was published, June 22, 1968, to be exact, Dr. Prinz, as rabbi of Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark, NJ, stood beside me at the front of that temple as I was bar mitzvahed! So that's the personal note I mentioned above. I wasn't that surprised to see Rabbi Prinz's name as a speaker. I remember Rabbi Prinz as a very kind man who sometimes came to our Hebrew School classes (although there was a younger associate rabbi who mostly handled this job.) He had been a figure of the American Jewish Community since fleeing Nazism (he'd been a rabbi in Berlin) in 1937. He also became prominent in the American Civil Rights movement and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington rally shortly before Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. A quick online search will yield several photos of Prinz with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, including meetings at the White House with JFK. (Looks like there is a children's book coming out in November about them! -- https://www.amazon.com/Rabbi-Reverend-Joachim-against-Silence/dp/1541589769)

Well, gee, that's a pretty long essay for a 46-page magazine!

>304 rocketjk: I recognized one: "Dr. Joachim Prinz, Jewish Center, Topic: The Future of World Jewry." The reason this jumped to my attention was that almost exactly 30 years after this magazine was published, June 22, 1968, to be exact, Dr. Prinz, as rabbi of Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark, NJ, stood beside me at the front of that temple as I was bar mitzvahed!

what a small world!will have to check out that book! incidently there is also a film the same name in 2014, about his work helping the Jews of Berlin and encouraging many to emigrate. " Prinz died in 1988 and Pasternak, whose grandparents attended B’nai Abraham, felt a sense of urgency in producing the film as many of the rabbi’s contemporaries were passing."

>305 cindydavid4: "will have to check out that book!"

Me, too! I have, in fact, found the author's website and sent her an email. I would love to be able to buy a few copies some way other than via amazon, which I loathe. Perhaps it's possible to buy them directly from the publisher. If she responds, I will ask her that. As I should have noted, there is also a documentary on Dr. Prinz's life (which, I'm more than a little chagrined to say I haven't seen, yet):

http://www.prinzdocumentary.org/

Nice review of The Giants and Their City, Jerry. I attended several SF Giants games in the early 2000s, but all were at what was then called Pac Bell Park. I attended mostly weekday games when I was on vacation, but I did go to at least one night game in the middle of summer. I remember buying a leather coat and gloves to go to the game, but I still froze my tail off!

I loved the Gilroy Garlic Fries that were sold at Giants games.

Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling



Monica Stirling was a correspondent in Europe for the Atlantic Monthly Press both during World War 2 and afterwards. According to the short bio of her on the dusk jacket of this novel, "Monica Stirling belongs to a theater family. Her father, the late Edward Stirling, founded the English Theater in Paris and took his company all over Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Her mother, Margaret Vaughan, is an actress, and her sister, Pamela, who trained in Louis Jouvet's class at the Paris Conservatoire, was the first English actress to be admitted into the Comédie-Française company. Miss Stirling started writing during the war and was encouraged by Edward Weeks, of the Atlantic Monthly, who bought her first stories. In I944 the Atlantic sent her home to France as their war correspondent."

Sigh for a Strange Land is a short novel about displacement and alienation, but also about love. Our protagonist is Resi, a teenage girl being brought up by her Aunt Natasha. As the novel opens, is on the way to fetch her aunt out of the hospital, where she is, essentially, suffering nothing more serious than the consequences of an all-night bender. (The novel's opening line is, "On the day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk.") But the streets are mostly empty, save for a few people seemingly scurrying to shelter. And as the two head home together, tanks have arrived, shelling has begun, dead bodies start to cover the streets and buildings are afire. They find Natasha's lifelong friend, Boris, and soon the trio are packed into a bus on its way to the frontier, where they suddenly transformed into refugees. Now what?

Stirling's writing here is hallucinatory and somewhat fable-like, adding to the sense of confusion and alienation. We're never told what country and what revolution we're in, or what country is over that frontier. But given the book's 1958 publishing date, the tanks and the confusion, the implication is clear that Resi, Natasha and Boris have escaped the Hungarian uprising and landed in Austia. The books themes about dislocation are clear. Resi's parents are dead but between her parents and her grandparents, she has the blood of four nations in her. Natasha and Boris have bounced around Europe, sometimes apart, sometimes together, since, as members of the Russian upper classes, they were run out of their homes by the Russian Revolution. All of this is very effective and compelling during the book's first half to two thirds, but by the final section, for me at least, the storyline flattens, as the sense of doom and horror fade.

Still, this is a very interesting and often powerful novel, also of note for its spot in history and its author's interesting story, as well. The only photograph of Stirling I could find online is one of her in olive drab sitting in an American jeep with the famed correspondent Lee Miller in Paris in 1945. I discovered this novel only because in an old copy of Atlantic Magazine I was reading (see Post 82, above) appeared the final installment of the book's serialization in that magazine. Reading the final section of the book would never do, but, curious, I immediately order it online. I do recommend Sigh for a Strange Land. Even the sections that were quite as good as other were still fine, all in all.

Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley



I remember when this book was originally published in 2014, hearing Smiley interviewed about it on, I believe, the NPR show Fresh Air, and thinking, "That sounds interesting." A few months back I found the book on our local library sale table and scooped it up. And, in fact, Smiley's book about MLK is interesting, indeed.

It is also a sad book. That final year of King's life almost exactly encompasses the speech in which he strongly and unequivocally condemned the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration's execution of that war. King was strongly condemned both within and without of the Civil Rights movement for this action. He was told by whites, conservatives and liberals alike, that he should stick to civil rights and leave politics and the war in particular to the people who knew what they were talking about. From within the movement, many of his closest advisors felt strongly that King was basically taking his eye off the ball and, worse, risking alienating the liberal whites who had been the movements allies up until then. The FBI stepped up their campaign of hounding King and executing their disinformation campaign against him. And at the same time, more radical Blacks in the Panthers and SNCC criticized King from the left, accusing him and his insistence on non-violence of becoming increasingly irrelevant. King came up with the idea of a Poor Person's March on Washington, as he began identifying a 3-pronged system of oppression in America: racism, poverty and militarism. Even within his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King faced growing discontent with this idea. One of the most bitter blows to King was longtime friend and ally Bayard Rustin's spurning of the Poor Person's March idea. Rustin thought this was a waste of time and money. He thought the time for mass demonstrations of this sort had passed, and wanted to focus on getting more legislators elected who would help them pursue their policy goals in Congress. In all, Smiley portrays King's final year as harrowing and disheartening. King began to muse ever more frequently on his own death, which he assumed was coming soon. And yet King never did fully lose heart, according to Smiley. He continued pushing for his March plan, and insisted on going to Memphis to help out with the long and bitter strike being waged by the garbage men's union there.

There were a couple of small irritations with the book for me. Smiley insisted on continually referring to MLK as "Doc," which was his nickname among his friends and advisors. I didn't feel that was necessarily appropriate here and it irked me from time to time, though not seriously. Also, Smiley relatively frequently writes as if he knows King's thoughts. He explains this in his introduction, saying he only does this when his interviews with King's close advisors reveal what these people felt sure King was thinking, or sometimes what he said to them. I was willing to give Smiley the benefit of the doubt on this effect, basically trusting that he had the ideas and emotions correct. Somebody who knew King might have a different idea.

All in all, I thought this book was very much worth reading, though frequently depressing. I had tended to think of King's live as mostly single-toned, if that makes sense. King was just King, the great man who sometimes had his missteps but was consistent in the long run. Understanding the that the enormous pressures of the times--the discord, hatred and doubt--had on King during his last year only adds to my esteem for his life and what he was able to accomplish.

Shiloh by Shelby Foote



This is a short, well written novel about the Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing), fought in southwestern Tennessee in 1862. Some historical perspective, as per the website of American Battlefield Trust: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/shiloh

"The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, allowed Union troops to penetrate the Confederate interior. The carnage was unprecedented, with the human toll being the greatest of any war on the American continent up to that date. The South’s defeat at Shiloh ended the Confederacy’s hopes of blocking the Union advance into Mississippi and doomed the Confederate military initiative in the West. With the loss of their commander, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, in battle, Confederate morale plummeted."

Foote is a well known Civil War historian, author of several detailed histories and a major contributor to Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series. The novel is a short one, only 142 pages in old fashioned pocket paperback format. (I selected it for reading more or less at random from my pulp paperback shelves.) Over the course of the book, Foote tells the story of the battle from lead up to finish, through the eyes of a variety of fictional participants, both Southern and Northern, some officers, others enlisted men. In this way, Foote is able to take us into the minds of the men who are planning and leading the battle, and into those who are only reacting to those plans and doing the actual fighting. The narrative is crisp, and the voices of the narrators believable. The book stays for the most part with the day-to-day and moment-to-moment aspects of the battle, touching only occasionally and briefly (though effectively) on the greater issues at stake in the war itself and the soldiers' motivations for fighting. (This was sometimes seen as a flaw in Foote's approach, as noted in Foote's NY Times obituary: "Some {critics} said that Mr. Foote may have played down slavery so that Southern soldiers would seem worthy heroes in the epic battles he so stirringly chronicled." Foote died in 2005 at the age of 88.

At any rate, I would say this is a very good novel about men at war and about the conditions that Civil War soldiers fought under, with the foregoing reservations.

>306 rocketjk: I get most of my books online from Bookfinder.com. Amazing site that is an umbrella for ABE, Albiris and all the independent book stores.I rarely am unable to find a book there, if you are unable to from her website

>311 cindydavid4: I use Biblio.com these days, a site designed to support independent bookstores. I jumped off the ABE caboose when I realized that they were a subsidiary of Amazon, although when I owned my own used bookstore I did use the listings on ABE as a guide to pricing.

I've had one very friendly online interaction with the author so far, but I haven't had a reply to my question about how to get the book other than from Amazon. However, once the book has been officially released, I will simply go to my closest independent new bookstore and ask them to order it for me from the publisher. Cheers!

>309 rocketjk: Enjoyed your review on the MLK book, Jerry. I was heartened to find that my oldest was studying about him and the civil rights movement in Religious Education class in secondary school. I don't remember learning about any of that stuff when I was at school.

>313 AlisonY: "I don't remember learning about any of that stuff when I was at school."

When I was at school it was all mostly still going on! I graduated high school in 1973. Glad you liked the review.

Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach



Picnic Grounds is an understated but very powerful collection of short vignettes (the fragments of the title), anywhere from a half page to a page and a half long, about life in Israel, mostly in and around Jerusalem. More specifically, they are about denial and absurdity. The "absurdity" aspect could mostly be about government deception and double-talk anywhere. But the "denial" dimension, much more prevalent overall, are about a very specific Israeli phenomenon, the historic denial of the destruction of Palestinian villages and the uprooting and banishment, sometimes the murder, of their inhabitants around the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Here is the book's opening fragment, from which it takes its title:

A professor of History from Bayit Va-Gan took his family for a picnic in a quiet pinewood near Giv'at Shaul, formerly known as Deir Yassin. It was not too cold to be in the shade and not too warm to build a fire, so the professor passed on to his son camping skills he had acquired in the army. They arranged three square stones in a U, to block the wind, leaving access on the fourth side. They stacked broken branches on top of twigs on top of dry pine needles. He let his son put a match to it. Listening carefully, they heard a faint low hum from the curves of the winding highway, hidden from view by the trees. The professor did not talk of the village, origin of the stones. He did not talk of the village school, now a psychiatric hospital, on the other side of the hill. He imagined that he and his family were having a picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its grounds outside history.

This short "fragment" becomes even more powerful if a reader recognizes Deir Yassin as the scene of an infamous massacre of Palestinian villagers by members of the far right terrorist paramilitary groups, Irgun and Lehi, in 1948. Not many of the fragments refer to specific incidents, but more to general historical patterns. A common theme, for example, is the wholesale planting of pine forests, non-indigenous trees that did harm to local ecosystems, to cover over the traces of the villages and farms that Palestinians had been evicted from. The psychic cost to individual Israelis, especially army veterans, is also alluded to.

Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968. He was in the army when the first Intifada broke out. Entirely disillusioned, he left Israel for New York City at the age of thirty. This book was published five years later, in 2003. He became an activist for Palestinian rights and Israeli protest. Or was. I could find no reference to him online any more recent than the interviews he gave in support of this book and the reviews of it. The blog he had set up seems to be inactive.

Here is a very revealing interview Shelach gave in 2003:
https://www.worldpress.org/1012.cfm

But not entirely revealing, for we have to read this approving review:

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5369983

from the Israeli publication, Haaretz, to learn this:

"We live in a small country. If we know who Oz Shelach is, a shiver goes down our spine, because it is difficult to forget what this young storyteller's connection is to Sinai {In October 1985, his entire family was killed in a terrorist attack in Ras Burqa}. But if we do not yet know who Oz Shelach is, let us be patient. No, he will not say a word about Ras Burqa, perhaps because that story has had so many interpretations that he hates, and he is telling the same story, over and over again, about our desire to escape from this country that has no history, and the return to its history, which is not our history. Again and again, nature is subverted; this is 'our' nature."

My wife picked up this slim book the last time we were at City Lights Books in San Francisco, one of my favorite spots on the planet. City Lights is also the book's publisher.

>315 rocketjk: I think a friend of mine who visits Jerusalem regularly would enjoy this one. I'll pass on your review to her.

Nice review of Death of a King, Jerry. I knew much of those details of the end of Dr King's life from my past reading, including the fabulous biography Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio, so I probably won't read Smiley's book.

I bought a copy of Picnic Grounds from City Lights many years ago (the entry date of my copy of it on LT is 3/10/07), but I haven't read it yet. I'll have to search through my stacks for it and get to it soon.

Despite my extensive travels in Western Europe, City Lights remains my all time favorite bookshop, and it is a treasure, as you mentioned. It's been several years since I've visited San Francisco, but my favorite employee there was Scott, an African American man who manned the front counter most weekday mornings and always had some great jazz on. I always enjoyed our far too short chats about jazz, books and food, and I'll have to make a trip there relatively soon to see if he still works there, and buy armloads of books, as I used to do.

I'm thawing out two pounds of frozen alligator tail meat now, and I'll make another batch of Cajun alligator sauce piquante while I listen to The Jazz Odyssey this afternoon. If you read this before the show I'd love a selection or two by Charles Mingus, if you please.

>317 kidzdoc: Mingus! You've got it, and a great idea. By the way, I have been remiss in that I haven't visited your most recent CR thread continuation, but I will catch up during the week. Cheers!

>318 rocketjk: Great! I'm way behind on visiting Club Read threads, so please take your time in visiting mine.

Indian Summer by Effie McAbee Hulbert



This memoir, written as a fictional narrative, describes the author's girlhood growing up during the late 19th century and into the early 20th century in the Yorkville and Anderson Valley region of Mendocino County, California, and about her constant, loving interactions with the native tribes of the area. My wife and I have lived in this same locale since 2008, and I have been undertaking a gradual project of reading as much as I can about local history of this singular spot on the planet.

The book begins with a brief history of the local native tribe and an imagining of their experience of the first coming of Europeans to the valley. The valley is surrounded by what were then relatively inaccessible mountains and is located generally in a remote part of northern California, so white settlers were relatively late arriving and few in number. That didn't last long, however. At any rate, Hulbert grew up in a prominent early land-owning family in the region, raised by her parents and grandparents. Her grandfather, particularly, had a strong empathy for and friendships with their Indian neighbors. Hulbert herself was back and forth constantly between the family ranch and the Indian villages and made life-long friendships there.

The book is full of descriptions of her interactions and relationships with the Indians, and descriptions, as well of events and individuals in the tribe during those years. There are many very well written details, also, of native way of lifestyle, crafts, religious practices and philosophy. But as more white ranchers come into the Valley, the Indians are squeezed more and more. Soon, just about all the land around is "owned" by whites. Whether or not the Indians can remain on land they've lived on for centuries come down to the attitudes of individual ranchers. Or, sometimes, the children who inherit land when a parent dies. The ranchers' livestock eats or tramples much of the native plant life that the Indians have long relied upon for food and medicine. Game they've relied upon for hunting becomes scarce. Tuberculosis (the "white man's disease") take a giant and ever larger toll. Infant and child mortality increases. In Hulbert's lifetime, the Indian culture in the valley essentially withers away.

So in the end it's a melancholy story, told in hindsight. And yet so many of the incidents that Hulbert relates from her childhood memories are filled with love and wisdom. Humor as well. In a way, Hulbert's attitude is a mixed bag. Obviously, her esteem for the indigenous people she has grown up among is sincere and the dominating aspect of her narrative. And yet, there is a clear paternalistic strain, as well. Indians are described at various times as "childlike" and "loyal" (as if Indians being loyal to the white settlers who were crushing their culture somehow made sense). Even her grandfather at one point tells an Indian leader who is concerned that the tribe may be forced to move to one of the reservations being set up for native tribes nearby that "if the government says the tribe has to move to a reservation, you will have to go." On the other hand, after saying this, he deeds a large part of his ranch officially over to what's left of the tribe. Since they now officially--as per the white man's law--own this tract of land, they cannot be forced to move off of it. So he means well by them and acts accordingly. But the injustice of their having to rely on his largess for their survival is only very lightly implied in Hulbert's telling.

Hulbert was a good, descriptive, writer. This book, published in plastic ring binding locally in 1988, is a very valuable source of information about the Native Americans of this specific time and place. It was, in fact, published by the Anderson Valley Historical Society, an organization of which I'm now on the Board of Directors. The Hulbert Ranch was still in evidence when my wife and I moved here, but on the land now stands a vineyard and winery.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth



This was a reread, chosen by me for my monthly book group. Roth is one of my very favorite authors, and I have some direct connections to him, as I lived my first 11 years in the exact same neighborhood in Newark, NJ, that Roth wrote about so extensively. We went to the same grammar school. My father went to the same high school Roth graduated from. So when Roth was still alive and still writing novels, I read everything he published as soon as it was available. Meaning I first read The Human Stain in 2000.

The novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's frequently appearing protagonist, like Roth a novelist from Newark. But in the The Human Stain, Zuckerman is mostly telling us the stories of others as they unfold, and as he either discovers or invents them, in a small Western Massachusetts town, the home of the similarly small, but also prestigious, Athena College. Zuckerman has retreated to this place to try to spend the end of his writing life isolated from his fame as a writer and from his tumultuous life. There he meets Coleman Silk. Silk had long been the dean of the college, responsible for dragging the institution into the modern age, hiring younger and relatively diverse instructors and administrators and gaining enemies as he rode roughshod over older sensibilities. Recently returned to the classroom, Silk is teaching a seminar at which two students on his class roster never appear. After several weeks of their absence, he asks the other students, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Alas for Silk, the two students are black, and the furnace of outrage, along with the animus of those he has offended during his tenure as dean, swings open. This is the age of the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings. Things devolve for Silk. His wife dies of a stroke brought on, Silk is sure, by the hounding. Instead of hoping for things to blow over on campus, Silk resigns in fury, and in that same fury, one day seeks out Zuckerman, the novelist living nearby whom he has never met, pounding on Zuckerman's door one night to be let in, to demand that Zuckerman write his story. And so begins a friendship. All of this is described over the book's first few pages.

What follows is, for me, a thrilling novelistic journey of exploration of human identity and destiny, character by character in multidimensional illumination. Silk's family history, and the lives of many others that Silk has been or becomes intimate with, are examined. Each has struggled to overcome the tyranny of family and/or circumstance to create his or her own destiny and identity. I've always been drawn by Roth's use of language and his ability to penetrate the mysteries of human emotion and intent. Here is an example. Silk, who is 71 and is by now is in a relationship with a much younger woman, has received an anonymous letter (though he's sure he knows the letter writer) that begins with the words, "Everyone knows . . . . " Zuckerman, attending a rehearsal orchestral concert at Tanglewood, see Silk with his lover, Faunia, in the audience:

"Three rows down from me, Coleman, his head tipped slightly toward hers, was talking to Faunia quietly, seriously, but about what, of course, I did not know.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in coining the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

And then as well . . .

"There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."

And yet, via the paradox inherent in the passages above, Roth, through Zuckerman, sets out to do just that impossible thing: to know, to allow us to see as much as can be determined about both Silk and all the characters who come into and affect, for good or ill, his life. Roth moves the camera around relentlessly, showing us the motivations and histories of all these people, the factors that have formed them and, significantly, their struggles against those factors and the ways in which they have coalesced to form what we often understand to be our individual fates. War, abuse, ethnicity, family expectations, societal rules and the boundaries eradicably erected by mortality ("The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens . . The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day . . . "), all are examined here. Just when you think that a character has been left behind, dimensions and motivations unestablished, Roth returns to breathe life into that character's struggles, dreams, fears and successes. Just when we think "Zuckerman couldn't possibly have known that," Roth returns to provide us with source of Zuckerman's knowledge. Though of course we also know that some unknowable but presumably large portion of the narrative is solely Zuckerman's conjecture, and, of course, all of it is Roth's invention.

There is some metafiction, here, as Zuckerman refers to the book he is writing, which is the book we are reading. In the book's final scene, a character says to Zuckerman, "Aren't you the author?" And Zuckerman replies, "That I am."

I had been wondering whether I would find The Human Stain as rewarding a reading experience now, 20 years on, when I am myself in my mid-60s, pretty much the same age as Zuckerman is in this book, as I did upon it's original appearance. I'm happy to say that I did.

I'm a little gun-shy of Roth. Didn't enjoy American Pastoral. Well, there isn't much better encouragement to try him out again than your review. Maybe. Enjoyed your posts on Indian Summer, Picnic Grounds, King and so on. I'll be thinking about the Haraatz comment on Oz Shelach a while.

Phew, I'm trying to catch up, but falling further behind, so I'm going to skip around and make a couple of comments, but mostly wave hello.

>141 rocketjk: I've only read one book by EF Benson, Mrs. Ames. It was part of an attractive set published by Bloomsbury Group. Unfortunately it was my least favorite. I enjoyed DE Stevenson's Mrs. Tim books, and Joyce Dennys Henrietta's War books were excellent.

>209 rocketjk: Yay, a fellow admirer of the Armed Forces Editions. I know we've talked about them before, but did you read When Books Went to War? It's all about these books: the philosophy behind the project, how the books were selected, where they were published and distributed, and how they were read and shared. I recommend it if you haven't read it.

You have read and reviewed so many interesting and thought-provoking books. Very inspirational. I feel smarter just reading your thread. I'm not yet caught up, but once I am, I will try to a more cogent contribution to the conversation.

>321 rocketjk: Fantastic review, Jerry. I've not read any Philip Roth, but this review is certainly selling him to me.

Are there any other authors you'd say his style is comparable to?

>322 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. Honestly, if you didn't enjoy American Pastoral, I wouldn't be particularly keen on pushing The Human Stain on you. While they are both clearly stand-alones, they are also part of Roth's "American Trilogy," with American Pastoral, about the 60s, first, I Married a Communist, about the McCarthy Era, second, and The Human Stain third. They are all more or less of a period in Roth's writing. I suppose it depends upon how long ago you read American Pastoral, and whether or not you think Roth's prose might seem different to you now. If you were of a mind to give Roth another go, I might recommend The Ghost Writer, the first book in which Nathan Zuckerman appears, the young Zuckerman, just beginning to become noticed as an author.

>323 labfs39: Hi, Lisa. Thanks for the visit and for the kind words about my reviews/reading. I haven't read When Books Went to War yet, though I've seen it reviewed approvingly several times and keep an eye out for it whenever I'm book browsing. One of these days! When I first moved to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, there used to be a big sign down by the Embarcadero area on one of the warehouses: Send Your Books to Sea! They were looking for folks to donate books to the merchant marines who still sailed out of the port there. I always had a mind to bring them a bag of books, but, well, one thing and another. And then the San Francisco port activity gave way to the high-rise condo buildings, and all the San Francisco Bay port activity was ceded to Oakland. So of course that sign disappeared.

>324 AlisonY: Hi, Allison. If you're interested in trying Roth and my review made The Human Stain seem attractive, I would absolutely recommend the novel to you. For whatever it might be worth to you, the novel received the PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. Honestly, though, I can't think of any other authors that Roth's prose style and/or subject matter really remind me of. In Roth's earlier writing I suppose he probably was compared to Saul Bellow, but by the time Roth wrote The Human Stain, he had far outstripped Bellow in (at least for me) every conceivable fashion (not that I've read that much Bellow). And, of course, Roth has his detractors, mostly readers who point out that Roth's female characters are always less well developed than his male characters. I agree with this criticism, but for me Roth's many powers overcome this shortcoming. At any rate, I know many women who love Roth. My wife is one, and she has a very strongly attuned radar for misogyny.

I'd add a post-script that this past Sunday, my reading group discussed the Human Stain, which I had selected for the group. Everybody enjoyed the writing. Some folks were more taken with (or recognized more readily) the themes in the narrative than others. Some found one or two of the characters unrealistic and/or a bit over the top. All these fellows were happy to have read the book, or at least so they said to me.

Another post-script: Wanting to confirm the Pen Award and see if there were any other awards for the Human Stain, I ran a quick online search and found a page with discussion topic suggestions for the book, one of which will give you some clue to Roth's narrative philosophy. (Maybe, anyway. Roth did not hesitate to put words into his characters' mouths that were actually antithetical to his own opinions.):

"In the overheard conversation that begins Chapter 3, one of the characters complains of his students, 'They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end–every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché? Any kid who says "closure" I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.' . . . "

>325 rocketjk: Well now you're really selling it! Thanks for that additional info - much appreciated, Jerry.

Is it better starting with the first in the trilogy, or do they stand alone?

>323 labfs39: oh Ive heard about that book, and remembered thats how paperbacks started. Think I need to put that back on my list

>326 AlisonY: Mostly, they stand alone. Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator of all three, though his arc has started many books ago. The Human Stain is actually the 8th Zuckerman book (plus one novella). In this book, Zuckerman is mostly an observer. For my book group, for example, no one but me had read any of the others. I just let them know ahead of time that the Zuckerman character/narrator had been a successful/notorious novelist over the course of his life.

In all three of the American Trilogy books (The LT "Zuckerman" list doesn't include American Pastoral, which is a bit odd), it's helpful but not strictly speaking necessary, to know Zuckerman's backstory. If you're aware of Zuckerman's past/reputation as a novelist, that's basically enough. During the American Trilogy novels, Zuckerman is in his 60s, as was Roth when he wrote them. In the earlier books (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife in particular), Zuckerman is the protagonist/anti-hero. Later he becomes more, as I said above, an observer.

Hope that helps.

>328 rocketjk: Cheers - that helps.

>325 rocketjk: that quote at the end of this post is really entertaining.

>330 dchaikin: Yes, I thought you might like that.

Lovely review of The Human Stain, Jerry! I haven't gotten around to reading my copy of it, so I'll move up higher on my TBR list.

Weequahic High School, I presume?

>332 kidzdoc: I did not go to Weequahic, though I would have if we hadn’t moved. My older sister went there for one year before we relocated to Maplewood and she transferred to Columbia High School, where I went as well. My father, however, did graduate from Weequahic. He was a Newark boy born and raised. I did go to the same grammar school as Roth, Chancellor Avenue School, right next door to the high school. My second grade teacher is mentioned by name in Operation Shylock, in fact! Halem’s Sweet Shop, mentioned by name in Portnoy’s Complaint, was on my regular rotation of candy stores to buy Bazooka bubble gum and baseball cards.

Great review of the Roth. I haven't read any of that trilogy, though I have a feeling all three of them live in our house somewhere. One of these days, though, because I'm not averse to him or his style.

And though I'm a big proponent of not letting personal impressions influence my view of an author, mine are probably the reverse of how many folks think of Roth. I used to work at the Museum of Natural History, and would often see him trying to hail a cab when I got there in the mornings, not in swaggering testosteroney writer mode, but a little old guy standing out in the middle of Columbus Avenue traffic trying to get a taxi—I figured because of the regularity he was headed to his therapist's office. I always smiled at him as I crossed the avenue and he smiled back, and whether that was his regular defense at being a recognizable figure or just a nice one didn't really matter.

>334 lisapeet: That is a great story. Thanks for sharing that. Although you've made me jealous, a bit. Due to my love for Roth's books and to our shared roots in the Weequahic section of Newark, I had always wanted to meet Roth, even if to just share a brief conversation. Having a beer or glass of wine with him was my real wish. Of course, living on the west coast as I have for 30 years, running into Roth at random was a highly improbable event. Like you, I don't think it's my right to bug artists when I see them on the street or in restaurants, etc. A quick, "Hello, thanks for the music (or books, whatever)" in passing while you keep moving is fine, but not a demand on the person's time. For Roth, though, I might have had to make an exception, to say hello and see if a conversation at a later date might be possible. As I understand it, he wasn't averse to speaking with fans on his own terms. At any rate, for that reason, when Roth died it came as a punch in the gut to me.

When I was working as a freelance writer, I had an occasional gig writing arts (mostly music) stories for a Jewish weekly newspaper in north Jersey (despite the fact that I was in San Francisco). When Everyman was published, the editor asked me to interview Roth. I said, "He's giving interviews to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and the Paris Review. He's not going to make time to give me an interview." She said, "Just find his phone number and call him up at home." Well, I was not going to bother Philip Roth at home when he was in the midst of a media blitz about a new book. First of all, he was rarely going to be at home. And secondly, I was not going to bother Philip Roth at home unbidden when he was relaxing in the middle of a hectic time. At any rate, I promised to give it the old college try, so I did what I'd always done when I wanted to interview a public figure: I called his publicist. It's the publicist's job to take my call and to decide whether to let me through to his/her client. I got as far as the publicist's assistant, a nice young fellow who gave me a full hearing. I gave him my whole spiel about being born in Weequahic and going to Chancellor Avenue School and how my second grade teacher is mentioned by name in Operation Shylock and my dad being a graduate of Weequahic High and my love of his books and having gone to Columbia High School in Maplewood, where Nathan Zuckerman's brother Randy's kids had gone, and how Rabbi Prinz, mentioned as the voice of reason in The Plot Against America, was my rabbi when I was a kid, and how I had this crazy editor who thought Philip Roth was going to give me an interview and I'd promised to give it a try. And so on. I wasn't a young writer at this point, either. Everyman came out in 2006, so I was 51 already. Anyway, this fellow, as I said, heard this whole tale through. When I was finally done, he said, "Wow. That's quite a story. If anything would get you an interview with Roth this week, that would be it. The best I can do is to give you my boss' personal email instead of the official company email. Write all that up just the way you told it to me and send it to her in an email message. Tell her I gave you her contact info. You're probably not going to hear back, but I think it's worth a try." So I wrote it all up and sent it off and, of course, never heard back. So the editor then just asked me to write up sort of a Roth career summary along with my own review of Everyman. I did that, but the problem was that, despite all the acclaim the book was getting, I had some real reservations about it. So my review was not quite the glowing praise-fest I think she was expecting. She ran what I sent her, but I never heard from her again.

So, while for 99 out of a 100 artists/public figures seen on a city street hailing a cab, yes, a friendly smile and wave would be appropriate for me, as well, I'm not sure I would have been able to resist asking Philip Roth if he wanted to share a cab. :)

Those are both great stories. Interesting about reviewing a book your editor expects you to love but you find issues with.

>335 rocketjk: That's an excellent story, Jerry. What a job, huh?—to be a publicist for someone so famous you have to act as gatekeeper. There's a line of work I thank my lucky stars I never even considered. But yeah—this was in 2012 or so, and he was such a Little Old Man... I wouldn't have bothered him for the world. It's a good memory, though.

Great recollections of Newark and Philip Roth, Jerry.

Due to my love for Roth's books and to our shared roots in the Weequahic section of Newark, I had always wanted to meet Roth, even if to just share a brief conversation. Having a beer or glass of wine with him was my real wish.

This brings up an interesting question: If you could choose one or more authors, living or dead, to spend an hour or an afternoon with, who would you choose, and why? My choice for an author who is no longer with us is James Baldwin, my favorite writer, as I would love to get his take on America in the 2020s. I would choose Atul Gawande as a living writer, especially since I met him after a talk he gave at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco about one of his books, probably Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. He was a very relaxed and engaging speaker, and I enjoyed chatting with him for a couple of minutes afterward.

>338 kidzdoc: "If you could choose one or more authors, living or dead, to spend an hour or an afternoon with, who would you choose, and why?"

Well, for me, obviously, Philip Roth is at the summit. Joining him there would be Joseph Conrad and Toni Morrison. Baldwin is an excellent choice, of course. I would love to have a steak dinner with Mark Twain. Also Jane Austen.

By the way, I've been away from LT for a while because my wife and I just completed a cross-country drive from California to New Jersey with our German shepherd, Rosie. In order to keep our consciences relatively soothed, we traded in our internal combustion SUV for an all-electric VW ID.4. It lengthens the journey due to have to stop a few times a day, but it is good for the karma. We look forward to our month visiting family and friends and just hanging out. We're in a very cool neighborhood of Jersey City (yes, you read that right), just a quick mass transit ride from Manhattan. Just got a negative rapid Covid test to be on the safe side after the drive. There are some states in the U.S. that seem never even to have heard of masking. Cheers, all!

Glad you had a good trip! Hope your visit goes well too.

>339 rocketjk: I hope the many stops meant less stress and more relaxing. You should post a picture of your new wheels. Have you been listening to any audiobooks? (I almost said books on tape, lol, my age is showing).

>339 rocketjk:
You're very brave!

Welcome to the east coast, Jerry! You just missed all our nice Indian summer weather, but the clear crisp fall days have their charms too.

>339 rocketjk: Nice! Which cool neighborhood in my home town are you staying in?

If you're staying Downtown, as I suspect, I would highly recommend a visit to Pecoraro Antique Bakery, located on Newark Ave between 2nd & 3rd Sts. Pecoraro's is (or at least was) an old fashioned 100+ year old Italian bakery that makes wonderful breads on the premises, which I, my father, and my paternal grandfather have been going to for over a century. It's one of the few bakeries outside of NYC that makes pepperoni bread, sausage bread, and pizza bread, and after we moved from Jersey City to suburban Philadelphia in 1974 a trip to Pecoraro's when we visited relatives in JC was essential. It closed for a while, before it was acquired by the equally renowned and also century old Antique Bar & Bakery in Downtown Hoboken.

>343 lisapeet: Thanks! The crisp fall days have been fabulous so far.

>344 kidzdoc: Well, we're quite close to Downtown, right across the street from Van Vorst Park, which the dog likes quite a lot, so I'm not sure if that counts as Downtown or not. At any rate, I laughed when I saw your post, as I'm in fact just back from having lunch at the Antique Bakery! So far we're loving JC. We can't go far from the apartment until we get Rosie, the German shepherd, acclimated to being along in this new apartment for somewhat longer periods, so we haven't been into NYC yet (can't take the dog on the PATH train, of course). But we're having fun learning the neighborhoods here. Cheers, all!

p.s. I have also discovered the well-named Wonder Bagels bagelry!

>345 rocketjk: Van Vorst Park is definitely Downtown, Jerry, as it isn't far from the PATH Grove Street station. That is a nice area!

Did you go to the Antique Bakery in Hoboken, or the Pecoraro Antique Bakery in Jersey City? When I was in Jersey City Pecoraro's was a small bakery that only sold breads and possibly some sweets, but you couldn't dine there. An old girlfriend had an apartment on 2nd Street, probably no more than 200 feet from Pecoraro's, and the second best thing about staying at her place was waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread.

I hadn't heard of or been to Wonder Bagels! I looked online, and it's "only" been in business for 30 years, which is well after we moved from JC to Pennsylvania in 1974, and probably just after my girlfriend and I broke up in 1990. We were both working in New York at the time, she at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and me at NYU Medical Center in Manhattan, and if we did buy bagels I would get them from H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side or Kossar's on Grand Street in the Lower East Side if I also wanted bialys, and she would get them from a number of bakeries in Brooklyn.

I look forward to hearing more about your stay in my home town. Enjoy!

>346 kidzdoc: "Did you go to the Antique Bakery in Hoboken, or the Pecoraro Antique Bakery in Jersey City? When I was in Jersey City Pecoraro's was a small bakery that only sold breads and possibly some sweets, but you couldn't dine there."

Jersey City. They have deli sandwiches, now, but no dining area. We took our sandwhiches and sat on a nice curbside bench in the sun to eat our lunch.

And, yes, one of the reasons we selected the area was its proximity to that PATH station. We are having fun exploring all the restaurants, etc. along Grove Street and Newark Avenue, the latter of which, along the three blocks closest to the PATH station, has been made into a pedestrian mall.

Yesterday we walked with the dog to the Harsimus Cemetery, which was fascinating to wander through, and then a little bit farther. It was a little bit strenuous, only because we had Rosie with us. She is a good dog, but has been a country dweller all her life, so she is on edge at all times in the urban environment. We brought Rosie back home (we are now training her to be alone in our rental flat for a few hours at a time) and took the PATH to Journal Square and wandered around that neighborhood. A wholly different vibe there than my parents and grandparents experienced it, I'm sure, but different does not mean bad, and it's still a vibrant, fun place to wander.

The other day, with some time to myself, I walked all the way to Hoboken to visit Little City Books. Much closer to home, I've also been to Word Books right on Newark near Grove. Both are very nice, with Word a bit more interesting than Little City, I thought. I'm looking forward also to seeing Symposia Bookstore in Hoboken, which has used books. And then, of course, once the pooch if fully acclimated to being on her own, into Manhattan for the Strand and elsewhere . . .

Today, Steph's brother, his wife and our niece, Lissy, are coming in from Westchester for a visit.

Sounds a lot of fun. I miss travelling.

I really miss my days living in Hoboken and doing things in Jersey City (mid-'90s to early '00s). That's a place I'd move back to in a heartbeat if I could afford a nice place (which I'm not sure I could at this point... shoulda jumped when I had the chance).

>347 rocketjk: I'm happy to hear the Jersey City branch of Word is still there. I actually haven't been to the Brooklyn branch, but they always had a well-curated booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival and I know it by reputation, of course.

>347 rocketjk: That all sounds great, Jerry! My mother's sisters and their children moved far away from Jersey City quite a few years ago, and I haven't been back to JC since then. I would like to take my parents there, as they only live 65 miles away, and hopefully we can do that sometime next year.

I presume that there will not be a live episode of The Jazz Odyssey today...

>351 kidzdoc: I hope you do get to take you parents to JC next year.

As to the radio show, there will, indeed, be a live episode today, just not hosted by me. One of the cool aspects of KZYX is the community of volunteer producers who host our various shows. And most of us are always jonesing to host a program or two in a genre other than their own show’s music. When I put up a notice on our programmers’ listserv that I was going out of town and needing coverage for six weeks’ worth of shows, within 36 hours I had the whole schedule filled in with six different programmers! Some are more familiar with jazz than others, but all know how to create a good radio experience. I don’t have the list in front of me, so I’m not sure exactly who’s up today.

Btw, I went back to Hoboken yesterday afternoon and visited Symposia Bookstore, a fun, non-profit community space/used bookstore.

>352 rocketjk: Sounds good. I wasn't called in to work today (I'm on backup call for my team), and since the chance of me being needed today is almost zero I'll plan to tune in to The Jazz Odyssey at 4 pm Eastern Time.

It's been years since I've been to Hoboken, so I'll have to pay a visit there next year, God willing.

>300 rocketjk: I miss Candlestick, only ever went to a day game for the Giants as a kid. But have sat in swirling winds for many 9ers games. Froze everytime.

My dad was at the ballgame in 89 quake. Couldn't get over the upper deck undulations but it never gave out. He had a lot love fir that old ballpark and the seagulls of Kezar.

I got a lot of catching to do here.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby



This is an excellent biography of a fascinating woman, Ella Baker, an essential and vastly underappreciated figure of the American Civil Rights Movement. (That is, "underappreciated" to Americans in general, not to scholars of the movement or to folks knowledgeable about African American history.) Baker was brought up in a middle class Black family in the South in the 1920s. Her mother insisted that Baker be well educated and, as would turn out to be crucial to her life's work, well spoken. Baker began her work fighting for the equal rights for all in the Harlem of the 1930s. Over the next four decades, Baker worked both within the NAACP and in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker was a moving force in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) despite the fact that she was considerably older than the organization's other founders.

Throughout her decades of work, Baker's operating principle was a faith in the people she wanted to help, in their ability to set their own goals, make their own decisions, to know what strategies were right or wrong for themselves. The idea was to come into a community, find the local leaders who could lead efforts to gain voting rights and/or integration (as two examples), provide guidance and, when necessary, manpower, and then get out of their way and let them go to work. This was the operating philosophy of SNCC in its first years. This provided Baker with some significant dissatisfaction with Martin Luther King during her days at SCLC, where she was never given her full due or the responsibilities that her experience and talents should have allowed. The King/SCLC model was to provide strong leadership role models (always men, although a huge portion of the grassroots work was accomplished by women) and top-down leadership and closely controlled and coordinated programs and events. Also, Baker supported the idea of nonviolence, but only as a tactic to be used when appropriate, one strategy in an arsenal of strategies, rather than as a over-arching dominant paradigm.

Well, I see I've given more of a summary of Baker's life, as told by Ransby, than a review of the book. So . . . Ransby's account of Baker's life is detailed and, mostly, readable. There are times when I felt the accounts bogged down some, but that was only because necessary background information is not always scintillating reading. Baker didn't write much, and although she gave many speeches over her life, the texts of these talks were rarely set down. As a result, we don't get much in Baker's own voice. And, unfortunately, Baker suffered from dementia late in life. But Ransby did do all the interviewing of Baker's contemporaries that she could. My sister-in-law, who for years was a college lecturer on the Civil Rights and other popular movements, tells me that this book is considered the authoritative Baker biography. So, while this is not always free and easy reading, all in all it is a compelling study of a very important woman in American history.

Nice review of Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, Jerry. I need to learn more about her, so I'll add this book to my Amazon Christmas wish list.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust



At this late date, nobody needs a lengthy review of Proust by the likes of me. Finally, at the age of 66, I decided to take on "In Search of Lost Time" (a.k.a. "Remembrance of Things Past"). It's really not a bad time in life to read these works, I guess, as they deal with the elusiveness of one's memories, and the joys, frustrations and sorrows that come from trying to recreate one's past lives via those memories. That's, obviously, a clumsy way to express the themes of this famed set of works, themes that have been described much better and in much greater depth elsewhere.

At any rate, I found the early sections of the book, in which our narrator describes deep and lasting memories of childhood, to be quite lovely and affecting. The long section about the title character's years-long love affair with a woman who's affections for him recede slowly but surely and about whom he must continually delude himself if he is to continue caring for her, as he wishes to, I found much harder to plow through, due to its repetitious nature and the "Alright, already!" reaction it elicited in me. I would be interested to read a feminist take on this section. Then, when we return to the narrator's coming of age and first love of his own, I again found the story more compelling. Here is a quote toward the end that I like quite a lot:

When a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena—an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

I should note that I came to this book blind, as it were, having read no writings about these famous books beforehand and having decided to pass on reading the Introduction by Lewis Galantiere. I'm sure some pre-reading of this sort would have opened my awareness of additional themes and cultural contexts that might have added to my understanding overall. As it is, I found this to be a mixed reading experience. It took me the better part of a month to read this book. I should add, though, that my reading pace was affected by the fact that my wife and I completed a cross-country drive and have bee enjoying a month-long visit on the East Coast (U.S.) that has cut into my reading time quite a bit. I do plan on continuing on with the next book in the set, Within a Budding Grove, sooner rather than later.

Book note #1: The copy I read of Swann's Way was a beautiful old Modern Library edition, circa 1948. Therefore, I was reading the original English translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. I've read that Moncrieff was known for taking some liberties with Proust's French in literal terms, in some cases to the annoyance of Proust, even when it came to this first book's title, but that he's thought to have had a good touch when it came to getting across idiomatic meanings. I also have books 2 and 4 in the series at home in old Modern Library editions, also, obviously, in the Moncrieff translations, so I will read those. But for any other volumes I read, which I'll have to order specifically, I will look for a more modern translation, just for comparison's sake.

Book note #2: On the blank page facing the title page, I find inscribed, with a fountain pen, in my copy of Swann's Way, "Raymond Kilduff Nov 6, 1950." There are quite a few Raymond Kilduffs listed on google, so I'm not prepared to take a guess, but whoever he was, he bought the book I own just a touch past 71 years ago.

>357 rocketjk: Interesting notes on both Swann's Way and the book itself. I have not yet felt compelled to read it, but it seems to be a popular CR book at the moment. I've enjoyed comparing people's various reactions. Are you still in NJ? Will you drive back as well?

>358 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa. Yes, we’re still in New Jersey, and, yes, we’ll be driving back as well. We begin the journey back on December 1. Fingers crossed, weather-wise.

Really enjoyed your review. I've not dared go near Proust yet. Psychologically he feels too much at a busy point in life, but that feeling is entirely subjective and probably all in my own head.

>360 AlisonY: ” Psychologically he feels too much at a busy point in life, but that feeling is entirely subjective and probably all in my own head.”

No, I wouldn’t say that that’s all in your head. One of the problems with my own reading of the book was that, due to our cross-country drive and then our subsequent very (happily) busy time away from home, I rarely had the long reading stretches that this sort of writing really calls for. It’s not a book to be read for a couple of minutes before dropping off at night or between subway stops or for a few quick moments before heading out for a walk around a fun Jersey City or NYC neighborhood. It’s a book to be read in one- or two-hour stretches on a park bench or in an easy chair, and I was never really able to attend to it in that way. One thing I did not mention in my review is that I did laugh out loud several times during my reading.

The House of Ashes by Stuart Neville



This is a novel of two storylines:

Sara, young, educated woman is married to Damien, her ever-increasingly controlling and emotionally abusive husband. They have moved to a house in a relatively remote area of Northern Ireland where it soon becomes clear that Damien's father is a powerful and violent man with a dark past.

60 years previously, a man and his two grown sons lure women to their farm, throw them down into the basement and keep them captive, letting them out of the basement only when it's time to do housework and have forced sex (not graphically depicted). Violence is common and the threat of violence is unrelenting. As the story begins, two of these young women and the daughter of one of them, a little girl named Mary, still survive.

The connecting thread between the two stories is that they are taking place in the same house. Soon we learn that Mary has survived into old age and is living in an assisted living home very close by.

Neville is a very good writer, and these dual and soon interlocking stories are told extremely well. My wife and I each read through this novel in two or three days. The theme of men's cruelty to and abuse of women through physical violence and emotional manipulation are explored extremely effectively. The question is whether or not a reader wants to inhabit these worlds enough at any given time to delve into the book.

Neville is known as a crime writer, a writer of Northern Ireland noir. This book is a departure for him. Certainly, horrific crimes are being committed, but not of the sort that come to mind when the term "crime fiction" is used. So it's important to understand what one is going to be in for with the reading of this novel. I bought and read this book basically sight unseen because I am such a fan of Neville's first novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (published in Europe as The Twelve). Neville has published quite a few books in the interim, which I've been meaning to get to, but when I happened to notice that he had a new one out, I just went ahead and ordered it from my local independent bookstore. I'm not sure I would have done that if I'd realized the subject matter, but having done so, I can say I am glad to have read the book.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar



This is a fascinating novel about life in Iran just after overthrow of the Shah and the onset of the Islamic Revolution, and over the following decade. The story is narrated by 13-year old Bahar. We learn in the book's second sentence that her brother, Sohrab, has recently been hung without trial by the new regime for political "crimes" that are trifling at best. Bahar's parents, and particularly her father, are lovers of art, history and literature, both modern and ancient, and deeply versed in age old Iranian mythology. In other words, they are targets in the new order. Soon, Bahar's parents have moved the family to a remote village in hopes of evading the wrath of the revolutionaries. As the novel progresses, we watch Bahar's family attempt to make their way through the crucible of anti-intellectualism, institutionalized violence and cruelty.

This fable-like allegorical tale of the violent unraveling of Iranian society during this era is told in fluid, poetic language (and, oh, to be able to read this book in the original Persian). The story is full of magical realism, as both ghosts and the jinns and demons of Iranian mythology abound. There is a real human touch shining through, here, and yet the current of anger courses through the telling of the story, especially in the book's first half, as a counterweight. In the second half, the fantasy element spins out in ways that I didn't always feel were entirely effective. I have a guess, though, that if I were more knowledgeable about Iranian legends and mythology, that section might have resonated with me a bit more. At any rate, by the book's end I was fully on board again.

For all its violence and sorrow, this a thought-provoking and, at least for me, ultimately life-affirming novel. It's worth noting that Azar is an Iranian political refugee, now living in Australia.

>357 rocketjk: Several years ago when I tried reading Proust (I got through volume 5 before letting the project drop), I found what worked best for me was to read 15-25 pages a day. The language meanders and digresses and requires savoring. I loved the books, and am always meaning to complete the project, but I feel at this point I would almost have to start over. In fact about 2 years ago I did start over, and reread Swann's Way (even better the second time), but once again it's been so long I feel I would have to start over (or maybe I could star with volume 2).
Our oldest son lived in Jersey City for about 5 years before moving to Florida 2 1/2 years ago, and we visited about twice a year. At first he lived near the Grove Street PATH, but ultimately bought a condo on Hamilton Square (at least I think I'm remembering the name correctly).
Hope your trip back to CA was safe and relatively uneventful.

>364 arubabookwoman: Thanks for your comments on Proust. I know the feeling of having to start over with a series if you've left off too long between books. I've done that twice over the past two or three years. I don't think I'll be reading Swann's Way again, though, regardless. :)

The trip back from Jersey to CA was fine and frequently fun, too. I have one more review to post to catch up on my reading, and then I'll post a bit about the trip as a whole.

Cheers!

Reunion with Murder by Timothy Fuller



This is the second entry in Fuller's Jupiter Jones mystery series. I read the first book in the series, Harvard Has a Homicide, back in August of this year. Like the first novel, Reunion with Murder is a mostly breezy mystery of the Thin Man variety featuring our irreverent hero and amateur sleuth, Jupiter Jones. The first book was published in 1936 and found Jones as a Harvard grad student. Reunion was both published and set in the year 1941. Jones is still at Harvard, now as a lecturer in the classics. He is about to be married but gets a call from his best man, Edward Rice, who is at his 10th Harvard reunion at a remote Massachusetts resort. We are not surprised to learn that a murder has been committed there, and Rice is a suspect. Can Jones hurry up to the site and help him out of the jam? Well, of course he can, tomorrow's wedding day notwithstanding, his long-suffering fiance, Betty, coming along for the fun.

The story is fast-paced and suspects, of course, abound. The police and district attorney are on the case, but naturally Jupiter is always a jump or two head of them. This is all lots of fun, although, again, the year is 1941. Jokes about Lend Lease among the reunion goers are common, and a serious undercurrent of concern about the war that most are sure they'll soon be swept up in runs throughout, as well, just enough to keep this book's feet on the ground, as it were. At one point, Jones is talking about the horrors and futility of war, for any purpose, when Betty says to him, "What are you going to do when they tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Here's your uniform?'" Jones' answer is realistically noncommittal. How does he know what he's going to do? But we're somehow aware that he knows full well he's going to put on the uniform. Again the book was written, and is taking place, with the war in Europe blazing but Pearl Harbor still in the future.

Well, I don't want to give anyone the idea that this mystery is any weightier than it is. This is a fun, comic mystery romp for the most part. Here's a fun quote from the very beginning of the book about the nature of reunions in general:

"The Reunion as a social function must have originated in the minds of a small group of men who wanted to recapture the spirit of some bygone, happy time. Probably some Stone Age massacre had gone off rather well and the participants vowed to meet again in a year to talk things over. It would have been interesting to have witnessed the varying degrees of disappointment each one registered as he realized there was going to be damn little recapturing of the old spirit. The party undoubtedly broke up on a false note of hilarity with promises to meet again next year and with every man telling himself he'd take pains to skip it. That the Reunion as a social function ever got beyond this stage is merely another monument to man's unfailing optimism and ability to forget his wounds."

There are five books in this series, and I'll probably read them all sooner or later. Anyone interested in my review of the first book in the series can find it here: >59 rocketjk:.

>363 rocketjk: It sounds really interesting and I rarely read about Iran, so I'll keep a note to look out for this book! Thanks for your review!

>367 raton-liseur: A memoir about the Revolution in Iran that I found quite good was In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs by Christopher de Bellaigue, an English journalist who was married to an Iranian woman and living in Tehran when the book was published in 2004. It's a combination of first-hand description of daily life in the city and reportage about the revolution and its aftermath.

In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu



This book does not quite deliver what it promises, but it is still well worth reading. Mitch Landrieu was finishing up his second term as Mayor of New Orleans when he published this memoir in 2018. Landrieu was the mayor who made the very fraught decision to remove four Jim Crow Era statues from public spaces in the city, an obelisk called the Liberty Place Monument commemorating an 1874 riot by White supremacists against the city government, and statues of Confederate figures Jefferson Davis, P.T. Beauregard and, most famously, Robert E. Lee. What I thought I was going to get was an in-depth look at the vociferous, increasingly nasty and sometimes violent fights around the decision, and Landrieu's reasons for taking the political risk to make that call. And the book does begin (relatively briefly) and end (in more depth in the book's final chapter) with that information. What we get in the interim is a political and family memoir by Landrieu, and an account of his terms in the Louisiana legislature, as lieutenant governor of the state, and as mayor for two terms.

But, as I say, this is all still worth reading. Landrieu recounts, among other things, the horrifying events that took place during the flooding of the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, making the connection, not in great depth, but still signifcantly, regarding how African American neighborhoods suffered more devastating and long lasting after effects. Landrieu also recounts the infuriating rise of Nazi and KKK member of David Duke in Louisiana politics, drawing a direct line between Duke's popularity and Donald Trump's eventual electoral success.

Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu, was New Orleans' mayor before Mitch. Moon Landrieu, who later served in Jimmy Carter's cabinet, was a pro-integration mayor during the 1970s, at a time when Jim Crow was dying very hard in the South. Moon, recounts his son, was responsible for integrating positions in city government, for example. And the son recalls the threatening phone calls that they family would receive at home, and the people calling out to him, while on his way to in junior high school, that his father was "ruining the city." Those phone calls would return when Mitch Landrieu made his decision about those statues, during the year and a half that the many court challenges to the decision ground slowly through the courts. Landrieu begins the book by relating how, with post-Katrina construction projects abounding around New Orleans, nobody would lease the city a crane to remove the Lee statue from atop its high column. When one construction company finally agrees, the owner of the company has his car fire bombed in his driveway, and the bid is rescinded.

Landrieu discusses the processes he went through as he evolved from a well-meaning but in too many ways not fully aware liberal to a person much more cognicent of the power and debilitating effects of systemic racism. He talks about the decades during which he passed by those statues, just taking them for granted, without even thinking to wonder how his African American neighbors (and constituents) regarded them. Having lived in New Orleans myself for much of my 20s and into my 30s, I can sadly say that I saw myself, with regret, in that description as well. It was just New Orleans, you know? Or so I thought then. I had come to fuller understanding of it all before reading this book, but still I was affected by that part of this reading.

Landrieu is a clear, effective writer, so the narrative is smooth, the accounts of events are vivid and the messages easily understood. There are times, especially in his accounts of his own post-Katrina accomplishments as mayor, including the rebuilding of the city and the improvements in the public school system, that Landrieu comes off as too good to be true, and possibly a bit self-congratulatory. I'm sure there are others who could provide a more critical assessment of Landrieu's mayoralty.

I should say, though, that Landrieu's history of those Confederate statues, of the timing and reasons for their construction, and of the white supremacist roots of the Cult of the Lost Cause, through which so many white Southerners came to (and still) view Civil War history, is quite good. It's certainly an effective primer on the subject for anyone who has not considered the question and is looking for an education on the subject.

>363 rocketjk: This is on my list; I hope to get to it during Paul Cranswick's Reading Asia thread for 2022. I read Savushun (translated as A Persian requiem) several years ago, and it enticed me to buy a copy of the Shanameh, an epic published in the 9th or 10th century. I've read bits and pieces of it, but never got all the way through.

The Landrieu also sounds interesting, but if I run away quick enough it may not jump onto my TBR pile.

>369 rocketjk: I read this one for the same reason you did, but left with the reassurance that there are still people in politics who are there for principled reasons.

>370 markon: I hope you read the Greengage Tree. I'd love to see your reactions to it.

>371 RidgewayGirl: Indeed. Landrieu comes from a strong progressive political tradition, and I'm happy to know someone who's willing to take a principled stand as he did is so involved in mainstream politics. Still I got the idea that the book might have been published in part as a calling card for Landrieu to use for his next political campaign. He's now working for the Biden administration, in charge of dispersement of the giant pile of funding included in the recently passed infrastructure bill. Here's one article more than a little critical of Landrieu's cosy relationship with the fossil fuel industry:

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/17/mitch-landrieu-fossil-fuels-infrastructure-b...

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles



This bloated novel just didn't work for me. It is a fable-like tale with a glaring plot hole* near the beginning, a group of characters who all speak in essentially the same voice, sentences full of empty phrases and cliched expressions ("mind you," "as far as the eye can see," "boggled the mind," etc.), a black man from Jim Crow era rural Tennessee who speaks as if he grew up in New York, an 18-year old boy who essentially acts like an 8-year old for no discernible reason and an 8-year old who, when it suits the plot, reasons like a 20-year old. There are some good passages, and Towles certainly has some good ideas. And the second half is marginally better than the first half. But this verges way too far into Tom Robbins territory for me. If this hadn't been a reading group selection by a friend of mine, I would have concluded my efforts somewhere around page 100, but as it was, I did a forced march through all 567 pages of this self-indulgent porridge of a book.

I know lots of people have liked Towles' previous novels, A Gentleman of Moscow in particular. The friend who selected this book for our group described it as a "fun read." I suppose I might have had fun with the plot if I hadn't found the language so exasperating. So, depending on one's tolerance for the sorts of things I've been complaining about, your mileage may vary with this book.

* And here I'm talking about something that just doesn't make sense even given the willing suspension of disbelief that the narrative calls for.

>373 rocketjk: I thought it was OK, with some fun parts in between filler, but wow what a dark ending for a supposedly lighthearted book.

>374 lisapeet: "Some fun parts in between filler" is about right for my experience, as well. But there was so much that bugged me that, in the end, it ruined whatever fun I might have had.

A quick example. One character, Ulysses, the African American from Tennessee I spoke of above, is directing two other characters to a hobo camp on an abandoned section of an elevated train track in New York City:

-- How do we get down from here? {Emmett} asked Ulysses.
-- We don't
-- Are you saying the camp is up here on the tracks?
-- That's what I'm saying.
-- But where?
Ulysses stopped and turned to Emmett.
-- Did I say I was going to take you there?
-- Yes.
-- Then why don't you let me do so?

My complaint is with those last two words. This, again, is a man from Jim Crow Tennessee (the novel is taking place in the 1950s) who is a veteran of grueling combat during World War 2 and has been living the last eight years of his life primarily in freight train boxcars. He does not say, "Then why don't you let me do so?" He says, "Then why don't you let me?" I suppose that seems like a minor faux pas, but this business of overly mannered dialogue from characters who have no business talking that way happens over and over in this book. That sort of thing drives me nuts. I got the feeling that Towles wasn't even paying attention to his own characters. I can also go on about the elements of the story that don't make sense, even within its light-hearted, fable-like framework. And to me, the jarring ending you spoke of is another sign of an author who is not in control--seemingly not even attempting control--of his narrative.

Well, of course, I'm talking about particular pet peeves of my own. Just because something bugs me doesn't mean it's going to, or should, bug everyone. But, wow, there sure was a lot of stuff in this book that left me exasperated. Or as Towles would say, that left me utterly exasperated. :)

>374 lisapeet: yeah, was really surprised by the ending too. He wasn't a nice guy, but geesh

I was in the 'it's just OK' camp about A Gentleman in Moscow, so I won't be rushing to read another Towles novel.

I've enjoyed catching up on your reviews. I'm way behind in my CR visiting.

Youth by Joseph Conrad



This wonderful work is a novella, only about 40 pages long. Conrad's frequently returning narrator/hero, Marlow, sits around with a group of friends with an ever-present bottle being passed around as he recounts a sea voyage of his youth, a passage on a coal ship bound for Bangkok, his first voyage to the East and his first as second mate. The journey is one delay causing--often life threatening--disaster after another, but the young Marlow sees it as nothing but adventure. Or at least that's how the old Marlow remembers it in the telling, full of beautiful, stirring description that puts you right onto this ill-starred old vessel.

I read this all in a single gulp, as it demands to be read. I first read it 35 years ago, still in my 30s. Now that I'm 66, it certainly resonates all the more.

"By all that's wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself--or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here--you all had something out of life: money, love--whatever one gets on shore--and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea, young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing except hard knocks--and sometimes a chance to feel your strength--that only--what you all regret?"

This volume also includes Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether both of which I'll be reading during the course of 2022. The former will be a reread (maybe my fifth?) while the latter is one of the few works of Conrad that I've never read.

I've actually never read Conrad, though I think we have a copy of Heart of Darkness around. I really ought to give it a shot—it seems, at least anecdotally, like something I would like.

>379 lisapeet: I hope you do read Heart of Darkness sometime soon. I would love to read your reactions. It's definitely a conversation starter! :)

Nice review of The Human Stain. I was planning to but didn't get round to reading Youth.

>381 edwinbcn: "I was planning to but didn't get round to reading Youth."

You could literally read it in an afternoon or evening. It's only 41 pages long. Go for it!

Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming



First published in 1960, this history of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the American Revolution, was evidently hailed as a major success at the time, and I can see why. Fleming did a great job of laying out the contributing factors to the growing points of contention between England and the American colonies, both political and economic, as well as giving thumbnail sketches of the major players on both the English and American sides. The conditions the combatants fought under, the weapons they carried and their motivations for fighting are all clearly described as well, as are the tactics of the officers and the ways in which those tactics either worked or didn't. The battle itself is described in detail, with a flowing narrative style that puts the reader directly into the horrific, bloody action. At times Fleming took some liberties, creating conversations between the participants that are, he explains in his afterward, recreations from the many diaries and journals he consulted. On the American side, most of the soldiers who actually took part fought bravely indeed, but many of those assembled, intimidated by the British artillery, actually stayed well away from the battle. Fleming gives a lot of credit, also, to the courage of the British soldiers, who three times charged the American emplacements in the face of point-blank musket fire. The British after that third charge, managed to get the Colonials out of their emplacements and off the hill (actually Breed's Hill, not Bunker Hill itself, as Fleming explains), but at a cost so high that the British generals had to abandon their plans to try to break the American siege of Boston, the reason they attacked the stronghold in the first place. The British lost half their army, killed or wounded, on that day, and the question of whether American volunteer soldiers would stand and fight against the British regulars, an army considered at that time the best in the world, was settled emphatically.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of the American Revolution or of military history in general. I don't know how much additional scholarship on the battle has taken place in the intervening 60 years since Now We Are Enemies was published. I know, for example, that Nathaniel Philbrick has written a history: Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution. I don't know how much new material was included in that book. It is in my LT library but is not on my shelf. I vaguely remember loaning it to someone, but can't remember who. It will come back eventually, I guess!

Book note: My copy of the book seems to be a first edition. At least, there's no mention of any edition other than the 1960 publishing date with the book's publishing info. The LT entry date for this book is in 2008, the year I first posted my library here, so there's no telling how long it's been on my shelf awaiting my attention. I do know that my copy at one time resided in the sailors' library aboard the USS General William Mitchell (AP-114), as per the stamp on the book's rear inside cover. There is also a pocket at the back in which the book's withdrawal card resides, though it is blank. Either nobody ever took this book out, or one or more previous cards had been filled up.

>383 rocketjk: Now We are Enemies sounds interesting. Now that I have moved back to New England, I've been planning to delve into Boston history with some sightseeing I haven't done since I was a kid. This might be a good book to include in background reading.

>384 labfs39: History-wise, absolutely! Although the geography is, I believe, much changed, as a lot of the harbor around Boston and Cambridge has been filled in.

>383 rocketjk: very interesting review and reminder.

>383 rocketjk: I live up in Revolutionary War territory—the North Bronx is high ground, and Washington had a couple of forts up here—so that looks interesting. I'll keep my eye out. It's just the kind of thing that turns up in local Westchester library sales.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson



I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful novel for its compassion, insights and wonderful language. John Ames, an aging and ailing Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town where he's lived all his life, knows that his time is short, due to his bad heart. He has married late in life and has a very young son. Ames is not afraid of death, but grieves that his son will grow up without him, and so sits down to write him a long journal, composed over many weeks, explaining his faith, his philosophy, his past, including the lives of his own father and grandfather (both ministers themselves), and events going on around the family as Ames writes that the son is too young to be aware of but that he might want to understand better as he gets older. Whew! That was a long sentence. I found this book wholly absorbing, though I understand some readers find it slow and I've noted one or two comments lately of folks here on LT who've said the didn't finish it. C'est la vie! Possibly I enjoyed this novel so much because it served as an antidote for what I found to be the insufferably sloppy storytelling and prose of The Lincoln Highway. Anyway, here are a few examples of passages I particularly enjoyed:

This first one I found by opening my book at random just now:

"I believe that the old man {Ames' grandfather} did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That's the pulpit speaking, but it's telling the truth."

This one I made note of when I read it:

"I remember once my father and my grandfather were sitting on the porch together cracking and shelling black walnuts. They loved each other's company when they weren't at each other's throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.

My grandfather said, 'The summer is ended and still we are not saved'

My father said, 'That is the Lord's truth.'

Then silence again. They never looked up from their work. It was the drought they were speaking of, which had already set on and which would go on for years, a true calamity. I remember a sweet, soft wind like there is today. There is no work more tedious than shelling black walnuts, and the two of them did it every autumn of the world. My mother said they tasted like furniture, and I'm not sure anyone disagreed But she always had them, so she used them."

Also:
"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire."

And finally:
"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

And that's a wrap for 2021. Thanks to all who joined me here. My 2022 thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337929

That's a fantastic book to end with. I love Marilynn Robinson's writing, and particularly Gilead and Home. I've enjoyed following your 2021 reading and look forward to 2022!

>388 rocketjk: So glad you love it for the same reasons I did. Home and Lila are excellent. Jack could have been excellent but I had some believability issues, but still worth the read (in fact I found many wonderful quotes in this last book)

>388 rocketjk: you've made me want to read it.

>390 cindydavid4: Thanks for that. I'm not sure whether I'm going to read further in the series any time soon, but I might.

>391 tonikat: Excellent! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.