rocketjk's reading Route 22

Greetings! I've greatly enjoyed three year's participation in Club Read and especially all the reading friends I've made here. To review: I live in Mendocino County, northern California, USA. 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. Last year I joined a monthly reading group for the first time in my life! In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list. Cheers!

I've been hesitating to post, because I didn't want to take up top real estate, but I think you are open for business. I only started following you partway through this year, but have greatly enjoyed it and look forward to seeing what you read this year. Happy almost new year!

>2 labfs39: Never hesitate to post on any of my threads, my friend! I won't actually start posting here until the new year officially begins, but, yes, I am open for business. Call it a soft opening! Happy to have you as my first guest.

Hi Jerry. Following. Waiting for a Joseph Conrad to pop up. Wish you a great 2022.

>4 dchaikin: Well, I'm done with the annual Conrad novel start to my reading years. I was trying to decide who to start next. It was down to Singer or Roth and I went with Singer. So I have his first novel, Satan in Goray, on order and will jump it to the head of the "list" as soon as it arrives. But I am 66, now. So how many of his 16 or 17 novels will I have time for at one per year? It added more than a little poignancy knowing that whichever author I chose for this tradition would very likely be the last one. I'm thinking about reading a Singer as my first full book each January and a Roth novel, starting with The Ghost Writer (the first Zuckerman novel) as my first book each July. The Roth would be sort of like a birthday present to myself, as my birthday is July 4.

But, back to Conrad, I do have another reading of Heart of Darkness on my "short list" for this year, as well as The End of the Tether, a novella I don't think I've ever read. Plus, I just ordered an intriguing Conrad bio I just learned about, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff.

But my first book of the new year, once I've finished Gilead, is going to be Darker Than Amber, the 7th Travis McGee mystery. Unless the Singer shows up first.

Happy reading 2022 :-)

Happy New Year, Jerry! Looking forward to your reading and thoughts again this year.

Look forward to your comments on Gilead (which I didn't get through). I loved Home and Lila.

Hi Jerry. I'm glad you are back for another year of Club Read, and I will be following along on your thread, even if I am very bad at always commenting.

A note about those "between books" mentioned in my opening post. For some reason I have recently been somewhat compulsively adding to those books in my reading, to the extent that I now have three stacks that I'll be rotating between. I start calendar year 2022 with these three stacks of "between books."

Stack 1:
Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad (blog entries about the state of affairs in Gaza circa 2006)
Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs (a collection of short stories, poems and excerpts from novels for, it seems, middle school or high school, published in 1929)
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin (short stories)
No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman (a series of oral histories with famous sports writers, with 18 interviews conducted and edited by Holzman; published in 1967)

Stack 2:
The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black (short stories; another book published in 1929)
Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf (humorous anecdotes published in 1952)
Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich (periodical with fiction and articles about current events)
Rough Translations by Molly Giles (short stories)

Stack 3:
Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink (an annual publication with some essays and lots of facts and figures about the 1962 season)
The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber (humorous essays)
The Background of Our War (a series of articles on different aspects/histories about World War 2, published in 1942 by the U.S. War Department's Bureau of Public Relations and evidently issued to West Point cadets to bring them up to speed about the war we had just entered)
The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley

>10 rocketjk: Happy New Year, Jerry. I’m looking at your stacks of “between” books, and noticed the first in Stack 2. I have that same book, which I dip into once in a blue moon. I love the leather cover, although mine is pretty worn. It was my mother’s, and she got it from an elderly woman who happened to be a neighbor.

Happy New Year, Jerry! I look forward to following your reading this year, and to becoming a more regular listener to The Jazz Odyssey on Monday afternoons.

Your stacks reminded me that I still haven't read Going to Meet the Man. It's on my Kindle, so I'll get to it this year.

>5 rocketjk: You make me realize how much I once wanted to read through Singer. I had forgotten. He was such a natural elegant prose author, not to mention very creative. How can i fit him in?

That Baldwin collection includes one short story I really really love, called Sonny's Blues. Enjoy.

>11 NanaCC: That's a great story. I am definitely finding those stories to be appropriate for dipping into once in a while, as you say. Reading that collection straight through would definitely dull the senses after a while!

>12 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. By the way, my wife, Stephanie, made a great pot of hoppin john yesterday, which we'll be enjoying again tonight. Also collard greens and dumplings. Cheers!

>13 dchaikin: Hey, Dan. Yes, Singer's prose is lovely. I've read several of his terrific short story collections, but though I have several of his novels on hand, I've only read one of them so far, Scum. I've read the first two of the Baldwin stories in the collection so far. Both very moving.

>14 rocketjk: Well done, Stephanie! My mother and I had black-eyed peas, pork, rice and collard greens again today, which is supposed to confer even more prosperity and good luck in the New Year.

>15 kidzdoc: Yep, leftovers for us, as well! Guess we're going to be rolling in good fortune this year!

I made black-eyed peas too, though without all the trappings—just a Holy Trinity of onions, celery, and sweet peppers (and garlic, and a little chipotle chili spice). I can definitely use all the good fortune I can get.

I've also meant to read more Singer, and I think have a couple of inherited books of his on my shelves. I'll have to take a look.

You get your own, Jerry!

Something I noted yesterday as I had my appointment for my booster shot was that of the forty odd people waiting there - filling in forms, waiting for their jab or under observation afterwards - I was the only one carrying (and reading from) a book.

>18 PaulCranswick: Thanks! And, yes, I've been noticing the same thing about the scarcity of book readers these days. I used to try to steal a glance to see what books people were reading when I was a daily mass transit rider in San Francisco. Nowadays, seeing a book on a subway or bus is the exception, definitely.

I think more people might be reading on their phones, either ebooks or audiobooks. I know my father does basically all his reading on his phone these days. There's something to be said for the convenience of digital books, but it does make it harder to see what other people are reading (and possibly strike up a conversation, if one is so inclined).

Darker Than Amber by John D. McDonald



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

>10 rocketjk: Wow, those are three great stacks! I also like having a book of short stories or equally short texts on the go, to read when I am in a slump with my novel or when I have finished a novel and cannot decide what to read next. I even use the tag "in-between reading" for those in my LT library :-) So I was excited to read about your "between books". Although I must add that I don't have any method like you do and I only read one of them at a time!

Following along. Happy New Year.

>22 MissBrangwen: Ha! Fun that you have a "between book" tag.

>23 majkia: Thanks! Happy New Year to you, as well.

Because I've gotten some fun responses to my "between book" post, I've decided to list my progress through them here. Here's what I've read post-Darker Than Amber:

* "Cheney Set Mark, Fanned 21 In 16-Inning Game" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Imperturbable Spirit" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Campaign in Poland (September 1-29, 1939)" from The Background of Our War
* "Around the Dear Ruin" by Gina Berriault from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Battle of the Naktong Bulge is Won and the Enemy is Driven into the River. August 18-19" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "The Failed Mission: The Inside Account of the Attempt to Free the Hostages in Iran" by Zbigniew Brzezinski from The York Times Magazine, April 18, 1982

Next up will be Satan in Goray by Isaac Singer, the first in my new tradition of starting each calendar year by reading a Singer novel and thereby reading through all of them in order of publication.

>24 rocketjk: it's fun to see this list. eclectic, for sure.

Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer



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

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

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

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

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

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

>26 rocketjk: enjoyed this review a lot. i read it trying to recall what I could from Singer’s autobiography, and a lot came back. It was quite a world he lived in before emigrating and interesting that he was maybe writing as much or more about that than the curious history he fictionalizes.

>26 rocketjk: A couple of years ago I read The Unwanted by Michael Dobbs an excellent nonfiction account about the desperate attempts by the inhabitants of a small primarily Jewish town in Poland to obtain visas to escape as the rise of Hitler became evident. The anti-immigrant sentiment expressed by many in the US at the time, including by Congresspeople, was as bad as or worse than anything we have seen over the past few years.
Singer is one of my favorite authors, and I've read several books by him, but I have not read Satan in Goray. I will have to get to it someday. I also have a couple of books by his brother on my shelf that I would like to get to someday.

>27 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. And yes, I think it’s safe to say that Satan in Goray was very much meant as an allegory about his contemporary times in Poland.

>28 arubabookwoman: Very interesting information about The Unwanted. The book I remember lots of people reading in my younger days was the similarly themed While Six Million Died by Arthur Morse.

Another trip through Stack 3 of my Between Books, post-Satan in Goray:

* "Dodgers Collapsed, Giants Won in Playoff" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Mr Monroe Outwits a Bat" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Scandinavian Campaign (April 9-May 3, 1940)" from The Background of Our War
* "The Proud and Virtuous" by Doris Betts from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Enemy Recrosses the Naktong and Miyang is Threatened. The Central Perimeter is Saved Again, September 3-5" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "How the Chinese Police Themselves" by Fox Butterfield from The York Times Magazine, April 18, 1982

Now on to On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

I really like your concept of "between books", and I think I need to try approaching certain books that way myself.

>31 shadrach_anki: I like it for a couple of reasons. Most important, it's fun for me. Other aspects of the system are:

I find that the entries in short story collections or other sorts of anthologies can tend to run together if I read them all in a row. This way, the reading gets broken up a little.

Also, the "between book" reading serves as a bit of a bridge between the books I read all the way through, so I'm not just jumping from one immediately to the next, which I've come to like.

Occasionally, I will add in other books that are not collections but which call, for me anyway, to be read piecemeal rather than straight through. An example is The New Breed, the history of the Korean War I've got on this list. I originally meant to just read it through, but when I found that each chapter was another battle description (I had thought the book was going to be more a series of oral histories), I realized that, while I still wanted to read the book, everything would begin to run together if I didn't break the reading up somehow.

In Stack 1 I have Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad. The book, a series of recreated blog posts about life in the Gaza Strip in the mid 2000s, is extremely compelling but most of the entries are so depressing and frustrating that I had to break it up into chapters, although I understand that in this case I am diluting the experience by doing that.

>32 rocketjk: I find that the entries in short story collections or other sorts of anthologies can tend to run together if I read them all in a row. This way, the reading gets broken up a little.

I've definitely noticed this when I've read an entire anthology straight through. It can make it difficult to differentiate the stories. I have quite a few anthology/collection works in my library, and I think I'm going to try this method with at least some of them. I've got a few already in progress that would be perfect for this method.

>33 shadrach_anki: Does this make me an influencer? :)

>34 rocketjk: Yes, I think it does.

>34 rocketjk: Yes, but you won't catch me using that term because I have what could probably be considered an unreasonable dislike for it (also for the term "side hustle" and a few other bits of modern usage that just rub me the wrong way). You are definitely an inspiration, though. :)

>36 shadrach_anki: Oh, I'm with you entirely on all of that terminology. Hence my smiley watchamacallit. "Side hustle" and "gig economy" are particularly odious to, as they try to make hip the idea that people should not expect to be able to make a living via a single job that includes proper benefits. Although "influencer" is mot far behind, denoting as it does people taking advice from people with no qualifications about stuff they really don't need in the first place. And another thing: Get off my lawn!

>26 rocketjk: Lovely review, Jerry. I read several of Singer's short stories a long time ago and enjoyed them enormously. I'm tempted to read a few now and see what I think a few decades on.

>38 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for your kind words about the Singer review, Kay. The two short story collections of his I've read recently are Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, which is a Modern Library collection, and The Death of Methuselah, which I'm pretty sure is the last collection Singer published. The latter collection I thought was particularly lovely, with many including more modern settings. I also recently read In My Father's Court, which is Singer's memoir about his childhood in Poland.

I enjoyed your review of Satan in Goray too, and learning more of Singer. It made me think of a Russian film I saw a few years ago, set in the C20th, called The Commissar (which was banned from being screened by Brezhnev), an excellent film, different in some ways, maybe it was the ravages of the attack made me think of it.

edit - since writing that i was thinking the film was a Soviet film and it may be not correct to say it is Russian. On a brief look at the wiki page I don't see mention of this, but it is based on a Vassily Grossman short story "In the town of Berdichev" and a googled and found a Berdichev in Ukraine (edit - again, they do mention it set in Ukraine). I was wondering also as it is about Jewish people and there was that zone in which they could live in imperial times. But anyway, it's a brilliant film. I saw it in a course titled as Russian film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_(film) - link not posting properly, you need that end bit on it,

and another edit - I've now learnt that Berdichev was part of Poland in the C17th.

>26 rocketjk: Putting this on my list. I'm interested in reading more from that time and place—my people on my dad's side were all Russian/Polish, and though I don't know much about my heritage beyond a couple of generations it would be neat to have more of a sense of the culture, the zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it.

>40 tonikat: "there was that zone in which they could live in imperial times."

I think you're referring to the Pale of Settlement.

"I've now learnt that Berdichev was part of Poland in the C17th."

Borders have been fluid in that part of the world, to put it mildly. Thanks for the information about that movie. It looks very interesting, indeed.

>41 lisapeet: Sholom Aleichem's short stories are also very good. They are about Jewish life in Russia. The collection Tevye's Daughters is excellent. It includes several stories about Tevye and his family (on which the musical Fiddler on the Roof was based) and a few others, as well. My review is on the book's page.

>42 rocketjk: I probably didn't put that well, sorry. Of course the Pale of Settlement. Yes indeed on those borders.

>43 rocketjk: Excellent, thanks. Onto the list it goes.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong



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

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

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

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

I took a trip through Stack 1 of my Between Books, post-On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous:

* “A Pig in a Bedroom” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
* “The Counting Game” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Incidents in the Life of Buffalo Bill,” (excerpted from The Life of Buffalo Bill) in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “The Man Child” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
* “Marshall Hunt” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* "The Minute Men of 1950: The Marine Reserves are Called" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "The Alternative to Arms Control" by Barbara Tuchman from The York Times Magazine, April 18, 1982

>46 rocketjk: Really nice review. This is a book i’ve shied away from…not because reviews were bad, but because I was worried it would be too sad/saccharine. But you have me rethinking that.

>48 dchaikin: "too sad/saccharine."

Definitely not, and I have a pretty acute radar for that sort of thing.

You convinced me i was way off with that idea.

>46 rocketjk: I have Vuong's book - I read his debut poetry collection a few years ago, you make me curious to try this.

But I've returned again on the theme of your Singer reading -- by coincidence I read this review just now and thought it woudl be of interest, the link was posted to fb so i am hoping it's nto something behind a pay wall for you, even if it is though you may be interested in this book, The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/books-of-jacob-olga-tokarczuk-book-review-ada...

I really liked On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

>51 tonikat: Thanks very much for the link. No paywall, and I look forward to reading the piece today or tomorrow.

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



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

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

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

Taylor writes:

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

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

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

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

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

>54 rocketjk: terrific review. Jefferson as a conniver here is consistent with how he comes across in Ron Chernow's Hamiton. I find this such an interesting era. I wonder when the ideas of Manifest Destiny become more universal, how it stood when it actually all seemed to happen under Polk. Maybe a book to for me to check out. Wonder if it works on audio.

>46 rocketjk: That book broke my heart several times before I finished it. Vuong's skill as a poet is really apparent -- there isn't a misplaced word in the book. I did get to meet him briefly at a book signing and he was just wonderful.

>55 dchaikin: Thanks for the kind words about the review, Dan. According to Taylor, the term Manifest Destiny was coined by New York journalist John L. O'Sullivan in 1845. I'm not sure how quickly it caught on.

>56 RidgewayGirl: "Vuong's skill as a poet are really used -- there isn't a misplaced word in the book."

I very much agree, and well said. Cool that you got to meet him.

>46 rocketjk: I saw this book mentioned everywhere, but I just put it on my wish list now, for the same reasons stated in >48 dchaikin:

>58 MissBrangwen: I'll look forward to seeing your reaction if/when you get to it. Cheers!

I had a read through Stack 2 of my Between Books post-American Republics:

* “Madam, the Duchess” by Federico de Roberto from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “J is for Jurisprudence” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Notes in Diary Form” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* “Ashes to Ashes” by Richard H. Parke from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “A Jar of Emeralds” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* "Preparation for Inchon" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "American Jews and the Holocaust" by Lucy S. Dawidowicz from The York Times Magazine, April 18, 1982

I'm now about a quarter of the way through Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet.

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet



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

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

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

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

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

>61 rocketjk: Fascinating. Although first, I think I want to read a biography of Genet.

I have not read anything by Jean Genet and so fascinating to read your review.

>46 rocketjk: >61 rocketjk: Great reviews of both On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and Our Lady of the Flowers. I haven't read anything by either author and am looking forward to learning more about them.

>63 baswood: I would be very interested in hearing your take on some of his plays.

>61 rocketjk: Came here from the What Are We Reading Now thread because I am currently also reading Genet (kind of, I pushed it to the back burner while finishing a couple of long library books). I'm reading Funeral Rites. Interesting thoughts on Our Lady of the Flowers.

>61 rocketjk: I read your review with interest. I tried to read this book when I was 17 (I studied Les Bonnes/The Maids for my A level examen and thought I should read his most famous novel), and it was too far from my life and interests of the time, so I could not finish.
I think the surreal aspects remains a major obstacle for me, and I have not intention to try again in a near future, but it was good to read this review and learn a bit more about it.

>67 raton-liseur: I thought I'd be reading Our Lady of the Flowers like I read poetry, more or less just letting the narrative wash over me and enjoying whatever impressions came my way, but most of the storytelling was more straightforward than that, even as we know that the whole thing is the "invention" of the fictional, but close to real, narrator. As I read that over, I realized I probably haven't made the book any more attractive to you! Anyway, I'm just trying to clarify what I meant, rather than trying to sell the book to you. There's plenty of books without forcing down your gullet a book that doesn't appeal to you. Cheers!

>68 rocketjk: No, not attractive... But interesting! That's one of the things I like in CR: I am not in this group only for recommandations, but also because I learn interesting things about books that I will never read... So thanks for having read and reviewed Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs/Our Lady of the Flowers (so that I don't have to read it myself!).
(But you got me interested in a more positive way with your Isaac Bashevis Singer readings!).

Took a trip through Stack 3 of my Between Books post-Our Lady of the Flowers:

* "Dodgers Led in Twin-Bills; Yanks, Mets Trailed" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The ‘Wooing’ of Mr. Monroe" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Fall of France (May 10- June 25, 1940)" from The Background of Our War
* "Man’s Courage" by Wyatt Blassingame from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Inchon Landing and Penetration to the Han River" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Alice Faye, I Love You” by Marvin Barrett from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to The Handle, book 8 in Richard Stark's gleefully evil crime series, Parker.

The Handle by Richard Stark



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

Back to Stack 1 of my Between Books post-The Handle:

* “The Wren’s Nest” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Living the Siege – March 2006” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad (blog entries about the state of affairs in Gaza circa 2006)
* “Facing the Arab’s Pistol” from Memoirs by M. Robert-Houdin in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Previous Condition” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
* “John Kiernan” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* "Seoul: Part 1 – The Battle for an Entrance to a City" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Golden Gate Fantasy” by Ralph J. Gleason from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to The Education of an Idealist, a memoir by Samantha Powers.

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power



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

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

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

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

Book note: This was a selection for my reading group. These guys are killing me with their doorstop picks. First Lincoln Highway, now this! Oh, well. Waddaya gonna do?

>73 rocketjk: Glad to hear it's a good one, since I have it on the shelf. Nice review, thanks!

>73 rocketjk: Not sure I'll tackle that one any time soon, although your review piques my interest.

>73 rocketjk: sounds fascinating

I took a read through Stack 2 of my Between Books post-The Education of an Idealist:

* "Seduction" by Alexander Pushkin from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* "K is for the Kremlin" from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* "A Note on the Recent Work of James Joyce" from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* "Runaway" by Erskine Caldwell from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* "Heart and Soul" from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* "Seoul: Part 2 – The Battle of Buildings, Roadblocks and Barricades" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "Lindberg: The Worship Lingers On" by Helen Dudar from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner (This is the mid-20th Century author rather than the contemporary journalist of the same name.)

Just stopping by to say hi, Jerry. Great reviews! I suppose you can't talk your wife into joining Club Read so we could then have two couples on Club Read, eh? ;-)

>78 avaland: My wife and I joined LibraryThing at the same time, in 2008, right after I'd stumbled upon it somehow. But after about a year or so, she stopped taking part, as she found it to be too time consuming for her. She never did join any groups. Let's just say that she's the productive one in the household.

Thanks for the kind words about my reviews. Cheers!

>73 rocketjk: i really enjoyed this review of Samantha Power’s memoir. Obama mentions her a few times in his presidential memoir and that left me curious. So it’s nice to get a feeling of her story. (Not sure i want to commit to 500 pages of it, however)

>80 dchaikin: "(Not sure i want to commit to 500 pages of it, however)"

Don't shortchange her. That's 554 pages. I read the Obama memoir last year. Both were selections for my reading group. These guys like long books!

Glad you enjoyed the review.

First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner (translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier)



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

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

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

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

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

What a complicated life. I’m looking for the Communist tilt in the novel. Did he remain Communist in the US? Did HUAC affect him? Should we interpret the occupied resistance in the novel as a sort of communist collective thing?

>82 rocketjk: That is a beautiful cover. I'll keep an eye out for a copy.

>83 dchaikin: I didn't really discern a Communist tilt in this particular novel, but certainly Pozner's anti-Fascist passion is prevalent. The villagers certainly act in concert with each other in attempting to try to protect the village as a whole from famine, for instance, but I don't think they would need Communism for that. He went back to France upon liberation in 1945, but he wrote against McCarthyism from there. My first reference to the Pozner Wikipedia page, above, is a link to the page. Check it out if you've an interest in more details. The Wikipedia page is a bit scattered, as they are wont to be, but I've only touched on the twists and turns and accomplishments of Pozner's life in my review.

>84 RidgewayGirl: Indeed! The front flyleaf tells us: "Jacket design by Adler-Lubalin". Elsewhere online I find reference to S. M. Adler and H. Lubalin. Here's a website about Lubalin. Scroll down and you'll come to this exact cover art!
https://lubalin100.com/day-10/

After finishing First Harvest, I took a read through Stack 3 of my Between Books:

* "Tribe Duo Hit Successive Homers Twice in Game" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Mr. Monroe and the Moving Men" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Battle of Britain (July- November, 1940)" from The Background of Our War
* "To the Wilderness I Wander" by Frank Butler from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "Bearskin" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle - Newly added
* "Marine Air Power over Inchon-Seoul: A Classic Demonstration of Close Support" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Conversation Watching” by Brock Brower from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Since then I've started Flats Fixed - Among Other Things, Book 6 in the obscure yet entertaining Giff Speer pulp crime series from the 60s & 70s by Don Tracy.

Flats Fixed - Among Other Things by Don Tracy



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's my latest journey through Stack 2 of my between books:

* “Twenty -Six Men and a Girl” by Maxim Gorky from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “L is for Literary Life” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “A Point for American Criticism” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* “Futility of Revolutions” by Andre Maurois from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “How to Quit Smoking” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “The Circus of Dr. Lao” by Charles G. Finney from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury - Newly added
* "The New Enemy: the Communist Chinese" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "The Subhuman Theater, or, What Richard Rodgers Has (or Has Not) in Common with Messrs. Albee, Pinter and Beckett" by Anthony West from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

I just realized I forgot to post my last Stack 1 read-through. Wouldn't want anyone to feel bereft. Ha! I crack myself up. Anyway . . .

* “The Black Mare” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
* “The Earth is Closing in on Us” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “The Patchwork Palace” by Henry Woodfin Grady from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Sonny’s Blues” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
* “Fred Lieb” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* "Wonson: A Guerrilla War and a New Enemy" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Television Highlights of the Month” from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

How are you getting on with The New Breed? Every time you mention it my virtual ears perk up.

>91 labfs39: Well, it's not what I was hoping it would be. The inside flyleaf synopsis says that Geer conducted hundreds of interviews with combat soldiers during his time with the troops during the war, so I was expecting to read a series of oral histories about the experience of fighting as a Marine in the Korean War. What Geer did instead was use these interviews to provide very close-in detail of the minute-by-minute unfolding of engagements and battles large and small. And that's what the book turns out to be - a chronicle of the Marines' actions in the war as a series of battles and troop movements. As interesting and enlightening as this can be (despite the fact that Geer is essentially a propagandist for the Marines and for the war, the horrors of the bloody conflicts leak through on basically every page), I quickly realized that it all would become simply repetitive quickly if I read the book straight through, which is why I decided to move it to "between book" status and read it a chapter at a time instead. So, wow, I guess I just wrote my review! :)

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene



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

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

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

>92 rocketjk: Thanks for the review, and I think I'll pass. A few years ago I read a very good military history called Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, but the tank movements, German vs Russian division names, and play-by-play of battles was difficult reading. Fortunately I knew enough history of the region to suss out the action. I would be lost in a similar military history in Korea. I did enjoy The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam though. Have you read it?

>93 rocketjk: It's not a theme I envisioned for myself beforehand.

I like it when things clump, do you?

I often, totally unintentionally, find that I am reading a couple books back-to-back with similar themes, story elements, settings or characters. I usually think it's a total coincidence, because I'm not aware of knowing enough about the books ahead of time to even subconsciously pick them for their similarities.

>94 labfs39: "A few years ago I read a very good military history called Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, but the tank movements, German vs Russian division names, and play-by-play of battles was difficult reading. Fortunately I knew enough history of the region to suss out the action."

Yes, a lot of military histories can get like that when they are deep-diving into battles. I read a book about the Battle of Gettysburg that was similar. On the one hand, I'm trying to keep in mind the death, bloodshed and horror I'm reading about, while keeping in mind the historic significance of it all. But on the other hand, I'm thinking, "If I read about one more flanking maneuver . . . " Regarding Beevor, I found his history of the Spanish Civil War, The Battle for Spain, to be quite good, though long, particularly because it is about the entire conflict, not just one battle, and because Beevor did a good job of also spending time with the background and also with the political factors of all that was going on. So it never became just a series of military engagements.

"I like it when things clump, do you?"

Yes!

>95 laytonwoman3rd: "I often, totally unintentionally, find that I am reading a couple books back-to-back with similar themes, story elements, settings or characters. I usually think it's a total coincidence, because I'm not aware of knowing enough about the books ahead of time to even subconsciously pick them for their similarities."

Yep, that happens to me, too. Plus, I often "choose" the books I read via an almost entirely random selection system I've established for myself. So sometimes I feel like it's the universe grouping those books together, not me.

Lots of great reading here.

I read Satan in Goray some ten years ago, wondering if Singer had any presentiment of what was to come. I concluded there was no hint of what was to happen to the Jews of Poland. Any fear about their immediate situation at that time was over the chaos resulting from the split between religious and secular groups within the community. Fear of outsiders was limited to the still very real fear of intermittent pogroms, but there was no hint of peril from outside Poland's borders. That was not part of Singer's world.

It was an excellent book, and now I'm wondering why I haven't followed up with more Singer.

Noting On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, First Harvest and quite excited to hear there is a tenth man out there somewhere.

Like the "betweens", something that never fails to keep a person reading.

>88 rocketjk: Thanks for the review of The new Jim Crow. I tried to read it shortly after it first came out, and felt emotionally manipulated. (tone policing maybe) I'm glad to see a breakdown of content, so I will put this back in the rotation of things to be read.

>97 SassyLassy: I think you're missing some important factors in your assessment of the perils of Jewish life in Poland in the early- to mid-30s, but I'm running out the door for a week's vacation right now and haven't had time to edit down my response. It's an interesting question, indeed. I'll have more upon my return.

>93 rocketjk: Really enjoyed your Greene review. Very curious now as to how this worked out after they drew lots. Pretty harrowing stuff.

>93 rocketjk: I always meant to read The Tenth Man... somehow I knew that backstory. Plus I'm a fan of The Third Man and wonder how it stacks up.

Lots of interesting reading here all around.

>93 rocketjk: I've never read Graham Greene and did not know where to start. This is clearly not his most famous work (and it's not available in translation at the moment...), but your review sounds interesting and it might be the incentive that I needed.

Great review of The New Jim Crow, Jerry. I should finally get to it this summer.

>97 SassyLassy: "I read Satan in Goray some ten years ago, wondering if Singer had any presentiment of what was to come. I concluded there was no hint of what was to happen to the Jews of Poland. Any fear about their immediate situation at that time was over the chaos resulting from the split between religious and secular groups within the community. Fear of outsiders was limited to the still very real fear of intermittent pogroms, but there was no hint of peril from outside Poland's borders. That was not part of Singer's world."

OK! My wife and I are back from our spur-of-the-moment beach vacation in southern Baja, which was wonderful, and I did want to respond a bit to your comment, for which I thank you sincerely.

Clearly you're entirely correct that the 30s in Poland were a time of turmoil within the Jewish community there, as an ever greater portion of the Jewish population turned from religious practice to a more secular way of thinking and being. (And after all, this is a major theme of Satan in Goray!) But the idea that this would have been the only source of fear for Polish Jews regarding their immediate situation leaves out an important factor, I think, which is the degree to which the Jews of Poland at that time were imperiled by domestic conditions not of their own making. Certainly, nobody saw the evil fury of the Holocaust coming. I don't think even the Nazi's had dreamed it up yet. That might have been all you meant to say, in which case, we're in agreement and just count the rest of my post as a wordy add-on. (The Wordy Add Ons would have been a great name for an 80s rock band!)

But if you're interested in what else I might be thinking of . . . : As Harvard scholar Ruth R. Wisse tells us in her introduction to the 1996 edition of Satan in Goray:

“In 1918, after more than a century of partition and political subjugation, Poland reestablished its national sovereignty, but although the government was formally obliged by the Treaty of Versailles to grant cultural rights to its minorities, the new patriotic spirit turned against ‘the strangers from within,’ and especially against Jews. Formally democratic, Poland was actually ruled after 1926 in semi-autocratic fashion by its military hero Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, and this ambiguous political situation had its parallel in the treatment of the Jews, who were granted formal citizenship but were faced with actual discrimination. . . .

“By the early 1930s, the 3000,000 Jews of Warsaw lived in something resembling a state of siege. Anti-Semitic boycotts crippled Jewish trade; sporadic violence threatened Jewish life; restrictive clauses blocked the entry of Jews into high education. Emigration, once the natural route for young Jews seeking a better life, and been curtailed by America’s tightened immigration policies, and by worsening economic and political conditions in Palestine. Jewish Communists who tried to make the illegal crossing into the Soviet Union risked arrest by police on both sides of the border. . . . The adjustment to Polish nationalism was never free of humiliation. . . .”

Wisse tells us that this made for fertile ground for an independent Jewish literary identity, “for while many Jewish writers and intellectuals did try to enter Polish society at the expense of their Jewishness, the vast majority reacted to the palpable hostility by remaining within the Jewish sphere.” The "Jewish sphere," for many young Jewish intellectuals at least, no longer meant Torah study, but the secular world of learning and literature. But they were forced inward on themselves. To move your way into mainstream Polish intellectual life, you had to shed all traces of your Jewish identity. Evidently, not even many secularized Jews wanted to take this step.

Regarding the issue of whether Polish Jews at that time felt any hint of peril from without, that, too, is an interesting open question for me. Satan in Goray was published in serial format in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. The book came out in novel form in 1935. Also in March of 1935, according to Wikipedia, "Hitler announced an expansion of the Wehrmacht to 600,000 members – six times the number permitted by the Versailles Treaty – including development of an air force and an increase in the size of the navy. Britain, France, Italy and the League of Nations condemned these violations of the Treaty but did nothing to stop it.” So we have a country on Poland's border with an antagonistic, saber-rattling, aggressively anti-Semitic ruler, the same country that had started a war of conquest only 19 years earlier. Perhaps in 1935 the anti-Jewish laws already passed in Germany by that time didn't seem on their face any worse than what was already going on in Poland. (I found a timeline of those Nazi laws on this page of the U.S. Holocaust Museum's website: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-pre...

But also, 1935 was the year that Singer left Poland for the U.S., one of the lucky few to obtain a visa to do so.

On the Wikipedia page on Singer, we read: "In 1935, four years before the Nazi invasion, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States. He was fearful of the growing threat in neighboring Germany." (Unfortunately, the footnote that goes along with this claim connects to a page on a pdf link that is blanked out. Not helpful!) I found a couple of other websites that made similar statements, but none featuring a direct quote from Singer or any substantive accreditation. Even the introduction I’ve been quoting from is silent on the reason for Singer’s move to America, saying only that he was extremely lucky to get a visa (arranged by his brother, who was already in New York). The bio on https://www.bashevissinger.com even glosses over the question! I've only read Singer's earliest memoir, In My Father's Court, which deals only with his childhood and adolescence in Poland. It would be interesting to read the section of his memoir in which Singer describes his departure from Poland to see what he says on the question. Either Singer actually saw trouble brewing in the form of Hitler’s rise and Stalin’s increasing brutality, or conditions within Warsaw at the time were already bad enough on their own to force Singer’s decision, or there was some combination of the two. Or maybe he just thought that America would be a better place to be a Jewish writer. At any rate, he felt it necessary to leave Poland. Something was up!

Apologies for this long disquisition, which, I understand, has grown outward beyond the scope of your comment! But that comment of yours was hugely thought provoking for me, and led to all sorts of "rabbit hole" scrolling and reading. I thought (I hope!) you would be interested in what I found. You have clearly given the question a lot of thought, and I'd be grateful to have any misconceptions of mine, and/or any alternative information sources, pointed out.

ETA: Before hitting the "Post Message" button here, I decided to jump down one more rabbit hole, and ran an online search for "Polish Jews in the 1930s." I quickly came to this link: https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/news/exploring-1930s-jewish-reckoning-danger.... It's a review of a very recent book on this topic called An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland by historian Kenneth Moss. From the review: "A new book by Kenneth Moss, the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College, tells a more complicated story of how, when facing rising ethnonationalism, fascism, and antisemitism across Europe in the 1930s, many Polish Jews began to recognize that that their community was in real danger and they had very little capacity to do much about it. At most, Jewish political efforts might help a small minority of the community win a reasonable chance at a decent future." Now I'm going to have to order that book and read it. One more to the TBR stack. Let me know if you'd like to read it together. That would be fun.

All the best!

>104 rocketjk: “By the early 1930s, the 3000,000 Jews of Warsaw lived in something resembling a state of siege..." the vast majority reacted to the palpable hostility by remaining within the Jewish sphere

In a Lockdown University lecture today, Trudy Gold talked about the Czech Jews and whether anti-Semitism is in a way responsible for strengthening Jewish identity. During periods of liberalism toward Jews, assimilation and intermarriage increased. But when anti-Jewish sentiment increased, the opposite occurred. It's not a new idea, but your comments above reminded me of it.

>104 rocketjk: i’ve read Singer’s 3-part autobiography, covering his emigration but it was a long time ago. My hazy memory was that he never wanted to leave Poland, but had an opportunity and saw leaving it as an escape. (Clearer in memory is that he was traumatized by emigration.) Also, he was very aware of the raw hatred of Poles towards Polish Jews.

>88 rocketjk: terrific review of The New Jim Crowe. I really appreciate how you have all the most essential points clearly and concisely laid out.

>88 rocketjk: I've had this sitting around for some time... and while I am familiar with the general themes, your review is a reminder to actually read the book.

>105 labfs39: "In a Lockdown University lecture today, Trudy Gold talked about the Czech Jews and whether anti-Semitism is in a way responsible for strengthening Jewish identity. During periods of liberalism toward Jews, assimilation and intermarriage increased. But when anti-Jewish sentiment increased, the opposite occurred. It's not a new idea, but your comments above reminded me of it."

A really interesting question, Lisa. It makes sense that people circle the wagons in times of danger. More generally, I guess it depends on what is meant by "Jewish identity" and also what we mean by "assimilation." Using myself as an example, I'm what most people would call an assimilated Jew. I dress like the average aging American child of the 70s, don't keep kosher, almost never go to synagogue. But I still have a strong Jewish identity. If you spend a little time in New York City and the surrounding area, you will find a vibrant and stratified (everything from Hassids to assimilated) Jewish community which has thrived over the years I'd say very much because of the relative absence of anti-Semitism. But maybe we can say that it needed the anti-Semitism of Europe to create such a strong Jewish community in America. Looking at the question the other way around, we can also say that being a strongly assimilated Jewish population didn't make the Jews of Germany any less targets once the Nazis came to power. And of course we'll never know what the eventual effects on that community would have been if the Nazis had contented themselves with simply maintaining the anti-Jewish laws they'd put in place by, say, 1936 instead of stepping up their program so horrifically.

You may be sure that I am not setting myself up as knowing as much about Jewish history as Trudy Gold does. I'm only saying that the point you raise, as I'm guessing you'd agree, is, as I see it, one parameter of a multi-faceted equation. (I think I just mixed a metaphor, there. Do equations have parameters?)

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



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

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

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

>109 rocketjk: Do I have this book? Seems the sort of thing I would have, intersection of Quammen and Darwin, and yes, checking LT, indeed I do from back when I was caught up with data entry. Pretty sure I haven't read it. You are fortunate in your reading group. I can't imagine persuading mine to read this.

mostly by studying barnacles!
FYI, there is Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott which I also have but haven't read. I wasn't wild about Darwin's Ghosts.

>110 qebo: There is evidently a whole cottage industry of writing about Darwin. At one point in The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Quammen mentions having 11 Darwin biographies stacked up on his desk. I'll admit that I haven't read anything else about him but this one.

>109 rocketjk: Ooh, I like Quammen's writing, but I hadn't realized he'd done a Darwin bio. That sounds right up my alley. Onto the wishlist it goes!

>112 bragan: I'd never read any of Quammen's books before, but I definitely enjoyed the writing and will be looking to squeeze one or two other's of his, at least, into my reading.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen



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

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

Gwendolyn Smith
Brayton, Iowa
April 21 -- 1923

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

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

>114 rocketjk: Nice review, and I equally enjoyed the story behind your copy. I have not read S&S in a very long time, but I do occasionally indulge in the BBC miniseries, which I like very much.

>115 labfs39: Thanks! Maybe I'll see if my wife wants to watch it with me.

>104 rocketjk: Catching up on your always interesting thread. Some years ago, I found a collection of portraits of Jewish families in Poland from before WWII and it's a book well worth hunting down (I think I got my hands on it through an inter-library loan).

Memories of my life in a Polish Village? and I agree, its well worth reading

>118 cindydavid4: That looks great. I will keep an eye out.

My "between book" tradition was necessarily suspended during my wife's and my recent vacation in Baja, I've returned to it now that I'm home. Here is my post-Sense and Sensibility read through Stack 3

* "Brock, Aaron Hit Historic Polo Grounds Blasts" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Monroes Find a Terminal" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Battle of the Atlantic (July- November, 1940)" from The Background of Our War
* "The Dark Roots of the Rose" by Walter Clemons from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Water of Life" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The ‘Advance to the Yalu’" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Little Women” (a review of the movie, Lolita) by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and movie reviews by Donald W. LaBadie from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now I've started Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

Aaron and Brock have me thinking about baseball. I wish Houston carried spring training games on tv.

>109 rocketjk: i have two unread biographies of Darwin around the house. One is a two-volume set. And, ( >114 rocketjk: ) my unread copy of Sense and Sensibility has been hanging out in the house since 2002. (I’ve only read Pride and Prejudice, but I adored the book) Enjoyed your reviews.

>118 cindydavid4: No, it was Image Before My Eyes by Lucjan Dobroszycki. I can't believe I forgot to add the title of the book!

>121 RidgewayGirl: That looks great, too. I will keep an eye out.

>120 dchaikin: "I wish Houston carried spring training games on tv."

If you have any sort of streaming TV, I think the MLB channel shows spring training games free (they want to suck you in so you'll pay for the regular season games).

"Enjoyed your reviews."

Thanks!

>111 rocketjk: I actually have a little Darwin shelf—I used to work for the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, transcribing hi-res scans of his notes. He had notoriously awful handwriting, so it took a bunch of research into his work and a lot of parallel natural science of the day to figure out just what in the world he was saying sometimes. And that piqued my interest in all things Darwin. The Quammen is on there, and a bunch of other Darwin-related and -adjacent stuff (including the marvelously titled Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider: How Scientific Names Celebrate Adventurers, Heroes, and Even a Few Scoundrels, which, criminally, I haven't read yet).

>124 lisapeet: That must be a fascinating project. Quammen makes mention of Darwin's horrible penmanship and says that he had one person in particular that he paid to transcribe his scribblings over the years. I guess that fellow learned to decipher the scrawl.

>124 lisapeet: What a cool job!

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



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

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

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

* During the primary debate, just as Michael Bloomberg was beginning to gather strength as a Biden replacement with lots of his own money to spend and a better chance to beat Trump than Biden represented, Elizabeth Warren came to the rescue with a withering attack on Bloomberg for which he had no response and which more or less ended his candidacy on the spot. Again, Warren wasn't trying to help Biden. She just despised Bloomberg and his belief that he could swoop in and buy the nomination. But, again, clearing the field of Bloomberg at that point served Biden enormously.

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

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

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

>127 rocketjk: (For the record, I was too. I volunteered in SC and those last few weeks before the primary were some long days.)

>127 rocketjk: For the record
As was I, and a good chunk of people I know, though on a map I wouldn't appear to live in a bubble, at the edge of a blue island surrounded by a red sea in a purple state. Not a time I would care to revisit for 413 pages.

>128 RidgewayGirl: & >129 qebo: I read an opinion piece about Warren shortly after she dropped out of the race. The gist of the piece was that many people who supported her were surprised when she had to drop out, as they had thought she was doing better than she was. The writer said something along the lines of, "You liked her and you knew a lot of other people who liked her, so why would she have to leave the campaign? The problem was that only a small, particular subset of the populace was in her corner, or even really knew who she was. If you liked her, a lot of your friends probably liked her, too, but you were all in that small subset. The people inside that group didn't realize how small the group was."

The authors of this book don't give her a lot of credit as a candidate, but they focus so much on the politics that they give short shrift to ideas and policies in general.

Here is my post-Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency read through of Stack 1 of my "Between Books," because I knew of course that you were all desperate to know . . .

* “Sport: The Kill” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
* “I Complain, Therefore I Am” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “John Ridd’s Adventures” – excerpts from Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
* “Paul Gallico” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* "The Marines are Introduced to Frozen Chosin" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Modigliani: How Many Vertebrae to a Neck?” – an excerpt from People and Life: Memoirs 1891-1921 by Ilya Ehrenburg from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - July 1962

I'm now on to this month's book group selection, the massive The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson



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

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

>132 rocketjk: determined to tell us everything he knew
Yeah, this. And multiple times over. I read an e-book and bookmarked along the way, and when I returned to review I realized how many were "oh this again". Incidentally, I listened to a recent podcast interview with a critic of cryptocurrency, and noticed how much of the described ideology was in TMftF:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-dan-olson.html .

I know you've all been impatiently waiting for my post-The Ministry for the Future "between books" progress. It was back to Stack 3 this time:

* "Expansions, New Parks Made 1962 Big Year" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Mr. Monroe Holds the Fort" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Mediterranean Theater of War (June 10, 1940 --)" from The Background of Our War
* "Arcturus" by Evan S. Connell, Jr. from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "How One Turned His Trouble to Some Account" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The Attack to the West" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Two Ways of Getting the Curtain Up” (a review of the musicals, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and No Strings) by Jay S. Harrison from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to something more relaxing though another long one, Turning Angel, the second book in Greg Iles' Penn Cage mystery series.

Turning Angel by Greg Iles



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

Having finished Turning Angel, I then took a read through Stack 2 of my "Between Books."

* “Fair Fiordespina” by Pietro Fortini from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “M is for Marts of Trade” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “The Simplicity of Disorder” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* "About William Caine” from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Baby Pictures” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “The Pond” by Nigel Kneale from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* "The Enemy Strikes: the Marines Are Surrounded" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* "Looking Back, Part 2" by Somerset Maugham from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

I've now started the semi-classic historical novel Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts.

Tomorrow my wife and I head south about 100 miles to Marin County (just north of the Golden Gate Bridge) where I will undergo a bit of surgery. There'll be a bit of sculpting on my innards, some standard senior citizen male stuff. (It's hard to remember to quit calling myself "middle aged!"). Surgery is Tuesday, one night overnight at the hospital, another night in a motel nearby just to be on the safe side, and then, the sprites and spirits willing, home again. I'll catch up with y'all in about half a week.

<137 All the best for your surgery, Jerry. Hope to see you back right as rain in a few days.

>137 rocketjk: Haven't you heard, middle-aged now extends to 90. Good luck with your innards!

>137 rocketjk: May all go smoothly and recovery be swift. We'll be here when you get back.

>137 rocketjk: I'm having trouble with that end-of-middle-age thing too. I had just gotten used to saying "middle aged" without wincing, and now this. Good luck with everything, hope it's uneventful and you get some good reading in.

Wishing you an uneventful time of it and a smooth recovery. Don't forget to pack a book or two.

>142 RidgewayGirl: et. al.

Thanks, everyone. It's only one night overnight in hospital, and one night overnight in a motel near the hospital, so . . .

"Don't forget to pack a book or two."

Right! I've just started Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, all 709 pages of it. Probably not the most practical book to be lugging around, given the circumstances, but it means I only need to bring that one!

>143 rocketjk: Good luck.

best of luck!

>143 rocketjk: "It's only one night overnight in hospital, and one night overnight in a motel"
Sounds like a four-book trip to me :-). All the best for your surgery.

>146 rhian_of_oz: Sounds like a four-book trip to me :-) To me too, but not for a planned reader, I guess.

Yes, all the best for your surgery!

Anyone standing in for your radio programme?. Get well soon.

yes, get well soon. For what it's worth, the in-between books stuff is interesting. I love that you do that, and I'm entertained by your lists. (And I'm noting your Baldwin progress.) Enjoyed your last three reviews. Very interesting about the Biden candidacy.

hope all goes well, and you are able to heal fast!

Thanks to all for the good wishes. I am back home! The procedure went well; my surgeon says I am "batting 1.000" so far. (That's a perfect score for the non-baseball fans in the crowd.) I will have to go back in on Monday morning for a follow-up appointment and the removal of one item that was purposely left attached. It won't be until then that we will know whether things are a complete success, but, as I said, my surgeon thinks it's all systems go. I've got some pain from incisions but nothing too dire.

>149 baswood: "Anyone standing in for your radio programme?"

Coincidentally, this past Monday was the week that I was scheduled to go from every week to every other week. For many years I'd been alternating with another fellow who more or less went into hibernation when Covid started, at which point I stepped in to host every week. That's been for a couple of years, now. Recently, this producer decided to finally officially retire from his program. I told the program director that I'd be willing and happy to stay as a weekly show, but there was another host who'd also been away from the station for a while who wanted to return, and as his show had been both popular and excellent, I agreed to go every other week with him. His name is Paul and his show is called Radiorama and he focuses on Cuban and Cuban-influenced music of all genres. So it's a natural fit for us to alternate. So he was on this past Monday. Next week our pledge drive starts. I've pre-recorded a pledge drive show for next Monday, as I'll be back at the hospital for my follow-up, and then, assuming I'm good to go health wise, I'll be on-air with Paul doing some pledge drive pitching together. After that we will alternate for a while, unless another weekday slot opens up that he can move into. Then I'll go back to hosting weekly. That's all probably more information than you needed. That's what you get for asking me a question when I've been away from my computer for three days and have itchy typing fingers! :)

>150 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I'm glad you enjoy the between-book reporting. For some reason it kind of tickles me to post those lists, so I'm glad somebody peruses them! The Biden book was good, and interesting, but not great. My guess is that there's a better book on the way on the topic one of these months.

>152 rocketjk: glad to hear it went well.

I'm still working on, and enjoying, Northwest Passage but I just wanted to pop in here and report that my follow-up appointment went well and that my plumbing now seems to be working all on its own just as it's supposed to. Surgeon 1, Prostate 0. The good guys win!

I missed your health issues somehow :( Glad to hear that you are doing fine! :)

I'm glad your recovery is going well.

I'm glad your surgery was a success.

P.S. I finished Gaza Mom while you were away. A tough but rewarding read. It's too bad she is no longer blogging, I would have liked to have gotten her thoughts on recent events.

>157 labfs39: Yes, I saw your review. The first thing I thought was, "Good on ya for being able to read that book straight through." As you know I've been reading the book one chapter at a time as a "between book" so that I didn't get ground down as a reader by the depressing oppression described. If I remember correctly, El-Haddad has been in the U.S. for several years, so I guess would no longer have the immediacy of experience to continue blogging effectively. My own guess is that conditions in Gaza are different now in some ways but not appreciably better overall.

>154 rocketjk: Hooray!

>154 rocketjk: prostates can be finicky bastards. Glad your surgeon won.

Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts



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

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

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

Ralph S. Stirling
Montreal
Sept 1938

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

Miss Della Ann Stirling
498 Main Street
Burbank, California

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

>161 rocketjk: Hmm, I have Arundel on my shelves. You make me want to read it sooner rather than later.

>161 rocketjk: That's a great backstory, and the book sounds like fun (with caveats). Glad all went the way it was supposed to and that you're feeling well.

Love your book note. I was reading your review and trying to figure out how dated Northwest Passage might be. It sounds like you really enjoyed. Also sounds like it might have helped inspire Lonesome Dove.

>163 lisapeet: You made me look! "Perhaps Della was Ralph's unmarried sister" But her grave marker says "Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great grandmother and sister"... The plot thickens!

Could that middle initial "S" be a "G" (handwriting, sometimes....)? Because there is a Ralph G. Stirling in Cimetière Mont-Royal,
Outremont, Montreal Region, Quebec. His wife's name was Dorothy. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/108957633/ralph-gaden-stirling

>163 lisapeet: "the book sounds like fun (with caveats)"

Yes, a fair description. However, I was a bit remiss in my review and/or trying to avoid spoilers in that I didn't make it clear that not all of the story takes place during the French and Indian War. There's more to it all than that.

"Glad all went the way it was supposed to and that you're feeling well."

Thanks! I've still got some pain from my incisions, but that's to be expected.

>164 dchaikin: "It sounds like you really enjoyed. Also sounds like it might have helped inspire Lonesome Dove."

I did, though I'd be dubious that this novel inspired Lonesome Dove much, as it takes place about 100 years earlier than the McMurtry books. It's a much different millieu. It's kind of dated, yeah, and some of the characters are larger than life, almost verging into tall tale territory at times. That was part of the charm for me, in fact.

>165 laytonwoman3rd: Ah, yes, you're right about that grave marker.

"Could that middle initial 'S' be a 'G' (handwriting, sometimes....)? Because there is a Ralph G. Stirling in Cimetière Mont-Royal,
Outremont, Montreal Region, Quebec."

Intriguing! I've already got the book reshelved, but I'll check it in the morning to see if I might have misread that middle initial. Your man was born in Twillingate, Newfoundland, which I have visited. Believe it or not I haven't been to Montreal, yet.

Post-Northwest Passage, it was time for a read through Stack 3 of my "Between Books"

* "Review of World’s Series" by Frederick G. Lieb from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Middle Years" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The War in the Balkans (October, 1940 – May 27, 1941)" from The Background of Our War
* "The Song" by Harris Downey, Jr. from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "How Three Went Out into the Wide World" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The Battle for Survival: Every Man a Rifleman" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “Coney Island: the Fun is Over” by Joseph Heller from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Next up will be this month's reading group selection, The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

>166 rocketjk: I got so distracted by reference to Find-A-Grave (one of my time-sinks; I visit lots of local cemeteries and contribute to that data base whenever I can), that I forgot to mention that I remember sinking into Arundel and Rabble in Arms when I was in high school. There's nothing like an immersive historical novel, but I think I'm glad I experienced Roberts as a teenager, because it sounds like I'd quibble with him to his detriment now.

>165 laytonwoman3rd: OK, here's an image of that inscription. That middle initial could certainly be a G instead of an S, especially given how different it looks from the S at the beginning of Stirling.

Yep, I'd say that's a G. >166 rocketjk: "Your man was born in Twillingate, Newfoundland, which I have visited. " So I think maybe he's your man.

>170 laytonwoman3rd: Also, check this out: https://www.myheritage.com/names/ralph_stirling
You have to scroll down until you get to a couple of Ralph Garden Stirling's, the first of which says . . .

"Ralph married Susan Dorothy Tilley.
They had 2 daughters: Della Ann Stirling and one other child."

So we've confirmed Della as Ralph's daughter. There are links for more information/sources, but if you click on them you're asked to sign up/pay, which I'm not doing. But it looks like we've nailed it down.

Here's Ralph's wife, Susan Dorothy Tilley (Hibbs):
Also born in Newfoundland. Looks like she remarried after Ralph dies.
Daughter of Richard Hibbs and Selina Grace Hibbs
Wife of Ralph Gaden Stirling and Chester Tilley
Mother of Della Ann Stirling and Private
https://www.geni.com/people/Susan-Dorothy-Tilley/6000000035490422393

I'd love to know more about them all, of course, but not enough to climb over that pay wall. Cheers!

Mmmm I have a copy of Dicken's children that has two inscriptions "Sam to Leila Christmas 1928" Followed by "Leila and Bina to Amanda, Chanukah 1992" wish there was a last name, coz I find that very interesting sequence. im figuring Sam is the father, Leila the daughter, then Leila and Bina the grandparents to Amanda the child.

>172 cindydavid4: Yes, these are fun! And you can make up your own stories, right? Your conjecture makes sense, although somewhere along the generations we switch from Christmas to Hanukah. I guess it wouldn't have been too unusual in 1928 for an assimilated Jewish man to give his daughter a Christmas present. I don't think American Jews began to emphasize Hanukah as a cultural event/alternative to Christmas until sometime later. I'm not sure about that, though.* Or possibly some intermarriage took place with a child/grandchild being brought up Jewish, making it appropriate for a book first given as a Christmas present to be given as a Hanukah present within the same family 64 years later.

Lots of guesses!

* Here's an interesting essay I found on that topic:
https://theconversation.com/how-hanukkah-came-to-america-106426

>173 rocketjk: I was thinking more about the intermarriage, which since the 60s has really skyrocketed (all three of us married non jewish spouses) but there are other possibilities esp if the dad in 1928 was keeping his religion secret.

thaniks for that link, wow I had no idea where it started from! Very interesting

'suburban Jewish children often comprised small minorities in public schools and found themselves coerced to participate in Christmas assemblies' Oh yeah remember singing christmas carols at home when I was in the 2nd grade,that I learned at school. My dad was livid and talked to the principal. Didn't change much but it made me realie just how wrong that was for them to insist that i participate.

and as a teacher I was often asked if I woud teach a class about hanukah. I did for a while but I told them no, its a minor holiday. If you want to learn about Judaism, I can talk about Passover or Rosh Hashanah. Same thing happens with Latino families in October - people assume that Dia los Muertos is like Halloween, just coz its in October

>171 rocketjk: Here's an interesting thing. The person who manages the Find-a-Grave memorial for Ralph G. Stirling has been a member of the site for going on 7 years, but has contributed nothing, and manages no other memorials. They apparently took this one over from the original creator of the memorial, suggesting to me that there is some strong connection.

>161 rocketjk: (and following) It was fun following your investigation regarding these inscriptions on your copy of the book. One of the reasons I love second-hand books. I've never conducted such an investigation, but love to dream about how the book ended up on my shelves, and what happened before.
BTW, I've never read Kenneth Roberts but he is on my list, for one day when I am in the mood for those historical books!

>176 raton-liseur: "One of the reasons I love second-hand books. I've never conducted such an investigation, but love to dream about how the book ended up on my shelves, and what happened before."

Yes! Me, too. I like to think of every used book having a multiplicity of stories. There's the story that the author is telling in the writing. There's the story of why the author wrote that book/told that story. OK, those are true for a new book, too. But then there are the stories of, as you say, what journeys the book has taken to end up on my shelf. Who else owned it, why did they own it, etc. As you may or may not recall, I owned a used bookstore for almost eight years. Swimming through all those stories everyday was one of the many joys of the endeavor. Cheers!

The Sellout by Paul Beatty



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

I’m glad you liked The Sellout. It’s hard to get satire right but I wonder if that’s the only way to address American racism without despair. It also allows anger to show without turning into a sermon. Have you read We Cast a Shadow or The Trees?

>179 RidgewayGirl: Yes, well said. I thought Beatty landed in exactly the right place between all those elements of the story and of our national situation. I haven't read either of the books you mention, but I'll certainly look into them.

Post-The Sellout, I went back for a second straight read through Stack 3 of my "Between Books."

* "Review of the 1961 World’s Series" by Frederick G. Lieb from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Pet Department" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
* "The Battle of Russia (June 21, 1941 – )" from The Background of Our War
* "The Unhappy Hunting Grounds" by William Eastlake, Jr. from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Clever Student and the Master of Black Arts" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The Attack to the South" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer
* “The Teeming World of Japanese Films” by Frank Gibney from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, the latest offering by Mary Roach.

>178 rocketjk: Thanks for that review, and definitely noted. I'm so leery of satire, but also love it when done right.

>182 lisapeet: I would love to know your reaction to The Sellout. I hope you decide to read it. Cheers!

>177 rocketjk: Yes, I've seen yu mentionning various times that you owned a used bookstore. Fascinating job... Some days, I day-dream working in a bookstore (used or new), but I definitely don't have the qualities for that...

>178 rocketjk: Interesting review and subject. I might try to read it if my library has it, despite usually not being a fan of satires.

>184 raton-liseur: "I might try to read it if my library has it, despite usually not being a fan of satires."

If you can get it at the library, give it a chapter or two and see what you think. (I guess that's what you meant by "try to read it.") My guess is that you'll be sold on it and will continue on.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach



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

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

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

Lt and safari conspired to eat my post

>186 rocketjk: what a cool connection. I enjoyed the one Roach I listened to on audio.

>178 rocketjk: fantastic post. I’m very interested. (But i have a Reel Big Fish brain-worm now)

Here's my post-Fuzz read through Stack 1 of my "Between Books"

* “The Sniper” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Out of Palestine, Still in Pain” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Finn MacCool, the Three Giants, and the Small Men” – excerpts from Hero-Tales of Ireland by Jeremiah Curtin from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Come Out the Wilderness” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
* “Al Laney” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* "The Attack to the South" from The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in Korea by Andrew Geer -- Finished!
* “The Art of Akira Kurosawa” by Anthony West from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - July 1962

My review of The New Breed will be coming shortly. I've now started the novel, Conjure Women by Afia Atakora.

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



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

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

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

Just a quick note that I have joined the LTers Covid Club. I am mostly isolating in my home office, but I can also get out onto our lovely deck, as the weather has been very nice, here. My symptoms were quite irksome on the first day (last Wednesday), but have mostly mellowed out since then. As I'm over 65, I'm eligible for and taking Paxlovid, which supposedly suppresses symptoms and hastens recovery. The one thing I can tell you for sure is that in puts a taste like metal filings in your mouth after you ingest it. C'est la vie!

>190 rocketjk: One club you would willingly forego joining, I'm sure. I hope your recovery is straightforward and swift. Take care!

>190 rocketjk: Wishing you a quick and uneventful recovery. Glad you got the Paxlovid.

Oof, sorry to hear. But glad you could get the Paxlovid, and hope it contributes to a speedy recovery.

>190 rocketjk: hope you feel better soon.

Get well soon!!!

Oh no :( Hope it does not turn into a bad case. Get better soon!

Conjure Women by Asia Atakora



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

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

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

>197 rocketjk: "I feel, as can happen with these reviews, that I've over-emphasized the faults I found to the extent perhaps of overshadowing this novel's many virtues. "

I am always worried about that when I am writing reviews... :) For what it is worth, this ones does not come out as a negative review.

>198 AnnieMod: Cool. Thank you!

>197 rocketjk: I enjoyed that one quite a lot when I read it last year. It was one of those rare finds that I had heard nothing about before I picked it up. I agree that the author's next work is something to look forward to.

Here is my post-Conjure Women ramble through Stack 2 of my "Between Books:"

* “Dream-Woman” by Wilkie Collins from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “N is for New Parlor Game” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Caviar and Bread Again: A Warning to the New Writer” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* “Dear Mikado: An Open Letter to the Emperor of Japan from a Humble Subject of a Barbaric Land” by Manuel Komroff from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “The Hour of Letdown” by E.B. White from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* "Introduction” by Philip Van Doren Stern from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern -- Newly added
* "White Villians Wanted: $8.33 A Day" by Norman Sklarewitz from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll by Colin Escott with Martin Hawkins

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



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

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

I hope that you are feeling better! I find that I still have some " after effects" from Covid- lack of appetite, not sleeping all through the night and I had a lingering end of cold for a while.

>203 torontoc: Thanks. I am feeling better, save for a bit of sniffles, essentially, but frustratingly I am still testing positive after 16 days, which means I am most likely going to miss the wedding of my very good friend this weekend. There are all sorts of reports of what it means if your home test is still showing positive so far along. Some say you're not able to pass along the virus any more, positive test notwithstanding, but all say no one really knows for sure. My doctor says a positive antigen test means you can still give the virus to someone else, and that's how I feel I should treat things, too. I'm about to take this morning's test (as soon as I drink this cup of coffee my wife just poured me). Then I'll know whether I can get in the car and head off for the festivities about 90 miles to the south of me.

ETA. Just got the OK from my local medical clinic to head down tomorrow for the wedding. I will miss tonight's bachelor party but I'll be able to attend everything else. My friends had the foresight to plan just about everything outdoors, so that'll be me in the mask. Cheers!

>204 rocketjk: I had a similar quandary when I had COVID two years ago. Not much was known about it back then, and there weren't tests around, so I was told to quarantine until I was fever-free for 72 hours. But, I had a fever every day for three months. What to do? I stayed in quarantine, but it was not fun. Glad you got the okay to go.

I've quarantined twice for exposure, came up negative both times. It's annoying when it's unnecessary, but the downside if I didn't is so huge...

>205 rocketjk: yeah!

Here's my post-Good Rockin' Tonight stroll through stack 3 of my "Between Books":

* "Sanford 14th to Reel Off 16 Victories in Row" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage" from The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber-- Finished!
* "The Path to World War in the Far East (1931 – 1937)" from The Background of Our War
* "A Summer’s Long Dream" by Nancy Hale, Jr. from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Princess Golden-Hair and the Great Black Raven " from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* “The Route from Anne Frank to Camille is Straight Down the Appian Way” by Helen Lawrenson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

Now it's on to Diary of a Lonely Girl or the Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove.

>207 jjmcgaffey: "but the downside if I didn't is so huge..."

Exactly, which is why I kept isolating and testing for several days after the time when the CDC says to stop testing. I only had minor symptoms at that point, but they were still symptoms and I was still testing positive, and I was still very much not interested in infecting anyone else.

The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>212 rocketjk: Reading the description of the novel, it felt like a more modern novel in some ways. I had to keep reminding myself that it was written during WW1. Very interesting. Will you seek out more of her works?

>213 labfs39: "Reading the description of the novel, it felt like a more modern novel in some ways. I had to keep reminding myself that it was written during WW1."

In terms of the power relationships between men and women, it is definitely modern in theme. The differences between then and now, for the most part, seem mostly minor, to be honest.

"Will you seek out more of her works?"

I might, though I'm more likely to sample some of the other books from the Syracuse University Press series "Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art" that Diary of a Lonely Girl is part of: https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/judaic-traditions-in-literature-music-a...

One drawback to the novel, at least in terms of the reading experience itself, that I only touched on, is that Karpilove shows us very little, indeed, of her protagonist's life outside of these encounters with the men in her life. We don't know where she works and only occasionally see her doing anything but dealing with these men. That's part of what I was referring to when I said the book gets repetitive sometimes. I am curious to read some of Karpilove's other works to see how they compare along those lines, but I'm not sure I'm going to carve out a space for that in my reading time. Perhaps I'll get inspired to do so, though.

Enjoyed a post-Diary of a Lonely Girl read through Stack 1 of my "Between Books":

* “Two Dogs” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “We Are Alone” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “A Group of Old Ballads” from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Going to Meet the Man” from Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin -- finished
* “Richards Vidmar” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “Famous Failures” by Robert Cunniff from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - July 1962

Now on to Chinese artist and activist Weiwei Ai's memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin



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

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, I'm off for about two weeks. My wife and I are heading out to a fun music festival in northern Mendocino County, CA, called The Kate Wolf Festival. We go and camp in a group with a bunch of friends from out town here. Then it's off to Toronto for several days for the wedding of my wife's cousin. Cheers!

omg I loved her! Got to see her in concert in SLC a few years before she passed. the station there played her music all the time; her 'give yourself to love was sung at our receptiont loved Pacheco. Been thinking of the lyrics to Hobo after hearing someones comments about the homeless on the beach....Anyway enjoiy the festival and the wedding!

Yes, enjoy-be advised that right now we are experiencing a heat wave in Toronto.

> 219 "Give Yourself to Love" is the song that's used as the festival's grand finale, during which all of the festival artists who are still on site, and many of the employees, come onstage and sing together with whoever the final act has been. In this case the final, glorious, act was Ruthie Foster, and also the song was not just the grand finale for the year but for the festival as a whole, as it had been announced that after two years off due to Covid, the festival management was coming back for one last go 'round and then calling it quits. It was hot and dusty in northern Mendocino County over the weekend, but along with the friends we camped with, we were able to help give the festival a good send-off. Some highlights musically over the four days/nights for me were (in no particular order), Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassidy (a.k.a. Acoustic Hot Tuna), David Doucet & Beausoleil (a very famous Cajun band), Old Blind Dogs (Scottish traditional), Taj Mahal, Leftover Salmon, Marcia Ball, a bluegrass/folk band called Two Tracks, a bluegrass band called AJ Lee and Blue Summit,* the Guthrie Girls (a folk group led by Arlo Guthrie's daughters (Woody's granddaughters), and a singing/storytelling session with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Sarah Lee Guthrie. Those are the highlights of the performers I was able to see. There are four stages running in somewhat staggered fashion, but still choices must be made.

* If you are at all inclined toward bluegrass and/or the Grateful Dead, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGDoxaeyA6M

>220 torontoc: So advised, and thanks!

Love bluegrass! Lately been enjoying Steve Martins and the Steep Canyon Rangers, but love it all. Thrilled that 'give yourself to love" was such a big part of the festivities! saw David Doucet & Beausoleil in Utah, amazing sound. Didn't know about the Guthrie Girls, will have to check them out. Sounds like a great time for all!

>221 rocketjk: Ooh, love the bass player. You had me at Grateful Dead. Although not a diehard deadhead, I saw them in VT in 1995 with Bob Dylan. Jerry Garcia died a few weeks later.

Well, I'm back from the events & travels described above and it was all terrific. The wedding in Toronto was fun and fascinating and heartwarming, and my wife and I very much enjoyed our free time in Toronto. Seems like a wonderful city. I did much less reading than I expected. One reason is that I have found that I have trouble concentrating on reading while wearing a mask, as I was doing on all of our flights, because my reading glasses fog up. I can take steps to minimize that, but still my concentration is affected. Anyway, that's all to explain while I didn't even finish reading Frederick Douglas' autobiography, which I expected to finish during the flights to Toronto! However, I do have a "between books" stack to list. Here's my read through Stack 1, which I began before we left and completed since our arrival home:

* “The Hook” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Gaza on the Brink” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “John Bull and His Son Jonathan” by James K. Paulding from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Shirley Povich” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “The Wish” by Roald Dahl from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Sir William Reid Dick” by Richard Atcheson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - July 1962

I'm now about 2/3 of the way though Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave by Frederick Douglass.

>161 rocketjk: My grandmother (or grandfather) gave me Arundel when I was a teenager. I remember that I liked it. I wonder if I still have it? If I do, perhaps I should add it to my "Books to Reread" shelf.

>225 WelshBookworm: If Arundel is anywhere as entertaining as Northwest Passage, I suspect it would indeed be worth a visit for you, assuming you were in the mood for that sort of storytelling. Cheers!