December 2020

 Ending the year with hope and optimism! Here's what we discussed:

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek - Kim Michele Richardson

Fruit of the Drunken Tree - Ingrid Rojas Contreras

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings - Helen Jukes

An American Sickness - Elisabeth Rosenthal

Let the People Pick the President - Jesse Wegman

N. Scott Momaday

Stormy Weather - Paulette Jiles

Enemy Women

Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart 

Travels with Myself and Another - Martha Gelhorn

An Elegant Woman - Martha McPhee

Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple

Always Cedar Point - H. John Hildebrandt

Janet Evanovich

White Fragility - Robin DiAngelo

Is this Anything? - Jerry Seinfeld

The Pull of the Stars - Emma Donoghue

The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls

Hillbilly Elegy - J. D. Vance

How the Penguins Saved Veronica - Hazel Prior

From Mary Lou in Maryland (November and December):

Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, An American Life (2003). This biography runs to nearly 500 pages, but it doesn’t seem lengthy because Franklin’s life is so entertaining, and because he was involved in so much of the early cultural and political development of the country. It is clear from this in-depth study of Franklin’s entire life that he was not the shallow individual of Poor Richard’s Almanac. He also was not the old “jovial lecher dabbling in statecraft in such plays as 1776.” He was firmly a man of the Enlightenment. He was of a practical rather than philosophical turn of mind, interested in the use that could be made of his scientific discoveries. The lightening rod is one example. He also was firmly anti-elitist with a staunch faith in the common sense of the “leather apron” artisan and merchant segment of the populace. He was more “democratic” than Jefferson or the other Founders. He was not a Puritan or a Calvinist but believed rather in “doing well by doing good.” He invented the self-help genre. He promoted religious tolerance and opposed autocratic authority. He was a fertile creator of civic organizations such as the volunteer fire brigade. He promoted education and founded the University of Pennsylvania. He was appointed one of two postal commissioner of the colonies and used his position to travel among settlements and promote unity. He saw a nation forming, well ahead of most of his contemporaries. The elderly Franklin was a cypher to many of his fellow-representatives at the Constitutional Convention, but their deliberations never would have succeeded without his astute contributions. Isaacson finds him “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in developing the type of society America would become.” If you read only one biography of a Founder, choose this one.

Ann Rinaldi, The Secret of Sarah Revere (1995). Yes, that Revere. The secret is the identity of the first person to fire a shot at Lexington in 1775 and start the American Revolution. Sarah is Paul’s daughter. Paul probably knows, by he won’t say. People keep asking 13-year-old Sarah, but she doesn’t know. They also ask her where her father is, or if he has been riding again. She is evasive. She won’t let them speak to her step-mother Rachel, who has recently given birth to Joshua. Perhaps Sarah learns the answer in the course of this novel, but the author leaves the question open. This is an interesting account of the Revere family in 1775 from the point of view of an adolescent girl. It’s very easy reading.

Michelle Obama, Becoming (2018). The fact that Michelle Obama is somewhat familiar to us from her time as First Lady in no way detracts from the interest of this memoir. She is a strong, intelligent, and introspective woman who did an excellent job of hiding her dislike of politics from the public in order to support her husband’s chosen career. She begins with her childhood and the family and experiences that shaped her identity. She tells us of her first impressions of Barack Obama and the adjustments each of them made over the years to accommodate their differences in personality and professional goals. She includes the funniest description of a marriage proposal you will ever read. Of course she describes the years in the White House and how she established her role and identity as First Lady. The descriptions of family life in the White House and the parenting of their two daughters is especially interesting. Aside from all these topics, the best aspect of this autobiography is the description of the process of forging one’s identity through the decisions and actions of daily life – becoming.

Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather (2007). This novel is set in the East Texas oil fields in the 1930s. In the fall of 1937, gambler and oil roughneck Jack Stoddard dies in prison. His wife Elizabeth and their three daughters move to the deserted family farm and try to figure out how to survive in the Dustbowl depression. The older daughter gets a job that pays very little. The 18-year-old tomboy middle daughter Jeanine works hard to make the farmhouse livable and the garden productive. The youngster Bea is too young and dreamy to be very helpful. Then another series of calamities hits. Each of them responds differently. The novel’s suspense is based on the question of whether they will somehow survive. Jeanine is the most spirited and sensible one. The over-arching theme of the novel is the development of her courage and maturity. This novel is rich in time, place and character, including the character of a racehorse named Smokey Joe. 

Tana French, The Witch Elm (2018). I have enjoyed other novels by Tana French, but not this one. The main character is unappealing and the others are not much better. The plot is tortured and there are at least four endings to the murder mystery, each one less satisfactory than its predecessor. I never say this, but this book is not worth reading.

Brooks Mencher, Wailing Wood: A Yarn Woman Mystery (2015). This is a full-length novel with several plot lines, set in a northern California logging town. One plot involves a timber company seeking to harvest Northern California’s last virgin redwood forest. Another involves a hundred-year-old murder and a haunted wood. The third and dominant plot line is Yarn Woman Ruth M’s analysis of fabric, soil, and other factors to solve the old murder and her efforts to prevent a new one. Newspaperman Nat Fisher is the narrator and his friend San Francisco police detective William Chu also is involved in the investigation. The colorful Russian Mr. Kasparov, Ms. M’s guardian and chauffeur, also figures in the story, along with his vintage Rolls Royce. The county sheriff and the young woman who owns the local newspaper ae additional interesting characters. Ms. M’s para-normal sensitivities once gain assist her in solving the mysteries.

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014). In 1983 the author was a Harvard Law School student who took an internship with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, working with death row inmates. There he met Walter McMiIlian, a young black man who insisted he was innocent. Stevenson worked on this case for years, following a tangled trail of judicial incompetence, lies, racism, and conspiracies. The book follows Walter’s case as well as the trajectory of Stevenson’s career as they evolved over the years. He went on to found the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. There he headed a variety of efforts to end such unjust sentencing practices as Life Without Parole for juvenile offenders. Many of the cases he won were the result of years of grueling investigative and legal efforts, weaving through the state and federal courts in many jurisdictions and sometimes reaching the Supreme Court. The pervasiveness of injustices perpetrated by these systems on poor and minority individuals is beyond appalling. The book demonstrates that ultimately the judicial system cannot attain the fundamental reforms that are needed until the public at large accepts responsibility for this effort.

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House (2019). The central relationship in this novel is between Danny Conroy and his older sister Maeve. Danny is the narrator. The story begins when Danny is about 8 and his sister is a teenager, living in the Dutch House with their father and two housekeepers. The story does not unfold chronologically. Instead it shifts between Danny’s experiences in the course of his life and his later reflections back on those experiences. It also follows his search for an explanation of their mother’s abandonment of them when Danny was 3. The Dutch House (“Dutch” because the original owners were Dutch of unpronounceable surname) figures prominently in the plot and the characters are revealed and developed in terms of their relationships to it. At the beginning of the novel, a woman named Andrea comes to visit Danny’s father Cyril and admire the house. Soon she marries Cyril and uses her two daughters to displace Danny and Maeve from favor in the home. The situation for Danny and Maeve deteriorates from this time forward. The complexities of the novel come from misunderstandings and miscommunications between the characters. Danny and many of the other characters suffer under expectations imposed by family members who fail to understand them. The major characters develop as they struggle to fulfill their true natures.

Lars Kepler, The Hypnotist (2009). This is the pen name for the Ahndoril husband and wife team who each have published independently as well. This is the first book in their series featuring Swedish police detective Joona Linna. Joona is a misfit -- Finnish, stubborn, unconventional, egotistical, and, as he insists to his doubting superiors, always right. Other main characters, including the hypnotist of the title, are similarly unusual, haunted by some secret in their pasts. The crimes are somewhat excessively gory. The plot is intricate and the main source of suspense is psychological. The novel is occasionally unpleasant to read and consistently hard to put down.
Lars Kepler, The Nightmare (2010). In this second novel of the series, Linna is battling his susceptibility to migraines as well as an international conspiracy of vicious criminals. Evil is a real force in the world of these novels. Violins and music figure heavily in this plot and in the lives of two brothers who are prominent characters. Once again, Joona Linna is determined to pursue investigation of a series of crimes that his superiors don’t believe occurred. He pursues a clue that everyone else believes is useless. As always, he is right, but he is also in great peril. 

 

October 2020

Let's start with a little humor!  Here's what we discussed:

Lamb - Christopher Moore

David Sedaris

Jason "David Wong" Pargin

Mill Town - Kerri Arsenault

Watership Down - Richard Adams

Sergey Prokofiev

Dmitri Shostakovich

The Yarn Woman - Brooks Mencher

How the Penguins Saved Veronica - Hazel Prior

Rage - Bob Woodward

Born to Heal - Ruth Montgomery

Travels with Myself and Another - Martha Gelhorn

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018). Owens is a wildlife scientist and has won awards for her publications about African wildlife. This is her first novel. It is set in the sparsely inhabited North Carolina coastal marsh and filled with eloquent descriptions of the wild marsh, rivers, inlets, and seashore. The main character is Kya Clark, known in the local town of Barkley Cove as “Marsh Girl.” The novel has two alternating narrative lines. In 1952, when Kya is only 6 years old, her mother flees her abusive alcoholic husband, leaving her children and in their shack in the marsh. Soon Kya’s siblings leave also. Kya must learn how to dodge her father when he is drunk and how to survive alone in the marsh without money. We follow her story as she grows up, becoming ever more cleverly self-sufficient. We share her observations of the life-forms of the marsh. A parallel narrative begins in 1969 when the body of Chase Andrews, town football star, is found near the fire tower north of town in the marsh. The sheriff can’t decide whether it is an accident or murder, but Barkley Cove residents believe the “Marsh Girl” killed him. This narrative follows the investigation of the death. The alternating story lines provide plenty of suspense as they begin to merge. Kya is an enchanting character and we are solidly on her side throughout. This is a wonderful novel, exploring complex social and psychological patterns as well as the intricacies of the natural world of the marsh, in the depths of which the crawdads sing.

Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (2011). Life is what happens when you are on your way to something else. This is the world of hapless, reluctant detective Jackson Brodie. In this novel he somehow agreed to search for the biological parents of a woman in New Zealand who was adopted as a small child in the north of England. While he is wandering around Leeds, he rescues a dog from an abusive man. At about that same time in Leeds Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police officer now heading security at a shopping mall, witnesses a known prostitute and thief being abusive to a 3- or 4-year-old screaming girl. Tracy has just taken a lot of cash from her bank and somehow without thinking about it, she offers the woman a large sum for the child. Jackson doesn’t what to do with the dog and Tracy doesn’t know what to do with the little girl. And we’re off and running with another delightful detective novel of the absurd.

Brooks Mencher, The Yarn Woman (2013). The narrator Nat Fisher is a San Francisco journalist and close friend of SF Police Detective William Chu. The Yarn Woman of the title is a woman apparently in her 60s or older who lives in the upstairs of a former movie theatre in a rough part of town. A mysterious Russian, Mr. Kasparov, serves as her butler, cook and general factotum and chauffeurs her around in a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. She is an expert in fabrics and yarns and Detective Chu has sought her assistance in solving several crimes. This volume consists of three novellas: Ghosts of the Albert Townsend, The Fisherman’s Wife, and The Boy in the Mist. The plot if each novella turns on fiber identifications made by the Yarn Woman, with more than a whisper of the paranormal.

Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (2nd edition, 2002). Besides being the husband of America’s most famous First Lady, James Madison was the most consistent and insightful recorder of the development of the United States of America. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed to keep their deliberations secret, but Madison kept detailed notes and he retained them for historical purposes. He maintained and preserved the records and writings of his four decades of political life, from the state of Virginia to the Continental Congress, to the White House, infamously burned during his presidency. It would be no exaggeration to deem him the Father of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and Author of The Federalist. He was a gifted political thinker, able to be both theoretical and pragmatic. Rakove especially admires him for recognizing the need – and the difficulty – of balancing majority power and minority rights. In addition to his contributions to American history and government, this slim biography details his family background, personal life, and relationships with other more famous founders. He was not an imposing figure or a flashy personality like some of his contemporaries, but his lasting influence on the structure and functioning of our national government is exceeded by none.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone (2009). The setting is a missionary hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The culture blends African, Mediterranean and Indian; Christian and Muslim and Hindu. In September 1954 twin boys are delivered by caesarian in Missing Hospital. The novel begins with this traumatic event. It then traces the lives of the boys, Marion and Shiva, for 50 years. In alternating chapters, it recounts the lives of their birth parents: from Madras, India, Sister Mary Joseph Praise and from Scotland and the Indian Medical Service, Dr. Thomas Stone. A third plot line tells the story of the parents who raised the twins, internal medicine specialist Dr. Abhi Ghosh and obstetrician Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha (“Hema”), both from Madras. Missing Hospital, its doctors, nurses, staff, and patients, and the social and political features of Addis Aba and Ethiopia are described in detail. The perspective is largely that of the twins as they mature. There is more detail about the practice of medicine than is comfortable to read, but both boys show an early capability for medicine and grow up to become surgeons. From beginning to end, the plot turns on things medical, but the compelling focus remains Marion and Shiva and the other vivid characters who inhabit this novel. 

 

September 2020

 I'm always amazed at the diversity we bring to the table. Here's what we discussed:

1984 - George Orwell

You Play the Girl - Carina Chocano

The Healer's Museum - J.M. Barrows

Lamb - Christopher Moore

Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series

Murder by the Book - Lauren Elliott

Ann Cleeves' Shetland series

Sarah Moss

Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

Rage - Bob Woodward

Embracing Coincidence - Carol Lynn Pearson

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke's Fantasy World of Interiors

The Daughters of Erietown - Connie Schultz

Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman

A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman

Holy Island - LJ Ross

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Cokie Roberts, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (2004). This history is written in the conversational voice familiar to us from PBS and NPR. It is a delight to read as well as being well researched. We know that Martha Washing held the troops together during that terrible winter at Valley Forge. We are familiar with admonition Abigail Adams gave John when the Constitution was being drafted: “Remember the Ladies.” Of course they didn’t as often as they should have. In the author’s words, “These are the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and friends of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, fought in the Revolutionary War, attended the Constitutional Convention, and served in the new government.” She protests the necessity of listing them in her Cast of Characters according to the roles of the famous men in their lives:

Signers of the Declaration of Independence: John Adams, husband of Abigail Smith Adams; George Ross, uncle-in-law of Betsy Ross;

Soldiers and Statesmen of the Revolutionary Period: Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, son of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, brother of Harriett Pinckney Horry, husband of Sarah Middleton Pinckney and then Mary Stead Pinckney; George Washington, husband of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington.

Signers of the Constitution: Alexander Hamilton, husband of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, son-in-law of Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler, brother-in-law of Angelica Schuyler Church; James Madison, husband of Dolly Payne Madison

This example illustrates how the women wove the social fabric of the times. All of the successes of the nation’s formative years show their influence. Their courage, accomplishments, and good sense will astound the reader. This book is a delightful, insightful presentation of our nation’s early history.

Richard Hack, Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie (2009). The famous author was very protective of her privacy, did not authorize any biographies, and resisted publicity and interviews. She wrote a couple incomplete and inaccurate autobiographies and Hack relied upon those as well as letters, correspondence with her publishers, and other materials that became available once her daughter Rosalind Hicks founded The Agatha Christie Society and donated her Greenway House residence and gardens to Britain’s National Trust. The book begins with an account of the famous author’s mysterious 11-Day disappearance in 1926. It remains a mystery to this day, as appears to have been her intention. Hack presents a plausible theory of how this episode may have played out. Whatever happened, her first marriage dissolved not long thereafter. Some years later she met and married archeologist Max Mallowan and the couple spent many happy winters on digs in the Middle East. At that time, Rosalind gradually took over most of her mother’s business with her publishers while Agatha concentrated on her writing. As Hack outlines Christie’s entire writing career, from novels to theatre, an understanding of here complex personality also emerges.

Agatha Christie as Mary Westmacott, Unfinished Portrait (1944). According to Richard Hack, this is the most autobiographical of Christie’s novels. The childhood upbringing of the heroine is very similar to Christie’s own in both setting and experiences. As such, the novel is interesting reading. It also seems to be a fictionalized version of the sort of psychological trauma that may have been the basis for Christie’s 1926 disappearance. It is a disturbing and unhappy book.

Alexander McCall Smith, Emma: A Modern Retelling (2014). The setting is the village of Highbury in Norfolk in the 21st century. Emma Woodhouse returns home after completing her university education in interior design at Bath University. Smith brings us up to date on the events of Emma’s childhood, including the hiring of the Scottish governess Miss Taylor. Mr. Woodhouse is as anxiety-ridden and Emma is as proud and meddlesome as Austin’s characters. The conflicts and plot remain the same. The cultural updating is hilarious. Smith is easily Austin’s equal in presenting the twists and ironies of internal monologues. Wherever you place Emma in the Austin canon, you will enjoy this book.

Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women (2002). The author was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks. She now has dual citizenship in Canada, where she has won several national poetry awards. This is her first novel, growing out of 7 years of research into her family’s history during the Civil War. Innumerable stunning prose poems grace the narrative. The heroine is 18-year-old Adair Colley, one of three daughters of a local Justice of the Peace who tries to remain neutral during the war. In November 1864 he is taken by the lawless Missouri Union Militia, who also plunder, trash, and set fire to their home. Adair takes her sisters and joins the stream of refugees walking north to escape the violence from both sides. She is searching for their father, but instead ends up in a women’s prison, a horrific place of corruption, abuse and violence. Her interrogator, a Union Major, falls in love with her. Adair’s efforts to regain her freedom and return home form the basic plot of the story. Each chapter begins with brief quotes from military dispatches, newspapers, and private correspondence about the Civil War in Missouri. The novel is an intimate and powerful exposition of the degradation and violence of war applied to an individual life. Adair is a very spunky heroine and despite the dark subject, the novel is a joy to read.

 August 2020

A variety of consuming culture is around us this summer: books, films, newsletters.

Here's what we discussed:

The Morning Newsletter from The New York Times

If It Bleeds - Stephen King

Salem's Lot - Stephen King

Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert

A Minute to Midnight - David Baldacci

Nothing Ventured - Jeffrey Archer

Beyond a Reasonable Stout - Ellie Alexander

Big Little Lies - Liane Moriarty

My Own Country - Abraham Verghese

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

Circe - Madeline Miller

The Woman in Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware

Knockemstiff - Donald Ray Pollock

The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock

The Devil All the Time movie

GoOhio.com

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019). There is a rare recessive gene that, when carried by both parents, produces offspring with blue skin. The condition is called methemoglobinemia and was first found in the USA in a family in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. In the 1930s President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) established the Pack Horse Library Project to create jobs for women and distribute reading materials in remote parts of Appalachia. These historical events form the background for Richardson’s novel. The Book Woman of the title is Cussy Mary Carter, named for the native French town of her grandfather who unwittingly brought the blue skin gene to Troublesome Creek. Her family is harassed and reviled for their blue skin in a culture where there is little tolerance for differences. Her mother has recently died. Her father is a coal miner, exploited by the bosses based on his unusual color. Over his objections, she gets a job as a WPA horse librarian. She rides her mule Junia (named for the sole female apostle) deep into the hills and coves, distributing worn books, magazines, and pamphlets to her patrons, many of whom are semi-literate. The poverty in the hills is extreme and her service goes far beyond the distribution of printed materials. Her life is endangered many times and happiness seems unattainable. Her kindness, strength, and resilience win our respect and eventually that of some of her neighbors as well. We are very much on her side throughout this engrossing novel.

Kathy Lynn Emerson, Making Headlines: A Biography of Nellie Bly (1989). This slim illustrated book tells the story of the pioneering female investigative journalist in the 1880s and 1890s. She began her career in Pittsburg, then went to New York, where she talked her way into a job with Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper. She had already made a name for herself when she persuaded the World to send her on a round-the-world trip in an attempt to beat the fictional record of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in 80 Days. The World’s coverage of this trip and the contest they run to guess the exact time of her journey made her famous far beyond New York. (Nellie Bly is one of the authors covered in my 8 Authors zoom class this summer, the only one I’d never heard of.)

Matthew Goodman, Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World (2013). When Nellie Bly left New York on November 14, 1889, neither she nor The World knew that the New York magazine Cosmopolitan had launched their female journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, on a competing trip later the same day. Bly sailed by steamer east across the Atlantic, while Bisland traveled west by train. Bisland seemed to have an advantage in weather and geography and The Cosmopolitan challenged The World to a race. Bly remained unaware of her competition until near the end of her race. The two women were very different in background, personality, and preparation. Bly grew up poor in the coal country of Pennsylvania, while Bisland was from a Southern plantation family who moved north during reconstruction. Bly lived in a poor NYC neighborhood while Bisland and her sister lived on the fashionable side of 5th Avenue, where they ran a popular salon. Bly traveled with one dress, one coat, a deerstalker hat, and a hand grip. Bisland traveled with an extensive wardrobe in a steamer trunk and a Gladstone valise. Despite these differences, each woman was committed to beating the fictional record of Jules Verne’s novel. The book is full of historical and cultural background, both of the post-Civil War US and British imperialism. It didn’t matter that Nellie and Elizabeth spoke only English, as all the ports and cities where they changed forms of transportation were outposts of the British Empire. This history-based account reads like a novel.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014). This is the best World War II novel I have read n a very long time. It relates the stories of two flawed but exceptional children as they grew up struggling to survive while war ravages Europe. In 1934 Marie-Laure LeBlanc is going blind at the age of six. She goes daily with her father to the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, where he is the locksmith and keeper of all the keys. There she hears the story of a cursed jewel deep in the vault called the Sea of Flames. She also learns about the collections in the museum and becomes especially interested in seashells. Her father builds a model of their neighborhood to assist her in learning to navigate the city with her white cane. She learns to read braille and is enamored with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In 1940, they flee Paris for St. Malo. Also in 1934, snowy-haired eight-year-old Werner Pfennig is living with his sister in an orphanage in a coal mining town near Essen, Germany. He is undersized and timid and he asks unanswerable questions. He scavenges bits of machinery and soon he figures how to make a radio receiver. In 1940 his unusual aptitude is discovered and he is taken to a special Nazi school, Schulpforta, and trained to track the radios of the Resistance. The experiences of Marie-Laure and Werner from 1934 to 1944 reveal the hardships and brutality of the war in personal terms. The novel is rich with imagery and the structure is complex.

July 2020

 We're reading a variety these days. From humor to historical fiction, and everything in between.

Here's what we discussed:

American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins

What in God's Name - Simon Rich

Horrorstor - Grady Hendrix

These Women - Ivy Pochoda

Visitation Street - Ivy Pochoda

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson

My Italian Bulldozer - Alexander McCall Smith

The Second-Worst Restaurant in France - Alexander McCall Smith

Lamb - Christopher Moore

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane - Kate DiCamillo

Works by David Wong

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese

Apeirogon - Colum McCann

Juneteenth - Ralph Ellison

The Hugo Awards

Middlegame - Seanan McGuire

The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix Harrow

Gedeon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

The Lady from the Black Lagoon - Mallory O'Meara

The Babbling Brook Naked Poker Club - Ann Warner

The Pioneers - David McCullough

Works by David McCullough

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (1999). This novel was extracted and edited by John F, Callahan from manuscripts left unfinished by Ellison at his death in 1994. Ellison had worked on an ambitious work of fiction, probably 3 volumes, over the 40 years following the publication of Invisible Man in1952. Ellison’s wife assisted Callahan, the literary executor, in developing the book that emerges as Juneteenth. In the Afterward Callahan provides a brief but informative discussion of the decisions he made in selecting and structuring materials from Ellison’s manuscripts and notes into a single-volume novel. Set in the 1950s, it tells the interrelated life-stories of two men, the race-baiting New England Senator Adam Sunraider and the old Black Baptist traveling minister Reverend Hickman, who adopted the young white boy “Bliss” and raised him to be a member of the Black evangelical movement. Bliss deserts the Reverend as an adolescent and forges a new identity, renouncing his upbringing. Still, his Senate speeches echo the Black Southern Baptist rhetoric and style. This is a very American novel, focusing on the essentially American historical and cultural issues of slavery and racial injustice, with a style that reads in part like Whitman and in part like Faulkner. The structure is a series of rambling narratives and flashbacks that gradually reveal the often-shocking stories of the two men. This complex novel is more than worth the energy and attention it takes to read it.

Tom Willard, Buffalo Soldiers (1996). In July 1866, the U. S. Congress passed a law creating 6 regiments of Negro troops (4 infantry, 2 calvary) to absorb Negro soldiers from the Union army, many of them formerly enslaved persons. President U. S. Grant sent them, under white officers and along with white regiments, to pacify the western frontier, where Indians, Mexican revolutionaries, and outlaws were creating havoc. The Indians called the Negro troops “Buffalo Soldiers” because their hair was similar to buffalo fur. This is the background for Willard’s novel. He creates a number of characters to inhabit the known military history of the forts, battles, and cultural groups of the western frontier from 1866 to 1885. Some historical figures also are portrayed, including Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson (of Vicksburg fame), who led the 10th Cavalry Regiment (Colored). The primary fictional character is Augustus Sharps, a former slave and champion marksman who took his last name from his rifle. He is unusually literate for a former slave and these skills bring him acknowledgement, in addition to his military skills. Still, he encounters a great deal of racial prejudice, despite some supportive while officers. The major female characters are the women of Laundry Row, who live in or near the quarters of the colored soldiers and do laundry for the troop. Several romances develop and figure prominently in the lot, along with campaigns and battles. An appendix lists the names of some of the Buffalo Soldiers who won Medals of Honor for their service in the 9th Cavalry (Colored) and the 10th Cavalry (Colored).

Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? (2008). I think this is the best Jackson Brodie novel so far. Police detective Louise Monroe is still a major character in the plot, but the most fascinating character is the resourceful 16-year-old orphan Reggie Chase, the only one besides the reader who believes something criminally terrible is going on. Like Atkinson’s earlier novels, this one begins with a horrific crime in a chapter entitled “In the Past.” Then it shifts to the present, with Jackson in Yorkshire, conducting surveillance at a playground. Jackson is always making mistakes and this time he boards the wrong train and is almost killed as a result. The plot unfolds thereafter with scant participation from him. Reggie is the link between the varied characters whose lives are somehow involved in the unfolding crimes. Jackson and Louise never would have solved the mysteries without her. Once again, Atkinson skillfully brings the many apparently unrelated characters and plot lines to a surprising and unconventional resolution. Through no skill of his own, hapless Jackson Brodie once again lands on his feet.

Connie Schultz, The Daughters of Erietown (2020). While this book is an interesting enough journalistic portrayal of small-town culture in the 1950s and 1960s, I found it lacking as a novel. This may be in part because I had more than enough of the racism, sexism, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness of those decades while I was living through them. The major cultural and political events of the times are a backdrop to the lives of the characters, but they seem to exert little influence. It is near the end of the book, in the late 1970s, before the characters exhibit any meaningful (and not always convincing) development. The central character, Ellie, is the only one who manages to surprise us. There are lots of secrets and some suspense, but no intricacy of plot. Despite what appears to have been intended as a positive ending, the novel is basically a sad story. Schultz is probably a better journalist than she is a novelist.

 

June 2020

It's the start of summer, and our reads have become a little lighter, a little cozier.

Here's what we discussed:

The Summer House - Hannah McKinnon
The Liars' Club - Mary Karr
Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng
These Women - Ivy Pochoda
Slightly South of Simple - Kristy Woodson Harvey
The Expats - Chris Pavone
The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury - Marc Levy
The Daughters of Erietown: A Novel - Connie Schultz
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson
What the Hell Did I Just Read - David Wong
P. G. Wodehouse

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War (2016). This novel is as quirky and delightful as her first one, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. In the summer of 1914, Beatrice Nash arrives in Rye, an East Sussex coastal town, to become a Latin teacher. Her father has died recently and she has to support herself. Her relatives do all they can to thwart her independence. The members of the school board and the town leaders aren’t at all sure that they want a female Latin teacher. She has the support of a couple of the leading women of the town, but even they have very narrow concepts of female propriety. Before school starts, she tutors a group of disadvantaged boys and strives to win them over. A couple eligible young men add a potentially romantic thread to the story. Beatrice’s situation is very precarious and stressful. And then along comes the war and upsets all the social dynamics. Simonson is justly compared to Austin.

Ian Ferguson, Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts (2003). In 1959, before the author’s birth, his parents left Edmonton and went 500+ miles north to the former fur trapping town of Fort Vermillion. His father was a charming con man with his heart in the right place who generally lived on step ahead of the law. He got a job as a school teacher and Ian was raised in a community of eccentric, independent characters, many of them First Nations people. It gave Ian quite a broad perspective on cultural norms. I think I have read this book before, but I got so engrossed I had to keep reading anyway. The story of Ian’s birth is one of the funniest I have read. His mother had a lot to put up with.

Kristy Woodson Harvey, Slightly South of Simple (2017). This may be the best summer novel you will find this year. It is set on the island of Peachtree Bluff, Georgia. When Ansley’s husband is killed in the twin towers on 9/11, she has no alternative but to move with her three daughters to the waterfront cottage she inherited from her grandmother. Her eldest daughter Caroline was particularly upset by the move at the beginning of her senior year in high school and she soon escapes back to college in NYC. The events that unfold 17 years later are alternately narrated by Ansley and Caroline. Ansley has established a successful interior design business. She is quite satisfied with her single life and proud that each of her daughters has established an independent life of her own. Then Caroline, 6 months pregnant, leaves her philandering husband in NYC and comes back to Peachtree Bluff with her 11-year-old daughter. Middle daughter Sloane and her two rambunctious sons decide to join the house party. Finally, youngest daughter Emerson, a Hollywood actress, comes to do a film in Atlanta. Ansley’s peaceful home and her orderly life are uproariously invaded by her daughters and grandchildren. Furthermore, she has a secret she doesn’t want them to discover. In fact, each of the women has a secret or two. Despite the interpersonal tensions, some of the scenes are hilarious. It seems impossible that there can be a happy ending, but this is a summer novel. 

 

May 2020

Although the virtual book discussions are short and sweet, I'm grateful we can still get together to share stories.

Here's what we discussed:

Eight Hundred Grapes - Laura Dave

At the Edge of the Orchard - Tracy Chevalier

Girl with a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier

The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan

A Baker's Daughter - Marcy Brenner and Kristin Donnan

Broken for Your - Stephanie Kallos

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff - Christopher Moore

The Plague - Albert Camus

Bossypants - Tina Fey

Jaguar in the Kitchen: My Life with Jungle Larry - Nancy Teztlaff

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson

Noir at the Bar: Authors and book discussion sponsored by Literary Cleveland

From Mary Lou:

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009). This novel presents British history in the time of King Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey through the life of Thomas Cromwell. Thomas begins life as the abused son of an abusive blacksmith. He escapes to the continent and doesn’t return to England until he is a grown man. He joins the household of Cardinal Wolsey, trains as a lawyer, and proceeds to make his fortune and his reputation. The novel provides a brilliant account of the upheavals in power politics and power religion before Elizabeth I came to the throne. It draws heavily on George Cavendish’s contemporaneous biography of Cardinal Wolsey. Thomas Cromwell makes an honorable and clever protagonist in this chronicle of intrigue and ambition.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (2004). This is an unusually structured mystery novel with three apparently unrelated case histories in 1970, 1994, and 1979, presented in that order. Each is horrifying in its own way. Enter our somewhat bumbling ne’er-do-well private detective, Jackson Brodie, in 2000. He is hired to investigate aspects of these cold cases and peculiar connections begin to appear. It does not seem possible that the cases can be interrelated, but they are. The suspense in the novel is based on Jackson’s discoveries of these improbable connections. In the end, after several life-threatening events, his efforts are rewarded in a most surprising manner.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (2006). Jackson Brodie, retired police office and retired private investigator, is now independently wealthy. He has returned from his villa in France to Edinburgh where his actress-girlfriend has a part in a fringe play during the summer arts festival. He witnesses a road rage incident where a man is beaten badly in the street by an incredible hulk. Jackson slips off before giving a statement to police. He goes to Cramond Island where he discovers a murdered woman with a pink card in her bra: “FAVORS - We do what you want us to do.” The body disappears in the Forth and the police to whom he reports it think he is delusional. Later the incredible hulk encounters Jackson and assaults him but when the police come, Jackson is the one who ends up in jail. He meets Louise, a female police detective who finds his explanations of events incredible, but somehow intriguing. Jackson does not believe in coincidences and he keeps looking for FAVORS. Other peculiar characters also have a connection to the road rage assault, including scoundrels, human traffickers, prostitutes and criminals. As in the previous novel, everything is interconnected. In spite of himself, Jackson manages to stay alive and figure it all out. There may even be a new romance in his future with Louise.

April 2020

Our virtual meeting was a lot of fun and just what I needed. Thanks to everyone who attended!

Here's what we discussed:

Look Alive Twenty-Five - Jane Evanovich
Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout
The One-in-a-Million Boy - Monica Wood
Overground Railroad - Lesa Cline-Ransome
Big Sky - Kate Atkinson
The Durrells in Corfu - Lawrence Durrell
The Black Book - Lawrence Durrell
Drive Your Bones over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
The Secrets We Kept - Lara Prescott
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Testaments - Margaret Atwood
Luna:New Moon - Ian McDonald
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Pioneers - David McCullough
Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow
Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow
The Mask of Sanity - Jacob Appel
Jacob, A film by John Stahl 
Cemetery Road - Greg Iles

From Mary Lou:

Albert Camus, the plague (1947; trans. Stuart Gilbert, 1948). The COVID-19 isolation period is the perfect time to re-read this classic philosophical novel. It is set in the ugly French port of Oran, Algeria, in 194-. The plot is unremarkable. Rats begin to appear in the houses and streets, dying dramatically. People begin to fall ill and die. The story is in the response of the general populace and specific individuals to the epidemic and quarantine. The populace progresses from fear to suspicion to anger to lawless assaults on the closed gates of the town. The individuals reveal their distinct characters in the responses they choose to make to the crisis. (This is an existentialist novel; choice defines the self.)
Dr. Bernard Rieux is the main character. He is first to discover and diagnose the plague. His choice is automatic: he will do his duty as a doctor and fight the plague.
With elderly Dr. Castel, he pushes the authorities to take appropriate action. (They deny and resist all the way – “Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic.”) Dr. Castel choses to devote his energies to developing a serum.
Raymond Rambert, a Paris newspaper reporter, chooses to work with criminals to escape the quarantined town, but ultimately chooses to stay and fight the evil.
Jean Tarrou, a wealthy visitor and detached observer who keeps a chronicle of the plague, eventually chooses to form a “sanitation league” of volunteers to collect and bury the bodies.
Joseph Grand (an insignificant civil servant who is anything but) chooses to keep the daily plague statistics and the records for the sanitation league.
M. Cottard, a paranoid recluse, attempts suicide at the beginning of the novel. Once the town is quarantined and everyone is trapped and threatened, he becomes sociable and chooses life.
Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest whose two lengthy sermons provide the most philosophical discussions of the novel, chooses to view the plague as the manifestation of God’s Will. First it is the justly deserved Wrath of God for the sins of the townsfolk. Later, after he witnesses the particularly horrible death of a child, he sermonizes that evil and suffering display the Mystery of God’s Will that the Christian must choose to embrace blindly and support vigorously, no matter how horrible. He decides that his Christian vocation requires him to refuse doctoring and he sickens and dies. Dr. Rieux wryly rules it a “doubtful case.”

It becomes clear that the atheism of Dr. Rieux and others is a matter of active philosophical choice, the opposite of the choice made by Father Paneloux. This analysis may suggest that the novel is formulaic. That is not how the reader experiences it. Rather, it is the meaning that evolves as the story progresses. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” Camus finds them unjustifiable and as a result chooses atheism.

March 2019

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations


We gathered on such a day, and here's what we discussed:

Mark Forsyth
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Louise Penny
Becoming - Michelle Obama
The Butchering Art - Lindsey Fitzharris
Twilight of the Gods - Steven Hyden
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Natural Law in the Spiritual World - Henry Drummond
Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship
The Prometheus Award
Kingdom of the Wicked Book I and Book II - Helen Dale
All Systems Red (The Muderbot Mysteries) - Martha Wells
Good Poems for Hard Times - Garrison Keillor
Bittersweet - Colleen McCoullough
Donna Leon
Maid - Stephanie Land
The Choice: Embrace the Possible - Dr. Edith Eva Eger
The Alice Network - Kate Quinn
Lilac Girls - Martha Hall Kelly
Serial podcast
The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
Arbitrary Stupid Goal - Tamara Shopsin
Shopsins
The Marriage of Opposites - Alice Hoffman
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 100

From our sister club in OK:

Lawton Any-Book Book Bunch 

Thursday, March 14, 2019 

Books 

Burke, James Lee. Robicheaux. 

Carter, Andrea. Death at Whitewater Church. 

Child, Lee. 61 Hours. 

Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. 

Flores, Mia and Olivia Flores. Cartel Wives: A True Story of Deadly Decisions, Steadfast Love, and Bringing Down El Chapo. 

Glass, Julia. A House Among the Trees. 

Grisham, John. The Reckoning. 

Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of De-Cluttering and Organizing. 

Larson, Edward J. To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration. 

Larson, Erik. Dead Wake. 

McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. On Chesil Beach; The Children Act. 

Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. 

Penny, Louise. A Fatal Grace. 

Perry, Anne. The Face of a Stranger. 

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet; The Taming of the Shrew. 

Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. 

Turtledove , Harry. Ruled Britannia. 

Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. 

Films and TV: (All of these films are available on Amazon Prime to rent) 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. 

The Book Thief. 

On Chesil Beach. 

The Children Act. 

The Comfort of Strangers. 

On Chesil Beach. 

A Man Called Ove. 

TV: 

Upstart Crow. (Amazon Prime to rent)

Why Upstart Crow? It’s satirical, somewhat Blackadder-ish, and requires close listening and a quick wit to catch the puns and sly allusions. The ABBB is the perfect audience. Take no more than two per night, though – it’ll wear you out, trying to keep up with the cleverness. From Wikipedia: “Upstart Crow is a British sitcom which premiered [in 2016] … as part of the commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Its title quotes "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers", a critique of Shakespeare by his rival Robert Greenein the latter's Groats-Worth of Wit.”

February 2019

In winter, all the singing is in the tops of the trees.
 - Mary Oliver

Here's what we discussed during a fine winter evening:

Jonathan Kellerman
The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben and Tim Flannery
Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees
Kindred - Octavia Butler
The Butchering Art - Lindsey Fitzharris
Voices from the Rust Belt - Anne Trubek
Anne Frank: The Biography - Melissa Muller
Libraries Discontinuing Book Fines
Something in the Water - Catherine Steadman
The Inflamed Mind - Edward Bullmore
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten - Robert Fulghum
The Temptation of Forgiveness - Donna Leon
Islands - Anne Rivers Siddons
White Oleander - Janet Fitch
About My Mother - Mike Rowe and Peggy Rowe
A Wedding in December - Anita Shrive
Calypso - David Sedaris
Pig Pen Sedaris

From our sister group in Oklahoma:

Lawton Any-Book Book Bunch 
Thursday, February 15, 2019

Books 
Clinton, Bill, and James Patterson. The President Is Missing.
Coben, Harlan. No Second Chance.
Dickson, H. Leighton. Dragon of Ash & Stars.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; An Experience in India.


Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.


Keller, Julia. Bitter River.
Keys, Jeff. Seventy-Five Homemade Salad Dressings.
McConnell, Caimh. A Man with One of Those Faces.
Obama, Michelle. Becoming.
Penny, Louise. The Nature of the Beast; Kingdom of the Blind.
Perry, Anne. A Breach of Promise.
Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner. Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds.
Springer, Nancy. The Case of the Left-Handed Lady: An Enola Holmes Mystery.
Turtledove, Harry. Ruled Brittania.


Films & TV 
Heat and Dust; The Householder.(Ruth Prawer Jhabvala)
Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery. (Acorn TV; Amazon streaming)


From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Booknotes Laura February 2019

Karen White, The Beach Trees (2011). When Julie was 12, her younger sister disappeared and she has been searching for her ever since. Now her best friend Monica has died, naming her guardian of her 5-year-old son Beau and bequeathing her a portrait painted by Julie’s grandfather. Julie leaves her job at a Manhattan auction house and sets out with Beau and the painting for New Orleans. She wants to introduce Beau to his mother’s family and also if possible to find out why Monica broke all contact with them 5 years before. Julie also has inherited a half-interest in the Guidry family beach house on the Katrina-ravaged gulf coast in Biloxi. The narrative is divided between Julie and Beau’s grandmother Aimee Guidry. The atmosphere is sultry and mysterious. Together Julie, Aimee, and Monica’s brother Trey gradually uncover the passions and secrets of the past, including the reason Monica left and how the portrait fits into the puzzle.

Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987, 2008). This is a well researched and engrossing biography of America’s most maligned and misunderstood of First Ladies. It covers her entire life, beginning with her childhood as a daughter of one of the first families of Lexington, Kentucky, and ending with her widowhood. She had a life-long interest in politics, for which her stepmother denigrated her as unladylike and arranged for her to live with her older sister in Springfield, Illinois. When she was First Lady, members of her husband’s cabinet and the press criticized her for extravagance in dress and in refurbishment of the White House in wartime. Some critics spread rumors that she was a spy for the South, based on the fact that some of her relatives were aligned with that side of the conflict. After she was widowed and before she was allowed access to her husband’s meager estate, scandal erupted again when she attempted to sell her wardrobe. Some years later, she was notoriously committed to a private insane asylum, based on the testimony and maneuvering of her son Robert. Eventually she cleverly devised a way to find the assistance that secured her release. This biography follows all the events of her life, many of them tragic. It refutes many of the slanders and provides context and documentation for the actions that brought her notoriety. It examines the evidence regarding her medical problems and her likely over-medication for them. This is anything but a dry and dusty biography.

Jennifer Chiaverini, Fates and Traitors: A Novel of John Wilkes Booth and the Women who Loved Him (2016). We all are familiar with the appalling story of the end of the life of John Wilkes Booth. The stories of the women who loved him, presented here in fictional form, are much more sympathetic. The women are his mother Mary Ann Booth, his sister Asia Booth, New Hampshire Senator’s daughter Lucy Hale, and landlady Mary Surratt. Lengthy sections tell the stories of each of these women. The most interesting section is the first, focusing on May Ann and describing this famous family of Shakespearean actors, beginning with father Junius Booth and including John’s brother, the handsome and idolized Edwin Booth. It provides details of Mary Ann’s 1821 elopement with Junius from London to Baltimore, the founding of the family homestead north of the city, the birth and raising of their many children, and the challenges of maintaining a large household with erratic supported from a traveling actor. The novel provides detailed descriptions of the lives of women in Maryland in the mid-1800s.

January 2019

"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
 - Rainer Maria Rilke

And that's how I felt when starting off the new year. So good to see everyone after the holidays!
Here are the books we discussed:

To Sell is Human - Daniel H. Pink
An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good - Helene Tursten
The Golden Merra - Kevin Moore
Arbitrary Stupid Goal - Tamara Shopsin
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
Rules of Civility - Amor Towles
Fantasyland How America Went Haywire - Kurt Andersen
Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners - Therese Oneill
Astounding: Campbell, Asimov, Heinlein, Hubbard - Alec Nevala-Lee
Kingdom of the Wicked - Helen Dale
Donna Leon
Educated: A Memoir - Tara Westover
Good Poems for Hard Times - Garrison Keillor
The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity - Matthew Kelly
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Judy Blume
Books and Books Key West
The Library Book - Susan Orlean
A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton
Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights - Jay Rayner

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Booknotes Laura January 2019

Patricia Wentworth, She Came Back (1945); The Ivory Dagger (1950); The Silent Pool (1953); The Benevent Treasure (1953); Poison in the Pen (1953). These cozy British mysteries feature retired school teacher turned private detective, Miss Maude Silver. She lives modestly, dresses conservatively, knits, quotes Tennyson, and has a talent for evoking confidences from strangers. She is an object of reverence to her former pupils, especially Detective Inspector Frank Abbott of Scotland Yard. Her comfortable parlor is decorated with many photos of grateful clients and their children. The fact that she is reminiscent of Miss Marple on no way detracts from the charm of these novels.
Lynda Jones, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker (2009). This delightfully illustrated National Geographic publication is subtitled “The Unlikely Friendship of Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Todd Lincoln.” The text is very simply written, but it outlines the life of the former slave who became Mrs. Lincoln’s friend and confidante, as well as dressmaker. It is based on Keckley’s autobiography, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Illustrations include photographs and portraits of the Lincolns and etchings from contemporary publications. The author describes Elizabeth Keckley as “self-taught, self-made, and utterly self-reliant.”

From the Lawton Any-Book Book Bunch in Oklahoma:

Books 

Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (1863-1869). 

Atkinson, Kate. Case Histories. 

Backman, Fredrik. Beartown: A Novel. 

Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. 

Bernstein, Jamie. Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein. 

Byatt, A.S. Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. 

Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. 

Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None. 

Coelho, Paul. The Alchemist. 

Conley, Garrard. Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family. 

Hogancamp, Mark and Chris Shelley. Welcome to Marwencol. 

Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans. 

Keller, Julia. A Killing in the Hills; Bitter River. 

Kirk, Shannon. Method 15/33. 

Koontz, Dean. The Forbidden Door. 

Lagerkrantz, David. The Girl in the Spider’s Web. 

Marsh, Henry. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery. 

McEwan, Ian. Amsterdam; Black Dogs. 

Mundy, Liza. Code Girls. 

Paris, B.A. Behind Closed Doors. 

Robb, J. D. (Nora Roberts). Innocent in Death. #24 

Tey, Josephine. The Franchise Affair. 

Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. 

Films and TV: 

Roma (available from Netflix/streaming). 

TV: 

Case Histories (available from Netflix/DVD and Amazon Prime/streaming for rent; also YouTube).

Nov/Dec 2018

Would like to thank everyone for festive holiday party at the Sandusky Yacht Club! Here are the books that we discussed:

Maverick - Cary Ashby
The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse - Alexander McCall Smith
Fear - Bob Woodward
David Baldacci
Circling the Sun - Paula McLain
The President is Missing - James Patterson and Bill Clinton
The Great Bridge - David McCullough
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean - Edward Kritzler
Answer to Job - Carl Jung
Maisie Dobbs series
How to Write a Sonnet
Nomadland - Jessica Bruder
Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
Somewhere in Time - Richard Matheson
The Great British Baking Show
Death by Dumpling - Vivien Chien
Dopesick - Beth Macy
Always Cedar Point - H. John Hildebrandt

From Mary Lou in Maryland:

Booknotes Laura November – December 2018


Alexandra Fuller, Quiet Until the Thaw (2017). The author was born in England, spent most of her first 25 years in South Africa, and then moved to Wyoming. This novel is set in South Dakota in the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are cousins, raised by their grandmother, Mina Overlooking Horse. She teaches her grandsons Lakota culture and history and wisdom. The title is taken from a Cree poem explaining the name of a woman who never speaks in winter. Rick Overlooking Horse doesn’t talk much even as a boy. As a disabled Vietnam veteran he renounces all use of the White Man’s currency, establishes his home in a secluded corner of the reservation, and trades by barter. He steeps himself in Oglala culture, studies the animals and plants around him, breeds horses, trades in herbal medicines, and gains a reputation as a Medicine Man and Elder. In contrast, You Choose Watson evades the draft, goes north to Canada, drifts east, becomes a drug dealer, and eventually returns to the Rez. He turns politician and serves briefly as Tribal Chairman before being ousted for incompetence and corruption. The social and political upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s are a glaring background for the Lakota concepts of the timelessness of history and the continuity of all things. Mina and the two cousins are fully characterized. The prose style is lean and poetic. This is a fascinating and philosophical novel.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2004). This 750-page historical biography was the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical that opened on Broadway in 2015. Chernow’s detailed presentation of the life, character, accomplishments, and failures of this formerly under-appreciated Founding Father provides a whole different perspective on the leaders and events of the nation’s formative years. The biography reveals how much of the US economic system and governmental structure were the product of the fruitful intellect of General Washington’s chief aide de camp, the main author of the Federalist Papers, and the first Secretary of the Treasury. None of this is dull stuff. In Chernow’s narrative, Hamilton’s personality and private life are as much a part of his story as his public writings and accomplishments. This biography essentially refutes our common understanding of the nation’s early history and the men who shaped it.

Susan Holloway Scott, I, Eliza Hamilton (2017). This is a fictionalized autobiography of the wife of Alexander Hamilton. It begins in 1777 when she is 20 years old and meets her future husband when he was a dashing Lieutenant Colonel working as General Washington’s Aide de Camp. Eliza describes their courtship, their married life together during the Revolution, and their many separations and relocations while Alexander was deeply involved in the formation of the nation, the development of the constitution, and the establishment of its financial systems. They had 8 children and Alexander was a devoted father. After his death, his political enemies (Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe) did all they could to wipe out all signs of his accomplishments. After she recovered from the initial shock, Eliza sent the remaining 50 year of her life documenting her husband’s legacy. The novel is essentially a love story, but its strength is its portrayal of the society and culture of the time.

Bill Clinton and James Patterson, The President is Missing (2018). This is a fast-paced and suspenseful thriller, as good as any Patterson has written. The White House and political detail is as accurate as only President Clinton could make it. The two authors obviously had fun with this project. The central issue of the novel is the security and vulnerability of our electronic
infrastructure, essential to our national security, our economy, and our individual safety and wellbeing. It is a very scary novel.

Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018). Truth is scarier than fiction. Investigative reporter Woodward describes the chaos and disfunction in the White House in scrupulous detail. The title is from Trump quotations that real power is fear. With this as a fundamental motivating concept, his penchant for creating chaos is an inevitable result. White House staff are frustrated with his short attention span, his refusal to accept briefings on complex issues, and his insistence on following his own notions, despite contrary expert advice from all quarters. He has fixed ideas that are impervious to fact or persuasion. The staff live in fear, or at least severe anxiety, over what he may do or say next. The country and the world have a great deal to fear from this manner of “leadership.”

Barbara Hambly, The Emancipator’s Wife (2005). This is a historical novel of the life of Mary Todd Lincoln. Using the established facts about Mary Lincoln’s actions, temperament and health issues, Hambly’s research into medical practices of the mid-19th century leads her to hypothesize that Mary’s condition was worsened by addiction to medications containing alcohol and opium. To present this theory of Mary’s condition, Hamble creates the character of John Wilamet, a former slave who first meets Mary in Washington in 1862 and later encounters her as a patient in a mental institution where he worked. The novel begins with an account of Mary’s 1875 trial for insanity, brought by her only surviving son. Partly through Mary’s recollections while committed to an Illinois asylum, the novel backtracks to events of her childhood and early life as a Southern Belle, with an unusual and “unwomanly” interest in her father’s political discussions, especially the moral, political and social issues related to slavery and plantation economy. Hambly also chronicles Lincoln’s courtship, the couple’s impoverished early marriage years, Mary’s support for his political career, and Mary’s growing isolation as Lincoln becomes totally emersed in the trials of the Civil War, and finally the assassination. The historical events are presented in terms of Mary’s experiences. Mary suffered severe trauma from the deaths of her sons and painful injuries in a carriage accident in 1863. Her health and mental stability declined as a result. Cultural and medical beliefs and practices of the era about the inferior and unstable female constitution merely worsened her conditions. She had an extremely difficult life.

From the Any-Book Book Bunch in Oklahoma:

Books

Coben, Harlan. The Woods. Connelly, Michael. Dark Sacred Night (A Ballard and Bosch Novel) Gabaldon, Diana. Outlander (Book One) Grunes, Barbara, and Virginia van Vykt. Cookie Advent Calendar Cookbook. Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans. Kerrison, Catherine. Jefferson’s Daughters – Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America.
Koontz, Dean. The Crooked Staircase: A Jane Hawk Novel.
Lagercrantz, David. The Girl in the Spider's Web; The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.
Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn.
Paris, B.A. Behind Closed Doors.
Van Heugten, Antoinette. The Tulip Eaters.
Warner, Ana and Curt and Dave Boling. The Warner Boys: Our Family’s Story of Autism and Hope.
Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir.

Other Books:

Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia.

Television:

Luther; The Wire. (Idris Elba)
Maigret. (Rowan Atkinson)

Summer 2017

We were very fortunate to have some special events this summer.  We had an enjoyable evening with poet Dave Lucas, and Karen was very kind to offer her house for a lovely evening on the Cedar Point chausee. Looking forward to seeing what fall has to offer.

We discussed:

Girls on Fire - Robin Wasserman
Startup: A Novel - Doree Shafrir
Pancakes in Paris - Craig Carlson
Movie: California Typewriter
The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka
Gwendy's Button Box - Stephen King
What You Break - Reed Farrel Coleman
Elements of Style - Strunk & White
Some Writer! - Melissa Sweet
Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
Camino Island - John Grisham
Watch Me Disappear - Janelle Brown
The Orphan's Tale - Pam Jenoff
The Little Book of Hygge - Meik Wiking
The Best They Could Be (Cleveland Indians) - Scott Longert
No Money No Beer No Pennants - Scott Longert
Spoonbenders - Daryl Gregory
On Turpentine Lane - Eliot Lipman
The Hours Count - Jillian Cantor
The Muralist - B. A. Shapiro
Dangerous Minds - Janel Evanovich
Late Show - Michael Connelly
Nothing's Sacred - Lewis Black
Carrying Albert Home - Homer Hickam
A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers
Foundation - Peter Ackroyd
Mrs. Fletcher - Tom Perrotta
Dave Barry's columns
Rum Run - R. C. Durkee
A Body in the Bathhouse - Lindsey Davis
Suddenly - Barbara Delinsky
Mary's Journals - Mary Warren
Why Buddhism is True - Robert Wright

From our sister club in OK:

Books
Asher, Jay. Thirteen Reasons Why.
Boylan, Clare. Emma Brown, a Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Bronte.
Brown, Margaret Wise. The Color Kittens.
Enger, Leif. So Brave, Young, and Handsome.
Gary, Amy. In the Great green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown.
** Mann, Charles C. 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created
Milburn, George. Catalogue: A Novel.
O’Donnell, Edward T. Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum.
* Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Walker, Martin. The Dark Vineyard
Worthen, John. Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician.
Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Book of Joan.

Films/TV/Internet
* More about Henrietta Lacks: https://shadowandact.com/while-you-wait-for-the-hbo-film-premiering-in-april-watch-the-way-of-all-flesh-a-bbc-documentary-on-henrietta-lacks/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lMrp_ySg8 (1998 BBC documentary) http://www.radiolab.org/2010/may/17/henriettas-tumor/
Cameron University Festival X: American Identities in the 21st Century
** Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and 1493; Thursday, 28 September, 7:30 pm, Cameron University Theatre; http://www.cameron.edu/festivalx . Free, but must request tickets at http://www.cameron.edu/festivalticketrequestform
Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma *** Theme: The Oklahoma Experience: From Wilderness to Metropolis. Readings illuminate the development of community in Oklahoma, from Washington Irving’s description of the empty prairie in the 1830s to the changing metropolis of Oklahoma City in the 1970s. Books: A Tour on the Prairies by Washington Irving; Sand in My Eyes by Seigniora Russell Laune; Catalogue by George Milburn; Briarpatch by Ross Thomas. Third Thursday of the month, 6:00 pm, Cameron University Library.

Books
Boylan, Clare. Emma Brown.
Brook, Rhidian. The Aftermath.
Brown, Sandra. Deadline.
Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River.
Gautreau, Norman. Elodie.
Harden, Blane. Escape from Camp 14.
Harris, Robert. Archangel.
Irving, Washington. A Tour on the Prairies.
Koontz, Dean. The “Odd Thomas” series
Laune, Seigniora Russell. Sand in My Eyes.
Lin, Grace. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.
Remnick, David. Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker.
Thurber, James. The Thurber Carnival.
Walker, Martin. Bruno, Chief of Police.

Videos
The Best of Ernie Kovacs (collection on VHS)

From Mary Lou in MD:

Bret Baier, Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission (2017). On January 17, 1961, three days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, President Eisenhower delivered his farewell speech to the nation. Of his accomplishments as presidents, the general cites only peace. He looks to the future and warns against placing partisanship above the national interest, excessive government budgets (especially deficit spending), expansion of the military-industrial complex, and the increasing political power of special interests. This fascinating book presents in vivid detail the biographical and historical experiences that led Eisenhower to the wisdom expressed in his speech. Ike began work on this speech at the beginning of his second term. Chapter by chapter, Baier tells the story of Ike’s life, especially the experiences that informed specific passages and concepts of the speech. Eisenhower is revealed as one of our greatest and most thoughtful presidents.

Donna Ball, A Year on Ladybug Farm (2009). Cici, Lindsay and Bridget are 50-something women who have been the best of friends for more than 20 years in their comfortable suburban neighborhood. Cici and Lindsay are divorced and Bridget’s husband has just died. The children are grown and moved away and their careers are flagging. The women are ready for new challenges and adventures and decide to move in together and pursue their life dreams. After internet browsing and a few trips, they fall in love with a hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Shenandoah valley. They sell their homes, pool their resources, and enter into a joint venture agreement for the period of one year. The property is in worse shape than they realized but their resilience and good humor carry them through the many challenges and adventures in their year on Ladybug Farm. This is a delightful novel.

Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016). Through a series of soul-searching internal monologues, this novel presents the struggles of Dmitri Shostakovich to maintain some degree of personal and artistic integrity under intense totalitarian pressures. We first meet him in 1936, huddled near the elevator outside his apartment, awaiting arrest and exile or execution because Stalin has denounced his latest opera. In 1948, he is sent to a cultural conference in New York and coerced by “Power” to deliver a speech praising the Soviet Union. In 1960, “Power” bullies him into joining the Party. In all of these crises, he tries to wriggle out of “Power’s” plans to exploit him and his art and chastises himself because it is impossible to resist and live to continue composing. Ultimately, he can only hold to the faith that the truth of his music will survive into the future. This is a painful account of one artist’s struggle against oppression.

Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words (1981). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (of the Ezra Pound poem) is a wealthy Canadian journalist and author who spends the 1930s and 1940s in the nomadic and artistic expatriate set in Europe. His encounters include Hemingway, Pound, Lindberg, and British aristocrats including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He gradually becomes drawn into a secret (and doomed) right wing political plot. At the end of the war he takes refuge in a decaying grand hotel in the Austrian Alps, where he writes his memoirs on the walls. The chronology of the novel alternates between the last days of the war (and Mauberley’s life) and his experiences of the preceding decade. The form of the novel is frame and tale, with the U.S. Army “liberators” of the hotel discovering his body and gradually deciphering his writings, thereby revealing the horrible political intrigue in which he became entangled.

Booknotes Laura June 2017
Nathaniel Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (2016). This in-depth history of the military and political events of 1776 to 1780 presents the thoughts, personalities and motivations of these famous generals in novelistic detail. There are maps and pictures and battle diagrams, 50 pages of notes on the chapters, and a 25-page bibliography. There is no doubt that the research was meticulous, but it doesn’t intrude on the flow of the narrative. It is clear that structural flaws of the Confederation, including the personalities of the political leaders and the lack of a national funding mechanism, are greater threats to military success than the British army. Excerpts from journals and letters of political and military leaders and ordinary soldiers provide a sense of immediacy to the narrative. General Washington is did not always lead wisely and General Arnold was not always a traitor. Valiance and ambition evolve differently in the lives of these two men. Philbrick increases our understanding and respect of both men. We think we know the story but we come to realize we did not know these famous men.

John Sanford, Escape Clause (2016). Someone stole a pair of Amur tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. Virgil Flowers is skinny-dipping with his girlfriend Frankie in the spring-fed pool on her farm when he gets the call. The press and the citizenry are outraged and State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is feeling the pressure. The case is starting to get complicated when Frankie is beaten up, introducing the subplot. Virgil’s attention is diverted temporarily from the tiger case, which just keeps getting more bizarre. Dismembered bodies begin to appear. As usual with a Sanford novel, we know who (and how nasty) the bad guys are from the beginning and we’re rooting for Virgil to figure it out. Of course he does, and of course he narrowly escapes death the process. The resolution is extremely satisfying. I think this is the best Virgil Flowers novel yet.

Timothy Findley, The Wars (1977). The structure is frame and tale. The narrator is researching the life of Robert Ross, a Canadian World War I veteran. We get glimpses of Robert’s boyhood and family and the tragedy in Spring 1915 that sent him to Kingston, Ontario, to enlist. The narrator pieces together Robert’s war experiences from his letters home. His training takes him west and assigns him to work with horses. He is trained as an artillery officer, takes a troop transport to Europe, and arrives in England just after Christmas 1915. Shipboard conditions are deplorable, but life in the trenches is horrific. Robert strives to remain honorable and do his duty. He endures several deployments to the front and finally suffers a sort of crisis of conscience. We are left to make our own evaluations of his actions. This is a moving novel that challenges our assumptions about honor, heroism, patriotism, and warfare.

Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean (1999). This is captain Linda Greenlaw’s account of the day-to-day details of one of her month-long sword-fishing trip to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the Hannah Boden. She also recounts her many learning experiences on other swordboats, first as crew member and then as captain. There are challenges of navigation, seamanship, fishing strategies, marketing, provisioning, leadership, competition and cooperation with other swordboats in the Gloucester, MA fleet, and the exhausting round-the-clock routine of long-line fishing. Even if you have no interest in fishing or the ocean, this account will hold your attention.

Booknotes Laura May 2017
Karen White, A Long Time Gone (2014). This novel is set in the delta cotton farmland of Indian Mound, Mississippi. It opens with Vivian Walker Moise returning home in 2013 after an absence of some years and a devastating divorce. The narrative shifts intermittently to the stories of Vivian’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of whom couldn’t wait to leave Indian Mound. Vivian is following the tradition of Walker women abandoning their children, whether by suicide or flight, and only returning home when they have nowhere else to go. The body discovered under the cypress tree in the back yard is only one of the mysteries that Vivian and the reader must solve. The jumping of the narrative from one generation to another drove me to make a list of the Walker women and their birthdates: Adelaide 1907, Bootsie 1922, Carol Lynne 1945, and Vivian 1986. Additional well developed and sympathetic characters include Tripp the local coroner, Vivian’s farmer brother Tommy, and her goth step-daughter Chloe. I will look for other novels by this author.

Fredrik Backman, Bear Town (2016; trans 2017). I liked this novel better than other things of Backman’s I have read. The characters are credible, largely sympathetic, and portrayed in depth. Still, it is a difficult read. It treats themes of social responsibility, loyalty, courage, truth, parenting, mob psychology, and honor. Chapter 1 establishes the central tension of the book:
Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
This is the story of how we got there.
As the plot and the characters emerge, Backman skillfully suggests many plausible answers to this riddle.

Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d (2016). The title comes from the chant of the “weird sisters” in Macbeth and the novel maintains a steady stream of literary allusions. The narrator and amateur detective-heroine is 12-year-old Flavia de Luce, of the small fictitious English town of Bishop’s Lacey. She is a very capable chemist and pursues her inquiries on her bicycle, Gladys. She has a great deal more in common with Amelia Peabody than with Nancy Drew. This entertaining novel is the eighth in this frivolous series set in the 1950s.

Tara Conklin, The House Girl (2013). The novel begins with the 17-year-old house slave Josephine in 1852 in Lynnhurst, VA, determined to flee from an abusive household. Her mistress Lu Anne Belle is an aspiring artist, but she doesn’t have half the talent Josephine displays on scraps of canvas and paper. The second chronology of the novel begins in 2004 New York, where young attorney Lina Sparrow is working on a class action lawsuit seeking reparations for descendants of American slaves. Newly discovered works attributed to Lu Anne Belle have come to the attention of the art world. We realize they are likely Josephine’s work, but Lina is challenged to figure that out and to seek out Josephine’s descendants. The portrayal of slave life on a Virginia plantation is wrenching and the account of Lina’s search is suspenseful.

Booknotes Laura April 2017
Marie Benedict, The Other Einstein (2016). This is an exasperating novel. If the famous man was half as nasty to his first wife as Benedict suggests, he was a truly terrible individual. Mileva Maric met her future husband when she was the only woman studying physics at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute. She was a brilliant mathematician and some historians have suggested that she made substantial contributions to the theories and publications that made her husband famous. In addition to a fictionalized version of Mileva’s life, the novel presents a version of the historical development of modern physics beyond Newton. It also presents a bleak picture of the suppression and exploitation of 19th and early 20th century women who dared to aspire beyond the conventional roles of housewife and mother.

Charles Frazier, Nightwoods (2011). This is another captivating novel by the author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. The setting is Appalachian North Carolina in the early1960s. Luce has chosen to move out of her small town to the abandoned somewhat decrepit guest lodge where she serves as caretaker. She is peacefully enjoying her solitary life until suddenly she inherits her sister’s orphaned children. They are mute, undisciplined and destructive. Luce is totally unskilled in childcare, but forges a relationship of sorts with them as if they were a peculiar species of wildlife. She is convinced her sister was murdered by her husband and she is afraid of what the children may have seen. Frazier creates an atmosphere of great natural beauty and chilling human menace.

Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery (2012). This events of this novel occur about midway through the series featuring Quebec Surete Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Detective Jean-Guy Beauvoir. It is set in the remote monastery of St-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, home to two dozen cloistered monks. The monastery remained in seclusion for 200 years, until a recording of their ancient pre-Gregorian chants brought them unexpected and unwanted fame. Now one of the brothers has been murdered in the monastery and Gamache is sent to investigate. He and Jean-Guy are the first outsiders permitted entry since the monastery was founded. Solving the murder requires the detectives to learn a great deal about the history of the religious community.

Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West (1948-1992; collection edited by Page Stegner, 1998). Following Wallace Stegner’s death, his son selected 15 essays not previously published in book form and the most powerful essays from some of his father’s books. The three parts of the book are titled “Home Ground,” “Testimony (defense of the earth)”and “Inheritance.” The fourth section is a novella, “Genesis.” Page’s short prefaces lead into each section. Many of the essays were published in periodicals such as Horizon, Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. The most famous, and perhaps the most important essay is the “Wilderness Letter” (1960) from The Sound of Mountain Music. This extolls the idea of wilderness as an integral aspect of the American national character. His eloquently written essays, with their personal observations and autobiographical threads, portray the many aspects of “The West” – shortgrass plains, alpine mountains, rocky plateaus and canyons, sagebrush or alkali deserts – all sharing the common qualities of aridity and public lands. He provides a detailed history of the development of the federal policy and legislation that fostered the national parks, national monuments, and wilderness areas. Despite complicated subject matter, Stegner’s descriptive powers, language, sensitivity and humor make for very enjoyable reading. It was the perfect book to accompany me to Arizona.