tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63326392024-03-28T11:19:45.084-07:00JOAN WAGNER TELLER -- BOOK REVIEWSwordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1120961633361029452005-10-16T10:30:00.003-07:002022-09-17T23:46:04.617-07:00A<strong></strong><br />
<strong>ABLOW, KEITH RUSSELL<br />
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<strong><strong><em> <span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e;">THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. KAPPLER:</span></em><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e;"> </span><span style="color: #38761d;"><i><span style="background-color: white;">THE DOCTOR WHO BECAME A KILLER</span></i> </span>(1994) </strong></strong></div>
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<b>True account of an anesthesiologist who continued practicing for decades despite considerable evidence that he was a murderer. Written by a doctor who was also the friend of one of Dr. Kappler’s victims.</b><br />
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June 2000<br />
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<strong>ACHEBE, CHINUA<br />
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<em> <span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e;">THINGS FALL APART</span></em></strong> (1958)<br />
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<strong>Remarkable novel about a village in Africa, where the main character, Okonkwo, distinguishes himself ultimately by standing up to the intrusive British church-and-state combination that is making alarming inroads into the native culture by using persuasion and force. Okonkwo loses his life in the conflict, but the action in this novel makes a strong statement.</strong></div>
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10 September 2001<br />
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<strong>ACKERMAN, DIANE<br />
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<em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">A SLENDER THREAD</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
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<b>Author’s account of her experiences as a suicide-prevention hotline counselor--in upstate NY? A moving narrative even though it is clearly an amalgam of her hotline counselling experiences thrown together with Ackerman’s observations of squirrels, as well as other material done for various periodicals. Her gifted writing makes the amalgam work, however.</b></div>
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25 March 2002<br />
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<b>ALEXANDER, MICHELLE</b><br />
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<span style="color: #6aa84f;"> <i><b style="background-color: white;">THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS</b></i></span> (2010)<br />
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<b>The edition of this book that I read is said to be the 2012 revised paperback edition, and the reference notes were omitted. I trust that the notes refer to valid sources but sometimes the author's inflammatory tone made me a little dubious.</b></div>
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<b>Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, and she clearly has an agenda. She makes a persuasive case for what is clearly an outgrowth of the long history of race prejudice--the gradual and little-noticed development of a "racial undercaste" in the United States in the last twenty or thirty years, as the war on drugs has moved forward at an alarming pace--and as many who have served time find themselves disenfranchised and unable to avail themselves of other advantages of US citizenship upon their release from prison. Alexander sees these developments as a concerted campaign to insure that large numbers of African-American men stay at the very bottom of the economic ladder.</b></div>
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<b>One source she often draws upon, however, is the controversial Lerone Bennett, long-time editor of <i>Ebony</i> magazine, whose books have met with a mixed critical reception over the years. For instance, Eric Foner writing in the <i>American Historian</i>, expresses reservations in his <a href="http://www.ericfoner.com/reviews/040900latimes.html">review of his most recent book (on Lincoln)</a>.</b></div>
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<b>And Alexander cites some very astonishing facts comparing the number of incarcerations in the 2000s to those in the 1970s, as well as numerous facts about prison construction, numbers of felony convictions, and many others.</b></div>
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<b>She insists that crimes that are tolerated "on one side of town" aren't tolerated in another part of town--white people have been able to traffic in illegal drugs for recreation with impunity while African-Americans are searched without due cause and arrested for possession on very slight or nonexistent evidence.</b></div>
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<b>She points out that prisons are now a very big business, with a lot to lose from any diminution in the number of incarcerations.</b></div>
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<b>One of her most alarming observations concerns the increasing militarization of the police--something any occasional watcher of the TV program <i>Cops </i>will have noted. The military has been making weapons freely available to the police for quite some time.</b></div>
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<b>This is a hard-hitting book, and, fortunately for the extremely important cause the author is backing, she doesn't adopt a shrill or strident tone though she is clearly outraged.</b></div>
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<b>Outrage is in order. </b></div>
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<b>Alexander is in favor of reparations for those who have been harmed by the war on drugs, according to her statements quoted in a</b></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/06/michelle-alexander-drug-war_n_4913901.html">recent article in the Huffington Post</a>.</b></div>
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<b>--As a postscript here, it is well known that African-Americans have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. The war on drugs is the area where wrongful convictions have been particularly widespread lately. But then there was a former student of mine, Delbert Tibbs, who was wrongfully convicted (in Florida) of rape and murder and who served 3 years in prison, two of them on death row, before being freed:</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/us/delbert-tibbs-who-left-death-row-and-fought-against-it-dies-at-74.html?_r=0"><b>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/us/delbert-tibbs-who-left-death-row-and-fought-against-it-dies-at-74.html?_r=0</b></a></div>
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<b>--There's nothing at all new about the injustice African-Americans have suffered in this country.</b></div>
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<b>Michelle Alexander's book, calling attention to the most recent manifestation of that injustice, should be read and discussed. Apparently it has attracted considerable attention. Good.</b></div>
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10 March 2014<br />
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<b>ALEXANDER, SHANA</b><br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">HAPPY DAYS: MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, MY SISTER AND ME</span></b></em> (1995)<br />
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<b>This book is a memoir and a tribute to the author's parents and sister. Her father was Milton Ager, a composer who wrote such songs as "Happy Days Are Here Again" and "Ain't She Sweet"--and who was a good friend of the Gershwins and other well-known composers of the era. Her mother, Cecelia Ager, was a columnist for <em>Variety.</em></b></div>
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<b>The narrative gives a fascinating glimpse into the show business world and a family for whom money wasn't much of a problem, who ate their meals in restaurants, and who were always, more or less, among the rich and famous.</b></div>
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<b>This isn't just a collection of dropped names. It is also a fond recollection of people who were important to the author.</b></div>
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7 January 2011<br />
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<b>ALLENDE, ISABEL</b><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSG0jkBY6aicQpOswBh6by8K4Lm_KOCygjZMl5gWBhEiT5VHdjMPVbl7DQ" /></div>
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<i><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SUM OF OUR DAYS: A MEMOIR</span></b> </i>(2009)<br />
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<b>The celebrated South American author, who became a US citizen, has written a stirring memoir of her life, especially the later part. She addresses the work to her dead daughter Paula, who died of complications of porphyria in her 20s.</b></div>
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<b>Isabel Allende has lived in Chile, Venezuela, and California, been married and divorced, and has been married for many years to an American lawyer, Willie, who has several children by two previous marriages. The complex family relationships are difficult to sort out but Allende guides us through the maze skilfully, including a couple of lesbian relationships in her family that involve children.</b></div>
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<b>Allende is nothing if not assertive at times. According to her account, she parked on Willie's doorstep with her suitcase, and they were married eight months later.</b></div>
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<b>By then, of course, she was in her 40s and was Isabel Allende, a well-established writer.</b></div>
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<b>She seems never to have wanted to closet herself away from her family's problems in order to write. This account reads as if she has been very involved in her family's many ups and downs (the addiction of several of Willy's children, for example) every step of the way, taking people in as needed and trying to make suitable arrangements for them.</b></div>
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<b>She makes it clear that she has never forgotten her South American roots even though she had to flee from Chile at the time of the Pinochet dictatorship. (She is the first cousin once removed of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973.)</b></div>
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<b>She doesn't spend much time on politics in this account. She is open to mystical ideas about other-worldly interventions in our everyday lives and believes in astrology. </b></div>
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<b>I would like to read more work by Isabel Allende.</b></div>
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11 July 2014<br />
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<strong>AMIS, MARTIN</strong><br />
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<strong> <em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1971-2000</span> </em>(2001)</strong><br />
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<strong>This substantial book is a collection of the author's essays and book reviews, with attention given to Cervantes, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and many other writers.</strong><br />
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<strong>His comments are entert</strong><strong>aining and lively. Amis is nothing if not opinionated, though</strong><strong> sometimes his opinions are open to question. Without having read <em>The Ad</em></strong><strong><em>ve</em></strong><strong><em>ntures of Augie March</em> and with only the quoted segments Amis provides to go on, I wouldn't agree that <em>Augie March</em> is "the great American novel," for instance. But then Saul Bellow's style isn't for everyone.</strong><br />
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<strong>Still, Amis persuaded me that I should try once again to read <em>Lolita. </em></strong><br />
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12 July 2012<br />
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<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">EXPERIENCE</span> </em>(2000)<em><strong></strong></em><br />
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<b>Semi-autobiography by one of the sons of the writer Kingsley Amis. There are interesting recollections of his father, as well as of Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, and other good friends.</b><br />
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<b>Amis gives a moving account of the tragedy of Martin’s cousin Lucy Partington, who was brutally murdered at 21 but whose fate was unknown for 20 years.</b><br />
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<b>In spite of its grimmer aspects, this is often an amusing book.</b><br />
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7 January 2002<br />
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<b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><em>"HEAVY WATER" AND OTHER STORIES</em> </span></b>(1998)<br />
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<b>Maybe I'm not a Martin Amis fan. I found these stories difficult to read. The author tries too hard to be witty and trendy--though he often succeeds.</b></div>
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<b>"The Janitor on Mars" is set in the future. The janitor on Mars proceeds to tell the people on earth how very insignificant we are--and how very doomed.</b></div>
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<b>"Straight Fiction" sets up a world where being straight is considered as unusual as being homosexual once was. Amis runs this idea much too far into the ground, I think.</b></div>
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11 March 2011<br />
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<b>ANGELL, MARCIA, MD</b><br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES: HOW THEY DECEIVE US, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT</span></b></em> (2004)<br />
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<b>The author was the editor of the <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em>, following the editorship of Arnold Relman, MD, who happens to be Marcia Angell's lifetime partner and a frequent collaborator in other publications.</b></div>
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<b>There isn't a word about multiple sclerosis in this book but there is considerable discussion of Neurontin, which is often used for MS spasticity.The author comments that Neurontin usage has been expanded for many off-label situations where it isn't effective.</b></div>
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<b>This book argues that the pharmaceutical industry in the US has entirely too much money and power--and that it is involved in many questionable practices that are enhancing its money and power at a rapid rate, such as its heavy involvement in continuing medical education (CME) programs for doctors, in sponsoring medical conferences, and in providing free samples and other gifts to doctors routinely.</b></div>
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<b>She points out that 32 percent of the sales revenue for the drug industry goes to "marketing and administration," while a much smaller percentage goes to research and development--and yet we US consumers are often told that the drug industry "must" be highly profitable because how else can the US be on the cutting edge in medical research?</b></div>
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<b>She demonstrates that the US is not a leader in medical research by mentioning that most truly innovative drugs in recent years have come from research outside the US. As for the efforts of the US drug industry, its major output nowadays is so-called "me-too" drugs, which are slightly modified copies of existing drugs that can be marketed as new drugs, thus enabling the industry to continue making a profit on a drug that has reached the end of its patent protection period.</b></div>
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<b>The research that is done in connection with drug development is often flawed, Dr. Angell notes. For instance, for FDA approval a new drug needs only to be compared with placebo. The author makes a strong case for requiring that a new drug be compared with existing drugs (as well as with placebo).</b></div>
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<b>She also would like to see more Phase IV studies done.</b></div>
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<b>This book is full of good ideas and facts. Anybody concerned with the high cost of drugs in the US would be interested in it.</b></div>
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5 June 2009<br />
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<strong>ANGELOU, MAYA</strong><br />
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<i> <b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">MOM AND ME AND MOM</span></b></i> (2013)<br />
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<b>Maya Angelou continues her autobiographical account here, focusing on the latter part of her childhood, spent primarily with her real mother in San Francisco after several years in Stamps, Arkansas, with her grandmother (the other "mom" of the title).</b></div>
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<b>Vivian Baxter, Maya's real mom, comes across as a very strong personality, cast in the mold of the traditional matriarch. Her financial ventures are somewhat vague, but she apparently doesn't hurt for money, and she likes to settle scores by packing heat.</b></div>
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<b>I found the incidents where Vivian wins her point by using her gun chilling but then the world we in the US live in is chilling because of the easy availability of firearms. I disliked finding that a writer as deservedly celebrated as Maya Angelou relates these incidents almost admiringly--but how can anyone take her to task for being a part of the world she found herself in?</b></div>
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<b>She has evidently set out to write a work in praise of her mother, and she has done that. She could hardly have turned the book into a polemic in favor of gun control. The book is a picture of the people who were important in her life at that early age, and as such it is very revealing, troubling, and wonderful.</b></div>
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3 October 2014<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME</span></em></strong><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span>(1974)<br />
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<b>This second part of Maya Angelou's autobiography is eminently worth reading. (The first part, dealing with her childhood, is <em>I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings</em> and is also very absorbing.)</b><br />
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<b>Now Maya (Marguerite, known as "Rita" often in this book) is in her late teens and on her own with a baby and no husband. She is in California, drifting from jobs as a waitress and a dancer to being a madam (on a small scale) to turning tricks herself. All the while she is trying desperately to hold onto her infant son, who has to be cared for by other people much of the time.</b><br />
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<b>She is worldly wise in many ways but in other ways astonishingly naive and vulnerable, as in her readiness to believe a pimp's sorry line.</b><br />
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<b>Maya Angelou has a rare ability to laugh at herself, to see herself from a perspective that usually only other people would have.</b><br />
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<b>This is a true story that needed to be told--and needs to be read.</b><br />
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16 October 2005<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><strong>APPLE, MAX<br />
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<em> ROOMMATES: MY GRANDFATHER'S STORY</em></strong> (1994) </span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>True account of the author’s Jewish immigrant grandfather who, when over 100 years old, helped to save the author’s disintegrating family life. </b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Max Apple teaches English at the college level in Houston, went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, married and had two children, but his wife became severely disabled by multiple sclerosis and went to live with her own parents, where she soon died. The grandfather’s gentle but ironic humor often saves the day with the family. </b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This excellent book was made into a movie, "Roommates." </b></span></div>
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<br />27 August 1999</span><br />
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<span><span style="color: #990000;">__________________________</span><br />
<br /><b>ASHLINE, SUSAN</b></span><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #45818e;">WITHOUT A PRAYER: THE DEATH OF LUCAS LEONARD AND HOW ONE CHURCH BECAME A CULT</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In 2015, nine people were convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Lucas Leonard, whose brother Chris was also brutally beaten during the same episode involving members of the Word of Light church, a group in upstate New York who seem to have originated with the Assembly of God but no longer had much of a connection with that evangelical Christian church.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Led for many years by Pastor Jerry Irwin, the flock was inherited by his daughter Tiffanie on his death. Both pastors kept a tight control over the congregation, all of whom seem to have been housed together in one building and been in constant contact by cellphone and in person. Time passed, children were born and matured. A few members left the fold but Pastor Tiffanie exercised tight control over the group. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In the fall of 2015 the teenaged Lucas Leonard admitted to having molested several young people in the group. Whether or not he actually molested anyone is never determined for certain. It seems entirely possible that, since he had been planning to leave the group, he may have lied about his misdeeds in order to antagonize or shock the group leaders.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In any event, some of them assembled with Lucas and his younger brother Chris and proceeded to beat them unmercifully. Among his torturers were his own parents and his half-sister Sarah. Lucas was beaten to death, and Chris was badly injured.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This book is a horrifying study of how a cult can develop and continue. In this instance, both Jerry Irwin and his daughter Tiffanie claimed to have direct contact with God. This gave them a particularly strong claim on the attention, loyalty, and service of their church members, all of whom were striving mightily to please the Almighty. So they did what the pastor told them to do, apparently unquestioningly, even to the point of killing one of their own.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Much of the book is concerned with the investigation that took place after Lucas's murder--at which time it came to light that conditions inside the church premises were appalling. The children involved had been mostly home schooled though not very capably--and not given much opportunity for contact with the world outside of their sect or for routine medical care. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>A very sad account but well documented and presented.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>December 7, 2020</b></div><div><b>______________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><div><span><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span><b><br /></b>
<span style="color: black;"><strong>AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS</strong></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"><strong><em><span style="color: #990000;"> </span><span style="color: #990000;"> </span><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE MAN BEHIND THE BOOK: LITERARY PROFILES</span></em> </strong><span style="color: #990000;">(1996)</span></span><br />
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<b style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">Political correctness might dictate that the title of this book should have been <em>The Person behind the Book, </em>particularly since some of the authors discussed are women, but that is just a passing comment...</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">Auchincloss presents brief essays on several authors in an attempt to demonstrate a link between an author's life and his work. I'm not sure that his essays do demonstrate such a link, but I feel that the link is always there.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">He has far more respect for T. S. Eliot than Eliot deserves, in my opinion, and so my opinions of Auchincloss are probably prejudiced. But his discussion of Sarah Orne Jewett (whose <em>Country of the Pointed Firs</em> is a remarkable but neglected work) is enlightening, and so are his remarks on Harold Frederick (<em>The Damnation of Theron Ware</em>).</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">I've read only one novel by Louis Auchincloss and am not an Auchincloss enthusiast, but his literary comments in this book are usually sensible and well worth reading.</span></b><br />
<br /><span style="color: black;">22 December 2007</span><br />
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<b>AUSTEN, JANE</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;"> MANSFIELD PARK</span></i> (1814)</b></span><br />
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<b>Fanny Price is the daughter of the least successful of a trio of sisters and at the age of ten is sent to live with one of her mother's sisters, her aunt, Lady Bertram, with the other sister (Mrs. Norris) hovering close at hand.</b></div>
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<b>We don't see much of Fanny's background until late in the novel but we are given to understand that it is deplorably poor, with at least nine children in the Price household and Mr. Price disabled. On the other hand, the two aunts have done quite well.</b></div>
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<b>Fanny is thrown together with the four Bertram children and their governess, but her situation remains ambiguous throughout her childhood, with her cousins mocking her for deficiencies she couldn't have helped. She is passive and humble when confronted by so many assaults on her self-respect--assaults that are described without emotional content. They are reported to us, as are her reactions. We are not induced to pity Fanny. Instead we have to wonder at and admire her self-control.</b></div>
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<b>Of the four cousins, Edmund is the only one who seems to understand her and defend her though he launches his words of support tentatively and rarely. It is clear that in this setting both he and Fanny would feel outnumbered by the other three cousins, backed up by the horrific Mrs. Norris and on occasion Lady Bertram.</b></div>
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<b>How keenly the characters watch the money in their lives and in the lives of their neighbors is made clear by their passing remarks about someone's income or property--and especially by their discussions of appropriate marriages. Clearly this is a time when a marriage is more of a business contract than a love match--but Fanny's situation and the way it is resolved amount to a statement in favor of abandoning the notion of a wife as a piece of property.</b></div>
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<b>There are the Crawfords, who become important as the children reach adulthood--the brother and sister, Henry and Mary. Henry decides to pursue Fanny, somewhat surprisingly, but since he has a history of dalliances, it's entirely possible that his intentions with respect to her wouldn't have been honorable. Meanwhile, his sister Mary flirts quite openly with Edmund, who is about to become a vicar and is still Fanny's friend and defender. Gradually we learn, by subtle indirect hints, that Fanny doesn't dare hope for Edmund as a suitor but if she did dare hope, Edmund is the person she would prefer.</b></div>
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<b>Others must not know about this preference, the reader assumes. By now we know that Fanny's situation is too lowly for her to presume to aspire to marry anyone so prosperous as a Bertram, even though as a vicar Edmund wouldn't have been very rich.</b></div>
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<b>She can and does insist, repeatedly, that she wants nothing to do with Henry Crawford, however. By now we have learned about Henry and Edmund and the others through a play that the young people want to perform in the absence of the master of the house (Sir Thomas Bertram, who is in Antiqua on an extended stay).</b></div>
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<b>During the rehearsal for the play, the question comes up: Just how would this performance go over if Sir Thomas were present, considering that they are appropriating his space and putting on a play that has some questionable qualities?</b></div>
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<b>The issue isn't the moral tone of the play, for it is pointed out that the performers can always strike out the offensive passages, but whether it is appropriate for them to take over Sir Thomas's premises to such an extent. Here Edmund and Fanny are opposed to going forward with the play, and both take almost rigidly sanctimonious stands--perhaps illustrating their appropriateness for each other (the prospective vicar and his possible wife), although Edmund does eventually cave in and agree to take part in it.</b></div>
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<b>Fanny's obstinacy in refusing Henry Crawford's proposal shocks her relatives, and she is dispatched back to her parents' home for a long stay. It seems unthinkable that someone in Fanny's impoverished circumstances would reject a proposal of marriage from a man of means.</b></div>
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<b>At this point we learn more about the actual Price household --right down to the noises and smells. Soon Fanny is longing for the Bertrams' quieter surroundings, even thinking of Mansfield Park as her home, conveniently forgetting the cruelty she has endured there. When it turns out that there is at least one sister who is enough like Fanny herself to become her friend and even to accompany her back to Mansfield Park, we probably sense that all is going to turn out well.</b></div>
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<b>And it does, as we probably hoped it would. Fanny would seem to have suffered enough. There has been a scandal but Edmund and Fanny haven't been involved. They will get their well-deserved happy ending--and we can assume that they will try to help Fanny's parents and brothers and sisters in any way they can. We're not told this, nor is it ever suggested, but we have been led to see the gross unfairness of a world where poverty is treated as if it's a disgrace. </b></div>
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<b>Jane Austen has sometimes been regarded as a delineator of manners in the upper echelons of English society but <i>Mansfield Park</i> shows that she is far more than a chronicler of polite ladies and gentlemen. Fanny's brother William and her father have made sailing their way of life, and the author takes us briefly into their world. With these glimpses, as well as the fact that Sir Thomas Bertram is away in Antigua on business for so long, we are made aware of just how small and narrow the world of the landed gentry can be. </b></div>
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<b>And throughout there is the pointed wit in the characters' barbed remarks to one another, especially the jabs at Fanny's situation, attacks that show the heartlessness that is tolerated in this so elegant world.</b></div>
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<b>17 January 2018</b></div>
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</span></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1120959390144701462005-07-10T18:18:00.004-07:002023-12-04T12:40:23.316-08:00B<strong>BAKER, NICHOLSON</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">DOUBLE FOLD: LIBRARIES AND THE ASSAULT ON PAPER</span></em></strong><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span>(2001)</blockquote>
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<b>The author is very perturbed about the way in which libraries are rushing to put so many books and newspapers on microfilm and, in the process, destroying the original works. The libraries insist that they are doing this of necessity because microfilming a volume entails "disbinding" it and thus rendering it useless, for all practical purposes. Also, there is the process of "embrittlement," by which every book eventually becomes brittle and crumbles, or so the theory goes.</b></div>
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<b>Baker points out that a microfilmed version is NOT an exact copy of the original, that the reader needs special equipment to read it, and that it is almost always much less readable than the original. He also disputes the notion, often stated in the library world in recent years, that books will "crumble" and turn to dust. He sets out to prove that the kinds of paper most books are printed on will never crumble or turn to dust. He stops just short of accusing librarians and archivists of conspiring to rid the world of books in their zeal to save space (and therefore money). </b></div>
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<b>This is an absorbing and provocative book, written with wit and verve. </b></div>
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<b>By the way, the author has bought up the runs of several US newspapers with his own funds and seems to have rescued them from the discard pile, for a while at least.... </b></div>
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14 November 2008<br />
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<strong></strong><br />
<strong>BALISH, CHRIS</strong><br />
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<em><b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b>HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT OWNING A CAR: SAVE MONEY, BREATHE EASIER, AND GET MORE MILEAGE OUT OF LIFE</b></span></em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(2006)<br />
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<b>The author is a journalist who is responsible for the <em>HOW TO LIVE WELL</em> series of books. I haven't read any other books in the series.</b></div>
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<b>As I'm writing this, the local TV news is featuring a story about a deadly car crash in the vicinity. The accident-proneness of vehicles isn't a major point made in this book but it very well might have been.</b></div>
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<b>The author makes a very persuasive case for living without owning a car. He acknowledges that a rented car can come in handy on occasion for some people, but he cites relevant statistics to show that the typical car-owner is spending entirely too much money and having entirely too many hassles in his life as a result of the "convenience" of owning a car.</b><br />
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<b>He discusses the options: carpools, shared rides, public transit, bicycles, and walking. He gives exact references for additional information.</b></div>
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<b>I was nearly one hundred percent in agreement with the points in this book. I don't share the author's enthusiasm for motorcycles as an alternative to cars, however. The noise they're responsible for is unacceptable, but that's just one person's opinion.</b></div>
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<b>I've never owned a car and never driven one much either--so Chris Balish is preaching to the converted here.</b></div>
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15 March 2010<br />
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<b>BANKS, RUSSELL</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">FOREGONE </span>(2021)</i></b></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><b>The details in the life of this novel's protagonist, Leonard Fife, bear a striking resemblance to the details in the life of Russell Banks, but to ask which details are drawn from life and which are not is probably beside the point.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Leo Fife is dying but as a former film producer of considerable renown, he is availing himself of the opportunity to have a final film interview to discuss his life. The opportunity has value for him--especially as a way of telling the truth at last to his wife of 40 years, to whom he would lie in any other situation--but it also clearly has value for the people taking part in making them--younger people who have known him for years.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Emma, the wife who absolutely has to be present for all of the filming as Leo irascibly insists, is actually wife #3. We (and presumably Emma too) find out about the first and second marriages as the story proceeds.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>But it moves forward in a jerky way, so that the reader is never sure just how much of what Leo says (or seems to say) is actually being filmed. But again, that may be beside the point.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Whether or not the events Leo describes as having happened to him actually happened isn't clear, then, particularly since he admits to confabulating at times, on account of the cancer that is ending his life and/or the powerful drugs he is being given.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>What we can probably be sure of is that Leo doesn't come across as a very agreeable or decent person. As someone known to be dying, perhaps he feels entitled to be bossy and demanding to Emma and Renee, his caregiver, as well as to the movie team. The facts that pile up--or his fictive version of "facts"--flesh him out as cowardly, dishonest, and exploitative.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>He seems to have fathered two living children. At least, so far as we know, they are still alive but he doesn't care enough about them to give them more than passing mention.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>We gather that he dumped wife #1, and wife #2 came with a lot of money and influence backing her up, and he's been content to be her family's pet for quite a while. His attempt at striking out on his own seems not to have succeeded.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The book may be an imagined rendition of what dying is like. Perhaps (the movie suggests) dying can amount to a blurring of the real with the unreal--and from there to the conclusion that in the last analysis, the distinction between the two doesn't matter.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>It's a tough question to grapple with but Banks tackles it.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I have one small quibble. An author of best-sellers, and Banks is one, probably realized that for a book to sell, it needs sex--and so, even in a story revolving around the grim topic of a man's dying, he manages to include one explicit sex scene even though dragging it in may have been a bit of a stretch: When Leo is staying at his good friend Stanley's, it develops that Stanley and his wife Gloria haven't been getting along, and lo and behold! Gloria turns up in Leo's bed, complete with a firelit background. Do I see a movie possibility here? </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Too many writers of fiction nowadays seem to keep a weather-eye on the potential for a movie as they write, and sometimes their vigilance is painfully obvious.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>That the author is not necessarily Leo Fife, though, shines through in moments like the time at the end when Renee, who has been quietly doing her caregiving job all the while, comes into her own by trying to discard the entire movie, probably as a way of expressing her opinion of its value and of the whole idea of making such a film. Bravo for Renee, the true hero of this story.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>December 4, 2023</b></div><div><b><br /></b>
<span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"><em> AFFLICTION</em> </span>(1989)<br />
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<b>This novel--said to be partly autobiographical--is the story of the downfall of one Wade Whitehouse, the narrator's brother, who works as a well-driller and the chief of police in a very small New Hampshire town.</b></div>
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<b>Ironically, as Wade goes downhill in an alcoholic plunge into memory blackouts, paranoia, and typical impulsive displays of temper and volatility, one of his suspicions that is actually right on target is ignored by the community as they recoil from evidence of his deterioration: he has rightly surmised that a man's death during a hunting trip was no hunting accident but murder. So far as we know, the murder never comes to light.</b></div>
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<b>In addition to being an absorbing (but grisly) story, this novel is a cri de coeur against the kind of bullying machismo that prevails in so many American male social relationships. The author focuses on hunting traditions, and his picture of hunting season in New Hampshire is horrifying.</b></div>
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3 July 2007<br />
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<strong><em><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF: THE STORIES OF RUSSELL BANKS</span> </em></strong>(2000)<br />
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<b>This is a fine collection of stories, with many previously published stories now revised. They are arranged thematically rather than chronologically.</b></div>
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<b>They are about working people in New Hampshire, chiefly, and in fact some of them are so brief that they seem as if they might have been fragments of a novel that never got written. Many of the stories involve the town of Catamount, New Hampshire, and a particular trailer park with a focus on specific characters--a man who lives on the ice every winter so he can fish through the ice, for instance.</b></div>
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<b>There are often alcoholic husbands and fathers bumbling through their sad lives. There are divorces aplenty in these stories. One of the longest stories (and one of the best, in my opinion) is "The Guinea-Pig Lady," about the trailer park. </b></div>
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<b>The last story in the volume, "Lobster Night," is grim indeed, but then Banks is not an upbeat writer. </b></div>
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<b>A few of the stories have the quality of parables, and these became annoying for that reason. Sometimes Banks is too much like a sociologist. But on balance this collection was absorbing reading, true to life, sober and clear-headed.</b></div>
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17 September 2007<br />
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<strong>BARNES,DJUNA<br />
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<em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">NIGHTWOOD</span></em> </strong>(1937) <br />
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<b>Rather frankly racist and anti-Jewish novel, with two prefaces by T. S. Eliot, praising it to the skies. The plot doesn't hang together well, and the characters are devoid of motivation. Occasional patches of "poetic" writing, but still a shockingly overrated work.</b><br />
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12 February 1999<br />
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<b>BARROWCLIFFE, MARK</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><em> THE ELFISH GENE: DUNGEONS, DRAGONS & GROWING UP STRANGE</em> </span></b>(2007)<br />
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<b>The author, born in 1964 in the UK, tells of his addiction to the role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons amusingly and self-critically.</b><br />
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<b>So very amusingly, in fact, that the reader may not always be certain when he is giving out the truth or speaking hyperbolically.</b><br />
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<b>Barrowcliffe analyzes the phenomenon of D and D addiction very insightfully, I think. He sees it as an instance of young males congregating, to the exclusion of most females, and therefore free to be as rotten to one another as their instincts led them to be. </b><br />
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<b>--Which, it seems, was plenty rotten. </b><br />
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<b>People who read this book would be well advised to have some prior familiarity with the game and with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. But even without that familiarity, I was able to get a detailed glimpse into the world of the D and D players.</b><br />
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23 July 2012<br />
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<b>BAUSCH, RICHARD</b><br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #45818e;">REBEL POWERS</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #45818e;"> </span></b>(1993)<br />
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<b>This started out to be an interesting story about a Vietnam Air Force vet with a wife and two children who has to go to prison in Wyoming for stealing a typewriter. The first-person narrator for most of the story is seventeen-year-old Thomas, the older child, though when he wasn't present at a scene, he imagines what might have happened.</b><br />
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<b>Lisa, the other child, is seven or eight years old but often makes comments that no child that age would make (in my opinion). Thomas himself often sounds like a much younger person in the dialogue, especially with his younger sister.</b></div>
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<b>"Mother" (their mother) feels that they must move to the small town in Wyoming to be closer to their father during his two-year sentence, and much of the story concerns their train trip on the way west and some people they meet en route, notably one Penny Holt, who appears to be quite rootless and very much in need of a family to belong to. She attaches herself readily to "Mother," and Thomas eventually develops a crush on her though she's considerably older than he is.</b></div>
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<b>They establish themselves in a boarding house in Wyoming where they have very little privacy--and where none other than Penny Holt turns up in search of them. She settles right in with their family, clinging to "Mother" as to a very close friend.</b></div>
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<b>Penny had been going to Kansas to see her boy friend who was imprisoned for draft evasion (it is the late 1960s). That hasn't worked out, and so Penny is again at loose ends.</b></div>
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<b>Before "Father" gets released from prison--long before the two years have elapsed--there is curiosity in the boarding house about why he is there, and a story gets started that he is doing time for protesting the Vietnam war. It is a lie that I kept expecting to become the center of interest in the story (what would happen when the truth came out?) because there is much heated discussion among the characters about what constitutes a "loyal" American and whether the Vietnam war is justified. However, the issue simply dwindles away, and the story rambles on without any further exploration of the question. In effect, the rest of the action goes forward as if the lie about "Father" were true.</b></div>
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<b>If having lived a lie has anything to do with his tragic end, this isn't made clear at all. We aren't even sure whether he has ever found out about the falsehood.</b></div>
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<b>"Father," upon release, is so shattered by his experiences (Vietnam, the US prison), apparently, that he's reduced to a very confused state--and has a drinking problem.</b></div>
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<b>In the last part of the book, the author seems almost too eager to tie up the loose ends and wrap up the story. He seems to have ceased to care much about his characters by this time--after having piqued our interest in them.</b></div>
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<b>On the whole, this is a sadly jumbled book. </b></div>
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6 August 2009<br />
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<b>BAXTER, CHARLES</b><br />
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<span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"><em> BELIEVERS: A NOVEL AND STORIES</em> </span>(1997)<br />
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<b>Among the stories here, I thought "Believers" was good. Some other stories dabble in magical realism, which isn't everyone's cup of tea.</b><br />
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4 September 1998<br />
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<b>BAYLEY, JOHN</b><br />
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<em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> IRIS AND HER FRIENDS: A MEMOIR OF MEMORY AND DESIRE </span>(1999)</em><br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
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<b>The author, a novelist, discusses his relationship with his failing wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch--a disciple of the German writer Elias Canetti--as she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. A very touching portrait of a devoted husband trying desperately to do what he can in the face of his wife’s increasingly incomprehensible behavior (she is ultimately consigned to a "home," where she dies).</b></div>
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15 May 2003<br />
______________________<br />
<strong>BEATTIE, ANN </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE NEW YORKER STORIES</span></i> </strong>(2010)<br />
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<b>A collection of 48 stories that appeared in <i>The New Yorker</i> between 1974 and 2006. Because many of the stories have the "<i>New Yorker</i> ending"--that is, no ending at all--they have a sameness that falls just short of getting monotonous when they are gathered together in a volume. </b></div>
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<b>Many are slight, merely setting up a situation, then going nowhere. They are more like vignettes.</b></div>
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<b>Beattie's characters tend to live in New York City or Virginia, drive cars, have partners who are leaving or have left, have difficult mothers, change careers, enjoy fine wines, have caterers, and get stoned. Even though many of them are creatures of privilege, the author makes them understandable and real. And often a story has dark overtones: a car crash, a dead child, AIDS. </b></div>
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<b>"The Confidence Decoy" is an interesting sketch showing the interaction between a more educated person (a lawyer) and less educated ones (two movers with whom the lawyer is temporarily involved). The story is unified by the element of the confidence decoy, but we are constantly aware of the way in which the lawyer thinks he is communicating with the movers even though we suspect he isn't getting through to them, and the way in which the lawyer constantly misconstrues what the movers say. </b></div>
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18 September 2013<br />
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<span style="color: #6aa84f;"><strong><em>THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE</em></strong> </span>(2002)<br />
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<b>This novel about a dysfunctional family involves a doctor who despises his wife and children. Eager to maintain his status as The Doctor, but womanizing almost to the point of obsession, he inflicts cruelty--mostly verbal but fiendishly brutal--on the members of his family. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The story starts out being told by Nina, one of the doctor's two children. She seems a bit too preoccupied with her brother's philanderings, about which we hear a great deal. Andrew, the brother, has been bedding down women he knew in high school at a rapid rate. </b><br />
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<b>Other narrators, Andrew among them, give us the rest of the story. Gradually we learn about the doctor's wife's alcoholism and other horrors of this family, who are sad--and probably only too true to life.</b><br />
<br />
8 November 2008<br />
<br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">PARK CITY: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES</span></em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1998) <br />
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<b>Interesting stories about contemporary people, though some of the endings dangle maddeningly. Some stories were published before in <i>Secrets and Surprises </i>and <i>What Was Mine </i>and elsewhere.</b><br />
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31 December 2001<br />
______________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BEERS, DAVID<br />
<br />
<em><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> BLUE SKY DREAM: A MEMOIR OF AMERICA'S FALL FROM GRACE</span></em> </strong>(1996) <br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an interesting personal account of the author's experience growing up in the 1950s as a child of a Lockheed engineer in the aerospace industry enclave in California. Well-written and thoughtful, with reflections on the effects the decline in military spending has on the employees in that industry. This writer gives vivid and detailed pictures of important aspects of his childhood: Catholicism on his mother’s side; his father’s lapses into abusive behavior; the sameness of the suburb they lived in.</b></div>
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<br />
17 July 1999<br />
______________________<br />
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<b>BELKIN, LISA</b><br />
<br />
<b><em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">SHOW ME A HERO: A TALE OF MURDER, SUICIDE, RACE, AND REDEMPTION</span></em> </b> (1999)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Lisa Belkin, who writes for the<em> New York Times, </em>was living in the general vicinity of Yonkers, NY, in 1992 and took an interest in an announcement of a lottery being held there for townhouse apartments in a new subsidized-housing development.</b></div>
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<b>The construction of these 200 units, which would go to low-income residents (and everyone in Yonkers understood that the residents would be African-American or Hispanic), was possible only after a protracted four-year battle involving a judge, the mayor, and the people of Yonkers.</b></div>
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<b>It seems a classic case of "NIMBY." In an effort to end a clear pattern of segregation, the housing was to be built in a middle-class, "white" area of Yonkers, much to the dismay of those who preferred the status quo.</b></div>
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<b>Belkin focuses her attention on several persons involved in the conflict at the grass-roots level as well as on the very young mayor, Nick Wasicsko, and his wife. Several women whom the author writes about were applicants and eventual residents of the new housing.</b></div>
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<b>The book is similar to <em>There Are No Children Here</em> by Alex Kotlowitz, and the author expresses her indebtedness to that book. </b></div>
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<b>People whose lives are too chaotic for them to be able to articulate their thoughts ought to have others speaking up in their behalf. Lisa Belkin--and Alex Kotlowitz and a few others--are trying to do just that. </b></div>
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<b>It's about time.</b></div>
<br />
15 January 2011<br />
______________________________<div><br /></div><div><b>BERENSON, EDWARD</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE ACCUSATION: BLOOD LIBEL IN AN AMERICAN TOWN </span></i>(2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author, a historian who happens to have roots in the town that is the subject of this book, delves into a 1928 incident that led some of Massena's citizens to make accusations of "blood libel" against the town's small Jewish community.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>A four-year-old girl had vanished. To be sure, she turned up a day later, unharmed and having simply wandered off and lost her way. But it was enough time for some Massenans to conclude that she had been kidnapped by the Jews, who they believed wanted a child's blood for their religious rituals--a myth that has been prevalent in Europe (and sparked many a pogrom) for centuries. Even though the child had been found, Jewish businesses were boycotted.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author looks into the population of this town on the Canadian border and points out that at the time, the Alcoa aluminum industry must have been the major employer there. He discovers that many of the Massena residents were fairly recent immigrants from Europe, perhaps bringing with them some Old World prejudices.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Complicating the situation considerably was a rivalry between two factions of Judaism that became involved in the controversy. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>This brief account seems especially timely in this era of rising anti-Semitism.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>13 June 2021</b></div><div><b>__________________________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b>
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<strong>BESTON, HENRY</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE OUTERMOST HOUSE: A YEAR OF LIFE ON THE GREAT BEACH OF CAPE COD</span> </em></strong>(1928)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Henry Beston deserves to be better known if this book is typical of his writing. A beautifully constructed and lyrically written paean to nature, it tells of his year spent in a cabin on Cape Cod. He was not trying to emulate Thoreau. He freely acknowledges that his cabin was moderately comfortable. He was trying to get a sense of the natural world as it developed throughout a year on Cape Cod.</b></div>
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<b>He doesn't preach at us. In fact, I don't recall that he used the word "spiritual" once in this book. He doesn't philosophize. He observes and reports on what he sees--whether it's the no-see-ums or the piping plover.</b></div>
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<b>I see that he has been compared to Annie Dillard, but Annie Dillard's writing can't begin to approach Henry Beston's.</b><br />
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23 November 2007<br />
_______________________<br />
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<strong>BINCHY, MAEVE</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><i>MAEVE'S TIMES: IN HER OWN WORDS</i></b></span> (2013)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a selection of Maeve Binchy's columns for the <i>Irish Times</i>, written over several decades. They include several amusing accounts of royal weddings, a dissection of Emily Post, and many pieces about people the author has met--the somewhat eccentric characters she has been fond of highlighting. There is even a short piece about her battle with ants.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>28 February 2016</b></div>
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"> EVENING CLASS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span>(1996)<br />
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<b>Interesting novel involving an Italian language class.</b><br />
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26 December 1998<br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;">LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE </span>(1982)</em><br />
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<b>Good novel tracing the lives of two women, one Irish and one English, from the World War II years of their childhood through their subsequent romances, marriages, and widowhood.</b><br />
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23 November 1998<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS</span> </em></strong>(2004)<br />
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<b>Sometimes I get cynical about Maeve Binchy and wonder if she has an eye on the movies in some of her novels. This is one of them. Set in Greece, which is always good for scenic shots (clear blue skies, the Mediterranean, ruins--who could ask for more?), its characters include a few Greeks who are almost too sage and perfect to be believable, especially the aging Andreas.</b></div>
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<b>Several tourists--from England, Ireland, the United States, and Germany--are brought together in this part of Greece when a tragic boat fire kills 24 people, many of whom are known to the townspeople. All of the visitors are fairly young, and it turns out that all of them are running away from situations they found intolerable.</b></div>
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<b>Soon their old lives are catching up with them, and decisions have to be made. It is astonishing how appropriately everybody behaves in this novel. It is as if they are marionettes whose strings are controlled by a crew of social workers. For things get wrapped up by the end of the novel, new pairings-off are transpiring, and a couple of long-gone sons are returning to the fold.</b></div>
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<b>This novel has one very strong message: Families ought to stay close to one another. Families ought not to allow their closest relatives to stray far afield, no matter how great the lure of other parts of the world.</b><br />
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<b>A very conventional message, to be sure, but Binchy presents the story in a tolerable way that is also enjoyable, even right down to the scenes with dancing Greeks that put one in mind of <i>Zorba the Greek</i> and other movies showcasing the Greek way of life.</b></div>
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2 April 2008<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE RETURN JOURNEY</span></em></strong> (1998)<br />
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<b>This is a collection of Binchy short stories. I had never read any of her shorter works, and I have to say I prefer her novels.</b><br />
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<b>These are interesting, quiet stories about families and relationships. But they are a bit thin and slight. I wish she had fleshed them out more.</b><br />
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18 November 2007<strong><br />
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<em></em></strong><br />
<em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> TARA ROAD </span>(1998)</em><br />
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<b>A fairly good novel about two troubled women who swap houses for a summer. One woman is an American who has recently lost her teenaged son, the other is Irish, and her husband has left her and the two children because he is involved with a much younger woman who is pregnant.</b><br />
<br />
28 February 2000<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i><b> A WEEK IN WINTER</b></i> </span>(2012)<br />
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maeve Binchy has given us a long novel, populated densely by characters who have a connection, in one way or another, with a hotel that is starting up under the auspices of Chicky, an Irish woman who has lived in the US. There are those who have been in prison, those who drink too much, those who have to get married, even a couple who have served as doctors on board ship.</b></div>
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<b>The stories move forward with the Irish lilt that is typical of Binchy's style, and we find ourselves acquainted with an assortment of lovable and somewhat eccentric people.</b></div>
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<b>--Not too eccentric, though. Binchy makes it clear that isolated people who aren't team players are suspect. In her world you'd better be one of the fun-loving crowd. Women who are too keen on rules while being in charge of libraries or schools come in for her particularly withering scorn.</b></div>
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14 November 2014<br />
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<b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">CHESTNUT STREET</span> </b>(2010)<br />
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<b>This is a posthumously published collection of stories about assorted characters, all of whom live on Chestnut Street, a semicircular street with some thirty houses.</b></div>
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<b>Binchy's characters are often put-upon, taken advantage of, tossed about by chance, doomed to loneliness, but the author's relentlessly sunny view of the world has a way of rescuing them sometimes that seems all too tidy.</b></div>
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<b>Some of the stories are very slight, little more than anecdotes, and in at least one--"Flowers from Grace"--Binchy seems to be straining too hard to teach a Lesson: Grace needs to loosen up and stop organizing everything.</b></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But as always, Binchy spins a good yarn with interesting, realistic characters and situations.</b></div>
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4 September 2015<br />
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__________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BLOOM, CLAIRE<br />
<br />
<em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">LEAVING A DOLL'S HOUSE: A MEMOIR</span></em></strong><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span>(1996)<br />
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<b><br /></b>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Interesting recollections by British actress Claire Bloom, who knew a number of famous men, including Charles Chaplin and Sir Lawrence Olivier. Much of the memoir concerns her husband of many years, the writer Philip Roth, and her objections to him are understandable and probably well-founded.</b></div>
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10 April 2004<br />
_____________________________<br />
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<b>BLUM, ANDREW</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">TUBES: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE INTERNET </span></i>(2012)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reader will come away from this exploration of the innermost workings of the Internet knowing that the entire globe now has vast collections of tubes and wires and fiberoptic cable, all being carefully taken care of (one hopes) so that human beings can stay connected by the new technology--a considerable improvement in speed and efficiency over, say, the telegraph, as the author points out.</b></div>
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<b>Blum does not regard this phenomenon as anything to be alarmed about. In fact, he seems to consider it a good thing. Small towns in Oregon that used to depend on lumber for their livelihood now have data centers to provide employment, for instance.</b></div>
<br />
20 July 2015<br />
<b>________________________</b><br />
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<strong>BLUM, DEBORAH</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">GHOST HUNTERS: WILLIAM JAMES AND THE SEARCH FOR SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH</span></em></strong> (2006)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Deborah Blum has undertaken a formidable task here but she has succeeded admirably. A problem confronting her must have been how to present William James in a favorable light without disparaging his long-lasting interest in psychical research and still treat the subject of psychic phenomena respectfully though not necessarily credulously.</b><br />
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<b>William James, along with numerous other notable figures in philosophy, psychology, and even the "hard sciences," was interested in finding out how much truth lay in the claims of psychics, especially mediums and clairvoyants.</b></div>
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<b>To that end, the American and British Societies for Psychical Research were founded, and many learned articles on the subject appeared in print. Some academics were dismayed that William James would have lent his name and time and energy to an enterprise that many regarded as crackpot and fraudulent.</b></div>
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<b>This book will do nothing to settle the question of the legitimacy of psychic experiences, but that is not its aim. The jury is still out on the matter, anyway--even after the passage of a century. What it does do is explore the extent of James's involvement in the struggle for respectability that psychical research faced in the early 20th century.</b><br />
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<b>To understand James's position on psychical research, one has to understand his insistence on remaining open to any and all ideas, no matter how wild they might seem--and Deborah Blum clearly does understand this. She does not waste time castigating the members of the scientific community who had only contempt for psychical research. She presents their views as simply another perspective on the matter.</b><br />
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<b>She reveals some facts that may not have come to light up to now--among them, the lengths to which the investigators would go in their efforts to prevent their chosen mediums from cheating. They sometimes tied the medium up or subjected the medium to noxious stimuli in an effort to find out if her trance state was real. Perhaps surprisingly, the mediums hardly ever objected to all of the hoops they were made to jump through.</b></div>
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<b>Another aspect of the studies comes out in Blum's description of some of the actual sittings or seances. These could become intimate in ways that went beyond Victorian mores. A medium might sit in the lap of one of the investigators, for instance. This sort of detail never found its way into William James's writings on psychical research so far as I know.</b></div>
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<b>This was a fascinating account.</b></div>
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6 December 2007<br />
__________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BOEHM, ERIC H.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">WE SURVIVED: 14 HISTORIES OF THE HIDDEN AND HUNTED IN NAZI GERMANY</span> </em></strong>(2003)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Originally published in 1949, this book presents fourteen accounts by survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The accounts contain enough specific detail about the situation in Hitler's Germany to give a chilling comprehension of the horrors involved in life under a totalitarian regime.</b></div>
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18 August 2008<br />
__________________________<br />
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<b>BOTSFORD, GARDNER</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> A LIFE OF PRIVILEGE, MOSTLY</span></b></em> (2003)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, who died in 2004 in his 80s, was an editor for the <em>New Yorker</em> magazine for some 40 years. This memoir is a briskly told account of his life there, with his World War II experiences thrown in for good measure.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>As the stepson of the magazine's owner, Raoul Fleischmann, he was always open to the accusation of having obtained his position through his family connection. The extent to which this was true isn't made clear in the narrative, but he succeeds in diverting our attention to some of the "dirty little secrets" about the apparently close-knit <em>New Yorker</em> group.</b></div>
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<b>By far the lengthiest account in the book concerns the disintegration of the author's close relationship with the editor-in-chief, William Shawn, as Shawn seemed stubbornly resistant to finding a replacement for himself. The portrait of Shawn is very unflattering indeed.</b></div>
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4 September 2009<br />
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<br />
<b>BOWEN, ELIZABETH</b><br />
<br />
<b> <em><span style="background-color: white; color: #6aa84f;">TO THE NORTH</span></em></b> (1932)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i>To the North</i> turns out to be a very bone-chilling title, but the reader will learn this only towards the end of the story, which advances in a very measured way to its conclusion, in which some lives become unravelled by the events of a few abrupt, unstoppable, harrowing moments.</b></div>
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<b>In the end we are left to imagine what will happen next. The action of the story takes place in a world where everything can be meticulously planned and very little just happens in a spur-of-the-moment way.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Celia meets a man on a train, and they strike up an acquaintance. This happenstance event sets the rest of the story in motion, for it is Markie, the man Celia has met on the train, who is the catalyst.</b></div>
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<b>How the author gradually shows Markie to us may be one of the most effective accomplishments of this novel. At first he seems pleasant and "acceptable" as someone fit to associate with the genteel and well-bred Emmeline and Celia and their set. But we start seeing interchanges between Markie and his sister--who is also his landlady--for instance, and later between Markie and a woman he knows that show him to be cruel and deceitful.</b></div>
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<b>It is not that he is socially "beneath" Emmeline and Celia. It is that he is heartless. Though we can see that Emmeline and Celia are somewhat shallow and self-absorbed, still we can't help feeling that they should steer clear of this man.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Elizabeth Bowen's strong point here seems to be character development. She deftly delineates each character tellingly, using subtle brush strokes.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>But in the catastrophic scene at the end she stumbles, I think.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The scene seems painfully long.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I intend to reread this book. I'm not sure I've read it carefully enough the first time. Some writers deserve to be read with considerable care, and Elizabeth Bowen is one of them.</b></div>
<br />
16 June 2010<br />
________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BOYLE, KEVIN</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> ARC OF JUSTICE: A SAGA OF RACE, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND MURDER IN THE JAZZ AGE</span> </em></strong>(2004)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, who is a historian, has written an account of a 1925 case in which the celebrated Clarence Darrow was the lawyer for the defense.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys and infant daughter, an African-American family, moved into a bungalow they had bought in an all-white area of Detroit. Ossian Sweet had had a difficult struggle to become a doctor and was keenly interested in establishing his family in comfortable surroundings. He also knew that there had been recent race-hatred incidents involving similar housing battles in Detroit. Getting wind of similar opposition to his family's move, he gathered nine friends and relatives (including two brothers) in the bungalow as the family was moving in. He showed them firearms he had accumulated in the event of serious trouble.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There was serious trouble. A mob of some 400-600 white people assembled outside the bungalow and began throwing rocks. A window shattered. Gunfire came from inside the bungalow--first firing above the crowd, then closer into it, and one man was wounded, another killed.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Eleven African-Americans, including Ossian and Gladys Sweet, were put on trial for murder, as a group. The NAACP and several prominent African-Americans were very involved in the case (W. E. B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and others), and eventually Clarence Darrow agreed to work for the defense.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The carefully chosen jury (of 12 white men) couldn't come to a decision, and there was a mistrial. The second time around, Darrow insisted on having each of the eleven defendants tried individually. The first to be tried was the brother of Ossian's who was the only person to have admitted firing a shot.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He was acquitted at last, and this meant that the other defendants were also allowed to go free, but it was a long and emotionally stressful time for those involved, with the defendants having to spend considerable time in a Detroit jail.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Not long afterwards, Gladys Sweet contracted TB, probably during her stay in the crowded jail. It was transmitted to the Sweets' daughter, who died while still in infancy. Gladys Sweet also died, a few years later.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Ossian Sweet remarried a couple of times but then divorced. In the end, not yet an old man, he shot himself to death.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a very tragic story that sheds light on the disgraceful era when "restrictive covenants" were becoming common in the US housing market. The racism that has been rampant in the US housing situation for generations is still with us today in spite of some corrective legislation over the years.</b><br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
13 May 2008</div>
______________________<br />
<strong>BOYLE, T. CORAGHESSAN</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQEgVebHI9LSBaJtJu-QnxJ3PeGtaTNhrQuvthSM2yiqg1dt-Yz" /></div>
<br />
<i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b> SAN MIGUEL</b></span> </i>(2012)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author delved into historical records for material for this novel, set on the rugged island of San Miguel, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. The focus is on two families--the Waterses, who settled there in the 1880s, and the Lesters, who came along in 1930 and stayed until World War 2.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Marantha Waters and her husband Will, who was wounded at Chancellorsville, aren't well equiped for running a sheep farm, but that is what they are doing on San Miguel even though Marantha is very clearly dying of tuberculosis.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The very realistic descriptions of Marantha's physical state make for a compelling narrative. Boyle has made this woman's slow and horrible death from TB--and her heroic perseverance in spite of her suffering--vivid and horrifyingly compelling. The reader realizes without having to be told in so many words that this woman is utterly a prisoner.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Another woman who seems to have very few choices open to her once she and her husband arrive on San Miguel many years later is Elise Lester. This second part of the book, which could almost be two entirely separate novels, is much less successful than the first.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Herbie Lester, her husband, is gradually disintegrating into a form of dementia perhaps brought on by shell shock suffered during World War 1. He and Elise are just as ill suited for running a sheep farm as the Waterses before them. She is 38 and has spent ten years working in the New York Public Library. And yet she copes with the primitive situation, going on to bear two daughters.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Somehow Herbie and Elise seem a bit lackluster compared to the Waterses, and the two daughters, though often in the picture, are little more than cardboard figures, saying and doing typical things but having little individual personality.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The two stories are linked together only once, briefly, by the very slender connection of Jimmy, a hired boy for the Waterses who is still around when the Lesters come. He has a few memories of the Waterses that he shares, and these are never referred to again after they come up.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maybe Boyle wanted to show us just two families of those settlers who inhabited the island over the years--without connecting too many dots.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He has told an absorbing story and done it well.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
11 January 2014<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> THE WILD CHILD: STORIES</span></b></i> (2010)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>An assortment of interesting stories, often with bizarre themes. "Admiral" involves the cloning of an Afghan hound. The longest story, almost a novella, "The Wild Child," must have been based on actual accounts of Victor, the "wild child" of Aveyron.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I kept wondering how closely the author followed the known facts about this child. There is an amazing amount of detail about how Victor behaved and how and what he ate. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
24 August 2013<br />
<br />
<b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"><em>TALK TALK</em> </span>(2006)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The plot of this novel revolves around identity theft. Dana Halter, a deaf woman who teaches, and her boy friend, Bridger Martin, are caught up in a chaotic mess, with Dana thrown in jail because someone has assumed her identity. A man named William Peck Wilson has been using the name Dana Martin--and living in high style, along with Natalya, his Russian girl friend and her daughter Madison.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Dana and Bridger set out in pursuit of the identity thief because they realize that the police aren't going to be of much help. After all, identity theft is a "victimless crime."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It's an exciting story, well told. The ending strikes me as unsatisfactory, however. It is jarring. The way William Peck Wilson behaves at the end isn't like the character we have seen up to that point. It's as if the author felt obliged to end the story but didn't quite know how. It seems slapdash.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And the story has all of the signs of a novel wanting desperately to be a movie--including a couple of car chases.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But it was interesting anyway, and the author presents the problems facing a deaf person with sensitivity and empathy even as he's moving the action-packed story forward.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
24 March 2011<br />
<br />
<br />
<em> <b style="background-color: white;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">WITHOUT A HERO: STORIE</span></b><b style="background-color: #6aa84f;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #38761d;">S</span></b></em> (1994)<br />
<br />
<b>These are absorbing stories, some parodic, most with humorous elements.</b><br />
<br />
1 June 2001<br />
_____________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BRAY, ROSEMARY L.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">UNAFRAID OF THE DARK: A MEMOIR</span> </em></strong>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author has told her story and told it well--a story that needed to be told in this time when the needy are constantly being accused of laziness and other character flaws.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Rosemary Bray, born in 1955, was raised on the south side of Chicago. Her father was present in the household although his was a presence of dubious value, for, seething with rage against white people, he beat his wife and four children regularly. Rosemary and her mother and the other children lived in terror of his anger. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She never indulges in psychobabble in this narrative, never portrays herself as an abused child, as we so often find authors of memoirs and autobiographies portraying themselves. She just lays out the facts, along with her emotional responses to them. Her mother had to put the family on welfare even though there was a male "breadwinner" in the house. His "breadwinning" was sporadic--and he was a compulsive gambler.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>When Rosemary was in 7th grade, she was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Francis W. Parker private school on Chicago's north side. She was plagued by mixed feelings about traveling to an entirely foreign part of town--a "whiter" part of town--for school and about associating with fellow students whose lives were radically different from her own. However, she survived her years at Francis Parker--and went on to undergraduate studies at Yale University, where she met the man she eventually married.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She became a book editor/reviewer for the <em>New York Times</em>. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a totally absorbing book.</b></div>
<br />
14 October 2007<br />
_____________________________ <br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BRENNAN, MAEVE</strong><br />
<span style="color: #6aa84f;"><br /></span>
<strong><em><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> THE ROSE GARDEN: SHORT STORIES </span></em></strong>(2000)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The stories in this collection were almost all originally published in <em>The New Yorker </em>in the 1950s and 1960s. They are quiet narratives, often with the non-endings that were part of the standard <em>New Yorker</em> style. The most successful ones, in my opinion, are set in Dublin. Others take place in New York.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The last several stories in the collection concern Bluebell, a dog, and just miss being slight and whimsical. The author clearly has a talent for describing animals in a perceptive and original way.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
6 September 2008<br />
__________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BRONSON, PO</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE NUDIST ON THE LATE SHIFT </span></em></strong>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Aside from now being outdated, this collection of anecdotes about employees in the burgeoning Silicon Valley software industry does little except for giving the author an opportunity to rhapsodize over what he perceives as a breathtakingly awe-inspiring revolution in the way we communicate information. He also gushes repeatedly about the vast fortunes being made nearly overnight by some of the computer-savvy young men who make up most of that industry.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His style is so annoying that I can't say I enjoyed this book. He likes trendy expressions, and so we have "way cool," "studly engineers," and "paradigm shift," to name a few.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
3 February 2008<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BROOKNER, ANITA</strong><br />
<br />
<strong> <em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">A FRIEND FROM ENGLAND</span></em> (1988)</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Told in the first person by one Rachel Kennedy, this is the story of her association with Heather, a younger woman who is the daughter of Rachel's accountant, Oscar.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is probably meant to be a story with an unreliable narrator, but even if it isn't, and we're supposed to take Rachel as behaving in ways we can sympathize with, her motives for the close association with Heather remain murky.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Rachel appears to be a less-fortunate hanger-on in the prosperous circle of people surrounding Heather and her parents, and she perceives her continuing to be included in their circle as Heather's parents' attempt at providing their only daughter with a friend.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Rachel perceives her own role--we learn increasingly as the story proceeds--as something of a self-appointed advocate for Heather's parents, however. Heather marries a young man who (it is hinted) might be a homosexual, and the marriage falls apart shortly after the splendid wedding.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The hints at the young man's inadequacies, by innuendo but with no explanation of the facts, no real evidence, are troubling. But it is Rachel's version we are getting. She senses that Oscar, Heather's father, shares her doubts about the young man, but again, no more is done with this idea.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Heather, a taciturn and constantly poised young woman, doesn't seem especially inclined to like Rachel. When she leaves her marriage and promptly takes up with an Italian man whom she marries, with little or no intention of keeping up contact with her family in England, Rachel volunteers to go to Italy to try to persuade Heather to visit her very ill mother.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Rachel sees herself as carrying a torch for the values that Heather's family are desperate to maintain. After all, they have put a lot of effort into raising this one daughter, and now she is turning her back on them by marrying and living in a foreign country, taking up with her husband's family while letting her own sink or swim back in England. Where is her sense of familial obligation? Rachel will be the one to bring her to her senses.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I was struck by Heather's parents' sad acquiescence to the situation. They raised their daughter so that she could have the same opportunities for happiness that they had had, they said. The implication is that there were no strings attached to their parenthood.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But this goes right by Rachel. When she finds that Heather has accepted the gift of freedom that her parents have so generously given her--that she still loves her parents but wants her life as she has made it--Rachel is probably defeated once and for all so far as this relationship is concerned.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We never find out if she delivered the gifts to Rachel's mother as Rachel asked her to do. It is hard to say whether this omission was intentional on Brookner's part, or whether we are to believe that Rachel's failure to mention it is part of her somewhat addled view of the world.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Somehow this story doesn't quite come off. Heather is too perfectly poised, and Rachel's place in the group seems to vacillate. Sometimes she is a businesswoman who is doing fairly well, but at other times she is almost shrieking out her anger because people like her have to work hard all their lives while people like Heather's family have everything they want.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It isn't clear just where this novel is going.</b></div>
<br />
13 January 2012<br />
<br />
<b> </b><em style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;">LEWIS PERCY </span>(1989)</em><br />
<br />
T<b>his novel is a reflective analysis of a marriage--specifically, a marriage entered into by Lewis Percy, a retiring scholar who frequents libraries, and a woman who seems right to him in spite of having a "disability" that appears to be primarily agoraphobia--and being encumbered by a protective mother and her long-term lover.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>We watch as Lewis Percy's life is dominated by this trio, but as time goes by he gets lucky.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This is a happy story, and its surprise ending is still believable--and satisfying.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
23 January 2012<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">DOLLY</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span></b>(1993)<br />
<br />
<b>A woman narrator recalls her aunt Dolly--her mother’s brother’s wife--an older woman of European background who exploits women, including the narrator, in her greedy quest for men and material things. This is aA surprisingly sympathetic study of a character, beautifully written.</b><br />
<br />
5 September 1999<br />
<br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">A PRIVATE VIEW</span></b></em> (1994)<br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This novel concerns a man reaching retirement age but losing his best friend, with whom he had made retirement plans. There is a troubling encounter with a brassy and rude much younger woman who insinuates herself into his life by a scam involving her being "permitted" to stay in another tenant's flat in the building he lives in. Absorbing.</b><br />
<br />
2 November 1998<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><em>ALTERED STATES</em> </span></b>(1996)<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Told by a first-person narrator, this story is about a man whose wife has killed herself after giving birth to a stillborn baby. Alan Sherwood, the narrator, is selfish and egocentric, with a self-destructive but persistent yearning for a selfish and inconsiderate woman, Sarah, who eventually marries money, lives in France, and vanishes from Alan’s scene. It is hard to say just what the center of this novel is. Most of the characters aren’t especially likable.</b><br />
<br />
1 September 1999<br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">VISITORS</span></b></em> (1997)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Thea May, 70, a widow living alone, extends hospitality to Steve Best, who is to be the best man for her American granddaughter’s wedding. The unsettling visit by Ann, the granddaughter, and her fiance, David, and the best man, with the revelation that the marriage has been necessitated by Ann’s pregnancy, leads Thea to come to terms with her aging and eventual death. Very good book.</b></div>
<br />
18 February 2000<br />
<br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">FALLING SLOWLY</span></em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a moderately bleak story about two aging sisters and the arrangements and rearrangements in their lives as their situations change. Miriam works as a translator, and her sister Beatrice has been an accompanist but loses her job and begins to show signs of failing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Miriam carries on an affair with the handsome man who was designated to give Beatrice the bad news about her employment. We watch as Miriam becomes increasingly desperate in her attempts at holding onto her married lover. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The events in this story are sad, but Brookner depicts them with interesting insights and attention to nuances that give them an importance beyond being sad.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
26 April 2011<br />
<br />
<br />
<em><strong> </strong></em><strong><em> </em></strong>_____________________________ <br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>BROOKS, GWENDOLYN</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvO2CdrEe5xT-V3SuUbFJ7LVzkV26nrmHfDUgTRnC920TLZRHBiekhWONhSmFiHUurgtEBwgOwxmx4MGRsxZWQCBVVY3JG4WTg3TraLn5wuwBu1HO7MgwxAxu4TRVKSminW88Vag/s1600/Gwendolyn+Brooks.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" i="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvO2CdrEe5xT-V3SuUbFJ7LVzkV26nrmHfDUgTRnC920TLZRHBiekhWONhSmFiHUurgtEBwgOwxmx4MGRsxZWQCBVVY3JG4WTg3TraLn5wuwBu1HO7MgwxAxu4TRVKSminW88Vag/s1600/Gwendolyn+Brooks.jpg" true="" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">REPORT FROM PART ONE</span></b></em> (1972)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Like <em>Report from Part Two</em>, this is a somewhat loosely assembled collection of reminiscences, poems, and letters, along with a considerable number of photos.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Here we get glimpses of the poet's childhood in Chicago, of her early years of adulthood, and of the breakup of her marriage. We see how large a role she must have played in the African-American arts scene in Chicago over many years. She was instrumental in organizing a writing workshop for some members of the Blackstone Rangers, a South Side gang, for instance. Her diligent and generous efforts at inspiring poetry-writing and an appreciation for poetry in children have been amazing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She makes a strong case for her belief that integration is not the whole answer for African-American people. She herself believed in integration at one time but later abandoned it in favor of an interest in promoting African-American culture as an independent entity deserving far more respect than it was getting.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hers is not an angry voice but a discouraged, resigned and realistic one. She feels integration has been too slow a process, with results that have only minimal significance. She believes that African-Americans have to see themselves as beautiful and assertively powerful before real progress can be made. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book came out in 1972. Events of the last 39 years seem to be proving her right. Racial prejudice is still abroad in the land, sometimes hiding in corners and veiled, sometimes very much out in the open.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>At one point in this compendium of interviews, snippets of poems, and memories she suddenly gives a brief but very graphic description of a Mississippi lynching. Placed as it is in the book, it can only shock the reader, and I suspect that her intent was to let this bit of grim reality pack as much of a wallop as possible.</b></div>
<br />
24 June 2011<br />
<em> </em><br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">REPORT FROM PART TWO</span></b></em> (1996)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Without having read <em>Report from Part One</em>, I may be in no position to judge this 1996 work, which is a compendium of some of Gwendolyn Brooks's poems and other writings, including quite a number of brief introductory speeches she gave in her capacity as poetry consultant for the U. S. Library of Congress.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Much of the writing here is "official." It was written for various occasions and has to say nice things about people. But there is a portrait of her mother that is quite readable, and some of the events in the life of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks have been remarkable and are described here.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a vignette involving the author Susan Sontag that shows Sontag in a very unflattering light. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As one of the pre-eminent African-American voices on the literary scene in the 20th century, Gwendolyn Brooks deserves to be taken seriously. In fact, all of her opinions in this collection are well worth reading. They are original, well argued and thoughtful. Her reflections on single parenthood, for instance, are outspoken and persuasive.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And, for the record, Gwendolyn Brooks dislikes the term<em> African-American,</em> preferring <em>Black</em> (with a capital B).</b></div>
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<br /></div>
5 July 2010<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>BROWNLEE, SHANNON</strong><br />
<br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"> OVERTREATED: WHY TOO MUCH MEDICINE IS MAKING US SICKER AND POORER </span></em>(2007)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a reporter, has written a very persuasive book arguing that in the US, one reason for skyrocketing medical costs is simply that we expect too much medical care--far more than we really need. In fact, she maintains, with medical care less is often more--and she demonstrates how too much medical care can actually harm the patient, as when invasive medical procedures are done unnecessarily.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She sees the flaws in a system that encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible in a day and would like to see primary care doctors restored to their former status instead of disappearing from the scene. She sees many advantages in a system where doctors are salaried.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Like another author on this topic, Marcia Angell, MD, she deplores the creation of "new diseases" or "pre-diseases"--osteopenia being one of her examples. The rise to prominence of osteopenia (said to be early osteoporosis) as a "pre-disease" has led to widespread prescribing of somewhat risky drugs like Fosamax.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an excellent book, much needed just now, when the US health care system is being closely scrutinized and found to be seriously wanting.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
20 September 2009<br />
<strong>__________________________</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BROYARD, ANATOLE<br />
<br />
<em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">KAFKA WAS THE RAGE: A GREENWICH VILLAGE MEMOIR</span></em></strong> (1993) <br />
<br />
<b>Broyard gives a terrible account of his life. He never met a sexual encounter he doesn't insist on including in this short work. The author is said to have been revealed as a "person of color" though he successfully concealed his racial identity all his life, and yet the subject of race is not touched upon in this book.</b><br />
<br />
20 April 2001<br />
____________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BUMILLER, ELISABETH<br />
<br />
<em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SECRETS OF MARIKO: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A JAPANESE WOMAN AND HER FAMILY</span></em></strong> (1995) <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a <em>Washington Post</em> reporter, wanted to give a picture of the daily life of a typical Japanese woman, and--during an extended 1991 stay in Tokyo with her husband and children--she found Mariko Tanaka, 44, a housewife and mother who agreed to be interviewed for a year. With the help of an interpreter, the author carried on conversations with Mariko and her husband and three children as well as with Mariko's elderly parents, who lived in the same house.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Japan, which bans immigration, is still a very homogeneous society, and some features of its rigid, structured lifestyle are probably difficult for outsiders to understand.The author tells us that Japanese is among the most difficult languages in the world, and we catch glimpses of some of its difficulties when she tells of the special vocabularies that are used only in particular situations--"sublanguages" that exist within the main language but are reserved for certain purposes (when respect is called for, for instance).</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Mariko works almost nonstop and rarely has a moment for herself--a situation probably common to housewives and mothers everywhere but taken for granted in Japan, where the men work till midnight in office jobs. Mariko's husband, a "salary man," seems typical, although the stress of such incessant work clearly takes its toll, for he occasionally disappears on drinking binges.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Mariko, in addition to being the chief cook and bottlewasher for her husband and children, helps with the care of her aging parents. She is active in the PTA and in local religious festivals. She works half-time as a meter reader, a job she enjoys for the opportunity it provides her to get out and meet other people.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Sometimes Elisabeth Bumiller describes Mariko's preparations for a family meal in detail, and we become aware of a diet that seems almost totally devoid of desserts but rich in seafood and vegetables.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Japanese politeness is celebrated the world over. In Japan courtesy takes forms that would strike a Westerner as extraordinary. For instance, there is the custom of staying in touch with your children's elementary school teachers year after year by having one of the class mothers be in charge of an annual get-together. This thoughtfulness toward a child's former teacher is also meant to provide a greater sense of continuity in the child's experience. This makes eminent good sense to me.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Elisabeth Bumiller has shown a fascinating world where the people lead their lives in a peace-loving, graceful, practical way. I found this book captivating from beginning to end. </b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
7 April 2003<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>BUSCH, FREDERICK</b><br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">GIRLS </span>(</b>1997)<b> </b></em><br />
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<em><b><br /></b></em></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel set in upstate New York is about a campus cop whose marriage isn’t going well since the couple’s infant daughter was a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Fanny, his wife, is a nurse. The couple are apparently unable to have another child and are finding the loss overwhelming. Jack, the main character, has a macho streak, is given to beating up on suspects he dislikes, and has a chip on his shoulder about academics. Some of the parodic treatments of academese are right on target in this novel.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Jack as a character is a bit of a puzzle--his motivations aren’t always clear. Why he falls into an affair with a woman professor isn’t made plain, especially as his wife, whom he still loves, knows about it.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The action of the novel centers around Jack’s attempt to solve the case of a missing teenaged girl. He succeeds in the attempt but the outcome is tragic, though the reader has been prepared for the outcome well in advance. An absorbing book.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
20 November 2002<br />
____________________________ <br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>BYATT, A. S.</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">A WHISTLING WOMAN</span></em><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(2002)<br />
<br />
<b>Maybe A. S. Byatt and I are just not kindred spirits. I've read one or two of her other novels and felt the same irritation that I felt with <em>A Whistling Woman</em>....</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There are too many characters in the novel to keep track of. The author herself doesn't keep very good track of them, either. But then she's dealing with the vast panorama of a university in the 1960s, with an anti-university springing up in its vicinity. On its property, as a matter of fact, and wouldn't you know? The university wins out over the little band of rebels in their encampment.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>A. S. Byatt is rather emphatically on the side of the university in spite of her attempts at making satiric thrusts at both sides. The implication here is that the rebels' "real" objective is to ease their own lives by forcing the university to soften up its foreign-language requirements.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>My biggest problem with this novel is that the characters don't come alive. They aren't fleshed out. There is too much going on here, and Byatt is apparently eager to show off her knowledge of just about everything under the sun.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The result is a novel that is showy but without much depth. Perhaps I would care more about the main character, Frederica, if I had read the rest of the quartet of novels involving her. But I doubt it.</b><br />
<br />
25 March 2006<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
</div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1074140770126673332005-07-09T20:26:00.008-07:002022-12-13T16:09:26.136-08:00C<div><b>CALLAHAN, MAUREEN</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">AMERICAN PREDATOR: THE HUNT FOR THE MOST METICULOUS SERIAL KILLER OF THE 21ST CENTURY</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This is the only time when I will have written a blog post about a book I haven't finished. But after reading about two-thirds of it, I feel qualified to make a couple of comments.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The serial killer, Israel Keyes, killed himself in prison. This account opens with his pursuit, capture, rape and murder of Samantha Koenig, an 18-year-old working alone in a coffee booth kiosk in Alaska. I stopped reading after his capture and interrogation by authorities.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book isn't especially well written. There is some sloppiness in keeping track of the details, and there are some stylistic horrors, like the misuse of the verb "lay" and the grotesque new verb form, <i>referencing</i>, instances of which have been infesting the language lately.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I decided I didn't care enough about this particular psychopath's other crimes to read on.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>By his own account, Israel Keyes sounds like as clear a specimen of a psychopath as anyone looking for one could find. The book's title, however, shows more thoughtlessness on the author's part. With the </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>21st century not even a quarter over, it is highly unlikely that there won't be other serial killers, quite possibly more horrendous ones than Keyes, by 2100.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Keyes's account under interrogation is so horrendous that the reader might be unable to take any more grisly details. Contemplating the vast number of young women who, eager for employment and needing to earn money, take jobs in situations like Samantha Koenig's that make them especially vulnerable, the reader might despair for the fate of the many young women in this very populous country who do not lead sheltered lives. Just who is looking out for them?</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Another problem I had with this book concerns the intensely admiring tones with which one of the players in this drama is treated: Steve Rayburn, a Texas Ranger, assigned to the FBI case in Texas in pursuit of the killer. Whenever Rayburn figures in the account, he is described with an aura of something approaching glorification. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In an era where organizations like the "Proud Boys" seem to have inordinate powers (and lots of weapons, let's not forget), the Texas Rangers look alarmingly like another instance when people are inspired to take the law into their own hands and--all too often--make up the law as they go along.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>4 November 2020</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>_________________________________</b></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><strong></strong><strong><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div>CAMPBELL, BEBE MOORE</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTHWILTcNL5EkTtyHn4KXRuNkQiWF1BWlPK4YiioHYZRtlZ0m3W" /></div>
<br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #45818e;">SINGING IN THE COMEBACK CHOIR</span></em><span style="color: #45818e; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
T<b>his book was a bestseller, and I have a hunch that the author was aiming at the bestseller list as she wrote it. It has all of the earmarks of a book written with sales in mind--and of course a movie version. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Who can blame a writer for trying hard for sales? </b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I liked the book. It offers an unflaggingly interesting story, told in a lively way with witty dialogue. Maxine is a woman in her thirties, married to Satchel, a lawyer. Both African-Americans living in Los Angeles, where Maxine is the executive producer of a successful TV show resembling "Donahue."</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maxine, pregnant with their first child, makes a couple of trips back to Philadelphia, where the grandmother who raised her still lives. Lindy Walker, the grandmother, was a well-known singer but she has had a stroke and appears to be descending into depression and alcoholism.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maxine tries hard not to meddle in her grandmother's life but she is drawn into the specifics of it, renewing old connections in her former neighborhood and pulling together the strands that will enable Lindy to stage a comeback.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Meanwhile, the pressures of her job are mounting, and eventually she has to face the failure of the show--but everything turns out beautifully because she's having a baby anyway.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The standard social-work line is overdone in this book. If Bebe Moore Campbell had done less analyzing and limited herself to telling a good story, the story would have been much better. She has an excellent command of contemporary conversational language. If only she could have let the characters speak without providing commentary.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
19 February 2010<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1992)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The world needed Bebe Moore Campbell, who died a few years ago at the age of 56. I read her memoir, <em>Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad,</em> a while back--a very absorbing account and well told.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel, which takes place in Mississippi and Chicago, begins with the murder of a black teenager, Armstrong Todd, by a white man (abetted by his father and brother) seeking to avenge an imagined bit of flirtation between Armstrong and the white man's wife, Lily.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This part of the story sounds like the Emmett Till case but I don't know if the author had it in mind. It doesn't matter, for it is the kind of incident that was all too common in the south for centuries.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is Armstrong's untimely death that shapes the lives of many of the other people in the novel, and we follow them into early old age. Armstrong's mother and grandmother, his father, and then there are the whites, whose lives are shown running parallel to those of the segregated black people in the story--Lily and her husband and his brother.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author has not written a diatribe against white people though she very easily might have. She has understood the white people in her story. She has the rare gift of seeing why her enemies might be the way they are and of explaining them to us.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Along the way she gives us glimpses into routine examples of what it was like to live in a segregated world--the missed medical care, the missed education, the closed doors that black people faced every day of their lives and still face all too often in the US.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bebe Moore Campbell has beautifully written a story that enhances the reader's perception of the way people have been--and still are--in the real world.</b></div>
<br />
12 December 2009<br />
<br />
<strong>__________________________</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>CAMPBELL, DENELE PITTS<br /><br /><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">NOTES OF A PIANO TUNER</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
B<b>rief collection of pleasant reminiscences by a woman who became a piano tuner after having learned piano-tuning from her father. She tells of her experiences tuning pianos in homes and churches in the Ozark Mountains. She writes well and has something interesting and amusing to say--far more than can be said of many published writers.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
21 February 2005<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus.jpg" t8="true" /></a></div>
<br />
<b>CAMUS, ALBERT</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE FIRST MAN</span></em> </b>(1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This beginning of an autobiographical novel was published more than 30 years after the author's untimely death. Camus's daughter explains in an introductory note that the family hesitated to publish such a raw and clearly unfinished work earlier because the climate of opinion at the time of her father's death was hostile in spite of his Nobel Prize. The family felt that the imperfections in this fragmentary start of a novel would be glaring enough to make unfavorable criticism only too easy.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, eventually the decision was made to publish it as it was, complete with the author's marginal notes to himself.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is a fascinating and often beautiful work, fragmentary though it is. Camus has chosen to write an autobiography casting himself in the third person, possibly in order to gain objectivity as he wrote. In the story he is Jacques, a boy whose father died in World War I and who lives with his nearly illiterate and severely hearing-impaired mother and his grandmother (his mother's mother) in Algeria.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The family is not just poor but abjectly poor. But Jacques comes under the influence of a remarkable schoolmaster who arranges for him to go to the lycée on a scholarship.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>At 13 he is put to work at a paying summer job because his grandmother believes he should contribute to the family income. He has to lie about his age even to get a job. A showdown comes after he has had to mislead his employer into thinking he will be a permanent employee when he himself knows very well he will be returning to the lycée. At the end of the summer he finds he can't follow his grandmother's advice and just walk off without returning. His employer learns that he has lied but takes pity on him and at least sends him packing with his final paycheck, which he might have kept.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The part of the novel that exists centers around Jacques's experiences in the poverty of Algeria--and around his developing courage in standing up to the stern grandmother who has beaten him regularly. The schoolmaster has beaten him too, but it is the grandmother's power that is the more formidable.</b></div>
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<b>The writing is extraordinarily self-revelatory for Camus, who normally writes very restrained prose in his fiction. The style is so different from his other writing that one is tempted to wonder if he might have been experimenting with using James Joyce or Faulkner as a model. Or maybe his intention was to let all of the experience escape on the page and later to tighten up the writing. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The most remarkable passages are those dealing with the Algerian setting. He makes it come alive, much as he did so memorably in <em>The Plague</em>, set in the town of Oran.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His was not a religious childhood although he went through the first communion ritual--but only because it was just what one did at that time and in that community. His family paid no attention to masses, rosaries, or priests and never prayed. They were too busy trying to survive to have much energy or time left over for anything else.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This start of a novel provides fascinating glimpses into the mind of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a man who spoke out repeatedly against tyranny and totalitarianism in its many manifestations.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
16 June 2011<br />
_________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSac1Xm4eUBvXrTvI82Rg8b1304llpoogUg8_Ga1O6pEZd7onIHQjwJ1F4x" /></div>
<strong>ČAPEK, KAREL</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #45818e;">WAR WITH THE NEWTS</span></span></em> </strong>(1936)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>An amazingly prescient novel, a work of fantasy that envisages an increasingly powerful group of newts who have been trained by humans to talk. Slaves may be the obvious analogue to the newts, but the story is not so simple as that. While it is at it, the novel takes ironic pokes at Americans, racism, and nationalism, while maintaining its very strongly pro-Czech stance. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Written only two years before the author's untimely death, and during the ominous rise of Nazism in Germany, this book is grim and all too perceptive about humanity.</b></div>
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1 December 2005<br />
__________________________<br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">CARROLL, DAVID L. & DORMAN, JON DUDLEY, MD.</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"> <em>LIVING WELL WITH MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS: A GUIDE FOR PATIENT, CAREGIVER, AND FAMILY</em> (1993)</span></strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Reading this book in 2009 is a strange experience. The "disease-modifying drugs" appear to have been unknown in 1993, when this book came out, for they aren't mentioned here. Also, MRIs were still new at the time.</b></span></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>So the book is badly in need of updating, but it is full of practical common-sense advice and is particularly good as a resource on exercises.</b></span></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">28 June 2009</span><br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>CATHER, WILLA</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTOoH8PL8gvJ-SpCTRpSyKbP439chQiZt4HMx2OpbZGmmfDHOrQ" /><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> MY ÁNTONIA</span></b> (1926)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It has probably been close to 50 years since I read this book, regarded as Willa Cather's best novel and still likely to turn up on recommended reading lists in schools throughout the land.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
--Maybe not though. It does contain a couple of disturbing passages that perpetuate racist stereotypes but perhaps an understanding, forgiving reader can pass over them by telling herself that this was "the way people thought" in Cather's day (the book's first edition came out in 1918). Still, her use of the word "pickaninny," with even a suggestion that African-American have smaller brains than white people, are hard to overlook. The entire literary canon probably may need to be scrubbed of its racial and ethnic prejudice.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And yet here Cather gives us a story that looks like an attempt at broadening the horizons of her readers by presenting us with a Bohemian (Czech) family in Nebraska, with the focus on Ántonia, who gradually develops into someone resembling an earth mother, clearly very much admired by the narrator, her childhood friend, Jim Burden. There is this passage, near the end of the story, where he sums up his impressions of her and universalizes her:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">
She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.25em; margin-top: 0.25em; text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;">
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Throughout the story it probably occurs to the reader that Jim should marry Ántonia. Why he doesn't is never stated. But if he had married her, the whole panoramic scene of Ántonia surrounded by her husband and some 10 or more children, all speaking Czech as well as English, would not have been possible, and the chances are that she could not have been quite as dramatic an "earth mother" figure with that scenario.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But within the framework of the story, what reasons could there be for Jim's failure to court and win the woman he clearly loves? </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
At one point he has to make a choice: whether to go East to continue his studies in college with his mentor, a man he admires. He opts to go East. He becomes a lawyer. Some 20 years later, he returns to Nebraska and sees Ántonia again.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Not to make too fine a point of it, but it looks as if Cather is implying that the class differences between Jim and Ántonia would have been insurmountable--she of foreign-born farming people, he from a more settled, less-recently-arrived lineage. He could move away from farm life. She couldn't. He could get a job where his mind was valued and where he no longer had to do heavy physical work night and day. She couldn't escape--nor is there any indication that she would have wanted to.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
What we're left with, then, is the settled world that many were lulled into feeling was well established and comfortable. It is, disappointingly, a well written book that rests on a sandy foundation, but it is the same sandy foundation that underlies many books that sell well.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
August 18, 2019</div>
</div>
<strong><br /><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL</span></em></strong> (1940)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Short novel about a Virginia family in 1856, with Sapphira, the mistress of the household, turning against her favorite slave girl, Nancy. Nancy, in danger of being raped by a visiting nephew of her master’s, manages to escape to Canada by the Underground Railroad with the help of Sapphira’s daughter Rachel Blake.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a good book, though it almost seems as if Cather might have lost interest in it when only half done, for its epilogue seems tacked on as an afterthought, meant perhaps just to put an ending to the story..</b></div>
<br />
9 March 2002<div>________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><b>CEP, CASEY</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <span style="color: #45818e;"><i>FURIOUS HOURS: MURDER, FRAUD, AND THE LAST TRIAL OF </i></span></b></div><div><b><span style="color: #45818e;"><i> </i></span></b><b><span style="color: #45818e;"><i>HARPER LEE</i></span> (2018)</b></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The first half of this account concerns the long and complex history of the career of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, an African-American preacher who took out insurance policies on several relatives who then died under suspicious circumstances. Then Maxwell was shot at a funeral he was conducting. Curiously, the lawyer who had defended Maxwell several times also defended his killer. Maxwell was never convicted of any of the suspected murders but the evidence against him was persuasive.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Harper Lee, by then the highly successful author of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, who had an abiding interest in legal cases, attended the trial of Maxwell's killer with the intention of writing a book about it--possibly a book somewhat like Truman Capote's <i>In Cold Blood</i>. But that was in 1978, and she lived until 2016 but apparently set the project aside and never returned to it.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The author focuses on the lifelong friendship of Lee and Capote and reveals the extent to which Lee was involved in the making of Capote's "nonfiction novel,"<i> In Cold Blood. </i>Lee was his research assistant, traveling with him to Nebraska and serving as an intermediary of sorts between Capote, who wanted information from the reluctant Nebraskans who shied away from someone as foreign to their milieu as Truman Capote evidently was but who felt they could open up to Harper Lee. She compiled and organized vast amounts of information for the book. </div><div><br /></div><div>Interestingly, there has been some evidence that Capote may have helped her in the writing of the first part of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is an absorbing account--though its main audience will probably be readers of Harper Lee--who turned out to be only a "one-book author," sadly.</div><div><br /></div><div>19 May 2022</div><div>
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>CHEEVER, JOHN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><i><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">BULLET PARK</span></b> </i>(1969)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I found this novel to be a slog. There's a character named Nailles, and then there's a character named Hammer. The story becomes increasingly bizarre as time goes on.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I can't say much to recommend it though there are some witty passages.</b></div>
<br />
24 June 2013<br />
_________________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>CHEEVER, SUSAN<br /><br /><em> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE: MY LIFE AS A DRINKER</span></em></strong><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span>(1999)<br />
<br />
<b>Here we have the life story of the daughter of writer John Cheever, exploring her family’s struggle with alcoholism and refusal to face it. This is a very privileged woman’s history but honestly told.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
23 July 2001<br />
<br />
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>CHERNIN, KIM</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b> <em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE OBSESSION: REFLECTIONS ON THE TYRANNY OF SLENDERNESS</span> </em></b>(1981)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a very thorough and thoughtful exploration of the modern woman's obsession with being thin, an obsession that has shown no sign of waning over the decades since this book appeared.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author has mined the psychological literature, especially material in the Freudian camp, but she isn't just parroting psychoanalytic theory here. Her idea is that women inherently have so much power--to conceive, bear, and nourish children--that we inspire fear, and with fear often comes a wish to stifle us, to keep us subservient.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She has very little explanation for how the world got this way but offers many persuasive examples to show that it is this way. It is not her objective to go into the historical and economic developments that helped this situation to come into being. Rather, she is interested in persuading us that the emphasis on being thin is dangerous, manipulative, controlling, and very unfair--and ought to come to an end.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She gives special attention to anorexia nervosa, and this is one place where an updated version of this book would be very helpful, for considerable work has been done on investigating eating disorders in recent years.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
2 May 2010<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>CHILDERS, THOMAS</strong><br />
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SHADOWS OF WAR: AN AMERICAN PILOT'S ODYSSEY THROUGH </span></strong></em><strong><em><span style="color: #6aa84f;">OCCUPIED FRANCE AND IN THE CAMPS OF NAZI GERMANY</span></em></strong> (2002)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author of this account of Roy Allen's World War 2 experiences after his plane was shot down is a professor of history who has written other books about Nazi Germany. Roy Allen, as the pilot, was the last crew member to parachute out of the plane, and he lost track of the rest of the crew for quite a while. He found shelter with a French family who were sympathetic to the Resistance at a time when France was overrun with Germans and opposing the occupying Nazis was very dangerous. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Eventually Roy was caught in his attempt to escape from France and return to his unit--and he was sent to Buchenwald, where he languished near death for many months, although he should have been in a camp for military prisoners of war. His situation improved only as the war was ending. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a moving account, containing highly detailed descriptions of everyday life at Buchenwald. I have read other accounts of concentration camp life, but this one offers a closeup look at the routines and the horrors of the prisoners' unimaginably nightmarish existence there.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
3 February 2007<br />
________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<b>CHOPIN, KATE</b><br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f; font-weight: bold;">"THE AWAKENING" AND SELECTED STORIES </span>(1899)</em><br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The author was a turn-of-century writer, and she has recently become the darling of the feminists. Her writing contains much Southern bigotry.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
9 August 1998<br />
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>CHURCHWELL, SARAH</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">CARELESS PEOPLE: MURDER, MAYHEM, AND THE INVENTION OF </span></i><u><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE GREAT GATSBY</span></i> </u>(2014)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald's life are well known and have been explored in minute detail by a vast industry of literary researchers. That the territory has been so thoroughly mined may be one reason why this author felt obliged to present her study almost as if it were in the form of Webpages, with little snippets of text, very short chapters interspersed with illustrations and quotations. The result is a book that seems aimed at a large audience.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She may also have felt obliged to come up with a somewhat original idea, and so her book is constructed around three stories, tied together loosely by her impressionistic attempts at finding connections: the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, the story told in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, and a news story involving a murder--the Hall-Mills murder--that was capturing the public's attention in 1922 and for some time afterwards.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Churchwell sees some parallels between the known facts about the murder and the deaths that occur in <i>Gatsby</i>. Whether she has a good case is debatable, but en route she treats us to many anecdotes about the alcohol-saturated world in which this author lived.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She clearly respects Fitzgerald's talent and in my opinion attributes far more depth to his writing than is warranted. Her account is fanciful at times, drawing on the half-baked but over-worked romanticism that seems to have pervaded much of Fitzgerald's fiction.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She has to reach pretty far afield to make her idea work, too--as when she notes a similarity between the names Jay Gatsby and Jane Gibson (the notorious "pig woman" of the Hall-Mills case).</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>2 February 2019</b><br />
<b>__________________________ </b><br />
<br />
<strong>CLEMENS, SAMUEL L. [MARK TWAIN]</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTk6bLeyLemwI-DJnPNJegcVAACk-C6rlFQlwIrz_7dAKiZnEbjFA" /></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><em><b>A MURDER, A MYSTERY, AND A MARRIAGE</b></em> </span>(1876; published 2003)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This very brief narrative was written as a skeleton plot for a writing contest Mark Twain envisaged as a way of attracting readers to his friend William Dean Howells's magazine, <em>The Atlantic Monthly</em>. Twain would provide the skeleton plot, and other invited established writers--including the unlikely Henry James--would supply their own stories based on the skeleton plot. Nobody ever submitted an entry, and the project died--with Twain's story lying unpublished until 2003.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It has appeared now with excellent commentary by Roy Blount, Jr., who fills us in on a number of relevant details about Twain's life and attitudes.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story itself is slight and somewhat corny, but it was meant only as a skeleton plot. For reasons that are obscure, Twain used the occasion to poke fun at Jules Verne's novels--and this segment of the brief narrative is hilarious.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
8 August 2009<br />
<br />
<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">LETTERS FROM THE EARTH</span></em> </strong>(1939; 1962)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These posthumously appearing essays and fragments underwent drastic restoration in the 1962 version. By this time Clara Clemens, the author's daughter, had given permission to publish an unexpurgated edition. Here we presumably have the "real" Mark Twain, bitterly cynical and opposed to organized religion.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
10 February 2006<br />
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>(CO-AUTHOR: LOUISE PENNY)</b></div><div><b> </b></div><div><b style="color: #45818e;"> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i> <b>STATE OF TERROR</b></i></span><b style="color: #45818e;"> (2021)</b></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #45818e;"><b>People active in the political sphere have been known to write novels. Benjamin Disraeli comes to mind. Now a former US Secretary of State and former Presidential candidate has written--with Louise Penny as co-author--an espionage thriller. At its center is Ellen Adams, a US Secretary of State.</b></span></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #45818e;"><b>The plot thickens and then thickens some more. I'm not a reader of espionage thrillers and am too unfamiliar with the genre to know whether this is a good instance of it. Like most espionage narratives, though, it soon became almost too complicated to follow, and the white hats kept being revealed as really black hats, and vice versa.</b></span></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b>Hints of sinister conspiracy abound, and there are incidents involving bombs, al Qaeda, and cellphones. But most spy tales leave me feeling as if I'm mired in quicksand.</b></span></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="color: #45818e;"><b>13 December 2022<br /></b></span>
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b><i>WHAT HAPPENED</i></b></span><b> (2017)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book by the candidate who lost the U. S. 2016 Presidential election almost had to be written. Hillary Rodham Clinton could have subsided into the background and played the good sport after being defeated by Donald Trump for an office she was clearly well qualified for. But her supporters were owed an explanation, and here it is.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Of course someone who has been on the political scene--and right near the top much of the time, as the wife of a two-term President and later as Secretary of State--for such a long period isn't going to take being defeated by an unscrupulous bigoted entrepreneur lightly. She offers several explanations for the election outcome and is gracious in acknowledging that she made some very stupid mistakes during the campaign.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But she has some serious complaints about the way the U.S. system now works. She sees it as broken and corrupt, easily controlled by moneyed interests. She calls for people to step up to the plate and start doing something to quell the rising tide of racism and xenophobia in this country.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Much of her book is political boilerplate. Peace? She's for it. "Tolerance--basic standards of decency"? Check. She's leaning over backwards to be ecumenical, too. In the chapter entitled "Love and Kindness," after admiring Pope Francis's TED talk where he called for a "revolution of tenderness"--a phrase she loves though I'm not sure what it means--she comes up with "radical empathy" as a name for what we need in the U.S. Though both phrases have a certain novelty, their meaning eludes me. And a little later a quotation from Pope John XXIII pops up. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She sees herself as having broken new ground, as having made history, by being the first woman to be nominated and nearly elected to the Presidency of the U.S. In this book she may be setting out to show that a woman like herself would have been a more empathetic leader than Donald Trump--or perhaps than any male candidate. She often emphasizes her religious faith (Methodism) and presents herself as someone who is always thinking of others--picking up gifts for people who have had babies or got married, hugging people. Surely a man campaigning to be elected President wouldn't be mentioning such gestures in a book about that campaign even if he had thought of them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Like many women of her generation, she may be too eager to present herself to the world as surrounded by a perfect family. She praises her daughter Chelsea to the skies, almost to the point where it looks as if Chelsea is being put forward as a player on the political scene--even though Chelsea is rumored to be close friends with Ivanka Trump Kushner, the current President's daughter--a connection that Hillary Clinton's book leaves unmentioned.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, she highlights her contention that there has been a concerted effort at voter suppression--disenfranchising U.S. voters on dubious grounds--and that the 2016 election results may have been skewed by the involvement of Russia.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One of her reasons for maintaining that Russia might have meddled in the U.S. election is that she is fairly certain that Vladimir Putin dislikes her intensely and wanted to make sure she didn't win. At first this looks as if she might be imagining a vendetta that isn't there but she makes a strong argument for it. She also points to the extensive financial ties between Trump and the Russians in support of her claim that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a book that avoids self-pity but manages to make a strong case in favor of a woman who probably should have been the U. S. President.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>2 June 2018</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
________________________<br />
<b>COHEN, RANDY</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"><em>THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE DIFFERENCE: HOW TO TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG IN EVERYDAY SITUATIONS</em> </span></b>(2002)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For some years I'd been aware of a syndicated newspaper column about ethics, and I glanced at it enough times to be interested in this book, which is mainly a collection of some of his columns. The column as it ran in <em>The New York Times</em> was called "The Ethicist."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Although the author has no particular training in ethics or philosophy, his down-to-earth advice and ability to articulate his views clearly seem to have won him an audience. He has spent a large part of his life as a writer for various TV shows, and the <em>Times </em>discontinued his column when he donated to MoveOn.org, evidently because he was unaware that the paper had recently adopted a policy prohibiting its writers from contributing to activist organizations.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This background information comes from Wikipedia, however, and may be open to question.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Readers write in with their ethical problems, and he replies. Sometimes there are follow-ups and responses from other readers. Occasionally there is a guest columnist replying. It is particularly refreshing when a pundit of this sort is willing to reassess his opinion and admit he was wrong, and Randy Cohen does so several times in this short book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Ethical questions can often be murky, and one problem with the book is that sometimes the readers' descriptions of their problems lack detail. One needs to know more about the situation before replying, I should think.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But the book is witty and amusing, and I usually agreed with his opinions. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
21 February 2012<br />
_________________________________<br />
<strong><span style="color: #660000;">COHEN, RICHARD M.</span></strong><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><em> BLINDSIDED: LIFTING A LIFE ABOVE ILLNESS: A RELUCTANT MEMOIR</em> </strong>(2004)</span><br />
<em></em><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>The author, who happens to be married to Meredith Vieira, the TV news broadcaster and talk-show host, was also in the TV news business until multiple sclerosis and other disorders entered his life. He tells his story, with considerable discussion about the impact of his illness on his wife and three children. After the MS diagnosis, he was found to have colon cancer, which returned later. The surgeries and their complications, and the pain of the colon cancer, made their family life difficult, but Richard Cohen takes a wryly humorous view of himself and freely owns up to his mistakes.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>His father is a doctor who also has MS, and his grandmother had MS as well (although she apparently never realized it). </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>This is a well-told and honest account of coming to terms with chronic illness.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;">7 January 2008</span><div><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #660000;"> <b><i>CHASING HOPE: A PATIENT'S DEEP DIVE INTO STEM CELLS, FAITH AND THE FUTURE</i></b> (2018)</span></div><div><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;">This interesting account isn't simply a rehash of the author's previous book (see above). Here we have his report on his venture into the promising new world of stem cell treatments for MS--a venture for which he has to have been more courageous than many of us would be, for the treatment's benefits are still debatable.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;">Along the way, he is concerned about hope. Can one have hope without faith? He interviews assorted people, such as Rabbi Kushner (author of <i>When Bad Things Happen to Good People</i>) and TV anchor Tom Brokaw, struggling with multiple myeloma.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;">His enthusiasm for stem cells began when he and his family attended a conference on stem cells at the Vatican. Soon he was in the hands of Dr. Saud Sadiq of the Tisch MS Research Center in New York, and he has clearly become a disciple of Dr. Sadiq, whose name is well known in MS research.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;">The treatment he received, which he describes in some detail, was part of a Phase I clinical trial involving some 20 patients. He does not say so in so many words but the results may have been disappointing, for he acknowledges that the improvement he noticed was only modest and may have been temporary. There was a 2-year follow-up of that clinical trial that makes it sound as if stem cell treatment may not deliver very encouraging results:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #660000;"><a href="https://www.tischms.org/phase-i-published-results-2-year-follow">https://www.tischms.org/phase-i-published-results-2-year-follow</a><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #a64d79;">The author has done a great service for everyone with MS by his willingness to undergo this experimental procedure and by his clear presentation of the account of that experience.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #a64d79;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #a64d79;">27 April 2021</span></div><div><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="color: #660000;"><br /></span>
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<b>CONRAD, JOSEPH</b><br />
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<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SECRET AGENT: A SIMPLE TALE</span></i></b> (1907)<br />
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Returning to this novel after several decades, I am struck by its depth. Although there is a veneer of something approaching sensationalism and even sentimentality at times--very unlike Conrad's other works--he is saying something important, something that even more than a century later rings appallingly true.</div>
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Set mainly in a grimy, seedy London, the story brings in several characters with a foreign background: Verloc, the secret agent, who travels to France often; his associate Comrade Ossipon and his apparent handler Mr. Vladimir, both strongly suggesting Eastern Europe. There are also Verloc's associates Karl Yundt and Michaelis the ticket-of-leave man, both of indeterminate origin.</div>
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Verloc keeps a store dealing in risqué reading matter as well as (probably) revolutionary tracts. This is his means of earning a living to support his wife Winnie as well as her mentally handicapped brother Stevie, who is still a boy. Verloc has long been a secret agent for an embassy but Mr. Vladimir makes it clear to him that he is in danger of having outlived his usefulness--unless he can do something dangerous, something attention-getting, to shake up the powers that be.</div>
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Coming out in 1907, this book would have been written at a time when anarchy was in the air throughout Europe. Conrad shows us the sordid and warped world in which his anarchists live, but it is mainly their ideology and their methods that are the focus of his attention.</div>
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That they are unscrupulous and ruthless men goes without saying. We see it in Vladimir, we see it in Ossipon, and especially (at the end) we see it in the Professor, who enunciates ideas that are clearly fascistic. The Professor would like to see all of the weaker people on earth exterminated--while assuming that he himself would not be among those who must go.</div>
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While the scenes are often bleak and even gory, there is never a hint that the supernatural is at work. Religion goes unmentioned; no representatives of the clergy are on the scene. This is a completely secular, dog-eat-dog world. Conrad gives the entire story an ambience of anonymity and impersonal bureaucracy proleptic of Orwell's <i>1984 </i>by often referring to most of the characters by their occupational titles instead of their names. The exceptions are Verloc, Winnie, and Stevie, who are clearly meant to be not nearly as dedicated to an ideology or to any one occupation as the others--whether anarchists or representatives of the established order.</div>
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The higher up someone is in the hierarchy, the less likely they are to be named. There is Chief Inspector Heat of the police, but his superior is called the Assistant Commissioner, and Sir Ethelred, the "great personage" whom he consults, is referred to only rarely by his name, which is always <i>Sir</i> Ethelred. </div>
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Conrad comes perilously close to the sentimental in his characterization of Stevie, who feels an intense compassion for any suffering creature. At times Stevie is a bit too much the little child who shall lead others to the light, as in an exchange with his older sister Winnie. Stevie asks what the police are for, and Winnie replies: "'Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so as them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have.'"</div>
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Stevie says: "'Not even if they were hungry, mustn't they?'" and Winnie replies, "'Not if they were ever so!'"--going on to point out, "'You aren't ever hungry.'"</div>
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The reader is clearly meant to side with Stevie in this discussion, but perhaps the point is made too emphatically when Stevie shows a fascination with the concept of "poor" (probably meaning "pitiable" more than "indigent" here) and sums up his view with the remark: "'Bad world for poor people!'"</div>
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Stevie's fate, once it becomes clear to the reader, is horrendous. By an accident--he stumbled apparently--the explosive device didn't reach its intended target. </div>
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Winnie's subsequent decline into near-madness and suicidal despair is described realistically and very affectingly, and the final scenes involving Comrade Ossipon, who we know to be cruelly exploiting her, are about as grim as such scenes can get. Winnie, raised at a time when even poorer women in England would have been somewhat sheltered and taught to rely on men for support, believes that she can trust Comrade Ossipon. She has cared about her mother and brother and about Verloc.</div>
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Interestingly, at the very end of the story the attention shifts briefly to one of the anarchists who has been largely in the background up till now--the Professor. His terrifying philosophy, based on some of the theories of eugenics that were popular at the time, is articulated, and the final sentence describes him walking along. After we have learned that the more humane characters in the tale are now all dead, we see that this proponent of a cruel ideology has survived:</div>
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<i>He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.</i></div>
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30 August 2016<br />
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<span style="color: #6aa84f;"><em><b>THE END OF THE TETHER</b></em> (</span>1902)<br />
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<b>An aging captain, who had gained some distinction previously with his maritime achievements, has lost most of his money in a business transaction that failed and is now widowed with one daughter, who lives in Australia, married and with children. He’s devoted to the daughter and disturbed to learn that her husband has become an invalid, useless as a support for the family, and she is having to run a boarding house to support them, including the invalid husband. The captain takes on a three-year-job as skipper of a vessel, a job no one else wants because the owner is also the craft’s engineer and is a bitter, paranoid, hostile person. The captain puts his remaining funds into a part-ownership of this vessel on condition that after three years he can leave and withdraw the full amount, which he counts on doing—so he can give it, intact, to his daughter to help her. But it develops, on nearly the last run of this steamer, that the captain is losing his sight and has been doing so for quite a while without telling anyone—not wanting to upset his daughter and afraid of losing his job on the steamer. He keeps on concealing his disability, but one or two envious men on board have figured it out, and one—the owner—is convinced that Captain Whalley is lying when he says he has no more money. The owner bought the vessel by winning a lottery, and ever since he has been obsessed with playing the lottery, hoping to win again. His greed is frightening. He plots to throw the steamer off its course and deliberately wreck his own vessel so as to collect insurance money.</b></div>
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<b>This novella is affecting, with its story of Whalley’s tragic death. The captain is noble in his rather simple determination to be of use to his child, even to the extent of concealing a serious physical impairment so as to spare his daughter the worry—and to safeguard the only employment he has that will enable him to help her. </b></div>
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10 January 1995 <br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS": A TALE OF THE SEA </span></b>(</em>1897)<br />
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<b>James Wait, the man on board the “Narcissus” who holes up, allegedly too ill to work for most of the voyage, astonished me by the way he subjugates most of the men, playing on their pity and fear in order to get them to serve him. Even more surprising was his accomplishing this in spite of being black and therefore contemptible in the opinion of most of the others. </b></div>
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<b>The author of the preface supposes that the story’s theme is the demoralization of the men by James Wait and his illness (or “illness”). Towards the end of the voyage he is accused of malingering, which he admits, but it is soon obvious that he actually does have TB. Eventually he dies, but not before at least one of the men has had the bright idea of trying to take advantage of his vulnerability by robbing him, and not before the idea has become current that a dying man on board is bad luck and has caused the ship to be becalmed. I fail to see that the men are demoralized at all. The final judgment on them (by the narrator) is that they were a good lot.</b></div>
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<b>At first I thought that the story would concern the resentment of a closed community whose labor is needed for its own survival when one of its number is or pretends to be unable to work, but this is only a secondary motif. In fact, in spite of the occasional murmurings of resentment to the effect that the others were having to do extra work on account of the disabled man, who would still collect his pay while doing nothing, but the others would get no extra pay for their extra contributions, the ultimate result of the severely strained voyage seems to be that they all come through it unscathed. So even on board ship, where the number of hands needed for a given voyage has to be very carefully calculated, the group can endure the incapacity of one of its number and even the laziness of numbers of others without any harm and can even find the time and resources to shower the disabled man with sympathy, visits, and gifts, even though James Wait is unlikable and imperious in the extreme. </b></div>
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<b>It is the possibility that he might not live to set foot on land that inspires the crew to so much compassion, and indeed he does not live.</b></div>
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25 March 1986<br />
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<strong>COUPLAND, DOUGLAS<br /><br /><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">GENERATION X</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1991)<br />
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<b>Dag, Claire, and Andy are the three main characters--all in their twenties, with Dag the narrator. These young adults have parents who are apparently far from indigent or indifferent, but they feel alienated from their families. These people hold McJobs, and in their spare time (of which they have a great deal) they pop pills carelessly and indulge in pointless fantasies as if they might be undiscovered literary geniuses just waiting to happen. They have easy mobility--they travel around freely in planes and take cars as a given. They gloom, they sulk, they come up with vague but probably meaningful remarks.</b><br />
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<b>This is Kerouac all over again, and I found Kerouac tiresome. <i>Generation X</i> seems to be accusing the older generation of having created a bleak world, but some members of the older generation may be horrified at the self-absorption they must have fostered in their offspring by letting that TV stay on so much of the time and by subscribing to the idea that one's children are the center of the universe. This is what those children have grown up to be--navel-gazers par excellence.</b><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>COURTIER, MARIE-ANNICK</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b><em> COOKING WELL: MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS</em> </b>(2009)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This cookbook is part of a series called <em>Cooking Well, </em>with each cookbook intended for a specific disorder (osteoporosis is one). I haven't looked at any of the other books in the series and so don't know if some recipes are repeated in other volumes.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>The Foreword is by Vincent F. Macaluso, MD, who is a neurologist specializing in MS who also has MS. Dr. Macaluso is also listed as being on the BiogenIdec National Faculty, and he takes Tysabri. The author's credentials are less clear, but she dedicates the book to two friends who have MS.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>A paperback book of 150 pages for about $9.00--not a bad deal, you say? Maybe for some it will be a treasure, but I'm returning my copy for a refund.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>I was hoping for some helpful recipes. I am glad that the nutrition information for each is included, but I'm not sure how accurate some of it is. A granola recipe calls for "muesli cereal" without specifying what kind--or even what ingredients go into the muesli--leading me to question the nutrition information for the granola because there are so many varieties of muesli out there, and many people use their own muesli recipes, which can differ widely in their calorie counts and other nutrition information.</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #990000;">The first 38 pages of the book are taken up by general advice and nutrition information--mostly of the standard sort that is widely available. I'd have welcomed more suggestions on how to open jars and bottles safely, how to avoid getting burned or over-exposed to kitchen heat, and how to do basic tasks with fumbling hands, dim eyesight, and general unsteadiness.</span><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>The recipes should please vegetarians as there are over 35 recipes that do not involve meat, poultry, or fish.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>However, many people with MS don't have the money for the kinds of ingredients called for in these recipes--and often they don't have the means of visiting the places that sell some of the more obscure ones: anchovy fillets, cilantro, wild rice, Portobello mushrooms, almond meal, flaxseeds, ginger root, wild smoked salmon, Pecorino cheese.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Nor can it be assumed that someone with MS has a blender, a food processor, or a microwave oven, as many of these recipes assume.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">The 6x9-inch format is a handy size, though I'd have preferred a spiral-bound book that could lie flat. Also, many bits of important information are set in black type against a fairly dark gray background, which is difficult to read.</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Some of the recipes seem so slight that I wonder why they were included--except perhaps to bulk up the book. Cottage Cheese, Raisins, and Walnuts (1 serving) is an example. And there is no index--a big shortcoming, in my opinion. If you want to see if the book includes a recipe for chicken cacciatore, for instance, you can find out only by leafing through its pages.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>And though the author knows the meaning of "brunoise," I had to look on the Internet to find out what it meant. It was in no print dictionary I own. I've read a few cookbooks over the years and never encountered this term, but I'm not a gourmet cook. It would have been nice if the book had included an alphabetical glossary of terms like <em>brunoise</em> and <em>bouquet garni</em>. <em>Bouquet garni</em> is defined in the thirty-five pages of informational text preceding the actual recipes, but it's hard to find. Every cookbook that uses the term seems to have a slightly different description of what a <em>bouquet garni </em>is.</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #990000;">Many of the recipes are for 4 servings and are usually simple enough for a mobility-impaired person to manage, <em>given the right ingredients and equipment.</em></span> <span style="color: #990000;">And that's the problem.</span></b><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>All too often material about MS or for someone with MS seems to assume that the person with MS is fairly prosperous. It's time to put an end to that idea and recognize that this disorder isn't limited to people with high incomes. Unfortunately, this book doesn't serve the needs of everyone who might have MS, and that is a great shame.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">3 July 2009</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>COYLE, PATRICIA K., MD, and HALPER, JUNE</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><b><br /> </b><em><b> MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF PROGRESSIVE MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS</b> </em>(2001)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Since this book came out ten years ago, its information is often out of date. For instance, Rebif was not available in the US as a disease-modifying therapy for MS when this book appeared. And the authors' recommendations on PSAT and mammography testing are no longer current.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>But the book is full of common-sense advice on the management of this chronic and disabling disorder.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">17 July 2011</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><b>CREWS, FREDERICK</b></span><br />
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<b> <span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>THE MEMORY WARS</em> </span></b>(1995)</div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>This book consists of some essays by Crews on Freudian theory in connection with the “repressed memory syndrome” that has enjoyed some popularity--and it includes several detailed rebuttals by eminences in the psychotherapy field. Crews is a tad vitriolic, but I thought his argument was persuasive—and one that desperately needs airing. It is time to debunk “repressed memory” theories.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>Crews surveys the recent literature on repressed memory—the book is well supplied with references—and remarks that the seminal work, the one that sold extremely well and is often mentioned in other works, is the one by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, <em>The Courage to Heal</em> (1988). </b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>Crews maintains that this book has had an immense influence—and that one effect of its inflammatory and irresponsible theorizing has been to destroy family ties. Lawsuits have been filed against allegedly abusive parents 30 years after the “fact”—and some of these parents, usually innocent, are languishing in jail—all on the basis of “repressed memories” dredged up by their grown children.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b><em>The Memory Wars</em> should be a much-needed corrective.</b></span></div>
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16 February 1998<br />
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;">CROMBIE, DEBORAH</span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;"> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">A SHARE IN DEATH: A DUNCAN KINCAID AND GEMMA JAMES MYSTERY</span></i> </span><span style="color: #990000;">(1993)</span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;">A group of assorted people are assembled in a time-share, and among them Duncan Kincaid, a newly promoted detective superintendent at Scotland Yard, has been fortunate--or unfortunate--enough to find himself thanks to the generosity of a relative.</span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;">He soon finds himself embroiled in the murders of a couple of people there and must tread carefully for fear of ruffling the feathers of Detective Chief Inspector Nash, who resents the intrusion of someone from Scotland Yard.</span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;">There are quite a few suspects on the scene, and the real murderer of course turns out to be someone the reader hasn't been paying much attention to.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong></div>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">It's an engaging story, well told.</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">8 October 2018</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">______________________</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">CUMMINGS, BRUCE [BARBELLION, W. N. P., pseud.]<br /><em></em></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong>
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> </em></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN</em></span></strong><span style="color: #990000;"> (1919)</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>I read this book in 1980 but it was memorable. It is one of the earliest known accounts by someone with disseminated (multiple) sclerosis. The author, who was British, lived from 1889 to 1919. He tells of discovering that his brothers had concealed his diagnosis from him.</b></span><br />
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span><br /></b>
<b><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #990000;">This is his actual diary although there is not much detail about his symptoms. What he does say is harrowing.</span></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><span style="color: #990000;">Some photos of him can be</span> <span style="color: #990000;">found at</span> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=W.+N.+P.+Barbellion+photos&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&prmd=ivnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=gpCmTernNYGdgQez4In0BQ&ved=0CBcQsAQ&biw=775&bih=307">http://www.google.com/search?q=W.+N.+P.+Barbellion+photos&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&prmd=ivnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=gpCmTernNYGdgQez4In0BQ&ved=0CBcQsAQ&biw=775&bih=307</a></b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">3 August 2004</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">UPDATED 7 July 2009:</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Someone who commented here has called my attention to two Websites where this book is available for Internet reading:</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/journalofdisappo00barbuoft">http://www.archive.org/details/journalofdisappo00barbuoft</a><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">and</span><br />
<a href="http://www.pseudopodium.org/barbellionblog">http://www.pseudopodium.org/barbellionblog</a><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">Many thanks to Katja!</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">_________________________________</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
<b>CUSK, RACHEL</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">OUTLINE</span></i> (2014)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel is the first part of a trilogy, but I don't feel prompted to continue with the other parts. Here we have a narrator but we don't find out much about her (only an <i>outline</i> is given). She's in Greece to teach a writing course. Each of the chapters focuses on various people who are in her life at the time--though none of these people is especially close to her, seemingly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>If anything happens in this novel, it is the narrator's somewhat surprising willingness to join an older man who sat beside her on the plane on his boat--just the two of them, and of course the situation turns into one where she fends him off.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Towards the end, her last encounter is with another writing teacher who turns up--Ann, who tells about her experience, mentioning that she has always seemed to be merely an outline while other people's lives were the subject of attention and interest.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is what has been going on all along in this attempt at a story. which often resembles a series of journal entries made by someone traveling in Greece who later decided to string them together into a "story" with herself at the center, except that there is so little of herself showing up in the story that we become aware of how very anonymous and amorphous she is--which is her point, it seems.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maybe she is trying to say something about many women and the way we are, whether by nature or upbringing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But the narrative has some subtle, telling touches. Being alone on a boat with a man who is little more than an acquaintance, the narrator puts herself at risk, and this becomes apparent--to the reader at least and probably to her--when she is declining his overtures while he--in charge of the boat--is playing with a knife he's been using to cut a rope. His superior strength and her vulnerability come through to us loud and clear in that small scene.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>By the end of the novel, the narrator has made arrangements to go sightseeing with her new friend Ann just before departing--and she turns down an offer from "my neighbor" (her phrase for the man met on the plane) of another boat ride. It looks as if she's learned something.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>All in all, this was a slight and disappointing story.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>May 8, 2018</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> TRANSIT</span> (2017)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>More vignettes make up this second volume in Rachel Cusk's trilogy. Not much happens by way of a plot. The narrator, whose name is Faye (we find out when it is used just once), is having work done on her house and is troubled by a downstairs neighbor who keeps banging on the ceiling.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Towards the end there are some children--including (over the phone) the narrator's two boys.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>That's about it for this book. There are some attempts at profundity, as when the narrator's cousin declares somewhat obscurely: "Fate is only truth in its natural state" or when a hairdresser says, "To stay free, you have to reject change."</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It's almost as if Cusk wrote up some incidents, strung them together in chapter form, threw in a few statements using more abstract words and hoped it would pass as a novel because putting together a real story, with a plot involving interactions among the characters, was simply beyond her.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>9 April 2021</b></div><div>
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<em><span style="color: #990000;"></span></em></div></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121311389477579262005-07-08T20:09:00.002-07:002022-09-15T12:35:03.324-07:00D<strong><span style="font-size: 0px;"></span><strong></strong>DASH, LEON<br /><em></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> ROSA LEE: A MOTHER AND HER FAMILY IN URBAN AMERICA</span></em></strong> (1996)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A very absorbing factual account of four years (1990-1994) in the life of Rosa Lee Cunningham and her family. Rosa was an African-American woman living in Washington, D.C., but with roots in rural North Carolina. The book covers several generations of her family in an attempt to trace the pattern of drug use, shoplifting, prostitution, and poverty.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is particularly noteworthy that, of Rosa's eight children, only two escaped from the "underclass" world of drugs, crime, and poverty from which they came, and that seems to have been because each encountered a person who influenced them at an early age (a teacher for one, a social worker for the other).</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A question might be raised about this author's approach. Why focus on people who exemplify such a negative stereotype as most members of this family? In these times, is the (African-American) author helping the cause of seeking racial justice? Isn't he just adding fuel to the fires of those who oppose civil rights?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'm not sure that that is really a valid criticism. The author treats his subjects with respect and dignity--but without getting totally immersed in their lives himself. He demonstrates that Rosa Lee made many bad choices in her life, but he also points out the limitations on her own ability to see that she might have had a wider range of choices than she knew. This was a woman who, while living in the nation's capital, was totally unaware of President Clinton's inauguration--or even of who he was. She and most of her family did not regard the political system as in any way connected to their lives. "What difference would participation make? Everyone knows that the white man is always going to come out on top" is the attitude.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The glimpses this book gives of the very old African-Americans still in North Carolina--their memories of their lives as sharecroppers and of their almost total subjection to the whites who owned the land--are remarkably telling and heartbreaking.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book has an important subtext. One of the main obstacles in the lives of Rosa Lee and her family has been their functional illiteracy. Ashamed to admit that they cannot read well enough to understand a typical document, they find themselves signing contracts without knowing what they have committed themselves to. And yet they might have been passed along through the primary grades in school ("socially promoted"), and no teacher or school system is held accountable for this colossal failure to do its job.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author mentions two works by Gunnar Myrdal that he found helpful in understanding the problems of race in the U.S.: <em>American Dilemma</em> and <em>Challenge to</em> <em>Affluence</em>. However, <em>Rosa Lee</em> is not a sociological tract and is not larded with quotations or footnotes. It is a straightforward work of reporting, readable and clear in spite of numerous details that might have been confusing in the hands of a less capable writer.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This nonfiction account by a <em>Washington Post</em> reporter ran in a somewhat different serialized version in the <em>Washington Post</em> in 1994. There was also a PBS-TV "Frontline" special, "The Confessions of Rosa Lee," based on this work.</b></div>
<br />
3 September 2002<br />
________________________________<br />
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><strong>DAVIS, HOPE HALE</strong></span><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">GREAT DAY COMING: A MEMOIR OF THE 1930s </span></em>(1994)</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hope Hale Davis, who died at the age of 100 in 2006, has left a very absorbing memoir of her life in the 1930s, when she was working for the US government while also being a member of the American Communist Party. She and her husband were willing to follow the Party's orders, though as time went on they seemed to realize that adhering to a structured ideology was compromising their independence.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her husband's hospitalization for schizophrenia occupies a large part of this memoir, and it is heart-breaking. He was in two different institutions, though whether he was hospitalized against his will is a question--because the doctors and his family, including his wife, conspired to deceive him into accepting hospitalization.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>By some carefully orchestrated maneuvers, this confused and deeply troubled man was strongarmed into a situation where he was held prisoner--for his own protection, of course, but the fact of being shut up was very nearly intolerable for him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Just as he was starting to make progress with the (then new) insulin shock treatments (which his family had to fight very hard to get for him), he was left unattended in the hospital--and killed himself.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Just as Hope Hale Davis and her husband had been docile in their acceptance of Party directives, they were equally docile in accepting whatever the hospital authorities and psychiatrists told them. As time goes on, though, the author of this memoir became less willing to do as she was told and began to speak up.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a remarkable book and well worth reading.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
25 September 2006<br />
<br />
<strong>_____________________________</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>DAVIS, LINDA H.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BADGE OF COURAGE: THE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This seems to be a thoroughly researched and balanced biography of the American author, Stephen Crane, who died very young (of pulmonary tuberculosis) but who had produced several remarkable contributions to American literature.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This study contains interesting details about the writing of many of Crane's works--including his well-known short story "The Open Boat," which, we learn, was based on an experience Crane himself had.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He was admired by and a friend of several very notable writers: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ford Madox Ford (Hufer), and he knew Theodore Roosevelt personally--though not always amicably.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>If Crane doesn't quite come alive in the pages of this biography, it is probably because of a lack of self-revelatory material. He was apparently not a diarist or letter-writer, and the common-law wife who survived him (Cora, who was a madam of a brothel) doesn't seem to have been inclined to communicate much, either.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
7 October 2007<br />
_____________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>DAVIS, LISA</b><br />
<b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SINS OF BROTHER CURTIS: A STORY OF BETRAYAL, CONVICTION, AND THE MORMON CHURCH </span>(2011)</b><br />
<b><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The author documents in considerable detail the case of Frank Curtis, who died in 1995 at the age of 92 and who spent his later years as a respected member of the LDS Church (Mormons) and molested some 20 children, mostly boys, in his capacity as a Boy Scout leader and Mormon elder.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">At first we are told about Jeremiah Scott (b. 1999), whose case ultimately became a case against the LDS Church, a legal battle that went on for 4 years--until Jeremiah Scott had had enough of the legal wrangling and decided to settle for the $3 million being offered by the other side in spite of his lawyers' urging him to continue the litigation for the sake of a more substantial amount in punitive damages. Later it was determined that he might have actually received less of an award had he chosen that course.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Astonishingly, very little seems to have been known about Brother Curtis's background when the LDS Church placed its confidence in him and relayed that confidence to the unsuspecting parents who entrusted their children to him. As the author reveals, Brother Curtis had spent considerable time in prison in his younger days--and over the age of 70 had had two penile implants, in connection with prostate surgery.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">He moved around, too. Most of his child molestations occurred in Portland, Oregon, but there were intervals involving other child molestations in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and in Wyoming.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The book establishes that these molestations occurred and that they were often repeated over years with a single boy. It is also established that the Mormon bishops who were involved knew of this man's record of child molestation (though perhaps not of his prison record) and chose not to let the parents know.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It is a shameful, sad story. The author makes it clear that the boys' lives and often those of other family members were ruined or badly troubled by the molestation experiences. That some of his victims went on to molest children themselves she sees as part of a known pattern in this troubling crime--what the child learns to expect in childhood may be what that child will pass on to others in adulthood. This pattern of recurrence has been observed in cases of child abuse in general as well--a parent who has beaten a child may have produced an adult who will go on to abuse his or her children. The tragedy is that this cycle can't be stopped unless child molesters are caught and prevented from repeating their crimes.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Mormon church has successfully hid many of its records from public view on the grounds that it is a religion, protected by law. It has also maintained that someone like Brother Curtis, who presented himself in good faith, seemingly, to the LDS community and who did what was prescribed to rehabilitate himself, was accepted as having been cured of his pedophilia and therefore capable of resuming normal activities in the community.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Including child supervision and living in households with children, sleeping in the same bed with them, bathing with them. What the Mormon Church seems to fail to have recognized is that statistics have been showing that child molesters often aren't cured:</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/what-can-be-done-about-pedophilia/279024/">http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/what-can-be-done-about-pedophilia/279024/</a></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The Mormon Church seems to have had more faith in Brother Curtis than the society at large would have done, but then the Latter-Day Saints believe in the perfectability of the human beings in their midst and have argued that information given by Curtis to one or another of the bishops involved is confidential in the same way that a Roman Catholic's statements to a priest in the confessional are beyond the reach of the law.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">It seems as if The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints is losing this battle but very, very gradually. In the meantime, there have been other instances of pedophiles within its community who have gone unchallenged for years while committing acts of pedophilia.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">This book doesn't make organized religion look good at all but it is free of any polemical passages. It presents the facts that are known and does an excellent job while dealing with very complicated issues and presenting the reader with a long list of people to keep track of.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b></div>
<b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">27 November 2016</span></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b>DEMPSEY, CANDACE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">MURDER IN ITALY: THE SHOCKING SLAYING OF A BRITISH STUDENT, THE ACCUSED AMERICAN GIRL, AND AN INTERNATIONAL SCANDAL</span></i> </b>(2010)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Amanda Knox received considerable news coverage at the time when she was accused of having murdered (or having aided in murdering, depending on what news story you were reading) a housemate in Perugia, Italy, where they were both living as foreign students--Amanda from Seattle, WA, and the housemate (Meredith Kercher) from the UK. From the start it was difficult to follow the facts of the case. The two students had been living in a house occupied by four young women on one floor and four young men in the lower level, all living somewhat casual lives with visitors coming and going easily and at all hours. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I was hoping that this book would clarify what did happen, for Amanda Knox went to prison but was eventually released, and all along she was protesting her innocence, and her family and friends kept insisting that she could not have done what she was accused of doing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Candace Dempsey, a Seattle-area reporter, makes a strong case for extremely inept police work, including bungling of the crime scene and the handling of important evidence.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>What did happen and who exactly killed Meredith Kercher may never be known. The situation may be too confused.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
1 October 2015<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>DESAI, ANITA</strong><br />
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<i> <span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE</b></span></i> (2011)<br />
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<b>Three novellas, each about people who live apart from the mainstream. In "Translator Translated," Prema, an English teacher who hasn't enjoyed her work, develops an enthusiasm for translating a book in her native Indian language partly because the process of translating it takes her back to her childhood, but she runs into trouble when she goes on to make editorial changes in the original work.</b></div>
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<b>Beautifully told stories.</b><br />
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30 January 2015<br />
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<em><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b> </b> FASTING, FEASTING</span></em> (1999)<br />
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<b>This is a beautifully told novel about an Indian family. The parents (seen as one entity--"Mamapapa"--by their children, so united is their front) are very determined not to lose face, to keep their status, regardless of the consequences. The son is sent to the United States to college in Massachusetts. His perspective on the American scene is clear-headed and bitingly critical at the core, without being overtly preachy.</b></div>
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2 August 2007<br />
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DESMOND, MATT<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;">EVICTED: POVERTY AND PROFIT IN THE AMERICAN CITY </span>(2016)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The author, a sociologist, spent time living among the poor in Milwaukie, Wisconsin, and this book calls attention to the "drastically shrinking supply of affordable housing" in US cities by showing us, up close, what happens when renters are evicted: how the process typically works and how it affects those renters and their families, the ripple effect it has on a community.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Desmond points out that the poor are often caught in a no-win situation, what with groceries costing up to 40% more in the inner city than in more affluent neighborhoods, and practices such as docketing a judgment--whereby the money judgment resulting from an eviction proceeding can be slapped onto a tenant's credit report. Then there are the hidden charges that often come as a very unpleasant surprise to tenants, as when one evicted tenant thinks she can afford the fee for locked storage of her evicted belongings, then learns that she must buy a lock and insurance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Desmond, whose focus is often on a particular trailer park, shows us the greed and meanness of the people who are caught up in eviction situations. He points out that</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">90% of landlords are represented by attorneys, and 90% of tenants are not. Low-income families on the edge of eviction have no right to counsel, but when tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically.</span></blockquote>
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"Their homes." Many of these homes are overcrowded and are apartments, not free-standing structures. The real-estate business seems to prefer to reserve the word "homes" for houses or at least for dwellings that have to be bought, not rented. But the concept of a "home" is not really so limited. A home is a place, whether it is a tent or a cave or an apartment or a trailer, where a person usually sleeps, probably eats, and feels safe enough to keep his belongings. The people who have been evicted who are described in this book have lost their <i>homes.</i> </div>
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The author argues strongly for the concept of a right to housing. Desmond would like to see a universal housing voucher program, along the lines of the current Section 8 program. In the present political climate, the idea is unlikely to get very far, but the swelling numbers of homeless persons in this country should tell us something about how tragically the housing situation has failed. </div>
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A book like this is long overdue. It is doubtful that the greed that drives our society will cease to be as important as it is but a study of this kind might alert its readers to the magnitude of this urgent problem.</div>
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June 7, 2017<div><br /></div><div>_____________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DE WAAL, EDMUND</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES: A HIDDEN INHERITANCE</span></i> (2010)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author, a ceramicist, has spun a memoir that is not only a tribute to his family, many of whom just barely avoided imprisonment in the concentration camps of the Holocaust, but to the obscure woman who rescued a valued family collection of 264 netsuke items.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In 1938 the family, the Ephrussis, who were probably as fabled as the Rothschilds in terms of influence and wealth and cosmopolitan connections, were given the choice of being sent to Dachau or ceding over all of their property. They opted to give up their property, </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>With careful attention to detail, the author manages to portray a very precise picture of what it was like to be Jewish in a Nazi-occupied country. The comfortable, opulent lifestyle of the family comes to an abrupt end, and they scatter to the ends of the earth--one to Mexico, one to Switzerland, two to the United States. Victor, the head of the family, ends up Tunbridge Wells near London, and for reasons not explained in the book, some members of the family become Anglicans.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Many instances of betrayal are described here, but de Waal focuses on the good-hearted conscientiousness of Anna, the (Gentile) servant who took it upon herself to rescue all 264 netsuke pieces and conceal them in her mattress until they were eventually retrieved by a member of the family.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>12 September 2021</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b>
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<a href="https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTI2NzE5OTAwMjQzNzMzMTIz/charles-dickens-600x487jpg.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="800" height="260" src="https://www.biography.com/.image/t_share/MTI2NzE5OTAwMjQzNzMzMTIz/charles-dickens-600x487jpg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<strong style="text-align: center;">DICKENS, CHARLES</strong><br />
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<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">OUR MUTUAL FRIEND</span></em> </strong>(1864-65)<br />
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<b><em>Our Mutual Friend</em> is a long and uneven novel. I thought it was going to be “about” greed, but no sooner had I come to this conclusion than Dickens began turning it into a rather sappy love story in which he pulled rabbits out of hats every which way just so that the plot could somehow be contrived to work out to the readers’ satisfaction. Several conflicting wills, people in disguise, and cheap melodrama are all piled on at the end.</b></div>
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<b> There are some important characters he can’t seem to make up his mind about. It’s hard to swallow the inherent goodness of Eugene and Mortimer, the two lawyers, towards the end after we’ve seen them under a cloud through most of the book. And what are we to make of Bella and her family? The apparently lovable Bella, so kind and agreeable towards her father and others, nevertheless has no compunction about declaring herself entirely mercenary in her pursuit of marriage, and she gets her wish—a rich husband, with all the trimmings. This whole plot line and the way it evolves into a “happy” ending seems thoroughly to undercut the argument about money’s being the root of all evil and greed’s being one of the most pernicious poisons to the human spirit. Dickens can’t allow the “happy ending” without considerable folderol at the very conclusion about how it isn’t “really” John Harmon’s money now but Mr. Boffin’s (however, it is carefully noted that John Harmon has received a goodly sum through Boffin’s generosity—quite enough for Bella and the insufferable baby to have their fancy house, etc.) and even about how much of the last third of the action—Boffin’s change toward miserliness, etc.—was all trumped up just to teach Bella a lesson about the worst aspects of money and greed. </b></div>
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<b>This is very hard to take. I felt cheated at this point, for I was taking Boffin’s miserliness and its consequences very seriously all along. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that Bella has been chastened and taught the lesson when she comes away with all of the trappings money can buy. Is money an evil, or isn’t it? Or is it only an evil in the hands of someone who hasn’t learned Bella’s lesson? If that is the point, it seems a very weak point to hang 900 pages on.</b></div>
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<b>A better ending, one more in keeping with many of the very grave issues raised by other incidents in the story, might have been for none of the likable, sympathetic characters to end up rich. But I gather Dickens’s own life showed a conflict between a social conscience and an impulse to make money, which he did rather successfully. <em>Our Mutual Friend</em> has some elements of the potboiler, in fact: the violent scenes, the pie-in-the-face type of revenge, the contrived plot.</b></div>
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<b>Still, it contains what must be one of the more sympathetic treatments of a Jew in the literature of the time. </b></div>
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<b>And Dickens apparently intended the portrait of Betty Higdon as an expression of outrage at the Poor Laws. I’m still unclear about why she refused to go to a doctor when that was suggested, but she sticks in the mind as a telling example of the plight of the poor and homeless, and the author’s postscript makes it clear that the arguments then being advanced in favor of not helping the destitute were a source of outrage to him. </b></div>
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<b>As a matter of fact, the same arguments are still circulating today, in these “enlightened” times: there are no really poor, and if there are any, it’s their own fault for not being enterprising enough to succeed. But the whole matter of Betty Higdon gets lost in the mire of plot contrivance, murder and mayhem, and saccharine love stories that closes the book.</b></div>
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<b>A book that purports to be an outcry against the way the unfortunate are treated ought not to reward any of its characters with wealth—unless such rewards are meant as an ironic underscoring of the point about poverty. Here, they don't seem to have that function</b></div>
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29 January 1985<br />
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<em> <span style="color: #45818e; font-weight: bold;">HARD TIMES </span>(1854)</em><span style="color: #45818e;"></span><br />
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<strong><b>Mr. Josiah Bounderby is a wealthy and boastful manufacturer who owns a factory employing Stephen Blackpool--an honest, hard-working power-loom weaver, married to a dissolute, drunken woman. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind runs a school, where Mr. McChokumchild is a teacher. Sleery’s circus troupe also figures in this memorable novel, a tale that reflects the author’s bitter outrage at the horrors of industrialization and of the education system.</b></strong></div>
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<b>The sentence "Coketown was a triumph of fact" appears in this novel, introducing an unforgettable paragraph of graphic description of the growth of a slagheap to the detriment of the town life.</b></div>
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER</span> </em></strong>(1869)<br />
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<b>An interesting collection of essays that probably need considerable annotation. Dickens shows a typical Victorian fascination with death--he visits a Paris morgue and is haunted and sickened by the image of one drowned man he saw there, for instance. He is at his most charming when he deals with annimals (dogs, birds, donkeys). Among the pieces is one about being on board ship with 800 Mormons who are emigrating to Salt Lake. </b></div>
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5 July 2008</div>
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<i> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">AMERICAN NOTES</span></b></i> (1842; 2004)<br />
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<b>Dickens, traveling with his wife in the United States and Canada for six months, published his comments, and some twenty-five years later returned to America and gave a lecture, which is appended to this book.</b></div>
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<b>In between the two visits the Civil War had taken place but his lecture doesn't allude to it--even though his notes about his 1841 trip seem permeated with forebodings about catastrophic trouble brewing for the United States because of slavery.</b></div>
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<b>Traveling was a rugged, hit-or-miss experience for him even though he was probably given the special treatment accorded a visiting celebrity, at least at times. He describes the rough spots, which were many and unpleasant, but seems to have taken them all with a good spirit and is unfailingly grateful to the Americans for their courtesy.</b></div>
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<b>What comes through in this narrative is the compassion and tolerance of this man, observing the customs of a people whose ways often strike him as alien and inexplicable. He finds the Americans to be a somber lot, humorless and too preoccupied with business. Visiting a Shaker community, where he isn't allowed to see their worship service, he finds the Shakers especially "wooden" and "cold." He makes it clear that he's a more fun-loving sort than would feel comfortable among such a pious group.</b></div>
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<b>Whether he is visiting an insane asylum or solitary-confinement prisons, or interviewing Laura Bridgman (who was both blind and deaf), he reacts with understanding and empathy. </b></div>
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<b>He often comments negatively on the universal habit of chewing tobacco and spitting, and makes observations about the frequently present pigs. He objects to the Americans' poor hygiene and recommends more attention to public health.</b></div>
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<b>He sees no particular majesty in the Mississippi River, and indeed at the time it may have been the sorry sight he describes. But he does rhapsodize about Niagara Falls--as did many visitors to the United States.</b></div>
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<b>The book ends with a chapter about slavery--an impassioned essay, citing instance after instance drawn from newspaper notices describing runaway slaves to show how severely mutilated--and shackled--slaves often were, and following that list up with another list of incidents involving violence between Americans. He becomes especially concerned about an incident involving a couple of boys in their early teens and a gun.</b></div>
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<b>His point seems to be that Americans are a violent people and that the inhuman practice of slavery just gives them more opportunities to be violent toward their fellow man.</b></div>
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<b>We in the United States should probably be very glad that this beloved English author chose to spend so much time observing us--at a very critical period in our history.</b></div>
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<b>This account should be more widely read. It gives a very concrete picture of some of the evils of slavery and its comments on Americans as a people are well worth reading.</b><br />
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<b>Also, much material from this trip was used in the author's novel <i>Martin Chuzzlewit </i>(1843-44).</b></div>
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17 February 2014<br />
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<strong>DOCTOROW, E. L.</strong><br />
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<strong> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">SWEET LAND: STORIES</span></i> (2004)</strong><br />
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<b>Anything I might say about this collection of stories amounts to saying I just don't seem to like E. L. Doctorow--which points up the general uselessness of most literary criticism, come to think of it, since what one person likes isn't necessarily what another person would like, and there's often no very good reason why one person's preferences should carry more weight than another's....</b></div>
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<b>These stories are about dysfunctional people. But the stories treat their people in an unpleasant way, or so it seems to me. Doctorow may have made a better sociologist than a writer of fiction. Often he seems to be showing how worldly-wise he is. And he looks at his characters with a superior sneer that he's trying hard to conceal, but it's still there.</b></div>
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11 May 2013<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"> <em style="font-weight: bold;">THE BOOK OF DANIEL</em> </span>(1971)<br />
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<b>Novel based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, emphasizing its effect on the two children--a boy and a girl in the story. The writing style is frenetic and hard to take.</b></div>
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29 May 1998<br />
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<b>DOERR, ANTHONY</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #38761d;"> ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE</span></i> </b>(2014)<br />
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<b>This novel has received considerable attention, favorable and unfavorable, and has been a prize-winning best-seller. That it seems eminently filmable may or may not have been part of the author's objective--and in any event what modern-day fiction writer wouldn't wonder about a cinematic adaptation while writing? After all, cinema is there, and novels are often adapted for it.</b></div>
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<b>The novel involves a possibly very valuable diamond, and of course the handling of it throughout the story would make for captivating movie scenes--as would the story's location in a picturesque walled city (Saint-Malo) in Brittany. There would be scenes in Germany and Russia as well.</b></div>
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<b>A far more serious criticism that has been made (<i>New Republic</i>, <i>Forward</i>) concerns the story's apparent neglect of the Holocaust--and of the presence of Jews in Germany in general. It gives us a young German boy eager to escape his certain future in the mines that killed his father--a boy who joins the Hitler Youth and is lured into ending up in the Nazi military.</b></div>
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<b>Considerable attention is given to the training he receives, and here is one of many places where I wished I knew how thorough Anthony Doerr's research was. Even if he did very little research, though, and merely imagined the type of training a young Nazi might have received, he makes it highly believable, and his account goes a long way toward answering a question many must have had in the decades since the war: How could an ordinary German, not a pathologically disturbed one, have been swept up so completely in the Nazi ideology as many must have been?</b></div>
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<b>Part of the answer may lie in the oft-quoted remark (attributed to St. Francis Xavier, Aristotle, and the Soviet leadership, among others): "Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man." Werner, the German child in the novel, may have been somewhat older than 7 when he joined the Hitler youth but we see how impressionable he is--and how assiduously the Nazi authorities must have been planning his future development, molding him by obliging him to aspire to the prestige and glory they dangled in front of him and to accept a world of cruelty and indifference to suffering, a world where the "weakest" are destroyed systematically.</b></div>
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<b>As time goes on, Werner misses the life he abandoned--his sister Jotta, the people who had been kind to the two of them even though they were orphans. That he sees the catastrophic mistakes he has made isn't stated but implied. When he takes enormous risks by helping the blind French girl, Marie-Laure, several times (as she points out later on by enumerating them), we see more evidence that he is serving a system he no longer trusts.</b></div>
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<b>Marie-Laure is actually helping the Resistance though Werner probably isn't aware of it. Since she is French, though, he has been taught to assume that she isn't to be trusted. And yet, as one human being to another, he does trust her.</b></div>
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<b>The book takes a long time getting to the time when Werner and Marie-Laure meet but the reader knows all along that sooner or later these two will be brought together.</b></div>
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<b>There is a rape scene (not involving Werner) but it is described with a minimum of matter-of-fact detail. In fact, war atrocities generally are treated in a muted way. But the brutal training to which Werner is subjected as a boy is at the center of several very specifically detailed scenes.</b></div>
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<b>Maybe if a reader comes to this book without having the question I have had--"What could make ordinary people, people who always tried to do the right thing and not hurt others, go along with the Nazis?"--the story being told might seem to be painting past horrors "with a gauzy, more pleasing brush," in the words of the <i>Forward </i>reviewer. There's nothing pleasing about Werner's horrifying early training, where young boys have to witness one of their number being bludgeoned brutally as part of a routine disciplinary measure.</b></div>
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<b>It seemed to me that <i>All the Light We Cannot See </i>isn't so much downplaying the horrors as it is looking at the time from a different angle. Doerr seems fascinated by the changes in the world of communication that have occurred ever since the advent of the radio, and in this story the importance of communication underlies every aspect of the action. If your world is being blown to smithereens, maybe you can still get radio communication, and the people who knew how to make that possible and had the necessary materials were among those who mattered most in the devastation of 1940-45.</b></div>
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<b>Werner was highly valued by his Nazi overseers precisely because he had an exceptional gift for working with radio communication. The transmission of radio communication--what can be done with it, how remarkable it is--is at the core of this novel.</b></div>
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<b>It may be much too soon for anyone to be objective about any work of art dealing with World War 2. In a hundred years the human race will have more perspective on it. As of now, our emotions and our own experiences are getting in the way of any objective assessment.</b></div>
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<b>So I can't say whether this book is good. It held my attention--though I found the way it jumped around from one time and place to another in the form of very short unnumbered chapters annoying. It seems like an honest, unaffected statement of a narrative that might have happened.</b></div>
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22 January 2016<br />
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<strong>DOMANICK, JOE<br /><em></em></strong><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><strong><em> TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE: THE LAPD'S CENTURY OF WAR IN THE CITY OF DREAMS</em></strong> </span>(1994)<br />
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<b>This is a fairly comprehensive account of the Los Angeles Police Department, including a considerable section on its history. The author is a journalist, and this book is based on a series of articles he wrote for the <em>Los Angeles Weekly</em>.</b><br />
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<b>The beating of Rodney King receives close attention. The author clearly believes that the Los Angeles Police Department is an example of law-enforcement personnel who have entirely too much power and are abusing it.</b><br />
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<b>This book is instructive reading for anyone concerned about police brutality and the increasingly militaristic posturing of our nation's urban police departments.</b><br />
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<b>One carping criticism: I wish the author had stayed away from the phrase "equally as." It crops up more than once.</b><br />
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10 August 2004<br />
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<b><br />DONNER, REBECCA</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;"> ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS: THE TRUE STORY OF THE AMERICAN WOMAN BEHIND THE GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER </span></i>(2001)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I found the overly long title offputting. I was also put off by the format of this book, which proceeds in tiny chapters and sub-chapters. The effect is of a book aimed at readers with a limited attention span, but the subject matter calls for a far more serious and well-documented treatment than it has received here. The book may have been intended as a cautionary tale for the contemporary US political situation, and apparently it has enjoyed robust sales. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It tells a grim tale, one that has been curiously seldom told, at least in the US--quite possibly because the principal activists in this segment of anti-Nazi sentiment in Germany in the 1930s-1940s were Communists who were involved in transmitting information to the Soviet Union. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>However, this group, called by the Gestapo "Rote Kapelle" (Red Orchestra), was zealously distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a clandestine way and even posing as bona fide Nazis in order to gain access to valuable information about Hitler's strategies. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Mildred (Fish) Harnack, originally from Wisconsin, was one of the most active members of this group, which eventually grew by incorporating other resistance groups. Her husband Arvid Harnack saw his career go down the drain because he was an expert on the Soviet economy, and he and many members of his family actively opposed the Nazis. For instance, a younger brother was active in Weisse Rose (White Rose, known to viewers of the movie <i>Sophie Scholl: The Final Days</i>) and was the only one of that group to have escaped execution.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Two of Arvid's cousins, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were both executed for their involvement in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The Nazis are known to have summarily executed many thousands of persons who had dared to oppose their policies. What is especially chilling about this account is the speed with which Nazi "justice" proceeded and the way in which customary rules about rights to a fair trial were set aside so easily.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Mildred Harnack and her husband were both guillotined.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The account involves a long list of names, including some very well-known ones (the writer Thomas Wolfe, for example), and seems to be accurate--though there are no footnotes or bibliography. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It gives a frightening picture of the extent to which the Nazis managed to nip opposition in the bud by exercising a very tight control over the media--and over any expressions of dissent at any level of communication. They were able to accomplish this extensive suppression of dissent with the wholehearted support of the majority of the German people, a support they assiduously cultivated over the years during which they consolidated their power.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>In this book we see how the system worked at a personal level--that of one woman, Mildred Harnack, and her remarkable, tragic life.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>September 15, 2022</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>_________________________________</b></div><div><b>DU</b><b>BUS, ANDRE III</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">TOWNIE: A MEMOIR</span></b></em> (2011)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I've read a couple of stories by this author's father, Andre Dubus. Though I didn't particularly like his fiction, I decided to read Andre Dubus III's account of his life as the son of a noted writer.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Andre III's parents divorced, and Andre and his siblings were brought up by an inattentive single mom in a rough atmosphere in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Andre learned to fight and became skilled at boxing. The book is replete with accounts of his fights with people he had differences with.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Towards the end of the book he is starting to express some misgivings about his pugnacious attitude, as it occurs to him that these are--gee whiz!--real people he's beating up on.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His father (the author), an ex-Marine, eggs him on and is clearly very proud of his son's battles.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book goes on in this vein, tiresomely, for all too long. A macho man has produced a macho son.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A thin veneer of devout Catholicism starts appearing towards the end of the account too, as it turns out that "Pop" (Andre Dubus II) goes to daily mass and says rosaries and Andre III indulges in some religious speculations.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Somehow this didn't go down very well after such extensive descriptions of repeated episodes of brutality.</b></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
19 February 2013</div>
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<br /></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121037502114299522005-07-07T16:12:00.001-07:002016-02-28T16:53:42.805-08:00E<strong>EARLEY, PETE</strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE: DEATH, LIFE, AND JUSTICE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN</span></em> </strong>(1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a journalist's account of two murders of young women in a small southern Alabama town, Monroeville, that happens to be the hometown of Harper Lee, author of <em>To Kill a Mockingbird.</em></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In fact, the author prefaces each section of his book with quotations from the Harper Lee novel. His account concerns a wrongfully convicted man who spent six years on Death Row before he was finally freed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is a long and involved account, and we never learn who actually did commit the two murders. The author captures the daunting complexity of legal procedures just by following the story on and on, through the maze of conflicting stories, many from less-than-reliable witnesses.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The narrative seems like a fairly realistic representation of the way things probably were in the lives of the many people named. I'm not sure that the author's representation of Southern African-American speech is accurate, and I have a question about the wisdom of using the n------ word.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'm assuming that the author's justification for his frequent use of this highly objectionable word is that this is the way these people talked, or even that this is an accurate transcription of their exact words.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Mark Twain got away with this idea (in <em>Huckleberry Finn</em>, for example), but he was writing before we had become fully aware of just how loaded this word is. Sometimes verisimilitude has to take a back seat to the spirit of the times, and the spirit of these times has--gratifyingly--favored burying this word as fast as we possibly can--not to forget that it existed but just to see to it that its use stops.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Representing its use in speech--even in speech that purports to be an accurate representation of the way these particular people actually spoke--does nothing toward eliminating the word from our vocabulary. There are other ways of conveying the bigoted attitudes of some of the people in this account. We don't have to read the n------ word to get the point, thanks.</b></div>
<br />
25 July 2010<br />
<strong>_________________________________</strong><br />
<br />
<b>EDWARDS, LAURIE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><i><b><span style="color: #38761d;">IN THE KINGDOM OF THE SICK: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF CHRONIC ILLNESS IN AMERICA</span></b> </i>(2013)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is one problem with books in this genre, and there are many such books--the author usually has a disorder or two that has prompted the writing of the book, and in order to illustrate points in the book's content, the author almost has to bring that disorder into the discussion.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>When that happens, if there's a tad too much of it, the book comes across as more about that person's disorder(s) than about helpful information for others unless, of course, "others" happen to have that disorder.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In this author's case, others with her disorder aren't going to come along very often. She has primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), a serious lung disorder, somewhat like cystic fibrosis, but so rare that it took a long time for Edwards to be diagnosed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>If her book has a fault, it may be that it gives a bit more information about the author's medical history than is warranted.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She covers a wide range of chronic medical conditions, but the coverage is rather standard information, easily available from other sources.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She has an impressive bibliography but these references turn out to be drawn primarily from the Internet. More depth would have been welcome here.</b></div>
<br />
14 May, 2015<br />
<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>EGGERS, DAVE</strong><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">HOW WE ARE HUNGRY: STORIES</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2005)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I am not sure about the title of this brief collection of very brief stories because there is no story called "How We Are Hungry" among them, but this book has been a best-seller.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Most of the stories are fairly slight and lack much plot, but they show the author's ready wit. "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself" consists of a couple of blank pages--a trick that has been tried before but it still may be good for a chuckle.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" was the most interesting story of the lot, in my opinion. It is an account of a woman's experiences on a mountain-climbing expedition to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and if I ever aspired to go on such an expedition, reading this story has thoroughly cured me of that wish. I suspect that the story accurately represents contemporary mountain-climbing conditions: too many expeditions cluttering up the mountainsides, and too many amateurs or poorly trained persons endangering the lives of others. This story was bone-chilling and well-done.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
27 January 2009<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2000)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This apparently autobiographical novel received wide critical attention, perhaps because its author had founded a successful magazine, <em>McSweeney's</em>--but also because Dave Eggers had something to say that readers found interesting.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Born in 1970 and raised in the prosperous Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Eggers had the bad fortune of losing both parents to cancer within a short time--and having his younger brother to take care of thereafter. His other (older) brother and older sister are helpful, but it is Eggers himself who does the day-to-day living with the younger brother, who goes from the age of 7 to his teens in the course of the book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They move to San Francisco, but questions about his parents' deaths keep troubling him--particularly the whereabouts of their "cremains." Towards the end of the book, he finally locates his mother's ashes, and it may be when he is casting them into the lake that his anger at the world comes to the foreground.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book ends on an angry note, but the readers will understand if they've read the rest of the book attentively. We can share his anger at the friend (John) who refuses to pull himself together and keeps trying self-destructive measures. We can understand how overwhelmed with responsibility Eggers must have been--and we can feel how much he loves his younger brother.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a remarkable book that deserves a careful reading, even though comparisons with J. D. Salinger will be unavoidable.</b></div>
<br />
27 November 2006<br />
_____________________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>EHRENREICH, BARBARA</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5IsoB2Ksq1doGLKH4pSDatRNm-mJ--h7CbBOfPqaeCDoDRR0cqw" /></div>
<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span style="color: #45818e;"> <b>LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A</b></span></i><i><b><span style="color: #45818e;"> NONBELIEVER'S SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING</span> </b></i><br />
(2014)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Using her autobiographical facts as a scaffolding for this narrative, Barbara Ehrenreich focuses on some episodes of what she calls "dissociation" in her late teens: "I began to indulge in a long-running fantasy" involving empty streets, no electric power, an abandoned world. Seemingly at will (though by no means always), the world was stripped of all external reality for her--or in flames. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The most dramatic episode occurred during a period of sleep deprivation and just after finding herself in a car driven by a beau who turned out to be filled with rage. She appears also to have been a victim of sunstroke at the time.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And, although she doesn't make this into a major point, her parents were both alcoholics, and the life of uncertainty she was clearly accustomed to as a result of their drinking problems may have predisposed her to an openness to extraordinary experiences.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maybe, too, she has had an overly active imagination, one that pretends that there is another reality concealed behind the "reality" our senses give us.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her parents were also atheists, and she knew what it was like to be outside the pale in a largely Christian church-going community. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reality-transforming experiences that shook her to the core did not quite alter her own atheism or agnosticism, which was bolstered as time went on by her scientific pursuits, but they led her to wonder if there is an "other" or "others," possibly inhering in all animate beings.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She sees a need for calling on her fellow human beings to "accept the moral obligations a godless world entails," pointing out that without God or gods, there can be no reason for not doing whatever we can for one another and for all life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Although she has had a couple of children, she omits almost all details about their births, their childhoods, their development--an unusual and refreshing omission in a memoir by a woman. She chooses to use her own psychological experience and her interpretations of it as the center of the account. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
5 April 2015</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><em> BRIGHT-SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA</em> </b></span>(2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Starting in the world of breast cancer awareness, pink ribbons and all, the author--who had breast cancer herself--proceeds to megachurches, popular psychology, and even the economic system and finds a disturbing trend toward an insistence on a smiling acceptance of the situations life puts us in, often an acceptance so thorough as to be emotionally blinding.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are employers who try to soften the harm done when they fire workers by offering support groups designed to bring the "terminated" employees around to seeing their job loss as an "opportunity," for example.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>People with breast cancer are even told to think of their breast cancer as a "gift." Ehrenreich raises serious questions about how far this trend can go--and how much it has already forced people into delusional thinking.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Implied in her book is the notion that there are situations where anger and sadness are very legitimate responses and yet popular psychology nowadays comes close to forbidding them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A book well worth reading.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
8 June 2012<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b>BAIT AND SWITCH: THE (FUTILE) PURSUIT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM</b></span> </em>(2005)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Barbara Ehrenreich has again gone undercover, this time for about ten months as a white-collar worker seeking employment. After creating a new identity, she attends networking conferences and workshops and samples job fairs.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She perceives that white-collar workers, even highly qualified ones, know that they are at the mercy of potential employers and are often willing to go to considerable lengths when it comes to personal makeovers. Ehrenreich herself consults with an expert about her dressing and makeup style.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She learns what to say (and not say) and how to say it. One person advises her that "to survive, you need to know where the bodies are buried." This statement suggests the cutthroat nature of some of the dealings in connection with obtaining jobs in white-collar occupations.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She also finds herself sitting in workshops that turn out to be meant exclusively for Christians, where the participants are voluble in their homophobic and anti-Semitic agenda. She speaks out in opposition to this approach but acknowledges that it might not be illegal.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In closing, she speculates about why white-collar workers can't rise up in protest against the kind of treatment they routinely put up with--like having to leave a job with no advance notice, coming to work one day and finding your desk cleared out. She sees union organizing as a possibility for the white-collar work force but she also realizes that so far most attempts at organizing white-collar unions have had little or no success.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Excellent book, very informative.</b></div>
<br />
23 March 2009<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2001)<br />
<br />
<b>Fascinating and excellent account of the author’s attempts at living on the income from several successive low-paid jobs in succession in the US--Maine, Florida, etc. Her observations about Wal-Mart are especially telling--and horrifying.</b><br />
<br />
30 December 2002<br />
___________________________________________________<br />
<strong>ELIOT, GEORGE [MARY ANNE EVANS]</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTvpj78fRsQJSeiWLdQKK43VYJH37ELFsewwm4md1qwP9i64ZOO" /></div>
<strong>
<em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #45818e;"> SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE</span></em></strong> (1857; 1988)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Three sketches of village clerical life. The last one, "Janet’s Repentance," is a remarkable exploration of alcoholism and an abusive marriage.</b><br />
<br />
10 June 2003<br />
_______________________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>ENGLANDER, NATHAN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK: STORIES</span></i> </b>(2012)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is attempting something that some believe can't legitimately be attempted: dealing with the Holocaust in fiction. It has been maintained that the horror of the Holocaust was so immense that it cannot be comprehended except perhaps by persons who lived through it. To try to represent it in art, music, or fiction would be futile and would serve only to reduce the magnitude of events that were unprecedented in human history.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Well, maybe not so unprecedented. History is full of instances where one people has slaughtered another, often on a very massive scale. And since the world's population keeps growing, genocidal slaughter is likely to be on the rise as time goes by.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nathan Englander doesn't deal with the Holocaust except as it exists in the memories of some of his characters, either, but he's making a point with some of these stories.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The point is that, given the immensity of the Holocaust--its duration, the vast numbers cruelly wiped off the face of the earth, the lives ruined--those who escaped with what is left of their lives deserve a place to call home if ever anyone did, and Israel is that place.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Another point that a couple of these stories make is that there are times when "an eye for an eye" is the only language the heart understands, when there can be no justice in a court of law. The story "Camp Sundown," where a group of elder residents of a summer camp are sure they have discovered a former concentration camp guard, a "Demjanjuk," in their midst, makes that point.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Englander has a talent for capturing the speech of his characters, and the stories are interesting and thought-provoking.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In "The Reader," however, where the character is named simply "Author," Englander gets a little too fiercely heavy-handed in his eagerness to hammer a point home. The story concerns an Author who used to have a following but who now goes on tour, only to turn up for readings of his work to find empty rooms. Except for one reader, who follows him around from one town to another, always insisting that since he came to hear a reading, the Author must do the reading--which he then obligingly does.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>--The point being, I suppose, that a writer must never give up even though there are no readers. There just may be readers some day, somewhere.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
8 October 2014</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
________________________</div>
<br />
<strong>EPSTEIN, HELEN</strong><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> WHERE SHE CAME FROM: A DAUGHTER'S SEARCH FOR HER MOTHER'S HISTORY</span></em> </strong>(1997)<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<b>A sad but interesting account of the author's investigation of her mother's life. Her mother, of Czech Jewish heritage, survived imprisonment in several concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of her survival tactics in the camps was to claim that she was an electrician--although she was a dressmaker.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Helen Epstein has probably captured the tense atmosphere in Prague as the Nazis tightened their noose.</b><br />
<br />
26 June 2006<br />
<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>EVANZZ, KARL</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>
<em></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE MESSENGER: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIJAH MUHAMMAD</span></em></strong><em> </em>(1999)<br />
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<b>Thoroughly documented--with several appendices, this book seems to be an accurate portrayal of Elijah Muhammad. Evanzz is not on a soapbox for Elijah Muhammad by any means. He presents evidence that the Black Muslims have been a community harboring murderers and thugs.</b></div>
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6 October 2003<br />
<br />wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121038054980452372005-07-06T16:18:00.007-07:002023-09-10T16:53:39.933-07:00F<b>FALLOWS, JAMES AND DEBORAH</b><br />
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<i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span><b><span style="color: #38761d;">OUR TOWNS: A 100,000-MILE JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA (2018)</span></b></i><br />
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and his wife Deborah undertook the task of getting to know more about a couple of dozen US towns. They traveled in their own plane and touched down in towns of various sizes--for instance, Bend, Oregon, and Fresno, California.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>Sometimes the account reads more like a Chamber of Commerce publication but of course the authors would not have wanted to be overly critical of any of the towns they visited, and criticism wouldn't really have been fair, coming from people who were just passing through and casually observing.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>So they asked themselves what sorts of enterprises were flourishing in each town and why. They seem to have particular enthusiasm for several charter schools--an enthusiasm I found surprising in authors who were also apparently interested in just what kind of atmosphere was prevailing in some US towns that enabled the election of Donald J. Trump as President. Surely charter schools represent one more effort at the kind of privatization that Trump has favored.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>One wonders if the Fallowses have failed to think this through. Charter schools are known for their ability to "cherry pick" their students, leaving less qualified students in the public schools, which are already severely underfunded. The result is the neediest students in our midst are even less apt to receive the education they need. Charter schools strike at the heart of democracy too by removing many young people into a protected environment instead of obliging them to associate with the general population. What will they have learned about their fellow citizens if they have been receiving their education only in charter schools? They will have learned only about those carefully selected classmates with whom they've associated on a daily basis for 8-12 years.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>However, the account is fair and informative otherwise, and usually interesting. For instance, one learns that the air space in the western US is often occupied by the military, and the pilots of other planes have to work around the air space that is reserved for the military.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>There is perhaps too much detail about the actual flights--technical specifics about flying a plane that might not be of much interest to readers who don't fly planes.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>And there is sometimes a tendency to use trendy language, like the absurd, meaningless "one-off" that has come into use in recent years: there are "one-off exhibits" and "one-off eco hotels."</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>But this is carping about a book that provides an interesting window on a variety of places.</b></span></span></div>
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<span face="sans-serif"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px;"><b>10 December 2019</b></span></span><br />
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<strong>FAULKNER, WILLIAM</strong><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSheguziOhKoe-XkiA8OBSQh6vjrqiL1cQKiGmON9kjdnBdK5pc" /></div>
<strong><em> MOSQUITOES</em></strong> (1927; 1955)<br />
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<b>This novel, Faulkner's second, originally appeared in 1927. It is a truly bad book, complete with ugly racial stereotypes, the n----- word, plus a character usually referred to as "the Semitic man." However, the Jewish characters seem to represent the "voice of reason" in the book, and maybe Faulkner is speaking through them. He puts an assortment of people on a yacht on Lake Pontchartrain, where they proceed to behave inexplicably and abominably. Are they all drunk, or what?</b></div>
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<b>Very little of the Faulkner style is evident here. Towards the end a few passages take off into the tiresomely overwritten style that he indulges in in the Sartoris novels and <em>THE SOUND AND THE FURY</em> and <em>ABSALOM, ABSALOM!</em> ("Not yet despairing because not yet desiring, he nursed his remorse in a silence that was so profound...," for example).</b></div>
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<b>In the Introduction I learned that Faulkner got fired as a Scoutmaster for drunkenness; that he fabricated his military record--not just once or twice in passing remarks but making a lifetime project of it, even going around in an outfit designed to look like an RAF uniform, which he’d had made for himself. He was in the RAF but never a pilot as he went around claiming to have been.</b></div>
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(1 March 2003)<br />
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<b>FELDER, DON</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> HEAVEN AND HELL: MY LIFE IN THE EAGLES, 1974-2001</em> </span></b>(2008)<br />
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<b>Don Felder of the Eagles band tells his life story here but I wish he hadn't. Most of the account is an outpouring of grievances against the two band members who he perceives as having wronged him--Don Henley and Glenn Frey.</b></div>
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<b>Felder seems to be a litigious sort and managed to get himself fired from the Eagles after more than two decades with them.</b></div>
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<b>One doesn't know how much of this story to believe because the bitterness motivating it is so intense. The Eagles took plenty of cocaine and smoked plenty of pot. They lived a life so high and so pampered that women were throwing themselves at them. This has been true of many music groups in recent times. One wonders why the many stories of instances of greed and cruelty on the part of Henley and Frey were included. Even if these are true, what is the point of disclosing them to readers who can have no knowledge of the situation and no way of obtaining other points of view? Clearly the only point is for Don Felder to vent his rage.</b></div>
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<b>Very little light is shed on the actual songs and how they were made though the process of mixing is made clear enough. Who actually wrote the music and who wrote the lyrics isn't spelled out except that it seems sometimes to have been a group project.</b></div>
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<b>This book was a long slog.</b></div>
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3 October 2012<br />
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<b>FERRANTE, ELENA</b> (pseud.)<div><br /></div><div> <b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS</span></i></b> (2020)</div><div><br /></div><div>This story is about lying--and the way in which the narrator, 16-year-old Giovanna, wakes up to the lies adults around her have been telling and starts telling some of her own. But it is also the story of an adolescent girl's introduction to an adult experience of sex.</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="text-align: justify;">Giovanna has two caring parents who seem to have risen from humbler backgrounds to become the kinds of people who don't behave coarsely--or speak in dialect any more. But she makes contact with her father's sister, her aunt Vittorina, who hasn't been in communication with the family for years and whose hatred of Andrea, Giovanna's father, spews forth with an almost animal-like ferocity. It is through Vittorina that Giovanna begins to see her parents from a different perspective.</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But while she is learning some secrets her parents have been concealing from her for years, she is also yearning for a more adult experience, and she develops a crush on Roberto, who is already engaged to Giuliana, a friend of Giovanna's who is also the daughter of Margarita, a friend of Vittorina who is the widow of the man who was Vittorina's great love. Roberto, somewhat like Giovanna's parents, has risen from a more squalid background to become a successful academic intellectual, and his polished air seems to appeal to Giovanna, who spends considerable time and energy devising ways of putting herself in his company.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Throughout most of the novel it doesn't occur to Giovanna that she is planning to take Giuliana's fiancé away from her. Surely most 16-year-olds wouldn't attempt this bit of treachery, but it doesn't bother Giovanna in the least--until near the end, when she realizes that she doesn't want to be this kind of person--and maybe she really isn't so interested in Roberto, after all.</div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that what she really wants is someone to help her lose her virginity, and she sets out to look for a likely candidate, and finds one.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">How many women who were approaching adulthood in about the same era must have indulged in similar exploits, and for similar reasons? This is a novel many women would be able to read with understanding and empathy.</div><div><br /></div><div>I read this book as an audiobook, read by Marisa Tomei, who reads the men's dialogue in a strange falsetto voice that is very jarring. </div><div><br /></div><div>19 June 2022<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">MY BRILLIANT FRIEND</span></i></b> (2012)<br />
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<b><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #6aa84f;">THE STORY OF A NEW NAME</span> </i></b>(2013)<br />
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These two novels are the first part of the Neapolitan Novels tetralogy, and since I have yet to read the other two, I would probably do well to reserve my comments until later.</div>
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For now, though, this story, which seems autobiographical though very little is known about the author, would speak to any woman who grew up at the time when the two main characters here--the narrator Elena or Lenu and her friend Lila--were coming of age. Both were born in 1944 in Naples, and at first they seem joined in a spirit of rivalrous camaraderie as they spend their childhood in the combative atmosphere of warring families in their tight-knit community.</div>
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They are both doing very well in school and aspire to become famous writers. But eventually their lives go in quite divergent directions--Elena to proceed with the luxury of continuing her studies because she has some lucky breaks and a more supportive family, Lila fated to stop her education and enter the workaday world--with the apparent escape hatch of a marriage that turns out to be disastrous for her.</div>
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<i> The Story of a New Name </i>never pauses to preach or to direct the reader towards any particular point of view, but in the story it tells it is making abundantly clear how calamitous a marriage to an abusive man can be--and how helpless a woman was, at the time, if she discovered after the fact that the man she married is physically violent.</div>
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When the overworked Lila, having received a story she'd written as a child (and forgotten about), tosses it indifferently into the fire, we know that she is yet another victim of circumstances (her poverty among them) and the cruelty of a system that looks the other way in the face of violence.</div>
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One would think that the title of the first novel, <i>My Brilliant Friend</i>, would refer to Lila since the story about Lila is told by her friend Lenu. But at one point it becomes clear that "my brilliant friend" is actually Lenu herself as well--when Lila, trying to persuade Lenu to continue her education, says, "You were my brilliant friend." There is considerable evidence that the bond between Lenu and Lila is so strong that they are almost two aspects of one person.</div>
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The two are often quite bitchy to one another. Lenu does not try to gloss over anything in her account. She clearly takes a dim view of some of her own past behavior, relating incidents matter-of-factly but with a tinge of cynicism. She is a much older woman looking back on her past as she proceeds with her narrative.</div>
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There has been much speculation about the real identity of Elena Ferrante but that seems beside the point, given the nature of the novels. They were written by someone who understood what it was like to grow up in one part of Naples at that time, someone who has enabled us to see the entire experience in vivid detail.</div>
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6 April 2019<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #38761d;"> THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY</span></i></b> (2014)<br />
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In this third book, Lenu and Lila are thirtyish and bearing children. Lila, along with her devoted live-in companion (but not lover) Enzo, has learned computer skills--and is hired by Micaele at a high salary. Lenu's life has taken a less rocky course. She is married to Pietro, whose mother and sister are often helpful to Lenu in her promising literary career, and there are two daughters. In 1976, the daughters are 3 and 6.</div>
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She and Lila are not especially close during these years. However, it is often Lila who contacts Lenu suddenly, often with some astonishing news to impart.</div>
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By the end of this third novel we know that Nino, with whom both Lenu and Lila have been smitten at various times, is irresponsible and vain, and yet we see Lenu destroy her marriage and even leave her husband and children for Nino's sake. By this time we are wondering about just how reliable a narrator Lenu has been, all this time, but perhaps in the last book we will find out more.</div>
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Throughout the story so far, violence or the threat of it has been a constantly recurring element--not appearing so very often but often enough for us to realize that it must always have been about to erupt whenever a situation involved several men of Lila's or Lenu's acquaintance.</div>
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The men are apt to want to prove themselves, to defend "their" women. Violence is the way a dispute is often settled. If this state of affairs leaves Lenu and Lila often at the mercy of the men in their lives, perhaps that is part of what this book has to say to us: This is the way things have been at this time and in this place, for women (and of course children, even more helpless).</div>
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This is a novel about class, about the almost impassable barrier between the haves and the have-nots in this world. Just how rigid the barrier must be becomes clear whenever the author pauses to tell us that one of the characters lapses into dialect in speaking. We soon learn that the dialect is not readily understandable to speakers of standard Italian--and that using it probably brands the speaker as belonging to a less admired, more marginalized class of people. Through this observant attention to whether her characters are using dialect or standard Italian, the author is letting us know what Lenu and Lila have been up against in their struggles to find places for themselves in the world.</div>
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Among the many unanswered questions facing the reader at the end of the third book is the problem of what Lila has meant about noticing that the "margins" of things were disintegrating. There have been hints that Lila is sometimes near the breaking point, and some of her statements about her perception of reality have been alarming.</div>
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Although, given the givens, this story could easily have become self-pitying, it is very matter-of-factly stated, and Lenu as the narrator seems to be viewing her past self from a critical, detached stance. In the last book perhaps we will find out how Lila disappeared and whether she was ever found.</div>
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4 May 2019<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD</span></i></b> (2015)<br />
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The reader who has read the entire quartet of the Neapolitan Novels will have spent considerable time learning about the first 60 years or so of the lives of Lenu and Lila---and on reaching the end will probably miss them as one would miss well-known friends.</div>
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There are many sad events and quite a few deaths in the course of those decades from 1944 to the mid-2000s.</div>
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We are left wondering about how much to trust Lenu (and her narrative). She has betrayed her friend Lila too many times, acted in ways that benefit herself and hurt Lila. For instance, Book 2 opens with Lila giving Lenu some notebooks that she wasn't supposed to read--whereupon Lenu drops them into the river.</div>
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Lenu has no qualms about pursuing her career as a writer and enjoying considerable acclaim and popularity while leaving her children in the care of others--one of whom is often Lila, who has children of her own.</div>
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The reader might want to know more about the "dissolving margins" that Lila describes at the time of the major earthquake. Is this a mental illusion, or could it be a vision problem that has gone undiagnosed? We never find out. But Lenu puts them to use by writing a novel about Lila (in direct opposition to Lila's having made her promise never to write about her) and claiming that she was motivated in doing so by an attempt at giving permanent form to Lila's dissolving boundaries. Are we expected to believe this lame bit of self-justification for her betrayal of her friend?</div>
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By the end of the narrative Elena (Lenu) looks like an ambitious person who doesn't mind exploiting her friends in furthering her career.</div>
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But perhaps it is the now-vanished Lila who "wins" in the end. It turns out that she has been quietly visiting libraries and studying up on the city she has never left, finding out its grim and bloody history. Elena's attitude upon finding out about Lila's research is tellingly condescending: she pronounces that of course Lila would never finish this project but it's good that she's occupying herself--even though she knows nothing about how to do research.</div>
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We suspect that she is underestimating Lila and that Lila will have figured out how to go about finding the information she is seeking, all on her own.<br />
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Elena/Lenu supposes that there might be a "text" resulting from Lila's writing and that she, who runs a publishing company, might acquire it and publish it. Here is yet another instance of Lenu's opportunism, her willingness to exploit her friend. Perhaps it would have been meant as a service to her friend (affording her a chance to have her work published) but the reader might suspect at this point that the idea has more to do with burnishing Lenu's reputation than with being kind to her friend.</div>
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After Lila has been explaining to Lenu that the familiar church of San Giovanni Battista is really founded on a disgusting trash heap, Lila says:</div>
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"They seem so important, the books," she said sarcastically. "You've devoted your whole life to them. And the evil breaks through the floor and emerges where you don't expect it."</blockquote>
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It sounds as if Lila has found the meaning of her dissolving margins even though Lenu might not have done so.</div>
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16 June 2019<br />
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<b>FINN, PETER AND COUVÉE, PETRA</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: THE KREMLIN, THE CIA, AND THE BATTLE OVER A FORBIDDEN BOOK </span>(2014)</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Peter Finn is a <i>Washington Post </i>columnist who gained access recently to some CIA documents pertaining to the publication and distribution of the controversial novel <i>Doctor Zhivago</i> by Soviet author Boris Pasternak.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>What we have here is an account of the CIA's involvement in the complicated story of the battle between East and West over publication of a novel that didn't toe the prescribed socialist-realism line laid down by the USSR and that even seemed a tad critical (but only a tad) of the Soviet system.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>The Soviet authorities seem to have shown colossal stupidity by raising objections to the book's publication in the first place. Moreover--though little is made of it in this book--anti-Semitism was involved.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>The book is oddly silent about a couple of topics that strike me as important enough to have been included: how Pasternak spent the Second World War years, and how it is that he could have been Jewish enough to have been a target of Russian anti-Semitism and yet Russian Orthodox enough to have had a Russian Orthodox funeral after receiving the last rites of the church.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>He seems to have been born into a Jewish family who were somewhat assimilated, with a father who reportedly became a Christian. However, Boris Pasternak stated that Jews ought to become assimilated--that Judaism ought to die out.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>This view is horrifyingly unacceptable to most Jews the world over, of course. One has to wonder about whether Pasternak had an opportunistic streak--and whether it was that opportunism that embroiled him in the controversy that raged around <i>Doctor Zhivago</i> for so long.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>This book doesn't pass judgment on the CIA but it should be fairly clear to any reader that the kind of cloak-and-dagger maneuvers and publicity stunts in which the CIA involved itself, for the sake of using this novel as a way of defying and showing up the USSR, may have been somewhat diverting for the CIA "operatives" but that they were using a novel as a political football, and a very dangerous one at that.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Pasternak's book (and the movie made from it) made vast sums--but he must have received only a small fraction of the royalties he was owed. His long-time companion/mistress and her daughter were arrested and sent to a camp for years on a trumped-up charge.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>It looks as if Pasternak had very little control over the situation once he had finished his book and shown it to a publisher. From then on he and his book became tools in the Cold War.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>He was a powerful enough figure in the USSR to be able to have personal conversations with both Stalin and Khrushchev, and the reports of these that are included in this account are fascinating.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Whether <i>Zhivago</i> is an important literary work is a question that has been put on a back burner. Vladimir Nabokov did not hold Pasternak in high esteem at all, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion condemned Pasternak and <i>Zhivago</i> as "despicable." It is unfortunate that the hijinks of CIA agents and helpers, some of them well known in the media (Gloria Steinem, Zbigniew Brzezinski), have overshadowed the issue of the work's literary merit.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>And then there is the vexed question of Pasternak's Nobel prize. The book implies that he might have been awarded the Nobel prize primarily as a political gesture--and it is noted that the award citation did not mention <i>Zhivago</i> specifically.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Somewhat later the Nobel prize for literature went to Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the darlings among the USSR's favored literary lights, for his ponderous novel <i>Quiet Flows the Don. </i>It seems as if the Nobel laureates in literature are chosen for political reasons sometimes--a sad fact that is highlighted by this book, though it is not emphasized.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>The book seems like a fair and objective account. However, since the CIA traffics in disinformation and lies, how sure can anyone be that the documents on which this book is based are the truth?</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>July 10, 2016</b><br />
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<b><br />FISHER, THOMAS, MD</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #76a5af;">THE EMERGENCY: A YEAR OF HEALING AND HEARTBREAK IN A CHICAGO ER </span></i>(2022)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This account of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic has very important things to say--particularly about the calamitously long waits endured by patients in emergency rooms. The author also inveighs against a tendency on the part of hospitals to give more favorable access to medical care to patients with adequate insurance. His revelation of the extent to which this is happening is eye-opening--and chilling.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>For me the book was also interesting because it dealt with a location in Chicago that I knew well for many years--the Hyde Park area and specifically the University of Chicago Hospitals.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>As an African-American, the author is particularly concerned about the poor quality of care so often received by the Black community.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Perhaps in an attempt at making the book more personal, he alternates chapters of his narrative with chapters that are letters to individual patients. I'm not sure that this technique works especially well but the book on the whole was well worth reading.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>10 September 2023</b></div><div><b> ________________________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div> <b>FISHKIN, SHELLEY FISHER</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <span style="color: #38761d;">LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY: REFLECTIONS ON MARK TWAIN AND AMERICAN CULTURE </span>(1996)</b><br />
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<b>Interesting comments on Mark Twain and the Mark Twain industry. especially the Hannibal, Missouri, tourist trade. The author does a good job of demolishing those who criticize <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> for its perceived racist elements.</b></div>
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<span face=", "arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #111c24; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.75rem; text-align: center;">10 May 2000</span></div>
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<strong>FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: A LIFE IN LETTERS</span></em></strong> (1994)<br />
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<b>F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters are interesting but sad as he becomes increasingly imploring in his need for ready money--so "his" daughter (always "my daughter," never "our daughter") can stay on at Vassar, so he won’t have to "put" Zelda in a "public asylum," and so on. </b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Fitzgerald reveals himself to be the whiny spoiled child one always suspected he was, and undoubtedly anti-Semitic despite a sort of friendship with S. J. Perelman. </b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>The collection includes letters to Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and other notables.</b><br />
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3 August 2001<br />
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<strong>FITZGERALD, PENELOPE</strong><br />
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<strong> <span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>THE GOLDEN CHILD</em></span> </strong>(1977)<br />
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<strong>The author takes us into the world of a museum--this one in the midst of staging a popular exhibit to display a gold-covered doll that was important to a pre-Christian culture.</strong><br />
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<strong>The story soon becomes a murder mystery and moves along at a fast clip. There are entertaining passages, and the story is replete with the author's wry humor.</strong></div>
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<strong>However, she may have got carried away towards the end, when she has one of the main characters, Waring Smith, wounded by a gunshot but apparently wandering around in a business-as-usual mode in spite of being covered with blood for quite a while. We never find out if his wound was tended to. There are quite a number of such loose ends in the story, but most of it is pretty good fun anyway.</strong></div>
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(7 April 2011)<br />
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<b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;"> THE BOOKSHOP </b>(1978)<br />
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<b>Short, quietly excellent novel about a widow in a small East Anglian town who decides to open a bookshop. Without any love story, this is an extraordinary disclosure of a triumph of human greed and lust for power.</b><br />
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8 May 2001<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">HUMAN VOICES</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1980)<br />
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<b>This short novel takes us into the lives of some employees of the BBC during World War II. The plot revolves around Sam Brooks, who is in charge of recorded programs but who has too great a liking for young women employees (his "seraglio," as some of his colleagues call his collection of young women). The novel has quiet humor and good sense.</b></div>
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<b>Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) began her writing career at the age of 60. She herself worked at the BBC during World War II, and this book is almost certainly based on her own experience. She has probably captured much of the atmosphere of war-ravaged London, including the ever-present danger of unexploded bombs.</b></div>
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<b>However, the plot of the story doesn't quite jell. Pathways are opened up in the story, only to trail off into nowhere. What become of Lisa Bernard and her baby, for instance? Still, this was a novel well worth reading.</b></div>
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1 April 2005<br />
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<b></b> <b><br /></b></div><div><b>FITZSIMONS, ELEANOR</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE LIFE AND LOVES OF E. NESBIT: VICTORIAN ICONOCLAST, CHILDREN'S AUTHOR, AND CREATOR OF "THE RAILWAY CHILDREN" </span></i>(2019)</b></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Although I haven't read any of E. Nesbit's work, I did see the film version of <i>The Railway Children</i>, which was quite well done and enjoyable. E. (for Edith) Nesbit was highly popular years ago, particularly as an author of children's books. However, as this biography reveals, she was also renowned as an entertaining hostess--and as a Socialist and member of the Fabian Society.</div><div><br /></div><div>She knew quite a few prominent people in her day, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Noel Coward.</div><div><br /></div><div>She must have been a powerhouse of energy as she produced numerous books and poems while also running a household (with a 30-room house) that included five children. She was an avid gardener as well.</div><div><br /></div><div>This was a fascinating story about a dynamic and influential woman.</div><div><br /></div><div>5 January 2023</div><div><br /></div><div>____________________</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>FLANDERS, JUDITH</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE MAKING OF HOME: THE 500-YEAR STORY OF HOW OUR HOUSES BECAME OUR HOMES</span></i> (2015)</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>This book is a fascinating and well-researched social history of the concept of a home--as contrasted with a house. We learn how the notion evolved over centuries, running parallel to the notion of privacy.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>I had a few problems with the book, however. One was the inattention to apartment living. How does it fit in with the author's general theories? One cannot refer to an apartment as one's "house" but one can (and usually should) refer to it as one's "home." And yet in many people's minds, apparently, only an actual house (free-standing or with only an adjoining wall or two) can be regarded as a real "home."</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>I've never understood why this distinction should be made. One can have almost as much privacy in an apartment as in a house. The only real difference appears to be that apartments cost less than houses do and usually require less maintenance (which means less expense to the resident). In other words, a "home" in the popular mind of the present day means a costly residence for the "haves" in this world, those who can afford a house, while apartment dwellers aren't entitled to call their (rented) space a "home."</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>This question has completely eluded the author, but her book would have been quite different, I suspect, if she had addressed it.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>The miscellaneous facts she introduces into her account are extraordinarily interesting. For instance, people in the past expected far less comfort in their residences than we do today. They were cold and crowded surroundings, and furniture came into the picture only fairly recently.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>This is a book that is well worth a careful reading.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>16 May 2017</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>_____________________________________</b><br />
<b><br />FLORA, KATE CLARK</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #45818e;"> DEATH DEALERS: HOW COPS AND CADAVER DOGS BROUGHT A KILLER TO JUSTICE</span></i> (2014)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>A true-crime narrative, set in New Brunswick, Canada, telling of the process of capturing David Tanasichuk, who killed his wife Maria, apparently because he desperately needed money to support his drug habit--and Maria happened to have quite a bit of pawnable or saleable jewelry, which he promptly hocked or sold shortly after her death.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>It makes for an interesting story though sometimes the writing is pedestrian.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>And, just as an aside, I've never known anyone who wore up to 20 rings at a time as Maria is said to have done. I can't imagine how she did it.</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>3 April 2021</b></div><div>____________________________</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b> <b>FORNI, P. M.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b><span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>THE CIVILITY SOLUTION: WHAT TO DO WHEN PEOPLE ARE RUDE</em></span></b> (2008)<br />
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<b>The author is a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University who is concerning himself with civility. This book isn't a guide to manners, exactly. For one thing, it isn't nearly comprehensive enough to qualify as an all-purpose etiquette book in the Miss Manners vein.</b></div>
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<b>Forni sets up a series of situations and briefly outlines one or more ways of dealing with them. He concentrates particularly on travel, driving, and the Internet.</b></div>
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<b>In general, the recommendations seem sensible, but there were all too many situations where I wanted to say, "Let it go! Forget about this!" but where Forni recommends saying something to the offending party.</b></div>
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<b>How much peace and quiet is a plane passenger really entitled to during a flight, for instance? Forni seems to believe that a passenger has a right to demand it. He also believes that people have a right to dictate what topics others can talk about.</b></div>
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<b>A little of this kind of insistence goes a long way, in my experience. All too soon a civility-chaser who pursues Forni's recommendations will be acting tyrannical.</b></div>
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18 November 2012<br />
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<strong>FORSTER, E. M.</strong><br />
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<strong><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic;"><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> A ROOM WITH A VIEW</span> </span>(1908)</strong><br />
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<strong>On the surface this seems to be a romantic novel with a happy ending--boy gets girl, and they live happily ever after. But it is ever so much more than that.</strong></div>
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<strong>Lucy, around whom the story turns, eventually faces a choice once she has decided to break her engagement to Cecil Vyse: she can become a liberated woman, never marrying but working at a job, or she can take the romantic route and give herself to George Emerson, the man who has been all but excluded from her world for having twice taken it upon himself to kiss her unexpectedly.</strong></div>
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<strong>The author makes it quite clear that Lucy's battle is with the physical feelings that George has awakened in her. Apparently George has not tried any such tactics as George has used, and indeed George himself makes quite a case for his having no real strategy but just having been carried away, acting on the impulse of the moment.</strong></div>
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<strong>For that time and place--among the more prosperous British around 1900--George's impulsive kisses were clearly regarded as an insult to Lucy so severe as to be almost an assault. Moreover, there has been a witness, and much of the story revolves around the treatment of that witness (Lucy's cousin Charlotte) and what she knows.</strong></div>
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<strong>Although not much is made of it, there is also the scene where Lucy and a couple of others happen to witness several naked men swimming--one of them George, and another (somewhat surprisingly maybe) the beloved clergyman. </strong></div>
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<strong>The two snatched kisses and the naked swimming scene have apparently had a profound effect on Lucy, and the reader is probably hoping that she will come to her senses and ditch Cecil Vyse before it is too late.</strong></div>
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<strong>The story is simple enough but it is the dialogue that gives it far more depth than a run-of-the-mill love story. Lucy and her brother Freddy are capable of acerbic wit--and both want to break free of the bonds of convention imposed by them on their mother, the amusingly named Mrs. Honeychurch, and her social milieu.</strong></div>
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<strong>The story often targets the snobbery and class-consciousness of British society. While a light-hearted story in many ways, it is shot through with critical arrows aimed at a world perceived to be too fragile to last much longer. The era of "gracious living" was sustained only at great cost, and Forster sees how flimsy and wrong-headed the whole structure of that life has been.</strong></div>
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<strong>3 July 2019</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #45818e;">MAURICE </span></em>(1913; published posthumously, 1971)</strong><br />
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<strong> Forster's novel about homosexuality came to light only after his death. Originally written in 1913-14, it was revised twice by the author (1932 and 1960) but apparently he thought it too controversial to be publishable, even in the more tolerant climate of his later life.</strong></div>
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<b>Presented here is an England that discreetly looks the other way while young men form sexual attachments for one another. Pretending that these attachments never happen was a necessity given the laws that made homosexual relationships a crime.</b></div>
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<b>Maurice Hall appears at 14 but we see him on into his early adulthood, as he becomes a stockbroker. He has always regarded girls/women as if they were another order of being, creatures from a different planet, perhaps. He can't work up any physical interest in them. But he forms intense attachments to men--notably Clive Durham, a schoolmate.</b></div>
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<b>It looks as if the bond between Clive and Maurice will become permanent--when suddenly Clive declares that he has discovered that he likes women and is about to marry one. Aware that Clive's family is eager to have an heir, Maurice feels helpless and devastated. </b></div>
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<b>Some years later Maurice visits Clive and his wife and experiences a crisis, culminating in his decision to visit a hypnotist in an attempt at correcting what he feels obliged to think of as a defect. Toward that end, he lies to Clive and his wife, saying he's already engaged to a woman.</b></div>
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<b>Meanwhile he's rapidly developing a relationship with Alec Scutter, a newer servant in the Clive Durham household and one who is about to emigrate to Argentina. Alec is crude and lower class, with a chip on his shoulder, and shrewdly knows how to suggest blackmail to Maurice without being blatant about it.</b></div>
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<b>That Maurice is disintegrating by this time should be apparent to the reader. There is an incident where he knocks an older man down on a train and causes his nose to bleed. There is the way he lashes out at a servant unnecessarily. Without putting his battle into words, he is clearly struggling hard against what he feels to be true--that his homosexuality is innate and irreversible--and what he knows is expected of him: a heterosexual existence. He sees himself with his chosen partner, Alec, defending their life against a critical world: "...when two are gathered together, a majority shall not triumph" is what he feels he and Alec must demonstrate.</b></div>
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<b>Many old notions in England were in the process of crumbling at the time when this book was written. This story isn't an especially good representation of that crumbling world, however.</b><b> This may be because Maurice either does some very odd things--yelling "Come!" out the window repeatedly at Clive's so that Alec will climb up to his bedroom window, for instance--or because the author hasn't made it clear how much of what is described is real and how much is a dreamscape. However, the character of Alec stands out. He is completely understandable, and his often ignoble part in the events shows how very keenly the class differences must have made themselves felt.</b></div>
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<b>Forster is especially sensitive to the class structure that was deeply embedded in the world he inhabited, and this book is one more instance of that sensitivity. But, astonishingly (considering the time when it was written), he also provides an eloquent statement of the homosexual's dilemma.</b></div>
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20 November 2013</div>
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<strong><em> <span style="background-color: white;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE LONGEST JOURNEY</span></span></em></strong><span style="background-color: white;"> </span>(1922)<br />
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<b>Said to be Forster’s own favorite among his works, this novel is definitely not my favorite. Although it contains interesting observations about the English public school system and about child bullies, the plot is contrived, probably faulty, and hard to follow.</b></div>
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<b>Ricky, the sensitive, lame protagonist, marries a woman who turns out to be "legacy-hunting" and who persuades him to hide his knowledge that another man is really his half-brother. Steve, the "earthy" half-brother, turns out to stand for Good, as does Ricky’s friend. Characters, including Ricky himself, die off in droves in this story, with very little attention given to their deaths--creating an oddly unreal impression throughout the absurd narrative. Very disappointing.</b></div>
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6 January 2004<br />
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<strong><br /></strong> <strong>FOWLES, JOHN<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE MAGUS</span></em></strong> (revised edition, 1977)<br />
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<b>A long novel, set mainly in Greece. It seems to have been changed considerably since its first edition. The story is larded with phrases and whole sentences and paragraphs in Greek or French, untranslated, and every section is prefaced by a quotation from the Marquis de Sade.</b></div>
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<b>When I read a work of fiction, I expect to find an interesting story with characters who capture my attention. In this book, the narrator/protagonist seems so incredibly dense and stupid in the way that he knocks his head against a stone wall throughout this novel that I found him tiresome.</b></div>
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<b>Fowles said that the original title of this book was <em>The God Game</em>. I have a notion that he might have written this book intending it to be an allegory about God's nature (God as a sadist). It's the only way this story can make much sense.</b></div>
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<b>Fowles also mentions having been influenced by Alain Fournier's novel <em>Le Grand Meaulnes</em>, a misty story of Platonic search for a vision of perfection that can never be grasped. This pointless but endless quest seems to be the "problem" of Urfe, the protagonist in <em>The Magus.</em></b></div>
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<b><em>The Magus </em>is an intellectually pretentious work, in my opinion. Moreover, I had the uncomfortable sensation that the author had his eye on the cinematic possibilities when he set the story in Greece. This uncomfortable sensation turned into downright annoyance by the time I got to the dramatic pageant, with characters dressed up in masks of animal heads. </b></div>
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27 July 2005<br />
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<b>FRANKLIN, RUTH</b><br />
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<b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i> SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE</i></span> (2016)</b><br />
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<b>Some years ago I read another biography of Shirley Jackson, and the author of this newer one cites it rather often. Even if Franklin's biography adds little that is new, it is a sympathetic portrait of a writer who she maintains deserved to be taken more seriously than she was.</b></div>
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<b>Whether she makes a good case isn't for me to say since I've read only one story by Jackson--the one she is best known for, "The Lottery"--but her life is of interest. A woman of her era who could combine motherhood (she had four children) with a successful career as a writer has achieved something beyond the wildest dreams of most women of the time.</b></div>
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<b>It wasn't accomplished without a heavy price, as the book points out. The emotional toll on Shirley Jackson was intense, and she died at only 48).</b></div>
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<b>2 November 2019</b><br />
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<b><br />FRASER, CAROLINE</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER</span></i> (2017)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>After having read three other books meant to provide a picture of the life of the author of the popular <i>Little House</i> books, I found this biography by Caroline Fraser to be the most thorough-going and balanced. Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and views are probably especially difficult to discern on account of her intense literary involvement with her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Fraser delves into the extent to which Lane was responsible for the content of Wilder's published work and concludes that Lane was by far the inferior writer--and that she all too often was pursuing her own political agenda.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Lane and possibly Wilder were, unfortunately, fascistic. What Fraser gives us is an author who helped to propagate a myth that the American public loved: of the basically happy frontier family, courageously overcoming obstacle after obstacle, conquering the wilderness almost single-handedly but clinging to the values of home and hearth above all. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Fraser seems to acknowledge that the myth was false and self-justifying--but her objective isn't to debunk the <i>Little House</i> books so much as to narrate Wilder's life and the context in which it was lived.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>She presents a scathing account of the televising of the Wilder books, focusing on the way in which Michael Landon, who played Pa, turned the TV dramatization into a showcase for himself--thus departing considerably from the original books, where the focus was on Laura.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This is a very timely account of a life that ended many decades ago, for it highlights the strong strain of bigotry and fascism that has been running through American life all along, and the recent Presidency of Donald Trump has been one more instance of an ideology that has long been a catastrophic element in our heritage.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>15 July 2021</b></div><div><b>___________________________________<br /></b>
<strong>FREEMAN, GREGORY A.</strong><br />
<em><strong> </strong></em><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><em><strong> LAY THIS BODY DOWN: THE 1921 MURDERS OF 11 PLANTATION SLAVES</strong></em> </span>(1999)<br />
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<b>In Georgia John S. Williams, a white farmer, owned a plantation worked by black men whom he had bailed out of jail. In exchange for their debt to him, they were bound to do his bidding--in perpetuity, as it turned out, for the debt was never regarded as paid, and Williams locked his peons up at night to insure that they couldn't escape. He and his sons (who ran sub-plantations of the same type) were always well armed, and bloodhounds were at the ready in case any black man tried to get away. The peons were beaten cruelly and often. Some were killed.</b></div>
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<b>Since peonage was against the law (though it was a frequently overlooked law throughout the south at the time, since it was a way for the south to keep the slave economy that had sustained it before the Civil War while nominally acknowledging that the former slaves were "free"), federal investigators showed up on Williams's plantation, looking into the matter of peonage there.</b></div>
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<b>Williams was concerned that they might have found out too much, and so he determined to end the lives of eleven black men whom he regarded as most likely to reveal his guilt. Accordingly he ordered his overseer, a young black man named Clyde Manning, to help him kill these men. Manning clearly did not want to kill the men, but Williams emphasized that he had no choice: "It's your neck or theirs, Clyde," he said, and Manning knew he meant it.</b></div>
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<b>The men were bludgeoned to death or dropped live off a bridge in pairs, chained together, along with stones to weight them down. </b></div>
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<b>The evidence surfaced later, and Williams was convicted--a strange turn of events in Georgia of that time, when it was highly unusual for a white man to be convicted on the testimony of a black hired hand.</b></div>
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<b>Later Manning was convicted too. Both men went to prison, Manning to die of tuberculosis only a few years later after serving on a chain gang while incarcerated.</b></div>
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<b>This story is riveting--and gives a very grim picture of life for black people in the south after the Civil War.</b></div>
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<b>One question I was left with was whether the reader is supposed to believe that Williams's family scenes during the courtroom--his weeping wife, his children clustering around him--were authentic and spontaneous, or staged for the sake of persuading the audience. I am inclined to believe that they were entirely staged, but I wish that the author had dealt with this question. The scenes (and there were several) have a Norman Rockwell quality that is almost too poignant to be real, given what we know for a fact about John Williams: that he was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.</b></div>
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(22 December 2005)<br />
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<b>FRENCH, TANA</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">IN THE WOODS</span></i> (2007)</b><br />
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<b>This was a very absorbing mystery involving murders that seemed to be related though they are separated in time by many years. The murders were brutal--and the victims were children. One of the pair of detectives assigned to the case, Ryan, has a personal link with the earlier murder, and much of the narrative concerns his struggle with the need to dredge up a forgotten traumatic past.</b></div>
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<b>The setting is Ireland, and the author seems to have a thorough command of the people and their speech. She gives us a credible cast of characters behaving in ways that we can (usually) understand.</b></div>
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<b>Ryan sometimes seems almost too self-pitying, even whiny, but he admits his own failings and sees himself as troubled. Cassie, on the other hand, is almost too often absolutely right in her judgments.</b></div>
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<b>But the questions the reader has are dealt with as the story proceeds, and the narrative hangs together in a well-constructed way. Moreover, Tana French writes in a fluent, often lyrical style.</b></div>
<b><br /></b> <b>15 December 2018</b></div><div><b>____________________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>FRENKEL, FRANÇOISE</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">A BOOKSHOP IN BERLIN: THE REDISCOVERED MEMOIR OF ONE WOMAN'S HARROWING ESCAPE FROM THE NAZIS</span></i> (2019; originally published 1946)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author was a Polish Jewish woman who opened a French bookshop in Berlin in the 1920s. Under the Nazis her bookshop came to an end, and this is an account, not so much of the bookshop but of the impact it had on this woman's life. She was caught up in a maze of trying to avoid being herded onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. She accomplished her astounding escape by perseverance and good fortune, but it took three grim attempts to get her to Switzerland.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Oddly unmentioned in her account is the fact that she was married and that her husband had been sent to Auschwitz, where he died. I have found no explanation for this omission but perhaps she made the decision to omit it on the advice of a publisher or editor, who may have wanted this account to be purely her story. And it is.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>It is beautifully focused and well told. She doesn't pause for many details about her life before the bookshop but she often gratefully mentions the good-heartedness of some very generous French people who helped along the way, as she sought shelter in various parts of France.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It would be interesting to know more about how this book, published in 1946, stayed forgotten until it turned up in some attic and was reissued in 2019. How many other books that deserve to be read are languishing somewhere in obscurity?</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>March 6, 2022<br />____________________________</b><br />
<b>FRITZSCHE, PETER</b><br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> LIFE AND DEATH IN THE THIRD REICH</span></b></em> (2008)<br />
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<b>The author is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, and he has apparently studied the literature of the Nazi era and the Holocaust very comprehensively. Drawing heavily on the astute observations in the <a href="http://wordswordswordsbooks.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2005-07-04T19:52:00-07:00&max-results=500&start=5&by-date=false">diaries of Victor Klemperer</a> as well as on many other sources, he paints a picture of the Germans that makes no apologies for them.</b></div>
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<b>They were not "just following orders," nor, by and large, were they just going along with the genocide idea for the sake of the other elements of Nazism. They were often whole-heartedly participating in the genocide.</b></div>
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<b>Fritzsche gives close attention to the use of the "Sieg Heil!" greeting in Germany--noting how often and on what occasions it was used. He finds that it was in very common use, replacing the more traditional forms of greeting at every level of social discourse. He moves on to explore the extent to which Gentiles and Jews knew about what was really happening to the Jews and other "undesirables" who were deported--never to be heard from again.</b></div>
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<b>Fritzsche offers no explanation for the Germans' behavior during the Nazi era, though he emphasizes that they were hurting economically in the 1930s, probably hurting enough to be desperate. He just lets us know that this is how it was, and yes, most Germans had a very good idea what was happening to the Jews.</b></div>
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<b>What is most puzzling to me is that so many people bought the twisted logic of the Nazis' plans. Why accelerate the "final solution" just when Germany seemed in danger of losing the war? The logic behind this change in plans escapes me--except that Fritzsche strongly suggests that greed was a very powerful motivation.</b></div>
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<b>The people whom the Germans were so rapidly moving about and ridding themselves of had property--and jobs. Land, valuables, assets that were coveted and all too easily seized. And, as people, they were occupying space.</b></div>
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<b>One wonders about the burgeoning population of the world. Will there be other instances of genocide as the world's population grows? More recent events seem to point in this direction.</b></div>
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<b>Fritzsche clearly does not believe that the Germans are uniquely inclined to hatred and brutality. His book is describing the way things probably were for the ordinary person in Germany between 1933 and 1945.</b></div>
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27 February 2013<br />
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<b>FROST, RANDY O. AND STEKETEE, GAIL</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> </b><i><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">STUFF: COMPULSIVE HOARDING AND THE MEANING OF THINGS</span></b> </i>(2010)<br />
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<b>The authors have interviewed and studied several compulsive hoarders--persons whose accumulations of personal belongings have reached dangerous proportions. The objective was to analyze their motivations and behavior patterns and offer assistance in the daunting task of (1) disposing of the excess stuff and (2) effecting a permanent change in the hoarders' habits.</b></div>
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<b>It seems to have been a discouraging enterprise since many hoarders do not perceive their accumulations as a problem.</b></div>
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<b>The authors point out that persons who house large numbers of pets irresponsibly are also hoarders--and that there is a clear link between obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding.</b></div>
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<b>Some hoarders have been able to continue their hoarding simply because they had enough money to pay for more storage space for their stuff. And the authors indicate that the US trend toward bigger and bigger houses is encouraging hoarding. Since 1970 the average house size [in the US] has increased by 60%, they tell us.</b></div>
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<b>The book isn't very carefully written, however. The authors give a citation from William James dated 1918 (he died in 1910). They haven't sorted out the difference between <i>convince</i> and<i> persuade</i>, and so there are frequent sentences like <i>When I convinced her to discard</i>... .</b></div>
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<b>Nevertheless, this was an interesting study of a disturbing phenomenon.</b></div>
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28 July 2013<br />
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<strong>FUSSELL, PAUL<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BAD; OR, THE DUMBING OF AMERICA</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1991)<br />
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Amusing incisive commentary on contemporary mores and style.<br />
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(1 June 1998)<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">DOING BATTLE: THE MAKING OF A SKEPTIC</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></strong>(1996)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author's autobiography, with a particular emphasis on his service in World War II. Growing up in Pasadena, California, he was in for a rude awakening when he entered the military. Later he went to graduate school and became a professor of English, concentrating on the 18th century and Samuel Johnson. Fussell's self-critical approach prevents this book from being arrogant or supercilious. He offers many refreshing if pessimistic perspectives on the American scene.</b></div>
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17 August 2005<br />
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___________________________</div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121038853504352692005-07-05T16:27:00.005-07:002022-11-05T16:22:24.008-07:00G<strong>GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE CULTURE OF CONTENTMENT</span></em> </strong>(1992)<br />
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<b>An essay by the well-known economist, arguing that the US is dominated by a moderately well-off class of citizens who embody "the culture of contentment"--a smug willingness to wall themselves off from the major problems besetting the society today. He views the US military as having an alarming independence and power and is concerned about the lopsided budgeting of vast amounts of resources on largely unnecessary defense buildups. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has had to look for "threats" elsewhere to justify the continuing outlay of resources for national defense. Galbraith regards the US as being in an increasingly untenable position when it comes to defense spending and the failure to address fundamental socioeconomic problems.</b></div>
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3 September 2005<br />
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;">GARR, TERI</span></strong><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><em> SPEEDBUMPS: FLOORING IT THROUGH HOLLYWOOD </em></strong>(2005)</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;">This account of her life by the actress/dancer Teri Garr interested me primarily because she has multiple sclerosis and became an MS "ambassador" for a large pharmaceutical company that produces one of the immunomodulatory injectable drugs now being widely used to retard the progression of the disease.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">Her account treats the MS rather lightly and in passing, it seems to me. Mainly her story concerns her career in acting. She comes across as a likable person, one who can laugh at herself. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">She maintains that a couple of her friends decided that she had MS before she was even diagnosed with it--and that they spread this rumor around, thus impeding her chances of getting more work in Hollywood as an actress. This backstabbing by her presumed friends must have been hard for her to tolerate. The more usual course of events is for the person who finds out he/she has MS to try to conceal it from employers for as long as possible--and to find that friends and relatives remain in denial about the diagnosis even after they've been told about it.</span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">15 November 2007</span><br />
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<strong>GAWANDE, ATUL, MD</strong><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> BEING MORTAL: MEDICINE AND WHAT MATTERS IN THE END</span></i> (2014)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Although sometimes harrowing, the accounts presented by the author here are meant to illustrate an important point--that modern medical care as practiced in the US (and probably in quite a number of other countries) places too much emphasis on doing everything possible to save a human life.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Dr. Gawande is in favor of more knowledge about when to back off, when to let a patient live out the remaining time in peace, without having to endure the many hospitalizations and ICU stays, surgeries and other procedures that are so often part of a seriously ill person's life towards the end.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>He also stresses that sometimes the patient would prefer palliative care to the more drastic measures that could be taken to save his life, but the family, in their zeal for keeping their loved one alive as long as possible manages to overrule that preference.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>He cites cases from his own experience and especially from his own family's, closing with a moving account of his father's traditional Hindu funeral.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>22 September 2022</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b>
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COMPLICATIONS: A SURGEON'S NOTES ON AN IMPERFECT </span></em></strong><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">SCIENCE </span></em>(2002)<br />
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<b>A surgical resident reflects on several instances where medical mistakes were made--and on the difficulty of finding the right treatment for a patient in a world where there are so many variables.</b><br />
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3 September 2005<br />
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<strong></strong><br /><b>GEORGE, ELIZABETH</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><i style="color: #45818e;"> A GREAT DELIVERANCE</i> (1988)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>A detective story set in England though the author is American runs the risk of getting customs and language wrong but Elizabeth George seems to have no problem making her situations British enough to be believable, but that is just one ignorant American opinion. She is particularly aware of the class consciousness in the UK--and, incidentally, the two characters who turn out to be the most understanding and compassionate in the book happen to be members of the aristocracy--Inspector Lynley and his friend and lover, Lady Helen.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Lynley is quite a stud, in addition to being so patient and big-hearted that even Barbara, his reluctant assistant who has an unfortunate history of dealing with him, is managed with finesse in spite of some outrageous outbursts on her part.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Barbara is trying hard not to ruin her chances in her chosen occupation--police work--by ingratiating herself with Lynley. But she keeps forgetting herself.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The two have a murder to solve, and they solve it. A man has been found beheaded, and his younger daughter is at the scene, saying she did it. Nobody who knows her believes that she could have. The reader goes along hoping that somehow she isn't guilty, but this reader began to suspect early on that she did kill her father but that there are dark secrets about the father-daughter relationship lurking in the shadows.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>They would need to be very dark indeed to explain such a brutal murder but they do turn out to be. In fact, towards the end, when the truth about the father is coming out, the sordid details are almost unbearably grim.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>I wonder about Barbara--whether she is believable. Her long tirade directed at Lynley at the end, just after Lynley has had a "gotcha" moment, seems overdone even for the Barbara we have come to know throughout the narrative--harshly judgmental in the extreme. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>However, it was an absorbing story. It did remind me somewhat of Dorothy Sayers (<i>Nine Tailors</i>) with its use of literary allusions and ecclesiastical knowledge, and at times these seemed like somewhat pretentious add-ons that didn't contribute much to the story, but that is a minor quibble.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>5 November 2022</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>__________________________</b></div><div>
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<b>GILBERT, SANDRA M.</b><br />
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<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">WRONGFUL DEATH: A MEDICAL TRAGEDY</span></em><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1995)<br />
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<b>An English professor is suddenly widowed when her husband--also an English professor, at the University of California at Davis--dies just after successful surgery for prostate cancer. This is her account of the probable hospital/doctor errors responsible for his death and of her malpractice suit.</b><br />
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15 May 1998<br />
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<span style="color: #993300;"><strong>GINTHER, JOHN ROBERT </strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #993300;"><strong><br />
<em> BUT YOU LOOK SO WELL</em></strong> (1978)<br />
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<span style="color: #993300;"><b>I read this book in 1980.. The author, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but was not told of the diagnosis until many years later. The diagnosing doctor told Ginther's wife, who agreed to withhold the information from him. This book is out of print now but is an instructive eye-opener when it comes to the way things are sometimes done in medicine.</b></span></div>
<span style="color: #993300;">
<br />1 August 2004<br />
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<strong>GLASGOW, ELLEN</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSt0_6epCFteyj3O9CrGyxT2WsuYozGHQNRFGufYO3D_pMp34dNNybptw" /></div>
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE WOMAN WITHIN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY</span></em> </strong>(1954)<br />
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<strong>Ellen Glasgow is probably not as well known as she should be. Her novel<em> Vein of Iron </em>has virtues that many American novels lack--not the least of which is a firm entrenchment in a realistic view of the world that doesn't dwell on the sordid or the sensational but that quietly stresses some hard truths about life as it moves forward for most people.</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>She wrote this autobiography piecemeal in her final years and intended it for posthumous publication. She was a native of Richmond, Virginia, and knew at first hand the way in which the Civil War was affecting both the southern landowners and former slaves. </strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>She tended to be sickly as a child, and was probably more cosseted than a child in a less prosperous family would have been. There is a strain of self-pity running through this account but it is muted and--to me anyway--tolerable.</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>In her literary career she knew many eminences on the American and Anglo-American literary scene and she provides vignettes of James Branch Cabell (a lifelong friend), Henry James, and others.</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
22 October 2009<br />
<strong>______________________________</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>GODWIN, GAIL</strong><br />
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<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><em>FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER</em> </span>(1991)<br />
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<strong>This novel concerns a central character whose mother leaves her and her father for no clear reason—and is later killed in an accident. </strong><br />
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<b>While reading the book I had hopes of finding out why this clergyman’s wife left her husband and daughter to go off with a woman friend. But now I’ve finished it, and only one question was resolved: by all accounts the two women weren’t lesbians. That hadn’t been my concern. I was wondering how the mother could justify just taking off like that. Over a year passes before the fatal accident—and during that time she and the woman friend go to England for an extended stay. In other words, enough time without visits has passed so that it is clear that the break will probably be permanent.</b></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story ambles on through the daughter’s life, taking her up to her early twenties and her father’s sudden death. There is a long segment about a community issue, with the parishioners and the various clergymen all getting into it, and I don't know if the author intends us to sympathize with the Episcopal church’s extremely emotional reaction to a threat of losing their cherished hundred-year-old Christ figure that adorns the church’s front yard. All of these people can get worked up about: saving this piece from demolition by land developers. As the plot thickens and the statue is vandalized by being hacked to pieces—leading fortuitously to a wondrous ecumenical reconsecration service—I felt sure Godwin wrote this part with a straight face. We’re not supposed to be sitting there as readers saying, “Is this what matters to Christian folk? Statues and buildings, the priestly stoles and chasuble, this fascination with rituals and holy water?” We never learn who the vandals were, either, though for a while there is much speculation.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is the way the whole book is: It raises questions, then cheats us by dropping them and trusting we won’t notice this sloppiness. And it isn’t an open-ended novel the point of which is that there are no answers. Not at all. At the end Godwin appears to be very neatly tidying up all the loose ends—except that she isn’t. She tidies up only those of the most recent sections of the book, leaving all the earlier ones untended to. Such a book is an insult to the reader.</b></div>
<br />
20 February 1992<br />
<br />
<br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d;"><i> EVENSONG </i> </b>(1999)<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel, the sequel to <i>Father Melancholy's Daughter</i>, rubbed me the wrong way and went on too long. The married couple, both of whom are members of the Episcopal clergy, are a bit too angelic to be interesting. Also, the author seems primly intent on demonstrating that she can write a "respectable" novel about "nice," "caring" people and still coyly toss in a few reminders that she knows the facts of life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In places, this novel reads like a sermon. It is replete with high Anglican theology, and its characters have a laughably prosperous life in spite of a welter of problems thrown at them as the novel proceeds.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are some very obvious flaws in plot development, too: a problem with which the main characters wrestle for a large part of the story is whether a lay-brother "monk" who descends on them from a known monastery is who he claims to be. Had these characters taken the obvious step of contacting the monastery--easy enough in 1999, surely--to check out his story, there would have been almost no plot to this novel. Why did these supposedly eminently sensible and intelligent characters not do so? Why was the possibility never even broached? If Gail Godwin is trying to be the American Barbara Pym, she fails at it.</b></div>
<br />
24 August 2001<br />
______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GOLDHAGEN, DANIEL JONAH</strong><br />
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST</span></strong> </em>(1996)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This study of the Germans' behavior during the Nazi Holocaust is an angry book, and I'm not sure how fair it is. Goldhagen is trying to answer the question that has troubled many people ever since the Holocaust: How could ordinary Germans not have known that Jews and other "undesirables" were being slaughtered by the millions right in their midst? And if they knew, why were there almost no protests?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Goldhagen's answer is that ordinary Germans did indeed know. In fact, he claims, many were all-too-willing participants in the slaughter. One of his chief points is that although the Germans charged with the responsibility for the actual killing often could have opted not to do any killing of Jews, they went ahead anyway and took part in the brutal murders. He maintains that the typical German had been taught a virulent form of anti-Semitism from birth--and therefore had no problem at all with falling in with the murder of the Jews. The goal of the Nazis was the total annihilation of all Jews, all over Europe. The ordinary German subscribed to this goal whole-heartedly, or so Goldhagen says.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Moreover, the Christian churches either went along with the Nazis' programme or were silent about it--a silence that was assumed to mean assent.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Another of Goldhagen's points is that the Nazis backed down when people protested enough--and here he uses the example of the Nazis' euthanasia plan. Therefore--he argues--if some Germans had objected as they did to the euthanasia plan, they could have persuaded the Nazis to put a halt to their plans for annihilating the Jews.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is a damning indictment of the German people before and during World War II. The author stresses that Hitler was putting forward an anti-Semitic programme as early as 1920 in his public speeches and writings. The passage of time (over 20 years), with Hitler and his followers constantly hammering home their message of hate, seems to have persuaded most Germans to go along with the ideas of National Socialism.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I do not know enough about the impact of the resistance and protest movements that did exist in Europe and even in Germany at the time, but the White Rose is one group that has been celebrated ever since the end of the war. Surely people must have known at the time that the three young people who were arrested in connection with this group's efforts--at passing out anti-Nazi leaflets--were beheaded the day after their sentencing. This fact alone says something about the atmosphere of repression that must have prevailed in Germany at the time.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Goldhagen does not deal with any of the protest movements except for a couple of passing remarks--for example, one about the attempt on Hitler's life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author does not simply report that a certain number of Jews were shot at a certain camp during a certain time. He gives us the reactions of some of the officers who were in charge of the actual shooting.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He devotes particular attention to the death marches--emphasizing how pointless they were unless the objective was to kill Jews by wearing them down, gradually and with bestial cruelty.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reader can only conclude that Germany must have been ruled by a collection of extremely sadistic madmen who were fiendishly clever in their methods of persuading other Germans to take part in torture and murder.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There can be no adequate response to these grim facts. </b></div>
<br />
5 March 2007<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GOLDSMITH, MARTIN</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY: A TRUE STORY OF MUSIC AND LOVE IN NAZI GERMANY</span> </em></strong>(2000)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author tells the story of his parents--both musicians who fled Hitler's Germany after spending some years playing in the <i>Kulturbund</i>, a showcase cultural group made up entirely of Jewish actors and musicians. They were able to escape the worst horrors of Nazi Germany for this reason--and eventually they came to the United States, where his mother played viola but his father gave up the flute.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author's grandfather was aboard the <em>St. Louis </em>on its voyage (with 900 Jews aboard) to Cuba, where it was turned away, and no other country would take in the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Since my piano teacher was among those on board the <em>St. Louis,</em> I have always had a horrified interest in its sad story. Goldsmith's father and brother eventually found a "home" in France, where they lived on the brink of starvation--and sent beseeching letters to George and Rosemary (the new American names for Martin Goldsmith's parents) in America, pleading for liberation from their tormented existence.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This part of the story left me puzzled. Clearly some of the correspondence never reached the persons involved--possibly because of the intervention of the Nazi censors.</b> </div>
<br />
2 October 2008<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GOOD, JEFFREY AND GORECK, SUSAN<br />
<em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> POISON MIND</span></em></strong> (1995)<br />
<br />
<b>True account of a Florida family poisoned by their next-door neighbor, a Mensa member. Appalling but absorbing.</b><br />
<br />
1 February 1999<br />
________________________<br />
<strong>GORDIMER, NADINE</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSv0mf4gRR6m-79q8Iraot1VLPxM4szqXGIe2eX3eTlNb3148FG" /></div>
<br />
<strong> <em> <span style="color: #38761d;">WORLD OF STRANGERS</span></em> </strong>(1958)<br />
<br />
<strong>I've become fonder of Nadine Gordimer's writing after reading this novel. </strong><br />
<br />
<strong>I'm not sure how much the reader is supposed to like the main character, Toby Hood, who has come to Johannesburg because his family's publishing business has sent him there. I didn't like him much, but the story being told is an interesting one.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Toby becomes friends with an angry African man and with some of his friends as well. The author describes in considerable detail a world most readers won't have known--where even friendship between the black and white races was illegal.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Surprisingly, though the book was banned in South Africa for 12 years, it is not even a thinly veiled polemic for an end to apartheid. Gordimer is simply telling a story and rooting it in the real world as she's known it.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>One of the last segments of the book, in which Toby goes on a hunting trip with some other men, contains some powerfully understated scenes that will probably impress upon the reader's mind the cruelty and senselessness of the whole custom of hunting. There is no preaching here, and the blood and gore involved aren't highlighted. </strong><br />
<br />
<strong>But the point is beautifully made.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>And, since Toby is perhaps the most liberal white man in the story, what does his participation in the guinea fowl hunt say about white men except that the best of them are still cruel?</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Perhaps I am reading more into this story than is there, but if that isn't what it is suggesting, then what is the hunting scene doing in the story?</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Before that there are some scenes involving horse racing. It looks as if Gordimer is saying that the sports indulged in by white people in South Africa are the expensive domains of a cosseted few and often have their basis in cruelty to animals.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>In the meantime, the black Africans, whose country it was in the first place, are being treated almost like slaves. Their country has been usurped by a foreign power.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Courageous people like Nadine Gordimer have persisted in spelling out what apartheid really has done. She has told an interesting story that has important things to say.</strong><br />
<br />
21 June 2010<br />
<br />
<em> <span style="color: #38761d;"><b style="background-color: white;">THE HOUSE GUN</b><b style="background-color: white;"> </b></span></em>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I probably haven't read enough fiction by Nadine Gordimer to be able to comment meaningfully about it, but <em>The House Gun</em> bothered me.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Yes, it's excellent that she's a white South African writer who is portraying the "new" South Africa, where blacks are prominent lawyers and have whites as their friends. But there is more to this story than its depiction of a new order, with the old one still poking through in the form of older people who haven't yet acclimated themselves to the changes.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a story about a young white man whose parents believe in his goodness. He has been an only child, been raised by two intelligent, well-educated parents, who have assured him that they will always be there for him, no matter what happens.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His mother is a doctor, and humanitarian concern plays a large part in his parents' lives even though they haven't been political activists. When it turns out that Duncan, the son, seems to have murdered a young man with whom he was living, the reaction of all who knew Duncan is that he could not have done violence to another human being.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>That being so, and we are made to believe that, why does Gordimer allow his case to be so flimsy? There are no witnesses to the crime. The only "evidence" is that the gardener on the premises (one of the least important characters in this book) saw him coming from the house and saw him drop "something" in the grass. Later the house gun was retrieved from the grass, and Duncan's fingerprints were on it. That is the sum total of the evidence.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The house gun, however, has been handled, possibly by everyone in the house the night of a party the previous night. Duncan has no recollection of the shooting or of wanting to kill Carl Jespersen, the victim. The psychologists theorize that he "blanked out"--was under stress so great that he was acting rationally but with loss of memory for what he did.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The case for his extreme stress is very convincing. But I'm not persuaded that, given the information we are given, he committed the crime. I kept waiting for the author to give us more information, but it is never forthcoming.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>At one point Hamilton Motsamai, the lawyer for the defense, mentions in passing that someone of Duncan's personality type might actually be willing to admit to committing a crime committed by somebody else--for altruistic or romantic reasons, for instance. However, this possibility is dropped as the novel proceeds, and it never comes up again.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I still think that is exactly what might have happened. We never find out much about the relationships among the four other people living on the premises--except for Duncan's affair with Natalie. Carl Jespersen is fleshed out slightly towards the end, but the others are shadowy.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Any one of them might have killed Carl Jespersen. Or some unknown person, even the gardener, might have had a reason to want him dead--and been happy to see Duncan take the rap.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story, if it is supposed to move forward like a murder mystery, doesn't answer some basic questions. Instead, Gordimer uses the judge and the lawyer as mouthpieces for long-winded opinions on current economic and sociological problems.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>At the end of the story we are seeing Duncan serving time for a crime I'm not sure he committed--and yet the book is set up so that we are supposed to believe that he did kill Carl. I just can't buy it.</b></div>
<br />
28 January 2010<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">"LOOT" AND OTHER STORIES</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2003)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I found these stories very hard to follow, but I have a strong hunch that their effect may depend largely on the way they are laid out on the page--the paragraphing, for instance.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It isn't always clear who is talking or thinking what in a recorded version of this book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The stories often deal with race in South Africa. One story, for example, tells of a "coloured" (mixed-race) couple who adopt a white baby who was left anonymously at a church.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nadine Gordimer deals with important themes, and I'm sorry to say I didn't like these stories more. She seems almost to be writing a sociological treatise at times instead of telling a story. I found her style tiresome.</b></div>
<br />
14 November 2009<br />
<br />
<i><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE PICK-UP</span></b> </i>(2001)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Julie is a member of the privileged, well-off, white class in South Africa but is inclined to conceal this fact from her friends--including, at first, a garage mechanic who fixes her car in an emergency, a young man from an unnamed country that may be Pakistan, who goes by the name of Abdul though his real name is Ibrahim.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her real background soon becomes clear to him, however, when she turns up in her father's much fancier car. From this point on the reader might suspect that "Abdul"/Ibrahim is on the lookout for people to exploit on his climb up the economic ladder.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He latches onto her, even likes her considerably though the word "love" doesn't mean much to him. They are both nearly 30 and already have histories. Ibrahim's has been a checkered career, spent bouncing from one country to another in his quest to escape from the less developed world of his roots. Deceptions and deportations have been a routine part of the picture for him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But Julie is quite enamored of him. And he is said to have university training in economics--though from an unknown institution in his native country. This isn't mentioned again after the beginning of the novel, but Ibrahim's persistent willingness to go to prosperous countries (Australia, the UK, the US) and work at menial jobs seems to indicate that he has been waiting patiently for his big chance at something better--that he trusts that his professional training will some day be put to use.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The romance is going along nicely enough when he's again facing deportation. Julie surprises him by buying not only his airfare back to his native country but her own.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We see Julie making earnest efforts at assimilating herself into the society of his family--learning Arabic, teaching English to many of the women relatives, joining in the chores.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He, meanwhile, is out among the men all day, which is the way men behave in this country, without necessarily telling Julie everything he has been doing. She is aware, however, that he is constantly applying for visas and filling out papers so that the two of them can get away--to some country, any country that will accept them. He keeps getting turned down.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Then his big break comes, partly with help from some of Julie's family. Her mother has remarried and is in the US, and the US turns out to be the country that looks as if it might accept Ibrahim and Julie.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She goes along with this, the papers are filled out, the two plane tickets are bought. Then she announces that she's not going.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He has arranged for her to stay with her mother "for a couple of weeks" while he lines up work in Detroit. She probably senses that it might be much longer than a couple of weeks and that the work he will find in Detroit is probably going to be the uncertain, poorly paid labor involving working under cars that he has been doing. In any case she resists the idea of staying with her mother, whom she doesn't know well.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We watch while Ibrahim spins this to his family so as to make it look acceptable: she will stay behind for a few weeks and then join him, after he has work lined up.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We have a pretty good idea that that isn't the way it will work out. By now we have perceived that Ibrahim is pursuing an impossible dream and that Julie has made the one choice that reveals him for what he is: an opportunist who has used her for whatever funds and influence she could provide.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Luckily, she seems to like and get along with his family. We are left hoping for the best for her but fearing that she will be very much alone there without him. Sooner or later perhaps she will return to her South African friends and family, as Ibrahim has predicted all along that she would do.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She has been used, but she has also allowed herself to be used. She brought with her an attractive personality, with the added asset of people in her background who could supply funds and contacts. When it was economically to Ibrahim's advantage, she was his wife. Now that he has used her to make his getaway, she will probably be cast aside.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For Ibrahim's obvious alternative--cancelling his emigration plans and deciding to stay near his wife, the future mother of his children--isn't mentioned but is probably very much present in the reader's mind. His family members don't mention it, but they seem to assume that a chance to emigrate to the US trumps everything else.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a thought-provoking story about one woman's surprising choices. One has to admire Julie's clear-headed approach to her situation. She must be aware that she has been exploited and yet she goes forward with her life uncomplainingly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story raises questions about nationality and citizenship that are hard to answer in an age of easy mobility.</b></div>
<br />
25 January 2015<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GORDON, LYNDALL</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART </span></em>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Lyndall Gordon has enhanced the vast Henry James industry with a seemingly well-documented study and a somewhat original theme: that the inner life of Henry James may have been shaped by the untimely deaths of two women who were clearly important to him, though not necessarily in a romantic way (this question is left undecided)--his cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple, who died very young, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom James may or may not have had a romantic liaison in middle age--who either fell or threw herself from a window in Italy and died.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Gordon makes a considerable case for these two women's strong influence on Henry James. She also wisely leaves the matter of James's possible homosexuality in the realm of the possible but probably unknowable.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>However, I have a quibble with this book that casts some doubt on the validity of her research and her thesis, and that is her treatment of Willliam and Henry James's attitudes toward Jews. She quotes (in passing) a remark by William James where Jews are compared to "maggots," and later, in a different context, she makes the unsubstantiated remark that Henry James was anti-Semitic--and lets it go at that. Nowhere in this book, or in its bibliography, is there any <em>evidence</em> of Henry James's anti-Semitism. Is the reader to assume that Gordon has such evidence? Why should the reader assume this?</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>It would not be so very surprising if evidence of Henry James's anti-Semitism would turn up. But where has it turned up for Lyndall Gordon?</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<strong>26 May 2007</strong><br />
<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GOUDGE, ELIZABETH<br />
<em><br /></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="Elizabeth_Goudge.jpg (288×246)" src="https://gretchenrubin.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Elizabeth_Goudge.jpg" /></div>
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE SCENT OF WATER</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1963)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This British author, who died around 1984, has written a quietly remarkable story of a few people in a village--one a middle-aged woman who arrives there to settle after inheriting property from a cousin she hardly knew. The story revolves around her attempt to find out more about her cousin through reading the journal she left, and to come to terms with her own faith, as well as to care for the cousin’s collection of charming "little things"--miniatures.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>What starts out to be a rather pedestrian tale about things turns out to be much more--a story with an underlying symbolism that doesn’t hit the reader over the head but runs subtly through the narrative. </b></div>
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<br />
<br />
12 March 2003<br />
__________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GOULD, JENNIFER<br />
<em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">VODKA, TEARS, AND LENIN’S ANGEL: MY ADVENTURES IN THE WILD AND WOOLLY FORMER SOVIET UNION</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1997)<br />
<br />
<b>The author, a reporter for the <i>Village Voice</i>, relates her many and varied experiences in Russia and some of the Caucasus regions, including Georgia. Interesting but not always well written.</b><br />
<br />
23 October 2001<br />
______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GRAHAM, KATHARINE</strong><br />
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<img alt="katherinegraham.jpg (211×250)" src="https://annecarolinedrake.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/katherinegraham.jpg" /></div>
<strong><br />
<em><span style="color: #38761d;"> PERSONAL HISTORY</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Autobiography of the woman who owned and ran the <i>Washington Post</i>, a family-owned enterprise, during the Watergate era and later, through a long and bitter pressmen’s strike. In spite of some friends of dubious value--Henry Kissinger, Clare Booth Luce, and others--her life has been influential and useful, and she has approached it with a balanced perspective and humor--even when dealing with her husband's suicide.</b></div>
<br />
2 December 1999<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<b>GRANN, DAVID</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;"> KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI</span></i> (2017)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the 1920s the Osage tribe, after having been forcibly relocated to an unpromising region of Oklahoma, became very lucky--or maybe it was unlucky. Oil was discovered in the region, and because the Osage owned the land and its resources, they received a large fortune for their oil.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>In came the huge oil companies with their drilling equipment, and the slow but sure depletion of that region's oil went on--while the Osage people didn't quite know what to do with their unexpected wealth.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The leasing of the Osage nation's headrights caused conflict, tension, and even murder, as this book chronicles in its focus on some 24 murders that occurred among the Osage in the early 1920s.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Grann traces the sad story of several of these murder victims and their families. He also gives an account of how some of the murderers were ultimately tracked down and convicted--thanks largely to the efforts of the FBI, which was just taking shape under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The book is not a tract in praise of Hoover. In fact, the author is well informed about Hoover's sorry record but sets those facts in the background and concentrates on the individual agents who were instrumental in piecing these cases together.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<b>This story needed to be told.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>30 September 2018</b><br />
<b>_______________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>GRAY, FRANCINE DU PLESSIX</b><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="6a00d8341c627153ef01538e444b21970b-pi (184×276)" src="https://isak.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c627153ef01538e444b21970b-pi" /></div>
<em> </em><br />
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> THEM: A MEMOIR OF PARENTS</span></b></em> (2005)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
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<b>Francine du Plessix Gray has written a lively and graceful account of the lives of her parents--her father, her mother, and her stepfather, Alexander Liberman. After leaving Europe during the war, her mother (Tatiana) became a highly regarded milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue, and her stepfather soon established himself in a position of considerable authority at <em>Vogue</em> magazine. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Many names are dropped in this account, for Gray's parents were keen participants in the world of high fashion and celebrity. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, was a close friend of theirs. But Gray drops names in ways that make it clear that she isn't trying to impress her readers.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In fact, she takes a dim view of her parents even while being very fond of them. She knows them to be vain, cowardly people who have often kept much too close an eye on the main chance--discarding friends when they cease to be of use to them and partying away their lives. The care of the child Francine was often in the hands of other people, but this book isn't about accusing her parents of neglect.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>She seems to have accepted her childhood for what it was, taking the good with the bad and graciously giving her parents the benefit of the doubt.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Her mother had been the great love of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky before marrying du Plessix. The book gives glimpses into life in revolutionary and Soviet Russia that are perceptive and extraordinary.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
13 April 2011<br />
________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GREENE, GRAHAM</strong><br />
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<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong><br />
<em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE COMEDIANS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1966)<br />
<br />
<b>This novel takes place in the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier’s reign of terror and is about a man who inherits a hotel in Port au Prince and his adventures with Jones and Smith, two men he met on the voyage to Haiti. Perhaps a bit too obviously oriented toward a Hollywood version but still a thoughtful work.</b><br />
<br />
12 October 1999<br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT</span> (1969)</em><br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><em></em>In this very funny novel the narrator, Henry Pulling, has led a routine life as a bank manager until the death of the woman he had always known as his mother. This woman's sister--his Aunt Augusta--attaches herself to him at this point and reveals that her sister was not Henry's real mother. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>For most of the novel we do not know who his real mother is, and the questions connected with this mystery would occupy most readers' minds although they do not form the core of the story. (Is his mother someone we already know? Why was the secret kept for so long?--and so on.) Instead we find out more about the intrepid Aunt Augusta and her lovers--especially "Wordsworth," as she calls Zachary, a West Indian black man.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Aunt Augusta, who tends to be involved in somewhat shady international escapades, is a globetrotter, and so we are taken to Istanbul and Uruguay as her mysterious missions occur.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The question of Henry's real mother ceases to matter much--though most readers will have figured it out long before the story ends--and the revelation comes in an oblique, offhanded way, as if to emphasize how little it has to do with the lives being played out in the story.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
7 February 2004<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT </span></em></strong>(1939)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel was written as a potboiler, by the author's own admission. He was working simultaneously on <em>The Power and the Glory</em> but needed more money--and cranked out <em>The Confidential Agent </em>at the rate of 2,000 words a day.</b></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b> </b><br />
<b>Maybe Graham Greene was incapable of writing a bad book, for this thriller has much to recommend it--though it isn't among my Greene favorites, which include <em>Brighton Rock, A Burnt-Out Case</em>, and <em>The Heart of the Matter.</em></b></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>The story centers around D., who enters England from an unnamed country that is at war (Spain?) as a former professor of Romance languages of some distinction, now charged with a mission of procuring a coal contract for his country. His is a dangerous job, as we soon learn, and he is being careful.</b></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>A love story is combined with a thriller here, and perhaps it is this combination that prompted Greene to designate this novel as one of his "entertainments."</b></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>There is a seedy, tired atmosphere pervading the action in this story--an atmosphere Greene excels at creating. It is somewhat like the seediness in Conrad's spy story, <em>The Secret Agent. </em>Greene isn't borrowing from Conrad but mining the same territory, which must be a fertile ground, for it also attracted Henry James, in <em>The Princess Casamassima.</em></b></div>
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<em></em></div>
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<br />
14 January 2009<br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">ORIENT EXPRESS (STAMBOUL TRAIN) </span></b></em> (1932)<br />
<br />
<b>This comes pretty close to being a bad novel by Greene. However, it is a very early work, and he considered it one of his "entertainments"--not to be taken as seriously as his other novels.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Rumor has it that he had his eye on the movies when writing this story. When writers have a movie bee in their bonnet as they write, it often shows, to the detriment of the story they're telling.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There is a love interest, of sorts, and that is where one of the biggest problems lies. Coral Musker, an English chorus girl traveling alone to Istanbul because she's been sent to take a job there, happens into bed en route with Myatt, a young Jewish businessman. She falls in love with him--or thinks she is in love--and would like to think that he cares about her too.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>He does, in fact. He even goes looking for her when she disappears and is in danger. That the story ends without their finding happiness together is to the author's credit. It would have been a much sappier story if they had walked away into the sunset together, and very unlike Graham Greene.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The biggest problem with this novel, which came out only a year before Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany, is its anti-Semitic flavor. To be sure, the most virulently anti-Jewish sentiments in the story are voiced by characters who are very unlikable and untrustworthy. We can assume that Greene isn't promulgating their views.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>But what to make of remarks about a "hand gesture" that is said to be "characteristic of his race"? And other references to Jews as a "race"? Even in 1932 Jewish people weren't usually regarded as a "race," and the whole idea of "race" was about to be called into question as an outmoded concept, one with no meaning. As for hand gestures, some ethnic groups--Italians come to mind--seem more inclined to use expressive body language with their speech, as students of language have often noted.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>An introduction, written many years later by Christopher Hitchens, makes no apologies for Greene. This is probably a book Greene's fans would prefer to forget about.</b><br />
<br />
22 May 2012<br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE HONORARY CONSUL</span></b></em> (1973)<br />
<br />
<b>Contemporary authors so often seem to have their eye on possible film versions of their novels that the reader can almost see the telltale signs. I had this feeling as I was reading <em>The Honorary Consul--</em>and, sure enough, it was made into a movie, <em>Beyond the Limit, </em>which I haven't seen.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Greene isn't at his best here. Sadly, he seems to be going over territory he has covered before--and far more compellingly.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>That Catholicism is going to enter into the story become apparent early on, when we find this sentence: "The Three Marys hung in the sky, like all that was left of a broken rosary chain. The cross lay where it had fallen elsewhere."</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The story involves Charley Fortnum, the "Honorary Consul," who is kidnapped by mistake by a gang of ne'er-do-wells. Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a medical doctor who is half Paraguayan, half English, is bedding his friend Charley's wife Clara, unbeknownst to Charley. Clara has been plucked from the world of prostitution, with which Plarr is familiar. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There is suspense, and there is shooting, and there is much discussion of machismo. But most of all there are long segments of dialogue about Catholicism. Leon, a childhood friend of Plarr's, is a former priest who is now part of the gang.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Greene tries to be straining for the kind of combination of seedy atmosphere and lost souls grappling with questions of faith that he achieved in his better-known works. But this story lacks the impact of those works.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>For one thing, the dialogue on faith seems too long and not well integrated into the rest of the story. And I found it hard to become particularly interested in any of the characters. They aren't well fleshed out, and there are too many of them--at least 28 by my count. With so many people on the stage, there should have been a longer book--or at least a meatier one, with less discussion of the Church.</b><br />
<br />
10 September 2012<br />
<br />
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________________________</div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>GREGORY, DICK</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<strong>
<em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">NIGGER</span></em></strong><em> </em>(1964)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Here we have the well-known comedian’s autobiography, telling of a fatherless childhood in desperate poverty, his struggle to make a living as a comedian, his marriage and children, including the loss of an infant son, and his involvement in the civil rights movement both in Chicago and in the South.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
23 July 2000<br />
<br />
_______________________<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<b>GREIDER, KATHARINE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE BIG FIX: HOW THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY RIPS OFF AMERICAN CONSUMERS</b> </span></em>(2003)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book has some rabble-rousing features but it rests on a foundation of apparently solid facts. And maybe rabble-rousing is what is needed.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book came out eight years ago. The author would probably find more horror stories now because I don't think that the situation has changed for the better since 2003.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Greider explores the ways in which drug companies pursue sales of their products through aggressive marketing to doctors--and through elaborate legal maneuvers that result in bigger profits for the drug companies. Her point is that drug companies should be working in the public interest since their products affect people's health, and yet they are often working against the public interest.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She also discusses DTC (direct-to-consumer) marketing, which has been responsible for the costly attention-getting ads that are flooding the airwaves and magazines.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an informative book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
14 May 2011</div>
________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>GRISHAM, JOHN</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE INNOCENT MAN: MURDER AND INJUSTICE IN A SMALL TOWN</span></em> </strong>(2006)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'm not usually a fan of John Grisham works, which are usually best-sellers. But since this one is an account of an actual case.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There's some stylistic sloppiness in the writing--Grisham is much too fond of using "and such" for my taste, for instance--but it's an absorbing story highlighting the US justice system's extreme unfairness in some instances.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Ron Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, served more than a dozen years, many of them on death row, for a murder he hadn't committed. So did another man--while the actual murderer wasn't discovered, even though there was considerable evidence pointing toward him.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Ron Williamson had had a drinking problem before his imprisonment for murder in the early 1980s, but because a psychotic condition seems to have developed during his prison stay, he was sometimes medicated with psychotropic drugs that took their toll on his health. For many years he was subject to fits of screaming protests of his innocence, but nobody was listening--and the only effect his protests had was (sometimes) to land him in a treatment center for a while. As a rule, though, his mental derangement was left untreated.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>When the case was finally corrected and Ron was freed, he won a sizeable settlement by suing the legal system. His alcoholism continuing, he gave money away with a liberal hand, moved around frequently, and in general was a pathetic figure. It wasn't long before liver cirrhosis caught up with him, and he died, in his early 50s, a victim of the justice system.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The real killer and rapist of Debbie Carter was a man who had been helpfully supplying the local police with drugs like cocaine. The police and apparently some lawyers and judges were instrumental in ignoring or covering up mountains of evidence that would have brought this man to trial--and exonerated Ron Williamson and the other man.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a tragic story from beginning to end--and a damning indictment of the way the US justice system functions.</b></div>
<br />
22 May 2008<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>GROOPMAN, JEROME, MD</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> </strong><strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">HOW DOCTORS THINK</span></em></strong> (2007)<br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and has had a distinguished career in medical research as well as in his writings about medicine.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In this book he isn't protecting his colleagues from criticism. In fact, he often subjects them to criticism, and it is refreshing in a time when the medical profession often seems like a closed circle of people determined to defend their turf.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Are doctors wrong in their diagnoses? Surprisingly many are, according to this book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Are doctors influenced in their choice of treatments by the lavish gifts showered on them by the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries? Yes indeed, Groopman demonstrates--singling out spinal fusion as an example of a procedure that is often done unnecessarily for the relief of low back pain.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Are entirely too many MRIs being ordered? Most definitely. And just how accurately are MRIs read by the experts? Tests have been done that have shown that MRI readings are often astonishingly inaccurate.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author analyzes ways doctors think because they're in the habit of thinking in those ways, and ways in which better doctors think because they are curious enough and daring enough to venture into the realm of less obvious possibilities when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was an interesting and valuable book.</b></div>
<br />
18 March 2009<br />
<br />
<strong>with PAMELA HARTZBAND, MD, co-author):</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><i>YOUR MEDICAL MIND: HOW TO DECIDE WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU</i> </span>(2012)<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A book that may be disturbing to read because it gives details about medical procedures among the critically ill. However, it is unusual in not being completely favorable toward living wills/advance directives.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The authors point out some of the problems that have arisen in dealing with carrying out the specifications in living wills--most notably, the confusion that results when family members or loved ones disagree about what a patient would want.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book provides a view of modern medical care from the perspective of the providers--and should make readers more aware of how very complex a matter it is.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
27 July 2015<br />
<br />
______________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>GUTERSON, DAVID</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i>PROBLEMS WITH PEOPLE: STORIES</i> (2014)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These ten stories concern people with problems, and none of them pretends that the world is a happy, rosy place. Many are set in the Seattle area. One, "Photograph," concerns a man whose son was killed when a salmon-fishing boat near Alaska went down. In more than one story, a man is married to a bossy matriarch. Life isn't easy for Guterson's people.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author has a special gift for dialogue. The characters' conversations are so realistically set down that the reader might easily have overheard them in real life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>David Guterson became well known with his novel, <i>Snow Falling on Cedars </i>(1994)<i>,</i> which I haven't read. This story collection has prompted me to find it.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>29 April 2016</b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;">SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS </span></b>(1994)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Finding out that a book has been a best-seller and then a movie has a red-flag effect on me all too often. Armed with this knowledge about <i>Snow Falling on Cedars</i>, I kept finding passages in the book that indicated that the author was aiming carefully at best-sellerdom and the movies. These indications made it harder for me to appreciate the book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is accomplishing a valuable social objective by calling attention to the plight of those Japanese Americans who were herded into camps in the atmosphere of panicky paranoia following the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are some clear descriptions of what life was like for families in Manzanar, and the horrific injustices suffered by the Japanese Americans--their need to forfeit their property, often farms on which they had labored diligently for many years, for instance--are highlighted.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I wish that the author had been content with telling this story and the related story that is central to the plot--whether Kabuo Miyamoto killed Carl Heine--set in an island community in Washington state.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It would have been a good, compelling story, and the reader could have focused on it. But Guterson dresses it up with an unusual snow storm and power outage right in the middle of the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto. And, as if that weren't enough drama, there is a story that is explored in considerable detail: the close childhood relationship between Kabuo's wife Hatsue and Ishmael Chambers, who became a local reporter.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Guterson doesn't seem to have made up his mind about just what happened in a hollow tree between Hatsue and Ishmael in their early teens because he presents two different versions of it, the second one laden with sexual explicitness, but then he's a bit vague about the date of the trial too. It appears to be 1954 but there are times in the first part of the novel when it seems to be 1961,</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b>Then there are several passages of lengthy descriptions of very ghastly combat scenes, probably included to remind us of the horrors of the Second World War and the anti-Japanese sentiment that anyone fighting on the Allied side would have been encouraged to feel. But one wonders whether Guterson needed to give us quite so much gore.</b></div>
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<b>But gore and sex are known to sell, and this novel seems larded with both.</b></div>
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12 March 2017<br />
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<em></em><em></em></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121050899238261682005-07-04T19:52:00.002-07:002022-07-19T16:42:26.282-07:00H<strong>HABEGGER, ALFRED</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong> <strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS: THE LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON</span> </em></strong>(2002)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This comprehensive biography seems thoroughly researched, and the author is at pains to correct the dating of Emily Dickinson's letters. In one of several appendices, there is a sad list of deaths from tuberculosis. In 1850, 22% of the deaths in Massachusetts were due to tuberculosis, the author tells us.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is sympathetic to his subject though it is clear that her behavior was often enigmatic, as were her writings. He spends perhaps too much time demolishing other biographers of Emily Dickinson, but it is probably a welcome corrective to what passes for scholarship when he hammers away at those critics who have tried to establish her as a lesbian.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He also puts forth the highly plausible idea that her refusal to become a Christian, in a community often swept by enthusiasm for revivals, could have contributed to her reasons for choosing to live apart from the rest of the world for most of her days.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
20 March 2008<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HACKWORTH, COL. DAVID H.</strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><em> ABOUT FACE: THE ODYSSEY OF AN AMERICAN WARRIOR</em> </span>(1989)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an account of the author’s life in the Army, including Korea and Vietnam, and of his ultimate disillusionment. He lied about his age in order to join the Army at fifteen. In June 1971, however, Colonel Hackworth, by now a much-decorated, career military man whose officer status didn’t come from West Point, went public with his criticism of the Vietnam War—on nationwide ABC-TV, where he was interviewed on the “Issues and Answers" program. </b></div>
<br />
May 27, 1991<br />
<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<b> (in collaboration with Tom Matthews):</b><br />
<b><br /></b><em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">HAZARDOUS DUTY: AMERICA'S MOST DECORATED LIVING SOLDIER REPORTS FROM THE FRONT AND TELLS IT THE WAY IT IS</span> </em>(1996)<br />
<strong><br />This is an excellent collection of reports from several recent arenas of US military exhibitionism: Iraq, Serbia, etc. Hackworth is outspoken in his criticism of the US overemphasis on military spending.</strong><br />
<br />
16 February 1999<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HAINEY, MICHAEL</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">AFTER VISITING FRIENDS: A SON'S STORY</span></i> </b>(2013)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a reporter, gives an account of his father's death as he pieces the details together decades later.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His father, who worked for a Chicago newspaper, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1970 when the author was only 6. The obituary notice leaves some questions open about this death--not its cause but just where Bob Hainey was at the time and what he was doing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I can understand the author's natural curiosity to have more information but I fail to understand his feeling that, in all honesty, he should tell his mother what he found out.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book raises some important questions about how and whether information is shared, and with whom. If his mother had seemed interested in knowing details, had tried to seek them out, perhaps he ought to have shared them, but, given the nature of the details and the fact that his mother had been suddenly left widowed with two sons to raise, I see no point in letting her know that her husband had been carrying on an affair with one of his employees.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We don't always owe our loved ones the whole truth. When sharing some information can only hurt the person with whom it is shared, why not keep quiet about it and let sleeping dogs lie?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Interestingly, most of the people Hainey finds and interviews in his quest for details refuse to share the story with him even though he senses that they know more than they are telling. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" isn't an outmoded idea.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
8 August 2015<br />
___________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<strong>HAMILTON,JANE<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A MAP OF THE WORLD</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1994)<br />
<br />
<b>Here we have a novel about two young couples and their children on a Wisconsin dairy farm.</b><br />
<br />
19 December 1998<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HARDY, THOMAS</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQZIFC3vhnDmZwv53nlQ4DGbybw13z0kQvMqP6EgzOrjtGYuv1YZQ" /></div>
<strong><em><br /></em></strong> <em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;"> WESSEX TALES</span> </b>(1888)</em><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A collection of Hardy's shorter tales set in his Wessex country. These stories tend to revolve around grim themes, and some have a ghostly element. Reading these stories before tackling Hardy's novels would provide a good introduction to the Wessex customs and speech--and to Hardy's somber, fatalistic view of the world.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
30 October 2005<br />
__________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HARTFIELD, CLAIRE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">A FEW RED DROPS: THE CHICAGO RACE RIOT OF 1919</span></i> (2018)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For junior and senior high school readers, this is a coherent and readable brief account of the race riot in Chicago in the summer of 1919, which erupted when a black youth ventured into the white area of the Chicago lakefront. In a northern city that ostensibly wasn't segregated, there has been an implicit "social" segregation that has been rigid, and this account of one of its early bitter manifestations is timely reading. One hundred years after the 1919 race riot, this city and the US in general are still fighting a race war.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The 1919 race riot might not have had so many casualties or so much damage if the police hadn't looked the other way and shown their own racial bias in the ways they did.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This shameful episode in the history of one of the largest cities in the US deserves to be highlighted, as is done in this excellent book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<b>6 January 2020</b><br />
<b>______________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>HASTINGS, SELINA</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE SECRET LIVES OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A BIOGRAPHY</span> </i>(2010)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Having read only one work by W. Somerset Maugham--his semi-autobiographical novel, <i>Of Human Bondage</i>--I can't say much about a biography of Maugham, but this particular book strikes me as an attempt to dig up all of the dirt the author could find, perhaps in an attempt at boosting the sales of her book.</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b>Hastings does not shy away from addressing Maugham's individual works, providing brief summaries of them and addressing their critical reception.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, she gives too much attention to delineating Maugham's unfortunate love life, including his disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome, originally the wife of a very prosperous pharmaceutical manufacturer, and proceeding to his long homosexual relationships with two much younger men, one of whom (Gerald) had been arrested for gross indecency and exiled from England forever. There are other relationships, usually with much younger men, and it is clear that Maugham and his circle had no qualms about frequenting boy brothels in Malaya. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The source material for the intimate details of Maugham's life is sometimes questionable. The author cites a couple of men friends in whom Maugham confided about his unsatisfactory marriage, for example. How reliable can this information be?</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hastings states that Hugh Walpole, a good friend of Maugham's, was known among the queer community as the only one among them who succeeded in bedding Henry James--but she offers no evidence to support this anecdote. Other accounts of the life of Henry James contain no mention of it, and in fact state that Henry James probably never had any homosexual encounters.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maugham rose to the status of an internationally known celebrity by virtue of his many plays and film adaptations. In the latter part of his life he was extremely successful--and knew many of the illustrious people of his age: H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, George Cukor, even the Russian leader Alexander Kerensky. He was in demand as a spy in both world wars, and he was nothing if not well-traveled.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Petrograd, Kuala Lumpur, Hollywood, and the Riviera--these are only a few of the places where Maugham could be found. He had an especially close connection with France since he had been born there.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Trained as a doctor, Maugham seems to have abandoned his interest in medicine once he began writing. Eventually he distinguished himself as a public speaker in spite of being troubled lifelong by an embarrassing severe stammer.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Moving in the upper strata of British society as he did, and being the most saleable of Doubleday's stable of writers at the time, perhaps it isn't surprising that he had such a close relationship with his US publisher, Nelson Doubleday, that the publisher built him a bungalow on an estate in South Carolina, with three bedrooms, a large living room, a veranda, a servants' quarters, and a separate cottage for Maugham to work in. The four servants who looked after him during his stay there in the World War 2 era are described in some detail. But then we never find out what happened to that bungalow during the rest of Maugham's life.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a quibble, of course. My main complaint about this biography is my objection to many biographies being written in recent years. I question the usefulness of intensive probing into the bedrooms of biographical subjects. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>It might be argued that Maugham's sexual predilections influenced the way he portrayed the sexuality of his characters. Perhaps. But how far does this train of thought get us? If he has told a story well, isn't it our business as critics or biographers to call it to an audience's attention and to point out particularly adept elements in the story--to hold it up for close inspection as we have it in front of us? We can say that Maugham's presumed bisexuality might have enabled him to have a more realistic view of some aspects of sexuality in women, but do we need to know every sordid detail of his private life?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
21 April 2014<br />
<br />
__________________________<br />
<br /><b>HAZZARD, SHIRLEY</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <span style="color: #38761d;"><i>THE TRANSIT OF VENUS</i> </span>(1980)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>This novel has enjoyed so much critical acclaim that it has almost come to seem like one of those books a person must read. So I read it.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It begins by looking as if it will revolve around two sisters, Grace and Caroline/Caro, who find themselves in the home of Professor Thrale, an astronomer, whose son Christian is engaged to Grace. Early on in the narrative we learn that the young man who also happens to be on the scene, Ted Tice, who is spending the summer working with the professor, will kill himself--many years later.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>We're probably going to plow through the book waiting to find out why and when he kills himself. Instead we are given that answer only in a very oblique way, at the very end, and the book has to be read with considerable care in order to find that answer. Apparently the author wanted the story to be a bit of a test of the reader's attention--so she could play "Gotcha!"?</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Along the way she clutters up the stage with any number of characters and seems to be involving us in other stories involving them, but ultimately most of these characters and subplots seem like padding, contributing almost nothing to this story unless it is to be taken as a chronicle of several people's lives, covering several decades. There are at least 35 characters in this novel, and yet there are only a couple of them about whom the reader is apt to care.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The American Adam Vail, for instance, whom Caro marries, is mainly used as a mouthpiece for the author to air some view on America. Then, too, the author often writes complex sentences that leave the reader bewildered--for instance, in speaking of Caro, there is mention of "the belief, which in Caro was to last her lifetime, that those who do not see themselves as victims accept the greater stress."</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Maybe I've missed the greatness of this book. It left me chilled and feeling as if I'd been played. When I read a novel, I'd like a story well told, not a puzzle designed to test my reading skills.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>September 25, 2021</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>_________________________________</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><b>
HEARD, ALEX</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE EYES OF WILLIE McGEE: A TRAGEDY OF RACE, SEX, AND SECRETS IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH</span></b></em> (2010)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Over half a century has passed since Willie McGee, a black man in Mississippi, was executed for the presumed rape of a white woman, but the author has delved into the story and provides a narrative of it. While he was at it, though, I wish he had come up with an attempt at an explanation of what really did happen.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>None is offered. Instead we have a long, rambling account, with snippets of quotations from a variety of people, some of whom might be very unreliable commentators.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Considerable attention is given to the involvement of various celebrities in this case: William Faulkner, Jessica Mitford, Paul Robeson and others.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There must have been more material about Willie McGee himself, but Heard has not availed himself of it. In fact, he seems to have almost scrupulously avoided the topic of the background and personality of Willie McGee. He suggests in passing that the executed man might have been of subnormal intelligence and understanding, but he is far more interested in pursuing other interests.</b></div>
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<b>One is the considerable activity of the US Communist Party with reference to this case, which became one of their pet causes. As might have been expected, others who might have lent support to Willie McGee tended to back off as soon as they saw indications that the Communists were in his corner.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Whether or not he committed rape isn't really the point of this book, but it would have been interesting to know what really happened, insofar as that can be known. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The point of the book, if there is one, seems to be that execution for the crime of rape is unduly harsh--and is a sentence that has been passed only on black men in the south. Whatever his crime may have been, the author indicates, Willie McGee should not have been electrocuted.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Heard discourses in some detail about Mississippi's notorious "portable electric chair." Willie McGee's execution is described. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In general, the book is making an important point but often lacks focus and provides too much information about material we don't need to know and not enough information about facts that are very important to an understanding of this case.</b></div>
<br />
21 March 2013<br />
______________________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HELLER, JOSEPH </strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR64wfdihbMS-hTWmXAdjrQNZaYp9rNELk4s_uF8x_EbSG3YqYMDg" /></div>
<strong><em><br /></em></strong> <strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">CATCH AS CATCH CAN: SELECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS</span></em> </strong>(2003)<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><strong>This book is a compilation of various writings by the author, published several years after his death. Some of the stories seem slight, but the material about <em>Catch-22</em> was very interesting.</strong></strong></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In particular, there is considerable information about the making of the movie--enough for me to want to see the movie, after all.</strong></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Heller may go down in history as one of those authors who had only one good book in them--but what a book it was. And in <em>Catch as Catch Can</em> it is like encountering beloved old friends to find the familiar characters--Yossarian, Chaplain Tappman, and Major Major, among others--who made so many of us laugh until we ached in the '60s.</strong></div>
<br />
<strong><br /></strong> 5 November 2009<br />
<br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">NOW AND THEN: FROM CONEY ISLAND TO HERE</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This autobiographical book sheds light on some of the originals for characters in Heller's <i>Catch-22</i>, more than thirty years after the publication of that acclaimed novel.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Heller tells of his childhood in Depression-era New York--specifically, Coney Island, where he was part of a fairly close-knit Jewish community. There is rich detail about the Coney Island atmosphere. Heller himself was in World War II, and it is clear after reading <em>Now and Then</em> that much of the experience described in <em>Catch-22</em> is actually very similar to his own.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This memoir largely omits the war, however, and concentrates on Heller's early years: his childhood friends and their activities, the local characters, some of his family.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a well-written and absorbing book. I should think that a reader unfamiliar with <em>Catch-22</em> would find it just as interesting as I did. The book is filled with many humorous anecdotes and observations, and it is well worth the reader's undivided attention.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
18 February 2003<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HENRIKSSON, ANDERS (comp.)<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">NON CAMPUS MENTIS: WORLD HISTORY ACCORDING TO COLLEGE STUDENTS</span></em></strong> (2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I would recommend this compilation of student mistakes as authentic and very funny. When I say "authentic," I mean that these are clearly not "made up" miscommunications but the real thing-- snippets from college students' writing that show how very wrong people can get things sometimes when they might be trying their hardest to get them right.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The selections in this book have been culled from several collections by professors and are a treasure-trove of gems such as "Russia was crushed under the Mongol yolk."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book includes some maps--for instance, one of "Middle Evil Times," with "vacant Bishop Bricks" designated.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
7 June 2002<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<b>HERSEY, JOHN</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">HIROSHIMA</span></em></b> (1946; 1986)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book first ran as a long article in the <em>New Yorker</em> in 1946, with the entire magazine given over to it--no editorials or other articles. .</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hersey focused on six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing (August 1945), and forty years later he wrote a follow-up essay about their lives.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This work had an immense instant popular interest. Albert</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b> Einstein immediately ordered a thousand copies, for instance. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hersey gives considerable attention to the "Hiroshima maidens," the women whose faces were badly disfigured by keloid scars as a result of the bomb--some of whom were brought to the US for plastic surgery.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One has to wonder if the author is taking it upon himself to atone for the US by showing how fundamentally kind most of us are. I was looking for more information on the effects of the bomb blast and its radiation on its victims. These are explored too but by 1986 the information could have been much more detailed. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But as a piece of reporting that had to be done, <em>Hiroshima</em> is a well written, balanced account. It gives the facts without sensationalism or preaching. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hersey seems sensitive to the Japanese people. He emphasizes the silence observed among the people in the aftermath of the bomb. He sees it as a manifestation of the stoicism and resignation to one's fate that are part of many Oriental world-views. Without any information about what had happened to them, the citizens of Hiroshima carried on as well as they could--and it was often their remarkable spirit of caring for one another that saved people from even worse fates.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Most people alive today can't recall a time when the world didn't live in the shadow of the explosions that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hersey is aware that there is no going back to that earlier time. Interspersed with his narrative are announcements of more bomb tests, of more countries that have acquired the bomb, and of the hydrogen bomb.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book ought to chill every one of its readers to the bone, but apparently not enough people have read it. Or if they read it, they weren't chilled enough by it. We may have abandoned our intention to build bomb shelters, and schoolchildren no longer seem to have the air raid drills that were part of my generation's experience, but sixty-five years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear war is still very much a part of the picture.</b></div>
<br />
31 October 2010<br />
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HIASSEN, CARL</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">TEAM RODENT: HOW DISNEY DEVOURS THE WORLD </span></b></em>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is such a short work, really a pamphlet, that it has no sections. Its author is really angry about the way in which Disney enterprises are taking over the scene in Florida. A native Floridian, he makes a good case for his concern and outrage.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His point is that Disney's vision of the world--as touted by the "imagineers"--is one where all animals, even mice, are fuzzy, cuddly, lovable and cute. And above all, they are fake. With this unnatural view of the way things are (because they "ought" to be that way), the Disney people have proceeded to buy vast tracts of land and appropriate it to their carefully organized tourist-trap scenes, and have branched out to create a planned community called Celebration.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nature and natural events have a way of disrupting some of Disney's plans, and Hiassen takes a fiendish delight in any disruption that comes along. He sees the Disney people as probably so powerful as to be unstoppable, but he at least has been willing to express his outrage.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a bitter and often very funny book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
August 31, 2011<br />
__________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HIGHTOWER, JIM</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES: THEY'VE STOLEN OUR COUNTRY AND IT'S TIME TO TAKE IT BACK </span></b></em>(2003)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is a public radio commentator and journalist--and served as the Texas Agricultural Commissioner from 1983 to 1991. He knows whereof he speaks.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Whether he's talking about food or sweatshops or Wal-Mart or the Bush family, he seems always to be on firm ground, with mountains of facts at the ready.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In a hilarious style, he speaks out on behalf of the many ordinary people in the US who are increasingly enraged at the growth in power of big corporations throughout the land.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He takes particular aim at George W. Bush. Like his fellow Texan, Molly Ivins, he has an awareness of Dubya's general ineptitude that is based on knowledge of his record in Texas before rising to national prominence. It isn't a pretty picture.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a frankly rabble-rousing book, but sometimes there needs to be rabble-rousing if anything is to be accomplished. Its polemical nature is buffered by its humor--with chapter titles like "Never Have So Few Done So Much for So Few" and its no-nonsense, gritty language.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A winner of a book.</b></div>
<br />
20 May 2010<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">HILL, BETH ANN</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> </em></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS Q AND A: REASSURING ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY </em></span></strong><strong style="color: #990000;"><em>ASKED QUESTIONS </em></strong><span style="color: #990000;">(2003)</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>A brief book, probably useful for somebody recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, by an author who has MS herself. She includes a handy list of all of the MS centers that have the blessing of the National MS Society, on a state-by-state basis.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>There are some errors in the book--Betaseron was not originally known as Copolymer 1, as Hill states. (Copaxone was called Copolymer 1.) But by and large the book would be a valuable practical guide for somebody for whom MS is new.</b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">25 July 2007</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">___________________________ </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><span style="color: black;">HIMES, CHESTER</span></strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"><strong><em> </em></strong></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"><strong><em><span style="color: #990000;"> </span><span style="color: #38761d;">RUN MAN RUN</span></em></strong><span style="color: #990000;"> (1966)</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"><b>This is an absorbing and suspenseful story about a black man in New York City who knows that a cop is stalking him in order to kill him because he knows too much. He has witnessed the cop's murder of two of his co-workers. The cop has a drinking problem and has forgotten where he parked his car. In his drunken fog, he assumes that it has been stolen, accuses a (black) man of stealing it, and shoots him dead. Then he feels obliged to shoot a co-worker who has witnessed the murder. </b></span></span></div>
<br />
<br />
2 January 2008<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HIRSCH, ROBIN</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;"> LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI: CREATING A LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF HISTORY</span></b></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author owns a restaurant in Greenwich Village and has had many adventures in several countries, but the focus of this memoir is on his parents' generation. His parents met at a dance at the Hotel Kempinski in Berlin in Nazi Germany, and left for England in the mid-1930s. Some of their closest relatives perished in the camps.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This history, as Hirsch demonstrates, casts a long shadow and has pervaded his life, as he moved from being a callow youngster ashamed of his family's German accents to a young man horrified and awed by what he can deduce has been their experience, an experience he himself would never begin to be able to imagine living through.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His renditions of his family's speech are well done, often slyly but affectionately humorous. He hasn't always seen eye to eye with his father, particularly, but it is clear that he respects him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Sometimes the writing becomes a bit ponderous, and there are entirely too many sequences of sentences starting with "And..." This stylistic quirk--quite possibly derived from the language of the Bible--has been tried by all too many writers in recent decades but it almost never works well.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But this one quibble shouldn't mar an otherwise absorbing and well-told narrative.</b></div>
<br />
3 August 2011<br />
________________________________<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span><br />
<strong>HISS, TONY</strong><br />
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE VIEW FROM ALGER'S WINDOW: A SON'S MEMOIR</span></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></em>(1999)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Tony Hiss is fairly well known and accomplished as a journalist, having written "Talk of the Town" pieces for <em>The New Yorker</em>, but he is also known as the son of the alleged spy Alger Hiss. This account is his defense of his father, dealing mainly with the several years Alger Hiss spent in prison and using as the principal material for the book Hiss's letters to his wife and Tony from prison.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Tony Hiss makes no serious attempt at disproving the charges against his father. His case for Alger Hiss rests on the assumption that any man who showed so much compassion and integrity in his dealings with people, especially his family, couldn't possibly have been a spy for the Soviet Union. Letting people see the human side of Alger Hiss is the son's purpose.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book would be most interesting for a reader familiar with <em>Witness</em>, the lengthy book by Whittaker Chambers that was very instrumental in Hiss's downfall. Tony Hiss asserts that Chambers's story was a tissue of lies, but he offers no guesses about what might have motivated Chambers to make his accusations and produce such an elaborate story.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I have no idea whether Alger Hiss was guilty or innocent. Historians are still disputing this issue, which may never be satisfactorily resolved. The picture of him that this book draws is of a man who loves nature and his family--and who never once mentions Communism in his letters. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The Hiss family had friends in high places, who helped them financially and emotionally. Without their help, one can imagine that the family might have been thoroughly destroyed. As it was, Alger Hiss and his wife ultimately separated, but by the end of the narrative the reader feels that those who were most affected by Hiss's conviction and imprisonment managed to survive the ordeal.</b></div>
<br />
9 December 2006<br />
__________________________<br />
<br />
<b>HOFFMAN, ALICE</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <i><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE RED GARDEN</span></b></i> (2011)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a novel only in a very loose sense. It's a series of stories, all set in the fictional Blackwell, Massachusetts, with each episode moving forward chronologically.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The material is trite, I think. Yes, Blackwell, Massachusetts, has its own quirky legends, including one involving the already-Disneyfied Johnny Appleseed. The author dabbles in magical realism from time to time, but in general her writing tends to have too many overworked passages, as in "they said 'I do'" and "...asked her for her hand." </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Hoffman might have learned the difference between <i>persuade</i> and <i>convince</i>, too, it seems to me, but her occasional use of the f--- word should have helped to boost sales, and nitpicking old fuddyduddies prattling on about fine points of usage should just get back to their knitting.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I can't say much about the characters in these stories because there's just not much to them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
June 22, 2014<br />
____________________________<br />
<b>HOLDEN, WENDY</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">BORN SURVIVORS: THREE YOUNG MOTHERS AND THEIR EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF COURAGE, DEFIANCE, AND HOPE </span></i>(2015)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Three women who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz tell their story, which is particularly remarkable because all three gave birth there, and their babies survived, against incredible odds.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The details about the Mauthausen, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz camps are probably accurate and are grim reminders of the cruelty inflicted on innocent people during the Second World War. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are times when the villagers in the vicinity of these camps were heartlessly indifferent to what they saw going on around them, but there were also instances where some tried to be kind to the prisoners being transported to their probable deaths packed into sealed train cars. Their acts of kindness were apparently so exceptional that these women who witnessed them never forgot them.</b></div>
<b><br /></b> <b>October 21, 2017</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b><br /></b> <b><br /></b> <b><br /></b> <b>HOLLAND, JULIE, MD</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">WEEKENDS AT BELLEVUE: NINE YEARS ON THE NIGHT SHIFT AT THE PSYCHIATRIC ER </span></i></b>(2009)<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Julie Holland, MD, became a psychiatrist and landed a post as the weekend attending physician in the Bellevue CPEP (Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, the psychiatric ER at Bellevue)—a position she stayed in for nine years, until, after having two children, the lure of the comparative safety of motherhood, home and hearth—and a (probably lucrative) private practice led her to quit. This book purports to be about her weekends at Bellevue.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We do get to know about some of the patients she saw—probably the more sensationally lurid ones, like the man who had concealed a razor in his rectum. But all too much of the book is given over to miscellaneous details from the author's life: her first colonoscopy, a well-nigh interminable account of her first labor, and later a description of the very scientific way she and her husband went about trying to conceive their second child. We also get passages about her association with actor/monologist Spalding Gray. We become aware that she and her family have not only a Manhattan apartment but a country house as well. She makes it clear from the outset that one attraction of working intensive weekends at Bellevue (a couple of 15-hour shifts) for her was that she would have the week free to do whatever she wanted.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Fair enough, and understandable, particularly for someone in a high-stress job such as hers must have been. But how is she performing on that high-stress job? After the catastrophe of 9/11, she wants to find out if she’s needed at the hospital, and says she spent 30 hours on the phone trying to reach the hospital. She didn’t go in until days later. In fact, days after 9/11, she decides to get her nails done: “’I haven’t had a manicure in months.’” She spends the days after 9/11 kayaking and hiking in the woods.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She doesn’t soon leave her world of cocktail parties, Cape Cod, and sailing just because emergency personnel might be in great demand during a national disaster.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>At another time she tells a patient she’s giving him the Methadone he’d requested but actually intentionally gives him the very powerful (and often dangerous) drug Thorazine even though she knows that lying to a patient about what medicine she’s giving is against the law. She seems almost proud of herself for being flexible enough to do something like this—mostly to accommodate a cop who wants this man sedated to a “dead weight.”</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She makes it clear that she’s often in danger as an ER doc at Bellevue. She gets threatening and anonymous suggestive phone calls. She’s afraid she’ll bump into a rapist. One patient punches her.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>OK, it’s a dangerous job. I wouldn’t argue that point for a minute. But she has police flanking her at all times. She knows all of them personally and works closely with them.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>--As, of course, she would need to, given the system she is working for. The mental health system, at least in the US, is organized around a flagrant violation of human rights, after all, even though most people prefer not to think about this fact.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are several ways in which a person can be locked up for mental illness, and none of them is truly voluntary--unless that person has money (quite a bit of it) and can sign himself up in a private mental hospital of his choice, in which case he is free to sign himself out as well. The rest of the US citizenry finds that “voluntary” hospitalization is really an illusion. Someone who has been reported as being a danger to himself or others is offered two choices: go voluntarily with the officers who will transport him to a locked mental ward, or else the officers will take that person by force.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As anyone who has ever observed any part of this process knows, “force” means just that. There are several police at the ready, fit as fiddles and of course armed. If the person puts up too much resistance, more force is applied. “Restraints” are used. A hypo is given—an injection speedily and efficiently administered so that the person quiets down fast. Later he will become aware that he is in a place with bars on the windows, from which there may be no escape.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>“Voluntary”? And yet in her Glossary for this book, Holland provides the shorthand used at Bellevue: “913” for a voluntary admission, “939” for an involuntary one, and then there is the “940” category, for a 72-hour hold, for an admission to the Extended Observation Unit or EOU.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>All through this book I felt that there was an elephant in the room, and Holland never saw it. The system she was serving is a brutal way of locking up people society finds inconvenient or threatening, getting them out of the way, and usually doing so very expeditiously. A psychiatrist can diagnose psychoses like paranoid schizophrenia after interviewing a patient for only a few minutes. Who looks at how long that diagnosis written on a form took? Who looks at how that diagnosis was made? Nobody.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Julie Holland goes jauntily along, rather evidently enjoying her immense power. She can decide whether a patient will be sent to a different facility, sent back to prison, released, medicated. Many people’s lives have been altered irreversibly by people like Julie Holland, MD.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While she’s at it, she emphasizes her own desirability. She gleefully details her several sexual encounters in the call room with male doctors. The boy friend who must have become her husband at some point in these nine years isn’t mentioned in this connection. Later she gets a new boss, Maxwell, who kisses her effusively and unexpectedly on the lips at a party—sickening her. And so on.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is appallingly bad. Not just because it reveals the author to be alarmingly unprofessional--and apparently almost proud of the fact--but because she indulges in trendy language, as in “My tough-guy confrontational thing is so over,” and the account is sloppily written.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And yet towards the end Holland is exuding compassion for the homeless on the street: “They’re my people”—as she prepares to leave Bellevue forever, and she smugly concludes that “Not everyone is built for Bellevue like I was.”</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her specialty seems to be psychopharmacology and she clearly has great faith in the efficacy of drugs in overcoming mental disorders. She is presumably whipping off prescriptions in her private practice even now. One can only be glad that she is no longer at Bellevue, but there is the unfortunate probability that other psychiatrists, like her or far worse, have come along to replace her.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
10 August 2014</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
__________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong> <strong>HOLLEY, BYRON E.</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong> <strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> VIETNAM 1968-1969: A BATTALION SURGEON'S JOURNAL</span></em></strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></em>(1993)<br />
<br />
<b>This book is mainly a collection of the author’s letters to his fiancée or wife, from his year as a combat medic in Vietnam. Colonel David Hackworth was in command of his battalion.</b><br />
<br />
10 April 2000<br />
__________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong> <strong>HOLTZ, WILLIAM<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><i><b style="color: #38761d;">THE GHOST IN THE LITTLE HOUSE: A LIFE OF ROSE WILDER LANE </b>(1993)</i><em></em><br />
<em><br /></em><b>An account of the life of the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, with considerable evidence that Rose Wilder Lane ghost-wrote most of the famous author's <i>Little House</i> books.</b><br />
<br />
September 1995<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HOOVER, HELEN</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A PLACE IN THE WOODS</span> </em></strong>(1969)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the 1950s Helen Hoover, a metallurgist, and her husband Adrian, an artist, decided to leave their Chicago jobs and adopt a rugged lifestyle in the Minnesota woods. They were by no means the only couple to make this choice (the Nearings come to mind), but the author's extraordinary talent for observing and describing wild creatures makes this account stand out.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Many of the practical details of the Hoovers' woods establishment remain unclear at the book's end, but if taken at face value, their experience has to be seen as a remarkable achievement in the pertinacity with which they managed to triumph over difficulty after difficulty.</b></div>
<br />
13 June 2008<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HOWARD, CLARK<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">HARD CITY</span></em></strong> (1990)<br />
<br />
<b>The autobiography of a boy growing up on Chicago's streets--with his drug-addicted mother vaguely and hopelessly on the periphery of his life.</b><br />
<br />
1996<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>HURSTON, ZORA NEALE</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
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<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK: STORIES FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE</span></i></b> (2020)</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The stories and (apparent) fragments compiled here represent work by Hurston that came to light only long after her death. Some are set in Eatonville, Florida, the town where she spent her childhood. Others take place in Harlem, with very specific references to streets. Many of the stories are just brief vignettes. Among them is a Brer Rabbit story. The attempts at a quasi-Biblical narrative are perhaps the least successful stories in the collection, but they are lively and entertaining.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hurston's stories might never have the stature of her novels, and Hurston's politics as well as some of her professional practices have caused her reputation to be somewhat tarnished. However, her political views sometimes seem closer to the black separatist views of the 1970s than to the libertarians such as Rose Wilder Lane, to whom she has been compared. I cannot determine whether she plagiarized some of her material or whether she fabricated some of her anthropology and passed it off as legitimate anthropology but there is evidence that she might have been guilty on both counts.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nonetheless, her work stands up, dazzling in its thorough command of a language and folklore that might not have been preserved without the efforts of people like Hurston who cared enough to put forth the effort. Hurston was writing in the 1920s-1950s, and all four of her grandparents were born into slavery. A child of the south, she was surely well versed in the ways and speech of her people.</div><div><br /></div><div>And she has given us these original stories that are rich with the flavor of their time and place. At last Hurston is gaining some of the recognition that she lacked for many decades.</div><div><br /></div><div>19 July 2022</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #6aa84f;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #6aa84f;"><b><i>BARRACOON: THE STORY OF THE LAST "BLACK CARGO"</i></b> </span>(2018; written 1927)</div><div>
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Having read most of Hurston's better-known works, I was particularly interested in this book, written in 1927 but not published until 2018, long after her death.</div>
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There has been controversy about whether she plagiarized it but the facts on this matter aren't altogether clear. She did interview Cudjoe Lewis in 1927 in Alabama. In any case, she put the material--consisting almost entirely of Cudjoe's words as transcribed either by Hurston or by Emma Langdon Roche, the author from whom she plagiarized--together in a form that makes a very compelling narrative.</div>
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There are very few first-hand accounts of African-American life under slavery and even fewer of the voyages from Africa that transported the slaves to the New World. To be sure, Cudjoe's account might have been embellished by his transcriber(s) for dramatic effect or for other reasons, and Cudjoe's age (around 87 in 1927 though when Emma Langdon Roche apparently interviewed him he must have been only 74) might have led to some memory lapses or misremembering on his part.</div>
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However, this is one of the few extant accounts of the way it really was, and it sounds as if it is accurate, given what is known about the horrors of the slave trade. Trading in slaves had been abolished in the US and the UK in the early 1800s but was continuing illegally while authorities looked the other way for a long time thereafter. Cudjoe's experience was part of that illegal slave trade--and involved having to conceal the "cargo" from prying eyes.</div>
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But the voyage succeeded, and Cudjoe spent over five years in slavery after arriving on "America soil." Upon learning that he had been freed, he found himself in an unfamiliar, mainly hostile country with no resources. Somehow he survived to 95 in spite of enduring the brutality of slavery followed by life as a free man that was riddled with catastrophe--the loss of all 6 of his children as well as his wife in a series of painful events.</div>
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It is to be hoped that Cudjoe's account will enshrine him in the collective memory of a nation that has preferred not to think about slavery for all too long. And it is Cudjoe's account that we have here--not Hurston's or Roche's or anyone else's. </div>
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Hurston as an anthropologist wanted to preserve Cudjoe's speech as it was, and so the narrative is written just as he presumably spoke it. She respected the civilization he came from and wanted to know more about it and treasure the elements of it that were transported across the ocean.</div>
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Cudjoe Lewis (Oluale Kossola originally) must have been a remarkable person, and we have Hurston to thank for giving the world a chance to know him a little better.</div>
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<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS: NEGRO FOLKTALES FROM THE GULF STATES</span> </em></strong>(published 2001)<br />
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<b>The celebrated anthropologist author died in obscurity, and only decades later was the manuscript of <i>Every Tongue Got to Confess </i>found. It seems to have been readied for publication but some decisions about what to include had not yet been made.</b></div>
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<b>Hurston carefully collected these folktales on her travels through the Gulf states in the 1920s, and they are reproduced here as she transcribed them. She retained the speech patterns of the narrators from whom she heard the tales, and now that some of the unique aspects of African-American speech are fast disappearing, Hurston's work should become increasingly important.</b></div>
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<b>Some of the tales are merely a sentence in length. A few are derived from European sources, but Hurston has tried to exclude "Pat and Mike" stories and other obvious borrowings. By and large, the tales are unique to the African-American experience--a world where animals talk and the white man is the enemy. It is in some of these tales, in fact, that the ex-slaves and their descendants can enjoy a small triumph over the white oppressing class by constructing narratives in which the master is bested or destroyed.</b></div>
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<b>Many contemporary African-Americans have no use for the older "handkerchief-head" dialect but they are doing themselves a disservice by rejecting an important part of their past. These tales show a rich culture that flourished in spite of the formidable obstacles that stood in its way. Zora Neale Hurston believed in preserving this culture, especially that of "the Negro lowest down" on the ladder, and she made strenuous efforts toward finding and recording its strong oral narrative tradition.</b></div>
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26 December 2008<br />
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<strong><em></em></strong><strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> TELL MY HORSE: VOODOO AND LIFE IN HAITI AND JAMAICA</span> </em></strong>(1937)<br />
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<b>This beautifully written anthropological work deals with customs in Haiti and Jamaica. Hurston seems to have blazed new trails in her field--anthropology--by insisting on being present at rituals from which she normally would have been excluded and by refusing to be content with "staged" events.</b></div>
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<b>While exploring life in Haiti and Jamaica, she manages to inject some very perceptive remarks about the US racial situation.</b></div>
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<b>If this book isn't among the classics of anthropological writing, it should be.</b></div>
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15 February 2008<br />
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<b>HUSTVEDT, SIRI</b><br />
<b><br /></b> <b> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">WHAT I LOVED</span></em></b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2003)<br />
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<b>This is a novel that keeps getting wrapped up in analyzing. Maybe Hustvedt is more of an analyst than a novelist, more a commentator than a storyteller. There is a long section appended to the book showing the extensive research the author has done, for instance. Most novelists don't bother to tell us what sources they used for their material.</b></div>
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<b>It is yet another novel (there seem to be quite a few of these nowadays) where decades pass and we follow the central characters on into their old age. Leo Hertzberg is the narrator, and he is telling us about his wife Erika, their son Matthew, and the apparently very talented artist Bill Wechsler and his family, who share the building in New York where the Hertzbergs live.</b></div>
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<b>There is considerable detail about the contemporary New York art scene and about the implications it can have when a crime is at issue, for instance: the ambiguities created when men dress as women and vice versa, the uncertainties involved in staged works of art that are reproductions of violent scenes. What happens when a real murder seems to have been committed, and an artist who specializes in violence-riddled hoaxes meant to shock the spectators seems to be the prime suspect?</b></div>
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<b>These are just a few of the "large" questions raised in this novel. The author also explores the mysteries of anorexia and drug addiction while she's at it.</b></div>
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<b>There are a few explicit sex scenes early in the book, but she gives up on those soon enough, maybe just because her characters are aging.</b></div>
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<b>There is also the tragic death of the Hertzbergs' son Matthew.</b></div>
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<b>So this story covers a lot of territory--too much for my taste. The author has tried to do too much in one novel.</b></div>
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26 April 2010<br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;"> YONDER: ESSAYS</span></b></em> (1998)<br />
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<b>These essays on a variety of topics may have appeared elsewhere before being compiled into this brief collection, but if so, there is no indication of where they were previously published.</b></div>
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<b>Siri Hustvedt discusses her Norwegian heritage, the paintings of Vermeer, Dickens's <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's <em>The Great Gatsby, </em>among other subjects. She is especially interested in the concept of "yonder" as neither <em>here</em> nor <em>there </em>but <em>in between</em>.</b></div>
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<b>Some of her symbol-hunting seems a bit fanciful, but she writes well. She has published a number of novels too, and this collection of essays prompts me to try them as well.</b></div>
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16 October 2008<br />
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<em></em></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121051148791487612005-07-03T20:02:00.000-07:002016-02-25T15:50:35.274-08:00I<strong><span style="color: #990000;">IEZZONI, LISA I.</span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> WHEN WALKING FAILS: MOBILITY PROBLEMS OF ADULTS WITH </em></span></strong><strong style="color: #990000;"><em>CHRONIC CONDITIONS </em></strong><span style="color: #990000;">(2003)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">T<b>he author, a medical doctor who happens to have multiple sclerosis, has written a thoroughgoing overview of the typical mobility problems faced by adults with chronic conditions such as MS. She focuses on some of the people she interviewed, in particular, usually letting them speak for themselves. </b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>The book includes helpful appendices.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">29 January 2008</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">_______________________</span><br />
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<strong>IRVING, JOHN</strong><strong></strong><br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">UNTIL I FIND YOU </b>(2005)<br />
<strong><br /></strong><strong>Either I shouldn't read two long novels by Irving so close together in time, or Irving has gone too far with this one. It is smarmy and boring and too long, in my opinion, though it has funny moments.</strong><br />
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4 April 2009<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1998)<br />
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<b>A long novel that may be trying to cover too much territory for its own good...</b></div>
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<b>Marian and Ted Cole have lost their two sons in a car crash some years before the start of the novel. It will be a long time before the reader finds out the details of the accident. In the meantime we have Marian being almost obsessive about the many photos of the boys that she has hung throughout the house--so obsessive that even their third child (conceived and born after the accident), Ruth, at the age of 4, is keenly aware of every detail in them.</b></div>
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<b>Ted, it seems, is very unlikable. He's an expert squash player who has built his own squash court at home in such a way that he is guaranteed to win. He writes stories for children for a living and is highly successful, even though the snippets of the stories given to the reader make them sound creepy and disturbing to a child. Ted <em>is</em> creepy and disturbing. On the pretext of taking photos of little girls in the neighborhood, he routinely moves to photographing their mothers--lonely suburban housewives whom he easily seduces and takes demeaning pornographic photos of them.</b></div>
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<b>His wife Marian can perhaps be forgiven for having a torrid affair with Eddie, who at 16 has been hired by Ted as a "writer's assistant." A problem here is that Eddie falls perpetually in love with Marian--and can't forget her for the next 37 years.</b></div>
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<b>Marian somewhat inexplicably walks out on Ted and her four-year-old daughter and disappears for several decades, surfacing eventually as a writer with a nom de plume. Meanwhile, Eddie has also become a writer--and so has Ruth Cole.</b></div>
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<b>The horror of this situation and of some of its tragic consequences is more or less forgotten about in the latter half of the novel, where we move forward into the daughter Ruth's adult life.</b></div>
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<b>The plot is much more involved than the partial outline given here. Unfortunately the novel has too many signs of an author with his eye on big sales and movie rights. Irving doesn't spare us the smarmy details we've come to expect in contemporary novels and films: we get more than enough pubic hair, masturbation, urination, explicit descriptions of sex---anything the reader might require to pique prurient interests.</b></div>
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<b>Free speech allows writers to say whatever they want, and that is great. But some readers might just get a little tired of so much undressed explicitness thrown at us repeatedly. Some of us might feel like saying, "Enough already! We've been there and done that."</b></div>
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<b>It would have gone over better in this book if Irving hadn't resorted to cheap cliffhanger statements designed to make the reader aware that what was coming next was Important--and to all-too-frequent substitutes for characters' names, like saying "the four-year-old" for "Ruth," and "the sixteen-year-old" for "Eddie." Is this being done because he feels we're likely to forget their ages, or what?</b></div>
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<b>I find it unbelievable that Marian, who is one of the most sympathetic characters in the book, would have left her four-year-old daughter in the hands of her peculiar father Ted. We are expected to believe that Marian loves Ruth--and that she walks out on her because she is afraid of losing this child too. We never find out just what she has been doing in the 37 years of her absence, either, except that she has been evolving into a writer of novels.</b></div>
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<b>The story has its absorbing moments and its funny parts too, but in general it is probably not worth the time it takes to get through it.</b></div>
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14 February 2009<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #6aa84f; font-style: italic;">MY MOVIE BUSINESS: A MEMOIR </b>(1999)<br />
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<b>I came to this book after having read a number of John Irving's novels and having seen one or two movie versions of them. I believe that the subtitle <em>A Memoir</em> misled me into supposing I would learn about Irving's life. Instead, the book is very short and contains only a few snippets of information of the author's life. Primarily it is an account of the problems in making a movie of <em>The Cider House Rules</em>, not one of the Irving novels I had read. There is also a less extended account of the filming of <em>A Son of</em> <em>the Circus</em>, which I had read.</b><br />
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<b><em>My Movie Business</em> would interest movie buffs, probably, but I found it disappointing.</b><br />
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<b>Also, I had an unpleasant sensation that Irving was doing too much name-dropping in this book. He has become acquainted with some big-name movie stars, but somehow this fact failed to interest me. The book puts Irving's novels under a bit of a cloud, in my opinion. I started to wonder if he wrote them with too much of an eye on their movie-making potential....</b><br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">A SON OF THE CIRCUS </b>(1994)<br />
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<b>Dr. Daruwalla, a Canadian orthopedist, has to reacquaint himself with a double murder that occurred twenty years before, in his native Bombay.</b><br />
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1997<br />
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<b>ISHIGURO, KAZUO</b><br />
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<b><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE REMAINS OF THE DAY</span></em> </b>(1989)<br />
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<b>It's probably not a good idea to see the film adaptation of a novel before reading the book. I had seen the excellent movie that was made from this novel, and when reading the book I kept seeing and hearing the characters as they'd been shown on the screen.</b></div>
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<b>The book has many nuances that couldn't have been conveyed in a movie, particularly when it comes to Mr. Stevens, the narrator, a butler in what he regards as a distinguished house in England around the time of World War 2.</b></div>
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<b>From the outset Stevens seems overly punctilious and perfectionistic, but the extent to which he carries his rigidity becomes clear only as the story unfolds. He unwittingly reveals himself to have shut down most human emotion, though at times he creeps around the edges of it, as when he imagines that Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, is crying behind her door.</b></div>
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<b>The relationship with Miss Kenton is essentially a thing of the past at the time the story commences, which is many years later, with Stevens on a motor trip that will take him--incidentally--on a visit to the former housekeeper who has now been married many years and has a grown daughter. But we get glimpses of past interactions between Stevens and Miss Kenton, and these show a relationship that could have blossomed but never did, quite probably due to Stevens's rigidity and general obtuseness.</b></div>
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<b>This is a sad story about a missed chance. Stevens's own loyalty to his master, Lord Darlington, which is steadfast in spite of Lord Darlington's unmistakable Nazi connections, shows us a man for whom the occupation--he would call it a profession--of being a butler is paramount, taking precedence over everything else.</b></div>
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<b>Small wonder then that he can't see his way clear to make overtures to Miss Kenton even though she gives him several opportunities.</b></div>
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<b>The author has done a masterful job of capturing the way in which the English can use extreme good manners to freeze a person out, to cut a person down to size, and for any number of other hostile purposes. The dialogue seems flawless, and as we hear more and more from Stevens, we become more aware of how impossible his situation is. Butlers have probably died out as a breed nowadays, and it may be just as well for all concerned....</b></div>
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21 October 2011<br />
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<strong>IVINS, MOLLY</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">SHRUB</span></em> (2000)</strong><br />
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<b>Molly Ivins has long been one of my favorite commentators on the US political scene. She is a Texan, deep in the heart of the land of George W. Bush, and she has been keeping up with the Texas political scene for quite a while.</b></div>
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<b>It isn't a pretty scene, and Texas has "Dubya" to thank for some of the worst ugliness. "Dubya" loves the death penalty, for example. He also has an astonishingly bad environmental record.</b></div>
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<b>She exposes "Dubya" as President for what he is: a rich boy who doesn't know much about anything, but who has dozens of well-off and well-placed cronies going to bat for him as needed.</b></div>
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<b>She paints an appalling picture--and this was in 2000, BEFORE this man became President, BEFORE he was reading <i>My Pet Goat </i>to a group of schoolkids during the al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, BEFORE the Iraq war he so deceitfully and disastrously started, and BEFORE his shameless treatment of the Katrina disaster.</b></div>
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<b>Maybe we should have paid closer attention to Molly Ivins.</b></div>
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9 June 2006<br />
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<strong>--with Lou Dubose:</strong><br />
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<em><b> </b><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>BUSHWHACKED: LIFE IN GEORGE W. BUSH'S AMERICA </b> </span></span></em>(2003)<br />
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<strong>Written during Dubya's Presidency, this book is a collection of Molly Ivins's articles providing the readers with valuable background about his activities on the Texas political scene. Ivins has clearly followed the second Bush's career for a long time--and she found nothing particularly commendable about him and his record.</strong></div>
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<strong>This country is still reeling from the damage done by Dubya and his cronies. Molly Ivins was one of the few voices of reason heard in the land.</strong></div>
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23 November 2009<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> WHO LET THE DOGS IN</span>? <span style="color: #38761d;">INCREDIBLE POLITICAL ANIMALS I HAVE KNOWN</span> </em></strong>(2004)<br />
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<b>We couldn't spare Molly Ivins. There is nobody on the scene who could even attempt to replace her. But unfortunately she has left us.</b></div>
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<b>At least we can still enjoy her essays, such as those in <em>Who Let the Dogs In?</em></b></div>
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<b>The book is a compendium of essays written both before and after "Dubya" attained the Presidency. Molly Ivins was warning us about him long ago. </b></div>
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<b>She has special fun with Tom DeLay, who--she likes to remind her readers--is a bug exterminator by profession. Her book contains moving tributes to Barbara Jordan and several other notable persons who have died in recent years.</b></div>
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1 May 2008<br />
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<b> --with Lou Dubose:</b><br />
<em><b><br /></b></em>
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> BILL OF WRONGS: THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA'S FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS</span></b></em> (2007)<br />
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<b>This posthumously published book gives details on several deplorable recent instances of human rights violations by the US government.</b></div>
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<b>It includes extensive references.</b></div>
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October 4, 2011<br />
<br />wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121051607798338392005-07-02T20:06:00.001-07:002024-03-28T11:17:23.402-07:00J<div><b><span>JACKSON, SHIRLEY</span></b></div><div><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> LET ME TELL YOU: NEW STORIES, ESSAYS, AND OTHER WRITINGS </span></i>(posthumous, 2015)</span></b></div><div><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span>The noted author Shirley Jackson's four children worked to compile this collection of their mother's writings, most of which have not previously been published. Some of the pieces are very short, perhaps unfinished or drafts. Some are occasional vignettes. "It Isn't the Money I Mind" is an anecdote.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span>It would have been helpful if dates or estimated dates when each piece was written had been included, especially since some of the pieces involve the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span>The author's own life, occupied largely with care of her family and a large (18-room) house, is often reflected in these works, and she reveals some of the frustration with the impossible ideals to which women of her generation were prompted to aspire. Mrs. Spencer of the story, "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons," is a case in point. The story raises the tricky matter of just how neighborly a person needs or wants to be. Boxed into a corner by her own snobbery and stand-offishness, Mrs. Spencer finally says: "'I spend my whole life making things nice for them, and what thanks do I get?'"</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span>A reader who enjoys stories with an eerie twist will find some of them here, and while she's at it, Shirley Jackson provides us with a glimpse into the very busy world of a mom coping with the demands of her family and her community--no small achievement even when money isn't an issue. Money probably wasn't an issue for the author and her family but she understands people who are less fortunate. A couple of the stories involve women who engage in petty theft, and Jackson explores their motives with compassion.</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span>Shirley Jackson isn't everyone's cup of tea, as I learned when assigning "The Lottery" to students. Many of them did not understand the story, and others just disliked it. But she writes well and entertainingly--and incidentally, her remarks on writing that are included here are among the best parts of this collection.</span></b></div><div><b><span><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span>21 October 2022</span></b></div><div><b><span>__________________________</span></b></div><b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><div><b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><br /></span></b></div><div><b><span style="color: #cc0000;"><br /></span></b></div>JACKSON, VICTORIA AND GUTHY, ALI</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #cc0000;"> </span></b><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><i style="color: #cc0000; font-weight: bold;"> SAVING EACH OTHER: A MYSTERY ILLNESS, A SEARCH FOR THE CURE, AND A MOTHER/DAUGHTER LOVE STORY </i>(2012)</span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Neuromyelitis optica, or more accurately the neuromyelitis optica spectrum of disorders, once known as Devic's disease, is a particularly grim neurological horror that unfortunately has often been mistaken for multiple sclerosis. In this book Victoria Jackson and her daughter Ali Guthy take turns telling about the years 2008-2011, when Ali was diagnosed with "NMO" and began coping with it.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Victoria Jackson and her husband happen to be very prosperous. A line of cosmetics known as "no-makeup" makeup has been quite successful, and both Victoria and her husband have also been entrepreneurs in infomercials.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">When their daughter at 14 was diagnosed with "NMO" and given perhaps only a few years to live, her mother left no stone unturned in her attempt to find answers. At one point in the book she catalogs a staggering number of MRIs and doctor visits Ali had had in those years.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Reading about the concierge doctor who was a close personal friend of the family and who seemed always to be available for them, and about the trips to Mayo Clinic and any other medical facility they decided to visit, I couldn't help thinking of the many neurologically impaired people whose reduced circumstances oblige them to make do without much (or any) medical care.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">However, research is often generously funded by people with deep pockets, and Victoria Jackson has been concerned enough about everyone who is afflicted with NMO to set up a foundation that appears so far to have been filling a genuine need. By its very existence it draws attention to this little-known disorder, and it has been responsible for funding research into NMO. (There are some 20,000 NMO patients worldwide but that figure is probably much too low since many have been misdiagnosed with MS or some other disorder, as Jackson points out.)</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #cc0000;">If the author seems to be blowing her own horn just a little too often and patting herself on the back a bit too resoundingly, the reader will probably overlook it because of the important story she has told and the good results coming from the foundation she established.</span></b></div>
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<b>2 November 2015</b><br />
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<b>JAMES, HENRY</b><br />
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<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">WHAT MAISIE KNEW</span> (1897)</b><br />
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<b>A great book has been said to be one that offers new perspectives with each rereading. <i>What Maisie Knew</i> may be such a book, for me at least, for I have read it several times, and each time has been a new experience.</b></div>
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<b>The child Maisie, who is never absent from a scene, seems to be the quintessential tabula rasa in some ways--and, with the possible exception of Mrs. Wix, may also be the one decent character in the story. This presentation of a child as intrinsically good and receptive to all experience was a Romantic or Emersonian notion that was surfacing in the latter half of the nineteenth century and is with us to this day.</b></div>
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<b>Time passes during the narrative but we never know precisely how much time--maybe about six years, with Maisie's age between 6 and 12, as she is bounced around during her parents' divorce and subsequent couplings with other partners.</b></div>
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<b>The situation reaches grimly comic proportions as Maisie's real parents fade out of her life, being replaced by some of the partners and by or two ex-governesses of Maisie's. (One of the former governesses, Mrs. Overmore, becomes her father's second wife, Mrs. Beale.)</b></div>
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<b>It would be comic were it not for one underlying question that remains pretty much unarticulated throughout the story: Who will be in charge of the rest of Maisie's childhood? For someone will have to see to her needs, and most of the adults in her life seem too selfishly preoccupied with their own concerns to consider her.</b></div>
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<b>Not much is said about money until near the end, when it is mentioned that there will be "means" available for Maisie's upbringing. Or there might be.</b></div>
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<b>Whether or not these "means" were considerable enough to warrant the constant bickering over Maisie that occurs is left vague. The point is that, to most of these adults, Maisie isn't so much a person in her own right as a pawn, a tool that is useful to them at various times.</b></div>
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<b>Henry James's fiction is notable for its lack of violence but <i>What Maisie Knew</i> contains some fairly raw scenes involving tugging and pushing and name-calling. In the Preface to the New York edition of <i>Maisie</i>, James points to the scene in Kensington Gardens between Maisie and "the Captain," another of Maisie's mother's male friends, as pivotal for Maisie, and it is a scene where Maisie cries. It is the only time anyone has spoken well of her mother, whom the Captain admires, and she is profoundly grateful. Throughout this remarkable scene, the Captain tries gallantly to rescue Maisie and her mother from the situation they are in, to redeem Ida Farange's good name, but what Maisie already knows about her mother makes this process next to impossible.</b><b><br /></b></div>
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<b>James's Preface also makes clear that it is the death of Maisie's childhood that is being chronicled in the story. It is satisfying for the reader to find out that at last her future upbringing will be firmly in the hands of one of the less objectionable and more qualified people in her life, but what is far more interesting--to the author and probably to most readers--is what has happened to her consciousness. </b></div>
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<b>This is a story about knowing, about how a child knows and about the limitations of a child's ability to know. There is so much about the adults' situations that Maisie doesn't quite grasp. By the end of the story, she is beginning to decipher them, and we have watched her pass through a painful time when she has been smitten with her stepfather, Sir Claude, even though the reader knows for a fact that Sir Claude isn't the sterling character we want occupying Maisie's life. She--and Mrs. Wix as well--have had to go through a process of coming to see Sir Claude as he is, and to say goodbye to him.</b></div>
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<b>2 May 2017</b><br />
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<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA</span> (1886)</b><br />
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<b> Having read this novel a few times before but many years ago, I returned to it to refresh my memory of it. Although it lacks the penetrating observation of the later fiction, it casts considerable light on James's view of the industrial age in which he lived and the social and economic problems of that age.</b><br />
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<b>In <i>The Princess Casamassima</i>, we have the formidably splendid figure of the Princess herself (known to readers of James's earlier novel <i>Roderick Hudson</i> as Christina Light), the estranged wife of an Italian prince. She has an enthusiasm for anarchic and revolutionary ideas and has involved herself to an extent that is always left somewhat fuzzy. Is she very deeply involved or only peripherally so? Does the revolutionary cadre take her seriously, or are they using her? Worse--are they simply laughing at her?</b><br />
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<b>The depth of her involvement becomes clearer by the end of the story, but it is primarily the story of "the little bookbinder," Hyacinth Robinson, that is the real subject of this novel, as we suspect from the very occasional indication that there is an observer standing by and telling us his history.</b><br />
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<b>"The little bookbinder," "the Princess"--these less specific ways of referring to the two characters are often used throughout the book, while others are far more likely to be referred to by their names (Rose, Paul Muniment, M. Poupin, Millicent, Miss Pynsent, Mme Grandoni). The author may be obliging us to step back and view Hyacinth and Christina as representatives of their functions--that is, we may be meant not to become too involved with either of them, to keep remembering that Hyacinth has a somewhat lowly occupation as a bookbinder and that Christina can't easily be detached from her role as the wife of the Prince, no matter how diligent she is about working for the cause and about giving away her assets.</b><br />
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<b>Henry James, steeped in the aristocratic elite though he was, had a keen eye for economic differences among people. He almost always lets the reader know what a person's exact financial circumstances are--though he always does so discreetly, more or less in passing.</b><br />
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<b>In <i>The Princess Casamassima</i>, one of the big issues is the vast gulf between the haves and the have-nots, however. Implicit in the revolutionaries' ideology is the belief that any overturning of the system will have to be done violently and very clandestinely--that is how difficult it will be to stage any effective opposition to the powers-that-be.</b><br />
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<b><i>The Princess Casamassima</i> is by no means a polemic. In fact, at times James often seems to be poking fun at how seriously revolutionaries take themselves and how naive some of their number can be--notably, Hyacinth Robinson. But now and then James pauses to give us a setting for some of the scenes, and we become aware of London as it must have been during the Industrial Revolution: the crowded, unsafe, anonymous conditions of life among the many urban poor, the densely smoky air, the harsh working conditions.</b><br />
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<b>It is all there--though never highlighted. At the center of the story is what happens to Hyacinth as he struggles with his conflicted situation. He might be the bastard son of a prominent aristocratic father, and he has had one brief meeting with his dying mother, a French prostitute imprisoned for murdering this man.</b><br />
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<b>Having no real proof of his paternity, he is free to imagine that with aristocratic blood possibly running in his veins, he comes by his more delicate sensibilities naturally--and perhaps might even be entitled to lay claim to a place in the upper echelons of society some day. His extreme devotion to the Princess suggests that he might be harboring hopes of a more permanent involvement with her even though the constant references to him as "the little bookbinder" remind the reader how unlikely that dream probably is.</b><br />
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<b>On the other hand, his mother's father is rumored to have fallen on the barricades during the French Revolution. This rumor has just as little evidence for it as the notion about the identity of Hyacinth's father, but, in his romantic view of the world, Hyacinth builds on it--and believes that he can play a role in helping to bring down the powerful forces against which this grandfather of his may have given his life.</b><br />
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<b>Wrestling with this inner conflict, Hyacinth develops problems with the revolutionary ideology that prove to be largely aesthetic. While in Paris he burns with a hard gemlike flame--and realizes that his political ideology, if carried through to its logical outcome, will probably destroy much of the beauty that he has come to value in the world.</b><br />
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<b>We are given two examples of women from the upper class who believe passionately in divesting themselves of their worldly possessions and giving what they have to the cause of helping the poor--Lady Aurora, who has systematically been involved in altruism for years, and her disciple, the Princess herself. As the story goes on, we see that both Lady Aurora and the Princess have made sure that they are quietly hanging onto some parts of their wealth. They will assuredly never be as poor as those who are born into poverty, and for that reason we can't be too surprised if they aren't taken as seriously by the revolutionaries as they take themselves.</b><br />
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<b>However, they are treated sympathetically. They are shown to have fundamentally good hearts. On the other hand, Paul Muniment, whom Hyacinth as chosen as his mentor and whose job as a chemist means that he dirties his hands and has to work for a living, turns out to be cruel and cold-blooded, particularly in his relations with the Princess.</b><br />
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<b><i>The Princess Casamassima </i>might be more about discipleship than about revolution--about the extreme hazards of becoming too devoted a disciple of any ideology or of any person representing an ideology. We have the Princess as a disciple of Lady Aurora, and Hyacinth as the disciple of both the Princess and Paul Muniment.</b><br />
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<b>Paul's situation deceives us (and Hyacinth) for quite a while, particularly since we usually see him tending to his bedridden sister Rose, in a situation where he appears benevolent and caring. By the end of the story, we see other aspects of Paul that are chilling.</b><br />
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<b>This is one of the rare (maybe the only?) Henry James story showing violence. Given Hyacinth's tragedy, we probably can only be glad that in his last days he found comfort in his childhood friend Millicent, someone who has been shown in a contemptible light throughout the story. She is cheap, rude, crude, blunt, probably grasping--and yet it is Millicent as she is who soothes him--harking back as she does to a childhood when he hadn't yet encountered his forlorn mother.</b><br />
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<b>13 January 2017</b><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><i> THE BOSTONIANS</i></span><b> (1885-1886)</b><br />
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<b>I first read this novel over 40 years ago and cannot recall just what my reaction to it was. This time around, it was quite clear to me that James is sympathetic to the cause of women's rights even though he pillories several exemplars of that movement for their over-earnest devotion.</b></div>
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<b>Some of the characters have been assumed to have been drawn from real life--Miss Birdseye based on Elizabeth Peabody, for instance.</b></div>
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<b>Be that as it may, what we have here is a story revolving around a naive, malleable young woman, Verena Tarrant, and the entire story is actually a conflict over just who will "get" Verena: her parents (soon edged out of the picture), or the manipulative Olive Chancellor, or the young man from Mississippi, Basil Ransom, who has no use for the women's rights cause but would like Verena to be his wife and helpmeet for life, or so he says.</b></div>
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<b>That Basil Ransom isn't the soul of integrity is established early on. And Olive's overly intense friendship and eagerness to keep Verena in her thrall makes us suspicious of the women's rights movement as a fortunate one for Verena's future.</b></div>
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<b>Basil Ransom states his case so persuasively at times that we wonder if this will be a story that ends happily ever after, with Verena and Basil joining hands and strolling off into the sunset.</b></div>
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<b>However, towards the end there are a few incidents that let us know that the women's claims that they have been subjugated are no mere figment of someone's imagination. There is the policeman who prevents Basil Ransom from seeing Verena at the hall where she is scheduled to deliver her most important speech so far, and there is the sudden appearance of a Mr. Filer, never before mentioned, who it turns out is Olive Chancellor's agent (he "runs" her), threatening to tear the door down to get at Verena and Olive behind it. Finally, there is Basil Ransom's physical removal of Verena from the scene "by muscular force."</b></div>
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<b>What are all of these but instances of the power men are understood to have over women?</b></div>
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<b>The story takes place in the 1870s, with the Civil War still very much present in people's minds and memories, and it is from the defeated South that Basil Ransom emerges. He seems to hail from an older world that is no more, and what he is offering Verena--a chance to serve him and only him instead of the people she has already proved to be important to--seems almost antiquated as well.</b></div>
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<b>But that view is the view of the late 20th-early 21st century. It would not have seemed out of date in the 1880s.</b></div>
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<b>Henry James has a way of keeping an eye on the economics behind his characters' actions, and here we see money talking once again: Olive meets with Verena's father to give him large sums of money to oblige him to allow Verena to stay with her instead of living at home with her parents. In effect, Olive buys Verena, much as a slaveowner might buy a slave, but instead of laws enabling slavery, which have by now been repealed, she hopes to maintain Verena's loyalty by the intense emotional bond she has established.</b></div>
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<b>That Verena escapes from that bondage, only to enter what is undoubtedly to be a different type of bondage by marrying Basil Ransom, is in itself a statement in favor of the emancipation of women.</b></div>
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<b>September 7, 2017</b>
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<br />
<b> </b><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">THE GOLDEN BOWL </i>(1904)<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0.5in;">This very subtle story seems to concern the way we can delude ourselves and others by telling only that part of the truth that we want to tell, while realizing that if a very shocking portion of it is omitted, we have behaved deceptively.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> Charlotte Stant</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: 0.5in;">chooses not to mention her affair with the Prince when she is asked to marry Adam Verver, and the Prince and Fanny and Colonel Assingham likewise choose silence, although all must be quite aware that because of the circumstances (Adam Verver’s being the father of the Prince’s new wife, who is also Charlotte’s best friend), it is a fact that deserves to have become known.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>This is one of my favorite novels.</b></span></div>
19 January 1989<br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">THE AWKWARD AGE</span> (1899)<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a novel about a young woman</span> competing with her mother for an eligible young bachelor. Nanda Brookenham, who is about 18 or 19, is a "modern" young woman. Vandebank (Mr. Van) is a young, attractive man who has no means. Wanting to maintain his warm relationship with Nanda’s mother, Mrs. Brook, he declines an offer from Mr. Longdon that amounts to a bribe: Mr. Longdon will endow Mr. Van with his considerable fortune if he will marry Nanda.</b></div>
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<b>Other characters people the stage: Nanda’s spendthrift brother Harold, her good friend Tishi Grendon, and Aggie (Agnesina), who is a near-caricature of the pure, sheltered young woman.</b></div>
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<b>James has said that his intention was to write this novel as if it were a play. Thus the action--what there is of it--takes place entirely in a few rooms and consists mainly of dialogue.</b></div>
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1993<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COMPLETE STORIES: 1864-1874</span></em></strong> (Literary Classics of the United States, 1999)<br />
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<b>This is the first of four volumes of James's short stories and represents his earliest published short fiction. The volume has 972 pages and so is quite a substantial collection. Some of the stories did not make it into the New York edition, and the reader familiar with James's later work will see why they might have been set aside. </b></div>
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<b>These stories are interesting for the light they shed on the later Henry James. They contain many of his later fascinations. Several of them take place in Italy. A number of them are padded with material that sounds more like a travelogue--but it's all beautifully written if one can tolerate James's snobbery.</b></div>
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31 January 2005</div>
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COMPLETE STORIES, 1874-1884</span> </em></strong>(1999)<br />
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<b style="background-color: white;">A recent biographer of Henry James made the unsubstantiated statement that James was anti-Semitic. Ever since reading the statement I've wished that the biographer had been more specific. In this collection of stories, however, I see why the biographer felt no need to provide chapter and verse to back up the assertion of James's anti-Semitism.</b></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;">It is not a rabid or florid anti-Semitism. That much can be said for it. But it is there, just as it is there in many writers of this time and place. Maybe it can be dismissed and chalked up to the provincialism of the time, but I'm finding this difficult.</b></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;">"Professor Fargo," one of the stories in this volume, includes a stereotypical "little Jew" who is interested only in money. In "Eugene Pickering," somebody is married to "a vicious Jew." And the first-person narrator of "Impressions of a Cousin," who reveals herself to be less then reliable as the story proceeds, makes frequent references to what she presumes is the Jewishness of one of the male characters whom she dislikes.</b></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;">These stories do show James exploring one of his favorite themes--the contrast between the American scene and the European--particularly in "An International Episode." And "The Ghostly Rental" shows his apparent fondness for the ghost story--and might lend support to those who see "The Turn of the Screw" as primarily a ghost story.</b></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;">"Longstaff's Marriage" has definite similarities to the story told in <em>The Wings of the Dove: </em>a dying young woman is in danger of being exploited for her money.</b></div>
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE OUTCRY</span></b></em> (1911)<br />
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<b>Very seldom read, this last of James's novels began life as a play--and seems not to have withstood the transition to a novel very well. Most of the novel consists of dialogue, with very little action. Even as a play, it probably would have failed. </b></div>
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<b>James is using the style that has come to be known as "late Henry James," which served him well in <em>The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove,</em> and <em>The Ambassadors. </em>Why it doesn't work so well here may have something to do with the theme. The other novels concern major human events (the death of Milly Theale, for instance). The focus of interest in <em>The Outcry</em> is a painting--with a rather slight romance perking around the edges of the story.</b></div>
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<b><em>The Outcry </em>is a comedy that gets almost blunt in its mockery of the English upper class. It very pointedly reveals its characters to be greedy for American money--or perhaps for any money. The American in the story (Breckinridge Bender, who has deep pockets and a wish to impress the world with them) doesn't come off well either.</b></div>
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<b>He is said to be modelled on J. P. Morgan. James gives us a deft caricature of a basically trusting and simple man who happens to have a great deal of money and a wish to collect a major work of art.</b></div>
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<b>The big problem of the story is whether the work he wants, which is the property of Lord Theign, is a fine Moretto, as has always been believed, or actually the eighth work by Mantovano, who has always been believed to have done only seven paintings in his lifetime.</b></div>
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<b>James thought he made up the artists' names but learned later that there really was a painter named Mantovano. This error caused him some embarrassment, by all accounts, but then he didn't often make mistakes---and had no Google search engine at his command.</b></div>
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<b>The action of the story, such action as there is, is so often interrupted by the appearance of the butler on the scene that I wonder if this was intended to contribute to the humor of the situation--or was it so routine at that time and in that place as not to be notable? The reader becomes keenly aware that at this high level of society, people must always have had to be on their guard about what they said because of the possibility of a servant's appearance--and so very important interactions between persons often had to be postponed or cut short.</b></div>
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<b>There is a larger theme at work here, too: the controversy about the proprietorship of major works of art--a controversy that was current at the time because it seemed to the English that Americans were buying British works of art and carting them off in large numbers, to the detriment of the British national heritage.</b></div>
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<b>James clearly regards the entire dispute as a pointless excuse for nationalistic fervor that could easily backfire on the English. One character in the story mentions the Elgin marbles to demonstrate that, after all, the English have done their share of walking off with the art works of other countries.</b></div>
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<b>I found this novel interesting though its style is often convoluted and difficult.</b></div>
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24 July 2009; re-read September 2016<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><span style="color: #134f5c; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">PORTRAIT OF A LADY </span>(1881)<br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
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<b>Mme Merle and Gilbert Osmond are fascinating studies in evil, greed and manipulation. Pansy Osmond is somewhat annoying as the palely delineated angelic offspring of Mme Merle and Osmond. Isabel Archer’s dilemmas are very true to life. This book improves on being reread.</b></div>
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8 June 2002<br />
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<strong>JEFFERSON, MARGO</strong><br />
<strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">NEGROLAND: A MEMOIR</span></i> (2015)</strong><br />
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<strong>The author, a few years younger than I, spent her childhood in Chicago, and at some point our paths may have crossed though I don't remember. I was interested in what she would have to say about Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s.</strong></div>
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<strong>This book starts as a memoir but becomes more of a compendium of the author's thoughts on various subjects, mostly pertaining to race. We don't learn much about her life after high school.</strong></div>
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<strong>Her father was a pediatrician, and she grew up among the most privileged African-American families in Chicago. The family had a boat, the two girls went to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and it was assumed that they would be college-bound.</strong></div>
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<strong>It is from this well-off perspective that Jefferson surveys the race situation. What is lacking in her book is compassion for those less fortunate than herself. Though she has contempt for the African-Americans who have tried to run from their history by passing for white or by imitating white ways, there is little attempt at understanding the world from the standpoint of the very poor people who have been the most tragic victims of race prejudice.</strong></div>
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<strong>The book is a collection of previously published works, and it reads as if it was thrown together without much thought to organizing the selections.</strong></div>
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<b>I'm not sure why Jefferson has chosen to talk about "Negroes" and "Negroland" at a time when the term "Negro" has fallen into disuse, either.</b></div>
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<b>I'm not sure what this book is but a memoir it isn't.</b></div>
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<b>July 20, 2017</b><br />
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>JOHNSON, DENIS<br />
<em><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>JESUS' SON: STORIES</em></strong> (1992)<br />
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<b>This writer, who seems to have been widely acclaimed, deals with the world of the drug-addicted. This is a very short collection of stories that seem chiefly to show the author’s wealth of experience with the sordid and the desperate. The stories lack point, lack plot, and lack character depth.</b></div>
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26 June 2000<br />
____________________________________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>JONES, EDWARD P.<br />
<em><br /></em></strong><br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">LOST IN THE CITY: STORIES </b>(1992)<br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
<b>Excellent stories about black people in Washington, D.C., in modern times.</b><br />
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11 September 1999<div><br /></div><div>___________________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JOSHI, KHYATI Y.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> WHITE CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE: THE ILLUSION OF RELIGIOUS EQUALITY IN AMERICA</span></i> (2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author presents the considerable evidence demonstrating ways in which Christianity is usually assumed to be the predominant and even the only religious belief that is recognized as "valid" in the US.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>There is the mistaken idea, often promulgated by the white Christian right-wing, that the Founding Fathers established this country on the basis of Christianity. They did not. Some were freethinkers, some were Deists, and it was made clear that this country was not meant to be founded on the Christian religion.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author goes on to explore areas of American life where Christian faith is assumed and articulated but other beliefs, including atheism and agnosticism, are ignored.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>She maintains that the concept of religious equality that is being taught as part of our heritage in the US is really a cruel illusion, badly in need of correction and a reality check.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>But when she argues (as she seems to be doing) that Diwali should be recognized as a national holiday, it could be pointed out that if this idea--of recognizing every religious belief equally--were carried out in a thoroughgoing way, there might be no days on the calendar when children could be in school or when government offices would be open. Could every religious minority receive special recognition? What about a religious sect having only 15 members? Why not include that group as well?</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>28 March 2024</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b>
<br /></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121052460349587162005-07-01T20:13:00.004-07:002024-03-08T16:10:54.713-08:00K<div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">KAMEI, SUSAN H.</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"> <i> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">WHEN CAN WE GO BACK TO AMERICA? VOICES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION DURING WORLD WAR II</span></i> (2021)</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This extensive oral history of the internment camps in which most of the United States' Japanese American population were held captive during World War 2 may have been aimed at younger readers but it is certainly eminently readable for any age group.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is clearly a partisan work: the author does not always try to be objective, but perhaps the topic isn't one that should be treated without a layer of outrage. That these people who were mostly US citizens were rounded up and deprived of their property, their homes, and their livelihoods forever, has to be one of the most shameful facts of American history. In the course of the narratives being spun by those who were in the internment camps we also learn of the cruel and grossly unfair treatment many people received from their fellow Americans--personal encounters with employers, neighbors, teachers that show the appalling zeal with which some US citizens threw themselves into the war effort by manifesting a brutally cold circling of the wagons as they rushed to exclude people with Japanese backgrounds from their midst.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author often refers to the camp residents as "incarcerees." It seems an unfortunate coinage, awkward and difficult to pronounce, but perhaps there can be no other word for persons who were obliged to live in a situation that wasn't equivalent to a Nazi concentration camp but was nonetheless depriving them of the privileges and liberties that the rest of the nation--at least the white element of the nation--could take for granted.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I read this book because in the high school I went to there were many Japanese American (Nisei, mostly) students who had spent part of their childhood in those camps. Although we never discussed that experience aside from the viewing of a few grainy photos, and it was a topic never touched upon in any history class, it must have been a time terrible enough and long-lasting enough to have left a permanent mark on the personalities of everyone unlucky enough to have had to spend time there.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This is a very reflective and well-organized book. Each quotation is followed by a few brief facts about the speaker, including the person's age at the time when the internment occurred. And it seems--judging from these descriptive notes--that the imprisoned Japanese Americans were not just taken to one camp for the duration of the war. They were bounced around among several different locations, often quite remote from one another and remote from their original homes. And the camps, where there was almost no privacy, were by no means furnished with modern amenities. </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This is a book that probably should be read by anyone wanting to fill in what was left out of the history books, at least those of some decades ago.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>26 February 2023</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>KAMINER</span>, WENDY</strong><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> I'M DYSFUNCTIONAL, YOU'RE DYSFUNCTIONAL: THE RECOVERY </span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">MOVEMENT AND OTHER SELF-HELP FASHIONS </span>(1992)<br />
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<strong>By 2007 the author's observations may seem somewhat dated, since the current evangelist Christian scene and the self-help movement have changed slightly, but her points are still worth considering.</strong></div>
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<strong>Wendy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Kaminer</span> sees an alarming relationship between the type of submission required by the self-help movement and the tenets of totalitarianism. She believes that the self-help movement probably originated with Alcoholics Anonymous, with its emphasis on acknowledgment of a higher power, but she finds AA to be a very useful organization for its purposes. Her quarrel is with the later offshoot groups that have sprung up, encouraging people in a sense of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">victimhood</span>: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Overeaters</span> Anonymous, EST, </strong><strong>etc.</strong></div>
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<strong>These groups believe in feelings but not in rational thought, and this disconnect is Kaminer's bone of contention. Groups and books that preach the "feel good/stop blaming yourself" doctrine may have their uses but ultimately they are saying nothing.</strong></div>
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<strong>A particular target of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Kaminer's</span> criticism is James <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Dobson</span>, of "Focus on the Family." Reading <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Kaminer's</span> book, with its skewering of the pundits of the evangelical Christian and self-help movements, was refreshing, in an era when these pundits are often quoted in the media as if they are oracles.</strong><strong></strong></div>
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<strong>Bravo, Wendy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Kaminer</span>.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
8 August 2007<strong></strong><br />
<strong>________________________________</strong><br />
<strong>KANFER, STEFAN</strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<i><b> </b><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN: THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY AFTERLIFE OF HUMPHREY BOGART </b> </span></i>(2011)<br />
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<strong><b>I didn't expect to find this book to be so very interesting but I was surprised by how absorbing it was. I'm only a moderate Bogart enthusiast, for one thing, and I can't recall ever reading a biography of a movie star before. </b></strong></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
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<b>The trouble with the lives of most U.S. movie stars seems to be that success destroys them.</b></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
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<b>Humphrey Bogart was no exception, though his downfall wasn't nearly as spectacular as some others' have been.</b></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
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<b>Four marriages and a serious drinking problem seem to have been his undoing, and yet in spite of his decline he kept turning in good performances as an actor. He was a man of considerable courage and conscience--a decent man who felt no need to promote himself as a Hollywood commodity.</b></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
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<b>The most interesting parts of this book involve the author's evaluation of the movies Bogart appeared in, with special attention to the best-known ones. There are also many interesting anecdotes involving Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, Jack Warner, and other celebrities.</b></div>
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<b>The author doesn't pretend that his subject was a moral paragon. Bogart in drunken scenes, Bogart enjoying the high life, his apparent homophobia--all are touched upon here. Then there is, sadly, Bogart the victim of esophageal cancer, which killed him at the age of 57.</b></div>
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<b>He left a legacy of many fine movies--as well as some memorable witticisms. My favorite is his reference to Forest Lawn cemetery--ridiculed by Evelyn Waugh in his 1948 novel, <i>The Loved One</i>--as "Disneyland for stiffs."</b></div>
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<b>Kanfer follows up the life story with a brief account of the Bogart cult that sprang up later, mainly among college students.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b>
10 June 2013<br />
<b><br /></b>
<strong>________________________________</strong><br />
<b>KAPLAN, VIVIAN JEANETTE</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">TEN GREEN BOTTLES: THE TRUE STORY OF ONE FAMILY'S JOURNEY FROM WAR-TORN AUSTRIA TO THE GHETTOS OF SHANGHAI</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2002)<br />
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<b>The author tells the story in her mother's voice--a true account of her mother's life during and just after World War II. </b></div>
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<b>In a Jewish family in Vienna, she was caught up in the upheavals created by the Nazis--and the family, facing deportation and having already lost most of their possessions to the Nazis, migrate to Shanghai, where there is a Jewish community.</b></div>
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<b>The living conditions in Shanghai go from bad to worse as the Japanese wield increasing power there--and are going along with Hitler's programme for the Jews.</b></div>
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<b>Liberation comes eventually with the war's end, but the Communist takeover in China means almost certain hard times for the family once more. With the help of relatives already settled in Canada, they arrange to resettle once again--and her second child (Vivian's brother) is born at sea.</b></div>
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<b>This is a sad but compelling story, well told. The author could have used a better editor now and then, but the story she tells is extraordinary.</b></div>
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13 October 2012<br />
_____________________________<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>KARON, JAN<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> AT HOME IN MITFORD: THE MITFORD YEARS, VOL. 1</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1994)<br />
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The first in a series about a small town in North Carolina. Its main character is the Episcopal rector, Father Tim.</div>
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<b>The author alienated me early on with her folksy, heart-of-gold boy of eleven </b><b>who often mentions "taking a dump." And the rector and several of the heart-of-gold characters are frequently in the praying mode. Some readers (myself among them) will find this goody-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">goodyism</span> cloying.</b></div>
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<b>Southern race problems seem never to have existed in this world--the large cast of characters includes one devoted black servant of the Aunt Jemima stereotype.</b></div>
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<b>This prolific and popular writer offends me.</b></div>
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29 April 1999<br />
____________________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">KARR</span>, MARY<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE LIARS’ CLUB: A MEMOIR</span></em></strong> (1995)<br />
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<b>This is apparently a true account of the author's East Texas childhood (1960s?-1980s?) with both parents succumbing to severe drinking problems. It is well written, in general, with a humor and a grace that keep the narrative from being mawkish or self-pitying.</b></div>
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<b>One quibble: The author--and her editors--have trouble with the "lay-lie" distinctions--an annoyance in an otherwise good book, one that probably should be read by every young adult who thinks his own childhood was deprived.</b></div>
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24 October 2002<br />
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<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">KAYSEN</span>, SUSANNAH<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">GIRL, INTERRUPTED</span></em></strong> (1993)<br />
<br />
<b>This is an excellent true account by a young woman who spent nearly two years diagnosed with mental illness and locked up at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
3 July 1999<br />
____________________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br />KEARNS, ANN E., M.D.</span></strong><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> MAYO CLINIC ON OSTEOPOROSIS: KEEP YOUR BONES STRONG AND REDUCE YOUR RISK OF FRACTURES</span></i> (2021)</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">This convenient and informative guidebook is written for the general reader and spells out exactly why osteoporosis develops and what can be done to prevent it--as well as what options are available to those who already have been diagnosed with it or who have been told that they are on their way towards developing it.</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">The book includes helpful practical suggestions for daily living. particularly diet and exercise.</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">8 March 2024</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">_______________________<br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">KEIZER</span>, BERT<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">DANCING WITH MISTER D: NOTES ON LIFE AND DEATH</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1994)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This interesting account is based on a Dutch doctor’s notes about his practice involving patients in a nursing home for the terminally ill, where he often assists in legal euthanasia. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The author, born in 1947, lives in Amsterdam.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
7 September 1999<br />
_____________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>KELLEY, VIRGINIA and MORGAN, JAMES</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">LEADING WITH MY HEART </span></em></strong>(1994)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This autobiography by the mother of President Clinton is a well written and interesting account of an eventful life. Married four times and determined to enjoy life, Virginia views her own faults and accepts herself as she is. She admits to being a party animal with a special fondness for playing the horses. There is a frankness, an out-in-the-open quality to her story that makes it highly believable and refreshing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She says very little about Hillary and Chelsea, and there is only one reference to race relations in the entire narrative--surprising for someone who lived her entire life in southwest and central Arkansas. The one reference is to an incident that is clearly meant to show that this family was not guilty of race prejudice....</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bill Clinton's half-brother (ten years younger), Roger, spent time in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Their mother believes that her maternal instincts had led her to "enable" Roger and to overlook some obvious signs of the trouble he was involved in. She blames herself, at least in part, for Roger's problems.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I liked this straightforward woman. She presents herself as she was, acknowledging her shortcomings without being unduly apologetic.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book appears to have been written when she was already under a death sentence from the cancer that ended her life.</b></div>
<br />
21 June 2007<br />
____________________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>KELLOW, BRIAN</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i>PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK </i>(2011)</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>As someone who's been reading Pauline Kael's movie reviews for many years--sometimes as they appeared in the <i>New Yorker</i>, sometimes as compiled in the form of several books, I was interested in knowing more about how this often-controversial writer developed and did her work.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>This book reveals that Kael was resolutely detached from academia, and that her early years involved a struggling family who had suffered a sharp decline during the Depression.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Kael had a daughter whom she raised by herself. The father remains a hazy figure throughout the narrative, and it is unclear whether the daughter had any contact with him. She seems to have been primarily Pauline Kael's helper until her marriage.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>This account of Kael's life makes no attempt at enhancing its subject. Kael could be a cruel critic and an unfair player in her determination to get to the top of the world of film criticism and stay there.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Kael's movie reviews sometimes struck me as wrong-headed but that merely says that I didn't share her opinion. Her admiration for Marlon Brando's acting, for instance, is beyond my comprehension.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Her enthusiasm for movies that showed considerable violence is harder to criticize. While I dislike movies with violence in them, I like to think that we don't need a censor banning them just because some of us (maybe most of us) find them distasteful and maybe even harmful.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The argument has been made that if you witness enough violence, you become inured to it. It no longer shocks or horrifies you because you have been shocked and horrified to the point of exhaustion.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>On the other hand, too many standard Westerns were fed to the American public in immense doses over many years--movies where sharp-shooting was admired and the blood and guts that resulted were minimized or not shown at all. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans would be sitting majestically on their horses without a hair out of place and their cowboy clothes crisply clean and neatly pressed. As for the horses, they hardly ever had a problem other than a need for a new shoe. The carnage was just swept behind a cactus or under a tumbleweed.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Kael, who incidentally was originally from California, recognized that it was time for the Western to be redesigned, for the audience to be hit with some hard reality: that the West was won with blood and violence, murder and theft. She had no problem with movies showing harsh grim scenes--she welcomed them as part of an attempt at abolishing the lies about our history that have been fed to many of us in school and at the movies (and on TV).</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The author mentions repeatedly that Kael surrounded herself with a group of fans, budding movie critics who came to be known as "the Paulettes." Like many a successful academic, she didn't mind being followed by a band of disciples, even if it caused her to look all too ego-driven.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>However, given the work Kael was doing, and her interest in, not just her own responses to a movie, but in the audience's reactions as well, it seems understandable that she might have welcomed a group of people around her with whom she could bounce ideas and observations back and forth.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Blunt and forthright, for all of her faults, Kael has always seemed like a breath of fresh air in the world of criticism. She's not afraid to rely on her visceral reactions to films.</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>The book sheds light on Kael's close ties with many people in the film industry, but in general this account could have been better written. </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>5 April 2016</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>KIDDER, TRACY<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #6aa84f; font-style: italic;">HOME TOWN </b>(1999)<br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
<span style="text-align: justify;"><b>This account centers around the lives of several residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, with special emphasis on Tommy O'Connor, a policeman whose best friend and fellow cop, Rick Janacek, is accused of molesting his daughter. O'Connor feels obliged to testify for the prosecution in the case because Rick has acknowledged a drinking problem so severe that he was having blackouts and therefore could not have known what he might have done. The reporting is very nonjudgmental throughout this book.</b></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
24 July 2004<br />
____________________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">KINGSOLVER</span>, BARBARA</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxhAVn-7gMvEkMR06QlAafFS0FZTcjRkPMkrxGQwzjl3i8ULPS" /></div>
<strong> <em> </em></strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">PRODIGAL SUMMER</span> </em>(2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This highly praised novel has many admirable qualities. It is tightly constructed, focusing in turn on three story lines. The seemingly separate characters turn out to have lives that interconnect in surprising ways.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Two of the central characters are women who are so strikingly similar, however, that I kept expecting them to merge somehow, if only by meeting one another and finding how similar they are. But Deanna and Lusa don't meet. They are both so intensely committed to saving endangered species and preserving and appreciating the wilderness in this world, though, that they are almost too much of a good thing. As the novel develops we find still another woman, Nannie Rawley, who is equally involved in getting on her soapbox and preaching against pesticides and for wild animals.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>I kept wishing for a more interesting story and less preaching and information. The novel all too often seems like a very transparent showcase for the author's considerable knowledge of biology, and her characters are tiresomely long-winded mouthpieces for her perspectives on nature and the environment. Even when a reader shares these views, such a large helping of information about moths, snapping turtles, chestnut trees, and other flora and fauna is too much.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>One comes away feeling stuffed to the gills with Kingsolver's store of information and her very definite opinions about nature. What I really had wanted was an interesting story about interesting people.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>For people we get a tomboy named Crystal who is entirely too much like Harper Lee's Scout and Mark Twain's Huck to be very original, and a couple of crusty but amusing Appalachian old folks--and a couple of horny women whose adventures in bed the author seems to enjoy describing in detail.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Her main point in the book is that summer can be a time when the urge to procreate is irresistible. All right, fine. But why do so many contemporary writers feel obliged to describe human couplings in vivid detail? When explicit descriptions of sex began appearing in fiction and poetry--after the initial shock wore off--authors were experimenting with this new territory, but by now it's becoming clear that there are only so many ways to describe sexual relations, and they've all been used. It's a rare book that can include explicit sex scenes that are very original or that contribute much to the rest of the story.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> What about letting the characters have a few closed doors--and leaving a few things to the reader's imagination?</strong></div>
<br />
<strong>20 October 2010</strong><br />
<br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">THE </b><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">POISONWOOD</span><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;"> BIBLE </b>(2002)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an absorbing novel about a missionary in the Congo and his family--a wife and four daughters--told from the family members’ various points of view. It is a damning indictment of American Christian missionaries’ efforts in the Third World, but subtly stated and therefore all the more effective.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
24 January 2002<br />
____________________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>KIZZIA, TOM</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b><i><span style="color: #38761d;"> PILGRIM'S WILDERNESS: A TRUE STORY OF FAITH AND MADNESS IN THE ALASKA FRONTIER</span></i> </b>(2013)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For a long time now every man, woman, and child in Alaska has automatically received a yearly bonus just for living in a state where oil was found years ago. If this situation hadn't given rise to at least a few opportunists over the years, I'd have been more than surprised as the bonus is quite substantial (I believe, around $1,000/year).</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is an account of one person who was particularly successful in availing himself of Alaska's bountiful system: one Bobby Hale, who called himself Pilgrim (as in <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>), the son of an FBI agent. He began his family in the community of Taos, New Mexico--at which time he was active in transcendental meditation. Eventually he became an ardent Christian, one who was sure that God was speaking directly to him and who expected the end time to be just around the corner. He ended up in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska with his wife, appropriating some National Park Service land to house his growing family--and their animals, snowmachines, and other paraphernalia.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Eventually there were seventeen children born to Papa Pilgrim and his wife "Country Rose." No one was ever allowed to be seen naked but the family seems to have slept jammed into one or two beds over the years.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Papa Pilgrim's word was law, and he trained the family to address him as "Lord." At first he was home schooling the children but objected to the books--and as a result all of the children except the oldest daughter Elishaba grew up illiterate.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author points out that Alaska has no laws mandating schooling for children: "The parents have complete authority."</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the Pilgrim household, so much freedom from community involvement was a license for child abuse and neglect.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For a number of years, the small community of McCarthy, of which the Pilgrim family were a peripheral part, heartily approved of their obvious piety, their sunny helpful spirit, their "one of us" Christian acceptability.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But time passed and, though the true brutality and tyranny of the household remained hidden, there were enough instances of questionable behavior on the family members' part to cause even the strongest supporters to back off. The Pilgrims, though giving folk-music concerts that pleased their audiences, were also a gun-toting group of bullying thugs.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, there were others in the community who had their complaints about the National Park Service and who felt that it was an example of government control, an impingement on their rights, and the Pilgrims became their cause.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One daughter, Elishaba, however, was to escape--at the ripe age of 29--and make known the truth about what went on inside the Pilgrims' private lives. Wanting to father 21 children but estranged from his wife, Pilgrim turned to his own daughter, Elishaba, to provide ancillary excitement so that, as he claimed, he could continue to impregnate her mother.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These sessions with Elishaba often involved brutal beatings so severe and catastrophic that she suffered permanent physical damage. He often beat his other children very brutally as well.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Another devout Christian family, the Buckinghams (parents and nine children), took in some of the Pilgrim children in their flight from the prison of their family. This association proved so fortuitous that a couple of the Buckingham children married Pilgrims.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Papa Pilgrim had his day in court--and went to prison, where he died. We don't find out whether his warped theology died with him or whether some of the children remained the disciples he must have hoped for though it sounds as if all of them were relieved to be out of his clutches.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>How such a violent, probably insane man can seize control over his entire large family because of the isolation of a life in the wilderness is an absorbing and horrifying story. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The author seems in thorough command of the facts--having followed the situation for a number of years as a reporter for the <i>Anchorage Daily News.</i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i><br /></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>5 June 2015</b></div>
____________________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">KLEMPERER</span>, VICTOR</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQmZTtLbtQok93op-QvluitnwmYGFutGHWuDToNZx6ZMBxTovKv7w" /></div>
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS, 1933-1941</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This fascinating diary came out in English translation (from the German, by Martin Chalmers) only a few years ago. Victor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Klemperer</span> (cousin of the renowned conductor, Otto <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Klemperer</span>), an "assimilated" German Jewish philologist, lived with his non-Jewish wife Eva in Dresden during the Nazi years, and he decided to keep a journal of daily experiences in the Third Reich. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Having read a number of Holocaust accounts by survivors and eyewitnesses, I came to this book with some awareness of the horrors of Nazi Germany. However, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Klemperer's</span> book provides a unique perspective on the scene. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Klemperer</span> is evidently a very intelligent, reflective, and well-educated observer of the daily indignities suffered under Hitler. He is also a victim of many of these indignities and brutalities, although I am fairly certain that he escaped being shipped to a concentration camp. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He makes the reader keenly aware of the shortages of basic supplies and of how adroitly citizens devised ways around some of the more oppressive rules in the Third Reich. He himself was imprisoned for eight days merely for accidentally neglecting to darken one window during a blackout, and he gives a detailed account of his experiences in prison, including the progression of his own feelings about incarceration from fear to acceptance and resignation to elation at the prospect of freedom.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While giving details about the daily struggle for transportation, money, essentials, and communication, he also keeps a running record of what he calls "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">LTI</span>" (for "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Lingua</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Tertii</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Imperii</span>"--the language of the Third Reich). He carefully notes the most popular Nazi terms and gives examples of the frequency of their use. He seems completely aware that the Reich government is systematically lying to the populace--about German "victories" in Russia and elsewhere, for example.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Volume 2 of his journal, covering 1941-1945, is also available.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
6 January 2003<br />
<br />
<em> <span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE LESSER EVIL: THE DIARIES OF VICTOR KLEMPERER, 1945-1959</b></span></em> (1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Victor Klemperer's diaries from the end of the war up until the time of his death (he died in 1960) reveal his very bleak perspective on Germany and on his role there. Plagued by heart problems, he is grimly aware of his limited remaining time.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His wife Eva dies, and he remarries--a much younger woman--though he constantly feels guilty about being so fortunate.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Immediately after the war, he and Eva just barely scraped by, often apparently near starvation. He describes in considerable detail the intricacies of re-establishing himself in an academic post--a matter that is heavily influenced by politics.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He wryly accepts his new post-war function as someone who can testify to the anti-fascism of people he knew. People come to him and plead for a word from him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book is generously supplied with explanatory footnotes though the translation leaves something to be desired at times.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
25 August 2012<br />
<br />
____________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>KOLKER, ROBERT</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i><b> <span style="color: #38761d;"> LOST GIRLS: AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY</span> </b></i>(2013)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a contributing editor at <i>New York </i>magazine, reports here on his investigation of the disappearance and murder of four (or five) women in their twenties on Long Island. All of the women were involved in sex work, usually as "escorts" who advertised their services on craigslist.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The way the narrative is told, shifting suddenly from one victim to another, makes it hard to follow, and there are many names to keep track of, but the book touches on some very important problems.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is considerable evidence here that law enforcement failed to devote as prompt attention to these cases as they normally would have because of the women's low status as prostitutes.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author provides a vivid picture of the life of escorts, the dangers they face (which are considerable even in the best of situations), and the ways in which prostitution has changed since the Internet has made it possible for each person to promote herself without using a madam, a pimp, or an escort service.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author avoids passing judgment and lets the stories unfold. I wonder how useful it is to include segments of Facebook postings in an account of this kind, however. There are many of these in the book, and they contribute little to it.</b></div>
<br />
4 December 2014<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">KONDO, MARIE</span></strong><br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">SPARK JOY: AN ILLUSTRATED MASTER CLASS ON THE ARTOF ORGANIZING AND TIDYING UP</span></i> (2016)</span></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">So often a follow-up book like this one is mainly a repetition of the previous book but there isn't much repetition here. Marie Kondo again tells about how she set about tidying up her family's belongings (without their permission) at an early age and about how her near-obsession with tidying led to her nervous breakdown at one point, but this is necessary background that makes her more understandable.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Here she addresses bathrooms, for instance--how to declutter one, how to clean one and how to maintain one.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She stresses the importance of giving every possession its own "home"--which amounts to the old advice many people have heard from their mothers, and though it's old advice it's still valid: "A place for everything, and everything in its place."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She believes in treating one's belongings as if they are sentient creatures and makes it clear that this belief has its roots in Japanese tradition. Before discarding an item, one should apologize to it and thank it for the joy and usefulness that it brought. It is almost by way of appeasing a god that inheres in the object.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Our things are important, and Marie Kondo's recognition of that may ultimately be helpful in efforts to eliminate or reform nursing homes. Although Kondo makes no mention of nursing homes, one of the saddest aspects of residence in a "home" is that as a rule the resident has to be separated from most of the things that always enhanced that person's existence. If we can acknowledge that our belongings matter far more to us than we might want to admit, we would go a long way toward preventing the wholesale abandonment of belongings that has to take place whenever a person enters a nursing home.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As Marie Kondo says: "Objects that have been steeped in memories carry a much clearer imprint of special times. Objects that been steeped in memories keep the past crystal clear within our minds."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<b>12 December 2016</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"> <span style="color: #38761d;"><i>THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP: THE JAPANESE ART OF DECLUTTERING AND ORGANIZING</i> </span>(2015)</span></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Marie Kondo has made a name for herself with her expertise in helping people to solve the problems posed by having too many belongings. She seems to have had a special gift for organizing and decluttering since she was a little girl. This book of hers has been a best-seller.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">She insists that we should keep only those things that "spark joy" in us when we see them. She sees the process of decluttering as potentially transformative. She enters into an almost personal relationship with inanimate objects, talking to her clothes and stroking her plants. She would say that they probably have a sort of life of their own, for she notes the musty, underused smell and appearance of clothes and linens that have lain on shelves without being touched for too long and concludes that they appreciate being handled and used.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">It's a bit whimsical for those who think of things as just things but she has a point. Many people do hang onto things they don't need and tend to have far too many possessions. Garages and vehicles and basements seem readily available as dumping areas, and the average size of a house bought in the US has increased appreciably in the last few decades.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Her methods are drastic, and I don't always agree with her. She favors abandoning the whole idea of off-season storage of clothes, for instance, but fails to address the problem of moths. If woolens aren't mothproofed in some way, they are apt to be destroyed by moths. The best way to mothproof them is to put them away for the warmer months in sealed storage units. But that is just my opinion.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">She sees no point in saving spare buttons. I have saved buttons all my life--not every button but those that looked as if they'd be hard to replace or those that were special in some way. My mother had also saved buttons, and I have her button collection added to mine. I have used those buttons many times over the years. A doll garment, a replacement button for some items of clothing that had lost a button--and many buttons take up very little space.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">She advocates tossing out all instructions connected with newly purchased items (clocks, radios, toasters, TVs, phones, etc.), asserting that you'll never read them anyway and if you do need to know something you can call the company or go online.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Here again I'd quibble. The instruction manual online isn't always so easy to find and it may not be quite the right one for your particular product. Calling the company is apt to lead to a series of calls leading nowhere because you'll need to be very very skilled at describing exactly what grommet you're talking about over the phone when you're trying to assemble a cabinet.</span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Still, I liked Marie Kondo. She seems cheerful and upbeat, and her heart is in the right place. She sees the importance of living a life free of clutter and unnecessary knickknacks. More power to her.</span></strong></div>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">14 March 2016</span></strong><br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">___________________________</span></strong><br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">KOTLOWITZ</span>, ALEX<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE: STORY OF TWO BOYS GROWING UP IN THE OTHER AMERICA</span></em></strong> (1991)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an account of life in the Ida B. Wells public housing project in Chicago, with an emphasis on the effect of this restrictive environment on the children compelled to dwell in it.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The city of Chicago, perhaps seeking to deal with the influx of African-Americans from the south, built rows and rows of high-rise buildings extending many blocks on the south side of the city, and in those poorly maintained, anonymous excuses for shelter, many black families spent their lives. Kotlowitz has provided a window into several of those lives.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
1991?<br />
_______________________________<br />
<b>KRAMER, CLARA</b><br />
<br />
<em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">CLARA'S WAR: ONE GIRL'S STORY OF SURVIVAL</span></b></em> (2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Anne Frank wasn't the only diarist in hiding during the Nazi occupation of vast areas of Europe. There was also Clara Kramer, a young girl who kept a diary while she and thirteen other Jewish residents of the town of Zolkiew in Poland lived jammed together in a bunker with primitive arrangements for food preparation, plumbing and electricity for 18 months.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Astonishingly, the house was often occupied by a <em>Volksdeutscher</em> family, the Becks, who entertained SS officers right over the heads of the hidden Jews, the group including children so young that keeping them absolutely quiet was a problem.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Clara Kramer's story is rich in specific detail about how the daily problems of living in such an extreme situation were confronted. It is one of the most remarkable and touching accounts of the Holocaust experience that I've read.</b></div>
<br />
February 21, 2012<br />
<br />
<br />
____________________________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br />KRUG, NORA</span></strong><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">BELONGING: A GERMAN RECKONS WITH HISTORY AND HOME </span></i>(2018)</span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">The author, born in 1977, was born in Germany but moved to the US in early adulthood. Long troubled by the silence on the part of all four of her grandparents on the subject of World War II, through which all of them had lived, she set out to track down any information she could find about what really happened in their lives at the time.</span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Despite her assiduous efforts, the resulting picture is by no means complete, but at least the work she has done might have helped to assuage her own guilt about her German heritage.</span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">In the form of a commercial audio book, the account is difficult to follow. Highly acclaimed, perhaps partly because of its unusual format as a partially graphic piece, it isn't enhanced by being narrated by the author herself.</span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Authors seem to like to read their own works aloud for the commercial audio book trade these days, but a writer isn't necessarily a good reader. On the other hand, only the author can know just what intonation and emphasis was intended, and so I'm sure that works read aloud by their authors will continue to be popular.</span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>4 January 2021</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>_____________________</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong></div><div><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">KUNSTLER</span>, JAMES HOWARD<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF AMERICA’S MAN-MADE LANDSCAPE</span></em></strong> (1993)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book generally makes a good argument for a less impersonal design of buildings and cities--though I have trouble agreeing with the author that building apartments above commercial establishments is a good idea.</b></div>
<br />
9 August 2001<br />
<br /></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121053111409452532005-06-30T20:27:00.003-07:002024-01-04T11:29:45.886-08:00L<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span>LAHIRI, JHUMPA</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">UNACCUSTOMED EARTH: STORIES </span></b></em> (2008)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Jhumpa Lahiri has a fine eye for telling details, but aside from that and her ability to let a story flow forward as if on its own momentum, I can't say I admire her fiction.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The problem may be the subject matter. She's probably writing about what she knows best--the situations faced by East Indians who find themselves in the United States--and she is probably giving an accurate and detailed picture.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These East Indians are very, very privileged. They come to the US and take jobs at MIT or Wellesley College. They go to Swarthmore. They live in the most affluent areas in or near Boston. The situations they are facing all too often involve spending immense sums of money.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They have excellent cameras at the ready. They think nothing of traveling all over the map. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It's not that only the indigent have stories worth telling or hearing about. It's that these particular stories of Jhumpa Lahiri's have the effect of highlighting the vast gap between the well-off and the poor in the world, even though I suspect that this was by no means the author's intention. There are almost no characters with money problems in these stories.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, she is calling attention to an entirely new way of life on this planet. People can now live with a toehold in several countries at once, never really at home in any country but always resettling, thinking nothing of crossing oceans frequently. Geography gets terribly in the way of the working out of their lives, and there lies the dilemma. Friendships and even marriages no longer bind people as they once did. People can just pack up and leave for some distant land. They do this because they have to--or sometimes just because they want to.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
8 September 2011<br />
___________________________________<br />
<b>LAMBERT, CRAIG</b><br />
<b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><br /></span></i></b>
<b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> SHADOW WORK: THE UNPAID, UNSEEN JOBS THAT FILL YOUR DAY </span></i>(2015)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, trained in sociology, summarizes several varieties of "shadow work." He notes a trend toward shifting effort involved in many everyday transactions and purchases onto the consumer. When added up, these instances of "shadow work" constitute a considerable erosion into the average person's available free time and energy.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For instance, there are many restaurants now that require customers to bus their own tables and even to assemble their own meals, dispensing with hostesses, sommeliers, waitresses or waiters, busboys and cashiers. Computers are sold to us but we have less and less access to adequate tech support. ATMs have done away with bank clerks. Travel agents are going out of style. Interestingly, Lambert selects gift cards as yet another example of "shadow work": If a gift-giver is spared the trouble of getting to know the gift recipient's tastes and preferences well enough to choose a gift and spared the effort of sorting through possible choices, ordering and packaging and delivering an individual gift, the recipient has the responsibility to use the gift card, usually at one particular store. Lambert has done some research here and found that a large number of gift cards are never used. They are lost or forgotten about--and so stores love issuing them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He perceives that "shadow work" must be a boon to the economy but he laments the toll it is taking on human relations and the sense of community that earlier times enjoyed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a thoughtful book that focused on an important problem in this high-tech era.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>16 March 2017</b><br />
<b>________________________</b><br />
<b><br />LAND, STEPHANIE</b><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> </span></i></b></div><div><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> MAID: HARD WORK, LOW PAY AND A MOTHER'S WILL TO SURVIVE</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author, who by now must be in her mid-40s, describes her two years spent working as a maid, mainly for agencies, while juggling her work as a single mom of a daughter who was about 3 or 4 at the time. She writes well and provides vivid detail about the work she was given to do--and it is indeed, as the title says, hard work at low pay. It is time for those who have never had to take menial jobs to be made more keenly aware of just how arduous and often repugnant this work is, and Stephanie Land has made that awareness possible with her concise prose that always says what she intends it to say, seemingly.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>She sets her sights on enrolling at the University of Montana in Missoula, and the book ends on a very happy note because she succeeds in her aspirations.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Bravo, Stephanie Land, for speaking up on behalf of a segment of society that is all too rarely heard from.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>17 January 2022<br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">LANDER, DAVID L. AND MONTGOMERY, LEE</span></strong><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><em> FALL DOWN LAUGHING: HOW SQUIGGY CAUGHT MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS AND DIDN'T TELL NOBODY</em></strong> (2000)</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This is a very short account by the actor who became known for playing the role of Squiggy on a sitcom, the "Laverne and Shirley Show." Since I've never seen the show and have almost no knowledge of it, I can't say much about this book as it pertains to the show.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Aside from that, however, David Lander tells about the gradual onset of symptoms of multiple sclerosis, about how he refused to admit anything was the matter--and about how he felt obliged to conceal his diagnosis from those around him for fear of losing out on opportunities for employment.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This fear was well-founded, as he demonstrates by telling of incidents where he was given the brushoff by potential employers as soon as his diagnosis came to light.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Eventually, as he decided to go public about it, he became a "goodwill ambassador" for the US National MS Society. </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>There are better accounts of a person's confrontation with MS. This one is slight--and some of the statements are incorrect.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>And he states that he began on Betaseron but later switched to Avonex. He never explains why he made the change, but I would have liked to know the reasons. </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Still, his likable and ebullient personality comes through in this book, which he lightens with a great deal of humor.</b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;">8 January 2008</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">________________________</span><br />
<br />
<strong>LARDNER, GEORGE, JR.<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE STALKING OF KRISTIN: A FATHER INVESTIGATES THE</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>MURDER OF HIS DAUGHTER</em></span></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A Boston art student in her early twenties is stalked, then brutally shot and killed by an ex-boy friend. Her father tells the story and blames the judicial and law-enforcement systems for not preventing his daughter's murder.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
March 1998<br />
_______________________________<br />
<strong>LARDNER, RING, JR.</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">I'D HATE MYSELF IN THE MORNING: A MEMOIR</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></strong>(2000)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This memoir by the son of the well-known humor writer Ring Lardner seems to have been written when the author was 85 (he died in 2000). He was a celebrated screenwriter--and a member of the "Hollywood 10," who had to serve a prison sentence as a result of his alleged Communist activities. For 15 years he was blacklisted in Hollywood, too.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In this book he gives an account of his struggle to restore his employability--as well as numerous interesting anecdotes about various movie producers he worked with and stars he knew (Katharine Hepburn, for one).</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He also tells about his work on the movie <em>M.A.S.H.</em></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Sometimes he seems self-pitying in this memoir, but it seems understandable. Many people turned their backs on him in an hour of need.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
16 January 2007<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>LA ROSA, P. AND CRAMER, M.</strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;"> SEVEN DAYS OF RAGE: THE DEADLY CRIME SPREE OF THE CRAIGSLIST KILLER</span></em><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This book would have been more useful if it had gone into more depth about the killer's background, but it's mostly just a collection of news snippets and Internet communications.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The killer, Philip Markoff, must have used some careful planning to carry out his crimes--three armed robberies and a murder, all in the space of a week and all involving women he contacted through Craigslist.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>Markoff--who killed himself while awaiting trial in 2010--was a promising young medical student at Boston University, probably in his second year. He was engaged to be married, his father was a dentist, he was known as a "regular guy"--with one or two very definite reservations expressed by persons--like his former lab partner--who had had some dealings with him.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The question arises: How carefully are doctors screened before being allowed to practice medicine? With Internet courses replacing traditional education settings, students don't have to spend much time in class or interacting with their teachers and fellow students. This is even true of medical school if this book is to be believed.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This man was leading a secret life that apparently led to his catastrophic downfall. The authors stress that it wasn't his sexual preferences that caused him to snap, if that is how to describe what happened to him during the week of his crime spree. It might have been the secret nature of a large part of his life, however: maintaining these interests while concealing them from everyone must have been a strain added to the stress of being a medical student.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This book was worth reading only for its evidence that not all aspiring doctors (or maybe even doctors in practice) are trustworthy. Some, it seems, are very dangerous.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
21 November 2012</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>__________________________________</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>LARSON, ERIK</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><font color="#6aa84f">THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY: MURDER, MAGIC, AND MADNESS AT THE FAIR THAT CHANGED AMERICA</font></i> (2003)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Contemporary Chicagoans know the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, if they know of it at all, only from the Rosenwald Museum, now known as the Museum of Science and Industry, which was one of the buildings put up as part of the vast fair that extended from the lakefront to Washington Park--mostly made up of buildings not intended to last.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It was an ambitious idea, to put it mildly, and it involved some of the foremost architects of the day. This account focuses on Daniel Burnham in particular, but also gives considerable attention to Frederick Law Olmstead.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The fair may have been Chicago's bit of civic boosterism, designed to attract people to a city whose reputation wasn't enhanced by its destructive fire of 1871 or by its stockyards, the odor of which permeated immense areas of the city offensively. There was also its challenging climate.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The fair's planners ran into many obstacles but the fair did take place, introducing novelties like the ferris wheel.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author has been intrigued by the way in which fairgoers were frolicking around Chicago's Midway while very nearby a doctor was attracting some of them to his hotel, where he was quietly preying on certain women and children and brutally murdering them. Dr. H. H. Holmes was eventually caught but only after many years during which he got away with his crimes. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author explores what is known about Holmes's personality and concludes that he was an exceptionally dangerous psychopath: apparently highly intelligent and polished, he seemed capable of charming people into doing his bidding even when they were clearly putting themselves at risk.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This was a very absorbing account, and, interestingly, when the author is resorting to speculation about what might have happened, he makes it quite clear that he is departing from the facts.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>August 3, 2020</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>___________________</b></div>
<div><b><br /></b></div><b>LAVIN, TALIA</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> CULTURE WARLORDS: MY JOURNEY INTO THE DARK WEB OF WHITE SUPREMACY</span></i> (2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author gives an account of her attempts at delving into the Websites and chatrooms frequented by white supremacists while often taking on a false persona. She is alarmed and outraged by what she finds.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book is an impassioned plea for greater awareness of the dangers posed by the white supremacists, who are often armed and whose rage is often long-term and irrationally intense, in our midst. She discusses, among other groups, the Proud Boys, who would go on to greater notoriety on January 6, 2021.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Talia Lavin's book came out in 2020. The pity is that more people failed to heed her warnings.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>11 May 2023</b></div><div><b>________________________</b></div><div><br />
<strong>LE CARRÉ , JOHN</strong><br />
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<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">THE NIGHT MANAGER </span>(1993)<br />
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<b>Jonathan Pine, who has several aliases, is the night manager/hotelier but has a range of other hats he wears as he pursues "Dicky" Roper, the Bad Guy in an international arms-for-drugs trading setup.</b></div>
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<b>A well-written book and probably well constructed, but I found the language of espionage hard to follow in spots. I might have appreciated it more if I'd read more work in this genre.</b></div>
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1 March 2002<br />
_____________________________<br />
<b>LEE, CAROL ANN</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE HIDDEN LIFE OF OTTO FRANK</span></b></em><b> (</b>2003)<br />
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<b>The author gives a balanced and well-researched account of the life of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, weaving her way through a maze of intricate situations in order to determine who might have betrayed the hiding place in Holland where the Frank family lived with some friends during part of World War 2.</b></div>
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<b>She portrays Otto Frank as an exceptionally conscientious and capable person whose concern for his family was always uppermost in his mind. He himself was imprisoned in a concentration camp but he was luckier than the other members of his family. His wife and two daughters did not survive to see the liberation of the camps.</b></div>
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<b>Much of the account is devoted to the aftermath of the discovery of Anne's diary--including Otto Frank's efforts at preventing the diary from being published or dramatized in ways that would harm the people involved or that would misrepresent the facts. There is also considerable detail about the conflict with the writer Meyer Levin, who developed such a proprietary feeling about Anne Frank's writings that he presented serious problems for Otto Frank and his friends.</b></div>
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<b>The most interesting part of the account (to me) involved Tonny Ahlers, the man who probably betrayed the Frank family by letting the Gestapo know about their hiding place. The author argues very persuasively that Ahlers was probably the betrayer, and in doing so provides a clear glimpse into the scurrilous activities of a snake of a man who profited by providing information to the Nazis.</b></div>
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7 August 2010<br />
_________________________<br />
<b>LEE, HARPER</b><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRtqL8Y7euKmkt2wcahhZ31-AVyl0Hk2IQYxrEw_htdrMigq9H82x11DpjvLA" /></div>
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<br /></div>
<b> </b><br />
<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">G<i>O SET A WATCHMAN</i></span> (2015)</b><br />
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<b>This controversial early version (completed in 1957) of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird </i>gives us Scout (now usually Jean Louise) at the age of 26, returning from her home in New York to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her family there--her father (the lawyer Atticus Finch), his sister and brother (her uncle Jack). Her brother Jem (Jeremy) is now dead, and Hank (Henry Clinton), is now a lawyer and like a son to Atticus. Hank is determined to marry Jean Louise.</b></div>
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<b>We get a view of life in a southern town in the 1950s, and Lee has captured its conversation and attitudes very competently. What she is trying to do here, though, is to use local color as a backdrop for the far more serious matter of the community's racism--viewed from Jean Louise's now-altered perspective.</b></div>
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<b>Everything down home is fairly pleasant and straightforward-seeming until Jean Louise turns up at a "citizens' council" meeting where her father and Hank are in attendance, and, unbeknownst to them, she hears the speakers vehemently opposing integration and the Supreme Court.</b></div>
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<b>It comes as a complete shock to Jean Louise to realize that those nearest and dearest to her are probably racists.</b><br />
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<b>Even though she grew up in close proximity to these people, loving them, she must never have been aware of their views about race.</b></div>
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<b>In setting up this situation Lee is flying in the face of all probability. I find it next to impossible to believe that a child growing up in a southern town in the 1940s-1950s would not have realized what her family's attitudes on race were, but that is by the way. For the purposes of the story, let's assume that this might have happened. Anything is possible.</b></div>
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<b>Jean Louise's reaction is violent. She rages at Atticus and her Uncle Jack and Hank. She resolves to leave, without marrying Hank--whom she realizes she didn't really love anyway.</b></div>
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<b>Unfortunately, Uncle Jack takes center stage at about this point, and his pontifications in defense of the traditional southern-white attitudes can be irritating in the extreme. Lee seems to want older people in this novel to be sages. Even if their fundamental attitudes are bigoted and racist, their "wisdom" will redeem them to the point where the thoroughly repelled Jean Louise is ready to soften up.</b></div>
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<b>This is where Lee performs some sleight-of-hand that strikes me as unfair trickery. Having established Atticus and Hank at the citizens' council meeting that was clearly aimed at perpetuating racial segregation, she later makes it appear as if Atticus doesn't "really"--in his heart of hearts--favor racism. Instead, we are asked to believe that he is so wise in the southern mores that--unlike Jean Louise in her youthful naivete--he feels he must go along with them in order to--what? Understand his fellow man better? Help to lead his fellow citizens</b><b> out of their bigotry and into a less harmfully provincial and exclusionary way of thinking? It isn't clear.</b></div>
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<b>What is clear is that Lee hasn't quite made up her mind about how this story should play out. On the one hand, Jean Louise herself is firmly opposed to racism. But is she to reject her entire history, her family, the man she was going to marry? Seeds of doubt about Hank have been planted early on, to be sure, but just what does Jean Louise have waiting for her in New York if she returns there, probably forever?</b></div>
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<b>A novel written by a woman about a woman in the 1950s perhaps could not have ended with Jean Marie's walking away from hearth and home forever, but she comes very close to doing just that. In fact, if you look at the story without the mushiness provided by Uncle Jack's lengthy and muddy speeches, that is what she is doing.</b></div>
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<b>By now her rage has subsided and she is armed with the understanding her psychologizing uncle has poured into her ear, complete with a reference to Browning's very darkly despairing poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."</b></div>
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<b>The idea of a quest,as in the "Childe Roland" poem, by Jean Louise--a quest for the truth about herself and her background, even though it threatens to overwhelm her in its horror--runs through the story, which would have been much better without quite so much of Uncle Jack. Jean Louise could have reached her understanding by other means.</b></div>
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<b>However, it isn't really fair to criticize a book in an early draft, a first attempt at a novel by a writer who went on to write a much better book. <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> is interesting for what it isn't but it also shows the <i>Mockingbird </i>characters, still very much themselves but in a different time.</b></div>
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<b>I don't find it unbelievable that an Atticus Finch who fiercely defends an African-American at one time might also be the same Atticus Finch who goes along with southern ideas of white supremacy. We just didn't see that side of him in <i>Mockingbird</i>.</b></div>
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<b>It would be interesting to know if <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> has been edited at all since 1957. </b></div>
<b><br /></b>
15 November 2015<br />
<b><br /></b>_________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>LEFF, LAUREL</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BURIED BY THE</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> TIMES:<em> THE HOLOCAUST AND AMERICA'S MOST IMPORTANT NEWSPAPER</em></span></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2005)<br />
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<b>The author, a journalist and professor of journalism at Northeastern University, has made a meticulous study of coverage of the Holocaust by the <em>New York Times--</em>and has come up with some disturbing conclusions. This book was reviewed negatively the <em>New York Times</em> in 2005, but I think that Leff raises some serious issues.</b></div>
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<b>She has found that stories about the fate of European Jews under Hitler rarely reached the first page of the <em>Times </em>during World War II--and that when there were stories, they were worded so as to minimize descriptions of the effect of Nazi policies on the Jews, repeatedly making the situation sound as if European Christians, political adversaries of the Nazis, and other groups were being equally adversely affected, and ignoring the Nazis' repeated rantings about making Europe <em>"Judenrein."</em></b></div>
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<b>She offers several possible explanations for the de-emphasis of the Jewish plight--one being that the paper's owner, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a vehement opponent of Zionism and a strong believer in Judaism as a religion rather than a peoplehood. He quite probably thought that with these convictions he was helping to counteract Hitler's insistence on referring to the Jews as a race, but Leff shows that a very unfortunate effect of Sulzberger's convictions was that reports of the losses of Jewish rights, property, and life in Europe were treated almost as if they didn't matter much.</b></div>
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<b>Sulzberger himself was often generous to relatives in Europe who were in danger of falling victim to the Nazis, but sometimes he refused help that he could easily have given. He could have used his influence as the head of the most widely read newspaper in the US in many ways and might even perhaps have put a stop to some of the Nazi atrocities, but--Leff implies--possibly because he was afraid that a Jewish-owned newspaper would be accused of being too "pro-Jewish," he leaned over backwards to avoid page-one stories that would have brought the horror home to far more readers.</b></div>
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<b>It is easy to be smart in retrospect. Perhaps Sulzberger knew all too well the deep strain of anti-Semitism in American life at the time, and maybe he was right in downplaying the Nazi campaign against the Jews. For instance, I came across this, which appeared in <em>Time </em>magazine in 1930:</b></div>
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<em><b>With her plump, black-eyed brood, Jewess after rich Jewess scuttled out of Germany last week, filling trains de luxe with wails and confusion. Mother-instinct knew the meaning of Jew-Baiter Adolf Hitler's election victory fortnight ago, when his Fascist 'Brown Shirts' leaped fearsomely from ninth to second place among German parties.</b></em></div>
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<b>--From <a href="http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,740394,00.html?internalid=ACA">"Strap Helmets Tighter!"</a> , <em>Time,</em> September 29, 1930.</b></div>
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<b>Written some three years before Hitler came to power, this paragraph is laden with anti-Jewish sentiment and appeared in a very widely read newsmagazine. Any reader of Leff's book would do well to think about what Sulzberger may have been up against at the time.</b></div>
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30 August 2009</div>
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_______________________</div>
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<b> LEPORE, JILL</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">BOOK OF AGES: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF JANE FRANKLIN</span></i></b> (2013)<br />
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<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/LadyJaneFranklin.png/220px-LadyJaneFranklin.png" /><br />
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JANE FRANKLIN</div>
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<b>The Founding Fathers had wives, daughters, sisters, mistresses--about whom not much is usually known. This biographer of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane has set herself the task of giving Jane Franklin Mecom her place in history, overshadowed though she will always be by her illustrious brother.</b></div>
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<b>--Overshadowed perhaps because she was trapped in the customary woman's role of the time. Married in her mid-teens to a man who appears to have been a millstone round her neck, she gave him a dozen children, most of whom predeceased her. Not only did she raise the children--she went on to raise grandchildren and great-grandchildren.</b></div>
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<b>But unlike many women of her time, she was literate, and a few of her letters have been preserved. Lepore makes quite a point of the fact that her brother Ben didn't save her letters to him but she saved all his letters to her.</b></div>
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<b>This seems to be a straightforward narrative based on extensive research. However, as history it lacks objectivity. Lepore has an ax to grind, and she doesn't hesitate to grind it. She is determined to make the point that women of that time had a very hard row to hoe and were often expected to be almost invisible--willing servants to the men in their lives.</b></div>
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<b>I wish she had let the facts speak for themselves and spared us the hectoring tone.</b></div>
<br />
March 26, 2015<br />
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________________________<br />
<blockquote>
<strong>LERNER, BARRON H.</strong><br />
<strong><em></em></strong></blockquote>
<span style="color: #38761d;"><strong><em>WHEN ILLNESS GOES PUBLIC: CELEBRITY PATIENTS AND HOW WE LOOK AT MEDICINE</em></strong> </span>(2006)<br />
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<b>This book is a collection of articles about thirteen "celebrity" patients--some of whom were famous before they became ill, while others became celebrities on account of their illness. The author reflects on how the rise of "celebrity patients" affects the way medicine is practiced, remarking that one sure way to call attention to a disorder and possibly increase funding for it seems to be to have a celebrity associated with it. Whether this is always for the good is an open question....</b></div>
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<b>So we have discussions of Lou Gehrig, whose name is now often attached to the disease that killed him, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and another baseball great, Jim Pearsall. The author also focuses on Steve McQueen, John Foster Dulles, Arthur Ashe, and Barney Clark (the first artificial heart transplant patient).</b></div>
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<b>Also included is the story of the Libby Zion case, which has been treated in more detail in <em>The Girl Who Died Twice</em> (1995) by Natalie Robins, which I read years ago. Libby Zion died unnecessarily and quite unexpectedly at the age of 18 at New York Hospital, and her father launched an energetic campaign to find out what really happened and to oppose the traditional hospital system of overworking residents and interns to the point where they become too dangerously fatigued to do a competent job--a situation where a hapless patient like Libby Zion all too often suffers.</b></div>
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<b>For someone who hasn't seen the popular movie <em>Lorenzo's Oil</em>, the material about Lorenzo Odone is particularly interesting. Lorenzo's parents were so determined not to lose their son, who wasn't expected to get through his childhood once his adrenoleukodystrophy was diagnosed, that they bent every fiber to find a cure. The "oil" they discovered appears to have been of only limited usefulness for a very limited number of patients, but Lorenzo did survive until the age of 30. And his parents' efforts led to the establishment of the Myelin Project, which is still functioning, for the purpose of finding a cure for demyelinating disorders.</b></div>
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<b>The author of this book is a doctor at Johns Hopkins University.</b></div>
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18 June 2009<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>LESSING, DORIS</strong></blockquote>
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQcmKHVEETC8YyJSvaAicTtpGp_zHYNHsusUSOAEeEsT75aTuZI" /> </div>
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<em><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE CLEFT</b></span> </em>(2007)<br />
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<b><span style="text-align: justify;">I may not have paid enough attention to what was happening in this novel, but it just didn't hold my attention. I'm not a fan of fantasy novels. </span><em style="text-align: justify;">The Cleft</em><span style="text-align: justify;"> is set in an imagined world that is before Roman times and is narrated by a Roman. We don't find out much more about any of the characters. They are featureless silhouettes presumably set against an eternal sky.</span></b><br />
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<b>But the whole thing just doesn't seem to work. At least it didn't work for me. The imagined world of the Clefts--prehistoric women creatures who have no use for men--wasn't something I wanted to know more about. I was curious about how they reproduced without men, but apparently they didn't. Or at one time they did but they lost that capacity. Or something.</b></div>
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6 February 2011<br />
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<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK</span></em> (1973)</strong><br />
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<strong>Kate Brown is a 45-year-old woman who has raised four children satisfactorily (with a highly successful husband in the background) and who finds herself suddenly without a real purpose in life. Fortunately she has extraordinary language skills and experience that catapult her into a fairly important job as a simultaneous translator. </strong></div>
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<strong>It is after that job ends that her real troubles begin. She launches an affair with a considerably younger man whom she hardly knows, but it never gets off the ground because the young man falls seriously ill. The illness is never identified, and she leaves the young man to his illness after a while, presuming that he is now having good care. The young man and his fate are never again mentioned in the story.</strong><strong></strong></div>
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<strong>This seems to me to be a serious flaw in a novel about a woman whose whole life has been devoted to caring for and about others, in the time-honored role of women. So far as we know, she never gives him another thought.</strong></div>
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<strong style="text-align: justify;">The story veers off in several directions without ever bringing them together: the translating job and the people involved there, the young man, and finally what happens when Kate returns--now ill herself--to England and temporarily shares a flat with a much younger woman, Maureen, who is clearly a daughter substitute.</strong><strong></strong></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong style="text-align: justify;">Maureen is particularly hard to believe in. She is shown repeatedly to be flirtatious and flippant, and yet she seems to be genuinely interested in hearing every detail of Kate's past. Maureen has three boy friends on tap and is trying to decide which one to marry. Maureen and her boy friends enter the story at about the halfway point, and this late appearance may be part of the reason why I had trouble being very interested in her. Moreover, she doesn't really connect with Kate or Kate's family, about whom we already know quite a bit.</strong><strong></strong></blockquote>
<blockquote>
<strong style="text-align: justify;">This is a well-told story of one woman's way of dealing with becoming an empty-nester, but the author tends to explain and analyze too much. I wish she had paid closer attention to interweaving the several strands of the plot.</strong><strong></strong></blockquote>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">6 July 2009</span><strong></strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #38761d;"><em style="font-weight: bold;">AFRICAN LAUGHTER: FOUR VISITS TO ZIMBABWE</em></span> (1992)</div>
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<b>The author reports on her four visits to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992. She had moved to Southern Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe later) at the age of 5, in the 1920s, but became a political exile as a result of her opposition to the white supremacist government. In 1949 she moved to England, where she remained. But after 25 years in exile, she made several return visits, and this book is an account of what she found.</b></div>
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</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The pieces are informative and beautifully written, organized loosely around a "theme" of African laughter, seemingly. The author sees laughter as a characteristically African response to hardship. She clearly writes from an abiding love for this part of the world and its people.</b></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a very absorbing book.</b></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
4 March 2005<br />
<strong style="text-align: center;"><em><br /></em></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="text-align: center;"> <span style="color: #38761d;"> </span><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">UNDER MY SKIN</span> </em>(1994)</span></div>
</div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Interesting account of the author’s early life (volume 1 of her autobiography--going to about 1949). Her formative years in Southern Rhodesia, her participation in the Communist Party, her two marriages and three children are described.</strong></div>
<br />
<br />
26 March 2001<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></em></strong>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> WALKING IN THE SHADE: VOL. 2 OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1949-1962</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1997)</div>
<br />
<b>The liberal English writer Doris Lessing describes some exceptionally interesting times in her life.</b><br />
<br />
27 February 2001<br />
<br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><span style="color: #38761d;"><b style="font-style: italic;">THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK</b> (1962)</span><br />
<br />
Boring!<br />
<br />
December 1996<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<b>LEVI, PRIMO</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcREBZPWBLyscU5rW95LrCmDhV77Hxu1xYaC5JRHI0ENoKk3qffHGw" /></div>
<em> </em><br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #274e13;"> A TRANQUIL STAR: UNPUBLISHED STORIES</span></b></em> (2007)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is known for his Holocaust memoirs. These gems of fiction did not appear until twenty years after his death.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As in <em>The Drowned and the Saved</em> and <em>The Periodic Table</em>, Primo Levi seems first and foremost a chemist. The stories in <em>A Tranquil Star </em>often involve chemical facts.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They tend to be brief fanciful tales, sometimes pointing to a gentle moral but usually just delightfully diverting in the fantastic world the author conjures up.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
12 November 2012<br />
_____________________________<br /><b><br />
</b></div><div><b>LEVITIN, DANIEL J.</b><br /><b>
</b></div><div><b><i><span style="color: #38761d;"> A FIELD GUIDE TO LIES: CRITICAL THINKING IN THE INFORMATION AGE</span></i> (2016)<br /></b>
<br />
The author, a neuroscientist, warns against approaching scientific "evidence" as often presented through the media with too much trust and gives some examples of the ways in which what looks objective and scientific is clothed in deceptive terminology and statistics that aren't really persuasive. If you haven't learned that correlation doesn't imply causation, you will learn it here.<br />
<br />
December 7, 2017</div><div><br /></div><div>_____________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><b>LICHTBLAU, ERICH</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR: HOW AMERICA BECAME A SAFE HAVEN FOR HITLER'S MEN</span></i> (2014)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It wasn't just Werner von Braun, as the author demonstrates with instance after instance where active Nazis, even ones with considerable power in Hitler's regime as well as ones who had been inflicting incredible brutality on its victims, found that their history could be overlooked and even expunged so that they could live out the rest of their lives here in the US. The US government was actively involved in the whitewashing of Nazi records, with the CIA and the FBI manipulating matters so as to safeguard some of their informants.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This book has frightening implications. Time has passed, and these people, probably often bringing their ideologies with them, will have influenced other people over the years--and will have had children and grandchildren who might have been similarly indoctrinated.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>4 January 2024</b></div><div><br /></div><div><br />
_____________________________<br />
<strong>LITTLE, CHARLES E.<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #38761d;"><strong><em> THE DYING OF THE TREES: THE PANDEMIC IN AMERICA'S</em> <em>FORESTS</em></strong> </span>(1995)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><b>Using examples such as the dogwood and sugar maple, the author pleads for more efforts to save U.S. trees, which are gravely endangered by the effects of air pollution.</b></span><br />
<br />
29 June 1998<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<strong>LIVELY, PENELOPE</strong><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRZnYkrExKivD9bhzBptfj_HAZkLq28HGZ_-WUhVL3WmnQ58MTC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRZnYkrExKivD9bhzBptfj_HAZkLq28HGZ_-WUhVL3WmnQ58MTC" /></a></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><em>THE PHOTOGRAPH</em> </b></span>(2003)<br />
<br />
<b style="text-align: justify;">Warning: Contains spoilers.</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a mystery implicit in this novel. It isn't put as a question anywhere in the story, and this seems a bit unfair to the reader. We find out immediately that one person important to everyone in the story has died a few years ago, but we're never told what she died of. It's as if it isn't relevant. But for a younger person such as Kath in the story, it of course will be relevant. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Towards the end of the story it comes out, but by then the reader has probably guessed that her death was a suicide. Fragments of her conversations keep drifting back to haunt the others--her husband, her sister and brother-in-law. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Once this fact--of her suicide--is finally on the table, we're still wondering why this strikingly attractive and appealing woman would kill herself.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is never explained, but we can put together a life of aimlessness, of semi-obligatory fun-loving cheerfulness, of searching for love and not finding it and draw our own conclusions.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Towards the end, the author gives us some sessions with Kath's best friend, who hasn't figured in the story at all up till then, and who turns out to have known Kath far better than anyone else on the scene.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In fact, she is almost obnoxious as she dishes out fact after hitherto unknown fact about Kath to the inquiring family members who approach her. Kath, who was childless, had suffered two miscarriages--all unbeknownst to anyone but the best friend, for instance.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The plot is set in motion when Kath's husband Glyn happens across a photograph showing Kath and another man holding hands among a group of people. Glyn learns that the man is Nick, Kath's sister's husband, and becomes obsessed with tracking down details of Kath's past as his fear that his wife was unfaithful while he was engrossed in his career overcomes him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The "lesson" here is that he never took the time to get to know his wife well. And that even her sister was so busy overshadowing her that she never knew her well either. That the affair with Nick was probably very brief just makes Kath's tragedy all the sadder.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story resembles <em>The Great Gatsby</em> in some ways. Kath is built up, writ large--the astonishingly attractive woman who doesn't even seem to realize how beguiling she is. But what we see of her is glimpses. Because she is dead, she will remain mysterious, having left behind shreds of herself as preserved in the memories of the others.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But do we need an authorial voice telling us that those others are paying tribute to Kath by discussing her as they are doing in this book? At times Penelope Lively gets too analytical with her characters, and they could use more fleshing out. They are a well-off bunch, intellectualizing their way through life because they have the time and the temperament to be cool and politely distant about everything they do.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One wishes that they could have been more likable....</b></div>
<br />
2 February 2010<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">MAKING IT UP</span></em> (2005)</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>A fascinating collection of stories where the author has imagined situations that might have developed if her life had taken a different course at one point or another.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Each story has a unique setting, and perhaps the most interesting one is "The Temple of Mithras," about an archeological dig. The author is clearly knowledgeable in a number of areas, but she doesn't use her fiction as a vehicle for showing off. Instead, she explores the human interactions perceptively and in depth.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<strong><i>21 November 2010</i></strong><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">SPIDERWEB</span></b></em> (1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A novel about Stella, a 65-year-old woman anthropologist who is settling down in a small English village after many years in the field, <em>Spiderweb </em>catches the reader up in its network of connections among its characters. The spiderweb is meant to refer to the many paths Stella's life has taken over the years, to the ways in which they might intersect, but it might as well refer to the structure of the novel itself.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Usually it proceeds as a straightforward narrative, interwoven with some flashback scenes. But sometimes we are given snippets of phone conversations, letters, newspaper advertisements and articles, and these too contribute to our understanding of the story.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are only about a dozen characters on the scene, and the author casts a magnifying glass over some of them so that we can get a good look at them. Most telling are the sections focusing on the family of two teenage boys and their parents Karen and Ted Hiscox, Stella's neighbors.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Karen Hiscox is a clearly depicted "toxic mom"--one who is giving her children a world where nothing is true, nothing makes sense, a world over which she tyrannizes by means of her ability to shout other people down until they give up. She succeeds with a terrifying consistency with her husband and two sons, ages 14 and 15. It isn't surprising but it is chilling when the boys turn out to be full of meanness and hatred--and take it out on Stella's dog, for no reason other than the handiness of the family's gun and their own seething rage.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Since this is an anthropologist's story, with many reflections about what anthropology is, maybe it's not surprising if the reader keeps hoping that the community will intervene to prevent more catastrophes as a result of the sick family situation presided over by Karen Hiscox.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The community does not. Another catastrophe occurs, and at the end of the novel it looks as if the Hiscox family will be able to go right on being the flaming tinderbox we've already witnessed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A remarkable book that says something important about the way families can be in our society--with the society turning a blind eye. It isn't a preachy book by any means. It just shows some situations as they probably all too often are.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
9 January 2011<br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">A HOUSE UNLOCKED</span></b></em> (2001)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is a meditation on the author's grandmother's house, constructed around a few memorable objects she associates with the house, Golsoncott in the English countryside, where she spent her childhood.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the hands of a lesser writer, this work could have been a negligible bit of nostalgia. But Penelope Lively brings perspective and insight to bear as she contemplates the significance of items like napkin rings or a sideboard.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her family once had numerous servants in the household, for instance, and she reflects on the softening of class lines in British society over the last century. Just how rigid these lines could be is illustrated in her observation that the English prefer processions while Americans like parades. In the UK, people are more comfortable, seemingly, when the old hierarchies are preserved than in the US.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A very remarkable and graceful book--with special attention to gardening.</b></div>
<br />
31 October 2012<br />
<br />
<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">DANCING FISH AND AMMONITES: A MEMOIR</span></b> (2013)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Here Penelope Lively is facing aging head on, not sugar-coating it but including all of its sadness and sense of loss. With humor and grace she glides over the harsh fact that the old are all too often ignored, discounted as having nothing to contribute, nothing to say worth hearing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She goes on to speak her piece, and every sentence of this book is worth a careful reading.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Not a memoir in any strict chronological sense, this book is more of an impressionistic survey of her life so far, which has been filled with diversity. In the last chapter, "Six Things," she tells about six items that are still of importance to her, including a couple of ammonites--fossilized prehistoric snail-like creatures--a collection of embroidered samplers, and potholders with a duck design that are an example of American folk art. The duck potholders lead her into a brief discussion of her fascination with bird-watching.</b></div>
<br />
31 January 2016<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>LODGE, DAVID</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: start;">
<strong style="text-align: center;"> </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: start;">
<strong style="text-align: center;"><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">OUT OF THE SHELTER</span> </em></strong><span style="text-align: center;">(1970)</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author was born in 1935, and so apparently was the protagonist of this novel, which is autobiographical in many details.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Shaped for all time by the blitz that affected him in several important ways, the young man at the center of this story struggles to find out why his older sister seems to have alienated herself from the family by staying remotely in Heidelberg.</b></div>
<br />
3 October 2009<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>LOSEE, R. E.<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> DOC: THEN AND NOW WITH A MONTANA PHYSICIAN</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1994)</div>
<br />
<b>The author telling his own story is capable of self-deprecatory humor, as in his account of his discovery about a common knee problem and his venture into the world of publication in a medical journal.</b><br />
<br />
8 February 1999<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>LOVELL, MARY S.</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em> T<span style="color: #38761d;">HE SISTERS: THE SAGA OF THE MITFORD FAMILY</span></em></strong> (2001)</div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Ever since reading and liking Jessica Mitford's <em>American Way of Death</em>, I've wondered how she and her sisters--two of whom were known for being Nazi sympathizers--could have come from the same family. This biography doesn't answer that question, and there may be no answer. But it does reveal how they got along--or didn't get along--with one another throughout their lives.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Jessica was always rebellious, and ultimately joined the Communist Party, to the consternation of her high-born English relatives. She eventually left the CP, but she finely honed her skills as a muckraking journalist and became both prosperous and respected as a writer.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Diana and Unity were the most vocal enthusiasts for Nazism in the family, though brother Tom and father David also were sympathetic to Hitler's government, at least at first. Unity appears to have had a frank crush on Hitler--and was able to act on her feelings by frequenting Hitler's favorite hangouts often enough to be noticed, and she became his very much favored friend, though not his lover, by all accounts.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Reading this book, with its references to the Mitford family relationship to the Churchills, one suspects that Hitler was exploiting Unity and her crush. He was surely far too shrewd to have allowed himself to be bowled over by an English debutante, no matter how young and beautiful she was. By being sociable toward Unity, he may have been on the lookout for any news of Winston Churchill or British war strategy.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Unity shot herself, as she had said she would, when living in Germany began to be less attractive once England and Germany were at war. She botched the job, though, and was left with severe brain damage for the rest of her days. The Mitfords rallied round and took care of her in her final years.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This biography seems to be a balanced and thoroughgoing study of this group of six sisters.</b></div>
<br />
24 November 2008<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>LOXTERCAMP, DAVID</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE MEASURE OF MY DAYS: THE JOURNAL OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR</span> </em></strong>(1988)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a family practice doctor in Belfast, Maine, decided to keep a journal for a year, and we learn about some of his patients, about his background, about his interests--his Roman Catholic faith, his wife and daughter, brewing his own beer, running.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is an interesting and well written journal. But if you're not a Roman Catholic, and especially if you're not a Thomas Merton enthusiast (I'm neither), you might not find this book to be your cup of tea. By a rough estimate, about one-third of this book is given over to discussion of the Church and Thomas Merton.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There was something pretentious and annoying about the way in which Loxtercamp insists on his piety in this journal. But maybe I just don't have the proper outlook on the practice of medicine.</b></div>
<br />
30 October 2007<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong>LURIE, ALISON </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSrR2b19VU-yinCrhYHipy7ncJ6NwszNU-Y3qloYz7ppov0izeAMEP1e9ht" /></div>
<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES </span></em></strong>(2005)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a novel of academia, set at the fictional Corinth University and involving two childless couples. Jane Mackenzie is getting desperate as the wife of Alan because for well over a year Alan has been incapacitated due to a back injury and is depending on her for entirely too much--while hating every minute of his dependency.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Much is said about his pain. We are reminded of it at every turn. We are even told that physical therapy has been part of the picture. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>A new couple emerges on the scene--Henry Hull and his presumed wife Delia Delaney, who is one of the fellows attached to the humanities center that Jane manages. The author can't quite decide if she shares Jane's view of Delia through most of the novel--that Delia is an overindulged prima donna with absolutely no consideration for others and an alarmingly oversized ego--or a more sympathetic take on her that comes to Jane later on: that Delia is somewhat pathetic and starting to show her age.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reader is left therefore with two conflicting views of Delia unresolved. The story is interesting in a way but predictable. We can see that Jane and Henry are going to try to pair off once it becomes known that Delia has cast her spell on Alan. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
27 September 2009<br />
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">FAMILIAR SPIRITS: A MEMOIR OF JAMES MERRILL AND DAVID JACKSON</span></strong></em> (2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Without having read much of James Merrill's poetry, I won't comment except to say that Lurie's perceptive observations on her two friends in this memoir are very much needed if the reader is to understand them. James Merrill was far and away the more successful of the couple, and it was perhaps his success that led to the decay of the relationship between him and David Jackson.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>This is a sad story, and the two men's long-lasting fascination with the ouija board is especially hard to fathom--and sad.</b><br />
<br />
24 March 2004<br />
____________________________<br />
<strong>LYNCH, THOMAS<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE UNDERTAKING: LIFE STUDIES FROM THE DISMAL TRADE</span></em> </strong>(1997)</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, a poet and an undertaker, gives his perspective on undertaking. I often disagreed with him but the book is revelatory. I still have problems with the whole practice of embalming and entombment of the dead. Of course Lynch does not share my opinion that there is something grisly and morbid about this cultural phenomenon, and these essays do not persuade me to feel less squeamish.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Death is too catastrophic an event to be wallowed in as the funeral-home industry would like us to wallow in it: with "viewings" and "visitations,"expensive caskets with satin lining or what-have-you, and all of the other grief-industry products that are imposed on the bereaved at the very time when they are most vulnerable.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I can't share in the general applause Lynch's book has received.</b></div>
<br />
7 July 2004<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>LYSIAK, MATTHEW</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b><i> <span style="color: #38761d;">NEWTOWN: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY</span></i> </b>(2013)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This account of the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut, where a young man named Adam Lanza killed his own mother, a couple of school staff members, and scores of elementary school children, could have been better organized and written.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>We don't find out much about Nancy Lanza, Adam's mother, but at least we learn some details about the way in which she regularly supplied her son, who was known to have been severely troubled for many years, with firearms--Adam being too young to buy them in Connecticut, Mom obligingly bought them for him.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Then there is the matter of whether Nancy Lanza had multiple sclerosis, and if so, in what way she was affected by it. We find out very little in this book. Her grandfather had MS, and her symptoms were noted in the late 1990s. At 52, we are told, she was diagnosed with "an incurable autoimmune disease," but Nancy believed she had MS.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>That is the sum total of what we learn, even though she played a large part in Adam's behavior.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This was a young man who had gradually begun living in a world of his own, centered around video games and violent imagery, someone so troubled that his mother had been trying desperately to find help for him for years.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>If this is true, it is a sad commentary on the state of the US mental health services. This was a very prosperous family who could easily have afforded the best psychiatric care.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Instead of delving into this situation, though, the author goes into detail about the victims. It is a very moving and chilling account.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The book's preface was written by the monsignor who conducted the funerals for nine of the victims.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This book may have been meant primarily as a tribute to those victims rather than as a piece of investigative journalism.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
12 October 2014</div>
</div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121054351599108252005-06-29T20:56:00.012-07:002023-05-21T17:26:32.505-07:00M<strong>MAC DONALD, BETTY</strong><br />
<strong style="text-align: center;"><strong><em><br /></em></strong></strong>
<span style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">THE PLAGUE AND I</span> (1948)</span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an account of the author's stay in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Seattle in the 1930s. It is highly informative and surprisingly amusing. The author is best-known for <i>The Egg and I</i>, which became a popular movie.</b></div>
<br />
3 May 1998<br />
__________________________<br />
<br />
<b>MADDOW, RACHEL</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTYbWaLx5SF2MCd6yfKJStruU3nt8qkw962IbeFUjGD7slE_mv0UZEccQ" /></div>
<b> </b><br />
<i><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">DRIFT: THE UNMOORING OF AMERICAN MILITARY POWER</span></b> </i>(2012)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This short but well constructed book makes a very persuasive case for putting far less emphasis on the military in the US today. Maddow argues that going to war has become much too easy, and people are not only suffering from the consequences of this extreme militarization but are also being endangered by the reckless inattention to human life exemplified in our slipshod handling of nuclear weapons.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She cites instance after horrifying instance of poorly conceived decisions and policies over the last 50 years. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There was the time when six nuclear warheads were flown 1400 miles across the US, and no one knew their whereabouts for over 36 hours:</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/12/us-usa-military-nuclear-idUSN1255936420080212"><b>http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/12/us-usa-military-nuclear-idUSN1255936420080212</b></a><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>She comments on the material she has unearthed with biting humor. There is no doubt about where she stands on these issues.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>She is alert to the problems that arise when the populace is less literate than it should be, too:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Others told investigators, without a hint of shame, that they weren't sure that <i>verifying </i>meant "like, actually physically checking something."</b></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, although there is an extensive list of sources at the end of the book, there are no footnotes or other indications of the exact sources for each person quoted or incident mentioned. Although the lack of precise references makes for a much more readable book, in a work on a topic as controversial as the US military, I believe that Maddow could have enhanced her credibility greatly if she had included them.</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
2 November 2013</div>
_________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>MAGNUSSON, MARGARETA</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE GENTLE ART OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING: HOW TO FREE YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY FROM A LIFETIME OF CLUTTER </span></i>(2018)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It seems that in Sweden there are people who do "death cleaning"--tidying up their belongings, getting rid of everything that seems unnecessary, with a view toward easing the lives of those who will have to deal with the stuff we leave behind after our death.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Some people do have a lot of stuff, particularly in a country like the US where many are prosperous and where advertising has persuaded them that they have to have products and more products.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is somewhat like a more somber version of Marie Kondo's books on sparking joy by keeping only what you really treasure.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a slight book, not long, chattier instead of very informative, but might be useful for people needing to simplify their lives.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>February 29, 2020</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>_______________________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b>
<b>MALCOLM, JANET</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSvmnxkmCojlXfReBbFxJ3EnY49FLoRidBzC2CnFnJhHT6GdZ-mi9jK4nb6" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>IN THE FREUD ARCHIVES</em> </span></b>(1984)</div>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This short book originally ran as a long essay in the <em>New Yorker.</em></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is an interesting account of a battle over the letters of the late Sigmund Freud. It revolves around the entry on the psychoanalytic scene of one Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, an apparently brilliant Sanskrit scholar who decided to concern himself with Freud's papers--and to become a psychoanalyst, although he failed to win acceptance in the tight community of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In fact, he went too far in some of his claims and theories. Although he was to have had full custody of the Freud archives on the death of Anna Freud, he suffered an abrupt fall from grace when some of his theories cast Freud in an unfavorable light.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The theories, supported by considerable evidence, were not so very damning, or at least that is how Malcolm tells the story. Masson's arrogance and abrasiveness must have made him a difficult person to deal with. He has abandoned his work in psychoanalysis since the events narrated here.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author takes a nonjudgmental approach to her topic. She is by no means squarely in Masson's corner. The result is an account that shows the limitations of the field of psychoanalysis and of its practitioners.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
11 October 2011</div><div><br /></div><div> <b><span style="color: #76a5af;"><i>NOBODY'S LOOKING AT YOU: ESSAYS </i></span></b>(2019)</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;">These perceptive essays by <i>New Yorker</i> writer Janet Malcolm are well worth reading. One is a chatty piece about the three sisters who run the Argosy Bookshop in New York, an enterprise they inherited from their father. The account supplies many glimpses into the world of bookstores.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There are two essays on <i>Anna Karenina. </i>Tolstoi readers might differ with Malcolm on the merits of Constance Garnett's translations, but Malcolm has given the subject her usual thorough consideration.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is also a discussion of Joseph Mitchell, who was revealed as a journalist who inserted fictional elements into some of his<i> New Yorker</i> "Profiles"--even inventing one person completely. Although there are many who would maintain that passing fiction off as fact is a definite no-no, Malcolm seems to be saying that Mitchell is in a class by himself, a level above ordinary reporters. Reporters, she states, are people who can't write fiction--or else they would be doing so, a claim that strikes me easily demonstrable as untrue. But there are people like Mitchell, she suggests, who are in a more exalted realm that entitles them to break the usual rules.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Malcolm's comments can be controversial but she never fails to be interesting.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>24 June 2021</div><div><br /></div><div> <b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER</span></i></b> (1990)</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Without having read <i>Fatal Vision</i> by Joe McGinniss, the controversial book that is the focus of this account by Janet Malcolm, I do not feel qualified to comment in detail about it. The McGinniss book, which Wikipedia classifies as "true crime/biography" is presumably meant to be fact-based journalism, but whether it presented only facts isn't at issue here. McGinniss was friendly enough with Jeffrey MacDonald, a Special Forces captain convicted of the murder of his pregnant wife and two daughters, to interview and correspond with him over several years and even made an arrangement whereby MacDonald would share in the proceeds of the book's sales. But when the book came out and MacDonald found that his reporter friend, contrary to his expectations, believed him to be guilty as charged, he felt betrayed and sued McGinniss.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For Malcolm, the issue is whether journalists can deliberately mislead the people they interview (their "subjects") for the sake of gaining their trust and thereby learning more about the story. Apparently this tactic is so commonly used that "everybody does it" could be given as a justification for it. But do the ends justify the means here? Is a reporter/journalist's determination to do whatever it takes to get the story the moral thing to do?</div><div><br /></div><div>Malcolm admits that it isn't moral, but she also states that the journalist's position is morally indefensible--cozying up to a subject long enough to get at that person's story, then quite possibly damning the subject with a very negative account that is published--by which time the subject can do next to nothing about it.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the McGinniss/MacDonald trial, a couple of well-known journalists were brought forward to testify--William F. Buckley and Joseph Wambaugh. Wambaugh on the witness stand differentiated between a "lie" and an "untruth"--claiming that what a journalist is doing is not a lie but an untruth:</div><div><br /></div><div>"'<i>A lie is something that is told with ill will or in bad faith that is not true while an untruth is part of a device wherein one can get at the actual truth.</i>'" </div><div><br /></div><div>Malcolm doesn't discourse much on this incredibly fuzzy definition. She wisely lets it speak for itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Malcolm believes that MacDonald was probably guilty of the murders. Oddly, however, she never offers any explanation of the fate of the unborn baby--a child who might have lived in spite of its murdered pregnant mother, it seems to me....</div><div><br /></div><div>21 February 2022<br />
______________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>MANNING, OLIVIA</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img alt="Manning as a young woman. She looks into the camera with a serious expression. Short, wavy hair is topped by a hat with veiling." src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b7/Olivia_manning.jpg/220px-Olivia_manning.jpg" /></div>
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>THE BALKAN TRILOGY</em> (Part I of <em>THE FORTUNES OF WAR</em>): <em>THE GREAT FORTUNE</em> (1960), <em>THE SPOILT CITY</em> (1962), <em>FRIENDS AND HEROES</em></span></b> (1965)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I fail to understand why Olivia Manning isn't better known. I've read <em>The Balkan Trilogy</em> and its successor, <em>The Levant Trilogy</em>, years ago and am rereading them now. Manning is a careful, sensitive writer who grounds her story firmly in its political and geographical setting and who delineates her characters in often amusing detail.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story she tells seems to be largely autobiographical: Harriet Pringle is a young British woman recently married to Guy, who is sent to teach English in Bucharest just as Hitler's armies are on the march through Europe.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The young couple soon acquires a circle of friends and acquaintances, particularly since Guy is almost too gregarious. Bucharest has its share of royalty who are down on their luck--among them the gourmand Prince Yakimov. In her presentation of Yakimov the author shows her skill--casting a deeply flawed person in a light that inspires compassion in the Pringles and, undoubtedly, in the readers.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The characters are clearly aware of the existence of concentration camps and of the dangers faced by Bucharest's Jews. The Pringles conceal a young Jewish man, Sasha, but eventually have to realize that he will never believe that they didn't betray him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>If the trilogy has a weakness, it may be in the relationship between Harriet and Charles Warden, an English officer temporarily stationed in Greece. Up until the appearance of Charles, Harriet has been a level-headed person, but her attraction to Charles and her insistence on continuing the friendship even though Charles is clearly trifling with her and being unpleasantly impatient about his pursuit of her is not adequately explained. It is hard to believe that Harriet would be dazzled by his military status.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The novel has an array of self-seeking characters whose shortcomings come to light as time goes by, and Manning seems to be smiling wryly in the background as their cowardice and duplicitous natures are exposed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
January 2, 2012<br />
<br />
<div>
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> THE BATTLE LOST AND WON </em>(Part 2 of THE LEVANT TRILOGY) </span></b>(1978)</div>
<div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>On a second reading many years later, I'm still impressed by the author's achievement in the six-volume set known as <em>The Fortunes of War</em>. In this second part of <em>The Levant Trilogy</em>, Harriet Pringle is becoming increasingly disillusioned with Guy, but this personal story is set against a backdrop of the near-chaos of Cairo at the time when war is being waged.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Olivia Manning shows an amazing command of a wide variety of scenes, including the most intensely action-laden battle scenes, of which she probably had only limited personal experience.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Towards the end of this volume Harriet--debilitated from amoebic dysentery--is about to sail back to England and get a job. <em>The Fortunes of War</em> may not please readers who believe that women shouldn't just attach themselves to men and be willing to supported by them even when a couple is childless, for that is what Harriet Pringle has been doing, without considering whether her choice is fair to herself or to Guy.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Women of later generations may fault her for this, but as the story unfolds, the extent of Harriet's quietly compassionate nature becomes more and more evident in unobtrusive ways, and eventually, if we think about it at all, we would have to say that the still-childless woman who is content to be "just" a companion and helper to her husband has her functions, her place in the world, just as surely as a woman with a salaried job.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>To be sure, the man with such a wife is lucky indeed, and few women could expect to have such helpful husbands even if the women could support them. But that is another matter.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The novel is laced with irony, as when the pretentious literary scholar Lord Pinkrose is assassinated because some gunman confused him with a Lord Pinkerton who had a certain diplomatic importance.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The ironies of the situation are never lost on Harriet, whose keen powers of observation can be depended on throughout.</b><br />
<br />
27 February 2012</div>
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>THE DANGER TREE</em> (Part 1 of THE LEVANT TRILOGY) </span></b>(1977)<br />
<br />
<b>Many of the characters we met in <em>The Balkan Trilogy</em> turn up in this novel, now transported to Egypt, with the war still buffeting them about.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Simon Boulderstone is introduced, a young officer who is trying to find his brother Hugo, also in the military. Simon is enamored of one Edwina Little, a party-loving young woman who shares a flat with Guy and Harriet as well as others. Edwina Little, however, is under the spell of an Anglo-Irish lieutenant colonel. Meanwhile, Harriet is becoming increasingly irritated at Guy's overly expansive gregariousness, and the novel ends with some loose ends dangling. Was Guy actually flirting with Edwina, as Harriet seems to have witnessed? Or was he just consoling a young woman in considerable distress?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The book contains far more than this brief sketch of some of its plot elements. Battle scenes are described in realistic detail, and through Manning's skilful writing, the reader can experience the desert heat as well as the horror of the ongoing war.</b><br />
<br />
7 February 2012<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>THE SUM OF THINGS </em>(</span></b>1980)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b>This part of the trilogy may have been written at the end of the author's life. By now Harriet and Guy have more or less separated, but at the book's end they have been reunited, after Harriet has struggled by herself in Syria and Lebanon, buoyed sometimes by her friendship with Angela but often coming up against considerable difficulties in surviving on her own, as an unattached woman seeking work in a foreign country during wartime.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b>This rather short novel is unfortunately the weakest of the six novels that make up <em>The Fortunes of War</em>, in my opinion. Harriet agrees to board a ship bound for England, at Guy's urging, but at the last minute she decides not to get on the ship and goes to Damascus instead. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, the ship goes under and most passengers are lost. Guy, hearing of this, assumes that she is among the dead since her name shows up on the list of passengers. His grief over losing her is evidence, if evidence were needed, that he cares deeply about her in spite of an overly gregarious nature that has often made their marriage a lonely one for Harriet.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #38761d;"><b>The story is absorbing and affecting, as were all of the other novels in this very impressive trilogy.</b></span><br />
<br />
19 April 2012<br />
___________________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
MARON, MARGARET<br />
<br />
<i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><b> SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT</b></span></i> (1993)<br />
<br />
Deborah Knott is the 30-ish narrator--and she has just been elevated to a judgeship in the North Carolina town of her birth. She was the only girl in her family, and several of her brothers figure in this story, which turns out to be a mystery only towards the end.<br />
<br />
By the time there is a death and suspicions arise, we have been introduced to some 35-50 local characters, including court clerks, lawyers, and other judges, defendants in cases, and Deborah Knott's friends and relatives. The reader might wonder if this crowd of people has been flung up as a sort of smoke screen, meant to obscure facts in the main story that are flimsy, but here the murder and the motive are at least plausible--though maybe quite unusual.<br />
<br />
As with many good stories in this genre, much depends on a bit of arcane knowledge--in this case, whether arsenic is found in a common household insecticide--and to that end, an expert appears on the scene.<br />
<br />
This was a solid story, well told, and we were spared any romantic involvements on the part of Deborah Knott--a good sign that the author isn't so keen on boosting book sales that she resorts to bodice-ripping passages.<br />
<br />
Each chapter is preceded by a brief segment from a carpentry manual that seems to have little connection with the chapter at hand. However, Deborah and some of her friends have become involved in building a house, as an all-woman project, for a needy woman of color (a single mom who has been chosen from several candidates), and the early part of the book provides details about this project and how the women are solving the problems that arise in connection with building inspections, electrical wiring, and vandalism. Then the project sinks into the background as other events become important. Towards the end of the book we find that all the while the house has been under construction and eventually the project is done, and its new occupants move in. The chapter openings, then, serve as a reminder that while the court is in session and other incidents are occurring in this town, that house project has been moving forward.<br />
<br />
This technique helps to establish Deborah Knott as trustworthy, dependable, and good-hearted, the sort of person who would be good at finding out the truth.<br />
<br />
8 July 2018<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><span style="color: #38761d;">ONE COFFEE WITH</span></i> (1981)<br />
<br />
Not having kept up with the mystery genre, I'm on shaky ground if I try to evaluate this story, but it held my attention, and its parts seemed to hang together.<br />
<br />
The novel introduces Sigrid Harald, a lieutenant in the detective bureau. She is assigned the task of solving a poison case involving an art department murder at a college.<br />
<br />
Most of the suspects are other art department faculty members, and the author conveys the academic atmosphere, right down to the jockeying for positions and the resentful sniping and gossip, in considerable detail.<br />
<br />
November 7, 2017<br />
<br />
______________________<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<br />
<strong>MARTIN, JUDITH</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://www.operanews.com/uploadedImages/Opera_News_Magazine/2014/9/Departments/CodaMartinlg914.jpg" /></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">MISS MANNERS' BASIC TRAINING: THE RIGHT THING TO SAY</span></em></strong> </strong>(1998)</div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I always enjoy Miss Manners, who delivers her etiquette recommendations with a lot of humor. This short work is full of useful advice.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I disagreed with her on only one point. She is somewhat in favor of the person who wants to make a friend over, but I find any attempt at "makeovers" offensive and intrusive, as well as presumptuous and arrogant on the part of the person who wants to do the makeover. Only if a person earnestly requests a friend for advice on appearance, style, or whatever, should the friend venture some (very cautious) remarks. But that's just my opinion...</b></div>
<br />
8 August 2007<br />
_____________________________<br />
<strong>MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">OF HUMAN BONDAGE </span></i>(1915)</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Philip Carey's childhood and early adulthood are the subject of this semiautobiographical novel, and in a sense it is a <i>Bildungsroman</i>, though some might say that the problem of Philip's human bondage that is--loosely speaking--the theme is never very satisfactorily resolved.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Philip goes from a tormented childhood struggling with having been born with a clubfoot, then losing both parents and being put in the hands of a cruel uncle who is a vicar, to a young adulthood as an art student in Paris so desperate for friendship that he ends up in thrall to a woman who is clearly taking advantage of him--and who treats him cruelly time and time again.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>A psychologist would probably call Philip a classic masochist but the novel is not a psychological study in any modern sense. Philip is a young man trying to find his way in a world that often treats him shabbily, even brutally.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The reader rejoices when at last things start looking up for him. After a long period of near-starvation poverty, he finds a family who befriend him, and he finishes his medical studies and finally enjoys being rewarded for his efforts. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>That he is "over" Mildred has been made clear earlier in one simple sentence remarking that he never saw her again. But, happy though we are that he finds Sally, the woman he marries at the end, how credible is it that he would have had to marry her because he is responsible for her unwanted pregnancy? With his medical training, including considerable experience in midwifery, are we supposed to believe that he could have been so stupid as he calls himself on finding out that a mistake has been made?</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Be that as it may, and maybe Philip will never learn that he isn't the actual father of the child, the book ends on an upbeat note, and we feel that Philip richly deserves the happiness he has worked heartbreakingly hard for.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>I first read this book many years ago when I was in my teens. On rereading, I'm struck by how much it tells us about the mores of turn-of-the-century England, especially how the working class lived. And it is a far better book than I remembered it to be.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>24 August 2016</strong><br />
<strong>________________________</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>MAY, PETER<br /><br /> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i>THE BLACKHOUSE</i></span> (2011)</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This novel, the first of a trilogy set in the Outer Hebrides, is less a mystery story than an account of one person's journey into his past. The protagonist is Fin Macleod, now a cop, who finds himself involved in a murder investigation that takes him back to the scenes of his youth--and to some very painful memories.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>There are two very suspenseful scenes at an annual local event, the time-honored guga hunt, when gannet chicks valued as a delicacy are sought, slaughtered, and processed for human consumption. The author spares us any sermons on the subject, and it would be impossible to say, based on his comments, whether he favors or opposes this controversial tradition:</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/25/scotland-hebrides-gannet-hunt">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/25/scotland-hebrides-gannet-hunt</a></strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>However, the description of the event--and of its extreme riskiness for the participants--will probably cause most readers to wonder why the annual guga hunt is still going on. Surely no culinary treat is worth the wholesale slaughter of gannet chicks. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The book alternates between its present and the past of Fin Macleod's childhood, and gradually we learn more and more about the relationships in this tight-knit community, of which Fin is no longer a part.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>It is at this point--when the relationships are being disclosed as far more entangled than we realized--that the plot begins to wobble a bit. The reader might get the feeling that a few too many rabbits are being pulled out of hats when learning once again that there is something that has never been revealed before, etc., etc.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>We get surprises from DNA tests and surprises about child abuse and parentage. But perhaps most surprising is the matter of Artair's motivation, which is developed at some length toward the end of the story. It is difficult to believe that any human being, no matter how unbalanced mentally, would be unbalanced in quite the way we are told Artair has been.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>And then there is the matter of the person telling us this--Fin Macleod has shown himself to be deeply flawed. How believable is he?</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Still, the author has given us a well-informed view of a world we don't often see. Even if he has had his eye on a movie version of his book while writing it, the glimpse we get of the customs and terrain of Lewis Island is remarkably clear. And there does seem to be a film adaptation:</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b><a href="https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/lewis-trilogy-books-set-for-bbc-tv-adaptation-1-3521331">Lewis trilogy books set for BBC film adaptation</a></b><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i>The Blackhouse</i> is well written and suspenseful, by and large. The author has a penchant for saying "only ever" that I found grating, but that is my only quibble about the style. "Only ever," as in "I only ever went there on weekends," strikes me as a muddy, nearly meaningless phrase....</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>17 January 2019</b><br />
<br />
______________________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>MAYNARD, JOYCE</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">AT HOME IN THE WORLD: A MEMOIR</span></em></strong> (1998)</div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maynard's autobiographical memoir with a focus on her association with J.D. Salinger - in his 50s when she was 18 - including very specific physiological details about Maynard's sexual relationships, childbirth experiences, and abortion.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book strikes me as being in the worst possible taste. Can one blame the reclusive J.D. Salinger for being furious at her?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
16 November 2001<br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">WHERE LOVE GOES</span></em></strong> (1995)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<b>This is some more drivel by the writer who "told all" about her affair with the writer J.D. Salinger. This book, a novel about divorced single parents, makes no mention of Salinger, however.</b><br />
<br />
3 January 2000<br />
__________________________<br />
<br />
<b>MC CARTHY, MATT</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE REAL DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW: A PHYSICIAN'S FIRST YEAR</span></i> (2015)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A doctor in training tells about his year of internship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. During that stressful year, involving 30-hour work days and a need to act very fast while using excellent judgment in life-and-death situations, he made many mistakes, including accidentally jabbing himself with a needle that had just been used to draw blood from an AIDS patient. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He describes the emotional meltdown he suffered during the month of needing to take several very unpleasant medicines and waiting to learn whether he had indeed been infected with the HIV virus. (He had not.) </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A day spent on a retreat in the Palisades, where he was encouraged to discuss his concerns with other doctors, may have helped him to regain the calm demeanor he needed to be able to continue his work as a doctor.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are other books describing phases in the training or later experience of doctors, and unfortunately some of them, including this one at times, seem more of a compilation of horror stories. However, since an intern's life may indeed be a collection of horrors, either witnessed or participated in, it could be argued that the reader is getting the real picture here--from the standpoint of the human being who is splattered with blood, who has to do CPR to the point where he is exhausted (and still might lose the patient), who has to endure odors and sights that are sickening. These are the people who are paid (rather well) for doing what they do. One reason we may be willing to pay such a high price may be our keen awareness that theirs is no easy job. And Dr. McCarthy has added to that awareness with his account.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>9 April 2016</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<b><br />MC CULLERS, CARSON</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> </b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/FB4N1F/carson-mccullers-1917-1967-american-author-and-playwright-about-1955-FB4N1F.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="676" height="800" src="https://c8.alamy.com/comp/FB4N1F/carson-mccullers-1917-1967-american-author-and-playwright-about-1955-FB4N1F.jpg" width="676" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER </span></i>(1940)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>I first read this novel in a very different time--around 1952. Recently I saw a movie version that prompted me to want to reread it.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Oddly, the movie version was devoid of political references of any kind, and yet I remembered the book as permeated by politics.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Having reread it, I'd like to insist that removing the politics from this book is a great disservice to it. The way in which McCullers weaves politics into the story is masterful--and shows how thoroughly she must have grasped the problems of the time and place--the US South (Georgia) just before the outbreak of the Second World War.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>She tells the story using a variety of points of view, including that of Mick Kelly, aged 12, Jake Blount, a perennial drunk and a comparative newcomer to the town, Biff Brennan, proprietor of the New York Cafe, and Dr. Benedict Copeland, a black medical doctor whose daughter Portia works for the Kelly family in the boarding house they run.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The lives of these people intertwine, and there are other characters as well, especially Harry Minowitz, who may or may not become Mick's boy friend at some point beyond the scope of the novel.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Because McCullers is so often giving us the point of view of a particular character, she uses the vernacular that would have been used by that character, and so there is an occasional mention of a "Negro odor" to a room, or there is Jake Blount's impression of the Copeland home as having "a certain Negro smell." These are not McCullers talking, and the use of the term "niggertoes" to describe Brazilnuts probably isn't either. I was in the south at approximately the time in which this book is set (a few years later), and the term was in very common use, although anyone with any sensitivity at all about race matters would never have used the word "nigger" in any form, even then, even in the south.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>That isn't true of the word "Negro," however, and when Mc Cullers uses it, it may indeed be McCullers talking. At the time it was considered a polite, acceptable word, the standard word, along with "colored," applied to African -Americans. "Black" wasn't in use for describing someone of African -American heritage at the time, or at least I didn't hear it.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The book has its flaws. There is a scene where Jake Blount imposes himself quite offensively on the Copeland household, after Dr. Copeland has been brutally beaten for having pursued justice too aggressively, that is cringeworthy at best, and I'm not sure what it contributes to the story.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>But McCullers was willing to give us the south as it so often was at the time: powered by racism and violent bigotry. And she must have been keenly aware of the impending world war and the dangers of fascism. According to Wikipedia, at the time of this book's appearance, it was taken as anti-fascist in sentiment. I would say that it still is anti-fascist in sentiment.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Aside from its strong political overtones, the novel makes it clear that loneliness, the inability of people to reach out and understand one another, is a sad part of the human condition. McCullers has shown us some memorable characters who are trying to find their way.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>21 May 2023</b></div><div><b>___________________________<br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<b>MC DONALD, BRIAN</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT : THE SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF A FAMILY KILLED IN COLD BLOOD</span></b></i> (2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a rather poorly written account of an actual case--the 2007 murder of a woman and her two daughters in their Connecticut home. The father, a doctor, was brutally beaten but survived.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book's subtitle should alert the reader that this is going be a sensational tale, and perhaps the words "in cold blood" are meant to remind us of Truman Capote's book by that title, for it was also about a family that was murdered by strangers for no apparent reason.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One problem here is that the fate of the two murderers, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hays, had not yet been determined at the time of the book's publication.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Another problem is the author's heavy reliance on Komisarjevsky's own writings, including a diary. After having demonstrated that this is one very troubled man with a long, long criminal record, does the author believe that Komisarjevsky has something to say that is worthy of the audience's attention? It looks as if, for want of much to say about the victims (the Petit family), he has padded his book out with quotations from Joshua.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, a point is being made here--that the ineptitude of the US criminal justice system needs correction. McDonald stresses repeatedly that neither Hays nor Komisarjevsky should have been released from prison when they were, and that if they hadn't been released, very probably Jennifer Petit and the two daughters would still be alive.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
4 May 2014<br />
<span style="text-align: center;">__________________________</span><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>MC DONALD, EILEEN</strong><br />
<br />
<em><b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">BREAKDOWN: SEX, SUICIDE AND THE HARVARD PSYCHIATRIST </span>(</em>1994)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In 1991 a Harvard University medical student's suicide attracted nationwide media attention when it was revealed that the young man had been involved in an unconventional type of psychotherapy with a Harvard-trained woman psychiatrist, who had caused him to "regress" to his childhood by insisting that she was his mother.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This sad case, which was settled out of court when the psychiatrist, Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, paid $1 million to the young man's family, the Lozanos. She gave up her medical license as well.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> Paul Lozano and his family were probably telling the truth about Dr. Bean-Bayog and her unconventional therapy. There has been too much evidence for the story to be false: flashcards used by the psychiatrist, gifts (books for toddlers, a teddy bear, etc.) she gave him, for instance.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Her office notes on her sessions (often four a week) with Paul Lozano corroborate his account that she was convinced that Paul had been abused by his own mother in childhood even though there is little evidence of any abuse except for an occasional spanking and possibly the use of a belt. On the other hand, by his own admission, Paul made things up in his conversations with her--perhaps just to have something to talk about, to become a more interesting case for her.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Paul's Mexican-American mother had several other children and was especially proud of Paul's achievements. He had been an outstanding athlete, had gone to West Point and then to Harvard Medical School. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>Dr. Bean-Bayog was from an elite family with professional and academic ties going back at least to her parents' generation. When she came under attack for her unconventional and exploitative therapeutic methods, many of her colleagues and friends supported her in spite of the tragic outcome her patient suffered.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Dr. Bean-Bayog had been seeing this patient on credit. At one point he paid a large sum towards her bill, but the total owed was considerably higher than the amount he had paid. She notified him that she could no longer see him unless he paid, but this notice was given after four years of a very intense therapeutic relationship--and her termination of the connection is said to have contributed to the depression that drove him to kill himself.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Just how intense the relationship was may always be open to question. Paul claimed that it had become a sexual relationship, using her private notes--lengthy passages of sadomasochistic pornography involving Dr. Bean-Bayog and Paul--as supporting evidence. However, the psychiatrist maintained that he broke into her house and stole the papers from her private files and that he had never seen them before.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book looks like a piece of responsible reporting. It favors Paul Lozano's side of the dispute but does not do so in a shrill way. It is thoroughly documented, and the author freely admits that all of the facts will never be known.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>How can they be, in a one-to-one association such as psychotherapy? The book raises troubling questions about the uses of psychiatry and the power psychiatrists have. A patient turning to a therapist for help is often desperate and vulnerable. The psychiatrist is respected and even revered. If the psychiatrist is persuaded that the patient needs to work on recovering "repressed memories" of abuse in childhood, the chances are that the patient will somehow recover at least a few repressed memories. Or reasonable facsimiles thereof....</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It has been shown repeatedly that the human memory is faulty, maybe far faultier than most of us realize. Relying on "repressed memories" has been shown to be dangerous, and yet such reliance has resulted in court convictions.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Dr. Bean-Bayog supposedly helped Paul Lozano to dredge up repressed memories of physical and sexual abuse by his mother. Other members of the family considered these "memories" absurd, but her belief in them may have served to depress Paul's state of mind even further. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author of this book should be commended for calling attention to the glaring problems involved in psychiatry as it is currently practiced in the United States. </b></div>
<br />
14 May 2009<br />
___________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>MC DONALD, JANET</b><br />
<div style="text-align: start;">
<span style="text-align: center;"><b> </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: start;">
<span style="text-align: center;"><b><i> <span style="color: #38761d;">PROJECT GIRL</span></i></b></span><span style="text-align: center;"> (1999)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author of this remarkable memoir spent the better part of her adult life living in Paris. The account takes her life up to the point when she decides to move there. (The author died in 2007 at the age of 53.)</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She was one of a family of seven children born to an African-American couple who believed in having strong family ties, even though they were living in a housing project in Brooklyn. At the time the project's occupants were chiefly the working poor. Later these people would be supplanted by the welfare-dependent poor, who--McDonald makes clear--tended to be more troubled people, more inclined to be involved in drugs and crime.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Some of Janet McDonald's sisters and brothers got trapped in the drug scene at an early age. Janet herself discloses that she took heroin--though the extent of her use of it isn't made clear.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Through prodigious efforts and her own inherently high intelligence, she enrolled in Vassar College and eventually went to law school at NYU. During her student days, however, she was raped--and the case against her assailant dragged on for decades and poisoned her life. She was also arrested and jailed for arson--for setting a series of fires in her dormitory.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She gives explicit details about her family life and her student life and even her experiences in therapy. She clearly expresses her rage at white people and at anyone who treats her with condescension or a wish to play oneupmanship games.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Details about the rape are missing, however. Ordinarily I would be glad that they weren't included. Reading details about another person's suffering is always difficult, and the intimate details that would be included in a description of a rape are even more difficult. Perhaps it was out of an understandable desire for privacy that she omitted this information. Perhaps it was because her book seems aimed at a young adult audience.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is one thing wrong with this picture. She brings up the rape and her feelings about the rapist repeatedly throughout the book as the case continues. The incident is clearly a major event in her life. And yet, in describing the court case, she tells us only that the other side maintained that this was merely a case of consensual sex between a couple of law students. She makes no attempt at disproving this claim.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We are told that when she'd first moved into a nearly-empty dorm as a law student, another law student knocked on her door and invited her out. When she declined, he said, "Do you realize you're going to get raped tonight?" And then he raped her. That is all we find out.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We need to know if she invited him in to her room and if so, why. We are told that he threatened to kill her, but this information is tucked into a much later mention of the incident. So he raped her by using force and while threatening to kill her.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'd be willing to take her word for it except for one thing. She continued to make a big issue of the incident--and went on doing so for decades. I'd like to know a little more about why this was considered a case of rape.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>It seems to me that he might have sweet-talked her into cooperating to some extent and turned on the force only at the end--in which case it isn't exactly rape, not in the usual sense.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Or is it? The author became a lawyer but although her specialty wasn't criminal law, I think she owed it to the reader to go into this gray area.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She is clear-eyed about herself and her faults, in general. She is not a self-pitying whiner by any means. However, she doesn't make it clear what prompted her to commit acts of arson, either, or how she went about setting the fires. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a very interesting book, full of insight. I just wish it had been more forthcoming on a couple of issues.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
25 January 2011<br />
<br />
____________________________<br />
<b>MC GINTY, BRIAN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN AND THE UNFORGETTABLE STORY OF HOW A FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED TO BECOME A SLAVE </span></i>(2016)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In 1861, just after the American Civil War had begun, William Tillman, a 27-year-old free black man located in Rhode Island was serving as a cook and steward on the <i>S. J. Waring</i>, a schooner headed for Uruguay. The <i>Waring </i>hadn't got very far before it was taken over by a Confederate privateer, the <i>Jefferson Davis. </i>Tillman knew that he would be sold into slavery and used a hatchet to kill the Confederate captain and two others. Without much knowledge and unable to read or write, Tillman managed to navigate the Waring back to New York harbor--and he was welcomed as a hero and awarded salvage money for having rescued the <i>Waring.</i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i><br /></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author (a lawyer) has called attention to a riveting, astonishing story.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>17 April 2019</b><br />
<b>____________________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<b><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">MEHTA</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">VED</span></b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="blsp-spelling-error"><img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQnMgfZzLJHCVpofBj8M2idZ3-AUZUHxXU8h-ECu8Bu-p0I7ZOEUQ" /></span></div>
<em><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></em>
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">DADDYJI</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1972)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>A portrait of the blind author's father, a medical doctor who served on committees involved in preventing tuberculosis--as well as fathering eight children.</b></div>
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">FACE TO FACE</span></strong></em> (1957)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">This is a continuation of Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Mehta's</span> autobiography.</b><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"> <b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">MAMAJI</b></span></span><span style="text-align: center;"> (1979)</span></div>
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<b>Like the other autobiographical works by <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Mehta</span> that I have read, this one portrays an exceptionally loving and close-knit family struggling against the many difficulties of living in India around the time of the 1948 partition. Even sufficient income and being part of a respected caste did not protect this family from falling victim to tragic circumstances--and sometimes to the double-dealing of other people.</b></div>
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<b><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Ved</span> was the fifth of the eight children born to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Mamaji</span> (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Shanti</span> Devi) and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Daddyji</span>, who was an "England-returned" doctor. They lived primarily in Lahore--and in summer quarters in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Simla</span>--until Partition. This book covers the years from about 1880 to shortly after 1937, the year when the three-year-old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Ved</span> contracted meningitis and was left blind.</b></div>
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<b>The author never boasts of his achievements, but they have been considerable. That <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Ved</span> at 15 traveled to the United States to go to a school for the blind in Arkansas, the only school among dozens he applied to that accepted him, and that eventually he went to Pomona College, where he was such an outstanding student that he won a fellowship to Oxford--and later became a staff writer for the <em>New Yorker, </em>are facts we know only if we've read some of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Mehta's</span> other works. </b></div>
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<b>Together they form an awe-inspiring tribute to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Mehta's</span> exceptional family.</b></div>
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10 March 2009<br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">SOUND-SHADOWS OF THE NEW WORLD</span></b></em> (1986)</div>
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<b>This is <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Mehta's</span> account of his years at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, where he spent his adolescence and enlarged his experience considerably.</b><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;"><b> <span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">UP AT OXFORD</span></b><i> </i></span><span style="text-align: center;">(1993)</span></div>
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<b><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Ved</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Mehta's</span> years at Oxford are explored here, and he freely admits to feeling inadequate in comparison with his fellow students, who seem to have impressive achievements. Socially and culturally, he is obliged to adapt and even to emulate the British. As this has been the fate of many an Indian confronted with the British Raj or with the vestiges of it, his account will probably be a familiar story to many an upper-class Indian. It is told with exceptional sensitivity and attention to detail.</b></div>
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<em><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"> VEDI</span></em> ( 1982)<br />
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<b>When <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Ved</span> was five years old, his father sent him to the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Dadar</span> School for the Blind in Bombay, 1300 miles away from home, and he spent four years there among other blind children, learning to get along on his own--and to read Braille English.</b></div>
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<b>MEIER, BARRY</b><br />
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<b style="text-align: center;"><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> PAIN KILLER: A "WONDER" DRUG'S TRAIL OF ADDICTION AND DEATH</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b><span style="text-align: center;">(2003)</span><br />
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<b>A <em>New York Times</em> reporter tells the story of OxyContin, a powerful prescription pain-killer (Oxycodone HCL, an opioid) from the Purdue pharmaceutical company. It can be crushed and inhaled or injected.</b></div>
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<b>It is an informative account, shedding light on how such a drug is marketed and emphasizing the extent to which Purdue went to promote sales of OxyContin, without questioning the data clearly indicating that the drug was being freely prescribed by doctors operating so-called "pill mills": for the price of an office visit, the doctor will prescribe whatever drug the patient asks for.</b></div>
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<b>The author acknowledges that this strong narcotic has definite uses for persons suffering from intractable pain, but he argues that there are other less dangerous drugs on the market. OxyContin has had an appalling track record.</b></div>
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<b>Recently the author reported more details about OxyContin:</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/fda-bars-generic-oxycontin.html?ref=barrymeier&_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/fda-bars-generic-oxycontin.html?ref=barrymeier&_r=0</a><br />
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27 April 2013<br />
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<b>MELVILLE, HERMAN</b><br />
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<em><b style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;">BENITO CERENO</span></b></em> (1855)</div>
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<b>It's been many years since I read this novella, and I came to it knowing that I'd be up against the problems of race that it involves.</b></div>
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<b>Does <em>Benito Cereno</em>, with its collection of very evil black men, show that Melville was a racist?</b></div>
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<b>Writing in 1855, he would not have been framing such a question about himself, of course. There was a general fear of people whose skin was a different color, especially since they brought a different culture along with that different color. It would take many years of struggle before some white people moved forward from fear to the desire to understand human beings who were different from themselves.</b></div>
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<b>And the racism expressed in this story is the racism of the characters, not necessarily shared by the author, who is not present in it as a voice.</b></div>
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<b>Once the question of racism can be set aside as irrelevant, we have a story of ambiguity and more ambiguity--a besetting problem that plagued Melville, who gave his novel <em>Pierre </em>the subtitle <em>The Ambiguities, </em>and whose Captain Ahab wrestles with ambiguity as well.</b></div>
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<b>Captain Amasa Delano, who is a good and trusting man, is confronted with a peculiar situation on board a ship he encounters during a voyage--a situation where what he sees is one thing, a very benign scenario with the captain of the vessel being helped by some of the black slaves on board. But he finds good reasons to doubt what he sees and hears. Eventually the whole horror of it is gradually revealed--peeled off for us in layers.</b></div>
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<b><em>Benito Cereno</em> is a beautifully constructed tale that raises questions about whether we can ever truly know what reality is. Unfortunately it may never have many appreciative readers.</b></div>
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<b>There is a positive side to this: there probably won't be many film versions of this story.</b></div>
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1 February 2013<br />
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<br /><b>MENAND, LOUIS</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA </span></i>(2001)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author provides the historical background surrounding the "Metaphysical Club," a somewhat loosely organized periodic gathering of several American intellectual lights in the 1870s: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others. This book is far more detailed bout the background than about the club, but their relationships to one another and the ways in which their very influential views developed are adumbrated, with a strong emphasis on the profound effect of the Civil War and its aftermath.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author explores the impact of Darwin's work on all of these men, and what we see is a segment of the world trying to come to terms with the weakening of organized religion and the rise of a vision of man's life as (sadly) finite, with no possibility of an afterlife or immortality. William James, in particular, explores confrontation with a world that is chaotic and uncertain, a milieu where structures are apt to crumble.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The latter part of the book treats pragmatisms, pluralisms and freedom, and in the course of the discussion we learn many interesting facts about the thinkers who are the focus of the author's attention--for instance, that Oliver Wendell Holmes disparaged James's concept of the "will to believe" as just a way to sneak Christianity in again by the back door, so to speak--and indeed James does sometimes appear to be reviving Pascal's wager for 19th-century consumption.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>This book seems like a sound work of scholarship and, particularly with its many anecdotes about the personalities involved, will enrich the reader's understanding of this critical time in American thought.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>19 January 2022</b></div><div><b>______________________________<br /></b>
<strong>MILFORD, NANCY<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><span style="color: #38761d;"><i style="font-weight: bold;">SAVAGE BEAUTY: THE LIFE OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY </i>(2001)</span></div>
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<b>This seems to be an even-handed study of this poet's life. There are a couple of maddeningly obscure passages, and at least one place where the biographer lets her own biases intrude unnecessarily.</b></div>
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<b>Also, the book ends abruptly when "Vincent" falls down a flight of stairs to her death. I'd have welcomed details about the aftermath: Was the literary world in general grieved by the news of her death? Or indifferent? After all, she was a friend of Edmund Wilson's and numerous other literary eminences. Was there no memorial service? Were there no tributes to her? What was said?</b></div>
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<b>More analysis of her poems might have been helpful, too. But this author skirts around the issue of whether Millay was a "great" poet or just a very good poet. Clearly she regards her subject as a "good-enough" poet (good enough to merit a lengthy biography), but what she has established in this book is that Edna St. Vincent Millay and at least one of her two sisters were alcoholics, and that Edna was addicted to morphine in her last years.</b></div>
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<b>The book is especially strong in giving the family dynamics--the way in which family members succeeded in wounding one another at their most vulnerable times and in their most vulnerable spots. Edna Millay is revealed as very human--limited, and even cosseted. She died, widowed and childless, in 1950, but she had won considerable stature as an American poet.</b></div>
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18 October 2004<br />
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<strong><br />MILLER, CHANEL</strong><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong> <i><span style="color: #45818e;">KNOW MY NAME: A MEMOIR</span></i> (2019)</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>We learn from reading "Emily Doe's" memoir, <i>Know My Name</i> by Chanel Miller, that her legal case against her assailant ultimately went viral on the Internet. In addition to the previous suffering resulting from her traumatic experience, she was then subjected to the perils of becoming a celebrity.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>Though not a Stanford University student or alumna, at 22 she went to a Kappa Alpha fraternity party on the Stanford campus with her younger sister and a friend. Miller acknowledges that she had been drunk to the point of blacking out before--and on this occasion she blacked out, with a blood alcohol level later recorded at 0.22.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>Just how much she remembered isn't always entirely clear but she supposedly left the fraternity building, and in the dark by a dumpster she was attacked by a young male, also at the party but known to her --and not a member of the fraternity, a promising swimmer, Brock Turner. He was interrupted when two Stanford graduate students from Sweden attacked him.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>The legal definition of rape was radically revised in 2012, and according to this revised definition, Miller was raped. Not only was there an assault on her person without her consent--because she was unconscious at the time, she couldn't have given consent; she was defenseless.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>Miller's account is quite readable--though I was "reading" it as an audio book read by the author, whose narration was sometimes difficult to understand. She comes across as naïve and sheltered by a loving, close-knit family. Occasionally, however, there are troubling passages where she describes acts of violence she'd like to inflict on her assailant.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>Still, unless any of us has been in her situation, how can we be sure that such violent feelings wouldn't bubble up in ourselves?</strong></div><div><br /></div><div><b>She expresses profound disappointment in the lack of a supportive response on the part of Stanford--even though she herself apparently never matriculated there. She felt she was a part of the Stanford "community"--but the extent of any college's commitment to reach out to people who have some connection to it always turns out to be debatable, and Miller doesn't go into the legal technicalities about just whose property was the site of the incident--Stanford University's or the fraternity's.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Brock Turner served only three months of his 6-month prison term. Miller maintains that his sentence was much too lenient--and later succeeded in a campaign to recall the judge in the case.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Women probably owe Chanel Miller a debt of gratitude for her persistence in this case. She endured incalculable damage to her self-esteem in the long process--as well as severe emotional stress.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>18 January 2021</b></div><div>_________________________________________________</div><div> </div><div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>MILLER, JOHN E.<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"><strong><em>BECOMING LAURA <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">INGALLS</span> WILDER: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND</em></strong> </span>(1998)</div>
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<b>This biography of the well-known author of the <em>Little House</em> books for children isn't especially well written or edited and is replete with material garnered from the social pages of the local newspaper, evidently.</b></div>
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<b>We learn that Laura <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Ingalls</span> Wilder was a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">clubby</span> sort of woman when once established in Mansfield, Missouri. We learn very little about the actual writing of her books.</b></div>
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<b>Another biographer has recently claimed that Mrs. Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, actually ghost-wrote much of her mother's fiction.</b></div>
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<b>This biography by John E. Miller seeks to establish Laura <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Ingalls</span> Wilder as the primary author, with considerable editorial help and advice from her daughter.</b></div>
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3 May 2004<br />
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<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">MILOFSKY</span>, DAVID</strong></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; text-align: center;"><b> </b><em><b>PLAYING FROM MEMORY</b></em></span><span style="color: #660000; text-align: center;"> (1982)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This is a novel about Ben <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Seidler</span>, a professional musician who develops multiple sclerosis. As he becomes increasingly disabled, the plot turns around how he and his family deal with the changing situation in which they find themselves. His friends and colleagues gradually dwindle away. Dory, his wife, has to make major adjustments. Ben develops a new closeness with his son as they mail chess moves back and forth.</b></span></div>
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<b><b><span style="color: #990000;">This is not a story for the squeamish: bedsores spawning maggots aren't for the faint of heart. Not an upbeat story but sadly realistic.</span></b></b></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">1982</span><br />
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<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">MISTRY</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">ROHINTON</span></strong></div><div><strong style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></em></strong></div><div><strong style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> A FINE BALANCE</span></em></strong><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1995)</span><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></strong>
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<b>This is a long novel but it will not disappoint readers interested in an accurate picture of India after the Raj--specifically, in the years 1975-1984, covering the "State of Emergency" declared by Indira Gandhi.</b></div>
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<b>The book does not pretend to be a panoramic survey. It is a gracefully and carefully told story with a few characters given to us in considerable detail. Although we do not often enter into their minds, so much happens to them that to have included their interior monologues would have been to burden the story with far more than it could have borne.</b></div>
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<b>Dina <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Dalal</span>, a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Parsi</span> woman trying to live independently since becoming a widow, is at the center of the story. It is around and through her that the other characters become known to us.</b></div>
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<b>One might expect such a novel, revolving around a woman from a more prosperous <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Parsi</span> family, to include other characters in her class. But the author keeps them very much on the sidelines (Dina's restrictive brother, for instance, enters into the story only insofar as he helps or obstructs her plans.) Instead, we are given a closely detailed account of the lives of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">Manekh</span>, Dina's nephew, a student who comes to live with her as a paying lodger, and more especially <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Omprakash</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">Ishvar</span> of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">chamaar</span> caste of tanners and leather-workers (formerly untouchables), who are trying to rise in the world by becoming tailors. They too occupy Dina's rented house for periods of time as she employs them--illegally so far as her landlord is concerned--to sew for her so she can maintain her at-home sewing business by delivering a specified number of sewn garments to the woman with whose business she is under contract.</b></div>
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<b>But many disasters strike these ill-fated people, and the author is unsparing in the details, which are vivid and plentiful, but never gratuitous, never seeming to be there for their effect. It would have been all too easy for the author to play to the gallery here by giving an unending spectacle of gore and sexually explicit scenes. There are grim and freakish incidents, but the author's story and the compassion it inevitably elicits remain the abiding concern of this narrative.</b></div>
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<b>We care about the fates of Dina, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Manekh</span>, Om, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Ishvar</span>--and of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">Monkeyman</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">Beggarmaster</span>, and even Ibrahim. Sometimes their fates are almost unbearable to witness, but they have the terrible power of verisimilitude. In this novel we learn about forced sterilization.</b></div>
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<b>The novel is not preaching for any school of thought--just presenting the horror of the way in which a poorly run, modern bureaucracy can ruin people's lives, riding roughshod over the individual and failing to grasp any part of his particular situation.</b></div>
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<b>The sixteen section headings might mislead a casual observer into thinking that this will be a quiet, orderly story: "City by the Sea," "For Dreams to Grow," "In a Village by the River," "Small Obstacles," "Mountains," "Beautification," "Return of Solitude," "Family Planning," "The Circle Is Completed," for example. There is an especially grim irony lurking behind "Small Obstacles," "Beautification," and "Family Planning." There is an epigraph from Balzac, reminding us that this is truth being told. It might be the author's intention to remind us--even while diverting us with his story--that the lives of most people in the world are not as easy or pretty as our own, that even such matters as the hygiene we like to take for granted in the more developed parts of the world have been a luxury far beyond the reach of many in India.</b></div>
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<b><span class="blsp-spelling-error">Rohinton</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Mistry</span> has arranged these disparate lives in a masterful way that seems harmonious to the reader although the lives themselves are often on the brink of chaos.</b></div>
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<b>The edition I read had no footnotes or glossary but the text has many Indian words not found in a standard English dictionary. As the narrative proceeds, sooner or later their meanings become clearer. In fact, the lack of explanatory notes made it possible to become immersed in the story without distractions.</b></div>
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4 November 2003<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;"><em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">FAMILY MATTERS</span></em></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> (</span>2002)</span></div>
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<b>In this novel about a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">Parsi</span> family in modern Mumbai, the author gives us a view of three generations living under one roof--after a fashion. At first the novel seems <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">focused</span> on the 79-year-old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">Nariman</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">Vakeel</span>, formerly a professor of English, who now has Parkinson's disease and needs the help of his grown children: Roxana, his daughter, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">Jal</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">Coomy</span>, his stepson and stepdaughter.</b></div>
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<b>In the first part of the story <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">Nariman</span> is able to communicate, but as time goes by his comments become less and less intelligible, and finally cease altogether--at which point he is truly a captive of the relatives who have become his somewhat reluctant caretakers.</b></div>
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<b>Towards the end he dies, and he is probably quite aware of his family's limitations, though we do not know for sure how aware he is. We do not get into <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">Nariman's</span> mind. His daughter Roxana and her husband <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">Yezad</span>, and their two sons <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">Murad</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Jehangir</span>, prove to be far more compassionate towards him than <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">Jal</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_59">Coomy</span>, whose plot to bash holes in their house just so that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_60">Nariman</span> won't be able to live there illustrates the cruel lengths people will go to in order to avoid being thrust into the role of caregivers for ailing relatives.</b></div>
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<b>Though their plot is eventually exposed, they have already managed to deliver <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_61">Nariman</span> by ambulance into the hands of Roxana and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_62">Yezad</span>, who have no choice but to take him in. They have far less space for him but they make arrangements. Family life is strained but not nearly so heartlessly as it was for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_63">Nariman</span> when he was at <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_64">Jal</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_65">Coomy's</span> place. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_66">Murad</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_67">Jehangir</span> react to their grandfather sensibly and treat him with respect.</b></div>
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<b>There is a tragedy, but it serves to resolve some of the family's conflicts by bringing everyone who is left together under one roof. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_68">Yezad</span> decides to return to the traditional <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_69">Parsi</span> (Zoroastrian or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_70">Zarathustrian</span>) religious traditions, which are very elaborate and specific. As he becomes increasingly exacting in these diligent observances, the reader senses, through his two sons' only faintly stifled skepticism, that the author himself may have doubts about the value of the concept of preserving <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_71">Parsi</span> "purity."</b></div>
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<b>This book, like <em>A Fine Balance</em>, contains a number of elements that will be incomprehensible to an ordinary English-speaking reader, but they contribute to the sensation of being truly immersed in part of Mumbai life.</b></div>
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8 May 2005<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_72">MITCHARD</span>, JACQUELYN</strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong style="text-align: center;"><em><br /></em></strong></span>
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong style="text-align: center;"><em> BREAKDOWN LANE</em></strong><span style="color: #990000; text-align: center;"> (2005)</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>A novel where the central character has multiple sclerosis is seldom found, but this is one. The author does not have MS but her best friend does.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Julianne, the protagonist, writes a syndicated advice column in addition to being a talented dancer, and a wife and mother of three. Her husband Leo suddenly decides to join an "intentional community" elsewhere, and we learn later that he is interested in a younger woman who is part of that community. He has exchanged e-mails with her (she is named Joyous--Joy for short), and the only reason we find this out is because Leo and Julie's kids read his e-mails after his departure, in an attempt to find him.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>For he has misled them into believing that he's supplied valid addresses and phone numbers when he hasn't. He apparently wanted to disappear from their lives.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>One flaw in this story is the length of time it takes his family to mobilize their forces toward locating him. Many months pass before any action is taken in this regard.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Meanwhile, Julie is developing peculiar symptoms, which turn out to be those of multiple sclerosis, and she starts taking a weekly shot (probably <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_73">Avonex</span>) that cripples her for a couple of days every week.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Eventually the two older children take off surreptitiously and find Leo and his community. Not only does he have a new woman partner--they already have a baby and are expecting another. His own parents are so outraged that they stand behind Julie in her battles with Leo throughout the story.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Julie also has a couple of women friends who are in psychology and who invariably say the right thing just when she is most in need of hearing common sense and worldly wisdom. This patter of sociological rhetoric weighs down the book, in my opinion, and could easily have been dispensed with.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>At about this point, along comes--surprise!--a knight in shining armor, in the form of a man who knew Julie in grammar school and who has had a lifelong crush on her, even though he's been married and widowed and has a daughter. Now (wouldn't you know?) he's fortuitously employed as a medical doctor, a plastic surgeon doing no end of good in the world. AND he's got a wad of money that must be endless.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>The next thing we know, he's buying a new car for Julie's son Gabe, throwing a wedding in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_74">Las</span> Vegas and flying Gabe's Thai girl friend over for several days from Thailand for the occasion, giving Julie an eye-popping diamond ring, and on and on. And Julie is well on her way to becoming a famous writer, with the publication of a book of her poems.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>I don't know what the author's purpose was in writing this story. Since she's written other novels, maybe it was to provide an entertaining story for her readers, one with a relentlessly upbeat happy ending.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>I have nothing against happy endings, but this one is laying it on too thick. Single moms with a potentially disabling neurological disorder don't usually marry rich doctors who are perfect in every imaginable way.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Not everyone with MS is as well off as Julie is throughout the story, either. Nobody in this crowd is hurting financially. I believe in treating rich people to stories about themselves. But if you're going to write a story about someone with MS, why not write one about a person who feels the financial pinch that is the lot of so many who have this disorder?</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><b>This book is moderately well written, and the author is especially good at dialogue. She has clearly been listening carefully to children and teenagers, and she represents their wit and manner of speaking with a keen ear.</b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><br />7 November 2007</span><br />
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<strong>MITFORD, JESSICA</strong><br />
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<img alt="Image result for Jessica Mitford photo" src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRe_H_vxnCQhLnRrpGKPfhyGC27Wgi_Ebm4HXS5YWiMuCvKdEiI" /></div>
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<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED</span></em></strong> (1998)</div>
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<b>An update of Jessica Mitford's well-known <em>American Way of Death </em>(1963), which dissected the US funeral industry (and evidently made a dent in its profitability). The updated version is just as informative and amusing as the 1963 book was. Mitford scathingly attacks the industry's exploitative greed and hypocrisy and strongly favors much simpler, less ostentatious ways of saying farewell to the dead.</b></div>
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21 April 2005<br />
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<strong>MOODY, ANNE</strong><br />
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<strong style="text-align: center;"><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI</span></em></strong><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1968)</span><br />
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<b>This is the author's account of her Mississippi childhood and youth--spent coping with the difficulties of being black in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and participating in the civil rights movement.</b></div>
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7 August 1998<br />
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<strong>MOODY, RICK</strong><br />
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<strong style="text-align: center;"> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">DEMONOLOGY: STORIES</span></em></strong><span style="text-align: center;"> (2001)</span></div>
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<b>The stories here have a variety of styles. Some employ magical realism, some imitation James Joyce. Two stories in this short collection deal with a young man whose sister dies unexpectedly. </b><br />
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<b>Moody has a liking for the macabre detail. This is a mixed bag.</b><br />
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10 December 2002<br />
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<strong>MOORE, LORRIE, ed.</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong><strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 2004: SELECTED FROM US AND CANADIAN MAGAZINES </span></em></strong>(2004)<br />
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<b>Unlike some annual short-story anthologies, this one is limited to the twenty stories selected by the editor, and to my way of thinking, it makes for a more readable and enjoyable volume than the more comprehensive collections.</b></div>
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<b>Lorrie Moore has chosen well. Some well-established writers are represented here: Annie Proulx, John Updike, Edward P. Jones, John Edgar Wideman. Also represented are Sherman Alexie and T. Coraghessan Boyle (both with stories revolving around drinking).</b></div>
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<b>One story, "Docent" by R. T. Smith, is an amusing parody of the Southern idolization of Robert E. Lee, cast in the form of a lecture delivered to an audience of tourists by an aging Southern matron.</b></div>
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<b>Angela Newman's "All Saints' Day" was particularly fine, a story about children and a Sunday school pageant where each child chooses a Biblical character to represent, and one girl and her sister decide to "do" John the Baptist and Salome--to the dismay of the Sunday school leaders.</b></div>
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10 June 2007<br />
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<b>MOORE, MICHAEL</b><br />
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<img alt="Image result for Michael Moore photo" src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSnO-DnBR1MwTRybgAXKWxDvLBdJEHvahAsr5y4t5oIL8MXqZnI" /></div>
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<b> </b><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>DOWNSIZE THIS!</b> </span></em>(1996)<br />
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<b>This collection of pieces about the downsizing trend in the US is still timely. In fact it sounds as if it could have helped to spark the "Occupy" movement that began in 2011.</b></div>
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<b>Moore is angry, as usual, but someone has to be angry about what has been happening to our society--its economic and political situation in particular. What saves him from being a screeching polemicist is his ability to laugh. This is a</b><b> funny book but it's also a desperately angry book.</b></div>
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<b>No matter what area of American life he chooses to focus on, he invariably has something to say that is worth considering. </b></div>
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<b>Just after finishing this book I ran across an article in <em>The Nation</em> explaining how the poultry industry is speeding up the line so that poultry will hardly be inspected much at all--and the workers who already have been suffering from severe medical problems involving their hands and arms, which have been subjected to entirely too much repetitive stress, will have far worse medical problems. </b></div>
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<b>This is exactly the kind of situation that would make Michael Moore angry--another example of corporate greed that to exploits people harmfully. </b></div>
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<b>And the chicken you eat will be far more likely to be contaminated.</b></div>
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12 May 2012<br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">STUPID WHITE MEN...AND OTHER SORRY EXCUSES FOR THE STATE OF THE NATION!</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2002)<br />
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<b>Michael Moore is the gadfly many love to hate, but I'm a fan. I came to this book just after watching the Royal Albert Hall version of <em>Les Misérables </em>(for the third or fourth time). The spirit of both works is remarkably similar--rambunctious and funny but full of rage.</b></div>
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<b>This book began to appear in 2001 but then September 11 happened and publication was postponed, as the author explains here:</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/fahrenheit-911">http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/fahrenheit-911</a><br />
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<b>I can't think of a woman writer who has criticized other women to the extent Moore is willing to hold (white) men accountable in this book. He is particularly intent on skewering the Son of a Bush, as he calls the second Bush to preside over the US.</b></div>
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<b>Another complaint of his is that the Democrats have been behaving too much like Republicans in recent years, and he backs this up with a detailed list showing what percent of each Congressperson's voting record followed the Republicans' positions on the issues.</b></div>
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<b>This book needed to be written. In days when the right-wing seems to be overrepresented in the media, there aren't enough Michael Moores rabblerousing. More power to him.</b></div>
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10 April 2010<br />
__________________________<br />
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<b>MÜLLER, MELISSA</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">ANNE FRANK: THE BIOGRAPHY</span></b> </i>(1998; 2013)<br />
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<b>This substantial biography has been translated from German. The author had access to persons who knew the Franks and especially to Miep Gies, the remarkable woman who was perhaps their most helpful friend in their time of extreme need.</b></div>
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<b>Over the years the world has learned that Otto Frank, Anne's father and the sole survivor among the eight Jews who were hidden in the "secret annex" in Holland, excised large segments of Anne's diary before its publication. These segments--which he deemed too personal or potentially hurtful to some individuals--were made available to this biographer although apparently she lacked permission to quote from them in the 1998 edition of her book. The 2013 edition provides abundant quotations, and it becomes evident that a considerable quantity of important material was withheld from the published version of Anne Frank's diary.</b></div>
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<b>The English title, <i>Anne Frank: The Biography, </i>seems an unfortunate translation as it implies that this is <i>the</i> (definitive) biography. A literal translation of the original German title might have been better: <i>The Girl Anne Frank</i>.</b></div>
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<b>The author devotes much attention to wondering if the person or persons who told the Nazi authorities about the secret hiding place will ever be known. She concludes that there were very many ways in which the secret could have been revealed and even states that it is probable that at least some in the vicinity looked the other way routinely as they saw large quantities of food going into the building that housed 8 people clandestinely.</b></div>
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<b>The author has selected telling parts of Anne's diaries to demonstrate what it must have been like to have lived in constant fear and at such close quarters with others--including even a cat.</b></div>
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<b>She also provides sufficient background information on the gradual buildup of the Nazi campaign against the Jews to give the reader a clearer awareness of the tightening noose.</b></div>
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<b>Perhaps most tellingly of all, she provides evidence that Anne (and presumably those living with her) were keenly aware of the fate that awaited Jews who were being mysteriously transported. There were too many rumors. As difficult as it must have been to believe that such inhumanity could exist, they were obliged by awareness of their own circumstances and of what they saw happening around them to realize that brutality on a scale never before seen was proceeding unchecked in their time and place.</b></div>
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<b>The author speculates, with good evidence, that--at least as time went on, and their stay in hiding was prolonged far beyond their expectations--that Anne maintained her diary partly in the knowledge that some day the world would want to know how they had survived.</b></div>
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<b>We can only be very glad that her diary was found and treated with the care it deserved to have. For it is clearly not just a record coming out of the Holocaust--it is also the testament of a very gifted writer, someone who could have shared her talent with the world for many decades had she been permitted to live.</b></div>
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8 March 2015<br />
_____________________<br />
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<b>MUKHERJEE, BHARATI</b></div><div><b><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></em></b></div><div><b><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> MISS NEW INDIA</span></em></b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2011)<b><br /></b>
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<b>Perhaps it was the author's intention to give us a part of the life of a typical young Indian woman here. A couple of Indian reviewers have stated that the novel misrepresents modern India--specifically, Bangalore--and suggested that the author is out of touch with the real situation.</b></div>
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<b>In any event, the heroine of this story is struggling to manage on her own by getting a job in a call center in Bangalore, after having run away from an arranged marriage her parents had been promoting for her. When the chosen young man, left alone with her on their first meeting, rapes her brutally, she feels she has no recourse but to leave her family, who then treat her as if she is dead. </b></div>
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<b>Mukherjee has raised the question of one of the most terrible problems inherent in arranged marriages: When the prospective bride's family has little or no money and can offer not much in the way of a dowry, what chance does she have of making a very good match?</b></div>
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<b>This is where maybe I don't understand about how these arranged marriages work. I always thought that the idea of a dowry was, to put it bluntly, to pay a young man to take a daughter off her parents' hands so that she would no longer be a burden to them. But Anjali Bose, the young woman in the story, regards the dowry as saying something about how much the bride's parents think she is worth. After witnessing her father offering golf clubs and other items to the young man, she concludes: "'Even my father thought I was worth a matched set of golf clubs!'"</b></div>
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<b>The issues raised in connection with Anjali's marriage are dropped as the novel moves forward, though, and new situations arise. In Bangalore, she is first housed in the decaying Raj-era mansion of Minnie Bagehot, along with several other young women. Later she is more or less taken under the wing of Parvati and her family, who are well off.</b></div>
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<b>Left behind are Anjali's sister and mother, hardly mentioned again, but then they have apparently declared her dead.</b></div>
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<b>As Anjali struggles to "neutralize" her English so that callers won't identify her as Indian from her accent, we see how naive she is. It surely must strike most readers as sad that an Indian finds it necessary to emulate Americans just to survive financially.</b></div>
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<b>This is a well-told, absorbing story. I wish Mukherjee hadn't peopled it quite so densely with characters, however. It might have been a more reflective work with fewer characters. </b></div>
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4 April 2013<br />
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<i> <span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE TREE BRIDE</b></span></i> (2004)<br />
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<b>This is a sequel to <i>Desirable Daughters</i>, and, together with <i>Miss New India</i>, the author has given us a trilogy. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In this second volume the story of Tara Chatterjee fades into the background though the material that makes up <i>The Tree Bride</i> amounts to an adumbration of Tara's origins. We are led to a better understanding of Tara's world through the web of stories (or legends) explored in this book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The Tree Bride was Tara's ancestor, Tara Lata Gangooly, who was married to a tree as a symbolic "marriage" after her fiancé died from a fatal snakebite. She used the resources from her dowry to help finance the Indian struggle against the British and became a local legend. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are a couple of other stories woven around this one, and <i>The Tree Bride</i> becomes almost too involved to follow sometimes, but it amounts to a fascinating discourse on Indian beliefs and customs.</b></div>
<br />
28 May 2013<br />
<br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;"> DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2002)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author tells the first-person story of Tara, one of three "desirable daughters" born into a very prosperous Bengali family. The three daughters are groomed and cosseted with top-quality education and ultimately turned out into (usually) arranged marriages.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Except that there's a secret that comes out in the story--one of Tara's sisters had an illegitimate son. This fact comes out into the open when a young man claiming to be that son appears on the scene.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Things take a downhill turn then. But somewhere in the middle of the novel, it is as if Mukherjee has lost interest in her characters for the events become somewhat confused.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, the book is packed with interesting facts about Indian customs and beliefs and lore. The author writes a fast-paced narrative and is especially adept at handling dialogue. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She is dealing strictly with Indians of the very top levels on the economic and social ladder. These are people who think nothing of flying all over the world. Their highly trained minds are in demand wherever they go. Money flows freely. The narrator's comments on their lives are often tinged with a sarcasm that lets the reader know that she (and Mukherjee herself, most likely) is capable of standing back and looking at this world in perspective, seeing its shallow materialism--as is particularly evident in the sections dealing with the sister who gave up her baby and went on to a life of fame and prosperity.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I have read other works by Bharati Mukherjee and have found her always well worth reading.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
10 December 2011<br />
<br />
___________________________<br />
<br />
<b>MUNDY, LIZA</b><br />
<em style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></em>
<br />
<div style="text-align: start;">
<span style="text-align: center;"><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">MICHELLE</span></i></b></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2008)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This brief biography of Michelle Obama, by a <em>Washington Post</em> reporter, may have been written to give a boost to the Obama campaign. Be that as it may, it is moderately informative though only occasionally somewhat critical.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Still, maybe there is little to criticize in the First Lady. She comes across here as very special indeed--a woman with incisive intelligence, humor, and know-how who cares intensely about the concerns of women and children.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The discussion of Michelle Robinson's childhood is sketchy, and her parents and even her brother pretty much disappear from the book by the time she reaches adulthood. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'd have appreciated more emphasis on her remarkable father, who worked as a laborer at a Chicago patronage job all his life--and died at the age of 56, having had multiple sclerosis for years.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
6 July 2011<br />
_____________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>MUNRO, ALICE</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSkb0Xk68KVLQ6zn0fS1NUDiVcGQG24eEQ_jkaOIQ5F5gvyufpi" /></div>
<br />
<i> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">TOO MUCH HAPPINESS </span></b></i>(2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The ten stories in this collection aren't day-brighteners. Many of the characters are trapped by uncontrollable circumstances, and many of the situations are grim.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But the author often sounds a profoundly hopeful note, as in "Wood," where Roy, who has a secret hobby, wood-cutting, injures his ankle while chopping down a tree and is found by his wife. She hasn't driven in years because of her failing health, and yet she drives the car to find him, then drives him to a hospital.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Perhaps the darkest story is "Child's Play," where the critical event of the narrative is withheld from the reader until the end, though what happened can be easily guessed early in the story: Charlene and Marlene, girls of about 9 or 10 who are friends in summer camp as well as in their home neighborhood, share an extreme dislike of Verna, a child who lives in a duplex shared with Marlene's family and is a "special"--developmentally disabled and not capable of enjoying the same activities as Marlene and Charlene. In camp, an opportunity arises, and without a word of conspiracy or planning between them, Marlene and Charlene push Verna underwater until she drowns.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Deep-Holes" gives a wonderfully apt rendering of Kent, the estranged son of Sally. After an accident at a family picnic that resulted in his breaking both legs as a child and being left with a permanent limp, he retreated into himself, then disappeared after six months of college. Years later he turns up in Toronto, where he has been "living in the present" for 7 years. The story captures the often-sanctimonious attitude of a young man who has adopted a lifestyle of begging and giving to the needy--while rejecting his well-meaning and loyal mother.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Too Much Happiness," the last story in the book, is somewhat different from the others because it follows--fairly closely--the actual life of Sofya Kovalevskaya, the well-known 19th-century Russian mathematician. Her life story sheds much-needed light on the difficulties faced by even prosperous women at the time.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Kovalevskaya's first marriage was a "white marriage," contracted purely for the purpose of enabling her to leave Russia. Without her parents' consent, a woman could not leave Russia unless she was married. Later, as a disciple of the eminent mathematician Weierstrass, she was able to find academic employment in Sweden, where the university that hired her then became the first university to hire a woman in mathematics.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Kovalevskaya was also a novelist of some distinction. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
18 September 2014</div>
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><i>CARRIED AWAY: A SELECTION OF STORIES</i> </span></b>(2006)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While reading this selection of stories by Alice Munro,
whose fiction I have been reading for many years, I was happy to learn that she
received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2013/oct/16/canadas-alice-munro-wins-nobel-literature-prize/">http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2013/oct/16/canadas-alice-munro-wins-nobel-literature-prize/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Margaret Atwood has provided an introduction, and I would
hazard a guess that Margaret Atwood had a hand in compiling the
extraordinary chronology that is appended. Many works of fiction include
such a chronology, which usually provides a listing of the key events in the
author’s life. But this one attaches to every listed year a notation of just one or
two significant books published during that year. By a very odd coincidence, at
least seven of the books in the chronology happen to be by Margaret Atwood. Surely
Atwood has not been generally regarded as such a significant author as to
justify the inclusion of so many of her works in such a list….</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But this is by the way. These stories are all exceptionally
fine—most set in Canada, some taking place in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, and
all representing situations involving people coping with rather ordinary lives.
None of the characters is a dazzling success. Munro’s world isn’t the sparkle
and glitter of great prosperity.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>“Save the Reaper,” for instance, gives us Eve, a woman of
around 60 returning to a vacation spot recalled from her childhood, accompanied
by her married daughter and her two children. The daughter is about to ditch
her by returning to her husband instead of staying the agreed-upon three weeks,
and the reader feels Eve’s increasing awareness of her own isolation closing in
on her.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>“The Bear Went over the Mountain,” the final story in the
collection, centers around Fiona, a woman of about 70 who seems to be afflicted
with senile dementia and whose husband visits her regularly in a nursing home,
where she has become so friendly with a former acquaintance, Aubrey, who
happens to be in the same home—but only temporarily—that she treats her husband’s
visits almost dismissively. Gradually we learn that the husband has been a
lifelong philanderer, and the story has an extraordinary conclusion that seems
to mete out something like justice to the four people involved (Fiona and her husband Grant, and Aubrey and his wife
Marian).</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Even with its upbeat ending, the story manages to
paint a grim picture of the realities of nursing homes, where dignity no longer
exists—e.g., there is evidence that those who do the laundry there don’t bother
to match up the clothes with their rightful owners. Munro speaks of the nursing home atmosphere as “a haunted rigidity, as if people were content to become memories of
themselves—final photographs.”</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Alice Munro deserves to be more widely read and appreciated. Her
carefully crafted stories take us inside the quietly tormented lives of women
and girls to whom fortune has not been kind.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
October 18, 2013<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><i>DEAR LIFE: STORIES</i> </span></b>(2012)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A fine collection of stories, including several largely autobiographical pieces at the end.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Often the stories--all with a Canadian setting--are told by a woman in the first person, and many of them involve family problems arising from the Depression of the 1930s. Some of the characters have been maimed--one with a lame leg due to polio, for instance. One takes place in a TB hospital.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Munro's characters do not have happy lives, and at least one of them, Jackson in "Trained," seems inexplicably detached from people with whom he has had long associations.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Munro seems to be presenting the world as she sees it: filled with people whose lives may make no sense, may have very little joy in them, but here they are. She bears witness to those who haven't been able to speak for themselves.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the final autobiographical piece, "Dear Life," we learn that as a child Alice Munro was often beaten by her father--and that the practice was "not uncommon" at the time (the 1930s). With these stories she has shown a few facets of this past time, with its own forms of cruelty and want.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
March 23, 2014<br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE: STORIES</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The stories by this contemporary Canadian author deal with characters and situations that are off the beaten path. The stories are affecting and well told.</b></div>
<br />
15 January 2006<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1971)</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This is Alice Munro's only novel, and it reads almost like a collection of short stories strung together in a loose chronological order. The main character is Del Jordan, a girl who--like the author--grows up in Canada in the 1930s-1940s.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The story is about her coming of age--specifically, the way in which she lets her romantic interest in a boy sidetrack her so that she doesn't win a college scholarship. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The characters here are drawn with a finely observant eye--and Munro is particularly adept with Del's best friend, the callous and often cruel Naomi.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Passages in the novel dealing with both religion and sex are forthright and illuminating. Munro has some important things to say here and says them resoundingly and clearly.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
24 November 2011<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div>
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> (</span>1998)</div>
</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>A collection of absorbing stories, usually with a Canadian setting. In them women struggle with abortion, family, divorce, and other problems. One ("My Mother's Dream") is actually told from the point of view of a woman character's baby. Here Munro appears to be toying with magic realism, and I wish she hadn't. The story borders on bad farce.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In "Rich as Stink"-- the title doesn't fit the story very well as the focus isn't on how rich Rosemary's family is--the reader has to be well into the story before finding out who "Ann" is. However, the story is remarkable for its perceptive representation of an 11-year-old girl's misguided attempts at coping with divorced parents--showing her sad lack of understanding of the situation as she tries to clown around in a forced way.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>"The Children Stay" shows us Pauline, a young mother who leaves her husband and children and lets a long time pass before giving the kids a thought. I find her almost incredible, and I'd have liked to have known how much contact her kids had with her later, but we aren't told.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>All in all, these stories weren't as well crafted as some of Munro's other work, but still they are absorbing depictions of the lives of people in their everyday situations--with a special focus on the 1960s.</strong></div>
<br />
8 June 2012<br />
<strong style="text-align: center;"><em><br /></em></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: start;">
<span style="text-align: center;"> <span style="color: #38761d;"> <em style="font-weight: bold;">RUNAWAY</em></span></span><span style="text-align: center;"> (2004)</span></div>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>More superb stories by this writer, whose books are best-sellers in Canada. These stories take place in the Canada of various times between the 1960s and the present.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The focus is always on a woman, and the characters are usually unexceptional, but their lives are tangled by the kinds of complications that many readers will find familiar from their own lives.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author deals with her characters in a sensitive way and expresses herself well, without any of the stylistic gimcrackery or touches of magical realism that characterize much of contemporary fiction.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She is content to tell a story and tell it well.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
25 March 2007<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong> </strong><strong style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: STORIES</span></em> </strong><span style="text-align: center;">(2006)</span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In this beautifully written collection of stories Munro is exploring her own family's history. She is upfront about having tinkered with the facts at times, but one suspects that most of these narratives are largely autobiographical.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Her ancestors came to Canada from Scotland, and she must have listened well and done considerable research to be able to describe such episodes as their voyage to America in so much detail.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The stories are arranged so that they move closer to the present as the reader progresses through the book. These stories are very honest and touching and well told.</strong></div>
<br />
6 June 2010<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #6aa84f;">FAMILY FURNISHINGS: SELECTED STORIES 1995-2014</span></b> (2014)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This collection incorporates many stories I had already read but, with a couple of exceptions, they are worth rereading, Her characters work in hardware stores, work as hired girls, schoolteachers, foundry workers, turkey farmers. They know poverty, they know trouble. In some of the stories where there is a first-person narrator, Munro seems to be writing autobiographically. "Soon" points bleakly to the distance that geography and personal preferences can put between a parent and a grown child.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These aren't happy-ending stories. Now and then Munro seems to be having a bit of fun mocking the type of person who likes to dwell on the most unpleasant details of daily life, but by and large there isn't much levity in the situations Munro highlights in her stories.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>February 7, 2017</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">FRIEND OF MY YOUTH: STORIES</span></i> (1990)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The stories here present more Munro people: some are very eccentric, many are in or have been in abusive relationships, and for the most part they are in Canada. All are worth knowing about, and Munro lets us in on her vision of their lives.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>"Dead-Eye Dick" is a subtle sketch that seems to be a rather pointless story about several rather ordinary people, but by its end we realize that the momentum for the story--what gives meaning to the brother-sister relationship highlighted in it--is the now-dead mother's somewhat extraordinary personality. She has given both her children an appreciation for poetry that sees them into their later years. The story could be taken as a tribute to the ways in which mothers influence their children.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>3 November 2021</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><em> </em></strong></div>
</div>
_______________________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>MURDOCH, IRIS</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong style="text-align: center;"><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE BLACK PRINCE</span></em> (1973)</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Maybe I'm just not an Iris Murdoch fan. This book was well reviewed, and it seems well constructed and well written.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The central character, one Bradley Pearson, who has suffered from writer's block for many years in spite of a very keen desire to write, is a tiresome, self-deluded windbag. Amazingly he still has friends who seem to be on hand as needed to help him. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The book revolves around Bradley Pearson and his network--his ex-wife, a sister, a couple who are long-time friends, and their daughter, primarily. There is also his ex-wife's brother.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>These people go in for melodrama in a big way. The couple, Arnold and Rachel Baffen, get into knock-down-drag-out fights, and early on--according to Bradley, who comes upon the scene--Arnold has been brutal with Rachel.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Later there is a suicide--and then there is a murder. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Bradley Pearson may or may not be a reliable narrator. The reader is probably meant to realize this from the outset, and if the reader fails to, by the end of the narrative there will surely be doubts.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>But if Bradley's account can't be depended on to be accurate, can we assume that his story of finding Rachel Baffen to be the victim of her husband's violence is true? </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>By far the most tiresome part of this novel, in my opinion, is Bradley's infatuation for the nubile daughter of Rachel and Arnold. Having already bedded Rachel, he proceeds to woo the daughter without giving a second thought to Rachel. At 58 he is clearly feeling the waning of his masculine powers--hence his pathetic attempt at making himself seem younger by lying about his age to the Baffen daughter, Julian.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>He insists that they love each other but it is quite clear that this is an instance of lust and little else, at least on Bradley's part. That he is going through an emotional crisis is also clear, but I had problems developing much sympathy for him.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>While she's at it, Murdoch uses the occasion of this book to do a bit of showing off of her literary knowledge. I found this irritating. I wish she'd just been content to tell a good story. She hasn't done so.</strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
24 April 2009<br />
<br />
<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE WORD CHILD</span></em></strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>This novel concerns a man with a real flair for languages, who is embittered at his failure to make the grade academically, a man with hatred so close to the surface that he is constantly seething.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><b>He has no qualms about declaring his love for whatever woman he is with, regardless of her marital status, or about having several affairs going on at once. He jealously guards “his” space everywhere—at work, at home—and manipulates other people shamelessly in order to achieve his goals. Above all, he leaves destruction in his wake without even seeming aware of what he’s doing—and he wins points by violence, or the threat of violence, in spite of being among supposedly civilized people. </b></span></div>
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<span face=""calibri" , "sans-serif"" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">March 1988</span></div>
</div></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121314990987784942005-06-28T21:22:00.000-07:002016-02-28T20:40:13.245-08:00N<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<b>NABOKOV, VLADIMIR</b></div>
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<i> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">PALE FIRE</span></b></i><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> (</span></b>1962)<br />
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<b>This work is justifiably regarded as a masterpiece. It's probably far more likely to be enjoyed by those who can share the author's vocabulary, however, and even they will probably have to look up words and puzzle over some of the connections, for Nabokov is given to word play.</b></div>
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<b>I balk at most stories that turn out to be difficult puzzles. A novel shouldn't be an intellectual exercise, a puzzle to solve, I tell myself. And yet many people have found <i>Finnegans Wake</i> a fascinating and enjoyable challenge. I just haven't ever felt up to tackling it.</b></div>
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<b>Why didn't I decide I wasn't up to <i>Pale Fire</i>? </b></div>
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<b>It began as a 999-line poem that I thoroughly enjoyed. By the time I got to the substantial number of footnotes appended to the poem by the poet John Shade's stalker, Kinbote, I was completely sucked into the story of John Shade and hoping that Kinbote's notes would shed further light on Shade's life--and death.</b></div>
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<b>A more careful reader might have read the footnotes as they occurred in the poem but I read the poem first and then turned to the notes.</b></div>
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<b>Early on, the reader has hints that Charles Kinbote, the assiduous scholar who has attached himself to Shade (by being a near neighbor), is less than trustworthy in his opinion of himself.</b></div>
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<b>As the footnotes move along at a leisurely pace, Kinbote's digressions become more and more frequent until at some point any reader would probably say, "Wait--is this book about the poet John Shade or about Charles Kinbote--or about the King of the fictitious country of Zembla with which Kinbote seems inordinately fascinated?"</b></div>
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<b>There is a point in the footnotes where the reader realizes that the King and Kinbote are one and the same, and from then on the matter of Shade's death becomes more important than ever.</b></div>
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<b>I disagree with the introduction by Richard Rorty in the edition of this novel that I read. Rorty claims that Nabokov tricks his readers by deflecting our attention from a genuinely disturbing bit of information--the tragic death of Shade's 23-year-old daughter--and finally making us feel guilty for having forgotten about it because we were so distracted by the rich and amazing story unfolding before us as Kinbote keeps spinning out the yarn involving the King.</b></div>
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<b>However, I was one reader who was almost bored by the events surrounding the life of King Charles Xavier. I kept wondering why Kinbote couldn't get on with the poem he was annotating--and being reminded of a celebrated <i>New Yorker</i> piece by Frank Sullivan (April 19, 1941) called "A Garland of Ibids," where what purports to be a scholarly piece of writing winds up with the footnotes more or less taking over. And I was indeed wondering about Shade's daughter Hazel.</b></div>
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<b>I felt that Kinbote was getting regrettably off the topic--and that that was a large part of Kinbote's problem: his almost total self-absorption, so total that he cannot even focus on the poem and its author long enough to get the annotation done without bringing himself into the picture.</b></div>
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<b>I thought that Nabokov was poking fun at all scholars in the literary criticism world, suggesting that every literary critic is probably an author manqué, bitterly envious and yearning to be center stage.</b></div>
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<b>So he weaves the intricate tale about a King, complete with a fabricated language for the country of Zembla, a story full of intrigue and escapes, and while he's at it he clutters up the cast by narrating some of his grievances against colleagues whom he loathes--including the head of the English Department at Wordsmith College who considers Kinbote to be "deranged."</b></div>
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<b>And all along, willy nilly, he's revealing just how zealous he has been in his stalking of John Shade--so zealous that, with Shade lying suddenly dead at his feet, he makes certain he secures the manuscript of the long poem called "Pale Fire."</b></div>
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<b>Kinbote is a dangerous person, and Nabokov might be suggesting that many literary scholars are dangerous to the lives and peace of mind of those authors on whom the scholars prey.</b></div>
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24 December 2013</div>
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<b>NATHANSON, LAURA, MD</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN KILL YOU: A PHYSICIAN'S RADICAL GUIDE TO CONQUERING THE OBSTACLES TO EXCELLENT MEDICAL CARE</em></span></b> (2007)</div>
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<b>The author has been a pediatrician. She lost her husband a few years ago due in part to some mismanagement of his medical data. She gives details about his illness as she proceeds with her collection of valuable suggestions for anyone facing medical procedures.</b></div>
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<b>Her book is very valuable because she is speaking with insider knowledge. She knows enough about hospitals and doctors to be aware of where the potential problems are.</b></div>
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<b>She urges patients to get hold of their medical records AND to comb through them carefully, being alert for errors and omissions. </b></div>
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<b>Radiologists' reports seem especially apt to have important omissions, possibly because the radiologist is typically remote from the actual patient. </b></div>
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<b>Dr. Nathanson also recommends having a spouse or relative or friend with you in the hospital to act as a "sentinel." She gives special attention to the long waits as hospital inpatients are taken for Xrays and other procedures and outlines specific details about how best to transport the person to and from the location and what to do while waiting. She stresses the importance of making sure that any catheters or IVs connected to the patient will be trouble-free during the long waits.</b></div>
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<b>Her fundamental message is one that needs to be stressed: Patients shouldn't accept medical procedures and advice unquestioningly. They should question the qualifications of the persons they are dealing with. They should question the substance of anything in writing concerning their case. They should even make sure that any specimens taken are actually theirs and not somebody else's, as mistakes do happen.</b></div>
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4 May 2011</div>
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<strong style="text-align: center;">NÉMIROVSKY, IRÈNE</strong></div>
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<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> </span><i style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">DIMANCHE AND OTHER STORIES</span> </i>(2010)<br />
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<strong>Ten stories, apparently written before 1942, and translated here, complete with their French titles.</strong></div>
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<strong>The first story, "Dimanche" ("Sunday"), is slight but somewhat reflective, stressing the different perspectives of an older woman and her daughter.</strong></div>
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<strong>Of more interest and substance is "Brotherhood," about an encounter between two men who share a last name, Rabinowitsch. One is partly Jewish and quite successful--though very anxious about his fate now that anti-Semitism is becoming so prevalent in Europe. The other is a poor Jewish man of about 50, who has been in Paris for 15 years, since leaving Germany. He is very frightened of Hitler.</strong><br />
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<strong>"The Spectator," set in Paris in August 1939, involves Hugo, admired for his wealth and taste and possessing one of the largest fortunes in Uruguay, and Magda, an American who is older than Hugo but more robust, who has just bought a house in New Jersey. Hugo, who is politically neutral, and Magda seem to be watching the war start in a detached, theoretical say--while handily escaping from it in luxury--until Hugo is on a neutral ship that is torpedoed. This is an imaginative and powerful story.</strong><br />
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<strong>"Monsieur Rose," which is very short, reads like a true anecdote. It concerns Mark, a young man who has been wounded while fleeing towards the Loire along with Monsieur Rose, an older man, who refuses to leave Mark behind when he himself has an opportunity to join some friends in a vehicle. Then the bridge the vehicle was crossing is blown up, and the car goes up in flames.</strong></div>
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<strong>The author is dealing with a time she herself lived through, when the boundaries of countries were shifting and peoples were being transported against their will to remote parts of the world. She has captured some of the fear and tension that must have characterized the years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War.</strong></div>
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<b>5 September 2014</b><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">SUITE FRANÇAISE</span></em> </strong>(2006)<br />
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<b>This remarkable work of fiction, which consists of the first two parts of what was to be a five-part novel, came to light only recently although it was written in 1942. The author, originally Russian Jewish but living in France for many years though without French citizenship, was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where she soon died, at the age of 39. Her husband met a similar fate though he survived without imprisonment for long enough after her incarceration to make many futile efforts at finding her. The couple left two daughters, and one of them rescued this manuscript at the time of her mother's deportation--but could not bring herself to read it until many years later.</b></div>
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<b>The book includes some correspondence, including letters from Irène Némirovsky as well as letters exchanged between her husband and various authorities and friends (and her publishers) as he tried to save his wife.</b></div>
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<b>She had already published several works of fiction in France and was fairly well known. </b></div>
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<b>The novel segments here concern French characters struggling under the Nazi occupation--including a household where a German officer is billeted. He turns out to be handsome, well bred, a talented musician, and polite to a fault. He is also married. The tension in the story is created by the way in which Lucile, the young married woman living in the house with her mother-in-law while her husband is a prisoner of war, fights to keep herself from falling in love with him.</b></div>
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<b>I kept waiting for the German officer's "true colors" to come into focus, but apparently the author meant for him to be an admirable person. Reading the notes and correspondence, we find out that the German officer would eventually be killed, thus ending the problem posed here--of whether he and Lucile really loved each other enough to forsake their spouses and get together after the war.</b></div>
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<b>Knowing the circumstances in which the author was writing--in fear for her own and her family's life under the Nazi occupation--one wonders if she was reluctant to include anything even vaguely critical of the Nazi regime. While she includes mention of people shot by the Nazis, she says nothing whatsoever about Jews.</b></div>
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<b>The author's own story is so catastrophic that it is difficult to be objective about her fiction....</b></div>
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12 December 2008<br />
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<strong>__________________________</strong><br />
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<strong>NEXØ, MARTIN ANDERSON<br />
<em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">PELLE THE CONQUEROR - VOL. 1: CHILDHOOD</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> and <strong><em>VOL. 2:</em></strong> <strong><em>APPRENTICESHIP</em></strong></span> (1903)<br />
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<b>A strong theme in this story seems to be the author's perceived need for socialist reforms. Pelle’s adolescence and early manhood are spent as an apprentice cobbler. </b><br />
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<b>The story has been made into a fine movie.</b><br />
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30 November 2000<br />
_______________________________<br />
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<b>NORTHUP, SOLOMON</b><br />
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<i> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE</span></b> </i>(1853)<br />
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<b>Writing and reading supplies were strictly forbidden to slaves in the US south. Slave-owners must have been keenly aware of the danger of the written word, and they would not have wanted any record of the conditions their slaves endured.</b></div>
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<b>It was fortunate for them that so few slaves and ex-slaves managed to keep a record. Performing back-breaking labor during every waking moment, often accompanied by daily lashings, what slave would have had the time or energy to keep much of a record even if literacy training had been available?</b></div>
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<b>But there have been a few exceptions, and one of them is Solomon Northup's meticulous and highly readable account of the twelve years he spent as a slave, having been (apparently) drugged with belladonna and kidnapped into slavery even though he had been free all his life and was the son of a freedman.</b></div>
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<b>How very unlucky for slave-holders that this account slipped out and into the public eye, at approximately the same time as <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin.</i></b></div>
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<b>It sounds as if Solomon Northup dictated his account to one David Wilson, who wrote it down. Regardless of how it was written, it is carefully documented, including affidavits from the people who had to file them, testifying to their knowledge of him as a free man in New York State, before he could be released from bondage and returned to his wife and children.</b></div>
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<b>He describes in detail the typical food and lodging of the slaves among whom he lived in Louisiana, where he both picked cotton and harvested sugar cane.</b></div>
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<b>He had considerable skill in playing the violin and asserts that without his violin to cheer him he did not think he could have survived.</b></div>
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<b>He gives detailed accounts of the misfortunes that befell some of his fellow slaves, creating a picture of a world that must have prefigured the Nazi concentration camps in its cruelty and unremitting exploitation of human labor.</b></div>
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<b>This is not primarily a polemical book. Its author is not on an abolitionist platform. His aim is to relate his experience and to let people know what slave life really was. He knows that many people believe the myth of the contented slave who is "really better off" being supervised by masters whose white skin automatically seems to grant them superiority. He grants that some of the masters under whom he served were kindly and well-intentioned, and he describes ways in which the slaves themselves were sometimes able to work around the worst aspects of the system--as when he had to lash other slaves but merely pretended to hit them with the whip, and they in turn pretended to scream with pain.</b></div>
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<b>These bits of subterfuge were probably rare, however, in comparison with the severe beatings routinely meted out by the "drivers" for very slight infractions of the rigid rules.</b></div>
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<b>Northup also describes the heart-breaking tragedy involved in separating families just because these people were seen as pieces of property who could be bought and sold like inanimate objects.</b></div>
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<b>When I was in school, hearing the myth of the benevolent plantation owners who treated their slaves so kindly that they didn't want to be free and wanted to stay on as slaves, I wish we had been obliged to read this account. It would have been a much-needed corrective to the syrupy southern fairy tales propagated by our teachers and textbooks.</b></div>
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12 December 2014<br />
________________________<br />
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<strong>NOVAC, ANA [nee ZIMRA HARSANYI]</strong><br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF MY YOUTH: MY SIX MONTHS IN AUSCHWITZ </span></em></strong><strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">AND PLASZOW</span></em> </strong>(1997)<br />
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<b>Ana Kovac was a Hungarian Jewish girl of 14 when she was taken from a train and shipped to Plaszow and then Auschwitz. Already an aspiring writer, she used whatever scraps of paper or notebooks she could lay her hands on to record her journal while she was held in the camps.</b></div>
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<b>Most of her written record was apparently destroyed because it was illegible, but this volume contains what was salvageable. This is a remarkably perceptive work, written under conditions of extreme deprivation and suffering. Some of the details aren't always clear, but the author reconstructed the remnants of the journal after the passage of many years.</b></div>
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<b>She conveys specific details about life in Plaszow and Auschwitz that are often missing in Holocaust memoirs--what the diet was like, what clothes the prisoners were allowed to wear, for instance.</b></div>
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19 October 2006<br />
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<strong>NULAND, SHERWIN B.</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE DOCTORS' PLAGUE: GERMS, CHILDBED FEVER, AND THE STRANGE STORY OF IGNAC SEMMELWEIS</span> </em></strong>(2003)<br />
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<b>This is a very tragic story of a doctor whose extraordinary discovery of the cause of childbed fever, which had taken a heavy toll in maternity wards, wasn't accepted by his colleagues. It is also the story of how one brilliant man's personality may have been an obstacle to successful promulgation of his ideas. Ignac Semmelweis (1818-1865) was practicing in Hungary at a time when the medical profession was structured rigidly and hierarchically. This rigidity may have been another obstacle to the success of his ideas.</b></div>
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<b>He discovered that puerperal fever was caused by the unhygienic practices of medical professionals, who were in the habit of attending women in labor right after handling cadavers in post mortems without bothering to wash their hands. Semmelweis was of course right when he called those doctors who refused to take this hygienic measure "murderers," but it wasn't a way to win supporters for his cause.</b></div>
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<b>Semmelweis apparently became so agitated by the situation he found himself in that he had to be committed to an insane asylum, where he died only two weeks later, quite possibly as a result of having been brutally beaten.</b></div>
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<b>The author (who is a medical doctor) has written an absorbing and informative account of this remarkable man.</b></div>
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(7 October 2008)<br />
<br />wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121112926052182912005-06-27T13:11:00.002-07:002020-09-23T16:38:59.619-07:00O<strong>O'BRIEN, DARCY</strong><br />
<strong><br />
<em> <span style="color: #38761d;">MURDER IN LITTLE EGYPT</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1989)<br />
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<b>This is the shocking account of a doctor in the Southern Illinois area known as "Little Egypt" who turned out to be a murderer.</b><br />
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1997<br />
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<b>O'BRIEN, EDNA</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> IN THE FOREST</em> </span></b>(2002)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This novel is based on a real case, which apparently happened too recently (1994) for emotions to have cooled down because the author reportedly got into hot water about her fictional treatment of the people involved.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The names have been changed, and O'Brien does not pretend that this is a factual account. There is an author's note at the end giving a few details about the real case.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In the novel a young man, Michan O'Kane, who has been headed for trouble from an early age, coming from a dysfunctional family, is so unhinged mentally that he kills a young woman and her small child as well as a priest. Volatile and prone to fly into violent rages, he is at large in the Irish countryside until he is finally captured and sentenced to life in prison.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Without being at all sympathetic to O'Kane, the author has been able to represent what might have been his mental state at various times during his killing spree and immediately after it. Whether this was his real mental state is never made clear. I would like to know how much of the novel has been built from facts and how much from O'Brien's imagination.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Did she have access to interviews with the real killer where he revealed his thought processes? Did she perhaps talk to him herself? Or to people who knew him? Have O'Kane's statements in the novel been made up completely, paraphrased, or directly quoted from the real killer's own?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These questions matter, however, only if we are interested in the novel as an accurate portrayal of the mind of a killer. Maybe an imagined representation is as good. What really matters here is that O'Brien has given us a pretty clear notion of what it must be like to live in a world where the line between the real and the unreal isn't drawn, and the picture of that mental landscape is terrifying.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I have one quarrel with this book, and it may seem like a small point, but given the frequent use of racial slurs in many mainstream books even nowadays, I should mention that finding the word "pickaninny" in use in this novel, even though it is used only once, was disheartening. This word may have been somewhat acceptable (among white people) in the 1940s but it certainly should have passed from common parlance by now.</b></div>
<br />
6 September 2010<br />
_____________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>O'BRIEN, MARK</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> HOW I BECAME A HUMAN BEING: A DISABLED MAN'S QUEST FOR INDEPENDENCE</em> </span></b>(2003)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author was paralyzed from the neck down by polio at the age of 7--and died at 49 after spending the rest of his days in an iron lung, one of only about a hundred polio survivors still living in an iron lung.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He was born into a loving family, but as his parents grew older they could no longer care for him and he was sent to a nursing home. This book makes some powerful arguments against nursing homes. This man's experiences should make anyone think twice before considering one as an option.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He got out because he was very determined to have a life--to become a human being, as the title indicates. And he did. He got his degree at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to graduate school. In journalism, he had a chance to interview the eminent physicist severely disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Stephen Hawking.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He was usually so isolated that his caregivers (whom he hired) were often his only human contact, and his quest for independence included a quest for romantic love or at least sexual involvement. As happens too often (usually unfortunately) with many people in similar situations, he fell in love with some of the caretakers.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He is very explicit about the choices he made and how they turned out. This much description might not be to every reader's taste.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This man must have been very remarkable, and his book calls attention to a much-neglected and forgotten segment of the population--persons stricken with polio.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They are forgotten now because the polio vaccine put an end to infantile paralysis, but there were those for whom the vaccine didn't come along soon enough. In my childhood young people were still getting polio. Some weren't afflicted as severely as Mark O'Brien but many have had to struggle with post-polio syndrome in the years since the onset of their polio. Not a pretty picture at all.</b></div>
<br />
20 April 201)<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>O'CONNER, PATRICIA T. AND KELLERMAN, J. STEWART</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">ORIGINS OF THE SPECIOUS: MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</span></i> </b>(2009)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The authors, who are a married couple, have aligned themselves firmly in the "descriptivist" camp in the ongoing battle among English-language mavens. Have no doubt about it--these people are not about to tell you what is "correct" in English.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They are so careful not to be prescriptive that at every bend in the road, they are in there telling you, in effect, that we all just have to learn to move with the times and accept the inevitable: Language changes, and just look at how even the dictionaries are reflecting those changes, even changes we might abhor.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Their pet method of helping the controversial usage changes to gain acceptance among those purists who insist on clinging to words and phrases that our authors assure us have gone out with the horse and buggy is to demonstrate that actually those "new" usages aren't so new. So they delve into the <i>OED</i> and other sources and come up with instances of a word in use back in the 16th century. Take that, you prescriptivists!</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Their tone gets strident, and they seem to be straining to make sure their presentation is witty, but in general the book is readable and makes some important points about our use of the language.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, when it comes to "hopefully," I'd like to quibble with them. They liken the recent tendency to use "hopefully" as an adverb modifying an entire sentence ("Hopefully the student will pass those exams") to many other uses of adverbs to modify whole sentences, citing examples like "oddly" and "luckily."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Oddly" and "luckily" aren't quite like "hopefully," though. There probably can be no confusion with using them to modify an entire sentence. But using "hopefully" in this way leaves the door wide open to ambiguity.</b><br />
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Does "She's going to the awards dinner, hopefully" mean that the speaker hopes that she will turn up there? Or does it mean that she is going to the awards dinner in a hopeful mood--perhaps because she might win an award?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I've noticed quite a number of examples of this sort of ambiguity. The authors should reconsider "hopefully," but that's just my opinion.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I wish they had heaped some scorn on horrors like the use of "fun" as an adjective ("We had a fun time") and "relatable" as in "The characters in this movie are very relatable." But they didn't, more's the pity.</b></div>
<br />
14 April 2015<br />
<br />
<br />
_______________________________<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i> </i></div>
<b>OLSEN, GREGG</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><i><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>A TWISTED FAITH: A MINISTER'S OBSESSION AND THE MURDER THAT DESTROYED A CHURCH</b></span></i><b> (2010)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>True-crime accounts can be riveting, and this one was--but not in the usual way. I had expected an account of just what details led to solving the crime, what evidence turned out to be significant.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There is very little about the actual case, however. There is a great deal about the intricate relationships and the several love affairs (if that is what they were) between the pastor, Nick Hacheney, and some local women.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>We are presented with a rather large cast of characters, all of them probably given their real-life names. Most were part of a tight-knit community revolving around a church that was apparently part of the Assemblies of God.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The Assembly of God, like several other branches of Christianity, especially in the US, embodies a logical extension of Protestant thought by removing most of the hierarchical or authoritarian structure of the more traditional Christian sects: If the clergy has little authority, then every person's religious experience is as valid as everyone else's, and anyone can be divinely inspired.</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Assembly of God people, also derogatorily known as "holy rollers," sometimes go into religious transports that fling them onto the ground and enable them to "speak in tongues"--in a language that is usually not known to anyone. But its significance, and the significance of that sort of experience generally, is accepted by the congregants as valid. A person who has such an experience has truly been touched by God, in the Assembly of God view.</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nick Hacheney was a highly respected pastor in a church in Bremerton, Washington. He is the youth counsellor, seemingly happily married and involved in counselling several church members. As a member of this antinomian sector of the Christian faith, he was able to establish himself as a trusted confidant of troubled members of the congregation.</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nick's young, healthy wife Dawn was found burned to death one night while Nick was apparently away hunting. Questions were raised at the time but it was decided that the death was accidental.</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We learn much about Nick and how he has managed to persuade several women church members that God wants him to become more intimate with them, and he even raises the hopes of some that he will marry them.</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Many years later Nick is convicted of murdering his wife, but we don't find out how the conviction proceeded. In fact, apparently his statement to Sandy Glass, a respected "prophetess" of the church who has believed that God has commanded her to dump her husband and marry Nick, to the effect that he did kill Dawn is the only real evidence that is presented by the author, aside from some of the facts of the case.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>So this book isn't what I expected but it is an interesting glimpse of this type of community and its infighting and intrigue--and especially its prophecies. It provides an alarming window on the extent to which some strains of Christianity can sometimes encourage delusion in the name of divine inspiration.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>April 20, 2020</b><div><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><br /></span></i></b></div><div><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">BITTER ALMONDS: THE TRUE STORY OF MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS, AND THE SEATTLE CYANIDE MURDERS </span></i>(1994)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This very long account gives the details of a case involving two murders in the Seattle area in 1986--both involving the ingestion of a well-known painkiller to which someone had added cyanide.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The involved story of several pill bottles, along with a very extensive cast of characters, is quite absorbing reading. There are two "branches" of the story--the Nickells and the Snows--the two families affected by the murders. We learn a great deal about the background of the Nickells but not much at all about the Snows, but since Stella Nickell is the one who is convicted of the crime, perhaps there should be more focus on her and her connections.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>23 September 2020</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b>
_____________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>O'NEAL, LINDA, TENNYSON, PHILIP, WATSON, RICK</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">MISSING: THE OREGON CITY GIRLS; A SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> </em><em>ABDUCTION AND MURDER</em></span></b><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In 2002 Ashley Pond, aged 12, vanished before reaching the school where she was in seventh grade. Some weeks later, a neighbor and classmate of hers, Miranda Gaddis, 13, disappeared under similar circumstances. Time was passing, and it looked as if the police and the FBI were following the wrong leads.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><em></em><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Linda O'Neal and her husband Philip Tennyson became involved in the case because Linda was a step-grandmother to Ashley and, as a private investigator, she considered herself qualified to pursue an investigation into the circumstances of the girls' disappearance on her own.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Almost from the start, she cast a suspicious eye on one Ward Weaver, whose daughter Mallory was a good friend of Ashley's--and in fact Ashley had virtually lived in the Weaver household for about a year because she didn't get along with her mother. Weaver had custody of Mallory and lived with a girl friend at the time. He had been so extraordinarily nice to Ashley (and to several other friends of Mallory's) that Linda was suspicious. She became more suspicious on discovering more facts about Weaver--for instance, that his father, a very violent man, was on death row.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It took a long time and a near-murder to bring the law authorities around to Linda O'Neal's point of view about Weaver, but when Weaver tried to rape and kill yet another girl, they began investigating in earnest and discovered the bodies of the two missing girls, whom Weaver had brutally murdered.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Details of the aftermath of Weaver's arrest are given, and the various family members' appalled and sorrowing reactions are explored. The book closes with an impassioned lecture by O'Neal about the need for everyone to be alert for any telltale signs of child abuse or pedophilia among people we deal with every day.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a very riveting account of a horrible tragedy told by someone who seems to know what she is talking about. Implicit in what she says is an awareness that as the world becomes more densely populated and impersonal, there is an increasing need for people to make an effort to connect with and know one another better.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is interesting that the law enforcement personnel failed to catch the signs of Ward Weaver's involvement in the girls' disappearance but those who knew the family relationships and some of the history of the persons involved were the ones who got to the truth and revealed it.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
5 March 2009<br />
<br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>OPDYKE, IRENE GUT</b><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSOh2yEOMIQyYjTceTMbHW0G5_NPFGZbjiIxu118PB0qr4NgOaw" /></div>
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">IN MY HANDS: MEMORIES OF A HOLOCAUST RESCUER</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The recollections of this remarkable Polish woman who did what she could--and under the circumstances it was a great deal--to rescue Jews in Poland during World War 2 are beautifully and coherently told, though the narrative must have been extraordinarily difficult to put together--both because of its complexity and because of the emotion-charged content.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While telling her personal story--of how she, a young nursing student, began by smuggling food out to imprisoned Jews and later hid about a dozen Jews in a cellar and smuggled some of them into the forest where they felt they could hide more safely--she conveys a sense of the extreme porosity of national and ethnic boundaries in Poland during the war, of the way in which both Germany and Russia felt free to overrun the area and leave destruction in their wake.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Irene Gut (she married and became Opdyke after the war) was a believing Catholic whose faith wasn't shaken even when a local priest warned her not to take the course she was taking because she'd be living in sin.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She had confessed to him that when given a choice between unmasking the Jews she was keeping in hiding and sleeping with the German officer who employed her as his housekeeper, she had chosen not to expose the Jews. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Irene Gut Opdyke came to the United States after the war and, late in life, was honored for her work during the Holocaust. An obituary (she died in 2003) makes it clear that for 30 years she had never spoken of her wartime experiences.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/21/local/me-opdyke21">http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/21/local/me-opdyke21</a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She seems to have known exactly what she was getting into every step of the way. Here there is no naivete of the sort that may have been part of the makeup of the three members of the German anti-Fascist White Rose group who went to their deaths for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, as portrayed in the film, <em>Sophie Scholl: The Final Days</em>. Irene Gut Opdyke saw the situation as it was unfolding right around her and did what she could where she was, without aspiring to reach large numbers of people with a message, which she must have known would be much too risky.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
8 February 2012</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
_______________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<strong>ORLEAN, SUSAN<br />
<em><br />
</em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE ORCHID THIEF</span></em></strong> (1998)<br />
<br />
<b>The author's report on her trip to Florida to meet accused orchid thief John Laroche. The book contains much information about orchids, the Florida swamp country, and the Seminoles.</b><br />
<br />
15 June 2001<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br />
<b>OZICK, CYNTHIA</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.edrants.com/segundo/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ozick1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://www.edrants.com/segundo/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ozick1.jpg" width="257" wt="true" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<b> </b><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">A CYNTHIA OZICK READER </span></em>(1996)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This is a sizeable collection of poems, stories, and essays, every one of them quite readable.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Ozick's densely packed prose is witty and always to the point. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The two Puttermesser stories are particularly funny--about a woman lawyer with the last name of Puttermesser who creates a golem.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In the essays, "Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and Her Nurse" was particularly interesting as I had just read a book about Virginia Woolf's relationships with the servants. Here Ozick makes a strong case for Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, as her principal caretaker.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Her essay on Edith Wharton is based on her reading of the R. W. B. Lewis biography that appeared in the 1970s to wide acclaim. It revealed an affair between Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton. Ozick turns her attention to Wharton's more mundane everyday life--and comes up wondering how Wharton managed to write so much while being in charge of a large number of servants, several residences, dogs, and a very troubled husband, in addition to traveling widely.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>She suggests that Wharton's fiction often rode along on the coattails of Henry James and claims that her much-praised <em>Ethan Frome-</em>-one of the rare works where Wharton's characters are not upper class--is slight and overrated.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>I tend to disagree with her evaluation of <em>Ethan Frome</em>, but it's been years since I read it. It held up well in the classroom as a book for discussion in college English classes, and it is a radical departure from most of Wharton's other fiction, but maybe some of us have given it higher marks than it deserves....</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Above all, Cynthia Ozick takes Henry James and Edith Wharton to task for their snobbery. Speaking as a New York Jewish writer with roots on the Lower East Side, she is understandably resentful of the sort of </strong><b>élitism whereby she was obliged to have her speech monitored when she was a school girl--she was taught not to drop her final r's, but she points out that speakers of Oxbridge English make a point of dropping their final r's, for instance.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Ozick's work is saturated with Jewish lore and Yiddish phrases. (Oz</strong><strong>ick has translated several works from Yiddish into English.) Judaism is clearly a part of her personality, and she has contributed some of its richness to the literature of our time.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
18 September 2011<br />
<em><br />
</em><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">FAME AND FOLLY: ESSAYS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1996)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Cynthia Ozick discourses on a variety of topics, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Saul Bellow, Isaac Babel, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in these essays.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>All of them are well worth reading. Her comments are incisive and original. She gives special attention to instances of anti-Jewish sentiment in such revered figures as T. S. Eliot--who up until recently had been regarded as considerably less fascistic than his good friend Ezra Pound. Some little-known facts about Eliot that show more of his fascistic tendencies, and Ozick highlights these as she also reveals him to have recreated himself with a keenly ambitious eye on success in the literary world.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The work of Isaac Babel has received too little attention over the years, and Ozick's essay should help to establish it among the more remarkable literary endeavors of the 20th century. (Babel was born in 1894 and probably executed in 1940 at the Lyubanka prison in Stalin's Russia). For more on Babel, see:</b></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/Publications/Babel.htm">http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/Publications/Babel.htm</a><br />
<br />
16 August 2009<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">HEIR TO A GLIMMERING WORLD</span></em> </strong>(2004)<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Cynthia Ozick has a knack for spinning an interesting yarn, and she does a fine job in this novel with a first-person narrator, who finds herself "hired" (but with only occasional meager pay) as an "amanuensis" by a refugee from Germany (it is the mid-1930s) named Mitwisser. Mitwisser was a noted scholar in Germany, as was his wife, now in a demented state. Mitwisser's specialty is an obscure Jewish sect.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>He is very much the head of a household that includes his wife and five children, and hovering on the periphery is the mysterious James, their very generous benefactor. The book's title in the UK is <em>The Bear Boy</em>, referring to James, the original "bear boy," the child model for a series of very popular children's books. James's tragedy--finding his status as the original "bear boy" too heavy a millstone around his neck--is at the center of this story, although other characters' lives that are of almost equal interest are touched on and picked up again and again throughout the narrative.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Ozick has captured the eccentricities of her characters and brought them to life. </strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
31 August 2008<br />
<strong><br />
</strong><i style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">FOREIGN BODIES </span></i><span style="color: #38761d;">(</span>2010)<br />
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<strong><strong>Told mainly from the standpoint of Bea Nightingale, whose name was originally Nachtigall, this novel ends with a question--asking, in effect, who got the better deal, Bea or her ex-husband, composer Leo Coopersmith?</strong></strong></div>
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<strong>Much of the story--set in the 1950s--revolves around her brother Marvin and his two adult children. Julian, Marvin's son, has gone to Paris and taken up with Lily, a refugee from Romania, and it falls to Bea to act as an intermediary between Marvin and Julian. Julian's sister Iris gets involved as well.</strong></div>
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<strong style="text-align: justify;">Lily has endured World War 2 and witnessed her husband and three-year-old child being shot. Her experiences have been so very different from Julian's--and she is older than Julian--that the reader has hope for her maturing influence.</strong><br />
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<strong style="text-align: justify;">Lily works as a translator for a Centre des </strong><b style="text-align: justify;">É</b><strong style="text-align: justify;">migr</strong><b style="text-align: justify;">é</b><strong style="text-align: justify;">s, founded by a Baron whose policy turns out to be directing the Jewish war refugees who come to his center in Paris seeking help to other destinations--i.e., passing them on and thus prolonging their suffering.</strong><br />
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<strong style="text-align: justify;">This is an intricately constructed and beautifully told story.</strong><br />
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<strong>20 October 2014</strong><br />
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<strong></strong></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121114269979329812005-06-26T13:16:00.006-07:002023-03-07T16:31:34.903-08:00P<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>PAGE, TIM</strong><br />
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<span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><em> DAWN POWELL: A BIOGRAPHY</em> </span>(1998)<br />
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<strong>After reading a couple of works by Dawn Powell, I wanted to know more about her, and this biography is a comprehensive account of her life. It also provides a fairly thorough discussion of her work.</strong></div>
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<strong>Whether she deserves lasting fame or obscurity is still an open question, apparently. In her lifetime she knew many important people, including Edmund Wilson, who championed her work, and John Dos Passos, a good friend of hers for many years. Her adult life was spent in New York, where she seemed to many to be the embodiment of Greenwich Village.</strong></div>
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<strong>Life wasn't all beer and skittles for Dawn Powell, however. Though her marriage to a successful man lasted until his death, the couple's one severely autistic child was born at a time when autism wasn't yet recognized or treatable. </strong></div>
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<strong>This book was an eminently readable and responsible study of a 20th century American writer.</strong></div>
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12 November 2011<br />
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<strong>PALEY, GRACE</strong><br />
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<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">JUST AS I THOUGHT</span></em><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1998)</div>
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<strong>This book is a compendium of Grace Paley's essays and talks spanning the years between 1950 and the 1990s, and through them we can form a well-rounded picture of the author, who died in 2007 in her 80s.</strong></div>
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<strong>She grew up in the Jewish tradition in the Bronx, and came from a family of socialists. She became a well-known writer of fiction and essays, published often in such publications as the <em>New York Review of Books</em>.</strong></div>
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<strong>An energetic participant in the anti-war movement, the women's movement and the struggle for racial justice, she never hesitated to speak out and to appear at rallies and demonstrations. She spent time in jail--and the book contains information about these experiences.</strong></div>
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<strong>It also includes brief tributes to some writers like Kay Boyle and Isaac Babel. </strong><br />
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<strong>She concludes with an account written by her father of his time spent as a political prisoner in Russia that is informative and grimly humorous.</strong></div>
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21 February 2011<br />
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<strong>PARKER, DOROTHY</strong><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">COMPLETE STORIES </span>(1995)<br />
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<b><em></em>Dorothy Parker's fiction might have been expected to seem dated nowadays, since she has so often been thought to exemplify the spirit of the 1920s-1930s. But her stories have held up amazingly well over the years, in my opinion. This collection, which includes the well-known "Big Blonde," contains many interesting gems of stories that are more than mere period-pieces. Dorothy Parker takes aim at hypocrisy and the monied classes in the US, at smugness and triteness and insensitivity.</b></div>
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<b>"Arrangement in Black and White" (1927) is probably a fictionalized account of an incident involving Paul Robeson--and she skewers the liberals who strain to prove their lack of race prejudice while revealing the same stereotypical thinking that they deplore.</b></div>
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<b>The author may be at her best when portraying drinking people--the repetitiousness of their conversations, the sadly tiresome behavior.</b></div>
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<b>Dorothy Parker's wit and perception are unique.</b></div>
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17 September 2004<br />
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<strong>PASTERNAK, BORIS LEONIDOVICH</strong><br />
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTwY6vEAL5knYo0QxeBYsMueRbQm72du3Bm50xmfv0AgDo10EzZ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="251" data-original-width="201" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTwY6vEAL5knYo0QxeBYsMueRbQm72du3Bm50xmfv0AgDo10EzZ" /></a></div>
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<strong> Boris Pasternak, painting done by his father, the artist Leonid Pasternak</strong></div>
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<strong><i><span style="color: #38761d;">DOCTOR ZHIVAGO</span></i> (1957)</strong></div>
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<strong>This highly acclaimed novel was made into a rather inferior movie some years after the tumult of its publication. A reader approaching the book with a certain amount of detachment, both from the political firestorm created by its publication and from the movie version, is probably best equiped to form an accurate impression of the work and of the author's intentions.</strong></div>
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<strong>It is a highly romantic story in some ways, tinged with mysticism and suffused with a sense of the vastness of the Russian land. There is considerable snow throughout, and now and again we are reminded of the ornate luxuriance of the Russian Orthodox religion.</strong></div>
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<strong>There is a love story--or, in a way, there are three love stories, for the central character, Yuri Zhivago, has three women in his life at various times. But it is Lara who is the most important to him. Unfortunately, Lara is perhaps the least successful character in the book. She comes too close to being the stereotypically overly dramatic heroine. There isn't much to her beyond the facts we find out--especially her having taken a shot at her lover and hit someone else instead.</strong></div>
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<strong>But scenes involving Lara are just a small part of this novel, which is probably largely autobiographical. Though Pasternak was not a doctor, and many of his characters have been found to be composites of real people, the times and places in the story seem to be drawn directly from real life.</strong></div>
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<strong>We are in the period just before, during and after the 1917 Revolution. Most particularly, the book focuses on the civil war that raged in Russia between 1917 and 1923. If one has thought of the Russian Revolution as "happening" on a date in 1917, one will think again after reading this book. The Revolution, which actually "began" in 1905, was a process lasting for years after the events of 1917 and involved suffering, chaos and famine as well as acts of extreme cruelty, with much bloodshed.</strong></div>
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<strong>It is this world that the author has documented splendidly in <i>Doctor Zhivago</i>, a work that was many years in the making. There haven't been many records of these times and these places. The USSR was making sure that literary works emanating from its authors toed the Party line with its dictates about socialist realism, and so what has been available has been mainly these somewhat skewed accounts.</strong></div>
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<b>Sometimes there are creaky plot devices, as when Yuri Andreevich returns from being a captive doctor in the civil war and find a note from Lara left for him in a secret hiding place and for quite awhile wonders at what the note fails to say--without noticing that there is more writing on the back of the paper.</b></div>
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<b>There is a tendency to use some characters--Yuri and Lara, notably--as mouthpieces for what are probably the author's own views on politics and philosophy but the tendency is kept in check. At one point Lara overhears Yuri discoursing to the effect that "God became man so that man could become God," for instance, but the thought is not given any further elaboration, and that is probably good, for the narrative is filled with many characters who pop up suddenly, then vanish, then reappear much later, and there are murders, changed identities, diseases, and suicides.</b></div>
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<b>There are many memorable sequences in this book, but one of the most poignant ones may be the suicide of Strelnikov/Antipov, found by Zhivago in the snow, with his blood drops frozen in the snow, resembling rowan berries. Shortly before this scene, there has been a section called "The Rowan Tree," calling attention to the tree and its berries. The scene seems to encapsulate the desolation of the life Zhivago, Lara, and the others have been driven to by events beyond their control.</b></div>
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<b>And what are we to make of a novel that appends the central character's poems at the end? Since Zhivago dies rather young but has begun writing poetry, perhaps this is the author's way of letting us know more about him: These are his poems, this is what he was, this is the distillation of the experiences you have just been reading about.</b></div>
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The Volokhonsky-Pevear English translation of <i>Doctor Zhivago </i>may have been intentionally quite literal, but sometimes its literal quality can sound awkward, as in "that low, already-setting sun." Apparently the translators were intent on preserving the flavor of the original, but they have leaned over backwards in the attempt sometimes.</div>
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The author may have intended to provide a panoramic record of a very significant, intense time in the Russian experience--and only incidentally have overlaid it with an intricate love story that is as intricate as the interior of a Russian Orthodox church. He has made us see what those times and those places were like.</div>
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10 August 2017</div>
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<strong>PATCHETT, ANN</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BEL CANTO</span></em></strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></em>(2001)<br />
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<b>In this novel we have a group of people from various parts of the world thrown together in the home of the Vice President of a Latin American country, who is the host for a recital by a world-famous operatic soprano in honor of the birthday of a Japanese businessman who is one of her enthusiastic fans.</b></div>
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<b>The festive occasion is ruined by the appearance of a group of young terrorists who take the entire group hostage at gunpoint.</b></div>
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<b>The story revolves around the changes that occur during the many months of captivity, and at the point where the terrorists become humanly lovable and love affairs start blossoming among the trapped people, the story starts to come unglued.</b></div>
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<b>Patchett can't seem to dislike any of her characters. It is her insistence on sweetness and light that grates on my nerves. Her Roman Catholic orientation, showing up in the form of an almost saintly priest among the group, who stays on of his own free will, and in the form of frequent references to the Catholic practices of many of the characters, does not bring Graham Greene readily to mind, either. Greene grapples with the problems involved in being a Catholic in modern times. Patchett grapples with the protocol of the confessional, the sign of the cross, and all of the other paraphernalia of the religion--the frills and furbelows, as it were.</b></div>
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<b>Roxanne, the diva, is almost too good to be true. She is kind and generous to a fault, loving, admirable--and possessed of a superior talent and training.</b></div>
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<b>By some peculiar twist that is left unexplained, the man with whom Roxanne has been having an affair during the captivity is not the man who marries her in the end, but by the time the reader reaches the end of this sad excuse for a story, there is only a sense of relief at being rid of this insufferable cast of characters.</b></div>
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22 April 2008<br />
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<b>PATON, ALAN</b><br />
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<i> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY</span></b></i><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1948)<br />
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<b>It is difficult to talk about a book that has become so well-known just in one's own lifetime. It rose to best-seller lists and now enjoys a place on many a school and college required reading list.</b></div>
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<b>I had never read it. But before I'd finished it I was wondering if the author might have set out to write an Important Book. Of course, most authors would like for their books to receive acclaim, but some set about achieving that acclaim far more assiduously than others.</b></div>
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<b>My hunch is that Paton was pretty assiduous about it. But that is by the way.</b></div>
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<b>Working undoubtedly from his background working with South African reform schools, he lays out the story of the son of a South African black pastor whose father is trying to find him. The Reverend Stephen Kumalo is at the center of the story, in his heart-breaking quest for his only child, who has gone to Johannesburg in search of an aunt there. </b></div>
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<b>The author pulls no punches, gives us no tidy happy ending. And as the story unfolds, we are becoming keenly aware of the sharp racial divide in South Africa.</b></div>
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<b>That the Reverend Kumalo's son is guilty of the crime he's been charged with makes the story far less simplistic than it might have been. The theme of <i>Cry, the Beloved Country</i> is not racial injustice but the race problem runs through the story like a thread that is never far from view.</b></div>
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<b>I found Paton's style annoying, however, almost to the point where it ruined the book. The late Roger Ebert once called his style in this book as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and the King James Bible, and that just about sums it up.</b></div>
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<b>In the sections focusing on the black African characters, Paton's style has pronounced Biblical overtones, and he is apparently trying to capture some of the nuances of the Zulu language in the dialogue. Whether or not he has succeeded is best left to someone familiar with the Zulu language.</b></div>
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3 July 2013</div>
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__________________________</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>PATTERSON, JAMES</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"> <i>MURDER OF INNOCENCE </i></span>(2020)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>in the true-crime genre, it is often difficult to know how much of the narrative has been invented, but apparently the two stories included here--"Murder of Innocence" and "A Murderous Affair"--are based on actual cases, and maybe the events and dialogue represent what actually happened. Or maybe they are just what might have happened.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The first tells of a very well-heeled man named Andrew Luster who is the heir to the Max Factor cosmetic industry fortune. Luster goes around seducing young women by offering them beverages laces with a substance that knocks them out long enough for him to sodomize and kill them.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The second story is about a luckless woman who decides to become an informant for the FBI--and develops an attachment for her handler, who is a married man, but he gets involved with her, and she becomes pregnant. And she ends up dead.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>FBI agents don't typically do this sort of thing, and so the story has a shock value built into it.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>However, her pregnancy is at least 4 months along when she meets her death, and yet the author never deals with it beyond letting the reader know that fact. It seems an odd omission since it would clearly be an element in the killer's motivation.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author has written many best-selling books, however. He is so extremely prolific that perhaps some of his writing has been a trifle on the hasty or careless side.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Otherwise, the stories made for interesting reading.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>7 March 2023</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> _______________________________</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>PIERCE, THOMAS</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">HALL OF SMALL MAMMALS</span></i> (2015)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book title is the title of one of the best stories in this collection. The author occasionally branches out into the magical realism universe ("Shirley Temple 3"), but he has a special flair for the details of the real world, particularly the everyday annoyances most people will find all too familiar: having to wait a long time in a line ("Hall of Small Mammals"), the difficulty in reaching a settlement concerning the disposition of the body of a loved one ("More Soon") when the person died of a mysterious virus.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The story I found least successful of the bunch was "Videos of People Falling Down," but it might work better in the print version. The audio rendition was difficult to follow.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book appeared in 2015--before the COVID-19 pandemic--but "More Soon" is weirdly proleptic of 2019-2021, revolving as it does around the difficulties created when a dead person's body has to be kept in storage (and in this case sent to many different locations) and carefully analyzed before the bereaved family and friends can have access to it, and when that access finally is given, it is in a form that is absurdly wrong.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author captures the inanity of some aspects of modern life with a wry humor.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>29 March 2021</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>______________________________________</b></div>
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<strong>PINKWATER, DANIEL</strong><br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">CHICAGO DAYS, HOBOKEN NIGHTS </b>(1991)<br />
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<b>This is an amusing collection of brief essays by a National Public Radio commentator. The essays amount to an autobiographical sketch, including the information that Pinkwater began by studying to be a sculptor.</b></div>
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17 November 2004<br />
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<strong> </strong><div><strong>PINSKY, MARK I.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">MET HER ON THE MOUNTAIN: A FORTY-YEAR QUEST TO SOLVE THE APPALACHIAN COLD-CASE MURDER OF NANCY MORGAN</span></i> (2013)</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In 1970 the body of a 24-year-old VISTA worker, Nancy Morgan, was found naked, hogtied, and brutally murdered in her car in North Carolina--and her killer or killers weren't found. The journalist Mark Pinsky was interested in the case and kept watching it over decades. Now he has put together this account, with his thoughts about the case, and it is a very timely work, highlighting the vast chasm in this country between the more provincial, right-leaning strain in American thought and the more liberal ideas current in urban areas and especially among the more educated people.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>For this isn't just a report on the details of a cold case. The author also delves into the local attitudes toward VISTA volunteers, who struck many native North Carolinians as interlopers, foreign, people who couldn't possibly understand them--and so why, they argued, should the taxpayers be picking up the tab for these young people to stay among them?</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>What was a benign federal effort toward correcting educational and economic inequities in Appalachia compared with the more prosperous parts of the country was deeply resented by some of the people on whom it was imposed, and Pinsky sees that resentment as possibly at the root of the violent fate inflicted on Nancy Morgan.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>He discloses a shameful record of the wrongful accusation of one man, whose life was almost ruined by the experience, and of the domination of local politics and law enforcement by a corrupt group of controlling individuals.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>This seemed like a balanced and careful account of a tragic case.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><b>11 November 2022</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>_____________________</b></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong>
<strong>POGANY, EUGENE</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">IN MY BROTHER'S IMAGE: TWIN BROTHERS SEPARATED BY FAITH AFTER THE HOLOCAUST </span></em></strong>(2000)<br />
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<b>This family memoir is one of the most revealing Holocaust recollections I have come across. The author has compiled everything he could find out about the lives of his father and his uncle, the twin brothers who were separated by faith.</b></div>
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<b>The book deals as calmly and logically as is probably possible with the interface between Judaism and Roman Catholicism as it was reflected in Hungary during the Second World War and specifically in the author's family.</b></div>
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<b>The family was Jewish but not particularly devout. They were among the many Hungarian Jews who regarded themselves as Hungarians first and as Jews only very secondarily. Like many German Jews and Jews in other European countries as well, they were bewildered and stunned as anti-Semitism began to flourish in their homeland.</b></div>
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<b>This memoir goes back to the days before World War I. Gabriella, the twins' mother, and her husband Bela convert to Christianity for seemingly practical reasons. Bela as a veterinarian finds it difficult to get a civil service post because he is Jewish. Becoming a Christian makes it possible for him to find employment. But the couple were not just converting to Christianity for convenience. They were entirely sincere, and raised their twin boys as well as their daughter to be Roman Catholics.</b></div>
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<b>Miklos, the author's father, wanted to become a priest at one time. Later his brother Gyorgy did become a priest. When the Jews of Hungary found themselves in increasing danger of being sent away, Miklos, as a baptized Christian, was given a special dispensation of sorts--an assignment to a Christian labor camp. Gyorgy meanwhile was in Italy for health reasons, easily obtaining an indefinite extension of his stay there from his religious order--and finding a niche for himself by serving a very saintly Padre Pio, who was thought to be destined for beatification and who had received the stigmata.</b></div>
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<b>In spite of her Christianity, Gabriella was sent to Auschwitz, where she reportedly died in a gas chamber, clutching a wooden crucifix. Miklos survives Bergen-Belsen--but emerges having lost his Christian faith and returned to Judaism.</b></div>
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<b>Many years go by, and the twins do not meet. Miklos moves to the United States with his family, and his twin brother remains in Italy. Through the author's urging, the brothers meet late in life when the priest makes a visit to New Jersey. The author also urges his father to return to the Hungarian towns that were familiar to him--hoping that his father will dredge up some of the emotions that have been so long suppressed.</b></div>
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<b>Whether this was wise on the author's part is questionable. His father was in his 80s when he made the trip to Hungary and visited his parents' graves--Gabriella's "grave" being merely a headstone with her name on it.</b></div>
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<b>Miklos and Gyorgy never settle their differences but can at least debate them. Miklos can no longer believe in a benevolent God or in some mysterious divine purpose behind the Holocaust that would have made it understandable. Gyorgy takes the traditional Catholic view and cannot see that the Church's non-response to the Holocaust was as damnable as Miklos claims.</b></div>
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<b>The book presents the facts objectively, but the evidence is too clear to be denied. It wasn't just the Germans invading Hungary who were responsible for the vicious treatment of Hungary's Jews. It was the Hungarians themselves, only too glad to help the Nazis in their anti-Semitic campaigns (and to avail themselves of whatever they could steal from the terrified Jews who were fighting for their lives).</b></div>
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<b>This kind of story needs to be told--again and again.</b></div>
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25 May 2009<br />
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<strong><br />PORINCHAK, EVE</strong><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong> <i><span style="color: #45818e;">ONE CUT</span></i> (2017)</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>This book came out as part of a Simon & Schuster series, "Simon True," true crime accounts involving teenagers and apparently aimed at the teen market.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>In 1995 a comfortable neighborhood in the Los Angeles area was upset by news of the murder by stabbing of a 16-year-old boy who happened to be the son of a popular LAPD police detective. Implicated were the several chums who were at or near the scene--lads ranging in age from 15 to 18.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>"The scene" was a "fort, " a structure put up in the family's yard by one Michael McCloran, the victim's best friend, who was seriously wounded in the altercation that resulted in the death of Jimmy Farris.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The "fort" was a gathering place for high school-age youngsters to gather, obtain and smoke pot, obtain liquor, and hang out.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Oddly, the existence of this "fort" seems to have been perfectly all right with the parents and other adults connected with the teens.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The author tells what happened and goes into detail about the court proceedings. Porinchak clearly has an axe to grind here, as she feels strongly that the boys were given far too harsh a sentence.</strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book would have been more effective if she had tried harder to be objective, to make it a piece of genuine reporting.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>However, she makes an important point in telling the story of these boys: that a willingness to solve problems by resorting to violence is a characteristic that is handed down through generations as children imitate their elders and get their cues about how to behave from the behavior they see around them.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div>26 January 2021</div><div>____________________________________</div><div>
<strong>PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE</strong><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR_dGE8NDmdo90YDYQfcC46_MvXdiftBZjiC--q4LhMS1jhOrr-" /></div>
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER </span></em>(1939)<br />
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<b>Rereading these three beautifully constructed novellas after many years, I'm struck by how well they've held up over time. In one way or another each is about a currently not very fashionable segment of society--white southerners, using the language they would have used at the time, and some readers might object to finding the words <em>nigger</em> and <em>Negro</em> cropping up in them now and then. But, as with the controversy surrounding <em>Huckleberry Finn</em> on this score, one has to look at the context. Who is using these words, and why? The character using the words is always someone who would have used no other words. We can't pretend that these people are any different from the way they really might have been if we're talking about verisimilitude, and in fiction we usually are talking about verisimilitude.</b></div>
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<b>Race is not really a theme in any of these novellas. The one I liked least, "Old Mortality," concerns a well-heeled Southern family and has the earmarks of an autobiographical tale. It's well known that "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is largely autobiographical, but I found it much more interesting and satisfying.</b></div>
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<b>A young woman who has recently met and fallen in love with a soldier about to be sent off to fight in World War I falls ill in the flu epidemic and is near death. The young man comes to her aid in every way he can. The story has a bit of a political subtext too. The woman has been upset by being pressured at her job to buy Liberty bonds, and indeed the pressure to buy these bonds, with an emphasis on patriotic duty, is powerful and ubiquitous, we see as the story unfolds. Like at least one of her colleagues at work, she doesn't make enough money to afford a Liberty bond, and yet she is worried that she might lose her job if she doesn't comply.</b></div>
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<b>The author doesn't wear her politics on her sleeve. Instead she weaves it into the fabric of her stories.</b></div>
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<b>Similarly, in the stark economics of the Texas farm where "Noon Wine," the best of the three stories in my opinion, the reader can see how grimly thoughts of money have to dominate the lives of the characters--Olav Helton, the hired man with no known past from North Dakota, and the farm couple who are very fortunate to have found such a hard working helper.</b></div>
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<b>The tragic unraveling of this story proceeds at a measured pace but the groundwork for every incident in the story has been carefully set up.</b></div>
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<b>We get a glimmering of a problem with Mr. Helton when he is found violently shaking one of the Thompson children. The Thompsons' reaction to this is not to be upset about child abuse (as might have been the case nowadays) but to want to be the ones who discipline their own children. They are angry at Mr. Helton for seeming to usurp their power.</b></div>
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<b>That there could be a lone man arriving at a farm from North Dakota with only a small collection of treasured harmonicas is entirely believable in the Texas of the 1920s-1930s. That there could be a farm family like the Thompsons is especially believable.</b></div>
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<b>The novella is a notoriously difficult form in which to write. It is hard to provide enough detail about your characters to make them live in the reader's mind. In these three tales, Katherine Anne Porter has wisely chosen to limit her cast to a few people. If "Old Mortality" is less successful than the other two, it may be because there are more people to keep track of in it.</b></div>
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20 March 2010<br />
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<b><br />POSNER, SARAH</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;">UNHOLY: WHY WHITE EVANGELICALS WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR OF DONALD TRUMP</span> (2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author probably wouldn't have been especially surprised by the events of January 6. It seems she saw this kind of thing coming. I understand that there is a more recent edition of her book, with an Afterword by the author. I haven't read this but it should be enlightening.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>She has dug deeply into the background of the white evangelical Christians who are a significant part of Donald Trump's loyal base. There are some important players on whom she focuses--among them Paul Weyrich:</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich">Paul Weyrich</a></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Posner sees some clear evidence that there is more than a hint of fascism in the views and activities of the white evangelical Christians, and Paul Weyrich is just one example. The cast of characters here is alarmingly large, and money is flowing into their coffers thanks to the generosity of like-minded benefactors.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>It adds up to a bleak picture for any reader who had been harboring hopes for a more tolerant and compassionate society. That isn't the way the country is headed, according to Posner, and we should be very worried.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>23 May 2022</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>_______________________________<br /></b>
<b><br /></b></div><div><b>POTOK, ANDREW</b><br />
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<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">13 STRADOMSKA STREET: A MEMOIR OF EXILE AND RETURN </span></i>(2017)</b><br />
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<b>Years ago I read a remarkable book by this author, <i>Ordinary Daylight. </i>It is a memorable account of the author's discovery that he had retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disorder that would eventually render him blind.</b></div>
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<b>In <i>13 Stradomska Street</i> the author, now in his mid-80s, tells about his trip to Poland (his birthplace) to track down a piece of real estate that he recently learned should rightfully belong to him.</b></div>
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<b>Along the way we learn about his life, his views, his relationships--and how he realizes that it isn't really the piece of real estate that is important. It is his interest in coming to terms with the past--which for him was fraught with nightmarish recollections.</b></div>
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<b>His family fled Poland during the Second World War, and thus some of them escaped the Holocaust. But he has been haunted by his memory of being a 9-year-old boy while they were leaving Poland and being aware that his father appeared to have tried to ditch the rest of the family right at the Polish border.</b></div>
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<b>The reader may wonder how reliable a young boy's memory would be during such a traumatic time, but perhaps the actual facts aren't what matter here, so much as the author's increasing awareness that the events of that time were so terrible that even his own father might have resorted to an extreme measure, maybe only briefly.</b></div>
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<b>Although the retinitis pigmentosa is very much in the background in this well-told account, anyone who remembers<i> Ordinary Daylight </i>will be interested in knowing how Andrew Potok adjusted to his gradual loss of vision and how he formed close attachments to his guide dogs.</b></div>
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<b>By no means a nostalgic reminiscence, this was a very thought-provoking book. </b></div>
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<b>18 September 2018</b></div>
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<b>POWELL, ANTHONY</b><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME</span></em></strong> (in 12 volumes) (1951 - 1975)<br />
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<b>Anthony Powell's 12-volume series of novels, <em>A Dance to the Music of Time</em>, has autobiographical elements, and over twenty of the 400 characters have been identified as real persons--George Orwell and John Galsworthy among them. However, one can read through the dozen volumes with appreciation without this knowledge.</b></div>
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<b>Powell lived from 1905 to 2000, and <em>Dance</em> goes up to the 1960s.</b></div>
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<b>It is the story of a generation of Britons, mostly upper-class and often involved in arts and letters.</b></div>
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<b>Powell has no axes to grind. These twelve novels are not a reflection on a dying breed, nor do they hark back nostalgically to any good old days. The "theory" underlying Powell's series, if there is one, is implied in the painting by Nicholas Poussin of the same name--or at least in Powell's interpretation of that painting. He seems to regard life as a dance in which, as time passes, the people with whom you have been connected keep reappearing and disappearing.</b></div>
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<b>The narrator, Nick Jenkins--standing in for Powell himself, we can assume--is a decent person who, like Powell, is pushing no special agenda of his own. He tells what happened--and helps us to keep track of the characters. He is an actor on the stage, too, of course, and his actions show a consistently decent and modest person, not given to introspection.</b></div>
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<b>Though a modern writer, Powell keeps violence and sex off the stage. They happen, and he doesn't attempt to pretend that they don't--but he spares us the details. I found this refreshing after exposure to many novels and television programs where nothing is left unsaid or unshown.</b></div>
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<b>World War 2, for example, is covered in <em>Dance</em> without a battle scene. For the most part, we are shown the world of the officers and their jockeying for status and promotion. Powell/Jenkins neither rails against the British upper class nor defends it. He just shows it--warts and all, but without dwelling on the warts. Other worlds do keep intruding, and as we move closer to the present, these other worlds seem to be about to triumph.</b></div>
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<b>Widmerpool is the character who occupies the center of the stage, doing so increasingly as time passes. In the earlier volumes he seems the least likely to do anything remotely unconventional. Stuffy, inclined to play it safe, even to be a snitch when it is to his advantage, and to disregard any harm he might be doing to others in his ambition and zealous attention to rules and regs, Widmerpool is the quintessential bureaucratic stickler. It isn't so very out of character when he later joins a cult with rigid rules--although the rules dictate conduct that would be unacceptable in his more traditional social setting.</b></div>
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<b>These books are well written and beautifully paced. They capture an era, and they embody a fascinating theory of time, experience, and character. There is an Anthony Powell Society Website, where you learn that in 1979-1982 the BBC did a radio adaptation of three of the novels, and in October 1997 BBC's Channel 4 ran a dramatization of the entire twelve novels in four two-hour episodes</b>.</div>
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14 August 2003<br />
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<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/The_dance_to_the_music_of_time_c._1640.jpg/220px-The_dance_to_the_music_of_time_c._1640.jpg" /></div>
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A Dance to the Music of Time by Poussin, c. 1636</div>
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volume 1: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>A group of English schoolboys launch this series of twelve novels. These boys will be followed through the next several decades of their varied lives.</b><br />
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8 July 2002<br />
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volume 2: <em><strong><span style="color: #38761d;">A BUYER’S MARKET</span></strong> </em><br />
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</em><b>Here we follow the narrator, Nick Jenkins, into early adulthood and his resumed association with Stringham, Widmerpool, and other school acquaintances.</b><br />
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1 August 2002<br />
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volume 3: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD</span></em></strong><br />
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volume 4: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">AT LADY MOLLY’S</span></em></strong><br />
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volume 5: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">CASANOVA’S CHINESE RESTAURANT</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>It is the time of the Spanish Civil War. Nick Jenkins is now married.</b><br />
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19 June 2003<br />
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volume 6: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE KINDLY ONES</span></em></strong><br />
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</em></strong><b>The "kindly ones" is a translation of the name for the Furies, the Eumenides. Set in England just before the outbreak of World War 2, this segment involves a suicide--as well as the death of Nick's Uncle Giles.</b><br />
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26 June 2003<br />
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volume 7: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE VALLEY OF BONES</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>With World War 2 continuing, Kenneth Widmerpool reappears, now outranking Nick in the military. </b><br />
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3 July 2003<br />
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volume 8: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE SOLDIER’S ART</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>This segment continues the characters' Second World War experiences--with no battle scenes whatsoever. We see Widmerpool’s nonstop rise to prominence.</b><br />
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6 July 2003<br />
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volume 9: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS </span></em></strong><br />
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</em>The war ends, and Widmerpool's relationship with Pamela Flytton is explored.</b><br />
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10 July 2003<br />
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volume 10: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM </span></em></strong><br />
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<b><b>This volume deals with postwar experiences. The title is a nickname for Bagshaw, one of the characters. Pamela ditches Widmerpool for a writer, whom she eventually ditches too, destroying his manuscript as she leaves. Pamela is such a bitch that Widmerpool begins to look increasingly tolerable and sympathetic.</b></b></div>
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31 July 2003<br />
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volume 11: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">TEMPORARY KINGS </span></em></strong><br />
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<b>Here there is more obnoxion on Pamela’s part.</b><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>8 August 2003<br />
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volume 12: <strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">HEARING SECRET HARMONIES</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>Climaxed by the death of Widmerpool, which is reported to Nick as having occurred while Widmerpool was running in one of the events peculiar to the mystic cult he belonged to, this last novel treats the characters as they reach their seventies.</b></div>
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14 August 2003<br />
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<strong>POWELL, DAWN</strong><br />
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<b>28 January 2020</b><br />
<b><br /></b><b><i style="color: #38761d;"> COME BACK TO SORRENTO </i>(1932)</b><br />
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<b>Originally known as <i>The Tenth Moon, </i>this novel resembles <i>Dance Night </i>somewhat--in centering around a married woman's fascination with another man, and in its setting, a Midwestern town.</b></div>
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<b>Connie Benjamin is the central character--married to Gus, who has a cobbler's shop. They have two daughters, Helen and Mimi. Connie has developed an interest in the new music instructor in the town's school system, Blaine Decker, who rents an apartment above Gus's cobbler's shop.</b></div>
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<b>Connie and Decker seem to be birds of a feather. Both have aspired to become musical stars, and both have enjoyed what sounds like a brief period of near-fame, or at least times when they enjoyed the recognition of people who seemed important to them--Connie having been complimented by the apparently illustrious Marini, Decker having spent a memorable year in Europe with a supposedly well-known writer. Together, Connie and Decker look down their noses at everyone else in the town and yearn to live in a place with more to offer culturally.</b></div>
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<b>"Together"? It's not entirely clear how together they are but Connie freely comes and goes from Decker's apartment, with her husband downstairs and surely aware of her visits--but not objecting to them.</b></div>
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<b>Eventually we learn that Connie was once very much in love with a tight-rope walker named Tony, by whom she became pregnant but lost the baby. Tony seems to have abandoned her for economic reasons that she has understood (times were hard, and it was too much responsibility too soon for him).</b></div>
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<b>The story moves along and ends satisfyingly, with Connie accidentally encountering Tony after many years, and no, they don't resume their relationship. Tony is married. Connie is married.</b></div>
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<b>Other parts of the story are a bit problematic. We start with two characters who are shown to be vain, egotistical, snobbish social climbers with unrealistic dreams of glory, and yet later we're expected to sympathize with them, or at least with Connie. Maybe, given the way they've been introduced to us, it is too much to ask of us. In any event, the effect was somewhat jarring.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Connie would have gradually become more sympathetic as we learned more about her past, and she becomes seriously ill with what seems to be tuberculosis. But then there are her husband and two daughters. Doesn't Gus have any feelings about the way his wife is cavorting with the music instructor right under his nose? And the daughters more or less fade out of the picture even though Helen's promiscuity has resulted in a pregnancy and what looks like an unfortunate early marriage. We find out no more about Helen or Mimi, however.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>What happens to Decker seems deserved. If the story has turned into a more compassionate perspective on Connie, Decker has remained a shallow cad up to the end: escaping to Europe--by taking a magnanimous "loan" from the local rich woman--just when the devoted Connie is near death, he finds that Europe has lost its appeal, and he really "belongs" back in the town of Dell River, but he will be stuck in Europe for two years.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a subplot: Louisa Murrow, an English teacher in the school where Decker teaches, who lives with a couple of other teachers in a hostelry occupied by unmarried women teachers, has a crush on Decker too. Absolutely nothing comes of it, and in fact Decker snubs her repeatedly, but she keeps on trying and hoping--and getting her hopes dashed. She seems like a caricature of Connie--and her presence in the story serves to illustrate just how much of a heel Decker is, a man who can charm women while being very cruel.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Human beings and their foibles and flaws interest Dawn Powell, and this novel shows that she has a lot to say about the fallible creatures we are.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<b>16 March 2020</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">MY HOME IS FAR AWAY</i> (1944)<b><span style="color: #38761d;"></span></b><br />
<strong><br />
</strong><b>A largely autobiographical novel about three sisters growing up in the Midwest, their mother having died and their father a fun-loving alcoholic who vanishes and reappears in their lives, as they are bounced around among various relatives. A really good book, especially in delineating sibling rivalry and human foibles.</b><br />
<br />
27 July 1998<br />
_______________________<br />
<b>PROSE, FRANCINE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">GOLDENGROVE</span></b></em> (2008)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This short novel is narrated by a 13-year-old girl, Nico, whose sister has drowned. We see how she and her parents respond to this shattering event--and how she goes along with her sister's boy friend's delusion that she can replace her sister Margaret in his life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Aaron, the boy friend, is about 18 and has just finished high school. As Nico and Aaron have their brief but uneasy relationship, the reader probably becomes keenly aware of the vast emotional gulf between a 13-year-old and an 18-year-old. Otherwise, their transactions with one another border on the smarmy and unnatural, and we can only breathe a sigh of relief when the association ends.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story leaves too many important loose ends to be very satisfying. For instance, although an autopsy is apparently done, we never find out just what caused the sister's drowning. Was it the heart condition she already knew she had? Or did she drown for some other reason? In the light of subsequent events in the story--Nico's chest pains and visit to a heart specialist, for instance--it would have been better to establish the exact cause of her sister's death.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Then too there is the connection with the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem beginning, "Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?..."</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>So far as I can tell, the "connection" comes down to the sister's name and the fact that the father's bookstore is named Goldengrove. At various points in the book it sounds as if the connection is about to have some significance, but it doesn't. Nico tries hard to wring some emotional resonance from it but it doesn't quite succeed. For one thing, the Margaret in the poem is mourning, not dead.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Most of the narrative focuses on the summer following the drowning, but then suddenly Nico is wrapping things up by telling about a few incidents involving her husband and children, many years later. The book ends on an upbeat, life-affirming note, but have we learned much about this particular loss and the grief that these people felt? Or does what we have learned matter?</b></div>
<br />
14 August 2011<br />
_________________________________<br />
<strong>PYM, BARBARA</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSO-qT48WxuUau5Idq1xkIBCeWKit_lRPnMxzadWJG4SWZZ-oXG" /></div>
<br />
<b> </b><em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE SWEET DOVE DIED</span></em><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> </span>(1978)<br />
<b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></b>
<b style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">This novel is about the way in which aging women can make fools of themselves over much younger men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Here there is a</span>n aging woman who is in love with a man twenty years younger, who inevitably hurts her because he thinks of her as a mother.</b><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 25.3px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">28 D</span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">ecember 1987</span><br />
<strong style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><em><br /></em></strong>
<span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 23px;"> </span></span><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">QUARTET IN AUTUMN</span></em><b> </b>(1977)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">The author calls attention to the way people feel obligated to one another while not really wanting to associate with one another—prompted by a sense of duty that often gives rise to many common social interactions.</span></b></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span></b></span>
3 December 1986<br />
<br />
<i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> JANE AND PRUDENCE </i>(1953)<br />
<br />
<b>This is a quiet novel about two women friends--one a clergyman’s wife, the other a younger, unmarried woman.</b><br />
<br />
1986<br />
<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">SOME TAME GAZELLE </i>(1950)<br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is Pym’s first novel, about two middle-aged sisters, Harriet and Belinda Bede, both spinsters, who care about each other.</b></div>
<br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">A FEW GREEN LEAVES </b>(1980)<br />
<br />
<b>This is Pym’s last novel--she died in January 1980--about life in an Oxfordshire village, with older and younger characters, rectors, widows, and others.</b><br />
<br /></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121114349707064492005-06-25T13:38:00.000-07:002005-07-13T21:14:05.720-07:00<strong>Q</strong>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121114707345531322005-06-24T19:00:00.004-07:002024-02-26T18:29:47.133-08:00R<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>RABAN, JONATHAN</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">WAXWINGS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2003)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, who I understand from reading another of his books is transplanted from the UK to the Seattle area, has written a novel about a man transplanted from the UK to the Seattle area.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For me, part of this novel's charm was the explicit detail in which descriptions of the area are given. It might not have as much appeal for readers who don't live in this region, but it is a solid story, absorbing and well-told, with a generous amount of humor injected into a serious tale.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The protagonist is one Tom Janeway, a professor at the University of Washington. His wife Beth leaves him, and then he is falsely accused of being involved in the disappearance of a girl simply because he happened to be in an area where the girl was seen last.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It doesn't take long for his career to come tumbling down--and at the same time he finds himself at the mercy of a Chinese illegal alien who is supposed to be working on restoring his house.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is his uneasy relationship with this man, Chick, that is the most complex part of this story. The author has a gift for dialogue and conveys Chick's attempts at "trendy" English in a way that makes them seem unforced and authentic.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Finn, Tom and Beth's four-year-old, also comes through talking and acting like a real four-year-old--and shows his talent for acute perception by cutting through his parents' attempts at lying to him about the divorce.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As the author moves the story along, he manages to skewer many elements of US society--including well-meaning child therapists and teachers, hustlers like Chick who are always on the lookout for money to be made, divorcing parents who try to sugarcoat the situation to their children, just to name a few.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
5 March 2008</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
_______________________</div>
<b>RAKOFF, JOANNA</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;"> MY SALINGER YEAR</span></i> (2014)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This work of nonfiction names names, with a few exceptions. The author, naive enough never to have read a word by J. D. Salinger and armed with a newly minted Master's degree, gets a job as an assistant at a place she calls "the agency" although it is clearly Harold Ober, the somewhat quirkily old-fashioned literary agency used by J. D. Salinger and many writers.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is 1996, and she is 24, living with a heel of a guy named Don, unbeknownst to her parents, in an unsavory situation. I wondered throughout her account why she didn't get rid of Don, but her story pales by comparison with the literary story she has to tell, and she has the good sense to keep the events of her personal life in the background long enough to focus on the Salinger moments.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>As part of her job Rakoff must sort through the piles of fan mail Salinger receives. Forwarded by his publisher Little Brown, the letters come from all over the world, and Rakoff's task is to reply to them with a form letter stating that Mr. Salinger doesn't reply to letters. As time goes on and she keeps reading the letters, she comes close to involving herself with a couple of the correspondents--by writing a personal letter that she signs. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her relationship with her difficult boss, the agency president (never named), is uphill but they reach a point where there is mutual respect--and woman at the helm turns out to have very tragic situations in her own life that go a long way toward explaining her erratic and often rude-seeming behavior.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Then a situation arises quite unexpectedly in the form of an agreement S</b><b>alinger has made with an obscure press in Virginia for publication of his <i>Hapworth</i> novella in book form--a story that ran originally in the<i> New Yorker. </i>Rakoff is involved in the negotiations for this publishing venture, and records her contacts with Salinger in considerable detail.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She gives us small glimpses of Salinger as an ordinary person, a famous writer who hates celebrity and runs from people. She wisely stays away from the gossipy tales about his personal relationships and concentrates on the Salinger she has seen and heard. At one point she reads through his entire oeuvre in one night--and becomes another devotee.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She makes no attempt at assessing his literary merit. She's just telling this story, her story, straightforwardly and (I'm guessing) quite honestly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The<i> Hapworth</i> publication plan falls through--because the man in charge of it leaks the story to the media. That story is probably well known in the publishing world. What might not be so well known is another story Rakoff has to tell.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A long-time employee of the agency tells her that shortly before she was hired, someone had sold one of Salinger's letters at auction. A Salinger letter can bring a good price, but in this case the highest bidder was Wynona Ryder, who wrote to Salinger with the letter enclosed and said that she was sure he would want to have the letter taken out of circulation and so she was returning it to him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The letter never reached Salinger because of the agency's policy of never sending Salinger any of the mail it received--not even, apparently, a letter such as this one,which he surely would have wanted to receive.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The current whereabouts of the valuable Salinger letter are left obscure in Rakoff's account, but it sounds as if the agency has kept it. Rakoff passes no judgment. She just reports--and lets the readers draw their own conclusions.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reader gets a good sense of the atmosphere of the publishing world from this account--the way in which "important" authors are kowtowed to and coddled, the constant emphasis on sales and saleability, the ambience of well-oiled camaraderie that prevails as business deals are struck and many thousands of dollars are changing hands.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was a very enlightening account for anyone interested in Salinger. And Rakoff even tries to answer one of Holden Caulfield's more pressing questions: Where do the ducks in Central Park go in winter? </b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>March 1, 2017</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>_____________________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>RANKIN, IAN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">KNOTS AND CROSSES</span></i> (1987)</b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I know very little about the mystery novels genre but was interested in reading some examples.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'm afraid I found this story, the first in a series involving John Rebus, a detective sergeant in Edinburgh, less than satisfying.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The plot depends on the revelation of part of Rebus's past that he can't remember. With the help of hypnosis, he does recover the memory but reveals himself to be so shaky emotionally that the reader might lose confidence in his judgment.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The Sherlock Holmes character usually needs to be someone the reader can trust--far from perfect, human, but at least not on the verge of falling apart on us. Or at least that's how it seems to me.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>May 18, 2018</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>______________________________</b><br />
<b><br />RAPINCHUK, BECKY</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <span style="color: #93c47d;"><i>SIMPLY CLEAN: THE PROVEN METHOD FOR KEEPING YOUR HOME ORGANIZED, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL IN JUST 10 MINUTES A DAY</i> </span>(2017)</b></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The products we are so fond of buying have been piling up in people's lives to the point where there is now an entire industry of experts telling us how to get rid of it--or at least how to rearrange it. The industry didn't start with Marie Kondo but she may have inspired many others to burst forth with their ideas on how to organize your stuff.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div>So here is one Becky Kapinchuk. Her qualifications for claiming to be an expert aren't entirely clear except that we do find out that she's the mother of three.</div><div><br /></div><div>I found her book to be of very limited usefulness. She is fond of essential oils, for one thing, and I have heard some negative reports on essential oils. Otherwise she advises us to sort through our stuff carefully and get rid of the clutter.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh, and she has a Website, where (surprise!) products can be bought. Including essential oils.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And she absolutely loves to use "couple" without the "of," as in "couple items." This is a minor quibble but this recent stylistic innovation strikes me as ill-advised.</div><div><br /></div><div>20 September 2023</div><div><br /></div><div>____________________________</div><div>
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b>REDIKER, MARCUS</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE <u>AMISTAD</u> REBELLION: AN ATLANTIC ODYSSEY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM</span> </i>(2012)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book appeared after the movie <i>Amistad </i>(which I haven't seen) but seems to have no connection with it. The author tells a straightforward, thoroughly competent account of the <i>Amistad</i> rebellion.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>In 1839 a group of slaves from Sierra Leone overpowered the ship's crew, killed the captain and escaped to freedom--though by a painfully long and circuitous route, involving their being transported to Connecticut and incarcerated there for a couple of years before their case was finally settled--in their favor--by the Supreme Court.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author suggests that it was the group's cohesiveness, despite almost insurmountable language barriers, and its leadership by the remarkable Cinque that made their achievement possible. By 1839 slave trading was illegal, and it was on this basis that they were able to win their case.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>They had help from the abolitionist leaders in the US, most especially John Quincy Adams.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>However, upon their being returned to Africa some of the abolitionists insisted on including three Christian missionaries in the party and establishing a mission to "improve" the African mutineers and their communities.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This account is long overdue. Those who learned US history in school up until very recently were told only that slaves were transported from Africa to the US. We were not usually told about the particulars: the conditions in which those slaves were obliged to exist, both while being conveyed across the Atlantic and while enduring bondage in this country.</b></div>
<br />
19 May 2015<br />
_________________________<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<strong style="text-align: justify;">REHM, DIANE</strong><strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> FINDING MY VOICE</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1999)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>An autobiography by an Arab-American woman of Christian background who married, had children, and went into public radio broadcasting, having her own talk show for over 20 years. The book contains much information about her struggle with the onset of spasmodic dysphonia, which crippled her voice until a treatment was found.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
3 October 2002</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>REICHL, RUTH<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">TENDER AT THE BONE: GROWING UP AT THE TABLE</span></em></strong> (1998)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is a restaurant reviewer for the <em>New York Times</em>. This book is a partly fictionalized account of her life as the daughter of a manic depressive mother known as the Queen of Mold, then as a member of the West Coast commune scene in the 1970s. The focus is on the development of Reichl’s interest in food and cooking.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
23 October 1999<br />
________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>REISEN, HARRIET</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: THE WOMAN BEHIND "</span></i><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">LITTLE WOMEN" </span></span>(2009)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Anyone familiar with the writings of Bronson Alcott has found out that he was something of a windbag and a High Transcendentalist. His daughter Louisa May, however, transcended her childhood with her impecunious and impractical father and wrote one of the most beloved of children's books, <i>Little Women</i>--a story that is in many ways autobiographical<i>.</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
<b>There were four daughters in the Alcott household, and, as in the novel, one of them (Lizzie) died young. The indomitable and good-hearted Marmee--the girls' affectionate name for their mother in the book--seems to have been very like the Alcott girls' mother.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>But there is no father present in the book. He is serving in the Civil War, leaving Marmee and her girls to run the household. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Louisa May Alcott did her part in the Civil War, both as a committed abolitionist and as a nurse in Washington, DC, where she contracted a very serious case of typhus pneumonia.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>In fact, Louisa May Alcott seems to have done more than her part throughout her life. She never married though she may have had one brief flirtation or love affair. In middle age she undertook the upbringing of her dead sister May's daughter, but Lulu, the child's nickname, was only 9 years old when she lost her Aunt Louisa to what was probably a stroke.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Louisa May Alcott lived only 56 years but wrote prolifically during much of her life, turning out potboilers in an attempt at shoring up the always-meager family funds--while Bronson Alcott traveled the lecture circuit and attracted a following of adoring disciples but brought in very little income.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The Alcotts were very close to the Transcendentalist milieu in New England, and were often supported in various ways, including financially, by Emerson. They had close ties to Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as well.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Family loyalty and a sense of commitment must have been cornerstones of Louisa May Alcott's personality. At one point she had her father's 52 volumes of journals bound, and she would rush to the bedside of ailing relatives, often helping individuals who were in a crisis.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The biographer's account of the success of <i>Little Women</i> will gladden any reader's heart. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This seems to be a thoroughly documented and well-told biography, with a special focus on the difficulties facing mid-19th century women, especially unmarried ones, who were expected to be nannies, nurses, governesses, and maids-of-all-work for assorted relatives throughout their lives.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
7 December 2015<br />
________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>REMNICK, DAVID </strong></div>
<br />
<b> (ed.) </b><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">DISQUIET, PLEASE! MORE HUMOR WRITING FROM THE </span><u><span style="color: #38761d;">NEW YORKER</span> </u></em>(2008)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This hefty anthology of humorous pieces from the <em>New Yorker</em> since its inception is an excellent book for dipping into--or for reading straight through. It is organized topically and includes brief biographical sketches of each of the authors at the end.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Some of the pieces, especially by James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, have been widely anthologized elsewhere. I skipped pieces by authors I already know I don't have much use for (David Brooks, Garrison Keillor, Christopher Buckley) but found most of the rest of the essays and stories entertaining indeed.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Especially notable was "Space Case" by Anthony Lane, an analysis of "Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith" (2005). Although I've seen only the first two "Star Wars" movies, I found his remarks edifying and funny. And I was happy to see the under-appreciated Ruth Suckow represented in her very funny "Complete Guide for Book Reviewers" (1927). </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>However, one has to wonder if the <i>New Yorker</i> is cultivating more celebrities-as-writers nowadays than it used to, perhaps thanks to Woody Allen, whose abundant talent and versatility enable him to excel in writing as well as in the world of movies. But now we find Johnny Carson represented?</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>And what of Marshall Brickman, who I learned was a member of the folk groups The Tarriers and The New Journeymen and collaborated with Woody Allen on some movies? The inclusion of his <em>New Yorker</em> piece, "What--Another Legend?" (1973) seems most unfortunate.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>It sends up the whole idea of finding authentic blues singers among the people of color in the South and making them into legends. I know of a couple of instances where this has happened, and I question whether it's something to poke fun at. Trying to preserve a music tradition that was born in lives of extreme hardship by recording what the few remaining exponents of that tradition can achieve, thereby giving them a very belated moment of fame, strikes me as a colossally difficult endeavor that deserves only praise and awe, not mockery.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This collection would have been much better without this piece, in my opinion.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<strong><i>21 October 2012</i></strong><br />
<br />
<strong style="text-align: justify;"><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">REPORTING: WRITINGS FROM THE <u>NEW YORKER</u> </span></em>(2006)</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The author, who has been the editor of the <em>New Yorker</em>, presents a collection of his essays and profiles published in that magazine between 1991 and 2006.</strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The pieces are long, thoughtful and observant. He has given informative profiles of Vaclav Havel, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Mike Tyson, among others--as well as of a husband-and-wife team who are translating some of the major Russian works into English.</strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>His remarks about Mike Tyson--who incidentally has captured the interest of the fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates--are especially valuable as reporting. He scrupulously avoids passing judgment on Tyson and is content to present the facts at hand. Even the fact that Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear during a match is presented without horror, without admiration: this happened, this is how it was, and you can make of it what you will.</strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This was a book I found well worth reading.</strong></div>
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
4 May 2009</div>
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<strong style="text-align: justify;"> (ed.) <em> <span style="color: #38761d;">WONDERFUL TOWN: NEW YORK CITY STORIES FROM THE <u>NEW YORKER</u></span></em></strong><span style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2000)</span><strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="color: #330000;">This is a l</span>arge assortment of diverting stories from <em>The New Yorker</em>, published between the 1920s and the present and all dealing with New York City in one way or another. Some very well known writers are represented here--John Cheever, Ann Beattie, Woody Allen, John O’Hara, Philip Roth, James Thurber, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger (whose story here must have preceded his famous novel <em>Catcher in the Rye</em>), Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, E. B. White and many others. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
9 November 2006</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>RENDELL, RUTH</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES</span></em></strong> (1998)</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A murder "mystery" with a twist. We see most of the story through the eyes of the murderer, and the question, instead of "Whodunit?", becomes "Will he get caught, and if so, when and how?"</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In Teddy (the murderer) the author does a close study of a warped mind, without delving too closely into its causes--which is a refreshing omission in this era of explaining all dysfunction by childhood trauma. We see that Teddy comes from a family where the dominant atmosphere is a cold indifference, and we may not be surprised when he turns out to be a cold and indifferent adult.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He has artistic leanings, and in general he seems overly concerned with visual effects. He is deeply disturbed by his own impotence, but overlying this sense of failure is apparently the notion that people can be arranged like puppets on a stage: dressed and draped and posed according to his whim.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>If some people are putting obstacles in your path, he reasons, he can just whisk them off the stage--by killing them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It seems sometimes as if his luck is a little too good. I wonder at how much he gets away with. But the author goes to considerable trouble to provide the details needed to establish verisimilitude, and she does so without any undue smarminess--even though some of the situations in the story are grisly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This was an absorbing story--like another of Rendell's novels, <em>Kissing the Gunner's Daughter.</em></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
1 January 2006</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
________________________<br />
<br />
<b>RIOUX, ANNE BOYD</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i style="color: #6aa84f;">CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON: PORTRAIT OF A LADY NOVELIST </i>(2016)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson provides much information about a novelist who has faded into obscurity although during her lifetime she enjoyed popular success even greater than her friend Henry James.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Whether she killed herself or accidentally fell from a window has long been an unsettled question, particularly in view of the effect her death had on Henry James. Was he having an affair with her? Or was she so crushed by a supposed rejection by James that she ended her own life?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This biographer acknowledges that Woolson could easily have fallen: she was quite ill, perhaps feverish, perhaps weak, and there is very little evidence of any premeditated suicide.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The biography is eminently readable and sensible. I have a couple of quibbles, however. One is merely stylistic. The author confuses <i>convince</i> with <i>persuade </i>at least three times. And she has adopted the currently voguish habit of using <i>reference</i> as a verb: "...Thoreau, whom she references..."</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The other is more than a quibble. The author assumes that Henry James was a homosexual, which has never been established and probably never will be. Moreover, her source for this "information" isn't given.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There are these statements:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>He [Henry James] was as good at hiding his desire for men as she [Woolson] was in hiding her desire to be loved.</b></blockquote>
<b>And:</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...<b>marriage could have provided a cover for [James's] sexuality, as it did for many gay men of the time. </b></blockquote>
<b>There is not one scintilla of evidence that Henry James was an active homosexual or even that his sexual orientation was homosexual. It is possible that the "obscure hurt" that was an impediment to his military service was a disorder that rendered him impotent, but nothing specific is known about it. If that was a reason for his reluctance to pursue a romantic liaison with Constance Fenimore Woolson, it's possible that she felt rejected and bewildered. But there is no evidence that that sense of rejection led her to contemplate suicide--as Rioux acknowledges.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>What does come through in this thoroughly documented account, using correspondence as well as Woolson's fiction as sources, is a woman who is often abject in her feeling that her talent is inferior to James's. Whether her attitude was real or assumed (because the world she lived in seemed to expect it), her statements often sound so much like those of a disciple that James might have found them embarrassingly adulatory.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>On the whole, this book provides valuable information about this little-known novelist, though the book's title may not suit the biographer's view of her subject. "Portrait of a Lady Novelist" is surely meant to suggest James's <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>--and in doing so doesn't it also suggest that Woolson has significance as a writer only as she is associated with Henry James?</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>9 March 2018</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>______________________________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>RISLEY, ELEANOR DE LA VERGNE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE ROAD TO WILDCA</span></b></em>T (1930)<br />
<br />
<b>Some background on this writer, of whom I have dim childhood memories since she was a dear friend of my family's:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b>In the brief time that she lived in Alabama, Eleanor de la Vergne Doss Risley (1867-1945) produced two notable volumes of sketches and stories that provide an insight into residents of Fairhope in south Alabama and the rural mountain communities and peoples of north Alabama. ... <u>The Road to Wildcat,</u> which appeared serially in the <u>Atlantic Monthly</u> and then was collected in a book (1930), recounts her adventures in the north Alabama mountains. </b></em><br />
<b><em></em><br /></b>
<em><b>Eleanor Doss was born in January, 1867, in Nashville, Tennessee... but she spent most of her childhood in Henry County, Missouri. Risley graduated from a Presbyterian school for girls and then married a member of a prominent Kansas City family; she divorced him after the death of their only child, Eugene, at age eight. She rarely mentioned her son again. She then moved to San Francisco, California, where she held various jobs, including teaching music, playing accompaniment for moving pictures, doing welfare work, conducting research for an author, and modeling coats for a department store. ...</b></em><br />
<b><em><br /></em>
<em>Because of continued financial difficulties, Risley returned to Missouri... She married Pierre Risley whom she calls Peter in</em> <em><u>The Road to Wildcat</u>. ...</em></b><br />
<b><em><br /></em>
<em>On the advice of a doctor who suggested that she might have less than a year to live (she was diabetic and her husband asthmatic), Risley and her husband undertook a vigorous walking tour of North Alabama to improve their health, accompanied by their dog John and a pushcart they named Sisyphus. Letters to her friends describing her adventures came to the attention of Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the <u>Atlantic Monthly</u>, who solicited her contributions to the magazine. His efforts were successful; after initial articles in 1929, the <u>Atlantic Monthly</u> published serially most of Risley's account of her Alabama travels, an account later published as <u>The Road to Wildcat.</u> ... One of her sketches is even given credit for exposing a corrupt sheriff who controlled the local moonshine trade and used his power to arrest people falsely to work on his chain gang, leading the Alabama legislature two years after the book's publication to correct the situation. </em></b><br />
<b><em><br /></em><em>Looking for a more economical place to live, the Risleys moved to a rural area about two and a half miles from Ink, Arkansas, a small community in Polk County near Mena, where they lived in relative poverty. In the late 1930s, they moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, residing for five years in an apartment in Carrie Nation's last home, Hatchet Hall, which had been purchased by Eleanor Risley's cousin, noted painter and muralist Louis Freund. </em></b><br />
<b><em><br /></em><em>Note: This entry was adapted with permission from the Introduction to <u>The Road to Wildcat,</u> (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).</em></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<a href="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2419"><b>http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2419</b></a><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<b>Probably fictionalized to some extent, <i>The Road to Wildcat </i>is the account of the walking trip the author and her husband took in the mountains of northern Alabama in the 1920s. They had no means of transportation other than their wheelbarrow, which was obligingly pulled by their beloved dog when the terrain was especially muddy.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There are cars on the road but they seem to be rare. No mention is made of phones. The hill people don't have television yet, and the couple are made welcome in most places they go, even invited in to stay over--by hosts who clearly have next to nothing to spare.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The author writes gracefully and is imbued with the Romantic tradition. She appreciates the natural world and loves most living creatures.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>She was apparently trying to render the mountain dialect as faithfully as she could, but unfortunately exact duplication of a dialect often makes it difficult for an ordinary reader to follow. The book would be more readable if she had used fewer instances of dialect forms, suggesting them rather than noting the unusual pronunciation of every preposition and article. However, getting at the meaning of some of the passages can be part of the fun of reading this book.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Eleanor and her husband come across as resourceful, quick-witted, understanding people who are grateful for the amiable reception they receive--and who try to make themselves useful in return for the hospitality of these friends they've made along the road.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Moonshine is a part of this story, and it's probably not just thrown in for effect. At the time the Alabama hills undoubtedly had plenty of people making moonshine and selling it. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This book could easily have turned into something on the level of Lil Abner comics or the tasteless hillbilly postcards one used to find (in the 1940s-1950s) in the southern hills--usually involving a privy, a corncob pipe, moonshine, and unfunny jokes.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>--All of which is condescending and even insulting to the people for whom privies and corncob pipes are just part of life. Eleanor Risley has too much respect for mountain people and their ways to treat them patronizingly.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This book is true through and through. There is not a scintilla of pretension in it. A woman gives an account of a hike with a wheelbarrow in the Alabama mountains at a time when everyone was poor. She says nothing about the hard times people were experiencing but the some of the atmosphere of the Depression comes through in the scenes where money is discussed.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The couple's attitude is summed up when somebody says to the author's husband, "'But you can't walk far in a day and push that cart,'" and he replies, "'There seems,' said Peter, 'no especial reason why we should walk far in a day, unless the road is uninteresting.'"</b><br />
<br />
4 March 2013<br />
__________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>ROBBINS, ALEXANDRA</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>THE NURSES: A YEAR OF SECRETS, DRAMA, AND MIRACLES WITH THE HEROES OF THE HOSPITAL</b></span><b> (2015)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> The author follows four nurses for a year, with names and places changed.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> Though this book is definitely partisan, it is probably true that nurses--in the US, at least--get the short end of the stick in most ways. Those who perceive a doctor making a mistake are in the very uncomfortable situation of needing to correct someone who is above them in the rigid hospital hierarchy--and risk being blamed themselves for something that wasn't their fault.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Overworked and underpaid, nurses need to be more plentiful, and if this book makes one point loud and clear, it's that more nurses are desperately needed if medical care is to maintain or improve its quality, particularly since many of the nurses now working are nearing retirement age.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Some of the many stories included here were rather obviously meant to shock the reader with their graphic details. Also, I'm not sure why the author sometimes gives quotations from nurses using the southern form "Y'all" even though the rest of the dialogue throughout the book isn't written in any regional dialect.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Because the narrative bounces from one nurse to another, it is a little hard to follow. But that one point, about an urgent need for more nurses, is made. One can only hope that this book will have many readers who will campaign for a solution to the shortage of nurses in this country.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>15 April 2017</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">PLEDGED: THE SECRET LIFE OF SORORITIES</span></i></b> (2004)<br />
<br />
<b>I can hope that this book has had an impact but I have a grim suspicion that it hasn't. The author reports on her year "under cover" in several girls' sororities on US campuses. She isn't overtly opposed to sororities but she discloses many situations that are appalling.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Having been fortunate enough to avoid the "Greeks," I knew so little about them that most of the details given here were new to me. Perhaps most surprising--and unsettling--is the picture the book provides of the vast, powerful network that keeps sororities (and fraternities of course) going.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>It is fairly clear that sororities and fraternities exist primarily to insure that college kids can winnow down their possible partners to those "of their own kind." The "sisters" and "brothers" can safely ignore their classmates and lab partners and people they might meet at social clubs or study groups and limit themselves to the people they meet in the hectic social life of their sorority or fraternity.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This of course is thinly disguised social discrimination and racism. Robbins describes an African-American sorority member who is subjected to routine racist comments and snubbing on the part of her sisters. This particular student has the poise and maturity to view her time at the sorority house (for which she has to work to pay for) as a "learning experience." But the wounds have been inflicted.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There is a lot of verbiage from the sisters and their leaders about the high ideals and values of the "Greek experience." Philanthropic efforts are espoused but on closer inspection these turn out to be very minimal indeed. So much for "service."</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The emphasis is almost entirely on the packaging. The girls undergo "dress checks," and often the color and style of their clothing is predetermined. For the frantic rush period, the "actives" put Vaseline on their teeth to make it easier for them to keep smiling--"'just like beauty contestants.'"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The sororities seem to do little to promote intellectual integrity (the sisters routinely lie to recruits, for instance) or even studying--which is, after all, the main point of college, or such was my impression. In spite of some restrictions in recent years, hazing continues--and hazing often includes forcing the recruits to drink.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>There are coed fraternities now, Robbins explains, and she looks into some of them and finds them to be totally lacking in supervision or restraint. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>People find comfort in banding together as part of a group of people they like to think are more like themselves than</b><br />
<b>those "others" out there. Young people entering college are specially vulnerable--and more inclined to be attracted to something they can belong to than older people would be. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The sorority/fraternity system exploits this vulnerability--and feeds the young people's yearning for the security of a group they can be part of by piling on rituals and secrecy motifs. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>"Once an Alpha Delt, always an Alpha Delt," it seems, as members of a sorority have been known to give a job to someone purely on the basis of her belonging to the same sorority.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>So there is indeed an old boy network--and there is even an old girl network. The unfairness of this situation is obvious, but so long as people are free to form voluntary associations--like sororities and fraternities--it's possible that there is no remedy for the problem except to persuade people that maybe these college organizations aren't such a good idea, all things considered.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>This books is a step in that direction.</b><br />
<br />
4 December 2013<br />
___________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>ROBINSON, MARILYNNE</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">HOUSEKEEPING</span></em></strong><br />
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></em></strong>
<b><em>Housekeeping</em> by Marilynne Robinson has flashes of beauty and thought that are remarkable, but the grammar and the transitions and possibly the verisimilitude are poor, and the ending ruins the entire book for me.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Having posited a woman who is a drifter, and the woman narrator following in her footsteps, the author sets up the inevitable clash between the forces of respectable society and the drifting free spirit who wants no part of society’s restrictions. Like any hoboes, these woman thumb their noses at the comforts of life in a home, the world of church, neighbors and school. But what is false, to me, is the ending. The author states again and again that families can’t be separated because—she likes to believe—memory is insistent and will always make its claims known. Perhaps that is what she and I find it comforting to believe because our own memories are insistent and true. What she doesn’t recognize—and it would have made a far sadder but more realistic story—is that people who are determined to follow the herd will be adept at forgetting even the warmest memories of a past but disgraced family.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Towards the end of the novel the narrator, Ruth, then a teenager, casts her lot with Sylvie, the drifter aunt, while her younger sister Lucille flees to the world of respectability and acceptance by the town. Then Ruth and Sylvie begin to feel superior to other people, in their isolation and their freedom from the shackles of home and responsibility. Then, as if to prove their superiority, the author ends the novel by harking back to Lucille and clearly indicating (from Ruth’s point of view, of course) that Lucille would forever be haunted by her memories of—and longing for—Sylvie and Ruth. But nowhere before then has there been any hint whatsoever that Lucille had any desire to do anything but escape from Sylvie. I can’t believe that Lucille will ever do anything but wallow in her respectability. There will be no nostalgia for the drifting life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But maybe the reader is supposed to see that Ruth’s sense of superiority is just a bit of wishful thinking on her part—that no one will envy her her “free” life or even remember her...</b></div>
<br />
(1 October 1981)<br />
<br />
________________________<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>ROGERS, MARY BETH<br /><em><br /></em></strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><em> BARBARA JORDAN: AMERICAN HERO</em></strong> (1998)<br /><br /><b>A balanced biography, though short on personal details (perhaps because Jordan guarded her privacy fiercely), about the distinguished Texas Congressional representative, her service on the Watergate judiciary committee, her devotion to LBJ--and her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, which she hid from everyone for 15 years but eventually had to make known because someone inadvertently revealed it.<br /><br />She died of leukemia brought on by taking Cytoxan for the MS.<br /><br />She was a phenomenon: a black woman from Texas who succeeded in politics--and a very able and intelligent person.</b><br /><br />8 September 2003<br />______________________</span><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>ROIPHE, ANNE<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">FRUITFUL: A REAL MOTHER IN THE MODERN WORLD</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1996)<br />
<br />
<b>This is a somewhat overwritten paean to motherhood from a well-to-do participant in the women’s liberation movement of the sixties.</b><br />
<br />
4 September 1999<br />
_______________________<br />
<b><br />ROONEY, SALLY</b></div><div><br /></div><div> <b><i><span style="color: #38761d;">NORMAL PEOPLE</span></i></b> (2018)</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This novel, set in Ireland, began as an interesting contrast between a young woman with a very privileged background and her male friend, who is from a working-class family. He isn't exactly her boy friend as their sexual encounters are kept secret, with their friends and family having no awareness of them.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the story falls apart as time passes, and the lad who is such a diamond in the rough that he is suddenly becoming a published author.</div><div><br /></div><div>Characters of apparent significance are introduced and then lost sight of. The total effect is of a slight story, told in a slapdash way.</div><div><br /></div><div>26 February 2024</div><div><br /></div><div>_______________________________<br />
<b>ROSE, PHYLLIS</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">PARALLEL LIVES</span> </b></em>(1983)<br />
<br />
<b>This book is a consideration of five Victorian marriages.</b><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b><span style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Phyllis Rose’s scholarship isn’t always topnotch, and she takes a gossipy approach to her subjects, spending entirely too much time in their bedrooms and indulging in many personal moral judgments—and her vocabulary is snazzily trendy, ringing in Pacman, for instance. </span></b></span><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b><span style="line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Can we really ever know whether the John Stuart Mills consummated their marriage? I doubt it. And does it really matter? Is it really our business? No, since neither J. S. Mill nor his wife pretended to be an expert on sex. What matters is that he and she were close intellectually, companionably, for many years. Ideas were exchanged and developed between them. Perhaps stylistic characteristics were also traded back and forth. </span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">3 July 1994</span></span><br />
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<b>ROSENBERG, GÖREN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">A BRIEF STOP ON THE ROAD FROM AUSCHWITZ</span> (2012)</b><br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The author is a well-known journalist in Sweden, and this remarkable memoir of his father has been translated from Swedish.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>His father, David, survived the Holocaust after a cruel time in a ghetto in Poland and an even crueller time in Auschwitz. Many members of his immediate family died. David killed himself many years later, after having settled in Sweden, married, and fathered two children.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The author set about piecing together what information he could find about his father's life, with particular attention to what motivated his suicide.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>He concludes that the increasing depression that led his father to kill himself was caused primarily by the Auschwitz experience, which was so inhumanly terrible that, for his father, there could be no true road back from it. There was too much of a disconnect between that world and the world of his new life in Sweden. His many years in Sweden were only "a brief stop" on the road from Auschwitz. </b></div>
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<b>This story makes for extremely painful reading but it is beautifully constructed and told by someone who clearly loved and respected his father.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>22 June 2016</b><br />
<b>_______________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<b>ROSENTHAL, ELISABETH</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">AN AMERICAN SICKNESS: HOW HEALTHCARE BECAME BIG BUSINESS AND HOW YOU CAN TAKE IT BACK</span></i> (2017)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a timely and important book. The author, who was a practicing physician for about 8 years before becoming the science and health reporter for the <i>New York Times, </i>seems to know her topic thoroughly. She paints an alarming picture of the US healthcare system, with hospitals and medical providers and drug companies all helping themselves to considerable sums of money thanks to cleverness in manipulating insurance company and Medicare policies. It adds up to a catastrophically broken system, with patients being harmed and often impoverished by it.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>She gives detailed descriptions of inventive forms of "strategic billing" used by doctors and hospitals who have devised ways of using the elaborate coding system to generate a far higher price tag for services and items that they should have. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>She has no use for direct-to-consumer drug advertising, which is now inundating the US media. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Then there are "surrogate endpoints." According to the National Cancer Institute Website, a surrogate endpoint is:</b></div>
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<span face=""noto sans" , "century gothic" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: #fffffb; color: #2e2e2e; font-size: 20px;">In clinical trials, an indicator or sign used in place of another to tell if a treatment works. Surrogate endpoints include a shrinking tumor or lower biomarker levels. They may be used instead of stronger indicators, such as longer survival or improved quality of life, because the results of the trial can be measured sooner. The use of surrogate endpoints in clinical trials may allow earlier approval of new drugs to treat serious or life-threatening diseases, such as cancer. Surrogate endpoints are not always true indicators or signs of how well a treatment works.</span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="color: #2e2e2e;"><span style="background-color: #fffffb;">An in-depth data investigation by the <i>Milwaukee Journal Sentinel </i>and MedPage Today in 2014 revealed that, thanks to surrogate endpoints, 74% of cancer drugs approved by the FDA during the previous decade ultimately did not extend life by even a single day.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>She discusses "accelerated approval measures"--the easiest way to get drug products onto the market. In this way companies can more easily market drugs and biologics that have no real proven value, she says.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>She strongly favors obliging hospitals to make their chargemasters clearly available to all patients so that they can find out what they can expect to be charged for everything that is done during their hospital stays, and she would like to see hospitals guarantee that all doctors who treat you are in your insurance network--to avoid the very unwelcome surprise of a bill that is astonishingly higher than anticipated just because the doctor who examined or treated you was out-of-network.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>She maintains that the skills of pharmacists in the US are very underused and points out that in Europe drugs are classified into three groups: over-the-counter, prescription, and pharmacist-dispensed. Using pharmacists' training and knowledge by enabling them to dispense drugs without doctors' prescriptions would ease the burden on doctors and provide patients with readier access to many well-established drugs.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>The book includes three useful appendices, with links to Websites where more information can be found.</b></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>5 January 2019</b></span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b>_____________________________</b></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>ROSS, LILLIAN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">REPORTING ALWAYS: WRITINGS FROM THE NEW YORKER</span></i> (2015)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Lillian Ross reported for the <i>New Yorker </i>for many years, and this book is a collection of some of her stories that appeared between 1947 and 2005.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>She can make anyone interesting. She has a talent for highlighting significant details about a person, gathering those details together in her story--but withholding any suggestion of judgment. One gets a picture but without any adumbrations that would bring the author's reactions or opinions into it--which is what good reporting has always been considered to be.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>So we get to meet Hemingway, Willie Mays, a bullfighter, John McEnroe, Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel, Wes Anderson, and many others, and we see part of a (1949) Miss America pageant up close.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The portrait of Hemingway may be one of the most illuminating essays in this collection. We see a pathetic figure towards the end of his career--a man whose thoughts sometimes seem so disconnected that their meaning is lost. </b></div>
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<b>Ross may come close to acknowledging that many of the people she has interviewed represent some of the shallower aspects of contemporary American life in "Symbol of All We Possess," when she follows Miss New York State, a nurse, in the Miss America pageant and quotes her: "'I knew that I would never be selected [for Miss Congeniality].... In nursing I got to know too much about human nature to be able to "act" congenial.'" In fact, this essay seemed to me among the best in this excellent collection. It shows us as we were at the time--and as we often still are.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<b>June 20, 2018</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b>ROTH, PHILIP</b><br />
<em> </em><br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">INDIGNATION</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(2008)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It's been quite a few years since Philip Roth made a name for himself with <em>Portnoy's Complaint,</em> which was known for the explicitness with which it dealt with some of the smarmier aspects of life. There were those who maintained that Roth was exploiting shock value of the material in his willingness to treat raunchy matters in a work of fiction, but those carping critics have probably shut up by now and are currently yawning their way through the many movies and books that are far more explicit than <i>Portnoy</i>.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Coming along in 2008, <em>Indignation,</em> in which Roth is still mining the smarmy vein, seems old-hat and tiresome, as if the author had never managed to get out of the somewhat sophomoric groove he began in, with <i>Portnoy</i>.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>It's such a short novel, too, that it almost seems as if Roth himself may have become tired of it after he'd developed a few characters and scenes.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>There is Marcus Messner, who died at 19 but who tells the story from a vague afterlife. His account of transferring to an Ohio college after a year in a cosmopolitan college in Newark, his home town, shows him up against a thinly veiled anti-Semitism on the part of the administration and his own uncertainty about which classmates, if any, he can trust.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The best part of the book, I think, is the long encounter between Marcus and the dean, where Marcus scores some points in favor of ending compulsory chapel attendance and deftly parries some of the dean's more intrusive questions.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>But the raunchiness is laid on pretty thick. This book seems like one more example of an overgrown boy's getting away with writing scenes that are mainly meant to be sensational.</b></div>
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1 September 2010</div>
_____________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>RULE, ANN<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE STRANGER BESIDE ME</span></em></strong> (1980)<br />
<br />
<b>An interesting study of convicted killer Ted Bundy of Tacoma, WA, by this writer of vampire stories, etc., who lives in Seattle and who became a good friend of Bundy’s while both were working on a crisis line in Seattle.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Bundy was executed in Florida in 1986 but the book ends before his execution. The author unfortunately gives no real clue about what might have driven Bundy to kill.</b><br />
<br />
23 August 1999<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BITTER HARVEST: A WOMAN'S FURY, A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
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<b>This is a true but poorly written account of a doctor-couple, two of whose three children die in a fire set by their mother in fall of 1995 in the Midwest. </b><br />
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29 October 1998<br />
_____________________________<br />
<br /><b>RULE, LESLIE</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> A TANGLED WEB: A CYBERSTALKER, A DEADLY OBSESSION, AND THE TWISTING PATH TO JUSTICE </span></i>(2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author, the daughter of writer Ann Rule (q.v.), gives us a (presumably) factual account of a murder that occurred in 2012. Oddly, the victim's body was never found, nor was the murder weapon, and yet there was sufficient evidence to find her murderer and convict her.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>It took years, however. The author takes us through the convoluted situations that were developing during those years as the principal people involved wove their lives in and out of one another's lives in a number of ways.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Liz Golyar, who has a series of lovers over the years, is determined to secure Dave Kroupa for herself. But Dave, who has already been married and has a couple of children, wants absolutely no commitment as he enjoys being free to date other women. When he seems more interested in Cari Farver than in Liz (AKA Shanna), Liz murders Cari, although for years it looks as if she has simply disappeared.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>After her disappearance, Liz starts deluging some people with vicious e-mails disparaging Cari and even disparaging Liz, making threats on people's lives and on the lives of their children. Nobody knows just who is sending the e-mails but for a long time it looks as if it is the vanished Cari.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Liz's behavior and the damage it causes over time, as Dave Kroupa and Cari's family and several other people are harassed, sometimes receiving several threatening e-mails a day, are a vivid illustration of a way in which the Internet can be used to cause harm.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It's a well told tale, in general, though I wish that there had been some editing. The author confuses <i>who</i> and <i>whom</i>, uses <i>couple</i> instead of <i>couple of</i> repeatedly, and comes up with wordings like "too extreme of a label." But these are quibbles.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>22 April 2023</b></div><div><b>______________________________<br /></b>
<b><br /></b></div><div><b>RUSHDIE, SALMAN</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i> JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR (2012)</i></span></b></div><div><b><span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i><br /></i></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>By now Salman Rushdie is one of the more celebrated authors on the planet--after having been for many years the target of a <i>fatwa</i>, resulting from some Iranian Muslims' determination to hunt him down and kill him. As of now he is still alive, though he was brutally attacked in 2022, ten years after the publication of this memoir.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Joseph Anton was the name he chose when he went into protected seclusion after the <i>fatwa</i> was declared (1988). This absorbing and often entertaining account of the <i>fatwa</i> years goes into considerable details about several of Rushdie's marriages in addition to giving a dizzying narrative of his attempts at coordinating his public appearances with the stringent requirements of the law enforcement people who were charged with guarding him (often from Scotland Yard).</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>As a noted writer he was in demand for book-signings and lectures all over the world. Perhaps largely due to the publicity generated by the<i> fatwa, </i>Rushdie has made many friends among the world's celebrities: Christopher Hitchens, Bono of U2, and countless others.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Surprisingly, the book does not seem to be an opportunity for Rushdie to capitalize on his important connections by dropping their names into his narrative. Instead, he comes across as a serious and thoughtful (and often very witty) writer who has been making the best of a very bad deal.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>He wrote a book, <i>The Satanic Verses, </i>that was critical of Islam and of the Prophet. From then on his life hasn't been easy. And yet he can see the humor in the whole charade that was set in motion because a powerful group of religious zealots chose to put him in their crosshairs.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>July 17, 2023<br /></b>
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<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN</span></b></em> (1981)<br />
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<b>This book often verges on poetry, with its amazing flair for repeating images and whiffs of themes that run through the book like a finely woven mesh, getting more and more intricate as the story unfolds, but not in an incomprehensibly Joycean way. All the reader has to do is grab hold of each thread and hang onto it to make the book rewarding. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>I was very taken by this book in spite of its considerable raunchiness. The raunchiness belongs, though. It is part of what the author is trying to say.</b></div>
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<b>Rushdie captures beautifully the teeming populousness of modern India—its sounds, smells, and colors, its masses of humanity. Maybe India—his India—is the future of the rest of the world. This is what we are all on the verge of becoming, shortly: brutalized, rendered primitive and animal-like.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>This is the ending:</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<em><b>…because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children [those born in 1947] to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes and to be unable to live or die in peace.</b></em></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>He is speaking of the relative few born at a particular moment, but by extension (I think) he means his generation as a whole, and perhaps all succeeding generations.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He talks, too, of fatalism and the “fatal disease of optimism,” and he has thought up a new word, <em>sperectomy,</em> to designate the excision of hope from the human spirit.</b></div>
<br />
3 October 1985<br />
<br /></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121115311278660702005-06-23T13:46:00.008-07:002022-10-09T16:42:01.112-07:00S<strong>SACKS, OLIVER</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://www.oliversacks.com/os/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/OS-Mask_final-opt.png" /></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<b> </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">HALLUCINATIONS </span></i>(2012)<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The experience of hallucination shakes the foundations of a person's concept of the real world. This book explores the experience by describing the various circumstances in which it occurs--the ingestion of some substances, migraine, etc.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author also sheds light on hypnagogic and hypnopompic sensations.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Sacks is drawing on his own experience in some of the accounts. He experimented with LSD and other drugs and noted their effects.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
22 September 2015</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> MUSICOPHILIA: TALES OF MUSIC; THE BRAIN</span> </em></strong>(2007)<br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Books by Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, never fail to interest me. First I read <em>The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat</em>, then <em>A Leg to Stand On</em>, then <em>An Anthropologist on Mars. Musicophilia</em> may be the most interesting so far.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He collects unusual neurological cases, often very tragic ones, and presents them in a narrative style that is appealing and comprehensible without talking down to his readers.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Here he treats musicogenic epilepsy, musical savants, and a wide variety of neurological disorders involving music. He calls attention to the rare genetic disorder called Williams' syndrome, in which the afflicted children are, to all intents and purposes, developmentally delayed but have amazing musical abilities as well as very gregarious personalities.</b></div>
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<b>There are people who have nonstop musical hallucinations, often quite disturbing ones involving loud or unpleasant music. There are gifted musicians who lose some but not all of their musical skills--who can hear music and compose it but who have lost an ability to understand musical notation, for instance.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While he is giving these accounts, he makes it clear that for most of these persons, their music-related afflictions have caused genuine and almost indescribable suffering.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Therefore this isn't an easy book to read--but it is fascinating and thought-provoking.</b></div>
<br />
13 January 2010<div><br /></div><div>______________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><b>SAINI, ANGELA</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">SUPERIOR: THE RETURN OF RACE SCIENCE</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The author argues strenuously in favor of doing away with race as a concept. She presents evidence from science and history showing that "race" has been a social construct, a convenient figment of the imagination of a well-entrenched class determined to become and remain in power while exploiting and oppressing countless other human beings who happened to look different from themselves. Backed up by an elaborate pseudo-science, the promulgators of racism are still in our midst, Saini shows. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>This was an instructive book to read in these times of an alarming increase in racism and bigotry.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>3 October 2022<br /></b>
______________________________<br />
<b>SAWYER, ANNITA PEREZ</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">SMOKING CIGARETTES, EATING GLASS: A PSYCHOLOGIST'S MEMOIR </span>(2015)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author, who worked for some 30 years as a psychotherapist with a Ph.D., associated with Yale University. tells her harrowing story of having endured 89 electroshock treatments in her late teens, when she was apparently misdiagnosed as schizophrenic in the 1960s. The electroshock treatments left her with a loss of memory, not only of the treatments themselves, but of much of her adolescence.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Nevertheless, with the help of therapy (21 years of it), she created a life for herself, married and had children and must have been successful in counseling others.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The book is divided into three parts, and only towards the end does the reader begin to discern that not only was she misdiagnosed as schizophrenic--she seems to have been sexually molested by her father in childhood, and was really suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder when she exhibited the many alarming symptoms (suicide attempts, self-mutilation) that prompted her parents to hospitalize her.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Seems to have been." She clearly believes that her father sexually molested her. Her father is dead, however, and if anyone who might have corroborated this story was consulted, she doesn't mention it.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Of course, many sexual predators are very careful to make sure that no one knows, and so the truth of an account of sexual molestation by a parent all too often depends on the memories, recovered much later, by the victim, who, a child at the time, quite possibly had a memory that worked more imaginatively than an adult's. Or at least differently from an adult's.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is only one dim suggestion of something approaching confirmation of Sawyer's story in her account: her mention of a friend who says in passing that her dad was a bit weird.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Sawyer had two brothers and a mother who presumably might have had some inkling of what was going on, but if they were consulted, we aren't told.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A story as appalling as this one cries out for evidence that is more persuasive than the author's somewhat impressionistic recollections. At one point toward the end of the book, Sawyer speaks of "the abused child I imagined within myself." "Imagined"?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The reader is left wondering how much of her story is real, how much imagined. Perhaps it doesn't matter. Insofar as her story is real to her, it is insofar forth true. But there was her father and there are the other family members. If the incest is imagined but accepted as truth, won't there be people who have been burdened with unnecessary guilt or blame? For her mother and brothers, might the guilt be almost unbearable? They would have stood by and allowed incest to happen. They might convict themselves of being so oblivious as not to have noticed what was happening in the household they shared.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>That is my only quibble, though, about a book that makes a strong case against the use of electroshock treatment--and provides a cautionary tale about the questionable nature of many a psychiatric diagnosis. The suffering Sawyer endured is hard to imagine. The fact that she has no memory of the electroshock treatments doesn't alter the fact that the suffering occurred.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>February 21, 2018</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b><b>______________________________<br /></b>
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>SAYERS, DOROTHY</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.movements.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/dorothy-sayers.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://www.movements.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/dorothy-sayers.jpg" wt="true" /></a></div>
<br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;"> GAUDY NIGHT </b>(1935)<em></em><br />
<em><br /></em><b>In this wonderfully told mystery there is no murder. Sayers's well-known creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, figures prominently, as does Harriet Bain. The setting is Oxford, and a romance that had been about to develop for five years finally gets off the ground at the end of this novel--a romance between Harriet and Lord Peter.</b><br />
<br />
26 April 2003<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<b>SCHAEFFER, SUSAN FROMBERG</b><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE MADNESS OF A SEDUCED WOMAN</span></b></em> (1984)<br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>There may be people who aren’t fundamentally violent, and people who are. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer has written a book about some people who are fundamentally violent—and about how they came to be that way. Violence pervades the book, but in a subtle, causative way.</b></span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<b><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Agnes, the murderess who tells the story, is no stranger to violence</span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">even though her immediate family aren’t violent or criminal. Her exposure to violence, the author seems to say, came at an impressionable age, when she witnessed a grueling drunken scene on the family farm where the family of hired hands were slaughtering and butchering a bull. These men and boys, all of whom she’d have known in an everyday way, were playing around with the bull’s inner parts, throwing them at one another and even eating the raw liver and smearing themselves with gore deliberately. The slaughter itself was clearly cruel.</span></b><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>Throughout the story Agnes seems ladylike, gentle, soft-spoken, and yet she shoots another woman at close range. Though her family isn’t violent, she is taught to be an expert shot by her grandmother, also an expert shot, as part of her training for life on a Vermont farm. Guns are familiar to her and easily obtained.</b></span><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>The young persons she meets and becomes friendly with when she goes to Montpelier to live in a boarding house and work as a seamstress are in the habit of being violent with one another—in seemingly trivial ways but violent nonetheless: the insults, the apparently innocuous threats to “knock someone’s block off,” and, most of all, the way the one young man treats his obnoxious married sister, hauling her physically from a room more than once and tying her up in her room. These aren’t “decent” people, and Agnes plays with fire.</b></span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>In her late teens she sets out to seduce Frank Holt. Her audacity is almost incredible. Later, during the trial, where Frank admits seducing her, no one ever brings up her part in seducing him. The seduction is mostly her doing, as I read the book—and yet her lover takes the blame. She throws herself at him, almost literally, and quite a few people know that she is doing so. But at the trial she doesn’t have to take any responsibility.</b></span><br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>Perhaps because she has endured a dangerous and harrowing abortion, the version of her as the wronged woman is allowed to stand, and she gets off on the grounds of insanity, claiming she never remembered shooting Jane.</b></span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">May 1986</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">_______________________________</span><br />
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>SCHAPIRO, RANDALL T., M.D.</b></span><br />
<em style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></em>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b> </b></span><em style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #38761d;"><b>MANAGING THE SYMPTOMS OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS</b></span></em><span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">, 5th ed. (2007)</span><br />
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>This book has been heralded as the definitive work on the subject of MS symptom management. It isn't long but the information in it is standard and clearly presented/</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>My only problem with it is that the illustrations are very poorly done--a serious flaw in a book that is giving step-by-step instructions for such tasks as getting up off the floor.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>Even without the inadequate illustrations, that particular segment on how to get up off the floor implies that the only way to accomplish this is to have a piece of furniture, preferably a chair or sofa, nearby. Physical therapists know of ways of getting up off the floor when no such piece of furniture is handy (and it usually isn't handy). Why has a standard work on MS symptom management failed to include this information?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #741b47; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">26 December 2012</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">________________________</span><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SCHWARTZ, JOHN BURNHAM<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">RESERVATION ROAD</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></strong>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a good novel about two families. In one of them a boy is killed by a hit-and-run driver, who turns out to be the father in the other family. The plot revolves around the bereaved family’s grief and shock and their attempts at finding the driver.</b></div>
<br />
18 April 2000<br />
_______________________<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong>SCHWARZ, SHELLEY PETERMAN</strong><br /><strong><em><br /></em></strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><em> MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS: 300 TIPS FOR MAKING LIFE EASIER</em> </strong>(2006)</span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong></strong></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong><b>This second edition of <em>Multiple Sclerosis: 300 Tips for Making Life Easier</em> (Demos, 2006) came to me as a freebie as a bonus for taking part in a survey. It was first published in 1999. The current paperback edition has 114 pages, including an adequate index, and seems well organized and thought out.</b></strong></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><strong>
</strong><b></b></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>
</b></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b><b>It includes a Preface by the Vice President of the Professional Resource Center of the National MS Society.</b></b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>
</b></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The three hundred tips are organized under seven general categories, and whenever a product that may not be generally available is mentioned, the author provides a symbol directing the reader to the end of the section, where companies selling the product are listed. This is helpful, I think. Though I object to books and periodicals that focus on trying to sell products, the purpose of this book is clearly not on product sales. Here the author is doing her readers a favor by providing names, addresses, phone numbers and Websites for specialized products.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>My one objection about this book is the same as my objection to much of what the MS Society puts out--you get the impression that most people with MS are fairly well heeled. In fact, you might even think that maybe you can't afford to have MS--when you read about how people with MS have rebuilt their houses, installed raised garden beds in their yard, and got themselves new lift-equipped vehicles.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Shelly Peterman Schwarz seems to assume that everyone has a car and a garage, owns a dishwasher, has a house and yard, and can afford to travel. Once or twice she mentions taking a bus but it's rare. And in the hospital can everyone afford a private room? She advises us to hang a "Do Not Disturb" sign on our hospital room door so we can get more rest. You can't do that if you're in a room with roommates.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Maybe I'm being too harsh here. She's clearly writing from her own experience, which is what she knows. She's done a good job on this book, as far as it goes, in my opinion. I just wish she had expanded her horizons a bit to include the <em>many </em>persons with MS who are in the lower-income brackets.</b></div>
</b><br />(24 January 2010)</span><br />
____________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>SEE, CAROLYN</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">DREAMING: HARD LUCK AND GOOD TIMES IN AMERICA</span></em> </strong>(1995)<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Some time ago I tried to read <i>The Handyman</i>, a novel by Carolyn See, but I couldn't get through its smarminess. I thought maybe she'd do better with an autobiography. I thought wrong.</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em>Dreaming</em> has its amusing segments. The author's matter-of-fact approach to her dysfunctional family can be humorous. But try slogging through this account of so many people that they're hard to keep track of, and their many couplings and marriages are even harder to follow. </strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
<strong>I don't quite see where "hard luck" comes into the picture, either. True, See was unlucky enough to have a couple of drunks as parents, but her father recovered, and aside from her family, she had some very good luck indeed, it seems to me. </strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>I'm afraid I just wasn't particularly interested in this family's saga.</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<br />
10 July 2006<br />
<strong>______________________</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SETH, VIKRAM</strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">T</span></em></strong><strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;">WO LIVES</span></em> </strong>(2005)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The author Vikram Seth has written an account of the lives of his beloved uncle Shanti and his wife Henny. Henny was German Jewish, and Shanti was an Indian who studied in Europe. The pair didn't marry until 1951, by which time Henny, who had escaped from Germany to England, had learned that her mother and sister had died in the concentration camps.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Shanti, a dentist, lost an arm while serving in World War 2 and had to make many modifications to his dental practice so he could continue working.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Vikram Seth followed up on Henny's friends from pre-war Germany, using interviews and correspondence, and he conveys the tragic awkwardness of the social relationships between Henny and her Gentile friends after the war. </strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Shanti's final days, when he became confused and tended to confabulate, show a fallible human being nearing the end of his life.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Vikram Seth has drawn a compassionate portrait of these two remarkable lives and in the process has contributed considerably to our understanding of what life was like in Nazi Germany.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
29 March 2011<br />
<strong>___________________________</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>SHADDAY, ALLISON</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b> <em> </em></b></span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><em><b> MS AND YOUR FEELINGS: HANDLING THE UPS AND DOWNS OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS</b></em> (2007)</span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>The author is a medical clinical social worker who has counselled persons with MS, and she has MS herself (diagnosed in 1996). This book is one of quite a number of books offering help in coping with MS. </b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>It isn't a long book, and its advice is fairly standard and commendable. The author suggests making a "gratitude list" of things we should be grateful for, for instance. She gives considerable attention to guided imagery, meditation, biofeedback, and managing the stages of grief and loss.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>However, as with many books in this category, the assumption is that everyone with MS (A) has a car, (B) owns a house, and (C) has ample funds available. For example, the author cheerily suggests hiring a home health aide, with no discussion of how persons with MS who have no means of hiring a home health aide are to get along if they have need of one. She also suggests remodeling a home to make adjustments for mobility limitations--again, with no thought to renters, for instance, who can't do their own remodeling. She might be surprised at how many renters are out there who happen to have MS.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>She uses the term "MS sufferer," a term I find unfortunate. And the book is carelessly written. For some reason the author has opted to solve the problem of the maintaining "gender neutrality" in her writing by coming up with sentences like:</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b> <em>If you think <u>your partner</u> wants to get out, suggest that <u>they</u> go alone and catch you up on things when <u>they</u> come back.</em></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>I was going to omit this comment as a bit of carping nitpicking on the part of one of those tiresome English teachers, but the book is filled with instances of this odd confusion of a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent--all in a misguided attempt at avoiding the awkward <em>he or she</em> or<em> he/she. </em>Or at least I'm assuming that this was the reason.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>Setting these criticisms aside, I thought that the book</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>has sensible advice, especially about "mind-reading"--the tendency to assume that our friends and family can read our minds, or to hope that they can, instead of being willing to be direct in stating what we want.</b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>Incidentally, the author is or has been a patient advocate for a pharmaceutical company.</b></span></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;">18 September 2010</span><br />
<span style="color: #cc0000;">____________________</span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: black;"><b>SHAPIRO, JAMES</b></span><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">OBERAMMERGAU: THE TROUBLING STORY OF THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS PASSION PLAY</span></b></em> (2000)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I've had an interest in Oberammergau ever since learning that imitations of its Passion Play were springing up elsewhere, even in the United States. One has to wonder if those who are responsible for these copies are truly aware of the history of Oberammergau and its theatrical production. This book should help to enlighten them.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author presents a very balanced account of the centuries-old Passion Play, presented every 10 years by the citizens of the Bavarian village of Oberammergau. Oddly, the production has usually had strong associations with the Catholic Church, and yet the Church has made it clear that it is not sponsoring the Passion Play--even though many among the audience regard it as very much like a pilgrimage to a holy place.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author traces the ways in which the Nazis availed themselves of Oberammergau, which proved useful for propaganda purposes as well as becoming the site of a major munitions operation during World War 2. And in fact the majority of Oberammergau's citizens seem to have been members of the Nazi party during the Third Reich.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>What interests the author--and should interest anyone concerned with the origins of anti-Jewish feeling in Europe--is the drama itself, the way in which the Jews are represented as the scurrilous, contemptible slayers of Jesus--slayers of God, to the believing Christians who constitute the audience for this spectacle.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Shapiro traces in detail the attempts at changing the script and the presentation so that the hatred of Jews has been almost expunged. What may be alarming to many is how long it has taken to get this accomplished.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Now--for the Passion Play is still going on, and drawing tourists who bring money into this small town--Jesus is being presented as a Jew among Jews, someone not attempting to found a new religion. This representation marks a sharp break from the traditional version, in which he was interpreted as (the first?) Christian, being persecuted by Jews.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One serious problem with this ancient Christian story, covered in detail in most Christian churches during Holy Week, the time when the Passion Play is given as well, is that traditionally the people were stirred up to a fever pitch by the theater--the Mass itself and the Holy Week rituals involve considerable drama, and this is augmented by events like the Passion Play--and often decided that there is strength in numbers and gone on a rampage against any Jewish people in the vicinity.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In other words, the Oberammergau Passion Play did nothing to stop the pogroms or to stop the brutal excesses of the Hitler regime--and it very probably exacerbated the hatred people felt toward a group who didn't share their religious beliefs.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author could have argued in favor of abolishing all Passion Plays, but in the interests of freedom of speech, he expresses the hope that a more ecumenical, tolerant version of the story of the crucifixion will prevail.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
17 April 2013<br />
_________________________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>SHIELDS, DAVID AND SALERNO, SHANE</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">SALINGER: A LIFE</span></i></b> (2013)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Biographies almost always have an author--the biographer--telling a narrative of the person's life, and it is that author's words that shape the narrative.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These authors apparently decided to do things differently. Having made a movie about the life of the reclusive J. D. Salinger, they produced this lengthy book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>But they do very little narration. The book is a compendium of short (a few sentences, usually) quotations from a wide assortment of people, and every now and then there is a paragraph by David Shields or Shane Salerno--not very often, however.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And instead of footnotes or other documentation to let us know the exact source of each quotation, we are sometimes given a brief reminder about the speaker's identity, then assured at the end of the book that every quotation cited in it has been verified through an independent source (not named). And there is a long list of people at the end, with short descriptions of their connection with Salinger.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is not a biography in the true sense of the word. It's a collection of quotations, which may or may not be accurate, from people, many of them celebrities.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The authors have one theory to promote about Salinger, and it isn't so surprising: that Salinger's World War 2 experiences (Hurtgen Forest, D-day,the Battle of the Bulge, and the opening up of a particularly horrifying sector of Dachau) governed his entire life thereafter, since (they reason) he probably had what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder and he did suffer a nervous breakdown just after the war. The authors see Salinger's most widely known work, the one that made him famous, <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i>, as "about" those war experiences.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Through some delving, and with no compunction about revealing intimate details, they have unearthed women who claim to have been involved with Salinger at various times. He had a particular fondness for much younger women, even apparently girls in their teens, but here again the authors have a theory: that he would have been frightened by mature women and so he restricted himself to girls before they had matured, women young enough to seem innocent and "safe." They come up with the somewhat fanciful notion that because Salinger had an undescended testicle, he would have felt self-conscious about this flaw and felt safer from criticism with inexperienced women. However, since, as Hemingway pointed out and is quoted as saying in the book, this flaw is easily corrected, one wonders if it wasn't corrected at some point and perhaps not the problem the authors assume it to have been.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Yes, Ernest Hemingway is here--becoming friendly with Salinger during World War 2, when Salinger appears to have been busily typing away (working on <i>Catcher</i>) in the midst of the chaos of war.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>We also get glimpses of William Shawn, long-time editor of the <i>New Yorker </i>and evidently Salinger's principal champion even in a literary world that failed to appreciate the Glass family stories that succeeded <i>Catcher</i>.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There are some interesting bits of information here, if they can be believed. For instance, there is the report that publisher Robert Giroux rewrote history so as to put himself in a better light. Having promised J. D. Salinger that Harcourt Brace would publish <i>Catcher</i>, he reneged on the promise at the insistence of the higher-ups--then later retold the story by claiming that his anger about the way Salinger had been treated prompted him to leave Harcourt, when in fact he didn't leave until some years later.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Then there is a considerable section of this book devoted to assassins--three of them who supposedly were influenced in their killings by a reading of <i>The Catcher in the Rye. </i>Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, is given particular attention, though how any of these sad stories is very relevant to Salinger's life isn't clear, and the authors simply muddy the waters by suggesting that there is violence implicit in the book and that some people--Chapman and the other two assassins--detected it. This comes close to calling <i>Catcher</i> a dangerous book, and the authors fail to make any case for this idea in spite of their sensational details about the assassins.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It seems unfair to have so many quotations from Salinger's former lovers when he himself is unable to give his side of the story, too. Of course these women who claim to have been involved with him are going to make themselves look good, and maybe all of them deserve to look good. But I somehow doubt it, if only because of Salinger's silence. What if he was the sort of honorable person who kept quiet about the quirks and faults he observed in his lovers--but his lovers had no such qualms in talking about him? And after all, these former lovers were getting attention when they opened up. It was a type of attention Salinger shunned and literally ran from.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He wanted to go on writing, not to become a celebrity. Fame wasn't his objective. Turning out good stories was. I wish that some of the people quoted in this book had had more respect for that.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>All too much of this book depends on speculation--"would have" and "might have" occur entirely too often. And since Salinger did affect many influential people, many of them are uttering their theories and opinions here. The book is impressive in the extent of its name-dropping but otherwise seems a shoddy job.</b></div>
<br />
10 January 2015<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
<b>SHIRAKAWA, SAM H.</b><br />
<br />
<i> </i><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">THE DEVIL'S MUSIC MASTER: THE CONTROVERSIAL LIFE AND CAREER OF WILHELM FURTWÄNGLER </i>(1992)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Wilhelm Furtwängler, who is commonly acknowledged as having been one of the world's great symphony conductors, was also one of the more controversial. Although he had many opportunities to leave Hitler's Germany, he insisted on staying on--and he paid a high price in the form of ostracism and even a de-Nazification hearing after the end of the Second World War.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His biographer makes a strong case for him here but it is still shaky, in my opinion. Furtwängler probably did believe wholeheartedly that music and politics should be two separate worlds and that music should transcend politics. And he did render genuine assistance to people trying to escape from the Third Reich--there is no doubt of that. Had he left, he probably could not have given the help he gave.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>On the other hand, maybe he could have given other kinds of help from a location outside of the Reich. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>His pointed failure to give the Nazi salute at the beginning of every concert is often cited in this book as evidence that his real sentiments lay with Hitler's opposition.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>And yet Goebbels, Goering, and even Hitler himself were often in attendance at those concerts. Furtwängler had frequent interactions with all of the top Nazis, who kept close tabs on the music scene in a strenuous effort to insure that it reflected the Germanic Weltanschauung they were assiduously cultivating.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book gives a comprehensive survey of just what was being performed in the Third Reich--and by whom. The play lists were heavy on Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner--both composers who were sympathetic to the Nazi notions of the <em>Herrenvolk</em>--and the Bayreuth Festival was a special Nazi pilgrimage occasion.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Furtwängler would have been treated well if he had opted to leave the Reich, but the fact remains that he wasn't suffering by remaining in the Reich either. Others were suffering, and for him to have been conducting concerts when large numbers of the orchestra members had been forbidden to play because they were Jewish and were being hauled off to concentration camps still seems wrong-headed at best. After all, his concerts had the effect of enhancing the glory in which Hitler hoped to clothe the Reich.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Musically, Furtwängler's performances were undoubtedly stellar. But attempts at portraying him as an innocent victim here are on a flimsy basis. Moreover, this man had countless extramarital affairs and fathered at least four illegitimate children.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is a shame that so much effort has gone into documenting the concerts given under the Third Reich.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Beautiful music is all very well. Beautiful music in the service of a regime run by murderers is no longer beautiful music. The music of Strauss and Wagner contains passages of pleasing harmony. I think of Wagner's "Liebestod" or the "Pilgrim's Chorus," though I have more trouble finding much to admire in Richard Strauss, especially after the much too often heard strains from "Also sprach Zarathustra" used in the movie <em>2001. </em>However, I can no longer listen to any of it without cringing.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bayreuth is still holding its annual festival although between 1946 and 1951 it was closed down. I can't think of Wagner's music without remembering the comedienne Anna Russell's hilarious parody of it.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>--And without recalling how excessively bored I was when I sat through a performance of <em>Das Rheingold</em> many years ago. People still take Wagner very seriously. This biography takes Wagner very seriously.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I'm afraid I came away unpersuaded.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
28 October 2011<br />
________________________________<div><br /></div><div><b>SILBER, JOAN</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> </b><i><span style="color: #45818e;"> <b> IMPROVEMENT</b></span></i><b> (2017)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I kept waiting for this novel to be about improvement in some way but I'm not sure about its title, which suggests that it might have something to say about improvement in general.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>There are assorted characters, including some in and from Turkey and some in and from Germany. This variety of course makes the plot more colorful (Oriental carpets even enter into the plot) and cosmopolitan, but sometimes a number of the characters seem extraneous, as if they were thrown in as filler.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>At the core of the story is one woman's guilt--and as it happens, it's a white woman's guilt though this fact--her whiteness and the injured parties' blackness--is curiously undiscussed throughout the novel.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Nevertheless it is <i>there. </i>We learn that Reyna, the white woman who is also (at times) the narrator, is in love with Boyd, an African-American man who has been serving time for marijuana possession. Boyd is involved in an illegal scheme involving traveling to Virginia to buy cigarettes, then selling them at a discount. The trips are risky but need to be made regularly. Once Reyna agrees to do the driving, but then she chickens out at the last minute, leaving the driving in the hands of Boyd's pal Claude, and Maxwell, Boyd's other associate in this venture, is badly injured. This pretty much ends Reyna's involvement with this group, somewhat to the bewilderment of her son, Oliver, who is 4 and who has become attached to Boyd.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>If this story had remained the focus of Improvement I might have liked it better. But instead there are Reyna's aunt Kiki, various friends and family members of Boyd's group, AND a collection of Germans who make money by hanging around archeological digs and helping themselves to possibly valuable finds, then selling them.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The connections among this motley assemblage of people are tenuous indeed.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>And one more quibble: The author hasn't sorted out the difference between <i>persuade</i> and <i>convince. </i>And so we get mention of "the euros she'd been <i>convinced</i> to leave behind."</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I found it hard to work up an interest in the main characters with so many others cluttering up the scene, but I might try another work of fiction by this author.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div><b>11 November 2020</b></div><div><b>_____________<br /></b>
<strong>SIMPSON, EILEEN<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #38761d;"><em> REVERSALS: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF VICTORY OVER</em> <em>DYSLEXIA</em></span></strong> (1979)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This autobiography tells of the author’s struggle with dyslexia. Simpson eventually became a social worker, married a celebrated English poet, divorced and remarried, and wrote a novel.</b></div>
<br />
11 November 1999<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<b>SIMPSON, JOHN</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE WORD DETECTIVE: SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF IT ALL AT THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY: A MEMOIR </span>(2016)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author was chief editor of the famed <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> for 20 years, retiring in 2013. This multivolume dictionary has long been a triumph of scholarly effort, and this fascinating memoir sheds light on the making of that work.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He was involved in the transition to an online version--helping to effect a radical transformation in the way the dictionary is compiled and used. The dictionary is of course never complete because it is the record of a living language. The author is clearly eager to move the record of the language along with the times, seizing upon neologisms and making sure that the definitions provided by the dictionary are accurate and up-to-date.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This has been his life's work, and yet he insists that lexicographers are not people who "love words," as is popularly believed.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Interspersed with his account of the dictionary's movement into the digital age and of his own career are occasional boldfaced words or phrases that he adumbrates with the stories behind them--thus making his book far more interesting than it would have been as just the account of one lexicographer's life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Lexicographers are thought of as plodders, or as the lexicographer Dr. Johnson defined it, "harmless drudges." That they may be but they are also providing a valuable service, particularly when it comes to the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>, which towers above the dictionaries that have been compiled for other languages because it is dealing with its language as historically developing --and as a language for which there has never been a prescriptive committee or "academy" (as in France and a number of other countries). The author is clearly in the descriptivists' camp, seeing language as constantly evolving, with no real "right" or "wrong" pronunciation or orthography or usage. Instead there is the matter of how often and where and when a word is used and in what way. Describing all of that is what the OED does--admirably. And the author has shown us how it does what it does.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<b>10 November 2019</b><br />
<b>________________________</b><br />
<strong>SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTylejmUDyRbzXmp82jIUjKV60Nf1tUaV8EYWFD6XBD6xU8skwV" /></div>
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">MESHUGAH</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1994)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This celebrated chronicler of Jewish life died in 1991, and this English translation of a short novel originally in Yiddish that was serialized in <em>The Jewish Daily Forward</em> in the early 1980s was published posthumously.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I've read several other works by I. B. Singer, but this one may be one of my favorites. Aaron Greidinger, the protagonist, is probably a stand-in for Singer himself: a writer of novels dealing with Jewish life. He hops in and out of bed with various women freely, but finds himself falling in love with Miriam, who he much later (when he is about to marry her) learns used to be, not only a prostitute for the Nazis during World War 2 (which he knew about and had come to accept), but an especially cruel <em>capo</em> in a concentration camp.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He does not confront her with the information he has obtained. Instead, at the end, when they are marrying, the novel takes a curious twist as he tells her something that will probably constitute her new husband's way of meting out justice.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This book is well told, well plotted, and moves along at a fast clip. As usual, Singer captures the speech and folkways of the Yiddish-speaking world superbly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
20 December 2006<br />
________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SKAKUN, MICHAEL<br /><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">ON BURNING GROUND: A SON'S MEMOIR</span></em></strong> (1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author tells about his father, who survived the Nazi Holocaust in Poland by a variety of subterfuges--including enlistment in the Waffen SS.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This short work is an interesting and totally unpretentious meditation on a struggle for survival.</b></div>
<br />
6 August 2007<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<b>SLAWENSKI, KENNETH</b><br />
<b> </b><br />
<b><i> <span style="color: #38761d;">J. D. SALINGER: A LIFE </span></i></b>(2010)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Reading this book shortly after reading another biography of J. D. Salinger (by David Shields and Shane Salerno--reviewed here on January 20, 2015), I'm tempted to make comparisons, particularly since the Shields and Salerno book draws on the Slawenski biography.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Shields and Salerno have compiled a sloppy mishmash of every sensational detail they could dig up about J. D. Salinger, and this becomes starkly clear upon reading the far superior biography by Kenneth Slawenski.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Even though Slawenski's observations are sometimes trite, and apparently he had no access to the more restricted documents, he has put together a credible and respectful account of what is known about Salinger's life.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>"Known," not conjectured. And what is known is actually enough to conclude that Salinger might have found his commitment to the religion of Vedanta inhibiting his creativity, for it is generally acknowledged that the work he produced after he began to feel that he had a religious mission was far less readable and universally appealing than his previous fiction had been.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Slawenski spares the reader any psychobabble or half-baked psychiatric diagnoses for Salinger. Instead he gives some factual details that might (or might not) indicate a very troubled person--and suggests that Salinger's war experiences might have been psychologically intolerable for him, as they would have been for many people.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Much light is shed on the inner workings of the <i>New Yorker</i> during Salinger's time, for he was first and foremost a <i>New Yorker</i> writer. The magazine had its established procedure for reviewing manuscripts sent to them for possible publication, but with the advent of William Shawn, Salinger was apparently the one writer who was allowed to bypass this procedure. Any fiction by Salinger was fast-tracked and assumed to have met the <i>New Yorker</i>'s standards. In fact, at least once an entire issue was given over to a long Salinger work.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>What this says about the existence of an "old boy" network even in the hallowed domain of a politically liberal periodical may surprise some readers, who might have expected more of a level playing field for all writers submitting manuscripts for consideration. But Shawn and Salinger were close friends, and Salinger dedicated one of his books to him.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This biographer treats his subject with compassion and understanding. He very tentatively suggests that Salinger might have adopted a reclusive life more as a ploy, a bid for still more attention (playing hard to get, as it were), than in a genuine attempt at barricading himself from the world, but he doesn't pursue this idea other than to point out that Salinger's reclusiveness did have the effect of piquing the curiosity of the media.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Slawenski provides sensible interpretations of Salinger's fiction as he goes along, and the result is a very readable and informative book.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
27 February 2015<br />
<div>
____________________________</div>
<br />
<br />
<strong>SMITH, KEN</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">JUNK ENGLISH</span> </em></strong>(2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This brief book includes many examples of some of the worst writing in the language today (in my opinion). The author's point is that the language is being used to obfuscate and to deceive when it ought to be used as a means of honest, forthright expression.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He takes aim at phrases like "friendly fire" and "collateral damage," invented words like "impactful," and other horrors in frequent use in the media nowadays.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>George Orwell would have loved this book. Even though it makes several points already made years ago in <em>The Elements of Style</em> by William Strunk and E. B. White, <em>Junk English </em>is a rich collection of new outrages.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
9 January 2009<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SNYDER, DON J.<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE CLIFF WALK: A MEMOIR OF A JOB LOST AND A LIFE FOUND</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A true account by a man who had a good job teaching English at Colgate University, with a wife and several children, but who lost his job after three years. His long and unsuccessful search for another teaching job culminates in his adapting to a totally different occupation--construction work--and liking it.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
20 December 1999<br />
________________________<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>SONNENBERG, BEN<br /><em><br /></em></strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong><em> LOST PROPERTY: MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A BAD</em> <em>BOY</em> </strong>(1991)<br /><br /><b>This is a sometimes confusing autobiography. Born rich and privileged, Sonnenberg has known many celebrities, founded a journal--<em>Grand Street</em>--and had many romantic involvements.<br /><br />This book gives an interesting account of his multiple sclerosis.<br /><br />As memoirs go, this one is refreshing--the author is aware of his own failings.</b><br /><br />21 March 1999<br />________________________ </span><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SPARK, MURIEL </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS </span></i>(</strong>1963)<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
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<strong>Do I keep reading Muriel Spark's fiction because I keep hoping that the vast critical acclaim she's received will turn out to be warranted?</strong></div>
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<b>This novel is set mainly in 1945 but often we are told what has become of the characters years later. Most of them are women in a rooming house just as World War 2 is winding down. </b></div>
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<b>We follow several of them in a superficial way as some events unfold, mostly involving one of the young woman who devises a way to squeeze herself through a narrow space to get onto the roof--and a tryst with a lover. Another young woman is constantly giving elocution lessons on the premises--a device that allows the author to lard her slight story with quotations from Gerard Manley Hopkins and other literary figures.</b></div>
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<b>Very thin.</b></div>
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23 July 2014<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d;"> <em style="font-weight: bold;">A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON</em></span><b> </b>(1988)<br />
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<strong>Maybe I'm just not a Muriel Spark fan. In this novel, set in London in 1954 but going forward for several decades, I kept hoping that the narrator (Mrs. Hawkins or Nancy) would be revealed as unreliable. But the novel ends, and Nancy has bagged herself a doctor husband, and all is well in Sparkland.</strong></div>
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<strong>The story begins in a rooming house, with Nancy one of the roomers. The others conveniently include a single medical student, whom we're inclined to ignore for a while because he's overshadowed by several more dramatic roomers. But suddenly he and Nancy are an "item," and away we go--into an ordinary romance.</strong></div>
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<strong>Until that point I thought that the story might be about to have something to say. Alas, it didn't. Much of the plot revolves around an insulting remark that Nancy, who is an editor, flings at an author she detests. She calls him a "<em>pisseur de copie</em>," and his unsuccessful attempts at persuading her to retract this remark constitute a large part of the plot.</strong><br />
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<strong>She refuses, and she is clearly proud of her ability to stand her ground. I kept wishing she'd see the remark at what I suspect it of being: an attempt to get away with a vaguely naughty insult while showing off a command of French.</strong></div>
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<b>As years pass and she keeps on in this vein, she becomes increasingly tiresome. And a novel that began promising some mysterious elements dwindles down into something mediocre.</b></div>
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7 November 2009<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE DRIVER'S SEAT</span></em></strong><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1970)<br />
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<b>This is a short novel about a woman--who is probably crazy--who seems to foreknow her own death.</b><br />
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7 December 1998<br />
______________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SPENCE, GERRY<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">WITH JUSTICE FOR NONE: DESTROYING AN AMERICAN</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> <em>MYTH</em></span></strong><em> </em><br />
<em><br /></em><b>This is a cynical account of the legal profession, by a lawyer. Good book!</b><br />
<br />
1991<br />
_______________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>SPIELBERG, ELINOR<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">UNINVITED DAUGHTERS</span></em></strong> (1993)<br />
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<b>This novel has a somewhat predictable plot about a childless woman transplanted to Vermont who becomes involved with Megan, a troubled ten-year-old whose mother has died and whose stepmother doesn’t seem to want her.</b></div>
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28 August 2000<br />
________________________<br />
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<b>SPITZ, ELLEN HANDLER</b><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRn48_x5PPVaIr9kUeXFIQkzN7972vAHkIPWijF8pcw5e0K0NFitA" /></div>
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE BRIGHTENING GLANCE: IMAGINATION AND CHILDHOOD</span></b></em> (2006)<br />
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<b>This delightful book is an investigation into the aesthetic experiences of young children. It is replete with references to works of art, literature, and music, with a bibliography running to six pages, and yet it is by no means pedantic or dull in the way so many works based on substantial scholarship are.</b></div>
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<b>The author draws on her own experiences, both as a child and as an adult dealing with children.</b></div>
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<b>Her point is that every child deserves to have a rich aesthetic life.</b></div>
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<b>She is particularly persuasive in the section of her book entitled "What Is Too Scary?" She confronts some knotty problems:</b></div>
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<b> <em>[I] wonder whether we should, then, let children know that the United States of America, in addition to aiding other countries generously has been directly and indirectly responsible for wars and for coups d'état all over the world that have brought untold suffering to innocent people. Or should we continue to keep this information hidden from them? And if so, for how long? What about religions? Every major world religion has been responsible for hostilities toward outsiders and guilty of aggression, however subtle, toward members of its own. Should we present these facts to children, and if so, how?</em></b></div>
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<b>On the whole, though, this book is not a polemic. It is emphatic in the points it makes but not dogmatic or didactic.</b></div>
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<b>There is an extensive discussion of the death of Bambi's mother in the Walt Disney film, for instance, that sheds light on why many children find this incident troubling.</b></div>
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<b>The book has eight chapters. The one entitled "Children's Rooms, Sites of Refuge, and Being Lost" stresses how important it is for a child to have a place of refuge--a room, a closet, or maybe just a homemade tent made by throwing a sheet over a table.</b></div>
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<b>This is a well constructed and well written work, filled with observations and valuable insights.</b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #134f5c;"> </span><strong><em><span style="color: #134f5c;">INSIDE PICTURE BOOKS</span></em> </strong>(1999)<br />
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<strong>This close examination of a number of popular children's books is full of important nuggets of observation. The author deals with books that first appeared in the 1930s as well as with quite recent ones. She is enthusiastically in favor of Maurice Sendak and of perennial favorites like <em>Goodnight Moon</em> and <em>Bedtime for Frances</em>.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>She gives considerable attention to the "gendering" of the children's stories she is discussing--and to racial stereotyping that crops up in some of them. I would have liked to know her opinion of the Uncle Remus stories, but they aren't among the works analyzed here.</strong><br />
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<strong>She ends the book with a detailed analysis of <em>Little Black Sambo</em>--including two new revised versions of this story that attempt to cleanse it of its racist elements.</strong><br />
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<strong>I have one reservation about this book. In discussing <em>There's a Nightmare in My Closet</em> (1968) the author</strong><strong> is troubled by the reappearance of a dreaded monster at the very end of the book, but in summarizing the story she seems untroubled by this part: "Armed with a helmet and toy gun, he threatens to shoot the beast when it emerges."</strong><br />
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<strong>Guns (even toy ones) a</strong><strong>nd shooting threats ought not to enter into stories for children, in my opinion. Yes, they are unfortunately part of real life, but when are we going to start getting them out of our lives? A good place to begin would be the activities and diversions we provide for our children. </strong><br />
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<strong>Maybe the author left her feelings about guns out of the discussion because she was trying to make an entirely different point--one concerning the open-ended way the story ends on a note that would trouble many children.</strong><br />
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<strong>The author has made a thorough and conscientious study of a number of children's books and has applied her perceptions to the way in which the books work on their readers. She considers not just the plot line but the way each page appears---the placement of the pictures, the details in the pictures, whether words or phrases are repeated or positioned in particular ways. </strong><br />
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<strong>She emphasizes the child's need to build a private space, particularly in her discussion of <em>Where the Wild Things Are</em>. This strikes me as an important observation, and it would be interesting to know whether children who must spend their childhoods sharing a bed and probably everything else with siblings are more or less intent on creating a private space than are children lucky enough always to have their own room.</strong><br />
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<strong>This book deserves a careful reading--and rereading.</strong><br />
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2001?</div>
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_________________________________<br />
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<b>STEGNER, WALLACE</b><br />
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<b> <em> <span style="color: #38761d;">ANGLE OF REPOSE</span></em> </b>(1971)<br />
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<b>The author insists that this is a work of fiction, but it has the feel of a work that is at least semi-autobiographical. A bit of Internet prowling turns up a Webpage where a biographer of Stegner discloses that the author took entire passages from the diaries and letters of a real-life person, probably an ancestor--quite possibly the grandmother of the fictional narrator, Lyman Ward. </b></div>
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<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/03/opinion/op-fradkin3">http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/03/opinion/op-fradkin3</a><br />
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<b>Would this be plagiarism? I'm no authority on the subject, and Lyman Ward makes it clear that he's quoting from his grandmother's writing.</b></div>
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<b>Still, the question of the real-life person whose words they were remains...</b></div>
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<b>It is an interesting story, constructed as two parallel narratives, one in the narrator's present, the other in the 1870s-1890s as he tries to reconstruct his grandparents' lives.</b></div>
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<b>His grandfather was a mining engineer, his grandmother a transported Easterner and a Quaker concerned with bringing "civilization" to the West--California and Idaho, mainly. The story isn't a "Western" in the usual sense but it is clear that guns and if necessary hanging are freely resorted to--and entirely justifiable in the opinions of everyone in the story, with the possible exception of Susan, the woman at the center of the story.</b></div>
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<b>Just where the narrator stands (and where the author stands) isn't entirely clear, but the guns and spurs and the cruelty and ruthlessness that won the West are very much a part of this story, and the reader has to deal with them. The tone in this connection is a bit too worshipful for my taste. The way the West was won doesn't appeal to me. Too many innocent people--especially the Native Americans--were viciously plowed under.</b></div>
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<b>And what are we to make of a passage toward the end where Lyman Ward (the narrator), describing a friend of his, says:</b></div>
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<em><b> ...the eyes, which had been rolling and changing back of the lenses like the eyes of nigger-baby dolls you used to throw baseballs at in county fairs,...</b></em></div>
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<strong>There is no excuse for the use of the word <em>nigger</em> here. None. And why are we being reminded of this disgusting feature of county fairs? Admittedly, Stegner may be trying--as the book nears its close--to undercut his narrator by revealing his shortcomings, but why does blatant racism have to be among them? He has enough as it is, and the book isn't "about" race except in touching upon the presence of Chinese laborers in the mining camps.</strong></div>
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18 August 2010<br />
<strong>___________________________</strong><br />
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<b>STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS</b><br />
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<em> <b style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;">LETTERS, VOL. 4: OCTOBER 1882-JUNE 1884</span></b></em><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;">,</span></span> ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (Yale University Press, 1995)</div>
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<b>This volume in the series of R. L. Stevenson letters can be read most meaningfully after reading the preceding volumes, of which I've read only one.</b></div>
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<b>Writing at a time when letters were the principal means of communication between persons too remote for face-to-face contact, Stevenson was a prolific correspondent--though writing was clearly very difficult for him at times on account of his attacks of what was probably pulmonary tuberculosis. In the two years covered by this volume, he suffered several severe hemorrhages and an attack of near-blindness.</b></div>
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<b>His loyal wife Fanny, along with financial help from his parents, must have rendered immeasurable aid to Stevenson, who was struggling to make a living by writing. Childless, he was a stepfather to at least one of Fanny's children by a previous marriage as well.</b></div>
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<b>The letters, written when <em>Treasure Island</em> and <em>A Child's Garden of Verses</em> were being published, cast considerable light on these two books as well as on several other works of Stevenson's--including even a poem deemed too raw for some publications ("The Canoe Speaks").</b></div>
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<b>His command of French and of the Scots dialect must have been superb, for he sprinkles his letters liberally with both. He indulges in puns and breaks into verse at times. All in all, in spite of his suffering, he is determined to have a good time living.</b></div>
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<b>A racist verse which he recalls as current in his childhood is included. There is no indication whether he approved of it but he thought it worthy of inclusion in one of his stories. The editors could not have deleted it, nor perhaps should they have. But it made Stevenson's work less appealing to me. Yes, racism was part of the atmosphere of the time, and quite possibly no white person was free of it.</b></div>
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<b>One can't expect every artist to be "politically correct" even before the concept of political correctness had come into being. Still, the Civil War had been fought in the US, and Stevenson had lived in the US for a while. He has to have been aware of the evils of slavery and racism. I have trouble getting past this one viciously racist rhyme.</b></div>
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27 July 2011<br />
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<strong>STOUT, MARTHA</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR: THE RUTHLESS VERSUS THE REST OF US</span> </em>(2005)<br />
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<b>Written by a psychologist, this brief book is mainly a showcase for several "composite" cases (real cases well disguised to conceal the identities of the real people involved) who are singled out as examples of sociopathic personalities.</b></div>
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<b>The author is fond of one statistic, though I'm not sure how authoritative it is: that 1 in 25 people will turn out to be a sociopath, a person without conscience. She proceeds to enlighten her readers by pinpointing some clues so we will know when somebody among the people we know is one of these born sociopaths. For example, the person might flatter us--we should be very suspicious. Or the person might try to engender our pity--another red flag. Beware of the person who is lying routinely. Beware of someone who seems more interested in controlling people or situations than in helping others.</b></div>
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<b>So we have been given these guidelines. Interestingly, the author has a Website that leads you to lawyers and guardians ad litem who might help you if you feel that you're in the clutches of a sociopath. I tend to be suspicious of pop psychology, and this book is pop psychology. Little or no supporting data are cited to back up the author's claims.</b></div>
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<b>However, she has probably done many people a service by warning us about several personality traits that are often treated too lightly. People are gullible--and do come under the spell of charismatic individuals who turn out to be pitiless and manipulative.</b></div>
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1 January 2009<br />
______________________________<br />
<br />
<b>STOUT, REX</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <span style="color: #6aa84f;"><i>THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN</i></span> (Nero Wolfe #2) (1935)</b><br />
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<b>Formula detective fiction has its limits but in the hands of a writer skilled in manipulating the formula, it can make for absorbing reading. Here we have the independent-minded detective, Nero Wolfe, who doesn't get out and about much but does a lot of thinking--bouncing his thoughts off his right-hand man, Archie Goodwin, who tells the story.</b></div>
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<b>In the course of the story we get to know Wolfe as a very large man who enjoys food immensely--and who is an avid grower of orchids. He is testy, unpredictable, and scholarly--possibly a New York 1930s version of Sherlock Holmes.</b></div>
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<b>The problem before us is that a group of about 30 Harvard graduates have been loosely banded together since their college days many years before. It seems that a trick was played on one of their number, Paul Chapin, in a hazing incident that went disastrously wrong, injuring Chapin and crippling him for life. In the intervening years the others have tried in various ways to help Chapin. But now there have been a couple of questionable deaths among them, and their suspicions are falling on Chapin. Tired of living in fear that any one of them might be the next victim, they hire Nero Wolfe to find out what is going on.</b></div>
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<b>Soon enough the stage is filled with an assortment of characters--so many that the reader is apt to confuse them--and in fact that seems to be a favored device in detective fiction.</b></div>
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<b>Mysterious letters have been sent anonymously to the group. Paul Chapin is a published writer. Wolfe promptly reads all of his books. Considerable time is spent on tracking down the typewriter used to type the letters.</b></div>
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<b>Soon we have the detective who knows just a little more than we do (or than we think we do), and the story ends with some new dramatic turns--and the moment when Wolfe can reveal his hand.</b></div>
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<b>It turns out that quite a lot of deception has gone on in the process of solving this mystery. Nero Wolfe and his associate--we can assume--believe that evil is so rampant in the world and so powerful that any means can be used to accomplish the goal of stamping it out when it is found.</b></div>
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<b>16 July 2019</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>____________________________</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>STROUT, ELIZABETH</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><span style="color: #45818e;">ABIDE WITH ME</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is rare to come across a book about a member of the clergy that does not disclose the author's religious stance, but this may be one such book. At its center is a Congregationalist minister, Tyler Caskey, who has had the bad luck to have married an enchanting woman who was perhaps too headstrong and opinionated to have been the best choice for the spiritual leader of a small Maine town's flock. Then the wife died, leaving him with two young daughters. The younger child is chiefly in the care of Tyler's mother, and Catherine, who is 5, is beginning to present some worrisome problems in her kindergarten.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Or at least they are worrisome problems in the eyes of the kindergarten teacher, the school psychologist, and the school principal--the three of whom summon Tyler to a conference at one point, and the scene is one of the best in the book in its gentle parody of a particular type of pseudo-psychology that was being promoted at the time (1959).</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The character of Tyler is a bit of a puzzle. In many ways he is the quintessential Protestant clergyman--perhaps too trusting and naive for this world, overly scholarly, but well schooled apparently in the art of saying tactful, soothing things to the people he deals with.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I wonder at the dénouement, though. After Tyler has stood in front of his congregation, unable to deliver his sermon and with tears streaming down his face, we are asked to believe that he will find comfort in the response and care shown for him by some of the church members and be reabsorbed into their community, just after a vicious campaign of gossip has been waged against him.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I'm not sure that the author has made this remarkable turn-around entirely believable, but the story is well told and absorbing, and the dialogue between Tyler and Catherine sometimes poses difficult questions about the God whose Word Tyler is preaching.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>13 February 2021</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">O</span></i></b><b><i><span style="color: #45818e;">LIVE KITTERIDGE </span></i>(2008)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Seeing the film version of this story caused me to want to read the original--especially after learning that more about Olive is now available in book form (<i>Olive Again</i>).</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The book isn't a novel but a collection of stories, somewhat loosely organized around Olive Kitteridge, who has taught math for many years in a small Maine town. (In some of the chapters, Olive is merely mentioned as a remembered teacher.)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The stories are the stuff of soap operas--suicides, attempted suicides, deahts that may have been suicides, catastrophic illnesses, and many instances where important pieces of information are known to some but revealed or almost revealed in the course of the story. But the author's writing skill and thoughtful perspective raise them well above the soap-opera level.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>She keeps our sights on Olive throughout, and we get to see that Olive has a good heart, an impulse for decency that prevails time and again--and yet she is capable of petty vindictiveness, as when she surreptitiously destroys some of her daughter-in-law's belongings after overhearing her daughter-in-law comment on her husband's rough childhood. And later Olive reveals that when her son Chris was a child, she hit him--and she makes it clear that this wasn't "just spanking." No more is said about this, and the disclosure appears late in the book, but it is the sort of detail that casts light on what has gone before.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>For we have seen what looks like an unbridgeable chasm between mother and son: Olive and her husband Henry in increasing desolation since their only child keeps removing himself geographically and emotionally from them, marrying first one woman and then another who have ways of furthering the distancing between Chris and his parents.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> Olive lies about how frequently Chris visits them, and it may be at this point that she becomes most understandable--and sad. A judgmental reader, upon learning that she had hit Chris as a child, might be tempted to declare that Olive has reaped what she has sown. But as we watch her helpless devotion to Henry after his stroke, when what remains of him is just a shadowy presence, even the most judgmental of readers must surely see the poignancy of the situation.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is to the author's credit, I think, that we aren't being asked to feel sorry for Olive so much as to respect her. She has met life head on, and by the end of the book she is facing old age alone.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>I liked Olive.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>25 October 2020</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="color: #38761d;">OLIVE, AGAIN (2019)</span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Olive Kitteridge is aging--and in fact the stories told here end with Olive at 86.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This book concerns coming to terms with a world where religious faith has almost no importance any more, but it is a world where both Olive and her friend Cindy (in the chapter entitled "Light") can admire the February light.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is also a world where people can change--as when Olive comes to realize that she has been prejudiced all her life against the people of French background who live in this Maine community.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Perhaps the best story of the lot is "The Poet," in which Olive, at 82, encounters a former student, Andrea, who is now a renowned poet and former US poet laureate. Olive, in a chatty mood, reveals facts about herself to Andrea that she wouldn't have revealed to most people. Then an anonymous someone leaves a poetry magazine in her mailbox, and one poem--by Andrea--is drawn to her attention. The poem reveals all of the facts Olive has disclosed and interprets Olive as pathetically lonely. Olive destroys the periodical but has no way of knowing who else in the town might have seen the poem, particularly since it has been established that the town's residents are close followers of Andrea's poetic output.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is at this point that Olive not only realizes that she's been prejudiced (Andrea is of French background) but that Andrea may have perceived truths Olive hasn't seen. Meanwhile Andrea has been in a nearly fatal car accident but has pulled through. Olive goes to Andrea's Facebook page and congratulates her on being alive ("Glad you're still alive"). This is especially kind of Olive--not to let Andrea know how deeply wounded she was by the poem. (She was crushed at being regarded as pitiably lonely by a former student, and she suffered worsening fecal incontinence after reading it.)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The last two stories deal with Olive's heart attack and its aftermath, including her adjustment to living in a retirement community. We see an Olive who is still her snappish self, coming to terms with the indignities of aging--and not yielding to despair. She finds to her surprise that the son who had for so long kept her at a distance is at her side when she needs him most.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>In one of the stories a character states what may be a <i>leitmotif</i> of Olive's life: Speculating on whether there is a God, the character, Suzanne, says: "'Our job, maybe even our duty, is to bear the burden of the mystery [of whether there is a God] with as much grace as we can.'"</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>That sums Olive up. At a woman's baby shower, one of the guests suddenly goes into labor. The woman doesn't want to ruin the other woman's baby shower, but Olive talks sense into her--and helps with delivering the baby.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Hats off to Olive. She's a class act.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>24 August 2021</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON</span></i> (2016)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Lucy Barton, the narrator here, is reminiscing about a very long hospital stay when she had been seriously ill--and her mother, from whom she had been more or less estranged for years, visited her.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Much of the story consists of snippets of conversation between mother and daughter, and Strout excels at rendering ordinary dialogue of this kind. Reading these is like listening in on a chatty exchange between people you know. They recall people they used to know, going over the details of their lives.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>We aren't meant to be completely in Lucy's corner though. As time passes we get to see her blind spots, her wrong turns. At one point she delivers herself of a political opinion that should sow some seeds of doubt in the reader's mind simply because it's probably untrue: "'It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government--education, food, rent subsidies--are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.'"</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>By the time this remark is made, we are undoubtedly aware that Lucy's experience, to which she refers, is in fact limited, maybe even provincial. Her childhood involved an abusive, bigoted father and considerable deprivation and poverty. Later in life, she seems to be trying to lay hold of the mother's love she probably missed out on in childhood. This flowering of her relationship with her mother is the core of the story here, but Lucy herself comes across as neither perfect nor pitiable--just as a person with a complex past.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This was an interesting story but not as well constructed as the other novels I have read by this author.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>8 August 2022</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE</span></i> (2017)</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The characters in these stories have some connection to Lucy Barton, and Lucy herself figures in one of them. Some of the people have brushes with the supernatural or at least with what they believe might be the supernatural. Some are grappling with their imminent decline.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The stories told are interesting and realistic but sometimes the events being revealed to us may have almost too much shock value, as when Dottie of "Dottie's Bed and Breakfast" spits in the jam she is about to serve to one of the guests at her bed-and-breakfast establishment. We're meant to like Dottie anyway but after that I had problems warming up to her.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>And the way the book ends seems almost weak and hackneyed. Abel Blaine is on his way to the hospital with what seems to be a heart attack, rejoicing that he has found a "friend" in the actor named Link who has just been cruel and abusive to him. Blaine feels at this point that he has gained the "perfect knowledge," which is: "Anything is possible for anyone."</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Is the reader meant to agree with Blaine on this? Or are we supposed to regard him as woefully misled and limited? It's just not clear.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Elizabeth Strout delivers up absorbing stories about believable people though.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>9 October 2022 </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">________________________________</div>
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<strong>SWADOS, ELIZABETH</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE FOUR OF US: THE STORY OF A FAMILY</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1991)<br />
<br />
<b>The author, who is evidently now a composer of some renown, tells about her family: her lawyer-father, her schizophrenic alcoholic mother who died tragically, and her schizophrenic older brother, who also died tragically. In spite of the very sad content, the author tells her story with a wry humor.</b><br />
<br />
16 July 1998<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<strong>SZPILMAN, WLADYSLAW</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE PIANIST: THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF ONE MAN'S SURVIVAL IN WARSAW, 1939-1945</span> </em></strong>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a remarkable memoir written by a Polish Jewish man who hid in Warsaw during the Second World War. By occupation a pianist, he had little to do with the piano during those years, when he barely survived. With the rest of his family having been sent off to a concentration camp, he was quite aware of what his fate would be if he were found. Even after Warsaw went up in flames, he was hanging on by a thread in burned-out building, with virtually no shelter from the fallling snow and with almost no food.</b></div>
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<b>Perhaps the most surprising part of this memoir is that a German captain, Wilm Hosenfeld, was instrumental in saving Szpilman. He brought him provisions in his hiding place and made it clear that he found the Nazis' behavior loathsome--even while continuing to be a captain in their military.</b></div>
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<b>The tables were turned when Poland was liberated and Captain Hosenfeld was a Soviet prisoner, needing someone to rescue him from the prison camp. Szpilman was unfortunately unable to find Hosenfeld.</b></div>
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<b>But in his book--which he actually wrote just after the war's end--he includes Hosenfeld's journal, a remarkable document in its own right.</b></div>
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<b>--This book has been made into a movie, which I haven't yet seen.</b></div>
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21 February 2008<br />
<br /></div></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121225639267123332005-06-22T20:21:00.001-07:002021-02-07T13:37:24.658-08:00T<strong>TABER, GLADYS</strong><br />
<strong style="text-align: center;"><em><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><span class="blsp-spelling-error"><br /></span></span></em></strong>
<span style="text-align: center;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error"> <span style="color: #38761d;">STILLMEADOW</span></span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">DAYBOOK </i>(1955<i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">); </i></span></span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">STILLMEADOW</span></span><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"> SAMPLER </i>(1959)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Both of these collections, culled from Gladys Taber's columns for a women's magazine in the 1950s, show what money can buy but without being so crass as to mention Money. The pieces are often tiresomely trite and repetitious, but Gladys Taber clearly has a good heart.</b></span></div>
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"> She writes about
Stillmeadow, the 40 acres in Connecticut where she and a woman friend lived.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">They’re both widows but the families were
friends before they were widowed. Their children are grown. </span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">The ideas here are stereotypical—and the author loves using “companion” as a verb. But what struck
me most about her essays is the assumptions they rest on: an assumption of a
life of ease and privilege that goes on and on without end. “Every yard now has
a barbecue pit,” she trills. And, because they raise dogs as a hobby, she’ll
say things like, “When we go away for a few days” [to a dog show]. They have a
pond to swim in, a car, assorted ultra-dependable neighbors who do everything
for them (handling the storms and screens, for instance)—whether these good
souls are compensated isn’t made clear. They’ve had lessons in flower
arranging. They entertain—and then they have all those ashtrays to empty. They
have a dishwasher, washer, and dryer, </span><i style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">thirty</i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">
cocker spaniels, a grown daughter who readily comes over to care for the dogs
when they’re away. </span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Taber recalls that in her childhood the family doctor was her
father’s best friend—and that her mother fed and entertained all her high school
friends.</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This may be the kind of life that some Americans now expect--and have.</span></span></b><br />
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<br />
May 1998<br />
______________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>TANCER, WILLIAM</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i>EVERYONE'S A CRITIC: WINNING CUSTOMERS IN A REVIEW-DRIVEN WORLD </i>(2014)</strong><br />
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<strong>Some books are readable mainly for the information they provide, and this book was like that. For some time I've been wondering about the usefulness of consumer comments on Websites like Yelp and many online shopping sites. I often read them and rely on them, but how trustworthy are they? Might they have been planted there to enhance sales or draw in clients/customers?</strong></div>
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<strong>According to this book, yes, they might have been. But the chances are that they weren't, and the ones that are fakes are often easily spotted. The author describes ways of detecting fake reviews.</strong></div>
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<strong>He makes the interesting point that in today's world, businesses are relying more and more on reviews. Whether this is good or bad has yet to be determined, but it's very different from yesterday's world.</strong></div>
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<strong>In some instances--he uses Uber as an example--the effect seems extreme at times, as when Uber employees are held to ridiculously exacting standards in terms of providing timely service.</strong></div>
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<strong>Tancer gives considerable attention to restaurant and hotel reviews, and the examples can be interesting as well as amusing.</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>8 May 2016</strong><br />
<strong>_________________________</strong>
<strong><br /></strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>TANNEN, DEBORAH</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE I CAN TELL: INSIDE THE LANGUAGE OF WOMEN'S FRIENDSHIPS</span></i> (2017)</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Deborah Tannen has published several previous books that seem to be similar collections of anecdotes about people she has interviewed in the course of her work in sociolinguistics. Although this is the first work of hers that I have read, I have an impression that this is sociology trying--but not especially hard--to look like objective scientific data.</strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>She's talking about women's conversations here. Underlying her discussion is the assumption that women talking to one another are fundamentally different from men talking to one another--a phenomenon (if it is one) that has often been commented on, as in the jokes about gatherings where the women assemble in the kitchen and talk about diaper services, recipes, and neighborhood gossip while the men congregate elsewhere to exchange information and opinions on politics, sports, perhaps the more "important" topics of the day.</strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
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<strong>So, in a way, by collecting examples of the sorts of conversation many women seem to be engaged in, Tannen probably isn't adding anything new to our knowledge of how women converse. Taken overall, the examples she chooses often show the women she has interviewed to be perhaps overly sensitive, a bit too quick to be suspicious of well-intentioned or perhaps ignorant comments made by others.</strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
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<strong>But then maybe the women she is talking about were mainly "mainstream" women in the US, women who might have enough leisure time to concern themselves with analyzing comments they have heard? Surely there are many women who wouldn't be offended by some of the comments Tannen or her interviewees found offensive.</strong></div>
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<strong>She devotes considerable attention to the tendency women have to share secrets--or, as she puts it, to engage in "troubles talk." To be sure, men aren't very commonly heard talking in a similar vein to one another. What Tannen doesn't give us is any possible reason for this disparity in conversation styles between women and men.</strong></div>
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<strong>She does disclose an aspect of "troubles talk" that I had been quite unaware of until recently. Or maybe it is a recent development? Tannen mentions that some women feel that "troubles talk" has to have reciprocity. If one woman unburdens herself to another by disclosing a secret she wouldn't tell anyone else, say, or by unloading negative feelings about her sister or husband or child, she feels betrayed if the other woman doesn't tell her one of <i>her </i>secrets. In other words, the woman who discloses a secret or who talks about "troubles" believes that she has just made a contract with the woman with whom she has been talking: "I'll tell you a secret but you'll have to tell me a secret too. Otherwise we can't be friends any more."</strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Tannen makes it clear that friendships often do end when the woman who has unburdened herself doesn't hear any secrets "in return." (How long a time needs to pass before the woman with the secret contract gives up on the other woman isn't specified.) </strong><strong>She isn't standing in judgment here--she is just reporting what she has observed.</strong></div>
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<strong>If this assumption is as prevalent as she suggests it is, then many women will find themselves friendless because there are surely many who are not inclined to talk about their feelings or their secrets to other women. They can only hope that those women they think of as their friends will not unburden themselves, for they may not want to be party to the contract their friends are drawing up without their knowledge. They are just expected to realize that there is such a contract, and act accordingly? </strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
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<strong>The examples Tannen gives make for interesting reading. But regrettably the work as a whole is fairly fluffy.</strong></div>
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<strong><br /></strong></div>
<strong>24 November 2018</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
___________________________<br />
<strong>TAYLOR, ELIZABETH</strong><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQKGrk6zxGuWsoSAIFySFkADdE4pDNlIjHe4tjocrZL1SzSd6Bdrg" /></div>
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1947)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The title of this quiet but absorbing novel seems to refer to a painting with that theme that is being done by one of the principal characters, Bertram, a retired Navy man who is a not-very-successful artist--nor, we are made to feel, is he an artist with much talent.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>The harbor is part of a small English fishing village that has seen better days. Of the several characters, it may be Bertram who connects most to the other characters, and yet he is an outsider to the town--a newcomer and therefore a bit suspect. The local pub also serves to bring people together in this story. But there is also the paralyzed invalid Mrs. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Bracey</span></span>, a widow, who has her own view of the harbor and who takes in much information just from her vantage point within her four walls. Bossy and irrational, she is not a pleasant person. Her two daughters are part of a subplot involving a young man and his aunt, who is in domestic service.</b></div>
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<b>The more important plot revolves around Robert, a doctor, and his wife Beth, a writer. Robert is involved in an affair with Beth's close friend (since their school days) and neighbor Tory, who is now divorced but has a son to look after. Prudence, the elder of the two daughters of Beth and Robert, who is 20 and in questionable health, becomes aware of her father's involvement with Tory. The denouement follows from this discovery of Prudence's.</b></div>
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<b>The story is simple and straightforward, the characters few, but these are people who come to life and behave in ways consistent with our expectations of them. This isn't to say that the novel is predictable or trite. By no means is this a dull or routine story. The action is not thrilling or sensational. No shots are fired, no blood spilled, no bedrooms or bathrooms are spied on. Nor are any heartstrings pulled. No cheap tricks here. It is a satisfying, true-to-life tale, well told. Who could ask for more?</b></div>
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<b>The author, who was English, was born in 1912 and died in 1975.</b></div>
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24 September 2003<br />
_____________________<br />
<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">THEROUX</span></span>, PAUL</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
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<img alt="Image result for Paul Theroux photo" src="data:image/jpeg;base64,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" /></div>
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<strong><strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COLLECTED STORIES</span></em></strong> </strong>(1997)</div>
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<b>This is a substantial collection of stories, written <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">and</span> published over several decades and set in various parts of the world, including London and Malaysia. They are well worth reading.</b></div>
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2 October 1999<br />
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<strong>TOWLES, AMOR</strong><br />
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<strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW</span></i> (2016)</strong><br />
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<strong>A reader who avoids bestsellers because they are often poorly written and all too often aimed pointedly at a movie version sometimes finds a good book among them. </strong><i>A Gentleman in Moscow</i></div>
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<b>is beautifully written, thoughtful, subtle, and at times wryly funny. It is filled with fascinating details about any number of subjects, including cooking, Russia, and hotel management.</b></div>
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<b>The hotel here is none other than the Metropol Hotel--the same hotel memorialized by a real-life former resident there, Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya, in her brief and haunting 2006 memoir, <i>The Girl from the Metropol Hotel.</i></b></div>
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<b>Count Aleksandr Ilich Rostov, the hero of the novel, experiences the hotel in quite a different way from Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya. The Russian Revolution's upheavals meant that the Count was sentenced to house arrest: at the age of 30 he was to be confined to the Metropol Hotel for the rest of his life.</b></div>
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<b>Most of the novel takes place within that hotel, perhaps Moscow's most elegant hotel even under the Soviet regime, and we see how the Count cleverly manages to arrange for a few of the creature comforts to be restored to his life there. He eventually becomes the headwaiter at the hotel's restaurant. Then there are his associations with various people there, most notably Nina and then her daughter Sofiya.</b></div>
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<b>A detail mentioned in passing early in the book might turn out to be quite important later on. As time passes and the reader reads on, the book develops a vocabulary of its own, in a way--as the Count has his own names for some of the belongings and people in his limited world. An episode that seems to be included for no particular reason, such as one about the apple orchards of Nizhnii Novgorod, might matter far more than would have seemed possible, eventually.</b></div>
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<b>The reader has to do some guessing about the ending but the groundwork for the dénouement has all been carefully laid. The reader will know what could be expected of the Soviet state and how cautiously its citizens learned to proceed. An understanding of why the Count behaves as he does at the end of the book will be there.</b></div>
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<b>Extending from the 1920s into the 1950s, this book manages to give substantial glimpses into details of Russian life as time passes--while also harking back to the moneyed elegance of the earlier time that spawned gentlemen like the Count. The book's tone isn't one of nostalgia for that bygone era, but the fact is that the kindly Count is a gentleman.</b></div>
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<b>January 28, 2018</b><br />
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<strong>TREVOR, WILLIAM</strong><br />
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<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlxcWt9u2wN7vpYvi5u_wMtB9HaCXwqtBsHInOVdLNty67PT_R0A" /><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE SILENCE IN THE GARDEN</span></b> (1988)</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6332639" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><b>I can't say that this novel disappoints because I suspect that truly understanding it depends on seeing the layout of the text on the page. Interspersed with the narrative are diary entries, set in italics, but listening to a recorded version I was often unaware of where the diary entries began and ended--a matter that is not the fault of the author, to be sure.</b></div>
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<b>But even if I had had access to this information, the story is told in a glancing way. We are given glimpses of an event we don't yet know about, and we find out about it piecemeal as the story proceeds. This happened often enough to make me wish for a more straightforward narrative.</b></div>
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<b>It can be irritating when an author teases the readers by telling about events in a "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't" style. However, in this particular story, spanning several decades, this dancing about in time has the effect of giving a picture of a place and time undergoing intense change.</b></div>
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<b>We become immersed in the Irish community of Carriglas as we see the crumbling of the its dominant family, the Rollestons, and the shuffling and realigning of allegiances as time passes. Ultimately the rottenness at the core of the Rolleston establishment is exposed, perhaps most glaringly when Mrs. Moledy, the long-time mistress of John James, one of the sons, turns up drunk at the wedding of John James's sister Villana. That Tom, the illegitimate son of the Rollestons' last butler, eventually becomes the focus of the story and apparently the head of the household is evidence of the enormity of the transformation that has taken place. </b></div>
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<b>The change from the gracious living that required servants to the far more relaxed, less fussy style from the mid-20th century on seems to have had considerable attention in recent decades, what with the two television series, <i>Upstairs, Downstairs</i> and <i>Downton Abbey</i>, and <i>The Silence in the Garden </i>might be taken to be another chronicle of the downfall of the great houses in which an entire way of life was supported by a collection of servants and merchants whose business it was to produce items of fine quality to please the tastes of fine ladies and gentlemen.</b></div>
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<b>But Trevor's story has the added dimension of the Irish "troubles." The conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics is always close to the surface in this story, even flaring up in violence. There is also the beautifully drawn character of Holy Mullihan, Tom's childhood associate, who is the quintessential overly devout Catholic, constantly lecturing Tom in priestly tones.</b></div>
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<b><i>The Silence in the Garden </i>seems a very appropriate title for a story detailing the decline of a way of life. A garden can't be maintained without leisure time, and the leisure class had the time to construct and maintain truly spectacular gardens in their day. But the day has passed, and there is silence. Their witty conversations, often carried on against the backdrop of their gardens, are no more. That their way of life was a very costly one to sustain is undeniable, and it sounds as if Trevor might have been glad to see the aristocracy disintegrate and be replaced by the very kind of people it had so long depended on.</b><br />
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<b>At the center of the story though often very much in the background is Sarah Pollexfen, who turns out not to be the omniscient narrator although for quite a while it looks as if she is. It is her experience, starting with a position as governess at Carriglass, that ties the strands of the story together. Jane Eyre was a governess as well, and there is a governess at the center of the Henry James story, "The Turn of the Screw." Perhaps Sarah Pollexfen is meant to represent another in a time-honored tradition of governesses with interesting experiences to relate.</b></div>
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<b>22 March 2017</b></div>
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<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><i>FELICIA'S JOURNEY</i> </span>(1994)<br />
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<strong>I read this book some years ago but after seeing a film version of it, I reread it. </strong></div>
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<strong>Trevor has told a "fallen woman" story that could have been trite and soap-operatic but in his hands this narrative of a young woman in her late teens whose boy friend has got her pregnant is transformed. To be sure, she ends up fallen. But for a long time the reader is more or less assuming that she's dead at the hands of the creepy Mr. Hilditch, a man so credibly evil that other villains pale by comparison.</strong></div>
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<b>The author has built up his story very skilfully, withholding or tiptoeing around one key bit of information--that Felicia has survived an ordeal no other such young woman has come through alive.</b></div>
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<b>By the time we learn what has actually become of her, we are ready to share in her joy in being alive--in knowing what she has narrowly escaped.</b></div>
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<b>She has paid a steep price: an abortion, the apparent loss of her family and her native land (Ireland), and the destruction of her illusions and dreams as her heart-breaking search for Johnny, the father of her child, proves futile.</b></div>
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<b>The diligence of her search--which we witness in considerable detail--underscores the power of her dreams: for a home, a family, a loving husband, stability.</b></div>
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<b>Although the story sounds a qualified triumphant note in its ending, it is still bleak in the extreme. It paints the seedy, cruel underworld inhabited by the indigent homeless in starkly realistic colors.</b></div>
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<b>This masterfully crafted story has absolutely no "agenda." However, and I have no way of knowing if this was the author's intent, in spinning this story, Trevor has managed to call attention to the plight of many contemporary young women. Cast adrift with no support system backing them, they are highly vulnerable and sadly subject to forces beyond their control. Trevor finds little hope for their situation in an increasingly impersonal world.</b></div>
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<b>In the character of Hilditch he gives us a man who has no memory of his heinous murders of several young women.</b></div>
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<b>Whether or not this variety of insanity exists in real life may be beside the point. For the purposes of this story it does exist, and we have Hilditch, quite successful in his food-related occupation and obsessed with fine dining, a <i>bon vivant</i> who enjoys the respect of everyone he knows, but he has a secret world involving young women who will probably not be very earnestly looked for if they go missing.</b></div>
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<b>This is a riveting and terrifying tale.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>6 July 2013</div>
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<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><em>CHEATING AT CANASTA</em> </span>(2007)<br />
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<strong>William Trevor's fiction always deserves a careful reading. Important details are packed into concise sentences and can easily slip past a reader whose attention is wandering.</strong></div>
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<strong>This is a collection of his stories, and as usual they are beautifully constructed. He focuses his attention on a few characters in each one, often bleak people whose lives have gone astray in ways they could not have foreseen or prevented.</strong></div>
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<strong>Some have made choices that were wrong, as in "Folie à deux," about two boys, now grown up, who once watched a beloved old dog drown instead of intervening. Trevor doesn't point us to morals, however. He shows us how it was and gives us enough detail so we can make up our own minds about what happened and whether or not we care to stand in judgment.</strong></div>
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<strong>Something tells me Trevor would prefer it if the reader withheld judgment and just appreciated the story for what it is--a story well told.</strong></div>
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25 August 2010<br />
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<b> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;"><em>A BIT ON THE SIDE</em> </span>(2004)<br />
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<strong>William Trevor seems incapable of writing badly. </strong></div>
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<strong>The title story concerns an adulterous couple who separate after the woman divorces her husband without telling her lover about it until the divorce is final. At this point her lover begins to worry about what people will think of their affair, and to realize that she will always be his "bit on the side." </strong></div>
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<strong>Some of the other stories are much darker and bleaker. Trevor has a special gift for giving us characters on the margins of society, in surroundings that are seedy but not spectacularly sordid. He renders the ordinary and the humdrum but casts a special light on them as he applies his acute observations and perceptions.</strong></div>
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<strong>Ireland is the usual setting, but it isn't a partisan version. It's just Ireland as it probably is.</strong></div>
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9 March 2011<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE STORY OF LUCY <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">GAULT</span></span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2002)<br />
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<b>William Trevor's masterful story-telling towers above most other authors'--and here it is again in this compelling novel.</b></div>
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<b>The action spans many decades, starting in 1921 and proceeding up to the present. Lucy <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Gault</span> is 9 years old when she runs away from her doting parents, who are preparing to move the family away from their traditional house because they have been threatened during the "troubles" in Ireland.</b></div>
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<b>Why it never occurs to her parents or to anyone else that Lucy might have run away and be still alive somewhere is a possible weak point in the narrative, for they give her up for dead--and leave, to spend many years traveling in Europe and eventually settling in Italy though never apparently successfully communicating their whereabouts to the caretakers of their house.</b></div>
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<b>These caretakers stand in for Lucy's parents from the time when she is found, injured badly enough to leave her with a limp. </b></div>
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<b>How her life and her parents' lives spin themselves out over the years is the material of this novel. It is a sad tale of missed chances and failure of communication, beautifully told.</b></div>
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22 August 2009<br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>ELIZABETH ALONE</em> </span></b>(1973)<br />
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<b>The story revolves around several women who are in a women's hospital ward together--all but one having hysterectomies. Lily Drucker has been ordered to stay in the hospital until her baby is born since she has had four prior miscarriages.</b></div>
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<b>Elizabeth is 41, divorced and with three daughters. Her former husband becomes engaged to be remarried in the course of the story. The others--a woman who keeps a boarding house for devout church members, and Sylvie, who has had a hard life even at the age of 25--are gradually revealed to us, along with some of their family and friends.</b></div>
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<b>And their "friends." By the novel's close it looks as if the story is meant to be a paean to women. Most of the men whom we get to know in any detail turn out to be far less than these women deserve. Elizabeth's former husband pilfers a probably valuable trinket from her household in her absence and has been generally cold and indifferent to her and their daughters. </b></div>
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<b>Their daughter Joanna, 17, has become enamored of Samuel, who is on drugs and pressing her to live in a commune without finishing her schooling.</b></div>
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<b>Elizabeth's childhood friend, Henry, who hopes to marry her (and whom she admits--after his death--she probably would have married), is a drinker and a constant bumbler at everything he attempts.</b></div>
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<b>Sylvie's Irish boyfriend isn't likely to turn out well in spite of having an uncle who is a priest. </b></div>
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<b>Lily's husband Kenneth seems hopelessly under his mother's control and inclined to ruin his chances by giving out more damaging information about himself than he needs to do.</b></div>
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<b>Then we have Mr. Maloney, Carstairs and Darcy, and Sylvie's brother Mickey, who was in a gang that harassed homosexuals and is probably in prison.</b></div>
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<b>The women, on the other hand, except for the over-controlling Mrs. Drucker, tend to be milder, less inclined to be duplicitous and manipulative, more attached to home and hearth. Above all, they are willing to trust men with whom they've become involved--and this trust is often their undoing. The ultimate in trust and forgiveness is Sylvie, but there is also Elizabeth, trusting her former husband and trusting her old friend Henry, and there is Lily, trusting her husband Kenneth, and there is Joanna, trusting Samuel, and, on the periphery, there is Pamela Vincent, trusting Elizabeth's former husband.</b></div>
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<b>There are glimmers of hope here and there, but n the end, it is still "Elizabeth alone, " and Trevor seems to be saying that it almost has to be.</b></div>
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11 January 2012<br />
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<strong><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">TRILLIN</span></span>, CALVIN</strong><br />
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<em><b> </b></em><br />
<em><span style="color: #38761d;"><b> TOO SOON TO TELL</b></span></em> (1995)<br />
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<b>A collection of highly amusing columns by humorist Calvin <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Trillin</span></span>, written between 1990 and 1995, on such topics as politics, restaurants, the younger generation, telephone area codes, and the Chinese claim to the invention of golf.</b></div>
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7 August 1998<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">FAMILY MAN</span></em></strong> (1998)<br />
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<b>This short book is a collection of essays about <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Trillin's</span></span> life with his wife and two daughters, spent in Greenwich Village, with summers in Nova <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Scotia</span></span>. As usual, the author is very funny.</b><br />
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29 October 2004<br />
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<b>TROLLOPE, ANTHONY</b><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="color: black;"><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">BARCHESTER TOWERS </b>(1857)</span><br />
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<b>This is perhaps Trollope's most-loved novel. Its characters are memorable: the delightful Eleanor Bold, daughter of the Reverend Harding; the horrid Reverend Mr. Obadiah Slope; and the formidable Mrs. Prowdy, wife of the Bishop--to name a few.</b></div>
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<b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">THE CLAVERINGS </b>(1867)<br />
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<b>Harry Clavering, the protagonist of this novel, is the only son of the Reverend Henry Clavering. The question is which woman will end up with Harry--Lady Julia Brabazon, who has loved Harry since before she married Lord Ongar as a practical measure and who is widowed at 26--or Florence Burton, 19, the only unmarried daughter remaining in the Burton household, who is engaged to Harry?</b></div>
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<b>Julia suffers for having initially married for money. By the end of the book she is widowed, deprived of the man she loves, feeling obliged not to use the money her late husband left her, and all but excluded from society, while the man she loves has spurned her (and her money) in favor of a prior commitment to another woman. That he never told Julia about his engagement even while he led her to believe he would marry her is treated as a bad fault on his part, but by the end this fault is forgotten, and he carries off all the trophies he needs: an unexpected inheritance—and the wife. Julia gets no man and is living with her morose widowed sister by the end.</b></div>
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<b>When Julia Brabazon wanted to give up her dead husband’s money and property except for a small income for her self-maintenance, she felt tainted by knowing she’d married for money without loving the man enough. Her other possible reasons for abhorring money are understandable, too, although they aren’t explicit in the novel: with money she attracted hangers-on who liked her money more than they liked her—Sophie Gordeloup, Count Pateroff, Archie Clavering, maybe even her beloved Harry—and she hated such motives even though, out of generosity, she clung to her money and estate for as long as she believed she could make Harry happy with them. The instant he vanished from her prospects, she was willing to give them all up—and, in effect, she did, declaring them worthless to her if she was to be all alone with her riches. She was willing to buy Harry if she had to. Julia must have known that so long as she had money, she would always have reason to doubt the motives of persons who befriended her—but with no money to spare, she could be free of such doubts.</b></div>
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<b>...There are subplots and unprincipled, duplicitous people who are up to no good in this novel, and it is absorbing reading.</b></div>
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2 February 1985<br />
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<i> </i><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">DOCTOR THORNE </b>(1858)<br />
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<b>This is the third of the six chronicles of Barsetshire. The plot centers around the honorable country doctor, Dr. Thorne, and his eligible niece, Mary.</b></div>
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<b>I disliked the way Trollope almost had to end the story: with Sir Louis’s death and Mary Thorne’s unexpectedly becoming an heiress and in effect the owner of the entire property mortgaged away by the father of Frank, the man who wants to marry her but whose whole family has been objecting that he must “marry money.” Yes, she does marry Frank, and it suddenly ceases to matter that she has no “birth” to recommend her, and all of the persons who so cruelly snubbed her before and even chucked her out are suddenly being very nice to her. </b></div>
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<b>I wouldn't have thought that Trollope could make this situation acceptable after having painted Mary in such glowing colors and made the De Corseys and Greshams so intolerable. But Trollope pulls it off. He must be one of the great realists of all time, for he does his string-pulling in such a cheerful, good-hearted way that you scarcely realize he must be laughing up his sleeve at the sort of greed that can inspire such total turnabouts in human behavior. It is as if he is fondly holding up a mirror to the world, laughing a trifle sardonically all the while and saying, “Look—here we are! Aren’t we absurd in our folly and in the transparency of our pretensions at being noble while actually being very grasping?” </b></div>
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<b>Towards the end he alludes to the fable of the fox without a tail and says there is no fox anywhere on earth who wouldn’t be overjoyed at acquiring a tail, no matter how much he might have claimed to be perfectly happy without one.</b></div>
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<b>Trollope exposes the emphasis on birth as a cloak disguising an emphasis on money. For all his seeming good nature and humor, there is considerable bitterness and cynicism in Trollope.</b></div>
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28 February 1985<br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1867)<br />
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<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b style="text-align: justify;">Josiah Crawley, the poor curate of Hogglestock, is <span style="font-family: inherit;">accused of embezzling. </span></b><b style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Almost everyone in the small community believes him guilty even though he has always had an excellent reputation as an honest, scholarly, “worthy” man. </b></span><br />
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<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">Trollope remarks, as the Reverend Josiah Crawley is being unjustly accused, assumed to be guilty without proof, and stripped of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>his job, with his entire family about to go under in disgrace, that the worst is always suspected of the poor.</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;">13 March 1985</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">PHINEAS FINN, THE IRISH MEMBER</span></b></em> (1869)</span><br />
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<b>In this novel it seems clear that Trollope may be an American democrat in the Tocquevillean sense. Maybe his mother’s travels in this country had their effect on him. He strikes some very hard blows at the British system of rank and privilege, undercutting his own “heroes” by exposing their self-deception and holding Parliament up to particular ridicule as an assemblage of men who are being kept busy doing nothing of any real consequence. </b></div>
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<b>But Lady Glencora is the biggest surprise, compared with the televised version in "The Pallisers" series on PBS. Instead of coming across as the perfectly correct, kind, and efficient lady par excellence, she actually conceals behind the correctness a vicious ambition to climb to ever-greater heights on the social ladder, coupled with a desire to wield power over everyone with whom she comes into contact—to say nothing of a violent anti-Semitism. And on this topic: while Mme. Gerstler is shown to be calculating in her way, Trollope puts much of what he surely regards as truth into her mouth, and she is clearly the victim of a far shrewder and more damaging kind of calculation thanks to Lady Glencora and her anti-Semitism—and it’s also apparent that Lady Glencora’s anti-Semitism is just a convenient mechanism for her to use as an excuse to conceal her real motives for quashing Mme Gerstler’s possible marriage to the Duke of Omnium, which are to protect her own and her family’s right to the Duke’s legacy. </b></div>
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<b>Then there is Lady Laura, and here Trollope takes a marriage apart, literally dissects it and leaves the pieces exposed for his readers to inspect in the glaring light of day. Lady Laura is surprising in her willingness to deceive her husband and to encourage her former lover, Phineas Finn, to keep visiting her in her husband’s absence—all of this in spite of mid-19th century respectability, which was far more severe than any we know now. Her husband is a cold, tyrannical man, to be sure, and his penchant for putting her and others through close interrogations, cross-questioning them on minute details of their behavior and motives, has to have been annoying. </b></div>
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<b>This was a thought-provoking and absorbing story.</b></div>
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6 May 1985<br />
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<i> </i><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">PHINEAS REDUX </b>(1874)<br />
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<b>This novel concerns two situations that show how easy it is for a woman to compromise her reputation even while she herself knows she is acting honorably…. </b></div>
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<b>One situation involves Mme Gerstler, a rich widow of about 30 who becomes friends with an aged Duke, a powerful man who never married, declines to become his wife and yet freely goes to visit him in the last few years of his life and is even present at his deathbed, at his request, when many relatives are excluded. To many she would appear to have been the Duke’s final mistress—and yet she wasn’t. But she was willing to risk public censure for the sake of this friendship. </b></div>
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<b>The other situation, explored in greater detail, involves Lady Laura, who appears in <em>Phineas Finn</em>. She marries a Mr. Kennedy even though she prefers Phineas, and she does so because she wants to bail her brother out of debt. She believes she will learn to love Mr. Kennedy, but he proves to be a cold person and a stern taskmaster with a suspicious nature. She often receives Phineas as a visitor over the years, with her husband not always around, but nobody ever regards the visits as improper at the time—and they are not, except insofar as any visit from an unattached man to a married woman in her husband’s absence would be considered improper. Eventually she tells Phineas of her intention to leave her husband. The conversation in no way presumes that Phineas is the cause of the separation. However, Mr. Kennedy later decides that she has “come under the influence” of Phineas Finn and tries to forbid him to visit her in Dresden, where she and her father have taken refuge, hoping to avoid any attempts by Mr. Kennedy to compel her to return to him. Mr. Kennedy argues that since he’s done nothing wrong, there is no reason on earth why his wife shouldn’t be forced to stay with him. When it is pointed out to him that she wasn’t happy as his wife, he explodes with the retort: “Who ever expects to be happy in this life? She’s asking too much if she thinks she has a right to be happy.” Then he writes a letter to a scroungy newspaper and makes these claims about Mr. Finn with the clear implication that Phineas and Lady Laura have been adulterous. </b></div>
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<b>Phineas prevents the publication of the article with a court injunction, but when he goes to Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy takes a shot at him. The newspaper gets hold of this story and with some clever distortions manages to suggest that Phineas and Lady Laura have been carrying on an affair. And all of this is based on his occasional social visits (conversation only) to her. It is pointed out that a man is known to be visiting a woman, anything at all might be happening during that visit.</b></div>
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<b>After the shot fired at Phineas by Lady Laura's enraged husband, Phineas, who hadn’t consulted the police from a desire to do the gentlemanly thing by Lady Laura and keep her name out of it, is criticized on several fronts and even suspected of wrongdoing himself because he kept the whole matter so quiet. In other words, if a person is wronged, he is expected to raise a ruckus about it, and if the ruckus isn’t forthcoming, the person might easily be suspected of being more sinning than sinned against.</b></div>
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<b>At one point Lady Laura says something like, “’You’re so suspicious—you’re worse than a Jew.’” </b></div>
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<b>Before giving up on Trollope here, maybe one has to know how to take him. What he puts into the mouths of his characters isn’t usually his viewpoint. In fact, he is satirizing just about everybody and every English institution. This remark by Lady Laura seems meant to show a side of her character—a narrow, provincial, bigoted side, an empty-headed side—much as Archie Bunker’s bigoted remarks on “All in the Family” are meant to show us a side of his character that we aren’t meant to find endearing.</b></div>
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18 May 1985<br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>THE PRIME MINISTER</em> </span></b>(1876)<br />
<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></i></b>
<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The Prime Minister</span></i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> is one of Trollope’s less satisfying books. It never gets off the ground, it verges on melodrama, and it drags.</span></b><br />
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2 July 1985<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i> </i><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON </b>(1864)</span><br />
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<strong>Here Trollope is showing his skill at undercutting his own characters, treating their faults and foibles with a clear, straightforward gaze but also with warmth. He exposes the shallowness and uselessness of much of the popular idea of romantic affection between two lovers. At times he comes close to saying that the amount of affection generated is often in direct proportion to what is to be gained economically from a particular match.</strong></div>
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<strong>One of the chief characters, Lily Dale, loves a man who becomes engaged to her, but then he discards her in favor of a richer woman—and even when Lily’s heartbreak has had time to wear off and another man comes along wanting to marry her, and the first man is married to his chosen woman, Lily declares that she still loves the first man.</strong></div>
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2 February 1985<em> </em><br />
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<strong><em> </em></strong><strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE WAY WE LIVE NOW </span> </em></strong>(1875)<br />
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<b>This is Trollope’s longest novel, containing intricate subplots. It should be noted that the non-Jewish characters are just as contemptible as the Jewish ones here, and in fact, anti-Jewish bigotry incurs the author's particular scorn.</b></div>
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<b>The story involves <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Melmotte</span></span>, an unscrupulous swindler and financier, who, on the brink of being exposed, kills himself. There is an American railway scheme, and one of the most memorable characters is Mrs. Winifred Hurtle, a "rough" American from the West who is rumored to have shot a man in Oregon but who turns out to be a good soul.</b></div>
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<b>Mr. Braggart, who is Jewish, is shown to be a far more decent person than the Christian woman he almost marries, and I enjoyed watching him ditch her in the end, when she so clearly regarded herself as above him all along.</b></div>
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21 January 2000<br />
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<strong>TROLLOPE, JOANNA</strong><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>A SPANISH LOVER</em> </span></b>(1993)<br />
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<b>Joanna Trollope has given us an absorbing novel about twin sisters who find that each has to differentiate herself from her twin even in their thirties. Lizzie is married with four children, and she and her husband have a successful business. Frances has never married, then suddenly decides to start a travel business. She goes to Spain as part of this business, meets a Spanish man and falls in love.</b></div>
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<b>So far, it seems to be a standard soap-opera-level plot. But then the author introduces some complications. As Frances's life begins to get romantic and exciting, Lizzie's takes a downturn. The business goes into a slump, due partly to the family's burden of debt, and they lose their house.</b></div>
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<b>Frances, meanwhile, runs into a snag with her lover, who is still married to a woman who would not dream of divorcing him. The lover declares that if Frances should get pregnant, everything will be over between the two of them. He firmly believes that once a woman becomes a mother, she loses all interest in the man.</b></div>
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<b>Frances apparently refuses to believe this. She deceives her lover by tossing her birth control pills into the trash--and becomes pregnant.</b></div>
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<b>At this point the reader may strongly suspect that we're in for a sugary-sweet happy ending: crusty Spanish lover turns out to be all warm and fuzzy about kids and embraces fatherhood and Frances forever after.</b></div>
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<b>But Joanna Trollope is a better writer than that. She refuses to tie up all of the loose ends neatly.</b></div>
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<b>She writes gracefully, and is particularly skilful in portraying the actions and speech of her child characters.</b></div>
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27 August 2006<br />
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<b> </b><em style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;">THE BEST OF FRIENDS</span></em> (1995)<br />
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<strong>Two married couples find their lives intertwined in new ways after one of the husbands (Fergus) declares his intention to move out on his wife and daughter, Gina and Sophie, who is 14. Gina has known the other husband (Lawrence) since they were in their teens, and they decide that they have always loved each other and want to be together from now on. Gina, who used to live in France and enjoyed being there, wants to return to France, with or without her daughter Sophie, who it turns out won't go.</strong></div>
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<strong>The only person in this foursome who doesn't show a willingness to change situations is Lawrence's wife, Hilary, the mother of three teenaged boys. Sophie, distraught about so much upheaval in her life, jumps into a brief fling with George, the oldest of the three boys. On top of her other worries, she is concerned about a possible pregnancy.</strong></div>
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<strong>There is also Gina's grandmother, Vi, who is 80 and who serves as a voice of reason when others are coming apart at the seams.</strong></div>
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<strong>How these situations are resolved makes for an absorbing story, well told. Some of Joanna Trollope's characters are a bit undifferentiated from one another, however. The three boys seem interchangeable except for their age differences. Similarly, the two husbands, Lawrence and Fergus, don't seem so very different from one another. But the other characters stand on their own, speaking with their unique voices.</strong></div>
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<strong>Without pointing a moral, the author has succeeded in showing how often some of us are willing to pursue our own idea of happiness while failing to think about the harm we're inflicting on others in the process.</strong></div>
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16 November 2011<br />
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<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE BRASS DOLPHIN</span></strong></em> (1997)<br />
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<b>This pleasant but somewhat predictable short novel by Joanna Trollope (who also writes as Caroline Harvey), a direct descendant of novelist Anthony Trollope, held my interest from start to finish. I say "pleasant" although the story makes no attempt at prettifying the effects of World War II on Malta. The characters suffer some catastrophic changes in their lives, and the author is no romantic about war and its turmoil. She could have seen war as a great leveller of class differences, but she doesn't.</b></div>
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<b>The central character is Lila, a young English woman who finds herself transported--with her indigent artist father--to Malta, more or less by necessity, in 1938. The ensuing events involve the Second World War to a considerable extent. In the seven years that elapse while the novel's action unfolds, Lila encounters three possible lovers, two of them aristocrats. The economic gap between the nobility and herself is all but unbridgeable, but the author isn't content with this easy way out of the problem of finding a suitable partner for Lila. She raises more complex issues, and this is where the novel takes a surprising turn--when Lila makes some startling discoveries about Anton, the lover for whom she has waited for seven years. It would be spoiling the story to reveal any more of its plot. But there are almost no unlikable characters on this stage. They shine with a goodness that harks back to the radiance of many of Anthony Trollope's characters.</b></div>
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<b>The author ties up the loose ends in the concluding part so that all characters have been taken care of, money has fallen fortuitously into the hands of those who most need it, and the result is a satisfying sense of a story well told by a thoughtful and conscientious writer.</b></div>
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20 September 2002<br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN</em> </span></b>(1998)<br />
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<b>This novel has quite a few characters whose lives have become intertwined by the passage of time and the effects of divorce, death, and remarriage.</b></div>
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<b>Tom's wife died years ago, and his two children by that marriage, now in their 20s, are still struggling with their attempts to enshrine their dead mother in their memories--an effort that, on the daughter Dale's part, will turn out to be out of control.</b></div>
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<b>Tom has married again--to Josie, who has just left the marriage with their son Rufus (8), for Matthew. Matthew, in turn, comes from a marriage to Nadine and has three children who are determined to dislike Josie. Tom soon hooks up with Elizabeth Brown, who immediately has to deal with Rufus and Tom's two grown children.</b></div>
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<b>Most of these people are pliable and agreeable enough to want the new arrangements to work. The fly in the ointment is primarily Nadine--and to a lesser extent Tom's daughter Dale, both of whom are revealed as troubled by inner demons.</b></div>
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<b>Clearly, these are people for whom money isn't a problem. They buy houses without a thought. When Rufus asks his new stepmother Elizabeth if he could have a new red rug for his room, her reply is "I don't see why not." Bingo! The red rug materializes.</b></div>
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<b>The way in which the children are cajoled into accepting the changes in their lives isn't the point of the story, but the cajoling is going on, at least in the background. Josie, whose big problem is Matthew's oldest child, Becky, and who has forbidden smoking, buys Becky some cigarettes and gives them to her without being asked to do so, for instance--but at this point Becky's prior life with her mother Nadine has just been disclosed as a living hell, with Becky wanting to assume far more responsibility for her mother than any 15-year-old should have to bear. Still...isn't Josie more or less telling Becky that from now on anything Becky wants is OK, even cigarettes?</b></div>
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<b>This is a thoughtful book. Most of the characters are infused with a fundamental kindness and warm-heartedness. This satisfying story never takes a wrong turn or strikes a false note. One child occasionally says things that seem wise beyond his years, but that is a minor complaint.</b></div>
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<b>The story sheds light on the difficulties involved in blending families that are being reshuffled after divorce or remarriage or both. Those difficulties are extreme. Joanna Trollope has done the world a service by pointing out in specific detail some of the situations that arise. More than that, she's told an absorbing story well.</b></div>
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4 November 2012</div>
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">FRIDAY NIGHTS</span></b></em> (2008)<br />
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<b>An older retired woman, Eleanor, who used to work in social services, is lonely and reaches out to a number of women in the neighborhood, assembling them for regular Friday night get-togethers. As might have been predicted, the guests, who are all considerably younger than Eleanor, are moving on to other situations--leaving Eleanor sadly reconciled to the way life is.</b></div>
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<b>As the story unfolds, we get to know the women and their husbands and boy friends and children. Trollope is particularly adept in her portrayal of children--the things they do and say.</b></div>
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<b>A new element is introduced into this setting when Paula, a single mom to all intents and purposes, is swept off her feet by Jackson, a man who seems too good to be true. It soon turns out that he has been full of promise but hasn't been able to deliver--though he has captivated several women with his aloof reticent self-confidence. His appearance on the scene, however brief, permanently alters the dynamics of Eleanor's social group.</b></div>
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<b>Another new element comes into the picture shortly after the advent of Jackson--in the form of another man, Derek, who also seems almost too good to be true as a companion for Lindsay, a widowed single mom. Derek isn't shown in nearly as much detail as Jackson. It is as if he's been tossed into the cast to balance the scales.</b></div>
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<b>Trollope has a sharp eye for the interactions among people in today's world, especially in scenes such as an exchange between one of the women who is buying a bouquet of freesias and a surly floral shopkeeper. Time and again Trollope gets these exchanges just right.</b></div>
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<b>Sometimes there is evidence of sloppy writing ("clothes to be leisured in" was particularly grating) but Joanna Trollope--judging from this book--strikes me as a writer who towers over most others on the scene.</b></div>
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30 November 2010<br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">MARRYING THE MISTRESS </span></b></em>(2000)<br />
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<b>In this novel about a 62-year-old judge who has had a mistress young enough to be his daughter for seven years, Joanna Trollope may have cluttered the stage with too many characters. The novel seems to be doing too much.</b></div>
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<b>In spanning three generations and expecting the reader to be interested enough to follow the strands of the story for the characters in all three, the author hasn't fleshed out her characters fully enough. Simon Stockdale often seems like a younger version of his father, Guy, for instance.</b></div>
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<b>The reader can probably see very plainly that when Simon allows his mother to dictate that he will oversee her finances in connection with her upcoming divorce from Guy, Simon has made a serious mistake. But it takes almost the entire novel for Simon to realize this.</b></div>
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<b>The novel has its weaknesses, but in her attention to detail and her excellent pacing of the narrative, Joanna Trollope sustains the reader's interest throughout. Or at least she sustained this reader's interest.</b></div>
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<b>A carping footnote: Sometimes there are signs of sloppy writing: <em>those kind of men.</em></b></div>
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21 December 2010<br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">DAUGHTERS-IN-LAW</span></b></em> (2011)<br />
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<b>Joanna Trollope scores again with this story about three daughters-in-law--married to the three sons of Rachel and Antony Brinkley. One problem is that Rachel is too involved in her sons' lives, too fond of Grandmotherhood as an ideal.</b></div>
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<b>Ralph is the most troubling son since has chucked a good job in Singapore and has a tendency to drink too much--and has married Petra, a rootless waif who happened to have a genuine artistic talent so pronounced that Antony--a bird artist--took her under his wing.</b></div>
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<b>The Brinkley family has adopted Petra and been kind to her, and now she and Ralph have two small boys, a three-year-old and a baby under the age of a year.</b></div>
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<b>By happenstance Petra meets Steve, a caretaker at a wildlife preserve, and when Ralph is overcome by his sense of a need to support his family and takes a job in remote London, Petra balks and refuses to move away from the sea, which she loves. Regarding Ralph as having betrayed everything she believed they as a couple stood for--a wilder and more carefree life, free of the shackles of corporate regulation--she is attracted to Steve and opts to spend time with him. One of Steve's strong points is that he is exceptionally skilful with the children and likes them.</b></div>
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<b>When the family members perceive this impasse and realize that they are about to witness the disintegration of Ralph and Petra's marriage, some major reshuffling occurs, and it is mostly because the other two daughters-in-law are willing to take some initiative that the reshuffling is as successful as it is.</b></div>
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<b>Ralph is persuaded to give up his ideas of wresting custody of the children from Petra, and Petra comes up with a compromise that will enable them to save their marriage.</b></div>
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<b>This is a story about strong-willed people coming into conflict with one another. In an interview Joanna Trollope has stated that she likes to portray strong women, and she has certainly shown them here--there is the quiet strength of Sigird, the Swedish daughter-in-law, and the obstinacy of Rachel, as well as the surprising strength shown by Petra.</b></div>
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<b>The author has also stated that she didn't intend for Steve to be seen as evil, and I would say that she succeeded here as well. Steve is used to women who are at his beck and call, and he has a temper. Joanna Trollope says that to have made him evil would have been unrealistic. She allows as how there are truly evil people in the world--but most of us are just shades of gray.</b></div>
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<b>Trollope's characters have a compassion and delicacy that are rare in modern fiction. And they are interesting and often humorous.</b></div>
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8 January 2013<br />
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<br /><b>TRUMP, MARY L.</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #45818e;">TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: HOW MY FAMILY CREATED THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS MAN</span></i> (2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The phenomenon of Donald Trump's mass appeal has always been subject to correctives emanating from the doubters, the nay-sayers, those on the sidelines taking a critical view. Surely--his adversaries reasoned--among the many people Trump has summarily fired there will be some who will be disgruntled enough to start leaking damaging information about him.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>There have been those. But here we have something even better: instead of a fired employee, the author of this book is Donald Trump's niece--the daughter of a now-dead brother who was done out of his share of a substantial family fortune by Donald's machinations.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>To be sure, such a niece would have an axe to grind, and grind it she does. However, it is such a clearly legitimate axe that any sensible reader will keep reading. This is a reflective, well-thought-out account of Mary Trump's dealings with and recollections of her uncle.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>She hasn't had much personal interaction with him for decades but she has paid attention to his rise to power. And what she tells us about his earlier years adds up to compelling evidence that this man has always admired success whether it's achieved through chicanery or outright dishonest, and that he hasn't balked at using whatever means he could find to achieve goals he had set for himself.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Perhaps aided by her training and experience in psychology, Mary Trump focuses on what drives Donald Trump and finds him to be someone without a moral compass. She finds it frightening that so much power was suddenly put into his hands.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Fortunately for this country, there seem to be quite a few others who share her well-founded fears.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div>7 February 2021</div><div><br /></div><div>________________________</div><div>
<b>TRUSS, LYNNE</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>TALK TO THE HAND: THE UTTER BLOODY RUDENESS OF THE WORLD, OR SIX GOOD REASONS TO STAY HOME AND BOLT THE DOOR</em> </span></b>(2005)<br />
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<b>This short book by the author of <em>Eats, Shoots and Leaves</em> (which I regret to say I haven't read) has much to say. It is frankly a rant, but there are at least a few people still around who think that manners have a very valuable social function--and that we have abandoned them at our peril.</b></div>
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<b>Lynne Truss is talking about the UK but her remarks are just as valid for the US--and quite possibly some other areas of the world as well. She is particularly disturbed by the overuse of the F word in recent years, as in the snarled "Fuck off!" so often directed at a person who is perceived as annoying.</b></div>
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<b>She is also worried about skateboarders and the dangers they present to pedestrians, mobile phones and the elimination of privacy--as well as the rude ways in which they are now used, and about an increasing tendency toward regarding other people as merely in one's way.</b></div>
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<b>It comes down to a greater emphasis on the self than has ever before occurred in human history--and modern technology has aided this self-absorption to the point where it is almost the order of the day.</b></div>
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<b>Bravo to this author for going to the trouble of speaking out against these trends. She has written a helpful, informative, and funny book.</b></div>
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23 May 2010<br />
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<strong>TUR, KATY</strong><br />
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<strong> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">UNBELIEVABLE: MY FRONT-ROW SEAT TO THE CRAZIEST CAMPAIGN IN AMERICAN HISTORY</span></i> (2017)</strong><br />
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<strong>Katy Tur has been an MSNBC reporter, and this is her account of her assignment to cover Donald Trump's campaign for President in the 2016 election.</strong></div>
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<strong>It is short but interesting. Mainly there are episodes where Trump seems to have been singling her out among a group of assembled reporters in a way that looks like harassment. Tur records some of the more attention-getting moments of the Trump campaign but offers little in the way of historical perspective or analysis.</strong></div>
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<strong>12 January 2020</strong><br />
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<strong>TWAIN, MARK</strong><br />
<strong>--</strong>see <strong>CLEMENS, SAMUEL L</strong>.<br />
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<strong>TYLER, ANNE </strong><br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">DIGGING TO AMERICA</span></b></em> (2006)<br />
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<b>Anne Tyler's husband was an Iranian, and this fact probably explains how this novel happens to have an Iranian-American family at its center. It contains a wealth of cultural knowledge about Iranians. </b></div>
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<b>A "typical" American family, the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Donaldsons</span>, meet the Iranian family at the airport when both are waiting to welcome the arrival of their Korean-born adopted babies, both girls. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Bitsy</span> Donaldson, an aggressively politically correct mom with a tendency to be very controlling, sees many advantages in keeping this acquaintance alive and turning it into a lasting friendship, and so we follow the two families for the next five years--long enough for the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Donaldsons</span> to have adopted a second Korean daughter.</b></div>
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<b>The story may be too full of the various relatives of the two families who are also very much on the scene--so much so that it is often difficult to keep track of who is who. </b><br />
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<b>As the story is unfolding, the author manages to skewer American mothers who insist on having everything their way, even when it's wrongheaded, as when <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Bitsy</span> decides that the younger daughter must give up her pacifier--and stages a party where over 40 balloons, each attached to one of the child's many pacifiers, are launched into the sky, and the event is topped off with a handsome gift for the child.</b></div>
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<b>Though not very deep and quite possibly "just" a woman's novel, this story was absorbing and well told. The character of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Maryam</span>, the Iranian <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Sami's</span> mother and a widow, is delineated carefully and understandingly, and it is her story that ultimately takes center stage.</b></div>
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22 February 2009<br />
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<strong><em><span style="color: #38761d;"> EARTHLY POSSESSIONS </span></em></strong>(1977)<br />
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<b>I liked this novel considerably more than I've liked other novels by this author that I've read. It is told in the first person by Charlotte, who (like the author herself) was born in 1941. The novel bounces back and forth between the present--1976--when Charlotte, all set to leave her husband, gets abducted at gunpoint during a bank robbery by a young man--and the past leading up to this event.</b></div>
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<b>Charlotte has married "the boy next door," who happens to be one of four boys, and eventually his three brothers are also occupying Charlotte's household, with her husband having been "called" to the ministry of a small evangelical Christian church.</b></div>
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<b>She has two children--a daughter and, later, an adopted boy. The children are given very sketchy treatment as assorted adults crowd into the household--not just the three brothers but also a couple of "strays" who have been given a permanent home in the preacher's house.</b></div>
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<b>Against this background there is the young man, who--somewhat unbelievably--manages to hold Charlotte hostage while he steals a car and travels to Florida, where he picks up his girl friend, pregnant with their baby, from a home for unwed mothers.</b></div>
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<b>There is enjoyable witty dialogue in this story, and it was an absorbing story. The author should be praised for not allowing the story to take the predictable turn--Charlotte does not climb into bed with the young abductor. In fact, the book is refreshingly free of explicit sex scenes, which have become tiresome in fiction these days--and seem all too often of being merely a means for authors to show off their worldly experience to readers who may have had some lingering doubts about it.</b></div>
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7 January 2009<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;"> CELESTIAL NAVIGATION </b>(1974)</div>
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<b>A novel spanning the years between 1960 and 1973, during which Jeremy, an abstracted artist and mama's boy of 38, inherits his mother’s boarding house, and marries one of the boarders, a separated woman of 22 with a four-year-old daughter, after the man for whom she left her husband returns to his wife and her own husband refuses to grant her a divorce. Jeremy and Mary then produce five more children.</b></div>
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<b>When the absent-minded Jeremy forgets that they are about to be married belatedly, Mary moves out with the children, borrowing a cabin belonging to Bryan, Jeremy’s agent. Mary and the six children manage in this somewhat rustic milieu--with considerable help from Bryan--and eventually Jeremy turns up (months later), begging Mary to return. Two years later she still has not gone back, and Jeremy is still in the boarding house with his roomers.</b></div>
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<b>The point of this book may be that a woman who tries to demonstrate that men are unnecessary in her life cycle of bearing and raising children is egotistical and cruel.</b></div>
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20 November 1999<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><b style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;"> MORGAN'S PASSING </b>(1980)<br />
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<strong><b>The author didn't seem to know just what she wanted to do with these characters: Morgan, the protagonist, starts as a Walter Mitty-like man who is fond of impromptu disguises and impersonations but who ends up middle-aged and remarried, after fathering seven daughters by his first wife. The household also includes Morgan's mother and sister and dog.</b></strong></div>
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<b>Morgan becomes fascinated with the young puppeteer couple whose baby he delivers by impersonating a "doctor in the house," and he eventually marries this baby's mother while Leon, the father, pursues worldly success, surprisingly. The child, Gina, is rather cavalierly given up by her mother and Morgan because Leon will supposedly provide a "better" (= more prosperous) environment for her.</b></div>
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<b>This book is all wrong--not just morally but also in terms of the internal consistency of its characters.</b></div>
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28 October 1999<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">LADDER OF YEARS</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A doctor's wife abruptly walks away from her husband and children and makes a new life in another town, getting a job as housekeeper for a divorced man with a son. Years pass, but ultimately Delia returns to her original family (surprise!). The ending is frustrating because the divorced man and his son, about both of whom we have learned to care, are left dangling, with no explanation given.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
22 July 1998<br />
<br /></div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121226082905776522005-06-21T20:34:00.000-07:002016-03-02T12:18:24.288-08:00U<strong>UPDIKE,JOHN<br /><em><br /></em></strong><br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">RABBIT, RUN</span> (1960)<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><b>This novel is about a self-indulgent young man whose wife has a drinking problem and is pregnant with a second child.. Hubbie leaves to shack up with a callgirl, who gets pregnant. The wife has the baby but drowns the infant in the bathtub while she is at home drunk.</b></strong></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story has much Sturm und Drang and too many passages that are overwritten (in a Faulknerian mode).</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
1 July 1999<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> RABBIT REDUX</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1971)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It is probably best to read the <em>Rabbit</em> books in the right order, not as I have done. This may be the climactic novel in the series, although the death of the baby in the previous novel was dramatic enough to serve as a focus for future events, too. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Still, it is in <em>Rabbit Redux</em> that racial questions are in the foreground, and we see Harry Angstrom leaning over backwards to "tolerate" Skeeter, the young black man who imposes himself and his lectures and dogmatism on Rabbit and his son Nelson, as well as on Jill, the young woman whom Rabbit has "rescued" at a local bar and brought home with him to live. She is only a few years older than his son Nelson and of course much younger than Rabbit.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story ends in tragedy, with the Angstrom house destroyed by fire and Jill dead in the conflagration. Here is where Updike's storytelling skill seems to fail. Too little is made of Jill's death. How is it that Harry's wife--separated from him but living in the same town and in contact with Harry's parents at least, as well as able to read the local newspaper--doesn't even know that Jill has died in the fire when she talks to Harry later?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>I have other quibbles with this book. The sex scenes are superabundant in descriptive detail, and every time I get the feeling that I'm looking through the keyhole at someone's bedroom scene that was assumed to be private. But I'm out of step with the times, clearly.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The character of Skeeter is superbly drawn. Skeeter lives and has no false notes. He is a black revolutionary like many another, but he is not just stereotypical.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Updike has served up a slice of 1969 America, preserved for all to see. What stands out starkly in this portrait of upper-middle-class suburbia is the racial hostility and fear. This needed to be shown in all its ugliness.</b></div>
<br />
24 March 2005<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">RABBIT IS RICH</span></em></strong> (1981)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Harry Angstrom is middle-aged and successful in the car dealership he has taken over from his late father-in-law. Living in his mother-in-law's house with his wife, he finds that he often has to let the two women determine what goes on in the business.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The most interesting aspect of this <em>Rabbit </em>novel is the relationship between Harry and his son. The author has father-son tensions down pat here--the father's tendency to expect too much of his son, the son's chafing at the bit in his conviction that his new ideas for the business are winners.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The people in the novel swap bed partners, and they are people for whom lust is almost a parlor game. They are also people who speak of "spicks" and "jigaboos." The time is 1979-1980, but even then these prejudices were typical of many people in the United States. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a lot of satire in this novel. Harry Angstrom and his family and friends are being mocked here, up and down and sideways. They are shown to be materialistic, shallow, and destructive. Harry's son Nelson and the woman he has to marry are the pitiable victims in these messy, tangled lives.</b></div>
<br />
9 November 2004<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">RABBIT AT REST</span></em></strong> (1990)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Perhaps a reader who hasn't read all of the <em>Rabbit</em> novels has not earned a right to pass judgment on this one--the novel where Harry Angstrom (Rabbit) dies. However, as a reader who doesn't quite grasp the immense popularity of Updike's fiction, I'd like to remark that one reason for the popularity has to be that it is so often larded with explicit sexual descriptions. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Some of the comments in this novel--Rabbit's observations on the passing scene, for instance--are amusing and pointed, but this novel of Updike's will need considerable annotation in a few years simply because of its all-too-frequent use of brand-names. To be sure, brand-names are a part of American culture nowadays, but do we have to have them thrown at us so liberally when we read a novel?</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Still, there are some poignant and sad moments in this story, particularly as we see Rabbit struggling to come to terms with aging and trying--much too hard--to belong somewhere again. </b></div>
<br />
25 February 2004wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121226326558996042005-06-20T20:41:00.001-07:002023-02-15T18:09:05.962-08:00V<div><strong>VAN IPEREN, ROXANE</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">THE SISTERS OF AUSCHWITZ: THE TRUE STORY OF TWO JEWISH SISTERS' RESISTANCE IN THE HEART OF NAZI TERRITORY</span></i> (2018; 2020)</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Janny and Lien Brilleslijper were two Jewish sisters who ingeniously managed to contrive ways of sheltering Jewish refugees who were destined for Hitler's concentration camps, and this is their story. Somewhat miraculously, both sisters survived the camps--and, at Bergen Belsen, witnessed the tragic deaths of Anne Frank and her sister Margot.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong>I am probably not qualified to say much more about this book as, in recorded form, it was difficult to follow, mainly because so many Dutch names of people and places were given but were difficult for a nonspeaker of Dutch to grasp.</strong></div><div><strong><br /></strong></div><div><strong>15 February 2023</strong></div><div><strong>________________________________</strong></div><div><strong> </strong></div><strong><div><strong><br /></strong></div>VON ARNIM, ELIZABETH</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTQCgt00CgP6NNaq3eDeN19pkzSJP8OPBtW9u6aOHiFmFWJje-PQ99TzrM" /></div>
<strong>
<em> </em></strong><br />
<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b><span style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN</span> (1898)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Though called a novel, this work is probably mainly autobiographical. It tells about an Englishwoman married to a German count and how she finds delight in a garden.</b></div>
<br />
16 September 1998<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">ENCHANTED APRIL</span></em></strong> (1922)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #38761d;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a delightful novel about two married English women who decide to rent a castle in Italy for a month, in order to get away from their husbands and responsibilities for a while. They are obliged to accept two more women at the castle, and the husbands turn up, after all, but the effect is a sunny, charming, witty novel. Its plot is fairly predictable, but the author's originality saves the story from being "ordinary." It was made into an excellent movie, too.</b></div>
<br />
18 March 2004<br />
___________________<br />
<br />
<strong>VONNEGUT, KURT</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/libapps/accounts/12839/images/STL14KURT_336623k.jpg" /></div>
<br />
<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT AND OTHER NEW AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS ON WAR AND PEACE</span></em> </strong> (2008)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This brief collection of assorted Vonnegut works was published posthumously, with an introduction by the author's son Mark Vonnegut.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The works include a letter to his family written shortly after his release from a World War 2 POW camp, telling about the bombing of Dresden--which eventually became the topic for his celebrated novel <em>Slaughterhouse-Five.</em></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>In some of the pieces he sounds almost preachy and shrill, but that is the only objection I can think of to make about this valuable addition to the Vonnegut collection. And some people can get away with sounding almost preachy and shrill now and then. He's one of them.</strong></div>
<br />
10 October 2010<br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX: UNCOLLECTED SHORT FICTION</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a collection of a few very short stories, originally published in <em>Collier's</em>, <em>Redbook</em>, <em>Cosmopolitan</em>, and other periodicals in the 1950s. The stories are formulaic and slight, for the most part, but interesting nonetheless.</b></div>
<br />
5 December 2003<br />
<br />
<em><strong> <span style="color: #38761d;">MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY</span></strong></em><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2005)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Vonnegut appears to have written this short collection of very short pieces when he was 82. The Vonnegut bite is still there.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Unfortunately, a glance at <a href="http://www.vonnegut.com/">http://www.vonnegut.com/</a> reveals that the author's heirs are doing quite a business selling a Vonnegut sculpture in a limited edition (called 'Waspwaist") for $9,000 apiece, T shirts with Vonnegut references on them, and silkscreen prints in limited editions at $375 each.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It's unfortunate when a good writer is being turned into a cult and an industry.</b></div>
<br />
23 July 2008<br />
<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">WELCOME </span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"><strong><em>TO THE MONKEY HOUSE</em></strong> </span>(1968)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>A collection of Vonnegut's short stories (1950-1968). Many of them, like "Harrison Bergeron," are predictable and slight, and a reader might finish this book with the strong conviction that Vonnegut is much better at novels than short stories.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The final story may be the most memorable--"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," which shows a future where people can live as long as they want. The story focuses on one family, where Gramps, the oldest, is able to order everyone else around, and the rest of the family must sleep in the hall while Gramps has the only bedroom and bed. The story amounts to a chilling caution about the consequences of overpopulation in the world.</b></div>
<br />
8 October 2006<br />
<br />
<br />wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121226764630057112005-06-19T20:45:00.006-07:002024-02-19T11:54:14.803-08:00W<strong>WAKEFIELD, DAN<br />
<em> </em></strong><br />
<em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">NEW YORK IN THE '50S</span> </em>(1999)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<b></b><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><b>The author’s interesting recollections of New York in the fifties, when he was writing for <em>The Nation</em>. He includes reminiscences of Calvin Trillin, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Meg Greenfield, and Norman Mailer. </b></b></div>
<b>
</b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><b><br /></b></b></div>
<b>
</b>
6 May 1999<br />
_______________________________<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>WALDMAN, MICHAEL</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> </b><i style="color: #38761d; font-weight: bold;">THE SECOND AMENDMENT: A BIOGRAPHY </i>(2014)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Written by a lawyer, this balanced account of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes a strong case for reconsidering the changes that have taken place between the time when it was written and the present.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author explains how an "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution has been in vogue recently--and demonstrates how sticking closely to the original intention of the framers, insofar as that can ever be determined, is not going to produce results that will benefit our world as it is today.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Waldman piles up considerable evidence to show that (a) firearms ownership was understood in the 18th century to be the prerogative and the duty of every white man in a community, as a means of defending that community (the "well-regulated militia"), (b) those firearms were very carefully controlled and monitored, and (c) since the 18th century, firearms have changed far beyond the scope of anyone's imagination.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Common sense would seem to dictate that weapons as lethal as today's firearms are should never be anywhere near children--or near adults whose ability to use them properly (and that would be most adults in the opinion of many) is open to question, and yet now this country is seeing a relaxation of its gun laws.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Much of the discussion in this book revolves around the 2008 Supreme Court Decision in <i>Heller v. District of Columbia</i> stating</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;"> that the Second Amendment</span><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;"> guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia</span><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;"> and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home. It was the first Supreme Court case to explore the meaning of the Second Amendment</span><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;"> since </span><em style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Asap, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">United States</em><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;"> v. </span><em style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Asap, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Miller</em><span face=""asap" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25.6px;">(1939). [from the Encyclopedica Britannica Website]</span></b></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Waldman maintains that the Heller decision, an instance where the "originalist" interpretation prevailed, has done incalculable damage and badly muddied the waters in terms of a clearer understanding of the Second Amendment.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He points out that the National Rifle Association and other powerful pro-gun interest groups have repeatedly brought pressure to bear on legislators, using deceptive tactics.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>On this hot-button issue it is difficult for any author to remain objective but my impression is that Waldman has tried to be fair and present both sides of the dispute even though it is clear that he himself doesn't believe that every citizen has a right to own a gun.</b></div>
<br />
6 March 2016<br />
<br />
_______________________<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>WALKER, REBECCA</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BLACK, WHITE, AND JEWISH: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SHIFTING SELF</span> </em></strong>(2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is the daughter of the well-known author Alice Walker, who wrote the novel <em>The Color Purple</em>. Rebecca Walker's father is a lawyer who was active in the Southern civil rights movement. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an interesting autobiography, bringing Rebecca's life up to early adulthood. She focuses on the difficulties she has faced as a person of mixed racial background--and as a child of divorce.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>She was ensnared in a divorce settlement that stipulated that she spend two years with one parent, then two years with the other, alternating back and forth between two geographical locations throughout her childhood. This must have made for transitory relationships with friends and schools.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Looking at the facts of her life as she presents them, any reader would have to acknowledge that she has grounds for complaining--and yet this is not a complaining whine of a book. She never criticizes her parents. But they seem to have developed an indifference towards her as time went on that borders on neglect. Her father remarried and started a new family, and her mother became a famous writer--increasingly inaccessible to her daughter, one feels.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In general, this is a well-written book, though I grew impatient with the author's practice of taking one sentence and repeating it anywhere from 15 to 40 times--a device that seems to serve as a way of making a transition from one chapter to another.</b></div>
<br />
16 August 2007<br />
_____________________________ <br />
<br />
<b>WALLRAFF, BARBARA</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">WORD COURT: WHEREIN VERBAL VIRTUE IS REWARDED, CRIMES AGAINST THE LANGUAGE ARE PUNISHED, AND POETIC JUSTICE IS DONE</span></b></em><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author has been writing a column on English grammar and usage for <em>The Atlantic</em> for some years, and this book is a collection of some of her columns, which include questions from readers and her replies.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Her readers seem to be far more inclined to be prescriptive about grammar and usage matters than she is. She takes a much more permissive approach than most of the letter-writers, often coming down in favor of a belief that in this ever-changing language, just about anything goes.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Not always, though, and her views seem sensible and logical. However, among the references she finds most useful she cites the original edition of H. L. Mencken's <em>American Language</em>, which appeared in the 1930s, and fails to mention the updated 4th edition (1963), edited by Raven I. McDavid. Since this new edition was widely praised among scholars in the field of dialectology, this omission seems odd.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
3 July 2012<br />
___________________________________<br />
<b><br />WARD, VICKY</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">KUSHNER, INC.: GREED. AMBITION. CORRUPTION. THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF JARED KUSHNER AND IVANKA TRUMP</span></i> (2019)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have played a far more important role in the Trump Presidency than many thought justified in light of their almost nonexistent qualifications, and this book demonstrates their incompetence and their appallingly substantial power.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>However, there are many quotations that are given without a reference or source. It looks as if many of the persons being quoted did not want their identities revealed, but the omission of identifying material dilutes the value of the material being quoted.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>16 April 2022</b></div><div><b>___________________________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b>
<b>WARREN, ELIZABETH</b><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTjqUvCZtsivoGg2nDztG5LkCASU4kC0LtX0mLWaea9jlQXusVB" /></div>
<b> </b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
<b><i><br /></i></b>
<b><i> <span style="color: #38761d;">A FIGHTING CHANCE</span></i></b><span style="color: #38761d;"> (</span>2014)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>For decades Elizabeth Warren has been fighting for the interests of ordinary Americans, the people who are often hardest hit by the predatory practices of banks and large corporations. In this book she tells her life story, with an emphasis on how she developed her zeal for defending and insuring the rights of consumers.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It hasn't always been easy for her. Obstructionist tactics have been used against her by politicians and lobbyists representing the entrenched interests of the powerful banking industry. She doesn't whine about having been victimized repeatedly but what comes through in her book is that changing or designing legislation and organizing teams of people who will support and promote it are jobs that take patience and perseverance--and toughness.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There was a time when she was attacked for having falsely claimed Native American ancestry in order to gain an advantage academically. Though she doesn't come up with definitive proof of her Native American background, she makes a very persuasive case for it--and unequivocally states that she never used it for her own advancement.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>While giving details about her own life and career, the book also provides some excellent discussion of the appallingly powerful banking industry--the banks that have been "too big to fail" have also been "too big to jail," as she puts it.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Moreover, this recorded book was narrated by the author herself. If she blows her own horn sometimes in this book, she's one of the few people on the contemporary scene who probably ought to be blowing her own horn even louder. More power to her.</b></div>
<br />
18 October 2015<br />
______________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>WATKINS, MEL</strong><br />
<strong><em><br /></em></strong>
<strong>
<em> <span style="color: #38761d;">DANCING WITH STRANGERS: A MEMOIR</span></em></strong> (1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These are the recollections of a black man who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1940s-1950s and who eventually became a writer for the <em>New</em> <em>York Times</em>. His account of life as a college student and fraternity brother at Colgate University is revealing.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>He provides excellent commentary on the race dilemma in the U.S. Watkins believes that "race" is not a valid concept and should be abandoned.</b></div>
<br />
16 June 2000<br />
_______________________________________________<br />
<br />
WEBB, MARY<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRCj_dvC16QUZ6ryOTNmnv64894nwPBS6LMj3e1N2gimMenhkLS4Q" /></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">GONE TO EARTH</span></b></em> (1917)</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><b>This is a beautifully written book, and I can tolerate the author’s intrusive preachments when I consider the effect of the book, which is having an even more powerful impact on me now than it did years ago. The way the story is constructed—with the central character, Hazel, married to a minister who loves her but is too “pure” to impose himself on her (it may have been many a gentleman’s solution to the problem of birth control—how else but by abstinence could he spare his wife the likelihood of child-bearing with all of its responsibilities?)—means that the reader has to be at least partly sympathetic when Hazel is attracted to Reddin. </b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The book seems to imply that women have passions as strong as men’s. Darwin’s ideas may have affected Mary Webb for what looks like a deeply pessimistic Darwinist strain runs through this book. </span></b><br />
<b style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Gone to Earth</i> is lush in its approach to the natural world in all its richness but is austere and full of foreboding in its philosophical orientation, which seems distinct and in no way muddy or obscure.</b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The author wasn’t mucking around in half-baked notions or pandering to a public demand for sensationalism. She had something to say, and she said it, and never mind if Reddin and Edward prove to be, by the end of the book, primarily mere symbols of good and evil. Hazel’s fate is so shattering that they almost seem appropriately relegated to the category of symbols.</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">2 February 1986</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">_________________________</span></div>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span></strong>
<strong><span style="color: #990000;">WEINER, HOWARD L., MD</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em><br />
</em></span></strong> <strong><span style="color: #990000;"><em> CURING MS: HOW SCIENCE IS SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF MULTIPLE </em></span></strong><strong style="color: #990000;"><em>SCLEROSIS</em> </strong><span style="color: #990000;">(2004)</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>The author has been an MS neurologist for 25-30 years and has written numerous research articles on MS. He sets forth 21 points--a breakdown of the knowns and the unknowns about MS and discusses the treatment options currently available (though the book appeared before Tysabri came along). The book includes a glossary and is written in easily comprehensible language. </b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #990000;"></span><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Some sample chapter titles: "Viral Origins," "Plasma, Placebos and Clinical Trials," "Chemotherapy for MS," "T-Cells and Tolerance," "Copolymer 1," "Inflammation vs. Degeneration," and "Going for the Cure."</b></span></div>
<span style="color: #990000;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;">20 July 2007</span><br />
________________________________________________<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<em></em><strong>WEINER, TIM et al.</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">BETRAYAL: THE STORY OF ALDRICH AMES, AN AMERICAN SPY</span></em></strong> (1995)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>In 1994 the news was sometimes dominated by the unfolding story of revelations about Aldrich Ames, who was unmasked as a mole in the US espionage system--a CIA "operative" who sold US secrets to the KGB, thereby enriching himself substantially.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>There is a very grim aspect to this ugly story: Many KGB agents whose covers Ames blew were killed under the cruel system of the USSR. Ames and his cooperative wife Rosario were apprehended after an incredibly long period (many years) during which Ames succeeded in his efforts.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Even more surprisingly, Ames was not an especially dedicated or intelligent agent. He was inclined to be lazy and to goof up--and he was often alarmingly drunk.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story amounts to a damning indictment of the workings of the CIA.</b></div>
<br />
27 January 2006<br />
_______________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>WEISS, PHILIP</strong><br />
<strong><em><br />
</em></strong> <em style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="color: #38761d;">AMERICAN TABOO: A MURDER IN THE PEACE CORPS</span></em><span style="color: #38761d;"><b> </b> (2004)</span><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>This is presumably a factual account of a case that had hardly any news coverage at the time (1976). A Peace Corps volunteer in the Pacific Island country of Tonga, a young woman named Deb Gardner, was brutally stabbed to death by a young male Peace Corps volunteer, Dennis Priven.</strong></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Although the evidence of Dennis's guilt is massive, Dennis escaped being hanged (the punishment for murder in Tonga), being imprisoned, and even the sentence that was ultimately handed down for him--being incarcerated in a mental institution in the US.</strong></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong></strong><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>How this came about is the subject of this book, which has so many details that it is difficult to follow at times. This is an interesting study in bureaucratic snafus--and in the alarming zeal with which the Peace Corps succeeded in burying this case, apparently for the sake of keeping the image of the Peace Corps wholesome enough for it to remain a viable organization.</strong></div>
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<strong></strong><br /></div>
8 August 2006<br />
<strong>_____________________________</strong><br />
<br />
<b>WELCH, H. GILBERT</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> <i><span style="color: #6aa84f;">LESS MEDICINE, MORE HEALTH: 7 ASSUMPTIONS THAT DRIVE TOO MUCH MEDICAL CARE</span></i><i style="color: #38761d;"> </i>(2015)</b><br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author is a professor at the Dartmouth Medical School and has obviously given considerable thought to the question of how medical care is used in the United States. He sees a system with serious flaws--some of which are attributable to Americans' overuse of medical care.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Doctors are encouraged by the current system to order up tests and more tests and to perform procedures and surgeries that can do so much harm that they're unjustified, and patients are often scared by media hype into going along with whatever the doctors recommend.</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The author sees particular problems in the way breast cancer and prostate cancer are often overdiagnosed. He sees no need for an annual physical exam to consist of many tests and very little face-to-face time between doctor and patient--as all too often happens. </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>These are just some of the eminently sensible recommendations in this excellent book, which makes its points succinctly and clearly. The author is strongly in favor of leaving well enough alone when it comes to the human body. He says: "The passage of time can have both diagnostic and therapeutic value."</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Occasionally he indulges in trendy language, as in his use of "way" in "... is way more technically challenging," but this is a book that many people should read before they report for their next medical procedure.</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>18 July 2016</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>_____________________</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b>WELDON, FAY</b><br />
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<br /></div>
<br />
<strong><em><br />
</em></strong> <strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE BULGARI CONNECTION</span></em> </strong>(2001)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;">I liked <em>The Bulgari Connection </em>more than I've liked some of Weldon's other fiction. Weldon loves to pillory certain types of people, and here she's especially adept at targeting the rich, the shallow, those whose main goal is to impress the powers-that-be.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;">A little Googling reveals that this book caused a stir at the time because Weldon received "wheelbarrows of cash from Bulgari" (as Alex Clark in a review in <em>The Guardian</em> in October 2001) in exchange for mentioning Bulgari twelve times in her novel. </b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;">It's a very funny book anyway, and the reader has to loathe Doris Dubois, the femme fatale who lusts after Bulgari jewelry as well as after much else, and has to enjoy the ambiguous ending where Doris is finally brought down.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;">While she's at it, Weldon takes aim at the ephemeral quality of most art, in spite of its claims to timelessness. The painting that plays a large part in the story is clearly not such a good painting to begin with, but what happens to it as a result of Doris's machinations and the artist's willingness to go along with them is hilarious.</b></div>
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<b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b style="background-color: white;">One of Weldon's better efforts, in my opinion.</b></div>
<br />
4 April 2009<br />
<br />
_______________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>WESLEY, MARY<br />
<em><br />
</em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">PART OF THE FURNITURE</span></em></strong> (1997)<br />
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Mary Wesley, a British author, began her writing career at the age of 70. The action in this novel takes place mainly during World War 2, with a strange combination of circumstances that involves a young girl in an entire new life--and an unlooked-for pregnancy. Although the plot is predictable, and the author tends to rely too heavily on the tired device of having the crusty old character turn out to be a warm-hearted softie, there is a lot of wry humor in this gentle, well-written story.</b></div>
<br />
18 June 2005<br />
______________________<br />
<br /><b>WHITE, JACLYN WELDON</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i style="color: #6aa84f;"> PURE EVIL: THE MACHETTI MURDERS OF MACON, GEORGIA </i>(2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>This true-crime account begins with the description of a grisly murder of a man and his son, but the reader won't find out any more about them or why this murder was included in the narrative until the Epilogue.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>It is a convoluted story involving one woman's twisted life and the extremes to which she would go for revenge. She even enlisted her three teenage daughters in her elaborate deceptions. The daughters, living in constant fear of her brutality, were her captives.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>The author does not implicate Becky Akins/Machetti's mother in any of the murders but we learn that Sarah, the mother, was a piece of work herself, and so maybe we are meant to wonder if the mother's personality included a tendency to violent behavior that was somehow passed on to the daughter.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>This was an absorbing, suspenseful account.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> 19 February 2024</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>__________________________<br /><br /></b></div><div><b>WHITE, RICHARD</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><i><span style="color: #6aa84f;"> WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD: A GILDED AGE TALE OF MURDER, DECEIT, SPIRITS AND THE BIRTH OF A UNIVERSITY</span></i> (2022)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Anyone who has ever wondered why Stanford University is known as the Leland Stanford Junior University will find out by reading this book, an absorbing story focusing on the mother of the Leland Stanford, Jr., in whose memory the university was named. Leland Stanford, Sr., died, leaving his widow Jane in charge of the funds and the university.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Railroads had made the Stanford fortune, and it was a large one. One problem, however, was that Jane was a committed spiritualist, following a belief in communication with the dead that was very popular at the time, and tended to take a less than objective view of the merits and failings of members of the Stanford faculty, over whom she had considerable power.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Jane died mysteriously in 1905, and eventually it was determined that she died "of natural causes." The author makes a strong case for her having been murdered, however--especially since she was apparently poisoned by strychnine twice, with a first attempt on her life having failed but being followed by a second, successful one.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>And that is not the only revelation in this book. Not only was Jane Stanford murdered (and the author is fairly sure he knows who would have killed her and why)--there was a concerted attempt at covering up the fact, simply because it was in the best interests of several powerful players in this drama for Jane's death to have been attributed to natural causes.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Chicanery and duplicity abound here, and the story gives a vivid picture of the frenetic world of San Francisco at the time of its wildest political scene and its devastating earthquake.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Stanford University (where the author is on the faculty) does not emerge looking like a very distinguished institution. The celebrated philosopher/psychologist William James (also a spiritualism enthusiast) was less than impressed by it, judging from the statements he made that are quoted here, where he rather clearly considers it second-rate in the quality of its teaching and students. </b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Of course Jane Stanford is long gone and has presumably been replaced by leaders who are less inclined or able to hire and fire faculty members whimsically. And the history of many another US institution of higher learning, if really known, might turn out to have similar closeted skeletons.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>17 April 2023</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>_______________________</b></div><div><b><br /></b>
<strong>WHITE, STEPHEN<br />
<em><br />
</em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">COLD CASE </span></em></strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><b>A murder mystery set in Colorado and involving Alan Gregory and his wife Lauren, who has multiple sclerosis, as well as a woman FBI investigator, who also has MS. Neither of these multiple sclerotics seems much impeded in carrying on a demanding career.</b></strong></div>
<strong>
</strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story isn’t bad, but I lost interest when the shooting and the gory details began.</b></div>
<br />
9 May 2003<br />
________________________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>WHITTEMORE, KATHARINE AND MARZORATI, GERALD, EDS.</b><br />
<br />
<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;"> VOICES IN BLACK AND WHITE: WRITINGS ON RACE IN AMERICA FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE, 1850-1992</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1992)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is a collection of pieces on race in America that ran in <em>Harper's Magazine</em> over several decades. Included are pieces by Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, among many others. The Reverend Jesse Jackson's remarks (in a dialogue with Charles Murray) seemed especially pertinent, particularly this: "'We must whiten the face of poverty. It's an American problem, not a black problem." Facts are presented showing that the majority of US poor people are white--a fact that is often overlooked in the ongoing discussion of African-American poverty.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
8 November 2010<br />
___________________________<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>WIELAND, KARIN</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> </strong><span style="color: #38761d;"><i><b>DIETRICH AND RIEFENSTAHL: HOLLYWOOD, BERLIN, AND A CENTURY IN TWO LIVES</b></i></span><strong> (2015)</strong><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>At first glance, the pairing of Marlene Dietrich and the Nazi propaganda film-maker Leni Riefenstahl seems odd since they weren't acquainted; their paths never really crossed.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>But the author found it interesting that both were Berliners, both were connected with movies, and their lives spanned almost exactly the same period (Dietrich lived from 1901 to 1992, Riefenstahl from 1902 to 2003).</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Though both women were egotistical in the extreme, Dietrich comes across as far more likable and honest. Riefenstahl spent the post-World War 2 years making up lies to minimize the extent to which she collaborated with Hitler and other Nazi leaders.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Her involvement, as it turns out, was considerable, and it might be said that, not only that she was the Nazis' darling but that she worshiped Adolf Hitler.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Dietrich, on the other hand, was so popular and well-known to the US troops during the war that she was reviled by many on returning to her homeland.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>There are those who like to value Riefenstahl's best-known films (<i>Triumph of the Will,</i> <i>Olympiad</i>) for some perceived artistic value and to overlook the substance of those productions, which is wholehearted support of the Nazi programme. This biography sets the record straight.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<strong>28 December 2017</strong><br />
<strong>______________________</strong><br />
<strong>WILDER, LAURA INGALLS</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">THE SELECTED LETTERS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER</span></i>, ed. William Anderson (2016)</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Even though this is a work of substantial size, it represents only a small fraction of the many letters written by the author of the popular <i>Little House</i> books, Laura Ingalls Wilder. There is little evidence here for anyone searching for the "real" Laura Ingalls Wilder--as contrasted with the one who may have been imposed on the public through the involvement of Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>It has been speculated that Lane might have grafted some of her strong Libertarian political views onto the <i>Little House </i>books, in the editing of which she was very active. Lane's right-wing views--she was a friend of Ayn Rand--are well known but just where her mother stood on political issues isn't so well known--and may have been obscured through the machinations of the daughter (or others).</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>However, as early as the 1950s, the letters show Wilder's concern with being politically "correct." For instance, she diligently corrects the text when it is discovered that through a presumably careless error, she has implied that Indians are not people.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Many of the letters are standard courtesy communications where Wilder is reaching out to schoolchildren who became her fans or to institutions wanting to honor her. She comes across as a very gracious, thoughtful person, and a reader of these letters would find it hard to believe that she shared some of the more extreme views held by her daughter.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>Still, oddly missing from these letters is any mention of World War II. There are almost no letters during that period. And the fact remains that Wilder seems to have remained emotionally close to her daughter up until her death while being aware of Rose Wilder Lane's politics.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The extent to which Lane imposed her views on the books isn't revealed here, and I haven't reviewed the books for many years. My recollection of them is that they had no particular political bent, one way or another.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<strong>The question may be endlessly debated. In the past I have commented on a couple of other books dealing with the topic of the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane association--William Holtz, <i>The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane </i>(1993) and John E. Miller, <i>Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend </i>(1998).</strong></div>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>4 August 2018</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>WINCHESTER, SIMON<br />
<em><br />
</em></strong><br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(1998)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>This is an interesting account of the sad but productive life of a major contributor to the monumental <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>-- an insane murderer who lived in an asylum in Britain--though he was originally an American who had been in the Civil War.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
10 January 2004<br />
<br />
<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING: THE STORY OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY</span></em></strong><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span>(2003)<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>The story of the celebrated <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em>, ably told by Simon Winchester, is meant to be a companion volume to his earlier book,<em> The Professor and the Madman,</em> which focuses on one of the more eccentric contributors to the immense project.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>It was a project that took many decades to complete, and its financial and editorial problems were often nearly overwhelming. These problems are documented carefully here, and we are given capsule versions of the personalities involved.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Anyone familiar with the <em>OED </em>would have to agree that the story of its creation deserves to be told well, and Simon Winchester has given the world an account that pays tribute to this monumental work and to the "harmless drudges" (to use Samuel Johnson's definition of lexicographers) who labored in obscurity to make it possible.</b></div>
<br />
14 November 2006<br />
________________________________________________<br />
<br />
<b>WINEAPPLE, BRENDA</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<em><b> <span style="color: #38761d;">HAWTHORNE: A LIFE</span></b></em> (2003)<br />
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<b>Nathaniel Hawthorne, who died during the Civil War, was most definitely not an abolitionist. He wasn't exactly pro-slavery--but he believed that slavery was better than any alternative would be. The wrongheadedness of this stance will (I hope) seem obvious to anyone by now, but Hawthorne is still a force to be reckoned with because of his writings, which have always been taken seriously--unlike, say, Melville, who had an uphill battle to have his work given a fair hearing in his lifetime.</b></div>
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<b>This biographer doesn't attempt to gloss over Hawthorne's politics. In fact, by the end of this biography, the reader may be starting to entertain the notion that maybe Hawthorne wasn't as great a writer as we've been told he is--and that much of the acclaim he received came about as a result of his lifelong close friendship with the likes of Franklin Pierce.</b></div>
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<b>A case can be made for this although Wineapple is careful not to make it. She treats all of his works with considerable respect. She comes close to saying that some of the devices Hawthorne typically uses--the minister's black veil, Hester's resplendently glowing embroidered "A," and other paraphernalia that crop up in his fiction--are almost wheezily gothic.</b></div>
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<b>She lets the reader in some interesting facts along the way. While living in England, the Hawthorne family, consisting of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne and their three children, employed a staff of a housemaid, nursemaid, cook, and gardener. This was a family used to living comfortably in spite of some less prosperous periods.</b></div>
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<b>Also, the Master of Arts degree Hawthorne received from his alma mater, Bowdoin College, was available simply by paying a fee. He did not have to sign up for courses, attend classes or lectures, write papers, or take exams. That is how it was done at the time, or so Wineapple implies.</b></div>
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<b>This seems like a thoroughgoing scholarly study of Hawthorne's life, complete with an ample number of photos. I would have liked to know more about the three Hawthorne children, however.</b></div>
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<b>Sometimes I had problems with Wineapple's choice of words. Saying that Hawthorne's daughter Una "had crashed" when a diagnosis of "galloping consumption" had been added to her case of malaria struck a jarring note, for instance. The use of the colloquial "crashed" isn't specific enough for this situation, which cries out for precision, it seems to me.</b></div>
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<b>But that is a small point. On the whole the book was absorbing and well done.</b></div>
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9 March 2012<br />
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<strong>WINERIP, MICHAEL</strong><strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;"> 9 HIGHLAND ROAD</span></em></strong><br />
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<b>The author spent two years studying a group home. His book puts an odd overemphasis on a presumed case of multiple-personality disorder in one of the residents.</b><br />
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<b>WOODSIDE, CHRISTINE</b><br />
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<b> <span style="color: #38761d;"> LIBERTARIANS ON THE PRAIRIE: LAURA INGALLS WILDER, ROSE WILDER LANE, AND THE MAKING OF THE LITTLE HOUSE BOOKS </span>(2016)</b><br />
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<b>The author of this study makes liberal use of the findings by William Holtz (<i>The Ghost in the Little House.</i>..--q.v.), who established fairly conclusively that the beloved children's books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was the real-life Laura in the stories, were actually written with considerable input and editing from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.</b></div>
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<b>Woodside now sets forth evidence that (a) Rose Wilder Lane was a very committed Libertarian, and that (b) her additions and changes to Laura Ingalls Wilder's original text were often aimed at injecting Libertarian ideas into the works.</b></div>
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<b>She passes no judgment. She is just stating the facts as she has found them and leaving it to the reader to reflect on the extent to which the Libertarian slant given to the <i>Little House</i> books may have influenced several generations of Americans.</b></div>
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<b>29 August 2019</b><br />
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<b>WOOLF, JENNY</b><br />
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<b> </b><i><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE MYSTERY OF LEWIS CARROLL: DISCOVERING THE WHIMSICAL, THOUGHTFUL, AND SOMETIMES LONELY MAN WHO CREATED </span></b><u><b><span style="color: #38761d;">ALICE IN WONDERLAND</span></b> </u></i>(2010)<br />
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<b>The mania for absurdly long book titles seems to have affected this author severely, but aside from the title length, this is a very readable and fair account of the life of C. L. Dodgson/Lewis Carroll.</b></div>
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<b><span style="text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="text-align: justify;">Lewis Carroll was not primarily an author of children's books. He was a mathematics instructor--and is also known for some contributions to mathematics.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="text-align: justify;">The </span><i style="text-align: justify;">Alice</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> books for which he is known were written for the entertainment of Alice Liddell, a little girl of his acquaintaince.</span></b><br />
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<b>Photography was just evolving in Carroll's lifetime, and he was a very enthusiastic photographer though the process involved transporting a considerable amount of equipment around.</b></div>
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<b>Jenny Woolf describes his photography efforts in detail and is at pains to demonstrate that, given Carroll's situation and upbringing and the styles in photography at the time, the photos of nude little girls that he took by no means suggest that he was a pedophile or even that he was overly attracted to young girls.</b></div>
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<b>Indeed, the photos I have seen--and I don't know if these were all of them--hardly seem to warrant any brouhaha at all. Not one of them could be called provocative.These are pre-pubescent girls, many of them draped, and not one in a suggestive pose.</b></div>
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<b>The biographer's point about Carroll is that, the eldest son of a vicar, he was devoutly religious throughout his life so far as anyone has been able to determine. The child, particularly the young girl, was idealized at the time as the quintessence of innocence, as anyone familiar with Romantic poetry can attest.</b></div>
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<b>Carroll also believed that draping the human form was almost sinful as it was covering up God's handiwork. However, in compliance with the mores of the time, all but a few of the many photos taken by Carroll are heavily draped.</b></div>
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<b>Woolf also points out that of the young girls whom Carroll photographed, most remained in contact with him and on friendly terms for many years into their adulthood, and not one account of any improper advances on Carroll's part has come to light.</b></div>
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<b>She does have to deal with the fact that some of Carroll's personal records and diaries, covering over a decade, were apparently destroyed by his survivors. She speculates on many possible reasons for the destruction of the records and concludes that since we can't know the reasons and there is no other evidence of his pedophilia, we cannot make assumptions about him.</b></div>
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<b>It is regrettable that she has had to spend so much time explaining away the scandal-mongering charges that have been made. Even so, this seems to be a thorough account of the life of this remarkable literary figure.</b></div>
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18 May 2014</div>
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<b>WOOLF, VIRGINIA</b><br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">THE VOYAGE OUT</span></b></em> (1915, 1920)<br />
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<b>I found this to be a far less successful novel than the later <em>To the Lighthouse.</em> Here Woolf hasn't yet hit her stride. She peoples the stage with entirely too many characters, with the result that none of them comes alive, and she even has trouble keeping them straight.</b></div>
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<b>Richard and Clarissa Dalloway put in an appearance here, and so we get a look at the Mrs. Dalloway of the later novel of that name. But they fade away in <em>The Voyage Out</em>, as do many other of the assorted characters.</b></div>
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<b>There is some biting wit here, but the one-dimensional characters often seem merely to be emitting bons mots into very thin air.</b></div>
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<b>That the author deflects our attention onto the more secondary characters right after the death of Rachel Vinrace perhaps shows that she didn't intend for the novel to be about death. But what point is she making after such a protracted death scene? That life goes on anyway?</b></div>
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<b>It's as if she didn't quite know where to take this story, and so it veers off in several directions at once.</b></div>
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21 August 2012<br />
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<em> <b><span style="color: #38761d;">MRS. DALLOWAY</span></b></em><b><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></b>(1925)<br />
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<b>Supposedly Virginia Woolf has stated that she wasn't influenced by Joyce's <em>Ulysses </em>in the writing of this novel, but there is evidence that she was reading it at about the time when she was working on <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>. In any event, it's a strange coincidence that another stream-of-consciousness novel about a single day in June and revolving around the lives of a few characters some of whom never meet one another happens to have been written, this time by a woman, and this time about London, not Dublin.</b></div>
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<b>However, influenced or no, Virginia Woolf has spoken up with a voice that is very much her own here.</b></div>
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<b>Clarissa Dalloway, who is about 50, is preparing to give a party, and the novel closes with that party. It is the story of her reunion with her old lover, Peter Walsh, who has been away in India for years and who is now married, probably divorcing and probably remarrying.</b></div>
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<b>There are parallel stories spinning out on the same day--especially that of Septimus Warren Smith, a troubled young man with an Italian wife. He is told that he must be separated from his wife and committed to a hospital, and the eminent doctor who makes this pronouncement happens to be a guest at Mrs. Dalloway's party. In this way the news of the patient's suicide that day reaches Mrs. Dalloway--even though she doesn't know Septimus Warren Smith.</b></div>
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<b>On one level her reaction is that of the seemingly shallow and frivolous giver of parties: How could the doctor bring up the subject of death at my party? </b></div>
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<b>But on another level she is shaken to the core. It helps to know that the author intended for Septimus Warren Smith to be Mrs. Dalloway's "double"--and that he wasn't in the story originally, and that the story might have ended with Mrs. Dalloway's death.</b></div>
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<b>The novel is a meditation on death and aging, and the song from Shakespeare's <em>Cymbeline,</em> beginning "Fear no more the heat o' the sun...," runs through it as a motif.</b></div>
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<b>But it is also effective in making the reader see that even the seemingly frivolous party-giver isn't necessarily a dissipated self-indulgent person. Mrs. Dalloway thinks of her parties as a way of bringing her friends together so that they can enjoy being with one another. Looked at in this light, the giver of parties is a generous spirit indeed, for arranging a successful party involves considerable effort--all of which Mrs. Dalloway is quite used to and seems to enjoy.</b></div>
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<b>I came away from this novel feeling as if I hadn't been nearly as grateful as I should have been to people I've known who've given parties.</b></div>
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<b>I also came away feeling that the power to confine a mentally troubled person to an institution without that person's consent should never have been granted to anyone. Though Mrs. Dalloway confronts her own mortality in the course of this novel, she is also brought up against the power wielded by Sir William Bradshaw, the doctor at her party who has been instrumental in arranging for the commitment of Septimus Warren Smith.</b></div>
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<b>The lyrical style often involves rich sea imagery--and parts of the book might almost be read as poetry.</b></div>
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29 September 2012<br />
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<em><b><span style="color: #38761d;">TO THE LIGHTHOUSE</span></b></em> (1927)<br />
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<b>Virginia Woolf's style resembles an elegant tapestry. She picks up a tiny theme here, goes on to other topics, and then picks it up again later in the narrative--and that is how it goes throughout this intricately woven novel. Whether it is a dropped brooch or a parental remark to the effect that the weather isn't right for a planned trip to the lighthouse, these seemingly ordinary details start to matter intensely in Woolf's hands.</b></div>
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<b>One such thread that is woven through, appearing only now and again but shining forth whenever it does, is a remark made by Charles Tansley that haunts the budding artist, Lily Briscoe--both of them being guests at the summer house belonging to the central couple in the story, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who are so important, apparently, that we aren't allowed to know their first names.</b></div>
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<b>Tansley's remark was that "'women can't paint--women can't write.'"</b></div>
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<b>It is fitting, or so it seems to me, that the novel ends with its focus on Lily Briscoe, who at last finishes the painting on which she has been laboring assiduously. "She had had her vision," the author tells us in celebration of that completion.</b></div>
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<b>By then Mrs. Ramsay is dead, after having given the world eight children and having worked hard at the demanding tasks involved in running a large and prosperous household---such as keeping her family and many guests comfortable and acting as an intermediary between her children and their formidable, unyielding father.</b></div>
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<b>This was in the Britain of the early 20th century, when gracious living was at its most gracious, and this must have been the world that the author knew best. The novel is no socially conscious diatribe against the subjugation of women, but it often seems to point the way toward later sentiments about the way women were treated in a world where they were expected to be primarily decorative.</b></div>
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<b>Lily Briscoe is probably not a great artist, nor does the author intend for us to think she might be. The point is that she ought to have had a chance--to do her painting, to finish her painting, in peace without having to be wounded by put-downs from people who begrudged her that opportunity.</b></div>
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<b>It's probably a mistake to find a "point" in this novel, however. The author may have intended for us to enjoy the beauty of its structure, which is truly remarkable, or of its perceptions, which are always surprising and original. Woolf intersperses traditional-length chapters with the occasional chapter consisting of just one sentence, for instance, but she does this so restrainedly that the effect is magnificent.</b></div>
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4 May 2012<br />
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<b>WOOLSON, CONSTANCE FENIMORE</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"> "MISS GRIEF" AND OTHER STORIES (2016)</span></b><br />
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<b>Constance Fenimore Woolson has had the misfortune of being only slightly known as a good friend of Henry James and as a relative of James Fenimore Cooper. These stories show her fiction to be little gems. Moreover, she often focuses on a situation that doesn't seem to have had much first-hand coverage--the Reconstruction South. </b></div>
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<b>In "Rodman the Keeper" she writes about people of that time and place who would have been unable to speak for themselves. To be sure, her perspective is that of a comparatively prosperous white woman from the North, but she treats her characters with understanding and without condescension, unless a couple of unfortunate references to "the little darky" are taken to be condescending. More than likely, "darky" was a fairly standard term for a person of color and wasn't regarded as especially negative--as with the word "black" in today's parlance.</b></div>
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<b>This is a world that we will always know entirely too little about because its people usually were illiterate and were too browbeaten by the experience of slavery to spend time reflecting on it or even talking about it to people who might be in a position to write about it. But Woolson has attempted to portray some people in that world.</b></div>
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<b>These stories, which appeared in print between 1873 and 1892, reflect the broad range of the author's experience and powers of observation. </b></div>
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<b>In a quiet way Woolson pillories the overindulged segments of society and draws attention to those who have missed their chances (or never had them in the first place). The last story in this collection, "In Sloan Street," is more of a sketch than a story--its plot is minimal. But it is a portrait of the shallow, pampered Amy Moore, a matron with two small children and a husband who treats her as if she's delicate.</b></div>
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<b>The editors may have been too diligent with their footnotes at times and not diligent enough at others. A French quotation that figures prominently in one story is left unannotated, but it might have been helpful to know that the author was Victor Hugo.</b></div>
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<b>March 30, 2018</b><br />
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<strong>WRIGHT, LAWRENCE<br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">REMEMBERING SATAN</span></em></strong> (1994)<br />
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<b>This is a report of a case of alleged child abuse in Olympia, Washington, where two grown daughters supposedly recover repressed memories of having been sexually abused by their father and some male friends. The daughters' stories become increasingly bizarre and incredible as time passes, and eventually the father and his friends are said to have been involved in Satanic cult rituals.</b></div>
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<b>The father was convicte</b>d<b> and imprisoned for crimes he probably never committed.</b></div>
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14 November 1998<br />
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<b>WRIGHT, RICHARD</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><em>A FATHER'S LAW</em> </span></b> (posthumously published, 2008)<br />
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<b>Shortly before his death, Richard Wright wrote the draft of an unfinished novel, and in 2008 his daughter published it. Whether the publication was a wise decision is open to question. Whether Wright himself would have wanted it to see the light of day in its present form is another big question.</b></div>
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<b>Its flaws are many, its writing slipshod and often hackneyed. It is the story of a black policeman who becomes the chief of police in a Chicago-area neighborhood (or is it a suburb?) where there has recently been a series of murders, all apparently committed by one person.</b></div>
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<b>Ruddy, the police chief, has a son who keeps to himself and studies all the time. Evidence pointing to the son as the murderer begins to mount, though by the end of this fragment of a narrative, the evidence seems shaky. The reader will wonder if Ruddy is a bit too quick to suspect his son.</b></div>
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<b>But we will never know whether the son turned out to be the murderer.</b></div>
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<b>It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that this book was published at all. <em>Black Boy</em> and <em>Native Son</em> are both powerful stories reflecting African-American experience. The chronology of the author's life, appended to <em>A Father's Law,</em> indicates that Wright's all-too-brief life was about as full of a wide variety of experiences as any person's could be. He knew the starkest and most stinging poverty for many years. Later he was to know many of the most remarkable people of his time and to have many opportunities and awards.</b></div>
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<b>He deserved better than to have this draft published posthumously.</b></div>
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26 December 2010</div>
</div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121226830784890522005-06-18T20:53:00.000-07:002005-07-13T20:44:30.910-07:00<strong>X</strong>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6332639.post-1121226848978878072005-06-17T20:53:00.000-07:002024-01-04T11:41:29.371-08:00<strong>Y - Z</strong><br />
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<strong>YEAGER, JEFF</strong><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: #38761d;"> THE CHEAPSKATE NEXT DOOR: THE SURPRISING SECRETS OF AMERICANS LIVING HAPPILY BELOW THEIR MEANS </span></i>(2010)<br />
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<strong><strong>Although this book contains much sage advice on how to live less expensively, the author seems a bit too interested in promoting an earlier book of his on the same topic. Also, trying to be funny (he was voted the funniest person in his 4th-grade class), he takes liberties with quotations. He cites statistics frequently--with no references.</strong></strong></div>
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<strong>For instance, he states that the average home in the US (in 2010, presumably) is 1,650 square feet. Where does this figure come from?</strong></div>
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<b>That's an astonishing figure, to my way of thinking. Have we as a people really reached a point where we feel we need that much space simply for living?</b></div>
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<b>It's entirely possible.</b></div>
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<b>More fact-checking would have made this a better book.</b></div>
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25 September 2013<br />
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<strong>YOUNG, CHRISTINE ELLEN</strong><br />
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<strong><em> <span style="color: #38761d;">A BITTER BREW: FAITH, POWER AND POISON IN A SMALL NEW ENGLAND TOWN </span></em>(2005)</strong><br />
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<strong>The author, an investigative journalist, gives an account of an arsenic poisoning case in the small town of New Sweden, Maine, where one person died and fifteen became critically ill as a result of arsenic that had been added to their church's coffee.</strong></div>
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<strong>The case is solved more or less satisfactorily, but apparently there will always be people in the community who firmly believe that someone else was responsible for the poisoning.</strong></div>
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<strong>The story is interesting in what it tells about the dynamics of a small, close-knit town--its suspicion of "outsiders" (people "from away"), for example, and its hyperactive gossip mill.</strong></div>
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<strong>The account is so packed with people's names, however, that it is difficult to keep track of the narrative. Also, the banter among the detectives on the case--dialogue which the author admits to having made up--could easily have been dispensed with. It adds nothing to the story.</strong></div>
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31 October 2011<br />
<strong>___________________________________</strong><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>ZACK, IAN</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b> <i><span style="color: #38761d;">ODETTA: A LIFE IN MUSIC AND PROTEST </span></i>(2020)</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>As a fan of Odetta's music since the mid-1950s, I found this account of her remarkable life especially fascinating. Her diligent involvement with the civil rights movement, her friendship with such notables as Maya Angelou and Harry Belafonte, and above all her sensitive and luminous personality--all of these are highlighted in this balanced and sympathetic biography.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>4 January 2024</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>__________________________<br /></b>
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<strong style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">ZHELVIS, VLADIMIR</span></strong><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"><em><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="color: #38761d;">THE XENOPHOBE'S GUIDE TO THE RUSSIANS</span></em></strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;"> (2001)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;" /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">A highly entertaining and interesting book, not just for someone traveling to Russia, but for anyone interested in Russians as a people. Written by a native Russian who has lived in diverse regions of Russia and who has studied philology and psycholinguistics for decades, it is written in English--not a translation from Russian--and is eminently readable. The author is also an authority on swearwords the world over.</span></b></span></div>
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<b style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">If you've been wondering what Russians are currently eating, drinking, buying, traveling around in, and doing with their leisure time, this book is an excellent guide. You will also learn much about the Russian character: morals, customs, conduct, attitudes, government, culture, conversation. The book has 19 brief chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the Russians as a people.</span></b></div>
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<b style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">The author views his countrymen with the unblinkered eyes of an observer who is wise to their ways. There is no boasting here. Russians come through to us in these pages with all of the stark realism that emerges in some of the Russian fairy tales we may have read in our childhood. This is not to say that the Russians depicted here resemble Ivan the Simpleton--far from it! They are shown to be shrewd, gregarious, sentimental, and very cynical indeed.</span></b></div>
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<b style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">The book contains a number of jokes--many revealing the profound cynicism of a people accustomed to dealing with inefficiency, corruption, and interminable waits for basic necessities. Russians must be among the world's greatest readers, and the author gives a plausible explanation for this: they spend so much time waiting in lines that they can get a lot of reading done.</span></b></div>
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<strong>ZUCKOFF, MITCHELL AND LEHRER, DICK</strong><br />
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<strong> <em><span style="color: #38761d;">JUDGMENT RIDGE: THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE DARTMOUTH MURDERS</span></em> </strong>(2003)<br />
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<strong>The authors, reporters for the<em> Boston Globe</em>, give a coherent and responsible account of a grisly murder of two Dartmouth College professors of geology in 2001. The murderers, two high school boys who chose their victims at random, appeared to have had no motive other than a wish to get hold of some money and access to PIN numbers.</strong></div>
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<strong>One of the boys is a probable psychopath, as is well demonstrated in the narrative. The other was clearly his disciple.</strong></div>
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<strong>They went to high schools in a blue-collar Vermont town, and the authors maintain that the local school policy of allowing high school students to finish their required course work before their senior year ("block programming") might have contributed to the unfortunate turn these two boys' lives took: they had too much unsupervised time on their hands at a vulnerable time in their lives.</strong></div>
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<strong>I'm puzzled about where these two boys--Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker--stood with respect to college plans, a big concern of many US high school students. I wonder if they chose the Dartmouth College town (Hanover, NH) as the place for their attempts at murder, not just because they felt there would be easy money available there, but also because of a certain amount of bitterness at not being destined for college. But whether they could have gone to college isn't made clear. I think it's an important question, nonetheless.</strong></div>
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23 January 2012</div>wordswordswords/agatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06322870884110104354noreply@blogger.com0