rocketjk's reading Route 22 Part 2

This is the first year I've decided to break up my CR thread into a second half Part 2. For those keeping score at home, here's my first-half reading:

1: Darker Than Amber by John D. McDonald
2: Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer
3: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
4: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor
5: Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
6: The Handle by Richard Stark
7: The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
8: First Harvest by Vladimir Pozner
9: Flats Fixed - Among Other Things by Don Tracy
10: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
11: The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
12: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen
13: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
14: Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
15: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
16: Turning Angel by Greg Iles
17: Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts
18: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
19: Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
20: The New Breed: The Story of the U.S. Marines in the Korea by Andrew Geer
21: Conjure Women by Asia Atakora
22: Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'n' Roll by Colin Escott with Martin Hawkins
23: The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities by James Thurber
24: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove
25: Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
26: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei

To continue . . .

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass



I've waited far too long to finally read this classic and powerful testimony of the evils of chattel slavery in America. Douglass tells in straightforward fashion his story of the frequency of whippings, the demeaning and demoralizing nature of living life enslaved and the daily pains and degradations endured by the enslaved men, women and children he knows as a youth. Enslaved from birth, Douglass, once he became old enough to understand the full ramifications of his situation, acquired and retained a determination to find freedom. His first step was to surreptitiously learn to read. As such, this is also a testament to the enduring possibilities of the human spirit. Anyone with a doubt as to the absolute evil of American slavery will be disabused of such doubts after reading these searing 126 pages.

I missed your review of the Kenneth Roberts on your previous thread...until now. I don't seem to get around to the threads as well as I used to. Roberts was a local boy and my father had been a fan, so we had all of his books. I read them all in the summers between the ages of 12 and 14 (before I moved onto his war fiction). I enjoyed revisiting the Northwest Passage through your excellent review (I do have most of the books here should I wish to dip back into them).

>2 avaland: Thanks! Glad my review provided a portal for you to a good reading memory. Cheers.

Catching up all of June. Glad your covid issue was over before your travel/camping plans.

I loved your review of Diary of a Lonely Girl. And I’m glad you enjoyed the James Baldwin collection. “Sonny's Blues” was easily my own personal favorite in that collection, and one of my favorite of all his works.

>4 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I strongly regret that I was not introduced to Baldwin in either high school or even college back in the 1970s.

Now then! For those who have not read my CR threads before, a quick note about my "Between Book" concept, as described in my first-half thread:

In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list.

So, that said, here's a look at my post-Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave reading journey through Stack 3 of my "Between Books":

* "Nationals Muffed Bid to Tie All-Star Series" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Battle of China (July 7, 1937)" from The Background of Our War
* "The Blue Serge Suit" by John Langdon, Jr. from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "Cousin Greylegs, the Great Red Fox and Grandfather Mole" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "Parentage and the Paternal Home” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Jazz Festivals: The Patient Makes It” by Leonard Feather from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962

I'm now reading Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, a reread for me and my selection for my monthly reading group, as it was my turn to pick a book.

Happy new thread! I love the variety and quality of your reading.

>6 labfs39: Thanks!

Happy new thread! It's been a long time since I read Song of Solomon. Hope your group enjoys it.

Following along, Jerry. I've less time on LT these days, but I'm lurking on most threads.

>9 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison! Here's my next book . . .

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison



Nobody needs a lengthy review of Song of Solomon at this late date from the likes of me. I fully enjoyed my reread of this modern classic, decades removed from my initial exposure to it. My memory of my first read was very light on specifics. (I remembered a particular scene very close to the end, but entirely misremembered how that scene resolved!) I only recalled how moved I was by the experience. This led me to select the book when it was my turn to make a pick for my monthly reading group. (Our rule is that you must choose a book you've already read, so that you know for sure that you think it's a book worthy of the group's time, rather than taking a flyer on some book off the bestseller list.)

On this second reading, I did have a little bit of trouble settling completely into the narrative at the outset. Initially, none of the characters are particularly likable, including the book's protagonist, Milkman. But as we begin to see more of these characters' lives, often as they explain themselves to Milkman or, in the case of Milkman himself, though his own experiences, they begin to gain dimension, and we begin to attain perspective. At this point, I became wholly invested in the story. The skillfully drawn themes of Morrison's narrative begin to emerge: the dangers of personal isolation, the holding of grudges and the assumption that there isn't more to be learned about the people around you; the prices paid of living a life in Diaspora; the power of mythology and legend; the slow-dripping, corrosive poison of hatred and revenge seeking; the redemptive powers of forgiveness and the liberating nature of learning one's own family history. All this is framed within the rewarding, perhaps somewhat larger-than-life, portrayal of African American culture, both in the rustbelt north, where Milkman's story begins, and in the isolated mountains of Virginia, where Milkman goes searching for treasure. I'm very glad to have reread this now.

>10 rocketjk: great post. I find this Morrison’s most playful book. And by that I don’t mean light, or that it lacks any of her deep anger. As I mentioned on the WAYRN thread, it’s my favorite of her novels in hindsight.

The Internet has been abuzz* with demands for news of my post-Song of Solomon "Between Book" reading, so before I bring the Net crashing down, here is my latest progress through Stack 1:

* “The Doctor’s Visit” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Gaza: From Conflict to Unity?” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Horatius at the Bridge” by Livy from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Ed Prell” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Barefoot in Lagos” by Geoffrey Holder from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - July 1962

I've now returned to my twice-per-year read through the novels of Isaac B. Singer, having begun Singer's second novel, The Family Moskat.

* In my fevered imagination.

>12 rocketjk: LOL. I look forward to your thoughts on The Family Moskat, a book that has been on my tbr since time immemorial.

I’m feeling the buzz. How was Shirley Jackson’s story?

>13 labfs39: "I look forward to your thoughts on The Family Moskat, a book that has been on my tbr since time immemorial."

Thanks. I may be a while at it, though. The novel checks in at 607 pages.

>14 dchaikin: "How was Shirley Jackson’s story?"

The long answer: Very effective in the gathering feeling of menace, although very subtle in the actual story and particularly in the ending. I sort of wonder whether I would even have realized the degree of danger accumulating if I didn't know who Shirley Jackson was and what sort of stories she's known for. It's a very short tale and in fact I had to go back and skim three times to see if I'd missed anything. Then I had to go online to find a story synopsis to see if I'd missed anything. It's turns out the one thing I'd missed was a tiny reference almost entirely embedded within the narrative, like trying to identify a key when there's only a millimeter of metal sticking out of the sand. The synopsis I found pointed that there are at least three obvious possible ways to read the story's open-ended conclusion, but points out that the point of the storytelling was really that mounting sense of dread in and of itself. It was an interesting reading experience, and I was also amused by the fact that the story happened to turn up in my "between book" reading while the discussion of Jackson's work was going on, as you know, on another CR thread.

The short answer: It was fine. I enjoyed it, though it did not strike me as a great story.

>15 rocketjk: thanks for the long and short. I’ll have to revisit her and check out a short story collection.

>10 rocketjk: Catching up on fellow CR members' threads (before catching up with mine...). I enjoyed your review of Song of Solomon. I've only read one book by Toni Morrison and did not really like it, but I'm playing with the idea of reading another one from her. Your review makes me wonder if that could be my next Toni Morrison (in a distant future, though, too many reading plans for me at the moment...).

>17 raton-liseur: Thanks, RL. I hope you do manage to get to Song of Solomon one of these days. I'd enjoy reading your reaction to it.

Nice comments about Song of Solomon, Jerry. I borrowed a copy from my local library on Saturday, and I'll start reading it tomorrow.

The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer



A note that this review is different from my normal reviews, as it is long (not that unusual for me these days, now that I think about it) and relies much more heavily than is common for me on quotations. There was so much in this book that I made note of during the reading that I had a hard time coming up with a better way of introducing the book here than to just let Singer speak for himself.

The Family Moskat is Isaac Singer’s second novel, published originally in 1950, or approximately 15 years after Singer’s immigration from Poland to the U.S. As with all Singer novels, it was written in Yiddish and translated into English. The novel portrays the at first gradual and eventually rapid collapse of the Jewish community of Warsaw in particular and of Poland in general, from the early years of the 20th century through the German invasion in 1939. The novel ends with bombs falling over the city.

The book is alive with detail and movement. Life, fear, lust, squalor, crowds, noise and smells. Near the beginning of the narrative, Singer propels us into the midst of a marketplace in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw as if ejecting us from a carriage with a sudden shove. In an instant we are in the midst of a rousing blast of striving and clamor.

The tale is told through the lense of the life of the titular family. As the book opens, Menshulam Moskat is the late-middle aged financially successful patriarch of a sprawling family. Adult children, in-laws and grandchildren abound, though Menshulam’s right-hand man in business is not a family member at all, but a retainer named Koppel Berman. The family is a mixed bag. Some are still pious Jews, even Chassidim, while others have become more secular, gradually or entirely turning their backs on the old religious ways. At the beginning, the tale of the feuding, fractious but insular family is told in almost comic fashion. And into the mix comes young Asa Heshel Bennett, who comes to Warsaw to get away from the smothering Jewish culture of a small shtetl town on the Polish-Belorusse border and instantly falls in with Abram Moskat, Menshulam’s most ne’er do well son who takes the young newcomer under his wing.

As the decades go by, the family’s fortunes deteriorate, as does the coherent nature of Polish Jewry, as younger generations increasingly (but certainly not entirely) turn their back on old ways. Many become socialists, Communists, Zionists, hedonists, academics . . . the whole range within the whirlpool of European intellectual life in the 20s and 30s.

Singer looks at these phenomena with a complex mix of understanding, criticism and sadness. In his own life, Singer was the son of a Warsaw rabbi and saw these developments at first-hand, himself turning from the religious to the secular/intellectual. For example, a crucial aspect of the story is the romance carried out between Asa Hesel and Hadassah, a Moskat granddaughter, Abram’s niece, who has actually been promised by her family to Fishel, a successful businessman. Says Abram to Asa Heshel:

She doesn’t want him, that Fishel, with the whole business of the mikvah, and wearing a matron’s wig, and his grandfather, and his lousy oil business, and the whole stinking mess. The damn fools. First they send their daughters to decent, modern schools and then they expect them to forget everything they’ve learned and suddenly become old-fashioned, orthodox, meek Jewish housewives. From the twentieth century straight back to the Middle Ages. Tell me about yourself. Is your health all right?”

At the same time, Singer is clearly looking back with affection. Thinks Abram at one point, as he reflects on his own life as a schemer and carouser:

“There was only one thing that wasn’t worth a plague: death. Why should he, Abram, have angina pectoris? What would he be doing through the long winter nights over there in the Gensha cemetery? And even admitting that there as such a thing as paradise, what good would it be to him? He’d rather have the Warsaw streets than all the wisdom of a Jewish paradise.”

And there is gentle humor running throughout, mostly put by Singer into the mouths of his characters. At one point, a rich man’s shiva (wake) is overrun by curious strangers. “Look at that mob,” Naomi complained. “A person would imagine someone sent for them.”

An ever-present theme, of course, is the endless current of tragedy that has stalked the community for centuries and shows signs, now, of accelerating rather than abating. In the period just after the First World War, a new mother looks at her aunt and observes:

“A sort of pious melancholy flowed from her, the generations-old dolor of the Jewish mother, the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives. And was she any different? What would happen to her child? Who could say that in another twenty years there wouldn’t be another war?”

In addition to the schisms developed by the tensions and changes in Jewish life as the years and generations proceed comes the ever-tightening vise of rising anti-Semitism in post-World War One Poland, described here in a relatively early passage:

The saloonkeeper rubbed his forehead. That’s the way it always was. Let one Jew into the place and they’d draw a thousand others, like flies, and the place gets to be a madhouse. The plate of soup was standing untouched. The cat was gnawing at the sausages. A pack of devils, these Jews, with their stylish clothes. The newspapers were right; that gang would eat up Poland like a flock of locusts, worse than the Muscovites and the Swabians.

As time goes by, things get worse, and as the 30s progress boycotts against Jewish businesses commence and Polish ruffians begin aping their German Nazi neighbors in beating up Jews on the street. Toward the end of the book another Moskat family member, Yanovar, after being falsely accused of being a Communist and arrested, has an ominous conversation with the police officer who, while releasing him, warns about the ubiquity of Jews within the Polish Communist movement.

Yanovar replies, “That, sir, is the unfortunate situation the Jew finds himself in. We are not permitted in the civil service, nor are we permitted to take posts in factories. Anti-Semitism creates Communism.”

“Well, assuming that this is so, do the Jewish leaders realize the Communism among the Jewish masses evokes an anti-Semitism tenfold, a hundred-fold, more intense?”

“We know that, too. It’s a vicious circle.”

“Mr. Yanovar, I don’t want to frighten you, but the situation is unbearable. Today the Jews are the spreaders of Bolshevism throughout the face of the earth. I’m not exaggerating. This puts the very existence of the Jewish race in danger.”

After the policeman dismisses the idea of a Jewish homeland, suggesting that Zionism is another source of anti-Semitism within Poland, the conversation ends on an ominous note. The policeman recommends that Yanovar acquaint himself with a book called The Twilight of Israel,* and concludes the conversation with the chilling pronouncement, “Time solves all problems. One way or another. Adieu.”

* (A note that while I could not find any reference to this book online, my guess is that it was never published in English and, more importantly, that it is an anti-Semitic tract and probably a vicious one.)

Elsewhere, Asa Heshel looks out of a tram window and sees this: “Along Marshalkovska Street women loitered. Their shadowed eyes shone with the gloomy lust of those who have lost all fear of peering into the abyss.”

The book represents a time commitment. As with many multi-generational family novels, The Family Moskat is relatively lengthy, checking in at just over 600 pages. Not every segment flows along exceptionally well, but most do. Also, I felt that the ending was rushed, the final 20 pages or so not as satisfying as the rest of the novel. But those flaws didn’t seriously detract from the overall power of this book for me. Also, on reading back over this review, I feel that I've emphasized a bit too much the sociological/cultural/historic themes of this novel. So to be clear, if you've stuck with me this long, this is a novel about people, with their loves, struggles, disappointments, fears and joys. The characters are not always likeable, goodness knows, but quite a few are memorable.

So I guess since this has become a review of quotes, I’ll finish up with one more lengthy one that in many ways sums up the sadness that, understandably, runs through The Family Moskat. Here, Asa Heshel has returned to his hometown village to visit his mother:

After the meal . . . Asa Hershel walked off through the village. For a while he stopped at the study house. Near the door, at a long bare table, a few old men bent over open volumes dimly illuminated with flickering candles. From the shul Asa Hershel turned into the Lublin Road. He halted for a moment at a water pump with a broken handle. There was a legend current in Tereshpol Minor that although the well underneath had long since dried up, once during a fire water had begun to pour from the spout, and the synagogue and the houses around it had been saved from destruction.

He turned to the road that led to the woods. It was lined with great trees, chestnut and oak. Some of them had huge gashes torn in their sides by bolts of lightning. The holes looked dark and mysterious, like the caves of robbers. Some of the older trees inclined their tops down toward the ground, as though they were ready to tumble over, tearing up with them the tangled thickness of their centuries-old roots.

Here's news of my post-The Family Moskat journey through Stack 2 of my "between books."

* “Senorita Clotilde” by Armando Palacio Valdes from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “O is for Our Four-Legged Friends” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of X X X Cantos by Ezra Pound” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* “The Invincible Armada” by Beyer Winetwig from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Chocolate Footballs” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “Ernest Bevin: British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1945-1951” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson - Newly added
* "The Gloom of Philip Roth" by Norman Podhoretz from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962 - Finished!

Yesterday I started Boy in Blue, an American Civil War novel, published in 1937, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Royce Brier.

>20 rocketjk: This has long been on my TBR. I've always stuck to Singer's short stories*. the mothers who bled and suffered so that murderers should have victims for their knives powerful line

*ETA: And Love and Exile

>22 labfs39: re: Love and Exile, I'd like to read more of Singer's memoirs and probably will someday. The only one I've read so far is In My Father's Court, which is about his childhood in Poland.

I agree that his short stories are really special. Not too long ago I read the Modern Library collection of Singer stories, Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and after that read through Singer's final short story collection, The Death of Methuselah. I found the latter particularly compelling. And even though, as I mentioned, that was his final story collection, published in 1988, he published four novels thereafter.

Show - The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962 edited by Robert M. Wool



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another entry from the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my closet that I'm trying to gradually read through. I tried running an online search to learn the history and duration of this publication, but couldn't find anything. I must admit I didn't spend a lot of time on it. At any rate, this July 1962 edition of Show provided a very rich selection of reading, indeed. The central theme of the edition was the Japanese film industry. Among the articles on this topic were an interesting profile of Akira Kurosawa and his movies and a humorous piece on the many openings in Japan for Americans and Europeans (no acting experience necessary!) to play movie villains. But there were many fascinating pieces above and beyond that central theme. For example:

* A long entry from Somerset Maugham's memoirs describing his unfortunate marriage but also his activities working for the British government during World War One.
* An evocative and absorbing memory essay from Joseph Heller describing the Coney Island of his youth.
* A fascinating essay by dancer/actor/writer Geoffrey Holder about his participation in an American government sponsored cultural expedition to Lagos.
* Leonard Feather writes about the health of the jazz festival.

These are some of the most interesting pieces, and also on hand are reviews of movies, plays, music, books visual art and more, all providing a snapshot of the American world of the arts in 1962. I love these old magazines for the pictures and knowledge they provide of the eras in which they were published.

>20 rocketjk: Wonderful review. You definitely put that one into my "very interested" pile.

>24 rocketjk: Oh man, you sent me down a rabbit hole on that one, without much more luck—there isn't a lot out there on Show. It ran from 1961–65, originally founded by zillionaire Huntington Hartford and then, when it went into debt, sold to American Theater Press, which publishes Playbill theater programs. I love those old deluxe mid-century periodicals too—there was a lot wrong with that era but I have to admit to nostalgia for that slavish devotion to the arts as a thing that would make you a better person. I'm still sad that I left a big heavy box of Horizon magazines behind in a move.

>25 lisapeet: Thanks for the kind words about my review of the Singer. I hope you read it sometime soon, as I'd love to see your response to it. Also, thanks for the research on Show. I'll be adding the January 1962 edition to my between book stack next. It doesn't seem to be quite as rich in content as the July '62 edition, but you never know for sure until you read the articles. :)

Boy in Blue by Royce Brier



Here is an obscure but highly readable novel about the American Civil War. Boy in Blue was published in 1937. Doing the math, this means that it was published 85 years ago, but "only" 72 years after the end of that war. The author, Royce Brier, was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who three years before this book's publishing had won the Pulitzer Prize in Reporting "For his account of the lynching of the kidnappers, John M. Holmes and Thomas H. Thurmond in San Jose, Calif., on Nov. 26, 1933 after they had been jailed for abducting Brooke Hart, a merchant's son."
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/royce-brier

In a way the novel is standard fare. Robert Thane, a young naive but good-hearted boy is growing up on a farm in Indiana. The Civil War has just begun. His father is a staunch Unionist and abolitionist, but his uncle's sentiments are with the Confederacy. Robert has an older brother who is soon to enlist with the Federals. In the meantime, Robert is in love with the pretty girl living on a nearby farm. She returns his affections, but he is too shy to do much about it. Soon, of course, events send Robert off to the war as well. Well, it seems that every Civil War novel, and many another historical novel in general, begin more or less in this way. A reader must simply determine to plow through the opening to get to the real action of the story. However, Brier was a pretty good writer, and he does a good job of using this opening act to set the stage of Robert's attitudes about the war. And while we see him as naive at the beginning, he comes to see his father's passion for the principles that have set the conflict in motion as being the real naïveté. We may or may not agree with that, but we can understand the soldier in the midst of the conflict thinking so.

Robert's early army days entail a lot of training, and then months of marching hither and yon, up and down Tennessee, without seeing much action. As readers, we know, of course, that there must be a climactic battle coming at the end of all this. Still, the descriptions of those dreary months of marching and discomforting struggle are rendered quite well and we do feel that we're getting a believable close feel for the experience of an army in the midst of its perplexing (to the foot soldiers) wanderings. Brier was very good with the sights and sounds and physical toils of the marching, rain soaked or sun beaten days and weeks going by, with just enough characterizations of Robert's marching comrades to fill in the spaces around him. The flyleaf tells us that Brier spend a long time walking the Cumberland Valley trails that the Federal army traversed during the weeks leading up to the battles fought there, and we can certainly believe it.

The battle, when we finally get to it, takes up around the final 60 or so pages of the book. We do not know whether Robert will survive. It is a testament to Brier's skill, I think, that the ending, whether it's to be happy or tragic, is not telegraphed. So, all in all, I am happy to have read this novel, though it doesn't surprise me too much that it's become forgotten and obscure. My copy, a first edition, is one of only four copies listed here on LT. I've had it on my shelf since before my LT "Big Bang," which is to say before I first began posting my personal collection here in 2008.

Having been away from Stack 2 for awhile, I decided that my post-Boy in Blue "Between Books" reading would be a return to that pile. Having finished the July 1962 edition of Show: The Magazine of the Arts with my last BB reading, I started the next magazine on my stack of old periodicals, which is the January 1962 edition of Show

* “Senorita Luisa’s Passion” by Antonio de Trueba from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “P is for the Pun-American Conference” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “The Work of Gertrude Stein” from Selected Essays by William Carlos Williams
* “Voodoo: Black Magic of the Cuban Dance – A Portfolio of Silhuettes” by Paul Swartz from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “The Planter Box” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “Robert Schuman: French Premier, 1947—1948; French Foreign Minister, 1948--1953” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
* "Opera: ‘The Crucible’ and ‘The Dove’" by Virgil Thomson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962 – Newly added

I've now started this month's reading group selection, Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia.

I read several books by Singer in the early 80's (I think instigated by his winning the Nobel), including The Family Moskat, which I loved. I reread The Family Moskat a couple of years ago, and still loved it. Another huge book by Singer I read so many years ago that I also absolutely loved was The Manor and the Estate, and my intent is to reread that one soon. And if you're into huge family sagas that are immensely readable, have you ever read Buddenbrooks?--Another one I love and have read multiple times.

>29 arubabookwoman: Always glad to hear from another Singer enthusiast! I haven't read Buddenbrooks yet, though I have a copy in the house awaiting my attention. I'm reading through all of Singer's novels two per year in chronological order by publishing date, so I'll get to The Manor and the Estate in, it looks like, 2024. According to the list of Singer novels on Wikipedia, The Manor was published in 1967 and The Estate in 1969 as, more or less, a sequel, and then they were republished together in a single volume later. I'll probably read them one at a time.

As I mentioned, I'm reading the Singer novels two per year, the first book I start in January and the first book I start in July. So the schedule at this point looks like this:
The Magician of Lublin (1960) — January 2023
The Slave (1962) — July 2023
The Manor (1967) — January 2024
The Estate (1969) — July 2024
. . . and so forth.

Cheers!

Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia



I was very much looking forward to reading this book, a murder mystery taking place in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance with a gay African American female protagonist, written by an African Canadian woman. The book was a selection for my monthly reading group. But I was sorely disappointed. I found the writing amateurish and cliche-ridden and the plot barely credible. And while the book ostensibly takes place in Harlem during the 1920s, I experienced essentially no sense of place, other than the fact that most of the characters, other than the policemen, are black and as well as an occasional reference to Prohibition.

So I would warn folks away. On the other hand, there are LT reviews giving this book 3, 3.5, and in one case even 4 stars, so your mileage may vary.

My post-Dead Dead Girls "Between Book" reading was a ramble through Stack 1:

* “The Wild Sow” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
* “'You Are Not Here'” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Horatius” by Thomas Macaulay from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “George Strickler” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “Earth’s Holocaust” by Nathaniel Hawthorne from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Movies: Miller Agonistes” by Stanley Kauffman from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

Now I've started the excellent history, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.

>32 rocketjk: Say Nothing is really, really good.

>33 lisapeet: Yes, I'm about 60 pages in already and ripping through it quickly. It was a birthday gift from my wife this past July. She'd already listened to it as an audiobook and knew I would like it.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe



This is a fascinating, disturbing and eminently readable history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It begins with the seizing in 1972 of a seemingly harmless widow, Jean McConville, by an armed, masked posse right out of her own apartment and in front of her 10 children. Historian Patrick Radden Keefe uses this crime, and its repercussions, as the central event in his in-depth account of the events of the Troubles and the aftermath of the tragedy, as well. Keefe soon backs his lens away from the kidnapping itself to describe the bloody years and events in Belfast primarily. He takes for granted to a certain extent a knowledge of the sectarian/religious animus between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast, and the hard line in the rubble between Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Catholics who want the counties of the North to join the Republic of Ireland. But one of the huge strengths of the book is Keefe's practice of focusing in on some of the important individuals on the Catholic (IRA) side, showing us who they were and how they became radicalized to the extent that they were will to go to "war" (most would say terrorism) to try to drive the English out of Ireland once and for all. Of particular interest are the Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, who turned to violence after a peace march they were taking part in was viciously attacked by Protestant thugs. Both end up not only in prison, but taking part in the hunger strikes that nearly cost both of them their lives. Occasionally, Keefe revisits the McConville children, their attempts to learn of their mother's fate, to stay together as a family, and then their individual often brutal journeys through the Northern Irish youth homes and orphanages. Back to the conflict, and Keefe takes us inside the IRA, mostly following the Price sisters and another very high-ranking member, Brandon Hughes, another prison/hunger strike survivor, as individual acts of terrorism are planned and committed, almost never coming off entirely as conceived. And, of course, we see the IRA's leader (or was he?), Gerry Adams, the man who eventually turned away from terrorism to create the movement's political wing, Sinn Fein.

Keefe illuminates the sense of betrayal felt by Adams' former brothers and sisters in arms by this development, and in particular Adams' insistence that he was never really an IRA member, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement between the IRA, the Loyalist Protestant forces and the British government. "What was it all for?" the surviving terrorists want to know bitterly in the face of the agreement that allows the British to remain on the island. As the violence fades, the accounting begins, including the search for answers about the IRA victims who have been "disappeared." The IRA's most commonly followed custom was to dump the bodies of those they'd executed, normally for being informants for the British (or even just for being suspected as such) or for disobeying IRA orders, on the streets as a warning to others. But there had been a small number, only 10 or 11 all told, who had been "disappeared," surreptitiously executed and buried in remote locations, never to be spoken of again. Even asking about these people's fates could get you killed. Had Jean McConville been one of these? And if so, why, and by whom? It turns out that the story of the post-Troubles accounting and unburdening is almost as fascinating, as presented by Keefe, as the story of the bloody years of the Troubles. Keefe also takes us, to a lesser extent, inside the British Army hierarchy in Northern Ireland, and shows us the British attempts to infiltrate the IRA organization, and the counter-espionage steps taken by both sides.

If there is anything lacking in the comprehensive picture Keefe provides, it stems from the fact that, as he describes the most violent years of the Troubles, he spends most of his time with the higher echelons of the IRA, with those who plan and carry out high-level operations and create the policies and strategies that were followed. To get at the horrifying claustrophobic and terror-laden daily life in Belfast during these years, I think one needs to turn to fiction, or perhaps to other memoirs/histories that I haven't learned of. So, for example, a novel like Milkman or even the thriller, The Ghosts of Belfast, give us a stronger view of what day-to-day life was like on the streets and in the neighborhoods than Keefe has provided here. That's not meant as a criticism of Keefe's accomplishment, however, which I consider to be enormous and extremely valuable. Also, as I mentioned at the start and want to reiterate here, Keefe is a clear and sympathetic writer, and his prose pulls the reader along, as horrific as his subject matter often becomes.

>35 rocketjk: Great review. Onto the wish list it goes.

>35 rocketjk: That was a terrific book, and you did it justice in your review. I think one of the things that makes Keefe really good at this big-subject narrative nonfiction gig is that he picks his parameters and sticks to them. And that he really seems to be a compassionate, decent journalist.

Great review of Say Nothing, Jerry; I'll add it to my wish list as well. (ETA: It's available in my local library, so I'll borrow it soon.)

It's Monday, so you know what I'm cooking today.

>38 kidzdoc: Red beans Monday! Oh, you just made me both hungry and homesick! (You are forgiven, though.)

ETA: Thanks to all for the kind words about my review of Say Nothing. Cheers!

>38 kidzdoc: Apologies, and thank you.

I am using authentic Camellia red beans in this recipe, as the other brands leave much to be desired.

>39 rocketjk: "I am using authentic Camellia red beans in this recipe, as the other brands leave much to be desired."

Duly noted. :)

>41 rocketjk: One of my closest friends from Tulane was almost disowned from her family recently. Her family moved from New Orleans to Minneapolis when she was a child, and before she took a trip to NOLA last year her grandmother asked her to buy red beans while she was there. She did so, but they weren't Camellia beans, and her grandmother was furious with her when she returned to Minnesota!

Camellia's butter beans (large lima beans) are also irreplaceable, IMO. I keep a stash of dried butter beans (and small red beans) in my pantry, and I'll use them to make Cajun butter beans with Andouille sausage and shrimp later this week.

 

>35 rocketjk: Great review, Jerry. As someone who lived through the Troubles period in NI I'm never overly keen on dwelling back on that depressing time in my reading, but I've heard great reviews about this book.

A number of my parents friends were killed in the Troubles. Most of them were part-time RUC (police) or part-time UDR (Ulster Defence Regiment army) just trying to earn a living for their families in County Fermanagh. Other than that, I would say we lived a fairly 'normal' life during the Troubles compared to people who lived in the thick of it in West Belfast, for example (i.e. where the likes of Milkman is set), although some of what seemed 'normal' at the time feels very strange now: being searched by the police before you went into the very centre of Belfast, not going into the city centre at night and seeing soldiers regularly out on the streets (always very embarrassing to be stuck behind an army Land Rover with a load of young soldiers hanging out the back when you were a young woman driving - you took a lot of stick designed to make you as flustered as possible behind the wheel!). My dad was abducted by the IRA in the early 1970s when he was delivering goods in West Belfast as they wanted his car for a bomb. Luckily they set him free unscathed, but my mum always remembers him returning home in a taxi as white as a ghost (and of course his beloved car was no more). In my first Saturday job at the age of 16 in a Belfast department store, one of my duties at store closing time was to check my section for bombs. It seemed perfectly standard at the time, but looking back I'd be horrified at the thought of my kids doing that now!

This video always sticks in my head of the young McConville kids being interviewed at home just after their mother disappeared and before they were split up and put into care (if you can understand the accents). A year or two back someone in the IRA was tried for their mother's murder but was not convicted. The family felt that this was the last decent chance they'll get at bringing someone to justice for her disappearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n19IgTegEg8&t=71s

We're definitely a country that's still raw and trying to heal - we're not there yet. Unfortunately politically we're still stuck in a Protestant vs Catholic mentality, with people voting for the 2 main parties on each side on the basis of religion and allegiance to either Ireland or the UK (and moreover keeping the other 'side' out of power). The sad part is that the people we consistently vote into power are the very people who want to hold the country back and keep it stuck in the past rather than moving forward. I'm hoping that perhaps my kids' generation will be the first to see real progress. My children were born after the Troubles had ceased, attend an integrated school and have friends belonging to both religious sides, so they don't really understand the divisions of the past.

Having lived through those times, remembering innocent people being murdered and Gerry Adams being banned from talking on UK news programmes because of his IRA affiliation (for want of a better word), it's quite difficult to see Sinn Fein as the majority party now in N. Ireland, with many of those elected coming from backgrounds of having parents who were in the IRA. However, for the sake of progress and peace we have to try and move on. With Sinn Fein strong on both sides of the border I wouldn't be surprised to see a united Ireland in my lifetime, but I'm not sure the Rep. of Ireland really wants us! I'm not sure that a lot of people who vote for SF actually really want that either. Time will tell, no doubt.

Sorry for the essay! Always like to give an insiders view when books on NI pop up on LT.

>43 AlisonY: Sorry? Don't be daft! In fact, I offer profound thanks to you for taking the time to relate your memories and feelings about that time and its reverberations into the present. It is always a bit fraught to sift through what one gets in both fiction and non-fiction about a controversial time and place, to know how much to trust what you're reading, and it is extremely valuable to me to be offered your deeply thoughtful first-person insight.

Sadly, out of any sectarian strife there seem to grow whole cohorts of people who are emotionally, politically and even economically invested in maintaining the state of conflict in one way or another rather than moving from war to peace.

On a more trivial note, I'm wondering whether I've ever asked you about the show, Derry Girls. My wife and I loved the first two seasons and we're looking forward to the third season becoming available in the U.S. It seems to reflect some of what you described, i.e. the Troubles being a very real but in many ways background element to daily life.

My only close contact with folks from Northern Ireland came once during my bachelor days when I was traveling on my own in County Sligo and spent a long weekend at a hotel in Mullaghmore. A day after I got there, the hotel filled up with a large group on holiday from Belfast who were there for a Murder Mystery weekend. The very gracious hotel owner invited me to take part without any extra charge so I wouldn't be entirely isolated during my stay. I ended up being adopted by one group of five who were tickled to have an American on board. "Look, we have a Yank!" they shouted at one point across the bar when some after-hours drinking was going on. "Do you lot have a Yank? Ha! No, we didn't think so!" They invited me to come visit them in Belfast, and in fact I stayed in contact via email with one of them for a while, but I never did make it.

>44 rocketjk: Well shame you never got the chance to take up that Belfast invite, Jerry! You'll have to visit me instead if you ever make it back to this green island.

Funny enough I never got into Derry Girls until we recently watched the last in the series and loved it, so we've been randomly watching some episodes in reverse. Some Catholic friends think the portrayal in the show of going to a convent school is hilariously absolutely spot on. In terms of the Troubles, yes I think they hit the nail on the head about life just going on as normal with the usual teen troubles being much more important to those of us who were that sort of age at the time.

>43 AlisonY: Having recently read Adrian McKinty's Cold, Cold Ground, set in Belfast in 1981, I really appreciate your insider's help in understanding what the situation was like there for "ordinary" people. I always take fictional portrayals with a healthy dash of skepticism regarding their accuracy, but it seems McKinty didn't overplay the prevalence of threat on the streets. Say Nothing has been on my wishlist for a bit, and thanks to Jerry's excellent review, I'm going to prioritize getting my hands on a copy. So, >35 rocketjk:, thanks, Jerry.

>43 AlisonY: I greatly enjoyed reading your personal account of growing up during the Troubles, Alison, although I'm sorry that you and your family had to experience that. Your comments and Jerry's excellent review make me that much more eager to read Say Nothing, so I'll try to get to it before the end of the year.

For my post-Say Nothing "Between Book" reading, I took a stroll through Stack 3:

* "Dodgers Paced Majors to Turnstile Mark" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "Latin America Facing a World at War: September, 1939 --" from The Background of Our War
* "Lula Borrow" by Tom Mabry from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "One Good Turn Deserves Another" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The Affliction of Childhood” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Television: Sid: Father is Sick. Come Home” by Warren Miller from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

Now I'm about 50 pages into The Constant Rabbit. I do love me some Jasper Fforde!

>48 rocketjk: Do you do reviews of "Between Books" when you finish them? I was wondering if you finished Gaza Mom, and if you did, what you thought. Perhaps I just missed your review?

>49 labfs39: Yes, I do post reviews of Between Books when I finish them, and, no, I haven't finished Gaza Mom, yet. In fact, I just read a chapter last night. I have about 7 chapters to go. Since I have three distinct stacks of Between Books going right now and go through one stack per "full length" book I read, it means I'll be finishing Gaza Mom around 21 books from now. So, anyway, a while. Here's my short review: powerful, enlightening, depressing, infuriating.

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde



Goodness, I do love Jasper Fforde's writing and imagination, and while probably nothing will replicate for me the delight of reading the early Thursday Next books for the first time, The Constant Rabbit, after a bit of a slow start, turned out to be great fun. It has been fifty-five years since the entirely unexplained Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event (a.k.a. the Event) has turned most rabbits, along, unfortunately, with quite a few foxes and a weasel or two, in England into sentient beings, weird hybrids between animals and people, grown to human size and able to converse. Humans have become ever more wary of the rabbit neighbors and suspicious of the consequences of their breeding power. As a result, laws proscribing the rights, movements of rabbits, and even where they are allowed to live, have multiplied, and a great "rehoming" to Wales is in the offing. The action of the novel centers around the antics in the town of Much Hemlock (Fforde has great fun with English town names, here) and our hero is the human Peter Knox. Peter works for the evil rabbit control agency (he only works there because he needs the money) though he is sympathetic to the rabbits and their plight and even has a crush on Connie, a rabbit he's known since college days.

The constant rabbit is a satire about anti-immigrant fear:

The rabbit issue used to be friendly chat over tea and hobnobs in the old days, but the argument had, like many others in recent years, became polarised: if you weren't rabidly against rabbits, you were clearly only in favorer of timidly bowing down to acquiesce to the Rabbit Way, then accepting Lago as your god and eating nothing but carrots and lettuce for the fest of your life.

But Fforde also takes on the issues of the complicity of inaction. As one rabbit, Finkle, puts the case (and as Fforde eventually pokes fun at himself) in this exchange, which I have edited for length:

"Shame is right. Shame works. Shame is the gateway emotion to increased self-criticism, which leads to realization, an apology, outrage and eventually meaningful action. We're not holding our breaths that any appreciable numbers can be arsed to make the journey along that difficult chain of emotional honesty -- many good people get past realization, only to then get horribly stuck at apology -- but we live in hope."

"It's further evidence of satire being the engine of the Event," said Connie, "although if that's true, we're not sure for whose benefit."

"Maybe it's the default position of humans when they feel threatened," I ventured, "although if I'm honest, I know a lot of people who claim to have 'nothing against rabbits' but tacitly do nothing against the over leporiphobia that surrounds them."

Or maybe it's just satire for comedy's sake and nothing else," added Connie, "or even more useless, satire that provokes a few guffaws buy only low to middling outrage -- but is coupled with more talk and not action. A sort of empty cleverness."

As always, Fforde is extremely clever with his world building (which I've only scratched the surface of here) and language. His satire is cutting but compassionate. And after that slow start I mentioned, the storyline moves along quite nicely building to a tense and believable (Did I just write that a novel about talking rabbits and foxes has a believable ending?) ending. So overall, the Constant Rabbit is fun and funny and has a message worth noting.

>51 rocketjk: I'll have to add this Jasper Fforde to the list. Never got into the Thrusday Next series but I do like his Nurse Rhymes retellings. He has knack for sucking you into that world.

>52 stretch: He does. The beauty of this book is that it's a standalone, so less of a commitment.

>51 rocketjk: I never took to the Thursday Next series the way I thought I would. I have read the first three and gave lower ratings to each, until I left the fourth on the shelf unread. The Constant Rabbit sounds very funny, as well as timely. Perhaps I'll give Fforde another go.

>54 labfs39: Sorry you never enjoyed the Thursday Next books as well as I did, but that's life! I absolutely loved the first two. The third, The Well of Lost Plots, doesn't have much of a plot, but then it wouldn't, would it? :) The rest, for me, are fun as well.

Shades of Grey* and Early Riser are both standalones and also very thought provoking. Shades of Grey is in fact kind of dark.

* Supposedly there is a sequel coming to this one next year some time.

>55 rocketjk: I have the first two of the Thursday Next books on my shelf, given to me a while ago by a dear friend. I should give them a try.

>56 lisapeet: I hope you give the first a try sometime soon. I would love to know whether you enjoyed it as much as I did.

OK, here is the report on my post-The Constant Rabbit "Between Book" reading you've all been waiting for! This time we take a wander through Stack 1:

* “A Pot of Gold” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Gaza: Gloom, Impermanence, Dread” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Hannibal Crosses the Alps” by Jacob Abbott from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Abe Kemp” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “Buzby’s Petrified Woman” by Loren Eisely from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Theater: How to Be Bored in Three Acts” by John Simon from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

I've now gotten serious again, as I've begun Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.

Enjoy your trip East! I'll look forward to your catch-up when you get back. Georgia, huh? I wonder what the topic of this book will be...

>58 labfs39: I think my wife does know, but she's sworn to secrecy. Anyway, she hasn't told me! Thanks for the note, and I'll "see" everybody when I get back in a week's time.

For folks seeing this who have seen my post on the What Are You Reading Now CR thread, I'm off for a week in NYC with a couple of buddies who go back with me to grammar school days. We'll be seeing a couple of baseball games, one Mets game and one Yankees game. Also on the schedule we have one set at a jazz club and one particular photo exhibition on of my friends wants to see.

My wife is going to Georgia (the country) a few days later with an old (college roommates!) friend and traveling companion.

It's cooled off (for the time being) in New York—have fun! That sounds like an ideal NYC vacation.

I'm back from my wonderful week in New York. Just before I left I made the executive decision to not bring my hardcover copy of Caste along, leaving the last 70 pages or so to finish up on my return. Instead I brought a long a fun science fiction novel from my pulp paperback shelves. Now I have three days to finish the excellent but long The Boys of Summer, a modern classic of the memoir/baseball history genre, for my reading group meeting this Sunday. Then I'll get back to Caste. Here's my review of the vacation reading:

Falling Toward Forever by Gordon Eklund



Sometimes you just need one from the pulp paperback shelf, especially when there are a couple of long plane rides in the offing, and so it was with my decision to take this fun science fiction novel along on my recent vacation. Falling Toward Forever was published in 1975. Two soldiers are fighting on the same side in an anti-colonial war in an unnamed African country. One, Ahmad, is a black man fighting to free his own country. Waller is a white mercenary, a former Vietnam War prisoner of war and torture victim. Embittered by the experience and the hypocrisy of the U.S. government, he was turned soldier for hire, willing, so he says, to fight for any insurgency against any established government. Although Ahmad is suspicious of Waller's motives and what he believes to be Waller's death wish, the two have respect for each other as fighters. In the heat of a battle, Waller comes upon a woman who is trying to hide from the fighting. But she has a gun that she fires at Waller, hitting his arm. Just as he is about to return fire, Ahmad runs up from behind and yells at Waller not to shoot. Suddenly, all three of them are snatched from the spot by an unseen force and dropped down in a wholly alien environment. Where are they and what has happened to them? The rest of the novel, of course, brings us the trio trying to sort out their circumstances and deal with the people whose time and place they have suddenly entered.

Eklund seemed to be attempting to add at least a touch of social awareness to his story. It's hard to miss the fact that our trio of heroes include a white man, a black man and a woman. The leadership and planning, and the best ideas and plans, ebb and flow between all three characters throughout the story. On the other hand, the leadership often does default to Waller, and we are expected, it seems, to see this as natural. Well, I don't want to make too much of all that. This is, after all, a pulp novel, and it appears Eklund was at least aware of these issues in his storytelling. At any rate, Eklund's writing is pretty good, here, in terms of physical detail and even, to a certain extent, characterization. The plot itself gets more implausible as things go along, and the ending is rushed, but what the heck, I had fun reading the tale, which was just right for vacation reading.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn



When my friend selected this book last month for our reading group, I was surprised to realize I'd never read it. The Boys of Summer is a classic of the genre of sports memoirs, at least in the U.S., not counting memoirs written by the athletes themselves. A day or two after my friend announced the selection, I ran into him in town and asked him, "Are all the guys in the group baseball fans?" I was pretty sure at least a couple of the group weren't. He replied that the book is well enough written, and deals with enough issues other than baseball itself, that even the non-baseball fans in the group would enjoy it. As I began reading, I realized how right he was.

Roger Kahn grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants, intellectuals who were frustrated in not being able to make use of their love of learning and literature professionally, but made sure there was a strong intellectual atmosphere in the household. (Even in adulthood, Kahn attended weekly sessions with his parents during which they take turns reading aloud from Ulysses.) Kahn describes his childhood lovingly, but without sparing the family's frustrations or the tragedy of his sister's polio. Kahn then takes us into his early days as a journalist, including his apprenticeship as a copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune, his first tentative writing assignments and the tough mentorship he receives from some of the experienced writers and editors. Soon enough, Kahn, at only 24, manages to land the prized assignment as daily beat writer covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. As Kahn describes his years covering the Dodgers, he concentrates on writing about the personalities and inter-team relationships of the most memorable players. Most fascinating, of course, is Kahn's relating of the drama of Jackie Robinson's entry into the Dodger clubhouse and the trials he had to go through as Major League Baseball's first black player. Some of the players, such as Pee Wee Reese, the shortstop and team captain, and pitcher Carl Erskine, supported Robinson from the beginning, especially as Robinson was such a talented and fearsome player. Others were resistant. But the Robinson story is not the only player's tale that Kahn weaves into the narrative, and we get a close-up view of the multi-faceted relationships within a 25-man team as well as the pressures of competition, of the daily failures and success, and how they are handled differently by the diverse personalities of the ballclub.

Kahn admits in the book that he never had much objectivity when it came to the team and their fortunes. He'd grown up a Dodger fan and remained one as a writer. But still he was able to write negative stories when he needed to, stories about on-field failures and less than admirable remarks. It was a different era in sportswriting, however, in which writers would more or less respect the players' privacy and to a certain extent protect their reputations as well. Kahn was able to walk those lines, and earned the respect and in many cases the friendship of quite a few of the famous Dodger players of those teams of the early- to mid-1950s. Significantly, Kahn does a good job of describing the often vicious prejudice experienced by Robinson and the other black players the Dodgers soon added, both from other players and from fans, and this theme is a constant throughout the book.

Eventually Kahn tired and/or grew out of the daily grind of the baseball beat writer and turned to freelance magazine writing and other outlets. Around 15 years later, Kahn developed the idea of visiting as many of the key members as he could of those by then legendary Dodger teams to see how life had treated them after their playing days. This section takes up, more or less, the book's second half. You don't need to care about any of these men as baseball stars to find these post-career portraits compelling. Kahn renders them with sensitivity and, yes, love. Many of the players have gone back to their childhood towns in the midwest or the Ozarks, removed from public life. Some remember their baseball years as the highlight of their lives and relish the memory of the relationships and fun of the clubhouse and the splendor of playing ball for a living. Others remember more the intense pressure they felt of trying to survive as major leaguers and perform well on the field. Some think of their baseball years as, more or less, part of their training for adulthood. One or two are bitter about how they were treated by the businessmen atop the Dodger corporate ladder. All in all we get a series vivid portraits of these men whose fame as athletes entailed the built-in obsolescence of youth. And it's important to remember that this was all before the era when a 5-year baseball career could set a person up financially for life. These men, in one way or another, simply went back to work in some other fashion, from bartenders to business executive in companies like Greyhound. Luckily, Kahn's relationship with Robinson was a good one of mutual respect. Robinson was already ailing from diabetes and other problems when Kahn went to interview him, and the story of that visit is largely taken up with a description of the man through the lens of his sorrows over the problems his oldest son was having with substance abuse. Over the years between ballpark and interviews, the 50s had become the 60s. Robinson himself died not very long after Kahn visited him.

So, as you can see, Kahn crammed a lot into these 456 pages, but he did it with grace and style and substance. As far as the quality of the writing is concerned, I'll finish up here by quoting this final paragraph from Kahn's chapter on Gil Hodges, the Dodger first baseman known of his quiet strength as a player. Hodges went on to manage in the major leagues, most famously leading the 1969 Miracle Mets to the teams first World Series championship, but died from a heart attack only three years later at the age of 47.

" . . . We parted, and in the large empty ball park I tried to imagine how this job and night and life felt to a man with mine deaths in his past and a heart condition in his present and I missed a sense of joy. He has been close to the peaks of baseball for a quarter century and, though he has gained things he wanted, Hodges has paid. He had seemed more tranquil as a player struggling to hit Maglie than as a pennant-winning manager. In the empty ball park, where my footfalls on cement made the only sound, I wondered whether Gil Hodges truly was better off with the satisfactions and fierce strains of his success or whether sometimes he envied his older brother Bob, who always talked a better game, but disappeared into the chasm of corporate life during the 1940s when all his talk and scheming ended with a dead arm on a Class D ball club playing in West Central Georgia. And here it was, only May."

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson



In this clearly written, crucial and devastating* book, Isabel Wilkerson lays out the concept of caste as it pertains to American society. The book more or less begins with the fact that racism grew out of a stronger group's desire to use "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits" (Ashley Montagu as quoted by Wilkerson) to create an underclass. Wilkerson quoting Montagu again: "The idea of race was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste." In other words, European colonizers needed an excuse to subjugate, plunder and murder the people they came in contact with.

These divisions and classifications hardened, with pseudo-science, religion, greed, hatred and ignorance acting as the cement among the brickwork. Now, white America is brought up with a wide array of assumptions about people who don't look like them. This holds true for working class whites who are taught to eschew social programs that could help them and their families if those programs will also help blacks. It also holds true for liberals (like me) who think they are past all that and who are well-meaning and think of themselves (ourselves) as "not seeing color," would never hesitate to shake hands with or even hire a Black person but who still embody a roster of unconscious suppositions about people of other races.

As Wilkerson puts it, "Color is a fact. Race is a social construct."

The crux of Wilkerson's explanation, and here, I'm afraid, comes a rather long quote, can be found on page 71 of my hardcover edition:

"In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positions and restricting those positions, vis-a-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste . . .

. . .

In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random black or brown person who is also shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a black or brown person who is also a guest to fetch them a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It's the automatic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences."

The rest of the book is more or less a detailed explication of this phenomenon. But I don't want to give the impression that Caste becomes repetitive or didactic. Far from it. The detail and the layering on of the different aspects and results of the social construct Wilkerson is examining helps immensely. The deeper she goes into those layers, the more she illuminates the history, complexity and fixity of the problem.

As a way of underscoring the concept of caste, Wilkerson also spends significant time looking at the caste system in India, its history and superstructure and, especially, its harms. In comparing U.S. society with the Indian system, Wilkerson strengthens her points about American caste culture.

The explanations of and comparisons with India work well, but where the book becomes flawed, in my view, is when Wilkerson talks about her third example, the Holocaust. For one thing, these segments seem jammed in somehow, and artificial. Primarily, to me, this is because she frequently refers to the 12 years of the Nazi regime, seeming to marvel at how fast the Nazis were able to turn Jews into a lower caste. But, of course, there was nothing new about Europeans treating Jews as a lower and reviled caste. It was a construct of more than a thousand years standing, a fact that the Nazis relied upon in their murderous anti-Semitic campaigns across the continent, but that Wilkerson never mentions.

That reservation, however, is not a major one for me. As many others have said here on LT and elsewhere, this is an essential book that should be assigned reading for every white (at the very least) American and European. I was a bit concerned that Caste would seem at least somewhat redundant after my relatively recent reading of The New Jim Crow. I needn't have worried, as the problem of race and caste in America is vast enough for more than one book, to put it mildly. The two books are complimentary, and in fact I would recommend a trio of works that each get at the issue from a different direction: Caste, The New Jim Crow and The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Us and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee. Together, I think, these three books help create a good starting place for understanding the issues and people involved.

* That is, devastating for American white people like me. My supposition is that blacks and other ethnic groups have known all about the information contained in this book all their lives.

My recent trip to NYC interrupted my "Between Book" routine for a bit, but now I'm back into the groove. Here is my post-Caste wander through Stack 3:

* "Wills Set Modern Standard with 104 Thefts" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "National Defense" from The Background of Our War
* "A Heart of Furious Fancies" by Winona McClintic from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The White Bird" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "Dream-Echoes of these Infant Experiences” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Jazz: Going Nowhere” by Leonard Feather from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

I've now begun book seven in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, Homecomings.

Homecomings by C.P. Snow



This is the seventh book in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series that takes a reader through several layers of middle- and upper-class English society from the 1920s through the 1950s. All of the novels feature a man named Lewis Eliot, who over the series fights his way from a lower middle-class upbringing into the halls of administrative power, first in industry and then, during World War 2, in British Civil Service. Hindered socially, and therefore professionally, by a profoundly depressed wife, Sheila, who cannot help him make friendships and connections through the never-ending round of dinners and parties Eliot is expected to attend, Eliot is, early in the series, thwarted in his attempts to make his mark in the legal profession. Snow's frustrations with a social environment that prevents the rise of capable people in this manner is mostly unstated but clear throughout the series. As this novel begins, Eliot is an adviser to a powerful industrialist. He is seen by his peers as a successful man, but one who has never fulfilled his real promise. Eliot sees himself this way, as well, but has mostly made his peace with it.

As this novel progresses, the war begins and Eliot makes his way into the wartime government. He has a job that is stressful with responsibility, but he is still attending to more powerful men. From his spot near but not at the top, Eliot is able to make sharply drawn observations about the nature of the bureaucracy--and the qualities of the people--both above and below him on the organization chart. At the same time, Eliot's private life, as Sheila's condition deteriorates further, becomes complex and sorrowful. The book is filled with small but powerful observations about the nature of love and responsibility, and the handicaps inherent in a life pointed too much inward. This is not just a flaw of Sheila's as Eliot describes things for us, but also of Eliot himself. There is a varied and entertaining cast of characters attendant, as well, and Snow is adept at describing their personalities and actions, for good or ill. Several figures from the early books are brought back into the scene here.

It's not an uncommon theme that the end of major wars bring on unexpected changes--ends of eras--in countries and cultures, but Snow's observations regarding this phenomenon in England just after World War Two has ended are, I think, particularly good. Eliot, who has come of age in relatively Bohemian company during the 1920s, looks around during a party at a couple of friends he's known since those days and reflects:

" . . . I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.

So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of skepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: thy would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except of catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by civil service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese court. . . . Just as the men of affairs had fractioned themselves into a group with its own rules . . . just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks . . . {I}t was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors."

I find Snow's writing style understated and enjoyable, and his observations and characterizations, his talent for detail, to be satisfying in the reading. The plotting of these novels is often slow, but I'm OK with that. I know that this is the sort of book that many of my LT friends are more or less avoiding these days: a book by a white, straight, male featuring a white, straight male protagonist living in a white world of power and relative privilege. I complete sympathize with all this, and tend to lean in this direction myself. Yet for me, the books of this series, which are about in the end about human nature, the joys, pitfalls and dangers of all sorts of relationships, be they private or public, provide rewarding reading experiences nevertheless. There are four more books in the series, and I expect to be attending to them gradually over the next couple of years.

A quick note on the title. As you'll see in the cover image I've posted, my American edition from the 1960s called the book Homecoming (no "s"), but almost every other cover image on LT shows the title with that "s."

>66 rocketjk: Interesting to read your excellent review of C P Snow's Homecoming. He is such an unfashionable author these days. The Paragraph you quoted about the crystallisation of the class system is as accurate today as it was in the 1950's.

>67 baswood: "The Paragraph you quoted about the crystallisation of the class system is as accurate today as it was in the 1950's.

Thanks. And this . . .

"it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class."

. . . was how those of us who were young in the U.S. (or at least, I should say, those of us who were young and white and living in the north) felt in the late-60s and through the 70s, although we would have substituted the word "race" for "class."

>66 rocketjk: >68 rocketjk: I’ve still only read one of Snow’s books: I really should have a proper go at him.

"it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class."

It’s all a matter of perspectives. Writers who identified with the privileged upper classes were writing in the forties as though they were expecting to be carried off to the guillotine (Brideshead revisited!), a pre-war middle class social climber like Snow saw his hopes of meaningful change frustrated, but the mostly working-class Angry Young Men writers of the post-war generation saw Snow’s generation as the old establishment figures hogging the positions of power…

>69 thorold: I've been reading these Strangers and Brothers books in order. I find them entertaining and particularly good on observations about human nature and about British society. Regarding the latter, though, as an American born in 1955, I can't really tell how accurate Snow is, though the books have the ring of authenticity about them.

Your comments about it all being a matter of perspective certainly ring true to me, as do your more specific observations.

"but the mostly working-class Angry Young Men writers of the post-war generation saw Snow’s generation as the old establishment figures hogging the positions of power…"

This resonates with the way the Baby Boomer generation is seen now. The more things change . . .

I've been barraged by tweets* demanding to know about my latest "Between Book" reading. So here are details about my post-Homecomings wander through Stack 1:

* “The Fight” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Gaza: From Prison to Zoo” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Spartacus to the Gladiators” by Elijah Kelloggfrom Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Al Horwitz” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “The Resting Place” by Oliver La Farge from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Dateline—East Lynne: 1862” by Robert Liston from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

I've now begun reading Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White.

*Not really. I'm not even on Twitter.

Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White



Professor Deborah Gray White's study of the particular aspects of the experience of female slaves in the American south was considered a groundbreaking book when it was first published in 1985. Most of the previous studies of the slave experience had either focused especially on the male experience or had more or less failed to differentiate significantly between the lives of male and female slaves. The book is still held in very high esteem these 37 years later.

White begins by describing the twin stereotypes of Black women through which became part of the white justification of the slave system and endured well past emancipation. One was the stereotype of the wanton, highly sexualized Jezebel, which was used to help justify the common sexual abuse of female slaves by their white enslavers. And the other was Mammy, the benign, all-knowing raiser of the white children, who ruled the kitchen with a firm hand and identified, so went the stereotype, more with her white masters than with her own black enslaved community. In contrast to Jezebel, Mammy was generally portrayed as essentially asexual, and therefore non-threatening. Here as the personification of the benign aspects of slavery, the supposed strong ties between enslavers and enslaved. This stereotype remained on America's syrup bottles and pancake mix boxes until very shortly ago.

White delves in as detailed a manner as possible into the life of the female slave. Important factors were the value females had within the system for their ability to give birth to babies that had high monetary value to their enslavers, and the resulting pressure to continue reproducing. In the meantime, they were still expected to get their plantation work in, as well. Women were much less likely than male slaves to have the sort of plantation jobs and/or privileges that allowed them to travel between plantations. In addition, because of their value as baby producers, women were much less likely than men to be sold away. Because of this, female slaves' strongest bonds were often to be found within the community of enslaved women. It was to this community that women most often turned for support in times of troubles and for tending in times of illness. Most women's strongest identities were through their roles as mothers rather than as wives.

I've only touched on two of the many important main themes of this book. I will say that the writing style is a bit dry at times, academic in nature, but never to the extent that I was hindered in the reading. Also, when I ordered my copy of the book online, I didn't realize that there was a newer edition which features an additional chapter. So I would recommend anyone thinking of picking this book would want to pick that later edition.

>63 rocketjk: Thanks for your review of this, Jerry. I picked up a copy of this right after reading The Warmth of Other Suns this summer and I should get going on it.

>73 RidgewayGirl: You're welcome! I hope you do read it soon. I'll be interested in reading your reaction to it.

Here's my post-Ar'n't I a Woman? journey through Stack 2 of my "Between Books"

* “A Forest Betrothal” by Erckmann-Chatrian from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “Q is for Quality Folk” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Marianne Moore” from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
* “Multum in Parvo” by Edward Brecher and Philip Dunaway from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Pie Dance” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “Winston Spencer Churchill: British Prime Minister, 1940—1945, 1951--1955” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
* "Previews: Television" by Morten Lund from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

I'm already almost halfway through the interesting memoir, Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley

Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley



Bob Motley certainly led a fascinating life. Motley was a Black man born in the early 1920 in Jim Crow polluted Alabama. His dream was to be a ballplayer, but his talents couldn't keep up with those dreams. When World War II broke out, Motley became one of the first African Americans accepted into the Marines and saw combat, and a lot of it, in the Pacific theater. After the war, Motley decided to stick with his dream of making a living in baseball, but now as an umpire, for which he felt that his combination of Marine toughness and natural flamboyance made him suited. In fact, after many years of umpiring sandlot and semi-pro games, Motley made it to the top of the profession, at least as it existed for African Americans in the 1950s, a job umpiring in the Negro Leagues. By the 1950s, Major League Baseball had been somewhat integrated, as more and more Black players had joined the Major League ranks after Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and several others had first integrated the game in 1947. Umpiring, however, was another story. I guess the difference was MLB's willingness to have Black players, in positions, despite their obvious talents, of relative subservience to management, but not, as umpires, in positions of relative authority. In other words, it was one thing for a Black man to be able to strike out a white player with fastballs and curves, another for a Black man to call a white man out on a borderline pitch or a close play at first base. And not only were the Major League umpiring ranks still segregated, but even the minor leagues as well. Motley kept pushing, however, and eventually was hired as the second African American to umpire in the Pacific Coast League, a very high minor league. Motley, all these years, had also had a full-time job at the General Motors plant. He gives the company high grades, in fact, for allowing him lots of leeway in terms of taking time off to go on the road to umpire during baseball season. By the late 50s, Motley had been promoted into GM's management ranks, and finally decided to give up umpiring in order to concentrate on enjoying life with his wife and two growing children. So he finished short of his dream of managing in the big leagues.

So the story that Motley has to tell is, obviously, fascinating. A constant thread throughout the memoir is the pervasiveness of Jim Crow, from his childhood days of having to duck down out of sight when the Klan came roaring through his family's poor Alabama small-town neighborhood to the dangers and humiliations the Black players experienced during their barnstorming journeys through the South, right into the 1950s. The memoir does have some flaws, though. For one thing, Motley was already in his 80s when he finally sat down and told all these stories to his son, Byron, who then produced this "as-told-to" narrative. As Motley says himself near the book's conclusion, many of the specifics of time and place had faded for him by then. So in the reading, there are times when recollections that you wish would be more detailed and specific remain general, and the narrative is often somewhat flat, with cliches relatively common. People are often "thrilled," and they "marvel" and so on. In addition, Motley umpired in the Negro Leagues at a time, post MLB integration, when the Negro Leagues were beginning to implode, with teams folding and investment waning for lack of interest. So I'm a bit dubious of Motley's claims that there was no diminishing of the quality of play over the seasons that the Negro Leagues gradually shrank from three full leagues to one four-team league. Nevertheless, many of the tales Motley does tell are fascinating. He doesn't add much to my knowledge in describing his impressions of Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Willie Mays, who as young players came through the late Negro Leagues, but his stories of umpiring behind the plate when the great Satchel Page was pitching are priceless. And many others of his recollections of events both on the field and off make this memoir well worth reading, particularly, though not necessarily exclusively, for baseball fans. This is, overall, an American story.

On a personal note, my wife and I are off tomorrow for two weeks-plus in Portugal! I've never been there before and I'm very much looking forward to it. We have a few days in Lisbon, about a week's drive around the small mountain towns of the midland (specific destination tbd) and then ending up with a few days in Porto. We've got a good chance of rain, but we will deal with that. Cheers, all!

>76 rocketjk: Another outstanding review! I remember reading a BBC article about Bob Motley about five years ago.

Have a wonderful trip to Portugal! I have never been there but it seems like everyone who has visited there loves it. Your plans sound excellent!

Wishing you a wonderful trip! Have all the fun! It's been twenty years since my one short visit to the southern coast of Portugal, but we loved the food, the music and the dogs napping in the middle of the streets of the smaller villages.

Is that the same trip you had been talking about in the last couple of years? Or did that one happen and this is a new one? (just curious). Have fun in Portugal! :)

>76 rocketjk: I think I'll get this book for my son for Christmas. He is a total baseball fanatic and both plays and umps plus likes history. Sounds perfect!

Safe travels! I've never been to Portugal and would love to go some day!

Have fun! My parents lived in Portugal for a couple years (for work) and I visited them. Enjoy the Algarve! The food is wonderful, so are the ceramics. And if you can, go up (out) the coast a bit from Lisbon and see the Boca do Inferno - it's an amazing bit of coast, with rock caves and arch created by waves (I think it's mostly to be seen from above, not entered - but it's been a long time since I was there).

Thanks to all for the good wishes regarding our Portugal trip. Our plans call for several days in Lisbon, several days drive around the countryside and mountain towns more or less in the middle of the country, and then a few final days in Porto. Folks frequently tell us of places that we "must see" but that we know we're probably not going to visit. Our favored travel style is cities and then "trust to luck" wanderings in less traveled areas. We miss a lot of famous spots that way, but have a lot of fun and create many fabulous memories. One of the many reasons my wife and I get along so well is that we both love traveling in this fashion. Nevertheless, I do very much appreciate people letting me know about their own favorite areas. Cheers!

>79 AnnieMod: "Is that the same trip you had been talking about in the last couple of years?"

I think maybe you're thinking of Daryll, who, if I remember correctly, had to put off a long planned return to Portugal in order to begin caring for his mom. We didn't decide on Portugal until a couple of months ago.

>80 japaul22: "I think I'll get this book for my son for Christmas. He is a total baseball fanatic and both plays and umps plus likes history."

Given all that, I'm sure he would enjoy "Ruling Over Monarchs . . . " Although, as I mentioned in my review, the it's not the very best in terms of writing style, it's certainly entertaining enough, and full of interesting enough details and anecdotes, to be very much worth reading. Plus, it's not a very well known book, so your son is not apt to have read it.

>82 rocketjk: Yep, I got you two mixed up a bit - I remembered that someone was talking about a Portugal trip during the whole mess we all lived through and apparently my brain connected the wrong dots. Sorry :)

Fazer boa viagem! (No idea if that is correct, but A for effort!)

>83 AnnieMod: No need to apologize. I'm always honored to be associated with Darryl in any way whatsoever!

>84 labfs39: Obrigado! (About 6 weeks of DuoLingo Portuguese lessons!)

Wow, plenty of great reviews here, Jerry! I have yet to read The Boys of Summer, although I do own a copy of it. Many African Americans, both within and outside of the NYC area, instantly became fans of the Dodgers after Jackie Robinson made his major league debut on April 15, 1947, although much of that loyalty was defused after other clubs signed Black players, such as Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians), and Monte Irvin and Willie Mays of the New York Giants. Other clubs took much longer (10-12 years) to do so, particularly the Philadelphia Phillies, the Boston Red Sox (no surprise there) and, sadly, the New York Yankees.

My father and paternal grandfather were diehard fans of the Dodgers until they moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. They both stopped watching baseball after that.

If you haven't read it I would highly recommend Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss. Even though we lived far away from Pittsburgh and I wasn't a fan of the Pirates (but was a diehard fan of the Miracle Mets) Roberto Clemente was my favorite baseball player, and I even imitated his neck stretching when I played stick ball and came to bat. I must have seen him play when we went to Mets games at Shea Stadium in the 1960s and been impressed by his play on the field, and I imagine that he was nearly as popular to the Nuyorican population of NYC as Jackie Robinson was to African Americans within and outside of the city.

I agree; Caste deserves to be widely read, but not just by Whites. Your criticism about her comparison of Holocaust victims with the plight of African Americans seems valid; I'll have to revisit that part of the book.

Have a safe and wonderful trip to Portugal! I am, of course, insanely jealous, but also sad, because my dream of retiring to Portugal, or even returning there in the near future, is quickly fading away.

curious, how is she comparing them?

>85 rocketjk: Thanks for the kind words about my reviews, Darryl. I'll be on the lookout for the Clemente bio. He was certainly a unique and admirable man. I think my father's baseball rooting history was much like your dad's. Since my father grew up in Newark, you'd think he'd have been a Yankees fan, as the Newark Bears were the Yankees' AAA franchise for many years. But when I was a boy, my father was always most partial to the Mets rather than the Yanks, so he was clearly a National League man. Sadly, if he ever told me which team he rooted for as a boy, I can't recall it now. For the record, my favorite baseball player is Rickey Henderson.

Thanks, also, for your good wishes about our trip. I'm sorry, too, that your Portugal plans have been derailed. I hope that you do get back there someday.

>87 cindydavid4: My comments on that are in my review, above, (>63 rocketjk:) assuming you're referring to Caste. I'd be glad to discuss it a bit more but I won't have time, as we're in the last minute stages of vacation prep, and I need to sign off at this point. All the best!

>89 rocketjk: ill check it out, thanks. Have a safe journey

>90 cindydavid4: I hope it didn't seem like I was being short with you. I definitely didn't mean it that way. Turns out I do have a minute, so, basically, Wilkerson compares the Black experience in America with the caste system in India and with the Holocaust as examples of dominant castes discriminating in systemic ways against lower castes. While I thought the comparison with India made perfect sense and worked well, I didn't find the comparison with the Holocaust to be equally fitting, for reasons mentioned above. But, as I also said above, I consider that a minor flaw in an excellent and important book.

>91 rocketjk: oh no, no apologies necessary! You had stuff to do, and you sent me to my review which was very helpful. But thanks for coming back to that. and yeah thats what I got from the review. I do have the book and have been meaning to read it Way too many shiny covers etc

Have a great trip Jerry!

>93 markon: Thanks! And, well, I'm back! We had a great time. Portugal is a fabulous country to visit, and I can see why a lot of people, certainly a considerable number of Americans, are thinking about moving there. We spent about 5 days in Lisbon, then drove out to and then stayed in the beautiful central mountain region called Serra da Estrela. We stayed in a small town called Monteigas and took day trips that included one great hike plus visits to other towns around the area. We were particularly interested in the towns of Belmonte and Trancoso, both of which include substantial Jewish history. We only wished we had time for more hiking. Then it was on to Portugal's second largest city, Porto, where we also spent five days and which we also enjoyed immensely. All in all, we found the people of Portugal to be extremely friendly to visitors. The food is great, as are the wine and the port, and the country is physically beautiful, as well.

My wife and I were laughing this morning, while giving our German shepherd, Rosie, her first post-kennel walk, that we should make a list of all the places that people have told us we "have to go" during our various vacations but which we have not visited. In Portugal, that would include the Algarve coastal region and, other then a quick drive-through during the journey to Porto, the Douro Valley. Oh, well. Maybe next time!

Reading-wise, I don't have very much action to report. I brought The Boys in the Boat with me, as I need have it read by this Sunday for my monthly reading group gathering. I was expecting to enjoy it much more than I actually am. I still have about 140 of the book's 370 pages to go.

I can happily report, though, that Portugal is a country of many bookstores. I spent some quality time in Lisbon's Livraria Bertrand de Chiado, which is reputed to be the world's oldest continuously operating bookstore. (There is even a Guiness Book of World Records sign in one side window testifying to the veracity of this claim, for whatever amount of ice that might cut for you.) Anyway, it's a fine bookstore. We also visited Livrario Lello in Porto, which is reportedly the world's most beautiful bookstore (it isn't: I still give that title to the aptly named El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenes Aires), and which, due to a presumed Harry Potter connection, one must wait outside in line somewhere around an hour to enter. It's not the bookstore's fault. They do their best and handle the crowds very well, but it's a small space and the crowded atmosphere does not make for an enjoyable browsing experience. It's pretty much the one thing we did during our vacation that I wish we'd known enough to skip. I did buy two books, though!

>94 rocketjk: Portugal's on my must-go-someday list, so that's an encouraging report! It sounds like a place you might want to visit a few times to fit everything in. I'd really like to see some of those bookstores, though maybe not the super crowded one.

>95 lisapeet: "It sounds like a place you might want to visit a few times to fit everything in."

Right! Like many another my wife and I have been to. As we get older, we keep thinking about returning to some of those spots that we'd like to see more of, but with time feeling more finite every year, we have so far ended up deciding on someplace new to see each time we have the opportunity for a trip.

I said the Algarve, but that's not what I meant - the Alentejo, the southern interior part of the country that has wine and ceramics and excellent food, was what I meant. The Algarve is pretty, but it's also quite touristy and crowded (or was when I was there), less interesting to me.

>97 jjmcgaffey: "I said the Algarve . . . "

You and about 100 others! But nobody else mentioned Alentejo. Anyway, you make that area sound really nice, but we're happy with where we did go. Maybe next time, though.

"The Algarve is pretty, but it's also quite touristy and crowded (or was when I was there), less interesting to me."

That was the idea we got from what we read, so we never really considered it as a destination, given our time constraints. But a lot of people we talked to certainly talked up the Algarve. I think that for some people, if a place is touristy and crowded, it makes them feel like they're in the right spot. To each his/her/their own.

>98 rocketjk: It's been twenty years now, but I went to the Algarve on a family trip and it was interchangeable from any affluent city in the southwestern US honestly. But a half hour's drive into the interior put us into the middle of the most wonderful sleepy villages where no one spoke English and the dogs slept wherever they wanted to.

>99 RidgewayGirl: "and the dogs slept wherever they wanted to."

That all sounds really nice. Next trip!

But your comment about the dogs put me in mind of one late night stroll my wife and I took through the mountain town Monteigas we were staying in. There were several very large dogs, some sort of mountain shepherding dogs, we guessed, that were just lounging about, not strays (they all had collars and tags) but definitely on their own. One evidently decided to start herding us, and came off the storefront step he or she'd been resting on to follow us hither and yon, sometimes to one side or the other and sometimes right behind us. There was no aggressive behavior, nothing to worry us particularly (we have a German shepherd of our own), but still, this was a very big dog! Maybe there was some nice bar or late night cafe we were being guided to. At any rate, this canine citizen stuck with us for quite a while, until his or her attention was diverted by someone walking down the hill with a dog of roughly the same size on a leash, a much more interesting proposition than a couple of boring old tourists, clearly, as we were instantly abandoned.

OK! Well, I left for vacation mid-"Between Books" crawl, so I finished my post-Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond journey through Stack 3 upon my return, thusly:

* "Two Grand-Slams for Twins in One Inning" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "National Defense" from The Background of Our War - Finished!
* "Greenleaf" by Flannery O’Conner from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The White Bird" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "Introduction to the World of Strife” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Movies” by Donald W. Labadie from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

Next it was on to The Boys in the Boat, which I've also completed. I'll be catching up with reviews over the next day or two.

The Background of Our War by The U.S. War Department Bureau of Public Relations



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). The U.S. War Department (now known rather euphemistically as the Department of Defense) put this book together immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally brought the U.S. into World War 2. The War Department evidently assumed that cadets at the U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point) needed to be brought up to speed about what had been going on in the world over the past 10 years or so. The book contains a chapter apiece about the war up until that time. The Japanese invasion of China and other pre-Pearl Harbor activities in the Pacific get a couple of chapters, and there's a chapter each for the Nazi invasions of Norway, Poland and France, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic, among others. There will be very little that's new here for folks who are up to speed on their WW2 military history, although the book might serve as a good primer for those who haven't read much on the topic. The writing and explanations are generally clear and straightforward. There's more than a bit of a propaganda element going on here, you won't be surprised to learn. The snafus that were part of the English Army's attempts to help the Norwegians fight off the German invasion and the inept defense of France are both pretty much whitewashed, for example. At any rate, copies of this book were evidently handed out to West Point cadets. It's unclear to me whether there was any further distribution of the book, although if not, the volume does represent a pretty impressive effort all told for such a small (in numbers, anyway) an audience.

Book note: This volume has been on my Military History shelf since 2010. So, a while. I have no memory of purchasing it, but most likely in some thrift shop or antique store somewhere. According to the penciled in price on the inside cover, I paid a dollar for it. According to the inscription written in ink, the book originally belonged to

Cpt. A.W. Brooks
Co. F-1, U.S.M.A

Guess you’ve been watching the world series? I’m a terrible baseball fan - I only watch when the Phillies are in the series. Got a 1 month deal on Sling so I can watch it on my ipad. No cable at our house anymore and had to access the local fox network.

>103 dianeham: Yes, we're watching. And you can rest assured we are rooting for the Phillies to beat those tiresome Astros.

>101 rocketjk: * "Two Grand-Slams for Twins in One Inning" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
Who else but the Twins should hit twin grand slams?
1962 was quite a year for baseball . . . especially in the NL.

Your mention of this also stirred up memory of something I’d almost forgotten, from 1999: Fernando Tatis hitting two grand slams off Chan Ho Park in a single inning at Dodger Stadium.

I like your “Between Books” crawls. They're cool.

>105 dypaloh: I like your “Between Books” crawls.

Thanks! And, yes, I remember that Tatis game, as well. Cheers!

I enjoyed reading about your trip to Portugal. It sounds like you had a wonderful time!
My younger cousin traveled to the Algarve a few years ago and was disappointed because it felt like a trip to the UK. She was staying in a place that was British pubs and British hotels all over, everyone spoke English, which she doesn't enjoy and isn't really good at - she is fluent in Spanish and had hoped to get by with it.
(Of course, this could happen almost anywhere where there is mass tourism, and I am sure that many people have traveled to a certain part of Mallorca and deemed themselves in Germany when discovering all the Bratwurst restaurants and German party music localities).
I think I would still like to go to the Algarve one day because the landscape looks beautiful, but I guess I will do a lot more research in order to find a good place to say.

Oh, and I looked up Livraria Lello. It looks beautiful indeed, and it does truly remind one of the flying staircases of Hogwarts, but all the hassle just to see that, while there are so many other beautiful bookstores around the world...

>35 rocketjk: I saw Say Nothing on many shelves in Ireland and it is on my WL now. I remembered your review when I saw it.

>107 MissBrangwen: Thanks, Mirjam. Regarding the Algarve, et. al., every tourist wants to be the only tourist, right? I laugh at myself along those lines quite often. But I do always wonder about the people who go somewhere else but want to recreate their own comfort space of the familiar. My wife and I were in Cork City several years ago and one night we went to a beautiful old pub where a traditional Irish group was performing. The pub was very small and most of the audience was right on top of the musicians. There was another American couple there, and the woman in that couple, from her table right next to the stage, kept asking the band to play American pop tunes rather than Irish traditional numbers. It was all I could do to keep from confronting her. (I would have been very calm and polite, of course!) Oh the other hand, the Beatles cover band we saw at a different pub the next evening was fabulous. Well, the Beatles belong to the world, though, don't they?

Along the same lines, yes, Livraria Lello is quite beautiful. If I could have been inside it with only, say, 20 other people, I'm sure I'd be glowing about the wonderful experience.

>108 rocketjk: every tourist wants to be the only tourist, right? I laugh at myself along those lines quite often. Haha, yes, exactly! :-)

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown



Well, nobody needs another long review of The Boys in the Boat at this late date. Everybody with an affinity for this sort of book was reading it when it first was published several years ago. I still owned my used bookstore in those days and I couldn't keep the book on my shelves. And I can understand why that was, now that one my reading group buddies assigned the book for last month's reading. It's a rags-to-glory tale of the group of mostly working class young men who endured personal hardships galore as well as a grueling training regimen of several years' duration to bring honors to themselves and to the University of Washington while rowing crew in an 8-man boat. Not only did they manage to defeat the upper class teams who rowed at Cal Berkeley and the elite Eastern Seaboard schools, but they went to Nazi Germany in 1936 and embarrassed Hitler by winning an Olympic Gold Medal.

The central focus of the book is one of the rowers, Joe Rantz, whom the author met very late in Rantz's life and was able to interview at length. Rantz's personal story, especially his early years, would have made a good book even if he'd never touched an oar. He grew up in Depression-era rural Washington and, at age 15, was abandoned by his family and left to fend for himself. (His stepmother couldn't abide having him in the house, and went the family moved, Joe's father acquiesced to leaving Joe behind in order to ensure that Joe's three half-siblings would have a father while growing up.) Years of difficult, hardscrabble existence ensue.

Brown does a good job of describing Rantz's youthful experiences, and also a very good job of describing the gathering of the crew team, and the harrowing winnowing out phase of the boys who turn out to audition for the freshman crews. Other figures who come into play are the team's coaches and George Pocock, the boat builder, part-time coach and philosopher who comes to have a great influence on the team as a whole and on Rantz in particular. The details of rowing, and what it takes to turn nine young men (eight rowers and a coxswain) into a smoothly running boat with "swing" are also handled extremely well. Also, Brown takes pains to show us the ways in which, simultaneously to all this training and effort and pain, Hitler is working feverishly to turn the 1936 Olympics into a showcase for the new Nazi regime. Finally, the minute-by-minute excitement of each individual race the boys row is presented in very engaging fashion.

So, as I said, I can certainly understand the book's success. The flaws, such as they are, come for me in Brown's breathless style and, in particular in his overuse of cliche. People are "thrilled to the core," they decided to do things "here and now," they "marvel" at events and observations. These sort of glitches pop up several times per page. I should note that, of the seven guys in my reading group, I was the only one who cared about this factor. There's also a "too good to be true" element to some of the storytelling, and a feeling that Brown had become quite enamored with the "sound" of his own voice. Finally, while the description of the buildup to the Olympics and the frantic efforts on the part of the Nazis to turn the events into a propaganda bonanza for themselves, is well done, there is basically no attempt made to describe and connection between all that and the Washington rowing team. If they had any idea of what was going on there, and what they were getting into, or of what their impressions of it were once they arrived in Germany, we get no hint of it. As readers we understand the context in which they won their medal, but the boys' knowledge and/or experience of it is entirely missing. Certainly, at least the coaches, whose perspective we are giving throughout the book, were at least somewhat aware of it all. And again, at least the coaches had to know about the large movement within the U.S. to boycott the Olympics due to the Nazi's anti-Semitic policies and actions. That movement is described, but as readers we'd think that nobody in the state of Washington had ever heard of it. Again, I was the only one in my reading group for whom all this was a concern.

So, anyway, I'd call this a very good book all in all. Brown's success here was deserved. The reservations I've described above knock it down to 3 1/2 stars for me.

Post-The Boys in the Boat, I spent some more time with Stack 3 of my "Between Books:"

* "Hank Aaron’s 25-Game Spree Year’s Best" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "How the Good Gifts Were Used by Two" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "Introduction to the World of Strife” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “A Russian Gallery” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
* “Theater” by Louis S. Miano from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

I'm now reading and greatly enjoying A Man Without Breath the ninth book in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther WW2-era Berlin Noir series.

A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr



This is the 9th book in Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther noir crime series. The beginning of this series found Bernie Gunther as a Berlin homicide detective in 1935, as the Nazi's were quickly taking over all aspects of life in Germany, much to Gunther's dismay and disgust. Gunther has both a solid moral compass and a backbone, and was not loath to let his strong anti-Nazi sentiment be known. On the other hand, his excellence as a detective condemns him to be constantly brought into situations where he is often working on behalf of, and often at the behest of, some of most prominent--and evil--figures in the Nazi hierarchy. By this ninth book, Gunther's disgust with himself over the moral compromises he's had to make in order to survive is strong indeed. Kerr (who died of cancer in 2018) was not shy about bringing real life figures like Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler and Goebbels alive as characters. In addition, as we move along in the series, Kerr jumps us back and forth in time. Although A Man Without Breath takes place in 1943, we already know much about Gunther's wartime combat activities as well as several years' worth of his post-war experiences.

In A Man Without Breath, as mentioned, it is 1943. Gunther, due to his long career as an investigator, finds himself, to his own disgust, officially a member of the SD, the intelligence wing of the SS. He is sent to Smolensk in German occupied Russia. The war's great turning point, the German defeat at Stalingrad, has just occurred. But just outside Smolensk, a giant unmarked graveyard has just been discovered in a place called Katyn Woods. The bodies seem to be those of thousands Polish officers murdered by Stalin's forces back at the beginning of the war when the German-Russian nonaggression pact was still in force.* Sensing an anti-Russian public relations coup, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels sends Gunther to lead an investigation. Gunther sets about doing this job, surrounded by a cast of German officers and Russian locals who motives vary. With the defeat at Stalingrad, the more clear-eyed among the Germans, Gunther as much as anyone, realize that the German Army's days in the region are numbered. And then murders begin occurring, as murders will in murder mysteries. Gunther has his mission, and yet, of course, his homicide detective instincts come to the fore. As always, Gunther is swimming in a stream of shifting motives, violence, compromise and downright evil. He manages to keep his own sense of right and wrong afloat, but his soul becomes more battered and scarred with each book.

As are all of these Gunther novels, A Man Without Breath is well written and very sharply plotted. There are a lot of characters to keep track of in this one, but the up side is that Kerr by this time had dropped the over-cute reliance on noir novel patter than had marred a few of the earlier books. I highly recommend this series to anyone who finds my synopsis here of interest. There are, all told, 14 of these books. Since there aren't to be any more, I've been allowing myself only an occasional foray into Bernie Gunther world.

* Most here will know that the Katyn Woods Massacre was a real life event.

Post-A Man Without Breath, I moved over to Stack 1 of my "Between Books" for a read-through:

* “Colic” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “Belonging” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “The Story of Sir Gareth of Orkney” by Sir George W. Cox and E. H. Jones from Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Ford Frick” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “Threshold” by Henry Kuttner from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Introduction” by John Kouwenhoven from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman - Newly added
* “1962: The Year of Paula Prentiss” by Richard Schickel from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

A quick note about the addition of Leaves of Grass, here. This is actually this month's selection for my reading group. I'd been a bit skeptical of the idea of gulping the whole thing down in one quick go, especially since I'd never read this famous collection, but I was willing to do so to stay in the spirit of the group. But then it turned out that I will be in Los Angeles visiting family during the group's November meeting. So I am off the hook as far as reading the whole collection in hurried fashion, but thought I'd take the occasion to add the poems to my Between Books stacks and read the collection section by section, beginning with the Introduction. So there you have it. I knew you'd want to know. :)

After a quick detour, I'll be on to The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

>113 rocketjk: I knew you'd want to know.
And we do... :)

Liberal Porto: A Guide to the Architecture, Sites and History of Porto edited by Manuela Rebelo



A quick hitter, here, a memento from my recent vacation in Portugal. This is a small (4.5 by 6 inches or 11.5 by 16.5 cm) book meant to be carried about with you while you walk the streets of Porto, Portugal. There are several distinct walks presented in the book, with, of course, historical information about the sights to be seen on each. A very large portion of the history provided centers around events that took place in the city from 1820, when a revolt against the absolutist reign of Don Miguel was harshly put down, to 1832, when Don Miguel's brother, Don Pedro IV, landed troops and occupied the city in support of his daughter, Queen Maria. Maria was a fierce supporter of a Charter that had been developed to create a constitutional monarchy rather than absolute rule. Hence the "liberal" tag of the book's title and text, although the writers also make the claim that the city had always had a reputation for learning and internationalism that leant themselves to liberal leanings, at least relative to the times. Don Miguel showed up and laid siege to the city for over a year, but Don Pedro's forces were ultimately successful in breaking both the siege and Don Miguel's claim to power. Anyway, that's the story told in this book, and, as I mentioned above, most of the buildings and parks and history are described within the context of the roles they played in the events of 1832-33. I didn't find this book until one of our final days in the city, and anyway my wife has an aversion to "walking tours," historical or otherwise. I'd say that on our own we found our way to about half of the locales described in this guidebook, though the full history of the Portuguese Civil War, as described here, didn't take real shape for me until I read over the short book this week. At any rate, we had a lot of fun in Porto and still learned a lot about the city and its people while we were there. Also, I'm aware that there's a lot more to learn about the events of the conflict and siege than is set forth here. Still, this is a fun reading trip around a very fun, interesting and beautiful city.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein



The Color of Law is another frustrating, infuriating and absolutely crucial study of racism in America. Richard Rothstein's central thesis is that most Americans (or at least most white Americans) believe that the widespread segregation of American cities and suburbs happened relatively naturally, the result of racism, yes, and of the economic forces that that racism produced, but not due to any overt official program of separation and exclusion, at least in the Northern states. Rothstein calls this the theory of de facto segregation. But as Rothstein proves convincingly and forcefully in his book's 240 information-packed pages, what we have had in America is and has been, in fact, de jure segregation, a condition created and maintained by over a century of overt governmental policies. These policies range from the widespread creation of public suburban housing developments like Levitown purposefully designed with strict "whites only" rules, the allowance and encouragement of redlining policies that kept white and African Americans apart and destroyed neighborhoods in the process, the refusal to offer government loans and mortgages to African Americans, the staunch refusal of law enforcement agencies to protect African American families trying to move into white suburbs from violence, and the purposeful designing of urban spurs of the Interstate Highway System to destroy middle class African American neighborhoods and push black Americans further away from white suburbs. And that's a very short list of the occurrences and policies that Rothstein covers.

It was all done on purpose, not by accident. So the idea, says Rothstein, that these conditions can be gradually done away with as public policy and peoples' attitudes become more compassionate over time is false. The harms that have been done are deeper, more solidly cemented into our jurisprudence and countrywide governmental behaviors since Reconstruction, than can allow for gradual evolutionary changes. Many of the policies that Rothstein proposes in the book's final chapter to begin to address the profound societal harms that have been done over the decades would take enormous political and cultural will, conditions that Rothstein acknowledges are not likely to arise any time soon in America. He also sets forth a few less comprehensive and more doable ideas that might be put into play, but not, he says, until Americans come to jettison the belief in de facto segregation that serve the purpose of letting so many of us off the hook on an individual basis.

I add The Color of Law to what now becomes a quartet of relatively recent books on the subject of systemic cultural racism in America that I consider essential reading for every American. The other three are The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee.

My post-The Color of Law "Between Book" reading occasioned a ramble through Stack 2:

* “At a Certain Church” by Girolamo Parabosco from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “R is for Railroads” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Kenneth Burke” from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
* “Seeing Through Time” by Commander Attilio Gatti from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “What Do You Say?” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “Inscriptions” from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman
* "1962: The Year of Edward Villella" by Robert Kotlowitz from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

After a very brief detour, I will be on to Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller.

>117 rocketjk: RE: Edward Villela
Sports Illustrated, of all magazines, ran an article on him in 1971. I had a subscription starting ‘68 and was surprised how often figures from the arts would pop into its pages.
If interested, here’s the link: https://vault.si.com/vault/1971/09/27/encounter-with-an-athlete

>118 dypaloh: Thanks! I will check out that article very soon.

>116 rocketjk:
what we have had in America is and has been, in fact, de jure segregation, a condition created and maintained by over a century of overt governmental policies.

Exellent review! I struggled some with the organization & writing style, but this book had a lot of meat on its bones. I was appalled at how baked in housing discrimmination is in our laws and policies.

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother by Sarah Hermanson Meister



This is another "quick hitter," a la the book about Porto, above. I spent a few days in New York City with some buddies in September, including one happy afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. I picked up this book in the museum gift shop as a gift for my wife. She read it and enjoyed it and then handed it over to me to read when I got the chance. It was published within MOMA's One on One series. Each book in the series is a "sustained meditation" on a single work in the MOMA collection. In this case, we have 42 pages of text and images describing one of the most iconic photographs in American history, one which came to represent in many ways to most Americans the hardships and inequalities of Dust Bowl life. Meister provides a thumbnail biography of Lange, who led a fascinating life, and then a history of how Lange came to take her famous photo and the life the image took on, the many adaptations and uses to which it was put over the years.

Among the most compelling facets of the story is the fact that Lange almost never took the picture. She was driving alone through California agricultural country, photographing Dust Bowl migrant life for the Resettlement Administration (an FDR New Deal organization), but she was finished for the day, exhausted, and already on the long drive home. She passed a sign for a Pea Harvesters camp but kept on driving. Twenty miles later, she turned her car around and headed back. After pulling into the camp, she took only a single series of seven photos of Florence Owens Thompson and her children, sitting exhausted in a lean-to, and then left. It turned out that the roughly 2,000 people in this camp were essentially slowly starving. A freeze had destroyed the pea harvest, so there was no work. None of the local aid agencies would help, claiming the migrants did not fit into their specific mandates. But when the administrator of Lange's agency heard the story from Lange that there were desperate people in the camp, he alerted the appropriate federal agency, who sent in food and other supplies to tide the workers over.

Decades later, it was revealed that by Thompson's family that Thompson had, over the years, come to resent the ways in which her image had been used so often and in so many ways while she had received nothing at all by way of compensation. However, when Thompson later became ill, an international effort raised a substantial amount of money for her health care. Also, only at around this same time did it become known that Thompson was Native American, a fact that brought about still another reappraisal of the photograph and its meaning and context.

All because Dorothea Lange was compelled to turn her car around and drive back the 20 miles to a migrant pea harvesters' camp.

>120 markon: Thanks! I know what you mean about Rothstein's writing style, but I was so engrossed in and, as you say, appalled by the information being presented that I had no trouble reading through the material.

>121 rocketjk: That sounds fascinating. Are you going to look for any of the others in this series?

>123 labfs39: "Are you going to look for any of the others in this series?"

I probably won't, though on the other hand they seem like a great way to become more interested in the world of fine art, which I have to admit is not one of my real strengths. You can find them all in the MOMA gift shop, of course, or, I'm sure, on the museum's website. I guess a quick browse at either spot might reveal a few that would interest me particularly. It strikes me that they'd make good stocking stuffers, in fact.

>121 rocketjk: Oh, that one sounds interesting. I've always wondered what was behind that photo, and the rest of Lange's work. I need to dig a bit into that series, too... A perfectly good excuse to head over to MoMA (and its very delicious gift shop), as far as I'm concerned.

>125 lisapeet: "A perfectly good excuse to head over to MoMA (and its very delicious gift shop), as far as I'm concerned."

Looks like my work is done for today. :)

>121 rocketjk: Learning to See: A Novel of Dorothea Lange, the Woman Who Revealed the Real America is a fictional novel about her; very well done story about Lange as well as her work.

>127 cindydavid4: Thanks! I might indeed check that out. Cheers!

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller



This famous book, which appears both on many a "Banned Books" list and also on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, is in turns exhilarating, hilarious, thought-provoking, tedious, irritating and, for its misogyny, deeply disturbing. Miller was, as I understand the situation, intent on breaking away from standard forms of narrative and plot, and so his books are considered relatively significant in the timeline of the evolution of prose writing. The book is at its best when Miller is describing his disgust with the dog-eat-dog, hurly-burly, money-driven, industry-riven, heartless, dirty tumult of American life as experienced in New York City during the 1920s and 30s. We are meant to see the desperation of the Depression flattened individuals he encounters in his job hiring and firing delivery staff for a telegraph company as poignant despite the relentlessly comic/satiric nature of Miller's description of it all. But Miller has also created his first-person narrator, also named Henry Miller, to be not just a commentator on, but also a product of, the society he is intent on exposing. As such, we are made to see him as almost entirely amoral, a determined ne'er-do-well. Even his frequent generosity is executed with an eye toward subverting the despised dominant paradigm. And that amorality definitely extends to Miller's sexual adventures, which are relentlessly frequent and basically heartless. Women are mostly to be conquered and used, then walked away from. There is a rape scene near about the 1/3 mark of the book that is the nadir of this element of the book. I read this book essentially "blind," meaning I have read essentially no literary criticism, either contemporary with the book's publishing or in the intervening years, and have very little knowledge of Henry Miller the person and his attitudes about all this, and/or his purposes for sprinkling the book with these scenes. I assume he was attempting to present the narrator's gleeful depravity as a characteristic of the bankruptcy of American society. Even the narrator who sets himself up as critic is wrent through and through with the same poison. Even if this were true, it's still really hard for a modern reader, and I'm sure for women since the day the book first saw print.

The writing comes down to earth only when Miller, the narrator, is describing his childhood in the fondest of terms, and later bemoaning the inevitable changes in the neighborhood streets where that childhood took place. Miller also leaves earth quite frequently, and for long stretches at a time, with pages-long passages that essentially turn into language poems. I essentially began to just skim these sections. The language was fun, the imagery was clearly (well, to me, anyway) describing a desire to break free and fly above the mundane, to rise above the ordinary and expected experiences and duties of culture and even of artistic endeavors. But in terms of being able to make sense of the individual images and metaphors, I mostly skipped off them. Or maybe that was the point. At any rate, I'm glad I read this book, more or less for the experience, for the filling of another hole in my reading arsenal. I did skim a few of the LT reviews of this book, and many of them commented that its predecessor, Tropic of Cancer, is actually the better book. I very strongly doubt I'll be reading it, though. I've got the idea, and I think one is enough for me.

Book note: I bought this book quite recently at an annual used book sale held to raise money for a local volunteer fire department. My decision to select this book was informed mostly be this edition's vintage and place of origin. It is an edition printed in 1958 (a later printing of a 1957 edition) by the famed Obelisk Press in Paris.

>129 rocketjk: That's another one I've had sitting on the shelves for most of my life, probably liberated from my parents at some point when I was feeling edgy. But I've never been super moved to pick it up... maybe someday. That edition you have is cool, though.

>121 rocketjk: Fantastic review, thank you. This photo was in a book on the Great Depression my parents had when I was a child and it fascinated me.

>129 rocketjk:

The real question is, how did you manage not to read this before? Miller's such a staple for men of your generation--and not just men...

FWIW, Cancer definitely is better, if only for being the first and fullest expression of Miller's bridge-burning liberationist agenda. Capricorn is just a retread (and if memory serves, the more antisemitic of the books, although that feature of Miller's doesn't register as fully in his novels as it does in less known fare).

>132 LolaWalser: "The real question is, how did you manage not to read this before? Miller's such a staple for men of your generation--and not just men..."

Don't I keep telling you how exceptional I am? :)

More seriously, though, I guess I really just never got around to Miller. What I thought the books were about never seemed particularly compelling to me, and eventually my attention moved on to other sorts of prose. Essentially, in purchasing the book a few months back, my eye was attracted to the "bright and shiny object" of the lovely 1957 Paris edition of the book, and not to any "I guess I ought to finally read Miller" idea.

Now I will tell you, and everybody else, a deep, dark secret. The reason I "chose" this book to read at this time is that I decided to use the "Random Book of Yours" link on the LT "Folly" page to pick my next book. The first book that came up was Selected Stories by Nikolai Leskov, which I've already read (and loved!). This recently purchased copy of Capricorn was what came up next. My first thought was, "Really?" And I had to force myself not to just click on that link again. But I have a strict rule that I am not to buy a book, no matter how lovely or cool historical artifact-wise, if I'm not willing to actually read it. So since . . . there it was on my shelf, I didn't allow myself to not read it. That last statement probably doesn't make much sense to anyone but me. C'est la vie!

"and if memory serves, the more antisemitic of the books, although that feature of Miller's doesn't register as fully in his novels as it does in less known fare."

There is plenty of Jew/Hebe bashing in Capricorn. However, not knowing much about Miller himself, I wasn't clear on whether the antisemitism was sincere or was supposed to be another manifestation of the evil of the times, so to speak. As you probably recall, I'm Jewish myself. As a Jew, I'm sensitive to, but never surprised to find, antisemitism in books of this era (or any era, I guess).* For some reason I was able to work around it much more easily than around the misogyny.

* Of course, people don't have to be Jewish for that statement to be true for them, but I'm sure you get what I mean.

>133 rocketjk:

No, Miller was very proud of his German roots and equally concerned that they shouldn't be mistaken for Jewish. I see no reason to suppose that, of all the things, his antisemitism alone wasn't "sincere". He's always very happy to inhabit the first person singular and voice opinions people generally know as Henry Miller's. But if you need more proof, you may want to look at Aller Retour New York and the commotion its reprints caused.

I was surprised by his antisemitism because he was (and is) sold as this "cool" guy. But that was before I met the cult of Céline...

>134 LolaWalser: Thanks for that. Good information to have. Sadly, "cool guy" anti-semites are not in particularly short supply.

After finishing up Tropic of Capricorn, it didn't take me long to read through Stack 3 of my "Between Books" thusly:

* "Banks, Musial in Dramatic Homer Feats" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Farlow Express" by Anthony Robinson from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "How Boots Befooled the King" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "I Enter the World” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Lisbon: Background of a Conference” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
* “Starting from Paumamok” from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman
* “On Tape: Sir John Gielgud,” an interview with London Sunday Times theatre critic Harold Hobson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

After that it was on to John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon, a coffee table-sized book illustrating the life and art of Heartfield, a famed German photomontage artist and anti-fascist. A quiet Sunday afternoon was all it took to read the relatively short text and examine the startling designs contained in this volume. I'll have a review up tomorrow or the day after. After another "Between Book" read-through, I'll next be reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs.

John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland



Helmut Herzfeld was an artist and graphic designer who came of age as an artist during the fraught and chaotic days of 1920s Weimar Republic Germany. He changed his name to John Heartfield as a political protest against what he saw as the disastrous rise in toxic German nationalism that had already led to the insane, meaningless carnage of World War I. Heartfield was a founding member of the short-lived but extremely influential Dadaist movement and, along with artist George Grosz, is credited with more or less inventing the art of photomontage. It was obvious to Heartfield that German industrialists were manipulating the politics and economics of the day and criminally exploiting German workers. He became a lifelong Communist, a very early member of the German Communist Party. Heartfield turned his artistic talent, plus his anger, determination and sharp wit, to message-bearing graphic design, most notably designing dozens of classic covers for the weekly German Communist Journal, AIZ, or Arbiter Illustrierte Zeitung: in English, Workers' Illustrated Newspaper. His profoundly affecting and often savage designs took on the monied interests and, increasingly, the rising fascist movement, personified of course by the Nazi's. Heartfield portrayed Hitler as being not only hateful but corrupt, funded, as can be seen in the book's cover image, by the industrialists themselves as a way to keep the workers in line. When the Nazi's finally took power in 1933, Heartfield had to flee Germany, literally escaping out a window and hiding in a trash bin for seven hours when the Gestapo raided his studio. The AIZ set up shop in exile in Prague until the Munich Agreement in 1939. Soon Heartfield was in England, where his determined anti-Fascist bona fides didn't mean much to the British authorities, who interned him for being a German national and a Communist. Released after six months due to poor health, Heartfield remained spied upon and, to a certain extent, harried as long as he was in England. He moved back Germany, specifically, to the DDR, in 1950, where he was once again viewed with suspicion due to his 11 years in England, not being formally admitted to the DDR's Academy of the Arts until 1956.

I've only touched on some main points of Heartfield's astounding and fascinating life story. This book is mostly filled with large and colorful prints of Heartfield's most famous posters and book jacket arts. In many cases, we see the original montages flanked by the finished products including the use of shading and text that appeared in AIZ and elsewhere. I would be remiss if I failed to point out that his art was not only anti-capitalism/fascist, but also in many cases pro-Communism, in which he stongly and determinedly believed. But here are two examples of the former work. Thanks to lolawalser for her review of this book in 2021, which inspired me to purchase it online and, at long last, to read it.

*

Finally, I should note that the two above images were not taken from the book, but were recreated from this website: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/collections/john-heartfield-periodical-illust...

"Soon Heartfield was in England, where his determined anti-Fascist bona fides didn't mean much to the British authorities, who interned him for being a German national and a Communist."

From the "The More Things Change . . . Department," I just saw this on The NY Times website:

"Antiwar Activists Who Flee Russia Find Detention, Not Freedom, in the U.S.
Thousands of Russians are seeking asylum in the United States. Many are ending up in immigration prison."

>138 rocketjk: oh good grief. Yup the more things change...

Very nice write-up. The reason there are so many pictures is that it accompanied the exhibition at the Tate. But in recent years there have been--finally!--multiple monographs on Heartfield in or translated into English (problem is, they tend to be pricey...)

Here's the report y'all have been waiting on regarding my post-John Heartfield read through of Stack 1 of my "Between Books:"

* “Josephine” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty (short stories)
* “The Lead is Cast” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “The Tournament,” excerpted from Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “John Drebinger” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman
* “The Big Mouths” by Bill Davidson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

Tonight I started Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs



This is an extremely well written and harrowing autobiography of a woman who, born in 1813, grew up a slave in North Carolina. Due to a protective mother and a kind "mistress" who even taught her to read and write, Jacobs as a girl was not even aware that she was a slave. But her mother and mistress died in short order, and in her mistress in her will, "left" Jacobs to her 5-year-old niece. This put Jacobs in the power of the girl's father, who proceeded to sexually harass Jacobs relentlessly. Jacobs refused to submit, and due to highly unusual community status of Jacobs' grandmother (who had long since bought her own freedom), Jacob's tormenter a prominent doctor, had to refrain from force or physical punishment. However, the psychological torment he subjected Jacobs to was horrible enough and remains a constant theme throughout most of Jacob's narrative. In the meantime, a relationship with another white man brings Jacobs two children. And while the father reneges on his promise to free both Jacobs and their children, Jacob's fight to protect her young son and daughter, along with her determination to evade the clutches of her tormentor, create the dominant, determined themes of her story, leading her into desperate sacrifices and risks. Through all this, Jacobs provides a detailed, horrific picture of chattel slavery.

Jacobs' book, published after her eventual escape to the North, became an important document in the abolitionist fight against slavery. Although not the first slave testimony, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was the first widely distributed slave account written by a woman. According to the excellent Introduction in my edition written by Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin, doubts remained in historical circles about the veracity of Jacobs' account, and even about whether there ever was a Harriet Jacobs, up through the 1980s, when researchers uncovered letters and other documents that proved the existence of Jacobs, and the details of her story, beyond a doubt.

Post-Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I had a ramble through Stack 2 of my Between Books:

* “The Crystal Globe” by Jacob Grimm from The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “R is for Religion” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “The American Background" (excerpted from “America and Alfred Stieglitz”) from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
* “The Augerino Oil Company” by Ronald L. Ives from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Peril” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* “Children of Adam” from Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman
* "Degas in the Wings" by Geoffrey Wagner from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

I've now begun Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

>136 rocketjk: Good to see Howard Pyle in someone's reading. I love finding books with his illustrations. Now if he had illustrated the Ivanhoe (>141 rocketjk:) excerpt, that really would have been something!

Enjoying the Henry Miller and Florence Thompson discussions.

>144 SassyLassy: Yes, the illustrations in The Wonder Clock are definitely (at least) half the fun. A Pyle-illustrated Ivanhoe would, indeed, be something cool.

I have a Pyle illustrated Robin Hood which I borrowed from my big brother in HS, and it somehow found its way with me through college. He never noticed! Very nice edition

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel



Nobody needs a lengthy review of Wolf Hall from the likes of me at this late date. I knew I was going to get around to reading this extremely popular historical novel eventually. My wife has read the whole series and liked them all. I read the book now, though, because it was selected for my monthly reading group. I'm not going to be able to go the the group meeting this weekend, however, because, dammit, I have to go to the funeral of a longtime friend who was killed in an accident recently. I decided to carry on with the reading regardless in solidarity with the group and, as mentioned above, I had plans to read the book, anyway.

At any rate, Wolf Hall is an excellent novel about the early to middle reign of Henry VIII, focusing on and seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell began as an aide to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, and moved on to become a very highly placed figure in Henry's court (a rarity for a commoner) after Wolsey's fall from power and death. Several years back, I read an excellent biography of Wolsey called Naked to Mine Enemies, by Charles Ferguson, so I knew going in what Wolsey's trajectory would be. Mantel is extremely detailed in her descriptions of the many machinations of government and power during Cromwell's/Henry's days. Mostly, this world circles around Henry's obsession about producing a male heir, and his efforts (and consequently the efforts of everyone around him who wanted to stay in power) of figuring out how to get the Pope to grant Henry a divorce from his longtime wife, Katherine, whose many pregnancies have ended in still births, every early deaths, and one daughter. The court and the country are split. Katherine is popular with the people. Their sympathies lie with her. Henry's desired replacement wife, the young Anne Boleyn, is seen as grasping and unworthy. Nevertheless, first Wolsey and then Cromwell attempt to maneuver the Pope into accepting the idea. Well, most of us know the history. The genius of this book is Mantel's focus on the details of Cromwell's life: his personal relationships and tragedies, political maneuverings and skillful use of power, which he is always accumulating more of. Who knows how absolutely accurate all Mantel's day-to-day details are about the figures in Cromwell's household and his minute-by-minute political strategies. Mantel herself in her acknowledgements speaks of her own "fumbling speculations." I don't really care much about that. This is fiction after all, and Mantel provides an aura of authority about, at the very least, the principal political/religious players and their opinions and actions. I will say, though, that after a while (about halfway through) the tone and narrative voice began to seem repetitive to me. I had to push through that somewhat in order to get re-involved with the storytelling. That, plus Cromwell did seem a little too good to be true. Always acting from a place of honorable intentions, always the smartest one in the room. Sort of a better written, somewhat less violent Jack Reacher. (OK, the Reacher comment's a low blow. Let's call it an exaggeration for effect.)

Anyway, those reservations are relatively minor. Mantel's navigations through the pitch and yaw of the political scene of 16th century England, which, as we read, not incidentally provides plenty of insight into the use and abuse of power more generally, and the frequent vanity and crassness of the powerful, adds up all in all to a very rich and enjoyable artistic experience.

oh Im so sorry for your loss!

>147 rocketjk: My condolences on the loss of your friend.

Hope you find some comfort in the service and gathering with other people who knew and loved your friend.

Thanks, all. He was a very fine jazz musician, band leader and educator by the name of Andrew Speight, full of energy and enthusiasm. After the funeral there will be a memorial jam session with musicians from all of the San Francisco Bay Area taking part. I probably won't stay at that long, though, due to Covid/flu considerations which are by this time ramping up considerably.

Post-Wolf Hall, I returned for another journey through Stack 2 of my Between Book piles.

* “Lady and Kazi” excerpted from Persian Nights in The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “R is for Romance” from Good for a Laugh: a New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “A 1 Pound Stein” from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
* “Autobiographies in Paint” by Kermit Kahn from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Self-Defense” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles
* "Susannah York" by Susan Lawrenson from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

A note that I have decided to remove Leaves of Grass from the Between Book rotation. After about 95 pages or so, I felt like I'd gotten the idea, and, surprisingly (at least for me), I wasn't really enjoying the imagery particularly well. Maybe at a future date I'll return for some more of this famous collection.

I'm now on to an obscure novel about the American South, Vinegar Hill, written by Franklin Coen, who was pretty well known at the time as a screenplay writer, and first published in 1950 (and not to be confused with the more famous novel of the same name by A. Manette Ansay).

Ah, Jerry, I'm sorry to hear about your friend. As one of the few books I've reread, I don't need another reading of Wolf Hall probably ever, but I do love checking out people's reactions to it.

>153 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. I'm sure one reading of Wolf Hall will do for me, as well, though I did enjoy the reading and admire the execution, you should pardon the expression.

ha! Ive reread it several times, one if those books that you find out something you missed each time youreread it. but I think this last time, for our book read here, was enough. Still one of my all time fav HFs

I read Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi this year which was wonderful. I've never read him either (or rather gave up after a few pages on Cancer) - but this one is a very different side. I see Capricorn was written in 1939. So it must have been on his mind when he writes of this time in greece beginning that summer, when he let himself not write for a few weeks (and also ignore a world war). He says something within it about having had to work through all the stuff in his 30s books, to get it out of himself somehow and he understands others might not like it. Maroussi is a very beautiful book. I thought I'd try another later book, his book on sex, having read a quote somewhere that I thought it worth trying, but have not enjoyed where i got to and its understanding (or lack of) of women and especially one woman.

>156 tonikat: "having had to work through all the stuff in his 30s books, to get it out of himself somehow and he understands others might not like it."

By getting it out of himself, was he saying that he was writing about his misogyny and antisemitism in order to expunge it somehow? A disavowal, as it were? Or was it more along the lines of, "Now that I've told you about it, we don't have to talk about it any more?"

>157 rocketjk: -- I think I took it as a sort of self therapy, a working out of something to make sense of the world and getting rid of it, difficulty, working through difficulty, having to get it out of himself.

edit - I'm not really meaning to defend him, just what i think he said in the book. I haven't read the 30s books. And I did not know anti-semitism was involved. When i read your review i may have not let it sink in, i think maybe as I've been reading of T. S. Eliot who also published antisemitic lines at times. I'm sorry if this has upset you, it wasn't intended and I should have read more closely and thought. This also makes his ignoring WW2's outbreak look different. I always associate Miller with sex.
edit edit - ah i see it was the follow up comment i did not read fully. but that just sounds lame. I'm sorry, if you want me to change or delete anythign i put then let me know. Equality/ respecting diversity is important to me.

>158 tonikat: Oh, no. The apology is entirely mine that I gave you the idea in my post that there was anything at all inappropriate about your comments or that I was upset in some way. Absolutely not. I very much appreciate your adding to that conversation. My knowledge of Miller is pretty much nil, other than my reading of Capricorn and the conversation with LolaWalser about him that came after my review. I an happy to have the further information you provided and simply curious (not upset or put out) to have more clarity about what Miller meant by the idea (I had the idea that you were paraphrasing rather than using a direct quote) I quoted.

Again, I'm sorry to have given you the wrong idea and/or caused you distress about my reaction to your comment.

ah no problem, glad we are both a little clearer, I think.

I've often wondered if I should read Miller...your review and the comments following here have relieved me of any doubt. I can pass and spend my reading time elsewhere for the rest of my life.

>161 laytonwoman3rd: Miller fills in a particular slot, I guess, in the timeline/evolution of what was allowed or expected in terms of prose styles and subject matter. That's basically the reason I decided to read one of the Tropic novels, just to plug in that hole for myself. Other than that, though, at this late date, certainly, I agree that those books are eminently unless one particularly likes that writing style. That's just me, though. Others still like the books for their own sake, of course. On the other hand, I do still have an affinity for Burroughs, though I haven't read him in many years.

Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen



I often buy old books that are in good condition and that I've never heard of if the cover descriptions make them sound interesting. You take a chance on quality, of course. There's a reason you've never heard of the book, right? But they can be fun to read. Such was the case with my latest book read, one that had been sitting on my shelf since before my LT "Big Bang" (the year I first started entering my collection here) in 2008. Vinegar Hill by Franklin Coen is not to be confused with the relatively well-known novel of the same name by A. Manette Ansay. Coen's book was published in 1950. It is the story of a conflict in an unnamed Southern town (in an unnamed Southern state) between a group of small farmers, most of whom are WW2 veterans, and the entrenched monied interests in the town who are trying to pull off a lucrative land grab. The issue is where the new highway is going to go through the area, who is going to make money off the land rights, and who is going to be served (or not served) by the new road. The powers that be, of course, have the sheriff and his deputies in their pockets. In the very opening pages, one of the leaders of the "troublemakers" is murdered. The storyline revolves around what is going to be done about that, and by whom. The storyline is interesting enough, and the book is a relatively quick read. There are many points of view presented, and Jim Crow is not left out of the equation, either. There's even some sections of very nice writing. Things never really come together coherently, however, and the ending is mostly a hash. So I can see why this novel sank into obscurity, to the extent that there are only five LT members, including me, who have this book listed on LT. I will say, though, that the book was entertaining enough in the reading.

I did a little research about Frankin Coen and discovered that he was actually a well-known screenplay writer. Here is his credits page on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0168759/

I went looking for a review of the book and couldn't find anything via a simple online search. So, as I'm a NYTimes subscriber, I decided to use the Times website search engine. I found there a very short review to the effect that while the writing was good, the characters were essentially set pieces. I actually thought the characterizations were a little better than that. However, I also found a link to a short article about a lawsuit Coen had filed having to do with Vinegar Hill.

Warners is Sued by Franklin Coen
Warner Brothers Pictures has been named defendant in a $250,000 plagiarism suit filed in Superior Court on behalf of Franklin Coen. The complaint alleges that "Storm Warning," the film starring Ginger Rogers and released early this year, infringes on a story of the same title submitted in screen treatment form by Mr. Coen to the studio about five years ago. The company rejected the story, according to the author's attorney . . . and then Mr. Coen rewrote it into a novel called "Vinegar Hill," published in 1950.

I couldn't find any online reference to how the lawsuit came out. The Wikipedia page for the movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Warning_(1951_film)) doesn't mention the suit at all. The description of the movie here makes it sound like the movie was quite a wretched affair. It also featured, by the way, Ronald Reagan and Doris Day!

But all that does make sense in terms of the book itself. It's easily seen as a novel produced by someone more adept at screenplay writing.

>163 rocketjk: Fascinating backstory

>164 labfs39: Thanks! I find this sort of things happens relatively frequently. You read a relatively obscure book, but then if you do a bit of research you find some sort of interesting background tale that a) puts the book in some sort of context and b) sometimes surpasses the book itself in terms of interest level. I would love to have the time and knowledge about legal records to look up the full story of that lawsuit. I can see it as the opening premise of a thriller. An amateur historian decides to try to find out what happened in an old lawsuit about a lousy 70-year-old movie, and what he uncovers leads to the key to a long forgotten Cold War mystery and, of course, heart-pounding adventure ensues. Some secrets are better left uncovered!

>165 rocketjk: LOL. Your next project?

>163 rocketjk: I love those kind of stories. I have read obscure books and said to myself "I'm sure this was made into a movie", and now you've come up with the real life scenario.

Back to the Between Book stacks post-Vinegar Hill. My wander through Stack 3 proceeded thusly:

* "Mets, Reds Lead Parade in Pinch-Homer" from Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
* "The Impossible He" by Rosanne Smith Robinson from The Best American Short Stories 1957 edited by Martha Foley
* "The Step-Mother" from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
* "The Nation of London” from Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
* “Arthur Vandenberg and the Senate” from Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known by Dean Acheson
* “42nd St., Part II” by Henry Hope Reed, Jr., and Gay Talese from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

I've now moved on to Black Arrow, the third entry in a series called the Sugawara Akitada Mysteries by writer I.J. Parker. Sugaware Akitada is a low-level nobleman in 10th Century Japan who just happens to be very good at solving mysteries and is, coincidentally, a murder magnet, as mystery series heroes are wont to be. The first two books in the series were fun, in the "good but not great" category.

>163 rocketjk: - 165 - Fascinating! I'd love to read your book :-)

>163 rocketjk: I also enjoyed that -- and the idea of some writers suiting certain forms.

The Colossus of Maroussi is my favourite Miller too--always partial to Greece, and in larger-than-life Katsimbalis he found a thankful central figure.

>161 laytonwoman3rd:

The air-conditioned nightmare might amuse you, Linda--the most anti-road trip road trip ever (not a spoiler: he appreciates American landscape, but hates every facet of its social structure).

>162 rocketjk:

I'm perennially mad that Burroughs got away with murdering his wife, but yeah, IMO his prose and Ginsberg's poetry are the only good things associated with the Beats. (Not including women here as nobody bothered to include them at the time.)

Snow Country by I.J. Parker



Snow Country is the third entry in I.J. Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series. Akitada is a low-level nobleman in 11th-century Japan who's become known, in the series' first two books, for his ability to solve murders and annoy his superiors. Now he's been sent to be the governor of a far northern province where the emperor's authority is but barely acknowledged and a powerful warlord holds sway instead. Akitada's job is to get this situation in hand. He is accompanied by his wife and by his two loyal lieutenants, Tora and Hitomara. Soon, as will happen in murder mysteries, there is a murder. Then the bodies begin accumulating. Plus there is the problem for Akitada of asserting his imperial authority. These books have been fun all along, and I will say that in this third book the quality of the writing has gone up a notch, both in terms of the sentence-level work (many fewer cliches, for one thing) and the the plotting. There are, in fact, 21 books in this series! Well, I have the fourth one on hand and will definitely be reading that one somewhere along the line, though I doubt I'll make a point of going any further. I should add that the historical context adds to these books' enjoyability.

>172 rocketjk: If you are enjoying them, why will you stop reading the series? Just curious

>173 labfs39: I'm in the middle of quite a few series at this point, including the Richard Stark Parker series, good old Travis McGee by John D. McDonald, Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther and Greg Ile's Penn Cage series. And that's just the mysteries. Also I'm gradually reading through the Mapp and Lucia books as well as C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series. Plus I got a start last year on Proust's famous set. Sugawara Akitada is fun, as noted, but as you know, every book you do read is, among other things, some other book you'll never read. That particular effect becomes more pronounced as time moves along, and I'll turn 68 this coming July. It doesn't mean I don't still read silly stuff just for fun, and I'm not ruling out a return to the Akitada series entirely. I'm just not planning on continuing past the one more book I have on hand at this juncture.

>174 rocketjk: every book you do read is, among other things, some other book you'll never read

So true, sadly...

Here's the heart-pounding adventure of my post-Black Arrow read through of Stack 1 of my "Between Books":

* “The Struggle” from Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
* “After the Assault: The Emergence of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” from Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
* “Telling the Bees,” by John Greenleaf Whittier in Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* “Harold Parrott” from No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
* “The Limits of Walter Horton” by John Seymour Sharnik from The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories edited by Ray Bradbury
* “The Historic Place” (uncredited) from Show: The Magazine of the Arts - January 1962

I'm now already about a 5th of the way through The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James' classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

I love your concept of between books. I'm considering adopting a version of the idea myself, for short story and essay collections, and magazine articles.

>177 Julie_in_the_Library: Yes, that's exactly what I use my between books for. Or on rare occasions a book like Gaza Mom, that I was finding just be too depressing to read straight through. I didn't want to bounce off of any of that information, or start to skim, so I decided to do the reading a chapter at a time.

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James



The Black Jacobins is a fascinating study of the Haitian Revolution and the ascent, leadership and eventual downfall of its most powerful character, Toussaint L'Ouverture. Haiti, or San Domingo as it was known until its independence, was the most lucrative colony among France's possessions and the most lucrative colony of any in the West Indies. As such it was endlessly coveted by England. The money came from the sugar plantations, and the sugar plantations were run on the backs of African slaves. James opens the book with a long section describing this slavery, by his account more cruel even than what was experienced by the enslaved on American plantations. Then came the French Revolution, with its eventual claims of Liberty and Equality for all. But even in its most radical days, the Revolution, as described by James, was never free of the influence of the powerful merchant classes and landowners, not just the plantation owners, but the shipbuilders, import/export merchants and slavers, all of whom relied in one way or another on the sugar coming out of San Domingo for their fortunes.

In San Domingo itself, the society was fractured along class/racial lines. There were the rich white enslavers/plantation owners, plus the merchant class. Also there was a large group of mulattos, children of mixed parentage between enslavers and enslaved. The mulattos were free, some even being plantation owners and enslavers themselves and always, regardless looking down on the Blacks, the enslaved. Many of the slaves in San Domingo had come over on the Middle Passage themselves. They had more of African heritage than any sort of the European heritage that might have rubbed off on them over several generations. Arose from this boiling cauldron of resentment and distrust an ex-slave, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a born leader and military strategist who was able to inspire unquestioned loyalty from fellow officers and foot soldiers. A much shortened and simplified account of all that went on: the Blacks took up arms to throw off slavery; the mulattos took up arms to defend their property and social rights from the whites and, especially, the colonial forces of the French and, for a time, the English who landed when they thought the colony was ripe for the picking, not understanding how well the local Blacks and mulattos, lead by Toussaint, would fight them off in defense of what they saw as the principles of the Revolution that would eventually lead to their emancipation by the French, but never by the English.

In the end, the fighting came down to Toussaint and the Haitians against the forces of Napoleon, who sent a large army to subdue the Haitaians once his war against England had been (temporarily) concluded. Toussaint saw Haitian independence as a mistake. He wanted the island to have the benefit of European learning and civil institutions. And he never could come to the conclusion that Napoleon had left the ideals of the Revolution behind him and, dependent on the money and power of the French merchants, had come with the purpose of reinstitution slavery, which the Revolutionary councils had abolished throughout the French empire less than a decade before. So Toussaint vacillated in his campaign against these French forces, still hoping to make Napoleon understand that he was not aiming at separation from France but merely freedom for his people. It took a more clear-sighted leader, Dessalines, to understand that Toussaint's equivocation was causing confusion among the Haitian masses, and that he would have to supplant his leader. In a way we can see Toussaint as sort of a Moses figure, ascending the mountaintop but not reaching the promised land himself (though James never makes this reference). Eventually, the repeatedly defeated French, with their armies decimated by battle losses and by yellow fever, gave up and left, and Haiti became an independent country. James ends his narrative, abruptly, here.

James outlines the cruelties and massacres perpetrated by all sides in this conflict. He also gives vivid illustration of the bravery of the slave forces who sometimes charges guns and cannons with nothing more than rocks and metal-tipped pikes. He also described Toussaint's growing autocratic side. For example, during lulls in the fighting he insisted that the slaves return to their former plantations and continue working under their former masters, though with strict rules on treatment and with the workers now receiving one fourth of the plantations' profits. The idea was to keep the island's economy and revenue production from grinding to a halt. This was not a vision embraced by all, but Toussaint had the power to ensure the policy would be carried out. Similarly, Toussaint tried to keep mulattos and slaves from carrying out reprisals against their former enslavers, thinking that their expertise would be needed after the wars were over. But, says James, Toussaint, in his growing autocratic ways, never felt compelled to explain his motivations, assuming that his orders would simply be carried out whether understood or not. But the workers who made up his army became confused. One minute Toussaint was protecting white landowners and praising France, the next he was calling for them to take up arms to fight against the French. Which was it?

James was a lifelong and eminent Marxist, and we receive this extremely readable history through that strong Marxist lens. For example, at one point we read:

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilization as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of humanlike and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

I have absolutely no argument with the statement (other than the fact that there did seem to be times that Toussaint held out hopes that the French would, indeed, stick to the oaths of their own Revolutions) and no beef with James' including these sorts of observations throughout his history. In fact, I found James' straightforward inclusion of his own perspectives a refreshing change from the normal historical "objectivity" that so many historians strive for. I also enjoy the fact that James places the history within the context of the times in which he was writing. The book was originally published in 1938. My copy is a second printing of the book's republishing in 1971. In a new introduction, James says that he's only made a few small changes in the text to excise short passages that further research had shown to be inaccurate. But often in the original text (occasionally with footnotes adde to remind us that the ideas had been written in 1938), James makes reference to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of anti-semitic laws in Nazi Germany. More frequent, and more to the point, are James' references to what he sees as the coming (in 1938) anti-imperialist revolutions in Africa.

I flew through this history's 400 pages. It is a compelling and detailed narrative about a section of history I knew very little about, extremely well told and clearly written, with additional insights that put the events in a valuable historical context.

I hate to drive traffic to the New York Times, but they did have a good series of articles on the aftermath of the revolution and what France's extortionate demands of compensation did to the country's economy and prospects (effects reverberating to this day). Of course, the NYT omitted a discussion of the no less damaging American politics, but it's a good start.

The Ransom : Haiti's Lost Billions

>180 LolaWalser:. Thanks for that link. I'll give the article a read soon. I'm not surprised to learn of these French actions in general, though. In fact, I was surprised that James chose to bring his history to a close with the French troops' departure rather than including information about the immediate aftermath, which I was both expecting and hoping for. Even the 1971 appendix doesn't mention it, although the U.S. Marines' arrival in 1914 is mentioned.

>179 rocketjk: I really enjoyed your review and appreciate the glimpse into this history. I get a sense of clarity in what you say, both from the history/historian but also in the events or in those times.

>182 tonikat: Thanks! Glad you liked my review. And now, here is my report on my post-The Black Jacobins dash through Stack 2 of my "Between Books"

* “The Praslin Letters” apparently excerpted from Paris court records (evidently a true story) in The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
* “S is for Sports” from Good for a Laugh: A New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
* “Pound's Eleven New ‘Cantos’” from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
* “Tattle-Tale Titles” by Parke Cummings from Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
* “Rough Translations” from Rough Translations by Molly Giles - Finished!
* "Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz: Dark Songs and Light Music" by Douglas Watt from Show: The Magazine of the Arts, January 1962

Now it's on to a short book, Watch Czechoslovakia!, written just before the Munich Agreement, about the many dangers that Nazi Germany posed to that country. The author was an journalist, evidently of Austrian origin but at the time living and writing in England, named Richard Freund. It seems that Freund was able to imagine many different outcomes to the situation, except the actual event: the Allied European powers handing the country over to the Nazis in a vain attempt to prevent general war.

Rough Translations by Molly Giles



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is Molly Giles' first short story collection, originally published in 1985. The stories are all well written, though overall the collection is not as satisfying as a later collection of her I read some time ago, Creek Walk and Other Stories. Well, that's what I get for reading the later collection first. The stories in Rough Translations all have female protagonists. For the most part, they are in, or relatively recently out of, unhappy marriages. Their husbands, care more about their jobs than their marriages, spend their weekend afternoons watching football to the exclusion of all else, undervalue them, condescend to and/or despise their wives and so forth. The women lack in confidence, though they'd once expected much more of themselves. In other words, despite the stories' individual effectiveness, resonating as they do with real life, there is a sameness to them that drains the collection as a whole of effectiveness. There are two or three that rise above these factors, and the final story, the title story, in fact, is a tour de force.

Perhaps we can see these tales as stylistic period pieces of mid-80s short fiction. At any rate, I found the stories in Creek Walk to be much more diverse and imaginative. I should say that Giles was an instructor at San Francisco State University when I was a grad student in the Creative Writing Department, there. I never had a seminar with her there, but she did sit in as instructor when one of my teachers had to take sick leave. She was an extremely popular and effective teacher, by all accounts.

>179 rocketjk: Really interesting review, thanks. I have a very broad understanding of Haiti's political underpinnings, so this might be a good one for me to fill in some of those gaps in my knowledge.

>180 LolaWalser: Thanks that link, too. Whatever you think of the NYT, they do some interesting graphic medium-deep dives.

Watch Czechoslovakia! by Richard Freund



This is a very short book, written in 1937, just months before the infamous Munich Agreement that allowed the German Army to occupy Czechoslovakia without a shot fired. The book is, at its heart, an examination of the conflicts within the country between the Czechoslovak majority and the German minority, the use that Nazi Germany might be likely to make of these conflicts, and the very important reasons why they would care. I could find very little information about the book's author. I did find a couple of contemporary book reviews online. Freund is referred to in one as an "Anglicized Austrian journalist" and in another as an "Anglo-Austrian journalist." At any rate, he seems to have known his business. He describes at one point an interview he had with Edvard Beneš, who had been the country's president since 1935 and would serve in that capacity again after the war. In between, Beneš led the Czech government in exile during the Nazi occupation.

Freund give a thumbnail sketch of Czechoslovakian history and describes the geographic and economic factors that have made the country of such strategic importance in Central Europe throughout the centuries. As Freund wrote:

"Four points should be remembered: (1) the Western mountain arch, pointing towards the heart of Germany; (2) the 50 miles' gap in the northern range which, as the "Gateway of Moravia," has played an important part in the migrations of the European races for thousands of years; (3) the long sweep of the Carpathians pointing towards Rumania and Russia; (4) the Danube in the south.

The Bohemian basin with its mountain walls has been coveted by ambitious nations from the dawn of history, because its possession gives to a strong military power a strategic basis for operations over vast tracts of the European Continent."

The German minority in the country actually made up around 22% of Czechoslovakia's overall population. As Freund describes things, quite a few of their grievances were legitimate. But by time of his writing in 1937, he says that rather than working towards solving these problems, a nationalist German party, under the leadership of a Nazi sympathizer named Konrad Henlein, was much more interested in kicking up dissension and creating an excuse for the Nazi Army to take action. Freund describes the separate mutual defense agreements the Czechoslovakians had with both France and Russia, and talks about what these allies were likely to do in the face of a German incursion. Freund seems to have been able to imagine every eventuality other than what actually occurred, the Allies ignoring their own strategic interests by handing over the country to the Nazi's. Given the strategic military use Hitler and his generals were obviously likely to make of occupying the country, it's astonishing in retrospect that Neville Chamberlin could have ever supposed that the result of the Munich Agreement would be a significant period of peace.

I've read elsewhere that Beneš threatened the Allies with resisting the Germans despite the Munich Agreement (for what it's worth, Freund, in describing their likely strategy could hold out for around six months), telling Chamberlin that, agreement or no, if the Czechs fought, the Allies would be forced by public opinion to come to their aid militarily. Supposedly, Chamberlin replied that Beneš was correct, that the English and French would have to fight, but that if that happened they would make sure that the country was punished in any post-war treaties.

It's all fascinating information, especially given the fact that it was written at the moment, and as educated conjecture rather than as history. It took me only a single rainy afternoon to race through the book's 112 pages. I have no idea when and where I found this volume. It's been sitting on my history shelf since before I first started posting my library here on LT in 2008, as its entry date in my LT collection is March 1, 2008. It's in perfect condition with dust jacket intact. Finally, there are exactly three LT "members" listed as having this book. Me, something called Czech Center Museum (which provides no information on its LT profile page as to where or what it actually is*) and Ernest Hemingway!

* Possibly this place in Houston: https://www.czechcenter.org/

And with that, I wrap up my 2022 reading. I'll have a 2023 thread up here soon. All the best, and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Jerry. See you next year!

>187 RidgewayGirl: Thanks! Same to you.