rocketjk's 2024 50-book rambles

Greetings, all! I'm back for a 2024 reading challenge. Last year (2023) I did pretty well, stacking up 58 books read, and almost all of them enjoyed. That was a bit of a bump up from 2022's 53 books, which was a good effort but didn't come close to 2021's 67 or 2020's crazy 82-book rampage. We'll see where this year takes me. 2019 found me reading 63 books. My previous five totals, when I still owned my used bookstore, had been 41, 41, 46, 44, 46 and, in the first year of the store, only 40. I doubt I'll ever hit 82 again, but who knows?

In case you're interested:
2023 50-Book Challenge thread * 2022 50-Book Challenge thread
2021 50-Book Challenge thread * 2020 50-Book Challenge thread
2019 50-Book Challenge thread * 2018 50-Book Challenge thread
2017 50-Book Challenge thread * 2016 50-Book Challenge thread
2015 50-Book Challenge thread * 2014 50-Book Challenge thread
2013 50-Book Challenge thread * 2012 50-Book Challenge thread
2011 50-Book Challenge thread * 2010 50-Book Challenge thread
2009 50-Book Challenge thread * 2008 50-Book Challenge 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.

Master List (Touchstones included with individual listings below):
1: The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
2: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
3: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
4: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto
5: The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan
6: Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
7: Death in the Making by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim
8: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam
9: The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
10: Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941
11: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
12: Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe
13: This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller
14: The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson
15: The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch
16: Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts
17: Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy
18: Lady in Armor by Octavus Roy Cohen
19: The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan
20: The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare
21: Erasure by Percival Everett
22: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
23: Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt
24: American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee
25: The Estate by Isaac Bashevis Singer
26: Iraq + 100 edited by Hasan Blasim
27: Balls by Graig Nettles and Peter Golenbock
28: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston
29: The Fortune of the Rougons by Emile Zola
30: Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce
31: The World's Greatest Romances edited by Walter J. Black
32: The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith
33: A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown
34: Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer
35: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
36: Timbuktu by Paul Auster
37: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor
38: Official Baseball Guide - 1963 Edition edited by C.C. Spink
39: Into China by Eileen Bigland
40: Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani

Book 1: The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer



At the beginning of 2022, having completed my once-a-year Joseph Conrad read-through, I began a similar tradition with the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, although I changed the process to two novels per year, one at the beginning January and one at the beginning of July. So, now I'm up to Singer's fifth novel, The Manor.

Once again we are in Poland, this time in the later decades of the 19th century. The novel begins just after an 1863 uprising by the Polish nobility against what had become ongoing Russian rule has ended in humiliating disaster. With this nationalist movement quashed, Poland instead turns to business, and the modern world begins seeping into Poland: mines, factories, railroads begin appearing. For Poland's Jews, the period is one of liberalism. In the town of Jampol, one of the insurrectionists, Count Wladislaw Jampolski, has been banished to Siberia, and a Jew, Calman Jacoby, has managed to win the right to lease the count's large landholding and manor house. He judiciously allows the count's family to continue living in the manor house, in order to avoid offending the local Poles, and he begins making money growing and selling crops on the land and, in particular, selling timber to be used as railroad ties. So begins our tale, with Calman at the center of what becomes a whirlwind of cultural and religious change and the personal crises and moral choices, both good and bad, of an expanding group of characters.

Calman himself is an observant Jew. He expects his children to stay within that community and some do. But the Jewish community as a whole does not stand apart from the modernism taking hold in Poland, and Calman, to his woe, has lived to see a growing divide among Poland's Jews: those who demand adherence to the old ways, and those who look westward with approval at the assimilation of the Jews of France, Germany and elsewhere. To them, the exotic, "Asiatic" dress, the standing apart from Polish society as a whole, is a self-defeating lifestyle of superstition, destined to bring down further antisemitism on all of their heads. To the traditionalists, antisemitism is a constant, sure to come in future waves however they're dressed and however they worship. Faith in God and loyalty to the commandments is the only path. Calman's children, as they grow to adulthood, more or less split down the middle of this divide. One of his daughters goes so far as to run off with the count's son. But the world of the Polish nobility is on no more solid ground than the world of the Hassids. In the meantime, socialism, Zionism, nihilism, anarchism and more are debated and sometimes adopted. The roles of women in this world are changing as well. Although this topic is not made specific, the limitations faced by The Manor's female characters, and the extremely unsatisfactory choices they're forced into, become an undeniable theme of the novel.

I don't want to give the idea that Singer's presentation here is devoid of sympathy and even love for the ways and tribulations of the observant Jews. Indeed, his portrayal is laced strongly with affection and understanding. The storyline is a tapestry, or perhaps labyrinth is a better description, of interrelationships between members of the old world and the new, the Jewish society and the Polish Christians, interwoven amongst and strengthened by family, marriage, business and religion. The old world's concerns are offered with as much detail as those more modern leaning. This is a vivid picture of a complex society at a tipping point, full of memorable characters. And of course Singer was writing, and we are reading, within the context of hindsight. In the end, modernization did not save the Jews of Europe.

Here is a good example of the issues Singer is dealing with. Ezriel, Calman's son-in-law, has mostly left the old ways and is studying at university to become a doctor:

Ezriel had had great hopes that progress could be achieved through education. Yet knowledge itself turned out to be extremely precarious. The entities which were said to constitute matter seemed to have almost magical properties. Moreover, the various materialistic theories, and Darwinism in particular, had put almost all values in jeopardy: the soul, ethics, the family. Might was right everywhere. Man's ancient beliefs had been bartered for the telegraph. But what could Ezriel do about it? For him the old traditions were already destroyed. He was left with nothing but examinations and dread. He had forsaken God but he was dependent upon all kinds of bureaucrats. He had made a mistake, Ezriel felt. But what exactly had been his error? How could it be rectified? As he lay in the darkness, it occurred to him that the young man who had been found hanging in an attic room in the Old City and whose dissection Ezriel had witnessed must have had much the same thoughts as he was having now.

Here's one more quote I like a lot, one that shows more accurately the range of human emotion and reverence for the natural world that Singer displays through the novel, as Calman, about a third of the way through the story, contemplates his situation:

Calman sighed. He heard his grandson, Shaindel's Uri-Joseph-Yosele, awake and cry. Burek, the dog, barked. The cows in the stall rubbed their horns against the door. The spring was a warm one, and after two years of drought there were signs that the coming harvest would be fruitful. The winter crops had sprouted early, rain and sunshine had been plentiful: the life of the soil was as unpredictable as the life of man. Scarcity followed plenty. When the earth seemed to have grown barren, the juices of life flowed through her again and she blossomed once more. Who could tell? Perhaps God would still grant Calman some comfort.

When I first began reading The Manor, I wasn't particularly enamored. But the more I read, and the more the branches of Singer's story reached outward, the more absorbed I became, and in the end I can say it's a book I recommend highly. My copy is a near first-edition hardcover, published in 1967. Singer, in his Author's Note at the beginning, says in part, "This volume, although it stands as an independent story, constitutes Part One of the complete sage of The Manor. Part Two is now in the process of being prepared for the English-speaking reader. That Part Two was published in English in 1969 as The Estate. The two are often published together now in a single volume. My general procedure would call for me to read The Estate as my first book in July, but I may well decide to push that up some and read that novel while the details of The Manor are still fresh in mind.

Book note: I found my copy of The Manor sitting way atop a rather haphazard stack of hardcovers in the S section of the wonderful Westsider Books at Broadway and West 80th Street in New York. As I began reading, I found that many top right page corners had been turned down in increments of every 8 to 15 pages or so. There were too many such creases for me to imagine that some previous reader was making note of particular passages, so I assume that the creasing was this reader's way of noting progress, in lieu of using a bookmark. As I read, of course, I unbent them. Each time I did so, I couldn't help wondering just who that reader might have been, and imagining that my own progress through the book, and my gradual straightening out of those creases, in some way connected me to that person across time. I am happy to report that the creases continued to the end. My fellow reader had, like me, finished the book! Also, sometime during the early stages of my reading, I happened to slop some red wine out of my wineglass, such that a small wine stain now appears on the edges of a few pages. So now, perhaps several years hence, another reader will wonder who caused the stain, and who made the creases which, although now unbent, are still visible. Was it the same person or was it two different readers? No, I am not going to leave a note in the book. Let the next person have their own mystery.

Book 2: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff



Year-opening tradition #1 was my reading of an I.B. Singer novel. Year-opening tradition #2 is one that my wife and I share. At the beginning of each calendar year, we give each other to read the book that we each enjoyed most from the previous year (and that we think the other will enjoy). So this year my wife gave me The Vaster Wilds to read. (I gave her Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas.)

A young indentured servant with the regrettable name of Lamentations (more commonly known as Zed) has been brought against her will to early-days colonial Massachusetts. Filled with grief over the death of the young, mentally challenged daughter of "her" family who has been Zed's main charge, and wanting to leave behind her the famine and disease that is afflicting the colony and the cruelty that is her daily lot, one night she slips through a hole in the colony's stockade walls and escapes into the forrest. Her goal is to walk north for as long as she must until she reaches the territory where she will find the French, who she hopes will be kinder than the English.

The novel proceeds from there as an adventure of survival and a reverie on nature and God and memory, as well as innocence and guilt. As we are taken through Zed's daily and hourly struggle for survival, and her awe at the natural world she finds around her, for a long time we sail along (or at least I did) with admiration for Groff's imagination and powers of natural description. The details of Zed's quest: finding shelter and food, building a fire, evading the indigenous people who she assumes would do her harm as just one more treacherous white person are very believably and entertainingly rendered, Groff is very good at making us feel Zed's hunger and her growing physical pains and weakness, and Zed's philosophical musings, as well as the gradual filling in of her backstory, flow nicely. This includes the horrors of vulnerability and abuse that a young servant girl without a defender was highly likely to experience.

I found that things began to drag about midway through, but the book's final, say, 20% picked up again and the ending I thought fit perfectly.

I must admit that I was distracted more and more as the narrative went along with Groff's attempts to render the language in ways that she clearly imagined would put us more in mind of the era, but for me became irritants. I'm talking about things like leaving the "ly" off of adjectives (such as "The bear was terrific large") or using "did" for past tense rather than an "ed" ending (such as "The rapids did surge" rather than "The rapids surged") Eventually this artifice got on my nerves, especially because I didn't think it necessary. Also, as far as I'm concerned, the use (and certainly the overuse) of the verb "to marvel" (She sat and marveled at the night sky) and the adjective "wondrous" can be retired from English-language fiction writing henceforth and forever more. But those are all just my own peeves. I know there are many who are not distracted by such things.

So, in the end, I do recommend the book for folks who enjoy these sorts of fictional accounts of struggles through, and immersion, in nature. There is a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief needed in terms of Zed's nature skills. Where did she get them? But I didn't really mind that element and it didn't take away from my enjoyment of Groff's accomplishment here.

Book 3: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich



Until now I have been one of those stupid idiots who had never read any of Louise Erdrich's novels. Finally I rectified that by reading her much acclaimed 2021 novel, The Sentence. Given this book's 91 reviews on LT so far, I'd say that nobody needs a long review of this book at this late date from the likes of me. But here's what I will say: all the acclaim is warranted. This is a good-hearted book about community, friendship, love and identity. It is a book about a bookstore, and so brought me back quite vividly--and in a good way--to my own days of bookstore ownership. The story centers around a group of Native American women living in Minneapolis who together run the aforementioned bookstore, as well as the husband of one of the women, Tookie, our narrator. There is also Flora, a regular customer. Flora is a white woman who, sometimes to the amusement but also often to the annoyance of the store's employees, identifies strongly with Native American culture. Well, but this identification often takes the form of acts of kindness and positive action, so how annoyed can they be with her. But early in the novel, Flora dies and soon thereafter begins haunting the store, in particular targeting Tookie for her increasingly unwelcomed attention.

Then Covid hits, and everything is turned upside down. And then George Floyd is murdered and, since we are in Minneapolis, the world explodes. Erdrich does an astoundingly good job of recreating the feelings of uncertainty, fear, isolation and dread of those early Covid days, events which already, only a few short years later, have faded from my memory, or have at least lost their vivid, horrifying intensity. And then stir in the turbulence, anger and regret of the George Floyd protest and the violent, repressive response of the police.

But ultimately The Sentence is, as I said at the beginning, a book about community and reconciliation. The strength of friendships and the vital role that we can play in others' lives through straightforward acts of support, and by listening to each other. The revelations about Flora and her purpose, and about a strange, very old, book that enters the story along the way, come in due course. The ending is spot on and the whole enterprise was for me an entirely uplifting (in a non-maudlin way) and satisfying experience.

Book 4: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto



This is a fascinating and very well-written and deeply researched history of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, the town on Manhattan Island that was eventually taken over by the English and became New York City. Dutch holdings at the time ranged as far north as the settlement that eventually became Syracuse, NY, and as far south as the Delaware River. In grammar school in New Jersey in the 1960s, we were barely taught about the importance of New Amsterdam. Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant became vaguely familiar names, but essentially no details about them were taught. We knew about the Dutch presence mostly through place names and through old storybooks like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But Shorto's narrative shines a bright light on the history of the Dutch in 17th century North America, and on the the degree to which Dutch influence molded the spirit of the multi-cultural, exuberant, dynamic city that New York City grew into.

Some important points:
The English colonies to the north and south of the Dutch were set up as religiously repressive Puritan outposts. "Heresy" was punished harshly. But the Netherlands during this time was the most liberal country in Europe, and freedom of religion and overall inclusionary policies were the word of the day. So people came to settle the incredibly fertile land in and around Manhattan, or to live and do business within the young city, from all over.

It soon became apparent that Manhattan Island, sitting as it did at the mouth of the massive Hudson River and having the best harbor for maritime activity on the east coast of North America, was the spot around which trade with Europe and exploration into the continent itself would clearly revolve.

While the English chartered land in the New World for their citizens to take over and settle, the Dutch, as their global trade networks expanded, left the work to private companies, namely the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India company. Generally speaking, then, the Dutch set up trading centers to be run for the profit of these companies, rather than for the country itself. New Amsterdam, then, was an anomaly in that a true colony grew up. The way these trading posts were administered was that the company would send a director, who would run his post autocratically. Authority derived from the company. In the case of New Amsterdam, that director was Peter Stuyvesant, who ran the place with an iron fist and fought tooth and nail against the citizens who began agitating for a role in the decision-making process of the town and for their own rights as Dutch citizens.

It's this last point that provides the heart of Shorto's story. Most of the history of New Amsterdam was presumed lost, but in the early 1970s, a treasure trove of documents from the colony, handwritten, of course, and in 17th century Dutch, was discovered in the archives of the New York State Library in Albany. Shortly thereafter, a scholar named Charles Gehring, a specialist in the Dutch language of that time, was given the job of translating the 12,000 pages in the collection. As of the original 2005 publication of The Island at the Center of the World, Gehring, while still at work on the task, had made huge strides. What had emerged were day-to-day administrative records of the settlement, court minutes, and official letters. All sorts of historical details that help create a nuanced, multi-dimensional look at New Amsterdam written in the hand of its leading citizens.

One important figure, previously almost entirely unknown, who came to light was one Adriaen van der Donck, who came to the colony to work with Stuyvesant as his secretary, but soon turned against him and became the ringleader of those trying to wrest significant amounts of authority away his former boss. van der Donck made it all the way back to The Hague, where he argued before the Dutch governing body that New Amsterdam should be taken away from the Dutch West India Company (and Stuyvesant) and instead become a province of the Netherlands proper, with all attendant rights for its citizens. He came very close to succeeding. The fact that he didn't eventually meant the end of Dutch Manhattan. As trade wars between the English and the Dutch intensified, the Dutch West India company ignored Stuyvesant's pleas for soldiers and weapons to defend his wildly valuable island. When the English showed up in the harbor with gunboats and soldiers, reinforced by English settlers from the North who showed armed on the colony's border, Styuvesant had no choice but to hand the place over.

Shorto does a great job of describing the Dutch culture and politics off the era, as well as their on again-off again conflicts with the English, and the ways that all this affected New Amsterdam's development. He also shows the many ways that the Dutch culture and mindset of New Amsterdam has influenced American attitudes over the centuries since and the ways in which American culture is different than it would have been had "original" 13 colonies in truth been entirely English in nature, as what became the prevailing American myth would have it.

Book note: My wife and I were told about this extremely interesting and entertaining history by friends of ours who are lifelong New Yorkers. Once we got to New York ourselves last June, my wife borrowed the book from our local NY Public Library branch and loved it. To ensure that I'd read it, too, she went out and bought a new copy which she then gave me as a Hanukkah present.

Book 5: The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan



The Ploughmen is a very effective but dark dual-character study about the springing trapdoor of loneliness and the sly banality of evil. The novel begins with a heartless murder in rural Montana. Soon it becomes apparent that we are going to spending a lot of time in this novel with the murderer. He is John Gload, orphaned in his early teens, who has learned soon thereafter that he is able to kill without remorse or revulsion. Very quickly, Gload has been captured and is sitting in a jail cell in Copper County. There he encounters Deputy Sheriff Valentine Millimaki, the book's main protagonist. The police have Gload dead to rights on this murder; they're certain of a conviction. But at the same time they are fairly sure that Gload, already in his 70s, has killed before, and often. He seems to respect Millimaki, however, so Millimaki's boss asks him to remain on night shift weeks past his regular rotation for that duty should be up, to see if he can get Gload talking about past crimes.

Millimaki has two additional problems. The first is that he is now barely seeing his wife, an ICU nurse who works days. The second is that he is the county's chief search and rescue officer. Working with his German shepherd, Tom, Millimaki has prided himself on finding wandering hikers and others lost in the Montana wilderness in time to save them. But now he is on a depressing run of finding people too late. With that on his mind, he has also to sit up all night listening to Gload, who gradually begins spinning stories of his life and his crimes. It turns out, as well, that the two men have elements of their past in common.

And so we watch the two men interact and develop, not a friendship, but an eery closeness. Gload is a man devoid of decency yet still beholden to his own sense of propriety. Millimaki is a decent man trying to maintain balance, alone in his cabin while his wife works by day and walking the hallway between jail cells at night.

So, as I mentioned above, this novel is pretty dark. But it is also beautifully written, especially when Zupan goes about describing the Montana countryside. Sometimes these descriptions enhance our sense of foreboding, but often they serve as a palliative and as a ray of hope. Millimaki's sense of decency adds another dimension of light to the dark spaces. At any rate, here's one of many such passages I liked which we read as Millimaki and his dog are out on a search and rescue mission:

After they set out the shepherd was immediately drawn to a streamed entering from the south and the going in that direction was slow: deep troughs and cutbacks and a twisted wrack of weathered plank and post and deadfall from some headland flood of the previous spring. Queer rocks lay atop the dirt as smooth and round as Jurassic eggs, and pinecones tumbled and abraded by the torrent lay all about like spined sea creatures of a past age. Grasshoppers wheeled up before them and rattled off into the weeds and sage.

While this is a novel about crime, it is not a whodunnit. That doesn't mean it's devoid of suspense, however, as we watch the relationship between Millimaki and Gload and read to find how each will be affected, even changed, by the other. You do come to care about Millimaki, the dialogue throughout is generally excellent, and both characters are memorable. This is not an easy read, as we spend a lot of time in very gloomy places. But my personal opinion is that overall this is quite a good psychological study and therefore a fine book.

Point of information: We are told that Millimaki is a Finnish name.

Book note: The Ploughmen was published in 2014. I've had it on my shelves since May 2019. I have no memory of where I bought it, however.

Book 6: Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang



Inheritance is a novel that takes us through three generations of a Chinese family, from the beginning of the 20th century up through the late-1980s. The narrative takes us through the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the gathering threat of Japanese imperialism, the Japanese invasion and occupation, the Chinese Civil War and the calamity (from the point of view of our protagonists) of the Communist victory and the family's exile to Taiwan. The focus is primarily on the women of the family, told often through the point of view of Hong, the daughter of narrative's central figure, Junan. Although narrative is often in the third person, we understand that the perspective is Hong's and that she is relating the family history as it has been told to her or as she has pieced it together or sometimes even conjectured. This somewhat shifting narrative strategy I found to be largely effective. And as importantly, or perhaps even more importantly as the historical events the family lives through, and are often drastically effected by, the novel takes us through a near-century of shifting and evolving attitudes and expectations of the roles and duties of women in Chinese society, from Hong's grandmother, who had spent 6 years with her feet bound before "the practice went out of fashion," to Hong's adulthood as a professional woman in the United States.

As noted above, the novel's central figure is Junan, the narrator's mother, who we follow from girlhood. Junan is beautiful and iron-willed, determined to pull her family through the national disasters whirling around them, even as her husband, Li Ang, is off rising through the ranks of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army. The complicated relationships between Junan and her husband, but also between Junan and her beloved sister, Yinan, are at the heart of the story. Personal and emotional sacrifices, unfortunate levels pride and standards of propriety course through the storytelling.

This is a first novel. Chang has since gone on to write several more novels and story collections, none of which I have read. I found Inheritance to be quite enjoyable and often absorbing, though I did find it inexplicably slow going in some parts. The writing is straightforward and clear, and for me very effective on almost all levels. The characters are well drawn and complex, and their lives and relationships are much more fully drawn than I have perhaps indicated above.

There are a couple of flaws in the procedure for me, however. One is what I call the "shayna punim" (Yiddish for "pretty face") factor. Junan is strong-willed and physically beautiful, married to a man rising in power and prestige and able to a large extent to bend conditions to her will. I do sometimes weary of novels in which the protagonists have the advantages of physical beauty and strength to help propel them over obstacles that might hinder the rest of us mere mortals. The other is the fact that the characters occasionally make crucial decisions that seemed inexplicable to me, and that the quick paragraphs meant to explain these decisions either presented at the time or later in retrospect, were opaque to me. Two or three times, I couldn't make out what Chang, through her characters, was getting at. At least twice, paragraphs that seemed to be meant to be explanatory were so cryptic as to leave me scratching my head. I decide whether the problem was the Chang was simply so sure of what she was getting at that she didn't realize she hadn't described things comprehensibly or that I'm simply a blockhead. I figure the chances at 50-50. Or, of course, perhaps Chang purposefully left things vague at those crucial points, though I'm not sure what the point would be.

At any rate, I found Inheritance very much worth reading, offering an interesting (if necessarily limited in focus) picture of Chinese society during extremely turbulent times, with memorable characters throughout. As a first novel, I'd say it's admirable indeed, and I will be keeping an eye out for Chang's subsequent works.

Book 7: Death in the Making by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim



This photobook of powerful images from the Spanish Civil War is mostly comprised of photographs by famed war photographer Robert Capa but also contains several by Capa's collaborator and sometime romantic partner Garda Taro and by a photographer known as Chim (born Dawid Szymin). (There are 111 images by Capa, 24 by Taro and 11 by Chim.) Capa was a Hungarian Jew, and Taro a German Jew. Both had fled to Paris to escape the rise in antisemitism. Chim was Polish. All three were fierce supporters of the Loyalist side, fighting against Franco's fascist armies (plus the Italian and German air forces).

The photos are remarkable, bringing to vivid life the faces of Loyalist soldiers and civilians alike. We see the smiling groups of soldiers in the war's early days when hope and camaraderie lit up these civilian solders' faces with the joy of the righteous cause. But we also see soldiers dying or freshly dead, killed in battle or in air raids. Fear and fatigue. The panic of civilian crowds runner for bomb shelters. The shattered, exhausted faces of refugees. The horror of war, and the cruel, relentless crushing of dreams. The refusal to surrender. The book's forward was written by Jay Allen, a journalist who had been in Spain since 1930. The captions to the photos are by Capa himself, though they often provide more of a narrative of the overall experience than direct descriptions of the individual photos.

This book was originally published in 1938. The war was still going, but things were already looking very bleak for the Loyalists. Capa had already left Spain, heading off to China to photograph the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion, and Taro was already dead, killed after a year spent at the front when the jeep she was riding in was struck by an out-of control tank. Capa left the publishing of the book to others, and the result was a book of powerful photos but less than stellar production values: grainy photo reproductions and subpar paper stock. The book sold poorly. In 2020, however, the International Center for Photography in New York City teamed with the Italian publisher Damiani to produce a new edition, with greatly enhanced reproductions and much better paper stock. (I bought my copy at the ICP Museum.) The new edition contains an extremely helpful and interesting afterward by contemporary photography curator Cynthia Young, who has done a lot of work with Capa's photos.

The book's cover photo, now known as The Falling Soldier, is one of the most famous photos in combat photography history. It depicts an advancing Loyalist soldier an instant after being struck by a bullet. Capa claimed that he stuck his camera up over the lip of the trench he was in and snapped the photo of the advance without looking. In the 1970s, claims arose that the photo had actually been staged. Young, in her essay, makes no mention of this issue and instead takes the photo at face value. She does wonder why the photo was only used for the dust jacket and not included in the book itself. (I read about the "staging" issue on wikipedia and haven't looked into it further.)

Original editions of the book are rare and extremely pricy. This new edition isn't cheap either, but I can say for sure that the New York Public Library as at least one copy, and other libraries may have copies as well.

Here are a couple of online images of Capa's photos the first is contained in the book. The second is not but gives a good idea of others depicting refugees that are there:

Book 8: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam



This one's really for baseball fans only. As the title lets on, The Teammates is a book about the friendship between Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio, four members of the famed Boston Red Sox teams of the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s (with time out for World War 2). In 2001, Ted Williams was dying. Pesky and DiMaggio, although in their 80s, decided to drive down from Massachusetts, joined by their friend Dick Flavin, a well-known Boston-area TV personality and humorist, to see Williams one last time. Younger than the other two men, Flavin has volunteered to do most of the driving. Doerr is absent, remaining in his Oregon home to care for his ailing wife. This trip is the occasion for Halberstam's slim book about the friendship and careers of the four famous ballplayers. Halberstam was already friends with these men himself, having interviewed them all for a previous book, Summer of '49, about the epic pennant race of that year between the Red Sox and Yankees, won by the New Yorkers on the last day of the season.

The Teammates contains pocket biographies of each of the four former players, as well as the history of the close friendship that grew up between them all during their playing days. Williams, the biggest star by far, was the leader. He referred to the others as "my guys." As portrayed here, Williams was also the only one of the four with a strong dark side. He could be generous and charming, but more frequently he was "cantankerous" (Halberstam's word) and pushy, never admitting he might be wrong, always insisting on having the last word and getting his own way. Although Halberstam never uses the word, Williams was clearly a bully. Halberstam spends about four pages detailing the miserable childhood and the irritations provided by his constantly ne'er-do-well brother that certainly contributed to Williams' distrust and bluster. The other three friends are presented as extremely skillful and intelligent ballplayers and all-round nice guys. If the narrative slips over the line into hagiography territory for these three, we're willing to forgive that. The stories of their careers and playing days are certainly interesting and fun: worth reading indeed for anyone with an interest in the topic.

The drive to Florida and the final meeting with Williams really provide only the thinnest of framings for the book. Halberstam was not in the car, of course, and there are only a few brief anecdotes from those days on the road. The meeting with Williams is described affectingly but briefly. Nevertheless, I can certainly recommend this slim volume for any baseball fan in the mood for an affectionate, well-written look at this friendship, as well as a trip back in time to a long-gone era of baseball history. And if the name Halberstam is familiar, yes, this is the same historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the early days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Book note: A few weeks ago I took the train from New York City into New Jersey to meet up with one of my oldest friends, a buddy from high school days who lives out in western Jersey. We drove to Montclair, where we spent a happy afternoon together at the Yogi Berra Museum. In the gift shop was a bargain book rack, from which I purchased three baseball books. Since my friends birthday was coming up, I told him to pick whichever of the three books he wanted as part of his birthday present. He picked The Teammates. Reading the book soon thereafter, he told me that he liked it so well that he insisted I read it too, and lent it to me the next time we saw each other.


That's me on the right (post-book purchases!) with my buddy Dan at the Yogi Berra Museum. My sweatshirt bears the logo of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a low level minor league ball club that plays in Coney Island.

Book 9: The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.



This beautiful, painful, heartbreaking novel about the spiritual and physical lives of the members of an enslaved community on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the 1830s was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2021. The story revolves around the love between Samuel and Isaiah, enslaved men who have grown together from boyhood and who have long worked together, mostly isolated from the rest of the community, in the plantation's barn, taking care of the animals and doing the many attendant chores and growing physically strong in the process. Mostly, the other enslaved folks consider Samuel and Isiah's relationship to be benign, referring to them as Those Two and either leaving them be or considering them friends. In a flashback to their ancestors' lives in Africa, we see that such relationships were not considered in the least remarkable. But the two men, and particularly Samuel, have stubborn streaks, and quietly refuse to follow the plantation owner's directive to help him breed more slaves.

The beauty of the novel for me stems from the skillful way that Jones shifts his attention around the plantation, showing us the inner lives of many of the enslaved people, particularly Maggie, the leader of the circle of female healers in the community and the one in closest, though mostly vague, contact with the ancestor spirits, the Prophets of the novel's title. Violence, of course, is ever present, or at least the threat of it is, as is the cruelly capricious manner in which the enslavers wield their power and display their hatred and fear. But while this threat of violence is always there, Jones describes the enslaved's true despair as their powerlessness, the stunted nature of their lives, devoid of outlet, individual potential bleeding, often literally, into the ground. That and the cruel crushing nature and impossibly long hours of the work demanded of them. But they are, as noted above, a community, taking care of each other to the extent they're able within the confines of their oppression. And always shining through is the love between Samuel and Isaiah, as well as the links between the lives of the enslaved and the memory, often not even conscious, of the lives their ancestors led in their home countries. Jones also brings us inside the lives and minds of the plantation owner, his wife and grown son, and the plantation's overseer, all of them woven into the pattern of this world, all warped by the evil nature of the power they wield.

I found the writing on a sentence and paragraph level to be excellent. I was not fully sold by the ending, but still I absolutely highly recommend The Prophets. Here is a longish passage that I thought was wonderful:

Isaiah's breath smelled like milk and his body curled snugly into Samuel's. Moonlight did all the talking. It just happened. Neither of them chased the other and yet each was surrounded by the other. Samuel liked Isaiah's company, which had its own space and form. Samuel knew for sure because he had touched its face and smiled, licked every bit of calm from its fingers and giggled. Then, without either of them realizing what had happened, it snuck up on them--the pain. They could be broken at any time. They had seen it happen so often. A woman carted off. Tied to a wagon screaming at the top of her lungs and her One risking the whip to chase after her, knowing damn well she couldn't save him, but if she could just stay near him for a few more seconds, his image wouldn't fade as quickly as it would have had she not challenged death.

No one was the same after the snap. Some sat in corners smiling at voices. Others pulled out their eyelashes one by one, making their eyes seem to open wider. The rest worked until they collapsed, not just collapsed in the field, but collapsed in on themselves until there was nothing left but a pile of dust waiting to be blown away by the wind.

Book 10: Collier’s Magazine - May 10, 1941



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is another publication from the stack of old magazines I've accumulated on the floor of my home office closet. This one is fascinating in that it was published just 7 months before the Pearl Harbor attack finally pulled the U.S. into World War 2. But the debate between FDR, who wanted to support the Allies as strongly as possible, and the isolationists was going full throttle. Colliers, as per this edition, had a very strong pro-Allies editorial stance. There are several short pieces and photography essays about the U.S. military and its drive toward preparedness. The centerpiece of this editorial policy is the long essay by Republican Wendell Wilkie. Interestingly, Wilkie had recently lost the 1940 presidential election to Roosevelt. He ran against Roosevelt's New Deal policies, but he refused to break with Roosevelt on his European policies, much to the chagrin of the isolationists, who dubbed him, iirc, "Me Too" Wilkie. At any rate, Wilkie's essay in this Colliers is titled, "Americans, Stop Being Afraid: The Dangers of Isolationism." There are also three or four fun short stories (by authors I've never heard of), and one very interesting feature on the famed race horse Exterminator by Bob Considine. All in all, a very interesting time capsule.

A note that this is the last of the magazines that I brought with me from California for our year in NYC, so my old magazine reading will be on hiatus from the "Between Book" lists until we get back to the west coast. At that point, we'll be packing up to move here permanently, and I guess most of the remaining magazines will get bundled up for the move.

The mailing label on my copy of the magazine tells us that it was mailed to Esther H. White who loved at 925 Jones Street, Apt. 204, in San Francisco. I couldn't find any reference to Ms. White online, but she lived on the 2nd floor of this building, constructed in 1922, in San Francisco's Lower Nob Hill neighborhood:

Book 11: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

*

Book note: The cover on the left is the cover of the edition of Homage to Catalonia that's been on my bookshelves since my LT "Big Bang" in 2008. However, I'm currently 3,000 miles away from those bookshelves. The cover on the right is cover of the edition I borrowed from the Harry Belafonte Branch of the New York Public Library to read this past week. More on this later.

No one needs a long review of Homage to Catalonia from the likes of me at this late date. The book is George Orwell's memoir of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell came to Spain to fight against Franco's ultimately (and tragically) successful Fascist takeover attack against the Republican government of Spain. Orwell's own political sympathies were Socialist, and he quickly joined the POUM militia, POUM being an acronym for what translates to English as the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Orwell describes his time in the trenches in the Catalonian mountains, where in the event, cold, hunger, lice and rats were as big a drawback as Franco's forces. The POUM troops were also very short on weapons and ammunition.

In addition, Orwell was in Barcelona in what he though was going to be a couple of weeks of R&R when street fighting broke out between the forces of the Communist Party, POUM and the Anarchist party. Orwell describes this bloodshed as part of the Communist Party's effort to consolidate control over the anti-Fascist armies, to create a single central government authority and do away with the independent party militias that had been fighting the war in many places, but also to suppress the popular anti-capitalist uprising staged by the working and peasant classes in that part of Spain with the advent of the war. Eventually, POUM was "suppressed," (declared illegal) and the police began arresting POUM members and throwing them in jail. This caused Orwell and his wife to have to escape from Spain. Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia six months after leaving Spain, while the war was still ongoing. And while he was able to do a bit of research before writing, he acknowledges that, as someone who was in the middle of these events, he does not have the perspective to understand in depth the causes and complexities of all the Barcelona events. (To paraphrase, he writes, "Beware my prejudices and beware of my inaccuracies.")

I very much enjoyed and was interested in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell writes with clarity, a terrific eye for detail and description, and humor. You very much get the feel for what it was like to be in those mountain trenches, despite (or maybe because of) Orwell's understated, wry writing style. He describes the mood of optimism, togetherness and idealism of Barcelona when he first gets there, and observes with regret that when he returned from the front lines just a few months later, the whole mood of the revolution had dampened, and class divisions were already reasserting themselves.

Book note, part 2: The reason I differentiated between the edition I own and the one I actually read is that the newer edition, published in 2015 includes not only Lionel Trilling's original 1952 introduction, but also a new forward by the excellent historian Adam Hochschild. Hochschile relates the fact that later in life Orwell decided that the book included two much emphasis on the events he'd taken part in in Barcelona, feeling that they didn't really constitute that much of an effect on the ultimate conducting or outcome of the war. Orwell asked later publishers to move the two chapters he'd written about those events out of the main body of the work and into a pair of appendices. Mostly, editors had ignored Orwell's request. Although a couple of translated editions had finally made the changes, the 2015 Mariner edition was the first English language edition to finally do so. The second of the appendices in particular is a deep dive into the motivations and actions of the various parties, along with the propaganda efforts each side took part in to justify their actions and vilify their opponents.

At any rate, all that minutia aside, I found Homage to Catalonia to be a fascinating, well-written account of Orwell's time in Spain during the war.

Book 12: Robert Owen by Joseph McCabe



This is a short, clear biography of visionary English social reformer, Robert Owen, written by Joseph McCabe, who was himself, 70 years later, a prominent Rationalist writer and lecturer. (McCabe wikepedia bio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCabe)

Robert Owen was a British industrialist in the early 19th century who spent his life and a major bulk of his money attempting to improve the lot of the British working class in a multitude of ways, including shorter work days (the standard at the time was 14 hours per day), raising the minimum age of factory employees from 7 years old, creating schools for children and even day care at company and/or public expense and full equality for women. Once he had amassed enough money of his own (he came from relatively humble roots in Wales), he purchased a factory and lands (including workers’ housing) in Scotland and proceeded to create what he considered a model industrial community in Lancashire, Scotland, called New Lanark into which he poured his own money and that of several investors to put his ideas to work, improving housing, building and running schools and day care (called “infant schools”), among the many efforts to improve the lives of the workers and the quality of the productiveness. In time, he was able to turn a profit. However, Owen also was vocal in his idea that, while belief in God was fine, organized religion was a source only of discord and misery in society as a whole. This brought him into conflict with his partners, and he eventually had to bow out of the administration of New Lanark, which, without his leadership, soon failed.

Owen, however, did not give up, and spent the rest of his long life agitating for his ideas, first in the English Parliament and then, giving up on the politicians, among British society as a whole. He never gave up on trying to replicate his success in Scotland, and in trying to point out the ultimate justice and economic advantages of improving the lot of factory workers, including champion and financially supporting the early English labor union movement. Not surprisingly, his pleas fell on deaf ears among British industrialists and politicians. The Church of England was particularly hostile. Owen spent time in the U.S., starting an industrial community in New Harmony, Indiana.

While Owen never succeeded, he never gave up, either. McCabe asserts that Owen’s ideas and efforts paved the way both for the increasing strong British reform movement that followed. McCabe also posits that many of Owen’s ideas foreshadowed the work of Karl Marx several decades later. Owen never went as far as Marx, certainly. For example, Owen never suggested worker ownership of the factories, only that capitalist ownership had a duty to raise the quality of life of the workers. But Owen did suggest that goods should be valued based on the amount of labor that went into making them, that that labor should be fairly valuated, and that the workers deserved a just share of the profits that thereby accrued.

This brief biography (120 pages of a 6” by 8” volume) is clearly a hagiography, just, really, an outline of Owens’ life, ideas and works. McCabe was an Owen enthusiast, to put it mildly. The book is simply but well written and includes some occasional humor. This volume was published in 1920 in England, evidently part of a series called “Life-Stories of Famous Men,” about which I’ve been unable to learn a single thing online. The book was given to me by my wife’s uncle, a recently retired minister of the Ethical Culture Society in New Jersey. He has been trying to downsize his personal library and asked us to pick out a few volumes each to take away on our last visit. This is one of the two books I took away.

You've been doing some very interesting reading so far this year, Jerry. I'm just catching up, but I find your reviews so useful...you say all the things I'd like to know about a book to decide if it's something I want to read. I hope you'll read a lot more of Louise Erdrich, who owns a bookstore herself, as you probably know. She's a favorite of mine. I've also had Homage to Catalonia on my TBR list for a long time, and you've probably assured that I will move it up the stack and maybe even get to it this year!

>14 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks, Linda! I'm glad you find my ramblings useful. Homage to Catalonia is indeed interesting and to me even moreso because you know as you're reading that Orwell's impressions about events and politics may or may not even be accurate. They're just one person's acutely described observations about his own experiences. And I do look forward to reading my of Louise Erdrich's works.

Book 13: This is Murder, Mr. Jones by Timothy Fuller



This is the fourth of the 5-book Jupiter Jones mystery series written in the late 1930s through early 1940s by Timothy Fuller. When we meet Jupiter Jones in the series' first book, Harvard Has a Homicide, he is still a Harvard student who stumbles onto the murder of one of his professors. By this fourth novel, Jones is a Harvard English professor. The year is 1943 and our hero is about join the Navy to fight in the war. Since there have been three previous books, you'll not be surprised to learn that Jones has already solved three baffling murder mysteries. So we're not surprised to learn that Jones, along with his wife, Betty, has been invited to be a guest at a radio broadcast from an old, deserted mansion in the Massachusetts countryside where, 100 years ago, a still-unsolved murder had taken place. Furthermore, you will not be astonished when I tell you that, once cast, crew and assorted guests are gathered at the house, a brand new murder takes place forthwith. Luckily, our man Jones is on the scene, as usual a step or two ahead of the local police. These mysteries are far from classics, but they are fun, with enough gentle, self-deprecating humor to keep things light, and an interesting time-piece of their era.

I've had this fourth entry in the series on my shelves since my LT "big bang" in 2008. I took it down from the shelf to read a few years back, only to realize it was part of a series. So, given my predilections, I had to go back and read the first three Jupiter Jones books in order before attending to this one. There's one more in the series, which I'll be attending to sooner or later.

The Curragh Incident by Sir James Fergusson (a.k.a. 8th Baronet of Kilkerran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_James_Fergusson,_8th_Baronet)



In early 1914, with a Liberal government in power in England, it had more or less decided that Ireland would be granted Home Rule. Ireland would not be independent, but there would be an Irish Parliament that would administer the country, while still being subservient to the English Crown and Parliament. The problem was what to do about the northern counties, whose Protestant majority considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown and wanted no part of being ruled, even nominally, by Catholic Ireland. In Ulster, the locals had put together a disciplined and quite strong Protestant militia and all and sundry feared partisan violence if the English Parliament tried to mandate Irish Home rule throughout the island. Cue the action of The Curragh Incident.

It had come to the attention of the English government, and in particular the Secretary of State for War, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, that the English army had stores of ammunition in several locations around northern Ireland that were only loosely guarded and might be vulnerable to being seized by the Ulstermen should any hostilities arise. So the order went out to Lt. General Sir Arthur Paget, commander of the British forces in Ireland, to see to securing those stores. Unfortunately, Paget did not get these orders in writing, and what the orders actually were, as opposed to how Paget actually interpreted them, became a source of controversy and contention. Most of the British forces in Ireland at the time were quartered and trained at a very large open field in County Kildare known as the Curragh. Installed there were several regiments, including infantry, artillery and calvary. It was well known that a large majority of the officers there were sympathetic to the Ulstermen, whom they saw as loyalists to the British Crown. So, despite the fact that the only orders Paget ostensively had was to secure those stores of ammunition, he sent word to the commanders of the regiments at the Curragh that every officer had to be asked whether he would be willing to obey orders to take action "against the Ulstermen." Any officer answering "no" would be cashiered from the service, with no pension to be forthcoming regardless of length of service. And they were given in many cases but a half hour to decide. At first, many of these officers chose to quit, as much over the insult they saw in the ultimatum itself as for the import of the actual question.

In the meantime, plans were, it seems (Fergusson lays out the evidence but does not make the claim that this evidence is conclusive), actually being laid out for the large-scale movement of troops into Ulster, and several naval vessels were dispatched in support. The plans were created by Seely and the First Lord of the Admiralty. Guess who? Yup, none other than Winston Churchill. Nobody told the Prime Minister, however, Henry Asquith, who was caught quite flat-footed when news of the "Curragh Incident" broke, or the King, George V, in whose name the orders were presumably given. The idea was, supposedly, to provoke the Ulster Militia to take action against the Army, so that armed resistance to universal Irish Home Rule could be crushed.

In the end, cooler heads among the officers prevailed, nobody quit, and the ammunition was protected. Paget, who does not come off well in this narrative at all, inadvertently threw a monkey wrench into the plot, if such there was, by evidently overstepping his orders (which, again, were never put in writing) and demanding that the loyalty ultimatum be put to the officers. Interestingly, other than an officer's loyalty to king and crown, one of the key arguments against even hypothetically refusing orders to take action "against Ulster" was some officers' logic that if the officers were going to refuse such orders, how could they expect the enlisted men, who were mostly from working class families, obey orders given during "strike duty," when the army was used to quell violence by striking factory and mine workers? (A wild guess would be that the army seldom took action to protect strikers, but I don't know the actually history.)

In the end, the question of Irish Home Rule was put on the back burner by the outbreak of World War I. I don't know whether the "Curragh Incident" is still even remembered in England these days. Certainly, as an American, I'd never heard of it. I picked up this book recently off a bookstore dollar rack on a whim. I seem to be on a roll of reading obscure bios/histories/mysteries from bygone eras!

I will say that, writing some 50 years after the event (the book was published in 1963), Fergusson does a very good job of recreated these events in day-by-day and even hour-by-hour detail. As I got deeper into the narrative, I became very interested, despite the by-now obscure nature of the history itself. The personality of the individual officers and politicians are recreated quite vividly (though of course I have no idea how accurately).

Book 15: The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch



This is the memoir of Theodor Broch, who was the mayor of the far northern Norwegian town of Narvik when the Nazis invaded in 1940. The book begins with Broch getting away over the mountains into neutral Sweden, having escaped arrest for his resistance activities several months after the Nazi's arrival. But then, quickly, we go 10 years back in time to Broch's arrival in the town with his wife. He is a young lawyer intent on starting a practice away from the bustle (and competition) of Oslo. His wife will run the law office. This first third of the book is a charming description of the town, its lifestyle and citizens, many of whom are charmingly eccentric. Imagine All Things Bright and Beautiful, but in an Arctic fishing and mining town on the inner coast of a Norwegian fjord, as told be a lawyer rather than a veterinarian. Broch's law practice is slow going at first, but eventually the couple gains traction. Then, pretty soon, Broch finds himself on the city council, and then the town's mayor. In the meantime, war clouds are gathering over Europe, though the folks of this sleepy town somehow assume they'll be spared.

But, of course, they aren't. In April 1940, German destroyers show up in the fjord. The Norwegian Navy ships on hand refuse to surrender, but are almost immediately sunk. The defeatist (and/or Nazi sympathizing) commander of the local Norwegian Army forces does surrender. The British, during their rather inept and soon to be aborted attempt to help the Norwegians resist invasion, send their own destroyers to the scene and actually win the ensuing naval battle, though the occupation of the town is not lifted. Weeks later, however, Polish, Norwegian, English and French Foreign Legion forces actually do run the Germans out, but only for a short time. Soon, the British decide to abandon the effort to defend Norway, withdrawing their forces to go defend their own island. Out go the British, and back into town come the Nazis. Broch describes all of this quite well, naturally emphasizing the daily lives of the people of Narvik and their experiences under Nazi rule, including his own negotiations with the Germans in his role as mayor as he attempts to placate the occupiers, keep the daily lives of his constituents as normal as possible despite disappearing food supplies and jobs, and keep the morale of the town as high as he can so that defeatism doesn't set in. Things go a little bit easier for the Norwegians than for other occupied nationalities, as the Nazis considered the Norwegians to be Aryans, people to be won over to the New Order rather than to be crushed, humiliated and exploited.

But, finally, Broch's activities in getting information out to the British and other minor acts of resistance are discovered, and he has to flee. Broch eventually made his way to the U.S., where he became active in trying to raise money for the training and supplying of the Norwegian military and government in exile. He travels the country, especially the midwest, where Norwegian immigrants have been settling for decades. when Broch talks to American college students, he is frequently asked how Norway could have let itself be caught by surprise. That's until the Pearl Harbor attack, when those questions naturally cease. Finally we visit an airfield in Canada where Norwegian airmen are being trained. The Mountains Wait was published in 1943, while the war, obviously, was still ongoing. Broch couldn't know that Norway would still be in German hands right up until the end of the war.

Given the book's publication date, I think it's clear that it was meant as a propaganda effort. The early sections are over-romanticized, I think, and the noble, stalwart Norwegian population certainly seems to be too good to be true. Nevertheless, it is well written* and moves along really well. As a WW2 propaganda work, it is an interesting example of its genre. And while we may assume the descriptions, both pre-war and during, to be offered under a hazy inspirational illumination, I would conjecture that the events described are essentially truthful.

This book has been on my shelves since before my LT "Big Bang" in 2008.

* The writing, and particularly the wonderful natural descriptions of the Norwegian fjords and mountain countryside, is so good that it made me wonder whether there might be some ghost writing going on, especially considering the fact that the book was written directly in English, rather than being translated from Norwegian. I have no trouble assuming that Broch was fully fluent in English, as, I think, are most urban raised Scandinavians. (If you want to hear people who speak English really well, go visit Helsinki sometime!) I wouldn't, however, be surprised to learn that a native English-speaking writer had a go at this text. Not that I care either way. Just a bit of conjecture.

Book 16: Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts



From the 1930s through the late-1960s, the Fillmore district of San Francisco was an ethnically-mixed working class neighborhood, alive with minority-owned businesses, a with a bustling neighborhood feel where different groups got along as a matter of course. Starting in the early '40s, the Fillmore became a hotbed of blues, R&B and jazz clubs where local musicians flocked and famous musicians came to jam after their paid downtown gigs, blowing until dawn in bars and cellar sessions alike.

The Fillmore was relatively undamaged by the 1906 earthquake, and many beautiful Victorian homes were built in the area to sell to people who had been displaced by the quake and the fire that followed. In Harlem of the West's introduction, we read this:

"Within a few years after the earthquake, the neighborhood became a melting pot. Japanese Americans living in Chinatown before the earthquake moved to the Fillmore, settling around the few Japanese-owned businesses already in the neighborhood . . . . Pilipnos, Mexicans, African Americans and Russians joined the Japanese Americans and the Jewish population. With its integrated schools and some integrated businesses, Fillmore soon had a reputation as one of the most diverse neighborhoods west of the Mississippi."

The World War 2 years brought a great influx of African American families, both looking for work in the Bay Area's war plants and navy yards, and fleeing the Jim Crow oppression of the South. And while they certainly found plenty of prejudice and rejection based on race in San Francisco, the Fillmore neighborhood was in many respects an oasis of community and inclusion. The exception was the Japanese population, who were yanked out of their businesses and homes during the war and sent to internment camps. Some were able to return and reclaim their businesses after the war, but most never came back.

Soon, as mentioned above, the neighborhood exploded with music clubs. Harlem of the West is a beautiful collection of photographs from the area's heyday, along with dozens of short oral histories from many of the musicians and other local residents who were still available to be interviewed when the authors were first doing their research in the early 2000s. We are lucky that most of the clubs had photographers who took photos of the patrons and musicians. The middle section of the book goes through the neighborhood, club by club, telling the stories of how each was established, and the colorful characters who ran them and performed in them. A reading of this book is a visit back in time to a wonderful era of jazz and inclusiveness in San Francisco history.

Of course, Golden Eras come to an end, and the Fillmore was done in by the usual culprits, prejudice and greed. Even while Fillmore residents were enjoying what many described in retrospect as great times in their lives, the City of San Francisco's Redevelopment Commission was taking pictures of the buildings and labeling them decrepit and liable for demolition. The buildings were, indeed, old and in need of repair, but the people who lived in the neighborhood loved them. From the mid-60s through the late-70s, whole blocks of the neighborhood were summarily knocked down. Geary Street which runs through the neighborhood was widened into a 6-lane highway as it goes through the Fillmore in order to allow drivers to essentially bypass the neighborhood on their way from the western urban suburbs to their jobs downtown. More houses and businesses were destroyed so that an ugly mall, intended to be a Japanese community center and known citywide as Japantown, could be built. When I lived in San Francisco from 1986 through 2008, Japantown was a dingy affair full of cheesy gift shops and mediocre restaurants. Certainly not worth eviscerating a vibrant neighborhood for. Well, developers gonna develop, I guess.

The Fillmore neighborhood still exists, of course, but it is a relative shell. Attempts at reclaiming some of the area's history can be seen here and there, for example in the fact that there is now a stone inlaid in the sidewalk in front of each spot where a jazz club once thrived.

The club that gets the most space in the book is Jimbo's Bop City, which operated from 1949 through 1965. It became, I think it's fair to say, the Fillmore's preeminent spot for musicians and jazz lovers, as players from all over would come to join the local musicians and go until sunup. I have a tiny little personal sliver of connection with that place, despite that fact that it closed 20 years before I arrived in town. During my San Francisco jazz writing days, I came to know a sax player named Vince Wallace, a white saxophonist who as a young musician had made his mark jamming with the famous players in Bop City, originally wearing a fake mustache in order to hide how young he was. I got to interview Vince in 2003 for a website called JazzTimes. It's long (there's a shock!) but Vince was a very articulate fellow about the creative process, about jazz, and about his time at Bop City in the Fillmore. For anyone interested, the interview is here:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/vince-wallace-a-jazz-legend-stands-tall-in-oakland-...


Here's a picture of Vince in his younger days at Bop City which I found here:
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Jimbo%27s_Bop_City

Book 17: Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait Murphy



This one's for baseball fans--and more precisely for those interested in baseball history--only. It's a history of the dual pennant races of the 1908 season, a year that saw both the decades-old National League and the essentially brand new American League enjoy seasons in which three teams in each league were still in contention right up through the final week. Author Cait Murphy, though, focuses mostly on the National League race between the Pittsburgh Pirate, the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.

Not only were the pennant races exciting, but this particular season offers an excellent view of the game as it was evolving away from its earlier, extremely rowdy days, when professional baseball was often essentially a barroom brawl on grass, into something somewhat approximating the game we know today. Although, to be sure, subtle and not-so-subtle cheating, like elbowing a baserunner to slow his progress, or even tugging on his belt loop, vicious umpire baiting, fistfights and other forms of mayhem had certainly not disappeared. Some of the most famous players of early baseball history took part in the action that season, including Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Joe McCarthy, Mordecai "Three Fingers" Brown, and the Cubs' famous double-play combination, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance. And then of course there was poor New York Giant Fred Merkle, whose base running gaff late in the season proved extremely costly to the Giants, so much so that the incident has lived in baseball lore for these 116 years as "Merkle's Boner."

The books seems extremely well researched, and Murphy's writing style is clear and appealingly breezy, even if she does occasionally slip into the over-indulgent metaphor. If you are at all interested in baseball history, this is a very fun book. And I will wrap up this review offering up this baseball-themed takeoff on Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" by much admired sportswriter of yore, Grantland Rice:

Last night while I pondered dreary, grouchy, sore and limp--
O'er the dope in my apartments, far upon the thirteenth floor,
As I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door,
"Tis some bill collector," thought I, "rapping at my chamber,
Only that and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember, I was thinking of September,
And the finish of the league race--what the future had in store--'
And I started prophesying where the pennant would be flying,
Tell at last I gave up trying, feeling very sad and sore,
Grumbling, slowly: "Nevermore."

As I sat there, nearly bug-house, longing for the nearby jug-house,
Once again I heard the tapping, tapping at my chamber door;
So I opened it, shining craven, wishing for somme happy haven--
When, behold--there flaps a Raven, stalking in across the floor--
Stalking Edgar Allan Poe-ish, right across my rugless floor
Ach du Lieber! I was sore.

"Raven," cried I: "Why the devil have you come here? On the lines
I thought Mr. Poe had written you would ever Nevermore,
What has brought you--you intriguer--with that look so keen and sore--
Speak up there, you old bush leaguer--why have you returned, you--
State your trouble and then skip, sir--leave me quickly, I implore."
Quoth the Raven: "What's the score?"

Book 18: Lady in Armor by Octavus Roy Cohen



Back in March I finished up reading the May 10, 1941, edition of Collier’s Magazine. The magazine was an interesting mix of fiction and journalism. Two of the fiction entries, however, were not complete short stories but instead excerpts from novels the magazine was serializing. I never read those, but instead put the novels on my "short" TBR list. Lady in Armor was one of those. With all the activity around our recent apartment purchase and move, I've been sticking with relatively light reading, and so I decided it was time for this book, which turned out to be a mostly entertaining, more or less standard pot-boiler about a southern U.S. small town being run by a corrupt band of ruthless ne'er-do-wells and the crusading underdog reformer who takes them all on at risk of life and limb.

Octavus Roy Cohen was an extremely prolific writer. Wikipedia credits him with 56 novels, mostly of the detective/crime genre, I think. He published several mystery series, each with its own private detective here. One of those series featured the character Florian Shippey, one of the first black private eyes in American literature. However, also as per Wikipedia, those books are remembered now mostly for their unflattering portrayal of blacks. Think "Amos and Andy" and you'll get the idea. Even at the time there were published, Cohen's black characters were derided as, in the words of one reviewer, "a travesty and a caricature." There is a side plot in this book featuring black characters who do, indeed, speak in an insulting dialect. On the other hand, one of those characters is revealed as both cool and courageous in a deadly crisis and ends up saving everyone's bacon, so at least there's that.

The action takes place in the fictional town of Karnak* (in a state unspecified). When the Democratic primaries for the local county elections draw near, the women of Karnak decide to run a slate of candidates. They don't expect to win any nominations, but they want to register their displeasure at the crooked, graft-laden way the county is being run. They hope some of their candidates will gather 10% of the vote. But the townspeople of Karnak get somehow tickled by the idea of having a female sheriff, and since they know and like the candidate running, more or less as a joke they vote our hero, Dale Meredith, into the post. As readers, we are not at all surprised to learn that Meredith has not only the strong sense of duty, but also the smarts and the backbone to stand up to the town's most powerful (though charming) crook, Neil Berkeley. Twists and turns, some of them deadly, ensue.

Cohen is mostly forgotten now as an author, and for good reason, though he was quite popular in his day. This novel of his is particularly obscure. For example, I am the only LT member with the book listed in his/her/their library. My conjecture is that the novel format was simply cobbled together from the serialized sections. I suppose it's a curiosity piece. And while, as I said, I found the storyline fairly entertaining, there are plenty of other authors of this time period/genre who don't feature the specific racist elements that Cohen's writing suffered from.

If by any chance anyone is interested in learning more about Cohen, this sems a pretty good short bio:
https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/octavus-roy-cohen/

* The only town named Karnak that my quick online search turned up is in southern Illinois, but the book is fairly clear that the action takes place deeper into the South than that.

Book 19: The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff by Thomas Kiernan



This fine baseball history tells the story of the National League pennant race of 1951, when the New York Giants came from 13 1/2 games back with just 6 weeks to go to overtake the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the pennant. The regular season ended in a tie, resulting in a best-of-three playoff series to decide the victor. In the third and deciding game of that series, the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the 9th inning trailing by three runs, but won the game thanks to a home run by third baseman Bobby Thomson, one of the most famous and dramatic home runs in baseball history, known alternately as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" and "The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff." (The stadium the Giants played in, the Polo Grounds, was built below a rocky cliff in Harlem known as Coogan's Bluff.)

Thomas Kiernan, a life-long New York Giants fan who was just entering college in 1951, provides the story of that season through the eyes of the Giants. He gives effective pocket biographies of the team's important players and their manager, Leo Durocher. Happily, rather than giving a blow-by-blow account of every day of the season, he picks out important points in the campaign to focus in on and provides overall themes that he allows us to follow along with. Just often enough, he picks out particular games to describe in detail, with an eye toward understanding how a season that ended in a tie could have a multiplicity of key moments: a double play not turned, an easy grounder bobbled, a light-hitting backup player's unexpected home run. Also, he shows us the personalities of many of the players and explores the dynamic that allowed the team to coalesce into one that could pull off such an unlikely comeback.

That's the first half of the book. Kiernan was writing in the early 1970s (the book was published in 1975) or only about 22 years after the event. That meant he was able to track down many of the most important Giant players from the team and interview them at length. The second half of the book is a collection of those interviews, providing a Roshoman-type picture of the season, the final game, and even the famous final rally that culminated in Thompson's blast. For example, in that final inning, Giants infielder Alvin Dark, having led off with a single, was on first. Given that the Dodgers led by three, his run didn't mean anything. Yet the Dodgers' excellent first baseman, Gil Hodges, played close to first base to keep Dark from getting a good lead, leaving a hole the Giant Don Mueller hit a grounder through for another hit that might otherwise have been a double play. Was that a positioning blunder by Hodges? One or two Giants said yes. One said that Hodges should have made the play anyway, but that his view of the ball had been blocked momentarily by Dark cutting in front of him. Mueller himself said that he hit the ball there because he saw the hole, and would have gotten a hit in some other direction had Hodges been playing off the back. And so on.

In addition, a few of the players providde fascinating insights into the nature of baseball from a player's perspective. Giants first baseman Whitey Lockman, for example, explained his theory that both hitting and pitching come down to half-inch zones within the strike zone. The pitchers have their half inches that they're trying to put the ball in, and the hitters have their own half-inch zones in which they can make solid contact. Lockman says that if a ball is just a bit outside of one of his zones, muscle memory can take over and still allow him to be successful, but the further away the ball is from the zone, the less muscle memory can help him.

Kiernan had an unfortunate fixation on sussing out the underlying causation of the comeback and final Giants win. Was it divine providence? Luck? Destiny? The players seemed mostly amused by the question. Other than the religious Dark, who was sure he saw God's hand in the events,* most of the players said something like, "The Dodgers had the better players, but we were the more tight-knit team. They squabbled, we pulled together." Kiernan also had a penchant for the occasional cliched overwriting. Fast outfielders "lope gazellelike," for example. But mostly this is kept to a dull roar. Overall, especially due to the excellent set of player interviews, as noted above I found The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff a very good entry in the genre of baseball histories.

* As for my agnostic self, if there indeed is a God, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he/she/they were a baseball fan. But I certainly hope that God isn't fixing ballgames.

Book 20: The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare

*
Note: The cover on the left is the cover of the edition of The Three-Arched Bridge I own but which is currently 3,000 miles away in California. The cover on the right represents the copy I actually read, borrowed from the New York Public Library.

This is the first book I've read by famed Albanian author Ismail Kadare. We are in the late 14th Century, and change is coming to a small Albanian village in the form of a new stone bridge being build over the river, previously traversed only by ferrymen, and in the ever-more-threatening encroachment of the Ottoman Empire which is already crowding up against the borders of the Balkans. These two developments may not be unrelated. The tale is told by Gjon, a Catholic monk who, because of his ability to speak many languages, is often called upon to translate at the meetings between the local nobleman and the various visiting envoys and businessmen, such as the interests who bribe the nobleman into accepting the construction of the bridge.

The plan to bring the villagers around to the idea of the bridge is long-range and cunning, although the locals watch the bridge construction with growing dread. The use of a local legend to intimidate the town turns deadly. In the meantime, the leaders of the small local principalities press their grievances against each other, seemingly blind to the growing threat to the east.

Kadare tells his tale effectively, and the sense of menace, the fear of loss, is present from the outset. The narration is fable-like, however. It's a story in which the chief character is that menace itself. There's not much otherwise in terms of characterizations, other than that of the narrator, and even he is mostly a cypher, other than his prescience and despair. The book is a quick read, and I recommend it, though I would also like to see what Kadare can do with a more in-depth novel with more full drawn characters.

The Three-Arched Bridge was translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson.

Book 21: Erasure by Percival Everett



I interrupted my long, slow journey through In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second book in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time series to read Erasure. My wife and I are back in Mendocino County, CA, in order to pack up our house here and get it ready to put up for sale in preparation for our final move to New York. Talk about a long, slow journey! Anyway, the time here has been a good opportunity to reconnect with and say our goodbyes to the friends we've made over our 15 years in this very small town. That's been bittersweet and will get more so as we come closer to completing the house project and heading out. In the meantime, the guys in the monthly reading group I've been a member of since Covid invited me to rejoin during the duration of our sojourn here, and Erasure was the book for this month.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't enjoy the book anywhere near as much as I was expecting to. Most folks here, I think, will be aware that this is the novel that the recent movie American Fiction was based on. This is one of the rare cases for me that I found a movie to be better than the book it is based on. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a black writer raised in an upper middle-class family. Both his sister and brother are doctors, but Monk has become an academic and a writer of novels that are more inspired by philosophy and ideas than by plot or character. Because Monk is black, one of the major criticisms of his work is that they are not "black" enough. And because his background is middle class, neither is he. Monk's insistence is, in essence, that any life experienced be a black person is, by definition, a legitimate part of the black experience. Or, to look at it another way, a work of art should be taken on its own merits. When a best-selling novel appears that Monk strongly feels is a crass exploitation of the so-called black experience, Monk becomes furious, and decides to see how much he can push those boundaries by writing his own, even crasser, novel under a pseudonym. All these elements will be familiar to viewers of the movie. In the meantime, Monk is dealing with family issues, including his mother's worsening Alzheimer's disease. Not coincidentally, I think, there is nothing "black" about these family situations. They are the same problems and conditions that any American of any ethnicity might experience. I felt that that was a big part of what Everett was exploring: where is the line between the black experience and the American experience?

Unfortunately, I do not feel that Everett handles the issues he raises particularly artfully. We are made to read through the entire angry "blacksploitation" novel in its entirety, when a single representative chapter would have sufficed. And because that book is, in my opinion, fairly artless, I don't get the publishing world going so nuts over it. I found the satire of the situation, then, too broad to be effective. The family issues are more adroitly handled, but there is nothing new, no particularly profound insights, to be found there. In particular I thought the movie handled the relationship between Monk and his brother more thoughtfully, and certainly in more depth, than the book does. On the other hand, I thought that the book's ending was clean and well done, while the ending of the movie goes off the rails.

I understand and essentially agree with the issues Everett is dealing with in Erasure, but I was expecting/hoping for more nuance, I guess. That's just me. Your mileage may vary, or maybe already has. I'll just add that my wife has read and very much enjoyed James, and I'm very much looking forward to reading that novel, and other Everett works as well, in the relatively near future.

And now back to Proust.

I'm glad you're not giving up on Everett. I read The Trees last year, and it was powerful. The "novel within a novel" thing has never worked for me, so I have avoided both Erasure and American Fiction for that reason alone. I have a copy of James waiting its turn...it seems to have met with near universal acclaim around here.

>25 laytonwoman3rd: Well, as I mentioned, I did enjoy the movie. One of its strengths, I thought, and to your point directly, is that the "novel within a novel" aspect is shown on the screen relatively briefly. The moviemakers are content to give you an idea of what the "novel within . . . " is like with a few scenes and then move on. The book presents the entire thing. I actually considered skipping to the that segment, but then I thought, "Well, maybe there will be something there that I need to know later." It's not a great movie, but I do think it's a good one.

Book 22: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust



Nobody needs a long review of Marcel Proust from the likes of me at this late date. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (a title originally translated into English as Within a Budding Grove) is the second entry in Proust’s famous 7-book reverie, In Search of Lost Time. I read the first book, Swann’s Way, in the original translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Happily, for this second book, I was able to find a used copy of the Penguin Classics edition with a more modern translation by James Grieve.

Our nameless protagonist is looking back at his young adulthood with longing, remembering two particular segments of his early experiences with love while delving deeply into the nature of memory and of the relationship between thoughts, perceptions and reality. Proust’s expositions of the tensions between the splintering “realities” of anticipation, actual experience and memory are often fascinating although, at least to me, sometimes repetitive and dull. This, however, seems to be woven into Proust’s intent: the fascination each of us has with our own memories, and our proclivities, even delight, in delving into them over and over again, even when they bring us pain, or the regret of missed opportunities, or of pleasures that will never come again. Sometimes we are indulging in the delight of experiences long past, and sometimes we are endlessly putting our tongue onto the throbbing tooth.

It's all a long, slow wander, with plot, what there is of it, subordinate to reverie. There are long passages of natural descriptions, which we strongly suspect are not meant to accurately represent the narrators observations at the time, but instead are heavily invested with the longing and enhancements rendered by time as the narrator looks back at them. The first part of the book takes place in Paris. The second segment brings our narrator, with his beloved grandmother, to a seaside town in Brittany. Because he is in poor health, his physical abilities are limited, helpful for an author constructing a novel of a young man who spends way too much time inside his own mind. The problem is that we often don’t really sympathize much with this poor fellows problems. I mean, sure, we can empathize with someone overthinking (to put it mildly) his nascent relationships with potential romantic partners. But the fellow is of a well-to-do upper middleclass family, and his observations of the prejudices and complications of the French upper class society do not make compelling subject matter for most of us these days. So there is a matter of, I guess you’d call it, willing suspension of disapproval in the reading.

The book is long: 533 pages in my edition. And it took me forever to read it. There were three main reasons for this. 1) I started the book just before my wife and I left for our cross-country drive from New York to California. Most evenings I’d get two or three pages read, but no more, before falling asleep in some nondescript motel. Between that and the work we immediately dove into of getting our house ready for showing in readiness for putting it on the market for sale, and also getting packed up and ready to move, reading time has been scanty. 2) Sometimes the prose becomes particularly dense and not particularly interesting, and the mind (at least this one) will wander. 3) Sometimes Proust’s observations hit home, and the writing would send me off into internal wanderings and memories of my own, off to revisit experiences and relationships from my own past.

There were several passages that I noted for revisits while reading. One of my favorites follows. It deals with a situation in which you have drifted away from, or broken with, someone who was important in your live, and more or less totally lost touch with them. But still you somehow cannot imagine never seeing the person again, even though all logic tells you this is what must be. In this case, Proust is speaking of a man thinking of a past love:

And what we keep postponing now, day after day, is no longer an end to the unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable memory of her seems: instead of the real meeting with her, in your solitude you can dramatize a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and even her unforeseeable animosity. To be no longer in love is to know that forgetting—or even a fading memory—causes much less pain than the unhappiness of loving. What I preferred, without admitting it to myself, was the reposeful promise of the foreshadowed forgetting.

I’m sure there are plenty of elements to these novels that I’m missing. I haven’t done any sort of examination of Proust criticism and history. I should mention that there are several frank discussions of antisemitism, and the Dreyfus Affair is mentioned two or three times. Overall I’d say I enjoyed this novel a bit more than I did Swann’s Way, the first book in the series. Should I live so long, I think I’ll eventually wander through the other five.

"Sometimes Proust’s observations hit home, and the writing would send me off into internal wanderings and memories of my own, off to revisit experiences and relationships from my own past." I think this is why people continue to find Proust appealing.

Book 23: Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). This is a fine set of short stories. Most are about life in India, though some are about the Indian-American immigrant experience. Quite a few, in both settings, deal with the devious and difficult paths laid out for women to navigate at all levels of society and business.

Bhatt was born and grew up in India. She moved to England for her undergraduate degree in engineering, then worked for multinational corporations in several European countries before moving to the U.S. Each of Us Killers was published in 2020 and began getting notice and award immediately. You can find more details on her Wikipedia page.

The stories are sharply written and effective, with few extraneous or wasted words. I found the tales about working class people in India to be the most effective, perhaps because those stories were placed in settings I had so little knowledge about. On the other hand, the reflections on the human predicament they highlight are more than familiar. Among my favorite stories were “The God of Wind,” about a rickshaw driver who finds an infant and has to decide what to do, “Time and Opportunity,” about a food stall owner who suspects one of his employees of stealing, and “Neeru’s New World,” about a young servant girl who finds her dreams of a new life shattered by the realities of her vulnerability as a woman alone.” Most humorous is “Separation Notice,” wherein, due to a trend of global disasters, Lord Vishnu is notified that he is being fired from the pantheon of dieties. The most devastating was the title story, which comes last in the collection and highlights the terrible oppression and indignities suffered by the Dalit underclass in India.

These aren’t among the very best short stories I’ve ever read, but, in both plot and writing quality, they are all satisfying and of high quality.

Book note: I bought this book, more or less at random, in the wonderful Sister's Uptown Bookstore and Community Center, an important community touchstone in Harlem that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Book 24: American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee



American Wolf is a very well-written, informative and often fascinating work of narrative non-fiction about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. Wolves had been ruthlessly hunted, trapped and poisoned to extinction in most of the lower 48 states in the U.S. in the early decades of the 20th century, the victim of the animus of, primarily, hunters and ranchers. But by the 1970s, pressure grew from naturalists and environmentalists to reintroduce wolves into the Yellowstone ecosystem. In 1995, that pressure finally created results. The project remained controversial, to put it mildly. Ranchers feared depredation of their livestock and hunters feared a quick crash in the population of elk that they loved to hunt (and in some cases depended upon for their winter’s worth of meat). Of course, Yellowstone is a nature preserve, so there’d be no hunting of wolves there. But as the wolves thrived and their population grew, there was no way to keep them from crossing borders and out of the park. At first, wolves were protected as an endangered species in the states surrounding the park. But pressure soon grew for the wolves, as their populations grew, to be “delisted” as endangered so that wolf hunting seasons could be instituted on non-federal land. Soon, of course, the issue became a political football.

Nate Blakeslee does a great job of balancing all these factors with the lives and observations of the many Yellowstone Park employees and government administrators who became fascinated, and passionately so, with the wolves and their lives. Many wolves were tranquilized so that they could be fitted with neckbands that each broadcast a unique signal so that individual wolves could be tracked and observed. Blakeslee gives us the close-up and detailed stories of many of the most passionate wolf observers who watched the animals through high-powered observation scopes, often going days without observing a wolf, or only getting brief glance, but remaining intent upon their daily searching/watching sessions. The most persistent were the most successful, of course. Over the months and years, these people kept notebooks of their copious daily logs they kept of individual wolves and wolf packs. Some wolves became particularly beloved.

Blakeslee uses these notes, and observations of his own, to create extremely absorbing narrative accounts of the actions and interactions between individual wolves and whole wolfpacks. The complex interactions between these fascinating creatures is revealed in dramatic fashion by Blakeslee’s dramatic narratives. The wolves exhibit bravery, strength, compassion, emotional attachments, playfulness and empathy for each other. Fury and viciousness are in play as well, particularly in the occasional competition between packs for territory and of course in the wolves’ hunting practices. This all makes for great reading, although I will say that sometimes I felt uncomfortable with the degree of anthropomorphizing Blakeslee seemingly casually engages in.

That quibble aside, and assuming that Blakeslee is accurate in his portrayals of the individuals on all sides of the pro/anti-wolf question, I think American Wolf is very much worth reading. I learned a lot about wolves, and to the history of their reintroduction, that I’m very happy to know.

Book 25: The Estate by Isaac Bashevis Singer



I read The Estate as part of my current two-books-per-year read through of the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer in order of their publication in English. The Estate is the sequel to The Manor, which I read in January. Really, Singer meant the two novels to be a single book, but due to the length of the endeavor, his American publishers insisted that the work be broken up into two novels. Later, they were republished in a single volume under the title, The Manor. My copy of the combined works comes in at 818 total pages.

The Manor is the story of a Jewish family in Warsaw that begins during the final decades of the 19th century. The Russians are occupying the country and an uprising of the Polish nobility against the occupiers has just failed. In the Jewish community, many, especially among the younger generation, are leaving the old ways, becoming assimilated, or trying to, and embracing the “enlightened” world of science and modern philosophy. The story revolves around Calman Jacoby, an observant Jew who becomes successful through the running of the manor of the title, and his family. The story is of the struggle that his children and other relatives go through to create a place for themselves in the world, physically, emotionally and spiritually, some adhering to the old ways, and some striving to find meaning within the new, all within the context of a rising tide of antisemitism in Poland. A passage that I liked and quoted from in my review of The Manor focused on Calman’s nephew, Ezriel, a doctor trying to reconcile his dissatisfaction with the old ways and his discomfort with new ideas:

Ezriel had had great hopes that progress could be achieved through education. Yet knowledge itself turned out to be extremely precarious. The entities which were said to constitute matter seemed to have almost magical properties. Moreover, the various materialistic theories, and Darwinism in particular, had put almost all values in jeopardy: the soul, ethics, the family. Might was right everywhere. Man's ancient beliefs had been bartered for the telegraph. But what could Ezriel do about it? For him the old traditions were already destroyed. He was left with nothing but examinations and dread. He had forsaken God but he was dependent upon all kinds of bureaucrats. He had made a mistake, Ezriel felt. But what exactly had been his error? How could it be rectified? As he lay in the darkness, it occurred to him that the young man who had been found hanging in an attic room in the Old City and whose dissection Ezriel had witnessed must have had much the same thoughts as he was having now

(My full review of The Manor is upthread at >2 rocketjk:. But beware: it is long!)

The Estate simply takes up the story exactly where The Manor left us. It is almost exclusively the story of the younger generation, now grown into middle age and eventually beyond, and in some cases their children as well. Some end up in Palestine, some in America, and some stay in Warsaw, either to live the old ways or to try to work their way into mainstream Polish culture. Ezriel’s daughter becomes a revolutionary. All struggle to make sense of life. For some, might and greed make right. For others, the search for comfort, for meaning and/or for love becomes what seems an ever more futile struggle against personal calamity. Failed relationships and affairs are common.

One of the wonders of The Estate for me is that Singer is able to present all these worlds through a myriad of lenses, without inserting any judgmental coloring of his own. Instead we perceive the world as his characters do. A Jewish quarter, as seen through the eyes of a woman who has converted from Judaism to Christianity, is dirty, crowded, impoverished, a place of squalor and grasping. Later, a man trying to find his way back to his religious roots describes the same neighborhood as a place of community, peace and stoic acceptance. Singer does not preach. Many of the characters are taken through the end of their lives. As the 20th century begins, Singer does not hint, at the end of The Estate, of a path forward for his characters’ children, although writing as he was here in the 1960s, he knew what was coming for Poland’s Jews. The world, at the end of The Estate, is simply the world. The precious few who manage to find a semblance of peace in this book are those who have found community.

Singer wrote The Manor and The Estate as a single book. It was only at his publisher’s insistence that the two were published separately, due to their combined length. (They were subsequently republished in a single volume that checks in at 818 pages.) Because I read the two seven months apart, I did have trouble while reading The Estateremembering who was who, especially at the beginning. A family tree would have been helpful! (Credit where due: arubabookwoman tried to warn me about this in her comment after my The Manor review, but did I listen?) I didn’t find The Estate quite as rewarding as The Manor, but I think that if I had read the two straight through, or at least not waited as long between the two, my experience of The Estate would have been enhanced. I still enjoyed The Estate quite a bit, though. Singer’s terrific powers of description, both of the human condition and of the physical world, had certainly not flagged, nor had his sense of compassion.

Book 26: Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq edited by Hassan Blasim



Read as a "between book" (see first post). In 2013, "amid the chaos and destruction left by the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq," Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim sent out invitations to other Iraqi authors, inviting them to write and submit stories imagining the country 100 years in the future. The result is this fascinating volume, published in Great Britain in 2016 and in the U.S. a year later. (The quote is from Blasim's introduction to the collection, in which he also lays out the history of wars and destruction Iraq has endured since the British Invasion of 1914 as well as the reasons for the overall dearth of science fiction writing in Iraq specifically and the Middle East generally over the years.)

Almost all of the stories presented are dystopian in nature, and almost all of them are excellent. Here are a few of my favorites among them, along with the very brief notes I wrote as reminders as I read each:

"The Gardens of Babylon" by Blasim himself:
A video game designer either is or isn’t the writer who committed suicide whose life he must make a video board from. Or maybe that’s his grandfather.

"The Corporal" by Ali Bader
A corporal comes back 100 years after being shot by a sniper in the U.S./Iraq war.

"Day by Day Mosque" by Mortada Gzar
The world is being turned back to front, and snot has become a valuable commodity. Or as Dubya put it right after the U.S. invasion, “Day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom.”

"Baghdad Syndrome" by Zhraa Alhaboby
Genetic mutations from chemical weapons used 100 years ago during the U.S. invasion are affecting Baghdadis, and one afflicted architect tracks down the legends of Scheherazade and her lover, and the statue of them that has disappeared.

I highly recommend this collection, and though it's accurately labeled a science fiction anthology, I don't think you need to be a science fiction enthusiast to appreciate and enjoy these stories. It is instructive to learn that of the writers included here, only Blasim himself was still living in Iraq at the time of publication. The others were in diaspora, for the most part due to the repressive nature of the Iraqi government.

Here is an article I found about the project, written upon the book's original publication:
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/this-radical-uncertainty-concern...

Book 27: Balls by Graig Nettles and Peter Golenbock



Once again, for baseball fans only. Baseball fans will know that 1) Graig Nettles was a star third baseman for the New York Yankees from 1973 through 1983, and 2) these years coincide with the period that George Steinbrenner owned the team. Steinbrenner was an egotistical blowhard who made his fortune via his shipbuilding company and knew a lot less about building and running a baseball team than he thought he did. Balls is Nettles’ memoir of the 1983 season, which turned out to be his final year as a Yankee. Nettles and co-writer Peter Golenbock intersperse chapters which follow the ’83 season chronologically with chapters that provide an overview of Nettles’ career up to that point.

This is not a standard baseball memoir, though. For one thing, such books normally chronicle seasons of players on teams that at least make the post-season, but in 1983, the Yankees finished third, though they did win a respectable 91 games and were in the pennant race until late in the season. For another, Nettles’ book is more about what it is like to be a player on the Yankees during the Steinbrenner era than it is a real narrative of the ups and downs of a pennant race. There’s relatively little discussion of individual games. The famous Yankees comeback of the 1978 season, where they overcame a 12-game deficit to beat the Red Sox for the pennant in a winner-take-all playoff game is handled in about two paragraphs. There are, however, some good descriptions of Nettles' teammates, including what it was like to be teammates with Reggie Jackson.

Nettles depicts Steinbrenner as an self-centered jerk who wanted to make the story all about himself rather than about his players. He regularly criticized the ballplayers in the press and took credit when things went well. Although he had a general manager, he insisted on decided upon trades himself. Nettles praises Steinbrenner for being willing to pay to bring in high-priced stars, but criticizes what he saw as the haphazard way this was done. In 1977, reliever Sparky Lyle won the Cy Young Award, a rarity for a relief pitcher. Nevertheless, the next season Steinbrenner brought in high-priced closer Goose Gossage. Irritated at having to share the closer role, Lyle fumed all season, was ineffective on the mound, and was traded the next year, an event causing Nettles to offer his famous quip to Lyle, “You went from Cy Young to sayonara.”

Another Steinbrenner would sign too many stars. The Yankees during a given year would have, say, five all-star caliber outfielders when only three of them could play regularly. This would lead to the team never having a set lineup, which Nettles claimed damaged the team’s cohesiveness and spirit. Steinbrenner’s ongoing feuds with manager Billy Martin are also chronicled here.

The bottom line for Nettles, though, was that although the Yankees were usually good, Steinbrenner’s methods and personality took the fun out of baseball for the players. “Baseball should be a game, not a business,” he says in the book. “Nobody ever says that the Yankees and Red Sox held a business meeting on Friday night. They say that the Yankees and Red Sox played a game.”

As the book ends, Nettles, at age 39, had just signed a new 2-year contract with the Yankees. But the book’s appearance during the 1984 spring training led immediately to Nettles getting traded to the San Diego Padres, which at least was Nettles’ hometown team. Balls is breezy and a relatively quick read, and it will be fun for baseball fans, and particularly for folks who remember those days. Yankee fans will enjoy reading about those players again. Yankee haters will enjoy the disfunction.

Book 28: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston



Tell My Horse is Zora Neale Hurston often fascinating account of her visits to Haiti and Jamaica in the mid- to late-1930s. Hurston was intrepid and fearless about going out into the countryside of both countries, experiencing the lives and learning about the folk customs and religious beliefs of the people she met. Because she met people on their own terms, rather than as a supercilious academic anthropologist, Hurston was able to gain trust and entry into lives and, particularly, into meaningful religious ceremonies, particularly in Haiti, where she attended and sometimes took part in a wide range of Voodoo ceremonies.

In a way, the opening section, the chapters about Jamaica, are the easiest and most compelling to read. Hurston describes her stay at a place called Accompong, inhabited by people known as the Maroons, the descendants of enslaved blacks who had escaped into the hills generations back and successfully fought off the British forces who came to reclaim them.

"The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freemen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. . . . They were here before the Pilgrims landed on the bleak shores of Massachusetts . . . There are other Maroon settlements besides Accompong, but England made treaty with Accompong only."

Hurston's wry observations about the Jamaican class structure between blacks, mulattos and whites is full of sly, Swiftian humor. But I think the most memorable passage in this opening section about Jamaica is Hurston's description of a funeral procession. A respected yet very poor man of the village has died in a relatively distant hospital. A group of villagers goes off to bring the body home. Hurston is in the group that has gone to a nearby bridge the corpse bearers and accompany them back to the village. It is the dead of night:

"So we were a sort of sightless, soundless, shapeless, stillness there in the dark, wishing for life. At last a way-off whisper began to put on flesh. In the space of a dozen breaths the keening harmony was lapping at our ears. Somebody among us struck matches and our naked lights flared. The shapeless crowd-mass became individuals. A hum seemed to rise from the ground around us and became singing in answer to the coming singers and in welcome to the dead. The corpse might have been an
African monarch on safari, the way he came borne in his hammock. The two crowds became one. Fresh shoulders eagerly took up the burden and all voices agreed on one song. Then there was a jumbled motion that finally straightened out into some sort of a marching order with singing. Harmony rained down on sea and shore. The mountains of St. Thomas heaved up in the moonlessness; the smoking flambeaux splashed the walking herd; bare fee trod the road in soundless rhythm and the dead man rode like a Pharaoh--his rags and his wretchedness gilded in glory."

Also very memorable is Hurston's vivid account of accompanying several of the villagers on a dangerous hunt for wild pigs.

The section about Jamaica takes up just over a fifth of my edition's 260 pages. The rest of the book is Hurston's account of her time in Haiti. It, too, is very interesting, especially when Hurston is describing the places she visits and people she stays with. There are some historical sections, particularly about different recent (circa 1938) presidential administrations, the ways in which they came to power (almost always via coup), and the ways and reasons they were deposed. These are interesting, with the proviso doesn't seem to be attempting any sort of scholarly histories, but instead is presenting more or less oral histories, the events as they were told to her by a variety of Haitians. Hurston also traveled to several areas in the Haitian countryside to learn as much as she could about Voodoo beliefs, history and ceremonies. While this information is interesting, Hurston unfortunately went a bit overboard, detail-wise, in her narrative. Whole sections of the book become recitations of specific Voodoo spirits and ceremonies. The page fills up with details about one, then another, then other. And though this does present a comprehensive (or at least multi-faceted) picture of the culture, the details crammed onto the page like that made it difficult, at least for me, to keep track, and I began skimming in places.

Hurston is matter-of-fact about the conditions of poverty and illness, and the destructive nature of the class system, in Haiti at the end of the 1930s. Nevertheless, from what we read now about current conditions there, seem things to only have gotten worse in the intervening 90 years.

Recommended? Absolutely.

>34 rocketjk: That memoir is included in the Library of America volume of Hurston's Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings, which happens to be on my shelf....sounds like I might want to take it down soon. Great review, as usual, Jerry.

>35 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks! I will be very interested to see your reactions to Tell My Horse. Cheers.

Book 29: The Fortune of the Rougons by Emile Zola



The Fortune of the Rougons is the first novel in Zola's 20-book cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, about life in France during the Second Empire, which began with a successful coup d'etate by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (a.k.a. Napoléon III, the original Napoleon's nephew) over the Second French Republic in 1851. We are in the fictional Provencal town of Passans, somewhat geographically isolated and a cultural backwater. This first novel presents the family backgrounds and then the lives of Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicité, along with Rougon's half-brother, Antoine Macquart. The Rougons marry and then struggle in the town's low middle-class, always plotting to make their fortunes and move up into the leisured gentry class and always failing. Antoine, one of two illegitimate half-siblings, returns from a long army hitch embittered against Pierre, a feeling that deepens as the story continues. We also read the story of the young lovers, Silvere, the son of the third sibling, Antoine's sister Ursule, and the lovely, young Miette. As the events of the coup unfold in far-off Paris, the Rougons plot how to use the developments to their advantage, Antoine plots revenge on the Rougons, and Silvere and Miette pledge their love to each other in some of the books most wonderful sections and to the insurgents who rise up in the countryside to resist the coup and defend the Republic.

There is a tragic-comic element to all of this. The Rougons and also Antoine Macquart are grotesques and, aside from the cunning skill for the main chance, essentially devoid of redeeming factors. The middle class group that solidifies around them are cowardly and grasping. As Zola describes the situation and their plotting:

The Rougons, those miserable, disreputable wretches, had thus succeeded in gathering around them the instruments of their fortune. Everyone, out of cowardice or stupidity, would be obliged to obey them and work blindly for their aggrandizement. All they had to fear was those other forces that might be working towards the same end as themselves, and might rob them of some of the glory of victory.

How this all plays out provides the drama of the book's last two-thirds. The "comedy" of the novel is interspersed with treachery and bloodshed. Zola was, of course, quite a fine writer, and the modern translation provided by Brian Nelson in this Oxford World's Classics edition helped the narrative flow really well for this English language reader. Because so many of the citizens of Passans are presented as craven fools, I was reminded of the Jewish folktales of the "Wise Men of Chelm" that I read as a child. But also, due to the Rougons' unscrupulousness and rapacity, Faulkner's Snopes Family trilogy came to mind. The Fortune of the Rougons lands somewhere in the middle for me, between the light-hearted foolishness of Chelm and the grim malevolence of the Snopes clan. Nevertheless, humankind's seemingly endless capacity for hypocrisy, self-aggrandizing and conscienceless greed are on full display.

At any rate, I found The Fortune of the Rougons to be extremely absorbing reading, and I'll eventually hope to work my way through the major part of the 20-novel cycle.

Book 30: Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce



A couple of years back, my wife and I were wandering around Bayonne, NJ, USA. Bayonne is right next to Jersey City, where we were staying at the time, but also it's of particular interest to me because it's the town my mother grew up in and where my maternal grandparents still lived when I was a child. We came upon a lovely bookstore called The Little Boho Bookshop, and there I bought this book.

I began this novel with a bit of trepidation. Being in the midst of my intermittent reading of Proust, I wanted something lighter and maybe a bit breezy, and Dear Mrs. Bird seemed to promise that. As it's a first novel, I worried about the writing a bit, and also that it would lean a little too much for my taste on the romance-novel end of things. Well, I will say that the novel does have flaws, but all in all I was pleasantly impressed and enjoyed the reading experience.

Emmeline Lake is a young woman making her way in London during the blitz. She dreams of being a Lady War Correspondent, but in the mean time has a boring if pleasant day job and works night shift answering phones at the fire department during German bombing raids. In the beginning chapters, things are breezy and cheerful, and so is Emmy, and she soon actually finds herself working at a newspaper. Sort of. Her job is simply typing up the letters that come in to the advice column of the paper's Women's Section. Worse, her boss, Mrs. Bird, only wants to see the most unoffensive letters. Anything to do with relationships or worry about the war or about loved ones off fighting is strictly off limits. If you think you can see where this is probably going, I think you are probably correct. Things take a serious turn, however, and quite suddenly, as we experience a night (which seemed to me at least to be admirably realistically handled by Pearce) at the fire department phone bank during a particularly hellacious bombing, and Emmy's personal life, and those of her closest friends, become rocky indeed.

That sudden shift in action and tone are, I think, the book's biggest flaw. At first it seems that the blitz is going to be kept more or less as an ominous background element. Then suddenly it is front and center. I take that as a "first novel" pacing issue. At any rate, by this time I was hooked on the story, so if there was a hurdle there, I was able to jump over it. If there is no lack of melodrama in the novel, there is, on the other hand, some rewarding depth after all in Emmy's character, her handling of her personal setbacks and of the constant worry, emotional fatigue and uncertainty of life under constant bombing. So I give the book 3 1/2 stars, if anyone's keeping score. This is at this point a 3-book series. I am likely at some time or other to be in the mood for the other two books, I think.

Book 31: The World's Greatest Romances edited by Walter J. Black



Read as a "Between Book" (see first post). I only mildly enjoyed this jam-packed (68 stories!) collection of stories, most from the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of them were fairly formulaic, having to do with the amorous and/or romantic adventures of nobility and knights and so forth. The first section of 11 tales were mostly gothic in nature and those were entertaining, but after that the collection settled into long waits, matters of honor, unrequited love and tragic misadventures, few particularly compellingly written. My favorite story was one that broke the mold, "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" by Maxim Gorky, about a group of men in a Russian prison who begin to idolize the young girl who works as a maid in the building. There are some other famous names among the authors, including R.L. Stevenson, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bret Harte and Henry James. Those are all writers I admire, but none of their stories stand out for me. This must be something to do with editor Walter Black's tastes, or what he deemed to be his audience's tastes. The rest of the authors were obscure, at least to me. It was fun looking each of those names up online after I'd read their stories here.

The volume is one of a series he published called Black's Readers Service. There were (I believe) 32 volumes in all of different topics, published between the late 1920s and early 30s. Given all that, you might not be surprised to learn that there are no more than three or four female authors represented here.

Book 32: The Third Ghost Book edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith



Cynthia Asquith was born into the English upper crust in 1887. Early on, she became friends folks like D.H. Lawrence, J.M. Barrie and L.P. Hartley. She became a fairly well-known writer, known for her short stories and WWI-era diaries. Quite a bit of her writing showcased the unfair social restrictions that English women were saddled with. She was also known for editing anthologies of ghost stories, such as the collection I've just finished. Because Asquith was a writer herself and otherwise strongly connected in the British literary world, she was able to get some quite famous authors to contribute to her collections. In The Third Ghost Book, originally published in 1955, we find writers such as Mary Treadgold, Elizabeth Bowen, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Taylor (the writer, not the actress) and Angus Wilson.

The stories are almost all quite good. Most are quite spooky and evocative, though a few are humorous. In “The Telephone,” by Mary Treadgold, a man and his new wife are haunted by his former wife via a telephone that they thought they’d had disconnected. In “The Claimant,” by Elizabeth Bowen, a man lays claim to his former property, even after death. Elizabeth Jenkins' “On No Account, My Love,” while offering a wonderfully disturbing sense of dread, is more of a character study than a true ghost story. A woman recounts her family history, beginning with what she’s been able to piece together from family lore about her beautiful, demanding great-grandmother, who ran a girl’s school very exactingly. The narrator finally visits the old family home. The twist at the end I found quite satisfying. That was one of my two favorite stories. The other was "The Tower," by Marghanita Laski, in which late one afternoon, a young women stops to investigate one last historical site in Italy, much to her regret. Very creepy, that one. Oh, and one more was “The Day of the Funeral,” by Margaret Lane in which a young girl and her dying grandmother hear footsteps and voices in the walls.

The one drawback to reading a collection of ghost stories is that you already know that every story is going to have a ghost. So if a solitary hiker, accosted by an sudden rainstorm, comes upon an lovely hillside inn offering shelter, we pretty much can be assured that either the inn is haunted or the innkeepers themselves are going to turn out to be ghosts. There are a couple of stories that follow this trope, but they are both charming enough tales that I didn't even mind.

So this was fun. My paperback copy was a 9th printing (1965) of the British publisher Pan Books' 1957 edition. It's been on my shelf since before my LibraryThing big bang in 2008.

Book 33: A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown



It only took me a couple of days to rip through this short but very well-written book about a company of American soldiers taking part in the invasion of Italy during World War Two. Their officer is wounded even before the landing takes place, and their mission then becomes unclear to them. All they know is that they have to go six miles up a country road and find a farmhouse. Presumably they are to take it, assuming there are even enemy soldiers in it, and hold it. Then they look at a map and see a bridge near the farmhouse, and decide for themselves that the job must be to destroy the bridge so the German army can't bring reinforcements, tanks and supplies across it. In the novel is about their trudge up that road. They are combat-experienced, having already fought in North Africa and Sicily. Some have become resigned and matter-of-fact about the dangers and horrors. Others are beginning to show the strains of a year straight in combat. As they walk, Brown visits with some of the individual soldiers, as we hear their thoughts and their conversations. They often use banter and jokes to ease the tension and handle the boredom and discomfort of walking the hardened, rocky road in the increasingly hot day. We also listen in on the strategy discussions among the company's leaders, two sergeants and a corporal. They are attacked from the sky more than once. The whole thing takes two endless houses, and then they reach the farmhouse.

Brown was a very good writer, and there are many excellent descriptions of the men, their states of mind, and the surrounding terrain as well. I knew I was in the hands of a very good writer when, as the soldiers are still on the troop transport awaiting their nighttime landing, we read:

"As the time of landing approached a growing tension was added to nervousness and discomfort. The men's mouths were dry. Sounds magnified themselves. The dark closed in like a smotherer's pillow."

Sometimes I wished that Brown had gone a little bit easier on the banter, but all in all, I thought this was an excellent book about men at war, with a few quite vivid characters.

A Walk in the Sun was first published in 1944, while the war was still ongoing. It was made into a movie just the following year. According to Wikipedia, "In 2016, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry."* My mass market paperback is a first printing of the Signet Book edition from 1957. It has been on my shelves since before my LT "big bang" in 2008.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(1945_film)

Book 34: Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer



This is a very recent book about which my interest was peaked by two reviews, one in the New York Times and the other in the English-language version of Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli daily whose stories often show up in my News app feed.

Tablets Shattered is a survey, more of less, of the history of American Judaism. Leifer is a millennial, and he is very much, and avowedly, writing from the perspective of his generation. That was one of the attractions of the book for me, a Jewish late-baby boomer (born in 1955). I wanted to see how a thoughtful person of a younger generation was seeing the subject. Leifer has been a journalist and an activist against Israeli policies and abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. That puts me in strong sympathy with his views along those lines. The book was finished just before last year's Hamas attacks on October 7 and the deadly Israeli response, but Leifer was able to make changes and additions to the manuscript based on those events before the book went to press.

Leifer's thesis is that the 100 years or so from the early 20th century, when Jewish immigrants poured into the U.S. from Europe, to sometime within the 2010s has been a golden age (with a couple of important chapters) for American Jews. He sees this period now ending, not because of antisemitism, but because what he calls the American Jewish consensus is now deteriorating. At first, immigrant Jews were kept together by that immigrant experience and by the ties to the religion and by Yiddish culture. The Old World, as most immigrant groups have labeled their countries/cultures of origin. Leifer makes the point that many of those original immigrants were socialists, members of the European Jewish workers' movement known as the Bund. Many of those people became involved in workers' rights here in the U.S. as well. By the 40s and 50s, though, with significant upward mobility, old world Yiddishkeit and labor issues began to fade as rallying points. Immediately after World War 2, however, as the horrors of the Holocaust began to come clear in America, and then with the establishment of Israel, American Jews had a new rallying point: Israel itself, and the perceived necessity for its survival and vibrancy, its existence as a refuge for the world's Jewry and as a symbol of Jewish strength where before had only been victimhood. Details of Israeli injustices to the Palestinian population were buried, though stories of Palestinian terrorism were accepted as gospel. More recently, however, according to Leifer, several factors have combined to severely weaken this American Jewish consensus. First is the growing knowledge of Israeli oppression in Gaza and the West Bank that is eroding American Jewish unquestioning support for Israel. Next is the further weakening of organized religion among American Jews. Leifer provides statistics about the closing of Conservative and Reform congregations for lack of membership, as a new generation has grown to adulthood that is even further removed from the immigrant traditions and even from the traditions of the social tenants of Judaism, including compassion, charity and the performance of good acts. Jewish support for the Civil Rights movement, for example, is now seen distantly in the rear view mirror.

So if religiosity among Jews is ebbing, and Israel can no longer stand as a central rallying point, what is the future of the Jewish community in America? Leifer sees several possible roads forward, though he doesn't seem particularly enthused by any of them. He is strongly supportive of Jewish advocacy/peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, but doesn't see those movements as likely to coalesce into a strong consensus that will carry American Judaism forward. Similarly he speaks of Jewish religious movements that are aiming to expand inclusiveness and broaden concepts of what it means to be Jewish. Leifer, however, comes from a religious background and fears that these movements will carry Judaism too far from the basic philosophical tenets of what he loves about the religion. And I guess because of his religious background, Leifer spends a good bit of time investigating and explaining the Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox communities, the only segment of American Jewry that has actually been growing in membership and cohesion. Finally, despite the horrors of the current war and the ongoing cruelty and criminality of Israeli policies toward Palestinians, which, again, Leifer has a history of actively opposing, Leifer doesn't see American Jewish abandonment of Israel entirely as a viable way forward. While the Jewish community in the U.S. has been the world's largest since the Holocaust, it is widely agreed that within the next 20 or 30 years, the Jewish population of Israel will exceed that of the U.S. Therefore, Leifer believes it important that American Jews not wash their hands entirely of the country that will soon have a plurality of the world's Jews, but instead continue to try to work toward a more just Israel. This is another uphill battle, to put it mildly, particularly in the face of his reporting that Israeli Jews no longer give a fig what American Jews think of them or their actions.

Personally, I think American Judaism will do what it has always done, which is to evolve organically and find a natural way forward. That may seem too simplistic, but I think the philosophical elements and historical strains are too strong to simply wink out or fade away. I liken this, rightly or wrongly, to my strong love of jazz. People are always talking about "help{ing to} keep jazz alive." Jazz is never going to be America's favorite musical genre, but it's not going anywhere and it's certainly not dying. Well, anyway, that metaphor has its strengths and its weaknesses, I guess.

I mostly found the first half of this book--Leifer's summation of American Jewish history--to cover ground I already knew, and I have several reasons why I wouldn't want it to be anyone's first introduction to the topic. The later stages, wherein Leifer examines some of the more modern movements within American Judaism, were more enlightening for me. I hope that some of these movements gain larger traction, but, sadly, I don't see much evidence of that. Here are some of my additional reservations about Leifer's approach:

* Leifer injects himself and his own experiences and ruminations quite liberally into the text. This is a problem for me because, first, I don't see him as really having the gravitas or experience to make his personal observations particularly meaningful, as thoughtful a fellow as he might be.

* Leifer, as mentioned, grew up in a religious household. He went to a Jewish day school rather than a public school. He writes about his early perspectives and opinions as being representative of Judaism in general, but most American Jews are not so wholly enveloped by the religion. In fact, it's part of Leifer's central thesis that, with the collapse of organized Judaism in America, most Jews of his generation are not living a particularly Jewish life at all. I wouldn't care overly, but Leifer continually frames issues through the lens of his own perspective, as if it were broadly shared.

* When Leifer speaks of organized Jewish life, he speaks only of religious training and support for Israel. As he sees those factors ebbing, he sees synagogue life per se as doomed. But he seems to miss wholly the important factor that brings families to synagogue, just as it brings people to church or mosque, that of community, of group support and association. I liked going to Friday night services, even into my hippie teens, because I saw my friends there. For my parents it was the same. Leifer seems to have a blind spot to this ingredient.

* Given his own strongly religious upbringing, not quite orthodox, evidently, but with plenty of cousins within the orthodox community, Leifer has a lot of sympathy for that tradition and spends a lot of time in the book exploring it. He sees a lot to like, in terms of cohesion and spiritual strength. That's fine for him, but it isn't the way forward for American Jewry as a whole that he seems to think it is. Crucially, he mentions, but quickly shrugs off, orthodox Jewry's rampant, foundational misogyny. He concludes the book's section he calls "The Orthodox Alternative" by saying, "For now, Orthodoxy remains the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer." For most American Jews, however, that's a hard no. Not really an alternative at all, whatever one might think of the evils of "liberal capitalist culture." (Leifer sees it, essentially, as quicksand into which American Jewry will soon sink out of sight.)

* On many issues, Leifer is content to provide us with a top-down history. So, for example, he will concede that many if not most American Jews have over the years had much more sympathy for the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories than organized leadership organizations have expressed and/or acted on. He waves this away, however, by adding that since those organizations get the headlines and have outsized lobbying influence, they are the most important factors to consider. But if the book is about American Jewry as a whole, it seems off to me to exclude the opinions so many American Jews.

* There's just enough of Leifer's summary of the Jewish American experience that I, as a current oldster, personally lived through that Leifer, as a current relative youngster, did not that he gets, from my perspective, just a little bit wrong, that I frequently lost patience. In fact, I came close to putting the book aside a couple of times during its first 100 pages.

* Given that the book's subtitle concludes with "and the Future of Jewish Life," Leifer really spends very little time looking at that future, all in all.

So, I'm sorry to say, this is not a book I can recommend. I guess I am better for having read it, for having gained exposure to the perspectives of an activist Millennial journalist. Those are two contradictory statements, I guess. What else is new?

Book 35: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust



This is the third book in Proust's famous In Search of Lost Time opus. It is even longer than the previous entry, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (a.k.a. Within a Budding Grove), 595 pages to 533, and wasn't, for me, as compelling a read, though it is more consistently funny. Of Young Girls I wrote, "It's all a long, slow wander, with plot, what there is of it, subordinate to reverie. There are long passages of natural descriptions, which we strongly suspect are not meant to accurately represent the narrators observations at the time, but instead are heavily invested with the longing and enhancements rendered by time as the narrator looks back at them. . . . In The Guermantes Way, there's much less revery, much less longing for an unretrievable state of innocence and discovery. Instead, we enter the maze of Paris' early 20th-Century upper classes along with our unnamed narrator, who himself, against all odds (he is the son of an upper-middle class aspiring statesman) gains an invitation into this world. As the novel opens, our young man is in love with the beautiful Duchess Guermantes. He of course knows their is no hope for him there, but tells us of his longing to simply be ushered into her presence, to be invited to her parties and dinners, to experience the impossible heights of elegance and, he imagines, insight embodied in the life she lives along with her husband, the Duke Guermantes. He is enamored of the romance of their nobility, of their lineage, and that of their social set, that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, evoking feudal days. He of course eventually finds himself, through friends, especially the Duchess' nephew, our hero's friend, the young army officer Robert Saint-Loup, invited into the august halls of the Guermantes and their friends and relations. What he finds there, of course, is not the intelligent, other-worldly conversation he imagined, steeped in history and romance, but instead a viper's nest of gossip, roomfuls of people whose knowledge, and interest in, history and literature is only of the shallowest nature. What passes for wit among them is almost always of the most mean-spirited and vapid kind, and their intelligence is no greater, often much less, than anyone else our man might meet in his daily life. And so most of the narrative is a black-comedy navigation of these conversations, a droll accounting of the Duke's obsession with the lineage of everyone he knows, the authenticity, or lack thereof, of their titles, and the determination of whose titles are the most ancient, who should thereby have precedence at table over whom. And this, mind you, 100 years at least after the end of any sort of royal reign in France. And while these memories of our narrators are, as mentioned, often quite funny, these incidents go on for several hundred pages.

I read this book in 150-page chunks, in between which I would turn to other reading. Despite the less compelling nature of this book to it predecessor in the series, I can still say I enjoyed the reading experience. The quality of the writing in so many places is just that good. I'm happy to be done with it, though, and will probably take a long rest from the series before continuing onward with book four, Sodom and Gomorrah. A note that I read both books two and three of the series, in the modern, Penguin Classics translation, which was helpful. The first book, Swann's Way, I read in the original English translation by Moncrieff. I already have a copy of the Penguin Classics version of Sodom and Gomorrah on my shelves, but I may break out my Modern Library (original translation) copy of The Captive when (and if) I get to it.

Reading two In Search of Lost Time novels in the same calendar year has knocked my reading goals for this year off the road. Each, basically, took up a month of reading time. I doubt I'm going to get to 50 books this year. C'est la vie!

Book 36: Timbuktu by Paul Auster



I normally stay very far away from novels that have dogs as their protagonists, but this is Paul Auster, and I've admired the few books of his I've read. Plus, after all the Proust, I definitely needed something shorter. So when I noticed this book in a lovely, small bookstore in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn called The Word is Change, I decided to give it a go. One particular I was happy to see was that the book isn't narrated in first person (first canine?), but instead via a close-in third person.

As the book opens, we immediately learn that Mr. Bones, a resourceful and empathetic mutt, is grieving in advance, for his owner, Willy, is clearly dying. Willy wakes up coughing and coughs his way through each day. Willy once seemed to be on his way to a career as an author, until mental illness knocked him off course. Decoupling from mainstream society, Willy, believing it's his calling to spread joy and hope wherever he goes, years ago assumed a new last name for himself, Willy G. Christmas. Willy and Mr. Bones have been essentially hoboing around the country for the last seven years, always somehow getting by and entirely attached to each other. Now they are in Baltimore, where Willy is searching for his high school English teacher, the first person to believe in his writing talent, so he can hand over a locker full of manuscripts.

That's the starting point, and things move on from there. Because he was so skillful a writer, Auster makes us easily accept that Mr. Bones understands everything that Willy, and every other human, says to him, and almost, but not quite, everything that's going on around him. The book is about the relationship between the two characters, and about Mr. Bones attempts to work out the elements in his surroundings, and in the world in general, that are opaque to him. Without going into detail, then, I can say that I found this a very affecting book about love, acceptance in the face of eccentricity, perseverance and mortality. It's not really a very deep book, but I found it quite nice for what it was. I will say that there were times that I thought Auster was channeling his inner Tom Robbins somewhat to the detriment of the narrative. But that's an extremely minor reservation. All in all, Auster found his way here, via a deft touch, to, for me at least, some memorable storytelling. It will come as no surprise that I'd recommend this particularly (though not only) to dog lovers.

Book 37: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege - 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor



Stalingrad is an extremely detailed and very well-written account of one of the most horrific battles of modern times, written by Antony Beevor, an excellent military historian. Beevor had access to recently opened files and had the cooperation of Russian authorities who let him see their archives (the book was first published in 1998). He got to see diaries, contemporary official accounts and even letters, some mailed and some unmailed and found on the bodies of soldiers killed during the battle. He also conducted interviews with survivors and historians alike. Beevor took all the material and information and crafted an extremely readable and detailed account of this seminal battle, including major troop movements and hour-by-hour accounts of individual engagements. He even, via those interviews, diaries and letters, takes us inside planning sessions, bunkers and trenches to describe individual moments of heroism, terror and misery.

Beevor begins at the beginning of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, even taking us inside the meeting between Russian and German diplomats as the Germans read off Hitler's list of phony provocations and rationalizations for his aggression. As the meeting breaks up and the Russians leave to pack and head home to Russia, the German representative Joachim von Ribbentrop followed his Russian counterpart, Valentin Berezhkov outside, and, with tears in his eyes, whispered, "Tell them in Moscow that I was against this attack."

We get a brief overview of the beginning of the campaign, as the Russian army retreated and then stood firm outside of Moscow. Things get more detailed, of course, when Beevor turns to the German's next effort, to storm their way to the Volga to destroy the Russian army's large war supply factories and depots. Originally, taking Stalingrad hadn't even been the plan, but along the way Hitler's pride became engaged, and he was soon insisting that the city be occupied, even if it has to be destroyed in the process. The German air force's constant bombing of the city did not break the inhabitants' will, nor did it dislodge the Russian soldiers defending it. Instead, the bombs created mounds of rubble and ruins that, in the long run, made the city easier to defend. The German laid siege for months, until they were finally surprised (they shouldn't have been, according to Beevor) when several Russian armies the Germans did realize were waiting in reserve broke out and raced around on two sides to eventually meet up in the Germans' rear and completely encircle the attackers. With quick action the Germans could have broken out, but Hitler refused to allow what he saw as a retreat, and told the German 6th Army to hold on at all costs and await a relieving column from the west. And though the German army did try it, the Russians were waiting for the expedition and destroyed it miles from the encirclement. Beevor shows us how, from beginning to end, Hitler's meddling in military planning and execution led to the invasion's downfall. (For one thing, it turns out that the old cliche about Hitler's fatal error in insisting that the invading army be split so that they could also try to capture the oil fields in the Caucuses is correct.)

All of the military action is tough enough reading on its own, although related, as I've said, with compelling detail, right down to the human element. What comes across most strongly in the narrative, though, was the toll of human misery and death on both sides. Beevor describes the Germans' atrocities, including the massacre of Jews and anti-German partisans and their general bloodthirstiness and callousness towards civilians during their advance. He also shows us Stalin's disregard for the lives of his own soldiers, who were frequently sent in waves to certain death and were even shot down by their own comrades if trying to retreat from a losing battle, and for the lives of Russian citizens, who might be turned out of their homes into the cold of winter by either side. During the initial Russian retreat, their scorched earth policy meant the burning of villages and stealing or slaughter of livestock, all of which might easily lead to starvation for the villagers left behind. As the German siege of the city endured into late fall and then early winter, and then the encirclement of the German army in January of a particularly brutal winter, their was death on both sides by the tens of thousands from freezing, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, suicide and disease. The list of horrors goes on, even after the battle ends, for the lot of the thousands of German soldiers taken captive during the battle and at the surrender, was mostly more misery and death. Russian prisoners fared no better. Somehow, Beevor is able to paint this picture largely in human terms.

Sounds like a fun read, eh? If one is interested in military history, this book is probably the ultimate account of this pivotal battle of World War 2. Once the German army had lost this battle, it was clear to their generals that what would come thereafter would be a long retreat and ultimate defeat. The Nazi leadership, on the other hand, of course turned a blind eye to this obvious truth, and the war ground on for another two years. Also, though, the book is an account of the misery that humans are willing to endure for nationalism and/or to protect their homeland, and for pride and loyalty, misplaced or not. This isn't a book that one "enjoys," as clearly written and readable as it is. It is a in-depth account, though, on the horrors of war and the follies of fanaticism and loyalty to power-(both political and economic)-besotted leaders.

I've had Stalingrad on my shelves since before my LT "big bang" in 2008. I've previously read Beevor's even longer history, The Battle for Spain, about the Spanish Civil War. I also have his The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II on my history shelf awaiting my attention.

Book 38: Official Baseball Guide - 1963 Edition edited by C.C. Spink



Read as a "between book" (see first post). The wonderful but now defunct weekly publication, The Sporting News, used to publish these digest-sized guides each year during spring training. So, because this is the 1963 edition, is provides a compendium of the events, accomplishments and statistics of the 1962 baseball season. Not only does the publication encapsulate the 1962 Major League season, but every minor league season as well. It contains relatively long rundowns of the American League and National League 1962 seasons and the World Series as well. There is also a fairly detailed account of the AAA (the highest level of the minor leagues) playoffs. Also, the publication is sprinkled with very short (1 to 3 paragraphs) little stories about interesting in-game accomplishments or statistics. For example, we learn that Jerry Wild, pitching for the Billings Mustangs of the Class C Pioneer League, set a Pioneer League record by striking out 21 Pocatello Chiefs on August 21, 1962, breaking the mark of 20 that had been set in 1953 by Vern Kilburgh of the Ogden Reds.

Other than that, the publication provides standings tables and long lists of statistics for every minor league then in existence. In those days, there were a lot of leagues. For a hardcore baseball fan such as myself, it's kind of fun to peruse the standings and stats of, say, the Class B Northwest League, with six teams in places like Yakima, Eugene and Wenatchee. Because I was seven in 1962, when I scan the lists of batting averages and pitchers' won-lost records for a league like this, I occasionally come upon names of players who actually made it to the majors and whom I remember from my adolescence. But also the list of names opens up for me an endless opportunity for conjecture. So, for example, we have Nelson Gardner, who hit .315 with 22 home runs for the Dothan Phillies of the Class D Alabama-Florida League. What happened to him? A quick look at the online Baseball-Reference.com minor league encyclopedia reveals that 1962 was Gardner's first year in organized baseball. He was 19. Between the '62 and '63 seasons, Gardner got traded to the Washington Senators organization, who bumped him all the way up from D ball to the Class A Peninsula Senators of the Carolina League. Another promotion brought his to the Senators' AA affiliate, the York White Roses of the Eastern League. And then, at age 23, he was through. Although he never quite approached his excellent offensive stats in that first minor league season, in his fourth and final year, he hit a very respectable .273 with an on-base percentage of .363. So not a slugger, but a very respectable leadoff hitter type. Were the Senators just looking for power bats in the outfield, and so simply released him? Did he suffer a career-ending injury loading trucks in the off-season? Did a job open up in his uncle's business? Maybe he and his wife had their first child and decided they couldn't raise a family on a minor leaguer's salary. Maybe he just got tired of the ballplayer's life and decided to move on with his life. I'm pretty sure I'll never know!

With its list after list of player names and stats, his book offers trailheads to thousands of mysteries like this one, many that would provide even less to go on than our friend Nelson's.

Obviously . . . for baseball fans only.

Book 39: Into China by Eileen Bigland



I have a habit of, when reading short story anthologies, looking up each author as I read his/her story entry. So it was that when I read "Remembering Lee" in the collection The Third Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, I looked up the author of that story, Eileen Bigland, and found that she had been a well-known writer in England from the 1930s through the 60s, author of several travel memoirs, biographies and children's books. Intrigued, I went to Biblio and ordered Into China, Bigland's memoir of her journey into that country in 1938. China at that point had already been invaded by Japan, and the horrors of Nanking had already taken place. So Bigland, with a contract to write a travel memoir about China and several letters of introduction from relatively high up British department officials in hand, hitched a ride on a munitions convoy bringing arms into the country for the Chinese Army from Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar) over the perilous, mountainous Burma Road. She is, in fact, not on a truck but on a bus crammed with rifles and TNT, and only three other passengers (at first). At first Bigland is only on the bus because she it is her only way into China, what with the war and all. She has grand, romantic ideas about China, and she is feeding her wanderlust (her word). The war is not "her war," as the German invasion of Poland that opened the conflict in Europe has not occurred yet. But it doesn't take long for Bigland to start to see and empathize with the wartime hardships exacerbating the difficult lives of the peasant classes in the the cities and countryside both: starvation, disease, exposure, as well as the brutal working conditions endured by the "coolies" and the complete indifference to their lives and deaths by government officials and upper class (and even middle class) merchants and politicians. At the same time, Bigland becomes friends with the bus' driver and other passengers and quickly begins to admire them and cherish their friendships. The day to day details about life on the Burma Road, with it's many hazards, including frequent delays due to landslides, bus breakdowns and almost constant rain, the observations about the people she comes in contact with and the astounding physical beauty of the countryside (they are frequently looking down at dazzling river valleys from high up on this precarious mountain road) are quite well told, as are her interactions with her bus mates. At the end there is a harrowing description of her time in the southwest city of Chongqing (Chungking to her) under frequent, deadly Japanese bombing raids.

So the narrative is very interesting and well-written but there are drawbacks. Bigland is definitely looking at China through a European eye. And for all of her described sympathy and love for the country, frequently looking down at China. Her descriptions of social conditions often spring from an attitude of superiority. Her desire is to "touch the hem" of what she deems "the Chinese philosophy," which in her view is the patience and serenity the people display (or at least display to her) in the face of hardship. To her credit, her phrase "touch the hem" comes from her realization that she has no chance of fully understanding a philosophy that's been thousands of years in the developing via a couple of months in the country. But she has a somewhat maddening (at least to me) insistence of trying to figure out "the Chinese puzzle," and is frequently perplexed when the Chinese people she meets display the same sorts of contradictions, the same changing moods and attitudes, of any other humans she has come across. How do these contradictions fit into the "Chinese puzzle?" More like the "human puzzle," if you ask me. On the other hand, there are times when Bigland displays compassion and humanity, not to mention courage (including ducking under a bridge during a bombing raid to discover a badly wounded woman all alone and about to give birth and steadfastly stays to help deliver the baby) that allow us to forgive her some of her cultural weak spots (including, particularly appallingly, the occasional, casual use of the N-word) to a certain extent. Reactions to these factors may vary. While this memoir is in most places a fascinating account, it is also, most definitely, a period piece.

As Bigland gets deeper into China, she begins to tell us of her admiration for the accomplishments of Chiang Kai-shek, particularly for his efforts to unify the country. Her information on this subject is not particularly in-depth, as we can see from our own perspective. However, on the book's very last page, Bigland expresses her opinion that no matter how much Chiang might accomplish, in the end the Chinese people will have to rise up and free themselves. When she wrote Into China, Bigland has already published a memoir of her time traveling in Soviet Russia. The blurb on the back of my copy of Into China of this book, titled Laughing Odyssey,* tells us, in a quote attributed to the New York Times Book Review, "Eileen Bigland set out from troubled Europe to find in the Soviet Union the happiness of which her Russian grandmother had told her, from the old days. And astoundingly, as it may seem, she found it." Toward the end of Into China, a longtime friend she's run into in China tells her, "Don't try to put your Red ideas over on me." So who knows how much of her real thoughts along these lines Bigland had to keep out of her accounts here in order to placate her publisher (my copy is a second American edition, published by Macmillan), or how much her publisher took out during the editing phase. I couldn't find a single piece of biography about Bigland online, so I can't say for with any degree of surety what her actual attitudes were along these lines.

So, a mixed bag, I'd say, but in the reading I was always engaged, even when particular passages had me wincing. An historical note that not too long after Bigland traveled the Burma Road, the Japanese invaded Burma, closing off the highway for the duration of the war. By that time, of course, the war was raging around the world, and China had gone from being an isolated victim of aggression to a valiant foe of the Axis. The allies, therefore organized an airlift over the mountains from India.

* Listed in only one LT library!

Book 40: Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani



I found this slim volume in a fun bookstore in Philadelphia called The Book Trader and couldn't resist, as it looked fascinating indeed. Its author, Najeeb Al-Kelani (1931-1995) (Najib Kilani as per the Wikipedia page about him), was born in Egypt and began his medical career there. He joined the Moslem Brotherhood while still in his teens and remained active in the organization throughout his life. He was arrested "more than once"* by the Abdul Nasser regime. In 1955 he was sentenced to ten years in jail, but was given a medical pardon and released after 40 months. He began his literary career while in prison. According to the mini-bio on the book's back cover, Kelani was the author of many Islamic novels, a member of the International League on Islamic Literature and winner of the Prize of the Higher Council of Arts and Literature in Egypt. Omar Appears in Jerusalem was evidently first published in 1970 (Kelani's introductory statement is dated that year). The English translation I purchased was published in 1986 by Dar Ibn Hazm, a publishing house and bookstore in Beirut. Their website seems quite active and up to date, so it seems they're still going strong. With luck they have survived the recent Israeli bombing attacks.

The book takes place in Jerusalem immediately after the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Our narrator, never named, is pacing a road through the city, trying to clear his head from the despair and frustration of the defeat and new, oppressive, paradigm of Israeli rule. A sleep comes over him and he is awakened by a voice and a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at a figure who reveals himself to be Omar Ben Al-Khattab,** returned to the world. ("I thought you're the God's Messenger's Caliph." "It is so.") Omar has returned to life to assess the state of Islam and the causes and repercussions of the recent defeat to the forces of darkness. He quickly discerns that the root causes of the Palestinians' (and the greater Arab world's) weakness is their turning away from God and the teachings of the Quran, their seduction by the secular world and the false promises of individual freedom and material comfort.

I was hoping for a contemporary, realistic, picture of life in Palestinian Jerusalem during the early years of the Israeli occupation, infused with the magical realism inherent in the reappearance of a prophet assassinated over 1,300 years ago. This was not that, but instead, really, a religious tract proselytizing the urgency of a return to strict Islamic practice and the many advantages of that life. The Israelis, evil in almost cartoon-like fashion (I have no doubt the reality was bad enough, to put it mildly, but the exaggeration, for me, anyway, takes power away from the message), of course harass Omar and eventually arrest him, but anyone but the hardest-hearted interrogators and torturers coming into contact with Omar is soon moved and persuaded by the quiet power of his words and his peaceful, assured demeanor, including the beautiful young Israeli woman sent to seduce and shame him. Omar delivers repeated religious and philosophical speeches, and conversions are frequent.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that Kelani selected Omar as his message bearer for this book. As is discussed several times in the novel, Omar was a strong opponent of Mohammed during the first years of his rise to prominence, but underwent a dramatic conversion and eventually became the Prophet's right-hand man. It is this theme of conversion and/or return to the path of righteousness that predominates throughout. There's a lot of anti-Semitism on display in Kelani's writing. Not only an entirely understandable hatred of Israelis, but a condemnation of Jews as a whole as more or less a devil people. Betrayals by Jewish tribes in the 600s are brought up as if of contemporary importance, and at one point Omar wonders how Christians can have sympathy for the people who killed Christ.

So while I found Omar Appears in Jerusalem disappointing in several ways, sometimes made tedious by the thinness of the characters and the frequent repetition of themes, I found it fascinating as an Islamic religious, political and philosophical statement in the form of a fable. Whether it is in any way a period piece from 50 years ago, or would in fact not differ much from a similar contemporary publication, I have no idea.

The book suffers from a very amateurish translation. We're told on the title page that the work was done by the publishing house's translation department, and indeed the quality of the translation seems to vary chapter by chapter. There are errors of tense and syntax throughout, which are easily glossed over, but also the English vocabulary seems extremely limited. My conjecture is that there may have been quite a lot of power of Kelani's writing drained out of the work during the translation process. I can easily imagine that a small local publishing house would lack the funds to contract a more skilled Arabic/English translator, but that, too, is mere conjecture on my part. At any rate, a quick look at the publisher's website shows Omar Appears in Jerusalem to be out of print.

** "Umar ibn al-Khattab was the second caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, ruling from 634 to 644 CE. He is known for his significant contributions to the expansion of the Islamic state and for establishing many administrative practices that shaped the future of the Islamic empire." (Again, Wikipedia.)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najib_Kilani