Book Archive - June to Dec 2021

New York as a microcosm 

of naughtiness over the course 

of almost a century - 1850s to 1950s. 

A GHOST SHIP, A KILLER, AND THE BIRTH OF A GANGSTER NATION

I don’t recall hearing of Albert Hicks before. Described as a colossus astride two eras of misfortune and crime, he is one of this month’s prototypes of “the naughty.” Early in his book Cohen picturesquely describes Hicks, setting him in the history of pre-Civil War New York: “He seems a kind of missing link. With him, the pirate turned into the gangster: he emerged onto dry land and took up in bars and casinos—Blackbeard morphing into Al Capone.” 

Cohen’s narrative retroactively establishes Hicks as a land-and-seafaring criminal orchestrating a decade of foul deeds, culminating in his murderous heist aboard an oyster sloop off Brooklyn in 1860. Cohen then masterfully takes us along to pursue the bloodstained robber through his hovels and haunts of Manhattan, on the lam by ferry and then across Staten Island on foot, and finally up Long Island Sound by another ferry to Stonington CT and Providence RI. Simultaneously, Cohen lets us in on the fact to which Hicks is oblivious: that he has a contemporary dogged pursuer, George Nevis—a prototype, in his own regard, of a hardened NY City detective. The policeman parallels Hicks’ northern waterborne flight, by riding trains from NY and following clues and eyewitness interviews through New Haven and Stonington and up to Providence. 

I’ll avoid the Providence-set spoiler and switch back to Cohen the writer. 

He says he relentlessly dug deeply for twenty years into old city records, vintage books, newspapers and magazines, checking and counter-checking the gangster myths and oral legends about Hicks. Lastly, Cohen credits the actual transcripts of Hicks’s trial and the “naughty one’s” own published confession as definitive sources for this informative and intriguing work of non-fiction. 

© 2019 Spiegel & Grau

OLD NEW YORK, THE JAZZ AGE, AND THE BIRTH OF BROADWAY

Here’s a manic book of shame I bought in the Mob Museum in Sin City. It is a riff, covering some fifty-odd years (circumscribing the beginning of the twentieth century) of the naughtiest people whoever put their devious minds and greedy hearts to the task of creating a nefarious society. The book is paced quicker than a New Yorker talks, is often more electrified than Times Square, and jerks around like a subway ride. So hold on.  

Parts of this book were crude enough to make me squirm. I kept trying to decide if the book’s articulation of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobic hate, and degradation of women were things I should attribute to author Charyn personally, or whether their inclusion was his way to portray honestly the subject thugs, bootleggers, politicos and power brokers of the press and theater and movies, actors, actresses and dancing girls, all whom the author refuses to honor or deify. 

 [ Santa would best carve their Broadway out as a no-fly zone, fearing personal retribution for etching their monikers onto his naughty list ]. 

This may well be judged a little gem of a book. Reviews at its time of publication were mixed. But like some other precious stones, it has its start in the darkness of the earth, in the confusion of heat and pressure, only to become adorned with the luster of power. 

As a reader/writer I found myself distracted/attracted by overstimulation/excitement 

in much the same magical way the blinking/blazing rectangular trail of bare light bulbs ironically focuses your eye on their surrounded movie marquis. For my website I hesitate to include the book without mentioning these caveats. 

© 2003 Four Walls / Eight Windows 

Few things challenge the nice in us as much as war and its aftermath can, as these two books invite us to consider. 

A NOVEL

Historical fiction doesn’t grow unhitched from the past lives and places an author sets sights upon to enlighten and hold up for present day consideration. The Orphan Mother is Robert Hicks’ third novel in a series (perhaps a trilogy) celebrating Franklin, Tennessee - as he does in his social and restoration activism in the current day town. 

He re-introduces us to midwife Mariah Reddick, whom we met in his earlier entry, The Widow of the South. 

Now a freed woman in the Reconstruction South, Mariah maintains her decency and compassion amid the heartbreak and savage brutality of the post-war period and, we come to learn, beyond. Mariah’s choices to right unspeakable wrongs and overcome her stunning spiritual loss—and to nurture a new and better generation of citizens in Franklin—are made at great personal cost. The deeds of leaders and influential persons  described in this book go way beyond the simply “naughty.” 

And though multitudes of children are welcomed into the world by Mariah’s calm and caring hands, she herself is way more than just “nice.” 

The sweep of this saga (1867-1912) bridges many of the years portrayed in this month’s non-fiction books. Hicks alternates his chapters most often between Mariah and her counterpart, the conflicted George Tole, Union sharpshooter-turned- hitman. His deadly skill, honed in the ethos of war, is sought out to have a place in the disruptive aftermath of armed conflict and a nation still at war with itself. 

Hicks invests in Tole the struggle to discern honor in wartime and the ethical imbalance of killing for revenge or justice in the subsequently declared peacetime. 

As an example of why I am so prone to favoring historical fiction as a genre, I found Hicks’ gift of creating this story much more penetrating and to my liking than all the facts and personages carefully amassed and detailed by authors Cohen and Charyn. As Mariah comes to learn for, and about, herself, “She had been like any other in the world, a world full of collectors of fact, who mistake fact for the true substance of life, who mistakenly believe that life is an infinity of fact, and that wisdom is the artful arrangement of such facts. She had known better, and yet she had pursued the facts anyway.”  

The authors of this month's fiction titles challenge us with nineteenth and twentieth century predicaments that still remain unresolved today in ours, the twenty-first.  

© 2016 Grand Central Publishing

A  NOVEL

And lastly, chronologically as well, this wartime-and-aftermath, coming-of-age novel is probably the most complex of this month’s four books. For me as a reader, it most likely was also the most rewarding. It tells of a vastly different world from that of Broadway and Hollywood of the later period chronicled by Charyn. Perhaps the landscapes of Warlight depict a universe which, in part, made that life in NY possible. 

Warlight is replete with the intricacies of the naughty and the nice within each person, as he or she wages the soul-searching struggle to discover an inner moral compass while serving as spies and foreign operatives during declared war and its inevitable subsequent covert hostilities. 

Paradoxes are piled upon personal compromises, as declared from the opening sentence, by the 14-year-old narrator, whose life until twenty-nine years of age is a search for truth. “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals,” to the admission about his mother, made late in the book: “She has accepted a world of secretiveness, where there is a different power, where there is no generosity.” 

Warlight graphically demonstrates the dilemma of war and its aftermath as Ondaatje seduces us to grow attached and sympathetic to several “argumentative souls who, having at one time legally crossed some boundary during the war, were now suddenly told they could no longer cross it during peace.” 

Ondaatje invites us to feel the pulse of his characters as they race to a fight, escape from an ambush, embrace for assurance that love may still be possible, fall asleep exhausted on a floor, exact violent revenge, or sadly slip away to another place. 

And most essentially to us in the 21st century, Warlight is masterful at having us live inside the skin of men and women remaking themselves into warriors and, because they did, agonizing for the rest of their days, to survive with as much honor as they can muster. 

A representative scene toward the end of the book is so captivating of this author’s craft and sensibility, I’ll close with it here without comment or making it a spoiler. “Only Felon, she believes, would use the word demise so unconsciously, this man with barely an education before the age of sixteen. The word from a secondary vocabulary he memorized, just as he re-trained his own handwriting away from the course script she’d seen in his childhood notebooks beside those precisely sketched molluscs and lizards he would draw from the natural world. A self-made man. An arriviste. Therefore not trusted as authentic by some in the trade, not even himself.” 

© 2018 Alfred A Knopf

STORIES

Ever since I read Snow Falling on Cedars I have sought out David Guterson’s work, with particular affection for his short story collections. The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind is a case in point. 

I marvel at Guterson’s lyricism—regardless if it conveys from short declarative sentences that build upon each other, or longer structures that lead me through images, stark or lush. Though Guterson’s stories do travel for their settings from time to time, he is largely identified as a local writer from and within the Pacific Northwest USA. I find myself grateful to have discovered that part of the country and its diverse people through his eyes and stories, even though my favorite piece in this book, “American Elm,” is set in the tristate corner of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and my home state of Connecticut. 

Wherever he brings you with his stories, Guterson’s genius is that he organically connects the inner soul, or heartlessness, of his subjects with the description of the earthly terrain, where we are enticed to accompany them, as they make their way.

© 1989 Vintage Books, Random House 

STORIES

I certainly won’t trouble anyone with accolades about the craft and style of Edward P. Jones, because they are legendary. Many who are far better equipped than I am to comment upon his vision and power to communicate have done so, and will continue to do so. 

But this I will do, which no one else may. I’ll tell you what happens to me when I read these stories, again and again. First and foremost, the individuals to which he introduces me are not “characters.” 

No, they become real people. 

People who lived at the same time I did last century. But people whose life experiences I did not share, nor had any real-time way afforded to me then to know about. Yes, there were many miles between my New York and their Washington DC. 

But there was a galactic divide between our cultures. 

As I read through their lives for my third time in this century, my age and our era have altered what Mr. Jones opens my eyes and mind and heart to witness. 

I thank him for this gift. 

© 2006 Amistad / Harper Collins. 

SELECTED STORIES

You come upon 43 stories together in one book, all written by the same woman, and published after she’s died and left the planet, upon which she was ignored, downtrodden, and largely unknown as a writer. 

(But loved dearly by her closest friends, students and colleagues). 

Probably think you’d get bored by one voice story-telling, over and over. (Think again). 

You’d wonder if they’re auto-biographical, because the stories are largely written in the first person. 

(But you’re so swiftly taken in by the personae, you come to not care if they’re all about just her, or not). 

And before you know it, you find a dampness on your cheek, dripping from the gutter of your eye, and into the corner of your smile. 

(You may have just fallen into a storybook love affair). 

And in her story “Point of View,” Ms. Berlin tells you how she has made this come to be:

 “What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can’t help but feel for her.” 

You will be thankful way beyond this season if you allow yourself to taste of this horn-of-plenty. 

© 2015 Farrar, Straus and Giroux

© 2016 Picador

The PEN AMERICA DAU PRIZE

Each month I try to make sure there is at least one debut book in these selections. (In fact, the first book above, Mr. Guterson’s “Country” collection, was his 1989 debut). 

Nevertheless, this month I depend upon the judges for this year’s prestigious PEN America Dau Prize to provide a contemporary experience of twelve such debuts. This collection is a treat for readers, to see how vibrant the present and future of this literary form may be. It is also a treasure chest for writers – already published or not – who yearn for the reassurance that discovery of their talent may just be one story away. 

The judges suggest you keep an eye out for more from these writers:

Lindsay Ferguson

Amy Haejung

Khaddafina Mbabazi

Stanley Patrick Stocker

Qianze Zhang

Pardeep Toor

Alberto Reyes Morgan

Mackenzie McGee

Mathapelo Mofokeng

Nishanth Injam

Heather Aruffo

Isaac Hughes Green

© 2021Catapult 

TRUE STORIES OF TEXLAHOMA, TRANSYLVANIA, AND OTHER STATES THAT NEVER MADE IT

This month’s first book is loads of fun. It has a sense of humor and some comments that tiptoe up to the border of political incorrectness. Trinklein helps us see that maps give us a vision of, and a way to interpret, the world. His informative, populist-geared text provides the explanations of what people and movements of a specific time had in their minds and hearts, and how they tried to shape the world to bring those aspirations to life. The 74 maps reinforce current day knowledge for those who missed cartography in their years of public education. 

© 2010 Quirk Books 

A TRUE STORY OF 

CARTOGRAPHIC CRIME

If nothing else—though I hope you  treat yourself to the entire book—you can’t miss the short “beauty and the beast” chapter of this book:  How to Make a Map, How to Take a Map. 

It is an anthem of appreciation to those who through the ages have contributed their unique vision and talent to the process and imagination of the art, science and technology of cartography. And a portrait of despicable criminal behavior of deceit, disrespect, book desecration, and map theft. The chapter is a microcosm of the entire book, like a cosmopolitan street map inset on an atlas page of a larger state. These are eleven of the best pages you’ll ever read about maps, mapmaking, and our human capacity for wonder and plunder. 

© 2000 Random House

WILLIAM SMITH AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN GEOLOGY

Winchester fans will again be happily engaged. In this outing, he tells the tale of William Smith and the first geological map on record. This month’s first two books are about making political and geographical maps of the world that explorers and dreamers could see, should they choose to venture far enough. But Smith’s life work (1769-1839) zenithed in his first-of-its-kind map of the unseen ground beneath his fellow Englanders’ feet. Smith progressed from working at predicting the likely locations of subterranean seams of coal to exploit, to plotting the most favorable commercial routes for canals to bring that coal to market, and to recognizing plant and animal fossils located within identifiable strata of rock as indications of the age of those mineral formations. His map crystallized the new scientific endeavor of geology and shook the foundations of literal reading of biblical accounts of creation and the then-current interpretations of the age of the earth.  

© 2001 Harper Collins

 THE TRUE STORY OF A LONE GENIUS WHO SOLVED THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM OF HIS TIME 

Just as William Smith in the preceding book, John Harrison (1693-1776) worked single-handedly and rose from the lower ranks of society to create a monumental contribution to humankind’s efforts to understand and navigate the world. Many of the maps introduced in Miles Harvey’s book, above, already existed in Harrison’s day. But ships’ captains and navigators lacked a dependable, accurate way to know their position at sea precisely—and therefore where their vessels were located on those maps—when they could not navigate by the stars. John Harrison’s self-taught talents as a carpenter and clockmaker positioned him uniquely to invent a marine chronometer, enabling ocean-plying sailors to know what degree of longitude their crafts occupied—at any time of day or night, regardless of weather or ocean conditions. Ms. Sobel’s style makes reading this book equally adventurous and satisfying. 

© 1995 Walker and Company .

THE WARPED, WONDROUS MAPS WRITTEN IN YOUR BRAIN -- AND HOW THEY GUIDE YOU

Imagine a three-to-four pound solid soft pliable object with hemispheres of its own, an intricately crenelated surface, and which is organically alive with constant and orderly pulses of biochemical and bioelectrical energy. Now draw a map of this object’s surface as the land-and-sea-going explorers in this month’s first two books did their world. But don’t stop there. Find a way to reference a particular spot on its mapped surface as Harrison did on earth’s oceans, so you can locate it at a later time and know you are back there again. Now, for good measure, map out its interior as Smith did the not-so-visible depths of his homeland. That’s half of what Rebecca Schwarzlose invites you to do in Brainscapes.
As if that mapping were not excitingly challenging enough, she invites you to partake in a still more adventurous cartography. Take your new map of this object—the human brain—and discover it has an amazing capacity. It can use its many surfaces and interior brainscape, you have mapped, to reconstruct a living image—more maps embedded within its very self—within which it organizes in a dynamic moving fashion, the sights and sounds and smells and touch sensed by its interconnected sense receptors in the eyes, the ears, the nose, and the skin of the person within whom that brain resides, thrives and awaits your visit in these pages. A guided visit into the wonders of life before, during and after birth; the importance of the first years of life; and a contemplation of how we can simultaneously better understand and live that life.

© 2021 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

THE SCIENCE AND MYSTERY OF HOW HUMANS NAVIGATE THE WORLD

Our final book of the month entices us to be mindful of where we came from, where we are, and where we are going. As in Brainscapes, this book connects the outside environment of the world with the interiority of our brain and our senses. Ms. O’Connor invites a consideration not just of finding our way in the physical world of today, and the imminent future; but in our social, emotional and spiritual existence as well. She takes us into the lives of real people she has researched and also travelled around the globe to meet and to whom to relate. These men and women live among cultures adept at finding their way without the electronics (GPS) of today and the technologies of the first several books for this month (graphic maps on paper, etc. as representations of the physical world): in the Arctic’s snow and ice and frozen waters, across Australia’s extensive outback of desert and flatland, and among the Pacific’s countless islands/atolls and extensive waters of Oceania.

Ultimately, Ms. O’Connor introduces us to remnant individuals who embody what may be the last vestiges of ancient ways to know the world and the self and to navigate in that world, in hopes of making a rediscovery of those ways attractive and alluring to reconstruct in today’s young and their children, across the continuum of surviving generations.     

© 2019 St. Martin’s Press 

THE INNER LIVES OF OUR UNDERWATER COUSINS  

This was one of my summer reading books the year it was published. I was amazed by the fish and horrified at myself. Balcombe masterfully taught me what the right questions were to ask, at the same time he instructed me in their startling answers. When I first picked up the book, I did not really consider what a fish perceives, or feels, or thinks, or knows, or provides for a next generation. When I put the book down every night, and finally at its end, I found myself only partially marveling over the fish. Balcombe’s power was that he also made me examine myself.  

© 2016  Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

A SURPRISING EXPLORATION INTO THE WONDER OF CONSCIOUSNESS  

Of this month’s three no-fiction books, this is my favorite. Ms. Montgomery travels far and wide to meet, greet, feed, touch, study and get to know four remarkable women, each of whom happens to be an octopus. Her writing style and heart enchant you and entwine around your awareness like so many tentacles. You can’t help but befriend Athena, Octavia, Kali and Karma, in turn, and be astounded at each one’s individual personality, demeanor, and other-than-human consciousness. Just as the author says she was gifted by her cephalopod lady friends, readers receive the identical gift from her book: “a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know.”  

© 2015 Atria / Simon and Schuster

THE OCTOPUS, THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher-scientist and he writes in that vein somewhat more than this month’s other authors. His precision in describing biology and evolution though never gets in the way of conveying his sense of wonder; whether describing octopuses’ coloration changes or tasting through their skin, or being conscious of, and interacting with, their surroundings. His narration and photography of his deep-sea diving off Australia is so exciting you feel yourself trying to catch your breath from your empathic scuba. Godfrey-Smith describes octopuses and squids and cuttlefishes as an “independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior.” Most fascinating is Godfrey-Smith’s view that humans making contact with cephalopods as sentient beings “is probably the closest thing we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” 

© 2016 Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A NOVEL

As in earlier groupings, I always like to include a first novel in a month’s selections. Ms. Stern tells her multi-layered story from the point of view of philosophy professor Ivan. His biolinguist wife, Prue, is an ornithologist professing that the finches in her university aviary can, and do, talk and communicate with each other. Prue’s widowed, bipolar father, Frank, adds great spice to the mix, occasionally seeing and speaking with more clarity than most. Stern makes her scientific case for animal language through Prue’s ground-shaking lecture and her colleagues’ reactions. Stern carefully fashions her characters to introduce us to humans who, ironically, seem often unable to say what they mean, nor communicate clearly what they feel most deeply.

© 2019 Viking / Penguin Random House LLC  

How does Civil War sharpshooter William Bartholomew go from being camouflaged and perched in a tree,  to living in Five Corners and working with Herman Melville along the seething docks of postbellum New York City? And how does he fashion an intimate relationship out of the necessity to seek help to heal his body and soul, while hiding his war-mutilated face from everyone else? 

© 1999 Harmony Books

How do Cecil Winge, a terminally ill lawyer, and Mickel Cardell, an amputee three years back from a military shipwreck in which he almost drowned, meet and work to solve a sinister murder in Sweden’s autumn of 1793? How will their lives change and what choices will they make as they doggedly pursue truth, justice and their own demons through Stockholm’s streets, waterways, and hidden haunts?  

© 2019 Atria Books (‡)

How do Ellie, a self-professed restless “housewife,” and Dan, an emotionally challenged maker of harps, form an unlikely friendship after meeting on the moors of Exmoor near his remote workshop/home? Prior’s first novel gives us alternating chapters from each character’s point of view for startling and frank insights into the inner workings of self-discovery and the willingness to be affected by a stranger-to-become-friend-to become-whatever-may be. A surprised-filled, absolute ode to joy and rebirth.

© 2019 Berkley (‡)

Back with her alternating point-of-view style for her second novel, Prior invites us to witness the stops and starts of hearts deciding whether to remain closed or to open. Veronica McCreedy is rich, dissatisfied, eighty-five years old—a Scot benefactor-to-be, used to getting her own way. Patrick is her self-absorbed grandson, whose father Veronica gave up for adoption at his birth. What they do, unwittingly, to provide themselves chance for a new start, is travel to a remote outpost on the Antarctic Peninsula, where they live with three eccentric scientists, including blogger Terry, who study Adelie penguins. I found this story endearing; perhaps even moreso as it brought back memories of my walking among Adelies on nearby parts of this same Peninsula four years later than the story’s setting.    

© 2020 Berkley 

General Sherman's march to the sea brought along wave upon wave of the remnant population the civil war left stranded and wandering the plains, hills, forests, farms, cities, towns, and the roads of the South connecting them all. The palette of Doctorow's portrait of these unforgettable individuals forms a picture whose paint is still not dry a century and a half later. This book warns against another insurrection with a passionate panorama of its predecessor's woeful, unsatisfying, and unresolved conclusion.

(c) 2005 Random House 

On his best workday, or even his worst, Harold Fry would never have imagined, in retirement, he would set off on a 600 mile journey. And one made mostly on foot, at that. As with all formidable travels in literature, Harold's pilgrimage is as much into his consciousness as it is into the English countryside. Step-by-step Harold becomes more aware of his relationships with his wife, his former work associate, and the serendipitous people he meets along the way from his Kingsbridge home in the south to a Berwick hospice center in the north.

(c) 2012 Random House

Young Khosrou travels from his home in Persia to Oklahoma. Through it all, in the spirit of Scheherazade, he tells stories that make sense out of, and save, his life and sense of self. This eye-opening, first person narrative draws you into a child's fear, bravery, and humor in a manner you may at first resist. Before long you will find yourself amazed at the resilience of this exiled young man and his family, and cheering him along on his journey. This book has immense heart, so it is ironic that my cardiologist not only recommended it, but bought and sent me a copy.

(c) 2020 Levine Querido

NASA calls upon disgraced Mission Commander Sally Jansen as earth's last hope to avoid annihilation by an on-rushing, alien cosmic object. Haunted by her failed Mars mission,   on which she lost her entire crew years before, her new journey is not only into the unknown of outer space, but into the terror of the inner space of her very soul. This is so personal a story that it appeals not only to fans of science fiction, but to all adults who must conquer their uncertainty of self-doubt, while remaining trustworthy and reliable to those depending on them. 

(c) 2019 Orbit/Hachette Book Group 

Fantastic three generation story of Cathy Williams, the only woman Buffalo Soldier, whose mother impressed upon her the royal heritage of her grandmother, Queen of the African Kingdom of Ouidah.  Posing as a man in order to serve the legendary General Philip Sheridan, Williams enlists and travels from Washington DC to the desert Southwest. This inventive historical fiction is the perfect book to celebrate not just one life, but the entire sweep of freedom to slavery and back to hard-won freedom in postbellum America.  

(c) 2018 St Martin's Press

Disguised as a crewman so she can accompany her naturalist husband, Jeanne Baret was the first woman of record to circumnavigate the globe. Her knowledge and meticulous scientific methodologies in the age of discovery and european colonization surpassed those of her husband, though true-to-form in the mid-eighteenth century, he was accorded, and he singularly accepted, all the honors for her work. This story of discovering the western world’s knowledge of the flora and fauna of exotic lands is a testament to the sacrifice and endurance of a woman whom every mature and maturing person should meet.   

(c) 2010 Crown Publishers    

Tucker returns from the Korean War to find unemployment and his family’s needs drive him to bootlegging 

through the backwoods and over the mountains of Kentucky. Poverty hovers at their dooryard and the state forcibly institutionalizes their four children.  His criminal activities get Tucker imprisoned and upon his release he remains enmeshed in the culture of moonshine and dishonest money.  A dark, but rewarding, tale of grit and the persistence of family love in the face of hardship and human cruelty.  

(c) 2018 Grove Press

Rice Moore finds a temporary refuge, from vengeful Mexican drug lords pursuing him, by fleeing to rural Virginia and taking a job as a forest reserve caretaker. Soon the animals of the wild, most especially the regal woodland bears, need his protection from poachers. Beholden to his employer who keeps his identity secret from local law enforcement, Rice puts his life on the line for the few friends he discovers in a sylvan territory and its nearby town. The book delivers an energetic narrative mix of mysticism, rugged individualism, and adventure.  

(c) 2018 Harper Collins