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England: Island of Last Hopes

7/1/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.
​George Sand [Amantine Dupin]
Author of Middlemarch
​Born July 1, 1804
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G. Sand

My Book World

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Olson, Lynne. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War. New York: Random, 2017.

This book ostensibly is about the United Kingdom and its role in World War II, but its story is so inextricably woven with the war on the continent, as well as U.S. involvement, that it becomes a much larger tale. Author Olson writes history in an absorbing fashion by doing two things. She, of course, follows and reports the facts (spending ten years writing this book), but she also unfurls the story with a narrative flair sometimes missing from history books. She achieves the latter by developing major and minor characters so that they are three-dimensional. For example, with regard to some major players—Belgium, Holland, France, and Norway—she helps readers become acquainted with both the strengths and weaknesses of its leaders: Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, Leopold III of Belgium, de Gaulle of France—as they take refuge in London for the duration.

While relating the story of Nazi cruelty and the utter depravity of war, Olson stops to tell “little” stories: that one Czech citizen, Madlenka Korbel, one day grows up to be Madeleine Albright. That fifteen-year-old Audrey Kathleen Ruston, living with her mother in Arnhem, Holland, the site of a major conflict, is so emaciated at the end of World War II that she barely weighs ninety pounds. Nutrition will always be a problem for the girl who is to become actor Audrey Hepburn. Olson quotes Hepburn: “I still feel sick when I remember the scenes . . . . It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing with hunger” (387). These are the sorts of details that make this book a pleasure to read.

One other thread is particularly poignant, that of Brigadier General John Hackett, “Shan,” originally from Australia but serving the UK. He is paratrooper who is shot down and injured as part of the Arnhem conflict. He is taken in by three Dutch unmarried sisters—Ann, Mien, and Cor de Nooij—and nursed back to health for many months until he can return to England. He is so moved by their love and care and their courage that in years to come, he returns to Arnhem again and again; likewise, he and his wife open their home to the sisters in the UK for future visits. They become family. This chapter is titled “I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In.” It is just one of the many moving stories interlaced with the UK’s status as the “last hope island” of the war. I’m delighted I found time to read this book. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert Long Foreman's Weird Pig

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Young Gay Man Is 'Railroaded'

6/24/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
Henry Ward Beecher
Author of Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
​Born June 24, 1813
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H. W. Beecher

My Book World 

PictureWoodruff with His Horse
Crawford, Phillip, Jr. Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents’ Murders. Kindle: CreateSpace, 2018.

Full disclosure: I won this Kindle version of Crawford’s book by way of a goodreads.com giveaway. I am providing this review because I do believe it is a narrative worth reading.
 
This brief book is reminiscent of absorbing feature articles I’ve read in Texas Monthly—stories of true crime set in the Lone Star State. As a gay man who has lived in Texas for over fifty years, I felt drawn to this case I’d never heard of before. Woodruff is a nineteen-year-old boy charged with murdering his parents in their home. Crawford displays a fine grasp of the tenuous legal situation for gays in Texas, and he sets up the facts of the case for readers to see that Brandon Woodruff is wrongly prosecuted and convicted. At the very least the teen should be given a fair trial.

Throughout the book Crawford makes clear, among others, certain facts. A Texas Ranger from Austin is assigned the case, rather than a local or regional official. This Ranger conducts a smear campaign against Brandon because of his participation in a gay social life and for appearing in legitimate pornographic movies, “evidence” that has nothing to do with the case but which prejudices the jury. The Ranger also fails to take advantage of information that does exist, for one, cell phone records that would indicate Brandon is not anywhere near the location at the time of the murders. By such evidence alone, he could not possibly have committed the murders. While some guilty parties never show any emotion when hearing the news of loved one’s murders, reliable witnesses testify that Brandon loves his parents, particularly his father, who has a sympathetic view of his son’s homosexuality—and he is beset with grief from the beginning. Brandon’s sister, who is more temperamentally bent toward anger and violence against their parents than Brandon, is never fully investigated. What about her whereabouts on the night of the murder? Her phone records? A party or parties who might have committed the murders on her behalf? One suspect, an ex-friend of Brandon’s who is vehemently homophobic, lies to Ranger Collins, and Collins conveniently never puts the ex-buddy on the stand at the trial. The Texas Ranger takes the easy way out all around, and Brandon Woodruff, now nearing age thirty-six, still remains in prison, a long life-term ahead of him.
 
If readers want to help Brandon Woodruff’s cause, they can go to the website freebrandon.org to donate and/or sign a petition to be sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. This is a wrong that must be righted and soon. Thanks to Phillip Crawford, Jr. for documenting this case in such a decisive manner.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World |  Lynne Olson's Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

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'Swing Time' Swings on a Star

6/17/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freed people—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. Imagine.
​Carol Anderson
Author of White Rage
​Born on June 17, 1959
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C. Anderson

My Book World

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Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. New York: Penguin, 2016.

I often make marginal notes throughout a novel I read, but I allowed this one to wash over me instead, primarily because I couldn’t put it down. Swing Time is, in part, a showbiz novel because the narrator, following college, gains employment as a personal assistant for an American pop star ten years her senior, the single-named Aimee. But first readers must learn of this nameless narrator’s early life in London in which her best friend (at the time) is also biracial (her mother black, her father white, whereas the situation is reversed for her friend, Tracey). She and Tracey meet in dance class, and Tracey’s “pig nose” is highlighted numerous times in the beginning so that one never forgets what Tracey is like, both her looks and her demeanor. She is a slovenly, take-no-prisoners, strong-willed female whom the narrator admires, at least to a point. Though Tracey winds up with the “real” career in show business as a dancer, it is the narrator who, for a decade, at least, derives some status by way of a well-paid and exciting career.

The novel makes a big leap when the setting moves from the UK to Africa, where pop star Aimee decides to build a school for children. The narrator is then dragged into a milieu for which she is unprepared. I admire the way in which Smith seamlessly advances the novel with a back-and-forth movement from era to era, from location to location, chapter by chapter, until readers arrive once again at the present day (2018) of cell phones and social media, phenomena lacking during the girls’ childhoods of the early 1980s. The narrator commits one great sin involving her boss, Aimee, and loses her job. She then returns to London to catch up with her mother, a feminist, who has never been the nurturer her father was. A great read that explores contemporary treatment of race, fame, family, and friendship.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Phillip Crawford, Junior's Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents' Murders

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Whitman Adored, Examined

6/10/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
​Saul Bellow
Author of Herzog
​Born June 10, 1915
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S. Bellow

My Book World

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Doty, Mark. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. New York: Norton, 2020.

This alternately erudite and yet expressive book is enjoyable on a number of levels. If readers are acquainted with both Doty’s prose and poetry, they know that not a word is out of place or mischosen in any way. Doty’s book is divided into five parts each exploring a facet by which readers might find a way into Walt Whitman’s era, his life, and his poetry. It might be used as a textbook for teaching Whitman, at least as an ancillary source. I am now inspired to go to my shelves and reach for that volume of Whitman, whose work I have only touched the surface of. Intertwined with Doty’s exegeses of Whitman’s work are bits and pieces of Doty’s own life and how, as his title suggests, Whitman’s life and work have influenced him. 
 
I have only one complaint, and that is with W. W. Norton. I’m not a copyeditor, and I don’t look for typographical errors when I read, but at least ten jumped out at me, from subject-verb agreement to putting a space between text and an em dash to repeating two words in a row that should not be repeated. One sentence had the verb agreeing with the object of the preposition instead of the actual subject. Pages 45, 106, 115, 134, 150, 154, 174, 231, 254, 269—in case others should like to find them for themselves. These errors are not the responsibility of the author. Shame on Norton—the last independent press in America. To say the least, the company has done better.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zadie Smith's Swing Time

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Novel Provides Glimpse of the Old West

6/3/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I worked in Harrods as a sales girl and I was so lazy, I just sat on my arse all day. Now I have huge respect for shop girls. It was boring, so I tried to shoplift things, but we'd always get our bags checked.
​Susannah Constantin
Author of
​Born June 3, 1962
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S. Constantin

My Book World

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Turner, Nancy E. These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901. A Novel. New York: Harper, 1998.

This book has remained unread on my shelf a long time, I think, in part, because I would always be put off by the apparent poverty of the title. It belies the intelligence of the narrator and story she has to tell. Set in mostly late 1880s of the Arizona Territories, the novel relates itself in the form a diary, a twenty-year period in the life of a young woman, the man she marries, their children, and almost all related family members. While the frontier adventures are exciting (some unique and some exactly like those found in earlier books), the novel may be limited by two factors. One is the author’s use of first person. Readers mostly receive Sarah Prine’s take on things, a bright but uneducated (for a while) youth. The other may be the form of using a diary. Both features seem to limit the amount or kind of information a novel can tell. On the other hand, the author makes good use of both methods to tell this tale of a young woman faced with many pioneer-like challenges: extremes in weather, battles with natives, sexism, childbirth, premature deaths in the family, and more. It offers a personal touch the third person might not. The diary format strengthens the female point of view which may be lost or obscured by male writers of similar historical fiction or literature. I still believe shelf appeal might have been increased by at least straightening out the grammar of the title. How about These Are My Words?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Mark Doty's  What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.

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A Writer's Wit: Walt Whitman

5/31/2022

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My America is still all in the making. It’s a promise, a possible something: it’s to come: it’s by no means here. Besides, what do I care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a forecast, a prophecy.
​Walt Whitman
Author of Leaves of Grass
​Born May 31, 1819
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W. Whitman
FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words
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Author Loves His Tulip

5/27/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
​John Barth
Author of Lost in the Funhouse
​Born May 27, 1930
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J. Barth

My Book World

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Ackerley, Joe Randolph. My Dog Tulip. With an introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York: NYRB, 1999 (1965).

A man in his sixties when he writes this book, Ackerley tells the story of his beloved Alsatian or German Shepherd, Tulip. I began the book thinking Tulip’s story would be broader in context, but I was wrong. A large middle section involves Ackerley’s attempts to mate Tulip properly with another Alsatian. In minute detail, and in a way that only the British can do, he writes delicately about an indelicate subject: Tulip’s female parts and how they operate every time she is on heat (a term he deems crude but still uses). A swelling this, and dripping that. But overall, the book is an unsentimental portrait of what according to Ackerley is an extraordinary Alsatian bitch whom he loves very much.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words

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Rosshalde: Story of a Child

5/20/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
A working definition of fathering might be this: fathering is the act of guiding a child to behave in ways that lead to the child's becoming a secure child in full, thus increasing his or her chances of being happy and fruitful as a young adult.
​Clyde Edgerton
Author of Walking Across Egypt
​Born May 20, 1944
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C. Edgerton

My Book World

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Hesse, Hermann. Rosshalde. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Bantam, 1956 (1914).

Spoiler: This novel is primarily about the death of a young child, a son named Pierre. But it is also about the death of a family, how a husband and wife drift apart and divide their love between two sons, the elder “belonging” to the wife and Pierre belonging to his father. But there isn’t much belongingness for any of the family members. The book overall is about the end of their life together at the estate called Rosshalde, an expansive property, a mansion, that seems to have a life of its own. An enchanting but sad read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

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Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks

5/13/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.
​Madeleine Albright
Author of Fascism: A Warning
​Born May 13, 1937
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M. Albright

My Book World

Von Planta, Anna, ed. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks. With an introduction by Joan Schenkar. New York: Liveright, 2021.

This more than fifty-year compendium of Highsmith’s 8,000 pages of diary and notebook entries is a stunning read—particularly if you savor the voyeuristic practice of reading someone’s private thoughts. Her diary entries are brutally honest about everything from her current girlfriend(s) with whom she is madly in love to resentments toward her mother, estranged father, and stepfather. Though bright enough to graduate from Barnard, she never quite masters the art of achieving a meaningful love relationship; her tone seems the same for fifty years. I can’t understand why this relationship has failed. And yet, I believe she does know why: her profession requires much alone time, which is not compatible with a needy lover.
 
Her notebooks, on the other hand, are about her current and proposed works, sometimes a poem here and there. She also talks business. About her agent(s), once her sales go international. Her publishers. Friendships, lasting ones at that, with a broad range of writers. Strong female writers (mostly part of a lesbian group of professionals) mentor Highsmith on how to navigate the heady waters of being a single woman sometimes writing about being queer. Early on, when she is young, she has sex and “love” relationships with a few men, but none of them is every satisfying.

What may be most fascinating is to watch how her life and living influence particular books. The Ripley series of five novels has such an authentic, European backdrop because besides being multilingual, Highsmith lives in Europe much of her life. Still, having been born in Fort Worth, Texas, she does return there to visit once her parents move back from New York. Yet she harbors deep resentments against her abusive mother, who lives to be ninety-five (PH nearly perceives it as a punishment), and, because of her own health problems, fails to visit upon her mother’s own funeral. A sad but triumphant ending for a triumphant but oft-times sad and lonely life. If readers have time, it is well worth theirs to read these 1,000 pages, especially if they’re curious about the writer who authored Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series of five novels, a total of thirty-two books.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World |  Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde.
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Latinos Love Kissing Stories: Bésame Mucho

5/6/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment . . . . Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Author of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
​Born May 6, 1947
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M. C. Nussbaum

My Book World 

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Manrique, Jaime, ed. With Jesse Dorris. Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction. New York: Painted Leaf, 1999.

On my shelf for a long time, I finally took this collection down and enjoyed most of the stories very much. Among the best, I believe, are Manrique’s “Señoritas in Love,” “What’s Up, Father Infante?”, a gripping story by Miguel Falquez-Certain, and “Ruby Díaz” by Al Luján. The entire collection blends together a beautiful chorus of gay Latino voices, from South America to New York to California. So much that the non-Latino community has to learn what gay Latino men face with regard to their families, their communities, and their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. They face immense pressures to conform to cultural norms, even more so than the Anglo population, I would dare say. Kudos to these men for sharing their stories by way of lively and enlightening fiction. It never dates.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

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Meridian of Blood Still flows

4/29/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying. 
​Humphrey Carpenter
Author of 
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
​Born April 29, 1946
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H. Carpenter

My Book World

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McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.

It might be that McCarthy brings to fruition that which Hemingway and Fitzgerald could not—due not only to publishing constraints concerning swear words and graphic violence but also the reins the authors may have held tight on themselves. The makings of complete literary honesty were there via Hemingway’s forthright sentences, at times extended to paragraph length (with little inner punctuation) and Fitzgerald’s fortitude in portraying the brutality of capitalism’s clutches on early twentieth-century America. But in this novel, McCarthy returns to the latter half of the nineteenth century of the West to extend his page-long sentences lyrically to rival the two authors mentioned before. And he does so in a way that somewhat softens the inherent mayhem of this novel.
 
At first, I had some difficulty in following the plot: that a sixteen-year-old Tennessean (the kid) ventures to the Southwest to see what’s in store for him there. The kid is tough, though, and becomes tougher as time passes. He joins a band of men who seek to scorch the earth of natives and anybody else with dark skin (the N word, due to Twain’s use of it in his books, seems to be used without restraint by these characters). But as the book shifts from one episode of killing to another across this physical and moral wasteland, I sense that the narrative is largely impressionistic. I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage—the wildly episodic nature of war—for that’s what this book is about, the White Man’s war to tame the West and all its human and animal critters.

Other than superficial features, the characters, as such, show little traditional development, but that may be McCarthy’s intent. These killers act as a single body, it would seem. In fact, little tolerance for the individual exists here. You act with the others, or you are fighting for your own life. And as an impressionistic work can be dreamlike in which a figure returns to you dream after dream, these characters keep running into each other, regardless of the miles and days or months between them. They can’t seem to remove themselves, if they should desire to, from this wanton way of life or death. And in most cases, it is the latter that guides them through their days heading toward McCarthy’s oft-cited orange sunset or that blood meridian.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jaime Manrique & Jesse Dorris's Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

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Kicked Out of Your Country

4/22/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . . “I am come Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
​Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Author of Uncommon Sense
​Born April 22, 1904
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J. R. Oppenheimer

My Book World

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Batsha, Nishant. Mother Ocean Father Nation: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.

I received this book by entering a goodreads.com giveaway sponsored by the publisher, Ecco (HarperCollins). A galleys edition, this book is scheduled to be released June 2022, so it may be subject to revision depending on its prepublication reception.
 
The novel is set in a nameless South Pacific Island in the 1980s. Said island is occupied by “Nativists” and “Indians.” When a military coup occurs, putting the Nativists in power, life becomes challenging for the Indians (their ancestors plopped there several generations earlier). The natives claim that Indians have stolen all the jobs, the property that should be theirs. From the Indian perspective, they themselves have worked industriously as farmers and merchants to better their lives, and have gained a certain amount of wealth. One family is split apart, when the only daughter, Bhumi, two years into her university career on the island, must escape to the United States to begin a new life. This leaves her brother, Jaipal, and her parents behind. Their father is an alcoholic who owns his own small grocery, and their mother is a strong but quiet woman nearly worn down by her husband’s abuse. Jaipal’s life is complicated by the fact that he is gay, against which there exists an official stricture. If he is to meet anyone, he gathers with others of his ilk in “hotels” (largely abandoned one must assume) at night with no lights, only their widening irises as they become accustomed to the dark (nice metaphor). Bhumi’s life in northern California is no picnic either. She applies for asylum with the U.S. government but will hear nothing for months and months. In the meantime, to support herself as a would-be student (she audits classes) she works as a nanny for an Indian family. Even so, the woman who hires her is condescending, and the child she must care for is a brat. She ultimately leaves. To tell how the plot is resolved would be to spoil the ending, which is a realistic yet satisfying one.
 
Nishant Batsha’s writing is commendable, combining excellent plotting in which there is little or no coincidence; most events seem to lead by way of a natural cause and effect to the next event. His characterization is satisfying, he releasing more and more information about characters as time passes. Readers have a sense of what they look like, who they are. He tackles the subjugation of one group by another (hinting of a genocide to come if the last 50,000 Indians do not leave the island when ordered to) with sensitivity and warmth. It provides a certain resonance for our own times, consider what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and what has happened to people of color in our own country for centuries. I wish Mr. Batsha good luck with Mother Ocean Father Nation. It is a new must-read.
 
NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Novel, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West 

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'The American' Never Changes

4/15/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.
​Henry James
Author of The American
​Born April 15, 1843
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H. James

My Book World

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James, Henry. The American. With an introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Dell, 1960 (1877).

Sorry to say, but this is the first book of Henry James that I have read. I expect to read others. Set mainly in Europe, the novel concerns the American character, under much scrutiny in the nineteenth century. Briefly, Christopher Newman, thirty-six, takes great advantage of his earned wealth as a canny businessman to travel the world, beginning with Paris. He is offered the opportunity to join a financially failing aristocratic family by marrying a young widow whose first marriage was arranged by her parents. After being smitten with this woman, Newman is then forbidden to marry her by her mother and brother. It may or may not have anything to do with a deep dark family secret. But the rest of the narrative is more or less how Newman comes to terms with not getting what he wants, having his heart broken, as we say.
 
The book’s language seems fresh, even now, almost 150 years after publication. James reverts to no clichés. His narration is a rich mixture of the American, the British, and French idiom. His characters’ names seem symbolic but not obvious: Newman (from a new country); Mrs. Bread (a servant who spends a lifetime nurturing the woman Newman is to marry); Bellegarde (nice guard, the family “guarding” their wealth, their name, their history). James may depend a bit too much on coincidence, in that often a character who has disappeared for a number of chapters seems to appear out of nowhere, particularly, when Newman leaves Paris for London and there runs into a young woman and her father who are present in the early part of the novel. This incident could occur, but it seems unlikely, yet as readers we buy it by way of the author’s convincing method. Although Newman is brash, he’s brash in his own manner, not being subject to stereotype, and his character does become transformed throughout the novel. By observing the best and worst of European and American cultures, he comes to see himself lodged in a larger context. He accepts the fact that with regard to this one event, losing his fiancée to a convent, he cannot control his life. Wealth means little, an ineffective salve for his eternal ache.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

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Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
The artist who really creates something creates it forever, but the scholar is at the mercy of expanding knowledge and changing habits of thought.
​C. M. Bowra
Author of The Romantic Imagination
​Born April 8, 1898
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C. M. Bowra

My Book World

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Quinn, Anthony. Freya. New York: Europa, 2017.

This novel, full of twists and turns, could perhaps, only have been written by a Brit—someone trained in reading and writing wordsmithing-worthy work. The plotting is superb. Characterization sparkling. Quinn gives readers the proper clues, subtle though they may be, and astute readers store them away and can say (or not), I knew it. I knew it was him. Two young women, the titular Freya and Nancy, meet at Oxford during WWII and develop a lasting friendship. But it is not an easy alliance. They both date the same Oxford boy who eventually marries his second choice of the two, Nancy. Freya realizes he is a scoundrel, but her friend can’t see it, not at first. There is a pattern of betrayal among these three characters, each deception crescendoing into a climax that may blow your bobby socks off. Spoiler: Only one false note seems to prevail and that is Freya, in the end, realizes she loves her friend, not in a platonic manner, but as a lover. This does not come out of nowhere; Quinn does subtly, perhaps too subtly, drop breadcrumb clues along the way, but there seems to be no inner struggle for Freya, no clues to the character herself that she could be a lesbian.

Others might argue that the author does inform. After all, Freya puts career ahead of all; she wishes not to marry (while having lots of sex with men) or have children; she blasts off into her life in any direction she wants with little regard for family or friends. She only has one other physical relationship with a woman, and it is in the context of a drunken orgy in which any woman might have sex with another woman. Again, very subtle. And perhaps it is as it should be. The period is late 1940s to late 1960s, a time of awakening, an explorative era in which women, even adventurous ones like Freya, may not know who they are inside and must be whacked up the side of the head by life itself to understand who they are. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

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Writing at One Hundred

4/1/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.
​Rachel Maddow
Author of Bag Man
Born April 1, 1973
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R. Maddow

My Book World

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Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-year-Old Author. New York: Simon, 2016.

The most fascinating aspect of this book may be indeed be Wouk’s age (b. May 27, 1915 and d. May 17, 2019, making him 10 days short of 104). One of the keys to his longevity may be that he never stops writing. In this slim tome, he relates the stories of each one of his books and how they come to be, but along with each one, he also shares where he is at the time. For example, while working on one novel for seven years, he and his wife buy a house in the Caribbean and reside there with their sons in paradise until he is finished. The book is a great way to become acquainted with his oeuvre if one isn’t already.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | *Anthony Quinn's Novel, Freya
(*British author, not the late American actor)

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Coppola: True to His Vision

3/25/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
If birds will abandon their young rather than miss the moment to begin a flight of thousands of miles, what migratory signals might our own cells still hold?
​Gloria Steinem
Author of My Life on the Road
Born March 25, 1934
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G. Steinem

My Book World

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Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Crown, 1999.

If readers are fans of both film and director Coppola, this book is an embarrassment of riches—at least as far as it takes us, through 1998 when the book comes out. One may not realize, for example, how easy the 1970s seem for Coppola, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The next twenty years are more arduous, and Coppola loses his credibility at times. He wishes to be more of an artiste, making films that appeal to him but perhaps not the public at large—or the studios. Even when he makes a big-budget, mass-appeal film, he is almost always at loggerheads with studio execs over scripts and, of course, money. He is a creative man, who also finances, for a time, his own studio, and even publishes a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, which still exists today—not to mention a number of other enterprises including a winery. He ends the nineties having made enough money to dig himself out of debt and establish an independent life. Although he continues to make film, it is at his own pleasure. One has to admire that.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's  Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author

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Untold Railroad History

3/11/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT:
Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.
​D. J. Enright
Author of The Oxford Book of Death
Born March 11, 1920
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D. J. Enright

My Book World

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Sedgwick, John. From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West.  New York: Avid, 2021.

If you’ve ever driven on an Interstate highway in the western United States—at posted speeds of 80 mph or faster, and people do zoom faster—it can seem as if you’re passing through a Disneyland sort of panorama. Mountains. Red arches. The occasional evergreen—with your AC cranked down low. In John Sedgwick’s book, however, one learns what it was like to traverse that terrain as a railroad builder, including the workers themselves.

Sedgwick traces the lives and work of two men—Strong erecting the Santa Fe and Palmer, the Rio Grande—who make “river to the sea” travel possible beginning in the late 1880s. This journey includes side trips by way of chapters devoted, for example, to the beloved Harvey House hotels, the first chain of its kind to provide bed, beverage, and breakfast along the way. Always, however, Sedgwick returns to the struggle these two men mount against the elements, terrain, and government (state and federal) but mostly against each other, to open up the West to the established civilization in the East. It is quite a ride, and Sedgwick ensures that you do not miss a minute of it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Diana Athill's  Somewhere Towards the End

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Splendid Is the Sun

3/4/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
​Khaled Hosseini
​Author of A Thousand Splendid Suns
​Born March 4, 1965
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K. Hosseini

My Book World

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Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, limns this portrait of two Afghanistan women that is both tragic and uplifting. Enemies at first, because they are married to the same abusive man, Mariam and Laila slowly realize their only way through life is to join together as friends. Both women are abused, one as a child, and both after their marriages. All this occurs over decades through the Soviet occupation and then the Taliban. The story ends just as the Americans enter the scene.

Surprises? The landscape. One is tempted to think that the entire country of Afghanistan is as dusty and dry as the movies and news videos that emerge, but Hosseini makes clear to readers that there are wet cycles, that there exist beautiful, mountainous vistas, as well. Another surprise: how misogynistic and cruel some Afghani men are, the women’s husband being a prime example. As the women toil to raise their children (a childless Mariam becomes a grandmother figure), they form a family structure of their own. After both suffering great losses, the story does end on a truly bright note: “But mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns” (366). Hosseini possesses a strong understanding of the human condition.
 
NEXT FRIDAY: John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West

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Taking Whacks at Lizzie's Legend

2/25/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
You go to school, you get a master's degree, you study Shakespeare and you wind up being famous for plastic glasses.
​Sally Jessy Raphael
Host of Sally (1983-2002)
Born February 25, 1935
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S. J. Raphael

MY Book World

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Robertson, Cara. The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story. New York: Simon, 2019.

If most readers are like me, what they know about one historical figure, Lizzie Borden, can be summed up in the following ditty:
 
Lizzie Borden took an ax,
Gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

 
After reading Robertson’s book, I see that there is so much wrong with this rhyming escapade. One, if  Lizzie Borden did kill her stepmother and father, Borden was never proven guilty. The actual perpetrator whacked Mrs. Borden only nineteen times. And certainly Mr. Borden did not receive forty-one chops. I had always assumed that Lizzie Borden was convicted and had served time in prison. But no.
 
This book takes readers through the entire trial process beginning with a detailed description of the murder scene. Briefly, someone axes Mrs. Borden and then an hour and a half later, when Mr. Borden has returned to the house, someone axes him downstairs as he’s napping on a sofa. The police investigators, lacking obvious clues, begin to suspect Lizzie, who remains almost preternaturally calm throughout the initial investigation, neither crying nor showing any sign of agitation, as Robertson writes (33). Andrew Jennings, Lizzie’s counsel, addresses the jury: “’your task is not to unravel the mystery.’ Instead, he said they must ask themselves: ‘Have they [the prosecution] furnished the proof, the proof that the law requires, that Lizzie Andrew Borden did it, and that there is absolutely no opportunity for anybody else?” (208). And throughout the past one hundred years there has existed such a great desire, on the part of some, to solve the mystery.
 
Near the end, Robertson summarizes these various interpretations that begin in the 1950s. For example, there is “the widely held speculation, which gained currency in the early 1990s, that Lizzie Borden committed the murders after enduring years of sexual abuse by her father [she was thirty-two]. The bedrooms that opened onto each other, the dead mother, the powerless stepmother, the special understanding between father and daughter symbolized by the ‘thin gold band’—all crystalized into a suddenly obvious solution, a solution that seemed to explain not only the identity of the killer but also the very brutality of the crimes” (284).
 
In any case, Robertson’s thorough research (some eighty pages of Notes) and lightly treading interpretation make for a fascinating read, particularly if you are a true crime fan, as I am. The book abounds with photographs, as well, mostly provided by the Fall River, Massachusetts, Historical Society.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

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American Dirt is Gold to Some

2/18/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
​Toni Morrison
Author of Paradise
​Born February 18 1931
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T. Morrison

My Book World

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Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York: Flatiron, 2020.

This novel, an Oprah Book Club winner, has a lot going for it. One, the novel takes readers to a dangerous place (actually many dangerous places) without having to leave their comfortable seats rooted on American soil. Next, it is well plotted. So much of fiction depends on believable coincidence, and sometimes writers stretch that credulity. But from the very beginning, Cummins lays out the plot perfectly, to the point that you say to yourself, Well, that could happen. Third, the author’s character development is superb. One feels what it would be like to have sixteen members of your family assassinated by a notorious drug cartel, grab your young son, and head out of Mexico to el Norte, seeking American dirt for sanctuary. There are many bad players in this novel, but the miraculous thing is (and so true in life, as well) there are many good characters who help this woman and son to piece together a new life after tragedy. The novel is well worth the time, well worth the tears you will shed. If only our tears could translate into help for these poor migrants who flee their countries for a better life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story

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Stories of Madness Everywhere

2/4/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
​Betty Friedan
Author of The Feminine Mystique
​Born February 4, 1921
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B. Friedan

My Book World

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Wolitzer, Hilma. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories. With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout. New York, Bloomsbury, 2021.

These thirteen delightful stories date from 1966 to 2020, from mid-sixties angst over the “woman’s place” to the best story I’ve yet read about the early days of the Covid pandemic. And yet, in terms of tone (humorous and sardonic) and theme (woman on the verge, but not, because the narrator must keep herself together), the stories all feel as if they could have been written at the same time—so unified is the writing. Wolitzer’s stories are a prose analogue to the perfect poem: they are compressed, metaphors are subtle, and each one brings pleasure that lasts.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?

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Lincoln: From Coast to Coast

1/28/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
​Colette
Author of Claudine in Paris
​Born January 28, 1873
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Colette

My Book World

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Towles, Amor. The Lincoln Highway: a Novel. New York: Viking, 2021.

​This charming novel tells of the ten-day adventure of two brothers who head out from Kansas to California to build a new life, following the death of their father and one brother’s release from jail. Yet their plans are thwarted when two fellow inmates hide in the trunk of the warden’s car (and hop out when the warden isn’t looking). Well, from there the adventure heads east instead of west. Perhaps the most captivating character is Billy, the eight-year-old brother who is smarter than any other character in the book but also the most disarming. It is his idea to travel coast to coast from New York to California on the “historical” Lincoln Highway. And without revealing any spoilers, the two brothers do eventually get to do just that—even if that journey doesn’t begin until the very last sentence. 
 
The Lincoln Highway is just as fascinating, though in different ways, as Towles’s previous book, A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles is a master at several things, all adding up to great writing. One, is characterization. Even characters with the smallest parts are developed so that readers know who they are. Second is structure. Towles’s intricate scaffolding keeps readers informed of where they are at all times in the novel’s unraveling, without making it too simple. By using multiple points of view, by way of a character per chapter, he, at times, overlaps the portrayal of certain scenes, from two different points of view—providing readers an interesting “truth.” By the way, the ten parts begin with Part Ten and work toward Part One. All POVs are written in the third person with the exception of one, Duchess’s, which may make him the main narrator though not the central character. And third, Towles’s dialog—represented by way of em dashes instead of quotation marks—harks back to the fiction of an earlier period. I’m not sure why Towles does it, perhaps to do just that, make the early 1950s seem farther back than they really are. Are we to expect Lincoln Highway II? It wouldn’t trouble me at all.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's  Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

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Survival Course for Actors

1/21/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I've just always been fascinated by what our belief can do, and what happens when we misuse that.
​M. K. Hobson
Author of The Ladies and the Gentlemen
Born January 21, 1969
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M. K. Hobson

My Book World

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Fischer, Jenna. The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide. With a foreword by Steve Carell. Dallas: BenBella, 2017.

I’m not an actor, but I imitated one in my youth, playing a duke in third grade, singing in a high school production of Damn Yankees, and marching down the aisle in college as part of the forest ranger chorus in Little Mary Sunshine. I loved Fischer's book because during the time it took me to read it, I realized I probably didn’t have what it would have taken to become an actor. At the same time, if I had attempted such a thing, I would so have used a book like this one as a guide.

Fischer addresses all the nuts and bolts of starting out: getting head shots done (professional ones, not phone pics), building a resumé, auditioning, even the machinations of how things work on a television or film set. Most of all, Fischer lets readers in on a little secret. Although the money can be great, the real joy of an actor’s life is ACTING. Becoming a person other than yourself. Developing a feel for all of humanity by taking on various roles. I would add that acting may be the most difficult of all the fine arts: memorizing lines (sometimes in a very short timeframe), bringing those lines to life in conjunction with a script and the ensemble, becoming (insofar as possible) that other person, taking direction, leaving your ego at the door, learning ancillary skills like singing, dancing, or fencing. If you wouldn’t do it for free (and millions of actors do), then you probably wouldn’t do it well in order to make a living.

Fisher doesn’t rely on her experiences alone; she peppers the pages with sidebars of advice from other actors: “I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera—both of which I did as soon as I left the Acting Company and was starving” (52).—Kevin Kline. And in the last section of the book, Fischer cites her interviews with four working actors, and they give, at length, their take on the profession by way of sharing with readers many more good tips. A must-read for aspiring actors and people who love Jenna Fischer (and I do) alike!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amor Towles's  The Lincoln Highway: a Novel

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Whom Do You Trust?

1/14/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them. 
​John Dos Passos
Author of U.S.A. Trilogy
Born January 14, 1896
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J. Dos Passos

My Book World

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Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise: A Novel. New York: Holt, 2019.

Boy! (or Girl!), what a ride this read is. Metafiction perhaps at its most confounding, at least for this reader. The first third of the novel seems to be a traditional high school love story gone awry, both David and Sarah soured on, yet still stuck on each other—set in a nontraditional performing arts high school. The setting is all important, as these kids are smart and are striving to become great actors—and are easily manipulated by adults they admire or wish to please. As near as I can tell, the story is set in a city like Houston (imagine primeval swamp with skyscrapers), though the name is never spelled out. Next third of the book changes to the voice of another young woman at that high school, Karen, a superficial friend to Sarah. The author does an odd thing whereby Karen sometimes speaks in first person, and sometimes talks about herself in the third person. Must be a good reason for this. Perhaps Choi is portraying the fracturing of this (by now) woman’s personality. In the third part, readers begin to realize something is off. The story strand they’ve been holding onto is no longer there. It turns out the first third of the book is really “fiction” that “Karen” has written about some real people whom readers now get to become acquainted with in the last third. To say more would create a spoiler, and I’m not going there. While there is much to admire about this award-winning book—its structure and its strong characterizations—it left me wondering if Choi was intent on entertaining herself or her readers. You be the judge.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jenna Fischer's  The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide

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One's Alma Mater in Literature

1/7/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
​Gerald Durrell
Author of My Family and Other Animals
Born January 7, 1925
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G. Durrell

My Book World

McCarter, Margaret Hill. A Master’s Degree. With illustrations in color by W. D. Goldbeck. Chicago: McClurg, 1913.

I read this book for two reasons. One, the novel is set in a place modeled after my alma mater, Southwestern College, in Winfield, Kansas. And two, I happened to have a copy I inherited from my grandmother, inscribed with her name and the date, “1915.” Some familiar spots on the landscape do appear in the book: the large “S” of sizable stones that must be whitewashed each year, the Walnut River Valley, Sunrise College substituting for my SC, the actual sunset hill of one hundred feet above ground. Otherwise, the novel is an overly sentimental rendering of one young man’s four years in college. The book is marred by the details McCarter leaves out: how many steps down Sunset hill to the bottom (77), how classes were conducted, where and how students lived, the topography to a greater degree (she does great watercolor washes describing spectacular sunsets). I did, however, get a feel for a certain type of student that both schools, fictional and real, seem to attract: a rough cut outlier, bright enough but unpolished, who arrives at commencement a much-changed person. One who will continue to grow and change throughout life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Suson Choi's Trust Exercise
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