​Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.
 
At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:

In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)

As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47  North Dakota

​What I recall most about New Hampshire is that Ken and I were visiting in Massachusetts and decided to make a daytrip to NH, but a driving rainstorm kept us in the car, mostly. Sad to say that the other time we drove through New Hampshire it was on our way to Maine. NH—the Granite State and tenth least populous—was the ninth state to be admitted to the Union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1988.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of
​     Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
 
Unspoken indeed. Professor Anderson takes readers through the long yet decisive history of White Rage. It is a history that has lain directly beneath the noses of all Americans but one that has been covered up, ignored, or outright distorted, as well. Anderson revives for readers the five primary events in US history which incite and keep alive White Rage.
 
First, following the Civil War, former Confederates refuse actually to take Reconstruction seriously, and the North ignores the South’s refusal. Two, as a direct result of this action, freed African-Americans migrate north, only to find they are no more welcome there than they have been in the South. In places, rejection is even more hostile, more vitriolic. Three, White Rage is incited with the Brown vs. Topekadecision to integrate American schools, and at least two decades are spent in fighting or rolling back provisions of this decision—making most school districts as segregated as they ever were. Four, the author delineates how Ronald Reagan’s white-rage leadership reverses, insidiously, the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s. And last, Anderson reiterates what contemporary readers have witnessed for themselves, how the election of an African-American president, Barack Obama, once again incites White Rage, a backlash that results in the questionable election of Donald Trump. 
 
Anderson’s book reinforces the recent writings of other black authors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, for one. She doesn’t mention reparations, but my thinking is that our country will never be at rest, can never truly hold its head up among nations until it has, in more than a symbolic manner, attempted to make reparations to the descendants of slavery. It won’t be difficult to determine who qualifies. The government will be able to use the same visible trait it used to discriminate, and that is the color of one’s skin. Anyone with African-American lineage should qualify for funding for free education, help with daily living expenses until one is independent. Not only that, but the trillions of dollars that were accrued by this nation during slavery off the backs of black men and women, should be multiplied to, in some manner, make it up to our dark-skinned brethren. Their ancestors were captured on their native soil, mauled, maligned—treated more harshly than work animals—and the surviving generations of victims of White Rage deserve recompense. The one percent will have to pay their fair share to ensure that this happens, along with the rest of us, but it must be done. And it must be done with an amount of good will and love. The fires of White Rage must be quelled forever. Only then can we heal.

Weinman, Sarah. The Real Lolita: The
   Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel
   That Scandalized the World. New York:
   HarperCollins, 2018.

Weinman takes two narratives—one, the actual kidnapping case of Sally Horner, in 1948, and two, author Vladimir Nabokov’s shaping of his 1950 novel, Lolita—and weaves them into a single, seamless story. About halfway through the Weinman’s book, Sally Horner is rescued by the FBI and returned to her mother. Two years later, Sally dies, at fifteen, in a car accident, and I wonder, In what direction could the author possibly now take this book?
 
All along, Weinman has woven the saga of how Nabokov writes Lolita with the story of Sally Horner, providing textual proof by way of his notecards and other documents that Nabokov was indeed influenced by Horner’s story. To what degree foments a debate between Nabokov and the literati that Weinman covers extensively. She also develops the idea that Nabokov has long been fascinated by the narrative of pedophiles and the children to whom they are attracted; in Lolita he finally produces the right combination of elements, one of which is the deployment of an unreliable narrator to steer the reader away from what a sinister crime he is actually participating in. Weinman skillfully stitches together these two narratives and provides a long, relaxed denouement tying up all the loose ends: relatives affected by Sally’s premature death, the imprisonment of her captor, a discussion of the abuse of young girls and women, and more.
 
Because of her unrelenting research and attention paid to detail, Weinman provides a satisfying read combining the genre of true crime with serious literary discussion of Nabokov’s novel. It is one of the few books I’ve read this year that I have not been able to put down once started. It’s that good. 

I recently had the privilege of attending a high school reunion in which we celebrated the fact that we were all born during the 1947-1948 span of time, which now makes us SEVENTY years old!

​Below I feature a slideshow of a few of the photographs I made of our Class of '66 reunion. On Friday, October 12, we met at Minisa Park in Wichita, and on Saturday, we were fortunate enough to gather at the home of one our very own, who happens to live in a dwelling known as The Castle Inn Riverside (or the Campbell Castle). For years it was a B&B run by classmate Paula Langenberg Lowry and her husband, Terry, but it is currently up for sale, should anyone be interested in acquiring a home with real history. Thanks to Paula and Terry for their generosity.

Dear Fellow Travelers,

I offer you the second round of photographs from our November trip to Barcelona. This time I picture primarily the lovely people of that city, from those selling their wares on the street to those joining us as we stroll down one of the grand boulevards. Appreciate your generous comments from last time! RJ

​I remember little about Louisiana, except that my family lived in a forty-foot trailer in Pineville, located near the air base at Alexandria. I recall cypress knees that my father brought back to Kansas and sanded to a sheen and varnished, using one to make the base of a lamp, the rest surviving as sculpture occupying various places in our tiny house. I recall the Po Boy sandwich my mother adapted by using “French” bread you bought in those aluminum foil wraps (instead of baguettes), shredded roast beef, topped with a mixture of ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. This was as spicy as my parents could tolerate, even as young people. Their Kansas palates didn’t care for the traditional sandwich of fried oysters, vegetables, and coarse Creole mustard. The black-and-white photographs taken by a black box camera tell me more than my memory. There are surviving pictures of my sister, coy and cute, poised beneath a large metal bridge all by her lonesome. Shots of us playing in the dirt outside our trailor. Shots of my handsome soldier father in his uniform. 

I later visited New Orleans when as a member of the SMU seminary choir we toured there. I remember wearing the choir stole jauntily around my neck as if it were a scarf. Getting a little tipsy along with the other seminarians as we partied on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. My fellow students grinning as if viewing the real me for the first time. ¶ Louisiana is the eighteenth state. Its centennial was held in 1912, its bicentennial, well, you know. One forgets how long the state has been established, part of the Old World, as it were. 

​Mundy, Liza. Code Girls: The Untold Story
    of the American Women Code Breakers
    of World War II. New York: Hachette,
    2017.
 
Award-winning author Mundy writes of 11,000 women recruited in the early 1940s to help break codes of Japanese and German intelligence. The Navy recruits from exclusive women’s colleges in the Northeast, and the Army recruits from the ranks of teachers (mostly math but some who teach foreign languages), many of whom are disenchanted with their poor salaries and tough classroom conditions.

​This dictum is one that is repeated throughout the book until the very end. Even as some of these women survive into their nineties, even after the government grants them permission, finally, they are reticent to tell their stories. However, Mundy does a superb job of seeking out these sources, still sharp mentally, and getting their stories down. Mundy also combs written sources to fill out her epic narrative of quiet courage among these women—not only their work lives but their personal lives as well.
 
The code girls tackle many important difficulties, including the one of German U-boats sinking US ships in the Atlantic (as many as 500 by 1942). The women slowly but methodically solve this problem so that American ships are able to get supplies and matériel to troops in Europe. They are also paramount in intercepting official messages between Japanese and German leaders and confounding their strategies. Because of their unique skills the women make the work look far easier than it is. With a combination of innate ability and extreme dedication they are able to shorten the war and help save lives.
 
Every man should think about what it would be like to minimize his intellect, to hide what he does for a living, to keep it a secret for almost seventy years—and come to the conclusion that it is not fair. And never again in our history should women be called upon to keep silent in this manner. It’s not only unfair but it cuts in half the sources our country could be using to solve problems. This book is not only a tribute to these particular women but to the idea of women taking their true place in the world as multifaceted individuals.

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction