​Watson, Robert P. The Nazi Titanic:  The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II. Boston: Da Capo, 2016.

​Even as a child, I was a sucker for disaster reads, particularly those taking place at sea: Titanic, Andrea Doria, and others. Watson seizes upon the fame of the Titanic to make a case for his story about the German ship, Cap Arcona  (German for Cape Arcona). Without the Titanic reference in the title, the book might not have much shelf appeal. I’m not sure that there are too many real parallels between the two ships except that they both sank. 
 
Nevertheless, Watson’s book is a fascinating one about the extraordinary history of a German luxury liner that services travelers from the Baltic to South America from 1927 until 1939. At that time the Nazis expropriate the ship and transform it for war purposes. Its most important history comes at the end of its life, in 1945, and I’m not going to spoil the read by giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that the Cap Arconastory is one that has been overlooked, and we have Robert Watson to thank for keeping it and its historical significance alive.

[If you missed yesterday's post, please scroll down. This will make more sense.]
​​
​WHEN THE BOOK BEGAN
In 2012 I swabbed my cheeks to get a DNA readout from National Geographic Genographic Project. Briefly, the Project determined that my “deep DNA” was about 41% Germanic, 41% Mediterranean, and 17% Southwest Asian. The NGGP results piqued my curiosity about the three generations of Dutch (half), German (quarter), and Welsh (quarter) ancestors immediately preceding me.
 
HOW THE BOOK PROGRESSED
I wouldn’t know much about those people, except that my mother and to some degree my father saved everything, which brings me to the second stage of my work. Since my parents died in the aughts, I had stored away boxes and boxes of documents and photographs and negatives, some going back a hundred years or more. My intention was to toss everything I could, but I decided that I should examine every document before disposing of it.
 
WHAT I FOUND
Hundreds of letters my mother wrote (I’d never before read them); letters my grandfather wrote to his hometown newspaper from France when he fought in WWI, with naïve but fresh descriptions of the Atlantic, the British and the French people; letters to and from other relatives; a dozen issues of Jayhawkerinfrance, a newspaper published by my grandfather’s Kansas Army regiment tracing their movements through France; journals my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my great-grandmother kept, as well as my father’s journal covering the two and a half years he spent in the South Pacific during World War II. In addition, I located newspaper cuttings that pertained to many family members, including ornately written obituaries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I came upon creative writing; art work; photographs, and much more revealing the joys and heartaches of my family.
 
WHAT I DID WITH THE INFORMATION
First, I felt compelled to write about my nuclear family, portraying how my parents (both with rather nonnurturing mothers) raised my brother and sister and me. I felt compelled to tell about my sister with Down syndrome and how her disabilities affected our family life, both positive and negative. I included a chapter about the tiny house (750 square feet) where I grew up, almost a character in its own right, a dark dwelling where many sad yet joyous things happened. In another section I write about my parents’ youth: my mother’s life on a farm in Kansas; my father’s life in suburban New York City. In the next section, I write about my maternal grandmother and her parents, a great-grandmother who suffers the loss of her first husband to a flood. I write about my maternal grandfather and his parents, even my third-great-grandfather who hails from Wales in 1790 (consulting several books having been written about him by other relatives). I then turn to my father’s parents and their parents, who live in Breda, Holland for many generations before my grandparents emigrate to the US. From my memory and from documents and from extrapolation I glean instances of abuse, premature deaths that cripple the family, shotgun weddings, mysterious decisions (like not placing my grandfather’s name on his crypt in New York), psychological and physical illness, severed hands and time spent in hospitals, missed opportunities for education, and much more. In the fourth section I return to revisit ghosts of my sister and my parents, once again bringing up the past but in an atmosphere of forgiveness, seeing everyone in his or her full humanity. Acceptance.
 
WHERE I AM NOW
I have written four drafts. In the first I submitted, over a two-year period, one chapter per month, to my writing group. After studying their critiques, I wrote a second draft; this time returning to my research to include information that had, the first time around, seemed irrelevant. In the third draft, I finally abandoned the idea of directly addressing each ancestor and relied on first and third person. Now, most recently, I realized, finally, that the inner chapters were not presented in the most felicitous order, so I am reordering them and dealing with the ripples that such a change makes. I feel close to the end, having read the six-hundred-page MS aloud multiple times for rhythm and to eliminate clunky language, not to mention other errors that only seem to rise to the surface when read aloud (such as omitted articles or verbs). I am ready to give birth to this monster and hope to wrap things up as soon as the thing presents itself to me. I have never enjoyed writing a book as much as this one, but I am ready to be done and move on!
 
I shall keep you informed!
 
Take a look at members of my tribe in the slideshow below.

​Kirp, David. The College Dropout Scandal. New York: Oxford, 2019.
 
Before I left public school teaching in 2002, the district I worked for had implemented, at a low level, a plan to mentor potential dropouts. Kirp’s book argues for the need to have American universities tackle the same problem, citing the fact that, nationwide, colleges and universities support a 40% dropout rate. The rate is even higher among community colleges: 60% of students drop out before completing an associate degree.
 
Kirp visits a number of universities who have implemented innovative programs to retain more students: Georgia State University, the joint campuses of the University of Central Florida and Valencia College, the University of Texas, and an “elite” school, Amherst College. His research indicates that, in some cases, small adjustments can allow a student to finish a degree. One helpful practice is to provide small grants (not loans) during the last semester or two; it can make the difference of finishing or not. Another is for the institution to provide professional advisors (not professors) whose job it is to keep tabs on students, particularly those at risk of dropping out; students cannot escape contact. The institutions have even provided experiences that help students to think positively about themselves. Some forward-thinking professors use the Internet to provide lecture material to be read on the students’ own time; then they use class time to work more actively together. Other places provide accelerated tutoring to catch students up in, say, math in the period of one semester without having to slow down the student’s advancement through a program.
 
In essence, Kirp asserts that because of the great expense involved in attending college now, institutions of higher education owe their students something better than the old sink-or-swim or trial-by-fire approaches of the past. They should meet halfway these bright students who have met the entrance qualifications and make sure they have every opportunity to finish their schooling. Although I attended a small, private school (a half a century ago) and found great comfort in attending small classes led by professors who were highly accessible, with the practices mentioned above, I might have succeeded at an even higher level. There were times that I felt like dropping out, and only the military draft, the threat of being sent to Vietnam, kept me in school. I wound up getting a degree in music that I only used tangentially to earn a living until I left the field entirely at age thirty. Professor Kirp’s book is one all college professors and administrators should read and consider. After all, in corporate parlance, students are the “business” of higher education. They should be given every opportunity to succeed.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert P. Watson's The Nazi Titanic

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco, 2019.
 
So many books I would not hear of if I did not watch C-SPAN’s Book-TV on the weekends—and so much cheaper than an expensive subscription to something like Publisher’s Weekly. In hearing Benjamin Moser speak of his years of research on this biography, I knew right away I wanted to read his book. He has undertaken an encyclopedic yet nuanced telling of Susan Sontag’s life, both the good and the bad, and her works both the lauded and the reviled. Moser divides his monumental book into four major parts of many chapters of short to moderate length, allowing the reader to absorb the material instead of being overwhelmed by it. In addition to many varied sources, Moser utilizes much evidence from Sontag’s own voluminous journals.
 
He begins with important early biography because Susan Sontag’s childhood gels her personality into one that haunts her until the day she dies. Her mother is hardly a nurturing person and helps to germinate Sontag’s many insecurities, including her body, which is eventually consumed by cancer. While though she is a brilliant intellectual and contributes much to a broad understanding of literature as well as world politics, she can be childishly petulant and hold a grudge longer than most. She tries the patience of all the people whom she purports to love. In spite of all her faults, however, Moser paints a sympathetic portrait of his subject because she does seem to be a victim of her own literary success, as well as a victim of her childhood. Moser is able to draw from many sources, including Sontag’s own words, and distill the facts in such a manner that one can understand the legend in terms that are both realistic and reverential—a must-read for fans or those (like me) who would like to know more about the subject.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Israel, Lee. Can You Ever Forgive Me: Memoirs of a Literary Forger. New York: Simon, 2008.

This slim tome of 129 pages is both amusing and instructive. A woman with a biting wit, Israel writes both apologetically and un about her career as a professional forger. Of course, the author of three previously published books, Israel does not intend to take such a path. She always has earned her living as a writer—having never so much as waited on a table—and believes she always shall. She is shocked when any sign of a new book deal vanishes. As she and her cat become destitute, and, because she is such a fine writer and also a small collector of letters, she believes she can succeed in forging letters of celebrities. Yet, as she expands her business, she realizes she cannot do it alone and signs on a colleague who turns out not to be as tough as she is, nor as smart, and she is arrested. Due to having a competent attorney and a kind judge, her sentence is reduced to community service and a five-year probation. She lives out her life working as a copy editor for a children’s publishing company and dies in 2014. The film starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant seems to fulfill the truth of the book.

Cep, Casey. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. New York: Knopf, 2019.

This fascinating book unfolds by way of three sections. In the first, Cep brings to life a decades-old Alabama story of insurance fraud in which one Rev. Willie Maxwell begins buying up life insurance policies on relatives and others close to him. If that isn’t unusual enough, then each one of those persons begins to die in car “accidents” or by other strange circumstances. Even stranger, Cep makes clear, is that for some reason law enforcement cannot seem to pin these crimes on the prime suspect: Willie Maxwell. When Maxwell attends the funeral of the last victim, a relative of the deceased pulls out a revolver and kills the minister.
 
The second section of the book is about the attorney who not only helps the minister stay out of prison for years previous to the murder but who is so skilled that he gets an acquittal for the minister’s murderer. The attorney himself is a colorful figure, a liberal Democrat who throws caution to the wind and runs for office. After he wins, his actions are too liberal for some and he is harassed (in a dangerous KKK style) out of office, never running again. Along the way, he makes friends with author Harper Lee, known for her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
 
The reason the two become acquainted is that Harper Lee is attempting to write a book, à la her friend Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, about the Reverend (The Reverend also being her working title). After all, when Mockingbird was finished, Lee had little to do, and not yet much money, so Capote hired Lee as his assistant to help him research his book. And what a great assistant she was. Cep makes clear that, in all, Lee offers Capote at least 150 pages of typewritten notes. Her talent is combing the physical landscape for specific details; his has more to do with affect, interviewing the related parties, getting them to open up. Lee spends years apparently applying the same journalistic skills to the Maxwell case, but she ultimately abandons the book, believing she just doesn’t have enough information to make it a great book. Cep’s portrayal of Lee is one that readers may not be familiar with: an alcoholic (she eventually, unlike Capote, gets clean); a millionaire who lives, in some ways, like the poorest among her; someone who writes because she loves it, not because she must make a living from it; her own kind of philanthropist, taking care of people and causes she believes in.
 
Cep weaves together these three strands into one compelling narrative which contributes to even a larger picture: a last gasp of the Old South and its many, many contradictions. A descendant of a slave who allegedly kills members of his own race. A liberal attorney who attempts to evolve the white race in his home state of Alabama. And a writer, childhood friends with Truman Capote, who may be more Libertarian than Liberal, never really finding her rightful place in the American canon of literature.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Nakazawa, Donna Jackson. Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal. New York: Simon, 2015.



This important book states its expressed purpose early in the introduction:

​Author Nakazawa spends the entire book demonstrating how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can and often do, depending on the individual, have detrimental effects on a child’s physiology—not just his or her emotional or psychological well-being. In fact, the research she sites shows that such havoc can also damage one’s DNA. And in so doing, that broken DNA can be passed along to one’s children—setting up a chain of continuing abuse by which one damaged adult injures his or her own children and so on. The author makes clear that while ACEs are similar to PTSD, they are not exactly the same. Adverse events happening to the adult brain have a different effect than the ones that happen to the child’s brain, particularly if very young.
 
There are a number of compelling aspects to Nakazawa’s book. One, she brings to light a large number of case studies to make her point and follows them throughout. You begin to hear about “Kat” in the beginning and you learn in the end how her life improves. Two, the author cites a great deal of cutting-edge research on the topic. For example, studies show that women, by a significant percentage, who consult a doctor concerning their history of ailments are dismissed by male doctors as being flaky or hysterical (common treatment throughout history). And finally, the author devotes an entire section of the book to treatments, because with appropriate care and therapy, the brain, which is plastic, can be retrained. Individuals can and do recover from Adverse Childhood Experiences. I highly recommend this book to be your first if you are exploring the topic.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. New York: Random, 2019.

Jia Tolentino may be one of the most eloquent spokespersons for members of the Millennial generation. These nine essays cover topics, among others, concerning her informed opinions about the Internet and social media. Another essay about her short stint in a Reality TV show is more confessional in nature, and brutally honest: 

​My favorite essay may be “Pure Heroines,” one in which Tolentino takes a hard look at how girls and women are treated in literature. She goes deep on this topic, examining books that are from fifty to one hundred years old: writers like Maud Hart Lovelace (whom I read in elementary school), E. L. Konigsburg, Lucy Maud Montgomery. But this discussion is to lay the foundation for her look at more contemporary literature. Tolentino’s observation is that the girl-heroines, who are brave and outspoken in childhood, become hemmed in by the sexism and patriarchy in adulthood. 

​Yet I also enjoyed “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” and the final essay, “I Thee Dread,” in which Tolentino declares that in her young adulthood (born 1988), she and her partner (she plans never to marry) have attended forty-six weddings, expending over a period of nine years as much as $35,000 to gift their friends, arrange for transportation to the weddings, not to mention the “uniform” and finally hotel accommodations. But if one is spending an average of $30,000 for a wedding why not expect your guests to put out their share, as well, eh? Jia’s primary objection to marriage is the inequity that awaits a woman once she crosses the threshold into wedded unbliss. Here, Tolentino deftly references her title, providing a sort of recap of her entire book:

​After that, the bride’s life is over as she splits into two personalities: one who is “large and resplendent,” and one who “vanishes underneath the name change and the veil” (290). Tolentino nails not only this vision of marriage (the thesis is not original) but she does so for her generation of women who still seem to be falling into the trick mirror of self-delusion.
NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD

​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

Fieseler, Robert W. Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. New York: Norton, 2018.

On June 24, 1973, manager of the Up Stairs Lounge, in New Orleans, a gay bar, ejected a disgruntled and emotionally damaged individual for fighting, and he returned with a seven-ounce can of lighter fluid. Dispersing the entire container of accelerant, he set the entrance on fire which spread almost instantaneously, trapping scores of gay men and a few women upstairs. Because the establishment was cursed with a number of unchecked fire hazards, the blaze trapped and killed, in the end, thirty-two individuals, three of whom were never identified their bodies were so badly charred.
 
Journalist Fieseler does a persuasive job of tracing the history of this event, developing the characters of its key players, limns a portrait of the arsonist and his personal difficulties, as well bringing to light the tepid response of the New Orleans community, including a police department more comfortable taunting gay men and treating them like second-class citizens than attempting to conduct an investigation of the fire.
 
On that June night in 1973, I myself was twenty-five years old, not quite out of the closet, and because news of the fire only made it to print in the largest of national newspapers, I’m sorry to say I never knew of it until I read this book. Earlier, in 1971, I had visited New Orleans as part of a seminary choir tour, in which, without my young wife around, I drank, smoked (along with other seminarians), and tossed a choir stole around my neck like a feather boa, as I sauntered through the French Quarter. Halfway out the closet door, I would not shed my wife until 1975; I would not come out entirely until age twenty-seven, feeling as if I had lived a lifetime without knowing why. Reading now of the fire, I think, under different circumstances, I could very well have been one of those victims. The Up Stairs Lounge, after all, was also home to MCC (Metropolitan Community Church), a national movement of gay Christian congregants. Not by the farthest stretch of the imagination—had I concluded my seminary studies at SMU, and had I accepted a job in NO—might I have been present that disastrous evening.
 
Fieseler has earned our gratitude for bringing to light this long-forgotten story and for bringing it before the public’s attention when, once again, fragments of our society are acting with hatred against anyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male. As with any holocaust, every story must be told.

Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical
       Novel: Essays. Boston: Houghton, 2018.

​This collection of essays is a staggering one. In the way that fiction writers link short stories, Chee links essays to explicate how he works as a fiction writer. His metaphors are simple yet profound. His advice is wrenched from the heart, and yet at no time does he allow sentimentality to interfere with his message. The entire collection—like a group of short stories, like a novel—possesses a narrative arc that is subtle, inching readers toward the climax, easing into a quiet denouement. The book seems nonlinear, but Chee glides readers from a few youthful months spent in Mexico becoming fluent in Spanish, to his older youth in college with Annie Dillard as a professor, to his maturation into an astute, caring professor of creative writing, to the publication of his first novel and how it explores and ultimately exposes the biggest secret of his life. 
 
The Publishing Triangle, a long-established organization for LGBTQ writers based in New York, recently awarded this work the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. I hope, as a tour de force, it will win even more accolades in the coming months or years. Chee is a remarkable writer, and anyone who takes a seminar from him ought to feel fortunate.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-41  Nevada

​Posey, Parker. You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. New York: Blue Rider, 2018.
 
I must preface my remarks by professing that I am a HUGE Parker Posey fan. I luh, luh, love her work. I can’t say I’ve seen ALL of her films, because sometimes they’re not easy to find, but I have to declare that whether Posey is the kooky character in the Tales of the City series or featured in one of her other roles, she is a brilliant character actress who prefers those parts to leading ones; at least that is the impression she gives. Yet I believe that because of her power as an actor her best roles may yet lie ahead, if she can find the right properties. So say I.
 
Unlike many actors, who have suffered untold damage in their childhoods, Posey seems to have flourished because of the strong relationships with family members, particularly her parents, who encourage her in her creativity. Yet Posey does not make acting sound easy or even appealing. Rather, she shares in great detail what many of her film shoots are like, the actors and directors with whom she associates herself for weeks or months. The squabbles, insightful observations about the business of making film.
 
What a fun yet significant read! Part scrapbook, part photo album, part Dear Diary, part tell-all, part recipe book, this memoir reads as if it is a monologue right out of one of her films. At turns, kooky, serious, honest, even a bit mean (in a kind sort of way):

​These passages seems so indicative of Parker Posey’s life: somewhat carefree, devil-may-care-what-happens-to-me, opinionated, fearless. Sort of her generation’s Tallulah Bankhead; in fact, I could so see her playing Bankhead in a biopic. Hey, Parker’s agent, are you reading this? Tallulah Bankhead, you hear!
 
Yet, Posey reveals what may be her true view of acting:

​The conceit that formulates this book is that Parker is seated on an airplane and sharing her life with a seatmate. Occasionally, the reader forgets, until once again, Posey throws in a second-person address to this imaginary person. I say imaginary  because I believe this person is really dead, or at least never talks back to Parker Posey. The format may or may not work, but Posey’s life is certainly quirky yet profound enough to sustain my interest for over 300 pages! 

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-38  Maine