Fall of Giants -- a Book Review

    So, I was on a walk with my walking group. We're lucky enough to live in a town where there are little free libraries scattered through the parks and neighborhoods.

    If you know me, you know I always stop to see what's on offer. And on this walk I saw Winter of the World by Ken Follett, one of his I'd never read. So, of course it came home with me. 

   Wikipedia identifies Follett as a Welsh novelist working in the genres of "thriller, spy  novel, and historical fiction." Years ago I read his Eye of the Needle, a spy novel, and then The Key to Rebecca, also a spy novel but with some historical underpinnings. Neither actually my cup of tea, but both well-written.

    Then I read Pillars of the Earth, the first of his Kingsbridge series. And I was hooked. It is set in the 12th Century. Then World without End with descendents of some of the Pillars characters, and then A Colume of Fire set in 1558 through 1605. (After doing a bit of research to write this review I see that I've got a couple more of them to read -- a prequel and the fourth in the Kingsbridge series.)

   

    On closer examination of the book from the Little Library, I discovered that World in Winter is the second in a trilogy.

    

        The Century Trilogy

    Of course it is, and I can't read it without having read the first, so, I went online to my local public library and downloaded the first book in the trilogy to my eReader -- The Fall of Giants. 

     

The Fall of Giants

    The Fall of Giants follows families from five cultures -- Welsh, English, German, Russian, and American -- actually more if you count the ruling and working classes.These families travel their intersecting paths from pre-World War I, the holdover days of feudal Europe through the struggle for rights for women and the working classes complicated by World War I and the Russian Revolution to what they hoped would be a fairer and freer world without war. 

    It begins in 1911 in Aberowen, a small, Welsh mining town. Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams, son of a union leader, goes to work down in a coal mine on land owned by the Fitzherberts, an aristocratic English family. Billy and his sister Ethel carry the Welsh common people's arc. 

    

    The Earl Fitzherbert and his sister Maud are the main characters in the English arc of the story. He the traditional capitalist/patriarch. She the entitled but modern woman suffragist.

    

    Fitz's friend from school, a proper upper class English school, Walter von Ulrich is a German nobleman, albeit the modern son of a traditionalist father.

    

    Fitz's wife Bea is a Russian princess, by blood and attitude. And the two Peshkov brothers were orphaned by Bea's brutal father.

    

    And Fitz's friend Gus Dewar is a wealthy, well-educated, son of a U.S. Senator. Dewar is a close aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an American-style upper class, white Southerner. Dewar is the modern American amid a traditionalist family and society.

    

Follett not only writes easily recognizable characters, he also writes vivid scenes of the times and places. His Lady Maud Fitzherbert gives us the venue of the war-ending Treaty of Versailles.

In The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles:

    "This was one of the most grandiose rooms in the world. It was the size of three
    tennis courts in a line. Along one side, seventeen long windows overlooked the
    garden; on the opposite wall, the windows were reflected by seventeen mirrored
    arches. More important, this was the room where in 1871, at the end of the
    Franco-Prussian War, the victorious Germans had crowned their first emperor
    and forced the French to sign away Alsace and Lorraine. Now the Germans
    were to be humiliated under the same barrel-vaulted ceiling. And no doubt some
    among them would be dreaming of the time in the future when they in turn
    would take their revenge. The degradation to which you subject others comes
    back, sooner or later, to haunt you," Maud thought. "Would that reflection occur
    to men on either side at today's ceremony? Probably not."

The Fall of Giants continues a few months after The Treaty of Versailles is signed.

    A few months after the peace treaty is signed? In June of 1919 communications were not so difficult as to delay the end of the war. No. Follett gives us the reason. The Russian Revolution. The Allies, especially the European Allies, felt threatened by the Bolsheviks. The English Government secretly, without telling Parliament, sent troops to Russia to aid the White Russians (the Royalists) against the Bolsheviks who were being celebrated in England by working-class Brits. 

   

     Follett's characters Billy Willams and his fellow soldiers from Aberowen, Wales, without being told where they were being sent, found themselves delivered by ship to Vladivostok, the major Pacific port in Russia, to fight in the Russian civil war. They were there even after World War I itself was over. 

    Billy observed, "People took little notice of the Aberowen Pals marching through the town. There were already thousands of soldiers in uniform there. Most were Japanese but there were also Americans and Czechs and others." 

    (Since reading this, I have not been able to find information about whether or not the United States Congress approved sending U.S. troops to fight in the Russian Civil War.) 

    This was especially interesting to me. My maternal grandmother's brother and my paternal grandfather's brother-in-law told stories about fighting in Siberia during World
War I. I could never understand why. Now, thanks to Fall of Giants, I do.

    

    Something else I learned (and I did fact check it) from Follett's Fall of Giants through his character Lady Maud Fitzherbert: 

"The Mail [a London newspaper owned by Lord  Northcliffe] had conducted a hate campaign against the thirty thousand Germans who had been living in Britain at the outbreak of war—most of them longterm residents who thought of [England] as their home. In consequence families had been broken up and thousands of harmless people had spent years in British concentration camps."

    

"[Northcliffe’s] talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper," she observed."

It seems The United States did not fall far from its British parent tree.

    Follett ends Fall of Giants perfectly. The Earl Fitzherbert meets Ethel, a woman, his former housekeeper from Aberowen, the daughter of a labor union officer at his mine, now a Member of the House of Commons, and her son on the stairs at Parliament.

    

    "Fitz’s expression was thunderous. Reluctantly he stood aside, with his son [and heir, the Viscount Aberowen] and they waited, backs to the wall, as Ethel and Lloyd walked past them and on up the stairs.”

    

    

Where the Crawdads Sing

 

A book. A movie

Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 book by Delia Owens was her first novel. It topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list for 2019 AND for 2020. Okay, so Where the Crawdads Sing is not on this week's New York Times Best Sellers List, but it was on that list for more than 168 weeks.

Owens has a BS in zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in animal behavior from the University of California at Davis. Her studies of African wildlife behavioral ecology have been published in such scientific, peer-reviewed journals as Nature, the Journal of Mammalogy, and Animal Behaviour.

Although most of her field work was done in Africa, it's safe to say that she knows where from she speaks in describing the world of Where the Crawdads Sing. And she describes the saltwater marshes of the North Carolina coast beautifully.

In the Prologue she sets the scene, and the scene is as great a part of the story as the human characters.

     "Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows

     into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, 

     and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace--as though not built to fly...."

     "Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in 

     clammy forests. [....] There are sounds of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is 

     quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the 

     rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life."

 As in all good murder mysteries, Owens gives us a body. 

     "On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp.... 

     A swamp knows all about death, and doesn't necessarily define it as tragedy, certainly 

     not a sin. But this morning two boys from the village rode their bikes out to the old 

     fire tower and ... spotted his denim jacket."

But is it murder or is it suicide? If it is murder, who dunit?

Kya's story begins the first of two timelines in 1952. She is six years old, the youngest of five children.

    

     "The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines 

     with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet except for the low, slow flap of 

     the heron's wings lifting from the lagoon. Kya [...] heard the screen door slap. Standing 

     on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of 

     worn-out suds."

The sound of that screen door shutting was her mother leaving. In the following weeks, Kya's oldest brother and two sisters left, too. Her brother Jodie, seven years older than she, was the last to leave her alone with their father.

 

     "She knew by the way [Jodie] spoke that Pa had slugged him in the face."

     "'Kya, ya be careful, hear. If anybody comes, don't go in the house, they can get ya there. 

     Run deep in the marsh, hide in the bushes. Always cover yo' tracks; I learned ya how. And 

     ya can hide from Pa, too.'"

When I first heard about this book, I was skeptical about so much of the story. A six-year-old left in the care of a physically abusive, alcoholic? The local authorities were aware of the situation and they did nothing?

My initial skepticism of that part of the story evaporated pretty quickly when compared with my own experiences. 

I worked for Oklahoma's welfare department in the 70s, some twenty-five years after this story starts. I'm sorry to say, things were not much different. We had a sexually abusive family. The abuse was documented by older children who had gotten themselves out of the home. They provided us with photos. We took the photos to the local assistant district attorney and were told he didn't want to look at them. Nothing was done. And that was not the only time families were treated differently by the law. Not because they were "swamp rats," like in North Carolina, but because they were "white trash."

Then there was the question of how a six-year-old could survive without parental care and guidance. 

For a period of time after everybody else left, her father stopped drinking so heavily. He taught her about fishing and operating his boat. He had been injured in World War II and received a weekly disability check from which he gave her small amounts of money to buy food and fuel for the boat. But he took to drink again, coming home less and less often until he just never came home again.

The people in the village, for the most part, ignored her or ridiculed her. Over the years, when the authorities took note of Kya, they attempted to literally catch her and put her into "normal" situations like school or a group home. Attempts, she saw as trying to trap her like an animal.

There were a few people in the Barkley Cove community who did befriend her, albeit mostly from a distance -- Jumpin' and Mabel, the African American couple ran the town's equivalent of a convenience store. They treated Kya with kindness and respect and provided what parental guidance she received. Tate, the son of a fisherman, taught her to read and provided her with books from the library. And Chase Andrews, whose daddy owned the local Western Auto store, fed Kya's dream of being accepted in   Barkley Cove.

The salt marshes of North Carolina were Kya's natural habitat. Kya was smart. She learned about life, about survival, from those saltwater marshes. Kya mostly did what she could figure out on her own to do. And, like her mother, she was a talented artist, drawing and painting and describing her world. 

The second timeline weaves in, around, and through Kya's life. It starts in 1969 and covers the investigation of Chase Andrews' death, Kya's murder trial, and the rest of her life. 

The local authorities decided that the manner of death of Chase, a football star and the only child of the closest thing to society in Barkley Cove, must be murder. His status in the community must surely make him immune to suicide, and he was too athletic to just fall from the old fire watch tower. Someone must have lured him up there and pushed him to his death. Chase's clandestine relationship with Kya, the swamp girl, while planning to marry a more acceptable Barkley Cove girl, made Kya the most obvious perpetrator. Her low status, also made her the least able to defend herself -- a slam dunk conviction for the prosecutor and a satisfying solution to the mystery for the townsfolk. 

And now it's a movie!

Where the Crawdads Sing, the film is visually stunning. It was filmed in the saltwater marshes of Louisiana, and they are beautiful. Filled with the natural world, neither the book nor the movie mentions dangers from animals native to saltwater marshes -- I'm thinking, mosquitos and ticks and alligators, all of which can cause death either by disease or predation. Both the book and the movie focus on the most dangerous animal in nature. Man.

Where the Crawdads Sing, the movie, deserves very high marks. 

Kudos to the Producers led by Reese Witherspoon. They knew what they had and produced a movie faithful to the original story. 

To Polly Morgan, Director of Cinematography, for the lush photography.

To Screen Writer Lucy Alibar for fitting the story into the movie's two hour and twenty-five minute time frame.

To Casting Director David Rubin for putting together this wonderful cast.

To the actors including, but not limited to 

           

             Jojo Regina as Little Kya                            Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya

  
                 Sterling Macer Jr.  and  Michael Hyatt                                Harris Dickinson

                           as Jumpin' and Mabel                                                as bad boy Chase

and David Strathairn as Tom Milton

Kya's defense attorney

And certainly, high marks to Director Olivia Newman who knew what she had when the actors gave her good performances.

Both the book and the movie are excellent. Truth be told, you can only read the book. Or you can only see the movie. Each is worth your time on its own. Me? I'm glad I did both.

Negroland, a memoir -- a book review

 

The book cover

Margo Jefferson, do you know who she is? 

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995 for her book reviews and cultural analyses in The New York Times. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) in 2016 for Negroland a memoir which was also short-listed that year for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, an annual British prize for the best non-fiction in the English language. And  this year, 2022, She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. (After reading the book, I googled her, a little research before writing the review. And all I've got to say about these honors is that I am impressed with the organizations. They had the great good sense to recognize and reward her work.)

How did I find out about this book? Since I seldom read reviews before I read the book or watch the movie or listen to the music. My daughter recommended it. While attending a writing program at Skidmore several years ago, my daughter heard Ms. Jefferson read a passage and thought I'd enjoy it. It didn't hurt a bit that one of the blurbs on the dust jacket is from Isabel Wilkerson, an historian whose work I very much admire. My daughter was right.

Okay, so you've read Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming -- if you haven't, do yourself a favor and read it. You can get it free from your local public library. And read my January 14, 2019 blog post reviewing it. (It's available in my blog's archives. Also free.) 

They grew up in the same city, Chicago -- our Michelle and Margo -- but a generation apart. Both are African American. Both are intelligent, well-educated women. And both have achieved great success. Dispite this common ground, I think you'll find Margo Jefferson and Michelle Obama to be as different as a Live Oak and a Coastal Redwood, both beautiful and hardy enough to not only survive but thrive in this hostile world.      . 

Michelle Obama grew up in a working class neighborhood amid a close, extended family. She attended neighborhood schools and was encouraged to get the best education possible. 

Margo Jefferson grew up in a wealthy, highly educated family, her father a doctor and her mother a social worker. They lived in an upper class, becoming integrated, neighborhood. They had famous people from the sciences to the arts as guests in their home. Her parents had a cabin cruiser docked on Lake Michigan. She describes themselves as "The Third Race ... poised between the masses of Negros and all classes of Caucasians. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity." They were the Negro Elite.

Growing up white in Oklahoma at the same time Ms. Jefferson was growing up in Chicago, I knew nothing of The Negro Elite. 

Obama's growing-up world was very like my own and that of my family and friends. I was the daughter of an electrician. My friends included the daughter of Cuban refugees (they had been wealthy and influential before Castro took over), the daughter of an art teacher at the local college (he may have been a professor, that was before I was familiar with academic ranks), the daughter of a highway construction crew boss, and the daughter of the local veterinarian (actually, he got his DVM at the University of Pennsylvania. Who knew that was, and is, an Ivy League school?) The son of a former Governor/US Senator was in my typing class, but I doubt he knew my name. To be honest, I knew nothing of The White Elite.

The one thing Margo Jefferson and I had in common was learning about the world through literature. All kinds of literature -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism and all their various permutations. During her sophomore year in highschool, she was introduced to the essay, "challenging essays -- by E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and James Baldwin."

Jefferson describes the first time she read Baldwin. She quotes from Notes of a Native Son, "Many Thousands Gone."

    The story of the Negro in America is the story of America--or, more precisely it is the story
    of  Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. [The
    Negro in America] is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we 
    helplessly battle."

At that young age, she began her life of critical analyses of the Word. "Who is this 'We'?" she asks. And answers, "It's you, white readers. But what of We, his smaller band of Negro readers? ...the Negro that so many Negroes like me dread having plural relations with."

Back to Baldwin, she quotes him "One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds."

Then she says "'One': a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than 'we.' An 'I' made ubiquitous. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation."

She, that highschool sophomore, continues,
    "Close the book. (Breathe deeply.) James Baldwin is proclaiming right of entry with
    every possessive pronoun, integrating America by means of grammar and syntax. No
    demonstrators hosed into the air and crashing onto pavements, no tear-gassed bodies
    coughing and twisting, no children our age dressed in exhaustively clean, pressed clothes
    to walk shielded by armed guards into schools built to deny them."

You know how some times you are moved by the perfect, most beautifully honest music or painting or movie or a play that gets life so right you see the world differently. I think that's what the best art forms done well do. The artform that has the strongest effect on me is the written word in my language, English. As I read, the words are experienced inside of me, not on a stage or screen across the room. Strong words, direct words put together in ways I'd never thought about, explode in my head, sunbursts glinting off shards of old understandings scattering into the darkness of the past.

In Negroland a memoir, Margo Jefferson did that for me. Over and over in its pages. It is the best  memoir I've ever read.

Margo Jefferson

Truth to tell, I just like the looks of her. She could be in our walking group. And I bet she'd be a great addition at coffee as my friends and I conspire to save the world.

Becoming by Michelle Obama -- a review

Michelle Obama's memoir is perfect to start 2019. It's open and eye-opening. This book scatters seeds of Yes-we-can, gently telling us little bits about people who are not to-the-manner-born, but learn, do well, and make a difference. It's her view of herself and her experiences and of the people around her that strengthens my optimism about America. And about humanity in general. Optimism that is being sorely tested.

Wikipedia identifies Michelle Obama as "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is an American writer, lawyer, and university administrator who served as the First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017." This paragraph identifies her as her, not just the wife of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, first black President of the United States. Not just as first black First Lady of the United States.

More than half the book is about her life before her husband ran for president. And that life was amazingly normal, working class, American. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the City of Chicago at a water treatment plant. And her mother, Marian Shield Robinson was a stay at home mom until Michelle went to high school. Both were born in Chicago to people who'd come North during the Great Migration. (I knew nothing about the Great Migration until I read Isabel Wilkerson's book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, published in 2010 by Random House.)

Like my own family, there were only two children -- Michelle and her older brother Craig. Being less than two years apart, they were always close (also like my brother and me, although I'm the older one.) The Robinsons maintained close ties to their extended family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and -uncles, and lots of cousins. All, of whom lived close enough to get together easily and often. And, let me tell you, from personal experience, a small family of four doesn't feel small at all with that many kin close by.

Michelle says she wasn't really aware of racial problems until she was older.

When she was small, Michelle's South Shore neighborhood was more diverse than my white one was. Oklahoma was determinedly segregated.

Bryn Mawr, her elementary school was considered one of Chicago's best public schools when she started kindergarten there. The children in her class picture are described by a classmate as "five little white faces and 23 shades of brown faces and one Middle Eastern face.”

By the time she finished the 8th grade, there were only brown faces. The children may not have questioned where their white and wealthier classmates went, but the grown-ups knew what was going on. At least some did.

When Michelle was entering the seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a newspaper widely read by the African American community ran an OpEd describing Bryn Mawr as a "run-down slum" governed by a "ghetto mentality." Michelle's school principal, Dr. Lavizzo wrote his own letter to the editor in which she says he made it clear that "he understood precisely what he was up against. Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear."

She says "There were predatory real estate agents roaming South Shore, whispering to home owners that they should sell before it was too late, that they'd help them get out while you still can." They used the word everyone was most afraid of -- 'ghetto' -- dropping it like a lit match."

In Oklahoma City, it was 'busing.' My parents bought it and moved us to the suburbs.

Mrs. Robinson did not. Michelle describes her mother -- "She'd lived in South Shore for ten years already and would end up staying another forty. She didn't buy into fearmongering and at the same time seemed equally inoculated against any sort of pie-in-the-sky idealism. She was a straight-down-the-line realist, controlling what she could." A yes-we-can kind of mom.

And one thing Mrs. Robinson could do was to lobby for "a special multigrade classroom ... grouping students by ability rather than by age -- in essence, putting the brighter kids together so they could learn at a faster pace.

 Dr. Lavizzo's background is a yes-we-can seed. The multigrade classroom "was the brainchild of Dr. Lavizzo, who'd gone to night school to get his PhD in education." Night school.

The importance of education is emphasized throughout this book. Michelle's brother Craig was offered basketball scholarships to the University of Washington and Princeton. Washington's offer was a full ride. Princeton would cost $3,500 per year. Although Craig told his father he'd rather accept the University of Washington offer so it wouldn't cost the family anything, Mr. Robinson, being a yes-we-can kind of father, wouldn't hear of it. He wouldn't let his son choose based on saving them money. They'd figure out a way. And Craig chose Princeton, no doubt, breaking trail for his sister.

Michelle was a determined student. She was salutatorian of her high school graduating class. Her inspiration to follow Craig to Princeton? A high school counselor told her that she wasn't the sort of student to go to Princeton. Hah! Another yes-we-can seed. She graduated cum laude from Princeton then went on to Harvard where she got her law degree. And, yes, she was a normal, working class daughter who achieved a big salary at a prestigious law practice back in Chicago which she needed even though she continued to live with her parents in South Shore so she could pay back her college loans. And that's where she met Barack Obama. She was his mentor. It was part of her job to lure him to work for the law firm when he graduated Harvard Law.

As it turned out, he lured her away. And into the White House.

There is so much in this book. So much. So much. Becoming is a good read, an inspiring read. I could fill pages with Michelle Obama's words. Her fears. Her aspirations. The places she went and the people she met.

And she explained something to me that I did not understand. Why, or at least part of why, we could celebrate electing an African American man to be our President, a face to prove that America truly does hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. From that to the shameful situation we have now.

Here's what she said:
         "For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we
          ourselves were a provocation. As minorities across the country were gradually
          beginning to take on more significant roles in politics, business, and entertainment,
          our family had become the most prominent example. Our presence in the White
          House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a
          reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and
          deep and as dangerous as ever.

        "We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on,
          as gracefully as we could."

I do believe that we, as a people and as a nation, will survive this regressive period in our history and again move forward. We will work toward the American dream of true freedom and equality of opportunity for all.

Yes we can.

Higher Authority -- A Book Review

I don't usually read books that scare me -- not because I don't scare easily, because I do. But usually I know that a book is going to be scary and I don't start it. Like, I don't read Stephen King or Tom Clancy -- not because they are not good writers. They certainly are. Somehow King's horror, as far-fetched as it is, is still viscerally believable and his books are too long for me to complete before it gets dark. Tom Clancy, on the other hand, is not far fetched enough. The wars he starts in his books seem altogether too likely.

Higher Authority is the third in Stephen White's Alan Gregory murder mysteries. I started reading them because a friend recommended them and White is a Colorado author. Sort of a hometown boy, dontcha know.

Dr. Alan Gregory, the usual main character in White's mysteries, is a clinical psychologist in Boulder, Colorado. The main character in this book is Alan's fiancee, Lauren Crowder. Crowder is a particularly interesting character because of her power and because of her weakness.

She is a hard-driving lawyer and as Deputy District Attorney in Boulder, she is unafraid to go after the bad guys no matter how threatening they may be.

Her weakness? She has multiple sclerosis. To protect her tough-on-crime persona, she hides her frail health. She neither seeks nor graciously accepts sympathy even from the few who know her condition, including Alan Gregory whose proposal of marriage she accepted but about which she still harbors serious misgivings.

Lauren joins forces with an old law-school friend to litigate a sexual harassment suit in Utah against a highly respected member of the Mormon Church. Danger and death ensue.

White's website introduces the plot of Higher Authority this way.

"The sudden death of Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch propels his successor, Lester Horner, first into Hatch's Senate seat and then on to become the first Mormon associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Carried along with Horner is Blythe Oaks, an ambitious and intelligent woman who is also Horner's favorite law clerk and fellow Mormon.  But Blythe's reputation—and, by extension, Lester Horner's—is threatened when a female former employee accuses her of sexual harassment and career sabotage."

Are you confused yet? I surely was, because, at least as of this moment while I am writing this blog post, Orrin Hatch is alive and well holding his seat as Senior Senator from the Great State of Utah. He is Senate Pro Tempore making him third in line to the United States Presidency.

Which brings us to the book's fear-factor for me.

I knew very little about the Mormon church. My only experiences with Latter-day Saints have been with parents of my daughter's friends, with writer friends, and with seat-mates on airlines. And, of course, Orson Scott Card one of my favorite writers. Then there are The Osmonds. All enjoyable and not the least bit frightening.

I knew a little about the founding of the Mormon religion and their self-exile to Utah to escape discrimination and mistreatment first in New York, then Ohio, and finally Missouri.

I did not know so, so much. Of course, this book is fiction, but White seems to have done his research well. His book plays to my one great faith -- that all religions develop fanatics and the element of secrecy in any religion or religious order is the cloak that hides those fanatics. That is frightening to me.

Not to mention that the real, still living, Orrin Hatch holds a potentially more powerful political position than does any single member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Let me just say this book is very well written and its plot believable enough that I must have gained five pounds in the three days it took me to read it.

House Made of Dawn -- Book Review and Memory

image from Paperback Swap

I depend on friends, relatives, and NPR interviews and reviews, for book recommendations. So when a writer friend (Dan Alexander, you know who you are) asked me via email if I had read House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, I had to confess that I had not. Nor, in fact, did I even know it existed.

The N. Scott Momaday, I knew was a poet. A poet I met some thirty-three or -four years ago. Back when I was studying poetry under Dr. Norman H. Russell at, what was then Central State University, and is now the University of Central Oklahoma.

Dr. Russell was a botanist and a well-respected Native American poet. He taught me two very important concepts. 1.) Science and art are not mutually exclusive. 2.) There are poets alive and well and still writing poetry.

Anytime one of Dr. Russell's fellow poets passed through Oklahoma, he dragged them to our poetry classes. Among them: Joe Bruchac a Native American from New York (who knew there were Indians in New York?), the Western poet Paul "Red" Shuttleworth (who kept Irish Wolfhounds as muses), the Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Heap of Birds (who also wrote poetry), and N. Scott Momaday.

When I met Momaday in Dr. Russell's class, he had long since received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and was "widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream." (Wikipedia) But I met him as a poet and did not know about this novel or its attendant acclaim.

House Made of Dawn is the story of Abel, a young man raised in the old ways of his native Pueblo by his grandfather. The structure of the book reminds me of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Like the character Olive Kitteridge, Abel's story is told by the people around him who tell a little of their own stories.

And it is like Carmac McCarthy's Border trilogy about the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest, but with a greater fullness of language.

A young Pueblo man returns to his home from World War II. Abel is changed by that wrenching experience as must all the young men be who return from war no matter what community they were born into. The dislocation by war makes Abel an outsider in his own Pueblo. He no longer fits, or maybe the Pueblo no longer fits him.

Things happen and he is removed again from his home and eventually relocated in Los Angeles. He is relegated to the Native American community which is itself a community of outsiders within the resident white majority. Abel does not fit even in the Los Angeles Native American community, because it is an amalgam of many disparate nations and cultures unreasonably lumped together as Native American. Each of them different from his own.

Abel's friend Ben Benally describes Abel's situation in Los Angeles "You have to get used to everything, you know; it's like starting out some place where you've never been before." And "Everybody's looking at you, waiting for you . . . . And they can't help you because you don't know how to talk to them. They have a lot of words, and you know they mean something, but you don't know what and your own words are no good because they're not the same . . . ."  Even though those words are all English.

In the end, for better or for worse, Abel returns to his Pueblo and his grandfather and the old ways.

Like other poet/novelists Momaday created this novel in the language of poetry. And it is beautiful.

The character Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, describes perfectly the feeling of the first Kiowa man to step out onto the Great Plains: "There is something about the heart of the continent that resides always at the end of vision, some essence of the sun and wind."

That is the prairie that I know and love. A sense of vastness washed by the sun and the wind.

I've read several reviews of House Made of Dawn. Some describe it as disjointed, hard to follow. And it did take me a bit to get into the rhythm of the story-telling. This is not a book to be read while you watch TV. Giving it your undivided attention, though, will return great rewards.

Dead Irish --- A Book Review

Dead Irish 

This is the first of fifteen crime fiction books featuring Dismas Hardy by New York Times Best Selling Author John Lescroart. And I've read them all.

In the beginning our main character, Dismas Hardy, describes himself as a bartending, divorced ex-marine, ex-cop, ex-attorney thirty-eight-year-old who doesn't know who he is.

Sounds like almost every hard-nosed, plain-spoken, crime-solving Vietnam veteran ever, doesn't it?

Then his boss's brother-in-law comes up dead. A probable suicide. Other people end up battered or dead. All connected. Or possibly not. And Dismas is among the living again.

The plot has twists and turns and enough suspects to keep me turning pages. Even this second time through, and I know whodunnit.

Named for the good thief crucified with Christ, Dismas Hardy is floundering. It's been ten years since he lost his baby, his wife, and any future worth caring about. He keeps his few friends at arms length for fear of losing yet more. He avoids anything that might rekindle any passion for life. Hardy has two interests -- competitive darts and an old but well-cared-for iron skillet.

Hardy's best friend and boss -- a buddy from Marine days in Vietnam -- Moses McGuire owns the Little Shamrock, a typical San Fran neighborhood bar where Hardy's flotsam self has washed ashore.

Frannie Cochran (nee McGuire) is Mose's much younger sister. It's been just the two of them since their parents died and Moses loves her more than anything in the world. When her husband Eddie Cochran is found dead of a gunshot wound, the plot's afoot. The McGuires and Cochrans are Catholic so suicide presents a certain complication. Not to mention that life insurance doesn't pay out on suicide.

No one who knew Eddie Cochran wants to believe he could have killed himself. He was too idealistic. He had plans. He loved his wife. They had a future. But there's nothing at the scene that substantiates any other possible cause of death. McGuire asks Hardy to look into it.

Abe Glitsky is a hard-working homicide detective with San Francisco's finest. He and Dismas were partners back in Hardy's days as a cop. Their friendship is still there, but it's been allowed to lie fallow. Naturally, Hardy contacts Glitsky for help.

Abe is up for promotion and a much needed raise to support his growing family. There are three men in the running for that promotion, a white man, a Latino, and Glitsky who is half-black and half-Jewish. Now we've got department politics in the mix. Abe didn't catch the Cochran assignment. The white detective did. Which puts Glitsky in the position of stepping on a fellow officer's toes if he helps Hardy. And that officer is prickly enough without the competition.

As events unfold, even Hardy's ex-wife Jane and her father Judge Andy Fowler show up .

What Lescroart does so well (and why I read him) is his character development. Each of them is unique and recognizable.

These people will show up in the next fourteen books. And by the end of Dead Irish, that's what they are. People -- not characters. They grow and change. Friends die. Babies are born. And you're left looking forward to the next book in the series.

A Man Called Ove -- Book Review

So would you like to know how to pronounce this man's name? http://bit.ly/2fd53xy  Check it out.

I think this is the best book I've ever read. Funny and beautiful and sad -- all tear inducing. That's the problem with reading. You read a really good book and get all teary-eyed and you can't see to get past the funny, beautiful, sad pages. At least when it's a movie, the movie goes on. Or an audio book.

But I read the book. My friend Lou handed the book to me after our walking group on Tuesday, November 22. Her only caveat was that I return the book to the library before December 5th. (Thank you, Lou!)

I am not a particularly fast reader, but this book I finished this morning -- two days after receiving it. Yes, it's that good.

A Man Called Ove (by Fredrik Backman, translated by Henning Koch) is about a difficult, lonely man who has lost the only person who ever understood him, his wife Sonja. He has decided to commit suicide and join her. Such a simple, honest decision. One would think.

But he is surrounded by humans. Totally incompetent, treacherous humans. These humans, completely innocent though they may be, inevitably bumble and stumble their way into his life and interfere with his plans.

Ove's attitude toward everything and everyone except his Sonja is summed up in the following paragraph. He's driving the everything and everyone in his Saab.

          "Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to
     a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realizes
     that the worst-case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.
     After this insight he reduces his speed and increases the gap significantly between his
     car and the one in front."

Backman's (or the translator's, I'm not sure who to credit here) language is pristine. He employs Hemingway's mot juste to say the most with the least and best words. And interestingly, anyway to me, he tells much of his story in present tense. The present part of the story. The rest he tells in the more commonly used past tense. (I know. I know. Only you grammar Nazis will even notice.)

Ove's present is explained as we read, discovering his past. As clearly and gracefully as a river winding its way through the countryside to the sea. And as inevitably.

I finished this book with my own cat annoyance snuggling in the throw on my legs (as long as I didn't try to pet him. My cat doesn't like to be petted. He bites. Rotten cat.)

Definitely Five Stars out of Five!

Gone Girl -- A Book Review

This blog post was written July 8 in the foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. It should have been hot and dry. It was not. The temperature was 60 degrees and it rained. Not typical Denver-heavy-mist rain, but legitimate drops that made pattering noises on the roof and splashed into the birds’ water bowl.

I should have been working. Novel number two was sitting in my head and languishing on a memory card, waiting for me. There was a piece of short fiction parked on my laptop wanting finishing. I’d committed to writing at least one tweet a day.

And, if that weren’t enough, there was laundry to be done. Instead of doing any of that, I read.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, published June 2012. Wikipedia says it is a “thriller” and “an example of the literary subgenre called Domestic Noir.” A term that was first applied to fiction in 2013 by Julia Crouch, an author described as “the queen of domestic noir.” She defines it as “a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants.”

The same view of hearth and home held by many street cops, male and female. Retired New York City policeman, Steve Osborne, in his nonfiction TheJob: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop, recounts one of many domestic violence cases he's worked. “The wife explained that she was having a heated argument with her beloved, and sisters being sisters – especially in the heat of battle – they stuck together. And when the second woman butted in, the husband went ape shit. . . . he grabbed a large kitchen knife from the sink and carved the two of them up.”

I know I’ve said before that thrillers are not my cup of Earl Grey. And they’re not. Nor do I pay any attention to the New York Times Best Sellers list. But I do take recommendations from friends and family seriously and my daughter said Gone Girl would be interesting to me because of its construction. She was right.

It begins with a husband coming home to discover his wife missing. The story then unfolds alternately, through his viewpoint and the wife’s diary entries. Is she alive? Or dead? Did he do it? If she is alive, how long will she survive?

The plot is exquisitely crafted leaving the reader not knowing what or whom to believe. Twists and turns hardly describe the hairpin curves and backtracks we’re led through. The fear factor, rather than proceeding up and down like a roller coaster, drops us from one frightening crest only a little way down before jerking us to the next greater height. Again and again. Never letting us relax.

I won’t tell you how it ends, but I will say it’ll make you grateful for your own problems.