• America,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  Psychology

    The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich **** (of 4)

    In a small farming town in North Dakota, sugar beet farming is almost as much everybody’s livelihood as keeping track of one’s neighbor’s business. Kismet, a high school senior, receives a marriage proposal from the star of the football team, Gary Geist. Crystal, Kismet’s mother disapproves, but Kismet is more like her mother than either wishes to acknowledge and will probably go through with the wedding. Gary is what you’d expect of an 18-year-old football player, which makes this book so captivating. Gary, Kismet, and their high school group of friends are on the verge of adulthood yet still saddled with the judgement skills of adolescents.

    Bad things, and good things, happen while we readers sit as silent flies on walls in half a dozen homes. Parents navigate their jobs, their spouses, their prying and supportive friends, their finances, loving their children, and letting them go. All of Erdrich’s characters, like all of us, are colored in varying and changing shades of goodwill and shortcomings. In the background, the call of agro-capitalism is keeping the small town alive while farmers lose topsoil and nature succumbs to the over-application of farm chemicals.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  Civil War,  FICTION

    Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke *** (of 4)

    The Civil War has come to Louisiana. Union soldiers are making advances, but slavery, and its cruelties persist. The experience of war, and its changing fortunes in 1863, are told through first-person eyes. Hannah Laveaux, a recently freed slave still living in the south, is accused of murder with only circumstantial evidence. She is supported by Florence Milton, an abolitionist from Connecticut determined to make life hell for enslavers. Pierre Cauchon is the local sheriff charged with enforcing the law, which means discounting most of what the enslaved and recently enslaved might have to say in their defense. Pierre answers to the truth, however.

    There are soldiers aplenty and considerable chaos and dislocation rampant in the swamps and plantations . Marauding troops are poorly commanded and consist of more irregulars than professional soldiers. Many of the people in this story have been abused and have lashed out with deadly force at one time or another. There are chases and dangers that keep the plot moving, but just below the surface Burke has us recognize some major themes.

    First, that much of the Civil War was fought over economics. A tiny wealthy class of landowners were willing to fight to the death to protect their enslaved source of labor. In so doing, owners of enslaved people degraded anyone with even tiny amounts of Black blood in their lineage. This helped ensure a class war between poor whites and Blacks that persists to this day.

    Second, in times of great crisis, love is a powerful corrective.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  NON FICTION,  Politics,  Uncategorized

    Keeping the Faith by Brenda Wineapple **** (of 4)

    What makes this account of the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee so compelling–in which a school teacher was arrested for breaking a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution–is its contemporaneity. The trial featured super-attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense versus William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a populist presidential candidate (three times) whose belief in his own rectitude and the infallibility of the bible was unshakeable. Bryan was a powerful orator with unwavering support from southern, rural Christian nationalists.

    Making the book even more insightful is the effort that Wineapple puts into contextualizing the trial. Fully, the first half of the book is setting the global and national stages. World War I had concluded in unimaginable carnage: more than 20 million dead, largely because of advances in science and technology that increased killing efficiency. Americans fought in Europe and emerged without benefits, feeding isolationism. Tech millionaires on the east coast were making money hand over fist. Elites, intellectuals, and college educated urbanites were condescending and dismissive of rural and southern Americans.

    The trial was a cultural and political clash of unparalleled magnitude pitting the ruthless progress of science and capital against the book-banning, but necessary return to faith of Christians looking for meaning in a world moving beyond their grasp.

  • America,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    A Childhood by Harry Crews **** (of 4)

    Published in 1978 and reissued in 2022, Harry Crews, an American novelist recounts the first five years of his life. He grew up in south Georgia, the son of dirt-poor sharecroppers in the 1930s. Stories flow from the pages (listen to the audiobook to get the full impact) like a stream meandering in the gulley at the edge of a sparse cotton field. One room shacks become theaters for orators and minstrels, itinerant salesmen and magical healers. Upstanding Black neighbors care for Harry while his family disintegrates, and a formerly enslaved Grandmother imparts the wisdom of a century (or however old she might be, she doesn’t know.) Pigs are slaughtered, hams are stolen from smokehouses by hungry neighbors, and broken down mules pull plows through exhausted soil. All before Harry turns five.

    Without electricity, and therefore without a television, radio, or addicting cellphone, Harry grew up with an extraordinarily creative imagination for play. His acumen as a storyteller is so confoundingly good, it is impossible to find the seams between the end of one tale and the beginning of the next.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Suspense

    The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich *** (of 4)

    In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, an American scientist, Charles Wilson, was working on chemical weapons in service to the CIA when he “jumped or fell” from an upper story hotel window. After the so-called “accident” the scientist’s family was compensated handsomely and quickly, but given few details. The body of the suicide victim was so mangled, they were told, they could not view it before its hasty burial. The Coldest Warrior does its best to put flesh on the bones of a skeletally true story by fictionalizing the CIA operatives most likely to have encouraged Wilson through the hotel window.

    Was Wilson a risk to counter espionage because he had been unknowingly given LSD by the CIA and had become mentally unstable? Was he having second thoughts about the validity of chemical weapons? Did the CIA do the right thing in covering up the story to maintain its advantage in the Cold War when communist aggression felt like it was spreading around the glove like an unstoppable infection? Or were the CIA’s actions, in the end, not very different than Soviet tactics involving sending exiles to Siberia?

    Paragraphs with scenery, weather, and outfits appear as stand-alones. Characters and their motives are a little difficult to keep track of. Nevertheless, there’s just enough action to provide inertia.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  Europe,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Polar

    The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides **** (of 4)

    In 1776, Great Britain’s King George sent his Navy to put down a rebellion fomented by British colonists on the eastern shore of North America. Simultaneously, he sponsored Captain James Cook to explore the unknown west coast of North America. Great Britain was especially interested in the northern reaches of the continent, hoping Cook could locate the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. For 300 years explorers had looked from the east. Why they thought a poke from the west would emerge in the Atlantic when no one had located an opening is one of those flaws in logic that comes with a 300-year quest.

    Cook was one of the most famous explorers of his era. He had already completed two global expeditions. His crewmen knew of his fame and kept detailed journals. His own notes were published. For more than two centuries, journalists and authors have chronicled Captain Cook’s life. Hampton Sides does the remarkable. He has read all the accounts and then written this book as if it were being reported in the newspapers. As readers, we live each day’s storms, make first contact with Polynesians, suffer the trials of monotonous food and freezing arctic temperatures, and the relief (if you’re a sailor) of landing on a tropical isle with luscious fruits and curvaceous females. Each event appears to happen in real time

    All the while, Sides overlays a 21st century perspective on the hazards and racism of colonization with the 18th century toughness needed to spend years at sea away from land, family, and home, instead living in tight quarters with the same handful of unwashed crewmen.

  • African American Literature,  America,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  History

    Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead *** (of 4)

    No one does a better job of capturing an era (early 1970s), a place (Harlem), or characters. New York City is on the verge of bankruptcy. Harlem and the South Bronx are in a perpetual state of fire as slumlords, in corrupt collaboration with city officials, set fire to apartments in order to collect inflated insurance policies.

    Ray Carney, a small time fence, and big time dealer of furniture–Can I interest you in this genuine leather Hathaway recliner?–comes out of retirement as a crook. He wants to please his daughter with tickets to the Jackson Five concert in Madison Square Garden. To access the hard-to-get ticket he exchanges favors with an old buddy with “connections.” His friends and acquaintances are people like Pepper, a quiet set of muscles who bangs heads for a living, and Zippo, a used-to-be firebug, burning things for joy, but today is a film school graduate, and Artiste making a Blaxploitation film. Chink Montague, Bumpy Johnson, and Notch Walker are Harlem mobsters fighting for control of city Harlem and the South Bronx. Black panthers and crooked cops strut the streets. Every character’s patter, eye twitch, and sidewalk shuffle is presented with perfect acumen. Don Graham, one of my all time favorite narrators, does the audiobook with brilliance.

    Whitehead’s description, I can tell you from having lived it, of 1970s New York City is so accurate that it feels like he is recording events with a monster sized VCR on his shoulder. His lovingly rendered accounts of 1970s oversized and overhyped furniture made me laugh aloud. Unlike his first book about Ray Carney, Harlem Shuffle, is a trilogy. The three parts of Crook Manifesto, give us an atmosphere that feels more real than life, but falters when a new story is told with only minimal relation to its companions.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  Creative Non-Fiction,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Politics

    I Hate it Here, Please Vote for Me by Matthew Ferrence *** (of 4)

    Matt Ferrence, a colleague of mine, and professor of English at Allegheny College, perfectly captures what it feels like to be a liberal in the sea of conservative western Pennsylvania. Matt ran to be the democratic representative to Pennsylvania’s state legislature. Our district not only has twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats but is so hopelessly gerrymandered as to make many races–local all way up to our Congressman–uncontested. Democrats don’t even bother to run. Or, as was the case with Matt’s candidacy, are offered up as sacrificial lambs with little or no support from the Democratic party.

    On the political front, Matt does a bang-on job of explaining the self-fulfilling calculus of the Democratic party. Why invest political capital in races that democrats are sure to lose. Democratic failure to engage serves to reinforce rural America’s sense that it is not just fly-over country, but that working class, white American’s are forgotten and overlooked by coastal urbanites. Matt did his best to formulate a campaign that spoke to the needs of locals, but was trounced in the election.

    Matt is from this part of Pennsylvania, more precisely from coal country south of Pittsburgh, and describes in painful detail the conflict of feeling tied to this land and yet all the while being cast as an outsider. He is, after all, from two hours south, not really from here. He is, too, an academic, a liberal, and a believer in poetry. His series of essay puts to words, with great elegance, my own feelings of dislocation. His landmarks, physical and metaphorical, are places I know all too well.

  • African American Literature,  America,  archaeology,  Book Reviews,  History,  NON FICTION

    The Ground Breaking by Scott Ellsworth *** (of 4)

    Scott Ellsworth answers a question I’ve pondered ever since I first learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. How come I had never heard of it before? Beginning the day after the flames died out, white Tulsans did everything they could to bury the evidence. Police gathered up photographs and hid them. Government investigations and after-action reports from the National Guard vanished. Bodies of the dead were buried in unmarked mass graves. Newspaper accounts were cut and taken out of library archives. By tacit agreement, white Tulsans refused to discuss it. Black survivors, like Holocaust survivors after them, were too traumatized to tell their children.

    Before the 9/11 attacks, the Tulsa race massacre of African Americans by a vigilante white mob was the worst attack on Americans in the country’s history (only if you overlook the decimation of Native American populations.)

    Ellsworth, is a white, very professional historian, opens the book with an impartial account of events based on credible evidence. His description is in contrast to white apologists who insist that deaths were minimal and roughly equal between Blacks and whites. Angry African Americans suggest that the invasion of the Greenwood District of Tusla was a pre-meditated land grab. Ellsworth lays out what can be said with certainty based on surviving testimonies and documents.

    The events were perpetrated by a riled up mob that ran out of control. Think about January 6 and the U.S. Capitol and shudder.

    Much of the book is dedicated to Ellsworth’s tireless search for mass graves of murdered African Americans purportedly dumped right after the riot. For more than two decades, Ellsworth scoured stories and archives, cajoled governments, and sought assistance from archaeologists to help him search and eventually dig through potential locations. Ellsworth is a strong proponent of the idea of paying reparations to the offspring of families whose lives and livelihoods were snuffed out by an unapologetic white Tulsa.

    His contribution was to find the bodies of some of those who had been disappeared so their remains could be returned and reburied with dignity. His other contribution was to write this book.

    The first person was identified on July 12, 2024, following the exhumation of African Americans from a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/tulsa-massacre-oklahoma-mass-grave-cl-daniel-rcna161599

  • African American Literature,  America,  Book Reviews,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  Prize Winner,  Speculative Fiction

    Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah **** (of 4)

    Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx are two of the greatest all-star fighters in history. Each woman has risen through the ranks of prisoners competing for their freedom. They have signed contracts to be contestants in for-profit showdowns arranged for regular broadcasts. Fans wear uniforms with their idol’s names. They follow every social media posting and watch special profiles of their heroes. They send fan mail and scream their heads off during matches. They weep over losses and glumly trudge to work when their heroes fail them. Televised fighting matches end when an opponent is killed.

    Adjei-Brenyah holds tight reins on prose that indicts America’s system of incarceration and its failed acts of correction. He brings to light a system that overwhelmingly and disproportionately jails people of color. He never excuses criminal behavior, but also clarifies that solitary confinement, tasing, and beatings by guards does not repair broken individuals, nor do the slightest toward preventing future crimes. He does it all by humanizing all-star fighters like Loretta and Hurricane who are dehumanized by their required acquiescence to their guards every request and who must live every moment under watch.

    Chain Gang is also an indictment of American football without once mentioning the sport. America’s most popular sport is akin to gladiatorial combat in Ancient Rome’s coliseum. A majority of players are black. All will be injured. Many will suffer irreversible brain injury and die early. The harder they hit one another the louder we scream in ecstasy. Chain Gang is an important read.