• 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,  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.

  • 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.

  • Book Reviews,  FICTION,  Memoir/Biography,  Prize Winner,  Speculative Fiction,  Uncategorized

    Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro *** (of 4)

    Spooky. Kids in a residential British school called Hailsham are raised to be donors. Their days are filled with what you would expect: studying, confidential discussions among friends, bullies, first loves, rules and rule breaking, secrets after dark, favorite and despised teachers (called guardians), and the slow dawning of adulthood and the ensuing responsibilities.

    The world is seen through the eyes of Ruth and her two best friends Tommy and Kathy. Ruth recounts her memories from their earliest days in grade school through their adult years as full-fledged donors. We learn, as Ruth and her peers slowly learn, what it means to be a donor.

    I spent most of the book certain that the book was an allegory. Perhaps it was a story of how we are all trained by guardians to donate our lives to a Neo-economic system that saps our bodies as well as our souls. Or, maybe Never Let Me Go is an indictment of factory farmed animals. Or, just maybe, it is really just a very eery story about kids who don’t fit in with the rest of society and whose lives culminate in mandatory donations. Ishiguro is a Nobel prize winner in literature and his characters are perfectly rendered. His meanings, however, are by his own description, left to the reader.

  • Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  Judaism/Jewish Culture,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein **** (of 4)

    If ever there were an experiment, god forbid, that could demonstrate how we are born with inbred sexual identities and sexual predilections, this would be it. Abby Stein was born a boy into an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Her fundamentalist sect of Judaism is so strict that all members are forbidden to access the internet and are barely taught the fundamentals English, learning Yiddish and Hebrew instead. Young boys are committed to a lifetime of Torah study. They attend Yeshivas (religious schools) 10 hours a day (or more) six days a week and learn no science or social studies and barely any of the other topics required by state curricula. They live the lives of their 18th century ancestors down to the clothes they wear, the language they speak, and the foods they eat, utterly and completely apart from mainstream America.

    And yet from the days of her earliest memories, without any knowledge that homosexuality even existed, no less such a phenomenon as transgenderism, Abby knew without question that she was a girl. She was raised as a boy, had a penis, eventually grew a beard, and fathered a child, and yet she always knew she was a girl. Becoming Eve is an extremely well told story of escaping fundamentalist Judiasm and a male body and the accompanying losses that come with such a transition. It also confronts the notion headon that any amount of grooming of young people might persuade someone to change their gender (take that Ron DeSantis and your fellow Book Banners), nor any degree of counseling could reverse someone’s sexual identity. If you were faced with years of counseling to the contrary, would you change your gender?

  • Book Reviews,  Humor,  Judaism/Jewish Culture,  Memoir/Biography

    Feh: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander *** (of 4)

    Feh, roughly translated from Yiddish, means yuck. It’s what you might say to yourself upon opening a tupperware container of leftovers that has sat on your counter unattended for two weeks. It is also how the author, Shalom Auslander, sees the world. Political divisions, internet conspiracy theories, twitter, climate change, systemic racism, indifference toward the homeless and dispossessed, Covid, and a news cycle of doom that spins every faster are all Feh. Everything about Auslander’s life is Feh. On the upside, Auslander is laugh-aloud funny. Intermittently, he is also a brilliant philosopher, literary critic, and analyst of religious dogmas. He drops pearls of wisdom so delicately they land gently upon felt cushions and simply lie there glowing. Then he has you laughing. There’s a rimshot for a well-timed joke every few pages. If only the package was not such a mountain of unrelenting depression.

  • Book Reviews,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Science

    Burn Book by Kara Swisher ** (of 4)

    You can take my review with a grain of salt: everyone else loves this book. Swisher has been reporting on advances in technology since the first personal computers hit the market. She has spent considerable time with Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. She predicted that everything, everywhere, would be digitized, and then monetized. Burn Book is a history of the PC, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Google, and so on. She also reminds us of all the epic failures. Anyone recall My Space? Netscape? Vonage? Are Snapchat and Twitter going to be around a lot longer?

    The point of her book seems to be to make sure that readers are fully aware that all the tech bros are awkward, juvenile, and male. She also wants us to know that she is, and always has been, smarter than all of them. The one distinction seems to be that she knows she is arrogant and condescending, unlike most of her subjects. It is a little bit fun to relive the ups and downs of tech throughout our lifetime, but Swisher doesn’t offer any insight. So who cares if she tells us how smart she is and how socially inept the bros are?

  • Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  History,  Memoir/Biography

    The Pigeon Tunnel by John LeCarre *** (of 4)

    Nearing the end of a long and terrifically prodigious career as a writer, Le Carre assembled here the true events that undergird his novels. He revels in his encounters with world leaders and events of the 20th century. He meets Yasser Arafat amidst heavily armed bodyguards, dines with Soviet exile Andrei Sakharov, skis with the actor Alec Guinness, takes a field trip to meet African warlords, hob knobs with KGB intelligence officials, tours the killing fields of Cambodia, interviews jailed terrorists, kvetches at length about his low-life father, and generally downplays his early days as a spy for British intelligence as being insignificant.

    Every one of his stories is compelling, and quite often humorous, for their air of authenticity and authority. Each vignette is assembled with the care and precision of a master novelist. Yet, because Le Carre has passed his entire life as a fabulist — first as a spy and then as a novelist — lingering above each tale is a question of whether every event is reconstructed with full honesty. Near the end of the book, Le Carre hints that he is not a totally trustworthy storyteller, and a posthumously published biography claims that Le Carre used his skills as a liar and deceiver to philander with multiple mistresses. But, you know what? It doesn’t matter: The Pigeon Tunnel is a great read. The audiobook is read by the author, who is a master of impersonations, bringing his counterparts to life as he meets them one by one.

  • America,  Book Reviews,  History,  Law,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin ** (of 4)

    Toobin can be a captivating writer; he is one of the greats at uncovering the backstories of a variety of criminals and noteworthy trials: OJ Simpson, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump, the Gore vs. Bush election, Bill Clinton, and the make-up of the Supreme Court.

    Which is why it is surprising that he missed the mark with this book. No question that Timothy McVeigh was one of America’s most successful and by Toobin’s accounting, one of its first domestic terrorists. On April 19, 1995 he drove a truck bomb to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up, killing 168 people including 19 children in the building’s daycare facility.

    He was motivated by rightwing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and the conspiracy theories that circulated amongst politicians. Shock jocks and their supporters pedaled lies about government overreach and suggested in rather stark terms that only patriots and other defenders of the second amendment could save the nation. Toobin draws a direct and clear line from McVeigh to the treasonous revolutionaries that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Men and women who attacked the Capitol were also spurred forward by a new generation of right-wing conspiracists and a new generation of communication, social media, but recycled the same dogmas that led to McVeigh.

    It is an important arrow pointing at how dangerously thin the line is between election deniers, second amendment fanatics, Newtown skeptics (Alex Jones acolytes) and their proclivity toward violence.

    But Toobin makes two mistakes. The first is subtle. He implies that McVeigh was the first right-winger of his ilk, overlooking McCarthyism, Silver Shirts, American Nazis, the KKK, and White Supremacists some of whom have been around since colonists considered Native Americans subhumans. The line leading to January 6 is twisty, but continuous, and a lot longer than Toobin is willing to admit. In a single toss away line he points to the Tulsa Race massacre of 1921 as having killed as many as died in Oklahoma.

    The first half of the book is a thorough biography of Timothy McVeigh from birth to bombing with thorough detailing of the years, months, days, and minutes leading up to the bombing. Then, because he cannot resist describing courtroom proceedings, Toobin repeats everything we have already learned as it was presented by prosecuting and defending attorneys. One recounting, or half the book, would have been enough.

  • African American Literature,  America,  Book Reviews,  FOUR STARS ****,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION,  Short stories

    How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

    Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who can be identified from a distance as “other” in an otherwise liberal setting, not all is well.

    Walker’s essays are short, often funny, and almost always leave you with an underlying feeling of anxiety. When Walker’s child is accused of being “stinky” in elementary school, Walker wonders if the accusation borne of home-taught racism, and does he already need to explain to his son what he is about to experience, or just a schoolyard taunt? When Walker shops at his neighborhood Whole Foods, white women instinctively seal up their purses, pull them from their shopping carts, and draw them close to their bodies. When his child suffers a seizure, and then another, and he sits in a panic in the ER for an eternity, while others appear to be treated with greater speed, is it because his is the only Black family waiting, because by rules of triage, there really isn’t much to worry about?

    This book was nominated for the National Book Award for good reason. The author makes us tighten up our shoulders with every page and we have to recognize that the fear he has engendered in us, accompanies him all the time.