Tag Archives: book review

New Release: Frieda’s Song

It’s clear that Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s imagination is captured by historic buildings that hold the unique and intriguing stories of the lives indelibly imprinted within them; it’s also clear that she is just the one to tell those stories. Her first novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, focused on the role of the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania as the holding location for a group of high-level Japanese prisoners at the end of World War II.

FRIEDA’S SONG, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Apprentice House Press

In Campbell’s latest novel, Frieda’s Song, the building is a cottage, designed in the 1930s by and for renowned German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland; here, she lived and worked for more than twenty years.

The cottage serves as the anchor point for a parallel narrative in which we follow Frieda’s story and, 70 years later, that of therapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick, who are renting the cottage even as the acreage of the old sanatorium is being given over to high-end suburban housing.

The novel opens with Frieda’s first-person narration, as she is forced to abandon her successful hospital in Heidelberg in 1935 as the Nazi noose tightens, leaving for America with her best friend and fellow therapist Gertrud even as her mother and sisters refuse to leave Germany. We meet her younger, estranged husband Erich (who is destined to become even more famous a therapist than his wife), and learn that Frieda is fated to grow deaf, just as her mother and father had—an impossible handicap for a psychotherapist.

Shifting into the near-present day of 2009, Eliza drives to pick up Nick from summer camp, where he’s been kicked out for starting a fire. A single mother, Eliza is drowning in the deep end of attempting to raise a sullen, isolated teenage boy, her training as a therapist seeming to offer no help to her in her own situation — especially since she has committed the cardinal sin of lying about Nick’s paternity. She finds herself talking to Frieda’s portrait as her own form of therapy, and later discovers a trove of Frieda’s journals, the source of that first-person account. Eliza takes comfort in Frieda’s quiet influence as she attempts to steer a course for both herself and Nick.

Campbell lets us in to Nick’s head, too, which is a jumble of anger, confusion, and inarticulate longing that he tries to assuage with matches and razor blades. For the reader, experiencing the world through Nick’s eyes makes it even clearer how little Eliza is truly seeing and hearing her son.

This concept of close, active listening — of the healing value that it offers, and of the damage caused by its absence — is one of the novel’s continuous threads. Frieda is painfully aware of her encroaching deafness, when her entire practice is based on establishing trust with patients through careful listening.

For her part, Eliza is stymied by the check-the-box, quick-turnover approach to therapy mandated by modern insurance guidelines. There is no time to listen to patients deeply, practically no time to listen at all. With Nick, unfortunately, she is taking shortcuts as a parent that she does not countenance with her own patients, both forgetting how to listen and practicing the age-old parental dodge of willful blindness.

As the title tells us, Frieda’s Song is steeped in music as well — both listening and playing, and the healing properties of both. Her song, by the way, is Mendelssohn’s “Lost Happiness,” part of his Songs without Words. Frieda is able to recapture some of her lost happiness in the success she has with her Chestnut Lodge practice.

For Eliza and Nick, recapturing the equilibrium in their relationship demands hard truths and a very literal trial by fire.

Campbell delivers a compelling story filled with captivating, humane, and thoroughly human characters. It’s intriguing to realize that Campbell was herself a psychotherapist practicing in Rockville, who lived close enough to the grounds of the sanatorium to be awakened by sirens and the smell of smoke the night it burned down in 2009.

And, not only had she studied Fromm-Reichman’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy early in her career, she later realized that Frieda died in her Rockville cottage the same day that Campbell, her parents, and her brother moved into their new Rockville home in 1957. It’s as though Frieda were making sure that Campbell would be the one to tell her story, knowing that she would be in very capable hands.

2020: Reviewing a Year in Reviews

Leave a reply

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.

In a year like no other in living memory, many of us turned to the comfort that books can offer when the world is too much. Unlike many of my friends and social network connections, I continued to go into an office every workday throughout the year, so I never found myself with the kind of enforced leisure time that so many encountered during 2020, but I still found myself burrowed in books—either reading them or listening to them—whenever possible, and I will own up to using them as an escape mechanism. Most I read to review, either in my bimonthly column for Late Last Night Books or for my regular reviewing gig for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In the hotly contested election year that was, my reviewing skewed heavily political, starting with Unmaking the Presidency, which was released on the first day of the January 2020 impeachment trial—and before virtually any of us had heard of the other issue that would consume our year, namely covid—and ending with What Were We Thinking, my review of which came out on election day. For the Independent’s “Best Book I Read in 2020,” I made a hard choice and said mine was OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?, “because America needs to re-learn its civics, and this is a great place to start.”

In a bit of serendipity, I read three books in row that fit neatly together in a feminist trio of echoed themes: Recollections of My Non-Existence, Too Much, and Why Fish Don’t Exist. In other parallels, The Doctor of Aleppo reminded me of earlier Elliot Ackerman novels, while Ackerman’s latest novel, Red Dress in Black and White, had stunningly eerie parallels to the moment into which it was released, at the start of this summer’s protests for racial justice.

So not even the fiction I read this year was exactly escapist. Let us hope that 2021 doesn’t need as much of an escape, that we can emerge from our protective crouch and rejoin the world around us as vaccines take hold and help us to beat back the darkness. And, as this column is posted on Inauguration Day, I also send out thanks for a speedy return to empathy, understanding, and competence. And may your 2021 reading bring you joy just for itself, just as it should be.

Books I read to review, with links to the reviews:

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos Lozada

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

The Boy in the Field, Margot Livesey

OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy is Supposed to Work, Ben Sheehan

It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, Stuart Stevens

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why: Essays, Alexandra Petri

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman

Red Dress in Black and White: A Novel, Elliot Ackerman

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, Valerie Trouet

Galileo and the Science Deniers, Mario Livio

Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, Rachel Vorona Cote

Recollections of My Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit

Little Constructions: A Novel, Anna Burns

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

Coventry: Essays, Rachel Cusk

Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, Jaquira Diaz

The Doctor of Aleppo, Dan Mayland

The Ghost in the House, Sara O’Leary

Known By Heart, Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Books reviewed together in my column Brief but Indelible

Midnight at the Organporium, Tara Campbell
How to Sit, Tyrese Coleman

Books Reviewed together in my column 2020 Summer & Fall Reading Round-up

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, Bea Koch
The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, Denise Heinze
When We Were Young and Brave, Hazel Gaynor
Blacktop Wasteland, S. A. Cosby
The Vultures, Mark Hannon
They’re Gone, E. A. Barres

Books I read to prepare for my interview with Louis Bayard at the virtual 2020 Gaithersburg Book Festival:

Courting Mr. Lincoln
Roosevelt’s Beast
Lucky Strikes
Mr. Timothy

Books I read or listened to for sheer pleasure:

Salt the Snow, Carrie Callaghan
The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown
Milkman, Anna Burns
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

Books I read and chose not to review:

Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen
A Woman Alone, Nina Laurin

Books still in progress at the end of the year:

Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow
Blood Dark Track: A Family History, Joseph O’Neill
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Book Review: Enemy of the People

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 21 September 2018.

Book Title: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

Recently, I had occasion to use a quote from Washington Post executive Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” He uttered those words last October while he and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were at the National Press Club filming an edition of “The Kalb Report” with the host, veteran journalist and author Marvin Kalb.

The topic under discussion was freedom of the press, and Baron was responding to the idea that his newspaper is “at war” with the current administration. While Baron, famously unflappable, appeared almost sanguine about the state of U.S. journalism in the face of endless presidential vitriol, his interviewer, Kalb, was not. In fact, he was clearly alarmed.

That sense of alarm comes through palpably and unapologetically in Kalb’sEnemy of the People: Trumps’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. The author makes this clear right up front, answering in the affirmative to his own question, “could I, after all these years, drop my usual dedication to objective journalism and, for probably the first time in my professional life, tell the public what I truly felt about Trump and his approach to the press?”

In fact, he does not confine his opinion to that singular element, as evidenced by such passages as this one: “The partisan split, which had divided American politics for decades, only widened further as Trump and his troops stormed into Washington, taking the nation and the world hostage to his chaotic, authoritarian style of leadership.” When it comes to throwing off journalistic objectivity for the first time in a 60-year career, Kalb has decided to go all in.

Arguably, if any living journalist deserves to do so, it’s Kalb, who interrupted work on his three-part memoir to produce this slender volume. Old enough to have met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the brief post-Stalin “thaw” of 1956, when Kalb was a young translator at the U.S. Embassy, he has witnessed and reported on enough modern history to have earned the opportunity to offer his unvarnished perspective.

In a stunning bit of timing, Kalb had already decided to offer his opinions on the president and the press in a speech he was to give at the Cosmos Club on February 16, 2017. That was the same day Trump tweeted that the press “is the enemy of the American People.” For Kalb, those words, “enemy of the people,” favored by dictators throughout world history, served as his red line. He rewrote the opening of his speech, and the battle was joined.

It’s worth noting that Kalb was a target of the last U.S. president who had an especially ugly relationship with the press: Richard Nixon. Nixon had Kalb’s phone wiretapped and his office ransacked, and yet Kalb feels strongly that there is something more dangerous about this administration even than that one.

Another crucial entry in Kalb’s bona fides is his distinction as being the last of the journalists recruited by Edward R. Murrow — “Murrow’s Boys” — to join CBS News. The bulk of this book focuses on the parallels between junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, and examines the determined reporting led by Murrow and his team to shine a scalding light on McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, which eventually led to the senator’s downfall.

Beyond sharing the no-holds-barred lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump share any number of other unsavory traits and abetting environmental factors, including a legislative branch that has misplaced its spine. Both men use the press to their advantage, lie egregiously, and play to the darkest impulses of their listeners. Both are wildly popular with their followers, seemingly untouchably so.

It’s as though Cohn is describing his later client when he spoke of McCarthy as being “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse…He would neglect to do important homework…He was selling the story of America’s peril.”

The parallels are useful, but they only go so far. Murrow had a long-standing relationship of trust with the American people, having brought the Blitz alive for them — almost single-handedly creating on-location radio and later television reporting as he did so — and then giving them on-the-ground reporting during World War II. And he kept his powder dry until he felt his team was fully prepared to make the case against McCarthy and his tactics.

And though McCarthy hitched his fortunes to the hottest topic of the time to ride to prominence, he was in the end a one-trick pony. This allowed Murrow and others the relative luxury of having a single area on which to focus audience attention. In contrast, the current president has journalists playing daily — even hourly — Whack-a-Mole, where the shifting, unending outrages lead to a sort of numb exhaustion.

It’s been a long time since America has had an Ed Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to speak to the entire nation from a place of trust. If McCarthy’s moment had come in an age of social media and 24-hour cable news playing to splintered, partisan audiences — well, that would be what we have now, the raging demagogue, but this time with no trusted Murrow-like newsman to bring him to heel.

The other unfortunate parallel between McCarthy and Trump is that both are exceedingly good at selling newspapers and driving up TV news ratings. Kalb quotes political reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune saying, “McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn’t off page one for four years.”

In Kalb’s discussion with Baron and Baquet, both guests acknowledged their respective papers’ return to solid financial ground after a number of rocky years; neither one addressed the role that Trump’s virtual ownership of the news cycle may have played in the health of the papers’ balance sheets. Could Trump be right that the media needs him as much as he needs them?

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent. On August 15, 300 newspapers nationwide published editorials to push back against this idea that the news media is the enemy of the people, rather than being one of the pillars of democracy.

Which brings me back to why I was using Marty Baron’s quote. It was for a poster I carried at a march, in memory of my oldest friend and long-time newsman, John McNamara, one of the five people killed at the Capital Gazette for the sole reason that he worked for the newspaper. So it’s not a big stretch for me to agree with Kalb’s final sentences: “And, so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the ‘enemy of the people’ is not the press. It is you.”

Book Review: The New Inheritors

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 August 2018.

I remember experiencing Kent Wascom’s 2013 debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, almost as a physical onslaught. Savage and searing, it was also gorgeously written. I remember, too, being stunned that the author was only 27; he wrote like a man who has lived several lifetimes.

Blood was the first in a loosely cast series of books that traces the Woolsacks, starting with bloody-minded Angel, through most of two centuries of Southern, dark-souled American history. And while the first sprawled across years and geography, the second, Secessia, had a completely different tone, kept its lens more narrowly focused — on a New Orleans occupied by Benjamin Butler’s Union troops — and unspooled in less than a year. Still, it remained as unsettling and foreign-seeming as the first.

Here, then, is the third of Wascom’s Woolsack novels, picking up in 1890 and bringing us closer to a more recognizable era just beyond the Great War. Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet — now that we know his writing — is fully identifiable as belonging to this author.

The first thing to set it apart is that a Woolsack is not the main character. Instead, Wascom brings us into this story through Isaac, an orphan torn from the one woman — not his mother — who cares for him, but is later adopted by another woman and her family, who fully embrace him as their own. His idyllic childhood and early adulthood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast awaken in him a talent as an artist, and his subject is the natural world he discovers around him.

That’s the second thing that sets this book apart: that any of it might be described as “idyllic.” Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two.

It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight (“They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case”), as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines.

Gradually, we’re introduced to the Woolsacks, who spend summers on their own island just across the sound from Isaac’s family. We met Joseph and Marina as troubled children in Secessia, and here they are as adults with three troubled children of their own: Angel, the carefully closeted eldest, named for his notorious grandfather; Kemper, the girl, named for her grandfather’s adopted brother; and George, apparently named for no one, described as a “puny boy with blood-red hair,” nicknamed Red, who spends his life attempting to live up to his grandfather’s unhappy example.

When, freshly arrived home after years of southward travel, Isaac finally meets Kemper, she is stealing crabs from a trap, and he is entirely smitten. He seeks her out the next day and finds her “on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair…She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.”

Wascom is a careful student of history, and his portraits of America are riven with many of its seamier episodes. Sometimes these are used as telling asides, and other times they are woven seamlessly into the backdrop of his stories. Kemper remembers “hearing her mother say that the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and took our turn.”

Joseph Woolsack’s money, built on his father’s wealth from slaving, has steadily increased through his own involvement in the Caribbean and Central and South American fruit trade, a notorious business in which ruthless U.S. corporate involvement directly gave birth to “banana republics.”

Kemper, aware of the stained wealth, removes herself from her family but is guiltily willing to take its money to support herself and Isaac. She is also haunted by her role in driving her beloved elder brother from the family after Red’s venomous revelation to them that Angel is homosexual. Once the Great War breaks out and Isaac’s refusal to serve puts him in prison, she is completely alone.

Red, for his part, is haunted by voices in his head. After having to teach himself as a child how to smile in an attempt to cover up his otherness, he begins to hear the voices in early adulthood and learns how to cover that up, too, though he listens to their violent instruction.

This is a family not destined for happiness.

The novel moves at various times through the eyes of Isaac, Kemper, and Angel, with a touch of Marina and too little of Neda, the woman who cares for Isaac through his first four years. The pieces of Red’s story come primarily through the eyes of his reluctant enforcer, a well-read black man named Rule Chandler.

Each one is trapped, one way or the other, by expectations they can’t meet and would refuse to anyway, and by circumstances that someone else has dictated for them.

If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.

If I understand correctly, there is one more book expected in the Woolsack series, which should bring us close to or into the present day. Since the only next-generation Woolsack children belong to schizophrenic Red, it appears he is to be the patriarch ushering the family into the latter half of the 20th century.

Given that Wascom makes an art of illuminating the many ways that America’s history belies the vaunted ideals on which it was founded, it should be riveting to watch him take on the more recent moments in the American story.

Book Review: Night Gaunts

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 27 July 2018.

Each of the stories in this most recent collection from Joyce Carol Oates originally appeared in other publications. It may be that reading them separate from each other would have allowed each one to stand on its own, thereby heightening the reader’s appreciation. In putting them together, neither the whole nor the parts benefit.

How so?

The author’s repetitive narrative tics — such as her intentional overuse of parenthetical phrases — nag to the point of intrusiveness. She also uses the avoidance of names to make a point: the cruel Sunday school teacher in “Sign of the Beast” is too evil to be named; the obedient Asian lab technician in “The Experimental Subject” is a useful but obscure functionary. Unfortunately, the constant use of “Mrs. S___” for the one and “N___” for the other is simply aggravating. In “Walking Wounded,” the device spirals out of control.

It seems that facial birthmarks are particularly malign, as evidenced by descriptions in two different stories. In “Sign of the Beast,” the narrator states, “The birthmark on my (left) cheek like a pustule was shameful to me.” And in the titular “Night-Gaunts,” the protagonist’s abusive, syphilitic father sports one. “The birthmark has become an inflamed-looking boil that no amount of make-up and powder could disguise.”

Nonetheless, the stories here are appropriately disturbing. The nightmares that Oates conjures are generally grounded in the ugliness of daily life, of the situations beyond our volition that drive us to the edge of reason. In particular, “The Experimental Subject,” which is the longest of the tales, is most effective precisely for its groundedness, its observance of the quotidian details that make its horror plausible.

In it, our unnamed protagonist — about whom Oates gives us all possible clues to understand that his name is Nguyen, so why bother being so coy? — pretends to be another student in order to cull out a chunky, awkward, friendless undergraduate as the experimental subject needed for the next phase of his revered professor’s “research” project.

The unsuspecting mark, Mary Frances, is described in terms usually reserved for apes (“an unusually low simian brow…large splayed feet and a center of gravity in the pelvic region”) and cattle (“tentative manner like that of a creature that is being herded blindly along a chute”). Certainly, it helps the researchers to dehumanize a person before performing inhuman experiments on her without her knowledge or consent.

Interesting in concept is “The Woman in the Window,” in which Oates imagines the story captured in Edward Hopper’s painting “Eleven A.M., 1926.” We spend time in the head of the woman sitting in the chair by the window, wearing only shoes, and in that of her abusive, married lover, who is tardy and still taking his own good time to get to their tryst.

Whenever she finally decides to employ them, I, for one, am rooting that her sewing shears get the job done.

Abuse — psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, often in combination —forms the common theme in almost all of these stories, which then capture the catastrophic results. Sometimes the abuse is practically invisible, as in “The Long-Legged Girl,” in which the long-term effects on Elinor of Victor’s constant affairs — or possibly unconsummated obsessions — with his beautiful, adoring undergrads finally leak out in an equally almost-invisible retaliation.

A little disconcerting, though, is the amount of attentive detail given to cataloging the physical defects of characters like Elinor and Mary Frances to the point that it feels like the author’s personal disdain speaking. And yet, I might not have noted that if I hadn’t read these stories in collection.

Book Review: Hard Cider

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 July 2018.

I’ve often written about my admiration of and appreciation for small, independent book publishers, those folks who are in the business much more because of their love of books than their pursuit of the next big blockbuster. Publishing these days has an ever-slimming profit margin amid fierce competition, and that makes things even more challenging for those who do this for love.

A small publisher that has drawn positive attention for its business model and a gratifying level of success is She Writes Press. In 2016, books from She Writes Press were awarded seventeen medals at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the most awards to one press in that year. Under the guiding hand of publisher Brooke Warner, the press has gone from a catalog of eight titles in 2013 to an impressively long list for both spring and fall in this, their six year.

One of the titles being released this fall is Hard Cider by Barbara Stark-Nemon. Stark-Nemon is an alumna of She Writes Press, which published her award-winning debut novel, Even in Darkness. (See my review of that book for LLNB here.) Fans of the first book—a historical novel covering many decades leading up to, though, and beyond World War II—should expect a quieter, more intimate, contemporary portrait here. What remains the same, though, is the focus on a single family through the eyes of a strong female protagonist.

Abbie Rose Stone is a mature woman who, having built and raised her family through a number of trials, is now ready to take on a challenge entirely for herself, simply for the joy she feels it will bring her: starting a business producing hard cider in northern Michigan. Her husband and three grown sons have trouble understanding her desire and even more trouble being supportive of it.

Abbie tells her own story, which she starts by recounting the trauma of losing their house to arson. She weaves in the details of building her family with husband Steven through infertility and the painful journey of treatments and disappointments, including a brush with surrogacy that Abbie cannot bring herself to repeat. Instead, over time, they adopt two boys, Alex and Andrew, and then end up having one of their own—the third boy, Seth—without any intervention.

From the outside, Abbie seems to have a comfortable, successful life in her early retirement, with a house in Ann Arbor and another on the northern peninsula, with time to spend on various quiet projects now that all three kids have established lives of their own. But the cracks are there. Each conversation with Steven or the boys is an exercise in eggshell-walking, in which Abbie carefully reads tone and sometimes body language in her attempts to navigate through the rocky shoals of each relationship. She mentions eyeing, and sometimes reaching for, the scotch bottle, and though she seems to drink in moderation, there’s a hint that the impulse is something she wrestles with.

Alex in particular represents her biggest maternal struggle, and perhaps failure. A strong-willed child who tested boundaries all along the way—though we never quite learn how—Alex’s parents finally felt that sending their troubled adolescent to boarding school was the answer. As an adult, his troubles stem primarily from his desire to protect the underdog, so that his best impulses cause the greatest issues. Now, as Abbie tells it, Alex has built a good life for himself a few states away, and she pushes to strengthen her connection with him.

As she spends an increasing amount of time at her northern retreat, learning the ins and outs of the hard cider business, Abbie meets a young woman, Julia, who seems to have a particular interest in Abbie’s family. The mystery of Julia’s attention becomes the book’s central question, though the true journey is Abbie’s reaction to what she sees as an assault on her family and on the delicate balance that she still struggles to achieve and maintain within it.

Stark-Nemon’s writing pulls us along, keeping the pages turning as we make this journey with Abbie Rose. For women of a certain age who have their own stories of dreams deferred in service to family, Abbie’s story resonates. Many readers will bring their own understanding of the landmines lurking when a wife and mother works to carve out a role separate from the centrality of family.

There are some opportunities that Stark-Nemon misses. One of the traps for an author of first-person narration is the tendency to tell more than show. Abbie describes her relationship with Steven and alludes to their issues far more than we see or experience them for ourselves. Often, it feels as though characters are talking at each other rather than to each other, making their points but not necessary striving for mutual understanding. Emotional scars left by trauma—the arson, Alex’s feelings of abandonment—are only tangentially explored.

That said, Hard Cider is a warm and inviting book, which may make readers long to spend some quality time in northern Michigan, enjoying the seasons on Abbie Rose’s lakeshore retreat.

Book Review: Laughing Shall I Die

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 20 June 2018.

Here are two take-aways from Tom Shippey’s latest book: One, “Viking” was a job description, not a racial or ethnic designation; and two, a quality demanded of those Vikings was a finely honed, mordant sense of humor that perhaps we modern nine-to-five cubicle-dwellers would find difficult to understand.

That sense of humor includes composing, on the spot, even as the composer is being bitten to death by a pit-full of adders, a beautiful song that will be handed down through the ages. The song concludes with the line, “Laughing shall I die,” primarily because the dying Viking knows his sons are coming to wreak vengeance on the king who put him in the pit and will subject said king to a longer, slower, far grislier demise.

It’s pretty funny, apparently, if you’re a Viking.

For the rest of us, it’s funny because the death song’s composer is named Ragnar Hairy-breeches, and one of his avenging sons is named Ivar the Boneless. It turns out, though, that while Ragnar may be mostly the stuff of myth and legend, Ivar is not only an historical figure, he is a significant one.

As for the “Boneless” part, no one is quite sure of the nickname’s origin, but one theory is that he was being compared to a serpent — which to the Vikings meant a dragon — so it’s actually a compliment.

The author’s stated purpose in this book is to explore what gave Vikings their edge, when they had fewer people and resources than most of the populations they came up against, as they swept across Britain and mainland Europe into Russia and the Middle East over a distinct 300-year period. He argues that their edge was “the Viking mindset. To put it bluntly, it’s a kind of death cult.” Their disdain of death made them hard to beat on and off the field of battle.

Shippey also notes that his book is meant for “the reading public.” What’s interesting, then, is that Shippey appears to be using his general lay reader — who should be forgiven for not being up on the latest battles within the learned academia of Viking lore — to engage in an argument with scholars on the other side of the divide (one of whom is his former tutor).

The effect is a bit like stopping by a friend’s house and finding yourself used as a go-between in an argument you’ve blundered into (“Could you tell him that?” “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe she should know…”), when you all you wanted was some wine.

To summarize his side of the spat, Shippey believes that modern academia finds its delicate sensibilities affronted by the less culturally refined aspects of the marauding Vikings, and has worked to ignore, bowdlerize, explain away, and generally discount what it sees as a cartoon version of the Viking ethos. These academics compare Viking legend with the overblown mythology of America’s Wild West. Shippey works to dismantle that view.

To do so, he draws heavily upon the great sagas, from which we derive much of our knowledge of the ancient Norse traditions, culture, and religion. Many of those sagas are thought to be far older than the Viking period itself, which is dated to 793, the point at which the outside world became aware of the pillaging Norseman — vikingr, or marauder.

Before written language, the sagas and traditions of eddic and skaldic poetry provided exceptionally well-developed oral histories of Scandinavia, embellished, of course, with many supernatural elements. Eventually, those oral histories were written down by Icelanders and then rediscovered by the outside world at the end of the Middle Ages.

In Viking lore, great deaths are assessed based on how stoic the victim is and what laconic wit he shows as he goes down. One Bui the Broad, having had his lower jaw hacked off, is recorded for posterity as having said (hmm — that seems like a bit of a trick), “The Danish women in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now.”

The first part of Laughing surveys four sets of characters and their stories to give us an up-close feeling for the well-known Viking heroes of the old sagas. Chapter five, for example, is called “Egil the Ugly and King Blood-axe: Poetry and the Psychopath.”

Part II gives a geographical view of the vast reach of Viking hegemony. Here is where the legends begin to morph into historical reality, and we start to grasp the enormity of Scandinavian influence on the British Isles, the Continent, Russia, and even the Middle East.

Among Shippey’s insights are that Vikings made more successful inroads in England than in Ireland because England had an established bureaucratic infrastructure. There, the Vikings simply eliminated a handful of rulers and stepped into the open slots. Ireland was too chaotic to deal with in a similar fashion; there was no operation to take over.

Part III describes in detail a few of the great sagas, such as Njal’s Saga, to highlight particular aspects of the Viking mindset. The problem is that setting the context requires a long lead-in, which — much like having to explain a joke — drains the energy from the stories.

And therein lies the larger problem: This material begs for a narrative-nonfiction approach, to get blood pumping through the descriptions and perhaps engage the readers’ imaginations more successfully.

Though Shippey tries to keep things jaunty with some of his descriptions, many details are too pedantically academic; it feels as though he’s still playing to his old tutor. As it is, Shippey may simply inspire his readers to binge-watch “The Vikings” (both the TV series and movie) so they can see what they’ve been missing.

Book Review: The Restless Wave

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on June 7, 2018.

Staring down one’s mortality has a way of sharpening focus. We’ve all heard stories recounting deathbed reassessments of choices made, of stinging regrets, and of the urgency to make amends while there’s still time.

And though it’s true that John McCain produced this book under the ticking clock of a brain cancer diagnosis, the reader senses it’s not significantly different than if he’d written it in the pink of health.

McCain fully owns both his failures and his successes, makes no excuses, and begs no forgiveness. He uses this book to record his version of crucial events of the last 20 or so years, but also, as he says, “I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more if I may.”

It’s worth considering what he has to say. He may side-step some issues, and no one writes a memoir to make themselves look bad, but it’s hard to argue that he is not sincerely considering what’s in the best interests of Americans as citizens of the world.

This is the seventh book that McCain has co-authored with his longtime assistant, Mark Salter, which is perhaps how they were able to pull it together so quickly. While they spend time dissecting McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential race — explaining how he was argued out of choosing his good friend Joe Lieberman as his running mate, while never once impugning Sarah Palin — most of the book focuses on the U.S. involvement in the various conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; foreign relations with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping; and the urgent need to focus on human rights both worldwide and at home.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain travels widely and frequently. He tries to make all trips bipartisan and uses the time and forced closeness to build personal relationships across the aisle. He makes the effort to see for himself the conditions on the ground in places both widely known and obscure so that he can speak from a more deeply informed position.

He’s unafraid to remind foreign officials where their countries are falling short, particularly on human rights and political freedom, whether or not we consider those countries important to U.S. interests. It is rarely difficult to understand where McCain stands on any subject.

Consider, for example, the subject of torture — or, because no euphemism is oblique enough that we can’t make it more so by creating an acronym for it, EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques). Beyond his own personal experiences informing his feelings on the matter, anyone wondering about his unwillingness to support Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA director because of her involvement in the EIT program, and her approval to destroy recorded evidence of EIT use, simply needs to read chapter three, “About Us.”

Easily the most chilling image in the book describes the torture of Fatima Belhaj, wife of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a man who found himself on the wrong side of the U.S.’ short-lived reconciliation with Muammar Qaddafi:

“[CIA interrogators] had taken a photograph of her in the interrogation room at the black site in Bangkok. She was seated in a chair, Americans surrounding her, duct tape wrapped around the lower half of her face, her wrists bound, and completely naked. She was six months pregnant at the time.”

McCain’s fight against the use of torture and for the release of an unclassified report concerning the U.S.’ use of EIT is based on the concept that we are supposed to be better than this. “What makes us exceptional?…Our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world makes us exceptional…This was never about [terror suspects]. It was about us.”

At one point, he notes that his treatment from his captors in Hanoi was, in comparison, more humane than the perversions exhibited by American guards at Abu Ghraib.

All of this may seem odd coming from a reliable hawk, but McCain has a fully nuanced, well-sourced view of the proper application of force. He walks his readers through his thinking on all of the conflicts in which we’ve been involved (or failed to be involved) since the early 1990s.

He calls out what he sees as the significant foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration, most notably Syria, but allows that multiple administrations are responsible for the unchallenged rise of Vladimir Putin into the pantheon of the world’s great tyrants.

For those who may be wondering, The Restless Wave contains any number of thoughts on the wrong-headedness of the current administration. McCain worries that we are now actively working to abdicate our role in the world order we worked hard to create after World War II, and notes that our allies are increasingly learning to work around us or entirely without us, which should cause us concern.

There are a number of issues where McCain remains silent. While he goes into some detail to explain his thinking on the most recent healthcare vote — observers outside the Senate saw his thumbs-down gesture as more dramatic than it actually was — he remains silent on his vote with the entirety of the Senate Republican bloc on a tax plan that is widely understood to add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s the agenda item I’d really like to hear his thinking on.

My respect for McCain was cemented when he pointedly refused to demonize his political opponent, Barack Obama, in the 2008 presidential race. As improbable as it may have been then, that sort of restraint seems positively quaint these days.

That McCain’s name continues to be invoked in the president’s ongoing campaign-style rallies as a sure way to prompt the boisterous crowds to boo is one of the more gob-smacking features of this most unpredictable of administrations. One longs to ask, “To what possible purpose?” but none of the likely answers are reassuring.

Professional politicians like John McCain are in increasingly short supply, and we are worse off because of it. We need people who grasp what “proper order” is and why it’s important, and are willing to explore good-faith bipartisan approaches to solving complex issues. We need members of Congress who understand that principled compromise is the way to get the people’s work done.

I miss him already.

Book Review: Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 17, 2018.

As we prepare for the 2020 celebration of the 100th anniversary of U.S. women receiving federal voting rights, books recounting the suffragists’ long fight are starting to roll out. Winifred Conkling’s contribution, written for young adults, is an excellent history for all readers, detailing the long, tangled, and sometimes violent path to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Conkling takes a straightforward approach to relating the history of the movement and the women who drove it, many whose names we know, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul, and a number whose fame (or notoriety) has not lasted as long, like Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The narrative starts with Elizabeth Cady learning that, in her world of early-19th-century Upstate New York, even the most determined girl could not make a contribution equal to a boy, laws and culture being what they were.

However, she was allowed to attend Troy Female Seminary, which offered a curriculum competitive with those offered to men, and she had the benefit of spending summers with her rich and progressive cousin, Gerrit Smith, who gave her freedom to exercise her forward-thinking ideas.

In part, the push for women’s rights was driven by the abolitionist movement, since women wishing to speak in public against slavery were accused of being “unwomanly and unchristian,” because, at the time, it was considered unseemly for women to speak in public.

The movement was also tied to the temperance movement, widely seen as a women’s issue because of the damage men’s excessive drinking caused to families. Without the vote, women had no formal way to press for change.

Newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton met abolitionist Quaker Lucretia Mott in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention — which, ironically, would not allow women to be delegates. By the end of the event, the pair had made plans to hold their own convention to “form a society to advocate the rights of women,” according to Stanton.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is widely seen as the start of a formal movement focused on women’s rights. Even there, the idea of suffrage was considered outrageous, and Mott shied away from making it a point of discussion.

Since no nation yet recognized women’s right to vote, she feared it would make the women look ridiculous. It appears to be Frederick Douglass’ impromptu speech to the gathering of more than 300 women that allowed the resolution for suffrage to pass.

Susan B. Anthony, a temperance champion, had no interest in women’s rights until she was repeatedly told that, as one, she could not speak at temperance conventions. She and Stanton met in 1851and immediately formed a bond that lasted 50 years.

During the Civil War, women’s suffrage took a back seat to the cause of ending slavery, and it was generally seen to be risking both issues to pair them together. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th guaranteed citizenship and civil rights to male former slaves. The dual causes of emancipation and women’s suffrage, which had often supported each other, were now bitterly at odds.

When the issue of the 15th Amendment arose, guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude — with no mention of gender since it was already in the previous amendment — Stanton and Anthony campaigned against it, Stanton sometimes using racist arguments.

The episode drove a wedge into the unity of the suffrage movement, as did free-love advocate Victoria Claflin Woodhull, whose scandals in the name of suffrage cost the movement significant support and set its efforts back years.

As the century turned and both Stanton and Anthony passed the reins to the next generation, the wind was out of the movement, and it lagged until 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt took over as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but it was Stanton’s daughter Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, along with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns — all strongly influenced by the militant tactics of the British women’s movement — who get the most credit for reinvigorating the U.S. efforts.

Paul’s huge march in Washington, DC, in 1913, and the melee that it caused, engendered widespread attention. (Oddly, the author states that only spectators were hurt in the semi-riot, when it seems well-documented that many marchers were taken to local hospitals.)

Paul and Catt’s approaches to winning suffrage were often at loggerheads, especially when Paul’s “Silent Sentinels” began to picket the White House — the first group ever to do so — and later to get arrested. The women’s infamous mistreatment in prison was yet another rallying cry that brought people to the movement.

The “Susan B. Anthony Amendment,” the 19th, was passed in the U.S. House and Senate in May and June 1919, respectively, and was finally ratified in a nail-biter vote in Tennessee in August 1920. Catt, supportive of President Woodrow Wilson and seen as the moderate voice for suffrage, was invited to the White House for congratulations, while Paul, the impatient, rude agitator, was snubbed.

Given the current political engagement of teens embodied in the #NeverAgain movement, perhaps the most useful lesson for this book’s target audience is the unflagging determination with which two generations of women pressed what often seemed like a hopeless cause.

Winning a pitched political fight is rarely brief or straightforward, but the victory — almost always — goes to the side that refuses to give up.

Book Review: Don’t Wait to Be Called

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on March 20, 2018.

At the Washington Writers Conference coming up in May, I’ll be moderating a panel with four local authors whose debut books made it to publication through very different paths. Each book is also a different genre — memoir/journalism, biography, novel, and short story collection — which means I’m reading four very different books to prepare for the panel.

The short story collection, Don’t Wait to Be Called, is by Jacob R. Weber. Publication resulted from Weber’s winning the annual fiction prize given by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a non-profit small press that publishes authors from the Baltimore/Washington area. Weber’s roots, which are on display in his stories, hedge towards the Baltimore end of that geography.

Weber’s biography reads like someone who has lived a few different lives, as a Marine, a translator, and an English tutor to adult immigrants, as well as a waiter and a retail clerk and manager. His experiences infuse his stories in fully authentic ways, and are rendered in voices that are unique to each story.

The title of the collection comes from its final, wrenching story, “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called,” which is also one of four stories in the collection that highlights the experiences of Eritreans fleeing their home country in hopes of something better than slow starvation. The escape is arguably as bad or worse than staying put, because of the high risk of becoming a hostage of the ruthless Rashaida, who “were like grizzly bears feeding off the salmon run of the Eritrean exodus,” as protagonist Daud notes in the story “Silver Spring.” He lost one and a half fingers to the Rashaida’s favorite method for hurrying the twenty thousand dollar ransom payments: making hostages shriek on phone calls to family members.

Weber’s ability to create fully realized protagonists in distinctly different voices and personas is one of the great joys of the collection. We have no idea who we’re going to hear from next, whether it’s a black high school kid from the projects writing about the Freddy Grey riots in the journal given to him by his earnest teacher from the suburbs, or a young widowed mother desperate just to enjoy one Sunday afternoon with her son, however pitched the battle of wills. The mediocre student in “Mr. Sympathy” decides to become a math whiz to make his dying father finally proud of him.

Chase, the protagonist in “Brokedick,” is a former active-duty Marine tortured by not having been as active as his buddies who went downrange; he earns his shot at redemption whether he feels he has or not. In contrast, the obtuse narrator of “Dawn Doesn’t Disappoint” ends up self-satisfied in a better spot than he started, having learned nothing, and without ever getting the punch in the nose or knee to the groin that he so richly deserves. Life, as we know, isn’t fair in ways that run on a sliding scale from miniscule to unendurable.

In this collection, the top end of that scale plays out most strongly in the example of the two unnamed characters that appear in both “Silver Spring” and “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called”. Daud and Helen in the former story, and Hiwet, the pregnant young woman in the latter, have all run afoul of the same two torturers in the Rashaida desert camp. One is fittingly ugly and deformed, but the other is strikingly handsome. “Hiwet had time to wonder why he was raping girls in the Sinai, when he could have been charming them on television.” Daud names him Gallantandregal, and notes that he is the most brutal enforcer among them. Gallantandregal enjoys his job, gets paid well for it, and has an endless stream of refugees to choose from. It’s almost certain that he and his ilk are still at it today.

Unjust? You bet. Jacob Weber’s stories capture life as it is, in which there aren’t always good guys and bad guys, and even when there are, the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them. It doesn’t matter, though; Weber makes you want to read about them all.

***

Note: While you’re waiting for Don’t Wait to Be Called to download to your e-reader or show up in your mailbox, you’ll want to check out Weber’s short story, “Directions, Partially Step-by-Step,” which appeared in the January 8th edition of Drunk Monkeys.