The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Hardcover, 422 pgs, Pub Sept 10th 2019 by Nan A. Talese, ISBN13: 9780385543781, Series: The Handmaid's Tale #2 Lit Awards: Booker Prize (2019), Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2019)

As this sequel to Atwood’s worldwide bestseller and Hulu serialized drama, The Handmaid’s Tale was coming to a close I grew anxious. ‘There are’t enough pages left to wrap this up,’ I thought, but I wasn’t giving Atwood and her editors enough credit.

The story is Atwood’s conversational response to readers who wanted to know what happened to characters left in extremis at the end of A Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s wonderful sense of humor brings the sharp-eyed, lumpy woman adorned in brown burlap and known as Aunt Lydia to life. Her diary is being composed as we read:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”

This turns out to be one page in Aunt Lydia’s apologia for misdeeds first forced upon her and then undertaken as a means to an end. Whose end we learn at the finish.

Two more points of view are given in short, discontinuous and not always parallel histories. A young girl growing up privileged in Gilead discovers at thirteen that she is considered marriageable. The horror of that notion stirs rebellion within her. An orphaned teen in Canada learns her guardians have been car bombed. She apparently has some debts to pay.

Atwood braids these three stories, giving each voice real distinction and character. Our mind’s eye has each firmly in sight as they gradually find themselves within arm’s reach of one another. One of the girls tells the other that Aunt Lydia is the “scariest of all the Aunts…You get the feeling she wants you to be better than you are…She looks at you as if she really sees you.” Hmm, yes.

What was most interesting to me as I blazed through this big book—it is very easy to read, a straight-line adventure story—is how Atwood could see so clearly certain social and political trends that are evidenced in our society now. Her clarity and comprehensiveness of view reveals so much about her own personality. She’d be a wonderful friend.

Vermont and Maine get top billing as states on Gilead’s border where residents are known to be willing to transport ‘grey market’ goods like lemons or escaping girls. A New Englander myself, I was disappointed New Hampshire was not similarly viewed until I considered the White Mountains would pose a significant barrier to anyone expecting to travel past them to the north.

In the end, I was gratified to discover Portsmouth, NH was chosen as a key location for by-sea person-smuggling from Gilead, just as it had been historically for black slaves of old seeking freedom in the north.

It is difficult to avoid Atwood’s premise that literature must be destroyed in a repressive state because new, creative notions about how to live are subversive. Atwood picked out for especial notice books that would be have an enormous impact on impressionable minds, like Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Paradise Lost, and Lives of Girls and Women.

I haven’t read the last but would like to, now. I might take issue with Paradise Lost. I read that again a couple years ago to compare it to Jamaica’s Kincaid’s memoir See Now Then and I can honestly say that book is too dense, particularly for young girls who are just learning to read. But Atwood probably knows better. When one’s library is limited, sometimes one’s understanding becomes sharpened.

When the girls in Gilead were finally able to read, it came as a shock to them that the Aunts had lied to them about the Bible. The Aunts had told the girls that the dismemberment story of the concubine, while horrific, was an act of sacrifice, a noble and charitable act. Reading the words themselves the girls discovered there was only degradation and hatred in the killing of an innocent.

“I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone.”

We have to have some empathy, then, for those who will lose their faith, however weak it has become over the years, in a political party now called Republican. It is sad, this death of belief.

Very very glad to hear from Margaret Atwood again. I miss her already.





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This Poison Will Remain by Fred Vargas, translated by Siân Reynolds

Paperback, 416 pgs, Pub: August 20th 2019 by Penguin Books (first published May 10th 2017) Orig Title: Quand sort la recluse, ISBN13: 9780143133667, Series: Commissaire Adamsberg #11

Vargas doesn’t spare us the grisly details of outrageous crimes committed against defenseless girls and women, but never have I ever wanted to be in a mystery novel before. The characterizations of police officers and villagers are so full of personality, intelligence, and humor that one cannot help but wish these folks were by one’s side—or at least televised.

According to Wikipedia, four of the Vargas mystery series have been serialized for television. I saw one, once, years ago. It was painful, considering the renown of French cinema and the intrigue of the novels. it is definitely time for a new rendition.

Any new film series of the novels must be filmed in France and in French because the charm of the series is the utter French-ness of the interactions, the local dishes like the cabbage soup with onions and ham the officers eat nearly every night of the investigation, and endless bottles of Madiran.

Vargas has given us a convoluted mystery so dense with criminality that we scarcely know which way to turn. Just today I was listening to Vox's Today Explained podcast discussing the many thousands of rape kits in American cities which were never run for DNA: when the kits were finally examined, the entire body of knowledge around rape and serial rape has been turned on its head. It turns out that there were many, many more rapists than one ever thought possible, and one out of every five rapes is caused by a serial rapist.

There has been, as can be seen in the history revealed in this novel and in the untested rape kits languishing on shelves in police stations all over America, a dismissive attitude towards crimes against women. In this mystery, some truly horrifying crimes are described (thankfully in a matter-of-fact, non-inflammatory way) and some male attitudes are examined for bias. At one point Chief Inspector Adamsberg realizes describing his favorite female lieutenant as worth “ten men” would be better changed to “one woman.” Those of us who have worked with colleagues of both sexes are pleased Vargas made a point of chastising Adamsberg for old attitudes.

Vargas is known for the depth of her knowledge about medieval subjects and archeology and gradually she incorporates some of her encyclopedic knowledge in this more modern mystery. There is an archeological dig, and we learn how to find the site and what it takes to manage it. There is a medieval tie-in, but the shocking part is that it sounds medieval when in fact some of the events happened within recent history.

Chief Inspector Jean Baptiste Adamsberg always puts me in mind of Simenon’s Jules Maigret, though the two police chiefs are quite different in many ways. One difference is that Maigret, unless my memory is faulty, wasn't necessarily a masterful team leader. Adamsberg is far from alone. We are intimately familiar with his entire team and grow to rely on them to keep their chief operating in maximum intuition. Adamsberg's “tiny bubbles of gas in [his] brain” jiggle when he walks, stimulating thought. Not so far, then, from Poirot’s “little grey cells.”

This novel, originally published in May of 2017 by Flammarion of France, has been translated by Siân Reynolds, winner of many awards, including a coveted Dagger from Crime Writers’ Association. Reynolds is a professor emerita of French at the University of Stirling, Scotland. In her words,

”… Fred’s books are quirky and often fantastical, sometimes with historical elements, and much appreciated in France. They are about French characters usually in a recognizably French environment, and will necessarily seem a bit foreign to anglophone readers, so the aim is to make them enjoyable on their own terms – but in English.”

This Reynolds does in spades. The novels are a remarkable glimpse of French culture and altogether are a marvelous series. Highly recommended.

More reviews of Vargas works:
The Chalk Circle Man
This Night's Foul Work



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Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

Hardcover, 291 pgs, Pub Jan 29th 2019 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812995701

I just love this book. When I first heard Terry Gross interviewing Dreyer on NPR’s Fresh Air, I thought he was trying too hard to make amusing something that can be utterly stultifying. However, when I had the chance to listen to Dreyer reading the book, published by Penguin Random House Audio, I was entranced and delighted. How can this be, you ask. It is counterintuitive that reading a style book on writing would be amusing.

Dreyer’s delivery is dry, dry as a bone, so-o-o dry that I would be laughing aloud, missing his next entry, as he lined up all the stupid stuff we write—the adverbs, extra adjectives, and the ‘very unique’ emphasizers. I was amazed Dreyer could read this text aloud and make sense, filled as it is with examples he needs to capitalize or spell a certain way. I could follow it! And it was interesting. He rarely read from his footnotes, which are copious and useful and also funny, one good reason to get both the book and the audio.

One can even make the case that audio is an excellent format for this material, as rules run into one another and it is complicated and time-consuming to both separate the rules and look them up. Dreyer just gives it to us conversationally, in context, without taking out the ruler.

Practically all of us are writers—indeed, publishers—now, whether we write blogs, notes to friends, or posts for social media. We need to take care our words communicate what we want them to say and not what we did not wish to say. We all must be copy editors as well, and we need Dreyer to tell us what we really mean.

Benjamin Dreyer has worn a lot of hats, all at the same company. He began as a freelance proofreader, moved to Copy Editor, then Production Editor, and finally Copy Chief at Random House, now one of the largest book publishers in the United States. In this B&N podcast interview, Dreyer describes the distinction between those jobs and how, after he moved into management, he had an opportunity to circle back and spend time highlighting discrepancies between good and bad writing. He’s awfully good at it, he’s funny, and he’s seen it all in his nearly thirty years in the business. I kept thinking how much there is to know about using language, even for native speakers, and how useful this material is to all of us. So I went and bought the hardcopy.

Dreyer admits to hating grammar, that is, he hates grammar jargon. Which is just fine because I usually just skip those parts. What the heck, I figure. If I haven’t learned it yet, what good will it do me? I am not a completist. I tried to follow his rules in this review so far as I recall them, having laughed through half of them and listened with half an ear when he hit on something I'd worried over in the past…my memories probing that sore place like a tongue in the socket of a lost tooth. How reassuring it is to me to know that the past tense of wreak is wreaked, something with which I have struggled.

There was a point on a long drive when I started laughing uncontrollably at the sometimes stupid stuff he says. In this case it was

GRISLY/GRISTLY/GRIZZLY/GRIZZLED
Gory crimes are grisly.
Tough meat is gristly.
Some bears are grizzly.
Mistaken references to “grizzly crimes” (unless committed by actual bears, in which case OK) are extremely popular, although good for a chuckle, and to be avoided strenuously.
“Grizzled” refers to hair streaked with gray—and by extension, it does make a decent synonym for “old.” It does not mean, as many people seem to think it does, either unkempt or rugged.

It’s okay if you didn’t laugh at that. I’m telling you, Dreyer’s wit is cumulative. If you have ever seen those old books by Richard Lederer, I recall one was called Anguished English, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Three generations of my family sat shouting and crying with laughter at the difficulty of writing well.

People who write for a living won’t want to miss this. Journalists, novelists, public speakers, politicians, business people who write reports, social media junkies: When he actually points out our common errors, we admit with chagrin it looks, and sounds, silly.

Below is a sample of Dreyer reading from the book. You can listen to this on a commute, can't you?




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Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

Hardcover, 339 pgs, Pub Sept 4th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812997415

I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was the first time I’ve partaken of a Shteyngart novel, and it is more in every way than I was expecting. There is a shadow of Pynchon’s frank absurdity there, and some bungee-cord despair—the kind that bounces back, irrepressible.

Shteyngart’s novel is overstuffed with funny, sad, true, caustic, simplistic, derogatory observations about life in America that somehow capture us in all our glory. He is not dismissive; I think he likes us. The main character in this novel, Barry Cohen, is nothing if not representative of what we have taught ourselves to be: money-mad and self-pitying, educated enough to capture our own market but too stupid to see the big picture. What introspection we have is wasted on divining the motivations of others rather than our own triggers.

Barry is a man America loves to hate. He is a successful hedge fund manager who emerged from the economic crisis in fine shape—it was only his clients who suffered. And his clients suffered because the government finally caught on to some irregularities in Barry’s operations that allowed him to win so much. While the SEC investigated, Barry left Seema, his wife and an attorney, with his son Shiva to see if he could find an old flame. Last he’d heard she was living in the South.

Right there Barry made a big mistake. One doesn’t leave an attorney for another woman. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? Barry and Seema had been doing okay marriage-wise, though it turns out Shiva is autistic. Unable to speak and often looking as though he does not even comprehend what words and comments are directed to him, Shiva is unknowable.

Barry wants to love him, but maybe wants Shiva to love Barry himself more. Seema handles most of Shiva's care which means she cannot work. More and more absorbed with nurturing her son’s growth, she recognizes and relishes small victories in understanding Shiva's internal world while her husband languishes.

Barry Cohen’s odyssey from New York by bus to various destinations in the south features a man with a skill set that serves him surprisingly well when traveling by bus on limited cash, no credit, and a roller-board of fancy watches. He can’t be shamed because he’s a bigger crook than anyone. Dragging around his collection of fancy watches turns out not to be very lucrative—who recognizes their value? But they do get him food occasionally, and a little tradable currency.

Barry spends relatively little psychic energy pondering the sources of his Wall Street wealth, but somehow recognizes it’s probably not worth as much as he was getting paid to do it. His long-story-short gives us cameos of American ‘types’: street-wise salesmen, long-suffering nannies, practical mothers, and money managers who believe their work confers some kind of godliness on their financial outcomes. Because we win, we are meant to win. Yes, this all takes place in the first year of the Trump administration.

Barry Cohen is hard to take. “See, this is the thing about America,” he tells his former employee in Atlanta, a man named Park that Barry keeps referring to as Chinese, “You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.” 


Well. Barry is not a very nice person, really. He simply is not reflective enough. We can feel twinges at his angst, but ultimately we make our own beds, don’t we? Barry is tiresome, that’s the problem. His adventures are quite something, but we grow weary of his blind spots and slow recognition that he does, in fact, love his imperfect family. It’s all he’s got, the silly doofus, and they are worthy of his love. We’d rather spend time with them.

In an enlightening interview with The Guardian, Shteyngart acknowledges the story is about racism:

"I think racism undergirds all of this, no question. It’s a huge part of it. When we were immigrants and couldn’t speak the language, the one thing this country told us was: ‘You’re white, there’s always somebody lower than you.’"

Shteyngart thought he might add a gender dimension to the story, and was going to make his main character a woman, but the few female hedge fund managers he found were rational and didn’t take such big crazy risks that they end up blowing up the world. Right, I think. Exactly right.





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Titans of History: The Giants who Made our World by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Paperback, 640 pgs, Pub: October 16th 2018 by Vintage (first published June 1st 2009), ISBN13: 9780525564461

This Vintage paperback original published this October is just the kind of thing people slaving away in their individual silos might like to read in snatches to put major figures in history in their proper perspective. I always wanted something like this when I was learning history: ordinarily we look individually at parts of the world. This book integrates history.

Each figure Montefiore chooses to introduce ordinarily gets a page or two. This is just enough to tell the major contributions of figures you may have only heard of but didn’t know why they were remembered. What was so interesting for me was that the history is chronological so we can see widely disparate events, discoveries, inventions with their contemporaneous personages elsewhere in the world, Walter Raleigh was roughly contemporaneous with Tokugawa Ieyasu and Akbar the Great.

In one memorable entry, Montefiore places the Borgias together: Pope Alexander VI and his children, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia. The details of this family are so gruesome—the face slowly destroyed by syphilis and covered with a golden mask—that we wonder their foothold lasted so long and the conditions of society that produced it. Rodrigo Borgia, who eventually called himself Pope Alexander VI, was reputed to be seductively charming in person but that hardly seems enough to sustain a reign of debauchery and vice. Montefiore gives a few clues which the interested reader might pursue to a more rigorous study.

Women, South Americans, and Black Africans get relatively short shrift, but then so have they through time. These are names we for the most part recognize already, giving us a few short details about the lives of each. Isaac Babel and Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov have back to back entries, Babel being noted for his Red Calvary stories relating the brutality of Lenin’s 1920 war on Poland. Yezhov is remembered for the frenzy of his arrests as a secret policeman under Stalin, anticipating the direction of the leader without explicit instructions. “He doesn’t know when to stop,” is how a colleague described him.

In the modern day, relatively few people are singled out, and those are mostly politicians or government leaders. JFK, Gorbachav, Elvis, Saddam Hussein, Muhammed Ali, Pol Pot, Thatcher…there are a few others, but the weighting is clear. In the end this book is grist for the mill. We can argue about what the author has chosen, but we would have to put together a series of arguments. It could be a fruitful endeavor for someone interested in how individuals shape events.

This is dinner party material. Random facts and random choices of famous figures within the range of possibilities can be interesting. The most damning bit would be that a page or two or even three for any major figure is not nearly enough space to explain that person or their effects. But if you just want to quickly understand what a person is known for, this could be a good choice. And it might be good for teens when paired with other work.



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Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Paperback, 400 pgs, Pub June 26th 2017 by Random House Trade (first published March 15th 2016), ISBN13: 9780525509714, Lit Awards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (2016), PEN Open Book Award Nominee for Longlist (2017), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Debut Goodreads Author (2016)

This was a stressful read for me and may make your stomach ulcer bleed a little. I became anxious contemplating the poor choices the characters faced, and picked out things I would have done differently, given the constraints. A man from Cameroon overstays his visa in the United States, invites his girlfriend and their baby to come from Africa, then seeks an immigration lawyer to plead a case of asylum for him.

This is a story of immigration, illegal trying to be legal. It is a story that puts the reader in the awkward position of caring about a person in a difficult position and still not feeling obligated to help them evade a law designed to protect said reader. The author wanted us to feel that tension and to recognize the strain under which many immigrants operate. It is almost unimaginable—the pressure under which people of conscience live.

Americans still have not had the conversation we really need to have about immigration. Of course people want to live in America. Although sometimes our nation does not live up to its promise, it is still a land of laws, democratic elections, enormous resources, and relative peace. One of the things that makes us special are laws, agreed upon and enforced, that benefit citizens. People from other countries are welcome to visit and perhaps even stay, if they follow the law.

The point of this story is that visitors and/or immigrants must decide what kind of life they want to lead. If they come illegally over the border or refuse to leave when their lawful documentation expires, they must decide if they want to spend psychic energy evading the law in the future. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live a life of evasion, less because of any moral stand but simply because I couldn’t take the uncertainty and inability to live openly. But I don’t have the difficult life in the home country that awaits those whose plea to stay in the U.S. is rejected.

These immigrants are from Cameroon. They could just as easily be from South America. Difficulties exist in the home countries of immigrants. Does that mean we must take them because they would rather be here than there? Most of us would probably agree that we do not. On the other hand, natural disasters, massive corruption, or political upheavals do seem to influence Americans’ attitudes, as they should. What should our policy be towards climate-related migrants? War-related migrants? Surely we cannot refuse them entry. That would be unconscionable. Mbue’s novel raises questions. It seems an opportune time to discuss these issues.

Add the complication of a black man immigrating to a country who has not yet solved their race prejudices:

“You think a black man gets a good job in this country by sitting in front of white people and telling the truth? Please don’t make me laugh.”

This novel is set in the run-up to Obama’s historic election, which was also the run-up to the financial crisis.

“The only difference between the Egyptians [during the Bible’s Old Testament calamity]… and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshipping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing.”

Near the end of the book two characters discuss a choice the illegal immigrants are considering so that they can stay: to divorce & marry someone else for a green card. Only they cannot figure out if it is right or wrong to consider this choice. The person to whom they speak quotes Rumi:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

I have always interpreted that phrase in a different way than Mbue tells us here it can be interpreted. She says Rumi means ‘Let’s not dwell too much on labeling things as right or wrong.’ Which means, doesn’t it, that rightdoing and wrongdoing are relative? I always thought it meant something like ‘Let’s be bigger than our differences.’ If anyone knows the heart of Rumi, please let me know.

Anyway, I spent a great deal of this book gnawing the inside of my cheek. That generally tells me how anxious I am getting. When I draw blood, I have trouble getting past it. This wasn’t a comfortable read. But I suppose it comes close to the truth for some immigrants. If you want to know what it is like to be them, try this.



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Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar

Hardcover, 295 pgs, Pub Feb 7th 2017 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812995800, Lit Awards: Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Nominee for Longlist (2017), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2018)

Steven Cohen is back running hedges (or do we call them dodges?) on Wall Street after being banned for two years from investing other people’s money. He is sixty-one years old, and has houses filled with beautiful things. His lifetime focus is trying to edge others in the market using whatever means necessary. He is said to have a reptilian cool when it comes to trading on the margins, making him one of the best traders ever. Cold-blooded is one thing. Cheating with inside information is another.

He can deny it all he wants. Nobody believes him because “everybody does it.” Proprietary, nonpublic information, the ‘black edge’ of the title, “is like doing in elite-level cycling or steroids in professional baseball. Once the top cyclists and home-run hitters started doing it, you either went along with them or you lost.” But it is also that kind of wrong: it corrupts the process so completely that winning no longer means anything.

Kolhatkar wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek for most of the time she spent gathering material for this book, but now she works as a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has the skill to make a boring story about old white men on Wall Street buying stuff interesting. We learn what didn’t work the last time government lawyers went after Cohen. If we are going to stop the kind of self-aggrandizement that leads to corruption of our most important governing principles, we need people who are brave enough to take on the cheaters.

That wouldn't be current and former employees of Cohen’s staff who were so internally corrupt already, like lifelong liar and cheat Matt Martoma, serving nine years for his part in the Elan trade that made Cohen dump and short stock he held in a company with a new Alzheimer drug, netting Cohen an estimated $275 million. Martoma had to change his name from Ajai Thomas because he was expelled from Harvard Law School for illegally modifying his transcript to get a clerkship.

Kolhatkar gives Martoma the slightest bit of cover by suggesting Martoma was traumatized in his childhood by a demanding father, but I’m afraid what we see is a character weakness so severe that Martoma felt entitled to criminal behaviors despite being a young, handsome, privileged man. His father says at his trial that he "maxed out" his gifts. Steve Cohen is the same kind of man. He has one gift that we can see. He is also more willing to be criminal than we are, perhaps as compensation for a kind of social and spiritual impoverishment. He will be remembered for…what? For buying things? Illegally. Wow. Big man.

If I understood the investigations into Steve Cohen, it was conducted separately by three different branches of government: the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the Securities & Exchange Commission. These players got together occasionally to share information, but were all the time afraid they could not make a case with the information they had gleaned unless someone in the Cohen organization flipped. Kolhatkar has an especially interesting discussion on why the ethically-challenged Martoma did not flip. To date we do not know why.

Several cases were being investigated and litigated by this same group at the same time, i.e., cases for other insider trading by the same miscreants, individual cases against Cohen’s current and former employees, cases against Cohen’s company, etc. Cohen did end up paying more than a billion dollars in fines, but he was never jailed. He was just prevented from playing with other people’s money for two years. One of Cohen’s former traders, David Ganek, actually countersued government entities, the FBI and Preet Bharara’s office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, for abridgment of his constitutional rights during that investigation. Ganek lost that challenge in October 2017.

Shortly after the decisions on Cohen's company SAC and Mathew Martoma, two cases decided earlier setting precedent on insider trading (Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson from Diamondback and Level Global, two firms with ties to SAC) were reversed, in effect reprimanding Bharara's office of zealotry. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Newman overturn was too lenient. The fight for right is ongoing.

Kolhatkar draws the contrast between those working for the government with fewer resources and those sleek white men working for Cohen. In the years after the investigation, some attorneys moved from one side to the other: the New York Times reports

“A day after Lorin L. Reisner announced that he was stepping down as head of the criminal division of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, the law firm Paul Weiss on Thursday named him as a partner in its litigation department.”

Paul Weiss supplied Cohen’s legal team. Antonia Apps, the attorney who tried the Steinberg case, went to Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. A high-level FBI investigator, Patrick Carroll, went to Goldman Sachs' compliance department. Amelia Cottrell of the SEC went to the firm where Cohen’s longtime defense counsel, Marty Klotz, worked. Sure, why not? Maybe one day, one of those who know both sides of the street will do the right thing for the right reasons.



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Educated by Tara Westover

Hardcover, 352 pgs, Pub Feb 20th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780399590504

It is of endless relief to me that this woman managed an escape from her family, though of course I know how the pain of leaving has scarred her. We all have scars at the end, I want to tell her. It is the ones gotten from life-threatening, abusive behaviors we do not have to accept as normal.

As a memoir, this is simply a brilliant one. Whether or not it is true in all its details is beside the point. Tara herself says there are many different remembrances of conversations and events. She kept a journal that faithfully recorded how she heard things that happened during stressful times in her life. Her version has an internal consistency that is hard to ignore, and since she is the one “coming clean,” as it were, we are inclined to believe her version of events above others. It is also possible to see how a religious mindset could blind one to what actually happened.

Tara Westover lived in a family of anti-government survivalists in northern Idaho. What happened to the children in her family was truly terrible, and exemplifies the definition of delusional in today’s secular society. At a time when our nation has grown to encompass many different religions, races, and ethnicities, Westover’s family, from their perch on a piece of land in northern Idaho, believed in self-reliance and in a single truth, even if it meant sacrifice of the clan. Delusional people sometimes forget that creating a life presents a challenge to one’s set of beliefs, in that each individual comes with free will and a right to life.

Tara recounts instances when her father’s investments in his scrapyard turned out badly, and incomes were strained to the point of breaking but for the ingenuity and generosity of family members determined to help out. But I will have to admit Tara’s descriptions of what her brother and father subjected her to while they were working in the scrapyard nearly blew out my blood pressure. With each sentence she stoked my indignation. At an early age I knew stupidity and exploitation when I saw it, but this could have been because of my own physical and mental weaknesses. Tara lasted longer in that environment because she was so able and strong.

We get very little background on the family before Tara is born. That seems fair: Tara must understand her parents’ story is theirs to tell. Suffice it to say the father may have been an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and bipolar. It appears he didn’t believe in public governance, or people coming together with good intent to solve societal wrongs. He believed in his own modified Mormon version of god and gospel and self-reliance. By itself this could almost be ignored except when he subjected his children to his mad imaginings, many of which were dangerous to their health and wellbeing.

Tara never went to school as a youngster, and she was not home-schooled. Like two of her brothers before her, she read enough to pass the state ACT, after which she attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her professors there were very impressed with her ability to think, and did what they could to advance her education by recommending her to attend Cambridge University in England. It must also be said that a bishop in the church there seemed to understand the obstacles Tara’s family presented by being so resistant to the larger world, and tried to help.

Tara’s professors at Cambridge were likewise impressed with her ability to reason and recommended her for a scholarship to Harvard. There she worked toward her Cambridge degree, looking at the constraints and obligations family ties present when considered in the context of the larger society in which we live, but she could only look at nineteenth-century philosophers. The advancements in thinking in twentieth and twenty-first centuries were too diverse and modern for someone of her religious upbringing to consider.

Nowhere do we get a sense of her understanding of race in our country and around the world. Her father may have been isolated out there in Idaho, but in his isolation he developed attitudes dangerously close to fascism. How has Tara developed her attitudes towards people of color after her upbringing would be interesting. But we don't get to that. She has plenty of other things to share, being something like a stranger in a stranger land, and now able to speak the language.

She is an interesting case study. Perhaps her professors thought so, too. Without a doubt she has a fascinating story and is able to tell it well. I listened to the Random House audio of this book, very beautifully read by Julia Whelan. It was involving, but infuriating that any child would have to withstand that kind of thoughtlessness and carelessness on their own behalf. It undoubtedly gave her some kind of strengths, but angst and self-doubt also. I wish her good luck. It is quite a story.

Below please find an interview of Tara Westover with her colleagues at Cambridge where she earned her doctorate.




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The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Hardcover, 622 pgs, Pub Sept 7th 2010 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780679444329, Lit Awards: Mark Lynton History Prize (2011), Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction (2011), PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Nominee (2011), Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction (2011), Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction (Runner-up) (2011) National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2010), Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction (2011), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for History and Biography (2010)

In the future, people will probably mistake the the origin of the phrase ‘the warmth of other suns’ to be this big book on America’s Great Migration, when it fact Wilkerson credits the phrase to a poem of Richard Wright’s that she uses as an epigraph:

"I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom."

The beautiful, elegiac poem expresses regret one had to leave some of one’s roots behind in order to ‘transplant’ elsewhere. Wilkerson interviewed about 1,200 people and did subsidiary research to collect & corroborate enough impressions and remembrances that she felt comfortable in this period and could supply details others forgot.

I'd be willing to bet she used techniques similar to those used by the author of one of my favorite histories, the award-winning Russian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, who wrote Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union. Alexievich’s journalistic technique uses the general experience to elucidate the personal, though Wilkerson also did extensive interviews with the three main subjects of her narrative.

The Great Migration covered the period 1915-1970; Wilkerson’s own attention span covers a period of about one hundred years, from 1910-2010. The three different sets of migrants whose lives she uses as examples did not know one another, and all three were alive when she began her research; all three had died before she’d finished. George Starling moving up the eastern seaboard from Florida to Harlem in New York City; Ida May Gladney moved from Mississippi to Chicago, part of the midwest migration; and Robert Foster moved from Louisiana to California, an experience about which I knew the least.

The book is huge with detail. It can’t be rushed, and those who read or listen to it regularly, recognizing it may take weeks to get to it all, may enjoy it best. There is a rhythm to the telling; it is long-form story-telling, and it adheres to an oral tradition. One can certainly make the case that, since Wilkerson conducted interviews for the bulk of her narrative, this is in a long line of family histories passed down orally from generation to generation. The experiences she recounts fills in holes some discover in our own family histories. We can now imagine what the migrants must have encountered.

In charts showing the movement of African Americans from the South to different parts of the country in the last century, Los Angeles and cities in California got only a third or smaller proportion of what Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia settled. Boston and New York were in between those two.

One incident Wilkerson recounted that shook me badly was the story of the attempted integration in the summer of 1951 in Cicero, an all-white town on the southwest border of Chicago. The mob mentality that took over the reason of the so-called white people—and it should be noted this was a broad swath of first- and second-generation European immigrants—when they learned a black couple had rented an apartment is horrifying, terrifying to recount. The couple’s belongings and the apartment were destroyed…on day one. The next three days brought a full-scale riot that needed the National Guard to subdue.

Boston is not specifically mentioned in this history, but the New York experience plays a large part. Wilkerson makes reference to the Northern Paradox, a term coined by the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal:

“In the North, Myrdal wrote, ‘almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.”

Considering African Americans apparently occupied approximately 25% of the population in these two cities, I’d have to agree that the discrimination, in Boston at least, is subtle, hidden, denied since most neighborhoods until recently were clearly segregated.

Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago October 14, 1929, and eventually ended up voting for Barak Obama as senator of Illinois. In describing cooking and eating corn bread the way it was made when she was coming up, she says

“Now you put you some butter and some buttermilk on it,” she says, “and it make you want to hurt yourself.”

I’ve never heard that phrase before, but it sure covers a number of addictive activities.

In describing Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster’s life in California, we get an indelible picture of the man by the way he remembered the clothing he and his wife wore at eventful moments in their lives.

“He remembered one night in particular. He was wearing a black mohair suit he ordered specifically for the occasion from the tailor who dressed Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra. He wore a black tie with a burgundy stripe, a white tab-collar shirt, gold cuff links, black shoes, black silk socks, and a white handkerchief with his initials, RPF, embroidered in silver.”

He doesn't mention it here, but elsewhere he mentions this black mohair jacket has a scarlet silk lining. How can one begrudge a man who is so enthusiastic in his compositions? There is such joy there.

The last individual detailed in this book, George Swanson Starling, was memorable for what he did not accomplish. His family held him back from finishing college, so George married an unsuitable woman and left home for the North.

"It was spite," George would say of the decisions he made at that moment in his life…"That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim [at] and goes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it."

A truer lesson was never told.

I used Whispersync to listen/read. Robin Miles narrates and her reading is perfect in pace and clarity. Ken Burns gave an intro to the audio edition which was not reproduced in the kindle version. He says, basically, "This is must-read nonfiction, essential to our understanding of race. I loved this book" and more. We haven’t had this kind of history told in this way before. Allowing this history to inform the construct that is your life will change that life a little bit.



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The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window: A Play by Lorraine Hansberry

Hardcover, 204 pgs, Pub 1965 by Random House

How the world turns. Lorraine Hansberry’s second play featuring a loose gang of liberal strivers and losers who struggle to make their voices heard politically, just might be, if viewed through a reducing lens, the grudging voices of enlightened conservatives in a disintegrating GOP. A creative conservative playwright—if such a person existed (how would we know, there is no proof)—could adapt this quietly devastating but ultimately fierce and brave and humane play to reflect conservative’s acknowledgement that their adherents are composed of just this diverse band of individuals working together for governance that works within law and without corruption or favor.

It is Black History Month and PBS recently aired an American Masters special retrospective on the life of Lorraine Hansberry, playwright forever famous for her universally-loved play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and suffered along with them the ignorance and backwardness of the stodgy thinking among white Americans, both liberals and conservatives, at the time.

Hansberry was only thirty-four years old when she died, shortly after her second play opened to mixed reviews on Broadway October 14, 1964 for one-hundred-and-one performances. Earlier that same year Hansberry had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she was struggling to write and revise the play through her disorientation and pain. Within a few short months of the October opening she would be dead, on January 12, 1965, and that day her play closed on Broadway for good.

When I picked this play up recently, I struggled with the 1960s-scent of it, despite its superficial relevance to now: a diverse and politically active group of people agitate to find, field, and elect the candidate of their choice in an important local election. Sounds like a play that could live forever, right? Hansberry’s instincts were so spot-on. My initial recoil from the datedness of the play began to change near the end of Act Two when things start to unravel for real, paying bare the true heart of things and the work’s universality. Act Three is icing on the cake. So it is that first act that was the problem all along, I guess.

The play has three acts and a cast of nine. Each of the characters seems to represent a larger group; there is a mixed race man, a prostitute, a gay man, a Jewish man, a Republican…you get the picture. Each of their difficulties in society needs addressing, and is the reason some of them band together politically to elect someone they believe will look after them. Each of the characters has high ideals but don’t necessarily treat others within their diverse group with the dignity they demand for themselves. The person they elect to represent them politically uses their support to get elected and then sells them out to monied interests.

The play could be a total bummer, but it is strangely lit from within by the naïve voice of a failed actress who, despite her lack of education and her inability to act, can see beyond what people say to what they do. She can see, for instance, that her husband cares more about helping people he doesn’t personally know rather than caring about the woman he is married to. To her he is dismissive, condescending, paternal. The mixed-race character has attitudes every bit as narrow, prejudiced, and cruel as those that had persecuted him his entire life. There is a supporter of Goldwater in the mix: she is intelligent, compassionate, and brave but also an anti-Semite and racist. In other words, people are complicated, and Hansberry allows us some time to digest that before suggesting we get up because we have work to do:

“Yes…weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again…Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”

We can’t just lie around bemoaning our foolishness and inadequacies but must make something of the hurt it causes us.

“…people wanna be better than they are…and I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things.”

I am not a believer in the conservative political or social platform. However, I am not wholly on board with liberal political groups either because they appear to be tone deaf and righteous and sometimes wrong. I believe the best solutions for government are often forged in the fire of differing opinions. We need a strong confident conservative voice in this country, not crazy far right closed-mindedness, to keep the left from blowing up their own side. Therefore I hope conservatives pull themselves together and remember what they believe.

The edition of this play I am reading has a Foreword written by a show-goer at the time the show played Broadway, John Braine, and an Introduction written by Hansberry’s former husband, the Jewish song writer Robert Nemiroff. I could not read these sections first—I had to go directly to the play, of course, or I wouldn’t know whereof they spoke. It is with some frustration I ask publishers to explain why these detailed examinations and discussions of the play are not placed at the end of the book in an Afterword or an Epilogue. That is where we want to read them. Those later sections are generally written by the play’s author, I realize, but convention sometimes needs to be shaken up. Anyway, I read them after the play and was glad for them.

Braine is convinced the play is a great one which was damned, not because of Act One which I have suggested, but because of the ending: the play acknowledges the inadequacies of each of the characters and does not condemn nor moralize. The affirmation and acceptance of man’s failures was its greatest sin, no matter that the idea was to do better tomorrow. Braine suggests a different age or a different country, perhaps, would find a public more at ease with what the brilliant and forward-thinking Hansberry had given us.

I felt similarly, my mind going directly to moderate conservatives who are being pushed around so they no longer know what they believe. Principled conservatives have gay people and black people and Jews in their ranks and somehow still manage to classify themselves as conservatives first. Hansberry’s friend James Baldwin tried to explain his ‘troubling ambivalence’ after seeing it—until he realized that what made him uncomfortable was Brustein’s ‘particular quality of commitment.’ In other words, Brustein continued to believe in commitment to our ideals, even when people let him down. For Baldwin, the play became an experience in soul-searching.

Ex-husband Nemiroff, for his part, thought the play brilliant, so full of ideas it couldn’t be easily classified or digested. Apparently the play’s only ‘rave’ review was from the Wall Street Journal correspondent: “…The taste left in the mouth after then final curtain is both bitter and good. For the playwright herself has taste, of the best kind.” But Hansberry never counted on plaudits. “…if there was one thing Lorraine Hansberry did not believe, it was that talent will ‘out’ in the end.” She herself thought the play was good, with lots of funny lines of which she was inordinately proud. Her life played out as tragedy, but she gave us comedy, and with that...responsibility.



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Happiness in This Life by Pope Francis, translated by Oonagh Stransky

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Dec 5th 2017 by Random House Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525510970, Edition Language: English

I don’t have anything against popes per se. It seems to me that some men are genuinely holy men, in that they have thought long and hard about life on earth and prefer the alternative: heaven. Pope Francis seems to have absorbed more than a few of the lessons taught in Christianity, and he is a good spokesperson. When he says he makes mistakes, we believe him.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis defended Bishop Juan Barros for being unaware of sexual abuse committed by his mentor, the Reverend Fernando Karadima, who was notorious and hated within Chile. Unfortunately, parishioners in Chile are not satisfied with the investigation that cleared Barros.


Bishop Juan Barros

Pope Francis’ support for Barros could very well be one of those ‘mistakes’ the Pope speaks of. At first the pontiff seems to be sympathetic to the victims of abuse and then backs off, suggesting the Church is being scammed by ‘supposed’ victims. He must be getting information from internal sources.

If I were him, I would have to doubt internal sources at least as much as believers. After all, the Church has failed its believers badly in the past, with abuse of minors, corruption, graft, and lack of humility right at the top of the list of wrongs. It must be hard to be part of such a large and wealthy organization and still preach humility with any degree of sincerity. Pope Francis managed it better than anyone, but he may be struggling now. When he preaches forgiveness, I might find forgiveness in my heart for him, but not so much for the pedos. Let them deal with the law first and then let's talk.

This book is divided into four sections; within those sections are very short statements he has given on different occasions between the years 2013-2016. The pieces are lessons that contain admonishments or suggestions. Those who like to meditate each day on spiritual lessons may find this form very successful for their practice.

Nearly every passage I marked out as insightful, useful, or on a subject discussed for years within the Catholic community came from the summer of 2013 when Pope Francis addressed celibacy:

“Once made, these vows of chastity never end, rather, they endure…when a priest is not a father to his community, when a nun is not a mother to all those with whom she works, he or she becomes sad…This sadness comes from failing to live a truly consecrated life, which, on the contrary, always makes us fruitful, fertile…the beauty of consecration is joy, always joy.”

We can see he means well, but not everyone is cut out to be a priest, let alone a pope, perhaps even less so today.

On another hot-button topic, the role of women in the Church, Pope Francis says this:

“The Church recognizes the indispensable contribution that women make to society, their sensitivity, their intuition, and other distinctive skills that women, more than men, tend to possess. For example, the special attention that women bestow on others, an attention often—but not exclusively—expressed in maternity. I happily acknowledge how many women share pastoral responsibilities with priests, how they guide people, families, and groups and thoughtfully contribute to theological studies.

But we need to create even more opportunities for women in the Church We need feminine genius in every aspect of society. So women must be guaranteed roles in the workplace and wherever important decisions are made, both within the Church and in social structures.”

Dear Pope Francis sounds like he is trying to make nice but his words are so old-fashioned I am not reassured. I would not be the person interested in reforming this edifice and in cranking open the brain boxes of men who long ago closed their minds to an entire sex. No. But I credit any woman willing to take it on. It is truly a labor of generosity and love.

The question remains, is the Church relevant today, or is it still standing but dead inside?

The audio produced by Penguin Random House and beautifully read by Arthur Morey is a good way to enjoy this title, though if using each little entry for meditation you may prefer the written copy. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. Pope Francis was born in Buenos Aires December 17, 1936, and was christened with the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He became the Bishop of Rome and the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church on March 13, 2013.



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Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub Jan 9th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780399588372

The subtitle of this book is “Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say” and her chapter headings are those twelve phrases. Corrigan’s grandmother always reassured her that she was “good enough,” and would be able to withstand the vicissitudes of life because when she failed, she just got right back up again and did something else. That resilience is a quality more important than beauty or intellectual horsepower when it comes to success in life, though nobody believes that when you’re young.

Some of these stories are sad, like when Corrigan loses her dad, and at little later, her best friend Liz. Corrigan can be eloquent when describing how important her best friend was to her, and what a horrifying shock it was to discover she would die. But she leavens her memories with the funny bits…the bits where both their families travelled together with the kids and shared laughs and more.

She is irreverent about her own accomplishments, a career writing, two daughters and a loving husband, but we can tell how much it means to her to be with them. It’s all she wanted: “Four by Forty,” is how she put it. Well, she did not have four kids because breast cancer intervened, but there were still four of them when she turned forty, two kids and two parents, so she satisfied herself with that. Corrigan volunteers to hold newborns at a local hospital once a week, getting her baby fix while giving relief to the corona of families and staff that surround a baby at risk.

One thing Corrigan had learned to say was “tell me more,” which works when someone is upset or when they are angry. The very fact of listening draws people out and clarifies their anxieties so that those stressors can be dealt with or dismissed. One doesn’t have to have any special expertise for this listening and yet people often find it most consoling.

The lesson I liked best was her learning to say ‘No.’

“Sexually, professionally, personally…saying ‘No’ takes balls. One friend told me her one big take away from three years and $11,000 of therapy was ‘Learn to say no and when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.’”

I learned this lesson early and all my life it has been my super power. Corrigan tells us her mother was a ‘No Pro’ who had no desire to curb another’s activities. “She had her own mind and she used it.” If she didn’t want to go somewhere everyone else wanted to go, she’d wave them off and settle happily to spend her evening alone.

“It must be possible to say ‘No’ nicely and still be loved,” Corrigan opines. Her mother must have managed it, since Corrigan loves her now. She may not have at the time, however, and we know this because of Corrigan’s earlier book Glitter and Glue in which Corrigan settles into recognition and love for how she was as a mother.

“Very few people I’ve known are able to set themselves free the way my mother has, liberated by the simple act of saying “no,” which I submit is impressive for any woman and downright radical for one raised in the “nice and easy” generation. My Mom had always been able to find outs where others could not. Looking back I think it came down to her impressive willingness to be disliked and her utterly unromantic position that people should take serious, if not total responsibility, for their own happiness.”

Corrigan has lots of personality—that used to be a way for men to say women are loud—but she actually says stuff rather than just blow air, and she can be really funny. It you listened to her describe using her daughter's round-tipped scissors to cut off a shirt she’d bought on sale but couldn’t manage to take off past her boobs once on, you know what I mean. She may actually be a little bit loud, but she is definitely the one you’d aim for at a party or for a long walk—she’d never be without some observation worth developing into something bigger and deeper. I am nothing like her, but I appreciate that mother nature of hers to the end. I have always admired mothers for their stop-gap practicality and their attention to the things that matter.

The end of this memoir reads like a long eulogy for Liz, and what her friendship meant. It is the best darn eulogy I have ever heard…in a way it sounds like a wedding toast, it is so full of life and love and gratefulness and remembrance. It would be a wonderful model for someone wishing to find a way to say what is in their hearts for their own friends or relatives. We’ll all have to face it one day and judging from Corrigan’s experience, we are never ready.

Corrigan reads the audio of this book herself, and it is a good way to enjoy the Penguin Random House production. The book would be good as well because the eulogy passages you may want to read again.

Attached please find Corrigan in a very short NYT video discussing Glitter & Glue, and below that, a 5 minute audio clip of Tell Me More:





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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

Hardcover, 207 pgs, Pub Jan 16th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812988635

I’d never read any Denis Johnson before this, though of course I knew of his work. I thought I had endless days to finally show my appreciation.

A GR friend describes the eponymous first story as if watching a magician at work. That story is actually a set of very short stories, each so well-conceived and trimmed of fat that worlds are conveyed in a sentence. Perhaps he could have been a lyricist; another GR friend says he was a poet “first and foremost.” Yes.

Both these GR friends cite that first story along with “Triumph Over Grave,” the penultimate story in this collection, as their favorites. So it is with me. These two stories are worth seeking out the collection to read. Probably you will not get a better idea of the art and the man than these.

“What have you been doing with yourself out here?” one character asks another who is naked beneath his open lab coat.
“Thangdoodlin’,” the other man replies. —from “Triumph…”

Johnson knew too much about addiction. It saturates his stories and while in some we get the sense of an understanding compassion for fellow sufferers, at the same time it gives us the claustrophobic I-can’t-breathe quality of hearing the same goddamn story again in its millionth iteration, perhaps even from the same person. Empathy, even sympathy, turns sour over too much time with addicts.

“We alkies are just a tangle of lies like the insides of a golf ball.”

At the same time I want to press this book into the hands of AA & NA attendees to talk about at their choreographed meetings. Surely the vision of someone managing to describe their common symptoms and regrets is restitutive, reflexively imitative. But how would he know these things except to have succumbed more times than can be counted? Some folks manage to escape. We have to hold onto that. Besides, he never asks for more.

Penguin Random House does a magnificent job on the audio of this collection, and provides some Soundcloud clips for stories read by different actors. Below Nick Offerman reading from “Ad Man,” one of the very short stories in “Largesse…”; My favorite voice among all these favorite actors is Michael Shannon reading the first page of “The Starlight on Idaho,” sounding so much like Sam Shepard in voice and subject matter that we remember a time when these men roamed the earth. They meant something to us, addictions or not; Will Patton reads the first pages of “Triumph…”, his voice all shaky and smoky like someone who will never lose the jitters anymore; the first page of “Strangler Bob” read by Dermot Mulroney sounds all brawny and seen-it-all; Liev Schreiber reads the last story in the collection, “Dopplegänger, Poltergeist.”




The Audible edition of the audiobook has all five actors reading one each of five different stories. But be careful with this listen: Denis Johnson’s work is so unflashy that its skill can be easily overlooked when someone reads it aloud just right. The book is small and easy to carry: it allows one to appreciate the shortness of the stories, the way he laid it all out and wrote it down, and what he didn’t say.



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Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo

Hardcover, 296 pgs, Pub July 11 2017 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812997316, Lit Awards: Reading Women Award Nominee for Nonfiction (2017)

Michelle Kuo’s debut stopped me in my tracks. All other work I had on my plate was shoved to the side while I read this nonfiction detailing Kuo’s after-college years teaching English to at-risk kids in Helena, Arkansas in the Mississippi Delta region. As a piece of literature, this memoir succeeds beautifully; her organization is laced with poetry and the work exudes a kind of transcendental grace. More than once I found myself barking out sobs at the waste of lives we tolerate every day and for her recognition of the means by which we express and acknowledge thanks.

Back in 2009 Kuo had published a piece in the NYT Magazine about her two years teaching in Arkansas, and a special student she had there. In one year that student’s reading had progressed two grade levels and his attendance had improved dramatically. His classmates has also named Ms. Kuo a great influence on their lives. The at-risk school closed for lack of funding just as her kids were entering high school. Then Ms. Kuo left to attend law school in Boston.

One of the things I liked best about this story is the self-questioning Kuo does regarding her reasons for choosing to teach in the Delta. She explains how racism impacted her and how, learning of writers of the civil rights movement, she felt exhilarated and enabled. She did not think she would do well trying to change the minds of self-interested people in power, but she thought she could bring notions of empowerment to those who had no advocates.

Kuo’s parents are my favorite characters in this story. Immigrants from Taiwan, they’d sacrificed everything to give their children more opportunities. When their clever and talented daughter graduated from Harvard and chose to teach in the Mississippi Delta region, they were confused, embarrassed, hurt. She could go anywhere and do anything, and she chooses social and racial justice work in the deep South. She doesn’t claim religious beliefs, and the work wasn’t easy. By the end of her story all of us can see that her generosity of spirit comes directly from her parents, though they didn’t recognize it at first.

Kuo names the chapters in her story after works of literature: poems, short stories, novels, or in one case, after the words of an affidavit her prize student, Patrick, signs to acknowledge his role in the death of a man. Patrick had dropped out of school when Ms. Kuo left for law school, had allowed his reading and writing skills to languish, and was a vulnerable teen with no oversight in a town that didn’t care very much. Kuo returns to the Delta to teach Patrick in prison, organizing her life so that she can try, in a few short months, to bring back some of the promising boy she’d seen years ago.

There were other teachers from northern schools who’d come to the Delta to teach in underserved communities and some had stayed. When Kuo returned to Helena, she was treated to their successes: the segregated black school did better on their state math scores than did the white schools. For the first time white families were complaining their better-resourced schools weren't providing the same kind of opportunity others had; they were moving their kids over.

What Kuo hadn’t been prepared for was that the man she saw in jail bore almost no resemblance to the promising boy she’d left years before. Now nineteen, Patrick could no longer read or write well. He expected nothing from anyone, least of all from himself. But he did remember what it felt like to have Ms. Kuo as a teacher. “It made going to school—you know, made it really mean something, somebody that care for you.”

Kuo infuses her work with the language of poets, and insists that we, like Patrick, listen to the sounds and decipher the deeper meanings. She shows us what teaching can be, and what a gift it is when done right. Discipline and good behavior often comes from not wanting to disappoint a mentor, and that impetus is what Kuo provided for Patrick. She draws for us the everyday reality of Patrick’s world so we do not blame him for his own inadequacies.

In this way, the memoir is a political book. We are persuaded that certain educational and social polices are not as helpful as others. We can see that there can be benefits to assistance and huge, disgraceful, unacceptable human losses without them. It is unforgivable of us to allow such disparities in opportunity, but we need those whose opportunity is stolen to acknowledge and address that lack. Ms. Kuo teaches us about that nexus, and we are grateful.


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Green: A Novel by Sam Graham-Felsen

Hardcover, 320 pgs, Pub Jan 2nd 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780399591143

One reason this debut novel succeeds so very well are the layers. It can be enjoyed by teens but just as well by adults. Race, religion, ethnicity, family dynamics, growing up, sexual awakenings, being harassed, winning admiration, feeling out of place, making friends and losing them…all these things are eloquently addressed in the hip hop slang of a white boy trying to fit in a primarily minority school in Boston. He is twelve and on the cusp.

Graham-Felsen gets the awkwardness and uncertainty of twelve just right. The time is 1990s Boston before the explosion of high-speed internet and we are treated to the excruciatingly slow process of downloading color jpegs, presumably from dial-up modems. The segregation in Boston schools does not feel so distant, however. The white-black friendship between David and Marlon, our narrator and a boy in his class, always feels a bit tentative and unsure, just like the boys themselves.

On an ordinary day, most of us might not be rapt listening to the thoughts of a twelve-year-old for nearly three hundred pages, but David’s jive language adds a layer of complexity to the picture that completely works. We understand that he uses this language with his friends and peers and not with his parents, two Harvard-educated hippies now living with their two sons in Jamaica Plain. The Arnold Arboretum, one of the largest collection of plant species from around the world, is part of David’s walk to his ‘ghetto’ school so that he can avoid the housing projects where he has been harassed.

Everything about the setting, the characters, the situations ring true. Dave’s parents believe in public schools so they won't consider a private school for David but instead encourage him to win a place at Boston Latin, the best public school in the city for grades 7-12. Dave and Marlon both have their sights set on Harvard because of the money they could make: just a look at the statistics for heads of corporations and heads of state tell them a Harvard degree is stone cold gold.

But Graham-Felsen adds the spice—that layering again—by having a teacher looking to show the boys what’s possible bring them to meet a city councilor who graduated Harvard and who has some pretty harsh things to say about the experience. The city councilor is black and knows that Harvard’s aura of success mostly works for whites but less well for people of color.

Another of Dave’s classmates, Jimmy, is Vietnamese and living in what Dave calls a real ghetto in Chinatown. One day Jimmy surreptitiously shows Dave a switchblade he’d brought to school; Dave considers getting a blade like it for his own protection, and so visits Jimmy’s ‘crib.’ This scene is painfully realistic and beautifully rendered. Jimmy knows there is practically no chance he will get into Boston Latin because of the quotas for Asian students. Reverse quotas.

All of this rich material is artfully mined by Graham-Felsen. It never feels heavy handed; the absurdity of the blond white boy speaking inner-city lingo just lightens the whole experience, even when we have reason to feel sadness, for example when considering that members of both Dave and Marlon’s families struggle with a mental illness diagnosis. Dave’s younger brother refuses to speak for a reason never revealed, and Marlon’s mother may be bipolar or schizophrenic. The families deal the best they can, both very differently, naturally.

The very best parts of the novel may be those sections that are not about being white, but are about being black: when Dave convinces Marlon to help clear snow to make some loot, most of Dave’s old customers don’t answer the door when Marlon rings the bell. Or the time the boys are invited to a party in a nice section of Jamaica Plain and are followed by a cop car as they walk. Or the times Marlon wants Dave to just figure it out why he does not want to get caught doing something even marginally illegal, or why he does not want to pick up recyclable cans at a Harvard reunion, or why he has never entered the gates at Arnold Arboretum despite the fact it is free to everyone, or why he doesn’t want to attend an exclusive arts camp in New Hampshire for the summer.

Finally I know the answer to the joke about what the whitest thing I ever did is. Everyone will have their own answers, and it is worth spending the time to figure out what your answer would be to this question. The novel is a triumph of noticing, of seeing color and speaking of it, as well as a paean to youth, to curiosity, to seeking, to becoming. I hope everyone gets a chance to weigh in on this one--it's a real conversation starter. Families can read it together. It’s a crossover novel on many levels.

Listening to this book is a terrific way to enjoy the language. Brilliantly read by Prentice Onayemi and published by Random House Audio, this book is available for Whispersync. The book is a fast read, and I moved between the two. Beaks & Geeks, a free Random House Soundcloud podcast, posted an interview with Graham-Felsen that is really worthwhile. Graham-Felsen also wrote a short piece for Lit Hub that is worth a glance.

Below please find a short PRH Open Book Event YouTube video by Sam Graham-Felsen about his background and the book. He is a magnetic speaker, and just as good on the page. Enjoy.




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I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub Oct 24th 2017 by Spiegel & Grau ISBN13: 9780812988840

The detailed nature of this book about the life and death of Eric Garner allows us to see, in horrible living color, exactly where we’re at in terms of race relations in the United States. Eric Garner died July 17, 2014 in Staten Island, victimized on this day by police who put him in a chokehold and ignored his pleas that he could not breathe. What Taibbi does exceptionally well in this difficult book is allow us to see Eric Garner for the man he was—a well-liked and respected member of his community.

The entire story told here is a long and winding one, going back to pick up relevant cases along the way, including that of Carnell Russ of Alabama, whose death in 1971 by pistol shot at close range in a police station was challenged in court a number of times until finally we learn a monetary award was never paid to Carnell’s widow. Forty-five years later the original prosecutor in the Eric Garner trial, Dan Donovan, was elected to Congress, proud of his role in protecting the white people, in his eyes, unjustly under attack for upholding the law.

So carefully has Taibbi prepared his case in the writing of this book that when we read the words “disrespect for the law, contempt for society, a refusal to abide by the responsibilities of a civilized people,” we briefly imagine the words were chosen to describe the men and women of the NYC police force who refused to give credence to citizen complaints about uncalled for police harassment and reckless endangerment. But no, this language was used by Joseph Concannon, retired NYPD captain and staunch defender of whatever the police did in the course of their duties, illegal or not.

City politicians elected before, during, and after the prosecution of the Eric Garner case come off looking weak and ineffectual at best, deliberately obfuscating at worst. The case of the killing of Eric Garner came amidst a rash of police killings around the country that were well publicized, mostly due to actual video of the crimes. It is absolutely horrifying to imagine for a moment how these cases would have been treated in the absence of a video record. Even in these cases, obstruction into the behaviors of repeat offender police is rampant, common, and from the point of view of the citizenry, indefensible.

The black lives examined in this work are extremely stressful. Putting ourselves in their place, we might even say these lives and conditions of life are hopeless. But Eric Garner did not see things that way, and certainly on the day he died, he was the happiest he’d been in a very long time, his son having just been awarded a sports scholarship for advanced education. Taibbi is able to make us feel the heat that day in July, and the satisfaction the big man would have felt. We’re plenty pleased, too.

I have wondered, in thinking of Taibbi’s past work, what it would be like to to be on the other side of one of his scathing investigations. Now we know, because he co-authored a book during his expat days in Moscow, in which he targeted everyone in the outsized-profits-fueled economy, from foreigners gaming the system to Russian oligarchs and their deadly, beautiful hookers. Adolescent, ridiculous, and forgettable, excerpts I read from that earlier work should have meant a far longer, more circuitous path to legitimate journalism. The argument in the link above charges Taibbi with sexism and misogyny, a shadow of which, it could be argued, appeared in his description here of Assistant DA Anne Grady.

It is my contention that Taibbi’s work uncovering the hows and whys of the life surrounding Eric Garner is a far weightier thing on the scales of right and wrong-doing than that earlier work. It is important we all scour our own past for sexism—doling it out or letting it pass—before nailing the coffin shut on the talent and real heart shown here. With this book, Taibbi blows past any criticisms that could be leveled for those earlier errors in judgment and gives us something terribly important: a honest, raw look at where we stand in our race relations right now. Perhaps only bad boys could understand, empathize with, and give us the nuance of all the imperfect characters Taibbi details for us here, and get to the depth in this story that explains Eric Garner’s life and untimely death.

Several of the Irish-sounding names in this history are exactly those of loved ones within my own family, though I don’t believe I am related to any of them. My grandfather was a Boston cop. What I take from this is that whatever place these white policemen go to in their heads when it comes to fairness and justice, it is not inevitable, and it doesn’t come from the color of their skin. I recall the recently-discovered 19th-C diary of African American boy convict Austin Reed,

“Yes, me brave Irish boys, me loves you till the day that I am laid cold under the sod, and I would let the last drop of this dark blood run and drain from these black veins of mine to rescue you from the hands of a full blooded Yankee…Reader, if you are on the right side of an Irishman, you have the best friend in the world.”

A lot has happened from then to now, but nothing that can’t be undone.





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