Nevermore: Gordon, Druett, Hanes, Kadish, Obama, Mayk

 
Author Noah Gordon has had a strong attraction for some of our Nevermore readers, with his book The Last Jew being the subject this week.  Set during the Spanish Inquisition, the story centers around a young Jewish man named Yonah who is the son of a silversmith.  After his father and younger brother die, Yonah keeps a low profile, working as a farmer, shepherd, and apprentice to an armor-maker while holding on to his Jewish faith.  Our reviewer likes all the historical research that the author puts into his works and enjoys the characters.  Regular readers of the Nevermore report will remember that Gordon’s titles have been a fairly regular feature at meetings over the past few months.

 

True survival stories often entice one of our regular members, and this time she had praise for Island of the Lost by Joan Druett.  This is one of those “stranger than fiction” stories about two ships which both wrecked near the same island in 1864. Unaware of each other, the two crews set out to survive the inhospitable Auckland Island conditions which included freezing rain and high winds. One crew worked together though they spoke different languages; they taught each other and even taught some to read and write.  They were able to rescue themselves. The other crew fared less well, shall we say.  Our reader highly, HIGHLY, recommended this book.

Obachan by Tani Hanes is also a true story, that of Hanes’ grandmother.  Born in rural Japan in 1916, Mitsuko wanted very little from life: mainly just a sleeping mat to call her own that she didn’t have to share.  As the oldest of eight children, she didn’t have that luxury and soon she was hired out to help pay her family’s debt.  She was pressured to marry a man her family chose. Despite it all, she strove to build a life for herself.  The Nevermore reviewer particularly enjoyed learning about the Japanese culture.

 

When her time came to share, a member started discussing The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish when it turned out that someone else had just read it. The book is about a cache of 17^th century Jewish manuscripts discovered hidden in a house.  The story goes back and forth in time from the present day scholars who are trying to learn about the manuscript’s author and the author herself. Both reviewers agreed that the beginning was slow and that it was more than a bit wordy in places, but felt it was still a good book.  The current reader praised the blend of intrigue and mystery, as well as good writing and the strong historical component.

A Promised Land, the new memoir by former president Barack Obama, was named as a book in progress by our next reader.  She said she was particularly interested to seeing how he formulated some of his policies, and was happy to note that he began addressing the subject fairly early in the book.  She will discuss it more after she has finished it.

 

Finally, the staff member brought up the book she was reading:  Growing Up on the Gridiron by Vicki Mayk.  It’s the story of Owen Thomas, a star athlete, scholar, and magnetic personality whose life ended in suicide.  Questions have arisen as to whether or not football played a role in his death, and the book examines some of the questions surrounding CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.)  It’s well-written and non-judgmental, and brings up a number of questions for which answers are still being sought.

Nevermore: Gordon, Segovia, Epstein, Picoult, Getty, Cep, Golding, LeGuin, Cooper, Flagg

This week our readers reviewed some classics, some new books, and we learned a thing or two that we didn’t know (and may not have wanted to know) about vultures.

 

Our first reader reviewed Matters of Choice by Noah Gordon, the third book in the historical fiction Cole Trilogy. This book talks about wanting proper health care and freedom of choice.  The main character, Roberta, comes from a long line of physicians and continues the family tradition.   After a personal crisis, she ends up in a small town in Massachusetts and she takes care of the local people and they take care of her.  Our reader liked this book so much that she will look for the initial books in the series.   The trilogy starts with The Physician and is followed by Shaman.   Many of our other readers who have read the first two thought they were far better than this last book, but highly recommend the entire series. 

 

The next book was The Murmur of Bees by Sofia Segovia, a historical fiction book about a family in Mexico during the flu and also about the revolution and the time that they were banning priests.  At the time of this writing, our reader was about two-thirds of the way through the book and wasn’t yet sure it is headed – it is kind of mysterious yet thoroughly enjoyable. 

 

Next up was a biography of early 20^th century writer Edna St. Vincent Millay who was considered one of the most romantic modern poets. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Daniel Mark Epstein details Millay’s life and real romances and explores some of her best-know works.  Our reader felt the book was very well written and thinks that if you like Millay’s works, you will love this book.

 

The next book reviewed was The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult.   This book goes back and forth in time so much that our reader found it confusing to keep the timelines straight and wished the book had been written in a more straightforward fashion.  Overall, she found it to be a very good book due to the writing, but confusing with the jumping timelines.  The main character, Dawn Edelstein is a death doula and the story centers on her relationships in both America where she has a husband and family, and in Egypt with her former lover.  Our reader’s opinion that the book would be easier to read if it were written linearly was echoed by other readers that had also read the book.

 

Our next reader told us a hilarious and revolting story about a time in 1876 when meat rained from the sky over Mrs. Crouch’s farm near Ranking in Kentucky.  This mysterious happening gathered widespread attention, including that of a local chemistry professor Kirk Gohde who had the taste of the meat duplicated by a lab and put into jelly beans for the locals to safely sample at the local yearly festival.  It turns out that the meat was from vultures – a whole flock of vultures who had thrown-up over the Crouch farm!  The story came from the website https://www.atlasobscura.com/ which is a travel site featuring strange stories from around the world.  There is also a book by the same title which collects some of these essays.

 

Next up was another reader of How to They/Them by Stuart Getty.  As with our previous reviewer of this book, it opened our reader’s mind to things that she had not taken into account before.  She thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a phenomenal amount from How to They/Them.  This book makes you very aware of how gender terms are used today.

 

Furious Hours by Casey Cep is a true-crime book about the intersection of one of America’s most honored authors, Harper Lee, and a possible real-life serial killer, Reverend Willie Maxwell.  Maxwell was an African-American preacher and voodoo practitioner whose relatives seemed to have a habit of dying violently, but not until after Maxwell took out insurance policies on them. Lee covered his trial with the idea of writing a true-crime book (she had helped research the groundbreaking In Cold Blood for her childhood friend Truman Capote) but that book never came into being and instead Lee became famous for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Furious Hours paints an unflattering portrayal of Lee.  Some feel that To Kill a Mockingbird would never have been published if Lee had not had such a good editor who did a lot of editing and rewriting for her. 

 

Speaking of classics, the same reader re-read Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and she could keep thinking about was how prescient the book was - we have two sets of people now, and so many of us are shocked to find out who our friends are; they are not who we thought they were.  It is sort of like the two groups in the book.  While our reader liked the suspense and writing in the book, she just kept thinking about it mirrors today’s society – and not in a good way.

 

Another of our readers highly recommended two young adult series that are touchstones for him:  The Earthsea Cycle and The Dark Is Rising series.  The Earthsea Cycle, written by Ursula LeGuin has become a classic in young adult literature – it follows the life of Ged, a young wizard, through his life and trials, and finishes with the story of Tehanu a mysterious young woman who does not know her past. The first book in the series is A Wizard of Earthsea.  The Dark Is Rising Series by Susan Cooper is a five book series based in England and is steeped in Aurthurian and pre-Christian British Isles mythology.  The series focuses on Will Stanton, the last of the Old Ones, born into this world to do battle with The Dark for the future of humanity.  While technically the first book is Over Sea, Under Stone, some readers prefer to start with The Dark Is Rising.

 

The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fanny Flagg won effusive praise from our next reviewer.  This long awaited sequel to the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café was deemed a fitting sequel.  She loved the book and now wants to go back and read the first book again – it is like visiting with family you haven’t seen in a long while.  Definitely recommend. 

 

Nevermore: Lee Smith, Country Doctor Writes, Alexander Hamilton, Affairs of Honor, Matters of Choice, Anne Tyler, Soul Full of Coal Dust, The Switch

 

Nevermore reviewed a wide range of books ranging from presidential honor to small town Appalachia.

First up was the locally set Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith. Our reader was prepared to like this book but ended up loving it. In particular, she cites the wonderful description of the dynamics of the family who are at the center of the story. This is a sweet, intimate look at the details of a difficult life. Set in the local coalfields with locations both fictional and real, this book is easy to read and gets into the details of peoples’ lives.

The small-town America theme continues with A Country Doctor Writes:  Conditions: Diseases and Other Life Circumstances by Hans Duvefelt. This memoir by the Swedish born, Maine based doctor really captured the attention of our reader. She was particularly struck by his candor – he does not hesitate to write about his mistakes and the things that he puzzles over and learns from other people. Dr. Duvefelt lives in northern Maine, almost into Canada, and this book of one hundred short essays chronicles his life and work in a small, northern American town. Our reader was fascinated by this book, and highly recommends it.

 

The next book reviewed was Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne Freeman.  This political history book examines how the idea of honor guided the Founding Fathers. They knew that because the country was so new, if it was not respected and honored, that it would not succeed. Their honor was wrapped up in their reputations, but the honor of the country came first and foremost. Some of the ways they dealt with honor was through gossip, or ghost written columns. More shocking to modern audiences was the fact that you could physically beat, or cane someone if you were senior to them in Congress. Duels were reserved for the elite, but if you turned one down your reputation would be hurt as you were considered a coward. The honorable way out was to negotiate an apology by using a Second, or emissary. One of the most famous duels in American history is the Hamilton/Burr duel. The author agrees with the historical consensus that Burr was the one who was truly defeated in that duel, because while Hamilton was killed, Burr’s reputation was destroyed forever. Hamilton got the honor; he had the biggest funeral that the country had ever seen, and Burr had to flee to the American West and then to Europe. The emphasis of the book is about how much the founding fathers relied on honor, well above their personal reputations.  Nevermore agreed that would be a nice thing to have today (besides the caning and the duels.)

 

The same reader recommends both Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which clocks in at a hefty 800 pages, and Richard Brookhiser’s Alexander Hamilton:  American – a shorter book at 217 pages, but packed with plenty of details about the Founding Father and his legacy.

Our next reader tackled Matters of Choice, the third book in the Cole Trilogy by Noah Gordon. Set closer to present day than the first two books, this story weaves women’s rights in as a central theme. The book is set in Boston where the main character is a woman physician performing abortions, and being chased by antiabortionists.  In the midst of getting a divorce, and reeling from professional rejection, she goes to her country house in the mountains of Western Massachusetts to get away from it all, and finds an unexpectedly rich life in the small town. The doctor does not like abortion, but feels that she must be involved to save women’s lives. This book was not the reader’s favorite, but it does wrap up the trilogy, which she highly recommends, beautifully.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler has been passed around and enjoyed by several readers. This charming, witty book is about a man named Micah who is very set in his ways. He does everything perfectly – he cleans something every day and feels that he is a failure if there is even a spot of grime on something that he has just cleaned. Every day he has his specific things that he does and follows his routine strictly. In contrast, his sisters all have normal families and households. Micah has a woman-friend who is gently trying to get Micah to marry her, to which Micah is clueless. Micah’s vision is also bad and he keeps seeing things that aren’t there. On top of that, one day a teenager shows up at the house claiming that Micah is his father. Overall, our reader thought this is a great book and recommends it highly.

 

Our next reader took on Soul Full of Coal Dust by Chris Hamby.  This investigative journalism book was reviewed by another reader a few weeks ago, and like that reader, this one recommends the book highly. What she was taken with was the story of how the coal companies had found lawyers and doctors loyal to the company and stacked the decks against the miners. The coal companies were undermining the laws passed to keep the miners safe, even gaming the air quality readings. They had taken this tenet of the law to mean that they should do whatever they should do to win, which included choosing only the reports that support their viewpoint. The lawyer at the center of the book put in for discovery which the coal companies fought as it would force them to divulge all of the information that they had. The story is about how gradually the laws changed over years, and in particular how the litigation by the miner, Gary Fox, became a rallying point for change. In the end legislation was introduced that made mandatory air quality monitoring black boxes that were harder to tamper with.  The Labor Department also passed a regulation that everyone on both sides of black lung cases had to release all of their reports/documents. After these changes, many of the cases started to go in favor of the miners. Our reader was struck in particular by the quality and depth of the research that went into this book. She found it was incredible. 

 

On a lighter note, the same reader breezed through The Switch by Beth O’Leary. The main character is Leena Cotton, a young, London based professional whose sister has just died of cancer. Leena is overworking herself in order to forget the tragedy until she is forced by her employer to take time off. Leena’s mother and grandmother, Eileen, live in the small Yorkshire town of Hambly and Leena decides to go there, and soon becomes friends with the surly neighbor. Eileen decides that she would like to take another stab at the single life, and takes Leena’s place in London. Grandma teaches her young roommates how to cook, while at the same time learning about the single life in a big city. Our reader found this novel to be light and fluffy, but rather fun.