Nevermore: Dopesick, Naturalist, Murder in Constantinople

 Reported by Rita

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy

Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.

I found this book to be easy to read and well researched. It was very thorough and informative - well done.      - KM     5 stars 

 

Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation by Jim Ottaviani (Adapter), Edward O. Wilson, C.M. Butzer (Illustrator)

A vibrant graphic adaptation of the classic science memoir. Regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists, Edward O. Wilson spent his boyhood exploring the forests and swamps of south Alabama and the Florida panhandle, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants—the latter to become his lifelong specialty. His memoir Naturalist, called “one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written” by the Los Angeles Times, is an inspiring account of Wilson’s growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define. This graphic edition, adapted by New York Times bestselling comics writer Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by C.M. Butzer, brings Wilson’s childhood and celebrated career to life through dynamic full-color illustrations and Wilson’s own lyric writing.

I thought this was a great expose of Wilson's life. Very fascinating.      - AH     5 stars

 

Murder in Constantinople by A.E. Goldin

A gripping, immersive historical murder mystery in which a wayward boy from London's East End is pulled into the hunt for a serial killer on the eve of the Crimean War. London, 1854- twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure.

This was a good read - a really interesting story.      - GP       5 stars

  

Other Books Mentioned:

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story: A Port William Novel by Wendell Berry

Jordan's Stormy Banks (Body Farm, #7.5) by Jefferson Bass

The Devil's Bones (Body Farm, #3) by Jefferson Bass

Trauma Room Two by Philip Allen Green

Skylark by Paula McLain

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney, Ted Widmer (Editor)

 

New Books:

Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson

The Company of Owls by Polly Atkin

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible by Rabih Alameddine

The Last Gifts of the Universe by Riley August

Nevermore: Paper Girl, Eleventh Hour, A Death in the Family

Reported by Rita

 

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

 

From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America's social fabric, her most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the '70s and '80s--certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her. But as Macy's mother's health declined in 2020, she couldn't shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community's civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn't begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend--once the most liberal person she knew--became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother's death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she'd left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues. Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth--in person, with respect--she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope. 

A really interesting read filled with really good information and research sources.     -KM       5 stars

 

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home: India, England and America, and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through. 

The writing is really good, interesting, and entertaining.     -WJ      5 stars

 

 

A Death in the Family by James Agee

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident--a tragedy that destroys not only a life but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

The beauty of this book is the love in it. It is beautifully written.      -AH      5 stars

Other Books Mentioned: 

Crosscut: An Evan Delaney Novel by Meg Gardiner

The Rainmaker by John Grisham

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain

Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro

Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith

Country Vet: Thirty Years of Treating Animals and Trying to Understand Their Owners by Randy L. Skaggs

A Child in the Forest by Winifred Foley

 

New Books: 

Homeschooled: A Memoir by Stefan Merrill Block

Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer's Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr

Simply More by Cynthia Erivo

Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases by Lydia Kang

Nevermore Books: November 17, 2025

 

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

 

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

  

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

 

All But My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissmann Klein

 

 

Follow Me to Alaska: A true story of one couple's adventure adjusting from life in a cul-de-sac in El Paso, Texas, to a cabin off-grid in the wilderness by Ann Parker

 

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris 

Sleep by Honor Jones

 

 

The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic by Edward Beauclerk Maurice

 

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin 

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston

Nevermore: Six Wakes, Lady Bird, It's All Relative, Man from the Train, Truevine, Unquiet Grave

Nevermore members read widely, and this week one reader read Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, a science fiction murder mystery.  The Dormire is a sleeper ship, carrying thousands of colonists from a war-torn, atmosphere-wrecked, socially disintegrating Earth to a new start on the planet Artemis.  But when Maria Arena and her crewmates awaken, as clones of their original selves, finding blood floating through the air leads them to believe that their former selves have been murdered.  Our reader greatly enjoyed this book and said that he could really see someone making this novel into a movie.

Turning to American history, another reader enjoyed Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson by Jan Jarboe Russell.  This revealing biography of the First Lady shows how much she contributed to LBJ’s presidency in the midst of the Civil Rights movement.  Conversations with family members and political associates make this a well-rounded picture of President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson.  Our reader said that she enjoyed the book and that Lady Bird was a lovely person.

It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A. J. Jacobs was enjoyed by yet another reader, as the author has explored the DNA connectivity of the worldwide community.  After Jacobs received an email from an eighth cousin who had been able to connect 80,000 relatives, he began a globe spanning journey to explore the far flung branches of his family tree.  Our reader enjoyed the humor, as Jacobs told his own family stories within the scientific explanations of how we are all related.

Our next reader began to read The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James, but sadly could not finish it.  Although the book was praised by other critics, our reader found that it was simply murder after murder, bludgeon after bludgeon.  She stated emphatically:  “It has 461 pages of murder and not all of them were near the train tracks.”

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy shocked another reader as it recounted the story of two albino African-American brothers who were stolen from their family in 1899 and forced to be part of a circus sideshow for almost thirty years.  George and Willie Muse were depicted as caricatures of themselves as they traveled the world with the circus, and eventually reunited with their mother.  Our reader said that it was an extremely well-researched book and that she learned a lot about Virginian society and race relations in the early 1900’s.

 Another novel was enjoyed by another reader, Abraham’s Well by Sharon Ewell Foster.  The story centers around the Trail of Tears, the removal of Native Americans from the southeastern United States and their forced march to what is now Oklahoma.  Foster’s characters are not just Native American, but Black Cherokee African Americans, whose bloodlines were also mixed with white slave owners.  The Cherokee removal is here told from the point of a young girl, Armentia, who experiences tragedy and loss as her family is forced from North Carolina to Oklahoma.

Finally, The Unquiet Grave by Sharyn McCrumb told the story of Zona Heaster, married to Trout Shue in 1896 and dead a few short months later.  Zona appears in a waking dream to her mother Mary Jane, insisting that she was murdered, and Mary Jane has no choice but to pursue justice for her daughter.  Set in recently created West Virginia, the story jumps in time from the actual happenings to a recounting by an aging lawyer more than thirty years later.  Our reader said that everything McCrumb writes is wonderful, and she only wishes the author had included maps in this novel based on historical facts.