Nevermore: Peter The Great, 1775, and When All the World Was Young

Nevermore readers were hooked on history this week.  Peter the Great by Robert Massie is the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of a fascinating Russian monarch.  At age 10, Peter became co-tsar with his half brother.  He had a lifelong fascination with the sea and ships, and traveled Europe incognito.  He modernized Russian life, bringing in Western influences and restructuring government.  Massie has been praised for his thorough and readable biography, which also serves as an excellent book on Russian history and society of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Massie is well-known for his books on Russia; his first book was the acclaimed Nicholas and Alexandra, and his most recent is a biography of Catherine the Great.

1775: A Good Year for Revolution by Kevin Phillips was also lauded for its good style, which made it a very readable book about events prior to the American Revolution. Phillips, who also wrote The Cousins’ War, makes a convincing case that 1775 was the pivotal year, as the colonies organized themselves against the British.  Not only were the rebels mounting boycotts, they were acquiring arms and creating governments without British oversight.  By the time 1776 rolled around, the rebels were ready. This book was recommended for anyone interested in the Revolutionary War era, especially the background for the conflict.

Barbara Holland’s When All the World Was Young is a personal memoir about growing up in Washington, D.C. during the 1940s and 1950s. Holland has an eye for the incongruities of the times, and a sharp wit with which to comment.  She grew up with a mother who didn’t fit the mold of the 50s housewife and an autocratic stepfather.  As those who have read any of her other books know, Holland has a wicked sense of humor and keen sense of the absurd.  Holland also wrote a book about U.S. Presidents, Hail to the Chiefs , a book about extraordinary women entitled They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades, and the self explanatory In Defense of Naps.  Her books come highly recommended from several Nevermore members, both for their insights and the wit.

Joshilyn Jackson

Review by Kristin

Joshilyn Jackson first caught my attention though the recommendation of a librarian friend in small town Georgia.  I was a Yankee newly transplanted to the South and was enjoying learning about my new environment through books, as well as “real life” in a town of about 4,000 people.  Jackson writes in a way that shows her love of the South, as cracked and damaged as the characters in her stories may be.

I have heard Jackson speak a couple of times, and the most significant thing I heard was that her books are all about redemption.  Sure, people mess up, hurt other people, lie, cheat, steal, and even kill.  In Jackson’s books, the road may be long and her characters may have a whole lot of life thrown at them, but the plot is always resolved with the redemption of those characters that the readers have come to love.

Jackson may also be the queen of first lines.  A Grown-up Kind of Pretty starts with:  “My daughter, Liza, put her heart in a silver box and buried it under the willow tree in our backyard.”  And I’m not sure there is any topping gods in Alabama’s beginning line: “There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus…”

That brings me to the PG-13 warning.  While the books are not full of gratuitous violence and sex, Jackson is not shy about telling life like it is.  I would not recommend these books for younger teenagers or for my Pentecostal grandmother, were she still living.  (Your grandmother might like them just fine; just be aware that they are not totally G-rated.)

If you enjoy audio books, Jackson’s books are entertaining.  She reads most of them herself, and I enjoy her dramatic expression.

Jackson is also entertaining in her blog, where she might post once a month or three times a week.  She’s busy writing more novels, so her faithful blog followers seem to understand.  Check out her “Faster Than Kudzu” blog at: http://www.joshilynjackson.com/

gods in Alabama
Arlene Fleet left the small town of Possett, Alabama with the intention of never returning.  In fact, she promised God that she would never again lie, fornicate, or go home, as long as He kept the body hidden.  Arlene went north to Chicago, became Lena, and kept her promises for ten years, despite her mother and aunt calling every week to ask when she was coming home.  Matters come to a head when Burr, Lena’s African-American boyfriend (who respects her “no lying and no fornicating” policy) wants to meet her Southern family.  Lena and Burr hit the interstate and the last decade fades away as they get closer and closer to the small town she left behind.

Between, Georgia
Nonny Frett knows two families, the one who gave her up and the one who claimed her as their own.  In the town of Between, Georgia (population 90), everyone knows everyone.  Nonny was born to fifteen year old Hazel Crabtree, unbeknownst to the rest of the Crabtree clan.  Stacia Frett, a deaf artist who is gradually going blind, saw that unwanted newborn baby and said, “Mine.”  Bernise, Stacia’s twin sister, helped make that “Mine” come true with her influence in the tiny town.  Nonny’s Crabtree grandmother is on the fringes of her life, always looking in jealously and wanting Nonny’s love and attention.  Nonny is all grown up and still pulled in many directions:  between the Fretts and the Crabtrees; between her cheating almost-ex-husband, Jonno, and her best friend, Henry; between big city Athens and tiny town Between.

The Girl who Stopped Swimming
Seeing ghosts is nothing new to Laurel. Uncle Marty used to come visit, usually on nights when a storm was coming.  When Laurel awakes to the vision of a drowned teenage girl, she thinks she is still asleep, seeing the shape of a body in her pool.  First feeling relief that it is not her daughter Shelby, then guilt that someone else’s child has drowned, Laurel realizes that the dead girl is Molly, Shelby’s best friend.  Although the drowning was ruled an accident, Laurel senses there is more to the story, and she attempts to discover what led to the drowning.  This path takes her back to her hometown, the impoverished DeLop.  With help from her feisty sister Thalia, Laurel digs through the present and the past, finding perhaps more than she ever wanted to know.

Backseat Saints
Rose Mae Lolley put in a brief appearance in gods in Alabama, but it turns out she had her own story to tell.  “Ro” Grandee listens to an airport gypsy who tells her she has to kill her abusive husband before he kills her.  Ro gets a gun and sets out to take matters into her own hands.  Not everything goes as planned, (of course,) and Ro begins a journey with her dog, Fat Gretel, that takes her from Amarillo, Texas, to Fruiton, Alabama, to Berkeley, California.  Having lived with her abusive father, who drove her mother off while Rose Mae was young, Ro goes back to confront her childhood fears.  Along the way she discovers more about her mother and herself, finally reinventing herself one more time.

A Grown-up Kind of Pretty
Mosey Slocumb is fifteen years old.  Her mother, Liza, and grandmother, Ginny, are determined that Mosey will not follow their example of having a baby at age fifteen.  This has been drilled into Mosey’s head her whole life, so she has no intention of getting anywhere near a boy, despite her family’s fears.  Liza has had a stroke, and Ginny is determined to put a swimming pool in their back yard to help with Liza’s therapy.  On the day that they pull up a willow tree to make room for the pool, secrets are unearthed along with the roots.  With the discovery of a silver chest containing tiny bones, the Slocumb family is thrown into a panic.  Who buried the box?  If those bones are human, then who is it?

Someone Else’s Love Story (November 2013)
A sneak peek of the cover can be found at:   http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p=2550

Staff Picks: Poems

Nancy W. likes“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” by Emily Dickinson for the lines,

“God preaches, a noted Clergyman – /And the sermon is never long.” The poem itself can be found here.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems appealed to a number of the staff.  Joan chose “First Fig” as a favorite, while Laurie went for “Second Fig” because “there’s nothing like being short and sweet.” Neither has anything to do with figs, by the way, but the first deals with a candle burning at both ends and the second offers interesting construction advice to two lines.

Jeanne liked both of the above and added “Receurdo,” which begins, “We were very tired, we were very merry/We rode back and forth all night on the ferry.” All of these poems can be read here.

 Nicki says,   “My favorite poem is a little strange.  I didn’t think I liked poetry when I was a teen, because the ones we read in school were dry and boring. Then I read Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer.  It had this poem in it that is an old prison rhyme that starts, “Deep in my dungeon/I welcome you here/Deep in my dungeon/I worship your fear.” It was like nothing I’d ever read, and I thought, “Wow!  That’s really dark. Maybe I do like poetry.”

Jud said that “Nonno’s Poem” from the Tennessee Williams play Night of the Iguana “is one that has been meaningful to various members of my family, including my parents.”

Christy H. chose Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Here’s her favorite passage:

Come my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!



The poem can be read in its entirety here.


Remember we're having three poets here on Sunday, April 28, at 2 pm! For more information, click here.

Fun verse

Comments by Jeanne

In an earlier post, I wrote about poetry being a thread woven through our lives, whether we realize it or not.  Song lyrics, nursery rhymes, jingles, all of these can be poetry.  We know a lot of poems without really believing they ARE poems.  Another semi myth is that poetry is always Serious Stuff.

Let’s have a show of hands:  how many people know the Ogden Nash poem, “Reflections on Ice Breaking”?

No one?  Really?  Not even if I tell you that the ‘ice breaking’ means social ice breaking?

How about if I tell you that it's just seven words and the first three are "Candy is dandy"?

Nash is one of the great humorist poets in my book.  I am especially fond of his animal poems, such as “The Panther.” It begins this way:

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.

The last two lines left a co-working giggling helplessly. You can read the poem in its entirety here.

 

Shel Silverstein is another author celebrated for his humorous poems.  His sense of humor was on display in books such as A Light in the Attic  and Where the Sidewalk Ends, but he also wrote the songs “A Boy Named Sue” and “Marie Laveau” aka “Another Man Done Gone.”

Dorothy Parker is known for her one liners, but she had a fine way with a poem as well.  Judith Viorst is probably best known for her children’s books such as Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, but she has a wonderful series of poetry books for adults built around ages.  How Did I Get to be 40 and Other Atrocities has one of my favorite poems, “True Love,” which lists all the ways she knows that she and her husband are still in love, including
“When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the middle of the street,
I always hope he's dead.”


Even “serious” poets write poems that can induce a smile.  Sure, T.S. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland,” but he also wrote all those wonderful feline poems that were set to music and became the play “Cats.” Want the lyrics?  Just check out Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

Jud says one of his favorite bits is from a Jefferson Airplane album, spoken between songs:
 [Voice 1] No man is an island! No man is an island!
[Voice 2] He’s a peninsula.

Poetry Month

This collection includes a number of my favorites.

Comments by Jeanne

April is National Poetry Month.

I know in some quarters that news will be greeted with a yawn or a shrug, the unspoken question being,  “Does poetry matter?”  Many people seem to equate poetry with high-falutin’ incomprehensible lines that have no relevance to everyday life or experience.  Poets are stereotyped as pale intellectuals who doen’t live in the real world, depressives who seek to spread gloom and doom or else air heads with lines about fragility and posies and, yes, doves and love—a cliché even in Shakespeare’s time.

I think a better question is, “What is poetry?”  and I can think of no better answer than to paraphrase Emily Dickinson who said that when the hair on the back of her neck rose, then she knew it was poetry.  Poetry speaks a profound truth that we can feel. Poetry says things we can all feel or know.  It may tell a story or express an emotion.

My mother loved poetry—a good thing, because she was an English teacher.  She had her students memorize poems back in the day, which they all professed to dislike.  Years later when we’d encounter a former student, most would start to recite some favorite they still recalled, decades later.  Mom believed in the power of poetry to express everything, albeit sometimes with a touch of exaggeration; or to at least cause a smile.  It was a sort of shorthand speaking.  When exhaustion would stop her labors in the garden, she would invariably quote, “I will lay me down and bleed awhile/And then rise to fight again.”  We knew she meant she was going to take a break and rest, and then would be at it again.  That same garden and the woodland would cause her to recall lines from her favorite poem, Thanatopsis:  “Go forth, under the open sky, and list/To Nature’s teachings.” An especially onerous task would begin with, “Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.”  The memory of a difficult decision might evoke lines from Robert Frost’s poem,  The Road Less Traveled:  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--/ I took the one less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.” Poetry in some fashion was woven into our lives just like cornbread and green beans, walks in the woods, or visits to grandparents.

I think my first favorite poem other than a nursey rhyme would have to be The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.  It’s the tale of a robber and his sweetheart, the innkeeper’s daughter Bess. I could hear the horse’s hooves clopping in the beat of the lines, see the moon as a “ghostly galleon tossed on cloudy seas,” foreshadowing the fate that awaits.  It was heartbreaking, heartstopping, and thrilling all at once.

I still shiver at the thought of those last lines of the poem.  I’m not going to quote them here.  If you don’t know the poem, you should discover it for yourself rather than have it spoiled by a hack blogger.
Most of us, if we think about it, have our own personal bits of poetry we think about at certain times.  The older I get, the more often have occasion to think of lines from Emily Dickenson:  “Parting is all we know of heaven/And all we need know of hell.”

Poetry even bursts onto the national consciousness at times. When many of us think of the Challenger disaster, the words we remember are from the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. which opens, “Oh! I have slipped the surly  bonds of Earth” and ends with “Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

Yet I have to admit that I’m not a great reader of poetry. I’ve thought on this and my conclusion is that for me poetry is meant to be be HEARD.  Sometimes words on a page just don’t capture the imagination and heart as do those same words read aloud.  Most of the poems I have taken to my heart are ones I’ve first encountered by listening to someone else read or recite. When I read them myself later, it’s still those lines that captured my ear that resonate the most.

If you’re the same way, you may want to plan to come to the library on Sunday, April 28, at 2:30 pm to hear some fine local poets read their work. Chrissie Peters, Rose Klix, and Nancy Fisher are all scheduled to appear, and they will have copies of their work for sale. You may come away with a new favorite poem of your own.

Update: The Sunday Bristol Herald Courier had an article about Chrissie Peters which you can read here.

Grey Dawn by Clea Simon

 Reviewed by Jeanne

Grad student Dulcie Schwartz is back, still working on her thesis—or trying to amid many distractions.  For one thing, her department is searching for a new director and while Martin Thorpe, her advisor, is in the running, the university is bringing in some big name scholars for interviews as well.  It’s hard to know what to hope for:  on the one hand he isn’t particularly enamored of her topic, but if he leaves, she’ll have to start over with a new advisor.

Again. 

A more enticing distraction are the pages of a manuscript that Dulcie believes might be a new, undiscovered work by the anonymous author of the somewhat obscure 18th century Gothic novel entitled The Ravages of Umbria.  Since Dulcie has pretty much staked her thesis on this author, this find could make or break her academic future.  She’s so involved in transcribing the text from the original handwritten version that she’s even dreaming sections of the story, especially those parts involving a coach trip with a mysterious stranger in a dark, wind-swift night with unearthly howls filling the air.

She’s so caught up in the tale that she’s only vaguely surprised when she thinks she hears a wolf in downtown Cambridge as she heads home that evening.  She knows that’s quite unlikely, but then she catches sight of her advisor looking disheveled, disoriented and—well, WILD. He rushes off into the night and Dulcie runs in the other direction.  The next morning she hears that an undergraduate was attacked, possibly by some sort of beast.

  Was Dulcie an ear-witness to a crime?  Could her advisor be a werewolf?  Could Dulcie have read a few too many Gothic tales? Can Dulcie resist investigating this mystery?

The answer to the last question is an obvious and resounding “No!” Aided once again with cryptic advice from her late beloved feline Mr. Grey and her new kitten Esme, Dulcie rushes in where angels fear to tread. 

Why do I like these books?  Because I can understand the rarified academic world Dulcie inhabits.   While most of us read books for entertainment or enlightenment, for Dulcie each turn of phrase in a book can have another meaning entirely and interpreting them can make or break her academic career.  She searches for scraps of writing as diligently as a forensic investigator looks at blood spatter. (I have vivid memories of nitpicking phrases from Shakespeare for my own college paper and trying to make them fit my objective.) She careens back and forth between the insular academic world and the more or less real world, albeit a real world where Dulcie can believe in communications from her cats (living and otherwise) yet scoff at her mother Lucy’s  premonitions as being products of an overactive imagination and too many hallucinogenic drugs during Lucy’s younger days.  In this book, which I see as a tour de force of the genre, Simon juxtaposes all those florid images from early Gothic novels with Dulcie’s everyday experiences.  Dulcie could be the very model of some of those Gothic heroines, yet would be appalled if you were to suggest this to her.  I find her disconnect to be funny, a sort of English major version of the physicists on “Big Bang Theory” but without a laugh track. Sure, other books have done something similar, but I appreciate Simon’s subtlety in the matter.  I’ve seen this sort of thing done in other books, but most feel they need to point out what they’re doing--wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I’ll admit that sometimes I’m not the most astute reader, but honestly I don’t need to be hit over the head more than once.  Okay, maybe twice.

I also enjoy the way Simon brings the setting to life.  I've never been to Cambridge, MA but she almost makes me feel as if I have visited "our fair city," as the Magliozzi brothers might say.

But what I liked best of all about Grey Dawn is the way that Dulcie solves the mystery through her deep understanding of academic studies. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Dulcie explains her reasoning to a somewhat bemused police detective (who had reached the same conclusion through less esoteric means.) It's that bit delicious insider humor that still makes sense to someone who hasn't done Literary Analysis in over 30 years.

As might be expected, I found all the scenes with cats were delightful and true to the feline spirit.  I have given up on a couple of mystery series with cats because the cats seem so generic. One cat is not the same as another, nor is a cat a dog.  (I can’t believe I have to actually say that, but apparently I do.)

If all you want is a cozy book with a single linear plot to solve, this may not be the book for you.  If, on the other hand, you like multiple stoylines, an academic sleuth who is less practical than she likes to imagine, and some slightly otherworldly felines, then Grey Dawn is a definite winner.  I suspect Garrison Keillor would recommend it to members of POEM (Professional Organization of English Majors) for their delight and amusement. 

Full disclosure:  I received a preview copy of the book but that did not influence my review.

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer

Reviewed by Kristin

Shine Shine Shine is a first novel by a promising young author.  The story centers around Sunny and Maxon, a married couple who have known each other since childhood.   Sunny was born during a complete solar eclipse to missionary parents in Burma.  Returning to rural Pennsylvania, Sunny and her mother meet neglected Maxon and he quickly becomes part of their lives.  Flash forward twenty years and Maxon is a genius astronaut working in space on a project to put a robot colony on the moon while Sunny is back on earth about to give birth to their second child while being with their autistic son, Bubber, and her dying mother.

Sunny has been trying to keep up the appearance of a typical family in Norfolk, Virginia, but the pretenses start to fall away as she has a minor car accident.  As the other vehicle hits Sunny’s van, her blonde wig flies off and out the window, landing in a puddle.  Suddenly, Sunny decides she doesn’t want to hide behind the wig anymore.

Maxon has always been socially awkward.  In fact, he and Sunny have made up formulas for him to understand how to communicate with other people.  Maxon is brilliant, but not comfortable in social situations.  He seems to understand his robots better than people.  When an accident damages the spacecraft, Maxon and the team must work to save the mission and save their lives.

All of this sounds fantastic and strange, but Lydia Netzer weaves the characters together and shows what it means to be a family.  At its heart, this book is about people feeling different from the world around them, but being accepted by others and understanding that those differences are a normal part of life.

Lydia Netzer has a very unique voice and I look forward to reading more of her work.  You can read more about the author at http://lydianetzer.blogspot.com/ .