“The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir” by Ruth Wariner (Flatiron Books, 2015)

I’m not alone in the perverse fascination with Mormon polygamy.  Two cable shows, “Sister Wives” and “Big Love” (neither of which I have seen.) averaged 1.75 million viewers per show. Warren Jeffs and his band of polygamists in Colorado City, AZ and Texas repeatedly make news with sensational trials for raping underage girls (marriage in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Later Day Saints - FLDS) and welfare fraud because the mothers claim state support and food stamps for each child.  

So, I grabbed The Sound of Gravel when browsing the shelves of the Chicago Public Library--it was an unexpected find.  The story of Ruth Wariner is different from the FLDS.  Her family lives in LeBaron, Mexico, home to a polygamist LDS sect founded by her grandfather in 1944.

The following is from Wikipedia on the section “Mormons and Polygamy”.
 
“In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which prohibited plural marriage in the territories. In spite of the law, Mormons continued to practice polygamy, believing that it was protected by the First Amendment. In 1879, in Reynolds v. United States, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Morrill Act, stating: "Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinion, they may with practices.

In 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto that officially terminated the practice of polygamy. Although this Manifesto did not dissolve existing plural marriages, relations with the United States markedly improved after 1890, such that Utah was admitted as a U.S. state in 1896. After the Manifesto, some Mormons continued to enter into polygamous marriages, but these eventually stopped in 1904 when church president Joseph F. Smith disavowed polygamy before Congress and issued a "Second Manifesto", calling for all plural marriages in the church to cease and established excommunication as the consequence for those who disobeyed.”

Many polygamist Mormons settled in Mexico, where they were tolerated.  Thus began the back and forth cycle for the members.  They always obtained U.S. citizenship, and when welfare was established, assured that they returned each month to collect their checks.  Each “wife” declared that she did not know the father, so there was no chasing for child support, etc.  

Ruth Wariner’s story begins in Mexico, her mother is the third wife of an entitled failure, father of 47 children, who feels little responsibility for providing for either wives or offspring.  These are cult members, indoctrinated in the original Book of Mormon which endorses polygamy and practically deifies polygamist men.  There is unhappiness within her community, but little thought of revolt.

As the mother and children shuffle back and forth between grandparents in California, who have returned to the official LDS religion, and LeBaron.  The children begin to understand that their settlement life style offers stark poverty and no opportunity.  Their religion, instead of providing consolation, threatens the women and empowers the men.  Since The Sound of Gravel is a memoir, we know from the outset that Ruth and her siblings survive, but not before catastrophe decimates the fragile family. This is a quick and engrossing read.

If you are interested in another graphic memoir of a totally dysfunctional Mormon family, please read Melissa Anderson’s Eleven Regrets (Little Bear Publications, 2015).  Beautifully written, it is perhaps the most disturbing memoir ever.  

Recommended
 

“New York”, by Edward Rutherfurd, Ballentine Books Trade Paperbacks, 2010

Better than most “epic sagas”, New York begins in the 15th Century with the Dutch and the Indians and ends with the fall of the World Trade Center.  The story traces various families representing old money, new money, illegal money, etc.  The focus is on New York as the financial center of the world, not just the U.S.  

The stories around the various financial crises provided insights on the role of J.P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt and others who knew that several New York financial institutions were “too big to fail” long before our debacle beginning in 2008.  They appear to have been right.  

There are adequate maps to use as Rutherfurd pulls the story from Downtown to Uptown following Manhattan’s development.  The growth of the boroughs is included, but the focus is Manhattan.  

The Masters family are the main characters—old money going back to the Dutch, who evolve into new money as they change with the times.  Nice characters, well drawn.  

Recommended for those who can deal with a book of 860 pages!

Playing Catch-up--so many books read and no time to give each a full review.

Pastoral by André Alexis (Coach House Books, Toronto, 2014)

First book of Alexis’s quincunx (a set of five books)—this one a pastoral.  Alexis’s goal is five books in five genres.  A pastoral, thanks to Merriam-Webster is “a literary work (such as a poem or play) dealing with shepherds or rural life in a usually artificial manner and typically drawing a contrast between the innocence and serenity of the simple life and the misery and corruption of city and especially court life.”  Pastoral fits the definition.  It’s an easy read, with deceptively simple characters.  It’s a book that could lead to many interesting conversations about God and nature and man. 
Recommended.

Five Carat Soul by James McBride (Random House, 2017) Short Stories

Five Carat Soul contains seven short stories, two of which are broken into chapters.  McBride’s stories are full of fun, quirky characters and history.  They mostly center around ghetto life seen through the eyes of children, teens, and their parents.  The scenes are “matter of fact” realism, with no maudlin appeal to the poverty of spirit and lack of money in the protagonists’ lives.  The last set of stories, “Mr. P and the Wind”, told by animals, was unintelligible to me, so I stopped reading it.  Recommended

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham (Doubleday, 2017)

Oh John, your last book, The Whistler, disappointed because you tipped the resolution of the plot in the first third of the book.  The Rooster Bar disappoints because it is just not interesting. 

Yes, Grisham is true to his genre of educating us about yet another folly of our society—this one involving for-profit law schools and the owners and loan companies who consume unsuspecting students and their bartered futures. 
Not-recommended.

Ghachar Ghochar a novella, by Vivek Shanbhag (Penguin Books, 2013)

How money corrupts, taken to the most finite pettiness in a family.  The name is a nonsense word for the string tie in pajama pants, and how, when it unties in bed, you can become all tangled in it.  It’s a good metaphor for what happens when a family that is poor, but tidy, economical and close-knit, becomes all tangled up when money is easy.  Status changes, relationships crumble, goodness is replaced not so much by evil as by neglect.  At 118 pages, Ghachar Ghochar packs a punch. 
Highly Recommended.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, BBC Audiobooks 2010

Egan’s newest book, Manhattan Beach, is a runaway best seller.  A Visit from the Goon Squad seemed a good prep before visiting Beach.  Now, I’m not sure I will ever read the new book.  Truthfully, I listened to ¾ of Goon Squad and gave up—too confusing to be a good audio book.  The plot and the characters jump all over the time sequence.  The characters are mostly low-life denizens of the music business.  Misogyny and amorality abound.  Reminded me of Brent Easton Ellis. 
Not recommended.

Ants Among Elephants:  An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India By Sujatha Gidla, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

This was a wonderful surprise.  Books about untouchables in Hindu cultures are like reading about mass murder—fascinating, but repulsive.  The caste system in India, and all caste systems, represses lives on a micro and macro scale.  And the lower down in the system, the more fascinating and awful life is.  Untouchables are so low, they are not in the caste system.  I expected this to be a memoir about the author’s life as an untouchable.  Instead it was a memoir about her uncle, Satyam, one of the founders of the Naxalite Party in India.  These are Maoist Communists, who continue as rebels today in rural East-Central India.   I’ve read about Naxalites, but never the birth of the movement.  This is a must-read for understanding one of the dynamics of modern India.  An interesting fact—the untouchables are often well-educated due to the work of missionaries.  Unlike the lower castes, untouchables are literate, sometimes with advanced degrees, and teach in the universities—to all castes.  These positions gave Satyam and other Naxalites sway over impressionable students who they recruited.
Highly recommended.

"Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue" by André Alexis (Coach House Books, 2015)

How often do you open a book, read a few pages and become captured by the story, the writing, the imagination of the author? Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs had me from the first sentence, “One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Hermes were at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern”.  You know immediately there is going to be a punch line to this story.

And what a story it is.  I’m not going to spoil your reading pleasure (and you must read this book) by revealing the plot.  Only that dogs do die, so those who cannot abide animal reality should not indulge in this wonderful story.

André Alexis is Canadian and has just been awarded Canada’s Windham-Campbell Prize for his body of work.  So why don’t we know more about him?  Ah, Canadian?  Not so exciting; perhaps a bit intellectual; published by a small Canadian house and therefore lacking the publicity machine?

Alexis refers to Fifteen Dogs as part of a Quincuix (a series of five interlocking novels that investigate the idea of faith, of community, of morality, of humanity).  Fifteen Dogs is Quincuix II, an apologue or moral fable often using animals as characters.  Each part of the Quincuix is written in a different genre: a pastoral, an apologue, a ghost story, a quest, and a romance. Pastoral is Quincuix I and The Hidden Keys is Quincuix III.  

Don’t miss is wonderful, quirky, amusing, sad book.  I plan to dive into I and III immediately.  
 

"Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford, (Three Rivers Press, 2004)

And we think that Game of Thrones is complex.  In one century, from 1206, when Genghis Khan was born, through 1294, when Khubilai Khan died, the Mongols spread from a small group of nomads on the steppes of what is now Mongolia to control all of Russia, northern India, Persia, Iraq and China.  

Inventive warfare, featuring swift warriors shooting arrows from galloping horses, overwhelmed rigid peasant armies and fully armed, mounted knights.  Mongols attacked front on, while stealth battalions came from the rear, crushing the enemy between the two.  The Mongols did not always exterminate the conquered.  They demanded loyalty and taxes.  If there was no pledge of loyalty, you were exterminated.  Where inhumane systems governed, they supplanted it with religious tolerance, rights for women, and learning.  Originally the Mongols were illiterate nomads.  When exposed to systems of writing, accounting, teaching, they brought these skills to their people and to other, less developed, cultures.  While Europe was in the Dark Ages, the Mongol Empire and culture flourished

As nomads, their focus was always on trade routes.  Mongols opened all the groups they conquered to international trading, developing the Silk Road and the system of caravanserais, motels of the ancient world build one camel-day journey apart.  At the caravanserais, all were welcome, baths were available, food was available, merchants could store goods to reclaim as they returned.  What they paid was tax in return for the services.  

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is not an easy read because there are so many important characters spread over such vast territory.  Jack Weatherford is an academic who spent years on the ground researching this book.  He presents the material in a logical and thorough manner.   This is a worthy read for armchair travelers and historians—eye opening to say the least.  
 

“A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin’s War with the West” by Luke Harding (Vintage Books Original, 2017)

We visited Highgate Cemetery in London last year.  Aside from noting how cleaned up the grounds were, we were attracted to the grave of Alexander Litvinenko, marked with candles and a sign posted by his wife requesting that we not take photos.   So, when this book released, I jumped at the chance to read what I knew would be a disheartening story of espionage gone wrong.

Luke Harding is award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian, who has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.  He is the author of Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia, and this book on Litvinenko. 

Litvinenko was well known in the U.K. as are many of the other Russian emigres who have fled either to escape political murder and mayhem and/or to protect their billions.  They are reported on daily in the press.  In the U.S., coverage is less frequent, unless, like Litvinenko, you are poisoned with polonium that contaminated every surface the bumbling assassins encountered on their death mission through London

Litvinenko’s story is of a middle-class Russian military espionage officer who appears to responsibly serve the state.  When he completes his military career, he uses former contacts throughout the world to serve commercial interests.  In that arena, it is easy to run afoul of criminals in the “New Russia”.  He did; he tried to escape to London; Putin put a hit out on him.  Litvinenko was finally murdered in the second attempt.  Bumbling murder assignments seems to be common among the Russian henchmen.  They use poison because it is often undetected.  The heart of Harding’s book is that after many years, the murderers were tried and convicted in U.K. law courts.  By implication, Putin was convicted. 

Harding is no friend of Putin and the “New Russia”.  He tells it as he sees it—Russia is country run by criminals with accountability only to Putin and his cronies.  The mask of statesmanship and amiability is geared to only one thing—restoring Russia to the former USSR borders and putting money into Putin’s pockets.  Things get done when Putin is paid.  Things go away when Putin pays or murder others. 

When I finished reading this book, I found it shading anything about Putin and Russia that was in the news as the work of criminals and liars acting in their own overt and covert self-interest.  I’m not uncomfortable with the opinion.  Looking at any Trump or U.S. contact with the Russians in this light make me realize they are as evil as North Korea, a lot smarter and therefore magnitudes more dangerous.   Communism failed Russia.  What filled the void is an evil criminal state without a moral center, not unlike Russia under Stalin.

"Perfume River" by Robert Olen Butler, (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016)

Robert Olen Butler is a prolific writer – and each time I read a book of his, I’m encouraged to dive into his bibliography and read others.  Perfume River is his latest book.  I chanced upon it in the Portland, MA library, but that’s another story.

Butler’s most famous book, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, is short stories, many of them about the Vietnam war, from the POV of the Vietnamese, both in Vietnam and in the U.S.  In Perfume River, he returns to the war again, this time from the POV of American families in the U.S. 

We are long post-war.  Robert Quinlan, the main character, is 70, a veteran; his father William a veteran of WWII.  Robert and his wife, Darla have a long and happy marriage, even though she was a demonstrating pacifist in the 60’s.  Robert is still dealing with his father’s attachment to war and killing.  This has affected Robert and his brother Jimmy since childhood.  They took different paths regarding the war:  Jimmy fled to Canada and Robert enlisted so he would not be in the infantry, as his father was.  This rift in the family has never been healed.  William’s illness and unexpected death force the family to deal with secrets that will change their lives.  

Twined throughout the Quinlan saga is the story of Bob, the son of a Vietnam veteran.  Bob is now homeless and suffering from his own PTSD.  Through him, Butler examines the war’s impact on next generations, a fascinating exploration.

This is a beautifully written book—the tale of brothers who chose different paths, their families and their ability to face life’s unpleasant revelations and move forward.  It is also a story of marriage, how it changes with age yet remains a defining source of loyalty.

Highly recommended
 

“Margaret the First” by Danielle Dutton, Catapult, 2016

Visiting the Chicago Public Library branch at Water Tower, I can’t help but peruse the newer releases.  And so, I chanced upon Margaret the First.  The velvety feel of the paperback cover, and its beautiful illustration of Margaret immediately made me feel this was a book above others.  And, an historical novel to boot.

Margaret is royally born Margaret Lucas, in 1623 in Colchester, Essex, England.  She joins the court as a lady in waiting for Queen Henrietta Maria and goes into exile in France with her and the court of Charles I during the Civil War with Cromwell and the Roundheads.  While in France, Margaret marries William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle on Tyne, a fellow exiled royal. This is a love match.  The Duke is considerably older than Margaret and supports her emotionally her throughout their childless marriage. Margaret indulges her interest in writing poetry, memoir, plays, some of the first science fiction—much of which she published in her name.  This was a first for a woman of her time and today Margaret, who was an early influence on Virginia Woolf, is revered by women’s liberation advocates.  

Dutton’s writes in a style evocative of the erratic nature of her subject.  Some chapters are a paragraph, other much longer.  She follows the historical landmarks of the time: war, exile, the restoration and life after the restoration.  Margaret and William lose their fortune in property, regain it after the restoration and eventually leave Margaret a wealthy widow.  Throughout, Margaret writes and writes—her preferred method of expression.  That and her costume, which titillated the masses who could read the first tabloids documenting the exploits of Mad Margaret.  

For my taste, the book was too short, exciting my interest in the historical period and in the characters.  That is a good thing and will lead me to seek other books relating to Mad Margaret.  
Recommended for history lovers.

“All We Shall Know” by Donal Ryan, (Penguin Books, 2017)

This is a sad, but well told story—set in Ireland, home of sad stories.  And Donal Ryan knows how to tell them.  The protagonist, Melody, seems evil, involved in a bitter marriage that she ends with pregnancy by her 17-year-old literacy student from a local community of Travellers (Irish Gypsies).  The pace of the novel follows the weeks of pregnancy, each landmark bringing another reason for spite towards her husband, Pat, his family, the village, the Travellers—and her self-hatred. She lives alone in her house; Pat with his menacing family.

Mary, a young Traveller ostracized by her husband Buzzy's clan because she is barren, befriends Melody as she lurks around the camp.  The troubles caused by Mary’s infertility and Melody’s fertility are the soul of All We Shall Know. Melody keeps her pregnancy secret from the young father, using it only to wound her husband and his family.  Mary's family enters into a protracted battle with Buzzy's clan, who claim he was cuckolded.  Melody’s own father, a passive figure, accepts her situation, and provides a safe home and care as the pregnancy ripens.  Unhappy in his marriage to Melody’s deceased mother, you feel he can begin life again with a grandchild.  

Ryan’s writing is flat-out beautiful.  

“I could still fly to London and end this, and come back and say, Yes, Pat, I was
lying, and he could persuade himself to believe me, and we could take a
weekend break somewhere and be massaged together, and walk along a river
hand in hand, and stand beneath a waterfall and feel the spray on our faces and
laugh, and think about the cave behind the falling water, cut off from the world,
and all the roaring peace to be found there, and have a drink in the bar after
dinner, and go to bed, and turn to one another's flesh for warmth, and find only a
hard coldness there, and no accommodation, no forgiveness of sins; and we'd
turn away again from one another, and lie apart facing upwards and send words
into eternity about babies never born, and needs unmet, and prostitutes and
internet sex and terrible unforgivable sins and swirling infinities of blame and
hollow retribution, and we could slow to a stop as the sun crept up, and turn from
each other in familiar exhaustion, and sleep until checking-out time on pillows
wet with tears"

All We Shall Know is concise, 180 pages, and spell-binding.  Highly recommended.

“The Spinning Heart” by Donal Ryan (Steer Forth Press, 2014)

The time is 2008, or so, the early days of the Great Recession in Ireland.  The Celtic Tiger period of the 1990’s through the mid-2000’s was fed by direct foreign investment, a subsequent property bubble and lax bank lending standards.  Unemployment in 2006 was 4.6%, in 2012 it was 15%, and among young workers, it was 33%.  Ireland was hit hard; they could not replace the foreign capital that fled the country.

The Spinning Heart brings this macroeconomics down to the micro world of small town Ireland.  A local contractor, headed by the scoundrel-son of a well-to-do citizen, flees the country in financial ruin, leaving his employees and his customers in a mess.  And what a pretty pickle it is: job loss, broken hearts and marriages, sad stories as only the Irish reveal in literature.  

This is a novel told from multiple points of view.  Each chapter is a character, speaking in the first person.  It takes a few chapters to see the web of plot holding them together.  Even then, it is possible to miss links that would be clearer in a sequential novel.  

The first-person narrative gives Ryan the opportunity to reveal the characters intimate thoughts and private actions.  The writing is terse, with a good deal of Irish patois and grammatical rhythm.  It takes a few re-reads to grasp the full meaning of some sentences, especially the articles and pronouns.  This may be the reason for not seeing some of the plot links.  But, stick with it.  This is a worthy and engrossing read by an emergent Irish author.

Book awards for The Spinning Heart – not bad for a first published book.

•    2012: Irish Book Awards, winner, Newcomer of the Year (The Spinning Heart)
•    2012: Irish Book Awards, Book of the Year (The Spinning Heart)
•    2013: Booker Prize, longlist (The Spinning Heart)
•    2014: IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, shortlist (The Spinning Heart)
•    2013: Guardian First Book Award, winner (The Spinning Heart)
•    2015: European Union Prize for Literature (Ireland), winner (The Spinning Heart)

Recommended
 

“The Essex Serpent” by Sarah Perry (Custom House, 2016)

As the white cliffs of Dover soar above the Atlantic, the Essex shoreline on the English Channel is low and muddy with river estuaries.  This mud sets the tone for the Gothic novel The Essex Serpent.  Mud that clings to clothing; mud that seizes boots and shoes forever lost; mud that pulses with brackish tidal water.

Freed by the death of her husband from an abusive marriage, Cora Seaborne escapes from Victorian London, loses her corset, and her elegant town house to embrace the plain life of Colchester in Essex, a bit northeast of London.  She is accompanied by her adolescent son, Francis, and his nanny and Cora’s companion, Martha. Dear friends from London figure in the story, but the plot develops around the denizens of Colchester.

The novel is full of Dickensian characters including the wry parson and his sprightly wife, old fishermen, curious children, learned physicians.  All spin around Cora and her trip from death and desolation to redemption.  The time is Victorian—London is a bustling, electrified city while Colchester still lives in the dark, lamp-wise and spiritually.  The myth of The Essex Serpent and it’s resolution reflect the seismic change that is coming to rural England with the 20th Century.

The themes of spirituality, demonism, and unrequited love, along with the intense observations of the writer reminded me of A. S. Byatt.  But, as dense as Byatt’s writing is, Perry writes in a flowing manner that quickly moves the story along.

Highly recommended – the best “new” novel I’ve read in several years.
 

"The Nymph and the Lamp", a novel by Thomas H. Raddall (Little, Brown and Company, 1950)

In 2005, Erik Larson wrote an excellent book about Marconi and the invention of transatlantic radio called Thunderstruck.  The secret of the wireless communication involved very tall receiving antennae on shore and electrical generating power at the source to create huge sparks of electro-magnetic energy.  They used the language of Morse Code.  The radio signal, which travels in a direct line, bounced off the earth’s atmosphere creating a curve towards its destination.  It’s far more complex than this; good reason to read Larson’s book.

Marconi stations were built on the most remote extremities of land abutting the ocean.  One of these is Sable Island off the Southeast Coast of Nova Scotia.  From its birth, Sable Island was not used to transmit across the ocean, but was a relay point for ships heading to Halifax, Montreal and Boston. There grew on the island a small population of hearty souls divided into three groups: the civilians who supported the lighthouses at either end, the lifesavers who ranged across the island ready to respond to shipwrecks.  These were established long before the Marconi station. The third group, signalmen, were employed by the wireless company, at the station built on the highest point of the island.  The former were permanent settlers, the later were usually one year and done.

The Nymph and the Lamp, set in the early 1920’s, tells the story of a signalman, Matthew Carney, who loved the island, called Marina in the novel, and stayed far beyond one year.  Finally, he took a three-month shore leave to find his family in Nova Scotia, with whom he had lost contact.  During this unfruitful search, he finds Isabel Jardine, an independent spinster, secretary to the ED at the wireless company.   Sparks fly between these two non-reactive subjects, culminating with Isabel accompanying Matthew back to the island for permanent settlement after knowing him only from his files, his reputation and no more than 35 hours together over three days. 

The story of her acclimatization to the station residents, all men, and the island’s citizens, both men and women, is a fascinating story.  It is hard not to like all the characters in this book, and to feel their anguish as the tale unrolls. 

Within a year, Isabel returns to Nova Scotia and finds a safe harbor in the region of her birth among the apple orchards of the north island.  She joins the roller coaster of boom and bust following The Great War, nurtured by an employer who is smart enough to give her responsibility and authority.  Such a man was a rare find in 1920’s provincial Canada, and a rare character coming from a male author, writing in 1950.

Raddell does a fine job of tying up the stories.  The book is beautifully written, full of glorious similes and descriptions of the nature of sea and shore.  Highly recommended for those who love an old-fashioned novel complete with love, betrayal, sadness, joy and a fascinating setting.  The book is out of print.  You may find it at a library or a used book store.  I purchased through a seller on Amazon.

"Jackie's Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family" by Kathy McKeon (Gallery Books, 2017)

When Jackie Kennedy died, May 19, 1994, I cried—not the same kind of tears as the death Jack Kennedy, who died when I was 20—the tears of one woman mourning the loss of a great woman who died long before her time.  Jackie should have enjoyed her later life:  the Onassis money, her adult children, her grandchildren, her lovers.  We wanted her to find peace.

So, when I saw that Kathy McKeon, former personal maid and sometimes nanny for Jackie Kennedy, wrote a memoir, it was required reading.  And a lovely memoir it is.  Just enough beans spilled to pique interest, nothing in bad taste.  An homage to a great American family.

Such fascinating things are revealed.  The lives of Irish immigrants who serve the wealthy on the Upper East Side, paid a pittance, but given lodging and meals and a foothold in the U.S. The title, Jackie's Girl, comes from Rose Kennedy who could not remember any names in the throngs that surrounded her.  There was such sadness in Kathy’s telling of the solitary evenings of “Madame” as she rearranged furniture and artwork to kill time.  Caroline is shown to be the blossoming figure of adult responsibility.  John Jr. is shown to be capricious, rowdy, even described as medicated for ADD.  Both children loving and respectful with Kathy and their mother.  

Madame was grateful for Kathy’s talents, which she needed to raise her children in the rarefied air of the truly wealthy.  But she did not respect Kathy’s personal time or needs.  Madame came first, not surprising.  

The story is woven throughout with the trappings of the lives of U.S. royalty (Greek, too): private planes, multiple homes with staffs, summers on the Cape.  But the Kennedy family and Onassis, never seem stuffy, overly demanding or entitled.  Ok, somewhat entitled.  Kathy’s life experience while with the Kennedy’s (She joined them when she was 19 and lived with them for 12 years, until 1976.), at least in her retelling, was touched at various stages by learning, tenderness and inclusiveness.  

Jackie’s Girl reads quickly—large leading on the pages, so it fluffs out to 300+.  It shows the polish of a good ghost writer and editor.  The small photo section in the middle is heart-warming.  Recommended for all Jackie fans.  

“Barometer Rising” by Hugh MacLennan (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941)

Second in the books I’m reading to prepare for my first visit to Nova Scotia in September.  Barometer Rising is an historical novel based in 1917, the First World War as experienced from the Canadian Maritimes.

MacLennan’s first novel (he went on to become a prominent figure in Canadian letters) folds elements of the Canadian experience into a romance set in history.  The reader’s experience is multiple:  how Halifax embraced her key role as the UK’s major port in the West, the jumping off point for convoys heading to the war bearing munitions, arms, lumber, coal, men—all produced in Canada and extracted to support a war effort that was not Canada’s. There is the experience of a provincial city (about 60,000), influenced by the mores of immigrants from the colonial U.S., Scotland, and the U.K., all conservative.  There is a touch of women’s rights, but only because of the war effort.  

The focal point of Barometer Rising is the Halifax Explosion, December 6, 1917.  As I was unaware of this tragedy, it pulled me right into the climax of all the characters’ development according to how they responded.  It is the largest man-made explosion prior to the atom bomb.  Read the book or check Wikipedia if you want the horrible details.

MacLennan did an excellent job of setting up rich characters who harbor slowly revealed secrets and set the story in a time unique to Halifax.  This is an “old fashioned” historical novel. Just a soupçon of sex, lots of conflict—a well-written and easy to read book.  

"The Death of a Pope" by Piers Paul Read (Ignatius Press, 2009)

I've enjoyed Piers Paul Read's other books, so thought this would be a good read.  It was and it wasn't.  Quick and easy - sort of a Catholic thriller set around the death of one pope and election of another.  Good setting and Read knows his Catholic stuff.  But, the book needed to be fleshed out more.  Characters lacked depth, and as with most thrillers, the ends tied together all too easily.

The plot centers around the possibility of terrorist activity in Vatican City when hundreds of thousands of Catholics are in St. Peter's Square watching for white smoke.  Nice time to set off a bomb, either by ISIS or others who would like you to think that ISIS in involved.  That situation is not something that occurred to me, but I'm sure it has to the Vatican and the Roman police. We live in such strange times.

The Death of a Pope is a good beach read.

"War and Turpentine" by Stefan Hertmans (Pantheon Books 2016)

The book clearly states, “a novel” on the book jacket.  So, I wondered why it seemed so much like a combination of a biography and a memoir.  That’s because it is.  It was not until I began to read reviews (I usually don’t consult them before reading a book.) to find out why I was so dissatisfied with this highly recommended book, that I discovered it is not a novel.  It is cobbled together, in a beautiful manner, from Hertmans’s grandfather’s journals of world war one, Hertmans’s memories of his father, and the author’s reflections upon visiting the locations of his grandfather’s war. The “novel” label may cover liberties taken with the journals and Hertmans’s memories.  As the reader, it confused me.

The prose is beautiful, poetic, even in translation.  Hertmans is best known as a Flemish poet. The story does not cover new ground by any means.  It does present a memorable impression of Flemish poverty in pre-war Belgium.  It also raised again my interest in the eternal hatred between Wallonia (French speaking) and Flanders (Dutch speaking) areas of Belgium.  In the war, the French were the officers and the Flemish the cannon fodder.  This animosity continues today.  

If I were to review this as a novel, it would be tagged disjointed and bland, though beautifully written.  As a memoir/biography it is more understandable and satisfying to read.  
 

“The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” by Alistair MacLeod (Ontario Review Press, 1988)

Book #3 in my research reading for a trip to Nova Scotia.  These short stories are existential in their presentations of life, choice, decisions, death.  You won’t come away laughing or even smiling, but you will feel that you have experienced MacLeod’s vision of the people of Cape Breton.  Some stories (there are only seven.) have one protagonist, others cover generations.  The atmosphere is always starkly real.  

Nova Scotia had many waves of settlement. The Micmac were the natives when the Europeans took up residence.  First the French, the famous Acadians who were expelled mid-18th century by the British after six wars for domination.  The British encouraged emigration from the New England colonies and 2000 families came in the early 1760’s, both farmers and fishermen. At the same time, Gaelic Highland farmers in Scotland were forced off their crofts (rented land) by the Highland and Lowland Clearance: landowners forcing the change from farming to sheep grazing.  Also, many Highlanders were Catholic and the prospect of more religious freedom in Canada appealed. Many of these Highland farmers settled in New Scotland, Nova Scotia, around Cape Breton at the far eastern end.  It is the descendants of these people, some still speaking Gaelic, who are the protagonists in MacLeod’s stories.  They settled in Cape Breton to be away from others and continue their Highland traditions.

MacLeod’s stories arise from the pressure of more contemporary society on the traditions and the psyche of these settlers.  They are mostly farmers and fishermen; few characters are from the city.  Animals are laborers, not pets.  The older generation cling to their independence despite infirmity.  In the remote areas, there are no phones, no electricity, only bad roads and tight fishing boats.  

In a slightly different vein, the last story, The Closing Down of Summer, is about miners who go “off-island” for the big bucks and the big risks.  Again, it’s about the pressure of change, knowing that you and your mates will likely be replaced by equipment.  And the miner reflects a point of view I’ve not seen expressed in relation to work underground.

“I have always wished that my children could see me at my work…And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do.  That they might appreciate the perfection of our drilling and the calculation of our angles and the measuring of our powder, and that they might understand that what we know through eye and ear and touch is of a finer quality than any information garnered by the most sophisticated of mining engineers with all their elaborate equipment.”

I am not a short story lover, but I felt fulfilled by MacLeod’s stories because they allow for character development.  All situated in Cape Breton, you begin to understand the nature of the environment, the people and plots from story to story.

Highly recommended, but not light reading.  
 

“Barometer Rising” by Hugh MacLennan (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941)

#2 in the books I’m reading to prepare for my first visit to Nova Scotia in September. Barometer Rising is an historical novel based in 1917, the First World War as experienced from the Canadian Maritimes.

MacLennan’s first novel (he went on to become a prominent figure in Canadian letters) folds elements of the Canadian experience into a romance set in history.  The reader’s experience is multiple:  how Halifax embraced her key role as the UK’s major port in the West, the jumping off point for convoys heading to the war bearing munitions, arms, lumber, coal, men—all produced in Canada and extracted to support a war effort that was not of Canada's making.  There is the experience of a provincial city (about 60,000), influenced by the mores of immigrants from the colonial U.S., Scotland, and the U.K., all conservative. There is a touch of women’s rights, but only because of the war effort.  

The focal point of the book is the Halifax Explosion, December 6, 1917.  As I was unaware of this tragedy, it pulled me right into the climax of all the characters’ development according to how they responded.  It is the largest man-made explosion prior to the atom bomb.  Read the book or check Wikipedia if you want the horrible details.

MacLennan does an excellent job of setting up rich characters who harbor slowly revealed secrets, and setting the story in a time unique to Halifax.  This is an “old fashioned” historical novel.  Just a soupçon of sex, lots of conflict—a well-written and easy to read book.  

“The Places in Between” by Rory Stewart (Harcourt Inc., 2004) and “The Prince of Marshes” by Rory Stewart (Mariner Books, 2007)

What great, loveable goofball Rory Stewart is.  I heard him speak at the University of Arizona about ten years ago—it was memorable.  Mostly, he dwelt on his time as deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah in 2003, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq.  This is the subject matter for The Prince of Marshes.  He contrasts the brevity of political and military assignments in post-Saddam Iraq with the centuries of tribal aggregation and rule, and the past continuity of British colonials who remained in their positions for years.  The two styles of government could not co-exist.  It was clear that the situation in Iraq was a train wreck and that civil war was inevitable.  You would not think the book would be entertaining, but it was.  Stewart writes like he is personally telling you a riveting story.

From 2000 to 2002 he traveled on foot through rural districts of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey totaling around 6000 miles, during which he stayed in five hundred different village houses.  The Places in Between is his journal from 32 days walking across Afghanistan in 2002—in the dead of winter, weeks after the defeat of the Taliban.  The man does not know fear.  I could not put it down.  It is an excellent travel book as well as political and social commentary. 

Today Rory Stewart is a Conservative MP from Cumbria.  You can visit his “professional” website at www.rorystewart.co.uk.  At Wikipedia, you find all the interesting goodies (he was William and Harry’s tutor). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart#Walking_and_travel

I wholeheartedly recommend these books.  Read The Places in Between first. 

"Hidden Ones: A Veil of Memories" by Marcia Fine (L’Image Press, 2017)

I love historical novels that make me dig deeper into the history told in the books.  And such is Hidden Ones, a novel about the Conversos, or Crypto-Jews of the new world.  

Set primarily in the 1650’s in Mexico City, the book traces the lives of Celendaria Crespin and her grandmother, Doña Clara Henriquez de Crespin.  They are victims of the Tribunals of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of the Spanish Catholic Church (and therefore Spanish government, there being no separation of church and state) against heretics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, rationalists and unorthodox believers. The Inquisition was not limited to Spain, but included Italy, Portugal, the Papal States, and Spanish and Portuguese colonies.  It began in 1231 and officially ended in 1834.  

The Crespin family are Sephardic Jews, originally expelled from Spain in 1492 (yes, the same year Columbus discovered the New World) and the from Portugal in 1497.  The resulting diaspora spread Sephardic Jews throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, Europe and into the New World.  At first, the choice given the Jews was convert to Catholicism or be arrested as heretics.  Later, even Conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism) were arrested for their Jewish background and the belief they still practiced in private.  It was a no-win situation, driving Jews into complete denial and occlusion of their heritage.  Today, their descendants, most living as Catholics are amazed to find Jewish ancestors on the family tree.   The Crespins followed other Jews they knew to Mexico, hoping for a better life.  The Inquisition followed the diaspora.  

In Hidden Ones, the Crespins leave Mexico City in the 17th century for parts further north, eventually ending in Santa Fe, New Mexico by the 19th century.  Celendaria marries into a Converso family and they continue to carry on Jewish traditions without rabbis, books, synagogues, or minyans.  They learn to identify fellow Jews and bond with them.  

I was raised in the Catholic Church.  They don’t dismiss the role of the Inquisition in church history, but we learned more about bringing heretics and radicals to trial (think Galileo) than about Jews and Muslims.  It was uncomfortable and enlightening to put sympathetic, though fictional, characters through the gauntlet of accusation, arrest, bribery, torture and imprisonment.  

Until recently, the Crypto-Jews have remained an unknown part of the settlement of the Southwestern U.S.   When I moved to Tucson, part of the fascinating history was the role played by famous Jewish families who settled here to provide supplies for the mines:  Levis, Goldwaters, Drachmans, Appels.  But they came in the 1850’s from St. Louis and points east or west. Little did I realize that Crypto-Jews had been living in Arizona for centuries, immigrants from Mexico and other Spanish and Portuguese colonies.  The University of Arizona website has a page on Crypto-Jews with links to historical research.  http://swja.arizona.edu/content/crypto-jews

Marcia Fine wrote this book in short chapters (a plus) titled to identify the point of view, Clara or Celendaria, and the date.  This enables a different type of dialogue using no quotation marks or attributions, as you know who is speaking. It makes for smoother reading and eliminates unnecessary words.  Initially, I had to make little associative leaps to get the rhythm, but after two chapters, I was into the flow.  

The story of the Crespin family is a solid foundation on which Hidden Ones is written.  The plot is straight forward and linked believably to the historical context.  It’s an easy read and one that may lead you to look more closely at local history and your family tree.

Reviewed by Ann Boland
ann@annboland.com