Archive for February, 2010
Twelve year old Miranda lives in a shabby apartment with her single Mom. It is 1979. Keeping safe on the streets of her New York City neighborhood seems easier than understanding the friends around her, even though she and her best friend Sal have to avoid a crazy man on their way to school. She is caught up in the confusions of shifting friendships – why won’t Sal play with her after he gets punched by a kid for no apparent reason and why has Julia turned cold to Annemarie?
Miranda is also worried about a note hidden under her bed. It seems to have foretold the invitation for Miranda’s mom to be a contestant on a game show. A number of notes written by an unknown person have appeared in odd places. In these tiny mysterious notes the writer seems to know more than she does about upcoming events. They imply that Miranda must help prevent a tragic death. Who is the victim and how can Miranda do anything about it? In this taut novel, every word, every sentence, has meaning and substance. The Newbery award committee called it finely crafted, exceptionally conceived, and highly original. I couldn’t agree more. ~Gretchen Echols
Like many people interested in the history of New York City, I’d heard about the Collyer brothers–Homer and Langley–long before E.L. Doctorow decided to fictionalize the peculiar but (in his hands, anyway) poignant story of their lives. They were born to a Manhattan physician and his wife, who had deep roots in American history. Well educated (Homer trained in admiralty law, his younger brother studied engineering), the two sons moved with their family into a Harlem brownstone in 1909. After their parents died, the brothers remained in that Fifth Avenue residence, becoming hoarders and paranoid recluses, with Homer slowly going blind. They eventually died in that house, both of them in March 1947. But so filled was the brownstone with newspapers and broken bicycles, specimen jars and old beds, skeletal Christmas trees and rotting food and surplus pianos, that police had to break in through a second-story window, just to see if anyone was still alive inside. Over the bare bones of the Collyers’ bizarre tale, Doctorow has stitched a quilt of details–partially true, partly fictional–that lend the brothers personalities beyond their eccentricities. What’s most moving in these pages is the love those brothers show one another, despite their escalating mental infirmities. Extending the lives of his main characters well past their actual obituary dates, Doctorow takes the opportunity to revisit high and low points of the 20th century through their eyes–the rise of speakeasies and gangsters, the emergence of “hippies” (with one of whom Homer finds something approaching affection), the Vietnam War, President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal and more. Homer & Langley is an enviable achievement of fictionalized history, presented with such human warmth, humor and compassion that you’ll feel compelled to start re-reading it soon after you’ve turned its final page.
~ Jeff Pierce
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
by Martha A. Sandweiss
Clarence King was a famous 19th-century geologist and mountaineer, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the man who exposed the notorious (and, really, incredible) Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1842, a confidante of the privileged, a friend of onetime presidential aide and future U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and a bestselling author to boot–”the best and the brightest of his generation,” as Hay pronounced–King also led a secret life. For 13 years, while his real name was featured in newspapers and rode the lips of government officials in need of scientific expertise, the unmarried King engaged in a parallel existence as “James Todd,” a supposedly light-skinned black Pullman porter with a much younger common-law spouse, Ada Copeland, the daughter of former Georgia slaves, and a home and family in Brooklyn, New York. Feeling confined by the upper-class life into which he’d been born, King first studied and toured, and then daringly leapt the border between white and African America–but never told his closest friends, or even his aged mother, what he’d done. Only after his death in 1901 were the facts of his double life revealed, thanks to a court case brought against his dubious estate by his black wife. Author Sandweiss, a Princeton University history professor, uses the story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland to explore the bigotry, economic disparities and racial “passing” pervasive in post-Civil War America, and raise the question of whether even King–for all of his intelligence–could admit “the paradoxes of his life.” She presents here a haunting tale, made all the more intriguing by a mystery raised in its later pages: Who was responsible for maintaining the payments on Ada King’s residence even after husband Clarence/James died? In other words, who knew about his secret life before the newspapers made it a sensation?
~ Jeff Pierce
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved AmericaUntil reading New York Times writer Timothy Egan’s latest work, I had never even heard of the Great Fire of 1910, which consumed 3 million acres of Pacific Northwest timberlands (an area slightly smaller than Connecticut) in only two days, and killed more than 80 people. But the drama and humanity Egan brings to that history make it hard to forget. The best-recognized players here are recently retired U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his friend and sparring partner, Yale-educated forester Gifford Pinchot, who together created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and fought to strengthen its authority after Egan’s “big burn.” And the villains are embodied in U.S. Senator Weldon Heyburn, an Idaho Republican who “stood in the way of nearly all Roosevelt’s progressive initiatives,” and who sought to defund and destroy the Forest Service and turn all of the forests it managed back to industrial use. However, the real heroes in The Big Burn have to be the Forest Service rangers who, outmanned and outgunned at very turn, nonetheless fought valiantly to stop a disastrous blaze that had een wind-whipped and stampeded across acreage grown dry after months of sunny summer. While thousands of residents fled the danger zone, racing away on trains that threatened to tumble from charred and wrecked trestles, the rangers found help from prisoners released for the onerous duty of firefighting and a black U.S. Army unit that, against tremendous odds, saved one town and safely evacuated another. Although the final chapter of this book is a bit too reportorial, not quite matching the pace of what precedes it, Egan (best known until now for his 2006 book, The Worst Hard Time) shows that he has mastered the fine art of fetching new color and life even from history that never lacked for vividness. The Big Burn is nothing if not a scorcher. ~ Jeff Pierce
