The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

carol — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:16:15 +0000

Fans of David Mitchell’s books know all too well the anticipated pleasure of revisiting a past character or the reworking of a familiar theme from his previous works. It gives the reader a sense of being part of privileged group-one who is knowledgeable of the Mitchell family of characters. So it was when I began his latest novel, a history/love story set in a Dutch trading post off the coast of Nagasaki in the late 18th century. What I found to my surprise was the not the usual pyrotechnics of intersecting plots and the leaping forward and back in time. Instead Mitchell has given us a straightforward historically accurate narrative, told in the third person about a group of characters who are so realistically drawn the reader feels transported to that time and place. The place is Deshima, a man-made island that housed the Dutch traders as they were not allowed to mix with their Japanese counterparts. Jacob de Zoet, a bookkeeper for the Dutch East Indies Trading Company, is assigned the task of uncovering the rampant corruption that was occurring for years. During his stay he befriends the many Japanese/Dutch interpreters, the resident physician (an irreverent and brilliant character) and the hired hands. It is his forbidden attraction to Orito, a Japanese midwife, which leads him to discover a debauched practice at a monastery involving murder and sexual abuse. What impressed me most about this novel is the rich historical detail (it’s evidently well researched) and his aptitude for writing “real-sounding” dialogue with the obvious differences in dialect. Ultimately it’s Mitchell’s storytelling ability that shines in this novel, and is sure to impress his loyal followers and first-time readers alike. ~Carol Santoro

Citizens of London by Lynne Olson

carol — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:00:54 +0000

In 1941 John Gilbert Winant took his place as American ambassador to Britain. Edward R. Murrow was already living and reporting the blitz from London over CBS radio. Averell Harriman joined them to direct and coordinate the lend-lease program. All three of these men worked to improve the relationship between America and Britain. They urged the American people and President Roosevelt to send as much aid as possible to the British people and military, and ultimately to join the war. This is the story of that time, before America entered the war, when Britain endured and stood fast against the pounding of the German air force, the destruction of the shipping life line by u-boats, and the seeming unconcern of the isolationist American public. It is also the story of the difficult relationship between American and British military command structures once the United States did enter the war, and the relentless efforts of men like Winant and Eisenhower to promote cooperation, and ease the tensions between these allies. Olson also explores life in London during the war: the loosening of societal controls, the changing roles of women, and the relationship between civilians and the military. The tension between Americans who had more and better everything, food, uniforms, vehicles, and the shabbiness of British society that has suffered years of deprivation, hunger and rationing kept men like Winant constantly at work promoting understanding and controlling outbreaks of conflict. At the same time, there is tension between these Americans over their respective roles and access to Roosevelt and Churchill. A fascinating and informative read with a slightly different perspective on a “special relationship” that has been much written about. ~Marla Vandewater

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson

carol — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:55:50 +0000

Major Pettigrew is as English as it is possible to be. At sixty-eight, a widower and the eldest son living in the ancestral home in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, he believes in honor, duty, and family. Stunned by the news of his brother’s death, he opens his door wearing his wife’s old robe and collapses into the arms of Mrs. Ali, the widowed Pakistani owner of the local mini-mart come to collect for his daily newspaper. Over a restorative pot of tea, their conversation sparks the beginning of a friendship that will set the entire village on end. As his attempts to understand his financier son, Roger, merge with his desire to reunite the pair of Churchill hunting guns split at the deathbed of his father, and gets further mixed up with golf club festivities and an annual shoot at the estate of the local lord, Major Pettigrew finds himself at the center of a local whirlwind. Mrs. Ali’s independence puts her at odds with her traditional family. Economic and social factors are changing British life. Major Pettigrew is trying to hold on to the past and move into the future with dignity intact. Major Pettigrew’s good heart and level head win out over his British reserve and the tsking of his neighbors. At times funny, sweet and exasperating, with an unforgettable cast of characters, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is a wonderful read. ~Marla Vandewater

Consequences by Penelope Lively

carol — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:14:44 +0000

Early in the marriage of Matt and Lorna Faraday, Matt paints a fresco of the dance of life on their bedroom wall. This is a perfect image for the three generations of women, Lorna, Molly and Ruth, as they endeavor to follow their own desires in their dance of life, despite the conventional expectations of their families or society. The account takes place against the backdrop of financial deprivation before and during World War II, the new-found freedoms of the Sixties, and the financial Golden Age of the 80’s and 90’s. Lively’s story is a seamless blend of romance and social commentary. Her elegant prose appears effortless and is a joy to read. This is a compassionate affirmation of the ultimate power of love within generations. ~ Gretchen Echols

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

carol — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:06:29 +0000

This debut novel (1994) by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan is one of the best literary works I’ve read in years. Aljaz Cosini is leading a group of tourists on a river rafting trip on the Franklin River. The trip is problematic from the start and now he is drowning. As he drowns he discovers he is having visions. They include the recent events that led to this horrible predicament, as well as the life events of different family members including ancestors he never met. This imaginative blend of magical realism and descriptive prose that includes the convict heritage of Tasmania and the lush land of the jungle is quirky, compelling and beautifully written. This novel sweeps the reader through the quiet spaces and rapids of one man’s life. ~ Gretchen Echols

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

carol — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:59:13 +0000

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

Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow

carol — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:53:48 +0000

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 by Martha A. Sandweiss

carol — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:48:21 +0000

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 by Timothy Egan

carol — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:45:59 +0000

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

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

carol — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:44:45 +0000

Historians use the word “lacuna” to indicate a crucial missing piece in a manuscript. Kingsolver expertly weaves many threads of story to reveal the lacuna in Harrison Shepherd’s life. Taken to Mexico as a boy by his Mexican mother fleeing an American father, he is befriended by the cook in the hacienda and learns much about Mexico and its Aztec history. Eventually he ends up working for the famous artistic couple: Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. In their household he observes revolutionary ideals and becomes acquainted with Leon Trotsky, on the run from a murderous Stalin. Shepherd eventually flees Mexico and settles in Asheville, North Carolina and becomes a popular novelist of ancient Mexico. Again, he is on the periphery of WWII and events of the Fifties. This powerful story shows how a person’s life can be caught up in political events without an active participation in their ideologies. Frieda Kahlo’s character says that to be a good artist you have to know something that is true; that knowledge about life has to go into art. Kingsolver knows many true things and has written a gem of a book. ~Gretchen Echols