Author Archives:

Some Library Gems and “Fool’s Gold” Finds

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One of the pleasures of being “retired” is having the time to discover new authors. I also discovered a new cheap way of doing this. My local library in Howard County Maryland has a shelf of books they are purging from their collection that are on sale for $2.00 each. And when you pay $2 for a book, you don’t feel you have to finish it if it’s not your cup of soup.

I’ll start with an author I discovered whose books who I’ll keep reading: Charles Finch. I bought Finch’s “An Old Betrayal,” the seventh in a series featuring Charles Lenox mysteries.

A test of an author’s writing craft is to pick up a book in the middle of the series and not feel lost or that you have to go back and read the others from the first onward.

Identity Guilt: A Review of Tommy Orange’s “There,There”

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I suspect Tommy Orange fears he’s not being judged on the same scale as other authors. He’s like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. When Thomas got into Yale, people let it be known they thought he only got in because of affirmative action.

I suspect Orange fears he only got a book contract and won awards for his novel is because he’s Native American. I suspect he worries that he’s not being held to the same standard as other authors and having read the book I suspect he’s right.

There, There is an award winner due to the content, not the writing or the structure of the novel. His non-fiction Prologue, which cites ways in which Native Americans have been victimized over the centuries, seems designed to pull at our heart strings before he introduces the characters of his novel.

Buried by the New York Times: How America’s Premier Newspaper Downplayed the Holocaust

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Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times (Cambridge, 2005)

One of the unfortunate casualties of the media’s war on Donald Trump and his ‘fake news’ response is a clear-eyed assessment of the extent to which outside factors influence what newspapers choose to print or not print. As a case in point, consider Laurel Leff’s thorough analysis of the New York Times coverage (or lack thereof) of the Nazi’s murderous campaign against the Jews of Europe. Leff exposes the Times’ intentional downplaying of what was happening out of a fear of being criticized for playing favorites due to the fact that the Times’ owner and publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was Jewish.

Sulzberger was a proponent of the idea that Judaism was a religion and not the cornerstone of a people, a nation.

The Poe Festival (Oct. 5-6): An Opportunity for Fun and Learning

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Honoring writers who paved the way with their contributions to the literary world is a great way to introduce young people (as well as the still young-at-heart) to the joys of the written word. In Baltimore, we are especially grateful for the existence of the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum and the annual International Poe Festival and Awards which will take place this year Saturday and Sunday, October 4 & 5, from 11 am to 4 pm both days.

Poe’s place in the literary firmament is assured by those who champion him as an forerunner of the genres of science fiction, mystery and horror, but he is also a must read for his poetry and his critical essays. He belongs in the pantheon of early American writers that includes the Transcendentalists as well as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The Power of the Mind: A Review of Rachel Kadish’ The Weight of Ink

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It’s the year 2000 and a cache of documents from the 17th century written in Portuguese, Hebrew and English has been discovered in a London suburb. With the help of a graduate assistant, an elderly female history professor begins to uncover the mystery of their origins. For her, it’s a last chance to go out on a high note; for him, it’s a distraction from a Ph.D. thesis on Shakespeare that’s not going well.

But The Weight of Ink is not just about that discovery and what it reveals about the past, although what they learn is quite startling. Instead, Kadish tells us the story of the people who composed and preserved the documents themselves. Dry? Pedantic? Just the opposite.

Book Review: Stewart O’Nan’s City of Secrets

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Jerusalem has been called many things. “City of Secrets” probably not until that is Stewart O’Nan chose that title for his 2016 novel of the tumultuous years in the “Holy Land” after the end of the Second World War.

The title implies the story is about the city of Jerusalem, which to a large extent it is, but it’s primarily about one member of a group of people campaigning to get Great Britain to fulfill its 1917 promise that the land west of the Jordan River become a homeland for the Jewish people.

O’Nan assigns his protagonist the single un-Jewish name “Brand.” Brand is a Holocaust survivor who makes his way through the blockade set up by the British to prevent Jewish refugees from the Holocaust from reaching the Holy Land beyond the small annual quota.

Interview with Running Breathless author Morey Kogul

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These days many of us are glued to the news as conflicts near and far are reported with up to the minute details. Can you imagine then how it must have felt to residents of Dubno in Soviet occupied Poland in June 1941 to hear rumors that Germany was about to invade? Jewish families in particular had few if any choices to assure their survival. In one family a young man decided to ride his bicycle to a near-by town to learn what he could. For Wolf Kogul that was the beginning of years struggling to survive war, tragic loss and future guilt.

Each story of that time adds concrete knowledge of those terrible years, bringing the truth of specificity that history books can only generalize about.

How Writers Read Novels

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Do writers read differently than non-writers, and if so, what do they do that is different, and can non-writers benefit from the difference? The answers to those questions is ‘yes,’ ‘I’ll explain shortly,’ and ‘yes’ again.

To put it simply, writers observe how a novel is put together as they read the story. What writers observe and how that can add to one’s reading pleasure is what I’m about to explain using a novel by Jeffrey Deaver as my model example.

Deaver, who keynoted at two Washington/Maryland writers’ conferences in recent years, is a meticulous plotter. He spends as much time researching and plotting each of his novels as he spends in the writing. One reason is that he writes thrillers.

Getting Re-acquainted with P.D. James

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P.D. James, The Black Tower (1975)

I hadn’t read a P.D. James novel in some years, but came across this one and I’m glad I read it. For those who are not familiar with her, James’ reputation was stellar. (Her dates are 1920-2014.) On the front cover Time Magazine is quoted as calling her “The reigning mistress of murder.” Two British papers are quoted on the back describing The Black Tower “a masterpiece” and James is labelled the “greatest contemporary writer of classic crime.”

James wrote a series of fourteen crime novels featuring a reserved male detective by the name of Adam Dalgliesh. He’s the opposite of James Bond. He uses deduction, perseverance and a dedication to an often thankless job to ferret out the criminal.

Up and coming authors heard at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books

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One of the reasons I keep traveling out to Tucson each March is to attend the Tucson Festival of Books, which has become one of the country’s top book festivals by attendance and by the quality of authors it attracts. This year 140,000 patrons were exposed to books and authors––fiction and non-fiction, geared to readers of all ages. I prefer sessions where I can hear fiction authors talk about their books and writing careers. Here’s a sample of authors readers might look for in their librarys and bookstores.

Rachel Kadish. Kadish is the author of The Weight of Ink, a complex historical novel that took her 12 years to write. The story takes place in London in two time periods—the year 2000 and the mid-17th century and traces the lives of two women––a history professor nearing the end of her career and an orphan who becomes the scribe to a blind rabbi.

Can Moderns find Happiness? A Review of Aminatta Forna’s Novel

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Aminatta Forna, Happiness (2018)

Happiness is a story of subtle changes. Aminatta Forna’s protagonists, an African psychiatrist specializing in trauma and an American naturalist, meet by accident on a bridge in London. Coincidence repeats and a relationship is built over a relatively short time period of time based on open-mindedness, shared natures, and eventually physical attraction, but what is this story about? Forna seeks to keep us interested in the slow evolution of these characters’ relationship by weaving each person’s past in with present events––which include the search for a lost child, dealing with the needs of a former lover institutionalized for dementia, and being tuned into a city populated by foreign nationals, foxes and escaped pet birds.

At one point, the psychiatrist, whose name is Attila, suggests happiness might be found in a village in Cuba which is cut off from that island’s poor infrastructure.

The Origins of Today’s Detective Genre Fiction: A Review of Dennis Dooley’s Dashiell Hammett

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Back in the day, most undergraduates took at least one English literature course. Sometimes it was Shakespeare, 19th century English novelists, or the American Transcendentalists. I took a modern novel course in which we read James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Remembrance of Things Past, and several others––a heavy load for a one semester course. The key lesson in all of these courses is that while it’s possible to read solely for enjoyment additional layers of understanding are available when you analyze and compare each work with others by the same author as well as books by other writers.

A few decades ago the Frederick Ungar Publishing Company launched a line of books about genre authors called Recognitions.

When Historical Fiction Becomes Allegory: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

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The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a young slave, who escapes a Georgia plantation hoping to hop a ride to freedom on the Underground Railroad. What she discovers is that freedom’s journey has many obstacles. At the end of the story, after suffering psychological and physical harm along the way, we find her continuing her flight still hoping to reach freedom’s promised land.

This novel is an allegory of sorts. It begins offering a harsh portrait of life under slavery; but when Cora leaves the plantation, she moves into an imagined world, still harsh, meant it seems to teach the reader about the dangers of placing one’s hopes on whites.

Cora is transported north, as the title implies, on the Underground Railroad.

Thriller, Mystery or Ghost Story: How Should We Label Elizabeth Brundage’s All Things Cease to Appear?

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When Stephen King writes a blurb for a novel, readers take notice. When a book is reviewed in the New York Times Book Review section, readers take notice. Let’s look at how Elizabeth Brundage’s fourth novel, All Things Cease to Appear, which was published in 2016, is being received by the reading public.

All Things has earned over 7,000 ratings and 1,000 reviews on Goodreads. That is very good, yet the book scores only 3.72 (out of 5)––not what one might expect. On Amazon, it does a little better with a 4.1 score, but from only 300 reviews.

What are the chief objections to the novel among Amazon and Goodreads reviewers? First, and least important in my opinion, is that she does away with quotation marks.

Destiny’s Rider: RIchard Russo on Writing, a Review of The Destiny Thief (2018)

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Richard Russo is a star . . . in Bulgaria––to wit, a few years ago he was invited to their annual writers’ conference and when his flights got scrambled, he thought about saying sorry . . . until they told him he was the headliner. That’s what happens when you win a Pulitzer Prize. It also means publishers want books and are even willing to publish nine essays that barely hang together. Oh, by the way, Russo participated in the conference during which he meditated on the life of writers in a country where not long ago you had to remain silent lest you be imprisoned or worse for writing the wrong thing about the country’s rulers.

The Destiny Thief should be read by fiction writers, as well as by devoted Russo fans.

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III: A Review

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Half a century ago, readers of the New Yorker thirsted for the short stories of John Cheever for the window he opened into suburban life and the tensions he exposed between an emerging post-scarcity society and the vanishing World War II way of life that fertilized his stories. That role today might be assigned to Andre Dubus III. Best known for his novel House of Sand and Fog, the movie version of which, starring Ben Kingsley, earned three Academic Award nominations, in Dirty Love, as in his other works, Dubus mines the tension between generations and the widening gap between traditional behavioral norms and today’s technologically-driven anything-goes code.

Dirty Love consists of four interconnected novellas. In “Listen Carefully, As Our Options Have Changed,” Mark Welch, a fifty-year-old project manager, has discovered his wife is having an affair.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Review

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In the Soviet Union in 1922, men who had been counts under the Tzar were either dead or in exile, with one exception. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who had returned to Russia from exile to participate in the 1918 revolution, was brought before a tribunal, and when his answers were found wanting, he was confined on penalty of death to The Metropol, Moscow’s largest hotel. Why was he spared the firing squad? A revolutionary poem published under his name in 1913.

Count Rostov has little choice but to make the best of his situation. As it turns out, this gentleman displays¬¬ all of the attributes one would normally assign to that title, and thus accomplishes the necessary adjustment with relative ease.

Persuasion through Fiction: A Risky Venture

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Using fiction to bring readers around to one’s point of view is not just difficult, it’s also very risky. Even when a novelist is not attempting to sway the reader to a particular viewpoint, plotting a story to reach a certain ending can force the writer to ignore inconvenient facts, portray odd character behavior, or rely on twisted logic.

The Legacy (Bombardier Books, 2018)) is British political commentator Melanie Phillips’ first novel. In it, her protagonist, Russell Woolfe, a British Jewish TV producer, comes to see the flaws in his previous worldview. In particular, as a result a series of unexpected events, he revises his connection, or the lack thereof, to Judaism as well as alters his relationship with his daughter.

What I’m reading and why

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Does anyone care what someone else is reading? Possibly not, but other than serendipity, choices are usually meaningful and those meanings might prove informative. “So here goes nothing.”

  • Dennis Lehane, Coronado (2006). Lehane is one of my favorite contemporary authors. In addition to being best sellers and earning critical acclaim, his novels Mystic River and Shutter Island were made into excellent movies. Coronado consists of five novella length stories and a two-act play. In this thin volume, Lehane demonstrates why his stories are so compelling. The characters are those we don’t often meet, but yet link back to American culture and tell us something about ourselves.
  • Rick Ollerman, Hardboiled, Noir and Gold Medals (2017). An analysis of a particular subset of mystery novels from the 1950s through the 1990s, Hardboiled, Noir and Gold Medals consists of inside baseball.
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How to Run a Successful Book Club

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Book clubs are popular places for book readers, but running a successful book club is not as easy is it may seem. Here are some tips for starting and running a club that meets the needs of its members.

1. Set a limit of no more than 12 people. Why? You want the group to remain small enough so that each member feels comfortable expressing his/her views. Big groups can become impersonal or be dominated by a few people.
2. Set a regular meeting schedule. Once a month should work in most cases.
3. Find non-public meeting places. A group I belong to met in the lounge area of a supermarket for a while. Sometimes it was so noisy we couldn’t hear each other.