Peter May (R.I.P.) Novel: A Winter Grave

 

 

 

 

 

A WINTER GRAVE (2023)

By Peter May

Riverrun, 358 pages.

★★★★

 

Thomas Friedman argued that global trade, technology, and advances in communications were making the world “flat.” Yet, communication today is often slower than when news from abroad arrived via teletype machines. It was just this morning that I learned that Scottish author Peter May died at the end of September.

 

May is/was one of my favorite thriller/mystery writers, in part because of his ability to capture places and spin them into characters in their own right. I adored his Lewis Trilogy and have read several of his Enzo Files and his stand-alone works. I thought of  Enzo MacLeod (half-Scottish half-Italian) as May’s alter-ego in that he, like May, left Scotland for the sunny south of France. You can get May’s novels in North America, but few bookstores or libraries have his full run of 30+ books. Whenever I’m in Britain, I buy one or two. A Winter Grave was this year’s discovery.

 

May thought a lot about what climate change could bring. The narrative is set in 2051, and climate change is well underway. Much of the east coast of Britain is underwater, as is half of London and a lot of Scotland. Despite misconceptions of so-called “global warming,” it could lead to another Ice Age with colder temperatures and bigger snowfalls in some places as moisture pulled from the earth cycles back as precipitation. In 2051, many Glasgow “streets” are underwater and the Clyde River is more akin to a giant loch. Few individuals own cars, as the age of driverless public transport (trains, small boats, taxis) had arrived.

 

Cameron Brodie is a police inspector in Glasgow, but he’s not so keen on following rules and always seems one incident away from being dismissed. “Cam” doesn’t care, as he has learned that he is dying. He is divorced/widowed and we learn how he once answered a domestic abuse call, fell for the victim Melanie (“Mel”), stole her away when her abuser Lee Jardine was in jail, and beat the haggis out of Jardine when he got out. Mel, however, had a fatal attraction to Jardine and left Cam to raise their daughter Adele (“Addie”) on his own. Nonetheless, he never bad-mouthed Mel, and Addie blamed Cam for her mother’s death. She left Glasgow, and cut ties with her father.  

 

Cam also burnt out, and angry when he nails a murderer only to see him released when his lawyer uses a deep fake AI video to “prove” police abuse and false arrest. Only Cam’s good friends, “Tiny” Sinclair and his wife keep Cam on the level. Cam’s love for mountaineering and technical climbing in the Mamores Ridge in the Western Highlands also cool his rage and guilt. He’s not afraid of death, but he does fret over whether he has been a decent person or a jerk.

 

As fate would have it, Cam is ordered investigate the death of a missing journalist, Charles Younger, whose body was found frozen in the Mamores. Much to his chagrin, he is picked up by an eVToL (Electric Vertical Take-off and Land) craft, a pilotless helicopter whose flight path coordinates and landing area are commanded by “Eve,” a computer voice capable of answering questions. All Cam needs to do is plug it in to recharge it when he lands. Along the way Cam picks up Sita Roy, a pathologist. Neither the computer nor the tight-lipped Dr. Roy are much solace in a horrendous snowstorm, battering winds, and the warning that their aircraft is losing power. Luckily, they survive a hair-raising landing outside a Kinlockleven hotel. Unluckily, Kinlochleven is also the wee village in which Addie lives and she’s the one who found Younger. Her husband, Robbie Sinclair, is friendly, but Addie wants nothing to do with Cam; he literally has to order her to cooperate.

 

Nothing much goes right in Kinlochleven. The hotel is empty; owner Mike Brannan advises the weather has led to mass cancellations. Scrounging up food and drink isn’t easy in a village of just 700 people, most of whom are local workers at a tunnel project near the Blackwater dam and reservoir. Someone has cut Eve’s cable, Addie’s eyes fire daggers at Cam, another murder occurs, and the body disappears from the hotel’s freezer! As Cam gets closer to the truth, he discovers that very powerful forces wish to add him to the now-vacant freezer.

 

There is much more to discover in this heart-thumper thriller, not to mention relationships to break and repair. My only quibble is the illogic of Cam continuing to entrust Brannan with tasks when he’s clearly either incompetent or involved. Loved the book; R.I.P Peter May.

 

Rob Weir

Remarkably Bright Creatures: Nice Novel, but Remember it's Magical Realism

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures

By Shelby, Van Pelt.

Harper, 384 pages.

★★★

 

 Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was a runaway best-selling novel about a very intelligent giant octopus. It takes place in both California and Washington State and centers on the forementioned octopus, Marcellus McSquiggles. He has a friend at his aquarium, Tova Sullivan, widowed septuagenarian a cleaning lady. She is Swedish, though her parents immigrated to the United States when she was quite young.

 

Readers of National Geographic and viewers of shows such as Nature have learned that octopi demonstrate intelligence that one would not expect in such an unlikely marine body. They can solve all manner of startling tasks, such as opening locked boxes, untying knots, and demonstrating awareness that indicates high intelligence. They also share with crows (another remarkably bright creature) an attraction to bright objects and a love of hoarding. Marcellus likes school rings, keys, and drivers’ licenses. Van Pelt’s debut novel builds upon such findings. Of course, observations alone are not scientific evidence of human-level understanding. You can train a dog to do incredible tricks, but you can’t teach it to hold a philosophical discussion. We infer, but simply don’t know what constitutes intelligence in the animal world because we can’t speak dog, whale, crow, octopus….

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures has been made into a Netflix film. The consensus opinion is that the book is far more engaging than the movie. I’ve not seen the movie, but novels are usually better crafted than a flick told in under two hours. Van Pelt’s book is satisfying and uplifting, but it is magical realism, not science. I enjoyed Van Pelt’s novel, but I also found that it telegraphed what is going to happen in both improbable and obvious ways.

 

As noted, it also takes place in California, which is where we meet Cameron. He has had a lot of trouble getting started in life. He has been a mainstay in a punk band, called Moth Sausage, but the lead singer and his best friend have gotten married, are starting a family, and have taken “responsible” jobs. Cameron hasn’t had an easy life either; his mother Daphne split and gave him to her sister Jeanne when he was a child. She has been generous and patient with Cameron, but he knows that he owes her big-time. Cameron’s serious abandonment issues and horrible work history have given him wanderlust. Cameron sets off in a down-market camper van hoping to trace what happened to his mother and identify his father. He lands in Sowell Bay Washington, where he meets Ethan Mack, a friendly Scottish grocer/rock fan, who allows him to park his van in his yard. We soon learn Ethan has a crush on Tova, who has other plans.

 

Circumstances, including Cameron’s desire to pay back his aunt who sacrificed her vacation funds for the van, leads him to take a job in the aquarium owned by a friend of Ethan’s. He’d also like to have some pocket change to charm the lovely Avery, the owner of a surf shop who is two years his elder, the owner of a surf shop, and definitely Cameron’s senior in life lessons. Tova has long been the nighttime cleaner in the aquarium and has struck up and unlikely friendship with Marcellus the octopus. She speaks to him all the time and he shows signs of understanding her. Marcellus also intuits that Tova is deeply grieving for her dead husband their son Erik, who is presumed to have drowned. In other words, we have a lot of human creatures during what alas they do unremarkably: endure emotional pain, but get stuck.

 

I remind again, the tale involves magical realism. Marcellus is indeed intelligent, but I doubt he keeps a mental diary involving the more than 1300 days of his “captivity.” Nor do we have evidence that sea creatures have an exacting sense of their lifespan. Marcellus has made escape efforts because he “knows” that his species only lives for 4 to 5 years. You also will need loads of tolerance for, dare, I say, remarkable coincidences. Perhaps because I read so many mysteries, I don’t like it when I can see what’s coming and how. Mind, I’ve nothing against happy endings. I admire this book for not dragging me through mud and murder; I just wish it had taken turns I hadn’t anticipated.

 

Rob Weir

 

Let Me Be Frank With You and the Literary Magic of Richard Ford

 

 

 

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (2014)

By Richard Ford

HarperCollins, 238 pages.

★★★★

 

Welcome to another book from my recent book fair shopping extravaganza. Richard Ford has long been a favorite of mine, though I confess his fiction is often on the cranky white male end of the literary equation. Lots of writers have alter egos, most famously Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and John Updike (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom); Ford’s is Frank Bascombe. In earlier books, Frank has been a sportswriter, a grieving parent whose oldest son has died, a divorcee, and a New Jersey realtor, but in Let Me Be Frank With You he’s a 69-year-old retiree in a happy second marriage. His greatest desire is to empty himself of his past and pretty much everything else that bothers him or requires effort.

 

This novel’s cover features the skeletal remains of the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In a case of the (not-so) great American pastime of historical amnesia, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has faded from collective memory, but if you lived on the Eastern Seaboard anywhere from Jamaica to Ontario, Sandy took out power, produced floods, killed 254 people, and left billions of dollars of damage. (Remember footage of Vermonters kayaking along Montpelier streets by the State House?)

 

Frank was lucky, as a few years earlier he sold his Sea-Clift waterside dream house to Arnie Urguhart when made an offer he could not refuse. Frank hadn’t spoken with Arnie in ages before getting his request to come to Sea-Clift and advise what should be done with the remains of the house and ruined property. Despite the fact that Frank closed his realty office years ago, he is badgered into telling Arnie he’d be lucky to get $500,000 for the land.

 

What he doesn’t tell Arnie is that he has no desire to rekindle old clients or friendships, and that even being asked for an opinion is more mental effort than he cares to expend. Let Me Be Frank is not a novel in which much happens, rather a journey inside Frank’s thought bubbles. If you will, it’s an internal war between what Frank says and what he thinks. It’s a breezy read divided into four sections: “I’m Here,” “Everything Could Be Worse,” “The New Normal,” and “Deaths of Others.” Ford pared down themes to unleash Bascombe to be Ford’s mouthpiece for his opinions on scores of random subjects. They’re not really unrelated, rather they show us Frank (Ford) carries a lot of mental baggage for a guy who allegedly wants to unburden.

 

For those who might wonder why they’d wish to be part of some old guy’s rants, I offer this: There’s a reason that Richard Ford was a Pulitzer Price winner. He is a literary stylist, has an enormous vocabulary, and knows how to walk the tightrope between pathos and bathos (though parts of the books are quite funny), satire and maliciousness, awkwardness and overly mannered, and intrusion and genuine interest. Through it all, Frank at least thinks his mind, even when he feels the pull of social constraint not to speak it. I leave it to readers to determine whether Frank is disingenuous, disengaged, cowardly, intellectually lazy, or sensible. I will say, though, that the “Everything Could Be Worse” section is an incisive look at white liberal guilt. It unfolds when an older black woman rings Frank’s doorbell. Frank twists his liberalism into knots into how to deal with a woman whose family used to live in Frank’s house in Haddam when his neighborhood was black working-class rather than upwardly mobile white middle class. Frank parses his conversation, but is never sure if what he said was the right thing or unintentionally offensive. Through it all we can tell that he is working too hard to prove he’s not a racist.   

 

In many ways Frank is a fraud, but he knows and feels that. There is an air of toxicity in his attempt to be civil to his ex-wife, who is in a memory care unit; or attend the deathbed or a guy he only pretended to like.  Frank is either frank with himself or the kind of jerk he believes others to be. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide, though Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other! But the prose… the boldness… the style… Ford is a writer par excellence.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eugenics in Vermont

Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics

            in the Green Mountain State (2023)

By Mercedes De Guardiola

Vermont Historical Society, 177 pages + appendices and back matter

★★★

 

 

 

When I was a high school teacher in Vermont, Nancy Gallagher was one of my favorite colleagues, even though she taught science courses and I was a social studies instructor. Years after I left, Nancy published Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), the first major work on the eugenics movement in Vermont.

 

Gallagher’s work concentrated heavily on Henry Perkins, who headed Vermont’s Eugenics Records Office for 11 years. Breeding Better Vermonters was a major inspiration for Mercedes De Guardiola, who looked deeply into available records across Vermont and published Vermont for the Vermonters. Guardiola would be the first to admit that even her study is incomplete as many records are missing–thrown away, destroyed by floods and fires, misfiled, or still undiscovered.

 

Eugenics is soiled by its association with racism, ethnocentrism, ableism, intolerance, and other now-unsavory assumptions. Because of its unsettling association with Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement is not broadly taught in the United States. Nor is it comfortable to acknowledge that eugenics passed for “science” in much of the Western world or that Hitler’s reign of hate drew upon American sources as well as European sources. Although adherents in Vermont and elsewhere argued that “positive” eugenics would literally produce better traits among humans, selective breeding was an ideal more suited to crops and livestock than humans. It thrived between the 1890s-1940s and its logical extension was to identify “subnormal” humans and prevent them from passing on their “defects,” either by voluntary or forced sterilization. In Vermont and elsewhere, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed eugenics. A large KKK rally in Montpelier during the 1920s was thus less shocking than one might assume. In retrospect, the truly shocking takeaway from Vermont eugenics is that so many educated and prominent luminaries embraced eugenics, including doctors, college presidents, governors, women’s club members, judges, scientists, and other professionals. 

 

De Guardiola pored over records from the Waterbury Hospital, the Brandon Reform School, the Perkins-led Eugenics Survey, state records, gubernatorial speeches, newspapers, and Vermont Country Life Commission reports. Among the many contradictions of eugenics is that “improving” the human race involved identifying those who would drag it down. Vermont eugenics dovetailed with the 1931 Vermont Commission on Country Life, whose 1931 Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, sounded the warning that the state’s “Old Stock” was in decline, which in turn threatened to alter Vermont’s special rural characters. Thus, other commissions on everything from potatoes, apples, poultry, and dairies to woodworking, tourism, land use, and “religious forces” voiced opinions on eugenics. In essence, what was at stake was old-time Vermont versus emergent Vermont. The Old Stock was Protestant, Yankee, and rural. Eugenics targeted those of supposedly low IQ, but it was far too easy to assume that African Americans, French Canadians, Catholics, Native Americans, mixed bloods, delinquents, epileptics, the poor, and the under-educated were prone to mental deficiency. Not to mention unscientific assumptions that retardation and intelligence were genetically based. Today, many would also find it distasteful to deny the right of procreation to those of lower IQs or physical challenges. (Some genetics advocates did allow for the possibility that “high grade imbeciles” and “morons” could perhaps handle family life, but not “idiots” or “low grade” and “medium” imbeciles. 

 

Classification also lacked academic rigor. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont highlighted six “families”–the “Pirates,” the “Gypsy,” the “Chorea,” the “Doolittle,” the “Rector,” and the “Furman.” Of these, the first three were not families at all, rather generalized collectives to describe those who lived on boats, travelers and peddlers, and those poor souls driven insane by Huntington’s Chorea. Nor is the data from the latter three biologically-related families consistent, as some family members led quite productive lives.

 

It would be far too simplistic to condemn all eugenicists as bigots. I reiterate that eugenics passed for science at its height. Science is a dynamic field in which rigorous observation drives conclusions until new tools and methodologies proves them wrong. I am a historian, not a medical doctor or scientist. I would say, though, that one of the jobs of a historian is to warn citizens to ask hard questions lest the errors of the past repeat themselves. Hats off to my old friend Nancy Gallagher and to Ms. De Guardiola for illuminating the dangers of predetermined assumptions.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

Fail Mary: A Good Book Badly Interpreted

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2016)

Directed by Phil Lord and Christoper Miller

Amazon-MGM Studios, 156 minutes, PG-13 (intensity, mention of suicide)

★★

 

Project Hail Mary was a megahit, but the film gets very little love from me. It is ever-so-loosely based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir (no relation of mine). Weir’s book was quite good, an exemplar of what is sometimes called a “hard science novel.” It was also “hard” in the sense that Weir didn’t shy away from throwing math equations, chemistry, and physics at his readers. Those things are also present in the movie, but it’s ultimately a buddy film between astrobiologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a xenon-based alien nicknamed “Rocky” (James Ortiz voicing a rather obvious puppet).

 

The story is rather straightforward. Grace is a wise guy scientist whose nonconventional behavior and lack of ambition have wrecked his chances of working at any sort of high-powered university or research lab. He has been reduced to teaching middle school science and he’s really good at it; it fits his slacker-like demeanor. He is, however, aware of the frightening buzz over mysterious celestial dots, the infrared “Petrova line” extending beyond Venus, and rumors that is has been sucking radiation from the sun at such a rate that within 30 years tens billions will die from global freezing.

 

Ryland is commandeered to do research on astrobiological problem he wrote about when he was a serious graduate student. Somehow this makes him the world’s expert above those malingering deadbeats at crappy schools such as Arizona State, Cal Tech, Colorado University, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and university labs in Beijing, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. Ryland almost immediately identifies that a microbe dubbed astrophage is the culprit. (How did those lab-coated dolts elsewhere miss it?) Ryland also realizes that the scenario is much worse than a frozen earth. The Petrova line upon which astrophage travels could wipe out all of creation, except for a faraway small planet named Tau Ceti. A team is needed immediately to be put into induced comas, go to Tau Ceti, determine why it is unaffected, and send probes back to earth–nearly 12 light years away. The odds of all this happening are so low that their spaceship is named “The Hail Mary,” a term that infers an act of desperation.

 

Ryland believes that his work is done, before Petrova Taskforce head Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) tells Ryland he is one of the three chosen for the one-way suicide mission. He protests that he is not an astronaut, doesn’t want to go, and isn’t ready to die. His refusal is ignored; the stakes are so high that he is forcibly sedated, plonked aboard, placed in a coma, and wakes up 4-5 years later (roughly 13 years by earth time). Ryland is alone in space–both of his colleagues died in their receptacles–until he encounters a giant array. After some gawking, he approaches the array and eventually meets an alien he dubs Rocky, whose language is based on music and echolocation. (Shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The two learn to communicate and Ryland writes a computer program that allows them to “talk” to each other. Rocky, an engineer from the Eridani A system, is also alone in space, his 22 crew members dead from radiation exposure. Despite their linguistic, cultural, and physical differences, Ryland and Rocky become good friends.

 

From this point on, Project Hail Mary plays more like a buddy film than any sort of thoughtful first contact movie. (For my money, Star Trek: First Contact tops the thriller/insightful list.) Like almost all buddy films, there are funny moments–Ryland is a klutz and playful goof-off–times in which they save each other, mutual homesickness, and teamwork to stave off disaster. A lot of the “cute” cultural misunderstandings skirt the boundary between character development and cheesy. The bonding process is even worse, as in Ryland’s efforts to hug Rocky through his protective sphere. Not to mention that the Eridian Rocky looks like the Horta from Star Trek’s first season crossed with a Muppet decked out in sepia and ash.

 

I do give credit to Greig Fraser for his stunning cinematography. I wish the movie itself had been more worthy of Fraser’s craft. Andy Weir’s novel made me think; the movie made me sigh.

 

Rob Weir

The Snowman a Chilling Novel to Read as Winter Lurks

 

 

 

 

 

THE SNOWMAN (2007)

By Jo Nesbø

Knopf, 512 pages

★★★★

 

  

 

 

Get ready for it, faithful blog readers. I’ve been at the League of Women Voters annual used book sale and came back with a large bag filled with novels of favorite authrors and books I wanted to read years ago but was too busy to get to them. Older books are still good books!

 

I have read several Harry Hole mysteries from Norwegian author Jo(n) Nesbø. Hole might put you in mind of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch in the sense that both work on “cold cases,” serious crimes that were never solved. Both are prone to drinking too much, don’t suffer fools gladly, and have been unlucky in love. Harry Hole is also suspected of being out-of-touch with modern police methods and impossible to manage, hence he’s on everyone’s potential firing list whenever police screwup and the need arises to feed the media or public officials a scapegoat. Hole’s ace in the hole–so to speak–is that he is the only investigator in Norwegian history to have solved a serial killer case. (Being Norway, not the USA, that’s a short list!)

 

Several things rock Harry’s world. First, Katrine Bratt transfers into his cold case group in Oslo. She’s bright, beautiful, and from Bergen, which likes to forget that Oslo is the capital. Bratt exudes an inapproachable iciness and a whiff of (perhaps dangerous) ambition. She’s allegedly married, but seems to be coming on to Harry. Second, Harry’s ex-wife Rakel Fauke whose son Oleg looks upon Harry as a fatherly role model though biologically, he’s from a Russian dalliance before Harry or her current husband. Harry’s heavy drinking is partially linked to Rakel, the great love of Harry’s life who got away. She’s been cheating on husband # 2–with Harry–though she claims she only wants his sexual prowess. (They are Scandinavians, so what can I tell you?) Third, Harry’s drinking makes him seem even more of a dinosaur, something that young homicide cop Magnus Skarre occasionally spills in discussions with Harry’s boss Gunnar Hager. Harry’s always a step or two ahead of them, but he knows his head is on the chopping block.

 

Speaking of which, the first snow of the year leads Harry and Katrine into a missing persons case. Strange noises outside lead Birte Becker to investigate. Her husband is at a meeting, Birte tells her son Jonas to stay inside, and that’s the last she is seen. Did she run away? Unlikely as her pink scarf suddenly appears on the snowman they built and her cellphone is missing. When the ring leads Harry to the snowman, something more ominous is clearly afoot. If there is any doubt, Sylvia Ottersen, the mother of twins, also disappears. Police scouring the woods behind her barn make a gruesome discovery: Sylvia’s severed head upon a snowman’s body. Harry suspects a serial killer and Katrine unearths a pattern of disappearances of women with children 24 years into the past, always at the first snowfall.

 

Don’t be put off by the heft of The Snowman; it’s a twisty mystery with more suspects than a campout of patrons waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. Several doctors are on Harry’s list, as is a missing Bergen cop, an obnoxious TV host who runs a prostitution ring, and Katrine. Questions abound. Why kill mothers? Why are doctors quiet about their research into rare medical conditions? Why haven’t crime scene forensics found more blood? What’s the significance of the killer’s MO (modus operandi)?

 

I found this novel both gripping and creepy. Perhaps it could have benefitted from judicious editing, as its pattern of “fingering” the wrong person as the Snowman wrong wears thin. Red herrings are standard in mysteries, and there’s always the possibility that the translation into English is to blame, but the quarter of the novel is, at once, thrilling and ragged. It sometimes seems that Nesbø stitched unused ideas into this novel. Two nearly fatal standoffs add tension, but steer The Snowman into adventure-story territory. It might not be a perfect mystery, but you will go through it like loose snow. It’s also far superior to the film made in 2017, which is hard to find, so warm up the cider and hunker down.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Hidden History Uncloaked in The Night Birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NIGHT BIRDS (2007)

By Thomas Maltman

SoHo Publishing, 370 pages.

★★★★★

 

There are many books named The Night Birds, but the one to read is from Thomas Maltman, which was published in 2007. To call it a different kind of Western doesn’t do it justice.

 

First a quiz: Name the president who declined to stop the largest single-day execution in American history. Answer: Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t traitorous Confederates dancing on the end of ropes. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota Sioux warriors were hanged in response to a clash between Natives and German settlers near Mankato, Minnesota. Maltman uses the Sioux uprising in his work of fiction, but also did his homework. As an old TV series once put, “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

 

Our narrator is Asa Senger, a lonely boy in 1876. An elderly Dakota Sioux man is found near a Kingdom Township home. This touches off fear in the area, though the man is a frail, trader. Minnesota was once a dangerous place for whites to be, even in areas where whites and Natives lived in relative peace. Though Asa was born in a few months after the uprising of 1862, his parents remain wary and retain their animus against the Sioux. Into Asa’s life comes Aunt Hazel, his mother sister. She has been in an asylum for 14 years because of her epilepsy. Bromide had been used to control epilepsy since 1861, but it took years for this knowledge to make its way into remote areas. The Sengers only reluctantly accept guardianship over Hazel and she is mostly confined to an attic room. Asa is warned that his aunt is delusional.

 

Asa, though, grows curious of his aunt, who tells him stories but swears him to secrecy. What tales she tells! At this point I should warn readers that both Germans and the Sioux had a penchant for recycling names, the Germans believing they paid homage to deceased relatives by naming babies after them, and mystical Sioux believing the spirits of the dead can be reborn. Hazel had a brother named Asa who died in the1862 massacre, along with both of her parents. The Senger family lived across a small river from a Sioux encampment and young Hazel slowly cultivated Sioux playmates. Her parents regularly traded with the Sioux. Though suspicious of each other, a fragile truce prevailed. Hazel learned some Dakota and grew close to Wanikiya, a boy roughly her age, who grows up to be an important person amongst the Dakota. Asa also learns that Wanikiya killed his “Uncle Asa” and that Hazel was a captive during the war. Her story is certainly not in keeping with the many so-called “captive narratives” that proliferated from Colonial period through the 19^th century.

 

The Night Birds is a multi-generational family story that, in its own unique way, is a melting pot story. Reading it will enlighten you about American history, peels back hidden cowboys-and-Indians myths, and shows how easy it is for victors to reinvent the past. At a time in which immigrants are imperiled in the United States, it also raises questions about who and what an American is. It is noteworthy that the Senger family had to flee Missouri because of their abolitionist views, yet somehow don’t connect the dots regarding Native Americans.

 

Maltman’s novel is filled with small details that help readers imagine life on the edge of the frontier. Maltman makes us contemplate what it would be like to plow land that has never seen a blade and to live where you nearest neighbors don’t look, dress, or speak like you. He also subtly juxtaposes individuals and circumstances. There is scalping, but it’s often done by white bounty hunters or in war as trophies. In a book in which Young Asa encounters Jesse James, who is a “savage,” the Dakotas who killed Asa’s forebears or the ruthless James-Younger gang?

 

Perhaps it’s best to muse upon the book’s title. The “night birds” are not owls or hawks; they are nocturnal nightjars, small fowl slightly bigger than sparrows who sleep during the day, roost on the ground, and are so well camouflaged you could be on top of one and never see it.  The are insectivores, but their prolonged call and trill is downright eerie. Now think of life with minimal illumination.

 

Forget books with similar titles; this older novel is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

 

Rob Weir

 

Twain's End: Speculative History or the Real Deal?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWAIN’S END (2015)

By Lynn Cullen

Gallery Books, 368 pages

★★★★

 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pseudonym Mark Twain, is perhaps the most-heralded American writer of all time. He was also an in-demand public speaker known for his humor and grasp of vernacular language. Millions have visited his home of 17 years in Hartford, Connecticut. Those who dig into biography are often astonished to learn that like many so-called “funny men,” Sam Clemens was not as jolly as his public persona. By the early 20^th century, it would be appropriate to say that he was an imperious, depressed crank who had begun to disappear into his fictional identity. His life had been marked by one misfortune after another.

 

That famed Hartford home was closed in 1891, as the family was deeply in debt, courtesy of Sam having squandered the equivalent of $10 million on failed inventions. They left to live in Europe, which in those days was cheaper. Sam further embarked on a world speaking tour to raise money. In late 1900, Clemens retired his debt courtesy of his earnings, a robber baron friend who secured his copyrights, and the management of Ralph Ashcroft. Yet Sam was not a happy man. His favorite child Susie died in 1896 at age 24, and his sickly wife Livy (Olivia) was bedridden by the time they moved to New York. Sam hired Isabel Lyon to be Livy’s personal secretary/nurse, but he commanded more of her time than Livy. When Livy died in 1902, a morose Samuel Clemens began to disappear into Mark Twain.

 

Novelist Lynn Cullen picks up the narrative in 1909, when he was about to move into a large Tuscan-style villa dubbed “Stormfield”* in Redding, CT. Though named for a Twain character, the remainder of Twain’s life were indeed stormy.  Cullen’s Twain’s End puts forth some debatable history; but it’s based upon a diary kept by Lyon. In March of 1909, Twain blessed the marriage of Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired them both and penned a 429-page screed in which he accused Isabel of swindling his money, treachery, and being a “salacious slut.” At least that’s Twain’s story.

 

Cullen pieces threads to give credence to a different tale. Did Isabel marry Ralph because Twain would not marry her? Cullen lays out the possibility that Twain’s flirtations and Isabel’s ambitious mother led Isabel into a coquettish role that blinded her to thing such as Sam’s increasingly eccentric behavior, his cruelty toward surviving daughters Jane (aka/Jean) and Clara, and the enormous difference in their ages. In 1909, Isabel would have been 46 and Sam an over-ripe 74. The last point raises the question of whether Twain and Lyon had ever been intimate. That’s unlikely when Livy was alive, but Cullen is willing to consider that Isabel may have engaged in dangerous flirting, such as giving Sam massages and dropping hints that she would be open to sexual intimacies that he allegedly rebuffed. After the public blowup, Twain even repossessed Isabel’s cottage On Christmas Eve of 1909, Jean died of an epileptic seizure in her bath. Any ounce of sympathy Sam had left went down the plughole with Jean’s life. Cullen casts Jean in a pragmatic peacekeeper role, as opposed to her younger sister Clara (1874-1962), who was (if possible) more vain, cruel, and irresponsible than her father. She hated Isabel and saw her as a gold digger, though she might have been protecting her own anticipated fortune.

 

Barring more evidence, there is no way to resolve these clashing narratives. Twain’s End could be close to the truth, or merely a fanciful work of imagination. You can, however, learn a lot about the vanities of fading Gilded Age elites from Cullen’s novel. Did Helen Keller engage in a love triangle with Annie Sullivan’s husband John Macy? There’s more evidence for this than of Twain being intimate with Isabel, but Twain’s parlor room rudeness toward Lyon during Keller’s visit to Stormfield would been in keeping with class deference expectations. Not to mention Sam’s vanity in building a mansion at a time in which he expected to die. He always predicted that since he was born in 1835 when Haley’s Comet was in the sky, he would “go out with Haley’s Comet.” Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910, when the comet was visible. Isabel and Ralph never sued the estate, but what does this tell us? Draw your own conclusions. Guess who got Sam’s money.

 

Rob Weir

 * The original Stormfield burned in 1923. It was rebuilt but is a private home not on public view. 

Bear With Me: Dan Horowitz and Human/Bear Interactions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEAR WITH ME: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF FAMOUS BEARS (2025)

By Daniel Horowitz

Duke University Press, 209 pages.

★★★★ ½

 

I was watching a movie a few nights ago when I got a warning from my neighborhood listserv that a large potentially dangerous bear had been seen in my neighborhood. I get these regularly and tend to ignore them. What am I supposed to do, lasso it? Besides, Massachusetts has black bears and I’m only in danger if I’m a blueberry bush or if I’m stupid enough to get between a sow and her cubs. Your encyclopedia of choice will tell you that black bears are omnivores, but that just means that an emaciated one might resort to eating road kill. If that’s me, they’re welcome to have a nibble.

 

Understanding how humans perceive bears has been done with more panache by Smith College professor emeritus Dan Horowitz in his newest book Bear With Me. To state bias upfront, Dan is a friend and former colleague. Among the things I admire about him is that he takes popular culture seriously. After all, a solid case could be made that popular culture is American culture. He wants to explore why bears are probably the most represented animal in our culture.  Some–white and brown bears like the polar, Grizzly, and Kodiak–are indeed potentially deadly. But is popular culture to blame for dangerous encounters?  Yesterday, I saw a little girl in a park hugging her Teddy Bear. I hope that her parents have taught her that Teddy is make-believe but wild bears should never be touched.

 

Horowitz opens with “Folkloric Bears and Actual Ones.” Is the lesson of Goldilocks that bears can harm you, or merely that you shouldn’t intrude upon the property of others? Horowitz draws upon global folklore wends his way into African- American tales to highlight the ambiguity: American culture doesn’t send clear distinctions between folkloric and humorous bears from “actual” ursids. How many colleges have friendly bear mascots? What do we do with Brer Bear, Garfield’s Pooky Bear, or Yogi Bear? Fat Bear Week videos from Alaska’s Katmai region give us bears snatching salmon from the air as if they are Joey Chestnut-like competitive eaters. Horowitz follows with tales of Hugh Glass, Grizzly Adams, and Timothy Treadwell to underscore the potential fury of bears, though he speculates that bears can be linked to Manifest Destiny, a manly conquest of obstacles embedded in the wild.

 

In chapter four he returns to children, specifically tales in which bears are personified: the Three Bears, Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington Bear, Care Bears, and the Berenstain Bears. (The latter provide an opportunity to look at backdoor antisemitism.) His dissection of Grizzly Adams again sounds an alarm. The TV series and Adams’ penchant for giving bears human names gloss reality:  “Adams forgot that he was James Capen Adams and [the bears] were not Ben Franklin or Lady Washington but rather wild bears he apparently both loved and violently trained.” In 1858, one captive bear bit through Adams’ skull and into his brain. This ultimately proved fatal.

 

Horowitz often uses the word “domination” when it comes to human/bear interactions. He makes it explicit in “Captive Bears and Their Captors as Workers,” which looks at bruins in zoos, circuses, on TV, and in films and video games. Changing mores have sparked debates over whether captive animals are being denied their natural roles. This may seem obvious, but saying so has also empowered defenders of capture practices. Mark Dumas claims to have domesticated a polar bear; others have “rescued” cubs to “teach” them how to be wild. Horowitz does not use the word “enslavement,” but he implies it. He further pinpoint sthe central dichotomy between bears as veritable monsters– “Cocaine Bear,” for instance–versus “cuddly,” friendly bears. Horowitz takes a deeper dive on Teddy Bears and Smokey the Bear, each of whom has appeared as cuddly and scary. Are bears racialized? His comparison of bears to golliwogs deserves serious contemplation.

 

Although I understand why he went there, his separate chapter on bears and gay subcultures is cursory and could have been reworked and folded into his final chapter on “bears, humans, and dangerous eroticism.” But Horowitz is spot on to make the plight of Arctic polar bears his coda. This intriguing book will please both scholars for its meticulous documentation, and general readers, who will debate his vivid examples.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesteryear and Social Media Hucksters

 

 

YESTERYEAR (2026)

By Caro Claire Burke

Alfred A. Knopf, 391 pages.

★★★

 

In some circles, Yesteryear has been hailed as this generation’s Handmaiden’s Tale (1985). That would be an atmospheric achievement for a debut author such as Caro Claire Burke. Hers is an entertaining novel, but Margaret Atwood was an accomplished poet and had published five well-reviewed novels before she released Handmaiden’s Tale. I do understand, though, how younger reviewers and readers could make a connection, but it misrepresents both authors. Atwood wrote a cautionary tale during the Ronald Reagan years when Second Wave feminism was under attack; Burke’s book is a satire on the shallowness of American culture and the vulture-like extremes of capitalism.

 

Our anti-heroine is Natalie Heller Mills is what is sometimes derisively called a “trad-wife;” that is, an old-fashioned young woman who wants to live a Biblical life. Natalie is college-educated, but much about undergraduate life offended her. If you know the Bible, though, it’s easier to imagine a Biblical life than to practice one. In practical terms it means she and her cowboy hunk-husband Caleb try to simplify and live as much off-the-grid as possible. The latter is very hard to do these days. Rather like the Amish who show up at farmers’ markets, her preserves and eggs attract buyers, word-of-mouth praise, and media attention. On the surface, Natlie is the poster mom for the religious right, as she pops out a new baby even year–six in total. Still, there are lots of things she can’t get the hang of; for instance, her bread comes out of the oven more suitable for building material than human consumption.

 

Before you can say “Trinity Broadcasting System,” Christian TV, bloggers, radio shows, and magazines all want a piece of Natalie, Caleb, and the kiddos. Their household becomes filled with cameras and the Mills family are reality TV show stars. Money starts to pour in from Natalie’s many side projects, but who can actually produce everything from nutritious meals to handmade rugs, books of aphorisms, a clothing line, etc. Who wants to haul water or learn on the fly how to cook venison stew? The viewers know nothing of her hidden industrial stoves, freezers, and refrigerators, or her team of childminders, cooks, product producers, and social media experts.

 

Readers are invited to speculate whether Natalie is a good-girl gone wrong, or if she was always a con artist. Are all those kids really hers? Some of the juiciest parts of the novel juxtapose Natalie’s inner thoughts and unsaid word bubbles with what she actually does and says– with a smile plastered on her face. But is she a fraud? Every time she has a vile thought or is less than kind, she tosses off quick prayesr or apologies to God.

 

Can you imagine being part of today’s gotcha media hounds? Back in the 1970s, a show called An American Family followed the Loud clan. Bill and Pat Loud only had five (gulp!) children, but they also drew 10 million viewers per week, though they didn’t even try to live a pioneer lifestyle. Things didn’t go well for the Louds, who eventually divorced when the cameras that made them famous exposed their warts. Numerous observers blamed their family collapse on the maddening pressure of being under the microscope. Burke avoids that debate, but she does ask us to consider a very different scenario.

 

What if you woke up and had been transported to the past? Natalie finds herself in 1855, without assistants, scripts, or Instagram. Just her, a very different Caleb, a hearth fire, a day filed with chores, and a big kettle filled with lye soap to boil and scrub ragged clothing and send them through a hand ringer. Natalie wants to flee, but how can she leave her kids when Caleb is fornicating with another woman? Is this the work of Satan? Is God testing her as if she were a female Job? Has she gone insane? There is a resolution, but one open to interpretation. Some readers will find this bold; others will feel cheated.

 

What we can say is that Caro Claire Burke has incisively butchered a few sacred cows. Hers is an indictment of materialism, an evisceration of of social influencers, a takedown of hypocrisy, an exposé of fake “reality” shows, and a backdoor condemnation of religious hucksterism. Ultimately, Yesteryear is closer to The Rainmaker than The Handmaiden’s Tale. Does the Devil smile like Burt Lancaster?

 

Rob Weir