John’s father was a preacher, and the Pentecostal faith is the basis of the family’s life.  Wrestling with sin and evil is constant.  The father, Gabriel, is determined to keep John from sin, something he is all too familiar with.

The teen’s story is told in third person, but John’s aunt, father and mother all tell theirs in first person lending an intimacy to their disclosures.  This black family speak of their heartbreaks, their beating down, their rage.  The church, with its singing, wailing in tongues, emotional prayers for salvation, offers a refuge.  Racism is not dwelled upon, but feelings about whites are clear from the few bitter remarks.

The family’s expectation is that John will become a preacher.  While John wants to be “good,” he must deal with his awakening sexuality and his feelings towards the attractive 17-year-old male minister in their church. 

The book is semi-autobiographical.  Baldwin grew up in a similar environment, wanted to be a preacher, knows his Bible quotations.  He is an astute critic of such a church and its teachings.

There are three extremely powerful, emotional passages; in two, someone is saved and in the third, someone succumbs to sin (sex). His compelling language, use of imagery, character dissection, and finally the portrayal of the evangelical life all illustrate the depth of Baldwin’s talent and show why this book is considered his masterpiece and an American classic.

After just two weeks, someone in the club is murdered and the members look at the two new women suspiciously.  But they are the ones with experience in this sort of thing and join together to investigate. Peg’s pushy nosiness and Rose’s soft touch are just the right combo for eliciting information.

The other main characters in this mystery are Peg’s three standard poodles who provide her, a widow, with company and support.  She and her husband had raised dogs in the past and she is still an accomplished judge at shows.  Rose is more a cat person.

It’s a good plot – well paced and just difficult enough.  I didn’t guess the ending.  This is a story that will especially appeal to the dog lover (especially poodles), the bridge player, and anyone wanting to relax with a mystery that is cozy rather than a thriller.

The women in her family, who always chose to raise their daughters alone, were often shunned by their small town – although those they helped with their specialized knowledge felt differently.  When two teenage girls disappeared and were later found dead in the pond on the Moon farm, accusing fingers pointed their way.  Unable to prove anything but easily convinced of their guilt, law enforcement did little to find the real culprits.

When her grandmother dies, Lizzie returns to the farm to get it ready to sell.  She misses this grandmother she loved and determines to honor her by clearing her name and hopefully finding the real murderer of the two girls.  She is helped by the handsome neighbor.  No one who has read a book before will have a hard time guessing what happens.  But how exactly it works out is very well done and we have an enjoyable mystery with a bit of “magick.”

The setting is France before World War II.  Lou was a fearless sports-oriented child who liked her brother’s clothes. She is sent to a convent where her athletic gifts are encouraged; the Olympics are mentioned.  When trouble comes, she is given shelter in a transvestite nightclub in Paris where she thrives for a while, becomes part of a show, and falls in love.  Because of her strength and competitive spirit, she is tapped by one of the customers to train as a race car driver.  She is successful and briefly happy.  But each success, both in love and work, ends in betrayal, leaving Lou depressed and embittered.

It is at this low time that she is invited to Germany where she is flattered and fawned over.  There is a dinner where the Fuhrer (no less!) chooses to sit with her and admire her strength and accomplishments.  She is totally seduced.  With her many contacts in the sports world, wouldn’t she like to help Germany, which is doing so well and wants to help France become equally successful?  Of course she would.

Lou’s choices – or is it fate – make this a meaty psychological book, but there is so much more.  The supporting characters tell their stories in their own voices.  There is the gifted photographer, Gabor, drawn to the steamy nightclubs of the Paris underworld who writes weekly to his parents.  His friend the writer, is penniless at the time, but eventually becomes a cult figure.  The Baroness, in a very French marriage, supports and loves Gabor.

Equaling the complex characters are the vivid descriptions of the prewar era.  The portrait of how Paris waited, of how the French lived their daily lives as war with Germany loomed, is superb.  At the same time, the Germans are crazy for their leader and idolize his views on strength and power.  When war comes, we see the details of how spying for the Nazis worked and how easily information slipped out to waiting ears.

In addition to evocative descriptions of an era, insightful character studies, and explorations of moral questions, Prose does a great job with the symbol of the chameleon.  On one hand, it is the obvious: the cross-dressing night club and the spies and resistance during the war. But it is also two themes of the book. Is there just one truth or does a story change according to how many are experiencing it?  Is someone’s identity stable, or does it change according to circumstance and time?  What is the chameleon’s true color?

The characters in the book are based on real people and events.  Lou is based on Violette Morris, a French lesbian race car driver who collaborated with the Nazis; the writer is based on Henry Miller; and the Hungarian photographer, Brassai.

Part of the group was deployed to Europe, Africa, and Asia to find needed facts buried in old pamphlets, newspapers, dry technical books.  They found, for example, information on railroad capacity enabling the US military to estimate how quickly supplies could be moved by rail in Germany.  Old telephone books kept in obscure libraries listed companies, (with addresses), that made parts such as ball bearings used in tank or truck production.  Bombing factories that made parts put many additional manufacturers out of business. 

At home, another part of the group read the reams of information that was sent and organized it into usable reports that answered generals’ questions. This was an interesting story about the kind of details that were important in winning a war and the kind of people able to find them.

Graham is interested in the U.S. culture of the 40s that looked in unusual places for experts and found them among the people Hitler most loathed – intellectuals, racial minorities, Jews, immigrants.  The diversity of the U.S., its melting-pot, was a great asset in collecting intelligence.  She contrasts this openness with German authoritarianism which valued conformity, overestimated the abilities of insiders, stereotyped outsiders.  Graham ends with a discussion of the continued need for a liberal arts education.

The beginning forewarns us.  The first letter is placid and friendly; the second is written during the 1962 Columbus Day storm, a benchmark for the Pacific NW since then.

Joan, a young woman living in Los Angeles, mails a fan letter to Imogen on Camano Island, Washington.  She encloses a small gift of saffron to Imogen, an established writer for a local news magazine.  When Imogen answers, they discover a rapport, and a warm friendship develops.

The flavor of the 1960s infuses the story.  What fun it was to read about Lawrence Welk and Herb Alpert, and to hear about The Feminine Mystique as something new. The characters anxiously await the mailman or pay $3 for a three-minute long-distance phone call.

But it is their delight in food – the discovery of unknown international flavors – pesto, molé, shish kebab – that makes this a joy to read. The two women share the new techniques and recipes exploding onto the American cooking scene; they watch Julia Child on the new education channel.  Joan discovers the Mexican markets of LA and finds someone to share them with.

I was reminded of that old movie Babette’s Feast where a spectacular dinner softens the most dour of hearts and intransient animosity.  In our book, the enjoyment of excellent food is a gateway to intimacy and love.  When troubles come, and they do, each woman has the support of a best friend.

Those living in the Northwest will enjoy the section on the Seattle Pike Place Market and the 1960s campaign to tear it down and replace it with condos.

A widow, just 60, Vera has plenty of zip and energy and not much to do with it.  Her run-down shop gets few customers and sitting by herself all day is lonely. But one morning everything changes when she opens the door and finds a dead body sprawled on the floor. Her desire to take charge kicks in. She pries the flash drive out of the dead person’s hand, does a few other helpful things such as outlining the body, and then calls the police.

Vera knows a murderer will return to the scene of the crime so she settles in to wait. But four possibilities show up at her tearoom so how will she choose?  Vera would have gotten along well with Joan and Imogen from the above review.  She decides to cook – the most delicious Chinese food – and feeds them all.  Her mothering, her advice (she has lots), her support are what they need and soon this troubled secretive group responds to the home cooked meals and care. They reciprocate by helping Vera refurbish her dated tearoom and offer the companionship she has missed.

Does Vera identify the murderer?  It wasn’t too hard to figure out what happened, although I never would have guessed the details. The best parts of the story are the very likeable characters, each with their own abilities, who bring this mystery to a satisfactory close.

There are three separate stories.  In the first, Deanna, a wildlife biologist who is in charge of a section of the Appalachians, encounters a handsome hunter on the trail.  In the second, Lusa, an entomologist, starts her life as a new farm wife in the small town nearby.  In the last, Garrett, a grumpy old man, can’t get along with his neighbor whose skirts are too short for her age (70) and has so many newfangled ideas about pesticides and weeds. The development of each story is nicely paced and after a while, a name from one of the other two appears in the third. At the end, the three stories join into a satisfactory whole.

Kingsolver is interested in the ecology of the Appalachians and has some definite ideas about predator species and pesticides.  Sometimes they intrude too much into the story.  As a birder, I was especially impressed with her descriptions of warbler songs.  Warblers!  There are over a hundred different kinds and identifying even a few by appearance, never mind song, is a big deal.  The author lives in rural Appalachia and I’m guessing this is something she, as well as her character, can do.

Frankie is a privileged young woman, newly graduated from nursing school in California, raised in a patriotic family whose generations of men have gone to war.  When someone suggests that today, women can be heroes also, she idealistically enlists in the Army and is sent to Vietnam.

We see her character change, quickly, as she encounters the unimaginable reality.  Although she comes home physically uninjured, she never recovers from that time.  She endures the deaths of a family member and several close friends; she is betrayed by the love of her life and abandoned by her parents; she suffers from PTSD before the term has been defined; she is unable to get help from the VA because “there were no women in Vietnam.”  But she does have the two close women friends she served with in Vietnam.

The novel is a bit overdone as Hannah tries to give as much of the wartime experience as possible to her one main character. It isn’t the most powerful war story I’ve read, but it is a worthwhile one about a group of women who deserve the honor of being remembered.

But happiness is not the subject of this Irish novel.  Helen is not so gay at her party but feels a sense of disquiet.  Toibin continues in this vein when he introduces a visitor the next day.  He is her brother’s friend who has come to tell her that the brother is dying from AIDS. She is asked to give the news to her estranged mother and grandmother and to go to him.

The brother’s illness controls much of the plot, but it is the relationships among Helen, her mother and her grandmother that are the crux of the story.  Neither of the two women were invited to Helen’s wedding or have met her husband and children; she hasn’t seen them in years.  There is a painful, suppressed rage, each towards the other.  Toibin places them in a situation where they are forced to interact to help the brother, and maybe to vocalize some of their feelings of fear, rejection, and anger carried forward from the past.

Vignettes, two or three pages long, start when Esperanza is a young child. Each paints a revealing slice of life in her family and then the larger Mexican community.  Together they are the coming-of-age story of a bright young woman observing the poverty-stricken world around her.

In the tenth anniversary edition, the author writes a perceptive introduction about her eventual move away from home. “I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised.  This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it.”

These phrases caught my attention as I have been thinking recently about the many cultural changes that have occurred in the last fifty years in our country: women’s equality and their expanding roles; protected minority rights in education, housing, jobs; LGBTQ being recognized and celebrated; white men’s traditional positions blamed and challenged.  There are also technological changes – safe abortion; advent of the pill and the subsequent sexual revolution; in vitro fertilization. 

These changes threaten our most basic identity, leaving us, as the author says, full of unrest.  It may be a partial explanation for why many want to “go back to how things were” when they understood their roles more clearly.  Fifty years may not be enough time for a culture to adapt and incorporate so many fundamental changes. Progress, unfortunately, is not a straight line.

“Their sense of world order is about to be undone by the women in their lives grabbing democracy by the ballot box. (When you’re a registered voter, they let you do it.)”

Another vivid sentence: “In Western Europe, many see America’s presidential election this year…as something more like a soccer game between a mid-ranking team and a herd of stampeding buffalo. Sure, the buffalo might win — but not by playing soccer.”

Twilley teaches us about the cold chain – how food is super cooled within a couple of hours of harvest, or production, and stays at a precise temperature, with a precise mix of gases, until it is displayed on the grocery shelf.  Those soft fluffy rolls that were baked this morning?  Think again – they’ve been in the freezer for months. Those juicy kiwi and avocados? In the refrigerator equally long. When they travel, it is on a refrigerated truck, boat, or train in a series of highly mechanized and controlled steps.  This is business as big as it comes.

 An early chapter details the work of the invisible people whose jobs, all day long, are in those warehouses where temperatures are near freezing or below zero, moving and storing pallets of tater tots and pot pies for dinner.

After giving the history of cold storage, starting with cut blocks of river ice, and ending with state-of-the-art home refrigerators, Twilley asks if it is worth it.  Is our food as good as we think?  Or have taste, variety, and nutritive value been lost more than we realize?   What about the environmental cost of creating a permanent freeze system at the expense of melting the natural one?     

This book had one interesting fact after another. I used sticky notes to mark them and finished with a rainbow of forty or so. Here are just a couple:

“There are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens on earth at any given moment compared with just half a billion house sparrows or a quarter of a billion pigeons…a combined mass (of chickens) that exceeds that of all other birds on Earth.” (There’s a follow-up discussion about chicken bones.)

“Many of the most peculiar recipes of the 1920s…peanut butter salad (green peppers, celery, whipped cream, and pb) are best understood as status signifiers…they demonstrated refrigerator ownership.” (I actually found this recipe online in an old pamphlet distributed by Kelvinator.)

 Twilley’s book would be of interest to anyone who eats, shops in a grocery store, or owns a refrigerator.

First the person must establish herself online and amass hundreds of thousands of followers.  How?  Have you watched any cat videos lately?  It is incredible to me what people will post and what others will watch.  Once a certain threshold is reached, advertising becomes a possibility.  People are paid to incorporate ads into their videos.  If you are ready to make your fortune, Lorenz will tell you what you are up against.

For many, being able to create a popular video (film their pets, bake a cake, play a prank) and get paid is a dream job.  Is it any wonder young people would rather do that than get up at five to serve McSandwiches? “Google has enabled millions to earn a living…build a business…sell merchandise.” 

People feel a sense of validation for their lifestyle choices and a connection with others when they get clicks and followers. They are noticed. Lorenz lastly wonders if people have become more interested in taking pictures of themselves doing things than doing the actual thing itself.  This is an informative provocative book about a new world that has been created in our lifetime.

In Tell Me Everything, a book about connections, she brings together two of her most famous characters, Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, who become friends. Lucy visits Olive in her retirement home and they tell each other stories about the people who have touched their lives. 

There are two plots.  Lucy, and Bob Burgess (also found in her previous books), both married to others, have a close friendship that may – or may not – develop into something more.  Second, Bob, a criminal lawyer in his previous life, has agreed to represent a man accused of murdering his mother. These two plots move the story forward but are only the backdrop for the main event.

Lucy wants to know what life is about.  What is the point?  What is the point of our individual stories?  It is a hard answer to discover when the truth about ourselves, never mind others, is so well hidden.  And our feelings are complicated.  Even the people we love most can be so annoying.

Strout’s characters, who have become our friends, experience the common but not trivial things of everyday life: love, friendship, work, aging, death. Traumas from the past resurface in feelings of sorrow and rage, but sometimes there are different memories of warmth and joy.

Simone met her husband in college.  She grew up in California and came from an anti-military, anti-gun family.  When her boyfriend talks about the military, she really doesn’t hear him.  But it is not a passing interest for Andrew.  More and more, he knows this is what he wants, must, do with his life.  How they resolve this chasm between them is one of the main themes of the book.

Simone finds herself living in military housing knowing no one.  Almost immediately, her husband leaves for training.  In the two years they are in Georgia, if her husband isn’t deployed, he is in a training designed to keep him combat ready.  He is rarely available.

Slowly, she finds companionship in the only people who are available, the wives.  At first, they seem very different, but they have an overwhelming common interest.  They share in the anxiety about a husband on deployment; they deal with the difficulties of transition when he returns; they are lonely without old friends or family nearby.  Eventually, Simone becomes part of a tight knit support group; they are the ones she turns to when in trouble; they are her “family.”

This is a memoir heavy on philosophy.  Simone tries to understand why her husband loves this life; she tries to reconcile her own feelings about living on money made from aggression and killing. She tries to find her own identity in a life where she has little control.

It is also a book heavy on feelings as the author creates a vivid picture of what this life was like for her and the others, dealing with the minutiae of Army life, the frustration of living at the Army’s whim.  Depression and anxiety are major companions.

This is an informative story about a way of life too few Americans are acquainted with.

Duniway came to Oregon as a teenager in the mid-1800s, brought by an adventurous father and unwilling mother.  Both the mother and a younger brother died on the Oregon Trail.  This imposition of the father’s will on the family with its devastating results must have been a catalyst for her views on women’s position in society.

Duniway blossomed into one of those high energy women. She became a farm wife and had six children.  In addition, she taught school, owned a school, wrote twenty-two novels depicting the plight of women, wrote for a newspaper, owned a newspaper, ran a milliner and seamstress business, became interested in women’s suffrage, travelled extensively, gave thousands of speeches and lobbied continually for women’s right to vote.  Whew!  I had to put my feet up just reading about her.

Kirkpatrick does a thorough job of depicting the attitudes towards women’s proper place in the culture of the times. Her position that they were infuriatingly unfair is exactly right.  Nevertheless, a whole book of complaint after complaint about injustice gets tiring in a different way. 

This story about all that women endured to get the vote and the many setbacks that befell them was a timely read during the Democratic convention.

This juxtaposition of rural Arkansas life with the occasional pop of detailed medical knowledge provides the setting for Thomas Holland’s The Evil to Come.

After another seemingly random shooting, Elmore finds himself continuing to say “I don’t know” when his neighbors and fellow professionals ask about the cases. There are few leads. Jewell Faye, his long-time secretary, who knows everyone in town and everything they ever did, is his pre-computer county-wide web of knowledge.

The book is very descriptive, possibly too much so, of small-town Arkansas characters.  They chew tobacco, are besotted with football; the women bake pies when there is trouble; but they are not stereotypes; they are complex sympathetic people.  The plot with its very surprise ending shows the long reach of childhood abuse and hatred. 

I’m the sort of reader who sometimes likes to read the end first. That way I don’t gallop through the story but can enjoy the richness along the way. In this case I was glad I did because I slowed down to enjoy the Arkansas flavor plus spotted some very well-integrated clues that I never would have seen.

Is it sexist to call this a “man’s” book?  It is full of gun details, military memories, and male law enforcement. The few women are wives or the secretary (granted, it is the 1960s). Nonetheless, it has a very strong sense of place, an intricate plot, and well-developed characters, all of which would appeal to anyone.

Chicken Hill residents may have no money; they may live in shacks with tin roofs on muddy roads with open sewers; they may be the rejects of society.  But they are beautiful; they are strong and resourceful; they are loved. Their skills are born of necessity – they know how to launder, fix the plumbing, and mix the cement.  McBride has created a vivid picture of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and blacks from the deep South who have built a web of connection to help them negotiate the scornful and belittling white world.

The stars of the show are Moshe, a theater owner who brings jazz to the hill; his beloved wife Chona who follows the Jewish tradition of “tikkun olam,” (repair the world), her best friends Bernice and Addie (blacks), and Addie’s husband Nate, who becomes the hero.

On the other side is Doc Roberts who loves to march in his white robe and pointed hood but is still besotted with the Jewess who ignored him in high school. There is Gus Plitzka whose machinations with the city water supply both in town and on Chicken Hill make up one of the two main story lines.

Young Dodo, deaf after an accident at home, is raised by his aunt Addie and Nate with the help of the childless Chona who loves him.  When the state wants to take him away and put him in a “school,” the community of Chicken Hill closes ranks.  Working together by using extended family contacts and calling in favors, they hatch a risky plan to save him.

While the two story lines are fine, they exist only to give McBride a platform for his exploration of race relations in small town USA in the 30s.  The main strength of the novel is in its richly detailed characters and the beauty of their descriptions:

Nate peered into his wife’s searching…brown eyes, then down at her hand…the long fingers that wiped the sweat off his face after work, that knitted his pants and stroked his ear and cared for him in ways that he’d never been cared for as a child.  And the rage that overcame him eased.

Rachel, her background Puerto Rican, is an ambitious art student at Brown, working to make a place for herself in the very white male art world.  She has never heard of Anita de Monte, the Cuban artist whose work is already forgotten, only thirteen years after she died.  But Anita, although dead, is not finished.

The professional lives of the two women echo each other as they deal with the indifference to voices that are female and Latin, and fight against curbing their artistic visions to gain approval.  Their relationships with the men they love have similar conflicts.  Both want to support their successful white partners.  Each has to deal with that partner’s “help.” Maybe she should wear her hair in a neat, more elegant bun; maybe she should wear the dress he has chosen.

Fiery Anita who has died but cannot give up her anger, discovers she can still control some things on earth. For those she hates, she can turn into a bat that can terrorize and bite.  For those she loves, she becomes a wind, flipping a page to a significant picture. 

When Rachel eventually discovers Anita’s work buried in storage, it is an epiphany to learn that she is not the first; there have been other talented Latina artists before her.  Anita is happy to be resurrected; Rachel is happy to have found her; they will help each other.

What was used beforehand?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe authors felt their audience would be offended if it was assumed they knew such words.

In it, she talked about the women who have run for high public office in the past and exhorts us to work together to make Kamala the first woman president.  She ended with:

I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here … that we were here…. This is our time, America. This is when we stand up….

It is the “we were here” part that caught my attention. 

In Henry V, King Henry, in the field, before the battle of Agincourt, inspires his fearful and badly outnumbered troops by telling them how their courage will be remembered and how others will be sorry they were not there for that glorious fight:

This day is called the feast of Crispian:… 
He that shall live this day, and see old age,… 						                     Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours… 						                      And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian’,..							                             This story shall the good man teach his son;…
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars….					        
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here…

So – hopefully – we will be here…when the first woman is elected president of the United States. 

For the immigrant enclave of Indian Americans living in Georgia, gold symbolizes success.  It is what they have left India to find – wealth and status.  They expect their children to fulfill this ambition and there is no doubt they will.  Constant study, AP classes, extra tutoring, summer internships, charitable volunteering; their resumes will be outstanding, and they WILL go to Harvard or Duke.

A few teenagers thrive in this competitive environment; they are naturally ambitious.  But the two main characters, Neil and Anita, do not, until help arrives in an unexpected way from Anita’s mother.  She knows a secret formula passed down from grandmother, to mother, to daughter and has the alchemical ability to melt gold into a drinkable liquid.  The resulting potion helps the drinker fulfill ambitions; it is a very special “lemonade.”  Both teenagers use the drink.

Magic realism mixes well with reality. Gold Diggers tells us a lot about Indian history in the US (they participated in both the California and Georgia gold rushes for example).  We learn about the culture of food and dress. We see the extremely high-pressured method of child rearing and demand for success. This exploration of identity and ambition is done in an imaginative way as we watch the liquid gold seep into the futures of our characters and those they love.

But this is not like Watson telling a story about Sherlock. (Watson after all, was not a real person.)  Character Horowitz is just like real writer Horowitz with many details that are true. This is the fun of it.  Truth blends so seamlessly into fiction it is a bit jolting to realize you’ve been reading along and have been taken in.

That twist adds interest, but it is the mystery itself, with its satisfying plot and pacing that keeps the pages turning.  In this book, writer Horowitz who is the character, is on deadline and can’t wait for another murder so he asks Hawthorne to tell him about an old case.

The murdered man had just moved into the luxurious gated community.  None of the neighbors, who got along well with each other, liked him.  He and his family blasted loud music, the children were unruly, there were too many cars and an ugly camper.  And now, he wants to dig up a beautiful garden and install a swimming pool and jacuzzi.

When he is found dead, the neighbors are under suspicion.  Since they all have the same motive, it is a tough case to untangle so Hawthorne and Horowitz are called to consult. Fairly soon, the police say the mystery is solved, but is it?  Hawthorne proposes a different solution; is it the truth?  Or… is there still something else?  And maybe just one last surprise?

It is not clear cut.  Switching from fossil to electric cars may be necessary in this time of global warming, but getting the lithium for the batteries is a challenge.  Currently, the US produces only 2% of the world’s supply leaving us at the mercy of foreign governments.  Mining it here (in the book) trespasses on Native American land and private ranches; it is a polluting business with the consequences of poisoned ground water for centuries to come.

The niceties of clean energy production are the background with a bit of tutorial on the Supreme Court.  But the forefront is an excellent mystery involving a murdered Supreme Court clerk, a pompous crooked senator, a lobbyist with connections to special ops, a mining company, and a coalition of ranchers and Native Americans.  The cowboys and Indians are on the same side in this one.  Riding to the rescue is more-than-spry Ethel with her wily intelligence and many contacts in the FBI and CIA.

In it Dench is interviewed by Brendan O’Hea, theater director at Shakespeare’s Globe, about her many roles in Shakespeare’s plays.  A book by two extraordinarily literate people about a man who was one of THE most talented writers has to be a winner.

It is not necessary to know the plays.  I read the book from cover to cover and knew the plots of very few.  It was enough to read about the complex characters and their motivations – how Dench chose to portray them and what Shakespeare may have meant. 

Also, there are the historical details.  For example, we are reminded that Juliet is only thirteen; her mother wants her to marry (not Romeo) and tells her there are other girls, younger, who are mothers already.  Child marriage is a long-standing thing.

Discussions of language, words, prose, rhyme, iambic pentameter
are lightly done and understandable.

This is a story of a performing lifetime and one of the nicest touches are the two photos of Dench. At the beginning of the book, she is in her dressing room in costume looking very young and stunningly beautiful.  At the end, she stands in a blurred snow background in a heavy coat.  It is a portrait of a woman in the winter of her life.

Does Shakespeare have a future?  Yes, she says.  He will always be relevant; he is a bridge across cultures; there’s something for everybody; he has examined every emotion; his writing has the capacity to make us feel less alone.

Dench’s obvious love of theater and joy in performing added to the pleasure of reading about her. How lucky she was to have found the perfect life’s work.  

 What he was really looking for was that elusive Northwest Passage across North America.  Unlike many others, he would try it from the west coast not eastern. Cook’s ships left England, sailed south along Africa, crossed into the Pacific, turned northeast, and stopped in Tahiti.  This was a place he did know; many of his crew had signed on specifically to return to the beautiful islands and sensuous women.

After refueling and R&R, they left with only the gray cold of Canada and Alaska to look forward to.  Thousands of miles of the Pacific with nothing between.  And then…as had happened before with Cook…some infallible sense…some uncanny luck…land is sighted.  They can hardly believe their good fortune.  But they can stop only briefly in Hawaii as they must get to the Pacific Northwest with time to explore before cold weather.  After that unsuccessful search, with no passage found, they needed a safe place for the winter.  It could be a sheltered harbor in rainy Oregon or Washington, or if they sailed further…it could be Hawaii. And so they headed south to return.

Sides tells the Hawaiian legend of Lono, the God who had been around before the world was born and before time.  When he lost his wife, he established the yearly festival of the Makahiki to honor her.  When all was to his satisfaction, he built a great canoe.  He would be gone for many eons but would return.  The festival was always the same time of year, in the same place. When Lono returned, he would come from a certain direction; the priests prophesied it would happen soon.

It makes my hair stand on end to think about the coincidence of Cook’s arrival, the correct time, place, and direction, in the middle of their festival.  The incredible ship; the imposing commander; a myth fulfilled.  Throughout the book, Sides presents many of the native views. He has listened to oral histories and read scholarly research. There’s a lot of discussion about first contact and the clash of cultures. 

There is also the sheer gall, the effrontery, of England/France/Spain, those relatively small sized European countries, to claim that the independent, well governed, self-sustaining cultures they found belonged to them.  They could only see the people who already lived there as inferior curiosities – without firepower.  Spain claimed the whole Pacific Ocean and its lands for itself. This colonial attitude of the 1770s has suffered some blows, but the sense of superiority is still alive and well.

In addition to very likable, well drawn main characters, the subject matter is appealing – budding authors, a writing retreat, and a book club.  There’s Wordle and The Guardian.  How nice and booky.

But – I was disappointed. There are too many secondary characters!  There are more than a dozen with an equal possibility of being the murderer.  Plus their relatives.  All interrelated.  Plus the police.  Plus friends of the police and private detectives.  At first, I wondered if it was me.  Am I getting forgetful – or becoming a lazy reader?   I don’t think so.  There are serious books where I am willing to keep a list to keep the characters straight.  But difficulty is not what I want from a cozy mystery.

It is beautiful because of the love among the main characters – lovers, spouses, parents, children.  It is devasting because the setting is the revolution at Euromaiden, Ukraine, in 2014, where over one hundred people were killed.

The book intertwines the stories of four main characters who are brought together at the demonstration at Kyiv. There is Misha, the mining engineer who lost his wife and father to radiation poisoning; Katya, the volunteer doctor whose young child died from heart failure; Slava, the political activist whose mother sold her into prostitution, and finally Alexandre, the musician who spied for the KGB.

It is the warmth and resilience of these people who have survived Chernobyl, the police state, corruption, betrayal, and prison that makes this such a compelling read.  Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, that celebration of the regenerative life force, is an apt image for our characters who can continue to love and cherish.

The book isn’t easy.  Time is not chronological. The cast of characters gets confusing and keeping track of their (possible) relationships takes effort. I finally started a chart. The names are Russian, meaning there are two names for some. The book’s structure is varied.  There are folk tales and songs, lists, newspaper articles, first person intimate story telling. Luckily, the chapters are short – sometimes just a few paragraphs that capture the essence and move the story along. The prose is spare. The disordered structure reflects the chaos of war.

This novel is a must read for anyone who thinks government by an autocratic strongman might be a good thing.

The truth of international questions doesn’t just float onto the page but is ferreted out by international news correspondents. In Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life, Nicholas Kristof, journalist for The New York Times, tells his story.

This memoir gives an idea of the bribing, manipulating, scheming, lying, trickery and courage needed to get information out of the reluctant.  International news correspondent is not a desk job; it is in the field – with pit toilets filled with bats, spitting cobras, flooded roads, suspicious armed militia, and murderous warlords.

As his interest matured, Kristof began to write more about social issues: global, such as child prostitution and forced marriage; local, such as homelessness and drug addiction. There’s philosophizing about how much good a news story can actually do.

Although Kristof has written about and seen some of the worst of humanity, he counters with stories of heroic individuals and selfless charities.  There is an acknowledgement that so many news stories about terrible things give a skewed portrait of the world.  Actually, we are told, medical care is the best it has ever been and illiteracy is disappearing.  The difference education makes is stressed again and again.

It was also interesting to read about his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist too, who was with him in China when they covered Tiananmen Square. Now that she is a mother of three, she has shifted to the less harrowing world of finance.

When one of the boarders is murdered in front of Ethel’s house, Jesse is startled to see his older cousin take charge, including personally calling the head of the Secret Service.  There is a lot that Jesse doesn’t know about Ethel.

Hs is a fast learner.  Soon the two are on the trail of possibly three rogue agents who are running a cryptocurrency fraud.  At the center is half a million dollars until they find an additional wallet containing two billion.

This is a well plotted mystery with two charming lead characters.  Perfect summer reading.  The bonus is that I learned a little more about how Bitcoin works.