Category Archives: Reading . . .

10-24-14 ***Still Life with Bread Crumbs

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Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread CrumbsBy Anna Quindlen (2014). Unanimity in my first book club meeting about this book—thin, unrevealing, wish fulfillment for 60-year-olds. This was my first Quindlen, so I was glad to hear from others who’ve read many more of her books that this one is an aberration. It’s the story of a dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan photographer, age 60, who moves to an upstate New York cabin to save money while she sublets her apartment.

The man who comes to evict the raccoons in her attic happens to be very handy around the house, in more ways than one, and her biggest quandary is whether to succumb to someone 15 years her junior. There are a few more plot elements, most of which lack believability, as does the portrayal of small-town life. But it’s well-written and an easy read for a day when you’re not up to much of a challenge.

I don’t scoff at reading for entertainment, but the “everything tied up neatly at the end with a bow on it” resolution strained my patience. The book group debated whether this was pure chick lit—I say “yes.”

Mysteriously, it was well reviewed. NPR said Quindlen “still has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of her generation.” Not so the 20 members of her generation in my book club. They were particularly riled by Joanna Rakoff’s New York Times review, which called the book “a feminist novel for a post-feminist age.” What could that possibly mean? Especially applied to a character notable for not taking charge of her life in any plausible way.

This is a book you can skim. It’s kind of like eating a Dunkin Donuts cruller. You know there’s no sustenance there, but if you’re in the right mood, it might taste pretty good.

****Sandrine’s Case

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Sandrine's Case, Thomas H. CookBy Thomas H. Cook & narrated by Brian Holsopple. This psychological suspense novel provides a day-by-day recounting of the capital trial of Professor Samuel Madison, accused of the murder of his wife Sandrine. A first-person narration, Madison tells the reader up-front that he did kill her, which gives the author a tall mountain to scale in order to make this protagonist likeable, so he doesn’t try. The prosecutor, the police, his defense lawyer, possibly even Sandrine herself, and certainly the reader decide Sam is “one cold fish.”

Sam and Sandrine are erudite college professors at a second-rate college in a small Georgia town. He claims her death from too much alcohol and too many pills was suicide; the police and prosecutor think otherwise. He calls a note found by her deathbed a “suicide note,” but hasn’t read it. It turns out to be about her academic work, about Cleopatra, and when the police detective refers to “the Egyptian Queen,” Sam—instead of behaving like a recently bereaved husband, confronted with his dead wife’s last words—says, “Cleopatra was not Egyptian.” She was Greek, evidently. This and similar pedantics show how intellectually superior he feels to the authorities and the jury, an intellectual condescension that puts him, as he slowly realizes, in considerable risk of his life.

At first, the day in court punctuated by Sam’s lengthy flashbacks to his and Sandrine’s life together seemed awkwardly handled, though I got used to it. For the middle third of the book, I thought “too much Gone Girl,” but other readers will have to decide that for themselves. In a way, this book might not have worked if Gone Girl hadn’t preceded it. I can’t be sure, because I can’t unread those pages.

The plot is nevertheless intriguing and ends up in an interesting place. The characters—especially Madison’s attorney and several minor characters—are people the reader can imagine breathing real Georgia air. Not so much Sandrine and the daughter Alexandria, but that’s the thing with a first-person narration—is may just be that Madison’s view of them is not quite in focus, either. Holsopple does an excellent narration of most of the characters, especially the relentless prosecutor, but the venomous way his Alexandria spits out the word “Dad” in nearly every line of her dialog became like the jabbing bite of Cleopatra’s asp.

****Alice

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Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Stacy CorderyBy Stacy A. Cordery – Drawing on diaries and personal papers previously unavailable to biographers and scholars, this detailed portrait of Alice Roosevelt Longworth reveals a woman passionate in her opinions who kept herself in the middle of Washington’s political scene for eight decades. Although she’s known as a wit and for her legendary skewering of political figures, especially her disdain for the Hyde Park Roosevelts—Franklin for his politics and Eleanor for, well, being Eleanor—it was her ability to converse on any subject, her vivacious style, and her political acumen that made her parties the refuge of Washingtonians in and out of office. When the Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White House, they seated Alice next to him, and the two talked about his previous visit there, in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was President.

Alice was 16 when her family moved into the White House in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley. The media and the public fell in love with this high-spirited teenager and soon dubbed her Princess Alice. When Teddy Roosevelt received complaints about her behavior, he said, “I can be President of the United States—or—I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” Nevertheless, when she was only twenty-one he sent her as a goodwill ambassador on a four-month East Asia trip where she impressed the 75-person U.S. delegation as well as the leaders of the countries visited. It was a remarkable transition from teenage party girl to trusted political adviser, a shift made in large part to gain the elusive attention of her adored father.

Ultimately she was just too smart to for him to ignore. And from Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, few Presidents did, even when they disagreed with her strongly held views. For Republicans, as Cordery says, she was “part court jester, part Machiavelli.” Not surprisingly, Richard Nixon found her “the most fascinating conversationalist of our time.” An autodidact, she read incessantly, could recite poetry by the yard, and could converse easily about history, science, philosophy, and first, last, and always, politics. She opposed the League of Nations and entry into World War II, yet socially she was liberal. The famous needlepoint pillow that read, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me” shows she was good-humored about her jibes, and she did rip off some good one-liners. When told the nomination of Wendell Willkie as the Republican presidential candidate in 1940 came from the grassroots, she melded her quick wit and political savvy, saying, “Yes, from the grassroots of 10,000 country clubs.”

Unfortunately, the men in her life never achieved the high ambitions she had for them. Her father lost his 1912 presidential bid and died before he could make a comeback. Her brother Ted lost a close race for New York State governor, was appointed Governor of Puerto Rico and Governor-General of the Philippines, and died in France in World War II after heroic action on Utah Beach. Alice’s husband Nick was Speaker of the House, but further career advancement suffered from the combination of alcoholism and womanizing. And long-time lover Idaho Senator William Borah (father of Alice’s only child) repeatedly missed opportunities for national leadership through a stubbornness of personality. As Janet Maslin in her New York Times review put it, “However fraught her relationships with men may have been, politics remained her first love.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth died in 1980 at age 96.

Cordery chairs the history department at Monmouth College in Illinois and obtained access to the remarkable cache of personal documents that informed this biography through Alice’s granddaughter, with whom Alice had an unusually close relationship. This biography would appeal to anyone interested in 20th century U.S. political history or feisty women!

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**** The Golden Hour

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Todd Moss, diplomacy, thriller,The Golden HourBy Todd Moss (sounds like a nom de plume, doesn’t it?). Read by Peter Marek. This was the best, most realistic (to me!) political thriller I’ve read in recent months. For a first-time novel, impressive. I bought it after reading this Washington Post profile of Washington insider Moss. The book tells the story of an Amherst academic, Judd Ryker, who develops a theory that the period for action after a military coup is limited—just a few days—otherwise the usurpers will be too entrenched and it will be impossible to easily get rid of them and reestablish the (presumably) more legitimate government. He calls this period “the golden hour,” taking the name from emergency medicine and the limited period after a massive traumatic injury in which medical treatment is most likely to avoid death. Ryker is recruited by the State Department to test his theory in real life and promptly ignored.

The book is not only about a newbie in the shark tank of seasoned diplomats, a coup in Mali, the kidnapping of a powerful Senator’s daughter, and U.S. security imperatives, but also about finding out whom you can trust. I liked that the main character isn’t an armed-to-the-teeth master of 20 forms of martial arts. He’s just a guy, a very smart guy, using his wits. He doesn’t meet up with a woman character as a flimsy excuse for the author to write a couple of steamy sex scenes. He doesn’t make decisions that had me silently screaming, “Why are you DOING that?” He doesn’t fall predictably off the wagon–a dead giveaway that things are going to go very wrong. Instead, he goes quietly about his business, calls his wife, checks on his kids at the beach, and learns who his friends really are. When he makes one most fateful decision, you understand he makes it based on his principles, not the external exigencies of the author’s plot.

Thriller writer John Sandford called it “A tough, realistic, well-written tale of American diplomats scrambling to reverse an African coup amidst intense turf battles – State, Defense, White House, Congress, and CIA – and ever-shifting facts on the ground. Moss is an insider who knows how these things are really done – and how thin the line is between triumph and disaster.”

The narration may make Judd sound a drop more tentative than necessary, but Marek’s portrayal of the African characters and military were beautiful. Awesome first book by Todd Moss. First of a series.

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* The Highway

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By C.J. Box – I met this popular and award-winning thriller author at a conference two years ago, and he was so highly praised there, I figured I was missing something by CJ Box, The Highwaynot having read any of his books. I still am. Box, a Wyoming native, sets his books in the West, with his series character, Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. This book (a gift) isn’t part of that series, and it was a real disappointment. The book is told through the eyes of several of the characters, including long-haul trucker Ronald Pergram, who calls himself the Lizard King, for his well developed schemes for trapping, torturing, and murdering “lot lizards,” the prostitutes who prowl the parking areas of the big Interstate truck stops—and any other women he comes across when the need to “go hunting” overtakes him.

Being inside the head of this character and privy to his disturbed (and not very original) thoughts is some especially sordid category of TMI. It’s a relief when Box switches to the point of view of the women in the story. We follow Cassie Dewell, a new Investigator for the Lewis and Clark County (Montana) Sheriff’s Department. Inexperienced and unsure of herself, she ends up alone on the trail of disappeared teen sisters—disappeared, as the reader knows, by Pergram. And parts of the story are told from the perspective of the younger of the sisters, sixteen-year-old Gracie Sullivan. Box handles girl teen-speak rather well, and the girls seem plausible enough, as is Cassie.

The book doesn’t lack for tension. During the early scenes in which Pergram is chasing down the girls’ little red car in his 80,000-pound Peterbilt (teach your daughters to pay attention to the “check engine” light!), I wasn’t sure I could keep reading. A number of Amazon readers’ comments show mine was a common reaction: “I almost took an early exit from ‘The Highway.’” “I hope that ‘The Highway’ was just the result of [Box] taking a wrong turn on a bad day.” “I love the Pickett series, but I just couldn’t stomach this one.” I may have to try again.

The West is a great place to live in, but Ronald Pergram’s head is not.

****Standing in Another Man’s Grave

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Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave, mystery novel, John RebusBy Ian Rankin (read By James Macpherson) – Working my way through the mystery and thriller-writers’ “best of” lists for 2013, I found myself once again in the thrall of Edinburgh detective John Rebus. In this book he is retired and languishing as a civilian in the soon-to-be-dismantled Cold Cases unit but emerges into the light of day when the disappearances of two young women suggest a connection with one of his dusty files. Then we’re hurtle pell-mell into fine-honed police procedural territory. Rebus is one of those complex, cynical characters you never tire of, and Rankin’s story is a good one.

I was tempted to pair this review with that of C.J. Box’s The Highway (reviewed 9/29), partly because of superficial plot similarities, but mostly because of the profoundly different reader experiences they evoke. Both are about a serial killer of women, hiding in a small town where he’s known and the frantic effort to find him just in case his most recent victim is still alive. The similarity stops there. Now I know why agents and publishers tell authors not to send them manuscripts written from the evil protagonist’s point of view. The Highway put me off entirely.

Rebus scolds himself (ineffectually) for his bad behavior, and his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke despairs. “He’s not a team player—never was, never will be,” said New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio, and naturally that puts him perpetually on very thin ice in the police department and is an endless source of reader enjoyment as he skates circles around the plodding conformists. It will be interesting to see how Rankin triple Axels his way into cases henceforth. Also, Macpherson’s reading is super!

A number of Rebus novels have been turned into UK television programs. The ones featuring Ken Stott as Rebus are considered the best and the only ones I’ve seen. Also entertaining.

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*** The Woman Who Rode the Wind

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The Woman Who Rode the Wind, aviatrix, Ed Leefeldt, flying machinesBy Ed Leefeldt – Never one to turn down a free book, I was handed a paperback copy of this novel at a local author event and put it in the ‘to-read” pile, without any expectations one way or the other. Now that I’ve worked my way down to it, it turns out to be a charming tale of the early days of flying machines. Told by a two-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist, the book demonstrates a reporter’s skill in picking significant details, and what it lacks in character development and literary flourishes is overcome by the sheer joy it conveys, as people capture the miracle of soaring with the birds. Published in 2001, it was recently reissued for the Nook.

The story takes off from the first chapter when a wealthy Parisian announces a one million franc prize for the first person to circle the Eiffel tower in a powered aircraft. The race is on, and the contestants are three: a dashing Frenchman whom the Parisians adore, a murderous German with the backing of the Kaiser, hopeful the win will demonstrate German technical superiority, and a wealthy American who hires a debauched stuntman to pilot his craft. An American woman—the novel’s main character and daughter of an airplane designer—helps engineer the wealthy man’s plane. There’s plenty of action, intrigue, and romance to keep the pages turning.

Set in 1901, the novel was inspired by such early women in flight as Harriet Quimby. Except for one near-sex scene interrupted by a suicide (no doubt tame stuff by today’s standards), this easy-to-digest story might be one young teen audiences also would enjoy.

 

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****The Danube

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Danube, river

(photo: author)

By Nick Thorpe, a BBC East and Central European correspondent who has lived in Budapest for more than 25 years. Subtitle of this book is “a journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest”—in Bavaria, home of Danube’s the headwaters, a spring in the town of Donaueschingen. The Danube, queen of rivers, runs through and along the borders of ten countries of Western and Central Europe—Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—the middle six of which I’ve visited. In one brief stretch, it passes through four nations’ capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. And through great swaths of sparsely populated countryside, known mainly to birds and watermen.

Thorpe’s travelogue-cum-history lesson-cum natural history exploration ranges widely and freely over this vast geographic and intellectual territory. In part his story is told through the wars and occupations, the conquests and lost empires that have shaped the region over thousands of years, and in part through his warm-hearted stories of individual men and women who still depend on the river as neighbor and provider today. Ways of life that withstood centuries of disruption have been torn apart by modern improvements—hydroelectric dams, locks, canals, diversions, “straightening.”

Though Thorpe understands the motives behind these changes, his heart is on the side of the scattered environmentalists who are trying to restore the natural flow of the river and, here and there, to nudge it back into its old, meandering course. Efforts to do so have led to a resurgence of wildlife and an elevation of spirit among those who perceive a river as a living thing, moving and changing, mile by mile, as Thorpe’s book so eloquently shows.

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*** Three Ellery Queens

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jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

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****The Cottoncrest Curse

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Michael H. Rubin, The Cottoncrest CurseBy Michael H. Rubin – Met this author—a Baton Rouge-based lawyer—at a recent mystery writers’ conference and was fascinated by the premise of his brand new book. (And a bit awed that it was published by the prestigious LSU Press, which has created a nice website for it.) The story takes place in three time periods—in 1893, with Reconstruction ended, and the wounds of the Civil War a decade fresher than the end of the Vietnam War is now; in 1961, when Freedom Riders went South to push the Civil Rights movement; and a much briefer framing story set in current time.

Cottoncrest is the eponymous plantation in which the novel’s inciting events take place—the murder-suicide of a respected Civil War Colonel and his beautiful young wife. The book’s hero, Jewish peddler Jake Gold, in the course of his itinerant business interacts with everyone for miles about—the erudite Colonel, as well as black shantytown residents, poor white sharecroppers, and wily Cajun trappers. And with Gold’s egalitarian streak, he gets along with most of them, too—the honest ones.

Rubin portrays these complicated Louisiana social milieux convincingly, though I hardly had time to fully enjoy the richness of the lives he portrays because the plot was speeding me through the burning cane fields and down the treacherous bayous. Breakneck plots have a way of reaching implausible velocity, but not this one. Every danger and twist he describes is absolutely believable. Though the reader ends up unraveling the mystery behind the murders and the recurrence of the curse, the characters from the present-day scenes will never know what we know, for good and certain.

Rubin’s accomplishment is all the more impressive because this is his first novel. An impressive debut!