MBR: Reviewer's Bookwatch, June 2024 (2024)

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Volume 24, Number 6 June 2024 Home | RBW Index

Andrew Brown's Bookshelf	Ann Skea's Bookshelf	Arthur Turfa's Bookshelf
Cara Nicole's Bookshelf	Carl Logan's Bookshelf	Chris Patsilelis' Bookshelf
Clint Travis' Bookshelf	Gregory Elich's Bookshelf	Israel Drazin's Bookshelf
Jack Mason's Bookshelf	John Burroughs' Bookshelf	Julie Summers' Bookshelf
Laurie Nguyen's Bookshelf	Margaret Lane's Bookshelf	Mark Walker's Bookshelf
Michael Carson's Bookshelf	Robin Friedman's Bookshelf	Suanne Schafer's Bookshelf
Susan Bethany's Bookshelf	Theresa Werba's Bookshelf	Willis Buhle's Bookshelf

Andrew Brown's Bookshelf

What Was and Is: Formal Poetry and Free Verse
Theresa Werba
Bardsinger Books
https://bookshop.org/shop/theresawerba
9780965695503, $12.95 pbk / $6.99 Kindle, 217 pages

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0965695506

In What Was and Is: Formal Poetry and Free Verse, a magnum opus decades in the making, Theresa Werba reveals how the calling of poetry is infused into the very being of the writer. Werba is no mere scribbler of verse. In her list poem, "Poetess," she catalogues the panoply of emotions that go into her vocation, beginning with:

Thinking, feeling, surging, trying,
Contemplating, dreaming, dying,
Resurrecting and creating,
Finding, telling, speculating....

Theresa is considered one of the living masters of the sonnet (a fact which another reviewer has pointed out). I would point out, in addition, that she joins the likes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edna St. Vincent Millay as one of a handful of women in history to have become expert in this form. She does not confine herself to the sonnet, however. This collection is full of wondrous variety of forms, including some high quality free verse.

Poems are organized thematically: creativity, love, the mind (about dealing mental illness), poems about people (some historical), her 'other' vocation as a professional singer, biographical poems, aging, and (in a fitting finale) her spiritual life.

Sometimes a poem is included in one section that might well be in another. One might think the sonnet "For John of the Cross" would go in the section "Pantheon" with other historical figures, or perhaps in "Ever Towards Uncertainty," the section of spiritual poems. But no. Werba slots it into the section "My Mental World is Overloaded," devoted to her experiences with neurodivergence. It begins:

It was five years of darkness. I was dead
But barely breathing, living hardly; lain
About the marble slab. It was my bed
Where I would live, if life were sleep.
Heart slain Of all feeling - empty, absent, gone -
Was beating only, but no heart therein.

We realize, of course, that this poem is as much about the poetess as the author of "The Dark Night of the Soul."

In the ballad, "A Formalist Poet's Lament," Werba captures her approach to writing verse:

It saddens and perplexes me,
The things I hear of late,
Of how to create poetry,
And how to make it "great":

I've heard it's not emotional,
It's nothing how you "feel;"
But it's entirely rational,
Not heartfelt in appeal.

"For nature poems are fine and good," she says a few lines down, "But what about the soul?" The soul is, indeed, what separates the true poet from the poetaster or AI program.

It also might be said to be the theme of every poem here, whether hidden or overt - both in the general sense of 'soulfulness,' and also (we find later) in a more conventionally religious sense as well.

Werba pulls out all the literary devices, often employing these in a mimetic way that reflects her theme and subject matter. In 'Sonnet of the Hardened Heart,' for example, parenthetical descriptions are enshelled within the details of her thoughts on erecting barriers of emotional protection:

Care less, I warn myself; bother no more
With inner crevices: prying the shell
Like scabs (rough, oozing, sore), which crust, but tell
Of tumults against the psychic seabed floor;
It is in vain. Swollen and hard around
The meat (like newborn skin, or the vagin*l flower).....

Werba belongs to that limited class of creatives who are adept in more than one field: in this case, music. Poetry and music have long had a deep connection, and her dual skills interpenetrate here. This section appropriately contains several actual songs, complete with instructions for performance. In "The Classical Singer's Drink Offering," we are invited to experience secondhand the ecstasy of music, which approximates both a sense of drunkenness and (as in the biblical passage from Numbers 28:7 that the title references) of spiritual inspiration. The closing stanza reads:

But after the heaves and pants, the shimmer, the ring,
The chill-bumps in the hairshafts, when my blood
Has leapt and circled corpuscular gamuts, filling
My mask with heat and sound, a kind of thud
Percusses my environs. I turn around
As if to see Him watching.
Oh, to face
Not loving half so much my very sound,
As Him for whom this pouring out took place.

In "Venus and Adonis," a long poem of over 100 lines, Werba demonstrates a capacity for extraordinary sensuality:

I see her standing there.
Ringlets of curls cascading down
Soft shoulders
Onto the copious breasts of pearl and alabaster.
The curls unfurl longer and longer,
Shining and reflecting like circle rings
The sun which hits them.

She walks, tall. Her feet bare and white,
Painted with lilies and grass.

The mountains in front of her
Are billows of soft escape,
And how I wish I could
Bury myself in them,
Taste and touch them,
Suckle them and know them,
Honor them and find them
Again and again.

The uninhibited quality of passion that fits well with the spontaneity and irregularity of free verse, and I must confess that of all the varieties of this form, I enjoy the topic of love most. I shared this poem with a lady friend of mine, and she LOVED it. "So beautiful and raw," was her impression.

Werba's ability in the spheres of both formal and free verse is reminiscent of some of the early modernists like Eliot, Stevens, and cummings, who moved to free verse styles after acquiring a deep familiarity with formal verse, allowing them to develop a unique voice and subtle structures. While Werba does not engage in the radical grammatical experiments of a cummings, her skills also reflected in several nonce poems - verses written in no named, congealed form, skirting the boundary between the formal and spontaneous.

In the final section, we encounter a series of poems engaged in deep spiritual reflection. One of the most impressive in the collection is "The Supreme-Breasted One (El Shaddai)." A poem of praise as well as philosophical and personal reflection, it has an irregular structure, with stanzas of varying line length and number, as well as an irregular rhyme scheme:

The woman in my Father's face
The ruach of my soul
Male images have hid the shad,
The breast, that El Shaddai has had
To comfort those, who wounded, have
Quite never been made whole.

Born anew? Yes; a birth it is -
But only from the pronoun "His"?
When earthly form so plainly shows
That woman is in what seed grows
And germinates, and procreates?
And she, whom Comfort has made flesh
To show His less, nay, more than "manliness":
That He is really also "She"-
A femininity in Trinity?

After five more stanzas, Werba, having assimilated an expertise for different forms, ends the poem with a couplet:

Now delivered, life from Life is come:
O feed me, fill me, Supreme-Breasted One.

As a master of the sonnet form, Werba is particularly adept at ending her poems with a powerful two-line punch like this. Its unexpected appearance as the closing to an ode makes it all the more effective.

The poems discussed and excerpted here are only a slice of the rainbow this collection contains. It is well-organized (and elegantly formatted): beginning with personal reflections on creativity and eros, we move through history, life, and finally come full circle into the realm of the spirit - all while never ceasing to be personal. In terms of both diversity and depth, Werba is both a poet for our time, and for all time.

Theresa Werba the author of eight books, four in poetry, including the newly-released What Was and Is: Formal Poetry and Free Verse (Bardsinger Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in such journals as The Scarlet Leaf Review, The Wilderness House Literary Review, Spindrift, Mezzo Cammin, The Wombwell Rainbow, Fevers of the Mind, The Art of Autism, Serotonin, The Road Not Taken, and the Society of Classical Poets Journal. Her work ranges from forms such as the ode and sonnet to free verse, with topics ranging from neurodivergence, love, loss, aging, to faith and disillusionment and more. She also has written on autism, adoption and abuse/domestic violence. Find Theresa Werba at www.bardsinger.com and on social media @thesonnetqueen

Andrew Benson Brown is a poet and journalist living in Kansas City. He is the author of Legends of Liberty, a mock-historical poetic epic. He is a member of the Society of Classical Poets, where he regularly contributes poetry, essays, and reviews. His work has been published in a number of journals. He is also an arts columnist for the Epoch Times and a history writer for American Essence magazine.

Andrew Benson Brown
Reviewer

Ann Skea's Bookshelf

Hungry Ghosts
Kevin Jared Hosein
Ecco
c/o HarperCollins
https://www.harpercollins.com
9780063213388, $30.00 hc / $12.99 Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Kevin-Jared-Hosein/dp/0063213389

The place is Trinidad, 'sometime in the 1940s'.

'Four boys ventured to the river bank to perform a blood oath. Two brothers and two cousins. The brothers were twins, both fifteen; the cousins fourteen and thirteen. They passed around a boning knife, making clean cuts across their palms.'

The boys mix and drink their blood, then christen their bond with the name 'Corbeau' (the vulture), because the vulture feeds on what has lived before and 'stays alive'.

Krishna, is the youngest, and he and his cousin, Tarak, live with their families in an old sugarcane estate barracks,which is broken down, leaky, infested with rats, 'neighbour to nothing', and some away from Bell Village which reflects 'the dogma of a new world' - the one 'being resurrected ' from a Trinidad killed by colonization.

'These barracks were scattered like half-buried bones across the plain, strewn from their colonial corpse. In their marrow, the ghosts of the indentured. And the offspring of those ghosts. This particular barracks sat by its lonesome, raw, jagged as a yanked tooth in the paragrass-spangled meadow.'

The ghosts are 'preta' - the 'hungry ghosts' of Hindu mythology - the ghosts of those whose lives had ended before their dreams had been fulfilled. They are always hungry 'for company', with big mouths and huge bellies. Krishna's infant sister, Hema, who died before he was born, is a hungry ghost. The elder, Rookmin, had performed magical ceremonies and had instructed Krishna's mother, Shweta, to observe certain rituals, which she did, but Hema's ghost still haunted her. Tansi, Tarak's mother who died of malaria, is also a ghost. She haunts her sister, Kalawatie, and Rookmin says Kalawati will hears her outside at night 'in the wind', and sees 'her shadow behind the bihar tree'. Kawatie must walk backwards into rooms and spread 'circles of salt leading up to the door' to keep Tansi's spirit from following her inside.

There are many ghosts in this story, and many people whose dream and hopes are never achieved. Krishna, after the bonding ritual, reminds himself 'Don't let your dreams fool you', and 'This is your place in the world', but he faces bullying and discrimination at school, and sees his father, Hans (Hansraj Saroop), placating a shopkeeper who will not allow a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian boy like Krishna into his shop but allows Bell Village, Christian, children to enter freely.

Five families live in the barracks, sharing a yard for 'cooking', 'drinking' and 'fighting' and existing in five tiny, half-separated rooms, with leaky walls, 'cold earthen ground' and no privacy. In spite of the dramas which fill Hungry Ghosts, the slow narrative pace allows the reader to get to know these families and see the hardship of their individual lives, but also the love, respect and sense of community that exists between them. It also brings the land around them to life:

'Here, the snakes' calls blurred with the primeval hiss of wind through the plants. Picture en plein air, all shades of green soaked with vermilion and red and purple and ochre. Picture what the good people call fever grass, wild caraille, shining bush, tamaries, tecomarias, bois gris.... Picture curry leaves springing into helices, mangroves cross-legged in the decanted swamp...'

The names may be unfamiliar but the richness of the land it clear. So, too are the smells and tastes of the food that is cooked; and the cadences of the Creole language and dialect which the people speak.

All this is background to the events that change the lives of Krishna and his parents. These begin when Dalton Changoor, the wealthy and mentally unsound owner of a mansion some way from the barracks, vanishes, leaving his much younger wife Marlee alone on the estate to be terrified by nighttime disturbances, ransom notes, threats and the horrible deaths of Dalton's beloved dogs.

Dalton Changoor's disappearance is a mystery for most of the book, and gossip circulates widely. The source of his wealth is attributed to criminal activities, or darker forces - 'Fiend Money'; and Marlee's background is the subject of lurid and salacious rumours, some of which are true. Marlee, always, has had to mask her true wants and desires. Only when Dalton is no longer around does she begin to enjoy the freedom to look and behave just as she wishes. She is a complex and vivid character who inspires mixed emotions in the reader.

Hans works on Dalton's estate with two other men. Baig, a part-timer, is a rough, unreliable, 'boisterous man with no filter''; and Robinson is a neat, self-sufficient, taciturn, Christian, black man. Marlee, who sees Hans as a hard worker, 'fit' and 'rugged in all the right places', decides to ask him to stay on the estate at night to protect her. When Hans tells Robinson about this he questions Hans:

''You mean till the Mister come back?'

'To scare off them boys'

'She paying you good?'

'Yeah'

....

'What your wife say?'

A pause. 'I ain't ask her yet'

....

'I hear a night shift usually spell trouble for a family in the barrack. Stories about women and daughters having to fight for their dignity in a husband's absence. The kinds of things that could happen in the night'.'

Hans does not ask Shweta, and when he does take the job his whole relationship with his family changes. At the Dalton house, Marlee invites him into the house, cooks for him, teaches him to use a gun to defend her, gets dunk with him and, inevitably, sleeps with him. Hans begins to enjoy sharing something of the comfortable life she leads. He draws away from Shweta and she, feeling increasingly rejected, pins her hopes on their agreement that the money Hans is earning will buy a plot of land in Bell which is known to be for sale. When Hans eventually tells her that he has been outbid for it, but he is still going to the Dalton estate day and night, Shweta is furious. Krishna, who has found his father out in a lie unintentionally makes matters worse:

'In the midst of the cocophany, the boy blurted out, 'Pa is lyin. He wasn't at the village this evenin'.'

Hans is shocked but tries to placate Shweta:

''Marlee is goin to help we find another lot as soon as -'

'Marlee?' Shweta came closer to Hans. 'I's your wife and I tellin you - you have no more business at that house. It aint right for you to be there. Not in the night. Is like we aint even exist when you over there. You become a total stranger -''

Nothing good comes of this confrontation and Krishna is disillusioned with his father, but he has troubles of his own to deal with. His quarrel with bullying boys escalates into violence for which he is arrested; and the police officer in charge turns out to be the father of one of the bullies. Marlee, who has some power, helps to resolve this incident, but a later bullying confrontation is much more serious and has disastrous consequences.

The twins, too, have faced a deadly confrontation. They are 'outcasts', because of the murderous actions of their now dead father and they live in a hut away from everyone else. Hans tells Krishna not to associate with them, but Krishna and Tarak ignore that and, because they are 'Corbeau', the four boys meet frequently. At one of these meetings, the twins tell Krishna and Tarak about a terrifying meeting with Dalton Changoor.

Lata, Krishna's young friend in the barracks, also lives through a dangerous incident after attending a celebration of the Hindu festival of Ramlila in a nearby settlement in which a model of the mythical demon Ravana is ritually burned.

'Plays and costumes and colours and songs. It was where friends converged, husbands met wives and enemies were forced into eye contact. A transaction of recipes and gardening tips and gossip. Where you learned that nani's curry gave everyone diarrhea. Or that beti's Muslim son secretly ate swine or tantie's daughter was frigid.'

Lata dreams of leaving the barracks and bettering her future life, so accepts the invitation of one of the Bell Village boys who is attracted to her and invites her to join him and his friends at the festival. The boys and Lata get drunk and the boys disappear, leaving Lata alone. The consequences of this precipitate a deadly conflict in which Krishna, Tarak and the twins all become involved.

Poverty, class-distinctions and religious differences are all part of Hungry Ghosts, as are traditions and customs, ancient superstitions, plant-lore, sex and pregnancy, but so, too, is the sheer joy of simple activities:

'The two boys and the dog set off in the direction of the paddies. The rice plants were still young and looked more like weeds. The water opaque. Each step they took raised a plume of muck to the surface. When they stood still, tiny outlines of fishes swam in spirals. They ran the bag through the water and scooped up a catch of mostly tadpoles and guppies. They spent about half an hour doing this, hoping to get something juicy there.'

In interviews, Hosein has said that many of the domestic details of life in Trinidad in the 1940s came from conversations with his grandfather and other elders. These were the ordinary things of life, but it was a time of war, the colonial powers were leaving and the Americans had begun to take over small villages to set up naval bases. It was a time of change, and of independence, and of dreams a better life.

Hungry Ghosts is an absorbing and exciting family drama and the uncertainty of Dalton's disappearance and the possibility that at any moment he might return adds tension to the story. This is traditional story-telling, well done, and the harshness of life is lightened by the warmth of Trinidad and the strong character of its people.

A Sydney Writers' Festival interview with Kevin Jared Hosein can be found at:

https://www.swf.org.au/stories/2023/interview-kevin-jared-hosein-on-hungry-ghosts

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years
Shubnum Khan
Viking
c/o Penguin Random House
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
9780593653456, $28.00 hc / $14.99 Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Djinn-Waits-Hundred-Years-Novel/dp/0593653459

A djinn, according to various encyclopedias, is a creature created by Allah from smokeless flames. It has a subtle body and is usually invisible to humans but it can change shape at will. Like us, it has feelings, can love and hate, and when it dies it is accountable to Allah.

Shubnum Khan's djinn lives in Durban in Akbar Manzil, which, 'for a long time... was the grandest house on the east coast of Africa'. In 1932, when we first meet it, it is not happy:

'It whimpers and murmurs small words of complaint. It sucks its teeth and berates the heavens for its fate. It curses the day it ever entered this damned house. It closes its eyes and tries to imagine a time before it came here, before it followed the sound of stars from the shore, before the world turned dark and empty.'

Something, however, is changing. A family moves in and the djinn watches them and, eventually comes to love one of them.

By 2014, when most of this story takes place, the djinn is still living in Akbar Manzil but the family has gone, the house had changed hands many times, and when it fell into neglect and disrepair the local municipality converted it into apartments. People moved in and quickly moved out, saying that the house didn't 'feel right', there was 'scratching at doors' and it was 'like the house was watching'. The house itself is still alive. It 'creaks and groans and shifts on its foundations' as its rooms remember past times; smells in the kitchen 'look down drowsily' and 'whisper to each other'; and it, like the djinn, reacts to everything the people inside it do.

15 year-old Sana, who has recently moved into an apartment in the house with her widowed father, is more than usually sensitive. She feels things 'moving around her', sees ghostly shapes and mists, and knows that the house has secrets. The djinn watches her as she explores abandoned parts of the house, discovering things which puzzle her and slowly learning these secrets, and it remembers and re-lives the past as she does so. The house, too, watches her, and turns 'in horror to the djinn as it realizes what is happening'.

'A feeling of burning begins inside the djinn, slowly at first and then like a flame it spreads red hot and burning.... The house howls. It begs the djinn to stop, to reconsider. To keep the last of their secrets.'

The djinn and the house are not the only ghostly presences in Sana's life. At birth she had a conjoined twin who died when they were separated. Now, her twin is a spiteful presence she cannot ignore, constantly trying to get Sana to join her.

'She feels her sister's space around her the way some feel a phantom limb, except this is a phantom sister'.

'If you feel so bad, you should kill yourself', her sister whispers in her ear when she is unhappy, and on one occasion she tries to takes Sana's hand as they stand at a cliff edge, encouraging her to jump.

'Her sister looks over the edge at the rocks below. 'I'll show you how then. Come here. Don't be scared. All you have to do is climb up and take one step. It'll be over in a moment'.'

'You're not real', Sana tells her sister, and 'You're just part of my imagination'. 'If only it were that simple', her sister responds. 'You can't go anywhere without me, silly', she had told Sana when Sana and her father had moved to Akbar Manzil - 'I'll always find with you'.

Of course, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a book of magical realism. Sana's life with her father, in the house he insists on calling 'home', is full of very ordinary meetings with the other residents, all of whom slowly reveal their idiosyncrasies and parts of their own histories as the story progresses.

All are Muslims from Indian families but they have lived in South Africa for years.

Razia Bibi is a cantankerous old woman: 'One sour lemon, always complaining-complaining', says Pinky, the maid. She frequently uses her 'well-worn pointing finger' to accuse Fancy, who has a beloved, but noisy, parrot called Mr Patel, of causing trouble.

Sana meets her first as she rages at Fancy for letting that 'Hindu bird' take 'God's name in vain' in 'a decent Muslim house like this'; but Razia Bibi finds fault with everything, especially the fact that Sana's father has taken up cooking.

She knows the new tenant is trouble when she discovers he abandoned a farm to move here and become a cook. She has never known a man who cooked for a living and this makes her wary. Why were these men trying to do things they weren't supposed to do? The world must be kept in balance. Girls must marry at eighteen and men must have stable jobs as doctors or accountants. Everyone knows it.

Razia Bibi is also openly racist, despising non-Muslims, those of a different sect to herself, and 'Black people, or worse, white people'; but she reveals a softer side when she starts to teach Sana to cook some Indian foods.

Fancy, ('Her Majesty' from 'the Great Upstairs', according to Razia Bibi) has secrets and has a sharp tooth when sparring with Razia Bibi. So, too, does the mysterious and exotic Zuleikha, who 'lives in a tower at the top of the house', and has a grand piano in her room.

Pinky, who is 'mainly forgotten and mostly ignored', has taken to talking to herself and 'referring to herself in the third person. As if she and her are two different people'. She and Sana watch romantic movies together and Sana notes that Pinky 'says that love in real life is an unpractical thing. It slows people down and makes their brains wonky'. Sana disagrees. She has discovered that when she sees two lovers together, she sees them 'suddenly transformed into one person with one shape and all their ends and trailing edges joined to form a single perfect outline'. Sana often sees people as shapes.

The most important person in the house, the one who chooses the tenants, is 'the old man', The Doctor. He likes to talk to Sana, and he tells her how he was born in South Africa, grew up in India, studied and lived in Ireland and 'wanted to become Irish', but returned to Africa to fight in several civil wars, which was where he lost a leg in an explosion. Sara, who is an awkward, lonely young girl, finds him easy to talk to.

Shubnum Khan threads the magical elements of the book into the realism of her characters, revealing, too, in part 2 of the book, the story of the family that the djinn first saw move into Akbar Manzil: Akbar Ali Khan, his wife Jahanara Begum, their two children, Soraya Bibi and Laddoo, and the Tamil labourer's daughter, Meena Begum, who disrupts this family's life. The djinn sees Sara delving into this history, and the house watches it all 'with a peculiar kind of horror', feeling this 'reopening of history like fingers digging into a wound'.

In Part 3 of the book, Sana discovers a long disused attic,

'The opening of the attic has unhinged the djinn.

The girl has stirred up too much from the past and now it is restless, full of longing and ache.

....

In its deepest grief the house begins to fall apart. The rafter tremble, the walls begin to crack. Blood runs from the ceiling....'

Sana finds things which begin to tell her part of the story, but there are still puzzles; conspiracies to be revealed; startling revelations by the Doctor; and some terrifying and dramatic events, which complete much of the story. For the djinn, 'Its time for walking is over. Change has been building and now it is here, the final pieces falling into place'. Only one final surprise is needed to complete the circle, and the last pages of the book provide it. The final scene is then given to Sana and her father, and Sana thinks of her dead mother:

' She sits next to him. 'You know when we first came here you said you thought she would like this place'

He nods.

Sana looks at the house. 'I didn't agree. I thought she would have said it was too old and dirty. But now, I think, maybe you were right, maybe she would have said it had character'.'

In The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Shubnum Kan has beautifully crafted a rich and exotic tale of love and loss, steeped in the sort of magic that is found in The Arabian Nights.

Why Do Horses Run?
Cameron Stewart
Allen & Unwin
https://www.allenandunwin.com
9781761069659, $30.16 PB

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Horses-Run-Cameron-Stewart/dp/1761069659

'NOW I EAT ROADKILL. When I'm desperate for food I drag dead animals off the road. Rabbit, kangaroos, goannas - as long as the carcass hasn't stiffened, if it still flexes, then it's edible. After gutting them, I check for parasites. I roast bits of meat on the end of my knife or on green sapling sticks. Ravens cook well on embers.'

It is clear from the start that something traumatic has happened in Ingvar's life. He has no destination in mind, just 'a vague notion to walk towards the coast' - 'to stay on the move. To remain stationary was to dwell and he didn't want that'. For three years now, through all weathers, he has walked across Australia. He is determined, too, to stay silent, and if he needs to communicate with anyone he writes notes. He also keeps a diary, and in the pages of this we gradually get to know him and, eventually, we learn what caused him to choose this way of life.

As much as possible, Ingvar avoids main roads, highways, and other people, taking old roads cut by 'wood haulers and timber cutters in the early years of settlement', and ancient tracks across the ancient land, which often lead to 'a waterhole or a good place to camp'. In his diary, he writes:

'Last night I walked north along a back road, and tectonic plates and Tasmanian tigers entered my mind. The moon cast a bright glow, the air was cool and I must have covered thirty kilometers before dawn. I can walk for hours without thinking of much. Some days are completely blank. But last night I thought of how I was walking north over land that was itself moving south.'

He thinks of 'continental drift', the breakup of Gondwanaland, and the time when 'Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, roamed the entire region'. And he remembers the last known Tasmanian tiger, held in captivity until, 'On 7 September 1936', it died in its concrete cage. His memory of the exact date hints at his knowledge of extinct species and the career he once had documenting extinction and 'the collapse of life'. His daughter, Lotte, whose voice Ingvar hears as he walks, reminds him of things they did together, and how he would come home from field trips and bring her something 'like a fossil or a piece of quartz'. Lotte's favourite object was a piece of amber

'yellow, like the eye of a cat, and trapped inside was a wasp that looked like it had been flying around yesterday. There were tiny air bubbles. You told me that amber was a window into time'.

Ingvar now carries that piece of amber around with him, and it soon becomes clear that he is mourning the death of his daughter. The real cause of his trauma, however, is not revealed until later in the book.

In the years that Ingvar has been walking, he has survived searing heat, icy winds and rain. He notices 'the remnants of rainforest', the 'flutter of honeyeaters', the boulders that hint of 'the savagery of past floods', and the 'hints of human habitation', but

'the moments around dawn, when the air was cool and the rising sun leaked into the hem of the dark night and the shadows peeled away and birds took flight, when the landscape shimmered and hinted at something new, these were the best moments of the day.'

His encounters with people, however, are less idyllic. He has faced abuse from teenage louts; 'had fruit and rubbish thrown at him'; been 'spat on'; been threatened by drunken 'pig or roo shooters'; and accosted by a half-crazy man metal-detecting in a derelict ghost town.

After a bout of fever, he reaches the ocean, 'as far east as the continent would allow', and walks into a valley which seems 'oddly familiar' to him.

'Ingvar wasn't sure what he was looking for when he started up the valley but when he finally stopped walking hours later he felt he'd found something. He dumped his rucksack on the ground and crossed the bitumen road. As he climbed a steep driveway he thought of the girl throwing rocks into the river and the teenagers who taunted him on the bridge. Don't be a f*cking weirdo.'

The property he comes to is owned by Hilda, an old woman, a widow, 'tough and lean with a hint of something softer'. She is suspicious of Ingvar but agrees to let him stay for a few days in the old banana shed at the bottom of her driveway. Hilda is rough and plain-speaking. She has been left to manage 'Col's domain' ('the two-hundred acre farm ran seventy head of cattle, including one bull'), tackling alone the feeding and watering of the cattle, the drenching, tagging, transport and sales, and everything else to do with the farm. 'I'm too bloody old for this', she thinks as she round up a young heifer that has broken through a fence, and her conversations with her dead husband are gritty: 'Where the hell are you when I need you, Col?', and 'Christ almighty Col, thanks for all the fun!'. Col's infidelities are a frequent topic in Hilda's antagonistic conversations with him. As she surreptitiously watches Ingvar washing in the creek, she hears Col's voice:

'Don't ask him about his past. Men don't like to answer questions about their past.'

'Referring to yourself?'

'You playing that game again?'

'Put a sock in it, Col.'

Ingvar's stay in the banana shed is brief but eventful. He does some work around the farm as repayment for staying there; is attacked by Hilda's nephew who thinks he is a threat to his inheritance of the farm; meets some interesting and colourful locals; and gets to know, briefly, the teenage girl, Ginger, who lives in the A-frame (which he recognizes) across from Hilda's property. Eventually he takes off again, spending some time fruit-picking, because he is running out of money. The orchards are not what he had expected:

'I'd imagined orchards set among rolling green hills like you'd see on the cover of a children's book, but this farm was spread over a thousand flat acres of red dirt, crisscrossed with roads and irrigation channels. The farm was its own little town... Three barracks, built from concrete blocks, lined a cleared area of red dirt like cauterized scars.'

Arriving in forty degree heat, he is handed a canvas bag and a ladder and put to work straight away. Eventually, Ingvar has had enough of fruit picking and 'of other humans' and he returns to the banana shed. Hilda recruits him for collecting ticks - the large female ones which she can sell to laboratories for making tick-serum. It is a lucrative occupation - 'a bit like panning for gold', she tells him. Later she removes a tick from his neck and he feels obliged to speak: 'Thank you' is all he can manage. After this, he writes a long account of the reason for his trauma, and leaves it at the house for Hilda to find.

Still feeling unable to reconcile himself with a past for which he feels responsible, Ingvar takes off again. What happens next is dramatic and the results are unexpected. So, too, are the events which bring this novel to its close.

Why Do Horses Run? follows a mentally distressed man as he walks and walks, day after day, through season after season, in order to forget. That may not sound interesting, but Ingvar is acutely aware of his surroundings and he brings the beauty and changeability of the land to life. The people he meets, the dangers he faces, and, especially, the voices of Lotte and Hilda make the book absorbing reading. And it is hard to resist the beauty of passages like this:

'One morning I didn't get up. I lay in the snow grass on my back and unpicked my matted hair as the sun crept up my blanket. The sky seemed immense. Close enough to touch. I watched the changing shape of clouds. Dragons into dogs. Castles into ghosts. I've never had opium but this was how I'd imagine it. The odd bird flew overhead but the only sound was the wind. And silence.'

As Cameron Stewart's first published novel, this a rich, often funny, and moving exploration of the complexity of human nature, and of the acceptance of difference and the unexpected generosity of strangers. He creates some memorable characters who are full of life and energy, and, at the same time, he writes feelingly of the beauty and fragility of our world.

The Familiar
Leigh Bardugo
Flatiron Books
https://www.flatironbooks.com
9781250884251, $29.99 hc / $14.99 Kindle, 400pp

https://www.amazon.com/Familiar-Leigh-Bardugo/dp/125088425X

'If the bread hadn't burned, this would be a very different story'.

So it would. Luzia would not have used her magical skills, Dona Valentina would never have noticed her, and she would never have met the strange Guillen Santangelo, 'The Scorpion', who makes her aunt Hualit quake with fear.

It was Aunt Hualit who taught Luzia the words:

'Those precious, perilous scraps of language, that mix of Hebrew and Spanish and Turkish and Greek that arrived in letters carried over land and sea.

'What's the difference?" Luzia had asked when she was still a child. My father gives me Hebrew. You give me... whatever the refranes are. Both are secrets to keep."'

Both Hebrew and the refranes - the popular proverbs and sayings of the Sephardic Jews - must be kept secret, because this is Madrid at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Jews had been banished from Spain in 1492. Those like Luzia's mother's great-grandfather had been dragged from their homes and 'offered death or baptism', but the baptised (the 'coversa') who remained were never considered to be 'real Christians'.

Luzia's Hebrew, and, especially, the small magical powers that she has discovered through the refranes her aunt has taught her, are dangerous. As her aunt says, she has 'murky blood', and could easily be 'branded as a Judaizer' and, since 'the Church owns miracles', if Luzia cannot prove that her powers come from God she will be accused of witchcraft.

Luzia has learned to hide her ability to read and write, and she knows it is 'Best not to be seen. Best not to be noticed'. She works as a scullion in Dona Valentina's kitchen and sleeps in rags on the kitchen floor, but she desperately longs for a better life. She has discovered that she can sing the refranes and make things change - '"Aboltar kazal, aboltar mazal." A change of scene, a change of fortune' - but that misusing them is dangerous. When she tried to increase the money the cook had given her to buy provisions, she reached inside the money pouch and 'something bit her'.

'Twelve copper spiders had spilled out and skittered away. She'd had to sing over the cheese, the cabbage and the almonds to make up for the lost money, and Agueda had still called her stupid and useless when she'd seen the meager contents of the shopping basket. That was ambition for you.'

Luzia is careful, but not careful enough, and once Dona Valentina discovers her magical skill and sees that there might be a way to improve her own low social status, Luzia is commanded to demonstrate her 'little miracles' to the guests Valentina has invited to supper.

In spite of Luzia's determination to do nothing - to fail and possibly be thrown out onto the street for humiliating Valentina, - she feels sorry for her mistress. Almost automatically, she reaches for a valuable Venetian goblet, smashes it, then, clapping her hands to hide her words, she sings the goblet back together again.

'The guests gasped. Valentina released a happy sigh.

'Praise God,' Don Gustavo cried.

'Marvelloso!" said his wife.

Don Marius's mouth hung open.

Luzia saw her reflection in the goblet, changed but unchanged, made perfect and ruined all the same.'

Arthur Turfa's Bookshelf

The Beautiful Immunity
Karen An-Hwei Lee
Tupelo Press
https://www.tupelopress.org
9781961209077, $19.95

https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Immunity-Karen-hwei-Lee/dp/1961209071

This is a book of verse to read, re-read, ponder, and read a third time. All f the world's problems converge at or around the same time, leaving humanity reeling. The poet does not shy away from any of them, but expresses hope for what the title implies. Can it be that while the problems do not necessarily leave, humanity is protected from them and continues on its path, on its destiny?

The poet writes "Wish I could do more than arrange inklings into lines/whisper God's love into out millennial vanity as labor" "Meditation on Soteriology": (p. 93). There are no easy answers, and certainly the religion that permeates this volume is deeper and more complex, and also expressed in the richness of language.

"On Lectio Divina, Counter-Clockwise" serves as an example:
"You left us your serenity
not as the world gives.
Nothing I do can deliver me from my own folly." (p.89)

The natural and spiritual worlds touch here, are tangential to each other, and are detailed in stunning ways,. There is a Gerard Manley Hopkins vibe here in several places. The opening of "On Laughter in a Garden, Post-Catastrophe" is one place where this is evident:

"A fiddlehead unfurls a fleecy, coiled question
in our future. Did we ever foretell
calamity in a garden of succulents- cholla, prickly pear..."(p. 38).

Here is a volume of verse that is worth reading, but to read slowly, to ponder, and to admire.

Loss and Its Antonym
Alison Prine
https://alisonprine.com
Headmistress Press
https://headmistresspress.blogspot.com
9798987763636 $15.00

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZ719W17

Loss is unavoidable, yet it does not have to drag people down, nor does it have to diminish what life later brings. Alison Prine's collection shows that through its imagery, well-chosen words, and tone.

"Recovering" (p. 35) mentioned the "anniversary of the accident" but relates "there is still some green in the grass/beneath the snow." In other words, there is hope, growth, newness after tragedy.

The color appears also as the title of a poem. In "Green" (p. 32), the poet's stepmother gives her clippings of plants for her room while she tends flowers "with poison ivy-blistered hands deep in the soil." When the poet visits after she has left home, she learned "the past tense of green" from the plants in her bedroom that...."had laid down in my absence." There is no sadness, no regret, rather an observation as if what happened was expected.

The images created by the well-chosen words are poignant, whether they touch on death, love, or self-reflection. There are memories of childhood: bomb drills and hiding under a desk, first loves, a more-lasting love, scenes in an around Pittsburgh and her current place of residence.

And the Antonym? Perhaps the title poem gives a clue, a defiant love that is a song "..falling hard into each other's lives." (p.51). This is a well-written collection that mentions but does not dwell on the past, and depicts a life that survives in spite of loss.

Small Altars
Justin Gardner
Tupelo Press
https://www.tupelopress.org
9781961209060, $21.95

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Altars-Justin-Gardiner/dp/1961209063

This slender and poignant book reminds me of an essay a student wrote years ago in the first Mythology class that I taught. The assignment was to write about someone who was a hero in the student's opinion. One student wrote about her brother, who had some developmental challenges. While not as severe as those faced by Aaron Gardner, I recalled this essay years after I read it.

Justin Gardner combines remorse, admiration, medical terminology and comic book heroes in this remembrance of his brother's life. The author was distant at times, emotionally and geographically, from his brother, but nevertheless strove to understand what was going on with him and to appreciate what was important to him. Additionally, Justin cared for the caregivers, who were his parents, and appreciated the people in Aaron's life- not necessarily friends in the conventional sense, but those who worked with him and who shared his interests.

Severe mental illness presents a formidable challenge in and of itself. When combined with an aggressive cancer, the result is beyond devastating. Aaron bears it as best as he can. He lives independently, has a job, and visits his parents daily. His parents provide the bulk of his emotional support. Aaron's career takes him to the other side of the country.

A published poet, Justin fashions a prose that is lyrical and precise in word selection and usage. He avoids sentimentality and becoming maudlin. Because of this, readers have in front of them a well-written, gripping narrative that cannot help but to draw them in.

Arthur Turfa
Reviewer

Cara Nicole's Bookshelf

The Wisdom of the Willow: A Novel
Nancy Chadwick
She Writes Press
https://shewritespress.com
9781647426521, $17.95, PB, 304pp
ASIN: B0C9HJWKTZ, Kindle, $9.95

https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Willow-Novel-Nancy-Chadwick/dp/1647426529

"There's nothing that can be done about this thing growing inside my head". "A tumor? You have a brain tumor, Ma?"

Synopsis: Margaret and Joe Dowling have bought their new house in the suburbs of Chicago where they plan to spend the rest of their lives and start a family. Margaret has always had an eye for any type of nature, whether it's flowers or trees, Margaret has always loved nature. When Joe and Margaret move into their new house, Joe plants a young willow tree as a symbol of belonging, growth, and home. As the years pass on, the willow tree becomes a place for Margaret to share life's wisdom with their four young daughters. Margaret and Joe's daughters go through different life experiences, but the willow tree is there for them to come back to when life gets too hard and they each need a moment to decompress.

No matter what obstacles get thrown their ways, Margaret is the glue that keeps their family together. Years after leaving the nest and moving out, the Dowling daughters find themselves faced with changes that will define each of their lives and impact those close around them. Debra, the oldest, is shattered when her husband asks for a divorce. Rose who is the second oldest has long hidden her true self, finally begins to reevaluate her pattern of being in uncommitted relationships. Linney the middle daughter fears losing Magnolia, the magical shop where she works that has changed her life for the best. Charlotte the youngest Dowling daughter is the only one who knows that Margaret is terminally ill and has been charged by Margaret to keep it a secret.

Critique: Despite their difficulties, Debra, Rose, Linney, and Charlotte are a group of strong independent women that deserve the world. Margaret is now faced with the greatest challenges and struggling with whether she has done enough to help her daughters find their ways in life, calls the whole family to the family home to reunite under the willow tree one last and finally time. My heart absolutely broke for Margaret when she would question her role as a mother, whether she was doing the best for her daughters, or if she was failing them completely.

I wanted to reach into my kindle so many times and hug this group of women under the willow tree and just let them know that no matter what gets thrown their way, life will eventually be okay. The things Joe did for his family, just left the biggest smile on my face. I'm just so shocked how beautiful and heart breaking this book was at the exact same time, one single page had me laughing and crying at the same time. I can't recommend this book enough, please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy immediately, it definitely won't disappoint, just keep the tissues on deck, because you will NEED them.

You are all probably wondering the same exact thing I am, why do I do this to myself? Well, because I love books that mentally destroy me. Am I okay? Probably not."

"The Wisdom of The Willow written by Nancy Chadwick was one heartbreaking story about family, love, forgiveness, healing, and loss. This book does have dual POV told by four daughters and their mother over the course of a year and their early lives. The only issue I had with this book was that I wanted to know more about the characters, it felt like their childhood was barely mentioned, instead it cut right to the chase of their young adult lives. I fell in love with the gorgeous cover and knew I had to get my hands on this book immediately, and I'm so glad I did because it was such a beautiful story, but also very gut wrenching. My heart needs to be repaired, the amount of times it shattered while reading this book was intense.

I absolutely loved the first person narratives because it felt like I was right there experiencing these characters' lives. I felt so many emotions while reading this book, I cried, I smiled, I giggled, I felt hope, anger, sadness, happiness. In all honesty, it felt like my heart was being thrown around and I couldn't help but grip my kindle for dear life wondering when the secrets were going to be spilled. I can't recommend this book enough, it truly shows that not all families are perfect, some families have their flaws and it's a beautiful experience watching people overcome their obstacles.

Cara Nicole
Reviewer

Carl Logan's Bookshelf

Current Perspectives on Stemmed and Fluted Technologies in the American Far West
Katelyn N. McDonough et al.
The University of Utah Press
https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu
9781647691431, $80.00, HC, 340pp

https://www.amazon.com/Current-Perspectives-Stemmed-Technologies-American/dp/1647691435

Synopsis: Collaboratively compiled and co-edited by the academic team of Katelyn N. McDonough, Richard L. Rosencrance, and Jordan E. Pratt, "Current Perspectives on Stemmed and Fluted Technologies in the American Far West" provides the most comprehensive overview of archaeological research into the late Pleistocene and early Holocene occupation of the North American Far West in over a decade.

The focuses is upon the relationship between stemmed and fluted point technologies in the region, which has recently risen to the forefront of debate about the initial settlement of the Americas. Established and early career researchers apply a wide range of analytical approaches to explore chronological, geographical, and technological aspects of these tools and what they reveal about the people who made them. While such interrelationships have intrigued archaeologists for nearly a century, until now they have not been systematically examined together in a single curated volume.

Contributions are organized into three main sections: stemmed point technologies, fluted point technologies, and broader interactions. Topics range from regional overviews of chronologies and technologies to site-level findings containing extensive new data. The culmination of many years of work by dozens of researchers, this volume lays new groundwork for understanding technological innovation, diversity, and exchange among early Indigenous peoples in North America.

Critique: Informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with numerous Illustrations, Tables, Figures, sixty pages of References, a two page listing of the Contributors and their credentials, and an eight page Index, this seminal and ground-breaking collections of informative contributions comprising "Current Perspectives on Stemmed and Fluted Technologies in the American Far West" is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, and college/university library American Archaeology collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.

Editorial Note #1: Katelyn McDonough is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology, director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History's Archaeology Field School, and curator of Great Basin Archaeology at the University of Oregon. Her research examines relationships between people, foodways, and environment in western North America, with an emphasis on plant use and landscape change during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.

Editorial Note #2: Richard (Richie) Rosencrance is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and with the Artemisia Archaeological Research Fund at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an instructor at the Archaeology Field School run by the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon. His research focuses broadly upon technological innovation, especially in the northern Great Basin and Columbia Plateau, and more specifically upon late Pleistocene lithic technology and chronology building.

Editorial Note #3: Jordan Pratt is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and with the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University. She is currently leading excavations at Weed Lake Ditch, an open-air Paleoindian site in eastern Oregon. Her research centers on the lithic technological organization strategies used by late Pleistocene peoples, particularly in the northern Great Basin.

Family Handyman Whole House Repair Guide Vol. 2
Family Handyman
Trusted Media Brands
https://www.trustedmediabrands.com
9798889770268, $19.99, PB, 288pp

https://www.amazon.com/Family-Handyman-Whole-House-Repair/dp/B0CL3B3BXQ

Synopsis: The Family Handyman magazine focuses on DIY home repairs and now has published "Whole House Repair Guide Vol. 2", an all-new follow up to their earlier best seller the "Whole House Repair Guide".

Whether you're a first-time homeowner or an experienced DIYer, you will refer to this extraordinarily 'user friendly' instructional guide and reference again and again. From fast fixes and easy repairs to weekend projects and money-saving maintenance suggestions, the "Family Handyman Whole House Repair Guide, Vol 2" is comprised of more than 300 repair projects and a wealth of practical tips -- as well as step-by-step directions and hundreds of photos.

Critique: This large format (8.13 x 0.8 x 10.88 inches, 1.8 pounds) paperback edition of "Family Handyman Whole House Repair Guide Vol. 2" is an ideal home-improvement guide for makes an essential repair guide for: Money-saving guidelines for window replacement, air-duct maintenance, gutter improvements and chimney repair; 22 instant heating and A/C fixes; Ideas to pet-proof your home; Basic household warning signs; Painting like pro; Lawn and landscaping secrets -- and so much more! Of special note is the inclusion of a Bonus Chapter of preventive measures. While also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $11.99), "Family Handyman Whole House Repair Guide Vol. 2" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library DIY Home Repair/Improvement collections.

Editorial Note: The Family Handyman website (www.familyhandyman.com) is a top destination for today's homeowners where they spotlight strategies regarding home and tool maintenance, lawn and garden care, and storage in addition to how-to videos and easy-to-follow projects. Family Handyman has more than 1.5 million fans on Facebook, 2 million followers on Instagram, 2.2 million Pinterest followers.

Carl Logan
Reviewer

Chris Patsilelis' Bookshelf

On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely
Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Ronald C. White
Random House
9780525510086, $35.00 HC, 487 pages

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Fields-Unlikely-Lawrence-Chamberlain/dp/0525510087

July 2, 1863. The second day of the horrific Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in which about 40,000 men were wounded and 5,000 killed.

On this day Union General Gouverneur K. Warren was shocked to see that Little Round Top hill, about to be taken by a brigade of Alabamans, was devoid of Union troops, completely undefended. If the Confederates took this strategic hill and brought up artillery, they could batter Union troops below mercilessly. Warren then persuaded a commander to immediately send a brigade to push back the encroaching rebels.

The man sent to defend boulder-strewn Little Round Top was 34-year-old Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine brigade. Mild-mannerly, soft-spoken, intellectual and friendly, Chamberlain in the previous year had been a Bowdoin College (Maine) professor of speech and modern languages. (He was fluent in nine). Besides four years of classical studies at Bowdoin, Chamberlain had spent thee years at a theological seminary in Maine.

Reaching the summit of Little Round Towpath with his men ahead of the rebels, Chamberlain could see the enemy slowly advancing up the craggy hill towards him. He then heard a loud, shrill sound - and suddenly realized what it was: The fierce, rebel yell from the waves of attacking enemy...

Ronald C. White is a New York Times bestselling author of the biographies "A. Lincoln" (2009) and "American Ulysses" (2016) and also author of three other books on Lincoln including "Lincoln in Private" (2021). He's also co-authored seven other works of history. His new work is "On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Lawrence Chamberlain."

Chabelain, White informs us, was born on September 8, 1828 in the small, rural village of Brewer, Maine. Aside from his extensive combat exploitis in the Civil War - in which he was severely wounded in the June 28, 1864 Battle of Petersburg, and which he was severely wounded in the June 18, 1864 Battle of Petersburg, and in which he engaged in ferocious, hand-to-hand battle at Five Forks, April 1, 1865 - Chamberlain also became governor of Maine (1867) and later president of Bowdoin College (1871)

But what Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is famous for on the world stage - what Medal of Honor upon him 1893 - was his decisive tide-turning action at Little Round Top on that fateful second day at Gettysburg...

-We return to that violent scene - Chamberlain and his men hear the bloodcurdling rebel yell louder!, louder! "Tree by tree, boulder by boulder they came" up the slopes Chamberlain wrote in his diary. All semblance o order breaks down in the smoky, vicious chaos of battle...
An hour passes....

The 20th Maine is running out of ammol. Chamberlain's men furiously restock bullets from fallen friends, or even enemies. But those sources could not supply their need for long, writes White.

At this critical, desperate moment Chamberlain shouts "Bayonnet!" - the weapon used when all the possibilities are gone.

His diminished brigade half the size of the Confederate onslaught, charges down the slope against the surprised rebels. "Cuts and thrusts gapplings and wrestlings... conflict swayed to and fro... At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men...", wrote Chamberlain in a post-war magazine.

Bullets went zipping - ricocheting viciously amongst the rocks and soldiers...

The tide turns for Chamberlain brigade - they finally prevail. The rebels surrender in scores. "The Twentieth Maine suffered 130 casualties, about one-third of the regiment including forth killed or mortally wounded", writes White.

On Februarty 24, 1914, in Portland's Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain died at age 85, succumbing to infections from old war wounds and pneumonia.

Assiduously researched and simply written, Ronald C. White's "On Great Fields" is the definitive biography of a true Civil War Hero.

Chris Patsilelis
Reviewer

Clint Travis' Bookshelf

The Last to Pie
Misha Popp
Crooked Lane Books
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Dreamscape Media
https://www.dreamscapepublishing.com
9781639106455, $29.99, HC, 336pp

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Pies-Before-Guys-Mystery/dp/1639106456

Synopsis: Daisy Ellery is back to doing what she does best: making pies and killing guys. And it's about to get more dangerous than ever.

Daisy knows the statistic -- domestic violence perpetrated by cops is rampant. It was only a matter of time before she was called in to help. But when this request arrives in her inbox, it isn't accompanied by the required referral and that makes Daisy nervous. Is this really a woman trapped in a violent relationship, or is it a shady cop trying to uncover Daisy's murdery side hustle?

Daisy hesitates to accept the job -- until the woman who left the request goes missing and it's clear her boyfriend is responsible. Knowing the boyfriend's work buddies won't be any help with the investigation, Daisy sets out to find the woman and plans a little justice of her own. When Daisy finds evidence that the boyfriend wasn't just a monster in private, but corrupt at work too, things get even more perilous.

Feeling guilty that she hesitated to help the woman, Daisy is determined to find her and get her justice -- whatever it takes.

Critique: A deftly crafted and riveting read from start to finish, "The Last To Pie" by novelist Misha Popp will have a particular appeal to readers with an interest in cozy mysteries that feature a culinary touch, a most unusual female sleuth (and self-appointed executioner of the unjust) -- and just a bit of the supernatural to spice things up. While also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $17.99) and in a complete and unabridged audio book (Dreamscape Media, 9798874750336, $45.95, CD), "The Last To Pie" from Crooked Lane Press is decidedly recommended for community library Mystery/Suspense collections.

Editorial Note: Misha Popp (https://mishapopp.com) enjoys writing about murdery women and over-the-top baked goods, but not so much about herself. She lives in rural Massachusetts where she bakes entirely too many pies and sculpts things out of chocolate. An unrepentant school nerd, she has a collection of degrees that have nothing to do with the jobs that pay her.

What Fire Brings
Rachel Howzell Hall
Thomas & Mercer
c/o Amazon Publishing
9781662504174, $28.99, HC, 384pp

https://www.amazon.com/What-Fire-Brings-Rachel-Howzell/dp/1662504179

Synopsis: Bailey Meadows has just moved into the remote Topanga Canyon home of thriller author Jack Beckham. As his writer-in-residence, she's supposed to help him once again reach the bestseller list. But she's not there to write a thriller -- she's there to find Sam Morris, a community leader dedicated to finding missing people, who have disappeared in the canyon surrounding Beckham's property.

The missing woman was last seen in the drought-stricken forest known for wildfires and mountain lions. Each new day, Bailey learns just how dangerous these canyons are -- for the other women who have also gone missing here... and for her. Could these missing women be linked to strange events that occurred decades ago at the Beckham estate?

As fire season in the canyons approaches, Bailey must race to unravel the truth from fiction before she becomes the next woman lost in the forest.

Critique: Rachel Howzell Hall is an author who has raised "What Fire Brings", her suspense thriller of a novel, to an impressive level of literary excellent has once again demonstrated her master of the psychological thriller genre. Unique, compelling, and a fascinating read from start to finish, "What Fire Brings" is especially commended to the attention of readers with an interest in contemporary women's fiction and well penned suspense thrillers. While highly recommended for community library Mystery/Suspense collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "What Fire Brings" is also readily available in a paperback edition (9781662504167, $16.99) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $4.99).

Editorial Note: Rachel Howzell Hall (www.rachelhowzell.com) is also the author of The Last One; What Never Happened; We Lie Here; These Toxic Things; And Now She's Gone; They All Fall Down; and, with James Patterson, The Good Sister, which was included in Patterson's collection The Family Lawyer. A two-time Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist as well as an Anthony, Edgar, International Thriller Writers, and Lefty Award nominee, Rachel is also the author of Land of Shadows, Skies of Ash, Trail of Echoes, and City of Saviors in the Detective Elouise Norton series. A past member of the board of directors for Mystery Writers of America, Rachel has been a featured writer on NPR's acclaimed Crime in the City series and the National Endowment for the Arts weekly podcast. She has also served as a mentor in Pitch Wars and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

Clint Travis
Reviewer

Gregory Elich's Bookshelf

The Normal Exception: Life Stories, Reflections, and Dreams from Prison
Rocco Di Pietro
Independently Published
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocco_Di_Pietro
9798218200435, $21.00, PB, 236pp

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-normal-exception-rocco-di-pietro/1143506042

For over a decade, Rocco Di Pietro worked as a prison educator in New York, Ohio, and California, including Attica and San Quentin. As a composer, he also performed his musical composition Prison Dirges at Alcatraz Island.

Rocco Di Pietro's The Normal Exception: Life Stories, Reflections, and Dreams from Prison draws upon his experiences in teaching college courses to prison inmates. A thoughtful observer, Di Pietro offers illuminating commentary on people's roles and the relationship between prison and life outside the walls. Incarceration, he points out, "was only one way to transgress out of the matrix of society; the artist, the poor, the homeless, the ill, the addicts, and psychological cripples of every sort were also some of the other ways one could slip through the cracks."

The book consists predominantly of essays written by inmates, focusing on their thoughts and experiences, prefaced by a brief commentary by Di Pietro. For me, the most striking impression taken from these stories is how many of these individuals had been living in prisons of other sorts long before their incarceration. Many of these stories are harrowing, and the words of one woman are indicative of the suffering: "Though I was incarcerated, I began to feel freer than I had in a long, long time. No longer did I live under an umbrella of constant fear."

Their stories of pre-arrest experiences are a microcosm of society as a whole, in which broad segments of the population are entrapped in abusive families or relationships, dealing with untreated mental illness or drug addiction, and struggling through poverty, hopelessness, and despair. It is a society built on wealth and privilege, in which millions of people are treated as refuse. One prisoner asserts that society was the most influential factor in becoming a criminal. The culture "literally turns its back on many of us," he adds. Another explains: "Values! The only values I remember taught to me were how to live in fear." The Normal Exception is a revealing look into the lives of those in the penitentiary and in our society at large.

The book is mainly divided into the three themes that Di Pietro had assigned to his students: life stories, reflections, and dreams. Di Pietro observes that at some point in his time teaching inmates, it occurred to him that the lives of those who passed through his class were destined to disappear without any trace in the wider world. "Gradually," he writes, "it dawned on me. I would bear witness!"

Di Pietro asked male prisoners to write on the theme, why you are a criminal? He had Joseph Rogers's book, Why Are You Not a Criminal?, in mind as an example. Rogers's book includes personal statements by people who have broken the law and those who abide by it, to illustrate commonalities. Di Pietro asked the female prisoners to write about their place in world civilization and what they had learned in class. Prisoners responded with personal stories about their life struggles before incarceration and how they ended up in prison. Di Pietro notes that the themes of dying and surviving regularly recurred in his classes. The stories in the Dreams section were written or videotaped and were used by the author as habilitation exercises.

The Normal Exception is an eye-opening and fascinating look at the lives of people one may not otherwise encounter. It provides an opportunity to understand a world that remains hidden for many of us. The author is to be congratulated on his dedication to his years of working with inmates and for bringing their affecting stories to us.

Gregory Elich is a contributor to the collection Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books).

Gregory Elich
Reviewer

Israel Drazin's Bookshelf

Maimonides: Faith in Reason
Alberto Manguel
Yale University Press (Jewish Lives)
https://yalebooks.yale.edu
9780300217896, $14.84 hc 256 pages

https://www.amazon.com/Maimonides-Faith-Reason-Jewish-Lives/dp/0300217897

Maimonides: Faith in Reason

Alberto Manguel's 2023 "Maimonides: Faith in Reason," a significant addition to Jewish studies, is published by Yale University Press. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the life, books, and ideas of the great Jewish philosopher, law writer, and physician Moses ben Maimon, also known as Rambam and Maimonides. Manguel, the author of ten nonfiction and three fiction books not on Jewish subjects, contributes his book to the series of Jewish Lives. In partnership with the Leon D. Black Foundation, Yale University Press has published over sixty books, including this volume in Jewish Lives. Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretive biographies designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity, with over thirty more books forthcoming.

The Manguel book is 256 pages long, with a four-page preface, sixteen chapters comprising 178 pages, a three-page conclusion, extensive learned notes ending on page 212, a two-page list of Maimonides's principal works, two pages of acknowledgment, and a two-column fourteen-page index. Manguel frequently compares Maimonides's ideas with those of prominent, highly respected thinkers, Jewish and non-Jewish, which is enlightening and helps readers better understand Maimonides. Readers will learn much from Manguel's interpretations.
In his first four chapters, he provides a fascinating biography and history of the great sage. He then follows this with chapters devoted to Maimonides the physician, scholar, philosopher, and believer, lessons drawn from the Exodus, Talmud, the Law, Mishneh Torah, The Guide of the Perplexed, what virtue is, and a lengthy chapter on the many famous Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers who read and thought about Maimonides. These include those who immediately reacted to the publication of his books and later renowned thinkers such as Spinoza and St. Thomas Aquinas. He describes how these scholars agreed and disagreed with Maimonides.
In this chapter, he also reveals the widespread disagreements on interpreting what we read Maimonides is saying. I experienced this disagreement also. For example, when I had correspondence with the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, a mystic requested that I, who was then on active duty as a general in the US Army, speak about the Noahide Commandments. I agreed. In a letter I wrote to him after doing so throughout the world. I said I did so as a follower of Maimonides, not because I am a Lubavitcher Chasid. He responded that he was also a follower of Maimonides. While some scholars would agree that Maimonides had mystical ideas, I think he did not.

To cite another example. I corresponded with a highly respected professor who was an expert on Maimonides. I have read and am still reading his many books and articles. In one book, he wrote his interpretation of Maimonides's statement that prophets needed a high level of imagination. I wrote suggesting that the need for a high-level imagination was more straightforward than he suggested. I said that since each prophet needed to articulate their vision in clear language and did so in their way with their poetic expressions, metaphors, and examples, they needed an excellent imagination to do so effectively. This made him very angry at me.

I am emphasizing these differences in interpretation to alert readers that while the book is very good, not everybody will agree with everything that Manguel states. I do not know of any book about Maimonides that everyone would think is entirely correct.

While praising and recommending this book, I also do not agree with everything he writes. What bothered me the most is that Manguel did not reveal that Leo Strauss took the position, written as the Introduction to Pines' Guide of the Perplexed, which I agree with, that Maimonides wrote his Guide for two audiences: enlightened, educated people and the average reader who might feel threatened by philosophical ideas. As a result, there are often statements in the Guide that Maimonides expected his educated readers to ignore. These were ideas written to please the average reader.

Many scholars reject Strauss' understanding. Among them is the famed scholar Isadore Twersky, who knew more about Maimonides than I and the formerly mentioned scholar. But, of course, even great minds make mistakes. What is important to note is that accepting the views written for the typical reader as Maimonides's actual view leads, in my opinion, to wrong conclusions.
An example is Manguel's discussion of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles. Many scholars who accept Stauss' view recognize that Maimonides only accepted the introductory principles that spoke about God, not the rest. Manguel, who ignores Strauss' view and seems to disagree with it, treated the thirteen as Maimonides' actual view. An example is the principle that the Torah in our hands today has never changed. Maimonides was very familiar with the multiple changes in the Torah wording, such as those introduced by the Men of the Great Assembly and the changes known as Tekunei Sopherim, which were changes made by other ancient sages for the honor of God. Maimonides wrote the contrary idea in his Thirteen Principles because he felt the average reader would be threatened by the idea that changes were made in what they considered God's words.

Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah
Ian Buruma
Yale University Press
https://yalebooks.yale.edu
9780300248920, $26.00, 216 pages

https://www.amazon.com/Spinoza-Freedoms-Messiah-Jewish-Lives/dp/030024892X

What is Spinoza's Philosophy?

Ian Buruma's 2024 "Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah," a significant addition to Jewish studies, is published by Yale University Press. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the life of the short-lived renowned Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who died at the early age of 45. Only two of his books were published during his lifetime: Theological-Political Treatise in 1670 and Ethics in 1677. Buruma's unique approach to Spinoza's life and ideas will captivate readers.

Buruma is the author of twenty-two other books and a Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. His book is a valuable addition to the Jewish Lives series, a prizewinning collection of interpretive biographies that delve into the various aspects of Jewish identity. In partnership with the Leon D. Black Foundation, Yale University Press has published over sixty books, including this volume in Jewish Lives. With over thirty more books forthcoming, the series enriches our understanding of Jewish history and culture.

Buruma's book is 216 pages long, with 12 chapters comprising 174 pages, 13 pages of notes, a page of acknowledgments, and an index of 10 pages.

The book is not a traditional biography but a collection of speculations about Spinoza's life. It does not delve into Spinoza's ideas and philosophy. Instead, it describes the many debates surrounding Spinoza's life and work. Buruma emphasizes that virtually everything said to be known about Spinoza is pure speculation, and scholars have different ideas about them. He praises "the excellent biography by Steven Nadler, whose book is about as exhaustive as one can be about a short life full of unknowns."

Buruma added, "Spinoza's complicated ideas are (also) open to many interpretations." Scholars differ on how to interpret them. As a result, we have no definitive picture of what Spinoza was teaching other than that he was a rationalist who stressed using one's intelligence. He writes, "The Israeli scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel has portrayed Spinoza as a philosopher whose thinking was profoundly influenced by his Marrano family background. He believes that Spinoza's use of language and his 'mastery of equivocation' were rooted in the habits of his ancestors who had to hide their faith behind a veil of Christian conversion in the face of the Iberian Inquisition." (I agree and will give my interpretation below.)

Buruma tells readers that since the fourteenth century, Jews in Spain were forced to convert to avoid persecution. Many converted while continuing to be faithful Jews secretly. Those who publicly converted but were discovered to be secretly practicing Judaism were killed. The remaining Jews were expelled in 1492. Many, including Spinoza's family, fled to Amsterdam, where Jews were tolerated as long as they did not "clash with (Amsterdam's) Calvinism on such matters as the immortality of the soul, belief in the afterlife, God the creator or the divine origin of the Holy Scriptures - all dogmas that Spinoza would later repudiate." The state felt it must protect its citizens from false religions. Strict theologians were in favor of banning Jews and Catholics from the country. However, the majority agreed to tolerate them as long as they caused no clash. Noting the very sensitive situation, the Jewish leaders, including the rabbis, were cautious not to speak about subjects that might endanger their lives.

Jews and Catholics were not the only groups facing the danger of causing the Amsterdam government to stop tolerating them. English Quakers escaped persecution and fled to Holland in large numbers. However, unlike the Jews, after being in Holland for some time because of the possibility of offending the government with their religious beliefs, they left Holland for America.

Spinoza was placed in herem, meaning ostracized, on July 27, 1656. As with virtually everything regarding Spinoza's life and thoughts, what prompted the herem is unclear. This is especially difficult to understand since we know that Spinoza was cautious throughout his life not to endanger his own life and the lives of fellow Jews by revealing what he believed.
Indeed, I am convinced that this is why his writings are unclear and subject to widely different interpretations. In this respect, he was very similar to Maimonides (1138-1204), who also hid his true rational ideas. He did so in his own way. He mixed them with the ideas of non-educated Jews. He did this because he was very compassionate and did not want to hurt fellow Jews in any way.

Buruma writes that Spinoza "was cautious about how much he was prepared (to reveal of his thinking). (This) makes his enthusiasm to publish (his book) Ethics (in 1677, long after the herem, the year he died) a bit puzzling. He must have known that this book" would enflame the passions of the Amsterdam government.

In my view, it is possible that in 1677, when he was deathly ill and died, he was not thinking very well.

Buruma ends his fascinating book, from which readers will learn much, by writing that Spinoza "showed the way all human beings can think freely and discover truths that apply to everyone. For that, we all owe him a debt, not as a 'good Jew,' or a secular saint, but as a great and humane man."

While Buruma does not explain Spinoza's ideas, I would like to do so.

First, we should realize that a policy of toleration is intolerable. Imagine a husband and wife lying in bed together. He taps his wife's shoulder, and when he gets her attention, he says, "Whatever anyone says, I want you to know I tolerate you." I think such an attitude is grounds for a divorce. I also think we should recognize that Jews in Amsterdam were very fearful, as were the Quakers, that the toleration policy could easily slide into a situation resulting in their death. So, they were very careful about what they said. This is why Spinoza hid his true opinions.

Second, it is reasonable to assume that Spinoza knew Maimonides' philosophy. He most likely learned about Maimonides during his years of study of Judaism. Because of his strong interest in philosophy, it is almost certain that he read his books either in his youth or later. It is also likely that he found Maimonides' rationalism closely akin to his own, if not identical.

Third, true Spinoza criticized some biblical laws and practices and even called some superstition and pagan. So did Maimonides. Maimonides stressed that the Torah needed to be presented to the Israelites in a way they could accept. He said it is impossible to change a person and certainly not a nation immediately. This was why the Torah had to allow slavery, sacrifices, an eye for an eye, and gave many hints that the laws needed to be changed. This is why the Torah stresses the goal of the change, "You should love the stranger as yourself," which means to treat others as you want to be treated yourself.

This law about strangers was repeated in the Torah and thereby emphasized thirty-six times. If I were a mystic, which I am not, I would point out that the Hebrew word for "life" is made up of two Hebrew letters, the letters chet and yud. The Hebrew alphabet was used to indicate numbers. The two letters number eight and ten. The statement about strangers being said thirty-six times is twice eighteen. Thus, if I were a mystic, I would have said the Torah emphasizes the rule about the proper treatment of strangers twice "life" to teach that this law is so significant that it impacts life in this world and the world to come. Although I am not a mystic, I agree, and so does the New Testament, that "Love your neighbor as yourself" and "Love the stranger as yourself" are fundamental principles of religion.

Fourth, since, as Buruma and others pointed out, virtually all "facts" about Spinoza's life are speculations, and Spinosa clearly never converted to Christianity, it is possible that he observed Jewish practices even after the herem.

Fifth, we should not dismiss the idea that Spinoza followed the teachings of Maimonides. For example, there is Spinoza's unclear famous statement that God is seen in nature. Based on Exodus 33:18-23, Maimonides taught us that nothing is known about God. All that we can know is what has been created. Although not full knowledge, we get some clues about God by studying the laws of nature and learning the sciences. (We can think about God being all-powerful, all-knowing, and the like even though we do not know because the ideas are not harmful, but we should remember that we do not know.) Thus, I am convinced Spinoza stated Maimonides' teaching in his own cryptic way.

Sixth, while I suggest that Spinoza accepted the views of Maimonides or most of them, and while I think Spinoza was brilliant, I do not believe he was as bright as Maimonides. While Maimonides was very practical, Spinoza was not, and while Maimonides devoted his life to helping fellow Jews, Spinoza secluded himself.

Simple Gimpl
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Restless Books
https://restlessbooks.org
9781632060389, $22.00

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Gimpl-Isaac-Bashevis-Singer/dp/1632060388

It is a pleasure to read the three versions of Simple Gimpl, a short tale by the Noble Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991): the original in Yiddish by Singer., the translation into English by Singer and David Stromberg, and the translation by Noble Prize-winning author Saul Bellow (1915-2005). Each of the three has subtle differences from the other two. The book includes Liana Finck's fanciful drawings and David Stromberg's Afterword. This 2022 tale edition was first published in 1945 as Gimpl tam.

I disagree with David Stromberg's analysis of the tale. He compares Gimpl with a story by the famous Hassidic Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1810), where the Rebbe's protagonist lost faith. Stromberg sees Singer's character, who is a fool, according to Bellow's translation, or a simpleton in Singer's, as a man who has faith. He is continually dupped because he is either a fool or simple. There is no indication that he has faith.

Gimpl is a baker with a low level of intelligence. He recognizes that he is continually fooled and that people laugh at his foolishness. They play tricks on him frequently. The story focuses on the worst trick. People persuade Gimpl that the town's pregnant prostitute is a virgin who is in love with him and wants to marry him. They claim that a youngster living with her is not her child but her brother. He believes them, goes to her, and proposes marriage.

She tells him she would only agree if she is given a dowry. When Gimpl says he understands that the bride's family provides the groom with the dowry, she persuades him that her situation is different. The town jokers gather enough money to satisfy the prostitute, and the two marry. However, whenever Gimpl tries to consummate their relationship, she finds an excuse, such as an illness. So, Gimpl has to sleep at the bakery.

Four months pass, she gives birth, insisting the child is Gimpl's. When Gimpl wonders how it is possible to bear a child after four months, she persuades him that it is possible. As time passes, Gimpl sees a man lying with her in her bed. She convinces him that he did not see what he thinks he saw. Later, she has another child. Gimpl sees his assistant baker in bed with her and is fooled again.

If David Stromberg is correct in saying that Singer's tale is teaching us about faith, Singer must say that having faith, relying on and acting on ideas that are contrary or not proven by logic, is foolish. People should not rely on faith. They should seek to improve their knowledge and intelligence. He would say that people who rely on faith are fools, and Soren Kierkegaard, who advised people to take a "leap of faith" whenever they face situations they cannot understand, are being duped. Rationalists would say this is sound philosophy.

Stromberg may be right in giving this tale this interpretation. But I doubt it.

Rather than comparing Gimpl with Nahman's tale, it should be compared with Isaac Leybush Peretz's (also known as I. L. Peretz, 1852-1915) magnificent Yiddish short story Bontshe Shveig, in English Bontshe the Silent. It is a sad story about a poor man and what happens to him after death. It is like Gimpl, a tale about people who suffer tragedies they cannot understand. It is a masterpiece. Bontshe did not understand what was happening to him. Even when he died, was in heaven, and was offered a reward for living a good life, he only asked for bread. The angels were embarrassed, and the devil roared with laughter. Peretz and not Singer should have been given the Noble Prize for literature for Bontshe the Silent, If Not Higher, and all the many others.
Gimpl should also be compared to Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Soul (1821-1880). Flaubert is widely recognized as a brilliant classical writer known for his masterpiece, Madam Bovary. Like Peretz, he can capture the essence of people and describe it interestingly. People should read classics such as Madam Bovary and this story; they are considered classics because they have withstood time and are enjoyed even today.

A Simple Soul is filled with pathos. Flaubert explores the tragic and sad situation of many simple people who lack sufficient intelligence to participate fully in life around them. They are ignored and secluded. They live an unrewarded life. Theologians address the issue: Why would God create such people? How does God relate to them?

It is about Felicite, a simple, uneducated woman with a low IQ, who is, like many simple people, perfect at what she does; she is the ideal maid, highly respected for her work, a maid everyone would be happy to have. We read about her first love and sympathize with her, how she saves her mistress but is then exploited, and her reactions to religion, upon which she relies but doesn't understand, like Gimpl and Bontshe. Flaubert describes her yearnings, fears, reactions to death, sublimated and highly unusual love for a parrot, and final unfortunate years.

Israel Drazin, Reviewer
www.booksnthoughts.com

Jack Mason's Bookshelf

On Farms and Rural Communities: An Agricultural Ethic for the Future
Jerry Apps
Fulcrum Publishing
www.fulcrumbooks.com
9781682754641, $16.95, PB, 156pp

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/on-farms-and-rural-communities-jerry-apps/1143667598

Synopsis: In a twenty-first-century American landscape marked by unprecedented challenges, the relevance of agriculture and farms has never been more apparent. From the unsettling shortages experienced during the pandemic to recent fluctuations in the cost and availability of basic grocery items due to historic droughts and climate impacts, Americans are being reminded daily of the importance of rural communities. And yet, the reality of these farm communities and farm policy is foreign to many Americans.

Written from the unique perspective of famed Wisconsin farmer, author and noted historian Jerry Apps, "On Farms and Rural Communities: An Agricultural Ethic For the Future" is a poignant testament to the enduring importance of this vital part of our nation and a call to shape agricultural policy for the present and future.

With the publiction of "On Farms and Rural Communities", Apps takes a comprehensive look at the historical, present-day, and future significance of rural communities. With insightful analysis of critical issues such as agriculture, land utilization, demographic shifts, and socioeconomic and cultural factors, Apps also highlights the urgent need to restore and better appreciate our rural communities. He urges the creation of an agricultural ethic that looks at the land and the people, celebrating all that has made American farming an essential part of our history while positioning it for a brighter future.

Critique: Simply stated, "On Farms and Rural Communities: An Agricultural Ethic for the Future" provides cogent insights and inspirational hope for a successful and prosperous agricultural future. Essential reading for all Americans with an interest in American agricultural policy, environmental science/policy, food science, and America's future as a democracy, "On Farms and Rural Communities: An Agricultural Ethic for the Future" is an essential and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, political activists, governmental policy makers, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "On Farms and Rural Communities: An Agricultural Ethic for the Future" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $14.99).

Editorial Note: Jerry Apps (https://jerryapps.com) is a former county extension agent and is now professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for thirty years. Today he works as a rural historian and full-time writer and is the author of many books on rural history, country life, and the environment. He has created six-hour-long documentaries with PBS Wisconsin, has won several awards for his writing, and won a regional Emmy Award for the TV program A Farm Winter.

Patagonia National Park: Chile
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, et al.
Patagonia
9781952338069, $50.00, PB, 276pp

https://www.amazon.com/Patagonia-National-Park-Chile-author/dp/1952338069

Synopsis: Centered on southern Chile's Chacabuco Valley, "Patagonia National Park: Chile" showcases the fascinating natural and cultural history of this amazing windswept region at the end of the world. The Pattagonia Natoinal Park exists today due to a committed team of conservationists who forged an innovative public-private partnership catalyzed by private philanthropy

In "Patagonia National Park: Chile", photographer Linde Waidhofer captures the region's singular beauty. For more than a decade Waidhofer witnessed this national park's founders (Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the late Douglas Tompkins, and the Tompkins Conservation team) as they shepherded the land's transition from former sheep ranch to world-class national park.

With contributions from former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, Yvon Chouinard, and others, Patagonia National Park: Chile invites readers to experience a place that is protected foremost as the home to its wild residents, and that offers human visitors a chance to reconnect with the land's natural rhythms.

Beyond this, the park's creation is a globally notable example of "rewilding", of helping nature heal, and ultimately of holding onto wild, radical hope for a future when all of life's diversity, including people, has freedom to flourish and continue to evolve.

Critique: This large format (10.9 x 1 x 10.9 inches, 2.95 pounds) paperback edition of "Patagonia National Park: Chile" is a profusely and beautifully illustrated volume that showcases what is arguably one of the finest national parks anywhere in the world. Ideal for the armchair traveler, "Patagonia National Park: Chile" is especially and unreservedly recommended for readers with an interest in Chilean history & travel.

Editorial Note #1: Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is cofounder and the current president of Tompkins Conservation. She was a key figure in the creation of Patagonia National Park in Chile and other conservation projects that have resulted in more than 12 million acres protected in new parks in Chile and Argentina. She holds several global leadership positions in conservation, including that of United Nations Protected Areas Ambassador.

Editorial Note #2: Michelle Bachelet is the first woman to have been elected president of Chile, a position she held for two terms, 2006-2010 and 2014-2018. She studied medicine before entering politics and was Minister of Health and Minister of Defense during the presidency of Ricardo Lagos. An advocate for the rights of women and the oppressed, in 2018 she was appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Editorial Note #3: Yvon Chouinard is an itinerant adventurer, passionate activist, and iconoclastic businessman. In 1973, he founded Patagonia, a mission-driven company known for its environmental and social initiatives. Cofounder of the Fair Labor Association, 1% for the Planet, Textile Exchange, The Conservation Alliance, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, he is a surfer, mountain climber, gardener, and falconer, and he is particularly fond of tenkara fly fishing.

Jack Mason
Reviewer

John Burroughs' Bookshelf

Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies
Juliana Cummings
Pen & Sword Books
c/o Casemate (US distribution)
www.casematepublishers.com
https://www.penandswordbooks.com
9781399012195, $49.95, HC, 256pp

https://www.amazon.com/Royal-Inbreeding-Other-Maladies-Intermarriage/dp/1399012193

Synopsis: When we think of kings and queens, we conjure up illusions of a magnificent kingdom where His and Her Majesties live in the lap of luxury and want for nothing. While this may be true, the lives of royals wasn't always as perfect Because with the history of royal families comes a long and twisted history of genetics and family intermarriage that is often swept aside by historians, novelists, and unknown to the general public.

With the publication of "Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies: A History of Royal Intermarriage and its Consequences", Juliana Cummings takes us through the complicated spider's web of royal marriages. She tells us of the atrocities of the Ptolemy Dynasty as they continued to marry brothers and sisters to fend off political outsiders. She tells us about the centuries of intermarriage in Europe's most prominent royal family, along with the devastating results that came with it.

We learn of the devastation of mental illness that befell reigning monarchs of The Hundred Years War and plagued George III of England, Juana of Castile and the Wittlebach Empire. Cummings will also tell us of the desperation that fell upon the Russian Royal Family as their only heir to the throne grew ill with hemophilia. She will then go into depth about the notorious Hapsburgs, the decades of physical and mental ailments that tormented them, and how their empire ended with the most inbred royal in history, Charles II of Spain.

After learning the heartwrenching stories of these great monarchs, you will find that you can't help but sympathize with them as you read about how genetics was the ultimate game-changer in most of the royal families known to history.

Critique: Informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of a three page Introduction, a six page listing of Works Cited, and a three page Bibliography, "Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies: A History of Royal Intermarriage and its Consequences" is an extraordinary, unique, and inherently fascinating study of the impact genetics had on the family lines of the aristocracy from Ancient Egypt down to the European Monarchies. A seminal, erudite, and ground-breaking study, "Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies" is an outstanding and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library Royal History/Biography collections.

Editorial Note: Juliana Cummings (https://thesavagerevolt.com) has been writing for close to thirty years. From her first publication in her junior high newspaper to her current writings on Tudor and Medieval history, writing has always been Juliana's passion in life. While she has always been interested in history, she discovered that her family lineage led to Tudor Royalty, which pursued her to learn even more. Through years of research, Juliana considers herself an expert on all things Tudor. Her interests also lie strongly with other aspects of medieval history, particularly the history of medicine and the macabre.

As well as actively writing her blog which focuses on the diary of a Lady in Waiting to Queen Katherine of Aragon, she continues to write for various publications in both the UK and US. Her work has been published in History is Now magazine, Matt's History Blog, A Tudor Writing Circle.com as well as Tudor Dynasty.com.

Under The Palms
Kaira Rouda
Thomas & Mercer
c/o Amazon Publishing
9781662511936, $16.99, PB, 269pp

https://www.amazon.com/Under-Palms-Kingsleys-Kaira-Rouda/dp/1662511930

Synopsis: Under the direction of the Kingsleys' new president, Paige, the family has gathered for a weekend retreat at a luxurious Laguna Beach resort.

Still clinging to the hope of succession are the sons of Richard Kingsley, the family patriarch and CEO: John, the oldest, who's clawed his way back from a dark tragedy, and Paige's estranged husband, Ted, the golden boy.

When Richard's ex and his wayward daughter join the fray, Paige finds herself with two fast allies. They know a secret that could shatter the family legacy. Call it leverage, call it revenge, the Kingsley women believe they have the upper hand.

But as the power games begin, greater threats than the howling Santa Ana winds are coming. Because this weekend, amid so much greed and betrayal, no Kingsley is safe. It's family. Watch your back.

Critique: Murder, psychological suspense, and a compulsive thriller, "Under The Palms" by Kaira Rouda is a compelling and fun read from start to finish that will have a special appeal to fans of family dynasty conflicts. Highly recommended for community library Contemporary Mystery/Suspense collections, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of the growing legions of Kaira Rouda fans that "Under The Palms" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $4.99).

Editorial Note: Kaira Rouda (www.KairaRouda.com) is an author of contemporary fiction that explores what goes on beneath the surface of seemingly perfect lives. Her domestic suspense novels include Best Day Ever, The Favorite Daughter, All the Difference, The Next Wife, Somebody's Home, The Widow, and Beneath the Surface, the first book in the Kingsleys series. She is a founding member of the Killer Author Club, supporting other suspense and mystery authors and can be followed on: Instagram: @kairarouda, Facebook: @kairaroudabooks, TikTok: @kairaroudabooks, and Pinterest: @kairarouda

John Burroughs
Reviewer

Julie Summers' Bookshelf

Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis
Karyne E. Messina
Pi Press
9781736238813, $19.99, PB, 134pp

https://www.amazon.com/Barbie-Great-American-Identity-Crisis/dp/1736238817

Synopsis: With the publication of "Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis: The Unfortunate Reality of a Nation Plagued by Racism, Patriarchy, and Stark Hypocrisy" author Karyne E. Messina has not merely written a book about women in today's society but has issued a call to action-a rallying cry for societal introspection and transformation.

With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Dr. Messina offers a roadmap for reclaiming our integrity and forging a more just and equitable future. Engaging, insightful, and indispensable, "Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis" must be considered essential reading for anyone invested in the fate of our nation and the preservation of our collective identity.

In "Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis", Dr. Messina has ingeniously used the Barbie doll phenomena to symbolize the multifaceted identity crisis gripping America. Barbie's transformation from Lilli reflects the complexities of stolen identity and cultural appropriation, mirroring the broader societal struggle with individual and national identity.

Just as Mattel co-opted Barbie's identity from a German toymaker, America grapples with a loss of authenticity and integrity in its own narrative.

Dr. Messina's exploration of Barbie's evolution serves as a poignant allegory for the broader issues at play, inviting readers to contemplate the profound implications of identity theft and cultural commodification.

In essence, Barbie is our metaphorical lodestar, guiding readers through the labyrinthine complexities of America's identity crisis. Through Barbie's lens, Dr. Messina illuminates the interconnectedness of personal and collective identity formation, shedding light on how societal pressures and external influences shape our sense of self and continue to perpetuate racism and patriarchal structures-that can hamper our ability to build an authentic sense of community free of tribal isolationism.

Critique: An extraordinary study, "Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis: The Unfortunate Reality of a Nation Plagued by Racism, Patriarchy, and Stark Hypocrisy" by Dr. Karyn Messina is a seminal and ground-breaking work that is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Contemporary Women's Issues and supplemental Psychology/Counseling curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, women's rights political activists, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "Barie and the Great American Identity Crisis" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $11.99).

Editorial Note: Karyne E. Messina (www.drkarynemessina.com) is a psychoanalyst, author, and podcast host who focuses on promoting the development of the mind and human relationships while also advancing scholarly and social progress.

Mighty Mindsets
Niamh Doyle, author
Carol Betera, illustrator
Little Island Books
https://www.littleisland.ie
9781912417865, $12.99, PB, 64pp

https://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Mindsets/dp/1912417863

Synopsis: Has your child ever said "I can't do this" or "I'm not good at that"? Do they find it hard to see the good in themselves? Do they feel overwhelmed at times? Children can struggle with life's challenges, big and small.

Written in a child-friendly way, featuring practical tools they can use every day, "Mighty Mindsets: How mindfulness can help your child with life's ups and downs" by author Niamh Doyle and artist/illustrator Carol Betera will help your child ages 5-8 to build new habits and ways of thinking, understand their emotions, and become happier and more resilient.

We know as adults that mindfulness can help us and it will help our children to live in the moment and calm our minds.

"Mighty Mindfulness" addresses such questions and issues as: What exactly is mindfulness? Why does it make it easier to deal with whatever life throws at us? How does your brain work, and what does it have to do with moods? Why do you sometimes feel anxious, cross or afraid, and what can you do about it? How can breathing, looking at a snowglobe, or changing what the voice inside you says, help you feel better?

When we tell ourselves negative stories - like "I'm not good at maths" - it becomes harder to learn. But if we can change our mindset - "I'm not good at maths yet" - we help our brains to learn. And "Mighty Mindsets" is a key to our understanding all this and teach it to our children.

Critique: Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Mighty Mindsets: How mindfulness can help your child with life's ups and downs" is especially and unreservedly recommended for family, elementary school, family counseling centers, and community library Life Lessons/Life Skills and Emotions/Feeling collections and reading lists.

Editorial Note: Niamh Doyle is a writer living in the West of Ireland with her family. "Mighty Mindsets" is her first book and is informed by years of teaching experience in both mainstream and special education schools. Niamh has an abiding interest in well-being and in how our daily lives can improve with a little awareness of how our minds work.

Best of Reader's Digest: Volume 5
Reader's Digest Editorial Staff
Reader's Digest Trade Publishing
c/o Trusted Media Brands
https://www.trustedmediabrands.com
9798889770299, $24.99, HC, 288pp

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Readers-Digest-Heartwarming-Photographs/dp/B0CM27XRM3

Synopsis: Featuring the Readers Digest magazine's best-of-the-best articles, interviews, cartoons, book excerpts, stories and photography, "The Best of Reader's Digest: Volume 5": is an informative and entertaining collection that will be appreciated for generations of readers.

"The Best of Reader's Digest: Volume 5 showcases a timeless celebration of American culture ranging from real-life tales of adventure and survival to delightful narratives of love and kindness. This all-new fifth edition of "The Best of Reader's Digest" is certain to incite lively discussions and smiles.

Critique: "The Best of Reader's Digest, Volume 5: Heartwarming Stories, Dramatic Tales, Hilarious Cartoons, and Timeless Photographs" is a fun and informative read from start to finish. While also available for personal reading lists in a digital book format (Kindle, $13.99), "The Best of Reader's Digest: Volume 5" is unreservedly recommended for school and community collections.

Editorial Note: The Reader's Digest (www.rd.com) simplifies and enriches lives by discovering and sharing fascinating stories, interesting ideas and exceptional experiences in addition to advice on health, home, family, food and finance. Reader's Digest originated content is delivered in multi-platforms including print, digital, books, and home entertainment products.

On My Way Back to You
Sarah Cart
Forefront Books
https://www.forefrontbooks.com
9781637632512, $26.00, HC, 304pp

https://www.amazon.com/My-Way-Back-You-Catastrophic/dp/1637632517

Synopsis: Throughout her 42-year marriage, writer Sarah Cart had enjoyed a life of "gloriously controlled chaos" as she and her husband, Ben, a successful entrepreneur and seasoned outdoorsman, embarked on numerous adventures with their four active sons. Then the unthinkable happened.

In suspenseful and heartrending detail, Cart shares how Ben developed an incurable autoimmune condition that was manageable and under control one minute and threatened to kill him the next, landing him in the ICU as the Covid pandemic closed the world down. Thrust into the role of nurse and caregiver, Sarah joined the ranks of 39 million Americans who champion and care for an ailing loved one.

In addition to confronting doubts, fears, and endless setbacks, aggravations, and red tape, she also had to consent to daunting procedures on Ben's behalf. Too, there were the months-long Covid-era restrictions on hospital visitations and the post-surgery snafus with home healthcare personnel. Thank goodness for the heartfelt communiques with family and friends, all of which reflect the faith, fortitude, grit, and grace that sustained her.

While readers will identify with Sarah's anxieties and be moved by hers and Ben's strength, they will also learn the questions to ask, the notes to take, the signs to never overlook, and the self-care necessary should they ever find themselves in her shoes.

Critique: Candid, heartfelt, and ultimately inspiring, "On My Way Back to You: One Couple's Journey through Catastrophic Illness to Healing and Hope" by Sarah Cart is a profoundly fascinating account of one couple's medical odyssey and showcases the patience, determination, and love that ultimately helped them to find their way back to one another. A story of triumph over tragedy, "On My Way Back to You" is an expressly recommended pick for community and college/university library family medically oriented memoir collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "On My Way Back to You" is also readily available from Forefront Books in a digital book format (Kindle, $13.99).

Editorial Note: Sarah Cart (www.onmywaybacktoyou.com) wrote as a freelancer for multiple local publications while she and her husband, Ben, raised four sons in northeastern Ohio. Upon becoming empty nesters, the two moved to the Florida Keys, but they returned every summer to the Pennsylvania Poconos, where each had lifelong family connections. Then came Covid. The pandemic, combined with Ben's health issues, necessitated their sheltering in place in Florida for the entirety of 2020. In the wake of Ben's undergoing miraculous lifesaving measures, they have been afforded the unanticipated gift of a future and, more than ever before, relish time spent with family and friends.

Julie Summers
Reviewer

Laurie Nguyen's Bookshelf

I Love My Love
Reyna Biddy
Andrews McMeel Publishing
https://publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com
9781449486761, $14.99 paperback, $9.99 ebook

https://www.amazon.com/I-Love-My-Reyna-Biddy/dp/1449486762

I Love My Love by Reyna Biddy is a collection of poetry that delves into Biddy's complicated relationship with her parents' views on love, and how she struggles to heal from those paradigms, regardless of their intentions. The collection has three interludes. Her mother's interlude is filled with regrets and desperation, pleading for her daughter to understand how lethal love can be. Her father's interlude, on the other hand, tries to justify his contempt for his heart, masking his insecurities by playing the part of a charismatic lover, only to fall short of giving Biddy what she actually needed. Finally, there's Biddy's interlude, a storm of awkward confusions, overwhelming emotions, and chaotic stories that, while may be painful to learn, make her who she is.

I was enthralled by how Biddy incorporates her parents into her dialogue, creating guidelines on how to approach romance in general. She glides through her mother's internal anguish through phrases such as "I should have loved you less" and "he loves me enough to look beyond my flaws, but will never kiss me with love handles and morning breath." Moreover, when Biddy writes the letter she wishes her mother could write to her, she reflects on all the ways her mother could have comforted her. It's a heartbreaking, universal truth to know that we, as women, yearn for our mother's protective embraces, even though they're just as helpless as us.

Her father has the same struggles, although instead of despair, she learns to be harsh and cruel towards the men who have seemingly broken her. While his attempts at playing the womanizing entertainer have fallen flat, Biddy overcompensates by rejecting her lovers altogether. For instance, in the poem ending, Biddy goes on to cut herself off from her ex-lover, screaming boldly, "if it were up to me, we would have been, but I've decided I don't want to be yours anymore." For all the times Biddy was taken for granted, the moment a man hears those words, he will probably fall to his knees and beg her to come back.

But despite her newfound confidence, I'm happy that Biddy can admit she has relapses. Her "I" shows that on some days, she may feel strong, a legacy of women encouraging her from behind, while on other days she feels small, shy, and introverted to the extreme through, again, the letter "i." Not to mention times when she gives into the idea of love like an addict, possibly around 3:00 AM when her inner demons come knocking on her door. Even so, in the words of Ruby Dhal, healing is not linear. We might remember a heartbreak fondly, with anger, with sadness, or anything at all. It is what it is, and that's okay. It reminds me of a saying we counselors use a lot, that it's okay to be depressed, to have anxiety, to just need to take a break from the world and everything in it. Life is stressful enough, and sometimes we do need a break.

I feel that Biddy expertly wove together a picture that illustrates how you can heal from your parents' pain. Although they are an inextricable part of your history, you still have your identity to treasure. And perhaps people learn from Biddy things she didn't realize she was preaching. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to someone who wanted to help a friend find a haven for the night; more specifically, they needed a list of domestic violence shelters that would cater to those experiencing intimate partner violence. I'd written those resources down and gave them to this individual. Ironically enough, the page had Biddy's contact information on it. It's interesting how a poet who unapologetically enlivens the world with her authentic self is helping other women do the same, however indirectly it may seem.

Because of this, I would give this collection a 5 out of 5 stars and recommend it to fans of Trista Matter and Rose Brik.

Laurie Nguyen, Reviewer
http://alighthouseinthedark.home.blog

Margaret Lane's Bookshelf

RHS Collage the Botanical World
Francis Lincoln
The Royal Horticultural Society
c/o Quarto Publishing Group USA
www.quartoknows.com
9780711293311, $19.99, PB, 192pp

https://www.amazon.com/RHS-Collage-Botanical-World-Fantastic/dp/0711293317

Synopsis: Bring the beautiful botanical to your collages with "RHS Collage the Botanical World: 1,000+ Fantastic & Floral Images to Cut Out & Collage", a vibrant collection of nature images, ready to cut and stick across any page. Or roam wild and let your creativity bloom - design anything from birthday cards, to wall art, to notebook covers.

Discover a world of floral fun and add the beauty of nature to your collage with this crafty collection of 1000 images from The Royal Horticultural Society. Choose a background image in various different sizes from the book (or simply combine images to create a new one) then just grab scissors and glue and begin assembling your own unique artwork.

Whether you're an experienced artist, or you're collaging for the very first time, "RHS Collage the Botanical World" is a full and flourishing sourcebook that will add an inspired touch of the botanical to your creation.

Critique: A stunning collection of 1000 museum quality images from the Royal Horticultural Society archives, this large format (9.25 x 0.6 x 11.65 inches) paperback edition of "RHS Collage the Botanical World" showcases: Vintage artwork; Birds, insects, and animals; Fruits and vegetables; Flowers, leaves, and other botanical illustrations . Of special note is the inclusion of inspirational tips and insights on successful collaging from leading collagist Katy McNulty (@collage.garden)

Made for everyone at any age, and ranging from the absolute beginner to the experienced collagist, "RHS Collage The Botanical World" is unreservedly recommended for personal and professional flower arranging, gardening designing, and mixed-media craft project selections.

Editorial Note: The Royal Horticultural Society (www.rhs.org.uk) was founded in 1804 and has established itself as the UK's leading gardening charity, with the aim of inspiring passion and excellence in the science, art and practice of horticulture. The world-famous RHS Lindley Library holds unique collections of early printed books on gardening, botanical art and photographs.

Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines
Daniel E. Bender and Simone Cinotto, editors
University of Toronto Press
www.utppublishing.com
9781487509026, $80.00, HC, 352pp

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/food-mobilities-daniel-e-bender/1142545886

Synopsis: Bringing together multidisciplinary scholars from the growing discipline of food studies, "Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines", collaboratively compiled and co-edited by academicians Daniel E. Bender and Simone Cinotto, examines food provisioning and the food cultures of the world, historically and in contemporary times.

This seminal and ground-breaking collection of 15 articulate contributions offers a range of fascinating case studies, including explorations of Italian food in colonial Ethiopia, traditional Cornish pasties in Mexico, migrant community gardeners in Toronto, and beer all around the world.

In exploring the origins of the contemporary global food system and how we cook and eat today, "Food Mobilities" also uncovers the local and global circulation of food, ingredients, cooks, commodities, labour, and knowledge.

Critique: A truly exceptional and impressively organized volume of collective scholarship, "Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines" will be of special and particular interest to students of gastronomic history. While unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library collections and supplemental Food Science curriculum studies lists, it should be noted that "Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines" is also readily available from the University of Toronto Press in a paperback edition (9781487526498, $24.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $18.99).

Editorial Note #1: Daniel E. Bender is Canada Research Chair in Food and Culture, professor of food studies and history, and director of the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto.

Editorial Note #2: Simone Cinotto is an associate professor of modern history and director of the Master of Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.

The Handmade Spa
Search Press Ltd.
https://www.searchpress.com

Search Press is a premier supplier of arts & crafts books in the UK. They publish beautiful and practical books that delight and instruct artists and crafters of all skill levels the world over. A two title series, "The Handmade Spa" will prove to be of particular interest DIY eco-friendly products for personal hygiene and self-care.

"Natural Cosmetics" (9781800922112, $16.95 HC, $12.49 Kindle, 80pp)

https://www.amazon.com/Handmade-Spa-Cosmetics-yourself-eco-friendly/dp/1800922116

Unlock the secrets of radiant, healthy skin with The Handmade Spa: Natural Cosmetics. This comprehensive DIY instructional guide and 'how to' manual, written by Sara Dumenil, the founder of French skincare company Formule Beaute, is a treasure trove of inspiration for anyone looking to create their own customized beauty products.

Making your own natural beauty products is not only empowering but also ensures that you have control over what goes onto your skin. With this guide in hand, you'll learn the art of crafting 100%-natural beauty products that are tailored to your body:

Determine your skin type using 2 questionnaires,
Choose the right ingredients adapted to your needs,
Personalize the recipes according to your desires and your needs.

Featuring 20 carefully curated recipes, this book covers a wide range of beauty essentials that you commonly find in your bathroom. From facial cleansers, lotions, and moisturizers to body creams, scrubs and even personal hygiene products like toothpaste and deodorant, you'll have all the tools you need to glow up your natural beauty routine. The recipe preparation time is short, from 5 to 20 minutes depending on the recipe.

With practical advice on preserving your handmade products, tips on maintaining hygiene throughout the process and precautions for those with sensitive skin, "Natural Cosmetics" ensures a safe and enjoyable experience and a smooth journey into the world of natural beauty.

"Natural Soaps" (9781800922105, $16.95 HC, $12.48 Kindle, 80pp)

https://www.amazon.com/Handmade-Spa-Natural-yourself-eco-friendly/dp/1800922108

Step into the world of soap making with "Natural Soaps" -- a comprehensive guide, written by artisanal soap-maker, Amelie Boue, founder of the French soap company Savon en Bullant.

Whether you're a seasoned soap maker or a complete beginner, Amelie's expertise and passion will provide you with invaluable knowledge and inspiration to create stunning and sustainable soaps to keep or to gift.

Delve into the science behind soap making and gain a deep understanding of the chemistry involved. Learn about the properties of different oils and additives and discover how to formulate recipes that result in 16 luxurious, skin-friendly soaps.

With Amelie's expert guidance, you'll gain confidence in experimenting with ingredients and creating blends that are explicitly tailored to your preferences. Ingredients include almond, peppermint, lavender, honey, beeswax -- even coffee; ensuring that bath time becomes an olfactory treat!

Unleash your creativity and discover various techniques for swirling, layering and moulding soaps, allowing you to craft stunning designs that make each bar a work of art. With detailed step-by-step instructions, accompanied by beautiful photography, you'll be able to follow along easily and make soaps that are as visually captivating as they are nourishing.

Critique: Beautifully illustrated throughout in full color, thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation, both "Natural Cosmetics" and "Natural Soaps" comprising The Handmade Spa series from Search Press are especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library naturopathic crafts collections.

Editorial Note #1: Sara Dumenil is a naturopathic expert specializing in natural cosmetology, Sara Dumenil launched the Formule beaute brand in France in 2016, with a mission to make homemade cosmetics accessible to everyone. Sara is dedicated to offering a solution for those who seek healthier alternatives to conventional skincare products and aspire to create their own natural skincare formulations. Sara lives in a small city outside Paris, France.

Editorial Note #2: Amelie Boue is a naturopathic expert specializing in natural cosmetology, Sara Dumenil launched the Formule beaute brand in France in 2016, with a mission to make homemade cosmetics accessible to everyone. Sara is dedicated to offering a solution for those who seek healthier alternatives to conventional skincare products and aspire to create their own natural skincare formulations. Sara lives in a small city outside Paris, France.

Margaret Lane
Reviewer

Mark Walker's Bookshelf

Kidnapped to the Underworld
Victor Montejo, author
Sean Sell, translator
University of Arizona Press
https://uapress.arizona.edu
9780816552597, $24.95

It seems appropriate that this book was published on the 500th anniversary of Spaniard Alvarado's conquering of the Maya in 1524 - making this a time to reflect on the impact it had on the Maya, one of the great civilizations of the Hemisphere. Victor Montejo is a respected Mayan intellectual and activist. He believes that racism in Guatemala is best understood as a system originating in the inequality established by the Spanish conquest. The Spaniards viewed the indigenous peoples as barbarians who needed to be controlled and civilized.

Despite the Spaniards' relentless efforts to alter and eradicate numerous Maya traditions and values, a significant number have managed to endure to this day. Montejo, a staunch defender of Mayan values, has chosen to resurrect his grandfather's near-death experience and epic journey through the Mayan underworld, a tale passed down to him by his mother. This act of preservation is a testament to the unwavering resilience of the Maya culture.

The book defies conventional categorizations, transcending the boundaries of a family history, a religious testimony, a political allegory, and a work of sacred literature. Regardless of the genre one may assign, the book stands as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling and traditions. Montejo, as a student, drew inspiration from the Mayan religious text, the Popol Vuh, the sacred narrative of the K'iche people, and Dante's Divine Comedy, elements of which have informed this unique blend of Catholic morality and Mesoamerican mythology.

Two guides and protectors took his grandfather to witness the suffering of the underworld, similar to Virgil rescuing Dante from the Valley of Pain to the eternal realms of suffering and saved souls. According to Montejo, his grandfather's vision reflected changes in the abstract conceptions that Indigenous people have about eternal values, as well as heaven and hell. However, the story also reflects the worldview and things that have special meaning for the Maya community.

Montejo makes the journey through Xiwb'alb'a, the dwelling place of the lords, even more personal by telling the story in first person. One of the stops during the trip was characterized by raucous music where drunks beat each other violently "like crazed, furious madmen. All were unrecognizable, as their faces and bodies were swollen from so much abuse. They fell and got back up, brutalized by the liquor they consumed without ceasing." Alcoholism has and still does take a tremendous toll on the health of Mayan communities.

Similar stories of suffering included women who were unfaithful to their husbands and prostitutes, those who mistreated their horses as well as those who beat their dogs. In a revealing encounter during his journey, Antonio meets his father, who reveals the sorrow he has experienced in his life of poverty. "He worried that his children would continue to be enslaved by the forced labor that the governments ordered in those decades, keeping the Indigenous people in poverty."

Possibly, the difference between the worldview of Dante's Divine Comedy and the Maya Worldview revealed in this book is their choice of villains and evil. Dante's greatest traitors of human history, chewed on by Lucifer's three mouths, were the betrayers of Caesar, Brutus Cassius, and Judas from biblical history. For the Mayas, this dubious designation went to the disgraced Catholic Priest Diego de Landa.

He came from the other side of the sea, not long ago, and burned and destroyed all the writings, histories, and literature of our people. He is the one who left our people orphans of wisdom when we could no longer use our way of writing... Instead of turning away from his true mission as a frier and bishop recognizing the knowledge and values of our peoples, he discredited and rejected them, destroying the wisdom of our ancestors...

Not surprisingly, the individual boiling in blood in the depths of Xiwb'alb'a was Pedro Alvardo, the conquistador of much of Central America.

This was the conqueror who made thousands suffer and endure what was called the war of conquest. His cruelty was that of a man possessed, and he caused intense pain and misery to the people he slaughtered; this was now the cause of his bloody ordeal. Here, then, were the most violent and hateful conquerors and genocides of all time...

At the end of the book, Montejo provides several reasons it is relevant today: " It shows us the deep religiosity of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala... In addition, we can affirm that there are many similarities between the Catholic religion and Maya spirituality... "I'd add two more reasons.

In March of 2024, the first hearing of the Oral and Public Debate was held against former General Benedicto Lucas Garcia for the crimes of genocide, sexual violence, and crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship of his brother Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982). The former President of Guatemala, General Rios Montt, was already convicted of genocide and given 80 years in prison, although he died before the sentence could be carried out. Over 200,000 Guatemalans lost their lives during the ten-year Civil War, the majority at the hands of the Guatemalan armed forces, trained and supported by the United States.

As a surprise to many, Bernardo Arevalo of the little-known "Seeds Party," who ran on a platform to combat corruption, is the new President of Guatemala. Although his first hundred days brought some change and hope, he still didn't name one Maya member to his cabinet. This country's population is still 46% Indigenous, yet only 8 of 106 congressional delegates were Mayan.

I was introduced to Montejo over twenty years ago when I read his humorous, satirical story of a North American adventurer mistakenly identified as the new Catholic priest by the local population of a small village in the highlands of Guatemala, The Adventures of Mr. Puttison.
I've reviewed seven of his twenty-plus books over the years and got to know him while researching a documentary I collaborated on about the impact of migration on Mayan communities, "Guatemala: Trouble in the Highlands."

Our production team was interested in Professor Montejo because we felt Mayan intellectuals like him would best tell the story of the challenges that impact the Mayan community, particularly endemic racism, political and economic inequalities, and historical realities that have not changed much in over 500 years.

My respect and appreciation for his writing and activism grew, and eventually, I profiled him as one of my "Extraordinary Lives" in my forthcoming book, The Guatemala Reader.

About the Author

Victor Montejo is professor emeritus of Native American studies at the University of California, Davis. His previous books include Popol Vuh: A Sacred Book of the Maya; Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership; El Q'anil: Man of Lightning; Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History; and Mayalogue: An Interactionist Theory of Indigenous Cultures.

Sean S. Sell is co-editor and translator of Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories and Ch'ayemal nich'nabiletik / Los hijos errantes / The Errant Children: A Trilingual Edition. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Davis, where he is currently a professor.

Mark D. Walker, Reviewer
www.MillionMileWalker.com

Michael Carson's Bookshelf

Hall of Mirrors
John Copenhaver
Pegasus Crime
c/o Pegasus Books
www.pegasusbooks.com
9781639366507, $27.95, HC, 336pp

https://www.amazon.com/Hall-Mirrors-Nightingale-Philippa-Mystery/dp/1639366504

Synopsis: In May 1954, Lionel Kane witnesses his apartment engulfed in flames with his lover and writing partner, Roger Raymond, inside. Police declare it a suicide due to gas ignition, but Lionel refuses to believe Roger was suicidal.

A month earlier, Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson (the tenacious and troubled heroines from author John Copenhaver's novel "The Savage Kind") attend a lecture by Roger and, being eager fans, befriend him. He has just been fired from his day job at the State Department, another victim of the Lavender Scare, an anti-gay crusade led by figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, claiming hom*osexuals are security risks. Little do Judy and Philippa know, but their obsessive manhunt of the past several years has fueled the flames of his dismissal.

They have been tracking their old enemy Adrian Bogdan, a spy and vicious serial killer protected by powerful forces in the government. He's on the rampage again, and the police are ignoring his crimes. Frustrated, they send their research to the media and their favorite mystery writer anonymously, hoping to inspire someone, somehow, to publish on the crimes -- anything to draw Bogdan out. But has their persistence brought deadly forces to the writing team behind their most beloved books?

In the wake of Roger's death, Lionel searches for clues, but Judy and Philippa threaten his quest, concealing dark secrets of their own. As the crimes of the past and present converge, danger mounts, and the characters race to uncover the truth, even if it means bending their moral boundaries to stop a killer.

Critique: Once again, with the publication of "Hall of Mirrors", award-winning novelist John Copenhaver demonstrates his storytelling mastery of the amateur sleuth, suspense thriller, mystery genre. A fun read from start to finish for dedicated fans of deftly crafted and vividly compelling mysteries, "Hall of Mirrors" is especially and unreservedly recommended for community library Mystery/Suspense collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Hall of Mirrors" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $27.95).

Editorial Note: John Copenhaver (https://johncopenhaver.com) won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery for Dodging and Burning and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best Mystery for The Savage Kind. He is a co-founder of Queer Crime Writers and an at-large board member of Mystery Writers of America. He cohosts on the House of Mystery Radio Show. He is also a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska's Low-Residency MFA program and teaches at VCU in Richmond, VA.

Requiem for a Mouse
Miranda James
Berkley Books
c/o Penguin/Random House
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
9780593199527, $29.00, HC, 288pp

https://www.amazon.com/Requiem-Mouse-Cat-Stacks-Mystery/dp/0593199529

Synopsis: At last, Charlie and Helen Louise's wedding is only a month away. They're busy preparing for the big day, and the last thing Charlie needs is a new mystery to solve.

Enter Tara Martin, a shy, peculiar woman who has recently started working part-time at Helen Louise's bistro and helping Charlie in the archive. Tara isn't exactly friendly and she has an angry outburst at the library that leaves Charlie baffled. And then she abruptly leaves a catered housewarming party Charlie's son Sean is throwing to celebrate his new home in the middle of her work shift. Before ducking out of the party, Tara looked terrified and Charlie wonders if she's deliberately trying to escape notice. Is she hiding from someone?

When Tara is viciously attacked and lands in the hospital, Charlie knows his instincts were correct: Tara was in trouble and someone was after her. With the help of his much beloved cat, Diesel, Charlie digs deeper, and discovers shocking glimpses into Tara's past that they could never have predicted. Will they catch the villain before Charlie's own happily ever after with Helen Louise is ruined?

Critique: With the publication ofk "Requiem For A Mouse", novelist Miranda James continues to show she continues to be at the top of her game when it comes to writing cozy mysteries. Another fun read from start to finish, once again librarian Charlie Harris and his ever-intuitive feline friend Diesel must catch a killer in a deadly game of cat and mouse where no one is who they seem to be. Certain to be a popular pick for community library Mystery/Suspense collections, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of all dedicated cozy mystery fans that "Requiem For A Mouse" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $14.99).

Editorial Note: Miranda James is the author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries and the Southern Ladies Mysteries series. (https://cozy-mystery.com/miranda-james.html)

Michael J. Carson
Reviewer

Robin Friedman's Bookshelf

Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation
Daniel Matt, author
Yale University Press
http://www.yalebooks.yale.edu
9780300242706, $26.00 hardcover

https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Elijah-Prophet-Transformation-Jewish/dp/0300242700

A Visit To Elijah

I read this book, "Becoming Elijah: Prophet of Transformation" (2022) in preparation for Passover. As the book points out, most Jews know Elijah primarily through experiences of the seder, in which the door is opened and a cup of wine offered to Elijah, usually near the conclusion of the service. The book discusses in detail that ritual and other rituals in Jewish life in which Elijah partakes. The book includes a telling story about Elijah and the seder told by a Hasidic Rebbe. At a seder, the Rebbe's disciples were disappointed when Elijah failed to appear when the door was opened. When they told the Rebbe, the Rebbe said "Fools! Do you think Elijah the prophet enters through the door? He enters through the heart." (p. 134)

Daniel Matt, the author of "Becoming Elijah" is a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, who has translated and annotated a celebrated nine-volume work, "The Zohar: Pritzker Edition". His book, is part of a series Part of a series called "Jewish Lives" described as a "prizewinning series of interpretive biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity". "Becoming Elijah" received the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Book Prize for 2022.

Matt explores this legendary Jewish prophet through a variety of voices and sources. The book is both a history of Elijah and a reflection about him, which invites the reader to think further about Elijah's continued significance. The book is short but needs slow reading because of the many references and quotations from Jewish and other sources. It includes detailed footnotes together with a lengthy bibliography.

Matt begins with a study of Elijah in the biblical Book of Kings which shows the prophet as a miracle worker, a zealot, a rebuker of kings and as an uncompromising voice for the existence of the Jewish God and of no other gods. He calls the Israelites from idolatry to repentance and worship of God. Elijah is carried to heaven in a chariot and perhaps never died. In the Jewish commentaries and in the Talmud, Elijah gradually changes character as compassion gradually takes precedence over zealotry. Elijah becomes a teacher and appears to sages and other sincere seekers explaining the texts and the religious life.

Matt then explores Elijah in the Jewish mystical texts which have formed the heart of his scholarly work. He discusses how Elijah appears in Jewish Kabbalism and, in particular, in the Zohar. He develops the concept of "Gillui Eliyahu" or Elijah as a mystical figure, more an angel than a human being, who both was faithful to the tradition and also took it in new directions with a focus on internalized spirituality. The Kabbalistic Elijah is the key to this volume. Subsequent chapters explore Elijah's influence in Christianity and Islam, especially in the mystical traditions of these daughters of Judaism. Matt then explores the role Elijah plays in Jewish ritual, including the Passover, circumcision, and the Havdalah prayer recited at the conclusion of Sabbath.

The book's final chapter "Becoming Elijah" takes the book out of the realm of historical summary and invites the reader to consider Elijah for oneself and to participate in the continuing growth and understanding of Elijah's mission. Matt notes that in the Bible, Elijah tended to see everything "in terms of black and white" where in later developments Elijah "realizes that conflicting views can sometimes be equally true." Elijah works to "reveal the unity within the contradictions of tradition." (p. 150) Matt sees the significance of Elijah in individual seeking and in helping the downtrodden and neglected. He writes:

"Elijah provides a human face for the transcendent, inviting seekers to learn the unknown. Over the ages, what sages and mystics discovered, he authenticated for them and their circles by his very presence, by his stature as vigilant defender of the faith and guarantor of tradition. If what they absorbed through Elijah seemed startlingly new, he validated it as simultaneoulsy ancient, thereby revitalizing Judaism. Especially in Kabbalah, gillui Eliyyahu (an epiphany of Elijah) signals a shift in religious understanding." (p. 154)

It was valuable for me to be reminded of Jewish mysticism and the spritual search through Elijah as developed in Matt's book. I may not have received Elijah, but perhaps I was able to visit him through this book. The book helped me understand the upcoming Passover holiday. It may help readers explore the nature of spiritual search.

Creatures of Passage
Morowa Yejide, author
Akashic Books, LTD
https://www,akashicbooks.com
9781617758768, $41.95 hc

https://www.amazon.com/Creatures-Passage-Morowa-Yejid%C3%A9/dp/1617758760

Washington, D.C.'s Wild Child

Although many novels have been written about political life and power in Washington, D.C., relatively few explore everyday urban life in the city and fewer still explore the neighborhood of Anacostia. Anacostia is the Southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C. located east of the river that bears its name. Once a working-class community, Anacostia's white population had fled by the 1960s and the area became an under-developed, poverty and crime-ridden African American community. Washington, D.C. native Morowa Yejide's "Creatures of Passage" (2021) is the only novel I know set in Anacostia; and, for that reason, alone, is of interest. Yejide's novel is not merely a naturalistic portrayal of the community; instead it is a work of imagination which combines a feel for Anacostia and its people with a sense of mystery and myth. The book is in a style that is sometimes called magical realism.

The writing in "Creatures of Passage" is lyrical and intense. With all its mystical elements, the book is at its best in its descriptions of Anacostia and its people. For readers unfamiliar with Anacostia, here is Yejide's depiction at the outset of her novel in a manner that captures as well the strange setting of the story.

"In 1977, Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire. It was the capital's wild child east of a river that bore its name, a place where much was yet discovered. Anything was possible in that easternmost quadrant, where all things lived and died on the edge of time and space and meaning. It was a realm of contradictions, an undulating landscape of pristine land and dirty water, of breathtaking hills and decimated valleys. Crab apples and cherry trees floursihed in the yards of abandoned houses and centuries-old oaks flanked run-down corner stores. Pushers stood watch for cars when little kids were crossing the street, and junkies held doors open for old women. .... And the damnation and glory of man was forever intertwined in Anacostia, since all who lived there were faced with the unconquerable presence of both."

The characters in this story have Anacostia in their bones. Nephthys Kinwell, 67, is an alcoholic taxi driver who drives her mysterious characters through D.C. and Anacostia streets in search of themselves. In r twin brother, Osiris, was brutally murdered and his body dumped in the Anacostia River. He figures in the story during his life and as a ghost after his death. Dash, age 10, speaks to the supernatural "River Man" at the Anacostia River and lives in fear after stumbling upon a child molester. Dash's mother, Amber, lives in a hut near the River and has strange powers in predicting upcoming deaths in the community.

The landmarks in Anacostia, including St. Elizabeth's, the Frederick Douglass House, and the World's Largest Chair are intertwined with the areas streets, homes and bars. The book is raw in its portrayal of violence, drug use, poverty, child abuse, prostitution, with these and other ills graphically described. The realism of the book is combined with mysticism, ghosts and repeated metaphysical reflections on the nature of life. Anacostia's residents, and all humanity, are described as "creatures of passage" between places on earth and between life and death, looking for peace and a sense of understanding. This is particularly true of Nephthys who, in her taxi, guides "wandering hearts through the darkness." Yejide writes that Nephthys knew

"as all ferrymen do-- that the fret of people was not how they would move around the streets of cities or across the currents of seas or through terrain and sky from one destination to the next, Rather, the worry of man was the worry of all creatures; the Great Fear of all souls seeking passage through the empires of the world, of all travelers of the labyrinthine byways of one existence to another. The dread that before they become shadow and mist, they would never find the place where they belong."

I have lived in Washington, D.C. since 1974. I visited Anacostia a handful of times in two summers in the late 1980s when a group with which I was involved sponsored blues musical shows at Barry Farms, a public housing project in Anacostia that is no more. Yejide's book brought Anacostia to life for me and made me want to take the Metro's Green Line to Anacostia and see again this neglected, relatively little known "isle of blood and desire" in the capital city for myself. The book reminded me of the power of literature to broaden one's understanding and sympathies for places and people.

Dawn Powell: Novels, 1930 -- 1942
Dawn Powell, author, Tim Page, editor
Library of America
https://www.loa.org
9781931082013, $35.00 hardcover

https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Powell-1930-1942-Sorrento-Library/dp/1931082014

Dawn Powell In the Library Of America -- I

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) wrote 15 novels which received little notice during her lifetime. Powell was born in rural Ohio. After college, she moved to Grenwich Village in New York City where she lived most of her life. Her novels have a strong element of autobiography. She wrote novels of her early experience in Ohio and novels of her life in New York City and often contrasted the different pacings and values of life in the Midwest and in New York. Her later books are sharply satirical and often cynical. She wrote of love and of affairs and of loss in unconventional situations.

In the 1990s, many people discovered Powell's works, sparked largely by the biography and other writings on Powell by Tim Page. In 2001, the Library of America published two volumes of Dawn Powell, with notes by Tim Page, including nine of her novels. The LOA is a wonderful and ambitious project which aims to capture the best in American writing, including novels, poetry, history, philosophy and more. The LOA offers a record of American thought and of the American experience.

This volume consists of five novels that Powell wrote between 1930 and 1942. The first two books center upon life in the Midwest while the latter three books are satires of urban life.

The first novel in the book, Dance Night (1930), was Powell's fourth published novel and her own favorite of her works. It is a coming-of-age novel set in a town called Lamptown, Ohio. It deals with the restlessness of adolescence in a small town and with sexual frustration. The book points the way for its hero to leave Lamptown on a train, presumably to seek his chance in New York City.

"Come Back to Sorrento", Powell's next novel was written in 1932 and sold very poorly. But the novel is a gem. It is set in a small midwestern town and its two main characters are a woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage who had dreamed in her youth of becoming a singer, and the town music teacher who had aspired to become a concert pianist and who is likely hom*osexual. The book is on the whole subdued and understated and centers upon the frustrating relationship between the two protagonists.

The next book in the collection, "Turn, Magic Wheel" (1936), is the first of Powell's novels satirizing life in New York City. Its characters are a young man who has published one successful novel lampooning a literary idol of the day, the literary idol himself, (modeled on Earnest Hemingway), and the women who are involved with both of them. There are great descriptions of the streets, bars and sites of New York City. The story is sharply, but compassionately, told. The book, I think, is ultimately a love story with an ambiguous message about the possibility of happiness.

"Angels on Toast" (1940) is a satire of the world of business with its two main characters commuting by train from Chicago to New York City in search of money and mistresses. It is sharp and engaging, if one-dimensional. I don't think it as good as the other four novels in this volume.

The final work in this collection, "A Time to be Born" (1942) was one of Powell's few novels to achieve commercial success during her lifetime. One of the main characters in this book is modeled in part on Clare Boothe Luce. In this book, Powell juxtaposes life in mid-west Ohio with life in New York City. The two major women characters in the book move to New York from the same small town in Ohio with very different results. This book is satirical but it is also -- actually primarily -- a coming-of-age novel for its young woman heroine. It gives an unforgettable picture of life in New York City just at the eve of United States entry into WW II.

Powell is best known as a satirist, but the books in this series show she was that and more. Her themes as a novelist are somewhat limited, but they are developed well and embroidered in each successive work. Her writing style develops with time until in her final novels (the second volume of the series) it becomes beautiful. She offers a vision of New York City and of the loss of innocence that is her own. The Library of America series is to be commended for finding writers describing American experience in somewhat unexpected places. Powell deserves her place in this series and in American literature. This volume will give the reader a good exposure to the work of Dawn Powell.

Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962
Dawn Powell, author, Tim Page, editor
Library of America
https://www.loa.org
9781931082020, $35.00

https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Powell-1944-1962-Locusts-Pavilion/dp/1931082022

Dawn Powell In the Library Of America -- II

This book is the second volume of the Library of America's compilation of the novels of Dawn Powell (1896 - 1965), a writer whose works have attained deserved if belated recognition. The first volume included five novels of Dawn Powell written between 1930 and 1942. This, the second, volume includes four of Powell's novels written between 1944 and 1962.

Powell's earlier novels generally are set in small-town Ohio in the early 20th Century. They have as themes what Powell saw as the conformity and frustration, sexual and otherwise, of small-town life. The main characters in these books, typically young people, long to escape to make a new life for themselves in the city. The latter novels are, for the most part, set in New York City where Powell lived most of her adult life. The novels are comic and satirical, sometimes sharply so. They reflect loss of innocence and love and, on occasion, fall into cynicism.

The first volume of the Library of America compilation included two early Ohio novels, "Dance Night' and "Come Back to Sorrento" and three novels reflecting Powell's change in style and theme and set in New York City, "Turn, Magic Wheel', "Angels on Toast", and "A Time to be Born." The second volume opens with a novel in which Dawn Powell returned to the setting of small-town Ohio. The book, "My Home is Far Away" (1944), is a fictionalized account of Powell's early unhappy childhood. The book offers a poignant picture of the death of Powell's mother and of her father's remarriage to a cruel and jealous stepmother. The novel features excellent scenes of the family wandering through cramped Ohio towns and small dusty hotels and back neighborhoods. The father himself is portrayed as a travelling salesman who generally behaves carelessly and irresponsibly to his three daughters. Powell initially planned this book as the first of a trilogy. This project did not materialize.

In the next book in the collection, "The Locusts have no King"(1948), Powell returned to sharp satire and to New York City. The book is set after the conclusion of WW II and includes a memorable passage of reflection at the end on the United States atomic testing program at Bikini Atoll. The book contrasts the life of serious, scholarly writing and its difficulty with the life of superficial magazine publishing devoted to economic success and to popular culture. There is also a love story, serious to the participants, in which the main character of the book, a serious if unsuccessful scholar, becomes infatuated with a shallow, sexy blonde. This book reminded me of George Gissing's Victorian novel of the literary life, "New Grub Street" as well as of West's "Day of the Locust", which has some of the same themes and the same dark humor as does Powell's book.

Powell wrote "The Wicked Pavilion" in 1954. Unlike most of Powell's works, the book appeared on the best-seller lists for a brief time. The book is set in New York City in the late 1940s and celebrates, if that is the word, a bar called "The Cafe Julien", located in Greenwich Village, and its patrons. The book is full of would-be artists without talent, unhappy lovers, and people on the lookout for the main chance. It is sharp, astringent satire very close to disillusion. The book is well and convincingly written.

Powell's final novel, and the last in this collection, "The Golden Spur" (1962) was nominated for the National Book Award. As does its predecessor, this novel centers around a drinking establishment which gives the book its title and its patrons. This book also is set in Greenwich Village in the 1950's and records novelistically the passing of an era. This novel, as are some of Powell's earlier works, is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of a young man who comes to New York City from Ohio to learn the identity of his father. In the process, the young man learns about himself as well. This book is impressive less for its story line than for the beautiful writing style Powell achieved in this, her last novel. The book is deliberately light in tone, and I think it ranks with Powell's best.

Dawn Powell produced a substantial body of excellent work describing the places and lives (primarily her own) with which she was familiar. The qualities of growing up, coming-of age, searching and frustration, and the loss of innocence are all well portrayed. The descriptions of New York City, in particular, are themselves irreplaceable. Those readers who enjoy the pleasure of discovering a previously little-known writer will enjoy the novels of Dawn Powell.

Domenico Scarlatti: Complete Keybard Sonatas, 21
Domenico Scarlatti, composer
Soyeon Kate Lee, performer
Naxos
https://www.naxos.com
B07JZB8F9L, $12.99

https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.573795

Soyeon Kate Lee Plays Scarlatti

A young pianist, Soyeon Lee, released her first CD in 2007 as volume 8 in the ongoing Naxos series of the complete keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Lee was born in Korea and moved to the United States when she was nine. She had won the 2004 Concert Artist Guild International Competition as well as second prize in the the Cleveland International Piano Competition of 2003 and was at the beginning of an outstanding career as a performer and teacher.

Following the Scarlatti CD, Lee went on to win another major prize -- the Naumberg International Piano competition in 2010. She concertized widely, continued to record for Naxos and was Associate Professor of Music for Piano at the University of Cincinnati -- College Conservatory of Music. In July, 2022, Lee joined the piano faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. According to her blog, in recent years, Lee has juggled the three demanding roles of "pianist, mom, and teacher".

I loved Soyeon Lee's earlier recording of Scarlatti and reviewed it on Amazon on March 20, 2007. Naxos invited Lee to record a second volume for the series, and her CD of volume 21 was released in 2018. (The series has now reached volume 28.) It was special to hear Lee perform Scarlatti again after many years and to learn how her life and career have developed.

This recording brought back memories of my earlier experience with Lee and was beautiful in its own right. She has an outstanding pianistic feel for Scarlatti in all his variety and quirkiness, with dancing themes, harmonic variety, pulsating repeated rhythms, and moments of melancholy. As Keith Anderson suggests in his liner notes, this recording helps capture "a demonstration of Scarlatti's originality and genius within the limits of his chosen forms." The CD includes 17 sonatas with "Kirkpatrick" numbers ranging from K. 5 to K. 290. Thus, the sonatas are preponderantly early works and less well-known than some of the works on Lee's earlier album. Of the 17 sonatas, four are in the minor key.

The sonatas are in a variety of moods, and Lee captures their ebullience and their reflective character. As with the earlier CD, I especially liked her performance of the slower, more meditative works. The works I enjoyed on this CD include the opening sonata in B-flat major, K. 202, the sonata in A minor, K. 110, the sonata in D minor, K. 34, and the concluding sonata in F major, K. 78. These works had all earlier been unfamiliar.

It was good to be able to continue with Scarlatti in the Naxos series which began in 1999 and is still ongoing. I thought of the many changes that have occured since 1999, to myself, to others, and how Scarlatti still goes along and brightens moments. I also thought of Soyeon Lee and especially of how I have enjoyed her readings of Scarlatti., This CD if a gratifying part of the Naxos series.

Total Time: 72:15

Robin Friedman
Reviewer

Suanne Schafer's Bookshelf

A Quantum Love Story
Mike Chen
Mira
http://www.mirabooks.com
9780778310341, $30.00

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Love-Story-Novel-ebook/dp/B0C4FKZ8QN

A Quantum Love Story is a quantum physics meeting Fifty First Dates sort of romance; though doesn't meet the Romance Writers of America definition of a romance, it is a slow-burn romance that fizzles out before true completion. When a San Francisco particle accelerator blows up, Carter Cho and everyone in it is thrown into a four-day time loop that seems to repeat endlessly, though Carter was apparently the only one zapped by a mysterious green current.

Carter's memory, bank account, and even his cholesterol levels reset every Monday morning. Though he failed his quantum physics major in college, he is enough of a scientist that, once he realizes he is looping, he tries to break out of it and does experiments to determine how. He writes notes to himself in note books so offset the memory loss. Mariana Pineda is a neuroscientist working with the ReLive project, a firm developing perfect memory recall. She visits the Hawke accelerator project one day and also becomes trapped in the same time loop. Carter manages to get her to work with him to solve the problem. They are just beginning to feel something for each other when Carter starts losing his memory.

The first part of the book deals with Carter trying to solve the loop problem and getting Marina to help him. In the second part of the book, Mariana takes the lead and makes a huge sacrifice to save the world from the loop.

Chen avoids much of the repetitiveness inherent in a time loop story by showing the progression of Carter and Mariana's efforts to defeat the loop. The story never bogs down in too much hard science, yet I was able to suspend disbelief.

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
A. S. Byatt
Grove Press
https://groveatlantic.com
9781786894526, $18.00

https://www.amazon.com/Ragnarok-Gods-Canons-S-Byatt/dp/1786894521

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is a novella that retells the Norse myths, covering the history of the world from creation to destruction, through the eyes of a woman looking back at her childhood during World War II. She has been shipped from London to the country in hopes she will survive the war. She is described as a thin, asthmatic child who spends her time reading books on nature, Pilgrim's Progress, Asgard and the Gods, written by the German Wilhelm Wegner. Her father is serving in the military in Africa, and she is convinced he will never return. Her character is not well-developed to allow the myths to shine. The prose is elegant and mythic. It is a short volume and serves as a quick review of the Norse myths.

Byatt's "Thoughts on Myths" in the post-matter of the book was interesting reading as well, attempting to differentiate between myths and fairy tales and in which she admits she retold the story of Ragnarok for her childhood self.

Dinosaur Summer
Greg Bear
https://www.gregbear.com/index.php
Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ASIN B00J52FM3O, $7.99

https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Summer-Greg-Bear-ebook/dp/B00J52FM3O

Dinosaur Summer is a coming-of-age story set in an alternate past after the two world wars. On a plateau in South America, dinosaurs still exist. In the 1920s, the creatures were captured and used in circuses. The top circus at the time was the Lothar Gluck Circus which features avisaurs, centrosaurs, ankylosaurs, and a huge predator named dagger. Gluck is retiring after the circus goes bankrupt from falling attendance and plans to return the animals to their home. In Manhattan, Peter Belzoni lives with his father after the divorce. His father, after serving in Italy, decided he no longer wanted to be a geologist but a photojournalist instead. He contracts with National Geographic to document the transfer of the animals and takes Peter along as his assistant.

This is a rollicking science fiction novel set in a world similar to those created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Pellucidar series, and Jules Verne in Journey to the Center of the Earth. The prose is taut. There is lots of adventure especially once Peter and his father get marooned on the plateau and have to face dangers they never dreamed of. A fun read.

Black Shield Maiden
Willow Smith, Jess Hendel
Del Rey
http://www.randomhousebooks.com
9780593356739, $30.00

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Shield-Maiden-Willow-Smith/dp/059335673X

Normally, I avoid books by celebrities as I feel they have enough celebrity without my adding to their aura. However, as the mother of a Black child who enjoys fantasy and science fiction, I read this anyway. I would rate this at 3.5 but rounded to a 4.

First of all, this is primarily a FANTASY, a story about a young Black woman who rises to become a queen and as such stands as a good role model and example, which tend to be few and far between for Black young adults. I did not find it anti-Muslim any more than I found it anti-Viking - the book describes the world pretty much as it was in back in the day (as well as now) with multiple countries practicing aggression, war, rape, against other nations and tribes and enslavement of conquered peoples. The Muslim aspect is minimal, and for the most part is deemed a good thing as the Vikings wish to collaborate with the Muslims to hold back the advancement of Christianity. The book handles discrimination and prejudice against Blacks well.

As an adult, I was able to suspend disbelief and read the entire book in one sitting. While not great literature, young adults will find it entertaining. The characters come of age and mature in a believable manner. I did like two things in particular: women were allowed their own agenda and the ability to achieve their goals, and Black and Whites were able to join together to bring down a common (White) enemy.

Say My Name
Joe Clifford
Square Tire Books
https://www.squaretirerecords.com/copy-of-square-tire-records-releases
9781960725035, $9.99

https://www.amazon.com/Say-My-Name-True-Crime-Novel/dp/1960725033

Say My Name is an interesting blend of true crime fiction and somewhat autobiographical fiction. Clifford writes of an author who, post-divorce, has returned to his childhood home to teach a summer session at a local university. When the job falls through and two girls disappear from a mall a few towns away, he begins researching/writing a true crime story, trying to connect their disappearance with that of two girls, fifteen-year-old Annabelle and Ana Rodgers, who disappeared from a mall when he was fifteen. The older case remains unsolved. The author, whose name remains unknown throughout, had his first crush on one of the girls.

This book intrigued me from the beginning. The list of potential suspects in the little town is vast: everyone from the local sexual predator to the author's kindly elderly uncle to everyone present at the mall on that fateful day, including childhood friends of the author, and there are plenty of red herrings to keep the reader intrigued.

From the onset with the author's note, it's hard to tell how much of the actual author is part of the fictional author, which is an interesting idea. It becomes even more interesting when the fictional author's therapist wonders if he is not a character in another author's book, sort of a meta-author. The protagonist, like many of Clifford's main characters, is a rough-around-the-edges, self-destructive guy dealing with emotional and physical problems and addictions of one sort or another, but the meta-fiction aspect raises it above Clifford's usual works.

Five Days in Bogota
Linda Moore
She Writes Press
https://shewritespress.com
9781647426125, $17.95

https://www.amazon.com/Five-Days-Bogota-Linda-Moore/dp/164742612X

Linda Moore has given readers another fabulous art thriller. As in her debut novel, Attribution, the art world becomes a dangerous place despite the supposed calm of museums and art galleries. This is a pulsating thriller within the world of art, yet the plot and the setting, Bogota, Columbia, are more intense.

Ally Blake, a forty-year-old mother of two, is a recent widow. Her husband died in 1990 leaving her with daunting financial responsibilities. The owner of an art gallery, she takes a big chance in going to an international art expo in Bogota. The city is full of drug kingpins, kidnappers, murders, and crooked government officials. There's also a young man she had an affair with when she was younger and worked for the US government. He tries to rope her into an illicit auction of high-priced art to get under-the-table funds for an undercover operation.

Five Days in Bogota is an original, well-researched novel blending art dealers with drug dealers and diplomats, all hoping for over-the-top profits from art collectors. It also demonstrates some of the techniques art dealers use to get sales.

Blue Ruin
Hari Kunzru
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com
9780593801376, $28.00

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ruin-novel-Hari-Kunzru/dp/0593801377

Give me a book about art and artists, and I'm a happy reader. I find Blue Ruin particularly interesting because it raises many questions about what art is, what it's like to produce it, and how much of an artist's life is performance. I'm still pondering it several days after finishing it.

Jay is attending art school in London; just before he graduates, he destroys the paintings he's produced for his final show, abandons representational art, and puts on a performance piece instead. From there, he seems marked for greatness in the field of conceptual art. He and his girlfriend, Alice (who wants to be a curator), live in a bubble filled with drugs and sex in the manner of Timothy Leary's infamous line "Turn on, tune in, drop out" from 1966. She eventually tires of the lifestyle and runs off with his best friend, Rob, (who becomes a more traditional painter) to the United States.

Eventually, Jay tries to not produce art but to be art. He reminds me of the Bulgarian artist Alzek Misheff who swam across the ocean by swimming in the pool of an ocean liner back in the 1970s. Jay ends up living his life in a dropped-out mode as he travels the world without documentation (no passport, etc) and ends up an illegal alien in the US and is reduced to delivering groceries. He becomes very ill from Covid, is thrown out of his apartment by his paranoid roommates, and begins living in his vehicle. While recovering, he makes a grocery delivery to a large estate and is met at the door by Alice. She, Rob, and another couple (Marshall and Nicole) are self-isolating to avoid getting Covid. When his past and present collide, Jay must confront his feelings at being ghosted by Alice and Rob and take a closer look at his toxic relationships with Alice, Rob, drugs, and alcohol.

This is an exceptional book if you can overlook the huge coincidence that Jay meets Alice again. When he tells the isolated group his story, he says he had no idea he was delivering groceries to her, but he is simply continuing an artistic performance? I also liked the representation of other races: Jay is biracial, Alice is half French and half Vietnamese, and Nicole is Black. Except for the impact of Jay's race on his relationship with his bigoted stepfather, these people of color are just people. I liked this book enough to read Kunzru's backlist.

Daughter of the Deep
Rick Riordan
Disney Hyperion
https://books.disney.com
9781368077934, $5.99

https://www.amazon.com/Daughter-Deep-Rick-Riordan/dp/1368077935

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/daughter-of-the-deep-rick-riordan/1138832956

With a teenager in the house for the first time in years, I am catching up on some young adult reading so we can talk about the books over the dinner table. Rick Riordan has been a long-term favorite in this household, so we were glad to discover a new-to-us book, Daughter of the Deep, set in the world of Jules Verne and Twenty-Thousand Leagues under the Sea. This is a standalone novel, so it was nice to not commit to reading a series. I loved that it had a strong female protagonist who is not lily-white. Instead, fifteen-year-old Ana Dakar, the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Captain Nemo, is part Bundeli Indian. She is a freshman at an advanced school, the Harding-Pencroft Academy, which specializes in training people in everything related to the sea: marine warfare, veterinary medicine, etc. She and her brother, Dev, were orphaned two years earlier. When, in a devastating attack by a a rival school, Dev is killed and her school is destroyed, Ana is forced to grow up quickly. She is the sole link left to the hidden island retreat of Captain Nemo, and she takes over his submarine, Nautilus, and leads it against her enemy school - and the person at her own school who betrayed them.

This is a fun romp blending modern with historical times but without the mythology present in other Riordan books (though you could admit Jules Verne's works have their own mythology, should you choose), so it's a bit of a breath of fresh air if you've read other Riordan works. Though it is a standalone, there is certainly room for sequels.

Suanne Schafer, Reviewer
www.SuanneSchaferAuthor.com

Susan Bethany's Bookshelf

Cultivating a Servant Heart
Cailin Mae Lyga Wilson
Fulcrum Publishing
www.fulcrumbooks.com
9781682753750, $19.95, PB, 176pp

https://www.amazon.com/Cultivating-Servant-Heart-Insights-Leadership/dp/1682753751

Synopsis: With the publication of "Cultivating a Servant Heart: Insights From Servant Leaders" by Caitlin Lyga Wilson, readers can follow along the inward journey of Servant Leaders as community leaders and influential businesspeople share insights and stories about their life's work. These stories, woven together with the unifying threads of our past, present, and future, are filled to the brim with inspiring insights and life lessons.

Whether it be a nonprofit, large corporation, faith community, or the city streets, these leaders take readers along through their childhoods, leadership development, visions for the future, and the passions that continue to energize and cultivate their servant leadership lifestyle. Readers will learn exactly how servant leaders have, and continue to, nurture hearts of love, and do the work of softening the heart -- a task that is never done.

Readers will learn lessons about: Community Building, Sacred Listening, and Leadership Development

While the contents of "Cultivating a Servant Heart" read like a well-told story, it also works as a guide for all those who seek to serve others, build compassion, open hearts, and develop strong bonds within their community. Whether you are a practitioner of traditional servant leadership or not, these insights can be applied to any person in any situation.

Critique: A part of the 'Servant Leadership' series from Fulcrum Publishing, "Cultivating a Servant Heart: Insights From Servant Leaders" is as 'real world practical' as it is inspired and inspiring. Exceptionally well written, and thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, "Cultivating a Servant Heart" is expressly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Self-Help/Self-Improvement collections. It should be noted that "Cultivating a Servant Heart" will prove of immense interest for readers concerned with job hunting, career selection/development that it is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $18.95).

Editorial Note: Caitlin Mae Lyga Wilson (www.fulcrumbooks.com/wilson) is a mother, writer, and native of La Crosse, Wisconsin. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and received her master's degree in servant leadership from Viterbo University. She serves as vice president of communications and inclusion at Marine Credit Union and has spent nearly two decades nurturing connections through her work in communications.

Experience Is the Angled Road
R. Barbara Gitenstein
Koehler Books
www.koehlerbooks.com
9781646637539, $25.95, HC, 234pp

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Angled-Road-Memoir-Academic/dp/1646637534

Synopsis: While "Experience Is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic" by Professor R. Barbara Gitenstein is about leadership, it is not a handbook on how to be a leader. It is the personal life story of a Jewish woman, academician, and educator.

When her parents moved from New York City to a small town in Alabama, R. Barbara Gitenstein knew that as a Jew and a northerner she just did not fit. After leaving for boarding school in the eighth grade, she discovered that it was more than being Jewish and a Yankee that made her an oddity. She was also an intellectual, plus she loved classical music.

Before entering academe, Barbara Gitenstein learned to lead from the periphery, benefitting from exceptional and surprising mentors. She survived painful loss and life-changing challenges. "Experience Is the Angled Road" is her memoir in which she fully captures the shock and the humor she faced when confronting the obstacles of being the only "whatever" in the room be it as a woman, a Jew, a Southerner, and/or a liberal.

Critique: A fascinating, candid, informative, and deftly crafted life story that will have a prolific resonance with readers whose own life story is one of being an unconformist (especially a intellectually and academically minded one) "Experience Is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, and college/university library Jewish & Women's Biography/Memoir collections. It should be noted that "Experience Is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic" is also readily available from Koehler Books in a paperback edition (9781646637515, $17.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $7.99).

Editorial Note: R. Barbara Gitenstein (https://rbarbaragitenstein.com) is the author of some thirty academic articles on Jewish-American literature and academic administration as well as the monograph Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry. She has made over 100 presentations at literature and academic administrative conferences. She was often interviewed on radio and television stations in New Jersey, focusing on higher education issues. After receiving a BA with honors from Duke University and a PhD in English and American literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by fifteen years as a full-time English professor, she served as provost and executive vice president at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and as president of the College of New Jersey in Ewing, New Jersey.

An Ordinary Life?
Anna Muller
Ohio University Press
www.ohioswallow.com
9780821424971, $50.00, HC, 376pp

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Life-Journeys-Lechtman-1918-1996/dp/0821424971

Synopsis: Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries (Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel) during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her small children.

Born in Lodz in 1918, Lechtman became fascinated with Communism in her early youth. In 1935, to avoid the consequences of her political activism during an increasingly antisemitic and hostile political environment, the family moved to Palestine, where Tonia met her future husband, Sioma.

In 1937, the couple traveled to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War. After discovering she was pregnant, Lechtman relocated to France while Sioma joined the International Brigades.

She spent the Second World War in Europe, traveling with two small children between France, Germany, and Switzerland, at times only miraculously avoiding arrest and being transported east to Nazi camps.

After the war, she returned to Poland, where she planned to (re)build Communist Poland. However, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned for six years. In 1971, under pressure from her children, Lechtman emigrated from Poland to Israel, where she died in 1996.

In writing Lechtman's biography, Anna Muller has consulted a rich collection of primary source material, including archival documentation, private documents and photographs, interviews from different periods of Lechtman's life, and personal correspondence. Despite this intimacy, Muller also acknowledges key historiographical questions arising from the lacunae of lost materials, the selective preservation of others, and her own interpretive work translating a life into a life story.

Critique: The fascinating life of a fascinating woman, "An Ordinary Life?: The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996" is a compelling and detailed account that is a simply riveting read from start to finish. Informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of Illustrations, a Guide to Pronunciation, fifty-six pages of Notes, and a thirteen page Index, Anna Muller's "An Ordinary Life?" is an extraordinary life story and this Ohio University Press edition is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, and college/university library Jewish Biography/Memoir collections and supplemental 20th Century Communism/Socialism History curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "An Ordinary Life?" is also available in a paperback edition (9780821425435, $28.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $27.50).

Editorial Note: Anna Muller is the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland and is a former curator at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, Poland. (https://umdearborn.edu/people-um-dearborn/anna-muller)

Susan Bethany
Reviewer

Theresa Werba's Bookshelf

Legends of Liberty II
Andrew Benson Brown
Bard Owl Publishing
9781737551324, $13.99 Paperback, $5.99 Kindle, 265 pages

https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Liberty-Andrew-Benson-Brown/dp/1737551322

Andrew Benson Brown has created a continuation of his Revolutionary War historical mock epic in Legends of Liberty II. This is a retelling of history which blends fact with absurdity in a way that is surprising and innovative. In the tale we are presented with a continuation of Revolutionary War saga, and we encounter such notables as Ben Franklin, King George III, Thomas Paine, and George Washington. We are also taken through a fresh retelling of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Benson Brown employs 10-line stanzas with alternating rhymes and final rhyming couplet. The form is ababcdcdee in lines of iambic pentameter with an additional metric foot in the last line. It may thus be seen as a sort of "truncated sonnet" form.

Benson Brown makes history humorous and interesting, and the retelling of the story is never dry or pedantic. At times it hardly feels like what is normally considered formal poetry - it is very story-like and moves with a brisk and expectant pace. We are reminded now and again of the funny and subtle rhymes and meter while reading an often-bizarre and surreal story. The historical mock-epic is overflowing with adroit rhymes and clever wordplay. Some of my favorite examples:

"Like a tree that sprouts full-grown
From fertile soil, Ben sprung upon his heels
And said with eager eccentricity,
'Eureka! I've discovered electricity.'"

"'It happens to us highbrows.'
She traced a yellow carrot round the brights
Of yellow orbs: 'What happened to your eyebrows?'"

"Immigrants all mutter grand
Ideas as their ships approach the motherland."

The rhymes eccentricity/electricity//highbrows/eyebrows //and mutter grand/motherland are quite clever indeed, and the entire poem is replete with such examples.

I particularly liked Benson Brown's description of 18th-century London from the eyes of the American Ben Franklin:

"Ben fumbled, squelching and meandering
Through worming alleys snaked with London fog.
A baron hounded whor*s, philandering.
A beggar prowled in shadows, licking grog.
A sooty urchin clawed loose pocket shillings.
Shopkeepers hawked their goods with piercing calls.
A gang, jaws bare, tore loot from their fresh killings.
Through haze, two folded wings - a dome? - St. Paul's!
This scene of lawless riot and confusion
Exposed the lairs that darkened majesty's illusion."

I also thought the description of Franklin as a "human Tesla coil" to be particularly inventive, as is his depiction of the insanity of King George III as a man's brain invaded by the devil in the form of a co*ckroach!!!

"One day as Britons cheered their sovereign's sight,
The devil crawled into his servant's brain.
He entered through the ear as a termite
And caused poor George the Third to go insane.
His Majesty's gray matter had a tang -
Dis nibbled reason's overlooking terrace.
The walls of speech fell next when yellow fangs
Went chewing on the pars opercularis.
Then recall's fortress, breached with just a scamper,
Flapped like a tent when Satan bit the hippocamper."

A particularly beautiful stanza involves repeating phrases and lines, rendered skillfully to poignant effect:

"The salt sea parts sweet lives from lovesick skies.
No motherland can stop tectonic shifting.
Connect the dots, or stars will fade from eyes:
A tree of broken branches slowly dies,
While crowns, well-pruned, stay healthy and uplifting.
The salt sea parts sweet lives from lovesick skies
When the sunset sails below the waves, to rise
Tomorrow, as the last ship darkens, drifting.
The salt sea parts sweet lives from lovesick skies.
Steer true: connect the dots, so stars don't fade from eyes."

The book is replete with illustrations which enhance the reading experience. The images are often surreal and Python-esque. Terry Gilliam would be proud!! The print edition, unconstrained by the rigidity inherent in Kindle formatting, inventively incorporates these illustrations and images into the formatting of the stanzas to pleasing effect, which complements Benson Brown's metrical experiments and text layout.

The extensive annotations can be clicked on with the Kindle edition to provide extra elucidation and clarification.

I would highly recommend Legends of Liberty Volumes I and II as supplements and enrichment to any American history course taught at the high school and college levels as well as anyone who enjoys satire and humor combined with deftly-written poetry.

Andrew Benson Brown is a poet and journalist living in Kansas City. He is a member of the Society of Classical Poets, where he regularly contributes poetry, essays, and reviews. His work has been published in a number of journals. He is also an arts columnist for the Epoch Times and a history writer for American Essence magazine.

Theresa Werba, Reviewer
https://www.theresawerba.com
@thesonnetqueen

Willis Buhle's Bookshelf

Too Close to the Flame
Joseph B. Engle
Forefront Books
https://www.forefrontbooks.com
9781637632918, $28.00, HC, 480pp

https://www.amazon.com/Too-Close-Flame-Condemned-Southern/dp/1637632916

Synopsis: Throughout his forty-five years visiting death rows across the American South, Joe Ingle has learned, loved, and suffered intensely. With the publication of "Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned inside the Southern Killing Machine", Ingle describes how the events of 2018-2020 finally exposed the deep wounds inflicted on his psyche by nearly half a century of enduring the state-sanctioned murder of friend after friend.

As an advocate for the men and women condemned to death by an unjust legal system that routinely victimizes the marginalized, Ingle has often found himself waiting through the darkest hours as the spiritual advisor and sole companion of those on deathwatch -- the brief period of isolation that precedes an execution. In vivid detail and startling candor, Ingle describes every moment with the expertise of a scholar and the affection of a brother. Through Ingle's eyes, we are invited into the inner sanctum during desperate attempts at clemency, intimate final hours, and the mourning that follows a night on deathwatch.

Part psychological memoir, part history of Southern state killing since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, "Too Close to the Flame" is above all a catalogue of love -- a gallery of relationships that could only be forged between people staring death in the face together. It is an account of the price of radical Christian love, a record of service to the least among us, and a testament to the full humanity of those whom the powers that be would seek to dehumanize and exterminate.

Critique: Timely, candid, fascinating, thought-provoking, and a compelling read from start to finish, "Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned inside the Southern Killing Machine" is an extraordinary and highly prized contribution by Joe Ingles to the current national discussion regarding the death penalty from someone who has had a decades long front row seat to its impact on the condemned, their families, and himself. An exceptional and unreservedly recommended pick for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Contemporary American Biography/Memoir collections and supplemental Criminology curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, political activists, and governmental policy makers that "Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned inside the Southern Killing Machine" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $14.99).

Editorial Note: Joe Ingle, a North Carolina native, left the South after college and moved to East Harlem to join the E. Harlem Urban Year program. He spent his senior year at Union Theological Seminary visiting prisoners at the Bronx House of Detention. Prior to that experience, his initial time with prisoners, he was a typical white guy from the South. When he returned to the South, he was a changed man.

Living in Nashville, TN, he began working against mass incarceration and the death penalty with the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons which he helped create. This led him to visit every Southern death row and create a web of relationships with the women and men imprisoned there. Working to save their lives led him to meetings in governor's offices, legislatures, courtrooms, churches, synagogues, bishop and archbishop offices. And it led him into the homes of the families of the condemned and victims.

Realizing many of the condemned had no lawyers, he along with three colleagues, created a law project (The Southern Center for Human Rights) to represent them. Although the death penalty is an issue, for Ingle it is primarily about people caught in the killing machinery. It is where he has devoted his adult life.

Becoming Homeschoolers
Monica Swanson, author
Zondervan
https://www.zondervan.com
9780310367628, $19.99, PB, 240pp

https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Homeschoolers-Education-Strong-Family/dp/031036762X

Synopsis: If you've ever wondered whether you have what it takes to homeschool your children, look no further than "Becoming Homeschoolers: Give Your Kids a Great Education, a Strong Family, and a Life They'll Thank You for Later".

Parenting author, podcaster, and homeschool mom Monica Swanson is here to tell you: you can do it. In fact, it can be the most fun, family-unifying, character-building, life-equipping experience you and your children will ever have.

"Becoming Homeschoolers" tackles your legitimate doubts and fears about homeschooling, as well as the questions you want answered before you commit -- questions like where to start and how to choose a curriculum, build social skills, teach what you're not good at, and prepare for college.

With humor and encouragement, Monica weaves her own story of homeschooling her four boys with step-by-step, practical advice on how to: Assess whether home education is right for you and your children; Establish a foundation of faith in your everyday homeschool routine; Find socialization opportunities such as sports and extracurricular activities; Care for yourself and your marriage even as you spend more time each day with your kids; Tackle the practical side of homeschooling, including standardized tests, transcripts, college readiness, and navigating education requirements.

Critique: There are many reasons for teaching children at home and avoiding the problems that are so prevalently associated with public and private schools. Comprehensive and thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation, with the publication of "Becoming Home Schoolers" from Zondervan Books it is possible for parents to become successful homeschoolers.

Editorial Note: Monica Swanson (www.monicaswanson.com), is a popular blogger, the host of the Monica Swanson Podcast, and author of "Boy Mom" and "Raising Amazing". Monica graduated from Pepperdine University and earned her teaching credential from Linfield College. Monica has a bachelor's degree in sports medicine and has spent much of her life as a personal coach and trainer. She and her doctor-husband, Dave, have one college graduate son, one son in college, another son surfing professionally and taking college classes online, and a twelve-year-old son homeschooled by Monica.

Willis M. Buhle
Reviewer

James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
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MBR: Reviewer's Bookwatch, June 2024 (2024)

Table of Contents

Andrew Brown's Bookshelf

Ann Skea's Bookshelf

Arthur Turfa's Bookshelf

Cara Nicole's Bookshelf

Carl Logan's Bookshelf

Chris Patsilelis' Bookshelf

Clint Travis' Bookshelf

Gregory Elich's Bookshelf

Israel Drazin's Bookshelf

Jack Mason's Bookshelf

John Burroughs' Bookshelf

Julie Summers' Bookshelf

Laurie Nguyen's Bookshelf

Margaret Lane's Bookshelf

Mark Walker's Bookshelf

Michael Carson's Bookshelf

Robin Friedman's Bookshelf

Suanne Schafer's Bookshelf

Susan Bethany's Bookshelf

Theresa Werba's Bookshelf

Willis Buhle's Bookshelf