wahistorian's Reviews (506)

I love this book, partly because it’s an old-fashioned testimonial of love to the place DuMaurier grew up. Despite the fact the she had a 55-year history with Cornwall when this book was first published in 1967, she and her son Christian Browning traveled around the region, Browning taking photos and DuMaurier researching by talking to residents and searching out villages and sights they suggested. The result is a book that covers myth and history, and, most interestingly, draws out the ways in which Cornwall influenced British literature, from King Arthur to the Brontes to her own works. I rescued this one from Goodwill; otherwise I never would have know about it.

‘We Were Eight Years In Power’ is a compilation of eight years of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ pieces from The Atlantic during the Obama Administration, with introductions from a current perspective. He describes a remarkable period of growth and change for him personally and—you would have thought—for the nation. Turns out that President Obama’s extraordinariness got him elected *and* allowed White Americans not to confront our own racism. The result: a President Donald Trump. The last chapters of this book blew my mind. I can’t remember the last time I learned so much; Coates is a young talent who will be a national treasure.

What a delightful gothic novel, in the spirit of the Bronte sisters or Wilkie Collins, but published in 1936! DuMaurier’s work is infused with the mysterious spirit of Cornwall and its landscape, which enhances the sense of young Mary Yellan’s lack of choices. Though alone in the world and dependent on her aunt and malevolent uncle, still Mary forges a courageous path through immorality and abuse.

In 1966 and again in 1969 Canadian writer Farley Mowat spent weeks traveling across Siberia with a translator and his wife. The visits were informed by his extensive study of the Alaskan and Canadian North, their people and wildlife; his goal was a comprehensive understanding of the Arctic North and human impact, particularly its “Small Peoples” (his term) or indigenous people. (I think by Small People he means small in population numbers, although he never explains the term.)

Mowat is captivated by Siberian hospitality and the fact that its former history as a gulag was erased by Russian determination to “settle” the most forbidding territory in the world. Over and over again he is told that the Russian Way is not to exploit the land, but to build communities there to integrate the territory into the nation. His gullibility is charming—he accepts everyone at face value, which probably opened many more doors than skepticism—but it’s more informative to read this book with Ian Frazier’s more contemporary ‘Travels in Siberia.’

One of the most interesting topics the book takes on is the challenge of building on permafrost. Here’s how that worked out: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/oct/14/thawing-permafrost-destroying-arctic-cities-norilsk-russia.

It does take some patience to get through ‘The Lady and the Law,’ because it is not ‘The Moonstone’ or ‘The Woman in White.’ It *is*, however, one of the earliest detective novels with a female protagonist who does relies on her own ingenuity and intelligence to solve the seeming murder of her husband’s first wife. Valeria Woodville discovers on her honeymoon that her husband is not who she thought she was, and she makes it her mission to exonerate her husband and clear his reputation. Male friends escort her through this journey—it is, after all, late 19th-century Scotland—but Valeria drives the action, remarking along the way about how extraordinary she knows this is. The real problem with this story is the characters: Valeria and her husband remain ciphers and one Dickensian eccentric, Miserrimus Dexter, dominates whole sections. He holds the key to the mystery; unfortunately, he also ruins the book with his inexplicable behavior. The resolution is forensically fascinating, however, and makes the book worth reading, if only as a curiosity.