wahistorian's Reviews (506)

My last book of the year, which is very fitting because Drabble’s very English book is about Fran Stubbs and her group of friends and acquaintances all confronting their own mortality. It’s delightful group of people to spend time with; despite their aches, fears, and insecurities, for the most part they are matter-of-fact about aging, a perspective that is terrifically cheering. They pursue their pet projects, they appreciate a delicious meal or the sameness of a hotel chain, and they care for their friends and family, even when it’s inconvenient or a downright bore. Climate change and the resulting refugee crisis provide the backdrop for consideration of their own mortality; like most of us, they perceive these global tragedies as outrageous and sad and unsusceptible to intervention, and yet their lives are shaped by forces larger then themselves. And that is ultimately what Drabble’s novel is about: what we can accomplish in the face of unstoppable forces of nature or politics or love.

The Grand Hotel is a place of great potential; every character there sheds his or her conventional life at the revolving door and somehow ends up becoming more truly themselves there. Like the Hollywood movie that the novel would become, the characters in ‘The Grand Hotel’ are not punished for trying on new identities, even when the process involves a little lying or infidelity or larceny; the hotel’s extraordinary alchemy instead rewards them with deeper love or luxury or at least self-knowledge. What’s wrong with a little overspending or drinking too much or eating rich foods? Even in the case of the few exceptions to that rule—no spoilers here—the characters’ fates seem like just desserts for misdeeds committed in their regular lives, not their hotel lives. ‘The Grand Hotel’ is a magical place, like ‘The Love Boat’ or ‘Fantasy Island’ or its tribute movie, ‘The Grand Hotel Budapest,’ a place exempt from normal rules. A melancholy read, but sweet, too, because there are so many people trying to escape.

Ruthnum begins his examination of what he calls “currybooks”—writing by South Asian writers who live far from their own or their parents’ home countries—by invoking the experience of savoring curried in restaurants, then cookbooks, then diasporic novels infused with nostalgia and longing. Ruthnum’s aim is to tease out where South Asian writers in English succeed in developing their own unique voices and where their work is shaped by White expectations of a “Brown” experience (as he calls it). If the first curry chefs in Britain adjusted their recipes to White diners’ tastes, until the dishes would have been unrecognizable at home, is a similar phenomenon brought to bear on writers? His genuine interest in food and film and writing makes this slim book fascinating. His book is ultimately less a critique of race expectations and more a call for writers to strive for particularity and being true to themselves.

This book is a bit of a patchwork, pieced together of tantalizing inferences and hunches from official documents and plays and poetry by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but that’s what makes it interesting. Nicholls takes as his jumping-off point the only known record of Shakespeare’s words (not written but spoken by him): testimony in a court case in which he was a witness. From this little incident—the daughter of his London landlady sues her father for failing to provide a promised dowry—the author discovers the neighborhood in which the playwright lived and wrote, its cast of characters, and his attitudes about love, property, and morals. An interesting micro history, particularly in the interlocking relationships among Shakespeare, other theatre-people, and tradespeople in the neighborhood.

A breezy yet comprehensive survey of Shakespeare scholarship, a good place to begin before diving deeper into the Bard’s life and work.

Having read James Comey’s and James Clapper’s book—both ethical men dismissed by Donald Trump for lack of loyalty—I can see how Andrew McCabe’s book is part of a pattern of values clarification on the part of government servants who *thought* they shared a common set of beliefs and morals with others who have chosen government service. McCabe’s book traces his history with the FBI, describing how he was trained and how agents investigate, interview, and collect evidence. In a world increasingly skeptical of facts, or even that such a thing exists, the FBI’s fact-based methods are confronted by conspiracy theories and political backbiting that tends to negate the safeguards they thought they had put in place. McCabe makes this point and often expresses his frustration at working in an environment in which the President himself is the chief conspiracy theorist. ‘The Threat’ deals with so much more than the Trump Administration and is worth a read by anyone interested in investigation in the age of anti-terrorism. His description of the Boston Marathon bombing in particular is enlightening. I finished with great admiration for all those who dedicate their careers to trying to uphold the Constitution and protect Americans.

What a delightful book! Its exploration of London’s nightwalkers begins in Shakespeare’s walled city, in which there was no good reason for anyone but the night watch to be out; it proceeds through the bohemian period, in which the noctavagant are actively resisting the strictures of clock-watching artisans. The books concludes in Dickens’ insomniac walks to his country home, tortured as he was by some pre-Freudian psychology that would only be drawn out by the noirs and crime novels of the mid-20th century (outside Beaumont’s purview). In between we get Wordsworth’s compositional walkabouts, Tennyson’s dark maidens (although no “Highwayman” and that’s puzzle), Chaucer, William Blake, and Thomas De Quincey. Beaumont’s book is an ecstatic celebration of our tendency to invest the night with all our fears, guilt, and desires. And I learned the origin of “curfew,” from “couvre feu,” the requirement to extinguish hearth fires at night.