wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Maggie Nelson’s book grapples with the American obsession with murder by dissecting her own family’s experience with the 1969 murder of her aunt Jane. Advances in DNA technology and a diligent detective result in a new suspect 35 years after the crime, and Nelson’s family endures his trial. She relentlessly bares her soul in this book and it can be difficult to read in places, but her bold honesty is refreshing. Her task is making sense of the senseless. Contradicting Joan Didion, Nelson concludes that we *don’t* tell ourselves stories in order to live, because they don’t seem to help with that. Yet we are irresistibly drawn to the scene of the crime, to the perp’s life story, to the gory details of murder, as if we are preparing to tell ourselves a story. For women it might be a story about how to survive—what she calls “the ongoing project of your safety” (130). Whatever that true crime drive is, she concludes that it may not serve a purpose. “I am beginning to think that there are some events that simply cannot be ‘processed,’” she writes, “some things one never gets ‘over’ or ‘through’” (114). 

I did enjoy ‘The Lady and the Law’—though not as much as ‘The Moonstone’ or ‘The Woman in White.’ The charm of this book lies in the fact that the female protagonist, Valeria Macallan, takes charge of the plot from the beginning and it is solidly hers for the remainder of the book; her tiresome and self-pitying husband is offstage for much of the novel. Valeria’s task is to clear her new husband’s reputation of the Scotch verdict, “not proven,” levied in a trial for the murder of his first wife. She is fearless as she follows clues where they lead her, including to Miserrimus Dexter, a disabled suitor of the first wife; Dexte was privy to the goings-on the night of her poisoning.  A female detective in 1874 is unusual enough, but someone this plucky, decisive, and indefatigable was new to me for this period. Even if the ending left something to be desired,  Valeria made the novel worthwhile.

Everyone should read this book, whether you’re a Facebook user or not, because Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book explains so much about the world we’re living in. She traces her journey from idealistic social media-user to skeptic, informed by her intense experience working as Facebook’s international policy expert. Chapters on Facebook’s expansion around the world, relations with China, the failure of internet.org, the 2016 election, and genocide in Myanmar, among other issues reveal an increasingly cynical, numbers-oriented management. Shocking stories behavior she witnessed in the party of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Stanberg, and other Facebook leaders characterize them as privileged, insulated and insular, and willfully ignorant about the world. Elon Musk’s behavior at DOGE suggests that if these techno boys are the future or our country, we are in deep trouble. 

A dark dark satire with moments of beautiful prose. Waugh’s novel prefigures Jessica Mitford’s ‘The American Way of Death’ (1963) by exposing the cynicism of the funeral home business, for humans and pets. Dennis Barlow is a transplanted Brit who launches a writing career in Hollywood, but can’t seem to write. He fancies himself a poet, but cannot compose. His fallback job lands him in a pet cemetery, which leads him in a roundabout way to a relationship with Aimée Thanatogenos, a cosmetician at a funeral home. Somehow, despite his shiftlessness, Dennis always lands on his feet. Waugh’s epigraph warns, “this is a nightmare and, in parts, somewhat gruesome. The squeamish should return their copies to the library or the bookstore unread” (p.1). Yet it is not without charm, in a sociopathic sort of way. 

My first Lee Archer novel and I would try another one. Although the plotting was complex and there were almost two many characters to keep track of, I was fascinated by the backdrop of the plot: a California wildfire rages while Archer tries to unravel the seeming kidnapping of a young boy and the disappearance of his father. Macdonald obviously familiarized himself with wildfire and firefighting for the writing of this book. Worth worth a read.

P. D. James is such an extraordinary creator of complicated characters that one has never encountered anywhere. Not an Inspector Dalgleish novel, this one unravels the complex histories of Phillipa Palfrey (née Rose Ducton); her adoptive parents, Maurice and Hilda Palfrey; her birth mother, Mary Ducton, who is also a convicted child murderer; and the father of the child she murdered. Instead of a whodunnit, ‘Innocent Blood’ is a painful exploration of grief and guilt and the ways in which crime ruins lives for generations. There are some excruciating moments in this novel, so much so that I can see why it’s little known, but still a fascinating read in the context of James’s other novel. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, partly because I knew nothing about the topic except what I’d seen in the Oscar-nominated film based on the book, ‘A Complete Unknown.’ The book is as much about the peak of American interest in folk music in the late 1950s and early 1960s as it is about Bob Dylan. Wald reviews the rise of the American artists whose music expressed a worldview that celebrated “the people” around the globe, their respect for the past *and* their invention. The author makes clear that young Dylan was always going to be an iconoclast; just because the folkies were his earliest influences did not mean he had any kind of debt or loyalty to them. Despite the title, Dylan was never *not* electric; his legendary performance at the Newport Folk Festival rode the wave of a youth movement that just had different—more cynical? more mystical—interests then their folk precursors. Fascinating look at how culture changes and how individual artists fit into that larger revolution. 

In a series of short chapters exploring Herman Melville’s career and the themes of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Nathaniel Philbrick brings new meaning to the novel. ‘Moby-Dick’ is an environmental novel, an exploration of the dangers facing a young democracy, and an expression of Melville’s writerly influences, especially Shakespeare and his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Philbrick delights in re-reading this big, baggy novel because, as he describes it, “‘Moby-Dick’ is a true epic, embodying almost every powerful American archetype as it interweaves creation myths, revenge narratives, folktales, and the conflicting impulses to create and to destroy, all played across the globe’s vast oceanic stage” (64). 

I guess I was expecting a more traditional horror narrative when I picked this up. While the novel does have supernatural elements, the suspense seemed blunted to me; even the family’s stalker felt less menacing than I would have expected, as if Due pulled her punches to leave uncertainty in the reader’s mind about what was real and what Hilton was imagining. ‘The Between’ was Due’s first horror novel and the theme was ambitious for a first-time novelist: what family members do for one another across generations. I would try another of her books—this one just felt more like an extended short story to me. 

To Olson’s credit, he is the scholar who went to Melville’s archive—his notes, letters, and his own annotated book collection—to understand what Melville was thinking about when he wrote about the great white whale and Ahab. Melville brought his own merchant marine and whaling experience to the writing, but also a healthy dose of Shakespeare and myth. Interested in SPACE and TIME as the preconditions for Ahab’s obsession, he conceived of his quest as an antidemocratic revolt against the natural world. “To Melville it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us individuals and a people,” Olson writes. “Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource” (12). I appreciated the way Olson handled the many characters, as a Greek choir to Ahab’s tragedy, but also a floating, diverse nation.