wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Together ‘Reservoir 13’ and ‘The Reservoir Tapes’ are like a kaleidoscope, in which the second book fills in some of the missing colored bits from the first one. Still centered around the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Becky Shaw, this book looks at various of the townspeople she encountered in the days before her disappearance, filling in their backstories in ways the chronological first book could not. It’s a fascinating technique that builds on the first book’s story of how life goes on, to show how life and relationships stop, too.

This novella is a “must read” for anyone interested in thinking about our place in history, what human qualities are innate and what socially constructed. At her father’s insistence, seventeen-year-old Sylvie and her mother Alison participate in two weeks of an Experimental Archeology field trip with “the Prof” and his three reluctant students. The aim is to live like Iron Age Britons, an opportunity father Bill, a bus driver, has been saving his vacation time for. Bill’s fascination with “real” British heritage has as much to do with his own insecurities and desire to dominate as it does with any true desire to gain skills through experience. For Sylvie, however, the sojourn is a chance to prove to herself her own survival skills and perhaps assert her independence from her parents. The experience throws into contrast gender roles and class privilege in ways that are subtle and intriguing: who makes social rules and why? Who does what sort of work and why? And who bears the costs of these decisions (or are they conventions backed by force)? Fascinating, and an interesting follow-on to Jon McGregor’s ‘Reservoir’ books.

An important book analyzing the Right’s opposition to K-12 comprehensive sex education beginning in the 1970s and the ways in which their battle enhanced their larger political movement. Opposition to sex education was part of an overall resistance to generational change in the postwar period, reflecting a desire to lock in traditional gender roles and preserve a Romantic notion of the innocence of childhood. But in order to make their argument, the Right’s rhetoric relied on more sexually explicit language even than proponents of sexuality education; conservatives put forward detailed accusations of teachers who recruited kids to homosexuality and assorted perversions, and even offered explicit classroom demonstrations. (Irvine shows how conservatives unconscionably lied about what was happening in classrooms, thanks to supposedly biblically endorsed “mental reservations” that were akin to fingers crossed behind one’s back.) This rhetoric advanced a sexualized culture without arming children with the knowledge necessary to make sense of it, and not incidentally resulted in a cottage industry of new political organizations and abstinence-only curricula and other products. The Right had successfully quashed sex talk in the classroom by the early 2000s, but Irvine suggests that curiosity and the thirst for necessary knowledge cannot be permanently denied.

I almost gave up on this book; as dense and sometimes convoluted as the prose is, it was a challenge to read during a pandemic. But Gadda’s passion for language (and, not incidentally, his disdain for Mussolini won the day for me). Two crimes take place in a seedy apartment house on Via Merulana in central Rome, and these crimes begin Dr. (really Detective) Ingravallo’s quest in this book: the theft of Signora Menegazzi’s jewelry and the brutal murder of Signora Balducci the next day. But the book is more about life in Rome, with its poverty and class tensions, but also its beauty. The novel is set in 1927 and fascism has already begun to remake Italian life; Gadda never misses an opportunity to poke fun at Mussolini’s obsession with trains, his vanity, his parochialism, and his narcissism, satire that was comforting to me in Trump’s America. It is spoiling nothing to reveal that the crimes are never solved—a Italo Calvino’s foreword tells the reader this—but that is not the point of the story. ‘That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana’ gives us a chance to live intensely in Gadda’s Rome for a while and that is worth the effort.

A beautifully written book with compassion for thoroughly reprehensible characters; there wasn’t a likable person in this book. I admire Momplaisir’s ability to handle multiple perspectives in an easily readable way and her ability to spend so much time with terrible people.

Perhaps not one of Lord Peter Wimsey’s very best cases, but entertaining all the same. Poor old General Fentiman is found dead in his favorite chair in the Bellona Club, but did he go before or after his sister Lady Dormer? That is the inheritance dilemma for Wimsey to unravel, as the identity of the heir(s) to the old lady’s fortune is depending on his answer. “The law,” as Lord Peter points out, “is nuts on what they call the orderly devolution of property” (106) and in this case so is Dorothy Sayers. You may need a scorecard to keep track of the suspects (and red herrings), but as always Wimsey’s jovial nature keeps you reading.

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel shares the lives of one Stratford family in the late sixteenth century, a family who just happens to be that of a famous playwright. If you’re looking for a story that focuses on that writer, this is not it, but instead, taking a cue from his tendency to lead two separate lives, the novel creates a sense of the country and family foundations of his work: his family’s strains and grief, the burden of the previous generation’s failures, their community’s disapproval of their unorthodox habits; in other words, the lives of artists, but in the late Middle Ages. Once you settle into the rhythm of these lives, ‘Hamnet’ pulls you into the difficult and rewarding world that produced William Shakespeare. Like everything you will read about him, it leaves you wanting more.

This work of nonfiction is extraordinary in so many ways: the family’s circumstances *and* their willingness to be candid about them; the author’s intensive research and ability to present it in a clear, concise way; and schizophrenia itself, the condition that has so far defied almost all attempts to understand it. At the height of the Cold War, Don and Mimi Galvin raised a family of twelve children—10 sons and two daughters—six of whom would experience psychotic breaks in their 20s. Robert Kolker explores the heartbreaking effects of the disease on family relationships and lives, even as he outlines the treatment possibilities available over the years. His book does not shy shy away from the question of the parents’ poor decision-making in creating such a family (and not being able really to cafe for them). Aside from the well children’s resilience in dealing with the terrifying consequences of the mental illness in the home, the book really takes off when tracing how the family contributes to research into solving schizophrenia. Is the disease the result of nature or nurture, or some complex combination of the two? From their pain, the Galvins have contributed to whatever we do know about schizophrenia. A page-turner.

Do not read this book if you are experiencing pandemic anxiety; it will be just too close to home. Lawrence Wright extensively researched this novel, which makes it all the more terrifying. Epidemiologist Henry Parsons is in Indonesia when hemorrhagic fever kills several people in a refugee camp. He tracks his driver and the virus to the hajj in Mecca, where three million pilgrims may have been exposed, and the terror explodes from there. The consequences of this global pandemic are catastrophic and even more so when it begins to appear that the disaster may have been orchestrated as an attack on the U.S. Although the ending feels improbable, Wright’s research is thorough enough that you believe, against hope, that if it is unlikely that humans could be this cruel and stupid, if they were, we would be doomed.

I love this book; it is glorious and appreciative and curious and full of delight. “Gardening has an embracing quality in that it colors the way you look at the world: everything that grows, and the way in which it grows, now catches your attention; the gardening eye assesses, queries, is sometimes judgmental—quite opinionated, gardeners. The physical world has a new eloquence” (186). And it certainly does, after reading this book.