wahistorian's Reviews (506)

What an exciting combination of genres! Attica Locke’s first-in-a-series of mysteries features Texas Range Darren Matthews, an African American East Texas native committed to his home region in spite of its racism. In this book a colleague points him in the direction of two murders in Lark, Texas: a white woman and a Black man both turned up in the bayou there. Matthews rejects the obvious solution and instead untangles the complex racial and familial ties that characterize East Texas on his way to solving the murders, with the help of one victim’s wife. Locke’s willingness to depict the racial climate of the town add a depth and a richness to the story, while helping the reader understand the very specific local context of a place Locke clearly knows and loves.

This early Agatha Christie spy novel is interesting mainly as a stop along the way to better things. She has populated it with a huge cast of mostly underdeveloped characters who move around the globe in ways that ultimately contribute to global politics. It is eight years after the end of WWI, Eastern Europe is still seething with intrigue and unrest, and Anthony Cade is recruited by a friend to take a mysterious manuscript, written by a Herzoslovakian count Styltpitch, by hand from South Africa to London for publication. By the time Case makes it to England he discover that on this manuscript turn numerous geopolitical developments: oil contracts sought after by England and the U.S.; the shape of the Herzoslovakian government, whether royalist or democratic; and the theft of the Kohinoor diamond which could finance which ever government emerges supreme. “King Victor,” an Arsene Lupin-like jewel thief is featured, as well as detectives from the American Pinkertons, the French Surete, and Scotland Yard of course. And there are several intrepid women who have their own problems, too. It’s a complicated romp, with the usual retrograde British colonialisms (“dagos” abound), and most interestingly Christie seems to come down on the side of liberated women *and* monarchy. When all the murders and thefts are resolved, the two protagonists (no spoilers here) rejoice at their future in Herzoslovakia: “We’ll have a lot of fun...teaching the brigands not to be brigands, and the assassins not to assassinate, and generally improving the moral tone of the country” (310).

This novel was painfully on the nose for me right now. Vesta Gul has relocated from the Midwest after the death of her tyrannical academic husband Walter; she’s now the owner of a former Girl Scout camp on a lake in Maine. She’s living alone with her dog Charlie, slowly establishing new patterns and habits. Her rebuilding is upended by a note she discovers on a walk in the woods, a note that seems to hint at a murder. Vesta distracts herself from her own grief and self-creation by creating a cast of characters around “Magda,” her imagined victim, as well as a life for Magda. Moshfegh cleverly uses this device to explore how we understand reality as we age, how the world can sap our confidence, but also what resilience we can draw upon to keep going. Poor Vesta.

Just a thoroughly fascinating book that looks at Southern California’s historical reputation as a gardener’s paradise, the immigrants it has attracted—from inside and outside the U.S.—and how those migrants have shaped and been shaped by the act of tending plants there. Generations of first Japanese and then Latinos have staked their claim on the American dream by maintaining the fantasy yards of wealthier white home-owners, growing landscaping businesses and incidentally being blamed for the water-guzzling and gas-guzzling lawns seemingly necessary to make these homes the showpieces that maintain property values. On their own time, immigrants also take advantage of community gardens as places to reconnect with cultural food and medicinal traditions and their compadres. Community gardens can nurture their souls and renew neighborly ties. Finally, the authors looks at the Huntington’s Suzhou garden and how even immigrants can use elite landscapes to announce their arrival on the scene as philanthropic forces to be reckoned with. I won’t look at gardens the same way after reading this book.

Attica Locke and her Ranger Darren Matthews are quickly becoming one of my favorite diversions, mostly because of her use of history and her evocative East Texas setting. The history of race relations informs Locke’s present-day plots in ways that help me understand how long memory is. Ranger Matthews is sent to Jefferson, TX on the shores of Caddo Lake, a body of water shared by Texas and Louisiana, to look into the disappearance of the son of a white supremacist figure. In the process he confronts the history of escaped slaves and the Native Americans who helped, and the town’s attempts to remake itself as an tourist spot for nostalgic whites. “This whole town is a lie,” observes a local junk shop owner. “Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud—the fiction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace—while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible” (239). Understanding this is integral to solving the mystery and Locke manages to unwind all the threads of the story in a way that does justice to the history’s integrity.

Hallie Rubenhold set out to restore the humanity of Jack the Ripper’s five victims with this book and she has succeeded. “In order to keep [Jack] alive,” she writes, “we have had to forget his victims. We have become complicit in their diminishment” (348). In painstakingly piecing together the lives of these women, she has also demonstrated how precarious Victorian life was for women: expectations were low but strict, jobs were few and underpaid, and illness could destroy one’s health and source of support capriciously. The picture that emerges of these five is of a group of women representing thousands more: coping with poverty, illness, death, pregnancies unwanted, and children loved but also burdensome. All in all, these women had few options, but they were resilient in making their way despite the odds against them. If we know anything now about serial killers, it is that they are opportunists, and Polly, Kate, Mary Jane, Elizabeth, and Annie could have been any of us.

A delightful, highly illustrated story of how the quest to recreate Shakespeare’s garden shaped garden history and gardens themselves. The bard’s beds at New Place became a sort of ur-garden for Victorians, who had the money and leisure to think about what plantings ought to look like and how they should be arranged. Publishing pushed the study forward, as numerous garden enthusiasts compiled catalogs of plants mentioned in the plays and poetry. And scholars combed through early works, especially Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Gardens,” to divine how Elizabethans organized the natural world. The result has been a series of shifting concepts of how a garden works: how it smells and looks, what is the balance of wild and tamed, and, most importantly, how it pleases and restores the human spirit.

In 1890s London, sisters Virginia, Alice, and Monica are our guides to the world of “Odd Women,” those “unpaired” and unasseted young women who have to make their way without resources of education, male protection, or legal rights. As the sister with the most promise, Monica’s journey is at the center of the story; she takes a job as a shop-girl, working six 13-hour days a week on her feet, 51 weeks a year, and begins to conceive of marriage as her only likely escape from the fate of her older sisters, who are slowly succumbing to penury, ill health, loneliness, and joylessness, despite their best efforts. Monica quickly gives in to the attentions of the lonely but distinguished Mr. Widdowson and abandons her single life for the prison that marriage becomes with him. Gissing’s book explores marriage in all its dimensions, but he’s particularly interested in how Victorian women’s economic and legal dependency distorts the institution. He presents other alternatives, particularly in the characters of Rhoda Nunn and Mary Barfoot, two “New Women” whose charitable school trains young women for genteel work as secretaries (then mainly a male profession) where they might improve their minds and earn some kind of freedom. Nunn and Barfoot are the vanguard of a kind of “sexual [AKA gender] anarchy,” in which women can begin to explore their human potential more fully. But it takes an extraordinary woman to break free of social convention; ‘The Odd Women’ demonstrates how messy—and how slow—change is.

A complex first novel from Dame Agatha featuring the debut of Hercule Poirot, Belgian war refugee who is very grateful to the British people. When Emily Ingelthorp is murdered in a locked room at her country estate in Styles, house guest Hastings knows the perfect detective to help with the case. The cast of characters is large and a bit underdeveloped, but it is fun watching Christie launch Monsieur Poirot with all his tics and his “little gray cells.” And who cares if there’s no way the reader could have figured out the murder?

I just learned that Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1921 for ‘The Age of Innocence.’ In 1925 Anita Loos, first woman screenwriter in Hollywood, published a series of sharp-tongued magazine articles in the form of diary entries penned by Lorelei Lee. At 15 Lee had escaped Little Rock, Arkansas and landed in New York City, where she quickly learned to live on her sex appeal by running a series of grifts on men hoping to bed her. Lee insisted she was not a flapper, raised as a Christian Scientist by a father who was a well-known Elk back in Little Rock. But she’s not averse to taking a Prohibition-era drink or luring a date into a breach of promise suit. Her confidence never wavers nor does her desire to improve herself, and with the sponsorship of Mr. Eisman, her regular beau, she travels to London, Paris, and Central Europe. She is analyzed by “Dr. Froyd” who is unable to do much with her and learns enough French to drink with “squeaking” Frenchmen. By the end of the novel she may have parlayed her new knowledge and connections into a profession slightly more certain and less grasping than her minute-to-minute cons. Read in the context of George Gissing’s ‘The Odd Women,’ ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ brings home the ways in which women of the 1920s were a universe away from their mothers in the late 19th century: gone is the fear, but also the morality and self-examination that kept the New Women of the 1890s trapped in loveless marriages.