wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Elliott’s incredibly compassionate set of essays has encouraged me to rethink what I believe about addiction, mental illness, family life, poverty, and even abuse, in the context of the capitalist and colonialist societies we’ve inherited. And she does this without jargon, by drawing salient examples from her own life and experiences, which is a generous gift to her readers. I will think about her thoughtfulness and insight often.

Sisters Mickey and Kacey are inseparable as they grow until, surrounded as they are by dysfunction: two drug-addicted parents and a hardened and unforgiving grandmother. Twenty-some years later Mickey is a Philadelphia cop searching for her missing little sister who has also fallen prey to the city’s epidemic of heroin use. This book succeeds on so many levels, but particularly in the author’s depiction of a female cop who is also the single mother of a five-year-old son, with all the complications that implies; her jaded male colleagues who may not be what they seem; and the many addicted people that populate the city’s streets. Her compassionate creation of complex characters raises the story above an ordinary suspense novel. I was also captivated by Mickey’s love for Philadelphia and her fine-grained observations about change and decay. Thoroughly enjoyed this book.

This slim book of speeches given by climate activist Greta Thunberg is repetitive, which emphasizes her passion and singleminded dedication to her crusade. “This is a crisis,” she tells anyone who who will listen. “Your house is burning down.” She recites the evidence in frustration, but what is really fascinating are the excuses she’s heard and the suggestions for why her message is falling on deaf ears. “Panic never works,” she’s told. And she should go back to school and study to be climate scientist, or leave the problem in the hands of adults. Changing our habits is too expensive, would be a job-killer, would impact too many industries. No wonder I she’s so single-minded.

The second in Christie’s Hercule Poirot series—and only her second novel—definitely shows the potential of a future master mystery writer, but she’s not there yet. The book is marred by much more “telling” than “showing,” and the story is unbelievably twisty, with secret pasts, duplicate weapons, and even twin acrobats. A side story has Poirot pitting his “little gray cells” against Detective Giraud’s scientific investigation just coming into fashion in the 1920s. I was also a bit disappointed that Christie made no use whatsoever of the sport of golf that was becoming to popular in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it is fun to see one of Poirot’s earliest cases and to get an early taste of his philosophy about love, family, and truth-telling.

I found this book challenging to begin with, but so rewarding once I stuck with it. Wilson unravels seven mysteries of Charles Dickens’s life and singular talent, beginning at the moment of the author’s death and circling around and around his experiences and influences to create a full picture of his work. The result is a very unusual and enlightening biography that is as much about his work as his life; deeply engaged with the Dickens novels since his own horrific public school experience, Wilson uses his knowledge of the works to reflect on—but not quite psychologize—the author’s unique vision. “[T]his is what happens in the ‘Life’ of a novelist... [A]lmost all biographies of novelists do indeed consist of this juxtaposition of supposedly ‘real’ experiences and the reproduction of these experiences in fictive form” (271). “The question is where all this stuff is coming from,” Wilson wonders, “what are the wells from which he is drawing water?” (274). Unforgettable insights, not just into Dickens, but into how an author works.

The author inherits a friend’s Great Dane after his suicide and together they grieve and heal and age and learn about what canines and humans have to offer one another. She makes room for Apollo in her tiny New York apartment, figures out a way to avoid being evicted, and along the way their uneasy introduction to one another becomes an inseparable friendship at a time when she very much needs that. “Am I talking to you, or to myself?” she asks of her adopted companion. “I confess the line has gotten blurred” (205).

Michelle Oberman’s intensive research resulted in a fair and even-handed books that looks at the real consequences of laws that make abortion illegal. Her case studies are extremes: El Salvador, where abortion is illegal without exception, and Oklahoma, the “reddest state is America,” where anti-abortion is the value that has united Republicans since 2004. Oberman uses compelling personal stories—of teenage mothers and pregnant women whose lives are threatened by the prospect of carrying a baby to term, of male politicians in the South wracked with guilt over contraception—to demonstrate the depth of feeling around the issue, as well as the real world consequences of opposition to abortion. What she discovers is that the very people most affected by abortion bans, ie. poor and uneducated women, are the women least likely to be able to influence lawmakers. And she makes a compelling case that the laws do not even result in fewer terminations. Mostly male office-holders formulate abortion restrictions out of deeply held beliefs or a desire to secure votes, and the women and their families who are most harmed are not the voters they are concerned with. The author makes a heartfelt case in the conclusion for seeing the humanity in one another, but as long as politicians are more concerned with fetuses than with women and their families, it is difficult to take their claims to humanity seriously.

Jody Shields account of a plague ravaging Kharbin (Harbin in Chinese) in 1910 is particularly appropriate to today; she describes in moving detail the fears and anxieties of this borderland, contested by Russia, China, and Japan, as more victims are claimed by the unnamed disease. The story is told from the viewpoint of The Baron, a Russian doctor sent by the Czarist government to this outpost to help secure Russia’s land claim against China. But The Baron is not a nationalist, but a humanist who helps explore all dimensions of the crisis. He is married to a Chinese woman, Li Ju, and is a great admirer of the local tea tradition and calligraphy in particular. By explaining these aspects of Chinese culture through Tbe Baron’s eyes, Shields gives a palpable sense of what is jettisoned as the bacillus claims more and more victims. There are also startling parallels to today, as Japanese soldiers refuse to take a Chinese serum, assuming it is meant to kill them. “What’s here today would scarcely have been believable yesterday,” one character observes (312). This is a richly imagined novel of a disaster, despite the somewhat slow plotting.

In general, I tend not to enjoy short stories, but I liked the way this book drew out different facets of Hercule Poirot’s character as he confronts 14 unique mysteries at the beginning of his career. We learn that he suffers from ‘mal de mer’ and is also not very happy on the train, which explains a lot about his tendency to allow Hastings to do his legwork while he comfortably applies his little grey cells in his rooms. “Most details are insignificant; one or two are vital,” he tells Hastings when describing his method. “The senses mislead. One must seek the truth within—not without” (p.160). And again later, he explains “I am looking for something I do *not* see.... A mistake—even a little mistake—on the part of the murderer” (p.160). Christie does not overplay his love of the finer things yet, nor do we learn much about his background before he comes to London as a refugee from his home country of Belgium. As with any collection of short stories, some of these are throwaways, but many include interesting insights into 1920s Europe: the dearth of affordable housing options in “The Adventure of the Cheap Flat”; readers’ fascination with the exotic in “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” and “The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman”; and a little about interwar politics in “The Kidnapped Prime Minister.” The fun of reading Christie is in her wide-ranging interests, which inform her books with investigative techniques and clues—the Almanach de Gotha, conduct in an opium den, and of course obscure poisons—unforeseen by the average reader and this collection is replete with those.

I first read this book when I was the same age as Holden Caulfield, which would have been 45 years ago. It was probably wasted on me then, but as an adult I can see the human condition in Holden’s predicament. He’s lost his way in the world, stuck as he is in the moment between childhood and adulthood, and nothing is dependable just at the moment when he needs something to believe in. Adults are phonies or creeps; even his favorite teacher, Mr. Antonini, turns out to be “perverty,” or is he? Holden can’t be sure. His four-day escape from the prep school that’s about to expel him turns into his walkabout during which he tries to rekindle old relationships and revisit familiar places, in an attempt to find a connection, to feel something. But still he keeps his real connections—Jane Gallagher, a girl he always admired, his sister Phoebe, and his dead brother Allie—at arm’s length. “One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something,” he tells us. “Some guys spend *days* looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I’d care too much” (89). Read in the context of today’s mass shootings committed by young white men alienated from meaningful connections with community, ‘Catcher in the Rye’ points to the fragility of family, school, peers, and the “American dream” for so many, without really solving the problem. Caring for someone more vulnerable ultimately pulls Holden back from the brink, but can it last? Even he makes no promises. “If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even *half* the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world,” he warns us, “It’s impossible” (202).