wahistorian's Reviews (506)

My first Ruth Rendell. ‘Road Rage’ rocks right along, plunging you into the action from the first page. With an ongoing protest against a proposed highway as the backdrop, Chief Inspector Reg Wexford’s wife Dora calls a cab to the train station and promptly disappears. Then four others who have called the same cab company are also reported missing. It doesn’t take long before the connection to Greens and protestors emerges and Wexford is racing against the clock to find the hostages. Rendell writes vividly of the environmental impacts of road development and the stakes involved for small town residents without losing the excitement of the plot.

I started this book because a friend had tried it and abandoned it early on. It is not your traditional sensational account of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Did Schiff explain the proliferation of witchcraft accusations?, she asked me. Not really. Did she talk about hysteria?, she questioned. Well, a little at the end. What Stacy Schiff does so wonderfully is recreate the world of late 17th-century New England, with its political intrigue, its petty grievances, its religious intolerance, and it’s justifiable fears of the French and local Native Americans, who brutally fought back against the interlopers, all of which helped to contribute to the teens’ accusations. The book is rife with Salem’s claustrophobia and boredom and jealousies. Ultimately, she holds the colony’s leaders responsible for their mishandling of what might otherwise have been a passing fancy on the part of teens looking for attention or excitement or power; most of the trial justices also help themselves responsible with the clarity of hindsight. Schiff wrings every bit of meaning out of the documents to create an intense sense of the world the Puritans lived in and how it contributed to the tragedies of 1692.

‘Grendel,’ first published in 1971, has not held up well, infused as it is with shades of Iron John and even Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Grendel lives on the edge of Hrothgar’s world, watching his power ebb and flow and waiting for the chance to wreak havoc with his plans. I can see how this would have been a refreshing take on Beowulf in its time, but now devices like the metaphysical dragon and the book’s hyper masculinity. Perhaps it is time again, 50 years on, for a new perspective on Beowulf.

Elon Green’s ‘Last Call’ is part of a new trend in true crime focusing on the victims rather than the perpetrator, in an attempt to blunt the general ego gratification that criminals get from their notoriety. (Hallie Rubenhold’s ‘The Five: The Untold Lives of Women Killed by Jack the Ripper’ is a great example.) Green recreates the lives of these five known victims of this killer who preyed on gay men at least in the 1990s and possibly as early as the 1970s. In so doing he creates a richly contextualized picture of the challenges faced by gay men and lesbians in this period: fears of AIDS that plagued them, but also gave rise to intensified “gay panic”; closeted men’s fears of being outed; and the search for companionship and sex among lonely, ostracized people. This is a much-needed style of true crime, but it does lack the suspense of the hunt for a reason—however unsatisfying or misplaced. Green does an excellent job at piecing together the forensic story, however, which is also suspenseful. This book is not for the squeamish.

One of the most beautiful and moving books I’ve read this year. Toni Jensen, a Métis, describes her relation to the American cultural landscape of violence in a series of essays that are somehow simultaneously outward-focused and deeply personal. These essays move back and forth in time, tracing her peripatetic life as a graduate student and then adjunct professor, but more importantly her dawning understanding about how violence has shaped her life, beginning with the historical theft of Native American land. The male tendency to conquer, control, dominate never stopped with the conquest of a “New” World and now it manifests as an obsession with guns and regular domestic violence and mass shootings. Yet Jensen can still write with love about her abusive father, her partners, her daughter, and most especially the physical landscape she lives in. Her writing makes a painful and complex world somehow one still worth fixing and loving, however intractable it might appear to be.

As usual, Simon Winchester has made an immensely complicated subject—land ownership around the world through history—eminently readable and even comprehensible. How does he do this?! His book proceeds thematically, but also somewhat chronologically. He juggles all the aspects of land—how hunter-gatherers subsisted on the land; the emergence of agriculture, followed by enclosure, followed by conquest and the exploitation and subjugation that went along with it. He acknowledges the seeming logic of ownership—because it’s a commodity that “they’re not making anymore”—while suggesting that indigenous people around the world know better than to count on territory as something that even can be owned. Along the way he tells some fascinating stories: the Domesday Book and how it laid the foundation for the British monarchy; the Oklahoma land rush (and the many Trails of Tears that went before it); the enclosure movement and how it scattered Scots to North America; among many others. Winchester is particularly interested in communal ownership of land and its potential to reverse the abuses of individual ownership, yet he is not naive about it. He catalogs communalism from the incredibly destructive Stalinist takeover of Ukraine in the 1930s, the Scottish return of Hebrides Islands to social experiments and American land trusts today. A thoroughly absorbing book that made me wish he would tackle water next.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the Disney version of ‘Pinocchio,’ but Carlo Collodi’s surreal picaresque really gets in your head. Separated from his foster father Geppetto at the beginning of the book, poor Pinocchio is his own worst enemy, as he tells himself at the end of each adventure what a naughty boy he is to make Geppetto worry so. That gets a little monotonous, but the book is written to be read to children, so each chapter is an opportunity to tell its listeners, “don’t wander far from home, don’t trust strangers, listen to your parents.” In the meantime, this little wooden boy is all but immortal, as long as he stays away from flames.

Abdurraqib’s perspective is utterly unique and refreshing. The subtitle of this books is “Notes in Praise of Black Performance” and a lot of it is about dance and music, including essays about Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, and excellent ones about Wu-Tang Clan and the rivalry between a James Brown and Joe Tex; the author is an insightful observer of popular music and what it does to audiences and performers. But it’s also more broadly about performance of the roles to which Black men have so often been relegated and because of that these essays are also about intimacy, anger, masculinity, and fear in many very candid ways. It takes a lot of courage for an author to open up his experiences in this way and I have appreciated learning from him.

A little-known case of husband-murder now, Florence Maybrick’s story turns out to be a fascinating discussion of what reasonable doubt looks like. Florence was an American woman married to a much older British cotton merchant at a time when continental marriages were a fashion among American girls. Unfortunately, James Maybrick also had a penchant for self-medicating with the dangerous medicines of his day, which included strychnine, arsenic, and opium. When a lingering undiagnosed illness—maybe a gastric ulcer, maybe gastritis?—killed him in 1889, he left two suspicious brothers, a house littered with pills, packets, and potions, and a wife who had initiated an affair and perhaps a divorce. Kate Colquhon does a painstaking job of reconstructing the trial and the evidence against Florence, weaving in changing conceptions of right behavior for women and how they were expressed in novels and the legal system. I won’t spoil the outcome of Maybrick’s case, but it turned on the state of scientific evidence in the 1880s, as well as how judges and juries allowed hidebound ideas about womanhood to influence their evaluation of evidence. Colquhon suggests that her case became “a cipher both for those grappling towards a different way of being [for women] and for conservatives who believed that her alleged crime struck not simply at a single man but at the prevailing hierarchies that kept men on top” (235). Substitute race for gender and you can see why the death penalty can never be a just punishment.

This first Tommy and Tuppence novel is a silly story, but a fun one. I enjoyed the search for the arch-criminal Mr. Brown, with the fate of British democracy at stake. The several love interests—Tuppence and the American Julius Hershheimer; Jane Finn and Hershheimer; and Tuppence and Tommy, of course—were an unnecessary distraction, but as usual Christie managed even to bring them off. And it was interesting to me to see the story shaped by the same sort of paranoia about “foreigners” and Communism and post-WWI labor strife that Americans suffered from. All in all, a light enjoyable spy story that moved along with the irrepressible rhythm of the 1920s.