wahistorian's Reviews (506)

My first Ngaio Marsh-Roderick Alleyn novel. I loved the setting on the Devon Coast, which Marsh could be quite poetic about, but she was also quite clear-eyed about the goings-on there: the romantic intrigue, the village gossip, the long-suffering pub landlord and his dim-witted son. Yet the characters were well-drawn and did not seem like types. The investigation of the murder at the center of the novel could be quite tedious, however; when Alleyn reviews the whereabouts of every pub patron when the lights went out for the umpteenth time, the reader begins to wonder if there wasn’t more economical way to solve crime. Still, I enjoyed the relationship between Alleyn and Inspector Fox, and the references to the British Communist Party, which was indeed worrisome to some Tories in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

A tight little horror story about five friends who meet in a haunted and crumbling mansion, to humor a bride-to-be whose dream is to be married in a haunted house. The friends bring with them their hurts and jealousies, which the spirits deploy against them, and the result is disaster. Khaw is at her best and sharpest when describing the state of the deteriorating house and the spirits that live there, and she certainly knows how to turn a poetic phrase. “From austere to aureate” is one of my favorites.

A delightful collection of Agatha Christie wintertime stories: one Miss Marple, two Hercule Poirots, and two Mr. Quins, which I’d never read before. There are the requisite train rides, frivolous youths planning practical jokes, country estates, and cranky Duchesses, all mixed in with the murders, mistaken identities, and purloined jewels. The plots don’t always make sense, but what I like about Christie is that even the improbable comes to seem at least possible. And I like that she occasional sprinkles in some life wisdom, even in exotic locales. “What are the years from twenty to forty?,” asks Mr. Parker Pyne. “Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That’s bound to be. That’s living. But later there’s a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth about yourself. Life becomes real—significant…. That’s when individuality has a chance” (187). Spoken like a writer who had recently been through some tribulations.

This book was a puzzle—I was never sure if I was reading satire or horror or what, which is my reading flaw, that I wanted to be able to classify it. It started out as a detective story, but with America’s racial past and present front and center—it reminded me a little of Attica Locke—but it quickly grew stranger and stranger. Here’s what that looks like: “The congregation could be seen cresting a ridge then coming down toward town like a tornado. And like a tornado it would destroy one life and leave the one beside it unscathed. It made a noise. A moan that filled the air. ‘Rise,’ it said, ‘Rise.’ It left towns torn apart. Families grieved. Families assessed their histories’ (306). The book’s in flinching speculation about the legacy of white Americans’ racial violence makes it a difficult read, but also a worthwhile one, and Everett’s characters have the ring of truth, even when he is poking fun at them. I will read more of Percival Everett. One note: Please, Graywolf Press, do a better editing job—there is no excuse for substituting “we’re” for “were,” unless you’re editing on an iPhone.

This is my first Mary Roach, a Christmas gift from my nephew, and now I see what all the fuss is about. I was first attracted by the subtitle—“when nature breaks the law”—but of course the book is about humans’ constant encroachment on animal habitat and our subsequent attempts to bend nature to our will. Roach’s writing style is sprightly, but the reader shouldn’t be confuse by that, because this book is deeply researched and culturally complex, with examples of human-animal conflict from India, Guam, New Zealand, Canada, and many other places. She explores the many attempted solutions to these conflicts and concludes that she is most admiring of the humans who can adopt “coexistence and biocontrol” (289). Along the way, the reader absorbs rich and fascinating facts about animals’ adaptability and resourcefulness that underline the fact that coexistence is really the only sensible path open to us. Finally, I love a book that teaches me new words—pinnipeds, kerf, and spurge, to name a few—and a book that uses footnotes to jolly effect.

3 1/2 stars, really. When newly divorced advertising designer Gwynne Dacres rents the cheapest room she can find in Harriet Garr’s boarding house, she little suspects how its tenants will enliven her life, and not in a good way. She thinks of the house as a “listening house,” one seemingly poised to take in her every move. She quickly finds out that it is the landlady who is listening and observing, in order to preserve her own secrets from the past. Mabel Seeley published this book in 1938, toward the end of the Great Depression, and I’ve never read a book that depicts the struggles of working people in this period so well and so matter-of-factly. Most of the tenants spend half or more of their take-home pay on rent, leaving them vulnerable to Mrs. Garr’s cranky rules and manipulation. Yet Mrs. Dacres remains a plucky investigator into the mysteries of this sinister house. She has suitors but they are very much secondary to solving the murder of the mob figure in the gully behind the house and the other crimes that follow. Seeley managed to incorporate police corruption and many other urban ills into the story. All in all, this is a Golden Age mystery—even though it’s not British—with a distinctly American, and even feminist, spin.

I am not a self-help book reader, which makes sense because this book is not strictly self-help. But I read it for self-help reasons: several important people in my life are survivors of childhood trauma and I wanted to learn how to be more understanding and compassionate about how adversity has shaped them as adults. I have not stopped recommending this book to people since I started reading it. With prompting from Oprah—because the book is written in dialogue-style—neurologist Bruce Perry traces the effects of early neglect and abuse on developing brains and how the brain and the body’s attempts to make sense of that world can have difficult consequences for them as they grow. Perry explains brain development under stress in easy to understand terms and interestingly describes his own process of learning about how to treat traumatized patients over the course of his career. Winfrey’s own experiences of building resilience from her own adversity also personalized the process and makes it feel positive and doable. “Everything that was happening to you was also happening for you,” she observes (298), which could sound sugarcoated, but with a little background on the brain’s plasticity, I could embrace the truth of that. Remarkably helpful book.

I so enjoy reading literary novels that address climate change—Ben Lerner’s ‘10:04’ and Margaret Drabble’s ‘The Dark Flood Rises’ are two examples—and some have called Stewart’s ‘Storm,’ written Jan 1938, the first climate change novel. The storm at the center of this book, named Maria by the “Junior Meteorologist” watching her, is the main character and the other humans are reacting and responding according to their roles: the Line Dispatcher is making sure telephone and radio lines function, the Superintendent is making sure mountain highways stay clear, and so on, all dependent on information from the senior and junior meteorologists based in San Francisco. Despite extensive passages about weather and its changes, the story remains compelling and it goes fast. Will the Streamliner train between Chicago and San Francisco get through on time? What happens to Rick, the line repairman? Stewart’s musings on the meanings of weather to humans through time are also interesting—he has such faith in science, that he predicts that worldwide cooperation may, “a century hence,” make weather entirely predictable (233). What he could not predict in 1938 was that climate change would make weather even more unstable, confounding the historical patterns meteorologists relied upon. Yet he does recognize the humbling effects of storms on even humans’ best weapons: “drought or flood, cold wind and ice, heat, blown dust, shift of the storm track—in the end they overcome even the imperturbable machines” (207).

This is the first of Emile Zola’s 20-book series tracing the history of the Rougon-Macquart families during France’s “Second Empire” of Louis-Napoleon, after brutally putting down the Republican movement. The series is meant to apply Zola’s Naturalism to an examination of one extended family through history, exploring the interaction of their genetic tendencies with the particular politics and social environment. In ‘The Fortune of the Rougons,’ the family is off to a rocky start in 1851 as two couples—Pierre and Felicite Rougon and Silvere and Miette—vie for dominance of the novel. Retired oil-dealers, Pierre and Felicite, “these two elderly people eaten up with greed” (250), are determined to ride the tide of counter-revolution to the wealth and dominance they have always believed they deserve. Silvere and Miette, an apprentice wheelwright and his fiancée, are just starting out in life and they are filled with a romantic spirit of social justice. After establishing the beauty of this young couple, almost in a Rousseauian state of nature, Zola traces the manipulations of the Rougons as they try to appear to protect the fictional town of Plassans during the Republican uprising. He describes their machinations and betrayals of the people around them, as they ruthlessly seek their pathetic pay-off from riding Louis-Napoleon’s coattails. (Some of this will sound familiar to anyone who has closely watched the Trump Administration, and reminded me of Marx’s admonition that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce.) Zola’s power of observation and his empathy make all his books moving and insightful; I was fascinated by this moment in history in a small town far from the action in Paris.

Brody does a good job at bringing to life the creator of ‘Harriet the Spy’ and the author of the books that Harriet inhabited. She also recreates the various milieus that shaped Louise Fitzhugh: the outwardly genteel, inwardly vicious South of the 1930s and 1940s; the bohemian, experimentalist years in New York City and Paris; and the more settled, creative environment of Connecticut and Long Island. Despite her success in art and children’s literature, the Fitzhugh that emerges is a woman never quite comfortable in her own skin: diffident, slightly paranoid, an out lesbian who lived with partners mostly in the closet, and a creative who perhaps never quite lived up to her own expectations. Nevertheless, in her friends and her readers she stimulated intense loyalty and pride in her accomplishments. Brody is not a historian, so if her contextualization of Fitzhugh’s life and work is a little light for my taste, still she cannot be faulted for the extensive research she put into her research.