wahistorian's Reviews (506)

One of Hilary Mantel’s lesser known books, ‘Beyond Black’ was recommended on the ‘Backlisted’ podcast. Set in the seven years after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the book details the decline of spiritualist Alison and her assistant Colette after their move to the London suburbs. This is a story of inexorable decay. Colette takes over Alison’s life and business, packaging her talents as if she were a commodity, and also alienating her from her community of fellow “Sensitives.” Alison goes along with the plans, hoping Colette can bring some order to her life and help her shed the baggage of her nightmarish childhood, still haunting her in the form of her spirit guide, Morris, a detestable client of her mother’s whorehouse. The book explores the shadowy borderlands between memory and imagination, between life and death, between city and country; Mantel is really at her best evoking the miserable world we create when we are jammed up against each other in the suburbs, without the happy distractions the city provides. Stuck in a new build in the middle of a field seething with white worms, rats, irradiated soil, and nosy neighbors, Alison becomes more and more dependent on Colette, even as her manager grows more controlling and vicious. Alison does manage to regain some autonomy by putting her spirit guides in their place in this world and in memory, “doing good acts,” and rejoining her community of spiritualists. But it is a hard-won victory that may not have left her much time.

Tim Miller’s excruciatingly honest book explore Trump loyalism from the inside, as a campaign operative who understands how the allure of winning, of being part of the tribe, can overwhelm one’s principles and beliefs. Miller relates his own experience as a young closeted gay men working on increasingly conservative Republican campaigns; his own coming-out forced him to re-evaluate what politics is for and put him on a path to oppose the radically right-wing shift of his own party. His candidates—John Huntsman and John McCain—started out reliably moderate, but Miller cites McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as VP running mate as a watershed moment for the party’s angry populist turn. Although he admits that for most campaign workers, the game is enough, he develops a schema of factors that motivated otherwise reasonable people to join and stay with the orange president, and then, remarkably, put names and histories to these stories. Some of these people’s narratives are painful to read; kudos to the author for the obviously gut-wrenching work of digging out these stories. Despite his best efforts, however, the motivations are those we mostly know: ambition, money, and unquenchable anger at the “libs.” “There is no shortage of people out there looking to make a dollar and a cent in the political business,” he observes. “But the moral quandary comes into play when that work is in service of something that they know is dangerous and harmful and they do it anyway” (180). He may not have found the answers, but this book may at least raise questions in the minds of the next set of enablers, and that is a service to the country.

One of the most clear-eyed and unflinching looks at the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the predicament of Ukraine I have read yet. Yes, Iuliia Mendel was press secretary to the Ukrainian president for two years, but she is willing to admit when he got things *and* the incredible learning curve he and his team experienced trying to bring the country out of post-post-Soviet oligarchic corruption and into democracy. Her close access to Zelenskyy and his government gave her a ringside seat to both his challenges and the skills and philosophy he brought to the task. She emphasizes his clear vision, his high standards for himself and those around him, his persistence, and, most importantly, his humanity. She relates European and American skepticism, but fiercely defends Ukraine as a bulwark against Putin’s expansion. It’s a heartbreaking story that everyone should read: how can a president and a people work so hard to join the community of nations that believes in the rule of law, human rights, a free media, and legitimate democracy, yet find themselves standing almost alone against Russian aggression? Incidentally, the chapter on language and nationalism alone is work the price of the book.

Mark Leibovich’s book is an excellent complement to Tim Miller’s ‘Why We Did It.’ Both men are interested in the accomplices who aided and abetted Donald Trump’s reign of terror on the campaign trail and in the White House, Miller from the perspective of a campaign operative and Leibovich from his viewpoint as a Washington correspondent for the New York Times. They cover familiar territory, but ‘Thank You for Your Servitude’ is a step-by-step dissection of the Trump presidency as it “spiraled” and “unraveled” (two of his favorite metaphors for DJT’s increasingly outrageous and demanding behavior). Neither book quite gets at the core deficiency of the Republican Party that would allow so many to continue to humor him, kow-tow to him, and pretend that he had anything of value to offer the American people, even after it’s clear that the emperor has no clothes (and Leibovich follows him to the bitter end, to Jan. 6 and beyond). It is the vacuum at the heart of the GOP—the lack of principled policy positions—that enables so many to sign onto servitude to Trump distorted reality, even those who tend to do it with a wink at others who are also “in on the joke” (another of Leibovich’s favorite metaphors). The problem is that this outlook is becoming the ideology that drives the party, as the author points out, with terrifying implications for the future: “Trumpism becomes more of a style and an ethic. It is not tethered to any set of ideas so much as an expansive code of denial and openness to lies” (284). Until the Republicans find a new lodestar, the American republic will remain in danger. But thank God for the Liz Cheneys, the Adam Kinzingers, and writers like Leibovich and Miller.

In this book, Charles Spencer tells the fraught story of the rise of William the Conqueror’s son Henry I to the British throne and his desperate attempt to stay there. Henry inaugurated a period of relative calm in England and Normandy, destroyed by the death of his likely heirs in the sinking of the ‘White Ship’ in a winter storm in 1120. The book is an interesting case study of “what might have been,” without going as far as counterfactualism. Spencer describes the misery and abuse suffered by ordinary people as various would-be kings, counts, earls, and bishops going about consolidating their power and holding territory, without norms or laws to temper their strategies. He also explores the illegitimacy of female monarchs in this period, as Henry’s daughter Matilda, rightful heir to the throne, lost out to his bastard son Stephen of Blois. A bloodthirsty tale of the middle—not to say “dark”—ages.

This was a fun one, following Christie’s several spy novels (Secret at The Chimneys, Man in the Brown Suit) in which she introduced new protagonists. She seemed in this period, her early writing years, to be trying to settle on a style and a detective that suited her; even in this one, she suggests that Hercule Poirot is retired and thus may not return for another novel. The author herself has said that she felt a bit stuck with the fussy Belgian, because he was so popular, making his retirement especially tricky because he went on to solve crimes for another 40 years. ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ is lacking in the social insights that I adore—Christie hadn’t yet hit her confident stride—but it is cleverly plotted with a little comic relief provided by narrator Dr. James Sheppard’s nosey sister. There are a lot of characters to keep track of and they are a bit cardboard, but the book has some unusual twists to keep the reader going, including the fact that the main suspect is offstage for most of the book. The ending is unexpected and fresh. All in all, this must have been a whodunnit that convinced Agatha Christie that she and Poirot had a future together.

A fictional account of the ripple effects of what is called the “High School Beauty Murder” in Seoul becomes a meditation on the meaning of beauty, death, and the providence—or lack there of—of God. I found it a bit challenging to follow with multiple unidentified narrators over a period of seventeen years. Beautifully written, however.

Having read many Agatha Christie novels and never having read a biography of the author, I thoroughly enjoyed Lucy Worsley’s comprehensive look at Christie’s life and work. Worsley explores all the facets of Christie’s unique role as a “authoress” of the early 20th-century scorned as middlebrow or even lowbrow for much of her career. These labels seemed to make little difference to the author, since her drive to write and ambition to play with new ideas and new problems in detective fiction kept her going, no matter what anyone said. And that passion built an empire of dedicated readers (if not always the income that it should have reflected). Worsley skillfully recreates the many aspects of Christie’s life: the writer, the archaeologist, the wife and mother, the businesswoman, the friend, and surrogate mother to many. She faced two wars, a seeming nervous breakdown and divorce, a second very successful marriage to a much younger man, a culture undergoing massive change, a publishing industry often actively hostile to women writers, and her own increasing infirmity with age. Many of these these themes found their way into her books, giving them staying power. Yet she also understood the separation between work and life, especially as her troublesome game grew. “You can’t write your fate. Your fates comes to you,” she wrote in her autobiography. “But you can do what you like with the characters you create” (338).

In which Catherine Morland lives too much in her novels, yet still comes to a happy end. This was my first Jane Austen and possibly my last, and not for lack of trying. Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’ ostensibly demonstrates—with humor—the pitfalls of allowing young minds to be shaped by excessive novel-reading, yet, for women at least, the world around them had not much to recommend it but duplicitous friends, grasping suitors, and household drudgery (although, granted, Catherine’s extended vacation at Bath and then the titular estate did not require much work on her part). Then entire first half of the book takes place at the health resort, where seventeen-year-old Catherine worries about how to make friends and whether her clothes and dancing skills are up to snuff. She finally decamps with her friend Eleanor Tilney to the Tilney home, Northanger Abbey, only to find it a disappointment in the gothic department. “In a house so furnished, and so guarded,” she thinks as a storm approaches, “she could have nothing to explore or suffer” (146-147). Confusion ensues from there, and not very prettily; Catherine makes a mortifying intimation to her would-be intended, and then she and her brother are disappointed in love and then not. The resolution feels tacked on, as if Austen herself had lost interest, which she all but says: readers, the narrator worries, “will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together toward perfect felicity” (233), a clever way to acknowledge the novelist’s imperative, but still… The best parts of the book are the comparisons made between real life and novels, and there just aren’t enough of those.