wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This extraordinary book is truly a group effort, even though the author might have actually preferred it had never been published. Obsessed with the obscure blues giant Robert Johnson, Robert “Mack” McCormick spent years systematically tracking Johnson’s traces across the Mississippi-Texas-Oklahoma landscape, following every tiny lead to ground. The research was essentially complete in 1970, but mental illness and lack of money made it impossible for the author to complete a publishable manuscript in his lifetime. What we have here, as the Smithsonian editor describes it, is a highly edited version of his final manuscript, even down to removing all traces of Johnson’s two sisters, who asked to be removed from the book after they felt taken advantage of by McCormick. Editor John W. Troutman is clear about the delicate racial politics of McCormick’s project, as a white journalist whose sources were all Southern Black people just after the height of the Civil Rights era; Troutman’s foreword might be a bit heavy-handed since McCormick himself was aware of the need for tact and diplomacy in his fieldwork, even if his single-mindedness sometimes got in the way of that politesse. But in the climactic chapter, when he finds himself in the right place with the right people, no one can dispute his ability to bring to life the transformative power of the music and its link to the Mississippi Delta. Some of those scenes are magical, and whatever McCormick’s flaws, you can’t take that away from him.

Leah Zani is a public anthropologist, who applies her understanding of cultural practices to learning about the after-effects of war, in this case the U.S.’s secret bombing campaign in Laos. ‘Strike Patterns’ relates her time traveling with international bomb clearance teams in the Laotian countryside, learning with villagers the techniques for making land safe to farm and build on. The book is sensitive and poetic in its descriptions of the land, the people, and particularly their spiritual and cultural beliefs. She argues that war is never really over for those on whose land it is fought, even for women and children. There is so much to this book, it is hard to put into words, but at a time when 16 months of Putin’s war against Ukraine has ruined a land mass the size of Austria, Zani’s work makes me wonder if humans even deserve the beautiful planet we live on.

This book was a bit of a slog, with so many characters introduced in the first half and no clue as to which ones were vital to the story. *And* it took fully half the book to get out of Paris and on to Mykonos, where the reader was promised the real action would take place. Historian-in-training and would-be spy John Craig fell into the plot when his old professor Sussman insists he’s seen a ghost: Heinrich Berg, the Nazi who had sentenced his family to death in a concentration camp was walking the streets of Paris, despite the fact that was long dead. Craig and an international group of operatives set out to unravel the mystery of Berg’s existence, but much of the action in this book takes place offstage while the men concerned sit around in cafes and talk about it. The last third picks up a bit, as the plan to capture Berg comes to fruition on Mykonos and Craig gets to test his mettle as a steely operative. I would try MacInnes again—her descriptions of place and flashes of humor were worth sticking with—and I am assured others of her books are better.

Possibly one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, but beautifully written, of course, somehow simultaneously capturing the innocence of a young boy and the perspective of time passed. Maxwell depicts the unrelentingly hard life of Illinois farmers at the turn of the century, not the idyllic life of the American myth, but a life dominated by unfulfilled expectations, poverty, exhaustion, conformity, and violence. When Cletus Smith’s mother gives in to the interest shown to her by her husband’s best friend, neighbor Fred Wilson, both families are destroyed, and the affair ends in two deaths. Attorneys, ministers, farm-owners (because these men are tenants), and their overburdened families fail the two couples involved. “It would have been a help if at some time some Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said ‘People neither got what they deserved nor deserve what they get…’ On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?” (123-24). Maxwell delicately explores the internal landscapes of these seemingly implacable farm people, and his occasional references to Freudianism suggest the legacy that their children were left to deal with. So moving and thought-provoking.

In 1953 Nicolas Bouvier and his friend Thierry Vernet embarked on a yearlong driving trip from Lubljana, Yugoslavia to the Khyber Pass in a Fiat prone to repeated breakdowns. Having little money, the two planned to work their way across the continent, Bouvier writing and giving lectures and Vernet selling paintings and making murals. Bouvier describes their adventures, the people they encountered and the landscapes and climate, in an admiring and even-handed way that must have been unique for two young Swiss artists in the 1950s. The reader cannot help but admire Bouvier’s willingness to accept people on their own terms, and to roll with the malaria, stomach ailments, occasional con artist, and the flies, always the flies. Six years later, he comments on an archeological dig he helped with in Afghanistan at the end of the trip, comments that summarize his documentarian style: “Is there a methodical way of putting down what is known about such a place, all the facts in order of importance? No doubt there is—I have labored over it, but I can’t get it right… Why add stale words to fresh things that can get along perfectly well without them?” (307). But his are far from stale words, and those of us who will never take such a trip are very glad he made the effort.

3.5 stars really. Interesting story that is more sharply drawn in the movie version. Smith created characters for whom duplicity is second nature, so there are crosses and double crosses, in the name of money (Americans) and love and the status quo (Russians). This book is poetic in spots, noirish in spots, and police procedural in places. The different genres do not always gel to create a seamless whole, but anticipating the whys and hows is an engaging ride.

Dorothy Hughes’ pioneering 1947 noir novel reads as fresh as it must have done when it was first published. Dix Steele—liar, con artist, and worse—lands in L.A. after the war, subletting the garden apartment of an offstage acquaintance, when he decides to look up his Army Air Force buddy, Brub Nicolai, now a police detective. The book follows the two over the course of a few months, as women’s bodies begin turning up strangled. Hughes writes from inside the mind of Dix Steele, slowly building his tortured perspective of the world: his ennui with his post-flying existence, his financial desperation, his disdain for Brub’s domesticity, but especially his anger and suspicion of women—like Brub’s wife Sylvia—who seem to know more about him than he knows himself, and certainly more than he wants them to know. It’s a tense and delicate portrait of a male predator, but one that still somehow provoked the reader’s sympathy occasionally. The book is actually much better than the film by the same name, but Bogart does an excellent job of embodying the psyche of a man who blames everyone around him for what ails him.

Michael Cohen’s book would seem at first blush to be a ‘mea culpa,’ in which he confesses all the many terrible things he did for Trump as the sociopathic real estate mogul took over first his life and then his personality. Cohen repeatedly cautions the reader that he knew then and he knows now that he was not blameless as he harangued Trump’s enemies into submission, helped ruin reputations and businesses, and generally ground people I got the ground so that DJT got his way. He was the “fixer” before he was personal attorney to the President, but his ambition for power knew no limits. “The real real truth”—Cohen is big on “real real”—“about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world” (105). The book relates his many transgressions on the way to the presidency—my personal favorite is the Benjamin Moore story that involves Cohen extorting 10,000 gallons of paint from the manufacturer for a job that Trump never paid for. But when he finally gets there, he finds their relationship tainted by the very act that facilitated Trump’s ascension to the throne: Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels to keep her mouth shut. His hero was never adequately appreciative and he began distancing himself from his fixer as soon as the payment was made. The FBI ultimately seized Cohen’s paper and computers, and he was indicted and convicted for campaign fraud, tax evasion, and misrepresentation on a bank form. Although Cohen would have the reader believe he has reached some new level of self-insight and candor with himself and his family, who is ultimately to blame? The prosecutor of the Southern District of New York. “No one reading this book should think for a second that they’re immune to [sic] these gangster tactics that have been so widely publicized, but continue unabated and unapologetically,” he writes (353). I did not see that coming, but I should have. And so should he.

What an extraordinary little book, one of the most unique I’ve read in a long time. Over the course of 181 pages, the narrator relates an “artistic dinner” at the Auersbergers’ flat in Vienna, on the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, Joana. The dinner was organized to feature the well-known Burgtheater actor currently playing Ekdal in Ibsen’s play ‘The Wild Duck.’ The narrator has recently returned from some years in London and now finds himself compelled by Joana’s suicide to renew friendships with his old crowd of artists, writers, composers, and actors. What follows is the narrator’s internal monologue of disdain for his fellow artists, their pretensions and ambitions, and the state of the arts in Vienna. This should be unpleasant, but the circularity of Bernhard’s style in this book draws the reader in; every thought is rolled around and examined from every angle, until the repetition of key words becomes almost hypnotic. What emerges is the artist’s love-hate relationship with Vienna and his fellow creatives. “Vienna is an ‘art mill,’ the biggest art mill in the world, in which the art and artists are ground down and pulverized, year in, year out,” he thinks. “Whatever the art or whatever the artists, the Viennese art mill grinds them to powder…. And the curious thing is that all these people jump into this art mill entirely of their own volition, only to be totally ground down by it” (158-159).

A well-researched biography of Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson that emphasizes the intentionality of his career as a musician rather the mythical and mystical phenom often depicted. Conforth demonstrates that Johnson saw his musicianship as a way to escape a life of backbreaking labor in favor of one of excitement, novelty, physical and sexual freedom, and even wealth and fame. Johnson could do things with a guitar that no one else had thought of, but this talent was not just inherent; his near-constant playing at jukes, parties, dances, and street corners honed his skills. Conforth traces his work on the way to recording sessions in Texas, where he shaped his sound and jealously guarded his technique from those who might imitate him. A tour of northern cities—Chicago, Detroit, and NYC—near the end of his life suggests what might have been had the twenty-six-year-old loved to old age. The trip itself must have been a revelation to him, as he moved through neighborhoods of urban blacks who had escaped the South’s poverty and race terrorism. Only the electric guitar, just coming into wide use in 1938, seemed to stymie him: “Although he like the volume, Robert told the guitarist…he ‘couldn’t make it talk’ like he wanted” (245). Poisoned by a jealous husband, Johnson never got the chance to move with the times, and that’s a terrible shame.