wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This early John Wyndham novel is not as accomplished as his 1950s novels, even for genre fiction, but it’s an interesting read in the context of interwar politics. After her divorce Phyllida Shiffer returns to her father’s home in the country, only to find him mysteriously gone without any indication when he left or why. A brilliant scientist who had done work for the War Department in the Great War, Henry Wooldridge and his assistant Straker were working on something, but what? And did their project get them disappeared? The novel quickly becomes a very chatty novel, Wyndham not having learned the fine point of suspense novels yet, and it is a bit of a slog, with so many characters so thinly described that it’s hard to differentiate them sometimes. Why name two characters Drawford and Draymond, one a good guy and one a bad guy? The author does manage to get some very intelligent anti-war arguments woven through the novel, particularly about the role of science in war making, and these still pertain today. But the reader has to wade through a lot to get to them.

This book deserves all the accolades it is receiving; Grann has done his usual fastidious job of researching and then making the research disappear into a fascinating story. Unlike many of the shipwreck stories told recently, the tale of the ‘Wager’ begins with war, as the ship joined a flotilla of British warships out of harass and capture Spanish ships during the War of Jenkins’ Ear in the 1740s. The fact that the ship’s loss happened in the cause of war and imperialism put different pressures on the crew, particularly once some had miraculously returned to England and were court-martialed for mutiny. Was the ‘Wager’s’ Capt. Cheap in the wrong or was his crew? In the meantime, Grann tells a fascinating story of around-the-world travel, the primitive navigation (pre-longitude), the ferocious weather of the southern hemisphere, the mores of British sailors, and the dim understanding of disease onboard. The only thing I could have wished was a little insight into reaction at home once the ships failed to return, but perhaps the sources did not exist. Highly recommend.

I’m not an inveterate King reader, but a rave review in the New York Times encouraged me to read this one. This noirish novel features private detective Holly Gibney, drawn into an investigation of multiple disappearances by the mother of one of the missing women. The story is fast-paced, but not a whodunnit, since we know from the very beginning about the strange behavior of local semi-retired professors, Rodney and Emily Harris. But why and how? Set in 2018 - 2021, the story is shaped by the pandemic, and as Holly pursues her investigation, the reader hears beliefs across the spectrum from COVID non-believers to those who have lost loved ones to the virus; I didn’t find this distracting, but more of an interesting documents of his times. What was distracting were King’s writerly tics: the annoying substitutes for profanity, like “fracking” and “poopie”; the underlining of character traits, in case the reader missed them; the repeated use of the same word or phrase in close proximity. Would a grown woman, a private detective no less, use the word “poopie” to describe distasteful things? No. (The reader should be warned that, unlike his approach to profanity, King doesn’t shy away from epithets when needed, pretty jarring if you’re listening to this as an audiobook.) I did find his villains fascinating and unique, and would definitely read a Holly Gibney novel again.

Kate Strasdin has published an incredible piece of research in this book, which uses a rare scrapbook of mid-nineteenth-century fabric swatches as the jumping-off point for an exploration of female relationships, social structures, fashion, and upper middle class life. All she had to work with were tens of scraps of cloth, neatly annotated with names—often not even surnames—and sometimes dates and occasions. From this she managed to recreate much about the life and marriage of Anne Sykes, the scrapbook-keeper, and her husband Adam. We learn about fabric design, production, and import and export, but, more interestingly, the motivations behind the choices that women made in their clothing. As a New York Times fashion editor wrote recently, “garments can serve as wormholes to memories that are the building blocks of a life, so wearing them becomes a choice filled with meaning” (Vanessa Friedman, “Post-Pandemic Dressing Finally Takes Shape,” NYT, 14 Sept 2023). Marrying in Lancashire, as his business grew, the Sykeses spent a decade in Singapore, then some time in Shanghai, expanding Anne’s cloth and color aesthetic, but also intensifying her female friendships. Strasdin reminds us that the the purpose of the scrapbook was mainly to capture memories of these occasions and the women who dressed for them, and she has done a laudable job of recreating Anne’s world.

This slim novel opens in a mountain chalet where Kehlmann’s narrator, his wife, and daughter are spending some time while he works to complete a screenplay for a long-anticipated sequel to a successful TV series. But rather than inspiring, the setting becomes increasingly disorienting, as the narrator realizes that his marriage, his work, and his vacation house are not what they seem. Kehlmann’s writing is spare, but anxious, as the reader figures out with the narrator what can be done to reverse this terrifying spiral.

‘Bottoms Up’ is one of the best books I’ve read this year—I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this, except that it doesn’t fit neatly into an ideological category, which to my mind is a good thing. Kerry Howley explores the development of the digital national state since 9/11 and the whistleblowers who call it into question. How many of the secrets our government keeps are necessary, and how many are covering up deeds that the American people would never support? The person who has received the longest sentence in American history for espionage, Reality Winner’s story is at the center of this book; hers becomes a case study of what happens when you burden a twenty-something translator with work that she cannot talk about, despite the fact that it appeared to her that the American government was not safeguarding elections from Russian interference. The second half of the book goes into her arrest, trial, and treatment in great detail, and made me chagrined about what is being done in my name.

Recently retired detective Reg Wexford has just launched his first retirement project—the reading of Gibbon’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’—when he is called back in as an advisor on the murder of Rev. Sarah Hussain. Rev. Sarah happened to be his very controversial local vicar: mixed race, single mother with a teenaged daughter, ordained late in life, and thoroughly modern. Her murder provides Rendell the opportunity to explore all sorts of issues—racism and misogyny among people of faith is an important example—and passages from Gibbon throw modern issues into high relief. Now separated from his police tools and authority, Wexford has to rely on his people and conversational skills and his instincts, and he’s not sure whether he likes that much. “Not for the first time but perhaps more positively and tellingly than before, he was realising how insignificant he had become in the great scheme of law and order, of lawmaking and law-implementing, of having nothing to do in a society where doing things was all-important” (242). But his advisor status also creates a perspective that benefits the case *and* the novel. This is a quiet police procedural, with few scary climaxes, but it’s an enjoyable difference.

A horrifying exemplar of the ways in which eugenicists and the medical establishment conspire to manipulate women’s fertility, so that only the “right” sort of women reproduce and do it in abundance. Ann Cooper Hewitt had the misfortune of being born to a mother whose only interest in marriage was as a money-making proposition; after her husband’s death, Maryon Hewitt utilized California’s sterilization law to ensure she’d never have to compete with her grandchildren for control of the family’s wealth, by having Ann very publicly diagnosed as a “moron” and a sexual deviant and thus a candidate for permanent sterilization just shy of Ann’s 21st birthday. Ann never recovered from her mother’s abuse, neglect, and manipulation. Though she sought satisfaction in the CA court system, the emotional toll of having her and her mother’s reputations dragged through the sensational press coverage of 1936, and the courts’ and doctors’ bias toward medical and psychological “experts” soon wore her down; Ann gave up the fight to have her bodily autonomy affirmed. Farley traces Ann’s and Maryon’s lives post-1936, layering in the history of enforced sterilization for women of color and poor women in the 1920s through the present and enforced childbearing for middle-class white women in the same period. Seen as two ends of the same spectrum, these attempts to control women’s reproduction are depressingly familiar. Farley can be repetitive and frustratingly imprecise with dates and events, and the book would have benefited from endnotes and cited sources.

Klein’s book started out fresh and intriguing, as she explored how public confusion between her work and the increasingly weird and hyperbolic world of Naomi Wolf impacted her life, particularly during the pandemic. She has thought deeply about the notion of the doppelgänger, the otherworldly double who bedevils literature and film, as well as numerous other topics salient to the formation of a public identity today. Because who are we if not public people, particularly in the social media and personal branding world? At 2/3 of the way through the book, I believed that Klein had made her argument, about how Wolf had been led astray—or led herself astray after a devastating interview publicly revealed sloppy scholarship—from her feminist ‘Beauty Myth’ arguments into the “mirror world” of conspiracies and myths. But then Klein veered off into autism and its specious connection to vaccines and then the Holocaust, and not only did I lose the thread of her argument, there was nothing new. And she lost me. The anti-vaxxer conspiracy is well-trod territory, and wasn’t needed here, or at least in this detail and length. I wish editors had the guts to tell smart, passionate writers, “hey, you made your argument—you were done in Chapter 8.”