wahistorian's Reviews (506)

A slowly menacing novel that is also a meditation on relationships. When the story opens, Jake and his (unnamed) girlfriend are driving through a winter storm for dinner with his parents at the farm where he grew up. It’s a relatively new relationship—she’s meeting his parents for the first time. She has secrets and he has secrets; given that, do they have a future, and when will she know whether to stay or go? Things get increasingly odd—his parents are strange, unhappy people and their home is cold and unwelcoming—but she wants to stay positive, to give him and his family the benefit of the doubt. On the drive home, her misgivings boil over and Jake’s truth is revealed. Reid builds a mesmerizing tension until you want to shout at the girlfriend, “something is wrong, find another way home!”

This book made me cry numerous times, because of Hutchinson’s youth and inexperience, her earnestness, and the willingness of others—mainly political men—to take advantage of her. I don’t want to psychoanalyze her, but her life story does provide plenty of insight into how an intelligent and self-possessed persons could be sucked into the Trump vortex. Her sense of loyalty and desire to serve worked against her ability to assess the ethics of what she was asked to do, until she saw Trump and the people around actively trying to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election, even after it was clear he had lost. Hutchinson describes her slow awakening in detail, a process that culminated in the histrionics, self-aggrandizement, and incitement to violence of the January 6 insurrection. And the aftermath underlined for her how, in Trump world, you’re either in or you’re out, and out can be a very dangerous place to be. I would give this book to any young person considering a career in politics, because Hutchinson’s story is instructive in how to recognize when you’re being used against your own interests. Good for you, Cassie, for sharing some very painful experiences.

Cain’s protagonist, Vitoria, is a woman out of time, striving to know herself and her talents. Except for her desire to write, she is strangely passive: artistic experiences—paintings in a museum, ballet, concerts—seem to wash over her (or flow through her, as she describes it) without making much of an impact. She gets momentary pleasure from these experiences, but the pleasure is small and quiet. Even sex with her husband makes her feel “almost close” to him. In a way, the novel is not about the transformative power of art, but art as sustenance, as a groping form of self-definition. “I wanted to tell her about my writing,” she thinks of her new friend Dana, “but I was afraid she would think I was exaggerating my relationship to it, that I was lying. After all, I wasn’t a *real* writer, yet I wrote every day. Though I hadn’t cleaned for a while, to say that I was a maid would probably have been a more accurate way to say who I was” (51).

In this comprehensive cultural history of the Zapruder film, Abe Zapruder’s granddaughter traces the effects of documenting the Kennedy assassination on her family and American society. Zapruder, a Dallas clothing manufacturer and photography enthusiast, planned the perfect vantage point for President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, little suspecting that he would be a witness to history. Nevertheless, Zapruder’s camera hand remained steady after shots rang out and others began to run. His 26-second 8mm film became the unprecedented evidence in the murder investigation, as well as the subject of conspiracy theories, but as Alexandra Zapruder point out, it could never solve the assassination. The author explores Zapruder’s remarkable foresight in protecting the film and trying to shield his family and the public from its worst effects; in a time when we regularly see the worst of human violence on the internet, it is difficult to recapture the shock of the event, but she does a nuanced job of helping the reader understand the delicacy required to stop the film from exacerbating the pain of losing a President in whom so many had invested high expectations. There is so much to this book—about changing technology, film as a material object, political violence, the legal implications of ownership of history—that I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Heather Cox Richardson takes a stab at understanding the current state of the U.S. by tracing our history of falling short of our stated ideals of equality and justice for all. For Richardson, the core document is the Declaration of Independence, an audacious rejection of monarchy in favor of the notion that members of a nation should choose their own government rather than relying on a natural aristocracy to govern it. But the founders’ vision stopped short of including so many living inside the boundaries of the new nation: women, indigenous people, and enslaved people, for a start, and men without property were also excluded from full citizenship. Americans have fought to rectify these exclusions since 1776, and been opposed by those willing to manipulate language and history—she refuses to say “lie” and “propagandize,” for some reason—to hold fast to their electoral and economic advantages. The structure of this book is somewhat problematic; chapters revisit the same parts of history over and over again to support the themes, which was dizzying for this historian. But Richardson has many fresh things to say, if no prescriptions.

Part of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, ‘Last Seen Wearing’ is a police procedural from an era in which apparently police were not constrained by search warrants, Miranda warnings, or other civil rights protections that shape today’s crime fiction. It’s hard not to think about how many real-life crimes were “solved” by police running rough shod over innocent people’s; witness the relentless interrogation of one young woman in this book who is only a witness. The plot is simple: college student Lowell Mitchell disappears from her dorm room at lunchtime one day in March, and is never seen again. Has she met with foul play, or is she a runaway or a suicide? It is not a spoiler to say that Det. Frank Ford quickly decides she’s “in trouble” and that becomes his chief avenue of investigation. There’s some clever deciphering of diary entries and lots of intimidation of suspects and witnesses; Lowell’s poor parents don’t get the kid glove treatment. Interesting as a period piece, but, wow, what a world to inhabit.

Wow. This moving novel, packed with action *and* reflection, follows Leigh Welles’ return to her North Sea island home after the sudden death of her father. Set a few years after the end of WWII, Leigh returns just in time for the traditional October arrival of the “sluagh,” the monthlong onslaught of crows that has bedeviled the island for centuries. The war’s violence and grief appear to have fed the birds’ cruelty and frenzy, so that together the islanders and the sluagh are locked in a cycle of murder, fear, and retribution. When Huge McClare commits a surprising act of violence against a bird on the first day of their arrival, the stage is set for a working-through of all the unresolved feelings left after the war, for Leigh, her neighbor, Iain MacTavish, and the rest of the townspeople. WWII was a sort of rude awakening for these islanders and, in simple language, Seckel does a beautiful job of describing the longing for a simpler time *and* the things people will try to make things right. Leigh “suspected that nobody still left on this island really deserved the blissful ignorance that was prerequisite to that slow and simple life anymore,” but still she is compelled to fix what has gone wrong (58). A metaphor for a post-pandemic world, too.

An entertaining, occasionally heart-breaking, occasionally cringe-worthy account of comedian Maria Bamford’s struggles with intrusive thoughts, OCD, and depression. These groups she joins are less cults than various kinds of twelve-step programs. Bamford has a highly original take on the world and her own struggles have given her compassion for others with difficulties, which I admired. Worth cringing through the difficult bits to get to the admirable parts.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. It takes place in an artists’ and fishing colony in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, where painter Campbell is found dead by the second chapter. The list of suspects is long—Campbell was not a well-liked resident of the town—but, unfortunately, not very well-distinguished as characters. We’re given Lord Peter Wimsey’s list early on, almost like a scorecard, so we can follow his and valet Bunter’s attempts to help the local police and Scotland Yard. The investigation consists of minute details about train schedules and whereabouts and the disposal or bikes and cars. Suspects only have voices toward the end of the novel, and by then I had given up trying to keep tracks of the comings and goings of people I’d never met.

Almost anything I would say about this book would be a spoiler. Like ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things,’ it is a slow-burning look at a relationship in crisis, although the two partners are worrying about different things. Junior and Henrietta—Hen, for short—live very alone in farm country, for from everything, and Reid’s prose is lean and spare to match. When a stranger arrives on their doorstep with an offer they cannot refuse, their next steps force them to look at their lives in new ways. Reid’s book is a subtle exploration of gender and what compromises we’re willing to make to share a life with another.