My first short story love affair was with John Cheever’s famous Red Book … the stunning collection of his already widely praised short stories. It seemed to be THE cultural accessory during the fall of 1978. All generations were reading it – all 693 pages, 61 stories. Maybe it remains exaggerated in my mind because I was in New York and New England, homes to Cheever himself and the fertile soil for his stories. Maybe it was being young and filled with an abundance of youthful promise. Maybe it was because code and the tech world had yet to destroy the joys of being a Lit major. Later, Tim O’Brien would light things up with his Vietnam collection, The Things They Carried and after that it would be the dark worlds of Raymond Carver. No collection in my lifetime, however, has ever felt more memorable than Cheever’s.

Short stories were “a thing” during the first parts of the 20^th century. It seemed every library in my parent’s friends’ world had the Somerset Maugham multivolume collection. There were John O’Hara’s and Irwin Shaw’s now forgotten works everywhere and, of course, the titans ranging from Hemingway & Fitzgerald to the music of J.D. Salinger. People read short stories … a lot of them. While certainly the medium didn’t disappear, by the late Eighties it was no longer so sexy that an issue of Playboy was incomplete without one. After WWII, The New Yorker was the gatekeeper of short story fame. Despite its current famished condition, it remains so today; however, the short story is no longer a prerequisite to literary fame nor a source for publishing success. Book Clubs avoid the medium like the plague, and it seems that the short story apprenticeship has been replaced by the more sensational “debut” novel.

Teaching literature kept me close to the short story. People overlook Hawthorne’s collection in favor of The Scarlet Letter – a mistake. Melville’s brilliant, dense and disturbing short stories cannot compare to Moby Dick, but what can? The Nick Adams stories by Hemingway are as close as literature gets to sacred text. Finally, the strangeness of Flannery O’Connor’s genius remains one of literature’s wonders. Each year I taught a combination of these at different times of the year. There were others that came and went including Tim O’Brien’s collection, Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth, My Father’s Tears by John Updike and Close Range by Annie Proulx. I strongly urge readers to return and sample these writers’ short works. Who knows where it may take you.

My stab at Groff’s collection might not have happened without another pre-flight airport acquisition, The Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. I wrote about this collection a few years ago. I hope I made it clear how grateful I was that Berlin reminded me of the unique pleasure that comes with a great short story. Television series are often sloppy, too long, almost always losing their grip as the seasons wear on. This is because they do not have to live within the tough, artistically rigorous confines of a standard 120-minute film. Concision illuminates. Thus, the short story’s gift …

A collection of short stories offers a collection of what makes reading so great. If it is Cheevers 61 stories in his Red Book, it is 61 different endings. It is 61 carefully crafted opening sentences. It is 61 opportunities to surprise, stun the reader. It is 61 different versions of a character arc. It is looking at life as a montage – something I am a real fan of because that is how life often “feels”.

Groff’s collection begins with a bang. It always helps if the best story is at the front. It is short and with an ending that lingers. Often a collection has a longer story, a quasi-novella, and Groff’s is a stunner. The stuff of a good Ang Lee film … if he still made films. One of the reasons people shy away from short story collections is that there will always been a dud or few. Groff’s last effort falls flat but that comes with tackling any collection. The inconsistency of a set of stories is the Achilles Heel of published collections. One must rally from one’s disappoint, give the writer a break, and venture forth. Berlin’s extraordinary collection had several of these and I was always grateful I continued. Ironically, it may require a greater concentrated commitment to read a collection of short stories than an uneven novel because of these “disappointments”. So many mediocre tv series stream successfully because you can “binge”, immediately erasing the weaker episode with something that might rescue your attention. The SHORT story may be a subtle casualty of our increasingly SHORT attention spans.

A good tutorial on how to unpack a short story is George Sanders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. George is likely our finest contemporary short story writer. His writing class at Syracuse is legendary and this book is a quick and easy way to take this class. George, like Groff, is a MUCH better writer of short stories than novels. The latter too often get mired in conceits best left to the shorter form. Regardless, this book centers around Russian short stories and is a treat.

So … exercise your ability to pivot your concentration and tackle Groff’s terrific Brawler

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Biggest Surprise of 2025: Rabih Almeddine … winner of the National Book Award for The True, True Story of Raja the Gullible. When dipping into the Book Award shortlist, I was least familiar with the writer who won it … and won it with a title as difficult to remember as his name. I read the first few pages and was hooked. I liked it so much that I checked out one of his earlier critically acclaimed books, An Unnecessary Woman. Both books take place in war torn Beirut. They are odd, deeply human, humorous books. The stories unroll like Super 8 film with the sepia of a tragic Beirut and the intimacy of a home movie.

The Great Overlooked Writer: Rumer Godden … I wrote a long piece about The House of Brede – her masterpiece. Those who have read it are in complete agreement about its merits. Another of her books, The Battle of Villa Fiorita, recently popped into our life and affirmed her place, in my mind, as a great overlooked writer. A very different, less ambitious book, The Battle of Villa Fiorita shares with The House of Brede (in a much more modest context) her clear eyed study of character illuminated by prose as clean as it is penetrating.

The Best History Book of 2025: The Fate of the Day … Rick Atkinson’s book is history at its finest. It is the second installment in his long-anticipated trilogy on the American Revolution. The first, The British Are Coming, is every bit as engaging. In both, I felt like an enthusiastic student in awe of the material and suffused with the enthusiasm unique to a genuine learning experience. There is no doubt that Ken Burns’ recent documentary on the Revolution is beautiful and moving; however, there is simply no way he can match in his medium what Atkinson achieves in these long but utterly readable books. My book of the year …

My Favorite “Reading” Experience: 4321 … this huge brass ring of a novel was also my favorite audiobook of the year. I listened to the author, Paul Auster, narrate it after reading the first couple hundred pages. I returned to the print at the end and was stunned and bereft. It, and Auster’s extraordinary voice, had been a constant companion. It is a story of being a young man unlike anything I have read. I wrote about it several months ago and I have nothing to add. Written in 2017, set mostly in the Sixties, its themes are timeless treatments staged in a world familiar to anyone my age … a world that was becoming unhinged both within and without.

My New Favorite Irish Writer: Donal Ryan … Irish literature is shining brighter than ever – thank God. I mentioned Ryan in my earlier piece on the Irish shoring up the high standards of serious literature. He will shock you in the best of ways. This is not the misty, romantic Ireland of popular imagination. It is dark, hilarious stuff with characters you can HEAR. The books are short and pungent. Start with The Queen of Dirt Island …

Sun Valley Writer’s Conference Award Winner: An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s … This engaging memoir written by the indominable Doris Kearns Goodwin is only in part a love story, even less an actual memoir; rather, it really is a history of a decade that resists any big picture effort to tie it together. This decade and the early Seventies are still being fought over in our everyday political and cultural life. This makes this uneven but intimate telling of iconic moments in the American Century so compelling. If you do read it, I strongly suggest you go on-line to the SVWC site and download her speech(s) to the attendees. The ultimate dinner party guest …

The Old Friend Award: John Le Carre … this “category” is a growing one as I get older. An “old friend” is a writer I deeply explored at some moment in my life. They include my early joyous romps with the adventures of Alistair Maclain, Michael Crichton, John D. McDonald and Raymond Chandler. These romps would grow more literary with the likes of Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, George Orwell and so many others. Recent “old friends” include Jane Gardham, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson and this year’s honoree, John Le Carre. I have reread Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People in the last twelve months. He remains in a place of his own. He owns the Cold War spy genre and wrote as well as anyone in the last fifty years. While much of his later work could not match the brilliant originality of his Smiley novels, his contribution to the joy of reading is incalculable.

The Best Memoir of 2025: Exit Wounds … I wrote about this stunning memoir written by Peter Godwin back in April and I think it best to simply quote from that brief review.

Exit Wounds is “a memoir that is so much more than that. Godwin’s book is as good a piece of non-fiction as I have read in the past five years. A symptom of its greatness is how much it resists any kind of summary. His origin story, his war correspondent background frame a life littered with contemporary relevance. His dying mother is straight out of a Maggie Smith cameo. The diction is extraordinary with words that vibrate with meaning. It is a beautifully layered story with historical and philosophical digressions that attracted marginalia like moths to a flame. It was one of those reads that leave you at a loss as to what to read next.”

Yes, It IS a Classic: Mrs. Dalloway … I taught Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse several times and have often thought it the great English language novel and, most certainly, her finest. Yet … because Mrs. Dallowayso often supplants my favorite on the endless greatest books lists, I felt I had to return after thirty years to the single day in the privileged life of Clarissa Dalloway. Reading bits out loud, never allocating less than 30 minutes to each read, I reveled in the world of Woolf’s language. NOBODY captures the modern sensibility of time and space like Virginia Woolf. I get it. Clarissa’s day is a monumental literary achievement on par with Stephen & Molly Bloom’s day captured in Ulysses. I continue to believe, however, that the deep thematic core of To the Lighthouse sets it apart from the more technical brilliance of Mrs. Dalloway. Ultimately, just one reader’s opinion … the difference is just another of those wonderful Godfather I v Godfather II debates that so enrich our lives.

Yes, It Will Be a Classic: Mothering Sunday … Graham Swift’s 2016 novel is short and perfect. That was what I thought when I first read it ten years ago. My recent reread served as a simple affirmation. It 192 pages cover a lot of territory ranging from class to war to young love and time itself. Never has a bed stain reverberated so profoundly and never has a private library been examined more intimately. It is very likely I will read it again. There is a poetic intensity to its diction and structure that is often the rarest quality in great fiction. This quality is reinforced by its superb length.

There it is … hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you for reading it

…

Grandon’s book is very familiar and thematically pedantic and redundant in places. I skimmed much of it after spending a lot of time on the first third. What triggered this long response was how much of what I taught in my twenty years of teaching American History is echoed in Grandon’s polemic. I like to think I introduced such material in a more measured fashion being myself more centrist than this noted Yale historian. Regardless, something was tapped and the following are a series of ways of looking at our history from a much less flattering, but I believe more honest perspective. The net is that much of the ugly roar of the present has deeper roots in our past than you might imagine and knowing that can bring the modest comfort that we can endure.

WAR

America has been at war in one shape or another for over 80% of its declared founding in 1776. Most Americans of all ranks might list our wars as: The American Revolution … the Civil War … WWI … WWII … the Cold War as represented by Korea & Vietnam … Afghanistan & Iraq. Right there you have 64 years or 25% of our 250-year history (since 1776). Let’s add the lesser-known War of 1812, the Mexican War, The Spanish American and the long insurrection in the Philippines and now you are up to 78 years or close to 1/3 of our history. If one the considers our violent domestic wars with Native Americans beginning (charitably) with Tippecanoe in 1811 and running near non-stop until Wounded Knee in 1890 the number gets closer to 70% of our history. Finally, toss in our long history of military intervention in Latin and Central America (including Mexico) and you are around 80%. The actual number leaves of plenty of room for argument; however, war as part of what defines us is right there with other vices like racism and nativism along with our many virtues.

Why war? This is the subject of something much beyond the scope of this letter. With this as my apology for jumping in the deep end of history, let me take a shot at a brief and simplified answer.

1. We were founded and formed as 13 very different colonies who did not trust or like each other and only came together based on a shared antipathy of the British and a shared desire to acquire and expand. While these fault lines were revealed most obviously in the Civil War, its seeds were there at the beginning in the American Revolution and then two very unpopular and sectionally divisive wars: War of 1812 and the incredibly violent War with Mexico. In both cases, a serious effort at secession by an aggrieved minority foreshadowed the events of the Civil War. To this day, Texas would like to secede, and diverse and blue California remains an obscene word to many. We were founded in an incendiary environment of distrust of each other and of central authority and remain very much that way. We have conflict imbedded in our DNA.

2. Though there were organized and vocal resistance to all the conflicts listed above (with an exception to the “good” war – WWII), in each one, even Vietnam and Iraq, the majority of Americans supported the war. We almost committed national suicide by triggering the War of 1812 against the British Empire. The reemergence of Napoleon saved our ass. We started the war with Mexico and committed atrocities to rival anything we have done in any other conflict. The atrocities were celebrated and launched Zachary Taylor to his doomed Presidency. We helped introduce to the world concentration camps and widespread torture (e.g. waterboarding) in the ten-year horror show in the Philippines. From intentionally and meticulously planning a firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people in one night to our triggering the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the genocidal slaughter of two million Cambodians thanks to our “secret” invasion during the Vietnam War, we have accepted and often celebrated our many wars and the sufferings that come with them. The fact is that war unifies this genetically fractious country of ours. It gives us an enemy outside of ourselves to focus on and binds us with the steroidal rush of power, fear and anger.

3. We are violent people who have developed an acceptance, even a taste for violence. We do not pass the most basic gun laws despite young shooters using automatic weapons to slaughter school children. Our films, our tv, our video games and our sports celebrate all forms of mindless violence. It feels that our sense of masculinity is forever lost in a miasma of violence. We are a product of a history of interminable war, exploitation and expansion that began with almost 300 years of slavery and found its most genocidal expression in the gradual “removal” of native peoples. One cursory look at the language of our politicians and spokespersons from the 19^th century reveals the unvarnished bigotry behind the violence. It took the Civil War to temporarily vanquish Jacksonianism and its openly expressed support of slavery and the extinguishing of the Native Americans and any Mexican that might get in the way of our “manifest destiny”. This Jacksonian mindset returned shortly thereafter with the rise of the KKK and legal segregation. It is a valve that can be turned on when politically expedient to rally against a real or perceived threats. Union organizers from the late 19^th century until FDR and the New Deal were shot and lynched, labeled as communists and anarchists. Leftists were jailed and deported during the Red Scare after WWI and property owning, tax paying Japanese Americans interned during WWII. It is a long and sobering list and is being played out once again. This legacy of Jackson’s America is a shoot first mindset that chooses hate and violence over deliberation and dialogue. It is the fatal temperamental flaw of The American Experiment and is most comfortable when at war.

COALITIONS (defined here as a shared but non-binding societal and political mindset)

A central theme of my teaching was that this country is, despite bursts of reform and world changing definitions of individualism, a deeply conservative place. While we have been an engine for much of the world’s efforts at free expression and commercial and financial innovation, we are also a vast country with deep reactionary instincts. As a percentage of our population, we attend church more regularly than any liberal democracy in the world – by a country mile. We are the world’s incubator for new Christian religions ranging from Mormonism to Pentecostalism – the two fastest growing faiths in the world. We go through “great awakenings” (evangelical outbursts) that reshape our lives and relationships. We have been in one since the Sixties and Seventies and are dealing with an organized effort to create a Christian Republic. Above God, however, is money.

Money is a very conservative God. It is attached to all types of property which is attached to individuals and certain entities. To violate that attachment is a purely radical act – some call it communism, the less informed include socialism. This country’s worship of property is assiduously defended by a constitution that for its first century interpreted slaves as property. As opposed to ALL of Western Europe, we have never had a politically threatening Communist or Socialist Party. Despite protestations from the right, we have a history of low tax rates, and we deeply distrust the government’s use of our funds. The last President to raise taxes was George H.W. Bush and he was tossed out of office for it after securing a near 80% approval rate after the First Gulf War. It is comically poetic that our dollar bills merge our most basic conservative impulses into “In God We Trust”.

The list of conservative pillars extends well beyond Religion and Money, but none come close to being as central. These include our civil rights as addressed in the Bill of Rights though each seem easily abused in the name of God or the Dollar. They include a long-standing distrust of central authority that used to extend to a reluctance to fund a viable standing army. Some of the crazy stuff that has come out of this conservative id include Prohibition, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Comstock Laws let alone all the laws required to keep segregation intact and to keep women from voting. Today we see the creation of ICE, mass deportations and extra-legal acts of Presidential authority at home and abroad. Prohibition produced the mob and structured corruption into the very fiber of much of American daily life. We only hope that today’s collection of looney tunes doesn’t taint and destroy so successfully. The following is a “scorecard” of Conservative America v. Reform America that, I confess, is purely of my own making.

Conservative Scorecard for Political Coalitions in America

1 Radical Reform to 10 Reactionary Conservatism

1776– 1828: the Founding Fathers … a foundational period that established both the direction of future political parties and many of the issues that continue to separate us to this day as a nation. SCORE: Not Applicable

1828 – 1860: The Age of Jackson … a pro-slavery Democratic Party in control of much of the government that came to be known as the “Slave Power”. Openly supported “removal” of natives of all stripes and pursued wars on all fronts. Represented 40% of the voters in the NORTH during the Civil War. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (9)

1860 – 1876: Rise of Republican Party … Lincoln’s party that sought the abolishment of slavery, the enfranchisement of African Americans and eventually sold out to money and the social “security” of segregation. Laid the seeds, however, for serious reform 100 years later. SCORE: REFORM (3)

1876 – 1900: The Gilded Age … Republican & Democratic agreement re tariffs, trusts, union-busting, continued “removal” of natives and strengthening of segregation among a long list of political, social and economic markers of American conservatism. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (8)

1900 – 1918: Progressivism … foreshadowing the New Deal a generation later, a fit and start effort to clean up government, expand its power and protect selected (e.g. white) segments of the labor force … undermined by WWI. SCORE: REFORM (4)

1918 – 1932: Republican Backlash … Roaring Twenties disguised unfettered rise of debt, consumerism, the KKK, nativism and large-scale racial violence. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (10)

1932 – 1948: FDR & the New Deal … though much of its reforms were before 1938, the New Deal radically reshaped our nation, realigning the government in our lives as a source of security and a counter weight to concentrated corporate power and individual wealth … NEVER would have happened without the massive suffering that came with the Great Depression. SCORE: REFORM (1)

1948 – 1968: The Great Aberration … representing 75% of the war devastated post 1945 world economy and with a “clear and present danger” in the aggressive language and tactics of the communist world, the United Sates was as “unified” politically, socially, and economically as at any time since our founding years. This very tenuous and, for the most part, white and male consensus would unravel with great social cost and violence in the Sixties, accelerated by an unpopular war and a Civil Rights movement that exposed for all to see our racist id. Our REFORM energy from the New Deal would resist CONSERVATIVE efforts to roll it back and then would accelerate to unheard of levels of change in the brief shock of The Great Society. CONSERVATIVE forces meanwhile would try to keep segregation alive and ignite fears of communism as an agent for control of individual freedoms … all of this with the Vietnam War and our inner cities aflame in the background would come to a head in the conservative backlash election of Nixon in 1968 – with 15% of voters supporting the hate machine, George Wallace. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE/REFORM (5)

NOTE: The Great Aberration is a book that I have thought of writing. When this country “won” WWII (with the pivotal role played by the Soviet Red Army), it inherited a world where we represented at least 75% of the GDP of the non-communist world. No nation (now a full-fledged empire) had ever been in this position in human history. We managed it with a mixture of pure self-interest, enlightenment with one entirely foreseeable result – the world would catch up. This Aberration is the seed of toxic nostalgia like MAGA and the tragic overreach of The Great Society. It was our Icarus moment … we have never gotten over it.

1968 - 1980: Period of Political Misery … both parties would rise and fall behind political extremism (McGovern), Presidential dysfunction (Nixon), economic strangulation (OPEC), financial mismanagement (Stagflation), terrorism (Iran) and the unleashing of radical social change (Women’s Liberation) that would trigger our fourth religious Great Awakening (Moral Majority) and the beginning of our still roaring Culture War. SCORE: Not Applicable

1980 – present: Age of Reagan … though the present MAGA / Trump incarnation seems and is miles away from the kinder, gentler and often bipartisan Reagan/Bush years, the latent conservative forces he unleashed are behind the world we are struggling with today. The list is long: demonization of government, tax relief and the inequality that came with it, a fetish for deregulation, the culture war and the political activism of the Christian right, eventual disarming of gun laws, the scapegoating of immigrants and the rise of the cult of the military. None of this would have taken such a secure hold, one eventually radicalized by MAGA, without booming markets, the end of the Cold War, the War on Terrorism and the weakening and appeasement of the Democratic Party. Clinton represents that appeasement with OBAMA the brief by-product of personal magnetism, near financial collapse and two unpopular wars. The strength of the conservative coalition since 1980 is how resilient it remains despite the leadership failures of the Neocons and now MAGA. Given the distracted and easily manipulated public that is now our reality, it is a bit frightening to think what it will take for us to shed this conservative hypnosis that has, at present, crippled our civic discourse. SCORE: Conservative (7)

Though this “scorecard” is an exercise in subjective narrative creation, the scoring illustrates the bias of the country with close to 50% of our history firmly in the hands of our conservative impulse. Reform, representing 20% of our political history, arrives in bursts and often after a crisis and too often easily extinguished. These bursts, however, left permanent marks on our society and the predictable conservative response has been mostly limited to dramatic but only partially successful efforts at peeling such progress back. We still have Social Security despite very real opposition throughout its existence. The same applies to Medicare and much of the basic regulatory functions of government put in place during the reform bursts. But … universal health care and childcare remain a bridge too far. The painful rub is that the “peeling” effort often disguises the very real steps forward our pluralistic, fractured society makes and, in the meantime, halting further reform. Will the furor over trans rights and gender identity extend to rolling back gay marriage? History suggests it won’t. We must hope that the current reactionary burst plays out in the same tortuous fashion as it has over our 250 years … to put it way too simply – a three steps forward, two steps backward kind of thing.

A HISTORY OF ABERRATIONS

As alluded to earlier, the American Century reached its apex during a historical aberration when she was left standing strong with a devastated world at her feet. It can be argued that most of the hinge moments of history are a product of a great aberration. There would have been no Napoleon without the French Revolution. There may not have been a Bolshevik Revolution without WWI. This could go on forever – a college bull session dream topic. But, seriously, the United States and its vast presence in the world over the past 150 years was, except for her geography, a product less because of her “exceptional” characteristics and more because of the fickle or aberrant rhythms of history.

1. BIOLOGY

Starting in the late 15^th century, the Old World brought (mostly unintentionally) to the New World a vast array of fatal diseases that over a couple hundred years would kill around 80% of the native population. Initially brought by the Spanish, these diseases had spread through North America before any Englishman had settled in their “new” world. By 1620 and the arrival of the Pilgrims and shortly after, the Puritans, the landscape was littered with the skeletal remains of most of the indigenous population. The fact that the great majority of Native Americans had already died from Old World diseases before any whiff of westward (west from the Atlantic coast that is) expansion had taken hold is too often glossed over when addressing our shared mythic narrative. It was the first wild aberrant gift given to the European settlers. The Puritans immediately interpreted it as a sign of God ‘s grace that would empower them to build their “city on the hill” – a biblical foreshadowing of Manifest Destiny 200 years later. I often asked my students to imagine a “wilderness” populated by four to five times the number of disease resistant natives when the English first arrived. What seemed like a vast empty continent to the Europeans, delivered by some version of a divine right, would instead have required either accommodation or an overt effort at conquest, subjugation and

extermination … altogether, in either case, a very different national origin story.

2. FRONTIER

As America opened the 19^th century, the vast and now sparsely inhabited and unexplored wealth of the frontier lay available for Europeans of all stripes desperate for land, autonomy and riches. With maybe the exception of the wintry expanse of Russia’s Siberia, never had so much wealth been available to so many and defended by so few. Its unique place in human history has made the frontier story the beating heart of our shared narrative. We have always remained fixed on what might be over the next hill whether it be the unique restlessness of most Americans, the dreams of the immigrant, putting a man on the moon or a foreign policy whose sphere of influence is pretty much the entire world. This frontier mindset took shape because the continental expanse of America was not covered in tundra or desert sands or impenetrable jungle. It was uniquely available in every sense only requiring the rapacious, relentless and violent ambition of the hungry common European migrant to realize it. Imagine if the Moon was a smaller verdant, watery version of Earth with a population that pretty much disappeared. Such was, and to some extent still is, the NEW WORLD to millions of immigrants. It remains human history’s greatest reveal and … aberration.

If you got this far, I deeply appreciate it.

Happy New Year (really!

)

His most recent book deserves its own letter. It has been a while since he wrote a book that really arrested me. The last book that “worked” for me was The Children Act (2014) and before that Sweet Tooth (2012). Neither however had the heft, the “stick with you” depth of his earlier books, the last of that quality being Saturday (2005). It has been a long wait and that certainly influences my embrace of his latest, What We Can Know.

Strangely, I am more comfortable approaching this book from its faults. A few of these plague most of his recent fiction and remain an obstacle for many readers. One that gets much attention, is his almost too transparent cleverness. I do not mean the trick ending of Atonement or the use of “Dover Beach” in Saturday; rather, his brazen exercise of his erudition. This is particularly true since he launched into the sciences as material for his previously all too humanist novels. Much of it felt like showing off and the first 50 to 75 pages of his latest novel flirts with this alienating flaw. Though it never really leaves the novel, after your initial difficult descent, the characters, the plot twists and the themes in What We Can Know begin to shape a powerful novel. In a related area, I have struggled with his preachy embrace of the topical – all part of his science adventures. Climate change is, after a long and deafening silence, finally the topic of choice in fiction and this is McEwan’s contribution. Though I wish he had resisted his pat treatments of America on one end and Nigeria on the other, his handling of climate change is one of the strengths of the book. I cannot get it out of my head. Finally, the tricks … One reads McEwan waiting all the while for a shoe to fall. Sometimes it is a slipper (Sweet Tooth) and others it is a ski boot (Atonement). With very few exceptions (see his earliest short works), it is a signature of his writing that some think detracts from its many literary merits. Beyond plot twists and shifting points of view, there is only one trick in What We Can Know that matters, and it is a BIG one. It divides the book literally and figuratively. It works and then kind of doesn’t as I wanted another act to bring things into a greater whole.

So far, I can be excused of “damning with faint praise”. I am NOT dismissing this novel in the least. This is an ambitious, maybe even important book. It should be read, and it will be remembered. It may be the first time that he has successfully merged his literary gifts with his need to be topical and relevant. Great books are often deeply flawed. While not comparing this novel to any of the following, Moby Dick is peppered with chapters easily skipped, War and Peace ends with a thud and all of Dickens can be over wrought. But like Richard Power’s recent tour de force, The Overstory, McEwan’s latest novel rises above its flaws because it leaves a mark on the reader, a mark that will stick. Now for the list …

1. ATONEMENT … one of the great pure reads of my life. It has survived a very good film adaptation and the envy of his peers.

2. CHILD IN TIME … again, not to be read by a young parent; however, the first half might be as good as anything he has written.

3. ENDURING LOVE … strangely, a very pure McEwan novel where technique triumphs over plot.

4. ON CHESIL BEACH … teaching this intimidatingly intimate novel to high school seniors made me appreciate how finely tuned a story it is.

5. SATURDAY ... something had to follow the sensation created by ATONMENT and he gets high marks with this more claustrophobic novel.

6. THE CHILDREN ACT … a tough clear-eyed critique of the law framed by the pains of a struggling marriage – not an easy thing to pull off.

7. SWEET TOOTH … in many respects his “sweetest” novel … fun to read … an “entertainment” of sorts compared to much of his work.

8. AMSTERDAM … a short tart novel that became a platform for a long overdue Booker, though among his weakest and least memorable.

There are his short early novels. They include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs. They are the product of the darker side of McEwan’s literary mind. They are tight and not ‘tricky’ … and in a couple cases, very disturbing.

We live in a distracted, informal, polemical age where rules are meant to be broken and the inherent uncertainty that is the shared human experience is being suppressed by violent certainties from all parts of our lives. This is not fertile grounds for the lyrical, searching novel. Too much of our fiction lacks beauty. There is too much telling and not enough showing. The “wonder” of fiction seems to be in very short supply. Much of this complaint may be my age and background talking and I apologize if that is the case. Regardless, my lament has found refuge in contemporary Irish literature where the art of fiction appears to be alive and well.

The following is a list of Irish writers and their novels that I have read over the past three or four years. While they are all very different, they share the gift of a lovely sentence, a finely tuned ear and a nuanced heart. Humor and pathos are evenly distributed even in the darkest of stories. We live in an unforgiving time with vengeance driven politics swirling amidst a poisoned digital world. All these Irish writers and their stories share a forgiving bias no matter the circumstance and in doing so open their writing up to something more than a narrative or a “message”. The list includes only those still alive and working. The order is based on my most recent reading of the author and is as limited as it is subjective.

DOLAN RYAN … I just finished The Queen of Dirt Island. A short rain-soaked story set in rural Ireland with three generations of strong willed, often hilariously foul-mouthed women trying to make-do amidst the gossip and inuendo of a village life. The writing is as sharp as the women’s wits. Having mostly listened to another of his novels, the very dark but still richly textured The Spinning Heart, I am hard pressed to identify a better writer of dialogue alive today. His ear is that of a rural Dennis Lehane. The violence of Ryan is psychological, however, and his gift extends to the less dramatic and more quotidian lives of both sexes.

NIAL WILLIAMS … his fictional Irish town on the Shannon River, Faha, has become a tourist attraction. I gather he deals with unwanted admirers from America on a consistent basis. He deserves this notoriety though I worry that it will signal the commercialization of his vast gift for storytelling. It doesn’t help that one of novels, Four Letters of Love, is now a “major motion picture”. It was inevitable. I just finished The History of the Rain. Idiosyncratic in shape and form, out loud funny and maybe a bit too cute, this novel shares the strengths of the other two I have read: This Is Happiness and Time of the Child. The former may be one of my favorite reads EVER while the latter is not too far behind. The writing is simply a thing of wonder. How many ways can you describe a rainy day in Ireland? How many ways can you describe an Irish cow in his field? It drops not a notch with pitch perfect dialogue and characters so memorable you are disappointed if they do not show up in the next book. Though he is not as overtly clever Ian McEwan, reading and discovering Williams has given me the same joy I felt when Ian came into my literary life.

JOHN BANVILLE … I have written about this highly respected writer in earlier posts. As I pointed out, there are TWO Banvilles just as there was two Graham Greenes. The most recent incarnation is that of a mystery writer. I have read three of his four Strafford & Quirke mysteries, the latest being The Drowned. They get better each time as the first version of Banville begins to bleed into his lighter, “entertainment” fare. It was the first version that put him on the literary map. It led to awards and a career as an insightful and respected book critic. The serious books are uneven, numerous and very unorthodox. What they have in common is sparkling prose and seductively elusive themes. While they can be sexy and funny, their greatest value is their penetrating critiques of our modern world. The ones I recommend include: The Book of Evidence, Eclipse, The Shroud, and The Sea. He also wrote a charming “sequel”, Mrs. Osmond, to Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Banville’s range is clearly as noteworthy as his talent.

CLAIRE KEEGAN … I remember first reading her years ago. It felt like a discovery. I handed out copies of both Small Things Like These and Foster. Both remain in my mind perfect novellas though I stubbornly cling to Foster as the more mature work. Each should be reread as a reminder of what literature can do. Her other short works pale but so do Tolstoy’s other works when lined up against his massive twin towers of Russian literature. She has become a bit of a reluctant celebrity. I hope she sticks with her very private rural life and avoids the creative disaster that is notoriety. She says it takes her forever to write. That is okay with me. Meanwhile, while I wait, I will continue to reread.

MAGGIE O’FARRELL … as a self-described feminist writer, Maggie contains her editorial points of view remarkably well. Pedantry does not interfere with her substantial storytelling gift. Her prose is sumptuous and her ability to use historical context to enrich her characters and themes leave the reader all too available for her feminist arguments. Hamnet was as good a read as I have experienced in the last ten years. I gather the movie is very good and, I hope, that the spotlight and money that comes with it does not corrupt her gifts. The Marriage Portrait was a bit overwritten, but the ending(s) saved it and left you with a “portrait” of man’s misogynist sins as sharp and damning as any I have read or watched. On a wildly different note, Maggie’s I Am, I Am, I Am is an arresting and original piece of autobiography. In this vivid memoir, she recreates the seven times in her life where she had a brush with death. The last is too long. They are uneven. But it is an arresting read and certainly gets you thinking about your own life’s many remembered and forgotten twists and turns.

SEBASTIAN BARRY … I just finished his 2016 novel, Days Without End. It is an Irish version of the 19^thcentury American West. It might be among the finest novels I have read. A tour de force of imagination, Barry blends his near perfect writing style with the vernacular of the west and conjures, with an intimate first-person point of view, the horror and wonder of the Indian Wars, the Civil War and the many roads that connected them. The narrator is a gay Irish immigrant who barely survives both the Great Famine and an equally horrific voyage to the New World. The back story of his gay life both in and out of the military is a deeply humorous and moving literary creation. Love, loyalty, betrayal and wretched violence are all embedded in this short novel. I did not think Barry could surpass his often-sublime The Secret Scripture. He has with this book; however, The Secret Scripture is of a wholly different fare and resists comparison. I will continue to delve deeper into the Barry oeuvre.

These are my Irish crew right now. A shout out to Sally Rooney is required. Her Intermezzo was fabulous and suggests a maturing style that I look forward to reading. Colum McCann is a talented writer adored by many. I thought his most recent book. Twist, was too forced. His great novel, Let the Great World Spin, captures my thoughts on his talent the best. The first half is pure lyrical genius but by the end much of the magic has faded. Maybe he should stick with shorter fare.

Any piece on Irish writers must include homage to those who have passed away. Jeanette Haien was a multi-talented artist who came to writing late and like Norman McLean and A River Runs Through It, she had one great book in her. The All of It is a perfect book. It really is. Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French is the first of his magisterial historical fiction romp. Long and beautiful, this book and the trilogy might be the finest historical fiction I have read. Finally, William Trevor lies in wait for those who are looking for the most clear-eyed and heartbreaking of the island’s many wonderful post WWII writers. While his short stories may be his greatest legacy, his short novels are stunners. The Story of Lucy Gault is a good place to start.

Thank you for reading …

If you want to do a deep dive on Russian history, Ukraine, Putin and Zelensky with a lot of Cossacks, Poland and Trump thrown in, read WAR & PUNISHMENT by Russian historian and journalist, Mikhail Zygar. It is a miracle that this Russian Kremlin watcher and Putin hater is still alive given the Russian’s dictator’s tendency to kill his critics. This is not an easy book. There are a lot of names to keep track of. There is the complicated cultural, political and physical geography of Ukraine. It appears to suffer from a sloppy translation, and I wish it had a list of names and job descriptions to refer to. Regardless, almost every chapter is one revelation after another. Reading this after watching Trump’s Alaska fiasco with Putin was, for me, a trigger. Many pieces came together and not just about the war in Ukraine.

Trump and Putin connect at an unconscious level. They are mirror images of each other despite all the surface anomalies. They are both FANTASISTS. Putin’s reasons for invading Ukraine and all the other parts of the old USSR over the past 30 years are rooted in an almost childlike embrace of a Russia that failed not only in 1989 but in 1917. Trump refuses to treat him as a murderous delusionist because he, himself, is subject to the same dangerous mindset. What mind is required to insult your oldest most loyal ally with whom you have enjoyed the longest peaceful border in human history? What mind is required to imagine a proud and very old Denmark handing Greenland over to a bronzed real estate developer? What mind is required to think you can end the war in Ukraine without Ukraine’s participation? What mind is required to publicly imagine Gaza as the future Riviera of the Middle East? Any sober, even keeled Congress would be taking a good hard look at the 25^thAmendment; however, nothing remotely close is happening. Why? Because Trump the Fantasist was elected by an American public now pickled in fantasy. Up to 15% of Americans are QAnon believers with the myriad of fantasies that come with that cult. Too many Americans believe Elvis is still alive and that there was no moon landing. How can anyone go to that many Marvel films and not think the world is filled with comic book figures. It goes on and on and has always been the case. We are the world’s cult factory. We are the world’s escapist conjurer. We love our drugs, our guns, our video games and our conspiracies. When Lincoln was young, the great obsession was the Blue Man on the moon. The John Birchers were convinced that millions of Chinese were amassing on our Southern border. Georgetown’s Kool-Aid is our national drink, and it took MAGA, Trump and a deeply lost Democratic Party to bring our historically peripheral fantasists home to roost in our nation’s capital. In hindsight, January 6^th was the comic opera foreshadowing of the political high jacking of this country by fools wearing horns. While an examination of the roots of this national disgrace is not within the scope of this letter, it is enough to say that it was long in the making. It took decades to get here. It was prophesied by the Founding Fathers and nothing short of a national exorcism (e.g. financial collapse or any one of The Four Horseman) may be required to wake us up. Then again, there’s AI …

I realize this is a vitriolic piece that may not sit well with some of my readers. It was triggered by this brave, tough book and my fear that history’s role in understanding our condition is sliding away, buried by the noise and distraction of a digital world and the shallow, mendacious individuals who have so much influence in it.

Next … a novel that will change your thinking about the ordinariness of modern life

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LBJ … listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin unpack the complicated rubric’s cube of LBJ and his legacy, I understand a point made by her colleague on the stage, Max Boot, that history’s judgement on a Presidency is a long term ever shifting process. What LBJ accomplished in the first two years of his single elected term has only been matched by FDR’s early New Deal days. We inhabit a world shaped by his Great Society legislation ranging from Medicare to Clean Air & Water Acts to the National Endowment for the Arts to, most profoundly, the Voting Rights Act. The list is long and has become part of the DNA of this country. It required extraordinary political courage and conviction to pass the most important nail in Jim Crow’s coffin. LBJ knew from the day he signed the Voting Rights Act that he had delivered the South and its active racism to the welcoming arms of the GOP. He left office with the scar of Vietnam writ large across his legacy; however, as Doris so movingly remarked at the Conference and weaves into her most recent book on the Sixties and her relationship with the great speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, the war’s scar is fading as we watch the long festering resentments of the Goldwater right try to erase the great steps taken in that decade. The idea of a Great Society and the idealism that fueled it, feels dreamlike as we watch today’s craven collection of politicians feed off fear, retribution and hate. The political courage of LBJ and the 89^th Congress burns even more brightly as Trump and his sycophants continue to turn off the lights of our democracy and try to Make America the Fifties Again.

After reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story , and after listening to her and others at the SVWC, I felt such a tragic sense of loss. The greater good, always mixed with baser motivations, has, for now, left us. The possibility of a Trump Center for the Arts possibly replacing the Kennedy Center is so clearly not only an ugly act of political revenge but an unvarnished effort to erase the best of the Sixties. LBJ, warts and war and all, is looking pretty good these days.

RONALD REAGAN … Reagan has enjoyed a lot of biographical attention for a Presidency and a legacy that by historiographical standards remains “contemporary” (a safe historical distance usually requires the passing of the generations that voted for that particular President.) Max Boot’s new book, Reagan: His Life & Legend, has been well-received and if his talks at the Conference are any indication, deservedly so. The book may be too long for me given my deep doubts about the long-term effects of Reagan and his anti-government drivel. Boot gives him credit for bringing the Cold War to a close and goes so far as to give credence as opposed to incredulity to Reagan’s talk with Gorbachev about getting rid of nuclear weapons all together. I remain convinced that he had begun to lose it at that point. Listening to Boot, I realize that Reagan in the abstract remains his legacy … and maybe that is the Achilles Heel of the whole legacy thing. His “Morning in America”, his Normandy speech, the jellybeans and his splitting wood on the ranch remade a grievously wounded POTUS into something many people could return to with faith and optimism. If Reagan represented much of what Boot alluded to, a pragmatist among ideologues, an anti-intellectual with excellent common sense and a man who could change his mind, then why has not this deification made the newly minted GOP of today stand aghast at our current President? It is obvious as the day is long that Reagan would have been deeply disturbed by Trump the man and the President. Regardless, a GOP that has strayed so far from their Godhead, Ronald Reagan, continues to utilize him as their nostalgic political elixir just as they did with Lincoln for so many years. This messy appropriation of Reagan will continue to stall any real clarity as to his legacy. Maybe Boot’s book is one step toward this clarity but that may be for me an 880 page ‘bridge too far’.

While I am at it, I think I’ll do a quick flyover of the most alarmingly misunderstood post WWII Presidents (as of this writing!). As clarification, “misunderstood” applies to the legacy that first attached itself to the President and that either remains the primary definition of HIS tenure or is the subject of a serious reconsideration.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH … was there ever a more highly qualified man for the Office of the Presidency? Based on a resume litmus test, the answer is NO. When was the last time any President was even close to his 90% approval rating after the first Gulf War? In fact, has any President ever achieved that level, even for a day? He was an awkward speaker. He was clumsy but … 90%? He was also a one term President who lost in 1992 because the GOP walked away from him after one of the more courageous political acts I have witnessed. After campaigning (“read my lips”) on no tax hikes, he increased taxes to create a measure of fiscal responsibility in light of a fast-growing deficit. This almost miraculous act of adult behavior doomed his reelection but set in motion a brief balanced budget moment at the end of Clinton’s Presidency that HW’s son later tanked. If you want to realize how courageous an act that was, simply watch the craven and reckless performance of the GOP and its Big Beautiful Bill and the lengths they will go to PREVENT a tax hike. As politics loses any semblance of dignity, as the GOP dives deeper into its amoral morass, H.W. Bush’s legacy is only going to shine brighter.

JIMMY CARTER … it still matters very much who you talk to when it comes to this one term outsider. However, even a died in the wool conservative might be less dismissive of Carter after not only a remarkable career as an EX-PRESIDENT but the slow rewrite of a deeply besieged Presidency. Many of Reagan’s defense and foreign policy initiatives had begun under Carter. His human rights focus proved to be a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union and the undermining of communism as an alternative to democracy. Fiscally he was a pragmatic Southern Democrat prone to getting lost in the weeds. He was confident enough to surround himself with mostly highly competent individuals. The ugly fact of most Presidencies is that they get defined by the unexpected and in this case the OPEC oil spike, the stagflation that came with it and the Iran hostage crisis. It is very likely that no President would have survived this set of events (FYI: if the election had occurred a month later, Carter may have won). Ultimately, he was his own worst enemy. His wardrobe, his delivery and tone, his tone-deaf aloofness opened the door for the charismatic Reagan as much as any of his policy issues. Style matters. In the short-term calculation, it can “trump” substance. The algebra of legacy, however, is the fading remembrance of style and the steady appreciation of substance. Carter’s changing legacy is a good example of this.

DWIGHT EISENHOWER … Ike left the White House popular among most voters, particularly Republicans. His popularity, however, was leavened with condescension and scorn from Beltway veterans and academics. His slow response to Civil Rights, his apparent appeasement of McCarthyism, his ubiquitous presence on elite golf courses gradually undermined his war hero image. For years, his polling among academics had him pegged in the bottom half of the Presidential rankings. He was quietly drifting into POTUS purgatory. Nobody wrote books about him unless it was about WWII. Then we experienced what we now take into consideration before condemning an ex-President. The releasing of the confidential papers of his term(s) after a twenty-year cone of silence. With these papers, a massive recalibration of Ike began and continues to this day. Ike resisted, often alone, the hawks in his administration who too often considered the nuclear option viable. He tried to start détente against the objections of most everyone around him. He refused to dismantle the pillars of the New Deal. His Presidency became a nuanced, often admirable, exercise of Executive power and RESTRAINT. This latter quality is contributing to his rising popularity among today’s disillusioned Republicans and forlorn Democrats. What is revealed in the broadest of contexts, is that with Ike, the American people had a true ADULT in charge of the DC Nursery in a time of many terrors and insecurities. No wonder the shifting legacy …

HARRY TRUMAN … Harry is the 20^th century’s legacy case study. Laughed at when he succeeded FDR after his death in 1945, written off as he sought reelection in 1948 and swept into the corner of history by the immensely popular Ike, Harry Truman was a man returning to his real place in history – a small man from Missouri who lives with his mother. A decade later, LBJ conferred with Truman about Civil Rights and gave him the first Medicare card in honor of his failed efforts as President to create a national healthcare system. It soon became clear that Harry would be admired for as much for his failures (e.g. universal healthcare, ending segregation in the military & the government) as for a now legendary character marked by candor, grit, honesty and the ability to do the right thing (e.g. firing the nuke crazy but wildly popular Douglas McCarthy). He is pretty much untouchable at this point – on both sides of the aisle. As with any Presidency, there are plenty of things to criticize or question ranging from the indiscriminate bombing of Japan, the A-bomb itself, cronyism, a tendency to black & white thinking and a hot temper. But until AI takes over, every President is human, and the legacy argument is simply history giving with one hand and taking with the other.

DONALD TRUMP … where does Trump fit into this conversation? His chaotic, revolving door first term with impeachments, scandal and a pandemic finale left him in the legacy dustbin. It is certainly one reason among many that he refused to acknowledge defeat and was so focused on pulling off a Grover Cleveland staggered reelection gambit. Though it feels like years, we are only in the first year of his second term. Right now, there are two powerful legacy forces squaring off after his unnerving and prolonged version of FDR’s 100 days. On one side, one occupied by Presidents Polk and Reagan, he has followed through on his campaign promises with tariffs rewriting global trade, the southern border being virtually quiet and our long-standing alliances all being renegotiated. This is legacy catnip. On the other side, there are threats to civil liberties, defiance of the judiciary and efforts to manage or censor the media. Any of these fully manifested will dominate any legacy conversation. It is important to talk about this subject since it is always in the mind of whoever is POTUS. As noted by comments from JFK to Reagan, walking into the White House as President is walking into history. Even in a such a mercurial and sometimes unhinged President like Trump (not the first by the way), this relationship with history will influence much of what de does and doesn’t do.

Enough with POTUS ...

My next letter will be a “catch-up” on recently read books. Thank you for reading

…

This book is one of the best histories, not just military, that I have read. A critic is right who wrote that Atkinson is to historical writing what Sinatra is to singing. He combines a gifted level of fluency with an equally soaring level of research to create a revision of our Revolution that I am sure will be the new standard. Now, it is ChatGPT’s turn …

1. Myth vs. Reality: The True Nature of the War

Atkinson dismantles the romanticized narrative of the American Revolution as a clean, idealistic uprising by a few determined patriots against a distracted empire. Instead, he presents it as a brutal, protracted, and chaotic war of attrition between a populous, increasingly radicalized insurgency and an overstretched, faction-ridden imperial force.

• Brutality on the Ground: One-third of all wartime deaths came from bayonets—signaling vicious, close-quarters combat. Muskets were largely ineffective (1% accuracy), and supply lines were excruciating, exacerbating British vulnerability.

• Psychological and Political Toll: Like Vietnam for the U.S., the British lost not just on the battlefield but in public perception and political will. They failed to win over the American populace, and their military efforts were continually undercut by bad intelligence, poor strategy, and demoralization at home.

2. Strategic Failures and Delusions

• Philadelphia and Howe’s Blunder: The British capture of Philadelphia was both tactically hollow and strategically disastrous. It gave a false sense of Loyalist support—especially in cities like Philadelphia, which misled British command into overestimating their popular base.

• The Tory Illusion: Loyalist support never exceeded 20% of the white population and was shrinking fast. Many fled to Canada or the West Indies. The war’s political center of gravity remained with the Patriots, despite their internal dysfunction.

3. Scale and Stakes of the Conflict

• Not a Colonial Skirmish, but a Global War: By 1778, after Saratoga, France entered the war—partly spurred by early British peace overtures. Spain followed. This transformed the Revolution into a world war.

• Naval Arms Race & Global Theater: The Royal Navy, the largest organization in the world at the time, played a central role. Each ship-of-the-line required massive resources (e.g., 6,000 oak trees, 32 miles of rope), illustrating the industrial and ecological cost of maintaining empire.

• John Paul Jones and Naval Heroics: American privateering and iconic battles like that between Bonhomme Richard and Serapis showed that the revolutionaries could challenge Britain even on the seas.

• Unwinnable War: Britain lost a quarter of its merchant marine to privateers. It was economically and logistically unfeasible to both defend the sugar islands, protect home waters from invasion, and subdue the American colonies simultaneously.

4. Disease, Death, and the West Indies

• King Sugar’s Dark Cost: Britain’s obsession with its Caribbean sugar colonies drained resources. Entire regiments sent to Jamaica perished from disease without firing a shot—e.g., 18 survivors out of 1,000.

• Warships as Floating Tombs: Naval warfare in the 18th century was defined more by disease than by battle, with life aboard ships often amounting to a death sentence.

5. Collapse and Radicalization

• Southern Theater and British Atrocities: As the British campaign shifted South, their tactics became increasingly barbaric. Yet these actions only hardened American resistance.

• Currency Collapse & Internal Decay: Late-war America was full of hardship—worthless currency, unreliable French support, opportunism—but the prolonged struggle forged a deeper identity and attachment to independence.

• Washington’s Endurance: Despite everything, Washington’s leadership remained a pillar of stability. The drawn-out war, rather than disillusioning Americans, forged national unity through shared suffering.

6. Home Front Unrest and British Instability

• Gordon Riots in London (1780): Domestic chaos in Britain—like the week-long anti-Catholic riots in London—revealed the fractures at home. Imperial overreach was not just unsustainable overseas, but destabilizing internally.

Conclusion

Atkinson’s work transforms the Revolution from a clean tale of liberty into a grim epic of survival, brutality, and global entanglements. It reframes the war as:

• A civil war complicated by international geopolitics.

• A protracted insurgency resisted by an empire unwilling to adapt.

• A war of myths, where sanitized patriotism overshadows the brutal, sprawling reality.

Atkinson, in this view, composes not just a revision but an orchestration—replacing the genteel string quartet of textbook history with a full symphonic clash, complete with “drums and all.”

There you have it …

I need to “process” this. I realize it came from my NOTES; however, I would have been stretched to organize them in such a good and accurate fashion.

Would appreciate any comments …

Thank you

In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden was written 46 years ago and is a traditionally structured and written novel set in a Benedictine monastery. Its unforgettably and meticulously drawn characters revolve around a few dozen cloistered nuns. Godden treats the nuns and their vocation as seriously as the nuns treat theirs. I will never think of their commitment the same after reading this book. My wife was given it by a friend at a school reunion. It was such an unexpected choice, but it resonated because Rumer Godden’s novel, An Episode of Sparrows, was a lifeline during the pain of our oldest son’s diagnosis. Religion is rarely the subject of my readings and certainly a lengthy and involved story of cloistered nuns was not on any of my “lists”. It is so rejuvenating to be so wrong. Godden weaves the intense, difficult and communal life of rigorous faith with the internal worlds of women who are as human as they are religious. One role of a cloistered monastery is to concentrate the prayers and faith in a way that ordinary life cannot. People send their prayers to the nuns seeking the comfort derived from this concentrated and fully committed faith. This trust is so moving but made even more so by the very human vessels these prayers are handed to. This daily commitment is both complimented and challenged by many extraordinary but not melodramatic plot twists that reveal and instruct with the power of parable. In the end, this cloistered world becomes for the reader not only a study of faith but a window into the worlds outside the monastery’s grilled windows and locked doors. Philippa, the heroine in this ensemble piece, decamps from her high-powered job at 45 to join the monastery to seek meaning, solace and purpose. We the reader are asked to do the same as we take Godden’s hand and set aside our prejudices and stereotypes and allow her world to illuminate from within ours.

4321 by the recently deceased Paul Auster is long – 970 pages. Its length was the sole reason I avoided what many consider to be Auster’s masterpiece. The same readers likely share with me the opinion that Auster was THE great post-modern writer. His works have embedded within them the disarming feints and twists that are a deconstruction signature of postmodern literature; however, what separates Auster, in my mind, is his ability to traffic our human hearts. 4321 was read by Auster and I listened to 80% of it. It is one of the two great readings I have experienced - Auster’s baritone voice giving his beautiful prose a rhythmic wonder. I did not want this novel to end.

The structure is complex. It is the story of one boy growing up in the late Fifties and the Sixties. Born in Newark, the story divides at his birth into four separate narratives. Auster’s chapter markings (2.1 = first version of Archie, 2.2 = second version of Archie) help but a certain amount of confusion reigns. I suspected as time went on that that was one of the points of the novel. It is a massive multi-layered coming of age novel that captures boys and young men as well as anything I have read. It is a very Jewish, East Coast based narrative. That and the role of sex (all kinds) reminds me of Philip Roth, but Auster writes with a much more empathetic and lyric pen than the snarky Roth. The context of the turbulent mid-decades of the 20^th century is the gilded frame within which his portrait shines. Especially for me, a WASP born in a then comparatively ethnic free California, this context simply shimmered.

Both books came out of left field. One I never dreamed of reading and the other just seemed to be a bridge too far. Both reasons may prevent anyone reading this letter from tackling either. I get it. They came to me from my wife’s high school reunion and from a near random click onto Auster’s audible. However, I think their “left field” origins are the undefinable reason why I discovered two “100s” at the same time. I may need to spend more time in “left field”.

NOTE: as some of you are aware, the Marrisa Roy for LA City Attorney fundraiser in Pasadena has been postponed to an early TBD November date. Marrisa is on a roll with many serious endorsements behind her so November should be just the right time to give her our support. Thank you …

· Charlemagne’s empire in 800 AD was the First Reich in the historical narrative of the German peoples. The myth of Charlemagne is rooted in the dream of German unification - a close relative to nationalism. Her post-Charlemagne history is the story of all the forces that kept her divided. While France, England, Spain and even Russia developed various versions of political structures that fed their national character, Germany was in a constant state of flux. When England was violently stitched together by the Norman invasion of 1066, the First Reich of Charlemagne had become a distant memory and the collection of wholly independent princely states known as the Holy Roman Empire was taking shape and ensuring political fragmentation for 800 years. When Spain was consolidated by Ferdinand & Isabel in 1492, Germany was a diplomatic and religious playing ground that would have its horrifying expression in one of the world’s most violent struggles, the Thirty Years War. From 1618 to 1648, up to 40% of the German population would die as the various princely states of the Empire would either fight each other or be used as proxies most directly by the Spanish and French but even by Sweden, Britain and the Ottoman Empire. The closest Germany came to unification was when the newly minted Napoleonic empire occupied her many regions and implemented a benevolent campaign of reform that led to many Germans hoping that Napoleon would remain. As the modern world began to take shape in the 19^th century, the remaining states of Germany, dominated now by Prussia, would still be a minority partner in the power games of the maturing empires in France, Russia, Austria and England. Though Bismark would almost single-handedly create a German state by defeating Austria then France while reluctantly absorbing the hated Catholic provinces of southern Germany, his national version of a unified Germany was, in fact, nothing more than a pan- PRUSSIAN state (see below). It would be that Prussian state that would lead the German people into the tragedy of WWI. The fact is that the first man to truly unify ALL of Germany was Hitler. Germany’s dark place at the heart of two terrible world wars and the horrors triggered by each, was, in no small part, the apocalyptic culmination of an 1100-year search for unification. The ironies only continue as her 20^th century world war sins led to her further bifurcation during the Cold War. Today, within the embrace of a 21^st century version of Charlemagne’s empire (the European Union), she finally stands, albeit a bit shakenly, united.

· Once again, geography is … fate, history, destiny … take your choice. The Northern European Plain that runs from the Low Countries to the Urals has irresistibly shaped the histories of the countries that lie within it: the north of France, central and northern Germany, all of Poland, Ukraine and the vastness of western Russia. Without a great mountain range or expansive sea to block their advances, the hordes from the steppes of Asia ranging from the Hun to the Mongols swept unimpeded through much of the Plain. Russian history is nearly unintelligible without understanding the Golden Hordes terrorizing her in the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Poland’s long history contains barely 200 years of independence as the Germans, Russians, Austrians and Swedes take turns dividing up her boundary free expanse. Ukraine, despite a late 20^th century flirtation with geographic independence was always being carved up by her powerful neighbors as so tragically evidenced by the most recent example. For Germany, the EAST was Catholic Poland and the huge presence of the ever-expanding Russia and her millions of Slavs. For almost 1200 years, the river Elbe, where pointedly the Soviet and American troops met at the end of WWII, was the great divide between the Germans and her eastern neighbors. The great plain running from the Elbe to the Urals via Poland, Ukraine and western Russia was, in many respects, for Germans what the West was for Americans – a vast land occupied by, in their mind, inferior but threatening people. Hitler’s popularity was rooted in several tenants ranging from German unification to racial purity; however, the idea of the eastern plains being the Lebensraum destined for German occupation and settlement was the most compelling and romantic. This Germanic version of our agrarian myth provided not only the emotional justification for his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union but was a central thesis in Hitler’s Mein Kampf written 16 years before Operation Barbarossa. As he confessed in his infamous book, America’s ruthless expansion West, her Manifest Destiny, was his model for a greater Germany.

· Modern Germany’s Founding Father was Otto Von Bismark. A tall, imposing and ruthless Prussian, Bismark would stitch together the outlines of modern Germany through war and diplomacy. Such is the traditional narrative. James Hawes’ history draws a very different and revealing conclusion. Bismark never wanted a unified Germany that combined his beloved Prussian north with the Catholic south. His goal was a greater Prussian state with secure borders, a military culture and a low wage, highly productive industrial base. Most importantly, he sought the Prussian ideal of an authoritarian Protestant only state with the hated Catholics of the south (e.g. Bavaria) with their Austrian sympathies and the equally despised Catholic and Slav peoples of Poland and the East all kept at arm’s length. His diplomatic brilliance fell short of this goal, and he was eventually forced to incorporate the despised Catholics and even go so far as to sign a treaty with Austria to secure his new Germany. This was a compromise that upset all parties. This was not the celebratory unification of the long-fragmented Germany. Instead, it was newly emerged modern state dominated by a militaristic Prussian minority that would lay the foundations for Germany’s role in WWI. The Kaiser was from a Prussian royal family. The military was run by Prussians. The large corporations were run by Prussians. The German juggernaut of 1900 was very much the product of a Prussian minority.

The role of the organized minority in modern history is both instructive and disturbing. While our Founding Fathers were fearful of tyranny from either the Executive Branch or from the rule of the majority, they clearly did not foresee the ability of an organized minority, like the Slave Power South, to consolidate power at the expense of the majority. A tiny minority of Bolsheviks would seize control of Russia and rewrite history. Though he would eventually receive the support of most Germans, Hitler’s Nazi party origins were that of an extreme minority amidst the great political confusion of the Weimar Republic. Arguably, a conservative minority has controlled Israel for over two decades. In our backyard, there is MAGA, a minority of no more than 30% of Americans, that is threatening America and the world with its toxic agenda. Even in an era of unlimited access to information and opinion, the greatest political threat is too often the vulnerability of a distracted, indifferent or fragmented majority to the concentrated, single-minded will of a determined or threatened minority.

NOTE: these minorities usually require another minority group to operate as the scapegoat to fuel their ferocious loyalties. When Bismark cut his deal with the German south and latter Austria, he lost his very effective Catholic scapegoat. He and his ultra-Protestant (mostly Lutheran) Prussian cohort immediately substituted the Jews for the Catholics, igniting an antisemitism that would forever scar Germany.

· The largest employer in the world in 1913 was the German (Prussian) railroad system. The German industrial worker worked the longest hours in Europe for low wages in return for health care and job security. Though not at all the same, the similarities with China’s 21^st century model are striking.

· In 1914, it was clear that Germany would surpass Britain industrially. Her steel provided the armor for the Royal Navy and her technology was cutting edge. Britain both feared and profited from Germany’s growing economic might and this paradox (a version of Thucydides trap) mirrors America’s current relationship with China.

· World War One did not end on November 11^th, 1918. Whole divisions of Prussian led soldiers continued fighting the despised Poles for months after the Armistice and their veteran remnants would form the core of the first ultra-right party in post war Germany. Poland was despised not only for its Catholicism but, in the minds of the Prussians, as the “womb” of Europe’s Jews. Several years after the Versailles Treaty, Prussian militarists would skirt the armament restrictions by developing an arms industry in the Soviet Union. This cooperation with the dreaded Slavs would lay the groundwork for Hitler’s notorious 1939 pact with the Soviet Union that gave him the green light to conquer, destroy and depopulate Poland … the goal of Germany since the Teutonic Knights in 1410.

· It was hard not to compare the long-standing split between the eastern Germany of strict Lutheran Protestants, the Teutonic Knights, Prussia, the Kaiser and the post WWII GDR and the western Germany with its Roman roots, its Catholic and religious diversity and its French influence with the split between much of America and the South. With the rise of a Vance supported hard right, Germany today remains haunted by its two halves. MAGA is, likewise, the modern crude return of the Anti-Federalists, the reincarnation of the Civil War without the obvious spark of slavery, and the dangerous overreach of anti-communism. In the case of America, our vast and protected geography absorbed our terrible differences until technology began to erase space. Geography, however, only exasperated Germany’s differences allowing for external and internal trafficking of conflicting ideas and peoples. Clearly, much of this is a bit of a stretch, but the fun of a book like this is that it provokes such comparisons. It allows you to conjure up the rhymes of history

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This is not my usual letter. It is, in fact, a political outreach on my part. The great majority of my readers do not live in SoCal and even fewer within the boundaries of the City of LA. Regardless, Marissa Roy’s run for City Attorney of LA matters to all of us. I taught her for three years in high school. My wife taught her in middle school. She was an unforgettable presence those many years ago and we all knew that she would be a force to be reckoned with. She has not let us down. She has already spearheaded several key lawsuits directed at the Trump administration. The City Attorney’s office acts as a legal watchdog for the city and is a very potent weapon for justice in the right hands. Its present occupant seems to be very happy with the status quo. The current City Attorney has been on the record that she won't sue the Trump administration. My wife Jeannie, Martha Brown and I chose to step-up to help Marissa not only because of our faith in her but to fight back. Marissa is a fighter with a moral compass and that is just what we need during this perilous time. 

For those of you in town, you are welcome to join us for a meet Marissa event at our house on Sunday, June 8^th from 3:00 to 5:00.  The address will be provided with a RSVP. For the rest of you, you are, of course, welcome to contribute. All the information that you might need to know is provided below. Please know that I appreciate the simple fact that you read this letter. Also, please be assured that your email address has not been shared in any way whatsoever.

Thank you … back to books …

RSVP HERE

I recently read EXIT WOUNDS by Peter Godwin. A memoir that is so much more than that, Godwin’s book is as good a piece of non-fiction as I have read in the past five years. A symptom of its greatness is how much it resists any kind of summary. His origin story, his war correspondent background frame a life littered with contemporary relevance. His dying mother is straight out of a Maggie Smith cameo. The diction is extraordinary with words that vibrate with meaning. It is a beautifully layered story with historical and philosophical digressions that attracted marginalia like moths to a flame. It was one of those reads that leave you at a loss as to what to read next.

I resist reading too much about Lincoln and our Civil War after years of immersion. It took several enthusiastic reviews of LINCOLN’S PEACE by Michael Vorenberg for me to step back into this well-trodden landscape. Vorenberg is a historian at Brown University and his book is traditional well-researched examination of a myth drenched period of our history. It is dense, very lucid and startling. His thesis that the war never ended when we thought it did and, in many respects, has never ended resonates in today’s troubled world. The many messages are as persuasive as they are subtle. This is not a polemic; rather, it is a scholarly reexamination of the myth of Appomattox and the real war that has continued to this day. This is good solid history without the revisionist trappings that all too often get in the way of the real argument.

I try not to write about a novel I am still reading. If I cannot finish the novel, it has failed (for me) at some level. Maybe because it is just shy of 1000 pages. Maybe because the audiobook is read by the author. Regardless, I am breaking my rule to promote 4321 by the late Paul Auster. There is hardly any dialogue. The sliding door structure is complex with four narratives about one young man. Archie Ferguson’s life begins at birth and, after 500 pages, is now in college … most of the lives that is. The family sagas are close to impossible to track. Great characters exist in one narrative and don’t in another. Auster was a post-modern trickster – often to a fault. Some of that cuteness exists in his opus but it doesn’t matter. The whole thing so far is one of the great explorations of youth, America, family, masculinity and fate that I have ever read. The cherry on top however is that Auster reads his masterpiece. His baritone voice brings each sentence, each thought to life. I found myself doing circles in Central Park without knowing it as Archie’s lives made me laugh and sigh as few novels ever have. I know I have another 500 pages to go. I will send out an SOS if it falls apart. I suspect it won’t.

As I have mentioned earlier, I am beginning to reread books more frequently as my aging mind airbrushes the first reading into relative obscurity. Rereading Edith Wharton’s HOUSE OF MIRTH was a true delight. Wharton has been at the top of my list lately as I read her New York novella trilogy over the holidays. If there is a better writer, pure and simple, I have not met her or him. Checking the novellas out from the stacks of the New York Society Library (the city’s oldest), in their original hardback version made for not only good reading but an experience that felt right out of her days in the city. HOUSE OF MIRTH is Wharton’s other great novel. It stands next to AGE OF INNOCENCE as her one of her masterpieces though I really think the latter is at another level altogether. Regardless, the fact that those twin towers of literature are there is a wonder itself. Which led me to think of other such pairings in the canon … ah, the stuff of the next newsletter. I already feel much better. Thank you …

I am writing a newsletter after months of existential tossing and turning. It is time to resume my duties. However, before we get to books & company, a little context may be required. (NOTE: nothing new in any of this)

Climate change is relandscaping our world. Trump is remodeling if not dismantling our over 400-year experiment in representative government (NOTE: it began with the first colonial legislatures). Technology continues to separate us from each other and the vital quotidian of our daily lives. While I am allergic to hyperbole, I must admit that my personal history has not felt so many seismic tremors all at once. (I try hard to separate it from the jarring act of getting older). In every case the traditional FIGHT or FLIGHT response fails. Climate is universal as is the pace and scale of technology’s rewiring of human life. There are Trumps everywhere and where there are not, there are different versions of failing and ailing states. Meanwhile, the few islands of stability are only penetrated by the plutocrats and oligarchs of our perilously unequal world. So much for FLIGHT … as for FIGHT … Where do we gather? Who do we champion? The failure of the liberal experiment in all corners of our world has left us leaderless and bereft of vision. The wars fought on the foothills of WOKE discredited and thus seriously weakened our allegiance to both our democratic and Democratic ideals. The fight must be reimagined and must contain within it a recognition of how fundamentally conservative and religious this nation is and always has been.

If this is a partial snapshot of the MACRO of my monkey brain at 4:00 in the morning, the question is where I find relief. It is NOT in ANY of the news outlets and the multitude of alternative platforms. It is NOT in the increasingly saturated and diluted world of PODCASTS. Though exceptions to the rule exist daily, I mostly want to escape the NOISE. I do believe that we are all living in an endless Whack-A-Mole loop of soundbites, clickbait and notifications. Again, I am not impervious to it and, at times, contribute. Like the New York City subway, it is loud and fast, and I cannot avoid it, but I do not want it as my daily soundtrack. That is the role of literature and its many subdivisions ranging from novels to poetry to theater to historical non-fiction to biography and memoir. Literature provides a refuge for the mind in these unnerving times, a place where the comforts of perspective and thoughtfulness are close at hand. Over the past several months my literary wanderings have been marked by the following:

1. The comfort of the sublime … the granular condition of the world outside the lovely and comforting confines of family and friends is too often harsh and hysterical. The center (my communal version of it) struggles to hold. Confusion and anxiety feel too omnipresent. Thus, I am drawn to the BIG PICTURE of sublime literature for perspective and the hope that comes with it. Great literature captures the confusion and anxiety in our human lives and through the beauty of language and all the tools of fiction reformulates it into the calming elixir of the universal. A recent production of “Our Town” in NYC, despite its earnest but awkward bows to WOKE, reminded me of the myriad ways this timeless play illuminates what is “eternal”. Whether in the rocks, the graveyards or the stars, our daily struggles are simultaneously ennobled and arrested by Wilder’s ironic and dry dance with time and space. If this play were a tonic, I would drink it with my favorite gin every night. The week before the play, I was waiting for a physical therapy appointment and picked up an old edition of “The Atlantic” and read Patrica Lockwood’s homage to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I later learned that Lockwood’s extraordinary essay was used as an Introduction to a recent Penguin reissue of Woolf’s timeless novel. I taught To the Lighthouse to high school seniors and read it annually for several years. It remains enthroned at the top of my desert island list; however, it had been over thirty years since I read the twin sister, Mrs.Dalloway. For the next couple weeks, I was revisiting Clarissa on the day of her society cocktail party. It was an immersion into the sublime at levels few writers achieve but most courageously try to. With its echoes of a changed and changing world, Mrs. Dalloway, framed by Lockwood’s essay, provided, through Woolf’s extraordinary language, a shot of metaphysical sustenance and artistic grace so badly needed in these mindless times.

When I use sublime in this context, I am referring to literature that is in equal measure timeless and beautiful. There is nothing I have read in recent years that can compete with Woolf’s twin sisters; however, many have drunk from the waters. Recent publications include: Small Rain by Garth Greenwall, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, The Time of the Child by Nial Williams, We Burn Daylightby Brett Johnson, James by Percival Everett, Absolution by Alice McDermott and Martyr by Kaveh Albar. Opening up the lens a bit, over the past five years, the following novels are the real thing and remain intact as candidates for that very short list: The Passenger & Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, This Is Happiness by Nial Williams, Foster & Small Things like These by Claire Keegan, Crossroads by Jonathon Franzen, The High House by Jesse Greengrass, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro .

(NOTE: Before moving on to non-fiction, I must repeat that the best book nobody has read is Thomas Flanagan’s first book in a remarkable Irish trilogy … The Year of the French, published in 2004. It is historical fiction that is as poetic as it is revelatory. Find the hardback edition.)

2. The Bracing Tonic of History … history in its different shapes was my first literary companion as I began to anxiously navigate the world. In the beginning it was military history – an enthusiasm that remains even if it suggests “issues”. It soon evolved into simple biographies and grand stories. For much of my adulthood, this early passion only grew, finally directing me to twenty years teaching American History (and Literature). Since retiring ten years ago, history continues to be a tutor and a cryptic oracle, serving as a tonic to hysteria and our human vice of presentism. Recent non-fiction publications have stuck with me and have provided the relief that comes with fresh insights and “big picture” perspective.

Robert Kaplan’s current book, Waste Land (A World in Permanent Crisis), is a coda of sorts to his recent opus, The Loom of Time (Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Middle East to China). The former layers the themes of the latter into our current time. The subtitles of each say it all. Kaplan is not a doomsayer, and these books are not jeremiads. Both books are too long in different ways and verge on the pedantic; however, there are nuggets throughout and a very persuasive narrative. Kaplan is a realist and his world is geopolitics. He has lived it as much as he has studied it. He is a serious, literate man with serious things to say. Using history and his life as a journalist as his sources, Kaplan shapes not only his own compelling narrative but makes all too clear how important historical narratives are to the world whether formed by empire or the great “men” of history. Kaplan’s historical perspective puts us clearly within the context of history’s wheelhouse. Reading Kaplan, particularly Loom of Time, provides the comfort, albeit a bit chilly, that our moment is nothing new in history though its particulars might be. If the template exists for how we got here, maybe we can learn from it enough to discover our way out … maybe.

A less bracing version of literary history is the story well told. While David Grann has been stealing the show of late with his gripping and revealing rewrites of history, The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon, my recent favorite is the Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. A retelling of Captain Cook’s ill-fated third voyage did not appeal to me on the surface, but it was on too many lists to be ignored. I inhaled it. Sides tells the story so well and what a story it is. I promise you it will surprise from the beginning to the end. Quite literally, the world will not look the same. I don’t want to spoil any of the reveals … and that is the point. Sides takes a worn narrative and gives it life and relevance. It makes you wonder how many such sad hand-me-downs are lying in the vast closet of our minds.

The last of recent journeys is the most original. Goodbye Eastern Europe (An Intimate History of a Divided Land) by Jacob Mikanowski is darkened a room illuminated with hundreds of candles. Writing history with the ear of a poet, Mikanowski literally lights up a part of the world, a CENTRAL part of the world, that usually lies in our mind’s shadows. Goodbye Easter Europe created a New World for me. Like the movie “Pleasantville”, the black and white opaque images of Eastern Europe are now replaced with the colors and varied histories that were always there. It is also a complex and too often tragic story of competing narratives and the forces that are required to protect them and the consequences of denying them.

Finally, books that I have returned to in the last months and thought about include several that I have banged the drum on before. They include:

*Hare with the Amber Eyes … this literary gem seems to get more relevant each year.

*Global Crisis (War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century) … the subtitle says it all. I wrote extensively about this opus a few years ago and believe it to be even more relevant today. History provides playbooks and the 17^th century in Global Crisis is one.

* The Restless Republic (Britain without a Crown) … talk about history rhyming … the English Civil War, what led up to it, what it created and how it ended, has many of the elements that have rocked our country for the past seventy years. It puts paid to the idea that Britain’s long history is rock of stability compared to ours. It also has, by history’s sobering standards, a “happy” ending.

* saving the best for last … The Inevitability of Tragedy (Henry Kissinger and His World). Everyday something happens, a thought emerges while reading, someone says something, and I think about this book. It IS about Kissinger but also equally about those who shaped his world and his increasingly prophetic take on ours.

Thank you for reading …

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In this letter I am going to list my Top Twelve but before I join the hubristic list crowd, I must comment on one book that made most of the lists, including, and most importantly, that of the critics at The Corner Bookstore … Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain. While 300 pages and fairly small in stature, this is a dense book where all the devils as well as the angels exist in its extraordinary detail and equally extraordinary digressions. The serious effort required to stick with it is utterly worth it; however, I must confess that I skimmed parts (maybe 10%). The overarching upfront subject does not lure you in … an undiagnosed, near fatal aortal collapse that leads to two months in ICU during the pandemic in Iowa City, each moment painfully and remarkable transcribed. The protagonist is a forty something gay poet and college lit professor and this book is the third in a Garthwell trilogy about this poet’s young life. It is autofiction since Garthwell went through a life-threatening experience not unlike that of his protagonist.

You might not run home to return to this book but if you make it through, it will stick. Much is relit and revealed in its blizzard of words. The pandemic’s initial shock and lethality lurks in the background throughout and serves as a vivid reminder that we are sadly and portentously rewriting and defanging what was, in fact, a terrifying moment. The health care system responded heroically despite the right-wing fantasies to the contrary and our heavily criticized lockdown response was as much an effort to save the system as well as to contain contagion. This seems to be entirely forgotten. The skills, mostly unrecognized, of health professionals shines through this book. At one point he compares the gifts of a good nurse to that of his own profession, teaching. Both the patient and student may experience a life-altering moment but the transiency of the heartfelt gratitude of that moment begins the day one checks out of the hospital or leaves school for a summer break. The digressions are filled with such poignancy. His ode to a potato chip as a wonderous but simultaneously barbarous product of a wonderous and barbarous humanity should be etched somewhere for all to read. The digressions take in much of our modern life ranging from trees to poems to love and to politics. Some go on too long, some can be a bit trite but the unevenness is a product of the novel’s ambition and scope. This is not a beach read. It is a winter’s tale … in every respect

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Now for the list … this is not in any order. Let history take care of that. They have all been published this year except one.

1. Orbital by Samantha Harvey … fiction

2. Small Rain by Garth Greenwall … fiction

3. The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle … non-fiction

4. Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh … non-fiction

5. James by Percival Everett … fiction

6. Absolution by Alice McDermott … fiction

7. Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan … fiction

8. We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston … fiction

9. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney … fiction

10. Martyr by Kaveh Akbar … fiction

11. Maniac by Benjamin Labatut … non-fiction

12. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout … fiction

CODA: the list reflects a turbulent, “tend your garden” year as fiction was and remains more comforting and informative in a troubled world. The LIST is based on literary merit but does not reflect the joys I experienced reading lighter fare ranging from Precipice by Richard Harris to You Are Here by David Nichols. Finally, the non-fiction deficit was also a product of reading and completing Chernow’s 940-page 2017 biography, Grant. A read that continues to reap many rewards.

More later … thank you for reading.

I wonder why I had never heard of We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston. It is clearly one of the best novels of the past couple years. I suspect its subject, the Branch Davidian siege in Waco that lasted 51 days and left 86 dead, felt too grim to reimagine. It captured the nation’s attention in a nasty “breaking news” rush at the time news had just begun to “break”. It was a visual feast, a law enforcement nightmare and all centered around that most American of phenomenas, the religious cult. Whether it be the Kool-Aid of Georgetown or the stenciled sneakers of Heaven’s Gate, the lure of such mindless self-immolation has always been deeply unnerving for me. It may have begun with the Manson murders where my family knew one of those slashed that night. Anyway, a neighbor suggested I read Johnston’s book and after a hesitant start, I flew through it. 11/5 gave me a push of sorts since the Waco siege was a flashpoint for the rise of right-wing militias and an alt right that blew up on social media a decade later. The siege also fueled the rage of the Oklahoma City bombers which to this day remains the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in our history. Of course, the nut jobs in Montana and the woods of Maine might argue that Waco gets that title. Thus, the difficulty of the subject …

We Burn Daylight is a based on real events and a lot of research. It qualifies as historical fiction; however, it reads very differently. It is an emotional jigsaw. There are no easy answers, no clear good guys or bad guys. Much is told through the eyes of two adolescents from different ends of the siege but connected in a way that brings more than a dash of “Romeo & Juliet” into the picture. The fact that Johnston puts a love story in the midst of all this madness is his greatest achievement. Just as the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s timeless tale throw into glaring relief the absurd extremism of the world that begat them, Johnston’s teenagers bring a contrapuntal complexity and depth to this tragic and ultimately utterly wasteful conflagration. The narrative is kept intact by another entirely different and very effective documentary touch that gives one valuable context to this whirlwind. It is a novel of real artistry that reads like a page-turner.

It is not perfect. It has an Epilogue … so often a slippery editor inspired slope best left alone. Libby at Carnegie Hill’s wonderful Corner Bookstore loved the book and unpacked the ending perfectly. I cannot reveal anything because it IS a page turner; however, Libby’s central point is that the Epilogue does not square with the rest of the book in any sense … thus our “editor” suspicions. Regardless, this is a book that will provoke and enthrall in equal measure.

I was upset that the Booker did not go to Percival Everett’s brilliant instant classic, James. It felt like a British snub to a very American novel. The winner was Orbital by Samantha Harvey and I might have snubbed her as well if it were not for the literate crew at the Corner Bookstore suggesting I give it a try. It is a small book in every sense but one – its subject. I hoped to read its 206 pages quickly and move on. No such thing …

The 3^rd century Roman philosopher, Longinus, defined the five sources of SUBLIMITY as “great thoughts, strong emotions, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement”. He suggests that the sublime is where the soul is released and revealed. This formal and lofty introduction is where I retreated to in order to find a way of capturing this 206-page ode to our Earth, humanity and the stars. It is SO beautiful. You are with six astronauts (including cosmonauts) in an aging space station that circles the globe 16 times a day, each orbit unique in its path and its reveal. There is no traditional plot. There is no traditional narrative. The book cannot end because its subject will not allow it. What is the subject? What is NOT the subject? Its sublime prose almost obfuscates its most deeply bittersweet message. This is a climate change novel. From that perspective, it will break your heart. I do not want to try to capture Orbital’s wonder. Just read it. Sorry Percival … close call at the plate.

As an aside …

While walking from the grocery store, I was sifting through my reactions to Harvey’s novel and the concept of cognitive dissonance (thank you Malcolm Gladwell) came to mind in relation to its heart-rending lament to our unique planet. Gladwell employs cognitive dissonance when addressing how the world allowed Hitler to rise to power knowing full well what the consequences would be (listen to his Revisionist History podcast on Hitler’s 1936 Olympics). The basis of this disorder is rooted when a set of facts point to a disturbing reality that can only be addressed by a profound change in behavior. To put it simply, if you believe in the facts then you must change your behavior. If you value your behavior too much, you must change the facts. The world is hotter. The floods are more frequent and worse. It no longer rains … it RAINS. Droughts are biblical as are the new hurricanes and typhoons. Every human being feels part of this at some unconscious or conscious level but the behavior (including mine) remains fundamentally unaltered … thus the fake news, the conspiracies. This aside is another attempt to convince you to read Orbital.

Thank you for reading …

Acknowledgements: Libby & Nick & Chris at the Corner Bookstore, Jane Smithers, and Jim L’Heureux

The following books are discussed in brief in this newsletter:

Martyr! … a novel by Kaveh Albar … (2024)  352 pages

Absolution … a novel by Alice McDermott … (2023 ) 336 pages

Caledonian Road … a novel by Andrew O’Hagan … (2024) 624 pages

You Are Here … by David Nichols … (2024)  340 pages

Burn … by Peter Heller … (2024)  304 pages

Precipice … by Robert Harris … (2024)  464 pages

Clear … by Carys Davis … (2024)  208 pages

Old Filth … by Jane Gardham … (2006)  289 pages

The Marriage Portrait … by Maggie O’Farrell … (2022)  352 pages

Fire Weather … by John Valiant … (2023)  432 pages with notes

The Drop … by Dennis Lehane … (2014)  224 pages

The Friends of Eddie Coyle … by George Higgins … (2010)  192 pages

Martyr! is an edgy book. The title’s exclamation point and the cover drawing suggest a lot. I read it, listened to it and, at the end, read it. While the audiobook reader is out of this world, the writing is beautiful and must be read to be fully appreciated. Another autobiographically structured novel, Martyr! soars above its memoir roots. It is in equal parts excruciatingly honest, moving, unnerving, and funny. Rooted in a Ven diagram of youth, gender, immigration, and drugs, the story’s narrative and its many themes are tied together by an artful combination of art, fable, and poetry. The chapters in the Brooklyn Museum of Art soar. While its energy can lead the reader into narrative cul-de-sacs, its Iranian narrator’s voice will stick with you forever. I confess that its youthful “otherness” made me anxious and censorious at the outset but thanks to the audiobook intervention I reconnected and am so grateful to have finished it.

NOTE: the writer made a brief visit at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference (SVWC). He stole the show in a Q&A that he had to share, unfortunately, with another less talented writer. His on-stage presence was the Martyr!’s narrator incarnate.

Absolution deserves a much longer response. Alice McDermott is on my short list of great contemporary writers. I have read most of her books and disliked only one (Charming Billy). The books are serious, modest, and filled with grace and insight. Kristin Hannah spoke about her nurses in her Vietnam bestseller at the SVWC. She and the book were and are great hits. Her book, The Women, is an important untold story that packs a punch. Absolution is another Vietnam novel structured around women but if Hannah’s book is a great story, McDermott’s is a great novel. A great novel is not formulaic. E.L. Doctorow once compared writing to driving at night … you only see as far as the headlights in front of you. The same applies to the reader’s experience with a great novel. The opacity that engulfs you is created by all its resonant elements: its evocative writing, the arc of its characters and its ability to rise above the plot. McDermott writes about women’s interior and exterior lives, whether they be nuns, housewives or, in this case, Army spouses. In Absolution, the young, innocent protagonist “grows up” in the emerging chaos of Vietnam, not in the bloody tragedy of the hospitals but within the paper-thin walls of Saigon’s American “cocktail society”. The drinks and dresses soon mingle with lepers and bombs as the novel traffics, in a subtle and unpretentious manner, the role of love, loyalty and faith in the midst of an alien and dangerous world. Like Hannah’s blockbuster, Absolution continues on, briefly, to life after Vietnam. By the end, one is left pondering about the wonderfully suggestive title. Who is “released” from what? It is McDermott’s nod to her spiritual roots and the final exclamation of a great novel.

Caledonian Road is a long novel that warrants every page of its length. Eminently readable, witty, and relevant, O’Hagan’s book reads like a more restrained, Scottish version of a Tom Wolfe satire. He certainly does to London circa 2020 what Wolfe did to Eighties New York. The narrative sketches a canvas as vast as the city itself. There is a Dickensian list of characters after the title page that comes in quite handy. The chapters are, however, coherently organized and it quickly turns into a very literate page-turner. Much happens. Money laundering is at its center along with a cast of nasty Russians; however, the “laundering” extends well beyond its monetary space into marriages, gangs, the art world and much of what shapes our thoughts about London and our money drenched world. The protagonist is an insightful, talented white 52-year-old man with a good life, sketchy friends, and an open mind who begins to slide into an existential crisis that mirrors the themes of this ambitious novel. Employing generation gaps and the Internet among other things, O’Hagan pulls off this narrative juggling act. I do wish he had exchanged a couple plot lines for further exposition of his charismatic protagonist. Regardless, this is a minor criticism in an otherwise deeply engaging novel.

I loved the television series “One Day” for several reasons. While too long and a bit corny, the show was moving, funny, and literate. It was based on a novel by David Nichols. I soon did a bit of a dive on the talented Nichols and was thrilled to discover that his latest, You Are Here, was met by waves of enthusiastic reviews. Like “One Day”, it is a bit too long and tips into the formulaic but rights itself quite brilliantly by the end. It is a very funny novel laced with insight and penny philosophy. Critics (at least the NYT) are increasingly obsessed with the “debut” novel. A “debut” may be crowned a “must read” because of its shock value, the poignancy of its relevance or as yet another groundbreaking sexual adventure. What is too often not there is the wry wit and comforting perspective that comes with age and years of writing. David Nichols is just the antidote to the tyranny of the “new”. An additional thanks is that I have always wondered about walking the neck of northern England and now I don’t have to.

The cover tells it all. A spooky, tight novel about a post-democracy America. Set in the woods and waters of Maine, it is typical Heller. This is my third Heller. He gets better each time. His stories are very male. Cormac McCarthy without the metaphysical, Hemingway without the art … more like Dashiell Hammett in jeans driving a pick-up with a gun rack. What elevates this book in particular and, to some degree, all his other works is a contemporary context that gives a true chill to his taut prose. In this case, it is a gradual and scary reveal of the anarchic consequences of another January 6^th moment that triggers a spasm of violence in the woods of Maine and, we suspect but don’t know, elsewhere. We know very little throughout this page turner. I wish Heller had written less backstory and kept his narrative within the terror of the story’s slow, opaque reveal. Regardless, the beauty of Maine infected with blood and fear makes for disturbing backdrop to our upcoming November plunge.

I consider Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy one of the great reads of my life. The first book, Imperium, is a “must” read for any one of the following: historical fiction fan, Roman Empire historian or political junkie. Ever since, I have remained a devotee of one of our finest historical fiction writers. Harris occupied this genre way before it became au currant. His books are uneven. The most recent, An Act of Oblivion, will likely remain there forever. He wrote it during the pandemic and supposedly is embarrassed by it. In Precipice, he has returned to his fine form … in fact, he may have reinvented himself a bit. The story begins in the fateful month of August in the fateful year of 1914. It is based on an extraordinarily inappropriate affair between the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and an engaging woman from the English aristocracy who is 40 years his junior. Much happens in the back of the “Prime’s” Daimler including the exchange and littering of state secrets. It flirts with being a bit redundant but its supporting cast ranging from Winston Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook combines with the harrowing events of the war to keep you flipping through to the end. The pleasant surprise, however, is how effectively it frames the eternal dilemma of the personal mixing and coloring the political. The Greeks might have got this ball rolling with the Iliad and “Antigone”, but Harris provides a startlingly reprise within the context of the great modern tragedy of WWI.  The letters delivered daily between the two lovers are the real thing. Their very existence is as remarkable as the fact that the Royal Mail delivered letters up to 12x a day at the turn of the century. Maybe social media was not that big a jump … anyway, this is a really fun and, ultimately, provocative return to form by Robert Harris.

I read a great review in The Spectator of a strange but beautifully written novel, Clear. The review convinced me and I read this short gem over a few days. There is nothing “clear” about this odd tale set in the remotest of Scotland’s northern islands … except her writing. She writes like a saint. In fact, her setting, its plot and particularly its characters are not at all mirrors of their 19^th century world. One is transported into a spiritual world of paganism and mystical Christianity with no hocus pocus or literary tricks. Davies’s jacket photo suggests a fiercely independent woman comfortable in the figurative and metaphorical wilds of her northern Scotland. Not that she is provincial. I was given her first novel, West, by a friend a couple years ago. It is short and takes place in Kentucky. I got sidetracked and must now return to it. She is a disciplined writer who writes NOVELS … not historical fiction or memoirs in disguise. It is refreshing and increasingly rare to read a novel launched from the writer’s imagination as opposed to the cheat sheets of history and autobiography. Not that either of those genres are second class, they are simply overcrowded and as the volume increases, the quality degrades. I get it. Historical fiction is a place where the competent likes of Kristine Hannah can contribute to a more inclusive and honest historical record and the endless memoirs are very often the voices one never heard in the not too recent past. Regardless, a writing voice like Davies is a reminder of the joy of the pure novel.

(PLUG: please read The High House by Jessie Greengrass. Another example of a pure novel, one of the best I have read in the last ten years.)

As the gap between ME and CONTEMPORARY FICTION continues to widen with age, I am now beginning to return to favorites that have receded into the cerebral mist just enough to allow for a fresh reading experience. I swallowed Gardham whole many years ago - the trilogy and a couple of her shorter works. Old Filth was the first novel I read and still is considered her best. It more than held up on a reread. The structure made more sense and its central themes of lost childhood and lost empire seemed much more elegantly paired than during my first reading. I have encouraged many to read this bittersweet, often funny, impeccably written ode to a lost world that keeps nostalgia at an ironic arms’ distance illuminating all too freshly its multilayered poignancy. This is the kind of novel that is fading amidst the soup of memoirs, subjective polemics and poor historical fiction that is our noisy but too often insubstantial fare. If this sounds a bit snarky, please read it and, if I am wrong, feel free to hang me out on the boomer wash line.

Too often the novel that comes after a critical and popular success is a keen disappointment. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was a joy to read – in every sense. It was more an act of imagination than a work of historical fiction. It captured the souls of its principal characters while avoiding the temptations of a feminist polemic. Finally, it was beautifully written with and a gift of an ending. Thus, The Marriage Portrait stared at me from its shelves as yet another disappointment in the making … Charlie Brown and the football. It took two years and several good reviews from fellow literary travelers to persuade me to tackle a book that tells you from the start that its beguiling heroine will die a brutal and young death. Not unlike so many of her Irish peers, death haunts O’Farrell’s work. Her shockingly original autobiographical I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death puts paid on this clear obsession. As she has done in her other works, she employs the surety of her heroine’s death to expand the reach of the true story from the more black and white terrain of historical fiction to the nuance of the metaphorical. The book is too long with descriptions that are a bit too drawn out. The ending, however, is carefully drawn and sublime and worth the wait. She is a gifted writer who raises the feminist novel to the highest of literary levels

.Fire Weather is an overheated, searing account of the terrifying Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada that burned much of the oil boomtown down and stands as a warning of the fires to come as the planet heats up. Valiant grabs you by the throat from the start. His descriptions of the fire are extraordinary. I will never think of a great fire the same after reading this. His contextual treatments are too many and too long; however, much will stick. The descriptions of the men and equipment involved in the massive oil sands landscape left me dumbfounded. It was as if I was reading about another planet. I never understood the long history of man and bitumen (tar). I did not know how early the climate warnings began (circa 1860). There is so much to take it. Reading this book is like sipping from a fire hydrant and that is its weakness. Once again, my siren call for an EDITOR! This book needed serious trimming. Seeing him at the SVWC it was pretty clear that an editor might have a hard time reining him in. Regardless, its repetitiveness and its endless amount of detail leaves one tired and undermines an engaging cinematic writing style and a story that stands out among the many terrifying climate narratives that now inhabit our conscious and unconscious lives.

This summer, Jeannie and I started our drive back from Sun Valley listening to Dennis Lehane being interviewed at the SVWC. It was riveting. In it he plugged his most recent novel, Small Mercies, as his best since Mystic River and The Drop. I wrote about Small Mercies in an earlier letter. I was utterly absorbed and thrilled by this short piece of literary dynamite. Listening to its audiobook version only made Lehane’s book even more astonishing. I was determined to read Mystic River after listening to another version of the unforgettable Mary Pat. I also ordered The Drop. The latter was waiting for me when I got home. It is very short and sweet. It was written to be a movie but that is one of Lehane’s many gifts. His stories have the narrative energy of film with dialogue that may rank as the grittiest and funniest I have ever read. The Drop was drop dead good and now it was Mystic River’s turn. A couple weeks later. I walked into a local bookstore in New York looking for Mystic River. It was not in stock with Small Mercies being the only Lehane in stock. This small but excellent shop is staffed with great readers so I asked “Nick” if he had read Lehane’s latest. I urged him to read it and he then reached into the shelves and pulled out George Higgin’s 1971 classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He was surprised that I had not read it. We agreed to read the books we had just recommended to each other. That was a very satisfying reader’s moment for several reasons but one is that I was blown away by the short genre founding book of Higgins. I guess this book led to the whole Boston noir thing with Lehane being a full member. In fact, Lehane writes the introduction to the latest edition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The book is 90% dialogue. I read it in two days. The movie is a classic and also spawned the long list of Boston crime flics. All of these books  (and their movies) crawl out of the same Boston swamp. Pick anyone of them and read it. They are so good.

The drumbeat continues … another shout-out for Cormac McCarthy.

The rereading of Cormac has begun. The third book in his Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, is the cleanest example of the pure McCarthy style. At its best it reflects a scriptural version of Hemingway that perfectly matches both subject and theme. The Road achieved this in ways still under appreciated and cheapened by the movie. Also, given how are existential selves have morphed in recent years, it feels almost unbearably prescient; however, its style is the perfect marriage of language and content. Right behind The Road is Cities of the Plain. It will break your heart but in a simpler and more direct way than the first two books of the trilogy.

Rather than beat this drum any further, I will rank his books with a brief commentary. While they all share a millenary vision of humanity, a genius for place and time, and an extraordinary ear for dialogue, it is their differences that truly magnify the genius of McCarthy.

1. The Road … a classic when published and for good but very painful reasons. Note the “fire” metaphor … a staple of his.

2. The Passenger … not for everyone. Should be read with Stella Maris and after two screenings of “Oppenheimer”. Some of the best dialogue I have ever read.

3. Stella Maris … breathtakingly original … difficult – must be read with The Passenger … a brother / sister act in every sense.

4. Cities of the Plain … as noted …

5. All the Pretty Horses … in some ways a bit too elegant but in a class of its own when published.

6. No Country for Old Men … the movie is better … may be one of the greatest American films but could not have been done without this in one sitting screed about our violent world.

7. The Crossing … I need to reread this as I struggled with it years ago and it may have been a case of bad timing.

8. Blood Meridian … on so many lists … I do not agree. I forced myself to finish it. It embraced an earlier more purplish, flamboyant style (see Sutree) that he, thankfully, walked away from.

Thank you … good luck with November.

The simplest answer is that I taught the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Grant Administration for 20 years. I have read different accounts of the war itself my whole life and, as most any teacher of American History would likely confess, Reconstruction is a quagmire of confusion in the great American narrative. Finally, I was a victim of the 150-year slur against Grant promulgated by historians of all ranks but particularly by those invested in reestablishing the glory of the Confederate Lost Cause. Chernow put paid to each of these reservations and thus was an enlightening and humbling reading experience for which I am grateful.

It is important that I go over what Chernow achieved in this magisterial work. The following, from minor to major, are the lessons I took from this long-delayed read. The definition of “lesson” in this case, is an event, fact, or emphasis that I would have embraced in my teaching days if I had read anything like Chernow’s book. The following “lessons” are not only historically instructive but provide perspectives I believe help illuminate our world today.

1.     The United States was actually close to war footing with Britain in the early 1870s as America sought indemnity for the British construction of the lethal Confederate blockade runners. Through his brilliant Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, Grant initiated a first ever international arbitration in Geneva to break the impasse marking the start of the historic, if a bit hyperbolic, “special relationship” between America and Great Britain – a tortured and potentially incendiary one up to that point.

2.     Mark Twain did not write Grant’s famous memoirs – considered to be among the finest of their kind ever written. Others also tried over the years to take credit. Grant, in his dying days, wrote every word with only the most cursory editing from Twain. Twain, a sincere admirer of the general, was the publisher … a role he leapt at, anticipating huge profits from the beloved Grant’s eagerly awaited memoir. It would, in fact, prove to be one of the bestsellers of the 19^th century. (NOTE: I advise anyone interested in Grant, the Civil War and 19^th century America to read this deeply literary memoir)

3.     Grant may have been one of the most continuously popular Presidents ever. He certainly was the most popular American general ever. Despite being plagued by often unintended but self-induced scandal, ruthless political intrigue and the endless horrors of Reconstruction, Grant came as close as any President prior to FDR of seeking and very possibly winning a third term.

4.     Grant was an alcoholic … a binge drinker who almost destroyed his career a few times prior to the Civil War. However, he rarely drank over the last 30 years of his life as a military leader and President in a world where alcohol consumption among white males far eclipsed what it is today. His abstinence was real and may have been his greatest personal achievement. His reputation as a drunken general and politician was the creation of political and military rivals, the opposition press and the Southern revisionists that rewrote Civil War history for almost 100 years. Grant endured a steady pounding of fake news, often deeply personal, for his entire professional career in the public spotlight.

5.     Many military historians, particularly those Southern revisionists, stamped Grant as a “butcher” who was indifferent to his soldiers and the massive casualties suffered under his continuously successful campaigns in the West and, most famously, in the East against Lee. Much of this defamation began with the pro-Confederate Democrats in the North. People forget that the Union fought with a hand tied behind its back as close to 40% of the North did not support the war. Grant became their favorite target. Later, as Americans cottoned to a more romantic version of the Confederate cause (most obviously seen in the proliferation of Confederate monuments), Lee was enshrined at Grant’s expense. This has finally been addressed in only the last 10 to 15 years. Too often overlooked is Lee’s determination to continue fighting an increasingly desperate and futile campaign and in doing so committing thousands upon thousand of young men to their death in one of the ugliest causes (slavery) ever fought for in Western history. (Please … if ANYONE tells you the Civil War was fought over states rights, leave the table, seek fresh air and new companionship)

6.     It is possible to make the statement that no President prior to LBJ and the civil rights legislation that he championed, put more on the line for the sake of African Americans than Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln died before he had to face the crucible of Reconstruction, protecting forever his extraordinary legacy. FDR set up much of the scaffolding for future civil rights achievements but did little directly for African Americans. Until the Sixties, Presidents for political and personal reasons did little or nothing to dismantle the edifice of segregation and prejudice that replaced slavery. As this blood-soaked edifice arose amidst Reconstruction’s collapse, the ex-slaves only way out was increasingly President Grant. He paid particular attention to the slaves freed throughout his campaigns both in the West and the East, organizing shelter and food for a people deeply mistrusted and disliked by many of his Union contemporaries including both Sherman and Sheridan. He rolled back Andrew Johnson’s bigoted version of Reconstruction and held sway over its tenuous implementation until he felt that the black population was protected both politically and physically. As this protection gradually evaporated amidst a violence thoroughly forgotten in the traditional narrative, Grant insisted on sending in federal troops to prevent wholesale slaughter. Reconstruction died only when his party abandoned it, mortgaging its ideals for the profits of a booming economy and country. This failure is the original sin of the GOP and they can wave the Lincoln shirt as often as they want but it is pretty clear that today’s GOP would disgust both Lincoln and Grant.

7.     Following on this line … the most lasting message from this huge book, is that our racial history is so much uglier than we ever want to face. A vote for Trump is, in fact, a vote to return to a sensibility that has always lain underneath much of the American id. It takes a strong stomach to read Chernow’s accounts of the rise of the KKK, the endless massacres and relentless terror promulgated by the great majority of Southern whites. The torch march in Charlottesville in 2017 was an homage to the horrors of a past too easily forgotten and dismissed. Remembrance is everything. It is our only insurance against the rhymes of history.

So much for the history lesson … stay cool wherever you are.

Despite my guarded commitment to my “listening” experiment, I did, in the end, regret not reading The Infernal Machine. I listened to it over several lovely June days in South Pasadena, gardening and fussing around the property before the heat of summer set in. If I had read this book, it would have been filled with my marginalia, in particular my DNKT acronym for “Did Not Know This”. It is a startling bit of history written concisely and almost joyously. The topic is far from joyous … the discovery of dynamite by our old friend Nobel, the rise of the modern terrorist empowered by the easily employed sticks (said ‘infernal machines’), the rise of modern detectives, federal and secret police, and our future CSI world. Wow … it really is a wild ride with several bumpy transitions and connections. Johnson creates, however, a narrative that is effortlessly accessible - a narrative that makes history thrilling and revealing. Johnson rightly reminds us of the least discussed of our violent national episodes – the brutal labor battles that came with industrialization and how much the “system” gave a pass to unbridled violence by the robber barons of the time. A reality in America that would only come to an end (of sorts) with the Great Depression and FDR. A reality of violent suppression that created, like serfdom in Russia and textile mills in Britain, the perfect platform for revolutionary ideology armed with homemade bombs. Johnson’s discussion of the rise of the 19^th century anarchist movement was a continuous DNKT. Finger printing, filing, Siberia, Alexander the First, and bombs everywhere are all part of a truly original historical narrative where, as it unfolds, you become all too aware of its evolution into our modern TSA world. Johnson’s entertaining tale has a serious origin myth feel to it and I am very grateful that he wrote it … and then read it.

The Infernal Machine (Audiobook)

A True Story of Dynamite, Terror & the Rise of the Modern Detective

By Steven Johnson

(read by Steven Johnson)

2024    368 pages

Don Winslow’s City in Ruins is the last of a mob trilogy that begins in Providence and ends in Las Vegas. Just what the world needs … another mob novel. I started reading the book after so many enthusiastic reviews and stopped immediately. Winslow’s writing has that firecracker structure and voice that James Elroy made famous. It is a simpler version and thus reads a bit more like a screenplay than a barely punctuated primal scream. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I tried it on Audible. Three days later I had finished it. I cooked, gardened, shopped, exercised, and drove with it. It was a blast. Fliakos is an extraordinary reader whose best and most original voices are reserved for the mob women! Our oldest daughter is a serious audiobook fan and I suggested she listen to the first novel, City on Fire. Eight days later, she had listened to all THREE. They should be listened to in order though I just finished the first after beginning with the third and it worked. How did it work?  Though I remain firmly attached to the written and read word, the audiobook has shown me the power of the written and spoken word. After revisiting parts of the written version of City in Ruins, I had to admit to the immediacy and intimacy that Fliakos brought to his reading. The trade off between the two mediums appears to be that of the discipline required to create real literary art, a discipline that must be read to be fully appreciated, versus the effect that literary art creates when projected theatrically in a way your internal reading voice is not equipped or prepared to do. They exist as separate acts of appreciation. Maybe a 21^st century book must toggle both directions depending on the reader’s bias and intent. Maybe in today’s chaotic choice of mediums, a book’s greatness may be measured by its ability to straddle all mediums: written, spoken, and, even, visual … maybe.

On a final City in Ruins note, there is nothing original or particularly literary in either this trilogy or Winslow’s style. It doesn’t matter. What Bourne is to film, this trilogy and Winslow is to fiction – particularly, in my case, with audiobooks. It is “The Godfather” ultra-light and, maybe, the real question is - why is arguably our greatest American film (and its equally great sequel) about the mob? Certainly, many would agree that “The Sopranos” is and will likely remain the gold standard of tv series. What is at the heart of our deep love affair with an organization built around theft, corruption, death, and violence? I suspect the answer is not far removed from our current enthusiasm to reelect a convicted felon, molester, tax cheat and serial liar. Americans enjoy, in fact, revere their criminals. Over 20,000 people attended the respective funerals of the mass murdering Bonnie & Clyde. You root for Winslow’s characters as they marry, have kids, stick with their friends, steal, lie and murder. We root for underdogs and villains but pay our taxes, don’t litter, pull over for ambulances and stand for and sing our national anthem. Maybe there is a crook inside the whole American Dream schtick that we are only too aware of. While we stole a continent, enslaved millions, firebombed cities, defoliated jungles and got the world addicted to easy money, fast food and on-line sex we also made it safer to be different and much more fun to be alive. When I finished with the bedlam that is City in Ruins, I chopped vegetables, mixed a cocktail, and had a lovely dinner with my wife in our comfortable home, on our wonderful street in our still shockingly safe and secure (yes … it is) country. Go figure …

City in Ruins (Audiobook)

By Don Winslow

(read by Ari Fliakos)

2024    400 pages

In my last newsletter, I discussed the three non-fiction books that have shaped my thinking the most in my life. Carlisle’s The Marriage Question (the Double Life of George Eliot) might qualify if a new list had to be made. There is much to say about this short, dense, and electrifying journey with a Cambridge literary philosopher as she navigates the writings and life of George Eliot or, more accurately, Marion Evans Lewes.

Let’s get a few facts on the table before I try to take a brief dive into this brilliant book.

1. George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans. She changed her name to Marian at age 32. She then adopted her partner’s name and was Marian Evan Lewes for 24 years until the death of her beloved George Lewes. George Lewes could never secure a divorce from his wife, who bred an entire family with her lover, and thus he and Marian always lived in the shadowlands of scandal. At age 37 she created the nom de plum of George Eliot in order to publish her earlier works. It would remain her public authorial name for much of her life. After George’s death she would marry, at age 59, for the first time to a much younger John Cross and adopt his last name. Cross would shortly thereafter suffer a breakdown and commit suicide. Eliot/Evans/Lewes/Cross would only survive him by eight months. THUS … the “double life” of George Eliot. THUS … the central role of “the marriage question” not only in Carlisle’s biography but in everything Eliot wrote.

2. George Eliot wrote in the height of the Victorian Golden Age of literature. Like Dickens, her books were serialized. Her first novel, Adam Bede, was a stunning success and put her on the map. In time she was more popular than Charles Dickens. Her novels made her modestly wealthy.

3. Despite several flattering portraits, Eliot was very unattractive. Nonetheless, George was not the only man to fall in love with her. Her voice was beautiful, her conversation brilliant, her heart full. She helped George with his adult sons but never had a child of her own.

4. The Lewes lived much of their life overseas, escaping the innuendo and pain that came with their living together. Their unmarried status was anathema to the Victorian world that surrounded them. No measure of success or fame could fully wash this blemish away.

(If you do not want to follow me further in this brief and limited unpacking, I suggest looking up James Woods’ extraordinary review in The New Yorker. It led me to Carlisle.) There are several portals through which to approach this book. The central one is the role of marriage in Eliot’s works, in the society around her and in our lives as humans. Carlisle and Eliot become almost indistinguishable on this question of marriage - THE central question around which so much of the great literature of the 19^th century revolved. Both the biographer and her subject see marriage as the intersection of the cosmic questions that come with our mortal selves and the social means we employ to navigate, consciously or not, these questions. The role of the woman in this marital world is where all the strengths and weaknesses of this timeless arrangement come together. In the hands of Carlisle, Eliot is not a towering 19^th century feminist. While deeply angered by the often-violent misogynistic world of Victorian Britain, Carlisle’s Eliot operates at a higher level. Outrage is dwarfed by the sublime. This leads us into the next portal. Carlisle is a literary scholar of philosophy. (She joins Jill Lepore on my shortlist of professors I hope to meet in an afterlife.) Carlisle weaves her deep knowledge of Spinoza and Herbert Spencer (two philosophers who materially influenced Eliot’s writings) into her narrative thus expanding The Marriage Question into an accessible and thrilling journey through 250 years of philosophy. Middlemarch is no longer just a study of marriage; it is seminar about individual freedom and the burden of choice. Its provincial location is not only familiar to Eliot, but it also protects and reinforces the ‘everyman’ nature of the internal worlds of her characters. Without the distraction and drama of Dickensian London, the characters of Middlemarch are embedded within the reader through the often tortured moral, philosophical, and theological worlds they either navigate or avoid. This opening up of her novels is the great strength of Carlisle’s book. Finally, the mosaic of Eliot’s actual life and those rendered in her novels lead you to understand why the like of Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud so admired her work. With deep learning and erudition backing her up, Carlisle’s Eliot is a woman who transforms pain, love, and uncertainty into timeless and sublime art.

The Marriage Question

George Eliot’s Double Life

By Clare Carlisle

2024    272 pages (before Notes)

Understanding money in all its layered significance was and remains one of the great challenges of my life. I left the world of finance and embraced a genuine vocation teaching the deeply loved subjects of American Literature and American History. Any idea that I had walked away from money, however, was pure fantasy both in terms of my personal life and, most ironically, in the arrival of a novel Investment Class alternative for seniors that was built around my place in the faculty and my background. It was, in hindsight, an act of grace. Teaching seniors the mechanics of investing quickly blended into an on-going discussion about the role of money in our lives. I returned to the markets, read many important books and through the role of teacher gradually found my way to a greater understanding of a subject that affected my thinking as much as any other force in my life. The book that I most often quote, that I repeatedly assigned for summer reading and remains a totem in my thinking not just about money but life is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. Taleb would later launch himself into international celebrity status with the “black swan” phenomena but this book is the early glimpse into the foundation of this brilliant man’s ideas about money and human nature. Reviewing it, I realize how much of what he wrote has been incorporated into our current psychological understanding of money. Many who have read it, including students, got a bit bogged down in some financial quantitative work that is spread throughout the book and concentrates a bit near the end; however, this can be skimmed, even skipped. Like panning for gold, his nuggets of insight that shimmer throughout the text, always both personal and anecdotal, are “take home” lessons for life.

I had taught American Literature for barely under two years when one summer I thought I would revisit the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the end, I chose “Self-Reliance” in its entirety and excerpts from a few others as the basis for a module on a period of literature and philosophy that has often been called the American Renaissance. The mid 19^th century movement was framed by Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller among many others. At its core it was an argument around the idea of Transcendentalism. It was the perfect framework for the marriage of literature and philosophy around a central question: is man part and parcel of an inherently good and accessible universe or is he alone in an indifferent, random, and Godless world? With Emerson on one side, Melville on the other and Hawthorne tacking in between, it became the basis for a winter quarter of philosophical, literary, and personal debate. It was likely my most original and risky effort as a 10^th grade lit teacher and it acquired personal meaning for me when a few years after embarking on this difficult pedagogical effort, I read Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire. This pure literary biography tracks the growth of Emerson’s mind as the Concord philosopher covers most of the intellectual, theological, and artistic landmarks of human history. Whether it is in the teachings of the East or the emerging Romanticism of Europe, each foray is coordinated by Richardson into a mosaic of thought that illuminates a brilliant mind at work. Emerson is not easy to love even if he is our most quoted philosopher. His arguments often feel contradictory – sometimes in the same sentence. His idealism can grate on a modern sensibility. His prose gets tangled amidst its density. Under Richardson’s insightful stewardship, all this sub-atomic chaos feels thrillingly alive and truthful. His book not only helped justify and ground my winter quarter, Emerson: The Mind on Fire gave me permission to continue my own restless searches.

The final non-fiction selection is not only one of the books that shaped my thinking, but also is one of the great books of my life – period. Jill Lepore’s These Truths is a retelling of American History through the lens of our original sin. This has been done before but too often with rancor and a bias as denigrating to the author as those he or she might be targeting. Lepore is a national treasure. A wildly popular classroom professor at Harvard, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, she is among the most versatile and eloquent spokespersons for not only American History but for the whole concept and conceit of history. I read her after teaching. It broke my heart. She would have inspired me to redo my entire approach. I gave her book to many people and those who read it were deeply moved and changed by the experience. Race is at the heart of this country. Maybe private property comes as close but even that has had to be filtered through our original sin. It is the ghost haunting our current election 305 years after the first slave ship, 237 years after the birth of our Constitution, 159 years after the Civil War and 55 years after the assassination of MLK. All those years are treated with an outraged, contained dignity by Lepore as she rewrites and simultaneously redresses our violent history. With scholastic empathy, the iconographic landscape of our history remains intact, just relocated to a shadier more nuanced environment. To accomplish this deft act, she stays away from too much political detail, from military history and from the more jingoistic fluff that filled the textbooks I had to work with over the years. The famous line from “The History Boys “that history is “just one fucking thing after another” does not apply to These Truths, the most elegant and relevant synthesis of American History I have ever read.

My usual critics newsletter will come in a few weeks. It will be a real hodgepodge of old and new, print, and Audible. This coat of many colors is a product of personal distractions, macro anxiety about the world at large and a fear that the publishing world is moving even further away from me. The fiction world has truly changed. I have discussed this before but I feel it bears further reflection. It is NOT an accident that the stepchild of the novel, historical fiction, is increasingly front and center. While it may be a part of rewriting our collective histories, I also fear it comes from a crisis of imagination triggered by an existential fear of the future. The purely imaginative act of fiction is intimidating and requires a freedom to safely imagine. Our catastrophically and too often hysterically drawn world removes the cocoon required to allow the imagination to run free. Whatever the reasons, the fictionalization of history mirrors similar blurring of literary borders whether they be the ubiquitous “fictionalized” memoir or the “fictionalizing” of social issues and inequities traditionally reserved for the different formats of the non-fiction world. Maybe the philosophers and pundits have been right all along. The personal is now indistinguishable from the political. Of course, this bout of fiction ennui may simply be an aging boomer facing not only an unsettling world but a mortality that inherently overweighs the past at the expense of both the present and the future. Maybe …

Thank you for reading

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