As I write, Russian troops are invading the independent nation of Ukraine. This backdrop compelled me to hurry up to read this book for insight into the current conflict, and I am glad I did. It tells a complex tale of three generations of Ukrainian women trying to make a life amidst international strife. The coincidences are stultifying, but the author claims that the general narrative is true. The story reminds us of the enduring…
The protagonist Sasha is born into a Russian family in a provincial town around the time of the Second World War. During her youth, Stalinist communism tries to white-wash Russian history by avoiding difficult parts, like barbarous murders, the horrors of anti-German military campaigns, and betrayals of one’s neighbors to prisons. For the Party, World War II tells the story of glorious and miraculous Russian triumph over the world, without any complications. However, Sasha soon…
Juneteenth, of course, is the day that word of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached the depths of Texas and marks the day when freedom was finally brought to all American slaves. Ralph Ellison, an African-American author of the outstanding and renowned Invisible Man, spent forty years compiling notes for this book. Eventually, death overtook him before a final version could be reached. Nonetheless, scholar John F. Callahan compiled this edition a few years after Ellison’s…
Feyi is a twenty-something-year-old widow. Her husband died one year into their marriage from a car accident. Her inner life is marked with a deep grief that no one around her seems to understand fully. With the encouragement of her best friend Joy, she begins to see other men in her home New York City. She begins to hang out with a friend Nasir. He is kind, but she has trouble moving from the friend…
For a period of time, lobotomy was the go-to treatment for psychiatry. It involved disabling the frontal lobes of the brain with the hopes of averting psychiatric symptoms. If “disabling the frontal lobes of the brain” sounds scary to you, it is to me, too. Over time, bad outcomes were chronicled, and lobotomy was eventually relegated to the historical record (much like other equally scary psychological treatments). However, in this book, Greene Woodruff brings frighteningly…
Many historians consider America’s Mexican War of the 1840s to be an unjust war, one primarily waged to grab land for the extension of slavery and thus of human greed. Because of this motive and rampant nativism in the US Army, many immigrant soldiers deserted the American army to join the Mexican forces. This story tells of these soldiers’ formation of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion (many immigrants were Irish) and of their historical leader John…
Most English-language readers associate detective stories with the Sherlock Holmes series. However, these books, as famous and well-composed as they are, do not mark the first detective stories in world literature. Instead, that achievement falls to the great American literary giant Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote three short stories in the 1840s and published them in both America and France for literary prizes. Each readable in a short sitting, they continue to enchant readers with…
The genre of historical fiction is as well-known for romances as it is for stories set in World War II. This book takes those simple premises but upends them by adding so much more to produce a beautiful product of art. Its setting – Shanghai, China, during the war – is unusual as are its main protagonists, a Chinese businesswoman and a Jewish refugee. Apparently, Shanghai, long-known for its prowess as an international business culture,…
This book’s ironic title indicates the “average American’s” complacency towards political concerns – a theme as relevant today as it was during the Great Depression. This book, written at the height of the Depression in 1935, imagines what would happen if a populist/fascist won the presidential election of 1936. Fascism was already taking root in Italy and Germany, and it was on the rise in America (primarily through Senator Huey Long, as the afterword explains).…
This book is the first one I’ve read by Berry, but the author has come to me highly recommended by consumers of literature. Jayber Crow sits in a series of books about a small town named Port William in Kentucky. Like much of rural life, the relationships among its inhabitants are intertwined, even incestuous. The book, set in the early-to-late twentieth century, describes the life story of Jayber Crow, an orphan and a barber. As…