Swarm, by Jorie Graham

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When I enter the world of a poem or story, I expect to be entering the author’s mind through the world they have created. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than in reading Graham’s poetry.

I know that each poem is carefully crafted, yet I feel a rare immediacy. I am in the presence of a mind in conversation with itself, breathlessly carried from one thought to another, whether the flow is tumultuous or a slow stream or even stuttering drops, a trickle that comes and goes.

This collection, more than the others I’ve read or tried to read, is something to absorb all at once, a perhaps-coherent whole. Yet for all the time I have sat with it, I cannot give you a thumbnail description.

It describes not so much an epiphany—Graham has long stood out against poems that offer such a moment, such a resolution—as a grappling with a moment of profound change. In some poems she takes on a persona such as Agamemnon, Calypso, Eurydice; others read like journal entries, while still others are prayers or explorations of what it means to live a life or to lose it.

Graham’s poems can be difficult to read. A Modernist, she treats narrative and even language itself as suspect, constantly doubling back on herself, doubting herself, exposing herself. Crusty critic William Logan says, “Graham makes you wish stream of consciousness had never been invented.” Yet even he praises her “sprezzatura.”

It is her daring that thrills me, her going all out even if it means discarding forms and traditions and the poetic line itself.

I also appreciate how she attaches value to the moments of our lives, how she finds joy in small things. The poem “2/18/97” begins:

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.

She goes on to name some of the things to give back.

. . .the gentle lawns of this earth.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won’t move.
And these bodies . . .

The poem is more than these moments. It is an argument with the “soil that brightens and darkens,” that demands we live and later that we die. It is a holding close of our treasures even as they slip away:

children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed round and then resettling on
                        their prints
where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
        visible—

It is a vision of a god, a breath, a giving up, and that which will not be given up.

Yes, her poems can be difficult to read. But if you sit with them for a while, you may find the words—mistrusted as they are—opening. You may find new ways of being in the world.

Have you been reading any poetry lately? Share in the comments.

The Maid, by Nita Prose

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NOTE: There may be some spoilers in this review.

My first reaction to my local book club’s choice for this month was that it was a shoddy knockoff version of the delightful Japanese bestseller Convenience Store Woman. Like that subtle, smart novel, Prose’s protagonist is a young woman apparently on the autism spectrum who works in a menial job and loves it. Unfortunately, The Maid doesn’t measure up.

Molly Gray works as a chambermaid in a five-star hotel where she enjoys restoring each room to “a state of perfection.” Less enjoyable is the disdain with which most of her colleagues treat her—referring to her a weirdo, a robot, a Roomba—though not to her face. Still, she calls on the platitudes and proverbs she learned from her gram, recently deceased, to keep her world in order. Then one day she enters a room to clean it and finds the guest staying in it dead on the bed.

Billed as a cosy mystery, the book fails to be either. True, there is a death and cups of tea, but there is no intrepid sleuth tracking down the killer. There are no clues to follow, no investigation. Instead, the story limps through a threadbare plot, every step of it embarrassingly obvious. There are a few gratuitous “twists” at the very end which come across as cheap tricks because they are not integrated with the plot at all.

Not only is the plot childishly simple, but the language is in the middle grade range (appropriate for age 8-12), often even simpler than that. And that gets to the worst aspect of the book. Since it’s quite obvious to the reader what’s going on, the plot is not the driving force in the book. Neither is the setting, which is barely sketched in. The people in the story are caricatures and stereotypes, either all good or all bad, so nothing there to keep the reader going. The only thing left is Molly herself.

Yes, the force propelling the story is the reader’s amusement as Molly constantly misinterprets what’s obvious to all of us neurotypical folks and responds with prim childish speeches. Making fun of neurodivergent people is a bizarre—and repulsive—choice for the basis of a book. I’m aghast that so many people seem to think this is just great, and that the book has won multiple awards, achieved bestseller status, and will be made into a film.

Making Molly be so childish and naïve seems like the author knows nothing about autism. We talk about cultural appropriation in literature. If a neurotypical author is going to write a first-person novel in the voice of a neurodivergent person, they ought to at least be knowledgeable about the condition. There’s also the way Juan Manuel, who works in the hotel’s kitchen, is presented as naive, unintelligent and helpless, summoning the most despicable stereotypes about immigrants and Mexicans. The police too are shown as bumbling and cruel.

In addition to the above concerns, there are gaping holes in the logic of this story, For example, Molly bounces back and forth from clueless to astute and back again. She tells us about her condition, but sometimes doesn’t show it in her behaviour. Also, no police detective arresting a young woman in her pajamas, would cart her off to jail without enabling her to get dressed. Here, Molly even has to appear in court in her jail-begrimed pajamas, like that would actually happen.

Maids do not trundle their carts through the lobbies of five-star hotels or leave them outside the door to the bar. Nefarious boyfriends are not able to clean out a person’s entire savings account at an ATM in one fell swoop; there are limits on how much you can take out at a time. Plus, how is it that criminals can be running a drug ring in a fancy hotel without anyone noticing? Where are the security people?

Most of all, how is it that no one, from Molly’s childhood teachers to her co-workers to anyone on the police force, recognises that she is neurodivergent?

I am baffled by the praise heaped on this book. As I read it, I alternated between boredom and outrage. Of course, even though it’s a first novel, the author is a longtime editor and, at the time it was published, vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster, so she knows a few people.

There are some cute things in the story, like the devotion of Molly and her gram to the Olive Garden and the old tv Show Columbo. But that’s not enough to make up for the story’s weaknesses.

What story have you read with a neurodivergent narrator? What did you think of it?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

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Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry

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Tom Kettle is a retired Irish detective, living out by the coast, in a lean-to attached to an old castle. In retirement, he does nothing or, as he says, stays “stationary, happy and useless.” For nine months he has treasured his empty days, when they are interrupted by two junior detectives appearing at his door.

They’ve come to ask for his help with an old case, one Tom worked on: the murder of a priest who had been accused of abusing children. But this is no police procedural, with a brilliant sleuth and a puzzle for the reader to figure out.

There is a puzzle for sure, but much of it has to do with how much Tom can rely on his own thoughts. His mind moves plausibly between day and dream, present and past, until the reader is left wondering whether a visitor is real or a ghost, if things happened the way Tom described them yesterday to the way he describes them today.

He’s buried under the weight of the past. The abuse he endured in the orphanage, witnessing the sexual assault of boys “with the light in their eyes put out” by the priests was still not as awful as his wife’s suffering in the convent. Later, he thought they’d outrun the priests and the horrors, him doing well in the Garda, June raising their two smart and wonderful children. But those cautiously happy years have been erased by the repeated traumas of his police work and by his unbearable losses.

His memory slips around like a Rubik’s cube, realigning sometimes in a new pattern or falling into chaos. He cannot trust his own mind, his own senses. He becomes friends with another tenant of the castle, a cellist—or was that a dream? Tom often hears the cellist practicing Bruch’s Opus 47, an adagio based on the Kol Nidre, a Hebrew and Aramaic declaration that is associated with the “day of atonement” in the Jewish calendar.

Just as Tom navigates his slippery sense of reality, the reader is carried from a scene of pure realism into stream of consciousness into dreams and memories. It’s a brilliantly written book. I had to pay attention, and sometimes be patient, but I never lost the thread of the story. I wondered at some of the detours, but in the end could see they were all necessary.

This is a story about trauma, how it is carried in the body and the mind, how it endures into the next generation. Tom Kettle has his code. He struggles to hold onto his integrity even as he tries to sort out in his own mind what is true and what is not.

In my book club we often talk about how some novels require an extra effort from the reader, a bit more thought, a little more patience. I won’t deny that Barry’s novel is difficult to read, both because of its slippery narrative and the terrible descriptions of abuse, but it is well worth the effort. It’s unforgettable.

Have you read a novel by Sebastian Barry? What did you think about it?

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayake Murata

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Convenience store Woman

This quiet, first-person narrative from Japan invites us into the life of a woman at odds with her culture. At thirty-six, Keiko Furukura still works part-time in a convenience store, a situation that is considered disgraceful in a society that values high-pressure careers. Even worse, she’s unmarried; in fact, she’s never even had a boyfriend.

She’s been working at the same store for half of her life and is an excellent employee: always polite with customers and colleagues, cheerful and hard-working. Keiko, who is neurodivergent (probably somewhere on the autism spectrum), responds well to the clear instructions in the store’s handbook and the rigid daily routine.

While she is proud of her success at the store, her family and friends worry about her and encourage her to take steps to become more “normal.” It’s hard not to worry about her when she has let the store dictate every moment of her life, even when she is not at work. For example, she makes sure she eats meals and gets enough sleep, not for her own sake, but so she will be at her best when she is at the store.

This is a slight book and I don’t want to give too much away. I’ll just say that the story is driven by that conflict between her life and what society deems normal. The conflict is exacerbated by being set in Japan, where conformity seems to be the highest virtue.

Thus, the story explores nonconformity and—almost as an aside—gender roles. In Japan the title translates to Convenience Store Human, and I’m told that Japanese readers, with whom the book is enormously popular, are mystified that U.S. readers find gender issues in the book.

Still, my book club believed gender was key to the story. For one thing, there’s the role reversal of a potential boyfriend wishing to stay home and do nothing while Keiko works to support him—another instance of nonconformity.

More importantly, there is the essential conflict for women of how much to accommodate society’s attempts to control what they are allowed to wear, what jobs they can have, even whether or not they bear a child. As one person said, the book explores the cost to women of being yourself. She added that these days the attempt to be happy with who you are is undermined even further by social media.

Of course men, too, suffer from rigid social norms, though I believe less so in the U.S. than in Japan’s work-obsessed society. And there is, in the U.S. at least, a strong movement in the radical right to control women and subjugate them to men.

I saw one additional—and subversive—point in Keiko’s story. Her robotic conformity makes her the perfect employee. She’s never late—often early, in fact—and never misses a day. She obeys every rule in the manual. She makes no demands on the company or the manager. She expects nothing for herself: she is there to serve the customers; she is there to serve the store. If this is the ideal employee, what does that say about the future of work?

My book club commented on the short, fairly simple sentences as being appropriate for the character. Of course, we read the book in translation, so wondered how it would sound in Japanese.

This book may be short, but it is not simple. We found a lot to ponder in it.

Have you ever read a story that seemed slight at first, but upon reflection turned out to have multiple layers?

The Dollmaker, by Nina Allan

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I looked forward to reading this novel because of its experimental structure. It turned out to be a labyrinth of stories within stories, dizzying reversals and reveals, counterpoints and echoes. Even more than usual, I felt that as a reader I was an active participant in creating the story as I read.

At an early age Andrew Garvie began collecting dolls. His parents eventually came around to appreciating their only child’s preoccupation, recognising that his dwarfism limited his social life and his expertise actually led to a valuable collection. Andrew also begins to make exquisite dolls, sometimes restoring antique dolls.

He comes across an ad in the personal pages of a trade magazine requesting information about a Polish writer and dollmaker named Ewa Chaplin, and begins corresponding with Bramber Winters who says that Chaplin “seemed to know that dolls are people just like us.”

As they exchange letters, Bramber reminisces about her childhood and describes people who live in the same house with her now, though she leaves us—and Andrew—to guess if it is a boarding house or an institution of some kind. After a year of this, Andrew declares that he “understood that we were destined to be together.” He sets out on a quest from London to where she lives in Bodmin in Cornwall.

The book is a mix of Bramber’s letters, Ewa Chaplin’s dark fairy tales (included in full), and Andrew’s own memories, descriptions of dolls he’s made, and his encounters as he travels from London to Cornwall.

I find dolls quite eerie myself and as a child had nightmares about them. Once I had to leave a store in Toronto because the walls were festooned with doll heads made into clocks. Yet they are a potent image, especially in this context of stories within stories of dwarves and princesses, of solitude and unlikely connections.

Their otherness—people but not quite—keeps dragging us away from the strangeness of these two people who have never quite fit in, making us question what “normal” means in a world where magic might be real and fetishes quite common.

Nothing is quite what it seems, and often I found myself lost in the funhouse—in a good way. I appreciate that much is left unsaid so that that the reader cannot avoid engaging with the story and contributing to it.

Have you read a novel that incorporates myth and fairytales?

The Violin Conspiracy, by Brendan Slocumb

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The Violin Conspiracy

I stumbled on this 2022 novel by chance. What a treat it turned out to be!

Playing one of his high school’s loaner violins, Ray McMillan finds his life’s passion. He loves music, especially classical music. However, his mother wants him to drop out of school as soon as the law allows and get a job at Popeye’s so he can help support the family.

No one in his family understands or supports his love of music except his grandmother Nora who gives him the fiddle owned by her own grandfather, a slave, given to him by his enslaver. Dirty and in need of repair, the fiddle is Ray’s most precious possession.

As a Black teenager, Ray finds his path barred in many ways. As my own son’s first grade teacher said, “No one expects to find a genius in a neighborhood like this.” Luckily he encounters teachers who help him get a scholarship to study music and advise him during his adjustment to college.

When he finishes school and begins auditioning, he discovers that PopPop’s fiddle is actually a Stradivarius, worth $10 million. He becomes a sensation, due to his remarkable talent and amazing story, but he still encounters racism at every turn.

And he’s got other headaches: His family orders him to sell the violin and share the money with them. Not to be left out, the Marks family, descendants of PopPop’s enslaver, claim the violin is theirs.

Then, just as he’s preparing to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, he opens his violin case to find it empty except for a white Chuck Taylor sneaker and a ransom note.

The author ratchets the suspense up even more, as the clock is ticking down to the start of the competition and to the deadline to raise the ransom money or find the thieves. Could his family have taken it? Or the Marks family? Or professional robbers?

This is simply a great read. The characters are well-drawn; many of them seemed like people I know. It’s a wonderful story with much to say about our culture here in the U.S. and in the international music world.

The author’s descriptions of performances make the music itself come alive. But you don’t have to love classical music to enjoy this story of a young man with a remarkable gift and the tenacity to make the most of it. Plot, character, theme, settings: this novel has it all.

Is there a debut novel that you enjoyed and would recommend?

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

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In this remarkable debut, the author gives us eight interconnected stories about a Jamaican-American family. Most of them center on Trelawny, the younger child, born after Topper and Sarah emigrated to Florida in the 1970s with Delano, their beloved first-born. Not only is Trelawny American in a way that the rest of his family is not, but he is also sensitive and bookish, earning scorn from his father and brother.

“In Flux” explores the complexity of race as Trelawny tries to find out what he is. His light-skinned parents were not considered Black in Jamaica, but he certainly is when he goes to college in the Midwest. That’s just the first layer, as he keeps peeling them back, showing both the obvious and the subtle workings of racism in the U.S.

In this, as in several other stories, the author makes extensive use of second-person point-of-view: addressing the reader directly as “you.” It’s an interesting choice. A fad for second person swept the literary world after the success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and then quickly became tiresome.

Here it works by engaging the reader and creating a buzzing immediacy. The author avoids the doldrums with the vibrant energy of his prose, the precision of his depictions of the culture, and his irrepressible—if often dark—humor. It is also a good choice for someone who hasn’t yet figured out who he is or if he as a person actually exists.

The other characters are unforgettable: Cukie, whom Trelawny envies because he gets to spend a summer with his father learning lobstering; Jelly, whose racist family baits Trelawny in the strangest Thanksgiving dinner ever; Delano, who totally buys into his privilege as the preferred son and assumes the world will likewise deliver for him. One story, in Jamaican dialect, presents Topper as a young man deciding to emigrate to Florida.

Having just been reading the essay “Dysfunctional Narratives” by Charles Baxter, I couldn’t resist applying his thesis that too many books are about a young person identifying the trauma that damaged them when young—usually from their family—and has continued to ruin their lives. Writers sometimes refer to this as the protagonist’s wound.

But if that is all there is to the story, then readers lose interest. Most readers want to see characters who grow and “start to act like adults, with complex and worldly motivations.” I agree with Baxter that we want to see characters admit their mistakes, take responsibility for them, perhaps even justify them.

Trelawny, at least, does acknowledge his mistakes. And certainly he is a victim of so many circumstances: racial discrimination, poverty, his father’s oft-stated preference for Delano, even a hurricane that destroys their home. However, even with the humor and brilliant writing, I sometimes had to take a break from his woes as the victim also of less-than-loving girlfriends, weird jobs, his own mistakes.

If I had any doubt that men are in trouble, this book would have put them to rest. The women, once they’ve left their husbands, do well, but the men all flounder.

Still, I have to defend Trelawny’s sense of being a victim. I can’t speak to enduring racial discrimination, but I’ve been poor and Escoffery is right: when you’re poor, survival hangs by a most tenuous thread. If you have the emotional support of your family or your community or both, you can weave in some happy times, sweet moments, even a few successes. Without them, your outlook is pretty bleak.

As Trelawny says, “It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.”

I am on the lookout for books of interconnected stories like this one, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Have you read a good book that uses that format?

Negative Space, by Luljeta Lleshanaku

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Negative Space

The title of this collection of poems by Albanian poet Lleshanaku intrigued me. The title poem, itself long and complex, about her childhood and the Cultural Revolution of 1968, a result of Communist Prime Minister Hoxha’s anti-religious policy of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s leader from the end of WWII until his death in 1985.

But I found a different perspective in the poem “Menelaus” where she writes using as a persona the Spartan leader who fought in the Trojan War under his brother Agamemnon and eventually married Helen after the sack of Troy. In Lleshanaku’s telling, not only is his ship becalmed on the voyage home, but actually never arrives in Sparta:

I continued to wander on open seas, forgotten,
on history’s waters . . .

Patris now doesn’t exist.
Not because of a curse from the gods,
but because with revenge
everything ends. The curtain falls.
And peace is never a motif.

“Patris” is the Greek word for homeland and of course also reminds us of Paris who started the war by stealing Helen. What I see here, though, is the enduring legacy of Albania’s civil wars, dictatorships, occupations, massacres, followed by four decades of communism and the empiness left after its defeat. How do you write about the traumas that shaped your life when they are over? In “The Deal” she talks about going home and all that has changed:

“I’ve come to write,” I explain.
“Is that so? And what do you speak of in your writing?”
asks my uncle, skeptically . . .

Only my eyes haven’t aged, the eyes of witness,
useless now that peace has been dealt.

What’s left in that negative space are the small, human things of life, beautifully rendered in other poems here, with a turn that lifts them out of the ordinary. For example, in “Small-Town Stations” she pulls us in with the first line: “Trains approach them like ghosts.” Then come the details, rousing our own memories of train journeys and what we see looking out at these stations. She ends, though, with a twist that makes us rethink the entire poem and the person narrating it.

This book is Ani Gjika’s 2018 translation of Lleshanaku’s 2012 and 2015 collections. As always, I wish I could hear the poems read in the original as well, since I’m curious about the musicality of the author’s poetic voice and am never sure how well it translates.

Regardless, I’m grateful for these translations that have given me access to these poems with their images upon images. They’ve stirred me into, not only remembering my own moments and reviewing what I know of Albania’s history, but also making me think further about the long-term effects of trauma, whether it’s systemic racism or the wars and dictators who are driving the many people deciding to try the difficult journey to another country.

What do you know about Albania? Have you read Lleshanaku’s poetry?

A Fever in the Heartland, by Timothy Egan

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I thought I knew pretty much about the Klan’s history. I knew that it was originally formed in the 1860s by Confederate veterans and tapered out a few years later. I knew that it surged back following the release of the blatantly racist film Birth of a Nation in 1915. But I had no idea how huge it became in the 1920s.

Egan tells a captivating story of D. C. Stephenson, a conman originally from Texas, who appeared in Evansville, Indiana in 1922 and, with no qualifications, set out to take over the state and eventually the White House. How? By appealing to the fears of ordinary white folks, stoking their anxiety about change and blaming their problems on Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The solution, he told them, the way back to that mythical, golden past was to enforce white supremacy.

“These were the people who held their communities together. They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that.” However, “A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping.”

Stephenson was thoroughly repellent. A cheater and serial rapist who got off on beating up women, his power grew as he quickly rose to the top of the Klan. “Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon . . . Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.” Egan says, “The Klan owned the state and Stephenson owned the Klan.”

He became rich by taking a cut of membership dues and other schemes. He bribed pastors to tell their parishioners they must join the Klan. He lied to everyone. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid.”

Within two years after his arrival in Evansville, he created a shadow government in the 1924 election. He controlled the General Assembly, the legislature, city halls, courthouses, police departments, and many protestant churches. And he had his army of 400,000 Hoosiers, loyal to the Klan and to Stephenson.

Egan is one of my favorite writers and this book does not disappoint. Vivid writing, solid research and a searing story made it a must-read for me. My only disappointment was that the subtitle—The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them—is misleading.

The woman is 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, an employee at the Statehouse, who was raped by Stephenson in 1925. More than raped, but I won’t repeat the details here. Her “dying declaration” finally persuaded a jury of White men in a Klan-dominated town to convict Stephenson and send him to prison. Humiliated Klansmen began to quietly pack up their robes.

So, yes, she took down the Klan but not in the derring-do way implied by the subtitle. I wonder if that was the publisher’s work.

If I had read this book before 2016, I would have struggled to believe it. Surely he must be exaggerating, I’d have thought. A few people, of course, but one in three men in a state? How could that many people be so filled with hate, so blindly loyal to such a disgusting man, and so cruel to others? How could so many judges, politicians, ministers be willing to betray their oaths?

Well, Egan doesn’t explicitly draw the parallels with today, but he doesn’t need to.

Now I’ve learned how dependent we humans are on our social tribe and how hard it is to go against them or question their mores. I’ve learned that people don’t want to admit they’ve been wrong—the sunk cost fallacy—or that they’ve been the dupes of a conman. I’ve learned that some churches are out to take over the country and remake it with religious instead of civil rules, just like the Taliban. And greed can outweigh integrity.

Now, I see it happening again. The military-wanna-bes are just sad, but they are only a small part of this wave. I admire the brave journalists, rabbis, and prosecutors who stood up to Stephenson, at great cost. Today we too must stand up to protect democracy here in the U.S. I hope Egan’s book is a great awakening.

Have you read any historical nonfiction that has helped you understand today’s plots to take over the U.S.?