history

Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

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If you’re going to read the history of women in England for the last 900 years, then you can’t be surprised that it is a huge book. Long? Yes. Also, fascinating and infuriating.

Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. Sound like a generalisation? Read this book, where each assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically.

Gregory’s extensive research yields statistic after statistic, example—by name—after example of women doing the work of society while having no power. She divides the book by eras and, within each presents a cogent description of areas such as the status of women’s health, marriage rights, widows, work (paid and unpaid), female soldiers, sexuality, slavery, rape, and prostitution.

Bottom line? Every time things start to look better for women, every time they are given a modicum of power, the immediate reaction by terrified men shoves them backwards. Think it’s all in the past? Look at how the percentage of rapes of women that are investigated by British police—already appalling low—have declined in recent years. If I remember correctly, the most recent figure in the book is from about ten years ago and is shockingly only two percent. Two percent!

Century after century, women are excluded from profitable work, from unions and guilds, from being able even to train for better work. All this while they are the ones feeding the family, more often than not. Elite women cheerfully throw their lower class fellow females under the wheels of their chariots.

A lot of this I already knew, but the tsunami of detail, of individual stories, really brought the horror of this persistent imbalance of power home to me. One area I hadn’t realised is that women were the true force behind the great resistance movements in England, the ones that pushed back against enclosure of common lands, automation, and other power grabs by the wealthy that left everyone else to starve. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was sparked by two women from Kent, Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn protesting a poll tax, not Wat Tyler, as the history books would have it.

If you think that 500+ pages of this would be boring, think again. There are surprises everywhere. Did you know that boxing was primarily a women’s sport in the early 18th century? Gregory writes with a cool attention to story, grabbing the reader’s attention and not releasing it. You cannot even turn away from her ten pages listing names of women murdered in Britain in 2019, nearly all dying from domestic violence. She tells us of the broken ribs and deformed bodies of women laced into too-tight corsets, of women colliers dragging coal out of mines like pit ponies.

She reminds us of how men of every period attempted to define women—quoting their very words—in ways that demeaned them and reinforced male dominion. All these unscientific theories of women’s nature spoke of her weakness of body, mind, and morals.

We are introduced to so many extraordinary women in these pages, but the author reminds us to look around us. “The history of women is a struggle over identity and inclusion: we are all ‘normal’ women even when we have been described as exceptional or deviant or inadequate, even when our vanity prompts us to stand apart, or our ambition to compete with each other.”

Yes, it’s a long book. You may want to pace yourself, though I confess that I tore through it. This is the book that I’m recommending to everyone this year.

Have you read any part of this remarkable book? What did you think about it?

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?

Best Books I Read in 2022

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston

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After reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the leader of the 1831 slave uprising, I wanted to read a first person account from someone who had been a slave. This slim book, subtitled The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” fits the bill.

I was already familiar with Hurston from her novels, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, and knew she had studied with the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Here, she combines her anthropologist and storyteller skills to give us the story of Cudjo Lewis in his own words.

Born in the town of Banté in West Africa, Kossola, as he was known then, was captured by the Dahomey when they destroyed his town, taking the teenager and others to sell as slaves. At the time Hurston interviewed him in 1927, he was thought to be the only person still alive who had made the gruesome Middle Passage from Africa to the United States. His was the last group of slaves to make that journey.

A storyteller in the griot tradition, Kossola describes what life was like in his town, including marriage customs, how murderers are punished, and his own training to be a man. He tells of the Dahomey raid—“ ‘I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run ‘way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey head’”—and the long march to Dahomey where they are kept in the barracoon, or barracks, until the White slave traders come.

Hurston captures his voice by representing his dialect. Although I usually tire easily when trying to read dialect, I had no trouble here, easily falling into Kossola’s voice. The dialect adds authenticity to his story.

Dey takee de chain off us and placee us in de boats . . . When we ready to leave de Kroo boat and go in de ship, de Many-costs [a derisive term for the Kroos, an African tribe that works for the white men, called that because many of them can be hired for the cost of a good worker] snatch our country cloth off us. We try save our clothes, we ain’ used to be without no clothes on. But dey snatch all off us. Dey say, ‘You get plenty clothes where you goin’.’ Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ‘Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savages. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ‘way from us.

He goes on to describe his life as a slave, which lasted a little over five years, and after abolition, when he and the other slaves who had been brought on the Clotilda, those who hadn’t been sold elsewhere, built a town for themselves that they called African Town, today a community known as Africatown or Plateau, Alabama.

Religion is important to him and he is active in his church. He doesn’t see a disconnect between the faith of his childhood and the Christianity he learned in Alabama. He says that they worshiped the same god back in Africa, though they called him Alahua. Because they couldn’t read the Bible, they didn’t know he had a son.

This is not a traditional slave narrative, the story of an enslaved person escaping, trying to survive in the wilderness as they struggle to reach a place where they will be free. Instead, it starts with a free man, captured at 19 by fellow Africans and sold to White slavers—a fact that startled Hurston who had not realised that Black people were as responsible for the slave trade as White.

Hurston gives us a man who, despite the trauma and tragedies of his past, is someone much like us: retired, working in his garden, enjoying a good peach. We feel his love for his wife and their grief over the loss of two of their three children. His words touch us, especially his heartsick knowledge that he will now never see Africa again. He hopes that someday someone will carry his words back to that town in Africa where people will recognise his name and welcome him home.

This is a remarkable primary source for a time before any of us were born. Hurston completed the book in 1931, but it was rejected by publishers, partly because of the dialect. It was not published until 2018.

Do you ever pair two books that you’re reading, so that one complements the other?

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

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Warmth

In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. In 1945 George Starling left Florida for New York City. In 1953 Robert Pershing Foster left Louisiana for Los Angeles.

They were part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of this remarkable movement.

The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages. There are historical sections complete with supporting statistics, but these are kept to a minimum and related to the stories we’re following. The author brings all the tools of fiction to keep us interested in this meticulously researched history.

World War I is usually considered to precipitating cause of the Great Migration. Black soldiers serving in the military and in Europe discovered that it was possible to escape Jim Crow. At the same time, factories and businesses in the north and west were desperate for workers since the flow of immigrants had basically halted and the military claimed many of the remaining men.

The scope of the Great Migration was not recognised for a long time. The effects were felt locally, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, but it wasn’t until southern businesses found they could no longer hire enough Black workers—whose wages had been kept artificially low by Jim Crow laws and local corruption—that the outcry began.

The last part of the book, almost one hundred pages, includes Wilkerson’s notes on her methodology, acknowledgments, endnotes and index, attesting to the solid underpinning of research. She says:

This book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists . . . The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analysis of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

It is that historical context that is the takeaway I most value from this book. Much of the information here was not new to me. Yet what stands out is how I now have a framework for all the pieces that I was already familiar with. I felt them slotting into place as I read.

One area I wish Wilkerson had covered in more depth, though obviously there wasn’t room for it, is the Black communities that flourished during segregation and then dissipated, partly through “urban renewal” demolitions and partly through integration. Wilkerson mentions it briefly in a few places, such as speaking of Harlem’s rise and fall. Robert Foster’s story, too, shows it in microcosm: as he aged, he left his prosperous private practice, where he was popular among his mostly Black patients, to join the staff of a Veterans’ Hospital. He missed being in charge and disliked having to answer to higher-ups who he believed discriminated against him, eventually forcing him out.

I will remember Robert’s story as well as those of Ida Mae and George for a long time. They brought to life the indignities of the Jim Crow South they fled and the different kinds of injustice and prejudice they found in their sanctuary cities, far worse than the discrimination that immigrants from other countries faced. Through these individuals, I have a better understanding of the people around me.

What nonfiction have you been reading?

In the Memory House, by Howard Mansfield

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memory

What we remember and how we remember it continue to puzzle me. Sometimes a random, quite trivial moment remains vivid decades later while critical events are somehow lost. And then, as a memoir writer, the accuracy of my memories matters to me.

Oliver Sacks said:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

I find this idea exciting and horrifying. My writing is sometimes like an archeological dig: unearthing memories followed by research to verify them as much as possible. Sometimes it is more like a circus clown’s act: pulling a handkerchief from my sleeve only to find it attached to another one, which when pulled out is attached to yet another, and so on.

But if every time I pull out a memory it is somehow changed, then I have to factor that in. Yet it is exhilarating to consider what those changes say about me and the person I’ve become, or rather, am becoming.

In this series of essays, Mansfield uses the recollections of individuals to compose a portrait of what we as a society remember, or more accurately, what we forget. From there, he considers the effects of that loss of cultural memory.

He visits small museums around New England, usually run by the local historical society, and ponders the objects donated to them: rock collections, strange antique tools, and in one a bottle of barley. Why would someone bottle up some grains of barley and present it to the historical society? Was it a particularly good harvest?

Mansfield says, “What is saved and what is discarded, who is remembered and why—all that is significant.” The who is important. In another essay he says, “In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors. We choose with monuments, markers and history books. We choose also with bulldozers, by what we remove.”

One essay describes the loss of Boston’s West End neighborhood in the late 1950s. In the name of urban renewal, the city assumed ownership of all the houses and demolished them to make way for luxury high-rises, giving the lie to their promises of mixed housing. Reimbursement, if it came, was minimal, leaving homeowners and landlords with mortgages they still had to pay. The layering of voices, remembering, summons a vision of what life must have been like before the wrecking balls came. Who decides what is destroyed?

Mansfield describes the tall trees that covered New England before the Europeans arrived. “Sailing to America, the early settlers could begin to smell pine trees 180 nautical miles from landfall.” In his brilliant book, Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessel described how the Native Americans had managed these forests to enhance hunting game and harvesting fruit and nuts. But the settlers feared the woods and cleared them for fields and, later, to send timber back to Europe. They also brought diseases that further decimated the woodlands. When trees were planted in towns in the 19th century, streets of elms and oaks and maples, another set of diseases came to wipe them out.

What enlivens these essays are the individual stories: the tale of the Cooke Elm in Keene, New Hampshire; Frederic Tudor who invented a machine to harvest ice from Walden Pond; the memories of West Enders like Joe Caruso, Richard Lourie, Barbara LoVuolo. Joseph LoPiccolo describes his grandfather, “known as the ‘mayor’ of Brighton Street” sitting outside with his cat Martha all day, greeting everyone who went by.

We have—each of us—in our lifetimes seen great changes in our culture. From our parents and grandparents, from the books we read and the songs we sing, we have memories of even older ways of life. Questioning the accuracy of those memories, which often seem transformed by nostalgia into a past that never was, may not be as important as asking why we want to remember the past that way, what our revisions say about our dreams and ideals.

What do you remember about the road you grew up on—perhaps what it looked like or an odd character who lived there or some game that you used to play?

All the Devils Are Here, by David Seabrook

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seabrook

This is a strange book. Seabrook creates a portrait of Kent, though not the popular “Garden of England” image and not the sort of portrait you’d expect. It is a form sometimes called a psycho-geography or an odd sort of travel memoir, where we are drawn into his mind, the odd things that interest him, the associations they carry with them. It’s like listening to a chatty passenger in the seat next to you whose inescapable monologue takes you to unexpected places, places you perhaps would never go, sometimes leaving you floundering as you try to figure out how he got from here to there.

Seabrook explores a number of coastal towns, down on their luck now that the boom for such seaside resorts has passed. Margate became England’s first bathing resort in the early eighteenth century with other fishing villages following suit. That time is over now, and Seabrook is drawn to the seamier side of what remains.

Margate is where Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” after World War I as he recuperated from a nervous breakdown. Seabrook says “Margate plays a deeper game” than putting up a blue plaque to mark the connection. He describes the poem as being unlike “a war poem in the accepted sense of the words,” instead “highlighting what was lost by describing what was left.”

This is a good description of the book as a whole. In Rochester and Chatham, Seabrook draws a tenuous link between the painter Richard Dadd who murdered his father and the last, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is of course our first association with Broadstairs but Seabrook also introduces us to a pre-World War II fascist network based at Naldera, the holiday home built for Lord Curzon whose daughter married Sir Oswald Mosley. “We still don’t know what’s buried there,” he says.

A later section find him in Deal, where he unearths anecdotes about disgraced English comedians, Robin Maugham (jealous nephew of William), the Stripper murders, and tales of several gay writers, actors and athletes.

I was drawn to the book because the summary on the back cover reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a fascinating book of a walking tour in Suffolk where places and people bring scraps of history, literature, art, and philosophy to the author’s mind. We learn little about the author himself except through his choice of material and meditations stimulated by them.

Both are first person monologues, both are journeys into a singular mind, one that is on the verge of a nervous breakdown—explicit in Sebald, implied in Seabrook. Both are assemblages of tesserae that resist forming a recognisable mosaic, pushing the reader to explore their own imagination and ability to find connections.

I found Sebald’s fragments far more interesting, but what is intriguing here is the way Seabrook’s bits and pieces lead you ever deeper into seedy and shocking stories. You’d think starting with a murder, the book could only go up, but you’d be wrong. We learn almost nothing about the author except his note early on that his fiancé has just died of cancer, yet we know him intimately from the juddering rhythms of his mind, the peculiar trail of associations that he follows. And still he surprises us.

Some people love this book; some hate it. If you are curious about the peculiar way one mind can work or about what goes on beyond the pretty postcards of Kentish oast houses, check out this book. But I warn you: abandon all preconceptions you who enter here.

Have you read a book that baffled you but you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz

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Recently I attended a talk about the flood of hippies and other progressives moving to Vermont in the 1970s and this book was mentioned. Having lived in a rural part of the state briefly in 1971, I was well aware of how conservative it was and so have always been curious as to how these two wildly different populations managed to coexist. Daloz’s book, subtitled Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America, helps me understand.

The story of the Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone, with digressions to describe the commune movement in the U.S. In 1970, three young people—Lorraine, Fletcher and Craig—found the 116-acre former potato farm and within a few weeks Craig had bought it, using his inheritance following his father’s sudden death for the down payment. Craig then created a land trust so it would be owned in common with everyone taking turns covering the mortgage payments.

After the group, which quickly swelled in numbers, discovered the joys of mud season in Vermont, they spent an idyllic summer living in tents, tipis and lean-tos. “It was like a weeks-long camping trip, but more romantic because this was not a mere vacation, but, for all of them, their new way of life.

They were determined to be self-sufficient, acquiring chickens, two milk cows and a beef calf who all had to be cared for. Besides building a rough shed for the chickens, they dug an outhouse and planted a garden. Water for cooking and washing had to be hauled in five-gallon buckets in the back of Craig’s truck. Lorraine prepared meals over an open fire, while Nancy cared for the children. The group had big plans for the future—a school for the children, wind-powered generators, a radio station—but their immediate task was to build a geodesic dome for winter housing.

We also get to know their neighbors, some who were original Vermonters and some, like the author’s parents, who wanted to go back to the land but were not interested in the communal part.

As with other groups during this idealistic period, the Myrtle Hill residents had no leader, making decisions by consensus. They embraced free love and shared occasional after-dinner marijuana; their open-door policy welcomed curious hippies and others. However, as seen by the division of labor above, they had brought gender role assumptions with them. And then, of course, winter arrived.

Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. Even in describing her parents’ path, her journalistic tone doesn’t waver.

It’s a fascinating book, combining the intense focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community, and some jobs are full-time so are better left to someone else.

At first the book saddened me, as I remembered my own back-to-the-land dreams of the same period. But as I read on, I realised that my reasons for not eventually choosing that path had been good ones. I’d had the good fortune to work on a friend’s dairy farm for a season and quickly saw that while I enjoyed the work, such a life was not for me. The idea of writing at night when the farmwork was over turned out to be a ridiculous fantasy, for all the reasons that plagued the young people in this book.

So when I did start visiting communes thinking I might find one where I could prosper, I knew what to look for. I ended up choosing community over commune, and do not regret it. Still, this book brought back many pleasant memories and also helped me to better understand the culture in today’s Vermont.

Have you read a book that took you back to an earlier period in your life?

Best Books I read in 2020

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Best Books I read in 2020

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2020. In general, this year I gravitated toward books that either comforted me or gave me courage. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Horizon, by Barry Lopez
In this profound and generous book, Lopez looks back over some of the travels that have shaped his understanding and philosophy. We go from Oregon to Antarctica, from Nunavut to Tasmania, from Eastern Equatorial Africa to Xi’an in China. The horizon he explores is physically and metaphorically the line where our known world gives way to air, to the space we still know almost nothing about. That liminal space is where exciting things can happen. The quest for knowledge and understanding—along with compassion—are what I value most in human beings.

2. Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck
The main character of Erpenbeck’s novel is a plot of land by a lake in Brandenburg, and the homes built there, especially a fabulously detailed home built by an architect in the 1930s. The succession of people who live in this house and next door mirror the changes in East Germany during the ensuing decades. Though short, this novel is surprisingly intense. It made me think about what inheritances are passed on and what are lost, about the so-brief time that we inhabit this world that is our home, and how the earth itself, though changed, persists. Our cares and worries, even in this terrible time, will pass.

3. Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
This unusual and fascinating novel explores the border between poetry and prose, story and fairy tale. The quirky voice of the narrator is firmly established with the first sentence and sustained throughout the book. Living alone in an isolated community in western Poland, Janina is an older woman who manages her vocation of astrology, the translations of William Blake’s poetry that she and a friend are doing, and the griefs that accumulate over the years. The story sometimes feels like a fable, sometimes a prose poem, sometimes a wrenching view of age and isolation, sometimes a paean to friendship.

4. A Woman of No Importance, by Sonia Purnell
Subtitled The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, this is a fascinating read. If you thought, as I initially did, that the subtitle is a bit hyperbolic, rest assured that it is not. Born in 1906 to a wealthy and prestigious family, Virginia Hall grew up in Baltimore but preferred adventure to marriage. During WWII, she became one of the first British spies—and the first female—in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies.

5. Abigail, by Magda Szabó
Originally published in 1970, it is the story of 15-year-old Gina who in 1943 is exiled from Budapest by her beloved father, sent to boarding school near Hungary’s eastern border. Headstrong, a little spoiled, Gina rebels, finding creative ways to break the rules at the strict academy. While having many characteristics of a traditional coming-of-age story, and echoes of books like Jane Eyre, Gina’s story is unusually perceptive and complex.

6. Blackberries, Blackberries, by Crystal Wilkinson
These stories feature Black women in rural Kentucky, young and old, each with her individual take on the world, her own idea of herself. In every story, Wilkinson demonstrates the writer’s mantra that the personal is universal. These may be Black women in Appalachia, but I saw myself in each of them. Reading their stories has been a gift, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

7. Gellhorn, by Caroline Moorehead
Moorehead’s biography brings the brilliant war correspondent to life, enhanced by the hundreds of letters Gellhorn wrote during her life, openly detailing personal and professional undertakings as well as her own thoughts and feelings. The biography is subtitled A Twentieth-Century Life. Indeed, although she was always out ahead of others, few things could be more emblematic of that turbulent century than the life of this remarkable woman who challenged customary women’s roles, stuck to her own moral code, and worked relentlessly at her chosen métier.

8. The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This first novel from Coates is the story of Hiram Walker, a young slave in Virginia whose been assigned to be the personal servant for his half-brother: the white, legitimate son of the plantation owner. The writing, as you would expect from Coates, is gorgeous. I loved the first part of the book, but after that, the story seemed to bog down. Still, this coming-of-age story of a man’s journey to freedom is one of the best books I’ve read recently. I loved the unusual and nuanced way the story embodies the themes of family and memory.

9. Grace Notes, by Brian Doyle
These days I’m turning to books not so much for escape as for courage and comfort, and welcome anything that might help replenish my stores of both. For me, that often means returning to one of my favorite authors. In addition to writing unforgettable stories and essays, Brian Doyle, who died much too young in 2017, was a teacher, magazine editor, husband, father. In this collection of short essays, while not shying away from the darkness, Doyle reminds us of what is good in the world.

10. Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout
A book by Strout is a balm just now, when we are so traumatised by grief and fear and anger. Yes, she takes us into the terrible crimes human beings, even those in quiet Midwestern towns, visit upon one another, yet she also shows us the complicated people that we are. Without dwelling on the ugliness, Strout evokes in us the emotions of these characters, their trials, their loneliness, and sometimes their quiet redemption.

What were the best books you read last year?

The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Lawson

by

Splendid

I hadn’t planned on reading more about WWII, having grown up in the shadow it cast, but I found A Woman of No Importance with its story of boundless courage and energy so inspiring that I couldn’t resist this book. Also, I knew I was in good hands with Larson, having enjoyed his previous books.

True to its subtitle A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, the story covers Churchill’s first year as prime minister. To say it was a tumultuous year is an understatement. When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty. Then when Chamberlain resigned on 10 May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. That same day, Hitler invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. The Dunkirk evacuation was only a few weeks later.

While I was already pretty familiar with events and people, Larson’s dramatic scenes and fast-moving action kept me engrossed. I was surprised by how gripping the story was, given that I already knew what was going to happen.

One factor, besides Larson’s skill as a writer, is all the new information from recently declassified files and intelligence reports—the amount of research Larson must have done is astounding. We get insight, not just into the workings and discussions of Churchill and his cabinet, but also into Hitler’s inner circle. The motivations and misunderstandings on both sides helped me understand some key decisions. We learn about the negotiations between Roosevelt and Churchill, who understood that Britain would fall without aid from the U.S.

Memorable anecdotes abound, such as Churchill’s aside after his famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. After he finished, Churchill said to someone near him, “‘And . . . we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.’”

Also, Larson focuses on individuals, making extensive use of personal diaries and letters. We see Winston in private moments dancing at parties, wearing outlandish costumes. We hear his wife Clementine caution him to be less contemptuous and kinder to those around him. We follow their youngest daughter Mary and son Randolph’s wife Pamela as they navigate family and social life through this turbulent year. Churchill’s private secretary John Colville gives us unusual insight into the PM both in public and in private. We learn about the key roles played by newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook and Federick Lindemann, a physicist and Churchill’s science advisor.

While I was fascinated by these private moments, my main feeling while reading this book was admiration for the courage of this flawed man who held his country together, even as Hitler expected them to surrender every day—surely they can’t hold out any longer! And for the British people themselves, who patiently put out the fires and swept up the rubble, patrolled fields and put up with appalling conditions in some of the shelters.

I was inspired by this tremendous example of leadership, and saddened too, considering where both the U.S. and Britain are these days. Larson’s book is more than an enjoyable read, more than a fascinating look into history’s public and private lives; it’s a brilliant primer on how to be a leader.

What book have you read about an inspiring leader?