Category: Book Reviews

In these short stories, a sequel to Brokeback Mountain,  Annie Proulx writes with bitter humor and irony about the hard scrabble life of small town Wyoming folks like the failed farmer turned coal miner whose brother-in-law talks him into helping with a wild horse round-up and he dies of a blood clot from being kicked in the leg.  Or the pregnant teenager who enlists in the army, becomes an MP and has her arm blown off. There is also the hardy woman hiker who dies alone with her foot caught under a rock on a little used trail.

Some stories are about early days when a barren pioneer woman might want a child so badly she would put kiddie clothes on a sagebrush, or a prehistoric Indian might be crushed in a buffalo stampede over a cliff or a teen-age homesteader dies of pneumonia after freezing to his saddle cowboying for a miserly rancher while his teen-age bride dies alone in their cabin trying to deliver her first child.

There are a couple of satire-laced tales where the Devil and his Sidekick amuse themselves while riding around the scenes of Hell in a golfcart planning new scenes of horror such as  New Orleans disasters embellished with additional crocs and imported plague-bearing insects or a Tour de France over the rock and boulder strewn Wyoming hills.

Yet the beauty of the Western hills and prairies, the hawks and cottonwoods, the space and stillness, the big sky are all here too…a gorgeous setting where it is dangerous and hard to make a living.

This clearly written and heavily documented book makes me want to avoid not only all processed foods but also all supermarkets. Yet where else can we shop except in summer at the farmers’ markets?

Raj Patel has worked for the World Bank, the WTO and the UN as well as Food First. Not only are the petrochemical companies controlling our food chain and the contents of our food but they are also sending small farmers all over the world into bankruptcy in favor of a few large agribusinesses. People can be obese and malnourished on overly fattened and sugared processed foods. The poor have little access to anything else.

Massive transportation systems are managed by a few large corporations. They are not only using too much petroleum for fuel; they are also using too much in destructive and harmful fertilizers. Their latest dangerous push is for genetically modified seeds that incorporate both fertilizers and pesticides into the seed and eliminate all other varieties.

Our only recourse is to seek out local suppliers, not easy to do in a part of the world where only half the year is a growing season. Perhaps we need to go back to preserving and/or freezing fruits and vegetables and patronize local organic meat and dairy farmers.

Above all we should avoid the big name brands and try to support those that benefit the farmer as well as ourselves.

Susan Vreeland again explores the life and times of an artist in this novel which, while taking some liberties with the facts, delightfully reveals Pierre Auguste Renoir and his friends (models, other painters experimenting with Impressionism, and the restauranteur’ family (La Maison Fournaise) on the Seine where this most famous of his paintings was created.

I was reminded of our pleasant strolls on the Seine and picnics in the Bois du Boulange as well as of all our river experiences in the boating accounts.  It was enlightening to learn of the Parisian interest in simple pleasures at this time, the customs of artists and models, and the struggles of the Impressionists to gain acceptance.

This novel is a largely fictitious but possible story of Emily Carr, the British Columbia painter who began to depict magnificent Northwest Indian totems and their forest settings when the Impressionists had begun to experiment in France but were not appreciated on this side of the Atlantic.

For many years her lushly pigmented and powerfully outlined representations were not appreciated.  In fact, all native art was scorned.  But finally museum collectors widened their horizons and she was exhibited in her fifties.

Meanwhile she endured rain and mosquitoes, made friends with the Indians, ( impoverished, almost wiped out by white man’s diseases, punished by missionaries for practicing their culture,) and struggled to make a living despite the disapproval of her own family.  The most terrible part of the story depicts a young man crippled and driven almost insane by his own missionary father for playing with his Indian friends.

As an soothing antidote to Joyce Carol Oates, I read Anne Tyler. She restores the humanity to human beings and keeps you smiling if not laughing out loud. Rebecca is a fiftyish grandmother who realizes (as who does not at that age?) that she has ended up with a huge and diverse family and is not sure how she got there.

The Davitches are a hapless but entertaining lot….actually entertaining by renting their Victorian house and catering for faux-luxurious group parties. Widowed soon after marriage, Rebecca overcomes her own shyness to become the socializing hostess who makes this all work. The characters, ranging from her own prissy mother to the prissy ex-fiance she might have married and including all the odd and often sparring yet somehow endearing members of the Davitch clan are as delightful as a cast in a Noel Coward comedy.

Joyce Carol Oates has written another terrible book…a traumatic experience ….which should be required reading for all incipient parents, especially the well-to-do.  The damage wreaked on nine-year-old-Skyler Rampike (recall Ramsay?) and his six-year-old sister (wee skating star tarted up and renamed BLISS by her socially insecure publicity grasping mother is unbelievable.

But narrated in the voice of the still teenaged boy struggling to put down memories foggy with prescribed drugs it is all too believable.  He captures the Mommy Dearest voice and the hearty self  congratulatory voice of the CEO-to-be father as well as the smarmy Jesus-loves-you voice of the arena church preacher and those of psychopharmacologists prescribing drug after drug, TV hosts battening on family trageidies, McMansion-plus peddling realtors and other wonderful figures of our upper class and aspiring middle class social ladder climbing castes.

She nails them and puts their heads up on spikes.: sadistic prep school teachers, frantic trainers of the hapless offspring of would-be-Olympic winners parents, drug-addled children of blue-collar criniinals, murderers (remember a sports hero indited for the murder of his wife and lover?) and others.

Yet the teen aged boy, rumored to have murdered his sister at the age of nine, still manages to make understandable if not sympathetic the terrible adults in this relentlessly gripping murder mystery.

Richard Russo sounds like a Mainer as he tells the story of a northern mill and lumber town fallen on hard times largely in the phlegmatic voice of Miles Roby, who came home from college to take care of his dying mother and was persuaded to stay on as manager of a grill owned by the widow of the town’s largest property owner.

Slow to act, Miles is also slow to perceive that he is being manipulated, as was his mother, by the vindictive Mrs. Whiting, whose husband once loved Miles’ mother, and by his father, a shrewd self-serving parasitic drunkard.

The story gradually reveals to Miles secrets probably known to others in his town and to his brother. There is a dramatic retribution in the end that almost destroys his daughter but results in a healthier relationship of Miles and his family and for the town, long subjected to a wealthy woman’s domination.

It is a painful and life-changing experience to read Michael Lavigne’s account of the holocaust seen through the eyes of a dutiful Nazi bookkeeper at a concentration camp who escapes the Russians by posing as a Jewish prisoner. Contemptuous of Jews by upbringing and indoctrination, he slowly morphs into a religious Jew himself, who spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the atrocities he took part in.

Whether by design or not, this man’s son is also a Michael. He slowly learns of his father’s dual identity and comes to accept the love that is finally made clear to him.

For the reader as for Michael, the atrocities of the camps and the later sufferings of the Israelis in their first war with the Arabs are terrible reminders of the extremes of human cruelty.

I am happy to have discovered British author Madeleine Wickham. She provides not only an entertaining story but thoughtful characters and an unpredictable plot.

In this book she brings together two couples who do not at first realize they have connections in both the past and the present that could change their lives. We soon learn that the first connection is an old love affair but the second remains undetected for most of the book.Hugh and Amanda, Chloe and Gerard have very distinct and unlike personalities, all interesting, none a stereotype. Jenna, the nanny, is perhaps the most entertaining of all, with her acute perceptions of all that is going on and the jolting contrast between youth and adult cultures. Even the children are of interest, four very unique young persons. There is also a mildly diabolical meddling acquaintance at work here who gets his just desserts in the end.

In THE GATECRASHER, Wickham depicts a beautiful woman,  Isabel, orphaned in a foreign land as a teenager, who has survived by going to funerals of the wives of wealthy men, luring the widowers into becoming her lovers, and eventually disappearing with a large chunk of cash off their Gold Cards.

I begin to recognize some character types…the naive boy-man who is educated by a wiser-than-her-years girl-woman, in both books the son of the male protagonist and here the daughter, Zara, of Isabel, who also convinces her mother to finally try staying with a good man who has plenty of money.

Susan Fraser King is a writer of historical fiction who has researched the monastic recordings of Scottish chieftan names and surmised a possible portrait of Macbeth the son of Finlach and Gruoch the daughter of Bodhe who kept the peace with the Norsemen and rival provincial Scottish thanes as King and Queen of Scotland for 17 years until the son of Duncan, fairly defeated in battle, successfully led his forces against them.

Ironically, Queen Gruoch, informally known as Rue here, blames herself for allowing the sons of the defeated Duncan to grow to namhood by persuading her husband’s backers not to murder them. The warrior daughter of Bodhe, himself treacherously slain, She is a far cry from Shakespeare’s bloody character.

In medieval details of warring tribes and the chores of daily life…cooking, cleaning, food and herbal medicines, the roles of chatelaines and servants, this book is a rich tapestry.

This is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir of her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya as well as her adult career as a Dutch emigrant who learns the language, works as a translator and becomes a member of parliament and journalist. After a short sculpture film she produced as a plea for abused Muslim women was produced by Theo Van Gogh, he was murdered and she had to spend months in hiding.

What she tells us about the excision, brutal subjugation and frequent murder of girls and young women by radical Muslim fathers is frightening, particularly as such fanaticism is prevalent in Saudi Arabia, our so-called ally, as well as Somalia and Kenya. Hatred of the Jews and the West is kept at fever pitch by rabble-rousing imams. Her message is that we must recognize and deal with all these realities, not dismiss them as lunatic fringe occurrences.

We went down to the Stillwater postoffice Tuesday to hear an Adirondack writer of mysteries talk about his book.  Michael Virtanen is an AP journalist, formerly with the Times Union.  Somewhat diffident, not unlike the narrator of his book, Michael read two chapters of this well written and plotted insurance fraud mystery set just north of Lake George.  He remarked that it was somewhat “noir” and I asked if he meant “Guy Noir”.  Actually the style has something of that flavor.  Each chapter brings surprises right up to the end.  And the familiar Adirondacksetting is enjoyable.