Book Review

The Underground Railroad, by Colin Whitehead

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio
• Why I bought this book: It is written by Colin Whitehead

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    Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad literally.

    

    He imagines it as a subway, with underground tracks,  cobbled together train cars, and live conductors. It has hiddens entrances, stations, and a schedule.

    Moreover, he imagines some of the stations leading to havens for escaped slaves -- a place for them to stay, work, and put together a life of normalacy, in a town where Black people can grow and succeed, and raise a family.

    But this is no feel-good fantasy. Real life intrudes, even in their free towns. White supremacists hate Black success. They hound and harass them. Slaves catchers make a career of chasing them. The escapees from slavery fear being forced back to the savagery of their previous lives or the torture that will end them.

    Make no doubt, this is a painful, fearful book to read. The descriptions of the daily humiliations, sufferings, and agonies of the enslaved are difficult to read. One is presented with the inhumanity of the enslavers and those who support and defend them. The entire callous system that brought about and sustained chattel slavery is shown for the cruel, merciless abyss is was.

    The story is told throught the eyes of Cora, an enslaved person. Because her mother successfully escaped -- or at least ran, and was never caught -- Cora's life is particularly difficult, She is an outcast even among the other enslaved. The overseer on the plantation selects her for particular harassment, and others condemn her to the hob, a portion of the slave camps for the unfavored. 

    She describes her life on the plantation, the deaths, the punishments, and the rapes and assaults. She longs for her mother, but simultaneously hates her for running off and leaving her. When Cora is offered an opportunity to flee by a fellow slave named Caesar, she takes it. 

    The book follows her on the Underground Railroad. She describes the efforts by her enslaver to recapture her, and by the slave catcher Ridgeway to kidnap and return her to her life of hell. Even the towns along the Underground Railroad, which appear to offer refuge, are an illusion that hide a insidious scheme to keep the enslaved from ultimate freedom.

    One finds it easy to root for Cora, who shows tenacity to get what she wants, and overcomes much of her suffering. Her compelling story is a testament to her character, and by extension, the character of her fellow enslaved people.

    Whitehead's writing is superb. His stories alternate from Cora's tale, to the backgrounds and motivations of the enslavers, slave catchers, and others who participated in the system. His language is profound and gripping. He draws you in to the story, and with a mesmerizing narrative, compels you to stay there. Cora's detailed account is raw, riveting, and captivating. 

    He deservedly won the Pulitzer prize for this novel.

Book Review: The Nickel Boys

 The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

    This book is grim, depressing, and infuriating. It's also extraordinary piece of writing depicting a horrific experience that seems all too common in the BIPOC community. 

    Although it's a fictional tale, the story is based in fact. Indeed it is based on facts showing that throughout the United States, Canada, and large parts of Europe, the dominant class structure always has mistreated, abused, and tortured others -- mostly women and people of color -- simply because it can, and it wants to. 

  

    Elwood Curtis is the narrator of his tale. As the book begins, he is an older Black man living in New York City who owns and runs a cleaning company. Then he see reports exposing the defunct Nickel Academy's history of  abuse and neglect, along with the discovery of dozens of bodies buried on its property.

    The story then shifts to Curtis's years as a young Black boy living in the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s. Of course, because of discrimination and segregation, all Black people lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s.

    Curtis is a smart kid, and his mother encourages him to educate himself and enrich his mind. He becomes enamored of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his words and actions, and strives to rise above the racism and bigotry surrounding him. But while hitch-hiking to his first day of college classes, he is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. Police stop them, and Curtis is charged with being a juvenile delinquent. He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a so-called reform school in small town Florida.

    Of course, the "academy," based on the Dozier School of Boys, is anything but a reform school. The boys are segregated by race -- with the exception of one Mexican boy, who is sent to either the Black side or white side, based on the whims of the "teachers." Both sides are horribly abused, subjected to random corporal punishment, having their meals withheld, and being sent out to work for local politicians or businessmen, with a small fee for the "headmaster." Some of them are sent for extra punishment, from which they seldom return.

    Whitehead explores the relationships Curtis forms with other boys in the home, along with his experiences with the headmasters. Curtis tries to accept his lot, while maintaining his dignity and fighting back against the cruel abuse the boys are subjected to. He also steps in when some of the other  boys turn on each other.

    The more he learns about the Academy and its "students," called the Nickel Boys, the angrier he becomes.

    The book reaches a high point when Curtis and Jack Turner, his cynical friend and roommate, decide to take action against the crimes of the adults. It's a scary yet compelling narrative that keeps you reading long into the night.

    The novel earned Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The first was in 2017 for Underground Railroad. "It burns with outrageous truth,"Josephine Livingston said in The New Republic. about The Nickel Boys. The Guardian newspaper said Whitehead showed "how racism in American has long operated as a codified and sactioned activity."

Book Review: The Natural

The Natural, by Bernard Malamud

    In the long, long ago, an old college friend handed me a copy of this book, telling me I should read it because it is the best baseball book ever written.

    I put the book aside, somehow ignoring it for the next four decades. But earlier this year, while meandering around a used-book store, I landed across the book. Not knowing where my original copy was, I decided to pick it up and actually read it this time.

    It was good.

    But the best baseball book ever written? I think not. I'd have to list at least five or six novels by W.P. Kinsella ahead of it. And perhaps a few others. 

    Maybe time has caught up with The Natural. It was, after all, published in 1952. It was made into a movie, with a then-middle-aged Robert Redford in the lead role, way back in 1984 -- long after an even younger Redford helped break the Watergate scandal.

Malamud is considered one of the greatest Jewish authors

of the 20th Century. Later in his writing career, he won a

Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer, his novel about anti-semitism in

the Russian Empire. The Natural is the first novel he published.

      The Natural begins with a young rube by the name of Roy Hobbs headed on a train to Chicago for a tryout with the Cubs. Something happens, and Hobbs' career stalls. Some 16 years later, Hobbs is signed as the new left fielder for the down-and-out New York Knights. Hobbs brings along his special bat, which he has named Wonderboy. He refuses to hit with anything else.

    It's unclear whether the bat has magical powers, or Hobbs just thinks it does. And while fueding with his veteran, old-school manager, Pop Fisher, Hobbs beomes the star of the team and starts leading the sad-sack Knights toward the pennant. As Hobbs gains fame and fortune, a cloud begins to surround him, and a deep, dark secret in his past is hinted.

    Each chapter of the book reads like a short story, self-contained but presenting a snippet of the whole. It's well written, and the baseball stories and tales in the dugout and clubhouse seem realistic for the era. But it sometimes falls into common baseball tropes -- the aging manager who's seen it all, the obnoxious superstar, the long-suffering fans. I also question some of the math -- in one sequence, a team is four games behind another in the pennant race, wins a four-game series, but then is just one game behind.

    But it's the magical sequences that are most problematic. Are they dreams? Mystical happenings? Or simply extended metaphors? 

    I don't know. And I am afraid the book's failure to properly deal with those is its major flaw.

Book Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

    The six-word summation of this book is: "Rich man makes bad life decisions."

    I mostly enjoyed this book, although it is perhaps the whitest book I have ever read. Imagine, if you will, this synopsis: The father of a young teenage child deserts his family. Later, the boy and his mother are the victims of a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mother dies; the child grabs a famous painting and escapes.

   

It's a lot of book

      Picture that happening to a black child. Now, as in this book, imagine the child is white. Yep. Two different stories, never meeting nor crossing paths. 

    This story is the white one.

    Simply put, it's about a child with an obsession about the stolen painting. Or more accurately, it's about a child cum man with an obsession about his obsession about his stolen painting.

    It did win a Pulitzer Prize, and it's not hard to see why: It's a grand, overarching book about family, love, desire, hope, and hopelessness. It's a sprawling book that moves from New York to Las Vegas, back to New York, and then to Europe. It's about the lifestyles of the wealthy, and the privileged way they walk through life.

    But it's also overwritten, meandering on for 771 pages. Just about every experience is overdone, every scene over-described. For someone who prefers tight writing, as I do, it's a slog to get through. At the end, Tartt grows increasingly philosophical, and you wonder if she is furiously adding on pages as you read. You fear the book might never end.

    That all said, however, it is a good story, with a handful of interesting characters; albeit none very likeable. It's no doubt a good book for the times we are in -- something that will remain with you through the long, shut-in days of quarantine.     

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot  See, by Anthony Doerr

This is a book about war.

It's about the worst of war: The bigotry, the poison, the death. It's about the dirty business of war: The propaganda of hatred. The killing of one's humanity. The destruction of  innocence.

But it's also a book about redemption, about saving one's humanity, about overcoming fear and ignorance, and about accepting grace from your better angels.

In this book, we meet two players from World War II: Werner Pfennig, a German teenage boy living in an orphanage, who has a flair for electronics and mathematics, and the slightly younger Marie-Laure LeBlanc, 12 in 1940, a blind girl living in Paris with her father. Each has a cast of characters coming in and out of their lives. For Werner, it includes his sister Jutta, as smart and enterprising as he is, who simply cannot accept Werner's gradual assimilation into the Nazi regime, and his roommate Frederick, a sensitive boy and bird watcher who is considered too weak for the Third Reich. For Marie-Laure, a reluctant member of the resistance in Saint-Malo, France, where she is forced to flee, it includes her father, Daniel LeBlanc, who has dedicated his life to teaching her to survive in a sighted world, and her Uncle Etienne, a WWI veteran with lingering mental problems from that service, who strives to overcome his fears to protect Marie-Laure.

It also features a strange blue diamond, the Sea of Flames, said to be blessed and cursed, that becomes the focus of the lives of several characters in the book.

The story is told, in alternating chapters, from the perspectives of Werner and Marie-Laure. Their lives and experiences eventually intersect and intertwine, coming to several emotional encounters as the book reaches its climax.

Doerr won a Pulitzer prize for this novel, and it is easy to see why. It is sometimes a hard book to read, but ultimately, is worth the time and effort.

Book Review: Fences

Fences, by August Wilson

I went to see this play this weekend at one of my local theaters, and loved it. But I figured I missed a few things, so I asked my daughter -- the real theater nerd in the family -- if she had a copy of the play. She did. Of course she did. It's her favorite play by her favorite playwright.

It's also a Pulitzer prize winner.

So I read it, and picked up a few things I had missed. More importantly, as I am learning to read plays, I discover it is easier to do so once you have seen the show.

This is outwardly a simple play, shown in a stark  format. Even the stage directions are sparse. All the scenes are in the bleak and dusty yard of the main character. This is a play that depends on its writing for its impact.

It is the story of Troy Maxson, a black sanitation worker in Pittsburgh in the late 1950s. Troy is bitter about how life has treated him because of his race. He is particularly angry that his baseball days -- he was a power hitter and one of the top players in the Negro Leagues -- coincided with the ban on African-Americans playing in Major League baseball. He especially hated when he was told he simply came along too early.

"There ought not never have been no time called too early," he shouts at one point early in the show.

The story revolves around Troy's relationship with his family and friends. It explores how his past -- including the racism he experienced and continues to experience -- influences his thoughts and actions. It's a remarkable play by a remarkable author.

This Week in Books, 1st Edition

Apparently, this is a thing with book bloggers: You write about what books you've just read, are reading, and what you plan to read next. I'm not always that scheduled -- often I just go to my TBR stack and grab what looks interested.

But hey, I'll play along. Maybe I'll make this a permanent feature.

My week in books. 

First off, as one can tell by my latest review, I have just finished, for the second time, Stephen's King's Elevation. As Lawrence Welk would say, "It's wunnerful, wunnerful."

On my current reading list are two books. One is the Pulitzer-prize winning, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. It's a book set in and before World War II, and contrasts the growing up of a blind French girl and a orphan German boy with a knack for electronics. So far, so good. The second is a Gulf War memoir, Wine in the Sand, by a buddy of mine, Jim White. It's as wild as the war (apparently) was.

As for what comes next, I'm not sure. It might be Music Love Drugs War, by Geraldine Quigly, a novel about growing up in Northern Ireland during the heart of the Troubles in 1980. Or is might be Jasper Fforde's latest, Early Riser, about a human society that hibernates in winter. Bonus for me: I am going to see Fforde speak and sign my book at Left Bank Books in St. Louis next week. Yippee!!