The Taxidermist's Daughter (2014) By Kate Mosse

I am not a particularly fast reader, yet I sped through The Taxidermist’s Daughter by Kate Mosse in only two sittings.  It’s a rather compelling and fun blending of several British literary genres save one, it spares readers any lead characters from the self-absorbed aristocracy.  Oh, and it includes nursery rhymes.

The book is equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Oliver Twist, and Macbeth; stirred into the cauldron with a sampling of British women mystery writers from Agatha Christie forward, and then adding a bit of American Edgar Allan Poe for spice.

The main character is named Connie, and as one can guess from the title, she is the daughter of a taxidermist, a once respectable occupation that has fallen out of fashion to the point that its mere mention frightens people.  She lives with her widowed father in Blackthorn House near the coast of England, an area heavily impacted by tidewaters and summer storms.  Her aging father is losing his faculties, and Connie, in her twenties, is still trying to piece together her past, she had some kind of accident when she was young, resulting in amnesia.  Her father has not been helpful in providing information about what happened, and she suspects that what little she has been told has been fabricated. 

Without a spoiler alert, I can go no further, but you should. 

Recommendation:  great summer read.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) By Sherman Alexie

My first exposure to author Sherman Alexie was through the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Film Festival many years ago.  I went to see his movie The Business of FancyDancing.  It was multi-cultural at its strongest.  The main character grew-up on a reservation, but “abandoned” the tribe by taking school seriously and winning a scholarship to college.  In college, he comes out as a gay man, and ends up in a relationship with a white man.  The book covers his return to the reservation for the funeral of a friend.  Based on the book, I started being a regular at the annual pow-wows that are held in Chicago – fascinating events when you take them more seriously than as a mere tourist attraction.

Alexie would go on to become quite the independent film director, prominent poet, and novelist.  His credits include the movie SmokeSignals & book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the autobiographical book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The Absolutely True Diary tells of his childhood on the Spokane reservation in the northeastern corner of Washington State.  He, as were the other kids on the “rez,” was culturally raised to expect nothing out of life.  When he independently decides that he is going to the high school in Reardon, an entirely white school 22 miles from the reservation, it changes his childhood and life.  He is accused of abandoning his tribe, and becoming a white-lover … an “apple,” red on the outside, but white on the inside.  Yet, at Reardon High School, he’s the Indian kid that shouldn’t be there.  RHS’s school mascot of course is the “Redskins.”  He’s caught in-between two cultures, which will become a running theme in Alexie’s body of work.

The trials and tribulations that he faces as a kid were endless – teenage angst, coupled with unquestioned and often internalized racism.  To tell the story, Alexie uses comedy to make it bearable.  (See my review of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka to see how this formula plays in a different cultural setting).

Arnold, the Alexie character in the novel, turns out to be extremely good at comedy.  Arnold draws cartoons, and they are sad, hilarious and on-target.  The book has enough cartoons to qualify as a comic book, and needs them.

It would be easy for me to relate this book to so many “other” of America’s ills – not the least of which is the subject of what society does to psyche of people raised on the reservation, or in the inner center “ghetto,” or in the “white-trash” trailer park.  Hope is destroyed.  One of my favorite passages in political literature is Harvey Milk’s “Hope Speech.”  The crux of the speech is that you must give people hope, because “without hope, life is not worth living.”  Sociologists point to this need whenever discussing alcoholism or drug abuse, or suicide.  Part-Time Indian puts this in personal terms.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.

Click on the movie trailer for The Business of FancyDancing and watch an interview of Alexie by Bill Moyers.

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (2003) By Martin Dugard

For my long Fourth of July weekend I was looking for something relaxing to read, something in my usual lines of interest, only as far removed from the year 2016 as possible.  I found it with Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. by Martin Dugard.

For those of you living in the modern day equivalent of “the heart of Africa,” Dr. David Livingstone, a Brit from back when Great Britain was at its greatest (the Victorian Age) is one of the world’s most renowned explorers, ranking with the likes of Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin.   The ultimate and final exploration of his career was to be determining the source of the Nile River. While on that quest, he went missing. Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh born American and journalist, was secretly tasked by the publisher of the New York Herald to find Livingstone.  The rest, as they say, is history, not to mention one of the best quotes of all recorded time: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

The book is a fictionalized history of the story that kept government administrators, the science community, and everyday newspaper readers throughout the British Empire, the rest of Europe, and the United States on edge in the 1870s.  It’s not the first fictionalized version of the Stanley & Livingstone story – that distinction, as explained by the author in the epilogue, belongs to Joseph Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness.  

Dugard’s Into Africa excels as an adventure story – despite the fact that most readers know the ending before turning the first page.  It covers a range of topics: empire building, the slave trade, the American civil war, the height of newspaper wars, cultural racism, the coming colonialism, the inner working of the British Geological Society, Gladstone & Disraeli; and serves as an incredible geography lesson for readers (with maps).  I’ll quote one paragraph to show the book’s period setting and topic range:

“It was October 31 when Stanley traveled onward again.  In America, Cochise and his Apache warriors were being hunted in the Arizona Territory, Chicago had just been destroyed by fire, and President Grant was about to issue a proclamation making the Ku Klux Klan illegal.  In England, Darwin’s The Descent of Man was just days away from publication.  In Paris, the first exhibition of impressionist painting was about to get under way.  If Stanley were back in the world, he would likely have been covering one of those events for the Herald with great gusto and self-importance.”

Dugard’s telling of this story never lost my interest.   And as it turns out, he is quite the eclectic author.  While his body of work includes Farther than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook and other books about explorers, it also includes a book about running, a book about sailing, and a series of “Killing” books he co-authored (ghost wrote?) will Bill O’Reilly:  Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing … fill in the blank.  When he’s not writing, he’s a track & field coach at a high school in California.  

Recommendation:  a great summer read.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book.