Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, Decadence in Old China (2016) By Taras Grescoe

In the past year or so I’ve been on an “all about China” reading binge.  I’ve found it fascinating because I know next to nothing about Chinese geography, culture, or politics. What I’ve learned, perhaps more so than anything about China, is that “the truth” very much so depends on who you talk to.   In Shanghai Grand, by Taras Grescoe, one gets the full western version viewpoint, and an opening glimpse of a native Chinese version. 

What makes that distinction important is that during the  mostly pre-World War II time period covered in this book, there was little firsthand reporting appearing in the West about what was happening in China.  Into this void stepped a small group of journalists who would make their everlasting fame with their reporting on China, though most would wander no further inland than the international settlements of Shanghai.

In that cadre of reporters was Emily “Mickey” Hahn, a New Yorker magazine regular with a society background, and a St. Louis-Chicago origin. In her years in China, she would scandalize the Anglo-community in the Treaty Port of Shanghai and give the New Yorker some of its first “other” China reporting.  Her tale of two cities, two cultures, is fascinating. 

The “scandal” is her long-term affair with poet Zau Sinmay, a married man, and native Chinese.  And then of course there is the side issue of her (and seemingly everyone else’s) usage of opium.

Surprising Jewish Links Abound in Shanghai Grand

The movie version of the book, if one is made, will most certainly focus on high society life in Shanghai, the “Paris of the East, “ a city and nightlife overseen by Sir Victor Sassoon, the phenomenally rich merchant who moved his business empire from Bombay (Mumbai) to Shanghai after World War I, well in advance of the predictable and inevitable “loss” of India by the British Empire.  Much of the movie will be set in Sassoon’s famous Cathay Hotel, and of course will zero in on the “scandal." 

Lost in the movie script will be the extensive reporting done by Hahn and others on what was beginning to happen outside of Shanghai, a political revolution of lasting significance, and unknown to the clueless policy makers in the U.S. and Europe.  Hahn made her journalism fame with the literary “Mr. Pan” series which appeared in the New Yorker which was in actuality a biography of Sinmay.  Later she would land an interview with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, cementing Hahn's status as a leading China-authority.  It would be another of the western journalists in Shanghai, Edgar Snow, who would land an interview with Mao Tse-tung, encamping with Red Army forces after The Long March, a reporting-coup that would provide the west with its first in-depth look at the rise of Chinese Communism (my current read).

Recommendation:  For history buffs, absolutely.

The Red-Haired Woman (Turkish 2016, English 2018) By Orhan Pamuk

In many ways Orhan Pamuk’s most recent book, The Red-Haired Woman, reminds readers of his many other works, in a good way, not an “I’ve read this before” sense.  But it is also different in two noticeable ways: it’s relatively short (253 pages), and it’s a suspenseful page-turner. I’ll try not to provide any spoilers.

The book is of course set in Istanbul and its ever sprawling metropolis.  The lead character, named Cem, enters the story as a 16-year old boy spending his summer as a well-digger’s apprentice, working to save enough money to attend “cram school” in advance of his university application.  During this job, in the town of Ongoren on the outskirts of the city, he will meet and become obsessed with a traveling theater actress with red hair, the book’s title character. 

Before the well-digging job, and then again while a university student, Cem works in a bookstore.  I mention this because he is clearly well read, which will play a significant role in the book’s plot. 

Cem was for all practical purposes, raised by his mother.  His father was a political leftist who tended to “disappear” for months/years on end and would be imprisoned for a number of years. Because of this, the welldigger he was apprenticing for, Master Mahmut, would become somewhat of a father figure to him.

After University, Cem will marry and with his wife -- not the red-haired woman -- start a construction company that will make them rich as new buildings go up to meet Istanbul’s relentless population growth. The couple will be childless, socially separating them from many of their longtime friends, but giving them ample opportunity to travel and study.  Cem has, and his wife soon develops, a deep intellectual interest in two great works of literature: Oedipus from Greek mythology, and its Persian counterpart Shahnameh.

To explore their literary interest, Pamuk writes a chapter that takes them to the manuscript Library on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet neighborhood.  One of the many reasons I love Pamuk’s books is because of his innate ability to capture the essence of “place” in words.  His writings, particularly Memoirs of the City, are what convinced me to vacation in Istanbul a couple of years ago.  The Topkapi Palace, and its library, are places visited on that vacation.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, the suspense comes rushing at you when Cem decides to visit the small town where he worked as Master Mahmut’s apprentice 30-years prior, and first met the Red-Haired Woman.  Without presenting a spoiler, I can go no further.

Recommendation:  Absolutely. 

Manuscript Library at Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations (2016) By Juliet Nicolson

Clearly when your childhood was lived at Sissinghurst Castle, and your grandmother is Vita Sackville-West, there are interesting tales to be told, yet those tales neither began nor ended with Vita.  In A House Full of Daughters, Juliet Nicolson (generation six) gives readers a genealogy tracing the female side of a very artistic and literary family. The result is fascinating and quite readable.

The story begins in 1830 with Catalina, raising a family in a poor neighborhood of Malaga, Spain.  Her daughter, Pepita will grow up to be an internationally celebrated flamenco dancer billed as the Star of Andalusia. Catalina, as readers will discover, was the ultimate stage Mom.   

While Pepita performs in Paris, she is able to escape her mother’s control, and begins an affair with an aristocrat, Lionel Sackville-West, a member of the British diplomatic corps. Their relationship, never sanctified by marriage, will produce a daughter named Victoria. When Pepita dies, Lionel, who always acknowledged his paternity of Victoria, continued to provide for her; but as a traveling diplomat he was just not equipped to be a single father.  He enrolls her in a convent school in France. 

After Victoria graduated, she re-connected with her father and went with him when he was appointed the British Minster to the United States. Victoria soon assumed the duties that were normally expected of an Ambassador’s spouse.  Victoria thrived in that role, becoming prominent in Washington social circles.  When Lionel’s post ended they returned to England where he had recently inherited the family estate, Knole House, upon the death of his childless older brother.  Victoria immediately falls in love with Knole House, but she knows she will never inherit the estate because of Britain’s primogeniture laws (only male children can inherit titles and property).  The next-in-line to inherit was her cousin, also named Lionel Sackville-West, and Victoria marries him to maintain her station at Knole House.  The marriage produces a daughter who is named after her mother but who will be called Vita.  Importantly however, the marriage did not produce a male heir. Although both Lionel and Victoria had other significant romantic relationships, they tolerated each other’s affairs and never divorced.   

Vita Sackville-West was raised at Knole House. She was what we might call bohemian in-spirit, more accurately she was a privileged young aristocrat with an independent streak. She was also bi-sexual – notoriously having an affair with a friend who would later become her Maid of Honor when she married Harold Nicholson, a British diplomat much like her grandfather. 

From its onset, Vita and Harold’s relationship was intellectual more than physical, though they did have children.  They were loving, close and respectful … but exclusivity was not in their genes. 

Vita’s affairs would include one of the more legendary ones in British literature, that with Virginia Wolfe.  Vita was the inspiration for Wolfe’s classic Orlando.  An author in her own right, Vita penned another classic of British literature, The Edwardians, a social critique of early 20^th century British aristocracy.  Not sitting at home alone, Harold would have his own series of affairs, with men, but was quite closeted, a necessity because of Britain’s sodomy law.

The “loss” of Knole House, because “as a daughter” she could not inherit it, weighed heavily on Vita throughout her life. She made a vow to never be financial dependent on a man.  When she and Harold bought their own estate, Sissinghurst Castle, it was with her money, and in her name.  Ironically, both of their children were sons, Ben and Nigel. The female side of the blood-line would have to skip a generation – though Philippa, the wife of Vita’s son Nigel, would serve as an interesting stand-in.

Philippa’s childhood coincided with World War II. Her lineage was every bit as aristocratic as the Sackville name, though of the prim and proper kind, not the literary bohemian type.  She was raised to be the mistress of the house, not a socialite.  In many ways that could have been the formula for a satisfying marriage with Nigel, a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, and for a while it was.  They would have two children, Adam and Juliette (this book’s author).  But the constant comparisons to both Vita and Victoria -- a measurement she could not win -- took its toll, her marriage fell apart.  Eventually she would rebel becoming her own woman, abandoning prim and proper, and flee to St. Tropaz, the epicenter of the “jet set” scene where appearance scored higher than intellect. The children were largely raised by their father, and a series of nannies.

Juliette’s autobiographical chapters have many 60s and 70s cultural references from her adolescent years.  She recaps the challenges, some painful, of growing up in a split household bouncing between the polar-opposite home environments.  She will eventually marry and have two daughters, Clemmie and Flora, generation seven. They will relocate to New York where the demands of careers, child-care & guilt, and the everyday stress of living in 1980s Manhattan will help drive Juliette to the family curse of alcohol, and eventually the demise of the marriage.  As divorces go however, it wasn’t contentious.  Her husband did not stand in the way of Juliette and the girls returning to England to live at Sissinghurst with Nigel.  There they would bring a needed calmness to their lives.  

As the book ends, Imogene who is generation eight, is born.  This book is for her to know, and to write the next chapters.

A House Full of Daughters is an unusual book to read.  It is a genealogy written following the female line, unusual for most western societies, (and more difficult to trace because of the changing surnames) and also written in a female perspective – think Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (though I’m not equating the two books). 

Recommendation:  If you are a daughter or a fan of Bloomsbury-like literary histories, you’ll identify with and enjoy the book.  If you are not, then perhaps you need to read the book.

Westerns (collected 2018) By Elmore Leonard

One of my summer reads was the collected Westerns of Elmore Leonard published by the Library of America.  It includes four books and eight short stories written in the 1950s and 60s by Leonard, before he switched to writing crime novels, for which he became better known (Get Shorty).  His Westerns though include some of the classics of the genre: Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and Three Ten to Yuma, all set in the Arizona Territory.  While I don’t consider myself a western aficionado, I rather enjoyed these.  

It would have been rather difficult to avoid Westerns when I was a child, they were an ever present cultural phenomena.  As kids my brother Randy and I could only stay up “past bedtime” if our father stayed up too.  Many a Friday and Saturday nights were spent sprawled on the floor in front of the family’s first color television watching Westerns on the late show – and if my father fell asleep on the couch, we’d sneak in the late-late show too.

And speaking of a by-gone era, most of these works were originally published in their whole, or serialized, in Argosy or Dime Westerns, staples of a magazine culture that has also gone the way of the dinosaur.  Leonard’s writing is flawless, and his story telling is perfectly structured (honed by magazine editors who bought stories based on the word count), and which may account for why so many of his works have been made into movies, some good, most not so good.

Trailer for Hombre starring Paul Newman

Trailer for Valdez is Coming starring Burt Lancaster

There is some difficulty reading books in 2018 that were written in the 50s and 60s.  The acceptable vernacular of the time, grates when read today, never more so than in Forty Lashes Less One, a prison story where two of the main characters are an African American and an AZ-born Mexican-Native American.  By the end of the novel, they will be known as “the Zulu” and “the Apache” though even that wasn’t where the conversation began.  Both are imprisoned for murder.  They are set up against each other by the “civilized” white men who control the prison, then “saved” (sort of) by a minister, eventually becoming allies.  Spoiler: they will get the last laugh.

Valdez is Coming is my favorite of the collected books.  The star of it is a town constable who, based on bad intel, shoots an innocent man and then tries to take up a collection of $200 for the guy’s “woman.”

The full-length novels included in the collection are: Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and Forty Lashes Less One.  The short stories are:  Trail of the Apache, The Rustlers, Three Ten to Yuma, Blood Money, The Captives, The Nagual, The Kid, and The Tonto Woman.

Recommendation:  Great “bedtime” reads, especially for those who no longer stay up to watch the late show.

Slow Ball Cartoonist: The Extraordinary Life of Indiana Native and Pulitzer Prize Winner John T. McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune (2016) By Tony Garel-Frantzen

The pages of the Tribune have produced some of the greats of journalism, not the least of whom is John T. McCutcheon an editorial cartoonist for the paper from 1903 through the end of World War II.  McCutcheon won the paper its first Pulitzer Prize in 1931 with his drawing of a victim of a depression-era bank failure.  His body of work is extensive and includes the paper’s legendary annual Thanksgiving post Injun Summer.

This week (June 10, 2018) saw the departure of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial and business offices from the Tribune Tower, a gothic architectural masterpiece that is an integral part of both the city’s skyline and its history.  While all things must change, this bit of “progress” strikes close to home, both as a lifelong Tribune reader, and as a former employee – I worked on the eighth floor of the Tribune from 1972 through 1978.  As legions of others can attest, walking through the lobby of the Tower every morning is a heady experience, particularly when you are only 21, and new in the big city.  It just seems wrong for the paper to no longer be at the Tower.

Last year, I read/reviewed a biography of another staple of Chicago journalism, George Ade, a columnist, author and playwright.  Ade and McCutcheon were both natives of Indiana and attended Purdue University.  They were friends at Purdue, roommates early in their careers, and remained life-long friends.   

Reading Tony Garel-Frantzen’s biography of McCutcheon, Slow Ball Cartoonist, was for me like a history lesson of my neighborhood. When McCutcheon and Ade first began their journalism careers in Chicago they shared a studio apartment near 8^th & Wabash, around the corner from where I live at 9^th & State.  Their frequent train rides always routed them through Dearborn Station a building which is now a protected architectural landmark that is out my back door, its clocktower is the centerpiece of my skyline view.  When McCutcheon’s career progressed a little, he moved his work space into the Fine Arts Building a couple of blocks away on Michigan Avenue next to the Auditorium Theater & Roosevelt University, each of which are architectural landmarks from a bygone era.

And while I thoroughly enjoyed the Chicago settings in this biography, what I really loved was McCutcheon’s non-stop world travels.  As a war correspondent he covered the Spanish-American War from Manila, and San Juan Hill, and was one of hordes of journalists in Paris in1919 for the Peace Talks which ended the “Great War” and divided up the world.  He used his fame as a prominent newspaperman to literally badger his way into early aviation, including over enemy lines in World War I.

As a friend and confidant of his boss Col. Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s politically powerful editor and publisher, he was someone every politician in the country wanted to befriend – he was selective, a friend and fan of Teddy Roosevelt, and an acquaintance and non-fan of William McKinley. 

Recommendation:  For nostalgia, for Chicago history, for journalism 101, and for just plain pleasure reading, it can’t be beat.

Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (2000) By Stella Dong

Chinese history is complex no matter what century or dynasty you look at.  Breaking it down into manageable parts helps … somewhat.  Stella Dong’s excellent nonfiction book Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City looks at the country’s commercial capital from 1842 until 1949 when the Communists finally consolidated their control of the mainland.   Then, and now, Shanghai is to China, what New York City is to the United States.

As the book begins, Shanghai is a Treaty Port – a port city where foreign merchants (British, French, Americans, and many others) are not answerable to Chinese law and do not pay Chinese taxes.  As an international port city chock full of sailors, immigrants, refuges, capitalists, criminals and rapidly alternating pockets of Chinese political activists, it’s wide open.  Romanticists will call it the Paris of the East, others will compare it (repeatedly) with Chicago’s Al Capone era, and each can provide a mountain of evidence to support their view. The Al Capone comparison relates to China’s attempt to wipe out the (domestic) opium trade, and the impact of Prohibition in the US, and their respective roles on the development of organized crime.  It is a compelling argument.

During World War II, there was an unholy alliance between the Communist insurgency led by Moa Tse Tung, and the forces of the post-dynasty Republic, to battle Japan, the common foe.  When the Japanese retreat at the war’s conclusion however these two groups will resume their delayed civil war.  In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek (the western-backed leader of the Republic) was forced to flee to the island of Formosa/Taiwan, taking with him the Bank of China’s gold deposits. The western powers, now denied the unbridled spoils of the Treaty Ports, would spend much of the next few decades in denial of the permanency of the Communist victory.

Shanghai, The Bund, circa 1930

But national history is just an extension of Dong’s book, the primary focus is on Shanghai itself and how it became one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world … as seen through western eyes. In the “glory day” if you will of the Treaty Port era, the Bund, the main riverfront street of the city, was an avenue of banks, hongs (import/export trade companies) and luxury hotels.  They were bankrolled by immense trade revenues, not the least of which were from opium.  Collectively these commercial enterprises built an economy that could support a limitless market for “sin” in the city: drug use, prostitution, and gambling. 

That the commercial success of Shanghai was built on a structured inequality, seemed lost to those who could never understand the political appeal of the Communist insurgency.  There are many, many “what-ifs” in this history, Stella Dong wisely leaves them to the reader to pose and answer.

One interesting sub-story in the book concerns the (then) status of Shanghai as an open port, meaning no visa was required.  This allowed countless refuges to access the city, not the least among these groups were “stateless” Jews escaping Nazi-era Germany, some 30,000 of whom made it to Shanghai establishing a new home in the Hongkew neighborhood.  Significantly, when the Japanese military occupied the city, Jews were either restricted to Hongkew ghetto, or like all allied-Europeans and Americans, interned in prisoner of war camps.  The Japanese however did not implement the “final solution” their German allies requested. While the reason is unknown, the Japanese failure to do so was likely not humanitarian in nature, more likely they just couldn’t be bothered.  After the war and the declaration of an independent Israel, most Jews living in Shanghai immigrated.

Recommendation:  Yes, for history buffs.

The Round House (2012) By Louise Erdrich

The story told in The Round House by Louise Erdrich is constructed on a plot involving the rape of a Native American woman living on a reservation in North Dakota.  People who shy away from picking up this book fearing the topic will be unbearable will be missing a brilliantly written work that while it contains a great deal of hurt, also entails a great deal of humanity. 

The main characters of the book are the woman, her husband, and their son.  How each of them deals with the brutal attack and its aftermath could be stand-alone novels yet Erdrich has skillfully woven them together. 

The father is a tribal judge, though the legal system on the reservation is as defined and imposed by treaty, and obstructs justice as often as it finds the truth.  It is important to note that as recently as 2009  86% of the rapes of Native Americans were perpetrated by non-Native Americans, and prosecution is rare, with a success rate that is even rarer.

The mother's story is critical, her silence is not merely reaction, it becomes a important part of the plot.

The son is your typical 13-year old, until he is not – the rape and its impact become an all-encompassing subplot in his coming of age story.  I won’t go into detail about how this story unfolds, because doing so would require a spoiler alert. Let’s just say, the book goes where it needs to go.

Writing about “Rez Life” has become a significant genre in literature. Louise Erdrich, with her lineage as a Chippewa, is one of several authors from this genre I have read.  Others include what could be categorized as the Rez “pop culture writer" Sherman Alexie author of SmokeSignals and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, who grew up on the Spokane reservation; and David Treuer, an Ojibwe raised on the Leech Lake reservation in Northern Minnesota, whose novel titled Prudence details the lasting impact of reservation life well beyond the days of the American Indian wars.

Recommendation:  Yes, excellent book, do not be afraid of the topic.

The Nature Fix (2017) By Florence Williams; The Blue Zones (2012) By Dan Buettner

I’m not sure if this applies to everyone my age, but pending retirement is dramatically changing my perspective on living.  I’ve stopped thinking about the manic need to “get ahead” or even to “survive until I can get out.” I now find myself dwelling almost exclusively on quality of life issues.  For my retirement, I’m way more interested in having less stress, enjoying what I like to do, and hopefully doing so in relatively good health.  The “next phase” of my life is mine to design, and it’s an important decision because it’s likely to be my last major one.

Topping the list of quality of life issues occupying my mind has been the “where” aspect of retirement – most particularly the urban vs small town vs rural choice (unfortunately all three isn’t a financially viable option).  I’ve touched on this dilemma in an earlier book review: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

Two recent reads have added many new points for me to ponder.

Florence Williams’ The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Heathier, and More Creative is a thought provoking book that views one’s relationship to the outdoors in measurable medical and mental health terms – ranging from its impact on stress & blood pressure, to its therapeutic impact on veterans suffering with PTSD, and on “troubled” children.  As a big fan of Frederick Olmsted, William’s does not automatically disqualify urban environments as unhealthy – though as someone who lives on the edge of Chicago’s “front yard,” a.k.a. Grant Park, I would find the neighborhood less stressful with more trees and fewer drunken/drugged concert goers, and don't get me started on the subjects of car alarms and endless sirens.  However, where Chicago will always score high is in the devotion of its residents to its beautiful lakefront and refusal to let “philanthropists” with big ego’s and connections to City Hall further desecrate it. 

William’s “ultrasimple” coda:

Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places.

Bring friends or not. Breathe.

And speaking of Grant Park, when I first moved to the city Dutch Elm Disease was devastating hundreds of trees in the park (since replaced with hardier stock).  Williams devotes a lot of time to documenting the positive impact of, in fact the necessity of, trees to the health of the environment, justifying the sentiment behind “tree-hugging” -- we should hug them, they do good work!  My one and only complaint with The Nature Fix is the standard placement of the Epilogue which contains a brief recap of Tim Beatley’s (Biophilie Cities Project at theUniversity of Virginia) “nature pyramid.”  This discussion would have made an excellent opening chapter, before heading into the case studies.

While what we see, breathe and experience in Nature plays an outsized role in the quality of life, so too does what we eat and how we live.  Dan Buettner’s New York Times Bestseller The Blue Zones is a treatise on demographic pockets from around the world where people have a life expectancy well above the norm.  While I’m not particularly interested in living to 100, I am interested in what might help one maintain a healthier life in retirement.

In his book, Buettner examines the diets and lifestyles of people in: Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea; Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda, California; Hojancha, Costa Rica; and Ikaria, Greece.  Shared by these very different communities is not only a longer life, but a healthier one.  What he found was not a common denominator “miracle” food, but a combination of diet plus other important influences, including social and genetic – call it a holistic approach.  

Since the publication of his (two) books on the subject, numerous communities around the world have begun work at emulating them.  One of those communities is Paducah, Kentucky, which is high on my retirement list for multiple other reasons.  

Recommendation:  If you are prepping for retirement, or just looking for a way to lead a less stressful, healthier life, you should find both of these books interesting.

The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates (2016) By James L. Haley

Unless you have a degree in American History hanging on your wall, the period between the Revolution and the Civil War is likely to be a blur – covered in a chapter, maybe three, in any history class you were required to take – although, you might know about Dolly Madison taking the portrait of George Washington out of the White House as the British arsonists closed in.  Author James Haley has taken on the task of filling in part of that blank space with a two-volume work of historical fiction, the first of which covers the war against the Barbary Pirates, the war that gave the U.S. Marine Corps hymn the line “to the Shores of Tripoli.”

Haley has created the character Bliven Putman, a young farmer living in Massachusetts who joins the fledging U.S. Navy in 1801, at the time a rag tag group of ships barely able to put boats to sea as training boats, rather on mount a war in the Mediterranean Sea.  His career in the Navy is an adventure story that gives us an understandable and exciting how-to (and how not-to) lesson on building and staffing a Navy.  Plus, he’ll participate in sea battles and also the legendary, though aborted, desert march on Tripoli, Libya, providing him (and us) a bitter lesson in the workings of international diplomacy, as shaped by domestic politics.

The book touches on many topics – the budding abolitionist movement, political battles between Madison and Jefferson, religious puritanism and antisemitism at home.

A second major character in the book is Sam Bandy, also a new recruit – while Putnam is the representation of the northern states, Bandy, a plantation owner’s son is the stand in for the South. Their respective reactions to meeting a black man named Jonah, who serves as the chamberlain to the dey (Ottoman Regent) of Algiers, are interesting, busting multiple stereotypes.  Jonah, once a slave on a plantation in Virginia, speaks fluent English & Arabic, and is obviously better educated than either of them.

 

Throughout the war with the Barbary Pirates, the U.S. Navy is constantly bumping into elements of the much larger and stronger British Navy, which display arrogance and commit acts that are just short of belligerent.  Detailing these interactions is the lead-in to the next volume of this “Bliven Putnam Adventure” series, which will cover the War of 1812, a book now on my reading list.

Recommendation:  Yes.  It's a totally fun adventure book with a dose of American history thrown in. 

Slade House (2016) By David Mitchell

The first book I wrote about when I started my TEDrake Book Blog several years ago was David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a historical novel about a young Dutch merchant stationed in Nagasaki, Japan in the early 1800’s, the only port open to foreign traders at the time.  Based on that memory, I recently picked up Mitchell’s Slade House, a book that turned out to be as far from what I was expecting as one could imagine, though by no means a disappointment.

While Thousand Autumns is an epic, Slade House is a gothic novel, set in England. It is also a page-turner. The only commonality between the two books is that the writing is superb in both.

Slade House is a place, well more accurately was a place, in the English countryside. Once every nine years, exactly, it can be accessed through a small iron door in a brick wall along an alley.  You visit Slade House by invitation, and then you are never seen again. That’s really about all I can say without giving away the book.

Mitchell’s novel runs the spectrum of the Gothic genre.  It has the House (consider the houses in the book-based black and white horror film classics like The House of Seven Gables, or House of Usher, or even Rose Cottage in Dark Shadows). It has the villagers, who know something is going on, but don’t know what it is (think: Frankenstein or Dracula).  Perhaps most important, it has empathy for the “bad” guys, in this case a brother-sister duo wronged by the world and just trying to make their way.  If you’ve read and felt the angst of Anne Rice’s characters, you will recognize these two.

Recommendation:  Great, short (238 pages), read.

Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution (2002) By Cyril Aydon

Like many biographers, author Cyril Aydon fawns over his subject, Charles Darwin. but It’s easy to understand why.  Darwin’s famous journey on the second Voyage of the HMS Beagle, encapsulates everything a wide-eyed person could ask for: adventure, discovery, nature and science – an early example of “join the Navy, and see the world.” 

From a wealthy family, and well educated, Darwin was not a sailor.  He earned his place on the Beagle because of its need for a trained geologist – the primary purpose of the voyage was to survey the coasts of South America and the South Pacific – areas “discovered” by earlier explorers, including: William Dampier, Captain James Cook, and Sir Francis Drake.  Darwin would keep a journal of the voyage and serve as collector of animal specimens, duties that would earn him a place in history.  

The log ended up covering five years, 1831 to 1836, as the ship circled the globe, though what is remembered most by history is the five weeks spent surveying the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles west of Ecuador.  His specimen collections and keen observations on the oddity of the animal wildlife in the Galapagos would linger in his mind.  Later, after returning to Scotland, those memories would form the thesis of what is arguably the most important scientific book of the all-time, On the Origin of Species, first published in late 1859.  The impact of the book was the development of the theory of evolution – still debated, by some, to this day.

Last summer I blogged on The Immense Journey (1957) Part I from the Library of America book Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos.  Like Darwin, Eiseley was multi-faceted, an anthropologist, naturalist, and budding astronomer. Parts II and III of the Collected Essays, The Firmament of Time and The Unexpected Universe contain several of Eiseley’s essays dissecting the evolutionary debate as it continued into the middle of the 20TH Century.  These essays compliment the Darwin biography quite well.

Recommendation:  Yes, definitely. The first half of the Darwin biography covers the voyage and reads like a first-class adventure novel, and the second half, covering the publication of On the Origin of Species and its explosive reception in the scientific community is equally compelling.  And I’ll also give a second favorable recommendation to Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays.

Empire of the Sun (1984) By J. G. Ballard

I guess I’m developing a new favored genre because Empire of the Sun fits comfortably with several other of my reads over the past few years, let’s call it the Pacific Theatre genre.  This story is perhaps better known because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name – both the book and movie are excellent. The book, and to a lesser extent the movie, is depressing from its opening chapters.  It is also completely engrossing.

The plot is how a 10-year British boy, living in the International Settlement near the Bund (Huangpu River front) of Shanghai, gets separated from his parents as the Japanese invade the city concurrent with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  He survives the duration of the war in a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the city, his parents, if they are still alive, are in a different camp.  While the British and citizens of multiple other colonial powers are prisoners in these camps, they also realize that their Japanese captors are the only thing protecting them from the Chinese peasants – “coolies” who for decades have been virtual slave labor to the Europeans.

Childhood, spent under Japanese occupation and/or imprisonment is also the “big picture” theme of the excellent The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, both by Tan Twan Eng, and set in the author’s native Malaysia.  They, like Empire, have a fascinating psychological subtext involving the personal relationship between captive and captor.  In Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, the British boy, this time from Kotakinakulu (Malaysia) is sent, alone, back to Britain just before the onset of the war.  While all of these books are excellent and important reads, The Gift of Rain stands out as the best – I’d love for Spielberg to make it into a movie.

I’m not normally complimentary of movies as they too often tend to rewrite the story to commercially fit a larger audience, who after all are in the theater for entertainment, not a history lesson.  In Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, rewrites are kept to a minimum, tweaking only to make the film fit, not to change the plot.    

Movie Trailer

Perhaps because the movie was true to the book, Empire of the Sun did not rake in any major Academy Award nominations.  This is a pity because John Malkovich was stellar in the film; and Christian Bale, who as a child himself played the lead role of Shanghai Jim -- who aged from 10 to 14 during the book -- was shamefully overlooked because of the Academy’s historic tendency to devalue the work of child actors.

Recommendation:  Watch the movie, and read the book if you are a history major – and by all means, read The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

The subtitle of The Gilded Age says it all: A Tale of Today.  When Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner penned their book, that "today" was 1873, and the country was recovering from the Civil War, "reconstructing" the South, and stretching ever westward with its railroads. The book was so successful at portraying the country, that it gave name to an era of American history.

It was a era of endless ambition, often blind; an unprecedented accumulation and flaunting of wealth by an oligarchy; institutionalized poverty, viewed indifferently; and corporate greed on a monumental scale, greased by compliant and highly creative governmental corruption. In other words, it was much like today, 2018.

While the book includes unmistakable political commentary, it’s bigger picture is a social commentary on a nation of people looking at unlimited opportunity, yet frequently forsaking it with a mad quest for immediate gratification, and a single-minded worship of the dollar, and little else.

The key storyline of book involves the ownership by the Hawkins family of a large tract of land in eastern Tennessee.  Unable to immediately make much of the land, they, like others in the post war period, follow the path of westward expansion to Missouri, then the gateway to the frontier. There they attempt one get-rich scheme after another, and fail at them all.  Importantly however, the elder Hawkins maintains ownership of the Tennessee land, and reminds his children that it would one day make them rich.

“Cashing in” on that land is the main plot of the book, and it goes like this (an over-simplification). The U.S. Senator from Missouri, working with the Hawkins family, devises a plan to create an economic development tract on the Tennessee property to help recently emancipated black folk.  This benevolent goal however is never anything more than a public relations cover for a scheme which in its fine print enriches everyone but the poor black folk. 

Looking at this 135 years later, what you have is a how-to manual for the recent so-called reform Tax Cut and Jobs Act – a nice sounding name for a huge tax break for corporations and the already wealthy, with table scraps for the middle class and further service cuts for the poor.  In the book, just like two weeks ago, the bill is even legislatively advanced in the middle of the night, with no one having a chance to even read the bill they were voting on.  And, as much as I’d like to pin this strategy on the current administration (on loan from Goldman Sachs), this legislative blueprint has been used multiple times in U.S. history – because “we the people” haven’t stopped it.

Recommendation:  Yes.  The book is vintage Mark Twain and completely readable.