All Boys Aren't Blue (2020) By George M Johnson

 

All Boys Aren’t Blue is the #1 target of book banners in the United States.

The American Library Association compiles an annual list of books targeted for banning. The complaint filers are interesting: per the ALA, 72% of book ban attempts are initiated by public officials egged on by campaigns organized by far-right political organizations, not by individuals. Interestingly, only 16% are initiated by parents.

To no surprise, four of the top ten books on the 2024 targeted list, including All Boys Aren’t Blue, are there because of “pro” LGBTQ subjects and/or authors. The political far-right just can’t stop bashing LGBTQ people for political gain -- just look at this year’s constant bashing of trans individuals if you don’t believe that. What better way in their minds to distract voters away from issues like corruption or billionaire tax breaks? But ask one of them if they personally know, or even know of, a trans person and you will get a blank stare.

The argument of course is they are protecting their children. From what? From exposure to the real world? So, what, they want their children to enter the real world without a clue? LGBTQ people have existed throughout history. At what age do they think becoming aware of gay people would be okay, 30, 50 70?

And then there is the issue of statistics. Let’s say All Boys Aren’t Blue is in a library. In all likelihood there will be at least 5,000 (small library) to 100,000+ (university library) other books there too. The impact will be none, with one important exception.

The exception is the person utilizing the library because they are or think they might be LGBTQ. Dick and Jane do not cover that topic. Parents emphatically do not discuss that topic. The bullshit in the locker room is not helpful. And religious organizations are likely to condemn it, or at minimum ignore it. The common early question among all gay people is this: am I the only one? There is a reason that LGBTQ kids are twice as likely to commit suicide. People who want to “protect” children are responsible for that statistic.

Imagine, if a kid had even one nonjudgemental resource to turn to.

If you are a Black “sissy,” or a White, Latino, Asian one, looking for answers there is no better starting point than George Johnson’s memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Recommendation: Yes. 

The Stone Diaries (1994) By Carol Shields

 

The Pulitzer Prize winning Stone Diaries by Carol Sheilds is a fairly structured, complicated, and mostly well-written biography of a woman named Daisy born 1905 in far western Canada. Her mother Mercy dies in childbirth. Her father, Cuyler Goodwill, a worker in a stone quarry, traumatized by this turns to a neighbor lady Clarentine to care for the newborn.

Eventually, Clarentine will leave her husband and move to Winnipeg to the home of one of her sons, Barker, taking Daisy with her. Barker is a professor, well-known botanist and research expert on the spring-flowering Lady’s Slipper, but from a more practical standpoint it was his work on improving the Marquist hybrid of hearty spring red wheat that won him acclaim, and a military exemption from World War I.

Cuyler will provide financial support for his daughter but does not see her. Considered an expert in stone work, Cuyler is presented as an uneducated bumpkin in Chapter 1, but he somehow becomes a partner in a limestone mining company in Bloomington, Indiana, and transforms into a leading Chamber of Commerce type citizen.

As his career advances Barker will be advanced to the Agricultural Department of the Canadian government headquartered in Ottawa. And Daisy will move into her father’s palatial home in Bloomington and attend college.

As is expected for the time period, Daisy will marry. On her honeymoon in Paris, her husband dies in an accident making her an incredibly young widow; until she takes on her second husband, Barker, her senior by 20-some years.

Got all that?  Like I said, it is complicated.

At this point, the book becomes less complicated, and more interesting. It takes us through chapters titled Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Sorrow, Ease, Illness and Decline, and finally Death.

Daisy has had two lifelong friends, nicknames Fraida and Beans. Her interactions with them, primarily through letter writing are priceless, and remind me closely and favorably of one of my favorite movies: How to Make an American Quilt. If you have not seen the movie (you should) it is comprised of weekly quilt-making meetings of old friends and relatives where personal and private trials and tribulations, loves and hates, are discussed in a manner that only close friends can understand. These are heartfelt discussions common among women, and nonexistent among men.

The book never lost my attention, though parts of it irritated me, Chapter 1 in particular. But read it, do not skip it, it provides too many connecting details – not the least of which is the “relic” discovered as Daisy’s children shift through her belongings after her death.

Recommendation: Yes

The Lincoln Highway (2021) By Amor Towles

 

I loved this book. In my years of mini book reviews, I have said: I recommend it, It was excellent, It was great, but until now I have never said “I loved this book.”

My niece gave me this book, The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles. At first I set it aside thinking it would be a travelogue, a road trip. Route 30, known in most towns in the U.S. as the “Old Lincoln Highway” was the country’s first transcontinental roadway, running from Times Square to San Francisco Bay. It is not Route 66 classic The Grapes of Wrath, nor is it the beat generation’s On The Road Again. While the Highway is a re-occurring theme in the book, there is much more.

The novel begins as its central character, Emmett Watson, is being driven home by the warden to the family’s farm in Morgen, Nebraska having served his time in a juvenile detention school in Salina, Kansas. Emmett’s father had died several months back, his mother had left them many years back. The only family he has remaining is his ten years old brother Billy who has been in the care of a neighbor Sally, since their father died. The farm is being foreclosed on. The only item left to speak of was a Studebaker car that Emmett had purchased in his own name from working odd jobs.

After the bank officer, and a neighbor, have left Emmett and Billy, the brothers discover two guys in the barn. And that is where the story begins. The guys are Emmett’s bunk mates, Duchess, and Wooly, from the detention center back in Salina. They had stowed away in the Warden’s trunk unnoticed, escaping before their time was up.

The main characters, in addition to Emmett are:

Billy: His younger brother, a well-mannered and precocious kid who could be the incarnation of Young Sheldon of television fame.

Sally: A neighbor back in Nebraska who is disallusioned with life.

Duchess: A thespian whose performances have ranged from Shakesperean to circus, and whose father was a vaudeville great.

Wooly: A teenager with the spirit of a six-year-old, and a trust account.

Ulysses: A World War II vet, who has become a railroad “hobo.”

Professor Abernathe: An author whose book Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers plays a significant role in the book.

Forgive me for being stingy with details, but I am trying to not provide a spoiler here, because I want you to read the book.

AmorTowles is the author of the New York Times bestselling book A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility.

Recommendation: You bet.  

Close Range: Wyoming Stories I (1999) By Annie Proulx

 

Annie Proulx is a Pulitzer Prize winning author with a large body of work including the blockbuster novels The Shipping News (1993) and the epic Barkskins (2016). She has also penned multiple short stories, famously including Brokeback Mountain (2005), which was made into a major Hollywood movie directed by Ang Lee.

Brokeback Mountain, at 35-pages, is the concluding story in Close Range: Wyoming Stories I, a collection of eleven short stories with the common denominator of ranch life in the western state where people are few, but cattle are thousands. While the state is beautiful, it has historically presented a challenging life for its residents, both cowboys and others. Close Range tells some of those stories.

One of these is A Lonely Coast, a short story about the trials and tribulations, mostly trials, of three Wyoming women. “All three women had been married, rough marriages full of fighting and black eyes and sobbing imprecations, all of them knew the trouble that came with drinking men and hair-trigger tempers.” The only available men were ranch-hands mostly, guys who live a solitary life but once a week will gather around the Buckle, the local bar, and drink themselves under the table. “Their” women were not much better.

A key theme in these one-saloon crossroads is going to a bigger town where the action was really no different. “That was the thing, they’d start out at the Buckle then drive down to Casper, five or six of them, a hundred and thirty miles, sit in some other bar probably not much different than the Buckle, drink until they were wrecked.” 

It was at this point that a haunting song came to my mind. It was composed by David Broza a folksinger born in Israel, raised in Spain, and widely traveled in the Americas. I have seen him perform at the Chicago Winery and at the 150 year anniversary celebration of the Oak Park Temple B'nai Abraham Zion. He records in Hebrew, Spanish, and English. He at one point in his travels ventured to Wyoming, and wrote a song titled Night in Wyoming. 

Night in Wyoming - David Broza

Other stories in Close Range include: The Bunchgrass Edge of the World, People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, 55 Miles to the Gas Pump, and seven other stories.

It still amazes me that Brokeback Mountain in its original form was a 35-page short story. Director Ang Lee with an assist from author Annie Proulx, took the story and turned into a breakthrough Hollywood movie starring two major actors, Heath Ledger and Jake Gillenhaal, playing the lead roles of two gay ranch hands. Its cultural significance cannot be denied. While issues it addressed have improved, they have not gone away, and even today are under direct political threat.

While writing this I watched the movie trailer for Brokeback Mountain 2. The tag line is "there are places we can't return."  It should be "there are movies we can't sequel." I will see it but was not even remotely impressed by the trailer.

Recommendation: Anything by Annie Proulx is worth reading.

The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories (1887) By Oscar Wilde, collection published by Alma Classic 2016

 

Recently I picked up a collection of short stories written by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) in 1887. They are eclectic in nature, and quite interesting in their different literary styles. The title story is The Canterville Ghost, so categorized as a “hylo-idealistic romance,” a term with which I was unfamiliar. It is a “philosophical position that reality exists by virtue of our belief in it” – perfect for ghost stories. In the short story an American professor and his family move to the English countryside and rent a manor house, which it turns out is haunted. It is an enjoyable story, considered a young adult classic, and has been made into a movie multiple times, I just watched the 1996 version with Patrick Stewart playing the ghost -- quite fun.

The closing story in the collection was a complete surprise, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime. It is sort-of a murder mystery, with a built-in spoof of the upper classes. In the story there are plenty of available clues. One could best describe the plot summary as reverse Sherlock Holmes, instead of trying to solve a murder, Lord Arthur is diligently trying to devise a murder he can get away with. One of the characters, a supplier of dynamite, is an underground Russian anarchist – who brought to my mind The Secret Agent written by Joseph Conrad. I checked on this briefly, while Wilde who died young, is contemporary with both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness), though nothing I have come across connects them.

The other two stories in the collection are The Sphinx without a Secret, and The Model Millionaire, both of which are more character studies than stories.

Recommendation: Light, fun reads.

Boston Adventure (1943) By Jean Stafford

 

Jean Stafford was an accomplished short story writer when she hit it big at age 29 with her first novel: Boston Adventure. It was a best seller.

The book tells the story of a young woman named Sonie. Her father, Hermann Marburg was an educated German immigrant who like many tens of thousands of Germans came to America in search of opportunity in the years after the first World War. He met Shura, Sonie’s mother on the ship on the way over. She was a Russian immigrant, fleeing the chaos of post-revolution Russia. She was poor and minimally educated and spoke not a word of English, and only a small amount of German.

Sonie’s father tried to practice his trade as a skilled cobbler but rapidly discovered no one who lived in their immigrant community of Chichester near Boston could afford his services. Her mother took a job as a housekeeper at the Hotel Barstow, a summer retreat for Boston’s rich. In large part the financial disaster of their situation led to the rapid failure of the marriage. The father disillusioned by America's often mistreatment of immigrants became an alcoholic and abandoned the family. The mother slowly sunk into mental illness.

Since the mother was often too ill to go to work, Sonie, still a child, would cover her shift at the Hotel. There she met Miss Pride, a wealthy widow who went by her given name. She pitied Sonie and took into her home and under her puritan stern yet benevolent wings after Sonie’s mother was institutionalized. Also still living in Miss Pride's home was Miss Hopestill Mather, her strong-minded, almost bohemian daughter who she is trying to marry off to a young, well-educated doctor from “a good family,” named Philip McAllister. Dr. McAllister’s father is an Episcopal Reverend, and while Miss Pride dismissed him as “almost Catholic” conceded that he was, at least, protestant.

Hopestill gently teases McAllister, primarily to keep her mother happy. However, she wants nothing to do with him beyond friendship, that is until she becomes pregnant, father unknown. The doctor agrees to marry her to salvage everyone’s reputation even though he had been feigning interest in Sonie. All of which comes to a predictable ending (with one exception, I and I suspect a great many other readers expected Sonie’s alcoholic father to return to the story, he does not).

The author’s depiction of Boston’s elite is both comic and brutal. Having “lost” their city to Irish Catholic immigrants, they were determined to not allow a new wave of immigrants into their social circles.

Recommendation: Okay, I guess. The first part covering the new immigrants in Chichester is interesting. The second part, after Sonie moves to Beacon Hill in Boston, is at times fun, at other times clearly contrived situations. I found myself not caring about any of the main characters, including Sonie.

The Magic Mountain (1924, German) By Thomas Mann; (English translation 1995 By John Woods)

 

The plot of The Magic Mountain was interesting, the writing was excellent, but the reading was slow, it took me three weeks to make my way through this novel. Written by Thomas Mann the novel covers the several years before the outbreak of World War I. It was first published in German in 1924, I read the English translation by John E. Woods published in 1995.

Mann’s earlier work included Death in Venice which dealt with a cholera outbreak, and won him commercial success and literary praise. The Magic Mountain, with a plot that deals with tuberculosis (TB), is considered by many to be his masterwork.

The title refers to the International Berghof Sanatorium, a tuberculosis treatment facility in the Alps of Switzerland. In an era of limited medical ability to address TB, the Berghof is a resort-like facility where wealthy, mostly highly educated Europeans go to for a “rest cure,” a regimented program of a lavish diet, on-site medical assistance, and fresh, cold mountain air thought to provide the only hope for a cure, of which there were few.

The novel begins in Hamburg (normally referred to as the “flatlands”) when Hans Castorp, who has just finished engineering school is set to begin an internship at the family’s ship-building firm. Before the internship begins he decides to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen who is a patient at the Berghof for several weeks. Joachim has arranged for his cousin to stay in the room next to his. When he arrives, he quickly learns to adjust to the Berghof routine. That routine includes mandatory community meals with fellow patients, as well as regular “rest cures” and sleeping on the balconies where one can breath in the mountain air.

These community meals are where the sanatorium’s other patients and medical staff are introduced, and there are many. Some will become important characters in the story. One is Herr Lodovico Settenbrini, an Italian man who spouts humanist philosophy throughout the book; late in the novel we will discover that Settenbrini is a high-ranking Mason. Another is Herr Naphta, a friend and neighbor of Settenbrini, who while ethnically Jewish was raised by the Jesuits and was on the verge of joining the order when he was diagnosed with TB and sent to the Berghof.

There is an attempt at a love story in the novel. One of the patients is a French speaking woman named Clavidia Chauchat. She is married to a Russian government administrator stationed in a province “beyond the Caucasus.” Hans is head over heels in love with her but only tells her so the night before she departs the Berghof to visit her husband. She returns to the Berghof several months later after spending much of her time in Spain. She returns as the “traveling companion” of an extraordinarily rich Belgian man named Mynbeer Peeperkorn.

The conversations between the cousins and Settenbrini and Naphta are why this book is a slow read. Presented as digressions from the main plot, these discussions ranged from theology, philosophy, politics, the secrets of the Knights Templar, the nation-state chaos of pre-war Europe and other topics. Note, while I said these endless discussions were a slow read, they were not uninteresting, quite the opposite. They are great essays tied together, loosely, by the storyline. Readers should not skip over them. 

One philosophical discussion that repeats throughout the novel is on “time” and how time is situational, particularly when the people having the discussion have been diagnosed with what then was an incurable disease.

Recommendation: Excellent book, but you will need to devote time and patience to do it justice.