Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  A yarn as wide as the Texas landscape. It is 1864 and Simon the Fiddler makes a living the best he can by playing jigs, reels, waltzes and hornpipes. It's not quite as disreputable a profession as being an actor, but a lot of venues include the kinds of saloons and dance halls that the upper classes tend not to frequent. Until the Union Army conscripts him, that is, and he has to play fiddle and soldier for a year. At the war's so-called conclusion - it doesn't so much end as degenerate into a kind of barely controlled chaos as Union forces occupy the state of Texas and barely maintain order - Simon teams up with three additional veterans and together they escape their army duties to play music, barely make ends meet, and have adventures along the Gulf Coast and the Mexican border. Paulette Jiles evokes of the landscape and era of post Civil War Texas with such acuity you can hear individual birds sing, grasshoppers hum, and feel the heat of an unrelenting sun. The ...

Jess Walter supplies a fine amalgamation of fiction and history, melding historical figures, most notably Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a fiery rebel who fought for the rights of working class men and women (and founding member of the ACLU) with a pair of fictitious Irish brothers searching for work in Spokane, Washington at the start of the 20th century. Lumber and mining barons are bulldozing the earth, earning and spending millions of dollars. Hobos, tramps, Native Americans are hired and fired at will, surviving on pennies a day, eating pilfered chickens, living in unwashed clothes, and sleeping in flophouses or open fields. Organized labor has taken its battle from wars in mining and timber camps across the west and heads to Spokane for a standoff with heartless employers. The Wobblies (I.W.W.) are enjoined by anarchists, communists, and socialists, but have their heads cracked by police, vigilantes, Pinkertons, and infiltrators hired by politicians and executives intent upon saving ord...

Detective Antoinette Conway has finally achieved her goal of reaching Dublin's murder squad, but Antoinette is not only the first woman to enter Ireland's male bastion of investigators, she is also the daughter of a dark-skinned (absentee) father. Conway is hazed mercilessly by her fellow officers who spit in her coffee when gets up from her desk, pat her backside, pee in her locker, throw away her files instead of handing them in, and mess with her computer.  Conway proudly stands her ground and when she and her partner are handed what should be a routine murder case -- girlfriend is reported dead in her living room right after her boyfriend is seen leaving the house in a hurry -- she does a full-on investigation.  As mysteries go, this one is just the right amount of tortuous to make it a page turner, but what Tana French does best is introduce us to the routine doubts and in-our-head-rebuttals that all of us endure. She does it by introducing complex, slightly flawed charac...

  In 1932, when Nazi planners were devising a plan that would lead to the marginalization, denigration, disenfranchisement, and eventual elimination of its Jewish citizens, they modeled their efforts on how America marked its black citizens in such a way that they could not be full members of American society. Nearly 70 years after slavery was outlawed, Black Americans could not attend white schools, eat in white restaurants, drink from white water fountains, swim in white pools, live in white neighborhoods, walk on a sidewalk if a white was approaching, or speak back to a white person in any way other than deferential. Failure to adhere to the rules of American white superiority could result in summary execution by mobs of self-appointed upholders of white law. More than 4,000 blacks were lynched. American segregation was the perfect model for Nazism and somehow I never learned that in school. What Caste  makes clear is that race, or more accurately, skin color was an arbitra...

 " Either you master your circumstances, or your circumstances will master you. " Soon after the Russian Revolution in 1917, Bolshevik authorities convicted the former aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, of crimes against the newly formed government. He wrote a poem critical of the authorities. Instead of martyring Rostov, they ascribed a punishment fit to a Russian, internal exile. Rostov was put under house arrest in Moscow's finest hotel, the Metropol .  The Piazza, one of the Metropol's dining rooms. Rostov remained inside for the next 32 years, but throughout his stay maintained unrivaled equanimity, erect posture, impeccable manners, exquisite taste in fine wines and elegant cuisine, and erudite allusions to the world's great literatures and philosophies. In short, while Stalinism and three decades of the Russian revolution played before him from the 1920s through the 1950s, Count Rostov's triumph was his ability to master his circumstances, providing a ...

David Starr Jordan was obsessed with making order from the chaos of nature. At the turn toward the 20th century, and importantly not so long after Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species , Jordan set out to name and place within a taxonomic category every fish he could capture from planet earth. A wife and child died early in his life and yet he persevered with such fortitude and public success he rose to become President of Stanford University. Adversity and chaos continue to track Jordan when among other calamities the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed thousands of his specimen jars, displacing archetypal samples from their floating labels in a shower of broken glass and formaldehyde. Within hours, Jordan was sewing labels to the gills of fish he could still identify, picking himself up and restarting his mission. Lulu Miller, whose own life has been overtaken by chaos and disorder, finds herself obsessed with David Starr Jordan, hoping that in understandin...

On a challenge, Gene Weingarten wrote a book about December 28, 1986, a Sunday in America picked at random. Think of all the newspapers in the country and what might have made the cut back in the day and it is pretty much what you'd expect: fires, murders, sports, car crashes, arrests, celebrations, and the arts, though not a lot of arts as the selected date fell in the quiet week between Christmas and the New Year. In the hands of twice-awarded Pulitzer Prize author, story after story unfolds to reveal the full depth of the American experience. A burning house, when fully investigated, includes the life-altering reactions of fire-fighters, children caught in the blaze, and parents whose trajectories from birth to that cataclysmic moment are far more complex than they are described in a newspaper column. Those swoops and arcs, measured as snapshots on December 28, are carried through the next 25 years with contemporary interviews. A football playoff game, similarly covered i...

David Treuer, an Ojibwe from Minnesota, lays out his thesis up front. "We are still here: proud, growing in numbers and strength, American and  Indian." The book's subtitle suggests the primary focus is Indian history from the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to the present. The first third of the book, however, begins 10,000 years ago as Natives established more than 500 tribes in North America with populations in excess of 20 million people at the time of European conquest. What follows is genocide as European settlers set to eradicate Indians. When armed slaughters, disease, displacement, and demolition of Indian sources of food failed to complete the project, Christianizing do-gooders took over. Even into the mid-19th century, when Abolitionists were making clear that black-skinned Americans were as American as paler Americans, there was general agreement that Indian unwillingness to absorb Christianity meant that America's first people were neither worthy of ci...

This series of stories is largely about David Sedaris's family and getting older. Beyond being laugh aloud funny -- in an opening line, Sedaris decries aging, suggesting his penis has lost a washer causing a steady drip -- his tales are deeply moving. His mother, whom David misses terribly, has been dead for more than 20 years. His father, with whom he has never really gotten along, is into his 90s and worthy of both sympathy and scorn. His sister, one of six siblings, has recently committed suicide. Still, Sedaris manages to get together with his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, his dad, and his four remaining siblings at a beach house in the Carolinas called the Sea Section (get it?). Families make us laugh, cry, and scream. They see, and don't hesitate to point out our flaws, and they can be compassionate as together we harumph through late middle age. Sedaris is more than comedian. He is a philosopher. 

Rachel Maddow's thesis is elegantly simple: the Founding Fathers feared that the President of the United States and commander in chief of the armed forces needed to be constrained, lest the power to deploy troops be taken too lightly. To prevent a President from ordering the military into war too easily, the founders invested Congress with the requirement to approve the initiation and funding of any war. Moreover, Maddow argues, the Founding Fathers constructed the army of citizen soldiers thereby making the decision to launch a war one that would necessarily involve a national debate. Everyone would be related to a soldier and everyone would have to decide if his life was worth risking. Drift  describes the post WWII slide into wars and proxy wars led by Presidents circumventing Congress and in recent years even side-stepping the U.S. Army altogether. America has fought in Grenada, Panama, and Bosnia without declarations of war. It has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq for dec...