Friday, March 15, 2024

Shelved: Roundup of Book Posts March 1 - March 15, 2024

 


Audiobook preview

Silent Cavalry:  How Union Soldiers From Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta --- and Then Got Written Out of History.  Howell Raines.  Crown, 2023.  576 pages.

Again, I feel misled. I thought I was getting book about a really fascinating and overlooked piece of Civil War history, the role of anti-secession southerners in the Civil War.  It's a great premise.  There were notable pockets of white resistance to the Confederacy throughout the South.  West Virginia actually broke from Virginia in order to remain with the Union, and there were sizable groups of people in North Georgia and North Alabama who opposed secession.  Some southern men actively resisted the Confederate conscription laws.  Some actively resisted by harassing Confederate officials and military units tasked with rounding up draft-dodgers and deserter.   Some provided assistance to escaped Union prisoners and soldiers trapped behind Confederate lines.  Some men actually chose to don Union uniforms and fight for the Yankee "invaders."  It's a subject that I would love to learn more about.

Alas, this is not the book for that.  It purports to be about the First Alabama Cavalry, USA, a unit of over 2,000 men from the northeastern corner of Alabama that General William T. Sherman hand picked as his personal bodyguard unit.  He tasked them with setting up and protecting his personal encampment on the March to the Sea, and they often rode point -lead - on the March itself. It is a story that should be told, and, until recently, it is a story that was intentionally covered up by so-called Alabama historians and archivists. THAT'S the story I wanted to read, both the story of the unit and of the cover-up.

Instead of that, I got  what appears to be a growing genre:  books written by retired or unemployed southern-born "journalists" that purport to be historical, but they're really memoirs that lay out how awful the South is and was and how their families were and are historic outliers, always proudly standing on "the right side of history."  And seemingly every other paragraph includes a damnation of  Donald Trump and "red-state Republicans."  (How many books would never have been written if Trump had never run for President? My guess is lots and lots.) I was listening to this book and had to quit after about a third of the way through, after learning nothing about the First Alabama, except that they existed and they came from the area around Winston County.  What I learned was the political views of the author and his family.  I don't read history for lectures about 2024 politics, and I couldn't care less about his politics.


Preview of Secrets of the Dead: A Samurai in the Vatican City, PBS

The Samurai.  Shusaku Endo.  Harper and Row.  336 pages.

Unfortunately, this is another book I didn't finish.  Shusaku Endo is considered a great Japanese novelist, and The Samurai is considered a classic.  A few years ago, I slogged through another of his classics, Silence.  I tried again, and I've decided that maybe I'm not cut out for Japanese fiction, and Endo specifically.

The problem is the pace. It's so slow and and spiritual.  Not my cup of tea.  I would prefer a more historical book about the real story.  In this case, The Samurai is the fictionalized story of Hasekura Tsunenaga, a Japanese Christian samurai who traveled as an official ambassador to the Americas and to Europe from 1613 to 1620.  Tsunenaga was well received in Spain and by the Vatican.  It's a really interesting story, and there was an episode of PBS' show "Secrets of the Dead" (preview linked above) about the mission.

Endo's fictionalized version moves so slowly, and it's focused more on the samurai's personal spiritual journey than the diplomatic one. Again, not my cup of tea, but I'm sure there are many who would appreciate the read.



author talk

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.  James McBride.  Riverhead Books, 2023.  400 pages.

In recent years, James McBride has published two of the most highly acclaimed and popular novels of the century:  Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.  I'm of two minds when I read McBride.  On one hand, I can easily see why they're so popular.  The reader is set down in an incredibly rich world populated by some of the most complex and fully developed characters and storytelling that has ever been published.  It doesn't matter who the reader is, black, white, northern, southern, the world that McBride reveals is foreign and strange, and, yet, it is so inviting.  On the other hand, McBride's writing is so detailed and complex that his books can seem to drag.  Like Faulkner, he seems to have an aversion to ending sentences. Some tangents seem to go on too long.  Every scene has to have pages and pages of backstory, sometimes reaching back generations.  One would not ask McBride to write a technical manual or anything else that requires bluntness or directness.

Heaven and Earth is set in the 1930s in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown Pennsylvania.  Chicken Hill is predominantly black with a few dozen Jewish families mixed in.  The groups tend to keep to themselves, but the nexus is a Jewish couple named Moshe and Chona.  Moshe owns a theater, and he brings in jazz, blues, and klesmer musical acts, drawing black and Jewish audiences to Pottstown, to the chagrin of white Pottstownians.  Chona runs the grocery store on Chicken Hill, never making a profit because she always extends credit and gives away candy, toys, food, and merchandise to anyone in need.  Women gather at the store to gossip and problem-solve.  Moshe and Chona's lives are changed when they take in a deaf black orphan boy to protect him from being committed to an asylum.  His plight soon involves lots of Chicken Hill's most vivid characters, and it's entwined, somehow, in the mystery that opens the book.  In 1972, police uncover remains of an unknown person murdered in 1936, and the mystery is solved at the end of the book, but not until the reader is totally immersed in the lives of the people of Chicken Hill. It's amazing writing.
 


author talk

Tropic of Stupid. Tim Dorsey.  William Morrow, 2021.  368 pages.  (Serge Storms novel #24)

This is my third Serge Storms novel written by Tim Dorsey, the Godfather of Florida Man fiction.  Serge, you may remember, is the Florida native who is an absolute fanatic about Florida's history and environment.  He travels around Florida with his perpetually stoned traveling buddy Coleman.  Along the way he geeks out - like no history lover has geeked out ever - traveling from site to site and explaining the historical significance of each to Coleman and to the readers.  Along the way, he rights wrongs by kidnapping, torturing, and killing in bizarre ways an assortment of swindlers, crooks, and criminals who have hurt some poor innocents --- sort of a psychotic, homicidal maniac Robin Hood. I see Serge and Coleman as a demented version of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the super-genius dog and boy who travel through time as Mr. Peabody teaches Sherman history.  Dorsey filled each Serge Storms novel with lots and lots of true Florida history, human and natural, lots of true Florida Man and Woman stories, and lots of humor.

In Tropic of Stupid, Serge and Coleman make the rounds of Florida's State Parks, visiting many to collect stamps in Serge's Park Passport book.  Each visit becomes a lesson on the park's history.  Meanwhile Serge decides to use a DNA service to work on his family tree.  He discovers the stories of several ancestors, allowing Serge to hold forth on sponge diving, turpentining, and cigar rolling.  However, a savvy Florida state investigator is also investigating Serge's family tree, having discovered that his DNA has similarities to DNA found at crime scenes connected to a cold case serial killer.  Is she on Serge's trail?  You have to read the book to find out.



Author talk

The Ratline:  The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive.  Philippe Sands.  Knopf, 2021.  448 pages.

On one level, it's a love story, the story of the marriage and love between Otto and Charlotte Wachter, just two people who stick together despite multiple affairs and attractions to others (on both parts), held together by their mutual fervent, undying, and never repentant devotion to Nazism.   Otto was committed to the Austrian Nazi arty from its beginning, and he was a leading organizer of the failed Nazi coup to take over the Austrian government before Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Hitler).  He joined the SS and rose to high ranks as an administrator of occupied eastern Europe, highly regarded by SS head Heinrich Himmler and other superiors.  He oversaw the establishment and operation of Jewish ghettos and of deportations, and he was linked to multiple instances of the mass murder of civilians.  

Declared a war criminal, he evaded capture by the Allies until 1949, when he died in a hospital in Rome.  How did he escape capture?  Like hundreds, if not thousands, of other war criminals, he escaped via ratlines.  "Ratlines" is the term used to refer to the formal and informal complex web of underground escape routes by which these murderers escaped capture, adopted new identities, and lived the rest of their lives usually in Europe or eventually South America.  The Cold War began as WWII ended, and the Americans and Soviets immediately began collecting Nazis whom they thought might be useful scientifically or in the intelligence realm.  There were also many Nazi sympathizers who saw it as their duty to protect the criminals.  And there were vast international organizations who knowingly aided thousands of war criminals to escape, including the Red Cross and the Vatican.

In this book, Sands attempts to unravel the ratline that kept Wachter safe for four years.  He works closely with Wachter's son Horst, who gives him unprecedented access to Otto and Charlotte's papers and letters.  Horst himself becomes a sad character, maintaining until the end (still alive at 84) that his father, whom he doesn't even remember, was innocent, "the good Nazi," despite all evidence to the contrary.