Shelved: Books Read, Reviewed, and Shelved in March 2025

 

Gator A-Go-Go.  Tim Dorsey.  William Morrow, 2010.  352 pages.  #12 of 26 in Serge Storms series.

"It's history. How can you not be fascinated?"  Serge Storms.

Serge Storms is my fictional alter ego.  OK, maybe not the psychotic, serial killing vigilante part, speeding across Florida and punishing criminals and the ill-mannered and annoying on behalf of the victimized - not yet anyway - but the super-enthusiastic love and knowledge of all things related to Florida's human and natural history.  Serge makes me look like a piker in comparison.

In this adventure, Serge relates the history of spring break in Florida to the reader, to his faithful companion Coleman, and to anybody who finds himself within the general vicinity.  As usual, the thrilling story involves multiple parties, all in pursuit of something.  In this case, a murderous Miami drug gang led by "Madre" Juanita, FBI agents overseeing the Witness Protection Program, and the producers of a "Girls Gone Wild"-style video series, not to mention lots of innocent spring breakers.  Characters from previous Serge adventures appear and get involved as well.  As always, it is a very fun ride.  I love this line from the Raleigh News & Observer’s review and “gobble up the Serge A. Storms stories…and you’ll see what an overrated, humorless dullard Hannibal Lecter has always been.”

Author talk

Kugels and Collards:  Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina.  Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey.  University of South Carolina Press, 2023.  256 pages.

South Carolina became home to some of the first Jews to ever live in North America, with the first recorded Jewish settlers arriving in Charleston in the 1690s.  Over the centuries, more Jews arrived, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, then Germans, Russians, and Eastern Europeans, at the turn of the 20th century and, later, escaping the Holocaust.  Jewish families adapted and blended their traditions and foodways in their new home, influenced by contact with other ethnic groups, black and white, and by new and different ingredients that they found.  The result is this history and cookbook, containing some 80 recipes alongside dozens of stories about their creation and history.  As I've said lots of times in the past, it's hard to go wrong when combining food and history, and this book is a revealing insight into a particular culture.

Author Talk

Paper Bullets:  Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis.  Jeffrey H. Jackson.  Algonquin Books, 2020. 336 pages.  

Another book about anti-German resistance in occupied territory during WWII, but this one is unique.  First, it's set on the island of Jersey, one of the Channel islands between France and the UK which doesn't get a lot of ink.  Second, it's the first book to tell the story of two queer artists, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe (known in the art world as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore), whose lives and resistance were almost forgotten.  Third, their resistance involved no weapons, no espionage, and no hiding of Jews or Allied pilots.  Their resistance was writing anonymous notes.  That might sound benign and low-key, but their actions were still punishable by death.

Schwob and Malherbe were well-to-do French women (childhood friends who actually became stepsisters when their parents married) who became lovers and were deeply involved in the cross-dressing, homosexual, gender-bending, artistic, and literary free-for-all that was Paris in the 1920s.  They socialized with all the big names (Gertrude Stein, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Aldous Huxley, among others) of the Lost Generation and Surrealism.  They became avant-garde artists themselves, dabbling in various media but mostly photography focusing mostly on gender and challenging social norms. As the European situation deteriorated, they decided to move to the quaint peaceful island of Jersey.  There, they had to closet themselves as just sisters because it was a different world from Paris.  Their respite was brief, however, as Jersey was occupied by German troops.  The pair began a propaganda war against the occupiers, conducting psychological warfare by creating and distributing "paper bullets" — small typed notes containing wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops.  They would sneak the notes into soldiers pockets, on and in vehicles, and various other places.  Finally arrested and sentenced to death, they continued resistance in prison, reaching out to other prisoners to lift their spirits.  It's quite an interesting story.

The Clockwork Universe:  Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World.  Edward Dolnick.  Harper, 2011.  400 pages.

England's 17th century was chaotic - a civil war, the execution of a divinely appointed king, a religious dictatorship, religious wars and persecution, a plague, the Great Fire of London, and a relatively bloodless royal coup.  London's streets were covered in filth, the overwhelming majority had no access to clean water or education, and the murder rate was five times higher than today.  At the same time, England's fortunes as a trading power and colonizer were rising, coffee houses boomed as men of various backgrounds gathered to discuss everything under the sun, and thinkers like Hobbes and Locke wrote far-reaching  philosophy. 

In 1660, the Royal Society of London was formed, bringing together the most intellectual men of the country to discuss, debate, and solve the scientific mysteries of the universe.  Along with their intellects, the men brought their faiths, wills, and egos, setting the stage for major discoveries and for major conflicts.  That's the real strength  of this book, the biographical sketches of men like Newton, Hooke, Boyle, Kepler, Brahe, Leibniz, and Galileo and the stories of their beefs - especially the beef between Newton and Hooke and Newton and Leibniz.  (Turns out that Newton's pettiness rivaled his brilliance.)

I loved that part of the book.  However, the author goes deep when he explains the theories and work of these men, albeit in an understandable way.  Personally, I tend to zone out when it comes to physics and math.  My wife, who taught math and science, loved that part, however.  I think this book can be enjoyed by both types.  It's a really good read.  

The Venetian Betrayal.  Steve Berry.  Ballantine Books, 2007.  496 pages.  Book 3 of 19, Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone's third outing leaves the biblical mystery world but still tackles an ancient mystery.  The retired U.S. Justice Department Agent turned rare-book dealer in Copenhagen finds himself looking for the final burial place of Alexander the Great.  Of course. it can't be that simple. Author Steve Berry throws in a female supervillain:  a ruthless despot who has singlehandedly united the former Central Asian Soviet republics into a major world player and who dreams of becoming the 21st century Alexander the Great who plans to devastate the rest of Asia with biological weapons of mass destruction. There are other secrets too, like Greek fire and a panacea cure for deadly viruses.  It's definitely a familiar Cotton Malone adventure, with his usual associates, globetrotting from city to city, gunfights in historic sites, betrayals on top of betrayals, and a shadowy organization of powerful oligarchs, but they're fun, with tasty historical bits scattered throughout.

The Charlemagne Pursuit.  Steve Berry.  Ballantine Books, 2008. 528 pages.  Book 4 of 19 in Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone, retired special agent of a secret branch of the Justice Department turned rare-book dealer in Copenhagen, is back for his fourth outing.  This time, it's personal.  (Well, it was personal in the books in which his son was kidnapped and his bookstore was bombed too, I guess.)  He learns that the death of his submarine commander father did not happen the way the US Navy said it did.  It was part of a top-secret mission, and the subject of a high level coverup for decades, to Antarctica - a mission to investigate a theory that would upend everything we think we know about the development of human civilization.  It was a secret that the Nazis explored too, and Cotton finds himself in league with two twin German sisters out to find proof of the theory that their grandfather and father shared, and possibly to kill each other in the process.  How does Charlemagne fit into all this?  The keys to the mystery are found in clues and riddles left by one of Charlemagne's courtiers who discovered the secret, and Charlemagne was one of many figures in history that used the secrets to advance his own goals.  The Cotton Malone formula at work, but it works - a nice adventure story.

Author talk, 2017

Five-Carat Soul.  James McBride.  Riverhead Books, 2017.  320 pages.

This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories by one of my favorite writers of fiction, James McBride.  As one familiar with McBride's work would expect, the stories are full of deep insights into human nature and vivid characterizations, and most of them are  history related.  An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. Members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives. The final story is set in a zoo, with the animals as the characters grappling with the big questions about life, the natural order of things, and their relationship with the "smellies" - humans.  Each story is a treat.

Nuclear Jellyfish.  Tim Dorsey.  William Morrow, 2009.  320 pages.  #11 of 26 in Serge Storms series.

The worlds of diamond couriers, coin show dealers, and Florida Man collide in this Serge Storms entry.  A vicious Florida gang led by The Jellyfish -err, I mean, The Eel- uses inside information to rob and murder dealers on the coin and stamp show circuit who supplement their incomes by secretly transporting valuable jewels between jewelers.  Serge Storms, the psychopathic serial killer and Florida's greatest historian, booster, and vigilante, stumbles into the mess while he's on the historical quest to visit landmarks connected to Florida's southern rock history icons, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers.  When one of Serge's friends is nearly killed by the gang, it's on.  If you hurt one of Serge's friends, your days are numbered.  

March 2025: Women's History Month Reads from 2024

 

    Would you like to celebrate Women's History Month with a good read?  Here's a recap of the best women's history-themed books, fiction and non-fiction,  that I read and reviewed over the past year.

Broadway Butterfly:  Vivian Gordon the Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York.  Anthony M. DeStefano.  Citadel, 2024.  256 pages.  

In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a group of women who followed their dreams of theatrical stardom to New York City.  There were so many that they were given a name,  "Broadway Butterflies."  Few of them attained stardom, or even work, on the Broadway stage.  Most had their dreams dashed, and some were forced to turn to even less savory occupations in dance halls and nightclubs, or, even worse as kept women, mistresses, or sex workers.  Some found themselves in lives of addiction or criminality, and several were murdered during the Jazz Age.  The most notorious example of the tragic Broadway Butterfly was probably Vivian Gordon.  On February 26, 1931, Gordon's battered lifeless body was discovered in a Bronx park.  The murder led to revelations of her life as not only a prostitute and madam, but also as a blackmailer and extortionist who kept detailed records of important men and their business with her and her girls.  These men were in the top ranks of New York society, business, and government and even included the infamous Judge Joseph Crater, who disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.  Gordon's murder generated a press frenzy and a public outcry, revealing the entrenched corruption of the New York legal system and the blatant corruption and incompetence of the city's charismatic Mayor Jimmy Walker.  In fact, Walker was a firm ally of Governor Franklin Roosevelt before the murder, but the public nature of the mishandled and bungled investigation led FDR to turn against the Mayor so that his rising presidential campaign suffered no damage.  Was the murderer one of her angry clients, a man afraid that she could testify about the system, of someone else?  DeStefano is a Pulitzer-winning journalist who's written several books about historical organized crime figures, and he takes the reader through Gordon's story, the various theories about why she was murdered, and the political ramifications that resulted.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum:  The Rise and Fall of an Organized-Crime Boss.  Margalit Fox.  Random House, 2024.  336 pages.  

When one hears the words "organized crime in New York," one naturally thinks of the gangster era of the 1920s and 1930s, when Italian, Jewish, and Irish mobsters competed to control the lucrative bootlegging, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and extortion rackets and went to actual war against rivals.  Few, if any of us, would picture a 6 foot tall, 300 pound German Jewish immigrant peddler's wife, known as "Ma" or "Marm" Mandelbaum, but she was a towering - pun intended - figure in New York City in the last quarter of the 19th century.  Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in New York City in steerage and struggled alongside her street peddler husband to make a living before opening a shop.  With the family living above the shop, she sold high end items,  silk cloth, cashmere, jewelry, and luxurious furnishings and accessories,  all at wholesale prices.  Some of her customers were upper class, but most were from the rising middle class  and those nouveau riche moving into the newly burgeoning Gilded Age upper class.  What her customers didn't, or did know, was that everything she sold was stolen by highly trained and organized pickpockets, shoplifters, and burglars who scoured the city and surrounding area for goods to take back to "Marm," as they called her.  She gave them a fair, fast payoff, made sure all identifying marks were removed, and then sold the items at about 60-65% of their value, still taking in a handsome profit.  Not only was she the city's most successful and prosperous fence, but she selected, trained, and organized the criminals and planned their jobs, taking in hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen goods in today's dollars.  Meanwhile, she entertained well-known and connected figures in government, business, and society at her dinner table and maintained a very protective network of policemen, lawyers, and judges.  She became a neighborhood philanthropist, paying rent for some, usually wives of men arrested in her employ, and making donations to worthy causes and to her synagogue.  Her world finally crumbled when she set her sight on banks, and one miscue after another led to her downfall.  It's a great and too little-known rags to riches story.  Margalit Fox's research is incredible, and it's not only the story of Mrs. Mandelbaum, but also a real history of crime and corruption in Gilded Age New York.  I highly recommend it.

Mistress of Life and Death:  The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Susan J. Eischeid.  Citadel, 2023.  464 pages.

"She was a nice girl from a good family."  Maria Mandl was the last of four siblings born to a highly respected and successful shoemaker in a small Austrian village and a devoutly religious mother who suffered from depression and other illnesses throughout her life.  Her father scrimped and saved to send Maria to a convent school, unlike her older sisters.  There, she learned to play the piano and developed a great appreciation for  and knowledge of music.  When WWII began, Maria joined the new corps of women guards for German concentration camps.  She quickly stood out.  She was refined and educated compared to most of her colleagues who typically had little to no education and were often former criminals and prostitutes.  She also surpassed them in sheer brutality and sadism, and she rose through the ranks quickly, eventually becoming the head women's overseer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp.  Meanwhile, her parents were known for their staunch opposition to Nazism and for their kindness to all.  Her father risked arrest by making anti-Nazi comments and by using leather scraps to make free shoes for village children during the war.  Her mother went to church daily to pray for Maria's soul.  They only had a vague idea of what she actually did in her job, and probably couldn't have imagined that she regularly, and without provocation,  beat prisoners with whips, rubber clubs, and her fists, oversaw their torture and starvation, oversaw hideous medical experiments, demanded inspections in terrible weather - standing for 10 to 14 hours- which led directly to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, ordering poison injections of pregnant women and infants, and personally leading children to the gas chambers after showering them with affection and treats for a few days.  Oh, she also created the infamous Auschwitz women's orchestra which she forced to play as work details left and returned to camp and during some selections and arrivals of trains filled with the doomed.  How can this happen?  This book is an incredibly important addition to the history of the Holocaust.

Mercury Pictures Presents.  Anthony Marra.  Hogarth, 2022.  432 pages.

Whew!  This was a long one!  It was an audiobook that we listened to together in the car, and it took a while, but it was worth it.  If you're a fan of James McBride's big sweeping, slow-moving epics with lots of characters like Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, you will enjoy this book.

The central character is Maria Lagana.  As a little girl in Rome, she developed a love of movies, bonding her with her father, an attorney whose principles made him an enemy of Mussolini's regime and led to his arrest.  When she and her mother immigrate to the US, she begins to work for a small struggling studio called Mercury Pictures, and she quickly becomes the indispensable right hand of the quirky studio head, full of great ideas and able to get things done, but constrained by her gender.  She begins a romance with a talented Chinese-American actor, himself constantly struggling to break through the racial barrier and become a leading man.  Her family is adjusting to life in the new country, and the studio is full of interesting characters, each with his or her own unique backgrounds and issues.  Many are refugees forced to leave their European homes.  Then, one day a visitor from Italy, who had been imprisoned with her father, arrives, World War II begins, and their lives are all upended.  I must admit that there were times when the book seems to drag and nothing much was happening, but there was lots of character development.  I did become invested in the characters and their lives.  It's very witty, and it paints a richly detailed picture of wartime Hollywood and the movie industry of the 1930s and 1940s. It's a good read.

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party:  How an Eccentric group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World.  Edward Dolnick.  Scribner, 2024.  352 pages.

Natural history was all the rage in Victorian England.  It seemed that everyone spent their leisure time communing with nature, walking, climbing, and beachcombing, collecting animals, plants, rocks, and fossils.  They assembled personal collections which they proudly displayed, museums were established and attendance bloomed, and scientific lecturers drew standing room only crowds across the country.  Scientists who were charismatic and attractive had audiences of adoring female fans hanging on every word.  The prevailing attitude was that God had created a perfect world functioned smoothly according to his plan, and that science existed in order to prove and illuminate His work.  That worldview began to deteriorate around 1800 when fossilized remains of previously unknown creatures were discovered and studied.  They had been found before, explained away as dragons, cyclops, unicorns, animals that didn't catch Noah's ark, fakes planted by either God or Satan to confuse, but a handful of people began looking at them differently, and their claims shook the Victorian mindset, raising confounding questions.  How can this be when the earth is only 6,000 years old?  Extinction was impossible -how could God make that part of His plan?  How could there possibly have been an entirely different world with entirely different creatures long before Man ever arrived on the scene when the world was created for Man to enjoy?

This book is incredibly entertaining and educational as it describes the work of these important, and eccentric, pioneers, the discoveries and theories that preceded their work, and the effects of their work on Victorian thinking.  It's one of my favorite reads of the year so far.  

Wild Women and the Blues.  Denny S. Bryce.  Kensington, 2021.  384 pages.

1920s Chicago: speakeasies, bootlegging, gambling, Al Capone, mob wars, numbers running - the backdrop for this historical fiction work, but with a difference.  The action takes place in black Chicago, the section called Bronzeville, so it's a 1920s story that's both different and familiar simultaneously.   The center of the story is centenarian Honoree  Dalcour, a sharecropper's daughter who moved to Chicago as a child, telling her life story to an aspiring young filmmaker, Sawyer Hayes,  who has discovered a possible unknown film by the successful black filmmaker of the era, Oscar Micheaux.  Honoree had a role in that film, and Sawyer can't resist tracking down the last living link.  Honoree tells him her story.  Abandoned as a teen by her mother and by her first love, she becomes a dancer in a speakeasy at 19, but she has dreams of bigger things, even stardom on Broadway.  She gets a break when she's hired to dance at Chicago's most prestigious black-and-tan (club that allows integrated audiences) speakeasy, the Dreamland Cafe.  Her revelry is cut short, however, when she is unwittingly involved in murder and mob double-crosses that forever alter her life.  The result is page-turner revealing a well-researched world and multiple family secrets that had been hidden for nearly a century. 

An entertaining read. 

The Paris Girl.  Francelle Bradford White.  Citadel, 2024.  256 pages.  Release date December 24, 2024, Advance Reader's Edition.

When Francelle Bradford White was six years old, she learned  for the first time that her mother was a World War II heroine, with the war medals to prove it.  Andree Griotteray was19 when German troops marched into Paris.  She and her brother Alain, who later became a celebrated French journalist, immediately began working in the French Resistance.  She had just begun work in the French passport office.  Her brother created an underground network called Orion, and she proved to be a valuable member of the organization, secretly typing up and copying resistance newspapers, and collecting and forging identity paperwork used by agents in their work and by Jewish citizens in their escape attempts.  She then became an undercover courier delivering critically important military intelligence to Resistance contacts and to Allied forces beyond.  She participated in the creation of a major escape route through the Pyrenees Mountains into neutral Spain; this allowed hundreds of French men to join the Free French forces in Algeria and also allowed downed Allied pilots and crewmen and Jewish refugees to escape.  Throughout it all, Griotteray displayed incredible courage and poise, allowing her to evade capture for a while and to survive arrest and interrogation when she was eventually captured.  Here, the author uses her mother's thorough diaries and letters in addition to research not only to document her mother's extraordinary courage, but also to paint a very detailed picture of daily life in occupied France.  It's a fine read for those who looking for a unique perspective on World War II.

Dear Miss Perkins:  A Story of Frances Perkins' Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany.  Rebecca Brenner Graham.  Citadel, January 21, 2025.  336 pages.  Advance Reader's Copy.

This biography ended up on my favorite ten reads list for 2024.  I always knew Frances Perkins as a footnote, albeit a major footnote, in American history, and I always made sure to mention her when I taught, but I never did her story the justice that she deserved.  American history buffs might recognize her as the first female in the presidential cabinet, serving as FDR's Secretary of Labor.  More than casual buffs might know that she was a literal eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, standing on the street below the building as dozens of young immigrant women jumped to their deaths to escape the fire, and that motivated her to become one of the driving forces behind occupational safety and labor regulations that had a tremendous impact on American society.  She became a leading figure in the New York state government administration before FDR took her to Washington, and she continued to make history and real fundamental, lasting changes, making a real case for consideration as the most effective and important American woman in the 20th century.  Yet, few, including history buffs and teachers like myself know enough about the real Frances Perkins.

She had major struggles in her life and career, a husband who spent most of their marriage in and out of mental institutions as a manic depressive, probably what would be bipolar disorder today. She had to deal with the sexism that women in any career faced, especially politics, as she was always the only woman in the room.  She was the object of vitriolic attacks in the press, and voluminous hate mail that accused her of being a communist  and Jewish (She was Episcopalian.).  She was impeached (but not removed) from Congress, and even FDR, who had been an ardent supporter and admirer, turned his back on her when her progressivism threatened his support.  (Another strong, accomplished woman who made him what he was that he betrayed.)  At the time of her tenure, immigration fell under the purview of the Labor Department, and she made it her mission to help refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.  This book gives the reader a look into her phenomenal character and career, particularly this part of it.  She was a real American hero.

The Good Wife of Bath:  A Novel.  Karen Brooks.  William Morrow, 2022.  560 pages.  

My classmates and I read parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in high school, and one of my major papers that year was about "The Miller's Tale."  (Shout out to Mr. Tony Turner and my other English teachers.  The quality of teachers of all subjects that I enjoyed in high school in rural south Georgia in the early 1980s was incredible, although I did not recognize how incredible at the time.)  Those excerpts were challenging, and maybe they weren't thrilling, but they were intriguing glimpses into a long-ago age that revealed the humanity of humanity and the universality of the human condition, an important reason to study literature.

Karen Brooks, a writer of historical fiction, was inspired by the story of Chaucer's fictional Wife of Bath and decided to bring her to life in a new novel, telling her story, from her point of view.  If you don't remember the original tale, this character is one of the standouts, mainly because she broke all the traditional constraints on women of the 14th century. She was assertive, bawdy, intelligent, and quite scandalous in the way that she lived her life and dealt with men.  Brooks gives the reader the full story, back, front and all-around.  The story begins when young Eleanor is orphaned and made a servant girl until she is forced into marriage at age 12 to a 60 year old man.  Eleanor is a fighter, however, and she has a very keen mind for business.  Thanks to her ambition and drive, a bit of good of good fortune here and there, and a life-long friendship with Geoffrey Chaucer, she navigates through five marriages, ups and downs, and many tragedies  to build a family and quite a legacy, always in pursuit of the Holy Grail for women in 14th century England, her greatest desire:  the right to control her own life.  

This was a great read.  We listened to the Audiobook version and found it to be exceptionally well done. 

Can't We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.  Eliza Knight and Denny S. Bryce.  William Morrow Paperbacks, 2024.  384 pages.

Thanks to the internet, people are becoming more and more aware of an extraordinary friendship between two of the most famous women of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, legends in their fields, at the peak of their careers.  I've never been a jazz fan, and I've never sat down and listened to Fitzgerald.  To me she was just that lady who popped up on 1970s variety shows and broke the glass with her voice in a commercial in the 1980s, but I recognized her great talent.  I've seen some of Monroe's movies and thought they were interesting, but I know much more about her personal life because of the "scandals" and conspiracies.  Historical fiction authors Denny Bryce and Eliza Knight have written a very entertaining novel about the deep friendship that emerged from letters that Monroe wrote to Fitzgerald asking for voice lessons.  Their common bond, besides real mutual admiration for each other's talents, was struggle.  For Fitzgerald, the external struggles were against racism, sexism, and body-shaming, while she struggled internally with finding true love and doubting her mothering because she left her son to be raised by an aunt while she toured the world.  For Monroe, there was the sexism of Hollywood which not only affected her earning power and personal control over her career, but it also led to type-casting and unfair accusations of unprofessional behavior.  Then, there was her horrible track record with men, which was both a cause and a symptom of her mental instability, depression, and self-doubt that led to major alcohol and pills addiction. 

The book is not a biography, but the authors obviously did a great deal of research, and they created an enlightening and entertaining novel which has added to my understanding of and appreciation for both women.  (By the way, much of the recent internet storytelling gets it wrong, apparently.  Yes, Marilyn may have helped Ella get bookings in certain L.A. clubs, but Ella wasn't ignored by those clubs because she was black.  Black women like Dorothy Dandridge, Earth Kitt, and Lena Horne performed in those clubs frequently. Ella was ignored because she had a fuller figure than those women.)

Shelved: Books Read, Reviewed, and Shelved in February 2025

 

Author podcast appearance 

The Sinners All Bow:  Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne.  Kate Winkler Dawson.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025.  320 pages.

Kate Winkler Dawson has made a name for herself as a true-crime author and podcaster, and her newly published book is a great one.  It's a great topic, a story-behind-the-story, a whodunnit, a true crime story, a story-that-inspired-a great-story story.  On December 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead,  hanging, on a small New England family farm.  Sarah was a mill girl.  Like many other single girls in New England, she had been drawn to the textile mills and long, hard work days, far from their families.  Her life was difficult, and she struggled.  She found solace in Methodist churches and meetings.  The Methodists were a relatively new denomination, and the established Congregationalists looked down on them, aghast at their fervent - in their eyes, frenzied and wild -  worship style and their loud, frantic, "hell-fire and damnation" style of preaching that didn't require formal education. In their eyes, Methodists were drunk, ignorant, promiscuous, and criminal, blasphemers Traditional, staid New Englanders also tended to look down on mill girls in general, often considering them wanton women, challenging societal mores.  Sarah's death stirred up a lot of controversy, especially after it was discovered that she was pregnant.  Questions arose.  Was it murder or suicide? Who was the baby's father?  As to the latter question, evidence soon pointed to a local, married Methodist minister named Ephraim Avery.  Was he also a murderer?  A noted author of the time, Catherine Read Williams,  immediately began investigating and published her own book about the case in 1833, perhaps the first true crime book in American history.  The case, and Williams' book inspired another book that you may have heard of, a little novel called The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Nearly two hundred years later, Dawson takes up the investigation, using Williams work, her own research, and modern forensics and experts to answer the questions and determine the truth, successfully weaving the stories of Sarah, Hawthorne, and Williams together.

CBS Sunday Morning interview

Cher:  Part One:  The Memoir.  Cher.  Dey Street Books, 2024.  432 pages.

Cher is the Icon of all Icons.  Before Chappell Roan, there was Gaga.  Before Gaga, there was Madonna.  Before Madonna, there was Cher.  And she's bigger than all of them. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only artist to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center. It's hard to name another entertainer whose life has been filled with re-inventions and rebirths.  Now, she's telling her story.

And what a story it is.  Her family's history and her childhood were chaotic, to put it mildly.  The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road look like happy fairy tales by comparison.  It becomes even more surreal (Speaking of surrealism, the later story about Sonny and Cher meeting Salvador Dali is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book.) when she adds stories about playing with Dean Martin's children and Liza Minnelli.  Part one covers her childhood through the 1970s, focusing, of course, on her marriage and partnership  with Sonny Bono and their rise to stardom,  and their divorce.  It ends with her divorce from Greg Allman and with Cher on the verge of launching her acting career.  Cher's always been known for her honesty, openness, and humor.  She pulls no punches here, and I'm looking forward to part two.

Tom Jones with Little Richard on "This Is Tom Jones!", 1969

Tom Jones:  Over the Top and Back.  Tom Jones.  Michael Joseph, 2015.  400 pages.

Like Cher, Tom Jones is an icon with a long and legendary career stretching over decades, with massive roller coaster ups and downs, and both have reinvented themselves and demonstrated the willingness to grow and adapt.  In 2015, he published his autobiography, and, like Cher's, it's a winner.  The stories are incredibly entertaining, and honestly told.  Unlike Cher, Tom concentrates mostly on his music and his career, not as much on his personal life and his marriage, and he never even alludes to the stories of thousands of sexual partners while on the road.  However, it's a great story told by a great entertainer who is still going strong.  We saw him live in concert a couple of times in his late 70s and were blown away, and, last week, I just purchased tickets to see the 84-year old in concert in May.  (Note:  I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the great actor Jonathan Pryce.  Pryce does a spectacular impression of Jones.)  

Author Talk

From Saloons to Steakhouses:  A History of Tampa.  Andrew T. Huse.  University Press of Florida, 2024.  338 pages.

This is, hands down, the best history of Tampa and one of the best histories of Florida that I've read so far.  What's not to like when an author combines food and history?  Modern Tampa was founded in 1887, a rough and wild frontier town.  Yes, people often forget, or were never aware, that the bulk of non-indigenous settlement of Florida took place late in the19th century, and "pioneers" were moving into the state and carving out homesteads well into the first quarter of the 20th century.  Tampa was a frontier town, drawing homesteaders and cowboys, before it was discovered by developers, and then really started booming when it became of the headquarters of US military forces during the Spanish-American War and cigar factories started attracting Cuban, Spanish, and Italian workers.  It was a wild and crazy place that was, if not totally lawless, at least law-challenged.  Saloons, bars, gambling halls, and theatres sprung up for entertainment.  There was lots of money to be made, especially for the proprietors of these establishments and for the politicians and lawmen that they paid to look out for their interests.  Huse uses newspaper stories and firsthand accounts to tell the city's story over the century, describing "temperance advocates who crusaded against saloons and breweries, cigar workers on strike who depended on soup houses for survival, and civil rights activists who staged sit-ins at lunch counters. These stories are set amid themes such as the emergence of Tampa’s criminal underworld, the rise of anti-German fear during World War I, and the heady power of prosperity and tourism in the 1950s." (from Amazon blurb)  It is thoroughly entertaining and enlightening.

Steve Berry discussing the creation of Cotton Malone

The Alexandria Link.  Steve Berry.  Ballantine Books, 2007. 480 pages.  Book 2 of 19 in Cotton Malone series.

Cotton Malone returns in his second outing as a retired elite special agent from Atlanta turned rare book dealer in Copenhagen.  This time, his son is kidnapped, and his Copenhagen shop is burned to the ground by a shadowy group of millionaires and billionaires whose aim is to force him into finding the famed Library of Alexandria, thought to have been destroyed 1500 years ago.  Their goal is to find historical evidence housed there that would ultimately  upend the entire Middle East, destroy the very foundations of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and possibly cause World War III.  Cotton and his ex-wife have to work together to find and free their son and solve the mystery, while his former boss in the States finds herself embroiled in a deadly conspiracy that literally reaches the highest levels of the US government as she tries to help Cotton.  

The Cotton Malone series is fast-paced action based on real historical fact and mystery, creatively embellished by the author, and it will definitely appeal to readers of political thrillers.  There seem to be certain tropes present in Steve Berry books like globe-trotting, secret code deciphering, multiple betrayals, mysterious secret societies, and, for some reason, shootouts in churches and historical buildings.  They're good adventure stories that will appeal to history buffs.  They're good adventure stories that will appeal to history buffs. These first two entries both deal with biblical mysteries, New Testament in the first and Old Testament in the second. (And they're better than later Dan Brown books in my opinion.)

February 2025: Black History Reads Shelved in 2024

 

Would you like to celebrate Black History Month by reading a good book?  Here is a recap of the best black history-themed books, fiction and non-fiction, that I've read and reviewed over the past year.

Love and Whiskey:  The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest.  Fawn Weaver.  Melcher Media Inc., 2024.  376 pages.

While I've never been much a drinker, and I don't have a very discerning palate when it comes to alcohol, I was intrigued when I stumbled across a short video of Fawn Weaver discussing her new book.  I read it, and I loved it.   It's a great story of American history, but it's so much more.  It's the story of an inspiring woman who should be an example  of achievement, but I had never even heard her name until I stumbled on that video.  It's a great story of historical and genealogical mystery solving.  It's also a great story for aspiring entrepreneurs and business people, especially women and people of color.

Fawn Weaver's journey is incredible.  The daughter of a Motown music songwriter and producer turned preacher and a minister's wife who published books on marriage and family, she left home  and school at 15, lived in homeless shelters, and worked various jobs until, by age 20, she had become the head of a successful public relations firm. That success led to more success, with stumbling blocks along the way.  One day, she happened to read a story about the relationship between Jack Daniel and his distilling mentor, Nearest Green.  That story implied that the relationship had been mischaracterized by social media (gasps of shock and disbelief!), and she was hooked.  She made it her mission to uncover the true story.  She and her husband relocated from Los Angeles to Lynchburg Tennessee to do research.  Three years later, she had turned the prevailing narrative on its head and discovered a totally unique, and previously unknown, episode of American history, and they founded a brand new distillery, named Uncle Nearest to honor the first known black master distiller in American history, to preserve and to tell the story.  This truly is a great American story, accessible on many levels, even for people who aren't whiskey connoisseurs.

Devil In A Blue Dress.  Walter Mosley.  W.W. Norton, 1990.  220 pages. Book 1 of 15 Easy Rawlins novels.

Walter Mosley has been one of the hottest names in crime fiction since at least the publication of the book in 1990, but I'm only now getting around to reading Devil, the first in his series of novels centered on Easy Rawlins.  Easy, the nickname of Ezekiel, is a Houston transplant to Los Angeles in 1948.  He's working and has bought a small house, living a life that attracted many black southerners to California during the Great Migration and WWII days.  Then, he loses his job and finds himself involved in a complicated mystery involving a powerful and wealthy man who has absolutely no qualms about using violence and hires Easy to look for a woman on the run.  She's on the run in LA's black neighborhood, where Easy would have easier access.  The story is a page-turner, and Easy Rawlins is a great character.  I will definitely be continuing his saga.

A Life in Red:  A Story of Forbidden Love, the Great Depression, and the Communist Fight for a Black Nation in the Deep South.  David Beasley.  John F. Blair, Publisher, 2015.  224 pages.

During the 1920s and 1930s, maybe as many as million Americans called themselves Communists or leaned toward the principles of communism, attracted by the promise of economic equality.  It is not at all surprising that a large number of black Americans were drawn to communism, not only for economic equality and opportunity, but also for the promised racial equality.  Jim Crow laws, lynchings and racial violence, and racial discrimination were ubiquitous throughout the United States, and, in the 1930s,  the hardships of being black in America were exacerbated by the Great Depression, the rise of the KKK and racist demagoguery, and the racist implementation of the New Deal.  

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union worked to capitalize - pun intended - on the situation by inserting agents on college campuses and in black neighborhoods to recruit and to promote communism.  Some promising organizers were educated and trained in the USSR and then returned to the US as paid agents and agitators.  Some even saw their ultimate goal as the creation of a black state in the Deep South, following a violent revolution if necessary.

Herbert Newton was one of those black agents.  Along the way, he met and married Jane Emery, the white upper-middle class daughter of a former national commander of the American Legion.  His activities got him beaten, arrested, and indicted for promoting insurrection in Georgia for passing out party literature. An insurrection law in Georgia at the time (struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1937) made that activity a capital offense. For her communist beliefs and for marrying a black man, Jane was committed to a mental institution by a Chicago judge.  A Life in Red makes the most of limited information to depict the lives of the couple, including their friendship with author Richard Wright, who lived with them for years.  Jane served as a sounding board and inspiration for many of his works including Native Son.  Not a great book, but not bad.  3/5 stars.

Can't We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.  Eliza Knight and Denny S. Bryce.  William Morrow Paperbacks, 2024.  384 pages.

Thanks to the internet, people are becoming more and more aware of an extraordinary friendship between two of the most famous women of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, legends in their fields, at the peak of their careers.  I've never been a jazz fan, and I've never sat down and listened to Fitzgerald.  To me she was just that lady who popped up on 1970s variety shows and broke the glass with her voice in a commercial in the 1980s, but I recognized her great talent.  I've seen some of Monroe's movies and thought they were interesting, but I know much more about her personal life because of the "scandals" and conspiracies.  Historical fiction authors Denny Bryce and Eliza Knight have written a very entertaining novel about the deep friendship that emerged from letters that Monroe wrote to Fitzgerald asking for voice lessons.  Their common bond, besides real mutual admiration for each other's talents, was struggle.  For Fitzgerald, the external struggles were against racism, sexism, and body-shaming, while she struggled internally with finding true love and doubting her mothering because she left her son to be raised by an aunt while she toured the world.  For Monroe, there was the sexism of Hollywood which not only affected her earning power and personal control over her career, but it also led to type-casting and unfair accusations of unprofessional behavior.  Then, there was her horrible track record with men, which was both a cause and a symptom of her mental instability, depression, and self-doubt that led to major alcohol and pills addiction. 

The book is not a biography, but the authors obviously did a great deal of research, and they created an enlightening and entertaining novel which has added to my understanding of and appreciation for both women.  (By the way, much of the recent internet storytelling gets it wrong, apparently.  Yes, Marilyn may have helped Ella get bookings in certain L.A. clubs, but Ella wasn't ignored by those clubs because she was black.  Black women like Dorothy Dandridge, Earth Kitt, and Lena Horne performed in those clubs frequently. Ella was ignored because she had a fuller figure than those women.)

Kill 'Em and Leave:  Searching For James Brown and the American Soul.  James McBride.  Spiegel & Grau, 2016.  256 pages.

In the past few years, author James McBride has published two extremely well-received novels, Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, but, in 2016, he published Kill 'Em and Leave, a biography, of sorts, of James Brown.  It's biography-ish, but it's also a book about McBride's process and efforts to discover the truth about The Godfather of Soul, and along the way McBride also reveals a bit, and learns a bit, about himself.  It's a difficult process because throughout his life Brown constantly told different stories to different audiences and made a concerted effort to keep almost everyone he ever knew from getting too close to the real James Brown.

In the opening pages, McBride posits that Brown was and is perhaps the most recognized, most famous, and most influential black man to ever live, and he sets out to make his case.  It's a remarkable story. Abandoned by his mother (It's still disputed whether she left or was driven away by his father.), at a very young age, Brown was mostly raised by his father's extended family, several female cousins and aunts.  He dropped out of school and did a three year stretch in a Georgia youth prison, becoming a school janitor after his release and singing in churches and juke joints in Georgia and South Carolina before becoming one of the biggest names in music.  What a life. The spending, the women, the bands, the career.  Quirks on top of quirks.  Brown never went anywhere without thousands in cash and cashiers checks on him. He, like many old-school black performers, having been cheated before, demanded cash payments before taking the stage.  In his Augusta Georgia home, he had a "money room" filled with shoeboxes of $100 bills and wheelbarrows of silver dollars.  He frequently gave cash, jewelry, and cars to friends and associates. The IRS came after him, wiping him out twice.  Each time, he back. When he died in 2006, his tax troubles were resolved, and his estate was estimated at $100 to 150 million.  

In spite of all the tragedies and hardships Brown experienced (in some cases, caused) in his life, the biggest tragedy may have been what happened after his death.  Brown's will left everything but personal belongings, about $100 million, earmarked to create an educational foundation for poor Georgia and South Carolina children. To date, none of that money has been used for that purpose.  Instead, it has gone to lawyers hired by Brown's various children and wives to fight the will, and the fortune fell to $2-4 million.  In 2021, a resolution of sorts was finally reached, maybe, but legal battles continue, and Brown's wishes haven't been met.

This was a great read.  I really enjoyed it.

Wild Women and the Blues.  Denny S. Bryce.  Kensington, 2021.  384 pages.

1920s Chicago: speakeasies, bootlegging, gambling, Al Capone, mob wars, numbers running - the backdrop for this historical fiction work, but with a difference.  The action takes place in black Chicago, the section called Bronzeville, so it's a 1920s story that's both different and familiar simultaneously.   The center of the story is centenarian Honoree  Dalcour, a sharecropper's daughter who moved to Chicago as a child, telling her life story to an aspiring young filmmaker, Sawyer Hayes,  who has discovered a possible unknown film by the successful black filmmaker of the era, Oscar Micheaux.  Honoree had a role in that film, and Sawyer can't resist tracking down the last living link.  Honoree tells him her story.  Abandoned as a teen by her mother and by her first love, she becomes a dancer in a speakeasy at 19, but she has dreams of bigger things, even stardom on Broadway.  She gets a break when she's hired to dance at Chicago's most prestigious black-and-tan (club that allows integrated audiences) speakeasy, the Dreamland Cafe.  Her revelry is cut short, however, when she is unwittingly involved in murder and mob double-crosses that forever alter her life.  The result is page-turner revealing a well-researched world and multiple family secrets that had been hidden for nearly a century. 

An entertaining read.  

...And Your Ass Will Follow.  George Clinton.  Audible Original, Words + Music, Volume 39.

If you love music and audiobooks and are an Audible subscriber, you may have already discovered the "Words + Music" series there.  Each volume is about two hours long and features a particular artist discussing his/her life and work, complete with lots of music samples.

This particular volume features legendary funkster George Clinton who blended everything from doo-wop and soul to funk and rock and sprinkled in bits like songs he heard at friends' bar mitzvahs to create the one and only Parliament-Funkadelic sound, becoming one of the most influential and sampled artists in history.  He talks about the musical influences that literally surrounded him growing up in his New Jersey neighborhood where he interacted with diverse people and cultures and knew people famous and becoming famous from Sarah Vaughn to Dionne Warwick to the Shirelles.  He talks about his own musical journey from assembling a group in junior high to rejection by Motown to the Mothership.  It's a fun ride.  Check this one out or look for your own favorite artists on Audible.

Homage:  Recipes and Stories From an Amish Soul Food Kitchen.   Chris Scott.  Chronicle Books, 2022.  272 pages.

I love food and cooking and the huge role food plays in culture and history.  If you had told me that one of the greatest books I've seen about soul food in the past couple of years was about AMISH SOUL FOOD, I would have called you crazy.  But here it is, and it's a great addition to my cookbooks.

Chef Chris Scott is a former competitor on "Top Chef" and a successful restaurateur, and his book is a really personal history of his family history, the African Diaspora, and the Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish immigrant experience.  His formerly enslaved ancestors left the South after the Civil War and settled in Pennsylvania Dutch territory, and they blended their African, southern, soul food with the Amish traditions of their new home.  That's how food and culture work, always blending and evolving.  And why shouldn't these seemingly distinctive foodways blend?  What is soul food but food that takes you home to family, traditions, and history and comforts you?  So every culture has its own version of soul food.  Scott grew up with both soul food traditions, and he makes it his mission to prepare and serve food that showcases all of the elements of his background.

The book has great stories, absolutely beautiful photos - some of the best photography I've seen in recent cookbooks, and delicious recipes that I look forward to trying soon.  

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.

James:  A Novel.  Percival Everett.  Doubleday, 2024.  320 pages.

I must admit that I was apprehensive about reading James.  I had tried reading Everett's previous critically acclaimed novel, Trees, and honestly didn't like any part of it.  I only read a few dozen pages.  I also have a general aversion to hugely popular things, usually steering clear.  Finally, I have had mixed reactions to "re-tellings" of classic stories.  I recently enjoyed The Good Wife of Bath  but found Demon Copperhead lacking.  Nevertheless, I decided to plunge into James, and I'm glad I did.

Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite Americans, and there's no doubt that his incredible insight into Americans and American hypocrisy and foibles is in a class by itself.  Whether it's Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn  or any of his other stories, speeches, travelogues, or novels, Twain pulled back all the coverings and painted astonishingly accurate portrayals of the American zeitgeist, the "spirit of the time." In James, Percival Everett proves that he also has that gift.  James is a retelling of the story of Huck Finn and Jim, his escaped slave friend and companion.  True, Everett's Jim is not Twain's Jim, but that's ok;  Everett makes him better.  He is now older, with a wife and child, he's literate, and he teaches the enslaved people in his world the essentials of language and behavior that allow them to survive in slavery.   The enslaved people in Jim's world are all at least bilingual, wearing metaphorical masks around whites - speaking and acting ignorantly - while using correct grammar and speech to discuss sometimes deep issues amongst themselves.  Jim and the other enslaved people in his world offer a brilliant look into slavery and race.  Many of Jim and Huck's adventures are captured in this book, and there are new adventures, and tragedies, along the way.  There's a major surprise twist and a "Django" like twist at the end, but I found neither jarring.  Jim - rather, James - emerges as a brilliant character and hero, and it's a great novel. I think Twain would have approved.