All posts by jbair

The Potted Gardner – Review

M. C. Beaton. The Potted Gardener. St. Martin’s, 1994.

As readers of this blog may know, we have enjoyed several Hamish Macbeth stories we have read. We thought we would try the other series by Mrs. Beaton, namely something about Agatha Raisin. Here goes.

As I started reading The Potted Gardener, I honestly did not care for Mrs. Raisin. She came across as on the rude or testy side. However, as I got accustomed to her, I began to see the humor. She used to live in London and now lives in the small Cotswold village of Carsely. There is a bit of the fish out of water sense, and although she is in her fifties, she has developed an schoolgirl crush on James, a neighbor who is a retired Army colonel.

Things get interesting as another urban transplant comes to town, Mary Fortune. She is an attractive divorcee—Agatha’s husband left years ago, but they never divorced. Ms. Fortune (misfortune?) is a skilled gardener. She becomes active in the local Garden Club along with James, the retired colonel.

Agatha, who really knows little of gardening, decides to join because it is clear that something is going on between Mary and James. To call her is jealous is putting it mildly. Agatha has a plan, though. It involves building a high fence in her back yard and then planting a bunch of fresh plants from a nursery the night before the big garden competition. There is a catch. A former co-worker has arranged all this, so she has to un-retire and go back to her Public Relations firm for six months. (Some of the funniest parts involve her PR hiatus.)

At some point it becomes clear that James and Mary are no longer seeing each other as much. We also learn from others in the town that there is a certain two-faced quality about Mary. She can be charming and friendly, and then come up with a zinger or veiled insult. Even the vicar’s wife admits Mary may be unkind.

And then shortly before the gardening open house in the village, someone begins sabotaging gardens. The roses in one garden are painted black overnight. Another night all the goldfish in a small garden pond are poisoned. And so it goes. And then Mary is murdered and hanged in her garden. The manner in which she is hanged is a bit bizarre. Let us say that that inspired the book’s title: potted literally, not inebriated.

By this time, Mary has managed to offend a lot of people in town. In other words, everyone seems to have a reason not to like her. Still all the slights seem relatively slight—not causes for murder. Agatha and James discover her body, and soon they begin to do their own amateur sleuthing with the help of local police officer Billy Chang. To illustrate Mary’s character, she has called Billy a chink: Not kind, not the first time he has been called that, rude, yes, but not the type of insult that would lead a normal citizen to murder.

We learn that Mary has a grown daughter who is a student at Oxford. She and her stand-offish boyfriend come to town. It seems Mary had not gotten along with her, either.

This is more of a cozy than the typical Hamish mystery. There is no criminal enterprise or hard-nosed crimebuster, but a retired, slightly nosy matron and her village friends. She is observant, and she knows people. That, along with sprinkles of Beaton humor, make this one a light but entertaining mystery.

The Name of the Rose – Review

Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose. 1983; Translated by William Weaver, Everyman’s, 2006.

A friend recommended The Name of the Rose to me over thirty years ago. Chris, wherever you are, I finally read it!

I see why he liked it. It is very rich, allusive, and exotic. It is set in a time that even people in Italy seldom study or remember: the fourteenth century. This is about a hundred years before the invention of the printing press and nearly two hundred before the Reformation. Things in northern Italy, where it is set, have not changed much since the fall of Rome, but change is coming.

Friar William of Baskerville, our main character, uses spectacles to read. Now they had been invented some time before, but were still uncommon. Some of the monks at the abbey where he is staying consider them almost magical. As he arrives at the monastery, he tells some hostlers where a certain horse has escaped by reading hoofprints in the snow. Yes, he comes across as a medieval Sherlock Holmes. He gives credit to Roger Bacon, whom he has read and is seen as the originator of inductive reasoning (a.k.a. the scientific method) used today. Baskerville has less respect for William of Occam, whom he knew from Oxford.

The story is told by Baskerville’s traveling companion, a novice named Adso. Adso respects and admires Brother Baskerville and wants to learn from him. He asks him many questions and usually takes what he says at face value. In other words, he is a Watson to William’s Holmes.

Baskerville is a former inquisitioner and member of the Franciscans. The monastery is Benedictine, so there is both some mutual respect and also some rivalry. In the background are a number of groups trying to discover “genuine” Christianity including the Fraticelli offshoot of the Franciscans and the radical followers of Fra Dolcino. The Dolcinites would be considered heretical; the Fraticellis, reformers within the pale but suspect by some.

Other groups such as the Waldenses are mentioned as well. Like Chaucer in England, who sympathized with the Lollards, there are reformers everywhere it seems. The Church itself is worldly and political, but it would still take another two centuries before the Reformation would be institutionalized. But the seeds are there.

At one point the real Inquisition shows up. Unlike Baskerville, the inquisitioner from Avignon (based on historical figure Bernard Gui) is more interested in consolidating power and ecclesiastical order rather than discovering truth. Remigio, the poor monk snared by Gui, “now wants death with all his soul” (436)—not unlike Winston “He loved Big Brother” Smith. Plus ça change… (Interestingly, the story begins by the author’s tale of how he discovered Adso’s manuscript that includes a visit to Prague in 1968. He ends up trapped for a while after the Soviet army invades the country.)

Much of the tale, though, is intellectual. The abbey has one of the best collections of books in Europe. At one point it is compared to the Library of Alexandria. But no one is allowed in the library except the librarian and his one assistant. There is a catalog, but the librarian, perhaps under direction of the abbot, can decide what books can be checked out and by whom. Some are never allowed to be checked out.

As Baskerville says, “Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten” here (200). Adso observes:

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. (208)

Adso and Baskerville sneak into the library one night, seeking both information on some books but also trying to solve one of the murders. The library turns out be arranged like a labyrinth. As a result, they are almost trapped in the library—if the librarian or abbot were to catch them there, they would be dismissed and probably the crimes would never be solved.

We meet monks from many parts of Europe including France, Spain, Germany, England, and Italy. (One thinks of The Magic Mountain, or how “all of Europe” contributed to Conrad’s Kurtz.) One is the old blind monk Jorge de Burgos, whose name suggests Jorge Luis Borges. That could tell the reader the kind of story The Name of the Rose is. And, yes, Borges’ most famous collection of tales is entitled Labyrinths, and one of its best known stories is “The Library of Babel.” The novel is allusive, but not all the allusions are to the Middle Ages.

As best I could tell, all the religious movements referred to were historical. So were the books mentioned. I do wonder about the some of the Arabic texts, but they could be authentic. I recognized a few titles. I was reminded of the books read by Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Some were invented by Poe, but others such as Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell really exist. Some of the mystery here revolves around an ancient philosophical text known to have existed but lost to history, kind of like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Found (see Martin’s Harvard Yard).

The Name of the Rose is a gothic novel and a murder mystery, but it is clearly much more. It is not so much an intellectual challenge as an intellectual feast. What is truth? What is the nature of God? Can we really know what is true? What is objectivity? What did the ancients know that we have lost? What do we know that they did not?

There are many sayings in Latin and a few in other modern languages. Having taken a year and a half of Latin in college, I was able to muddle through most of the Latin. The French was fine for me. When I was stumped by a German quotation near the end, I discovered a web page that contained English translations of all the foreign quotations. I do recommend this to readers: “Translations to Accompany The Name of the Rose.

The introduction by David Lodge to the Everyman’s Edition covers the story quite thoroughly. Because he says so much well, this review defers to his. I do recommend his advice to the first-time reader to stop at page xiv of the Introduction until after reading the novel to avoid spoilers. It also helps to reader to be familiar with the Bible, especially Revelation and the Gospel of John, though there are allusions to many books of the Bible including the Apocrypha.

This book is a gem. I confess being a little disappointed a the very end, only because it seemed to terminate in a kind of postmodern vagueness instead of a more typically Medieval point of view (think of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, or especially Boethius). The author drops enough hints, though, about what will happen, if, as in a whodunit, we pay attention. It will keep readers thinking and keep researchers investigating. I am glad to have read it. It might even be worth a second look.

Up On the Woof Top – Review

Spencer Quinn. Up on the Woof Top. Forge, 2023.

After some patient waiting, we finally got a chance to read the latest Chet and Bernie mystery from a local library. Any readers of our blog should note by now that we are fans. Up on the Woof Top does not disappoint.

Readers can probably tell by the title that this mystery is set at Christmastime. Bernie Little, the detective, and Chet, our canine narrator, happen to attend a book signing by Dame Ariadne Castle. Miss Castle may be based on Donna Andrews or David Rosenfelt with some Dame Agatha Christie. She has made a successful career writing Christmas mysteries. In fact, her latest one is number 99 in the series. As can be told from her title, she is British, but she spends about half the year in the United States at a ranch in the Colorado Rockies that is a kind of Santa’s village she calls Kringle Ranch. She has a number of lodges or chalets there and keeps it decorated for Christmas year-round. She also has nine reindeer on the premises.

Chet makes an impression on her at the book signing, so when one of her reindeer is missing, she contacts the Little Detective Agency for help. Like other writers who have become institutions, she has a staff who also live on the premises including Chaz LeWitte and Georgette Eliot. If Georgette’s name sounds suspiciously like a certain nineteenth-century English author, I suspect that is no coincidence. The lodge Chet and Bernie stay in at the ranch is called the Cratchit House. There are other characters named Wordsworth, Missy Havisham, Sikes, and Pelgotty (Peggotty?), and some of the action takes place on Mt. Murdstone.

They arrive at Kringle Ranch in something like the fifth Porsche that Bernie has owned (we lost track, they keep crashing). Not only is the reindeer gone, but soon Chaz is missing as well. Chet and Bernie, thanks in part to Chet’s nose, do find Chaz—unconscious at the bottom of a cliff known as Devil’s Purse. As Bernie does some more sleuthing, we learn that some thirty or forty years ago Miss Castle’s fiancé was murdered and his body discovered at the same location.

The story gets interesting and complicated. Miss Castle is also having a struggle with writer’s block. She usually cranks out three or four novels a year, now she is stuck. She thinks it might because of the missing reindeer. Chet and Bernie will indeed crack the cases of both Chaz and the deer as told by Chet’s usual hilarious narrative style. Oh, and it looks like Bernie is getting serious about his latest girlfriend, Weatherly.

I have one quibble with this novel. I am beginning to see a pattern among the perpetrators in some of the recent Chet and Bernie stories. Mr. Quinn seems to have fallen into a kind of Hollywood stereotyping trap. As soon as I first read about one of the people in the story, I said to myself, if Quinn is following that stereotype I have noted in his recent books, this person is going to be the criminal. Sadly, I was right. Sad, not because it was too easy for Bernie to solve—it wasn’t—but because of the Hollywood typing convention. Next time, surprise us!

Your Daddy Did Not Die – Review

Daniel A. Poling. Your Daddy Did Not Die. Greenberg, 1944.

Readers who are familiar with tales of World War II may recall something of the four Immortal Chaplains. The American troop ship Dorchester was on its way to Europe in late 1942 with about 900 soldiers on board. It was early in the war when German U-boats were big trouble for the Allies. A German torpedo sank the ship. About 300 men survived. As the ship was sinking, the four chaplains assigned to the troops—one Jewish, one Catholic, two Protestant—gave their life jackets to other soldiers and went down with the ship, praying together.

1948 Immortal Chaplains Commemorative Postage Stamp.

One of the chaplains was Clark Poling. Your Daddy Did Not Die was written by Lt. Poling’s father as a kind of memoir about his son to Clark’s three-year-old son, Corky. It is homey and sentimental. I can recommend it as a good sketch about what life was like for the middle to upper middle class in the United States from 1910 until the beginning of World War II.

We learn a lot about the Poling family. It is honestly a little hard to keep track of everything. Clark’s mother died when he was a preschooler and his father remarried a widow with her own children. It seems, then, there were six children in the family, and maybe one born afterwards. If it seems a little hard to note this for sure, it is partly because the story is largely told in a nonlinear, rambling style.

The author himself was a fairly high-ranking (if such a term applies) clergyman. He was the assistant pastor for many years for Norman Vincent Peale, published Christian Herald magazine, and was a leader of Christian Endeavor, a ministry for church youth leaders. We get a sense of what mainline churches were like in the first half of the twentieth century. Religious belief and membership was pretty much taken for granted. I could not help thinking of Will Herberg’s acclaimed 1955 sociological study Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Back then, every American was one of those three religions. Atheists and skeptics were Communists or (before the war) Fascists.

No reader can seriously question the author’s faith or the faith of his son, but we note a generational shift. Clark and his brother Daniel, Jr., who was also a pastor, were the seventh generation of clergymen in the family going back to the Puritans. Clark’s grandfather was a Baptist missionary to Oregon who worked in rural areas and among Indians. The author calls him a Fundamentalist, that is someone who subscribed to the teaching of The Fundamentals, including the atoning work of Jesus alone for salvation and the complete inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.

From his tone, we sense the author was less strict. His son had doubts about parts of the Bible such as the virgin birth of Jesus, but still believed in God and in the Christian religion. We can see in this the gradual shift of emphasis in many mainline churches that continues until the present.

There is no real theme to the book, but there are fond memories of the fallen chaplain. We learn, for example, that in the war a greater percentage of chaplains were killed than any other army corps except for the Air Corps. They were often in harm’s way but were noncombatants. Readers can appreciate the family’s sacrifice. While Lt. Poling did have about two years with Corky before he left for Europe, he never did meet his daughter whom his wife was carrying when the Dorchester went down. As they say, freedom is never free.

Lt. Poling had only been in the army about a year when he was killed. That was true of two of the other chaplains as well. However, because of his job, he got to know hundreds of soldiers during that time. Some people, especially mothers, often worry that the rough life of many soldiers would corrupt their sons. He observed that young men who were raised well and had positive character traits still had them in the service. Their experiences would affect them, yes, but their basic personalities, whether for good or evil, would come forth in the military as much as any other occupation.

From what I have seen, that is still true today. To mothers I would say, if you want your sons to become men, the service is a good option. Yes, there are great risks, but at the same time it truly tests their character. I still recommend the military experience for any young man who can pass the physical.

Above photo is of the 1948 Immortal Chaplains Commemorative Postage Stamp. I believe Lt. Poling is second from left. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Breton Folk Tales – Review

F. M. Luzel. Contes Bretons: Recueillis et Traduit [Breton Folk Tales: Collected and Translated]. 1870; Wikisource, 2021.

I recently heard of Francois-Marie Luzel for the first time. As some readers of these pages may know, I studied folklore and oral transmission in college and have an interest the Grimm Brothers tales (märchen to scholars) as well as ancient epics. Since starting this blog, I have noted Joseph Campbell’s work. Luzel was the Grimm brother of folk tales of Brittany. He spoke the Celtic Breton language, which is very similar to Welsh. A Breton and Welshman can carry on a conversation with one another with nearly 100% understanding. Luzel then translated the folk tales he collected into French. This collection contains six tales, all somewhat reminiscent of folk stories from other places, but with a clear connection to Brittany and France.

Luzel tells us that most of the tales were told by more than one person as he was doing his research. He included what he considered the most representative details of each story with some endnotes describing certain variations. In other words, we can read this as a scholarly collection, but for most of us, we read it as a collection of clever fairy tales. While children can appreciate them, they were probably meant for grownups as were the Grimm tales. And at least one tale has a postscript telling us that the story really happened…

The first tale, “The Giant Goulaffre,” combines a number of typical folk tale elements. Indeed, when our two heroes enter the giant’s castle, the giant first becomes aware of them from their scent: “I smell the odor of a Christian, and I want to eat him!” (257) says the giant, not unlike “I smell the blood of an Englishman…I’ll grind his bones to make my bread” in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” We understand that many animals have a better sense of smell than humans, so this illustrates the animalistic or savage side of the giant.

The main character of the story is a young Breton named Allanic, the only son of his widowed mother. He wants to explore the world to find his fortune, as so many young men in such tales do. He also is skilled musician, playing the pipes. For some of his adventures, he has a dancer friend who accompanies him. They outwit the giant to escape his hunger and end up in Paris serving the king.

When the king hears of Allanic’s escapade with the giant, the king sets him back on two quests to regain items the giant has stolen from the king. Allanic is able to very cleverly outwit the giant—indeed, he gets the giant to kill his own wife and daughters. It is no spoiler to say that at the end, Allanic gets to marry the king’s daughter because of his loyalty, bravery, and cleverness, not unlike the ending to many other fairy tales.

“The Man with Two Dogs” is more magical. This also involves an enchanted castle, and our hero is able to outwit evil devils, who also want to devour Christians. He gains the help of a captive princess. In this case, he is actually eaten three times, but each time a piece of his body is left behind so that he is magically recreated, the third time from only a fingernail. In this case our hero is Jean, the son of the king, but Jean is usurped by his older sister and her husband, so there is also three trials to regain his rightful throne. Once again, the cleverness of both the hero and heroine as well as the magical abilities of the two dogs is able to save the day.

The hero of “The Godson of the Holy Virgin” is, as in the first tale, a poor boy who does well. His parents are old when he is born and ask the parish priest to be the godfather of their son because the father had been tricked by a troop of devils to give them his firstborn son. Because he is a priest, the godfather says the boy’s godmother must be the Virgin Mary.

As the boy, Pipi, comes of age, he also must go out on some adventures and overcome those devils. He does so with the help of the Blessed Virgin and a holy book she gives him (presumably some Scriptures). In this case he also helps free the daughter of sorcerers. Their wedding, we are told, was attended by a great-great grandfather of one of the storytellers, so we know that the story really happened.

“Jesus Christ in Lower Brittany” begins by telling us that one time “Our Savior Jesus Christ once had made a tour of Lower Brittany, accompanied by St. Peter and St. John” (816). This is more of a clever moral story with echoes of the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis. In this case, the lonely widow they bless has to learn a lesson, to distinguish between what God can do and what happens to humans who try to imitate God apart from Him and their own desires. Like the other tales, there is some humor, though in this the humor is more lighthearted. They three travelers teach a similar lesson to the cook of a lord. Both episodes have echoes “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in those lessons.

“The Two Sons of the Fisherman” may be the most magical of the stories here. A fisherman and his wife have twins after being childless for a long time. When one twin comes of age, he wants to seek his fortune. He does, and ends up rescuing a princess in a castle whom he marries. But then trouble begins. Without going into too much detail, this is the second story that involves a deadly “wheel of razors.” (Were they trying to imagine a deadlier circular saw?) Brother number two ends up rescuing brother number one in a heady triumph of good over evil.

“The Miller and His Lord” may be the cleverest of the stories. It is probably the funniest. A miller owes his lord rents but is unable to pay them. Unfortunately, the lord shows no mercy, so the miller leaves for the nearby town with his one valuable possession, a cow. He is attacked by robbers. He escapes, but the cow is captured, killed, and eaten by the thieves. While the thieves are resting after their repast, the miller gets into the cow skin—its head and horns are still intact—and scares the robbers off. He gathers all the money left behind that they have robbed from others.

He is now able to pay the landlord the twenty écus he owes. The lord asks him where he got the money, and he said he sold the hide of his cow for a hundred écus. The greedy lord then slaughters all he cows in his own herd and takes the leather to the town, expecting a hundred écus per hide. The people there laugh him out of town. The miller shares a few other supernatural secrets which his lord believes. Ultimately, the lord loses his wife and his wealth. Without going into detail, the additional devices are equally clever. Towards the end, the positions of the miller and greedy lord are nearly reversed.

One recurring image or idea is that all the protagonists except in “Jesus Christ in Lower Brittany” have to overcome or face three challenges. In the case of “The Man with the Two Dogs” there are three trials followed by three more different trials. There are certain other recurring elements, especially the triumph of clever young men and the helpfulness of high-ranking but endangered young women. and, of course, there is the general triumph of justice over injustice. Readers who like fairy tales will definitely enjoy these. While I read them in French, they have been recently translated into English. Have fun!

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not page numbers.

The Josiah Manifesto – Review

Jonathan Cahn. The Josiah Manifesto. Front Line, 2023.

This past year we happened to see a television interview with Jonathan Cahn on his latest book, The Josiah Manifesto. It sounded intriguing, and when we saw that one of the local libraries had a copy, we were able to read it. It certainly suggests something about the power of God, and that He truly observes what is going on in the world.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is largely a study of the biblical concept of Jubilee and how that applies to things going on today. The second part is the titular manifesto, a call to action based on the figure of King Josiah in the Bible.

The concept of Jubilee is that every fifty years the nations of Israel and Judah were to restore things to their original state among the people. That meant property that had been bought and sold was to revert to its original owners, that any slaves or indentured servants were to be released, and that any debts were to be forgiven. Cahn basically sees this as a restoration to the way things were and a way to start from the point that God intended.

Without going into too much detail, he notes a couple of “jubilees,” fifty year restorations of justice from injustice. The most important which he discusses at length is the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the court ruling that legalized abortion on demand in the United States. The restoration of protection for the vulnerable babies in the womb was fifty years after the original ruling.

He notes also that in 1970 the first two states in the Continental United States legalized abortion: New York and Washington. In 2020 they were the two states most in the news over Covid-19. The first case in the country was in Washington and the most and deadliest cases were in New York. To him this is not coincidence.

As a biblical parallel, he notes that the first of the ten plagues of Egypt under Moses was the Nile River turning to blood. This paralleled the drowning of babies in the river when Moses was a baby. “…the waters of the Nile would turn to blood just as the blood of the Hebrew children had once reddened its waters.” (126)

He notes that the United States and a few other nations finally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, fifty years after Israel began ruling there in 1967. Cahn also speaks of an interesting series of events after fifty years of Communism in Cuba, events which he observed.

The second part is the actual Josiah Manifesto. Cahn sees King Josiah of Judah as a leader of a nation in a condition similar to that of America and most of the Western world. When Josiah became king, the nation had been ruled by a succession of ungodly rulers who promoted idolatry—including child sacrifice—and persecuted and killed the prophets. Josiah rediscovered the Hebrew Scriptures and restored worship of the true God and a just government.

King Manasseh, Josiah’s grandfather, had embarked on a campaign to further the worship of foreign gods, to erect pagan shrines and altars, and to bring the practices of the pagan world into the land. In its initial stages it could be championed in the name of tolerance, acceptance, freedom, and openness to the new.

But once things were legitimized, established, and enshrined, the banner of openness and tolerance was withdrawn and replaced by an iron rod of coercion, oppression, persecution, and cultural totalitarianism. It is no accident that Manasseh is recorded as having “shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another.” [see II Kings 21:16] It was the inevitable flip side of the coin. It was inevitable that the same culture that called evil good would call what was good evil. If one embraces evil, one must end up waging war against the good. (194)

The Josiah Manifesto, then, becomes a study of Josiah and how people in today’s world, especially the West, can promote justice and recover a lost worldview. Throughout, it exhorts the reader to trust in God. There are few specifics, but a general call to be courageous and stand for the truth.

The more a culture departs from the ways of God, the more revolutionary it will be to walk in them. Every godly act will become a revolutionary act. Every godly word will become a revolutionary world. And every godly life will become a revolutionary life. The people of God must increasingly live as a revolutionary people. Those who follow Messiah must increasingly return to their first of all states, the state of revolution. (206)

A culture that has fallen from God will always seek to justify its altered state by altering standards, redefining values, and reframing reality. (225)

But, as Joshua would have said, the righteous are to “be strong and of good courage.”

The righteous must ultimately be defined by that which they stand against but by that for which they stand. Their lives must bring forth healing, restoration, salvation, and redemption. Their impact on the world must be positive. They must love in the face of hatred, bless in the face of persecution, return good for evil, and manifest heaven in the face of hell. (239-240)

It is impossible for a universe to come forth out of nothing, for a sea to part in two, for a man to shut up the heavens, for a virgin to conceive a child, for the dead to rise to life, for a weak and broken band of disciples to change the world, and for a nation that has been dead for two thousand years to come back to life. But God is the God of the impossible. And those who follow Him, especially in times of adversity and impossibilities, must live against the odds, above the laws of the natural, and by the power of the impossible. With God all things are possible, and nothing will be impossible. (271)

May it be, Lord. May we be found faithful.

The last chapter brings the two parts of the book together. Without creating any spoilers, let us just say that it reminds us that, regardless of what seems to be going on, God is still on His throne.

Hidden History of Connecticut – Review

Wilson H. Faude. Hidden History of Connecticut. History Press, 2010.

Hidden History of Connecticut is for Connecticut residents and those who are visiting the state. While each short chapter describes a historically significant event or person, each includes some location or landmark that the reader can visit. In most cases, these places are not well known, even to the average resident of the state.

The landmarks include some historical houses and buildings. Many chapters deal with artists who lived or settled in Connecticut such as Frederic Church or the “Harvard Five” architects. You will not find the Mystic Seaport or any university museum here. There are, however, descriptions of the New Britain Museum of American Art—the first museum in the country dedicated just to American artists—and the Florence Griswold Museum which housed a large artists’ colony a hundred years ago.

We also learn of certain significant historical events. Most people in the state are aware that Connecticut, when it was a colony, had the first written constitution of any government in the world. Here we learn a little more about it and especially the famous, if legendary, story of the Charter Oak.

The meeting in Connecticut in 1780 between American and French military leaders including Washington and Rochambeau would lead to the success of the Revolution a year later. The author believes this would have led to annual celebrations and re-enactments in many places, but Connecticut tends to be low-key. So it is with the house of Oliver Ellsworth in Windsor who proposed the Connecticut Compromise which saved the American Constitution.

An easily-overlooked set of plaques commemorates the Washington-Rochambeau event. That is all. An even easier-to-miss plaque notes a meeting in 1976 between William Buckley and Ronald Reagan that gave some direction to Reagan’s eventual successful presidency as well as some direction for Ronald, Jr., in pursuing ballet.

While some historical places are known for festive Christmas celebrations, Hidden History of Connecticut tells of at least four places that have interesting Christmas presentations of one kind or another that are often overlooked. This includes the Butler-McCook and Harriet Beecher Stowe houses and the Boar’s Head Festival, all in Hartford, and the Hill-Stead House in Farmington.

There are many more gems and touching stories. Some perhaps more trivial than others, but all noting historical curiosities and interesting places to visit in the Nutmeg State.

American Wild – Review

Marissa Hale. American Wild. Publish Pros, 2023.

The title of American Wild has a double meaning. Yes, it is a novel set in the wilderness of North America west of the Appalachians mostly in the 1780s, but it is also a wild story. And like The Frontiersmen, about a similar time and location, it is the novelization of true events.

In some ways, one could look at this as The Frontiersmen from a woman’s perspective, not only that the author is female, but that the main character is a lady. And we mean a lady. She is a French noblewoman whose fiancé is an officer fighting for France in the American Revolution. When Captain LeClerc returns after six years in North America, they marry and return to America. He sees more opportunity and freedom than he could experience in France in 1783.

However, he does not settle in one of the coastal cities or even one of the original thirteen colonies, He wants land to work over the mountains in the wilderness that is opening up. Much of the story takes place in what would become Kentucky. Not far from Mammoth Caves in western Kentucky there is a prominent hill, now a state park, called Frenchman’s Knob. Among other things we learn how the place got its name. Like The Frontiersmen, the story is based on much detailed research, and a reminder that even in the eighteenth century, people were coming to North America to start a new life from many countries.

And on the frontier it was a completely new life. Communication with the old world was sporadic at best and nonexistent for most. For many it was a new language and a new kind of government. When adding in the challenges of mere survival in the wild, we can only admire what some of our American forebears endured.

Victoire “Vittorie” Monet LeClerc is our main character. She is more than a mere fish out of water. Raised in the literal lap of luxury, her father took part in the Treaty of Paris. She had met Ben Franklin and John Adams when they came to France after the Revolution to negotiate America’s independence. Now she has come to their country, but not to Boston or Philadelphia, or even to someone’s Virginia plantation.

With her husband Gilbert, she does visit Virginia at first, but Lexington, Virginia, west of the Blue Ridge. The book mentions two of the main figures in The Frontiersmen, Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, but the historical figures besides Captain and Mme. LeClerc are other scouts, notably William Smuthers and Henry Skeggs.

Skeggs (a.k.a. Scaggs) is another one of those woodsmen like Kenton who seems to have been everywhere. He knows the way to the land Gilbert has purchased and seems to know everyone else as well, including Ohio River pirates and the various Native Americans who pass through. (As The Frontiersmen suggests, there were apparently few Indians in Kentucky at the time it began to be settled.)

American Wild shows us the challenges of life in the wilderness—outlaws of various kinds, the necessity to produce everything to live on yourself, the loneliness. In the case of Mme. LeClerc, the loneliness was compounded because she spoke only French. A few other French speakers besides her husband show up from time to time, but until she masters English (about half a dozen years) she is on her own.

Still, most people settling the American wild are in similar positions and understand and care for each other. Even in small settlements, people begin to discover who has specific skills, and a division of labor naturally evolves. There is hard work and not much play, but American Wild tells a tale of struggle and ultimately success. Hard times, yes, but those things makes us appreciate what we have and what those who went before us accomplished. We personally have no horse in the Kentucky race, but American Wild and The Frontiersmen together weave a picture of historic America that readers will not be able to forget.

Wrecker – Review

Carl Hiaasen. Wrecker. Knopf, 2023.

Whether Carl Hiaasen is writing for young teens or adults, his stories are usually set in Florida with some distinctive characters. Wrecker is no different in that respect, though it is very much an original tale.

Valdez Jones VIII, fifteen years old, is known as Wrecker because he comes from a long line of Key West salvage operators. That family tradition goes back to the 1700s with Valdez Jones I, who came from the Bahamas to Key West and stayed on. The only exception to that tradition is Valdez Jones VII, Wrecker’s father, who gets seasick.

Wrecker attends high school, but his real love and interest is boating. He owns a small outboard boat and spends much of his spare time fishing and diving around reefs and wrecks. He also has a unique after school job. A retired man who lives near him pays him fifty dollars a week to clean the gravestone of his sister every day it is not raining. The resident iguanas and feral chickens keep the cemetery markers dirty and defaced.

He usually does this after dark by climbing over the cemetery fence with a ladder and using a hose from a neighboring house. One night he hears a girl or woman singing in Spanish next to a gravestone. She disappears before he can start up a conversation.

The two gravestones catch his interest. The one he cleans has the legend “The rumor is true.” The gravestone where the singer left a vase of roses belonged to a black man hanged by the Ku Klux Klan in Key West around 1920. He wonders who would even remember that man today. Wrecker himself has a black father and white mother and tries to imagine what it would have been like back then.

One day while he was out fishing, he tries to help a speedboat that has run aground. His sixteen-footer is too small, but the man in charge of the cigarette outboard, known to us only as Silver Mustache, tosses Wrecker some money for the help. Soon Silver Mustache contacts Wrecker to drive his boat on occasion and to clean another gravesite in the cemetery. In this case there is more than just a marker, it is a mausoleum for one Bendito Vachs. This also strikes Wrecker as unusual, not because the outside of the crypt gets fouled, but because the date of death on the grave is still a few days in the future.

There are some interesting subplots, too. Wrecker’s father (“number seven”) abandoned him and his mother a long time ago to pursue an unsuccessful career at singing and writing songs. However, Wrecker does not live with his mother and stepfather but rather with his twenty-three year old stepsister. She is paralyzed from the waist down from when she was hit by a drunk driver. The settlement was generous, so she does not have to work but spends her time as an environmental activist, especially concerned with protecting the waters around the key.

Like the other book we recently reviewed, this takes place during and shortly after the Covid-19 shutdown. Wrecker’s stepfather is quite ill from the virus but does survive. His mother has different medical concerns, namely plastic surgery. Her latest attempts at beautification include a Reese Witherspoon chin and Nicole Kidman eyes.

Things get very complicated. One day while fishing, Wrecker sees a sunken speedboat that looks a lot like the one that he tried to help earlier. He dives and sees “dozens” of tightly wrapped and taped pizza boxes on the boat. He brings many of them up to his own boat, but it is weeks before the reader learns what the boxes contain. He figures the men were smuggling something, and maybe the boxes could be leverage. After all, his Valdez Jones ancestors used to brings things in from Cuba during Prohibition.

Valdez becomes friendly—just friends—with Willi, a girl in his class at school. Together they soon realize that Wrecker is in over his head. Silver Mustache’s business is indeed smuggling, among other things. The men he works with are armed bodyguards. Also Silver Mustache seems to have learned a lot about Wrecker’s family including his sister and her activism. He knows Wrecker’s phone number, and it seems as though Mr. Mustache is always changing his own phone number.

Wrecker and Willi realize that they have gotten into a relationship with people they would rather not have ever known. They want to come up with a plan to extricate themselves from that relationship before it turns deadly or Wrecker becomes a criminal in order to survive.

The story of Valdez VII, the singer, is humorous. He calls himself Austin Breakwater and seems to be ripping off Jimmy Buffett. His first song “Tequilaville Sunset” actually breaks the Billboard 100 one week because of the publicity around a lawsuit. No, Buffett is not suing him for stealing from “Margaritaville,” the Eagles are suing him for stealing from “Tequila Sunrise.”

There are a number of clever references to popular culture here, even though Wrecker himself is more interested in other things. He chooses a lock combination of 2003 because that was the year the Marlins won the World Series. He was not alive back then, but he heard talk of it so it is an easy number to remember. Willi’s favorite author is Judy Blume.

When “Austin Breakwater” is explaining to Wrecker why he is trying to make a career of singing and songwriting, he says, “This is how Jimmy Buffett started. James Taylor. Bonnie Raitt. All the greats” (86). It just so happened I saw Bonnie Raitt play at least twice that I recall before she had recorded anything. She was a terrific steel guitar player.

One of the times, she opened for James Taylor before anyone had heard of him. (It was supposed to be Chris Kristofferson, but he could not make it.) Back then, I recall Taylor being tall and very mellow. Both were at the same small venue, but the audience could really enjoy the music without having to deal with any hero worship or avid fandom as they do when the musicians become more famous and play for bigger crowds.

Wrecker is an entertaining and ecologically aware tale that YA readers will enjoy. They may even pick up bit of history and pop culture.

Mixed Up – Review

Gordon Korman. Mixed Up. Scholastic, 2023.

Mixed Up is more serious than many of Gordon Korman’s novels, but he still our favorite YA author. Mixed Up is worth reading as it deals with some serious ideas.

We were reminded of a couple of movies as we read Mixed Up. One film was Yesterday. Readers who saw that recall that there was some kind of “anomaly” in nature that caused everyone in the world except for a handful of people to forget all about the Beatles. A young, struggling British musician was not affected and became a rock superstar by playing the Beatles songs as his originals.

Mixed Up has a different kind of anomaly. Two twelve-year-old boys who live in the same city but in different neighborhoods begin sharing each other’s memories. Theo begins to remember things that happened to Reef and vice versa. It becomes more complicated as these memories begin to become more real than the things that actually happened to them.

Reef was raised by a single mother who died recently. He was taken in by the family of Jenna, his mother’s best friend, and Willis with three kids of their own. The two older kids in high school pretty much ignore him, but their younger son Declan is downright evil in the way he torments Reef (e.g., he calls him Reek). He has a way of doing things that would get him into trouble except that he makes it look like Reef did it.

However, because of this “mixed up” memory situation, Reef reaches a point where he cannot even remember what his mother looked like if it were not for photos he kept on a cellphone—but he knows what has been happening to Theo.

Theo’s family is intact, but he has been a big disappointment to his father. His father was a jock type who “ruled the school” when he was in middle and high school. Theo is simply not interested in those things. He would rather keep a vegetable garden and keep to himself. His father is really demeaning to him, but Theo seems to handle it about as well as he can. But things get more complicated as Theo begins having memories about his mother dying and having an adopted brother who torments him.

Eventually Theo and Reef meet up. This is somewhat awkward for both of them. They know that they can probably help each other, but they are not sure what to do.

It also becomes a little complicated as Reef blames himself for his mother’s death. Portia, a girl he really liked, invited him to a party. After the party, Portia got sick and was out of school for three weeks. A week later, Reef and his mother both came down with Covid—this is right before the Covid shutdown. The virus killed his mother, so Reef blames himself for his mother’s death.

So we have Reef mourning and Theo not able to live up to his father’s expectations. These are problems that many people can identify with to some degree. And then there is the memory mix-up. The two boys are forced to help each other get through this.

Things get more complicated. Theo begins to volunteer at a food bank near Reef’s school so he can stay in contact with Reef. Portia also volunteers there, and Theo develops a crush on her, too. Reef had used to be outgoing, but since his mother’s death he has withdrawn. Portia and a lot of others who knew him feel sorry for him but do not know what to do to help. Theo and Reef both want to help each other to somehow change their memories.

Even though this is more serious than many of Korman’s stories, it still has a kind of crazy ending that many of his tales have. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say that the wrap-up might remind some readers of the movie Back to the Future.

Except for obvious science-fiction element of the memory mix-up, Mix Up is honestly realistic. It speaks to many of us because the problems the boys encounter are not uncommon. There is not a perfect ending, but it is one that shows us that some things we have to accept and learn to live with.

As kind of a postscript, Mixed Up also has another message. Even though sometimes we wish we knew what other people were thinking, it is a good thing that we do not. I would say to my students, “If we could read one another’s minds, the school would have fired me a long time ago.” The students usually chuckle at that and perhaps imagine some of the things I might have been thinking. Then I add, “And the school probably would have kicked out half of you!” The students usually laugh at that, too. We have enough problems dealing with our own thought lives without having to worry about what others are thinking.